Pickens, however, had been told by his boss to go to work that day, thus he missed the accident.
He left for California in the early 1920s, married in 1924 and began working for the phone company. His son, Bobby, was born in 1925.
One day his company announced a new advertising campaign, posters that could easily be tacked onto bulletin boards throughout its system. Executives sought an eye-catching picture to convey their message — “Modernity Is My Motto.”
So Paul Pickens dressed his young son Bobby in coveralls, placed an oversized cap on his head, handed him a then-modern telephone and tucked a coil of wire over his shoulder. Bobby posed “looking for all the world like Jackie Coogan, who had been the idol of the silver screen in just such an attire,” according to The Ledger, Aug. 8, 1957.
(Jackie Coogan was one of the highest paid stars in Hollywood in the early 1920s. His movie with Charlie Chaplin, “The Kid,” made in 1921, brought him fame and fortune.)
Bobby Pickens’ photo was selected for the campaign and the posters began appearing throughout the area. Local newspapers, including the Los Angeles Herald, picked up the story, according to the Southern California Pacific Telephone TELENEWS, Aug. 30, 1957.
The family was living in Long Beach when Paul Pickens experienced his second disaster, the 1933 earthquake. Five years later, the Pickens family purchased a house on Young Drive in Montrose.
“He paid $3,500 for it,” his grandson, John Pickens, noted. He put $500 down and his monthly payments were $40 per month. (The house had been in the Pickens Canyon flood of January 1934, well before they moved in. John Pickens added that, as far as he knows, they are not related to Theodore Pickens, for whom the canyon was named.)
