One of the most widely-read Los Angeles newspaper columnists of his day, Lee Shippey wrote for the Los Angeles Times from the 1920s until the 1950s, with a daily column that ran for 22 years. He also made a home in Sierra Madre, where, with folksy charm, he gave Angelenos unique insights into their city.

Born in Memphis, TN, in 1884—the son of a former midshipman in the Confederate navy--he got his start in journalism in his teens as a proofreader for the Kansas City Times.

In an instance of life’s ironies, Shippey’s first success as a columnist coincided with the loss of his sight. At the age of 23, bad advice from a friend led him to smoke a pipe soaked in methanol.

“I was told the alcohol would mellow the pipe,” Shippey later recalled. “That was before Prohibition days when we knew little about the effects of wood alcohol.” Dizziness and headaches began to plague him, and one morning he woke up realizing that most of his sight was gone. While recovering, Shippey found that several humor columns he had written had been published in the Kansas City Star. Shortly afterward, he was hired as a full-time writer with the paper.

Though the start of his career was bittersweet, Shippey always kept a positive outlook. “I never really saw the world until I lost my sight," he told the San Diego Union years later.

Shippey’s romance with a young Frenchwoman he met while serving as an overseas correspondent during World War I provided fodder for gossip columnists nationwide--and ended his first marriage, as well as his writing career with the Star. 

After falling in love with Madeleine Babin, who was 14 years his junior, Shippey divorced his first wife and moved with Babin to Tampico, Mexico, where he briefly served as editor of an English-language newspaper. 

Shippey began writing for the L.A. Times in 1920, after impressing Times publisher Harry Chandler with a dispatch he had written in France. "Get out and find human interest stuff anywhere in the state," the editor of the paper instructed him. "Dig up stuff that the tourists, and even the natives, have not discovered about themselves. 

After an early column titled “People You Know,” Shippey began writing “The Lee Side o’ L.A." in 1927. The same year he began his column, Shippey moved to Sierra Madre.

During his 3o years in the city, Shippey contributed regularly to the Sierra Madre News, and among his many keen observations of the community was an article that became a well-known part of local lore—an “obituary” for the Pacific Electric cars, published Oct. 5, 1950—one day before they ceased running. “We wish the bus drivers luck,” he wrote, “but they’ll have a lot to live up to.”

Shippey loved a good story, whether he was writing about famous figures like Robert Frost or lesser-known people like “Tyree the bicycle mender.” One anecdote he liked to tell was about the rose bush in his garden, which he claimed was given to him by Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepdaughter and was descended from cuttings Junípero Serra had brought with him from Spain during the Mission Period.

The loss of Shippey's sight did not diminish his output as a writer; in addition to his voluminous newspaper work, he wrote an autobiography and was the author of many novels. One of these, The Great American Family, was adapted for the stage, and premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1939—starring renowned actor Laird Cregar.

Known for his famous friendships, Shippey was close with fellow writers like Robert Frost and the English novelists James Hilton and Hugh Walpole—who claimed to read Shippey's column daily. According to a 1942 edition of Who's Who in California, Shippey was also an avid hiker.

Retiring in with his wife to Del Mar, CA, in the late '50s, Shippey died in 1969. Shortly after his death, he was remembered by the Sierra Madre News as a writer who accurately captured the "warmth, humor, triumph, and tragedy" of life, and "reminded us that even with 20-20 we can be blind to the riches that surround us."