The Loris Bulla Diary

September 03, 2024

Personal diaries often show up in archival collections. The Loris Bulla Diary is held in CSUN's Special Collections & Archives. Loris kept a diary from May 13, 1918 through February 19, 1919. This diary arrived in Special Collections & Archives as an individual item. So, unfortunately, there are no other documents to help contextualize the diary, nor are there any additional materials to help us understand more about who its author was. Even so, it is awe inspiring how much information a reader can glean from the contents of a lonely diary.

Historical diaries provide insights into the social norms of the time period it was written in. They give us personal perspectives on national and global events. They provide a peek into a person’s class and family status and how they operated within the world. Once situated in the historical context of its time, a diary can be a wonderful window back in time from a very detailed and personal viewpoint.

When Loris wrote in this diary in 1918 California, women did not yet have the right to vote, the United States was fighting in the first World War, and the Spanish Flu Pandemic had just reached the United States.

The first entry of the diary is about her engagement to her fiancé Bill after two years of dating. She later mentions that Bill’s mother is "Mrs. Nye" and that Bill works at the Standard Oil Company plant in El Segundo. Details like these can be pulled from a diary to do genealogical research and expand our understanding of the author.

When talking about her fiancé possibly getting drafted Loris says, “..so I must expect it and get ready to be brave when the time comes and ‘send him away with a smile’ because I want him to be brave too and an example is the best way to do it. When Johnny left Connie cried so and made such a scene that he broke down too and cried and I surely don’t want that to happen when Bill goes. It is a thing that happens to everyone now and we should be proud of our boys instead of helping them make babies of themselves.” This entry gives us an understanding of gender norms of the time, as well as the emotional expectations of Loris’s social class.

Many details about how Americans on the Homefront understood the war from afar are included in Loris’s writings. She recounts news reports on the war as well as rumors: “…while the bad news is the rumor that Germany has 100,000 men concealed in Mexico waiting until our troops are away to attack us here on the Pacific Coast.”

She mentions going to see the Red Cross Parade in Los Angeles where there were 10,000 people and it took two and half hours to pass her. Information like this provides an opportunity to search for archival images which might give us a more well rounded picture of Loris’s life. Here is a photo from the Los Angeles Public Library of the parade Loris mentions.

The diary also illuminates new technology from the early 1900’s: Loris mentions having “grape juice ice made in our new auto-vac freezer”. This is most likely the Auto Vacuum Freezer used to make ice cream at home in a metal tin around that time.

The diary entries give clues as to how women of Loris’s class were expected to move through the world in 1918: Loris notes that she wants to convince her soon-to-be mother-in-law to go see her fiancé, Bill, in San Francisco where he is stationed with the army, so that she can go along with her since “of course” she can’t go alone.

With the last few lines of her diary, she laments over not writing as much as she would have liked and says, “I believe I never went through a more serious year or one that brought more changes with it. To be sure 1919 will bring the biggest change in my life but it will be a happy one whereas the last six months or more have been full of anxiety and trouble. This volume of my diary might rightly be called the ‘War Number’ while my next will in all probably be one of the most exciting I will ever have to write, the ‘Marriage Number.’ “

This is one of many archival diaries that are held in Special Collections & Archives. They are all available for viewing in our reading room. Come take a peek into the past! 

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Post tagged as: special collections, diaries, los angeles