I See by the Papers...

Let the record show: In 1968, Santa Rosa achieved Peak Pepper. That was the year when the local Grand Poobahs gave a badge to our town character and proclaimed she was henceforth the town marshal. What could possibly go wrong?

This is part two of the story of Pepper Dardon. Her backstory was hashed in "I, PEPPER" which I urge you to read before continuing. Starting sometime in the mid-1950s she became a noisy and (mostly) cheerful fixture around the downtown district. How well someone got along with her depended on who they were and which Pepper they met. "She could be obnoxious or sweet, depending on the street persona she adopted that day," her 1992 Press Democrat obituary noted.

She was invariably kind to children who seemed to view her as silly, a grownup who didn't act like the usual sort of adult and wasn't much taller than they were. Older kids might think she was scary or mean because she teased them. Teenagers with smart mouths sometimes recognized her as one of their own ilk.

If you were a store clerk or bank teller having a busy day you did not want to see Pepper coming through your door. "Santa Rosa merchants, who endured her tirades as she made her daily rounds, considered her either a charming looney or a public nuisance," the PD obit also recalled. She was sure to do something disruptive; "Topping it all off, she yodeled, sang and played the harmonica. But not very well." Should there be a candy jar on the counter she would shoplift fistfuls to hand out later - see above, Children: Kindness to.

The men and women who were active in social clubs and charities appreciated her as an indefatigable volunteer. Pepper's self-appointed downtown duties included collecting money for good causes, which often were a sizable portion of all money raised during a fundraising drive. She sold lapel pins for the Lions Club's White Cane Day, ersatz red poppies for the VFW, candy for the Santa Rosa Jewish Women's Club (she wasn't Jewish), tickets to the Kiwanis pancake breakfast, rattled donation cans for the American Cancer Society and probably begged donations for still other groups forgotten.

When the campaign was over and the club held its inevitable self-congratulatory luncheon Pepper was often invited because of her outsized contribution. For a long time those orgs treated her as something like their own poster child, as did the Chamber of Commerce and particularly the Police Department.

"There's no question she got away with a lot. She was a kind of mascot to our smaller-town Police Department. The officers treated her like a pet." Gaye LeBaron wrote in a must-read 2005 column. Even before the town marshal gag, Pepper was chummy with the officers personally and they did favors for each other; cops would give her a lift in patrol cars and she would run errands for them, such as fetching a raincoat from the police station, according to a different column by Gaye. Nor did it hurt that she prowled downtown with a sharp eye for lawbreakers, like the top elephant enforcing good behavior on her unruly herd. Woe to anyone she caught jaywalking or dropping a gum wrapper - people were astonished such a tiny woman could holler so loud.

But Pepper had no greater champion than the Press Democrat, particularly columnist Gaye LeBaron. Pepper's birthday was usually heralded in the column, as were the impressive sums she collected for the fundraiser de jour. There were items when she broke her thumb and when she adopted a kitten. After husband Paul lost his job of twelve years as Occidental Hotel janitor, readers learned the Lions Club passed the hat and raised $36 to help them out. Updates followed as he was hired twice again as a janitor and lost those jobs as well. At one point an anonymous caller sniped to LeBaron's editor she should "stop talking so much about Pepper."

It was early in 1968 when a Pepper fan wrote to LeBaron suggesting they lobby to have Pepper chosen as Grand Marshal for that year's Rose Parade: "Riding in an open car down Fourth street would perhaps repay her in some small way for all the time she's donated." Gaye liked the proposal and hoped Pepper would get the nod - but a quirk of fate caused her to end up as a different kind of marshal instead.

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

She was funny, she was annoying, she was quirky and she terrorized a generation of kids. Her name was Pepper.

Everyone who lived in Santa Rosa between (roughly) 1955 and 1985 knew her, if not through a personal encounter then from Gaye LeBaron's columns where her antics were often chronicled. And although she passed away in 1992 Pepper has achieved a kind of immortality via social media, particularly in the FaceBook nostalgia groups where stories about her pop up regularly.

Pepper was called the "town character" but that doesn't ring quite true, as that usually describes someone genuinely eccentric. In Pepper's day Santa Rosa did have those sort of people too, such as the woman who burned off nervous energy by walking miles every day wearing ballet tights, a scarf and floppy hat. Or the Russian man who handed out malt balls wrapped in handwritten prayers and liked to perform scenes from Othello.

No, Pepper was better described as the town jester - it was as if she thought the Marx Brothers' movies were instructional films. She did things she hoped people would think funny. She would yodel in the Exchange Bank or into the microphone at a store's checkout register. She would stand next to the Post Office and ask people where the Post Office was. She would pretend to direct traffic at the corner of Mendocino and Fourth. She would plop herself in the backseat of cars waiting for a stoplight to change and expect the driver to take her somewhere. Once she pulled that stunt with a convertible and when they drove down the street she royally waved at pedestrians. They waved back.

Another of her hallmarks were the cornball jokes that would only tickle the funnybone of a very young child. "Squirrels are looking for you. They think you're nuts!" Instead of saying goodbye she might make the lame quip, "If I don't see you in the mattress, I'll see you in the spring." And then there was her perpetual favorite: "Hey, you dropped something. Your footsteps."

