A baby dies... Hollywood is born.

SYNOPSIS:

BABY HARRY'S HOLLYWOOD is a true story of a Michigan farm boy in Antebellum America who, at the age of 13, is stricken with polio that puts him into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Since he cannot work on the family farm, he is cast out to serve an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, but he is not beaten. His indomitable spirit comes to the fore almost immediately.

H. H. challenges his handicap, changes careers as he enters local politics and wins several elections during the 1860s. Eventually becoming a real estate agent and at the age of 29, woos and wins the heart of a 16-year old woman, Ellen Young, in nearby Bryan, Ohio. They marry on the day after Christmas, 1861.

In April 1868 Harvey and Ellen respond to the call of "Go West, . . and grow up with the country”. They settle in Topeka, Kansas where he opens a real estate office, sells new homes like hotcakes, and becomes wealthier by the day.

Harvey enjoyed politics so much that he enters politics again, serving as president of the Topeka City Council, then joins several other men to found the town of Rossville, Kansas; serves as Topeka City Clerk from at least 1877 through 1880; and buys a ranch and large herd of cattle that his adopted son, George M. Stanley, managed near El Dorado in Butler County, Kansas. Harvey is growing in confidence, wealth and political power and isn't about to allow someone else to manage his growing cattle empire without his direct input and he participates in several cattle drives from his wheelchair mounted in the back of a Studebaker farm wagon.

Harvey's life is not without tragedy and his young wife dies of tuberculosis and, with typical Wilcox family bullheadedness, Harvey finds it difficult to work with his dead wife's nephew, so Harvey throws him out of the family home. Still recovering from his wife's death, his wealth and availability soon attract a girl more than thirty years his junior who he courts and marries on December 6, 1882, in Topeka. “Ida” is a woman with a strong desire to rise in Topeka society, but she considers the city too "primitive” and is soon pushing Harvey to move to the new paradise on the West Coast where he could make even more money in real estate development and she can become a leader in Los Angeles society.

Harvey forms the real estate company of Wilcox and Shaw and shortly after that Harvey and Ida have one child, a son, who dies in 1886 at the age of 19 months. To console themselves over the death of their baby, Harvey and Ida take weekly buggy rides to the beautiful canyons west of Los Angeles. They fall in love with the area and Harvey purchases one hundred sixty acres for $150 per acre in an agricultural area of fig and apricot orchards. His wife names the tract "Hollywood" and plants holly trees on the property, all of which soon die. Soon Harvey plats a housing development, The University Tract, next to a new school named the University of Southern California and the next month, on February 1, 1887, Harvey files a plat of the subdivision of Hollywood with the Los Angeles County Recorder's office, but his health is failing and it's left to others to complete his dream.

Copyright 2013 Richard Welch