Kansas and the Imperial Valley The fourth child of Charles Louis and Emily Young Garrigues, Charles Harris was born on July 7, 1902, in
Utica, Kansas. The family later moved to
Imperial, California,
near the Mexican border. As a result, the lad was expelled by the school board in May 1918. The expulsion resulted in what the
Enterprise called a "Walkout of High School Students," who "paraded the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction at the refusal of the faculty to reinstate C. H. Garrigues of the senior class." It was said that all the students walked out, "with the exception of two girls." Garrigues was befriended by the editor of the newspaper, who taught him the craft of journalism, and in 1919 he was allowed to graduate.
Southern California Garrigues attended the
University of Southern California for a year but dropped out to become a reporter with the
Hemet News in Riverside County. He then worked for the
Venice Vanguard in Venice, a suburb of Los Angeles, and by mid-decade was with the
Arizona Daily Star in
Tucson. In 1926, he returned to Los Angeles, where he joined the
Los Angeles Express as a copy editor. The next year he had become a reporter with the Los Angeles
Illustrated Daily News, published by
Manchester Boddy, where he specialized in reporting on civic affairs, particularly the county government. He also did investigative work into graft and corruption in county government, as a consequence of which by January 1931 he was granted a leave by Boddy to take a temporary job as an investigator for District Attorney
Buron Fitts. His work led to the indictment and conviction of, and a prison term for, county supervisor
Sidney T. Graves for accepting a bribe from builders of a flood-control dam on the
San Gabriel River. In 1934, he was working for a county
grand jury impaneled by Superior Judge (and later Mayor)
Fletcher Bowron; his investigation led to Fitts himself, whom the jury indicted that year on charges of bribery and perjury. In this work Garrigues became an enemy of Fitts, and the reporter was assaulted in a Hall of Justice stairway and beaten in a vacant courtroom by what he described as "a gang of the district attorney's plug-uglies." By 1936, Garrigues was free-lancing as a political consultant, and the next year worked briefly for the
San Diego Sun but soon left to become the editor of the
Labor Leader, a newspaper published by the San Diego Federated Trades and Labor Council. In 1937 he was an organizer in Los Angeles for the
American Newspaper Guild. He joined the
Communist Party in 1937 but left it the next year.
San Francisco Bay Area At the age of 34, Garrigues was named in 1936 as an investigator for a defense committee in the case of three
labor union officials,
Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner, who faced trial for murdering an officer aboard a
freighter anchored in the east
San Francisco Bay, and three years later, in 1939, he moved to the
Bay Area. He found work as a
copy editor on the
San Francisco Examiner, where he stayed until his retirement in 1967. During that time, he wrote about the jazz scene in
San Francisco. In 1943, his name was listed in a report of the anti-Communist
Tenney Committee of the California state legislature in connection with testimony by writer
Rena Vale about her experience as a Communist Party member from 1936 to 1938. In March
1953 Garrigues testified under subpoena in Los Angeles before Congressman
Harold H. Velde of the
House Committee on Un-American Activities about his interest in the
labor movement and his membership in the Communist Party. Between 1956 and 1961, Garrigues was the ''Examiner's'' staff jazz reviewer, "with a weekly column and a recognized name." He retired in 1967 and moved to the Los Angeles neighborhood of
Brentwood in 1968. He died on March 8, 1974, in
Pacific Palisades.
Marriages Garrigues was married on April 30, 1926, to Beulah May Dickey. They had two sons and were divorced in 1937. He was married in 1938 to Naomi Silver, and they had one daughter. Naomi died in 1968. His third wife, whom he married in 1968, was Marguerite (Peggy) Walker. ==Published works==