Soup of I

We crawl into this big, wonder-filled world with no control over the fundamental influences most likely to shape our futures.

We may dye our hair, change careers, file for divorce and move to faraway lands. If we are unhappy with our station in life, we can fill the holes in our souls by losing ourselves to addictions. Or we may throw out our wardrobes, trade in our vehicles, plaster our skins with tattoos and reject our birthright religions. We can lift ourselves from poverty, or we can reject our earthly inheritance.

We can do all that. But we are still stuck with our hereditary heritage.

Even if our parents surrendered us to a superior set of adopted authority figures, adoption doesn’t clear the genetic makeup that develops us from conception.

Each of us is bequeathed the biological whammy of genetic constitution. The successes, traumas, failures, celebrations, miseries, complaints, joys, handicaps, capabilities, phobias, sufferings, superstitions, abilities, talents, limitations and traditions of previous generations are the mutated ingredients that brew the phylogenetic Soup of I.

We are gifted our unique Soup of I at birth, with neither warning nor assent. For some of us, the gift is the curse of a “normal disposition.” But some of us are lucky; we hit the mental-disorder jackpot. A lot of us, actually, if we’re being honest.

The National Institute of Health noted that “most mental disorders are due to some combination of inheritance and exposure, meaning genes and environment.”

The NIH study asserts that certain genes and gene variations are associated with certain mental disorders. “Disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression tend to run in families, posing an increased risk if a person has a relative with a diagnosis.”

So, apparently, much of the hard wire of destiny is mapped for us before we ever know what hit us. We spend the rest of our lives either easing comfortably into our hereditary legends or flailing about to escape them.

As for me, I have no reason to complain. I am lucky that a variant Soup of I didn’t place me in some truly horrifying reality, locked in an existence without comfort and hope. I count my blessings every day, or at least the days that I remember to remind myself that things could be worse.

Still, somewhere deep in the dark recesses of my idiotic id, I can’t reject the notion that someone somehow has dropped a disabling ancestral dead rat into my soup.

This discomfitting suspicion is embodied in the man who was my father. My family called him Pop. Pop was trouble. Pop was unhappiness. Pop was the source of stress, wackiness and misfortune. This sort of stuff wasn’t diagnosed back then, but let’s say he had his very manic ups and his very debilitating downs.

Back in my 20s, when my proverbial dead rat was fresh, I did the only thing my limited emotional capacity allowed. I rejected my father. I rejected him gladly. The experience was liberating. I could be my own man. I could succeed or fall on my own. As it turns out, this independence spawned my own neuroses.

My Soup of I coagulated anxieties, confusion and unresolved anger into good old-fashioned bouts of depression. But at least I was still functional. Somewhat functional. That’s what I told myself.

While I don’t deny that I enthusiastically embraced my long estrangement from my father, the record should reflect that I don’t blame him for anything. Memories of Pop summon frustrating torments and memories of raging dysfunction. But can anyone suffering from the chemical imbalances that stir up a confusion of mania and depression be blamed for his behavior?

I can’t begin to understand the mind of another man. I can only say that Pop was served a big disorderly bowl of the soup, resulting in an untreated confusion of conflict and misunderstanding.

As I tried to make sense of all of this, I enrolled in support and education programs offered by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Those programs helped me come to terms with what my father and our family were going through during difficult times. They helped me cope as an adult. Understanding brings forgiveness.

And now I serve as board president of the local NAMI affiliate. I’m proud of the good work NAMI does in this community, and I am grateful for our dedicated staff. You can learn more about NAMI HERE.

NAMI has lately been expanding its great evidence-based programs throughout this community, which is good news. But, unfortunately, our funding is threatened.

On Saturday, May 2, NAMI Monterey County is holding its very first NAMIWalks event at Toro Park. The intention is to increase awareness about mental health wellness and to raise needed funds.

I invite you to join my team, which I’m calling Radio Free Luxembourg. Or please support the effort with a generous donation.

Donate to NAMIWalks

A variation of “Soup of I” was included in a chapter of “The Road to Guanajuato,” a series I wrote for The Monterey County Herald in 2007. The series was made into a self-published book. Readers who donate at least $100 to Radio Free Luxembourg will receive a signed copy of the book, as well as a commemorative NAMIWalks t-shirt … and you’ll also receive a certificate that grants you honorary Luxembourgian citizenship for a day.

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When last we caught up with Hung Cao, the howling loon who defamed Monterey and its Wiccan community, he was named undersecretary of the U.S. Navy by the Howling-Loon-in-Chief.

And now, as proof that mediocrity will always rise to the top in today’s political hellscape, Hung Cao has now emerged as Acting Secretary of the Navy. He mediocred his way to this exalted position on Wednesday after the incumbent Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, announced his immediate resignation.

If you’ve been reading Monterey Neighbors & Friends for a while, you’ll likely recall that Hung Cao is the sniveling dingus who once described Monterey as a place crawling with witches because Monterey blasphemed Jesus by removing His name from Lovers Point.

Hung Cao is a MAGA darling who was featured at the Republican National Convention in 2024, around the time he told a podcaster that the original name of Lovers Point was “Lovers of Christ Point.” Speaking with the earnest authority of a delusional dipshit who actually believes his own ignorant yammer, he told the podcaster that “they” removed Christ from the name and, as a result, “Monterey is a very dark place now.”

“There’s a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over,” he declared.

Of course, nearly everything about his defamation of Monterey was utter horseshit, starting with the fact that Lovers Point isn’t even located in Monterey. Cao apparently spent time at the Naval Postgraduate School, earning a free degree on the taxpayers’ dime, but didn’t pay enough attention while he was here to learn the difference between Monterey and Pacific Grove.

Soon after John Oliver exposed Hung Cao’s dipshittery on HBO’s The Daily Show, I demanded that Hung Cao apologize to the good people of Monterey. But so far I’ve heard nothing from the damn fool.

I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath. He’s got a war to wage these days. He’s got to take marching orders from Pete Hegseth. That’s right. As loony as Cao might be, his superior is Pete Hegseth. Who said these aren’t dangerous times?

Given his ignorance about something as simple as Monterey County geography, I sure hope he can find the Strait of Hormuz on a map.

See Monterey Neighbors & Friends’ full coverage of Hung Cao:

• The Honorable Weirdo from Virgina Owes Monterey an Apology

• The Myth of Jesus at The Point

• Another Friendly Reminder that Hung Cao is a Damn Weirdo

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Ed and Mary Rouzer were the young lovers in Room 97, newly arrived at the stately Hotel Del Monte in Monterey. It was Day Six of their honeymoon, a time to cement their bond during a road trip along California’s coast. Ed was a hotel man who ran the Copper Queen Hotel in Brisbee, Ariz., with his old man. Mary Rouzer, nee Smith, was a recent graduate of Pomona College. I read somewhere that Mary was “a particularly engaging young woman,” but I can’t say what that meant in 1906.

No one will ever know what Ed and Mary were doing that night — April 17, 1906 — but I hope they enjoyed one another’s company in a loving state of ecstasy. And I hope that the rapture of shared love whisked them away to a blissful dream world, and that they were still lost in that world before the terrible dawn of the following day, when Northern California buckled and seized with a violent ferocity and a brick chimney crashed through the roof and crushed the young lovers in their bed.

Deep in love and happy repose. That would be a sweet way to die, don’t you think?

But who can say for certain what happened that morning in Room 97? The intensity of what became known as the Great San Francisco Earthquake might have stirred Mary and Ed from their newlywed slumber, and the quaking bed might have confounded them. What is happening? she might have whispered. Confusion might have turned to fear, briefly, before the chimney came down. But I prefer to believe that they slept through the calamity that preceded their demise.

Mary and Ed were the only Monterey County fatalities reported due to the earthquake, which devastated the San Francisco Bay Area 120 years ago today. The destruction killed more than 3,000 people, while 400,000 others were left without homes.

The immediate aftermath must have been terrible at Hotel Del Monte. Surviving guests were certainly frantic after the 7.9-magnitude tremor awakened them, after hearing the horrible crash of the building’s falling chimneys. They stumbled about in the darkness, trying to find their way out of the wrecked building. Newspaper accounts said guests were “thrown into hysterical excitement.”

I don’t know who discovered Ed and Mary in their honeymoon suite that morning. But someone summoned an ambulance from the Presidio. Responding medics determined that Ed was deceased, that he had probably died instantly. Mary was still breathing, but she was unconscious, too far gone. A severe brain injury. The rescue crew gently lifted her to another room, to another bed, where she stopped breathing sometime before noon.

Those who saw the bodies said the lovers were still in bed when the chimney came down, and they probably never knew what hit them.

I think of Ed and Mary whenever I see the old hotel.

To learn more about the Rouzer tragedy, see the previous story published by Monterey Neighbors & Friends here. And that story inspired a magical connection.

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John Steinbeck was a dog guy. He made no bones about it.

“A dog is a bond between strangers,” he once wrote, when describing the road trip he took with his dog Charley.

