Professor’s Life Work, a History of California, Goes Up in Smoke

They are lost forever, gone up in the smoke and flames of Normal Heights.

In the case of Abraham P. Nasatir, what disappeared in the inferno of Sunday’s fire was more than the personal mementos he and his wife had accumulated in their North Mountain View Drive home during the past 33 years.

What Nasatir has lost is an irreplaceable piece of California history--hundreds of stacks of important historical documents collected over half a century.

Nasatir was sitting in his living room editing the final pages of a book he had been working on for 12 years when he saw the flames.

“We were given less than 30 seconds to get out of the house . . .. Thank God my wife picked up my reading glasses,” said Nasatir, who had lived in the home since 1952.

Nasatir’s home, along with others on that block, was leveled by the blaze. But, for Nasatir, what’s gone is far worse than the simple loss of a favorite picture or memento.

Within the four walls of his canyon-ridge home there were stacks of historical documents, as many as 500,000, many of them irreplaceable, according to local historians.

“There is no price value of those documents,” said the 80-year-old historian, who is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University and taught history there for 50 years. “There was a tremendous amount of work in that house. I had used perhaps only 20% of the information in that house.”

Considered a leading U.S. historical researcher and expert on California and Mississippi Valley history, Nasatir had painstakingly collected documents, letters and other correspondence from French, Spanish and British archives that pertain to early California history.

The entire collection, much of it hand-copied and translated into English by Nasatir himself, turned to ashes in the blaze.

“Oh, God, he didn’t lose all those documents in the fire!” James R. Moriarty, a former student of Nasatir who now is a history professor at the University of San Diego, said Monday when told of the loss. “Any loss of his work would be of material significance to the history world. They are absolutely irreplaceable.”

Also lost was the final manuscript of the book Nasatir was co-authoring with Gary Monell, a history professor at Mesa College. The two had been working on the book, entitled “British in California: Calender of Material Relating to California in the British Archives,” for more than 12 years.

“I was proofreading the last 20 pages,” Nasatir said. “I put it down and got out with only the dirty clothes on my back.”

Monell on Monday was frantically printing a computer read-out at Mesa College to determine how much of that book was lost.

“I’m optimistic about this project because a lot of the first draft is in the computer,” Monell said. “It’s his (Nasatir’s) other documents that are irreplaceable.”

Dennis Berge, chairman of SDSU’s history department and another former student of Nasatir, said he was sickened to hear of the loss.

“Abe has literally lived in archives and libraries for over 50 years researching that information,” Berge said. “It’s a shame. Undoubtedly, this is a great loss to historians.”

Meanwhile, Nasatir and his wife, Ida, were trying to piece their lives together. Calls to insurance companies had to be made. New clothes had to be purchased.

What was certain was that no amount of money could replace his lifetime of work.

“When you think you have lost your life’s work . . . “ he said quietly. “I was hoping simply to finish off those volumes while I was alive.”