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That house that burned, with the tapes inside, was The Mansion in
Piru. It was built between 1886 and 1890, and purchased by the Newhalls
in 1968. In 1981, when restoration was four months from completion, a
fire destroyed everything but the circular stone tower and chimneys of
the Victorian landmark.

Ruth Newhall's response to Mrs. Baum's 1982 letter was that Scott
said it was just as well that the tapes were lost in the fire because
they were too long and rambling. They were planning to redo them. Ruth
again agreed it was more practical for her to do the interviewing. "I
know the story so well, I know which direction the questions should take,
and I am also in a position to catch him at odd hours. The most
important part of his history is that dealing with the San Francisco
Chronicle and I think we can still do a good job on that."

In fact two transcripts were salvaged from the fire, and they are
both incorporated in the oral history that follows--Chapter XVI and the
appended "On Being a Newspaper Photographer."

The Newhalls had things to do from 1982 to 1987 other than redo
interviews, as the oral history in covering those years makes clear. And
so a second round of interviews of husband by wife was never begun. For
one thing, Ruth by then was the editor of the Newhall Signal, and Scott's
was the most significant newspaper voice in the newly-designated Santa
Clarita Valley, and in the town the Newhall Land and Farming Company
built.

But in 1987 the proposal to interview Scott Newhall came up again.
Karl Kortum, an old land and seafaring friend of Scott's, and the Chief
Curator of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, reminded
the Regional Oral History Office that there was still a great story to be
recorded. And this time the San Francisco Chronicle's assistant to the
publisher, Phelps Dewey, and publisher Richard Thieriot, joined the
Newhalls and the Newhall Land and Farming Company in raising the funds to
do the oral history . That meant that interviews with Scott Newhall could
be conducted by the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library .

Of course, by the late eighties, twenty years after the first oral
history proposal, the story had doubled in length. The past was twenty
years further back, the present was full of problems with the Newhall
Signal. Numerous witty and impassioned words had been written by and
about Scott Newhall--his response to witless and unfair charges in 1987
against his paper, its editor, and the Farming Company is in the
appendices--a version of Shangri-la was in place in Valencia, California ,
The Mansion had been rebuilt within an inch of perfection, and there were
new stories to be told.