She would be considered a little person today, about the height of a smallish 12 year-old girl. It's not cruel to say she dressed clownish (but not always) and her usual attire was so garish she appeared to glow radioactive. She wore neon-bright Hawaiian blouses and shirts, muumuus so baggy she could have shoplifted half a store underneath, and invariably had children's moccasins on her feet with plastic flowers poking out of her hair. After she had gall bladder surgery in 1970 she carried her 45 gallstones in a jar to show people.

Gaye LeBaron wrote a further description in a 2005 column: "She was a sight to behold -- built like a fireplug, heavy on the makeup, including glitter and those gold stick-um stars the teacher puts on very good tests; heavier yet on the perfume, which she applied from test bottles on the counters at Rosenberg's and the several drugstores on Fourth Street."

LeBaron knew Pepper better than anyone else, and that column is a wonderful tribute which I urge you to read straightaway. "People have always had mixed feelings about Pepper," she wrote in an earlier profile. "Some people, sad to say, hate her. I have mail to attest to that. But mostly people grin at her, shake their heads in wonder, and pass by amused because that's just Pepper and everybody knows Pepper."

Judging by comments on social media over the years the jury's still out. Folks (like me) who weren't around in her heyday fifty years ago only know her through anecdotes, so it's easy for us to view her as a goofball who made downtown Santa Rosa a fun place to be. But to those growing up here a common complaint was "she scared me to death." To kids Pepper could seem crazy and acted like a police-sanctioned bully.

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

There were 49 prisoners awaiting execution but only one was a woman. That woman was Iva Kroeger.

On May 1, 1963 she was sentenced to death for the murders of Mildred and Jay Arneson and sent to the California Institution for Women at Frontera (AKA Corona State Prison) to await a decision on her appeal to the California Supreme Court. And to the surprise of many, the justices ordered her sentence be reconsidered on a technicality.

The court agreed her trial was fair and did not dispute her first degree murder conviction. But when giving instructions to the jury during the penalty phase of the trial, the judge erred by telling them a sentence to life imprisonment would make Iva eligible for parole, so there was a chance - however microscopic - she could be back on the streets in as little as seven years. Iva soon found herself headed back to San Francisco for a new (partial) trial.

But first: More medical reports - and guess what? The new experts contradicted all the previous experts!

Doctors at the state prison declared Iva had "chronic brain syndrome and central nervous system syphilis." Her history of syphilis came up during the trial. A quarter-century earlier she was treated at a hospital and the medic at the San Francisco jail infirmary thought she had signs of paresis, which is a kind of chronic brain inflammation often found in late neurosyphilis. A doctor at the trial testified he didn't believe it because she didn't display the typical symptoms: "I won't mention them unless you make me," he said, "because she might have them tomorrow if I do."

Iva was also seen by two new court-ordered psychiatrists. The three who had examined her before the trial said in court she was a “pathological liar” and a criminal sociopath putting on a show in hopes of avoiding punishment. The new crop of experts diagnosed her as fully psychotic.

Now certifiably physically and psychologically impaired, Iva was once again before Judge Neubarth, who had sentenced her to death almost exactly a year prior. This time she had two lawyers, one of them being famed litigator Melvin Belli whose law firm had also represented her in the damage suit over the injury that caused her incurable limp, which seemed to come and go.

Neubarth and the prosecutor had already agreed it would be a bench trial, as she was such a "mental defect" it would be inhumane to risk a new jury condemning her to death because such a verdict would be easily overturned on appeal. With no objections from her lawyers, Judge Neubarth reduced her sentence to life without parole. "When I say life, I mean life," Neubarth stated. "She should never be returned to society. I am going to file a special report in which I will urge that she never be released."

The hearing was over in 25 minutes and the shortened proceedings deprived Iva of a stage where she could perform for her fan club in the gallery. Still, she "...trundled into court in a wheelchair with her left leg bandaged heavily (apparently her own idea and not that of Corona physicians)," according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Afterwards she spoke with reporters in the hallway. "I never had a trial...I don't believe the judge knowed the truth. I have 108 witnesses to prove my innocence."

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

The little boy would not wake up. It wasn't as if he was short of sleep; the night before, seven year-old Michael Anderson said he was getting tired not long after eating a few pieces of his Hallowe'en candy. His parents assumed he was just overcome from the excitement of trick-or-treating. But now it was morning and a schoolday, so it was time for him to get out of bed. Except his mother could not wake him up.

Then she noticed he had vomited on his pillow while asleep.

Instead of taking him to Sheppard Elementary, she rushed Michael to Memorial Hospital.

Blood tests revealed he had consumed an overdose of barbiturates. Also, he had aspirated some of his stomach contents, which put him at risk of death. He was in a coma for over 24 hours.

Elsewhere in Santa Rosa on that 1973 Hallowe'en, two teenage girls went to the hospital. One of them was in the same Roseland neighborhood where Michael lived and feared she was having a "bad trip" (hey, it was 1973). The other girl was in South Park and felt sick after eating wrapped taffy which doctors thought might have contained aspirin with codine.