One of his most endearing characters, the decrepit one-handed ranchhand named Candy, had a dog that met a sad end in Of Mice and Men. The Joad family kept a scruffy dog with them on their journey to California, until it was run over by a speeding car at the end of Chapter 13 of The Grapes of Wrath.

Big-brained academics who dive deep into Steinbeckian mystique will tell you that Candy’s aging mutt and the Joads’ anonymous canine symbolize the fragility of life, the inevitable fate of the weak and the innocent.

Steinbeck himself always seemed to have a dog. There was Charley, of course, of which Steinbeck waxed philosophic. Charley was a standard poodle that Steinbeck described as “more intelligent than I am.” Of course, his dog’s horizons are limited, he wrote, “but how wide are mine?”

John Steinbeck kept Airedales for much of his life. But the dog that famously ate the first draft of Of Mice and Men was a setter named Toby.

Late in his life, he told an interviewer, “I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.”

And one of John Steinbeck’s first published pieces is a long-lost short essay he wrote at the age of 19 about his family dog, a mongrel named Teddy.

That story, called “The Lariat Dodger,” was published in The (San Francisco) Bulletin on April 20, 1921.

It is a bittersweet little composition, submitted to the newspaper as an entry to a writing contest The Bulletin sponsored for a couple of weeks. The contest was called “Tales of Dogs: Get on the Waggin’.”

I get the sense that somebody at The Bulletin probably had a couple of dogs he or she needed to get rid of, so an editor got the bright idea of hosting the writing contest. Indeed, the writing contest winners won either a Boston terrier or an Airedale.

The contest judge — who described himself as the “Dog Story Editor” — seemed to be a crabby bastard who constantly complained during the run of the contest that he was overwhelmed with essays from writers who couldn’t tell their story within the 400-word limit ascribed in the rules or who submitted their stories written on both on the front and the back of a single page, another clear violation of his rules.

Steinbeck clearly followed the rules, and he got his first byline for his dog tale.

At the age of 19, Steinbeck was straddling the world of academia and the workaday drudge in the Salinas Valley. He was on the six-year plan at Stanford University, while taking full semesters off to work in the fields with bindlestiffs and migrants. The evidence seems to indicate that young Steinbeck was home in Salinas when he submitted his story to The Bulletin; the Dog Story Editor identified each author by name and home address, and Steinbeck’s entry included his address at 130 Central Avenue in Salinas.

“The Lariat Dodger” was selected as one of the featured stories published in The Bulletin. His article is charming, sentimental, funny and ultimately forlorn. Sadly, Steinbeck’s tribute to Teddy was not a winner in the Tales of the Dog contest, and so he received neither the terrier nor the Airedale as a prize.

I happened to stumble across “The Lariat Dodger” not long ago while looking for something else. I have never seen the story referenced before, and it’s possible that “The Lariat Dodger” is the first John Steinbeck work published for a relatively wider audience.

The following is the essay, as it appeared in The Bulletin on April 20, 1921:

THE LARIAT DODGER
John E. Steinbeck, 130 Central Ave., Salinas, Cal.

Teddy was not an extraordinary dog. To my knowledge he never did an extraordinary thing until he disputed the road with a fire engine and acknowledged his mistake too late. It was my boast that one could walk twenty miles in any direction without finding a dog whose breed was not among Teddy’s ancestors. He was afraid of guns, hated the water, did not kill chickens or scratch up flower beds and kept most of the fleas to himself. In fact, he was not even good enough to make the neighbors complain.

He came among us with his tail flapping his sides, and decided to stay. It seemed to take a great load off his mind when he finally found a home. I was very little when he came, and I immediately began to boast of his pugilistic prowess. Teddy, however, was not of a vindictive nature and departed from all possible fights with a dignity which did not interfere with his speed.

The poundmaster of our town was very fat and slow and had a large lump on his forehead, which started the rumor that his Adam’s apple had got misplaced. This man often tried to lassoo (sic) Teddy while a crowd of boys followed, jeering. It was a laughing matter, for when he threw the rope Teddy would lie down, forming a perfect semi-circle with its ends touching the ground. The rope would slide over his nose and off his tail, and Teddy would come flying home with a malicious grin on his face, fairly whipping himself with his tail.

Teddy was as much a part of my childhood as the Indian suit and the cap pistol. I can still remember, though it is many years since, the lump which rose in my throat when they told me he was dead. I had not thought of Teddy ever dying. I did not know how much I loved him until he was not there to jump on me when I came home from school. He left a hurt in me which has really never healed. That is the only trouble with dogs; they do not last.

Note:
Oddly, the “Tales of Dogs” contest was a product of the newspaper’s sports department, and the stories appeared regularly on the front page of the Sports Sections in April and May of 1921.

Sources:

• The (San Francisco) Bulletin

• Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck. 1962

• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. 1937

• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. 1939

• The Steinbeck Institute, Stanford University

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The woman who was Kate Carew might qualify as the most fascinating forgotten woman in Monterey County.

Indeed, her death on Feb. 11, 1961, at the age of 91, was scarcely noticed. The headline over her bare-bones obituary, buried on Page 6 of the Monterey Peninsula Herald, read, simply, “Mrs. Reed.” It mentioned in passing that the deceased traveled extensively and was a ”talented artist, known especially for her portrait sketches.”

But the obituary completely missed the fact that Mrs. Reed had been a trailblazing media personality during a golden age of journalism. It didn’t mention that she had been “discovered” by Ambrose Bierce and William Randolph Hearst in San Francisco during the 1890s, that she was once the toast of New York City, that for a brief period she was a bright light in Paris and London.

The death notice omitted the fact that Mrs. Reed was better known as Kate Carew, and that Kate Carew was a glittering dynamo who had made a name for herself in the male-dominated newspaper industry. It didn’t say that she had a flair for literary nonfiction, that she cranked out hundreds of sassy and sometimes hilarious feature profiles accompanied by bodacious, spot-on caricatures she drew herself.

The obituary failed to mention that she was the first woman to develop a comic strip for the funny pages.

It also didn’t say that Mrs. Reed had interviewed and sketched nearly everyone who was anyone during a period that straddled the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era of American culture, from Mark Twain to Pablo Picasso, from Guglielmo Marconi to J.P. Morgan, from Sarah Bernhardt to Ethel Barrymore.

Instead, the Herald summarized the life of Mrs. Reed with a scant 143 words, ignoring the glitz, glamour and fame that defined her early life. And there was no explanation about how Kate Carew could have possibly aged out, in obscurity, before dying quietly in a Monterey Peninsula convalescent home.

The woman who would become Kate Carew was born Mary Williams in Oakland in 1869. She was the oldest of seven children. Her father was a mining engineer and her mother was a lucky winner of the Louisiana State Lottery. While the family spent much of Mary’s early years in Placer County, her mother’s lottery winnings enabled them to spend time in Dresden, so that she and her siblings could study the fine arts abroad. Mary’s brother, Gluyas, would become one of The New Yorker’s great early cartoonists.

Mary attended the California School of Design in 1890 and set up a studio in San Francisco, where she befriended Leigh Bierce, a young man who would become her student. Leigh introduced his father to Mary and her work. Ambrose Bierce was a hot commodity in the West Coast literary orbit at the time, a popular author who wrote a Sunday column for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Ambrose was impressed enough by Mary’s work that he recommended her to Hearst, and she was hired as an illustrator.

In the years before the newspaper industry developed photogravure, local rags kept a stable of quick-sketch artists on staff to illustrate big stories. Mary quickly advanced as The Examiner’s go-to caricaturist, providing exquisite portraits of the subjects of Hearst’s yellow journalism. They included sketches of prize fighters, stage actors, clerics, mystics, murderers, victims, widows and street urchins. Also on The Examiner staff at the time were young bucks who would eventually become renowned artists in California, including Maynard Dixon and Jimmy Swinnerton.

Mary married a journalist she met at The Examiner, an Australian chap named Harrie Kellet Chambers, and together they moved to New York in 1900. Harry struggled in his quest to become a famous playwright, but Mary got work at The Evening World, hired to make caricatures of actors from first-night performances.

In New York she came up with her alias, Kate Carew, pretty much out of thin air. But it was her style that set her apart, and her career took off in the Big Apple, almost overnight. “I awoke to find myself pseudonymously famous,” she wrote several years later.

The Evening World gave her a front-of-section full page on Sundays with which to package her drawings with her interviews. Kate Carew’s caricatures of the rich and famous were accompanied by extended accounts about the encounters she had with her famous subjects. Carew fashioned a new approach to journalism at the turn of the last century, inserting herself into the profiles she wrote, often to comic effect. She referred to herself as “Aunt Kate,” and she brought a decidedly feminine eye to her descriptive essays.

She also inserted caricatures of herself into the drawings of her interview subjects. She appeared in those sketches dressed to the nines, with her signature plumed hat. She drew herself significantly smaller than most of her subjects, a nod to her diminutive size; she was 5-foot-3 inches tall without heels.

Her first interview for The Evening World, with Mark Twain, appeared on Oct. 21, 1900.

