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

Newer Posts Older Posts Home