San Diego Yesterday

I’m not particularly a fan of e-readers but some people swear by their Kindle or Nook.  And now The Way We Were in San Diego is available as an ebook for $9.95.  Here’s a link for the Kindle version: http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Were-Diego-ebook/dp/B007T9D41C/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

And here’s the Nook version from Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1105947483?ean=2940014474238

Babe Ruth in 1921. From Library of Congress.

George Herman Ruth, world’s greatest baseball player, came into our midst on the noon train today slanting one eye at his traveling bag and the other at the overcast sky. “Low visibility,” quoth the Babe. “But if the raindrops will stay away for a short time I guess I can get the range and park a few baseballs on the far side of your famous stadium.”
–San Diego Tribune, October 29, 1924.

The story of a barnstorming Babe Ruth when he hit homers in City Stadium: Babe Ruth in San Diego.

Opening day, June 7, 1890.

One of the great needs of San Diego for some time past has been a system of cable street railroads. This improved method of covering long distances in cities has become very popular in all of the metropolises of the country, and it has been one great improvement in which San Diego was deficient.
–San Diego Union, June 9, 1889

The story of San Diego’s Cable Cars.

The abandoned Narwhal on the mudflats off National City. Courtesy San Diego Maritime Museum.

A ship without a country,

A mast without a sail.

Then someone swiped the galley range,

And that’s the Narwhal’s tale!

The story of a famed American whaleship that ended it’s days on a beach in San Diego. Click here for The Narwhal.

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.

This week San Diego’s PBS station aired “Wyatt Earp,” a new segment from the American Experience series. The one-hour program spends most of its time on the Tombstone years, remembered for the celebrated “Shootout at the O.K. Corral.” But San Diego history buffs know that Earp and his wife spent some time here during the “Boom of the 80s.” Unfortunately, the PBS program botches this local fact by saying the Earps moved to Los Angeles at that time, and then illustrates their mistake by showing an entry from the San Diego City Directory of 1889-90, which the show’s writers seem to think was a Los Angeles directory.

Wyatt Earp as he would have appeared in the 1880s.

Which brings up an interesting question. How much do we really know about the Wyatt Earp experience in San Diego? Not much, I’m afraid. While there is no shortage of popular secondary accounts of Earp in town, they all seem to repeat the same tired, poorly documented stories. We’re told the notorious gunfighter turned “capitalist” owned some San Diego property, ran card games, refereed boxing matches, and ran race horses, all true. But we’ve yet to see an Earp biography that corroborates these particulars with primary source citations, or demonstrates any attempt at research.

Much of our local Earp knowledge comes from biographer Stuart Lake whose 1931 book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall was based in part on his interviews with the gunfighter taken shortly before his death in 1929 in Los Angeles. An adept magazine writer, Lake penned a thrilling narrative with only scant commitment to historical accuracy. But the book sold well and created an enduring noble-Earp mythology. An early Hollywood take on the O.K. Corral, “My Darling Clementine,” was based on Lake’s book, as was the 1950s TV show starring Hugh O’Brian.

Stuart Lake says little about San Diego in his book Wyatt Earp but an article in the September 6, 1957 edition of the San Diego Evening Tribune cites Lake for a few specifics. According to Lake, who lived much of his life in San Diego, Wyatt and his wife Josephine bought multiple lots of land in the downtown and Hillcrest areas in 1887. And Earp leased gaming concessions from several saloons. “It was a licensed, respectable business at the time,” Lake claimed.

More San Diego information comes from Glenn Boyer’s 1976 title I Married Wyatt Earp, a book which purports to be based on the recollections of Earp’s widow. Boyer devotes an entire chapter to the Earp’s in San Diego with particular attention to the couples “horse racing days.” Alas, Boyer’s fidelity to truth seems even less than Lake’s and today, most historians believe the book’s sources to be spurious.

Casey Tefertiller’s 1997 biography Wyatt Earp: the Life Behind the Legend is  the most reliable Earp account seen yet. It is soundly researched and respected by historians and critics; regretfully, Tefertiller offers only a single paragraph on Earp in San Diego.

There’s a new book on Earp that sounds promising. Garner Palenske’s Wyatt Earp in San Diego, Life After Tombstone (Graphic Publishers, 2011), tells “the real story of Wyatt Earp’s time in San Diego. . . a story that has never been told before.” We have that book on order here at the San Diego Public Library but as yet, it’s unseen.

All those old exposition buildings are nothing but fire traps.  I go to bed every night afraid that I will wake up in the morning to see the park buildings wiped out and with them collections of materials that could not be replaced for less than $1,000,000 [and] several years of hard work. –Joseph W. Sefton, Jr., president, Natural History Museum.

The story of a disaster in Balboa Park: the Civic Auditorium Fire.

The Civic Auditorium was the former Southern California Counties Building, built for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915.