In no time, Kate Carew was so popular that The World included her name in headlines over her stories so that her fans wouldn’t miss her work. Those headlines tracked her exploits:

Kate Carew, Attuned to Wireless Waves, Gets Marconi’s Message …

John Muir Makes Kate Carew Eager to Trail Him to Yosemite …

Abdul Baha Talks to Kate Carew of Things Spiritual and Mundane.

Carew’s profiles read like spontaneous diary entries, stream-of-consciousness riffs filled with personal observations and motivations. They usually included descriptions of the hoops she had to jump through to secure interviews with celebrities, as well as accounts about how her subjects reacted to her and what she personally thought of them.

She blazed a New Journalism/Gonzo trail before the birth of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson by half a century. But Kate Carew’s gonzo was rolled into a petite and proper woman with a sardonic sense of humor, topped with feathered Gainsborough hats.

Consider these random passages from Aunt Kate’s extended “five-minute” encounter with the great inventor and radio-frequency engineer Guglielmo Marconi, in 1912:

We sat silent for a moment, our vibrations tuned to the pitch of wonder and enthusiasm.

And:

I had simply taken it for granted that a man so famous, engaged in such unusual doings, chaining the elemental forces to the use of man, giving airy nothings local habitation and name, would have an appearance to correspond — dark, lustrous eyes, flashing continuous sparks; hair prematurely white, witness of midnight vigils; body a mere human motor, charged with psychic force, ascetic, attenuated … (But) there is nothing of the mystic in his appearance … He is perfectly unobtrusive in externals. He does not, apparently, take himself seriously overmuch, too intent on the big things to dwell on the little.

The woman who was Kate Carew went to the funny pages in 1902. The Evening World convinced her to pen a Sunday comic strip featuring a precocious young girl known as “The Angel Child.” The strip is regarded as the first comic created by a woman. It lasted more than two years.

And then, as her career was picking up steam, Kate Carew inexplicably disappeared from the public eye in early 1905. She would be gone for the next five years. She may have been content as a stay-at-home wife in the Connecticut home she shared with Chambers, while he wrote forgettable plays with short runs on Broadway’s Theater District. Or there might have been something else going on in her life. In any case, at the age of 40, Carew gave birth to her only child, Colin.

Soon after Colin was born, Carew returned to The Evening World.

But she wouldn’t be long for The World. Star journalists were hot commodities in New York City at the turn of the last century, and Kate Carew was a star. Within months after her return to the print world, she was plucked up by the New York Sunday American. She wowed readers with two illustrated interviews with black heavyweight boxing legend Jack Johnson — both before and after his celebrated match with James Jeffries, who was known as “The Great White Hope.”

Both interviews underscored her respect for Johnson, who was a lightning rod in racial/cultural relations at the time, while highlighting her acute humor.

“Mr. Johnson’s profession is to batter the faces and bodies of other men with his fists,” she wrote. “It is a profitable profession, because large numbers of men are willing, when such battering promises to be difficult and bloody, to pay $50 apiece for the pleasure of seeing it. For goodness’ sake, don’t ask me why, dears, or you’ll betray the inferior intellect of our sex.”

The American then sent her to London, where she chased down famous Europeans, including daring pilots, great opera stars, statesmen and suffragettes.

But then she disappeared from public life again, for about a month. No explanation, though she apparently secured a divorce that had been hastened by Harrie’s not-so-secret affair with a Mexican writer named Maria Cristina Mena.

When she returned to work, it was with The New York Tribune. She was dispatched to Europe, asked to provide readers a steady diet of celebrity profiles from London and Paris. A Tribune headline bragged that “Kate Carew Creeps into the Center of Parisian Gayety.” She chased down fashion designers, musicians, stage actors, royals and statesmen. She also spent a memorable afternoon with an aging Auguste Rodin and another day with a young Pablo Picasso.

“I don’t know if Picasso was seeing me in cubes and squares,” Carew told readers, after establishing that she was puzzled by his work. “I didn’t find Picasso an easy man to engage in conversation.”

Picasso was her final meaningful interview.

She apparently had played herself out by 1913. She was exhausted, and was hospitalized in London with an undisclosed illness. Something about issues with her nervous system that impacted her eyesight and her ability to hold a pen steadily. After her release from the hospital, she remained in Europe for a bit, doing portrait/caricature work for several English publications, including The Tatler, but her work was tapering off. And she had stopped doing the big interviews.

Finally, she returned home, back to San Francisco. She was followed by an English gentleman named John Reed, a fellow she had met during her European adventures. Reed was an upright conservative widower who was living well off his considerable investments. Carew married Reed in 1916.

Over time, she sent The Tatler clever illustrations of famous Americans — President Woodrow Wilson, Jack London and his wife, etc. But her enthusiasm for caricatures waned.

Around 1938, she and John Reed were living out of suitcases in places she was familiar with, including Carmel. She told the Carmel Pine Cone that year that they were looking for a house in Monterey. She said her caricature/cartooning days were over.

“I love color and have no interest anymore in pen drawing,” she told the Pine Cone. “Probably because of a nerve difficulty that followed an eye operation that was necessary a few years ago, I find it much easier to hold a brush than a pen.”

She joined The Arts and Crafts Society of Carmel, and painted landscapes and portraits.

Perhaps her most famous fine-art portrait, a commission by poet Robinson Jeffers, was rejected because Jeffers’ wife Una didn’t like it. Decades later, the painting was purchased from Carew’s estate by the keepers of Jeffers’ Tor House.

John Reed died in 1941, and Kate Carew bought property in Monterey Mesa, a home built by Lucy Pierce, a former Monterey artist.

Kate Carew continued to paint, but she became more withdrawn and difficult as she aged. “She became a shadowy presence,” according to her granddaughter, Christine Chambers.

The woman who was Kate Carew died on Feb. 11, 1961, at the age of 91 in a nursing home. The Herald obituary was sadly lacking. The only mourners who showed up for the memorial service were her son, his wife and daughter, and a couple who lived across the street from her Monterey Mesa home.

The woman who was Kate Carew’s youngest granddaughter, Christine Chambers, was born in Monterey when her grandmother was a 75-year-old in declining health. Christine’s parents were struggling financially, so Carew haed let the family live in a separate apartment on her Mesa Road property.

For most of her life, Christine Chambers only knew that her grandmother was an artist, and an unhappy woman who didn’t allow the kids into certain rooms in the main house. “She didn’t know how to be with family," she said. “I don’t remember her fondly.” Kate Carew may have charmed the world with her caricatures, “but she wasn’t friendly or lovable.”

It wasn’t until Chambers was in her 50s, long after Kate Carew was dead and gone, that she learned who Grandma Kate had been, once upon a time.

An English journalist named Christopher Silvester had become obsessed with Kate Carew after stumbling across her profiles of Jack Johnson while researching the boxer’s life. He had been searching for Carew’s descendants for a while when he finally found Chambers, who was living in her grandmother’s house at the time. (Chambers now lives near Mendocino.)

Chambers says she was initially mystified that a random stranger would ask about her grandmother. Silvester explained to her that Kate Carew had been a big deal in New York, London and Paris, that she had rubbed elbows with some of the most high-profile celebrities in the 1900s, that she was a pioneer in the newspaper world, a celebrity in her own right. It was all news to Chambers.

The New Yorker eventually published Silvester’s profile of Kate Carew in a 1998 piece headlined “Celebrity’s Midwife: The Lost Work of Kate Carew.” Silvester noted that Carew helped develop what became an insatiable public appetite for celebrity news and gossip.

“The burgeoning cinema of the twenties and thirties would bring a great intimacy between the public and a new type of celebrity,” Silvester wrote. “As Kate Carew, Mary Chambers was one of the midwives of that particularly modern invention.”

Since learning about her grandmother, Christine Chambers has been managing the Kate Carew legacy. Unfortunately, much of the original caricatures, portraits and comics Kate produced are now gone, disappeared like so many old newspapers.

But there seems to be some resurgence of interest in Kate Carew — or, at least, a few people have rediscovered her. Two years ago, Fantagraphics Underground published a handsome full-color 158-page book called “Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist.” The author, Eddie Campbell, is a British comic artist and cartoonist who collaborated with Christine Chambers on the book.

And a production company has been soft-pedaling its promotion of a Kate Carew documentary since at least 2018, though it is unclear where that project is in development today.

NOTES:

• Legend has it that Kate Carew once auditioned John Reed for a job as her assistant at The American. Reed didn’t take the job, apparently offended by the critique of the writing samples he submitted to her. He groused that he didn’t wish to play second fiddle to a “fussy female.” That particular John Reed ended up buried at the base of the Kremlin wall after famously immersing himself in the Russian Revolution. It is only a coincidence that Carew later married a different man named John Reed.

• Speaking of a confusion of names, the story of Kate Carew is often complicated by the various legal names she had over the years. She was born Mary Williams. During her years at The Examiner in San Francisco, she was known as Mary Davison, having married a fellow named Seymour Davison, a cashier for an insurance company. She married Harrie Chambers after divorcing Davison, and then John Reed after returning from London. Before she was laid to rest, her legal name was Mary Williams Reed.

