Despite its ambitions to become the grand metropolis of the North Bay, Santa Rosa didn’t have a public park until the Juilliards donated their nine acres in 1931. But ten years before that, the city and Chamber of Commerce had bought land just north of our current high school with the intent to create the “Luther Burbank Creation Garden.” Efforts to raise money and bootstrap those plans dragged on through the 1920s. Newspaper articles about the latest (non) developments were so common it was referred to as just “the Burbank Park” without further explanation.
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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 summer of 1925 was approaching the midpoint of the Prohibition era and by then Sonoma County pretty much knew what to expect. Every week or two the Press Democrat would report some poor guy arrested by deputies for hiding or transporting a few jugs of “jackass” brandy or other hooch. The fines for these small-time bootleggers was $400-500, which was the equivalent to about six weeks of an average income at the time. That pace would pick up considerably the following year when “Jock” Pemberton became County Detective (see “THE ELIOT NESS OF SONOMA COUNTY“).
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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: 1925, prohibition
You can sum up the display ads in the July 1925 Press Democrat as good, bad, and… WTF. Should you have any interest whatsoever in the evolution of commercial art this midpoint of the 1920s is like a history book. There were ads that could have been throwbacks to an earlier decade alongside stylish modernist layouts. Advertisers framed illustrations to look more like a camera shot you might see in a movie instead of showing an image of the product.
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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: 1925, advertising, movies
Judging by the amount of ink spread by the Press Democrat, the most pressing story in July 1925 didn’t involve Sonoma County or a great crisis – it was the doings in a small Tennessee town. In this the PD was not unusual; papers large and small printed an enormous number of articles that month about the Scopes “Monkey Trial” and events leading up to it.
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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 no clues that was to be Luther Burbank’s last summer. In July 1925 his health seemed fine (for a 77 year-old) and the Press Democrat regularly printed small items about him receiving a steady procession of visitors. People came here from all over the country to shake his hand and get a garden tour – a busload of East Coast teachers enrolled in a program at UC/Berkeley, a batch of ministers, plain folks and all sorts of celebrities. Helen Keller stopped by for lunch.
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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: 1925, burbank, RipleyRobert
Another joy in reading the old newspapers is regularly finding nutso ideas that Serious People claimed were absolutely true or were about to happen, no doubt about it. Gentle Readers today are left scratching their heads wondering if the editors completely believed this stuff or were just presenting it as something for subscribers to cluck about over the breakfast table. July 1925 was typical with three real corkers:
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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
If it wasn’t for the reefers, Santa Rosa would have been a sad, sad place during the 1920s. Prohibition had nearly wiped out Sonoma County’s wine industry and Santa Rosa’s downtown was a quiet place now that our dozens of saloons were either closed or pouring nothing stronger than sarsaparilla. The only bright spot in the local economy was fruit.
The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 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: 1925