Sonoma County Sheriff Don Striepeke told the Press Democrat "there's no doubt at this point that all three of these young people were drugged by candy from trick or treat bags" and advised all Hallowe'en candy given out in Santa Rosa be thrown away.

Deputies went door-to-door in the area where Michael made his rounds that night and contacted 150 residents, warning them about the tainted candy. Two people were given polygraph tests and nothing further was said about them. But no matter - Michael's story made him the perfect poster child for "Secret Witness"! 

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

It wasn't a courtroom; it was a theater stage, it was a circus ring, it was the geek tent at the carnival sideshow. It was the 1963 double murder trial of Iva Kroeger and since you couldn't attend in person, you eagerly soaked up every news report describing her daily antics.

Iva was captured by the FBI in September 1962 and the trial would not commence until the following January. She and husband Ralph would be put on trial together and they shared the same defense attorney, Emmet Hagerty of San Francisco.

After Iva had been in jail six weeks - and following Grand Jury indictments and attorney delays (including an effort to move proceedings to Santa Rosa per a theory the murders were committed here) - she pleaded innocent by reason of insanity and Ralph made a plea of simple innocence. The judge appointed three psychiatrists to interview her and a month later, all agreed she was sane at the time of the murders.

The trial potentially would have three phases. Should the jury find Ralph and Iva innocent, proceedings would be over. But if the verdict was guilty, the next phase would consider whether Iva was insane at the time of the murders. And if she was found sane, jurors would decide between the death penalty or another sentence. There were eight women and four men on the final jury.

In the interim before the trial there were several new developments. The Santa Rosa branch of Bank of America had already filed an attachment on the Santa Rosa Ave. motel and the San Francisco house for $5,000 plus attorney fees. She further had loans from Exchange Bank for $1,177 and a Bank of America branch in San Francisco for $3,100 - taken together, the equivalent to $92k today. Another lien on the property was made by John Mazurek of San Francisco, who had one of those Believe-it-or-Not! encounters with Iva the con artist. It seemed she answered his 1961 classified ad to sell a dining room set. Iva didn't pay Mazurek for the furniture, of course, but also borrowed $975 from him (!!) - I swear, that woman's powers of persuasion were supernatural. His lien was for $1275, covering the sale price of the dinette and the loan she didn't pay back.

Gentle Reader might recall from part one that a couple of months after Mildred Arneson's disappearance her family received a mysterious telegram and typewritten letter demanding all of them to "keep your nose out of my affairs." It was so out of character they had no question someone else had written them, but the Sonoma County sheriff's investigator only yawned. But when the department did bother to ask questions about the letter they discovered Iva had borrowed the typewriter from Inez, the Native American woman who lived in Santa Rosa and often acted as Iva's chauffeur. As for it being postmarked from Tijuana, Inez told them Iva was in San Diego at that time (probably attending Rosicrucian Fellowship meetings).

There was also pre-trial chatter about whether Mildred was killed in Santa Rosa or San Francisco, much of the speculation centered on a large steamer trunk that was at the motel. What happened to it? Was it the same trunk that would hold Mildred's body?

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

Iva Kroeger was headed to Santa Rosa, she told a friend after she arrived back in the Bay Area in mid-August, 1962. "I'm tired."

She didn't make it, but what she intended to do here was unknown. Did she expect to resume managing the fleabag motel on Santa Rosa Avenue? Was she not aware the Sonoma County sheriff and the FBI were looking for her? Didn't she know the Press Democrat - and other Bay Area newspapers - were printing investigative stories linking her to the disappearance of the Arnesons?

Or maybe she wasn't planning to return to Santa Rosa at all; the context was asking the friend for money to buy bus tickets. Iva was a fluent liar and adept at making up tales to grub cash out of everyone who was unfortunate enough to cross her path.

But she was likely telling the truth about feeling tired. She had just finished a 7,000+ mile trek across the nation and back again via trains, Greyhound buses and lifts from strangers, with her two grandsons (ages three and four) in tow for the cross-country return journey.

This article is in two parts; it begins with the story of that wild trip which can be told thoroughly for the first time, thanks to modern resources such as Ancestry and the availability of many regional newspapers on newspapers.com. The final section describes the three weeks between the discovery of the bodies and her arrest, when many developed a maniac obsession over the case and imagined they were seeing Iva everywhere. Before we begin all that, Gentle Reader will surely find her pre-Santa Rosa backstory illuminating:

The deepest secret of Iva Kroeger was the lie she told about her origins. In Santa Rosa she claimed to have been born in Munich Germany and sometimes added she was Jewish. She spoke in broken English and cocked her head to one side when reading or listening to someone, as if she struggled to understand the language.

In truth, she was born Lucille Cecilia Hooper at Louisville, Kentucky in September, 1918, which made her 43 when she murdered the couple and became a fugitive six months later. She married in November 1934 at age sixteen; she lied on the marriage license and said she was 19. Her husband was nearly twice as old and they had two sons while she was still a teenager. 