• Some of Kate Carew’s plein air paintings may be seen at and purchased from Hauk’s Fine Arts in Pacific Grove.

Sources:

• “Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist,” by Eddie Campbell. Fantagraphics Underground, 2024.

• Christine Chambers, interview

• The New Yorker

• The San Francisco Examiner

• The (New York) American

• The New York Tribune

• The Carmel Pine Cone

• Monterey Peninsula Herald

• The Mendocino Beacon

• The New York Times

• Comiclopedia.com

• twainquotes.com

• 239 Days in America

• The Comics Journal

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Troubled by the civic plague that was David Jacks, a delegation of Monterey businessmen convinced H.L. Bradford to start up a newspaper in 1889 that would expose the rotten son-of-a-bitch once and for all.

Jacks had bamboozled his way to tycoon status in the dank old town. Among other things, he had arranged a horrible coup of a land deal in the middle of the 19th Century that became known as the “rape of Monterey.” Picking up 30,000 acres of real estate for a paltry $1,002.50 during a suspicious auction, Jacks hijacked operations of the city to enrich himself, to the detriment of others.

He screwed and sued anyone with property between Monterey and Chualar over the decades, while turning Monterey into the headquarters for his greedy realm. After enduring four decades of his nonsense, his Monterey neighbors were finally ready to punch back.

To chronicle their fight, they recruited Bradford, a newspaper guy who also doubled as an attorney. He was a clever fellow from San Francisco, the son of a judge, a California native who was supposedly one of the first white babies born in the state. Bradford first dabbled in newspapers in the Central Valley, publishing the Modesto Strawbuck, a German paper, and several other journals before gravitating to Monterey County.

The townspeople lured Bradford to Monterey by putting up the money that guaranteed 500 annual subscribers to his new publication. The first edition of the Monterey Cypress hit the streets on Jan. 5, 1889. Bradford told readers he hoped The Cypress “will approach somewhat near (the) standard of what a country newspaper should be.”

His weekly was the first — and perhaps the last — real kick-ass newspaper on the Monterey Peninsula. Newsy. Lively. Aggressive. Fun.

In the Cypress’s first edition, Bradford invited Monterey citizens to attend a special meeting at Bagby’s Opera House. The gathering, sponsored by the newspaper was meant to organize a campaign to re-incorporate the city so that its residents might finally wrest control of Monterey from David Jacks’ grubby hands.

“That Monterey should, with her three thousand population, be compelled to struggle under her present limited charter, handicapped by it in every enterprise she undertakes, is shameful and deplorable,” Bradford wrote.

This effort to reorganize the city had been on the agenda for a while, and the Monterey Cypress would be a mouthpiece for that campaign.

Bradford’s newspaper may have been the most entertaining read in the state. The Cypress specialized in exposing and mocking David Jacks as a corrupt, cruel, sniveling little creep. David Jacks might have been widely regarded as the most contemptible bully in Monterey County during the last half of the 19th Century, but now H.L. Bradford had turned him into a laughing stock. The onslaught of his public attacks on Jacks, the most powerful man on the Central Coast, was relentless and sometimes downright comical.

While in one breath he insisted that Jacks was not his enemy and that he wished him no harm, Bradford proceeded to rip him a new rectum.

“(He) finds more pleasure in watching the sufferings of his fellowmen than in himself enjoying the comforts of his life,” Bradford wrote, on March 30, 1889. “An acre of land is no incentive to this man unless he knows that someone is being made miserable by being deprived of it.”

Bradford continued his withering assault on Jacks from his editorial page for a good long while. At one point, he even mused on the prevailing sentiment that the citizens of Monterey might be better off if Jacks would just drop dead already. No, Bradford continued, it would be better if Jacks simply acted like a decent human soul.

Bradford also devoted much time and effort to stories that exposed Jacks’ underhanded and amoral business dealings with hard-core front-page journalism.

For example, the villain once tried to withhold money that Collis Huntington, a railroad tycoon, had handed Jacks specifically for a Presbyterian church building fund in Monterey. A church lady went so far as to publicly castigate Jacks from the pulpit in the middle of a Sunday service, causing quite the scene. And the Cypress was there to record every awkward detail of the scandal.

On Sept. 14, 1889, the Cypress dropped a Page 1 story with news that Jacks tried to swindle an illiterate widow — a mother of four, no less — out of the home she owned outside town. The story was headlined “A WIDOW’S HOME: Jacks’ Midnight Effort to Get it.” According to the report, Jacks showed up at the woman’s door at 11:30 one night and tried to goad her into signing paperwork that would grant him ownership of her little house in exchange for a measly $400. The woman was identified only as Mrs. Cervantes.

According to Cervantes’ brother, the widow was “physically a wreck, deaf, weak-minded and wholly (unable) to take care of herself.” She had been living on a small piece of land that Jacks had coveted for 35 years. She had raised her family there, but Jacks apparently waited until her husband had died before showing up late one night to cheat her out of her house.

What’s worse, Jacks was accompanied by a deputy sheriff who allegedly served as a “notary” to her signature. Confused, she signed her name with an “X,” and, to make it all the more legal, Jacks convinced most of her children to also sign the document. An older daughter lived down the road, though, and she pitched a fit when Jacks tried to get her signature.

When Cervantes’ brother learned what was going on, he hunted Jacks down and confronted him. Words were exchanged. What was said — and how it was said — was not recorded for posterity, but Jacks apparently abandoned his efforts to swindle Mrs. Cervantes.

In the edition that carried the widow's story, Bradford mused that it was “simply an old story retold. It is only a repetition of what has time and again been done by this man Jacks … Our hills are dotted with once happy homes, but now wrecked by this land grabber who never stops at anything to enlarge his acreage.”

The Cypress’s relentless assault on Jacks continued apace. Readers and editors from other newspapers took notice.

“The Monterey Cypress seems to have an eternal grudge against poor Uncle Davy Jacks,” observed the editor of the San Lucas Herald, in South Monterey County. “They don’t seem to give the old mortal a moments rest but chase him about in a most unmerciful manner. The Cypress editor’s respect for the old gentleman seems to be very limited.”

To which Bradford responded, with lawyerly sass: “We poke him PRO BONO PUBLICO.”

As a businessman, Jacks might have been a wretched bully, yet still he whined incessantly that he never received the appreciation he deserved for all the great things he did around town. Ever self-righteous, he pissed and moaned and complained at every opportunity, as though he was president of the United States of America in 2026. And when he did, the Cypress was usually there to quote him, verbatim.

In 1890, when asked permission to allow a troop of passing U.S. soldiers to camp on his property near Hotel Del Monte, he responded by bragging that he brought narrow-gauge rail to the city. “And what do I get for it?” he whined. “Nothing but curses. So much so that my family will not live here, but they would rather live in Oakland, where their father is not damned from morning until night.”

During this particular hissy fit, the Cypress noted, Jacks’ voice trembled, his eyes watered and his body shook with emotion. It was a “pathetic speech,” according to the Cypress account, and it might have gone on much longer had someone not interrupted Jacks to ask, “Yes, that’s all very good, but what about the soldiers’ camp?”

Bradford did eventually tone down the hot rhetoric, but only after residents in Monterey voted to re-incorporate and the locals were able to gain some control of the city’s destiny from Jacks.

Bradford later sold off his interests in newspapers, including the Cypress, but continued to practice law on the Monterey Peninsula. He reportedly also held a sizeable investment in a silver mine in Sinaloa, Mexico. He died in 1932.

Bradford no longer ran the Cypress when Jacks died in 1909, having sold it to a bland gentleman who carefully avoided controversy. The Cypress founder must have blanched when he read the paper’s fawning obituary that extolled Jacks’ business sense, his righteous Christianity and his alleged acts of charity.

But The Sacramento Bee wasn’t so reverent. “The moss-grown Court records of Monterey County are filled with the cruelties of this man,” eulogized the Bee, two days after Jacks’ death. “He delighted to squeeze the little fellows. He gloried in piling suit after suit upon poorer men whose lands he coveted, until he crowded them to the wall. At one time he was hated by nearly every man, woman and child in Monterey County, and more than once was it dangerous for him to walk the streets of the little town of Monterey.”

The Bee’s summary obituary of Jacks concluded poetically: “Nothing more need be said upon the subject. Nothing less could in common justice be stated when such undeserved and fulsome eulogy is spread broadcast over the grave of a man whose treatment of his fellow-men would have been concealed behind the charitable sanctuary of silence.”

Note: Jacks’ real name was David Jack, but over time his surname acquired a superfluous ‘s.’ Purists still insist it’s Jacks, plural. Even Wikipedia lists him as Jacks. On The Monterey Cypress editorial pages, Bradford often referred to him gleefully as “Uncle Davy.” And sometimes he referred to him simply as a son-of-a-bitch.

