Oscar Macy

Macy was born July 28, 1829, at Maria Creek in Knox County, Indiana,^[1] and died at the age of 81 on November 1, 1910, in his residence at 519 Plymouth Street in Boyle Heights (Now part of North Cummings Street).^[2] leaving four children, Oscar A. Macy, Estelle and Alice Macy and Irene Macy Whitney, as well as siblings Obed Macy and Lucinda M. Foy.^[3] The cause was noted as "an attack of bronchial asthma.^[4] He was predeceased by his wife, Margaret Elizabeth Bell, whom he had married on August 24, 1873, in Los Angeles: She died October 28, 1891, at the age of 42.^[1][5]

Macy had no formal schooling, but was tutored by his father. Soon after the settlers' party arrived in California, Oscar went with a brother-in-law, David W. Chessman, to Condemned Bar in Yuba County to work a gold mine. The venture was unsuccessful, so Macy went to Sacramento to work as a printer on the Alta California. He next worked for his father at the Bella Union Hotel,^[1] and in the late 1850s he was the foreman of the print shop of the Southern Vineyard newspaper published by J.J. Warner.^[6]

In the early 1870s, Macy had a fifty percent share of a herd of ten thousand sheep on Catalina Island, and at the same time he worked on the Los Angeles Star, a newspaper published in both Spanish and English. He left the newspaper while serving as city treasurer (below) but returned in 1888 and remained a journalist until retiring in June 1903.^[1]