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

"Are the police looking for me?" she asked her friend on the phone.

It was mid-June 1962, and the Sonoma County sheriff's office was indeed looking for her...sort of. An arrest warrant was issued even though they weren't sure of the woman's name (was it Eva Long or Iva Kroeger?) where she might be (she was last seen in a taxi headed for Cotati) or what she looked like (she had taken all known photos with her when she vanished).

The warrant was for an assault with a deadly weapon because she pulled a gun on a tradesman who was owed money, but there was a growing clamor for her to be investigated in the disappearance of Mildred and Jay Arneson. Six months had passed since they went missing and Eva/Iva was the prime suspect, having taken over the Arneson's motel business and peddled lies or contradictory stories about what she knew. Yet while the sheriff still believed the elderly couple would turn up someday, the family and their lawyer kept gathering evidence which convinced them the Arnesons were dead. All that (and more!) was covered in the first chapter, "MURDER MOTEL ON SANTA ROSA AVE."

When Eva fled Santa Rosa on May 23 she left her friend Mrs. Kelly in charge the motel. She had met the Kellys five years earlier in San Francisco, when their son was in Cub Scouts and Eva/Iva was the Den Mother. (Let's pause for a moment to digest that unexpected factoid.) When deputies arrived the next day to make an arrest Mrs. Kelly told them her friend was then known as Iva Kroeger - which was indeed her legal name. Unsure which was an alias, the Press Democrat and other papers took to calling her Mrs. Eva Long-Kroeger.

As mentioned previously, the search for the Arnesons didn't begin in earnest until the Press Democrat launched its investigative series on July 1. The paper found that after Iva left Santa Rosa she headed for the San Francisco home she shared with husband Ralph Kroeger. She stayed there with him for a day before taking off, supposedly returning to Santa Rosa.

The thread that weaved through each part of this story was Iva Kroeger's astonishing Svengali-like powers to get others to do her bidding even when it was against their own best interests, and Ralph was no exception - see sidebar.

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

At the beginning of the summer of 1962 nobody much cared about the story except for a Press Democrat staff writer. By midsummer it was the top news in the Bay Area. As the season came to an end, a mania over the case had gripped all of California, with tips and false leads flooding police telephone lines.

The pressing question everyone wanted answered: Where were the Arnesons? Mildred and Jay had been missing over six months when the first PD article appeared. They had no close friends in Santa Rosa so there was no one to raise an alarm over their unusual disappearances, but her family in Washington state was convinced something terrible had happened.

They presented the Sonoma County Sheriff with their suspicions and even evidence of crimes. Yet the office stubbornly refused to investigate and treated it like a routine missing-persons case, which is to say they did nothing as the months passed. "It's primarily a matter of waiting for leads," the sheriff's investigator said. The PD slammed the department for what it called "official indifference." In a headline, no less.

And then there was Eva Anna Long, who had also vanished. She was supposedly a friend of the Arnesons - were they all together somewhere? The inspector in charge of the case believed so (while leaving open "possible foul play") even though the woman had an incredibly sketchy history. She was already wanted by the sheriff for recently pulling a gun on someone and her name was actually an alias.

At its core this is a true crime story which any competent writer could sum up in 2,500 words or so - as several have in years since. (Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, wrote a novelized version called "Naughty.") Sure, it can be framed as a straight-forward "Motive, Means and Opportunity" crime, but only by going back to the original sources can we grasp what made this tale so remarkably compelling; it sucked everyone in because each new detail was wilder and crazier than the last. It was like receiving a piece of a jigsaw puzzle nearly every day which changed the emerging picture from what you expected.

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

Someday we will have large brains but no teeth; such was a prediction that appeared in Santa Rosa's newspaper in 1885.

As seen through the pages of the Sonoma Democrat, the 1880s were years of frustratingly slow progress. Take the example of the telephone; at the start of the decade people in San Francisco and Sacramento could speak with each other, but it took until 1884 before Santa Rosa and Petaluma were connected by a single telephone line. Similar with electricity; since 1879 San Francisco had electric street lamps and lights in a few important buildings, but it was almost Christmas 1892 before the Merchant's Electric Lighting Company managed to get a few lightbulbs glowing in downtown Santa Rosa store windows for the first time.

Yet our ancestors in the 1880s were intensely interested in what things may come, particularly when it came to advances in knowledge. In the Democrat can be found over five hundred mentions of "science" or something being "scientific," which is quite a lot considering it was a four-page weekly with about half the space taken up by advertising. And a good portion of those references came from the ads - there was a guy who did "scientific horse shoeing" in Santa Rosa.

The Democrat was hardly alone in its fascination with anything science related. Some editions of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner filled a page or more with so many letters from researchers and amateur scientists that it could be mistaken for an academic journal. Probably never before or since in America has the very concept of science been such a popular buzzword. This attitude continued into the 1890s, although newspaper science items became more sharply focused on the development of internal combustion engines and the horseless carriage.

