Archive for February, 2012

Postcard of Houdini and Bess from the book Houdini: His Legend and His Magic by Doug Henning.

In October 1907, the famed magician and escape artist Harry Houdini appeared in San Diego. Known at that time as the “Handcuff King,” Houdini performed for three nights at the Grand Theatre on Fifth Street. I cover this story in my book The Way We Were in San Diego.

While researching the Houdini visit a postcard image of the magician was pointed out to me by John Cox, who writes a superb blog called Wild About Harry. When I first saw the undated image I thought it must have accompanied Houdini’s 1907 visit to San Diego. But Houdini’s physical appearance seems wrong for that year. He would have been 33 years old at the time and probably looking much younger than the postcard image.

“Handcuff Harry Houdini” circa 1905

Here’s another photo that’s dated 1905–only two years before Houdini’s San Diego performance.

The postcard image raises a question: did Houdini return to San Diego in a later year? Did he perform again, or was he just vacationing with his wife Bess?

And here’s another mystery. In July 1935, nearly a decade after Houdini’s death, his widow Bess came to San Diego and visited the California Pacific Exposition. A reporter from the San Diego Union quoted Bess as saying “Here it was that Harry and I spent our honeymoon 40 years ago.”

This was nonsense; the Houdini’s married in 1893 and it would be years before they ventured to Southern California. But it seems likely that the world’s most famous magician and his wife Bess did return to San Diego at some date after his 1907 performance at the Grand Theatre. Perhaps they vacationed here during the 1915-16 Exposition?

San Diego newspapers for that era are unindexed but available for research on microfilm at the San Diego Public Library. Perhaps a definite answer will be discovered there.

“You can’t parade. Our orders are to prevent it.” In a moment there was a seething, screaming mass around the policemen. Staves and sticks began to fly. –San Diego Sun, May 31, 1933

The story of a student demonstration that turned into a riot: The Young Communists.

Courtesy San Diego Police Museum.

On Wednesday morning the United State cruiser San Diego will be formally rechristened in San Diego’s harbor . . . No city on the California coast has been so signally honored by the government, and the fact that a modern war vessel with its hundreds of men will carry the name of San Diego to all parts of the United States and the world is worthy of a celebration.
–San Diego Union, September 14, 1914.

The story of the USS San Diego, the city’s famed battle cruiser of World War I: USS San Diego.

USS San Diego

In December 1919, full-page advertisements began running in San Diego and Los Angeles newspapers soliciting dollars for an audacious plan to explore for oil in San Diego. Remarkably, the instigator of the proposal was the city’s mayor, Louis J. Wilde. The scheme would attract thousands of dollars from hundreds of San Diegans, all anxious to follow their mayor in the “Jazz Cat Gamble.”

Read the story of a reckless scheme by the city’s mayor The Jazz Cat Oil Gamble.

Mayor Louis Wilde and his portable drilling rig. Courtesy Motor Transport Museum, Campo, CA.