For more about Jacks, see the Monterey County Historical Society’s biography HERE. See also a biography from the Mayo Hayes O’Donnell Library HERE. The Monterey History and Art Association published its own bio of Jacks HERE. Monterey Neighbors & Friends published a story about Jacks’ petty squabbles with the women from the Presbyterian Church HERE. And Jacks how Jacks ruined a man’s life and sent him to Death Row is HERE.

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President Benjamin Harrison blew into Monterey late on April 29, 1891, stepping off a special five-car presidential train and into his encampment at Hotel Del Monte. He was at the time about midway through his month-long, 10,000-mile tour of the nation’s outer reaches, and he thereby became the second U.S. president to visit Monterey County.

The president spent three days there, tooling around the city, visiting the building where the California Constitution was signed, and the Custom House. The Monterey Weekly Cypress, the local newspaper at the time, effusively described Harrison’s precious time here with more than a thousand words under a simple headline: “HE CAME!”

It’s always a big occasion when a president comes to town.

Also noted for posterity in the May 2 edition of the Monterey Weekly Cypress was news of Gen. Manuel Castro’s death, a week earlier. Castro was a man of great wealth and prominence, born in Monterey, the son of an original Monterey alcalde, and the man chiefly responsible for Mexico’s military operations in California. During the war with the United States for the conquest of California, Gen. Castro fought General John C. Fremont’s army in the Gabilan foothills. Loyal to Mexico to the end, he never became a United States citizen.

The Cypress devoted a whole six sentences to Gen. Castro’s death.

John F. Kennedy took a break from his historic presidential campaign to chill out in Pebble Beach for his 43rd birthday. He treated himself to three quiet days at the Lodge with his wife Jacqueline, for what were probably the last quiet days of his life.

By May of 1960, Kennedy was already the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. He was known at the time for his vigor, his youth and his family money. But none of that got him a table inside the ultra-exclusive Cypress Point Golf Club on May 28.

JFK had played a few holes of Saturday golf at Cypress, and he showed up at the clubhouse for lunch in his golf togs. Reminded that Cypress maintained a strict dress code, he was denied entrance inside, but was allowed to dine on the veranda.

By all accounts, Kennedy took it in stride; after attending mass at the Carmel Mission the next day, he showed up for lunch at Cypress, this time wearing an appropriate tie and sports coat.

American presidents do seem to enjoy the exclusive golf playground that is Monterey County.

For instance, I’m told that Donald J. Trump loves golf so much that he even buried a pesky ex on a golf course he owns. And, sure enough, when he wasn’t flying off to Epstein Island, the once and future king was a regular at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am tournament, playing the amateur field seven times without making the cut during the 1990s and 2000s. He even recorded a hole-in-one at Spyglass Hill in 1993. Good for him.

Also making a nuisance of himself at the pro-am tournament was Jerry Ford, the accidental and accident-prone president emeritus, who bonked a woman on the head with an errant golf ball in 1984, once again validating his reputation as a stumblebum.

Former President George H.W. Bush played AT&T a couple of years without wounding anyone in the gallery, but his son’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, caused damage to another woman’s noggin with a wayward drive in 2013.

William Jefferson Clinton may have had a firm grasp on his own putter, but he was never invited to the AT&T. Still, Clinton made more public appearances in Monterey County than any other president, before or after. That’s likely because Leon Panetta, the heavyweight pol from Carmel Valley, was a big cheese in the Clinton Administration.

While serving out my professional sentence as a reporter for The Monterey County Herald, I covered three of Bill Clinton’s appearances on the Central Coast. He was the guest of honor and speaker at the opening of CSU Monterey Bay in 1995. He lugged Al Gore, his veep, to San Carlos Beach to kick off a National Oceans Conference in 1998. And he did a song-and-dance to thousands of people in front of the Salinas Courthouse on Alisal Street to announce a new tough-on-crime measure in 1996.

At that latter event, he seemed to be smitten by Anna Caballero, then a Salinas councilmember. While doing his obligatory shout-outs to dignitaries, Clinton had special praise for Caballero, who was among the undercard speakers at the event.

“I was sitting listening to her speak … I thought, you know, she speaks better than most of us do,” said Clinton, himself a master of the golden tongue. “She ought to run for higher office someday. I think she will. She was very good.”

Caballero has been running for higher office ever since. Thirty years later, she is now a state senator.

President William McKinley doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow who would play a lot of golf. He had more important things to do, like cozying up to big business, imposing tariffs and leading the U.S. to victory in that bullshit Spanish-American War.

Still, McKinley came to Monterey County in 1901. He was on a grand tour of the country, whipping up some good old-fashioned patriotic fervor. Upon his arrival in Monterey, he paraded down to the intersection of Alvarado and Franklin streets, from where he made a speech. I’ve read the speech. It’s mostly forgettable, something about the plucky strength and promise of American youth.

But a local newspaper reporter said hundreds of gathered citizens lapped it up. McKinley spoke from a makeshift stage in the middle of the intersection, surrounded by the crowd. Among those in attendance, according to the news account, were “the poor and the rich, the obscure and the famous, the young and the old. As he stood there among them, his head bared and his countenance lighted with smiles, he appeared to be a father among children.”

There are several streets in Old Town Monterey named for presidents: Harrison, Van Buren, Roosevelt and Jefferson. Even Tyler has a street. But no street in Monterey commemorates the father among children.

President Theodore Roosevelt spent a quiet Sunday at Hotel Del Monte in May 1903, among the several presidents who have tried to slip in and out of town without pomp and circumstance.

Roosevelt had been McKinley’s vice president, and he took office after an anarchist with a couple of z’s in his surname shot McKinley to death at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. (The assassination came several months after he was bestowed the father-among-children honorific here in Monterey.)

Roosevelt’s visit to Monterey was mostly a rest stop, part of a 25-state tour of the country. While in California, he concentrated his attention on a land-conservation agenda, and spent three memorable days camping with John Muir in Yosemite. In Monterey, the so-called Hero of San Juan Hill jumped on a horse and got escorted around the shoreline by a couple of locals hoping to be noticed, before attending a service at St. John’s Church. That was it. No big ceremony, no big speeches.

Other presidents who popped in and out of Monterey County without much public attention were George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower slipped in and out after he left office to shoot a few rounds at Pebble Beach. Richard Nixon politicked here a couple of times, long before he was elected president, and he also did a three-hour telethon at KSBW in support of his failed gubernatorial campaign in 1962.

For the record, Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to visit Monterey, in 1880, but it’s difficult to get all that excited about Rutherford B. Hayes.

Lyndon Johnson never came to Monterey County, as far as I know, but Lady Bird did. On Sept. 21, 1966, she stood in for her husband to dedicate the Big Sur Scenic Highway, and it was sort of a big deal at the time. Everyone who was anyone escorted her along the coast during the festivities, including Ansel Adams, Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Sen. Fred Farr, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, stage star Carol Channing, Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman and Danny Kaye, who emcee’d a scenic highway gala at Hearst Castle.

“Lady Bird Johnson scattered stardust along the coast of Monterey County yesterday,” enthused Eric Brazil, a staff writer for the Salinas Californian. “And when the stars came out, she raised a champagne goblet and toasted California conservationists ‘for all that you have worked to protect.’”

After the Hearst Castle soiree, she was escorted down to Bixby Creek Bridge for the formal dedication of Highway 1. “This is so dramatic, so magnificent,” she said, gazing out at the magnificent drama that only Big Sur can offer. “And now it’s mine to remember in my mind’s eye.

“I am proud of being a wayfarer here.”

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(Note: This version corrects a couple of typos.)

Thomas B. Poole may not have been the last scoundrel to serve as Monterey County undersheriff, but he almost certainly was the worst.

Poole was a conniving bastard who defied the governor and hung a guy when he wasn’t supposed to. And then he became a lousy bushwhacker, a lieutenant in a criminal guerrilla organization operating surreptitiously in California to support the Confederacy during the Civil War.

And so, happily and with due respect to the so-called “prevailing conditions of the times,” Poole’s ultimate demise at the end of a noose can only be regarded as sweet karma.

Poole came to Monterey County by way of Kentucky, probably sometime around the Gold Rush, when he settled in Pajaro. He was a widower with a couple of kids and a lopsided face. He was known as a gregarious type, and he befriended Henry DeGraw, the fourth sheriff in Monterey County’s young history. DeGraw, who was an aging consumptive at the time, made Poole his second in command.

Poole earned notoriety almost immediately when he stirred up some serious shit by taking advantage of a clerical error to hang the guy he shouldn’t have. This all happened in 1858. California had only codified civility nine years earlier, when a gathering of men signed a Constitution in Monterey. In practice, though, rugged outposts like Monterey County were still governed by Frontier Justice, especially when it protected white man’s dominion. And Poole apparently cared little about the rule of law and the dictates of some bleeding-heart politician.

So who knows what really happened two years earlier, the night some poor bugger named Frank Mellen got his throat slit while returning to his home up Carmel Hill with a sack of provisions. The surviving accounts allege that a young Native American named Jose Anastasio was responsible for the heinous crime. But those records were written by guys like Poole, so Jose Anastasio might have been nothing more than a convenient stooge.