In that era continuing education was considered a pastime; like Petaluma and Healdsburg, Santa Rosa formed a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.¹ When it was declared Cloverdale would be the ideal spot in the North Bay to view the 1889 total solar eclipse, an estimated 800 people booked seats on a special excursion train. "The sidewalks on the main streets were lined with amateur astronomers, the result of whose observations consisted in chief of aching eyes and the satisfaction of having witnessed an event of great scientific importance," reported the Democrat.

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

Rules to live by: Never eat anything bigger than your head. Never shoot pool at a place called Pop’s. Never eat food at a place called Mom’s. To that list let me add: Never, ever, trust a doodlebug.

During the first half of the 20^th century, pretty much everyone knew a doodlebug was a fellow who had a device that could supposedly find oil underground (it's also been the name for a motorscooter, a go kart-type midget race car and several different insects). Sometimes it was what they called the contraption instead, making the operator a doodlebugger.

Gentle Reader has already met a doodlebug: John W. Frank, the General Manager of the 1908-1910 attempts to strike oil near Petaluma. We don't know whether he tried to use an oil-finding gizmo here but after Frank left Sonoma County he went to Canada, where he said he had invented just such a device. A 1913 British Columbia mining newsletter described how he scammed two different groups of investors and then found himself pushed out when rival grifters made a better sales pitch...

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

His name was James Dalzell Brown. Should you dig up your great-grandparents (and please do not do that simply on my account) and asked them who the "bank wrecker" was, they would not have hesitated to spit out his name. Had they lived in Petaluma around 1910, there might have been some cussing along with the spit.

Before plunging forward, a short prologue and apology: This is part II of the previous article, "DREAMS OF AN EMPIRE OF OIL" which covered Petaluma's ill-fated oil and gas boom through part of 1910. Players introduced there are discussed in greater depth below, so Gentle Reader might wish to review it before continuing (the article's not that long).

This article, however, is very long and I do apologize for that. But this is an incredible story which has never been told, even though Brown was a criminal with plans extraordinaire. (Honestly, I don't understand why there hasn't been a book, movie or documentary mini-series about this guy and his gang of pirates.) To make this easier to read in more than one sitting there's an option of hopping past the Petaluma oil saga and going directly to the part about Brown's crazy schemes.

The takeaway from this story should be that Petaluma was lucky it didn't become the West Coast hub for oil and natural gas in 1909. Undoubtedly Brown and his boys would have exploited the town and anyone who mistakenly trusted them - and we know they would've done so because a pair of them did manage to scam a few Petaluma residents, as you'll discover at the end of this article.

And let's note Petalumans of a vintage age might also recall there were indeed productive oil wells operated by Shell Oil east of Petaluma. Those projects began several years after the events described here and did not involve any of the same companies or people. Researchers interested in exploring that history should seek out references to the Ansonia Oil Co. between 1921 and 1928.

So let's now pick up where part I ended: In 1910 Petaluma's elation over striking oil began to crumple in September after the town's papers printed a letter from the State Mining Bureau. Cassius Webb, acting as the attorney for Ramona Oil, asked them how much the oil field was worth so Consolidated Oil could start paying dividends within a couple of months.

The Bureau's response was brutal. First, it was their view there was "little or no chance" of hitting large quantities of oil. Some of the company's expectations were "entirely ridiculous" and "it would require considerable time to put the property in paying condition." Webb's claims seemed "intended to deceive the most ignorant" and it was the Bureau's opinion the project had "all the earmarks of deliberate fraud."

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

It cut through the summer night sky like a star fallen to earth, its blue-white flame casting deep unnatural shadows for miles. "I have lived in Petaluma for forty-five years. It was the grandest thing I ever saw," said Frank Lippitt.

"Put me down as saying we are just on the verge of a new era of prosperity," Richard Skinner told the Petaluma Morning Courier. "The striking of gas will put Petaluma before the world as the ideal manufacturing center." Forget the eggs, forget the chickens; soon there will be oil rigs on every farm and field and everyone in town will be as rich as the McNears. Richer.

This is the first of three articles on the Sonoma County speculation oil boom in the early 20th century. Although this installment covers just a single oil field near Petaluma, during those years petroleum prospecting companies were sprouting overnight with their "experts" rushing everywhere, signing oil leases on lands from Occidental to Bennett Valley to Two Rock. So also forget the hops and the grapes, the dairies and the orchards - no more Redwood Empire but rather an Empire of Oil.

But these particular stories are really not about the search for oil. They are about stock swindles and fraud scams - crimes which not only occurred here, but apparently were endemic to oil prospecting all over the country at the time. Then there are related mysteries about how much the local bigwigs and newspaper editors knew about what was really going on and chose to keep quiet. As found below, the Petaluma Daily Morning Courier seemed particularly eager to keep a lid on news that may have raised eyebrows.

Andy Ducker and his family had a 363 acre sheep ranch three-quarters of a mile east of (what's now) Petaluma Adobe State Park. It was never explained what set the wheels in motion but we can assume in 1907 Andy told someone about the thick black gunk seeping out of the ground in a few places. In August a man named Larrimore showed up and he signed a lease to allow drilling on part of his property. If they didn't strike oil at least he'd get a free water well out of the deal, the 68 year-old rancher said.

