I See by the Papers...

It was nearly dawn when a Boy Scout jumped off his bicycle and burst into the hotel lobby with an urgent message: The building next door was on fire. At about the same time, the driver of the city street sweeper found billowing smoke in the alley behind the hotel and pulled the nearby fire alarm. It was 5AM on May 8, 1936.

Santa Rosa's Fire Department was there almost immediately with their eight year-old La France "Quad" fire truck, capable of throwing 750 gallons of water a minute. Fire Chief William Muenter saw that wouldn't be adequate so he also brought on line their older 650 gallon pumper.

Meanwhile, The New Hotel Santa Rosa was being evacuated. Although the building on the corner of Fourth and B (currently the location of the CitiBank office) was best known as Rosenberg's, the department store only occupied the street level with a mezzanine. The eighty room residential hotel took up the second and third floors, with about 65 people staying there when the fire began.

As soon as the Boy Scout with a newspaper route told night clerk Russell Sutor about the fire he roused his boss Leo Bonalanza, who lived at the hotel with his wife and two kids. Sutor began calling rooms from the switchboard to awaken guests while hotel manager Bonalanza contacted the Occidental Hotel and other places in town to accomodate their displaced residents. An elderly woman was carried to the Occidental but otherwise people gathered in the lobby still in their pajamas ("scantily clad" and "partially clad" were the terms used by our Santa Rosa newspapers).

Evacuating the hotel was precautionary - the fire was contained at first to the McDannel Building on its east side and besides, the big store-hotel was built with reinforced concrete after the 1906 earthquake and always touted as fireproof.

There were several tenants in the McDannel, most prominently a hat shop and the L. A. Drake electrical supply and paint store. Signs for those businesses can be seen in the photographs below. The fire started in the backroom of Drake's store, but the exact cause was never determined (as far as I can find). Muenter told the press he thought it might have been a wiring short circuit or spontaneous combustion from flammable dirty rags.

The sequence of events during the early part of the fire are unclear, but by the end of the first hour Chief Muenter realized his two engines weren't enough, so he reached out to Petaluma and Guerneville for assistance. What we don't know is whether that happened before or after McDannel's exploded.

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

What does a town do after suffering a traumatic event? Try to quickly forget or make an effort to remember? It was mid-December 1920, after the sheriff was murdered and his killers were lynched. Santa Rosa seemed to want to move on; Christmas was two weeks away and most everyone had better things to do than stew over those horrific events.

Yet there were some who couldn't let it pass. Sheriff James “Sunny Jim” Petray was extremely popular throughout Sonoma County, known as a cheerful guy with a big heart. He deserved to be remembered and honored - a monument dedicated to him, maybe.

This is the surprising epilogue to the series “THERE WILL BE PRICES PAID” about the aftermath of the 1920 lynching in Santa Rosa. It's surprising because some were very upset over the design and setting of the memorial to Petray. It's also surprising because in more than a century we haven't heard about them getting so worked up - I stumbled across this forgotten history while researching something completely different.

Our story picks up four days after the sheriff's funeral. The concept of building a Petray Memorial Fund quickly turned to organizing a benefit baseball game between Santa Rosa's home team Rosebuds and a pickup team of major league professionals spending the winter in San Francisco. Included were indeed some celebrities of the time: “Lefty” O’Doul, "Duster" Mails and "Duffy" Lewis. (I know nothing about baseball so anyone who wants to argue about them pls. squabble elsewhere.) The Press Democrat claimed Babe Ruth might play, which was never likely.

With only two months to organize (game day was February 22) the community came together and pulled it off with remarkable ease. Extra streetcars and buses were scheduled. They formed committees galore; one prepped the grounds at Recreation Park (right behind our present high school) and extended the bleachers; others managed ticket sales by districts. A brass band of forty local musicians formed to play at the courthouse before the game, with Lee Brothers' freight trucks prepared to cart them over to the baseball field so they could toot more tunes between innings.

The Governor sent his regrets for not being able to attend but the Lieutenant Governor threw out the first pitch, the band entertained and comics performed a warmup show. The "Salient Six" all-stars beat the Rosebuds 2-1.

At $1.00 each, tickets were "going like hot cakes at Davis' Rotisserie" (per Santa Rosa Republican). The Farm Bureau bought a block so they could attend together, as did the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce. The sheriff's office in Eureka ordered 100 and the San Francisco sheriff took 500. Another 700 were sold at the gate. The final attendance was not recorded, but estimated up to 3,000. The total receipts ended up being over $2700, with a net profit of $2400 - over $80k today.

They had expected to raise about $800 so getting 3x as much was quite a windfall. Original memorial plans were modest - just a drinking fountain in front of the sheriff's office (on Hinton Ave. across from Courthouse Square). But now that there were fistfuls of money available, ideas on how it should be spent rolled in. The Sonoma County Federation of Women’s Clubs lobbied for a double row of trees planted along Redwood Highway, which the Santa Rosa Republican was quick to shoot down.

A committee of three was formed to make a decision; it was headed by Judge Seawell and included a representative from Petaluma and Healdsburg. By the end of the year it was announced they had commissioned J. W. Dolliver, architect of the beautiful courthouse, to construct a memorial on the northeast corner of Courthouse Square.

The design would be a kind of proscenium stage, raised a couple of steps above the sidewalk and 24 feet wide, with a drinking fountain on each side. The back was curved and at the top was carved, "Noble Life Crowned With Heroic Death Rises Above Self and Outlives the Pride and Pomp and Glory of the Mightiest Empire of The Earth." (It was from an 1868 speech by future president Garfield at the first Memorial Day celebration.)

But this was to be no empty stage - a San Francisco artist was separately commissioned to create a statue. "The main figure in the design is the Goddess of Justice, seated, with sword and wreath upon her knee. The whole is to be eight feet high and constructed of artificial stone," wrote the Healdsburg Tribune. It was so large that sculptor Henry von Sabern used three tons of clay just to build the model.

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.