But what we know for certain is that, on Dec. 31, 1857, a Monterey County judge found Anastasio guilty of the crime and sentenced him to death. The execution date was set for Feb. 12. By law, the sentencing judge was required to forward a statement to the governor stating the facts of the case and a copy of the judgment. When the judge failed to meet this legal requirement, Governor John Weller sent a reprieve to DeGraw, ordering that the execution of Anastasio Jesús be delayed until March 5.

That’s right. The governor had sent an official reprieve for a nonexistent person named Anastasio Jesús. Not Jose Anastasio. Oops.

By then, DeGraw’s health had deteriorated so badly that he turned most of his sheriff-ing responsibilities to Thomas Poole.

The undersheriff took one look at the governor’s order, but couldn’t find anyone named Anastasio Jesús sitting around the jail looking for a reprieve. And so Poole went ahead and executed Jose Anastasio on Feb. 12. He made a big show of it, too, inviting a crowd to watch him personally hang Anastasio from a temporary gallows erected on Carmel Hill, at the scene of the murder.

Two days later, he sent the governor a nauseatingly disingenuous letter to explain his justification for the deed.

In that correspondence, he acknowledged he did not doubt that the governor meant to delay the execution of Jose Anastasio, “as there was only one culprit condemned to death by Judge Hester … but as an officer of the law, I considered that I had no possible right to understand the instrument otherwise than as it read, viz: not respecting the sentence of Jose Anastasio, who was the prisoner under sentence, but Anastasia Jesus; thus making it virtually an altogether different person, and thereby putting it out of my power to act otherwise than in the manner in which I did act.”

Poole concluded his letter with unmitigated gall, asserting that he felt compelled to hang Anastasio himself because, if he hadn’t done it, an inflamed Monterey lynch mob would have done the job for him.

Back in Sacramento, Weller was unable to contain his rage. He dashed off a furious response.

“(I) have no hesitation in saying that you are guilty of judicial murder,” he wrote. “You had no more authority, under the laws of this State, to execute that man than you have to shoot your neighbor without provocation. Besides, to hang a man because ‘if you did not, in all probability the citizens would’ places you in the most unenviable light, whilst it reflects disgrace upon the people of your county.”

Because he was a dipshit, Poole then made matters worse for himself with another letter to the governor that is a masterwork of mid-19th Century self-righteous gaslighting. He also enclosed a letter signed by a couple dozen Monterey residents who supported the undersheriff’s action.

After his term expired, Poole left Monterey County, settled in the Bay Area and made his mark during the Civil War as a bumbling bushwhacker on behalf of the secessionist movement, joining secret societies that actively sought to undermine the Union. He even flew a Confederate flag from his front door stoop.

Early in the war, he joined up with a couple of millionaires who shared their fervent sympathy for the Confederacy. This secret group purchased the J.M. Chapman, a ninety-ton schooner in San Francisco, and outfitted it with cannons, rifles, revolvers and cutlasses. Poole was one of 20 crew members aboard the ship. They planned to sail south of the border to waylay eastbound Pacific Mail steamers, stealing the gold and silver being plundered from Mexico at the time. The schooner would then circle the Horn and deliver the goods to the Confederate Army. That was the plan, anyway.

The Chapman was prepared to set sail at daybreak on March 15, 1863. After the privateers retired below deck the night before, a cadre of San Francisco cops and U.S. Marines came aboard and dragged the would-be pirates to Alcatraz, where the ship of fools were charged with treason. The conspiracy was spoiled after the Chapman’s navigator got cold feet and ran to the cops.

Poole and the others spent seven months behind bars on the island without a trial. And then, suddenly, they were inexplicably set free, on condition that they take an oath of allegiance.

Being the asshole that he was, Poole then joined the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secretive whack-job bunch of seditionists out of San Jose. The Knights’ stated mission was to establish a slave-holding empire that would extend across the Southern United States and into the West Indies, Mexico and parts of South America. Based on the historic descriptions, the Knights of the Golden Circle might be considered a west-coast precursor to the Ku Klux Klan and every other modern right-wing conspiracy group spawned from hearts filled with hate. I like to think of them as the Nick Fuenteses and Tucker Carlsons of their day.

Poole then joined an offshoot of the Knights, a band of guerrillas led by Captain Rufus Henry Ingram in 1864. The so-called “Captain Ingram’s Partisan Rangers” existed to help fund the Confederate Army with the plunder they expected to collect from the various crimes they committed in California. For the most part, they conspired to rob stage coaches because swiping treasure from the Wells Fargo was easier than robbing banks. As Ingram recruited his platoon of like-minded criminals, he seemed impressed with Poole’s experience in Monterey County law enforcement, so he made him a lieutenant.

“We were determined to raise funds to go South, and if we could not go peaceably we intended to raise an insurrection in the State of California,” Poole would later say.

The Rangers turned out to be a besotted bunch of losers who apparently liked to brag about their schemes to anyone who might seem interested. The group was also plagued with internal bickering, resulting in turncoats who ran to the local sheriff whenever someone bruised their egos.

As a result, lawmen always seemed to be one step ahead of them.

The bandits did manage to rob a couple of stagecoaches in Placerville, but a posse of lawmen tracked them down a day or two later in a house several miles from Pleasant Valley. A brutal gun battle erupted. Poole was shot in the face in an exchange that killed El Dorado County Deputy Joseph Staples.

Poole survived his injury but was dragged into jail and convicted by a jury that deliberated for about 15 minutes, even after Poole ratted out the rest of the Ingram gang to the sheriff.

Poole was sentenced to be hanged in October 1864. His execution was delayed while attorneys appealed his conviction to the California Supreme Court. As his date with death approached, a bunch of his pals requested clemency. His supporters included a sheriff, a retired judge and several other prominent citizens from Monterey and El Dorado counties.

By then, Governor Weller was long gone, replaced by Frederick Low, California’s ninth governor. Low was from Maine, a northerner at heart who had little sympathy for stupid Confederates. Low must have also at least heard about Poole’s callous disregard for Weller’s reprieve for Jose Anastasia. And so, as they say, what goes around comes around.

On September 29, 1894, Poole was led to the gallows in Placerville, where the sheriff pulled the lever, Poole dropped through the trap, and a former Monterey County undersheriff bit the dust.

Sources:

• “Copperheads, Secesh Men, and Confederate Guerillas: Pro-Confederate Activities in Santa Cruz County during the Civil War,” by Phil Reader. Santa Cruz Public Libraries, 1991.

• “Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California,” by John Boessenecker, University of Oklahome Press, 1988.

• The Nevada Journal

• The Sacramento Bee

• The Monterey Cypress

• The Santa Cruz Sentinel

• Photo from Wikimedia Commons

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I’ve got a thing for the oddball characters and the peculiar back alleys that are ingrained (and largely forgotten) in Monterey County’s history. I also enjoy sharing stories. Satisfying those passions is why I do this Monterey Neighbors & Friends thing here on Substack.

I offer these stories here free of charge because I’m not that interested in the money end of creative endeavors. Also, I’m aware that Monterey County’s weird history is a very niche topic, so I’ll never be the Heather Cox Richardson of this overdone Substackian universe.

Monterey Neighbors & Friends has developed a modest following — not rising to “cult” standards, maybe, but whatever — and I do appreciate those of you who follow it. I appreciate your story tips. I appreciate your social media shares and your feedback.

I mostly do history here. But, as you might have noticed, I also take fanciful flights, with an occasional personal essay or a memory from my days in local journalism. I even threw in a bit of fiction I wrote this year.

The following are five of the most popular stories that appeared on Monterey Neighbors & Friends in 2025. They are the stories that drew the most readers. Steinbeck in the House, that fictional short story I mentioned above, made the cut. The top story of the year, A Proper Burial, is also my own personal favorite; good ol’ Sam Farr!

Thanks for reading.

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I tried to ignore this conspicuous poser when I first encountered him on the Recreation Trail west of Lovers Point. A smattering of bird-brained human admirers were already giving him all the attention he demanded. They pulled out fancy cameras and the latest smartphones and painters’ easels. He was still there when I looped back down the trail 45 minutes later. He still begged for my attention, and so I relented.

Speaking of feathered friends, this year our backyard fig tree magically transformed into a hummingbird nursery. We watched as mother skillfully assembled her nest with painstaking precision. She created a marvel of engineering, then nestled in for patient incubation. We watched the hatchlings grow from little black blobs to bristly juveniles. I shot this photo a day before a neighborhood scrub jay destroyed the nest and devoured the little darlings. We were heartbroken, of course. The entire drama might have served as a reminder that nature is often cruel, but for us it was a terrible WTF!

I’m not often up and at ‘em at the crack of dawn, but when I am, the waterfront rarely disappoints.

Franklin Street, as Monterey comes alive on an autumn morning.

Inspiration Point at Palo Corona Regional Park offers magnificent views, but the scenes on the climb to get there aren’t so bad either. That’s Point Lobos out there in the distance, poking through a determined blanket of brume.