Within weeks, prospects were starting to look like a sure thing. "At a depth of only about sixty feet the men have come across strong indications of oil," wrote the Argus-Courier. "Blue soil, which has a strong petroleum smell is being brought up by the auger and there is such a flow of gas that one man was put out of commission on Tuesday."

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

Well sir, it's just past 800 articles at the little history blog halfway down on your bookmark list, so it's a good time to take a look around and see what's new in the neighborhood.

Our last cook's tour was five years ago (2018) in article # 650. Since that was just a few months after the Tubbs fire, the most read article was THE FORGOTTEN FIRES OF FOUNTAINGROVE AND COFFEY PARK, which described man-made fires in 1908 and 1939 that could have been catastrophic had the winds shifted towards Santa Rosa. That and other articles about historic fires are still the most popular and featured in the list below.

The only technical change to the site is the addition of the RANDOM option in the header, which works as described. It was created during the early days of the Covid lockdown and seems to be well used. I've even rediscovered several items I'd forgotten writing about.

The curated list found here mainly contains stories written over the last five years and a different list can be found in article 650 with one overlap. Articles now tend to be longer and more in-depth; there's a catagory below for multi-part series such as the 41,000 word, twelve part examination of the creation of Santa Rosa Plaza. The ever growing number of newspapers and journals available online has also made it possible to dive deeper into research beyond just the Sonoma County papers.

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

In another world Luther Burbank would be forgotten today; only in the most comprehensive county history books might you find mention about him as a wholesale purveyor of novelty seeds and saplings and cactus paddles.

In that same world the residents of the Bay Area would recognize Santa Rosa by name but think of it as a smallish county seat like Martinez, or a place you must pass through to go somewhere else.

Here's the executive summary of how it turned out instead: In the early 1900s, Burbank became one of the most famous people in America and tourists flocked to Santa Rosa for a look at his celebrated gardens.

There's lots more to the story, of course. It didn't happen overnight and followed years of hard work by Burbank to produce a steady stream of new hybrids. While Burbank's name was always well known to readers of gardening newsletters and farm journals, by the mid-1890s he was increasingly appearing in mainstream newspaper and magazines being described as a "wizard" of plants. And once he started being wizard-ized in those Sunday features, Burbank and Santa Rosa became famous together.

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

April 1, 1916 was a grand day in Santa Rosa as an estimated 20,000 visitors - "one of the largest [crowds] ever seen here," boasted the Press Democrat - joined residents to cheer a parade of autos two miles long. No, it wasn't the Rose Carnival (there wasn't one that year) but “Safety First Day” organized by town bigwigs. Hyped as being the kickoff of a new national semi-holiday, six newsreel camera crews were on hand to record the doings.

There were all manner of safety-related demonstrations. Firemen extinguished a mock fire on the roof of the Santa Rosa Savings Bank, although there was a delay because a car was illegally parked in front of the hydrant. A PG&E lineman faked electrocution (!) and was given aid by a doctor and nurse who were part of the act. It was performed so convincingly that two doctors in the audience rushed up to help. The parade included two boys carrying an enormous model of a safety pin which was a real crowd-pleaser for some reason, and the Petaluma contingent included children dressed as chickens (of course).

But the main focus of Safety First Day was "instructing people in the rules of the road and operating of automobiles to prevent accidents." Earlier the San Francisco Examiner promoted the event with promises that "expert drivers of motor cars will give exhibitions of the right and wrong way of driving in the city streets...drivers will give an actual demonstration how automobiles should be operated to comply with the laws" and not to be left out, "pedestrians will also be taught how to cross the streets. Dummies will be used to show how the drivers of cars have to avoid the average pedestrian who never looks up or down the street before crossing."

Luther Burbank and his new Willys-Knight five-passenger touring car were at the front of the parade, and afterwards the Examiner quoted his enthusiastic endorsement of the event. "Such a demonstration as this is amazing...if adopted nationally it would be one of the greatest benefits to humanity. I had no idea that it would be as good as this."

Unfortunately, a few months later our Luther was involved in a safety mishap which could have ended tragically. He and Elizabeth were driving to the movies when he confused the accelerator with the brake pedal. The big car lurched over the curb, narrowly missed a pedestrian, then crashed through the display window of the White House department store at Fourth and B streets. Burbank parked and called store owner Bill Carithers (did Burbank just walk through the broken window to use their phone?) before he and his wife proceeded with their plans to watch a romantic melodrama and a British documentary on WWI combat.

Gentle Reader might expect the most famous guy in town crashing through a plate glass window of the most popular store in town would merit more than a 200 word item on page eight of the PD. But despite the enthusiasm shown on 1916's Safety First Day, in the following years even serious accidents became so commonplace they became back page fillers - it was rare to open the paper and not find reports of a driver and passengers being hurled out of their seats, a car "turning turtle" (flipping over) or a pedestrian being struck.

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

I actually gasped at seeing the enhanced image - I had no idea the technology had advanced so far.

