Higgins, she would say in a voice far too diminutive to suggest a command. “Prepare the car. The ladies will be going to Yosemite today.”
And Higgins, ever the loyal chauffeur, would check the engine of the new 1916 Pierce Arrow (later replaced by a Rolls Royce), fill up with gas and don his uniform. The automobile would purr from its garage, still called “the carriage house,” on Eads Avenue and load the trunks at South Moulton Villa on Prospect Street. The travelers, Ellen Browning Scripps and her entourage, would be off, with the car gliding along smoothly like a shiny bright ornament in the sun, impervious to the dust on the roads. Fred Higgins was at the wheel!
“My grandfather loved to drive the ladies to Yosemite, and they would go about twice a year,” recalled Bob Higgins, Fred Higgins’ grandson.
Now age 62, living in Tierra-santa and recently retired from a career in the construction field, the grandson visited the La Jolla Historical Society to catch up on family history.
“A lot of the early stuff has been lost and my own father never really was one for history,” he said.
We discovered a bonanza, locating not only a file on his grandfather complete with oral histories about his job as chauffeur for Miss Scripps but a wonderful photograph from 1923 showing Higgins with the travelers and car parked at the foot of a Yosemite waterfall. Then Bob Higgins had a great chuckle out of the burial headstone in the Society’s front office that once marked the gravesite of Queenie, the Higgins family dog, when the family lived on part of the original Scripps property in a house at the corner of Eads Avenue and Coast Boulevard.
Granddad himself was only a lad of 19 when he first was hired as the Scripps chauffeur in 1916 to drive the new Pierce Arrow that had been purchased for Miss Scripps by her half-brother, Fred Scripps. He was the chauffeur for 20 years until Miss Scripps’ death at age 96.
“My granddad always talked about what a really good person she was and never treated anyone like a hired hand,” Bob said.
In the Society’s oral histories recorded in the 1960s, Fred Higgins talked about daily trips early in the mornings to the Scripps residence to see what was planned for the day: “I’d go up about 7 o’clock and she’d be up in the kitchen cooking breakfast “¦ she would say, ‘I just made some biscuits. I want you to try one.’ And they were delicious.”
Perhaps one of the ties that bound Ms. Scripps and Higgins was that both of them were born in England ” she in London and he in Coldfield.
“I don’t remember my granddad ever really saying why he left England,” Bob said. “But I know he was at the British consulate in Ensenada when Fred Scripps called down there looking for a chauffeur.”
While working for Scripps in La Jolla, Fred Higgins lived just down the street from “the carriage house” where he raised a family of three children “” besides Bob, Higgins’ father Hal, another brother named Alfred and a sister, Elizabeth. Although Alfred died early in life in a plane crash, both Hal and Elizabeth lived in La Jolla for some time.
“It was while I was in high school that I spent the most time with my granddad,” Bob said. “We’d go on fishing trips to the Sierras. He drove an old camper on the back of a 1956 Chevy pick-up and never thought twice about once having been at the wheels of a Pierce Arrow and a Rolls.”
” “Reflections” is a monthly column written for the La Jolla Village News by the La Jolla Historical Society’s historian Carol Olten. The Society, dedicated to the preservation of La Jolla heritage, is located at 7846 Eads Ave. and is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