Window on the Bay in Monterey is a great gathering place for those of us with something to say. This was the scene at the No Kings Rally in October. Deplorables say it’s all a waste of time, that resistance is futile. And maybe they’re right. But like the man with the hat says, Chinga tu MAGA.

Rainbows are always better over Monterey Bay.

A new beast adopted our family this year. Say hello to Buddy. He’s almost 5 years old, a rescue out of a ditch in North County. He might look like a ferocious monster, but he’s got a heart of gold. He’s also popular with the girls.

The simple flick of a big ear betrayed this youngster’s hiding spot in the tall grass behind Monterey High School on a summer's day.

The neighborhood road hogs took their own sweet time on Jefferson Street in Monterey not long ago. If I’m not mistaken, they prefer to hang out in a copse around the corner, but they are often on the prowl for low-hanging fruit and the local gardeners’ prized roses.

A morning blaze charbroiled the Carl’s Jr. on Lighthouse Avenue on April 3, and the Monterey Fire Department deployed its ladder truck.

Back at Palo Corona, local wildlife rightly deserve the right of way on all trails. Mange has apparently been the scourge of Central Coast bobcats recently, and wildlife experts believe rodenticides are the culprit. So if you are plagued by rats, ditch the poisons and get an owl box.

Loma’s epiphyllum blossoms are a marvel, and even more so the closer you look.

The array of flags that proudly grace the Morse Building at Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey is a reminder that we don’t live in a parochial bubble. The diversity of cultures that institutes like MIIS bring to the region is one of the city’s great attributes. So it was a shock when Middlebury announced it will shutter its graduate programs in June 2027. Let’s hope the campus finds new stewardship.

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Grandma Sue kept her fun treasures in a blue metal storage chest in the closet next to the front door.

The chest wasn’t fancy, probably something she picked up dirt cheap at Sears or Woolworths, or maybe she paid for it with S&H Green Stamps. The big flimsy locks never fooled anybody into believing that the contents within were secure, but it didn’t really matter anyway because someone had lost the keys.

Grandma Sue curated the contents of the chest exclusively for the amusement of her grandchildren. It’s where she stored silly knick-knacks, memorable newspaper clippings, witty joke books, commemorative Lindbergh memorabilia, decks of cartoonish playing cards, and scrapbooks filled with cute dogs.

Opening the blue chest was to expose Grandma Sue’s whimsy.

I especially liked to dig through the screwball newspaper clippings and amusing yarns and tall tales typed on brittle paper that she kept in a manila folder tucked away in the chest. She seemed to enjoy silly folk stories with humor that skirted the edges of propriety.

It wasn’t until later that I recognized that the humor in many of those stories relied on the unfortunate cultural stereotypes of the time.

For instance, one silly document was a purported letter of complaint to a coffee company from a German man who struggled with the English language. The man was upset that he had purchased a bag of coffee in which he found “ratt schidt” scattered among the beans. The fractured English and the presumed naivety of recent Deutsch immigrants were what made the thing amusing.

The magical blue chest also held a yellowed newspaper clipping about a visit from a Mexican St. Nicholas. The poem was called “Merry Christmas, Amigos,” and it was a spoof of Clement-Clarke Moore’s classic night-before-Christmas favorite. The first couple of lines of the spoof read:

Twas the night before Christmas and all through la casa
Not a creature was stirring. Caramba! Que Pasa!

The Amigos poem was heavy on the Spanglish, but the humorous twist relied on the notion that Christmas in this particular household was threatened because Santa, i.e., el Padre, was spending Christmas Eve getting drunk at the local saloon. It was clever-ish, but it also relied on a dumb Anglo perception of Mexican male behavior.

The poem in the blue chest had evidently been copied from somewhere, without attribution.

Decades later, after first landing in Monterey, I opened the local newspaper on Christmas Eve to discover “Merry Christmas, Amigos” anchored on the editorial page. It was the very same poem in Grandma Sue’s treasure chest. The byline read “Prof Toro.”

I wasn’t working for The Monterey Peninsula Herald at the time, but I had been reading it long enough to recognize that Prof Toro was a pseudonym for a Herald writer — or maybe an amalgamation of different writers — with an occasional column called “Peninsula Parade.” The anonymous columnist(s) waxed eloquent about random oddball things they’d run across as reporters, with occasional bursts of creative deviations.

“Merry Christmas, Amigos” was a creative deviation. It was clever enough that its publication had become a Christmas Eve tradition in The Herald.

_______________

Let’s face it, The Herald was never a paragon of cultural diversity during its various permutations. During its heyday, citizens of different ethnicities around town were mostly referred to as “paisanos.” In proper slangy parlance, paisanos referred to peasants from Italy or Spain. But as far as The Herald (and John Steinbeck) was concerned, anyone in Monterey exhibiting an abundance of pigmentation qualified as a paisano.

“Paisano” was code for “other.”

And so “Merry Christmas, Amigos” remained a holiday tradition. Year after year, decade after decade.

Until Fred Hernandez arrived in the newsroom.

Hernandez came to The Herald with proper cultural/journalistic credentials. He was born in San Francisco, and claims that an abuelo fought with Pancho Villa. While still in high school during the early 60s, Hernandez was a copy boy for The San Francisco Examiner. He graduated to copy editor during the glory years in San Francisco when newspapers hired hard-boiled white guys who wore dandy fedoras, drank like your mother’s uncle, and wrote golden prose on clackety-clack typewriters.

Fred Hernandez was a real pioneer, a Mexican-American in a post-Eisenhower U.S. newsroom. In his estimation, he might have been the senior Mexican journalist in California following the shooting death of Ruben Salazar by Los Angeles police in 1970.

Early in his career, Hernandez recognized the dismissive attitudes towards people of color among the writers and editors in newsrooms. Some of them meant well, perhaps, but many simply didn’t bother to learn the cultures they were supposedly trying to represent in their coverage of communities and neighborhoods.

Hernandez said he remembers the time an Examiner editorial writer wrote some nonsense about how “Spanish parishioners” were in despair over the loss of their community hub after the local Catholic church in the Inner Mission District burned down. Hernandez said he asked the editorial writer why he referred to the predominantly Mexican and Central American residents in the neighborhood as Spanish.

“Well,” the editorial guy sputtered, “they speak Spanish.”

“I’m speaking English,” Hernandez said. “Does that make me English? I’m Mexican and damned proud of it.” The editorial guy harrumphed, and that was that.

After taking a break from journalism to run a resort near Yosemite, Hernandez returned to the newsroom, taking a job as assistant city editor at The Herald. For the most part, the newsroom reporters appreciated his deft language skills and his advocacy for reporters with great stories to tell.

And then he noticed “Merry Christmas, Amigos” — the silly little poem my grandmother kept in her treasure chest.

“At first I chuckled,” he told me, “but after a few years, and having experienced firsthand the blatant anti-Mexican attitude of many of the Herald’s readers, I realized how ‘all through the casa’ fed that racist attitude.”

He brought it up to his bosses, suggesting that the stereotypes might actually drive away Mexican-American readers in the county that The Herald hoped to win over. The Herald, at the time, sought to expand its coverage into the Salinas Valley. His supervisors never mentioned his complaint about Amigos again, Hernandez said, “but I could sense an ‘aw-shit’ awareness.”

But then, quietly and without fanfare, a Christmas Eve passed without Amigos’ appearance in the Herald. And that was that.

Grandma Sue’s treasure chest is also gone. But the world evolves, and so it should.

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Neighbors found Count Wolfgang von Ballestrem’s body sprawled across the blood-soaked floor of a cluttered little shanty in Point Lobos on a dank October night in 1896. A shotgun blast had ripped through his heart, killing him instantly.

His violent death was a sad end for the outcast son of German nobility. Blessed with an aristocratic birthright and an intelligence that promised a bright future, von Ballestrem somehow went astray. A San Francisco newspaper observed that he battled the “vicissitudes of life.”

He ended up dead at the age of 38 in a drafty bungalow that was, according to a report, “more like a hermit’s abode than the home of a German nobleman.”

On the shanty walls above von Ballestrem’s body hung portraits of various Prussian heroes — Bismarck and Emperor Williams — and the first verse of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Vagabond,” which ends with this line:

There’s the life for a man like me,
There’s the life forever.

A fellow inebriate named Charles Abiger, variously identified in the press as von Ballestrem’s roommate, traveling companion and “bosom companion,” was disconsolate. Lawmen who arrived on the scene that night found Abiger wandering outside the cabin, holding a lantern and weeping like a child. He had shot his friend, he told them, but it had been a terrible accident.

Or was it? There were certainly reasons for skepticism, questions to be answered, mysteries to solve.

Abiger and The Count had been flamboyant newcomers to the Point Lobos community. They called themselves artists. Von Ballestrem had recently finished a banner for the McKinley presidential reelection campaign that hung above Alvarado Street in Monterey. And the Count, a teller of tales, often boasted at length of his nobility, his lavish past, and the promise that tremendous personal enrichment was just around the corner, just as soon as he received his inheritance from Germany.