Over the years I've dabbled with applying colorization and other image processing effects to old pictures. Anyone interested in history or genealogy has likely done the same; probably all photo editing apps have at least a few enhancement tools built-in, and some of the more powerful online versions use AI to guess at the contents of the image for automatically adding color to black and white photos.

Results were rarely satisfying. Colorized images looked washed-out and the color choices could be laughably wrong. And because the underlying software was developed using modern photographs taken in color, a processed black and white images might even lose quality - old portraits often have a shallow depth of field, for example, and apps may "fix" that by sharpening up the background.

Then on a whim, I recently took a photo from a 1920 Press Democrat and uploaded it to an AI website. I didn't expect much improvement; my experience was that the software would probably despeckle the picture but not materially improve it. Still, I wanted the best possible image since the woman was key to the article I was researching.

To repeat myself: I actually gasped.

There was so much signal noise in the PD original it was difficult to read the woman's expression; was she glaring angrily at the photographer? Did she look tired, or even sick? But with one click of the mouse, out of that hazy static emerged a clear and sharply-focused image of a woman's face - with eyelashes, even!

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

Run! Hide! The AIs are coming for you! They're going to take away your job and otherwise completely screw up your life! Or maybe there's a single mega-AI like Skynet in the Terminator movies which will kill us all! Elon Musk could be secretly assembling murder robots at Tesla factories right now and frankly, I would not put it past him. Why, just the other day he...oh, never mind.

Making apocalyptic predictions about AI has become a popular new subgenre for the egghead class. Thomas L. Friedman, who preens as A Really Big Thinker on the New York Times' editorial pages, was given a simple dog-and-pony demo of a chatbot and after a sleepless night wrote a March 21, 2023 column saying he foresees it becoming as powerful and dangerous as nuclear energy. "We are going to need to develop what I call 'complex adaptive coalitions' ...to define how we get the best and cushion the worst of A.I." Pundits who want to appear extra savvy usually toss in an ominous warning that doomsday is only a few years away - or if we're really unlucky, just a few months. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Look, I get it; recent advances in AI can seem super-scary, and it doesn't help when even an OpenAI co-founder admits "we are messing around with something we don’t fully understand." It seems safe to say these technologies will impact our future in ways we can't anticipate - though I doubt they will nudge us towards Utopia, which is the sort of thing AI developers actually like to say.

Chabots in particular are hyped as a boon to humankind because users can supposedly ask questions about anything and receive easy-to-understand answers in a wide variety of languages. A top concern about chatbots is they work too well - that students can use a 'bot to effortlessly write homework assignments for them. And unless a teacher has reason to suspect the work was generated by a computer, the student might expect to get a very good grade. After all, any report or essay generated by the computer will be clearly written and contain true, verifiable facts...right? Uh, maybe. There's that sticky little problem of hallucinations.

A chatbot will sometimes make stuff up - Wikipedia has a good page on this "hallucination" phenomenon. Not only will it tell you a lie, but when asked followup questions the 'bot will double-down and insist its answers were accurate, despite absolute proof it was dead wrong. Even more worrisome, researchers do not understand why this happens (see quote above, per "we are messing around").

Since the topic here is history, I want to be very clear this is not an issue of interpretation - that a chatbot answer was considered incorrect because it stated the Civil War was about state's rights or that John Quincy Adams was a better president than his father. Nor does it suggest the 'bot was simply confused and mixed us up with (say) the city of Santa Rosa in the Philippines. No, a chatbot hallucination means the program invented people, places or things that never existed, or that it ignored facts which have been proven true. And as I was amazed to discover, it happens a lot.

To evaluate the quality of the chatGPT 'bot, I submitted a dozen questions discussed below. None of them were intended to be tricky; they were the sort of questions I imagine might appear on a middle school or high school test after the class spent a unit learning about local history. (I did, however, throw in one where the topic was inferred.) ChatGPT answered three accurately; the rest were all/partially wrong or the question was skipped. One answer was a complete hallucination. If a teacher gave the chatbot a D+ grade I would consider her to be generous.

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

Our country is so divided some are starting to worry it could lead to a civil war. Even Sonoma County is split with neither political party clearly having an upper hand, Democrats mostly in control of the government while Republicans dominate the media. It's easy to find reasons to sneer at the guys on the other side of the fence; Democrats are in disarray while Republicans bark out conspiracy theories. Both parties have resorted to name-calling and view themselves as unfairly treated victims. And it will probably get even worse - who knows what craziness awaits us next year in 1858?

While Santa Rosa was the county seat it was still little more than a village in the late 1850s. There were about 400 people in the town proper, although there were three times that number living in simple cabins and roughly made houses in the surrounding township. There were six blacksmith shops but only two restaurants; three carpenter shops and one clothing store. A farmer's town. By contrast, Petaluma was a regional mercantile center - it took at least 90 minutes to reach it by buggy, but it was said half of Santa Rosa still shopped down there.

