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 20th 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
Labels: SantaRosaHistory.com
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