Althea Rhodes

Keeps the Belmar Association's archive, and can tell you which of three hundred families a name belongs to.

Two rooms above a dance studio on Pico, shelved floor to ceiling in gray document boxes. Althea Rhodes has read all of them. She is twenty-eight, a Rhodes on Verna Reece's side three cousins out, and she took the archive over when Reece left the city because nobody else offered to.

The collection is deeds, probate files, letters, funeral programs, and a long run of insurance photographs of houses that stopped existing in 1961. It is also the evidence base for the registry fight. Every claim Delphine Ward files rests on a document out of these rooms, and Ward checks with her before she files it.

What she has that the Association's own minutes do not is the whole shape at once: three hundred households, who married whom, and which branch stopped writing to which in 1974 over something nobody will say out loud.

What the crew knows#

• Give her a name and she will place the family, usually inside a minute, and she will keep going after that unless somebody stops her.
• She works in cotton gloves with the windows shut and taped. A clip lamp, a scanner plate, and no daylight in either room.
• Nothing leaves the rooms. She will copy, transcribe, read aloud and photograph for as long as anybody wants, for free, and she says this before it is asked rather than after.
• If somebody waves a claim at the crew, she can tell them inside an hour whether the paper behind it exists.

Contact#