This is a (long overdue) companion piece to an article I wrote several years ago, "PETALUMA VS SANTA ROSA: ROUND ONE." That covered the stirring rivalry between the towns, including Petaluma's insistence it deserved the county seat more than Santa Rosa. There's some necessary crosstalk between these two items, but the focus here is on the feud between the town's newspapers. This is not just because of the entertainment value of a good ol' Victorian-era insult throwdown (ranging from childish taunting about "a set of block heads and dolts" to an almost poetic, "wou't [sic] somebody hold this high mettled charger? He has already bucked sufficient"). More importantly, the 1850s squabble in newsprint revealed details about Santa Rosa during that era that wouldn't have been otherwise known.

For example: The early years of the Sonoma Democrat - Santa Rosa's newspaper - are most associated with its pro-Confederacy position during the Civil War and expressing its raw hatred for Lincoln even before then. But that was when the Democrat was owned and edited by Thomas L. Thompson starting in 1860; the paper had two earlier owners. Were they likewise pro-slavery zealots? Historians mention them only in passing (if at all) so the answers will be surprising.

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

Santa Rosa's downtown was in big trouble during the 1980s, and it wasn't very long before I began to view the story as a murder mystery. This was an unexpected offshoot of my research on the run-up to opening of the downtown mall in 1982, which culminated in the "Road to the Mall" series that just wrapped up. From personal memory I recalled the years following the mall's debut were tough on businesses in the downtown core and in Railroad Square - but only after paging through back issues of the Press Democrat did I come to understand how bad it was. By the end of the 1980s, it appeared Santa Rosa's downtown was not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

Places we thought would never, ever close were shutting down with frightening regularity. The White House Department Store at Third and D Streets closed in 1985. They had constructed a cavernous 25,000 sq. ft. building and moved in only sixteen years earlier. The downtown McDonald's had a prime location just two doors down from Exchange Bank and it closed in 1986. Note to city planners: If you have a fast food restaurant that depends on lots of foot traffic and it fails because of a lack of customers, that's a pretty good sign your sidewalks don't have enough feet.

The PD conducted a 1986 survey asking people why they came downtown, comparing it to an identical survey conducted in 1983. In almost every category - shopping, dining and convenience - the numbers declined sharply. The only response where downtown showed an uptick was when asked if they agreed with "[I] like downtown because of Rosenberg's." Two years later in 1988, Rosenberg's closed.

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

It was a grandest day, to hear the dignitaries tell it.

"It's a day of celebration and a day of tribute," said Mayor Bill Barone. "We as citizens can be very proud of what we've accomplished and of what we see because we've done it all together." Other notables called it "fantastic" and "a very joyous occasion." They all wore flowers on their lapels, pinned there by performers wearing tuxedos and top hats. The Santa Rosa High School marching band played the Rocky theme song and oddly, the "thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat" background music from ABC's Wide World of Sports.

This was happening at the 1982 ribbon-cutting for the mall, which the mayor crowed was "the new heart of our city."

Mall developer Ernest Hahn was also on hand and said he was gratified by all those who supported the project "through thick and thin." The shopping center was going to provide 2,000 permanent new jobs with an annual payroll of $20 million. Oh, sure, only about sixty of the 130 spaces were actually leased at the time, but by the end of the year he expected full occupancy.

What a difference a year makes. In early January 1983 - roughly 300 days since the grand opening - Hahn Inc. sold the mall. Over half the spaces were never rented, and after a lousy Christmas shopping season prospects grew even dimmer as eight tenants moved out.

The Press Democrat had printed countless front page articles and feature spreads cheering for Hahn and portraying the mall as a no-risk road to riches while damning Hugh Codding and other skeptics. Yet when the end came, the PD buried the bombshell story of Hahn's hasty departure in a 500-word item on page eight of a mid-week edition.

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

You’re standing at the intersection of Fourth and B streets, next to where the Citibank building is now. It is March 15, 1978 - groundbreaking day for the downtown mall.

Twice before you've visited this spot; the most recent was the 1982 grand opening of the mall. In 1972 you were also here for a last look-see at the old district west of B before the city began demolishing it all. Those time machine trips were mentioned in the first chapter of this series, "HOW THE MALL CAME TO BE."

But before you now in 1978 is a vast vacant lot, 43 acres scraped clear of the barber shops, the hotels filled with pensioners, the dive bars and the ballet school, the grand Art Deco "Cal" movie palace, the thrift shops and lunch counters. Gone are places where you could swing by after work and go home with the latest Elton John album or a live parakeet in a cage - the sort of eclectic district whose character helps a town thrive. All that remains now is the old Post Office, which will be moved in a couple of years and become the Sonoma County Museum.

About 300 yards away, near what once was the corner of Second and A streets, there's something going on. You see a raised platform with a lectern - although so few are in the audience that a speaker could be easily heard without a microphone.

Such a meager attendance seems odd, considering that morning a PD editorial boasted this is "the beginning of a new day" that will bring "a thriving shopping center in the heart of our city." The paper will later claim a poll shows four out of five residents want the mall opened ASAP.

Yet the crowd doesn't seem too appreciative of the blessings that are surely soon to come. In front of the rostrum a young girl marches back and forth with a protest sign. There are also adults (including a former Planning Commissioner) holding posters that read, "Don't divide our city!" and "Don't isolate Railroad Square" and "Did you vote on urban renewal?"

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