I See by the Papers...

"The past is never dead. It’s not even past" is a flippant line tossed off in a novel by William Faulkner (don't bother reading it; I did one college summer, when I thought Faulkner novels were something I just had to learn to appreciate, more the fool I) and that quote reflects the theme of the book, which is about the terrible prices we often pay for long-ago mistakes. In recent years it's been misappropriated to mean history in general, particularly as an upbeat catchphrase for historic places. That meaning fits the town of Sonoma, with its adobes haunted by Vallejo's ghosts, or Petaluma, with much of its downtown undisturbed since Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. But Santa Rosa - not so much. Here the phrase has to be used in its original intent, to express the unhappy ways we are dogged by our past.

 This is the 700th article to appear in this journal, which now clocks in at over 1.5 million words (I have statistically typed the letter "e" about 190,530 times but the letter "z" merely 1,110). Normally such a milestone is an occasion for a "best of" recap but I did that not so long ago back at #650 with "650 KISSES DEEP," so instead I'd like to step back and reflect on some of the reasons Santa Rosa came to be the way it is today.

 This is also timely because right now (summer 2019) the city is working on the Downtown Station Area Specific Plan which "seeks to guide new development with a view to creating a vibrant urban center with a distinct identity and character." The plan calls for wedging up to 7,000 more housing units into the downtown area, which will be quite a trick.

 There are limits to what developers can build, in part because this is a high-risk earthquake zone (a 1 in 3 chance we will have a catastrophe within the next 26 years), but a greater obstacle is that Santa Rosa is uniquely burdened by layers of bad decisions made over several decades.


 The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott

On September 4, 1915, Luther Burbank met his destiny - or rather, he met the man who would eventually write the book which would define history's view of his life's work. Had Burbank somehow enjoyed a miracle of foresight to know that, he might have spent considerably less of the afternoon grousing about how he was being victimized.

"Burbank was thoroughly angry; his resentment had been growing for months," his biographer Walter L. Howard would write some three decades later. "With flashing eyes he declared that the Company had swindled him out of everything he had, which, of course, was an exaggeration but he was crippled financially, with his normal income from sales having been cut off for two or three years."

"The Company" was the Luther Burbank Company, which had been formed back in 1912 to completely take over the sales wing of his business, giving Burbank a guaranteed annual income and allowing him to concentrate on plant breeding. “I have no time to make money,” he told the Press Democrat. “I’ve more important work to do." (More background can be found in "BURBANK INC." - and by the way, have you read, "THE UNDOING OF LUTHER BURBANK, PART I"?)

But by that late summer afternoon in 1915 the company had only paid Burbank a fraction of what was owed, and that only after he had repeatedly twisted arms. The business was on the verge of collapse; that same month, top management was replaced in a last-minute bid to save it from bankruptcy. Another clue that the company was in serious trouble during the summer of 1915 was that a letter went to stockholders offering to sell them more shares at half the $25 face value, as long as they paid for the stock in cash. But even that was too expensive, commented the San Francisco Examiner, as brokers were offering shares at $8 and not finding buyers.

Looking back, it's no surprise the Company was circling the drain by then - the real mystery is why it was even formed; there was really nothing in its prospectus except for the exclusive right to use the respected name of Luther Burbank.



The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott