1870S L.A. VISIONARY TOO FAR AHEAD OF TIMES.

Byline: Ralph E. Shaffer Local View

GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned triumphantly this week from a six-day trade mission to China. Unfortunately, a similar venture by a 19th-century Angeleno didn't end that way.

In China, Schwarzenegger represented a state with 36 million people and an economy that would rank sixth in gross national product. When Frederick M. Shaw embarked in 1873 on a comparable mission to Europe, he represented a sleepy cow town with 6,000 residents.

Nearly 100 government officials and representatives from the nation's leading corporations escorted the governor at a staggering but unannounced cost for the week. Shaw went alone, accompanied only by boxes of Southern California agricultural products. His half-year expenses ran just over $1,000.

But he left Los Angeles with the endorsement of the city's major daily newspaper, The Express, and the backing of its most prominent residents. A few days before he boarded ship at San Pedro, he organized the Southern California Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College Association. His company would promote the region as a health resort, erect a first-class sanitarium, encourage foreign purchases of Southern California's agricultural produce and open a technical college.

Shaw was no fly-by-night. Farmers and ranchers knew him through his weekly column on California agriculture in The Pacific Rural Press. The Express enthusiastically backed Shaw, urging growers and manufacturers to send samples of their goods with him to Europe.

While Schwarzenegger spent six days in China, Shaw worked European investors and markets for six months, mostly in the British Isles. Like the governor, he met with leading political figures, toured model farms and spoke to civic groups.

The governor may not have handed out California products, but Shaw did. He was particularly encouraged by British reaction to his offerings of citrus fruit.

By chance, he had encountered Joseph Wolfskill aboard ship after leaving San Pedro. Wolfskill, whose family was the leading citrus producer in Southern California, was taking boxes of oranges to San Diego. He palmed some of them off on a reluctant Shaw, who thought they would spoil as he went through Panama.

But the oranges arrived in Britain in almost perfect condition after a month in transit, much to the delight of Shaw's British contacts, who praised the California fruit.

Otherwise, his mission was a fiasco. Financiers wouldn't market stock in his corporation. Potential health seekers found Los Angeles as a health resort unappealing when Shaw admitted that his hotel was unbuilt, no suitable facilities yet existed, and the accommodations available were second-rate.

Back home, the personal magnetism with which he convinced the city fathers that the project was feasible vanished when he left San Pedro. In his absence the directors quietly decided to abort the project, forcing him to pay most of the cost.

Shaw returned to Los Angeles in early 1874, a bitter, impoverished man. He still believed that Europe had great promise as a market for the region's agriculture, that the Los Angeles climate was ideal for health seekers, and that the city needed a technical school.

He was right on all counts, but ahead of his time. Before the decade was over, other entrepreneurs built the great Sierra Madre Villa, symbol of the region's health resort industry. Southern California farm and industrial products soon found overseas markets. And in the early 1880s the forerunners of what became the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California were established in Los Angeles.

Schwarzenegger may have more immediate success, but Shaw, Southern California's forgotten dreamer, paved the way.