Charles Abiger also had stories. But the only tale he ever told that was recorded for posterity was his alibi. According to newspaper accounts, he told lawmen and reporters that the gun had gone off during a playful tussle in the cabin.

In the end, untangling truth from fiction is a pointless exercise when it comes to men like Abiger and von Ballestrem.

The killing of Wolfgang von Ballestrem de Castalengo on Oct. 10, 1896, is now all but forgotten. But because of his shaky ties to German nobility and his colorful history in the Bay Area, the mysterious circumstances of his life and death were fodder for sensational stories in newspapers along the West Coast.

Judge Ernest Michaelis and Constable D. Hernandez were the first lawmen to arrive at the scene, and the local judge readily identified the victim as von Ballestrem. Awkwardly for Michaelis, finding von Ballestrem’s body in a pool of blood essentially negated a real estate partnership that he and the Count had expected to consummate within the week.

According to contemporary reports at the time, Michaelis had agreed to partner with von Ballestrem to purchase nearby property, as soon as the Count received a portion of the inheritance he expected to get from his sister in Germany.

That was the plan, anyway. By most accounts, von Ballestrem had a history of promising big things — purchases, business partnerships, etc. — just as soon as the money he was due arrived from Germany. More often than not, the pittances his sister did send him disappeared quickly, in support of his drinking habit. So there’s no reason to believe that this supposed partnership with Judge Michaelis would actually happen, even had he not been shot in the heart.

Nevertheless, Michaelis vouched for both the victim and the suspect after the tragedy. “I believe that I knew the Count better than anyone in the neighborhood,” the judge told a reporter for The San Francisco Call Bulletin a day after von Ballestrem’s death. “I also knew Abiger quite well, and am sure the killing was an accident, pure and simple.”

Like many before him, Michaelis had been impressed with von Ballestrem’s claim to royalty. The wild west produced plenty of shady characters who posed as something they weren’t. But von Ballestrem laid honest claim to royalty, even if his royal family wanted nothing to do with him. He was indeed the nephew of a Prussian ruler. His title as a count had been a birthright inheritance. He had been provided a superior education, and his position in society gave him access to the finest families in Europe.

Dark, handsome and fluent in seven languages, the Count was naturally expected to follow the martial traditions of artistocracy by joining the German army at the age of 18. He rose to the rank of lieutenant, though a San Francisco newspaper later noted that his military service was notable only because “he gave himself over heart and soul to a course of riotous living.” In fact, so potent were his libertine excesses that his family disowned him, and he was prevented access to its wealth.

The Count landed in San Francisco, where he navigated the Bay Area’s sketchiest beer halls, saloons and taverns. He regaled fellow inebriates with tales of Prussian aristocracy, telling one and all that he would soon receive his full share of an inheritance worth half a million American dollars.

Bay Area newspapers treated him like a curiosity — the living, breathing personification of a royal fuck up — and they chronicled his misadventures now and again. They reported that von Ballestrem picked up odd jobs along the way, earning enough to feed his drinking habit. He staggered through life with a checkered career as a failed artist, an inebriated housepainter, a lackadaisical private in the U.S. Army and a bootblack. He married a Spanish woman from San Pablo, one of those semi-arranged sort of marriages. The couple had three children and the family lived in squalor until she was granted a divorce. His estranged wife told a newspaper reporter she hoped never to see the bum again for as long as she lived.

The Count escaped to a Hawaiian island, on the flimsy pretext that it would inspire his art. He returned to San Francisco within the year with an empty portfolio. He shined shoes from a bootblack stand that he and another loser occupied on Mission Street for a bit. He worked in a furniture factory, and then tried to revitalize his artistic career in Santa Cruz.

Along the way, he befriended Charles Abiger. They had much in common: they were both heirs to prominent German families and they both drank to excess. The two of them ended up in Point Lobos in early 1896, and von Ballestrem announced to one and all that he was a serious artist. He had come to this beautiful part of the planet to sketch and paint the local landscape. They moved into a two-room wooden shack, about a quarter mile from a roadside tavern run by a Portuguese family.

The Count and Abiger befriended many of the local characters around the point: fishermen, laborers and other furtive people who specialized in mind your own business. The two of them were especially fond of any hospitable neighbor willing to share a bottle of wine or two.

Ernest Michaelis was also an acquaintance of the two Germans. Judge Michaelis lived nearby and bragged that he and the Count were buying property down the road. Learning that Arbiger liked to hunt, Michaelis loaned him a shotgun.

And if von Ballestrem claimed to be an artist, why would anyone doubt him? In fact, Judge Michaelis himself had commissioned von Ballestrem to sculpt a clay bust of President William McKinley for him. Working on that bust for the judge was one of the last things the Count did that night, before Abiger shot him in the heart with the judge’s gun.

After showing up at the shanty around midnight and surveying the crime scene, Ernest Michaelis and Constable D. Hernandez arrested Abiger and interviewed neighbors who were willing to talk to cops.

The coroner convened a jury for an inquest in a Salinas undertaking parlor on the morning of Oct. 12. Wolfgang von Ballestrem’s body was laid out in the middle of the room, surrounded by a crowd of curious men and women eager to hear the gory details of the death of a dissipated aristocrat.

Michaelis was the second witness to testify, and he provided a brief description of what he had observed upon his arrival at the shanty. The Count was “stone cold and dead” when he arrived, he testified. He saw that Abiger was distraught, but that he seemed relatively sober.

Abiger was then called to the stand. He was the star witness, of course, and this is the story he told jurors about how his best friend had died:

A couple of neighborhood fishermen had shown up at the shanty with a demijohn of wine on the afternoon of Oct. 10. After the wine was gone and the neighbors departed, Abiger announced to von Ballestrem that he wanted to shoot rabbits. The Count told him that it was too late in the evening for a hunting expedition, that he should stay home. Abiger went into the front room and returned with the shotgun, but von Ballestrem grabbed the gun by the stock, and the two of them playfully tussled. The Count stumbled and the gun went off accidentally.

“I rushed forward and caught him in my arms,” Abiger testified. “He never spoke after he fell. We never had a quarrel and were the best of friends.”

With no other eyewitness to the actual shooting, the jury spent less than 10 minutes in deliberation before exonerating Abiger.

As noted in the San Francisco Examiner’s reporting of the inquest, a number of questions remained unanswered. For instance, Abiger’s testimony at the inquest differed significantly from the account of the shooting he gave to a reporter during a jailhouse interview in the Monterey jail a day earlier. Also, during his investigation, Hernandez had found a mysterious note pinned to a wall in the shanty that read “B. died at 11:30 p.m.” Neighbors had all testified they heard the shot fired much earlier that evening. No one, including Abiger, could say what the note meant or who wrote it, but it was assumed that “B.” referred to von Ballestrem. The inquest jury shrugged off the mysterious note.

A contingent of German nationals living in the region showed up to pay their respects at Count von Ballestrem’s funeral. The rite was a perfunctory Catholic service performed in the undertaker's chapel. The San Francisco newspapers made a point of reporting that the Count had been buried in a pauper’s grave, but The Monterey Cypress noted that several of the Count’s kind friends had seen to it that he got a “decent Christian burial” in Monterey’s Catholic cemetery.

What’s more, The Cypress added haughtily, “whatever may have been his faults, we do not believe in villifying and slandering the dead. We will leave that to the hyenas of the press. During the five months that the deceased and his friend have lived in this neighborhood, they have always acted and behaved like gentlemen, and we simply judge them as we find them.”

A little more than three years after the incident, Charles Abiger was found dead in a room he rented above a restaurant on Alvarado Street. His death came less than two weeks before the turn of the last century, on Dec. 22, 1899.

Abiger “had been on a continuous debauch for many weeks,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, “and it is believed that excessive drinking was the immediate cause of death.”

Postscript:
Much of this retelling of Count von Ballestrem’s death is based on contemporary newspaper accounts, most of them from wildly sensational San Francisco newspapers of the time. I have ignored much of the weird speculation and obvious nonsense contained in those articles. However, the following paragraph that opened the Page 1 story in the San Francisco Call Bulletin on Oct. 13, 1896, is too bizarre not to share. It reads in full:

“The killing of Count Wolfgang von Ballestrem by Charles Abiger brings forcibly to mind an article in THE CALL only a week ago regarding the superstitious belief of old Indian families in the neighborhood of Point Lobos Park that any one who ventures near the point during the “hoodoo” period will meet with some mischance. This is the “hoodoo” season according to the prophets of the tribe, and already two men have been killed at Point Lobos—one accidentally shot while hunting and the other killed by his boon companion.”

Indeed, the Call Bulletin on Sept. 19, 1896, had reported that some of the oldest Indian families in the region “have a horror of this point, and said that it is hoodooed, especially on certain days of the year.”

Sources:
* The San Francisco Call Bulletin
* The Monterey Cypress
* The San Francisco Chronicle
* The San Francisco Examiner
* Geni.com
* The Los Angeles Times
* Line drawings from the Call Bulletin

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Joan Fontaine walked down the aisle in St. John’s Chapel on a steamy Monterey afternoon on August 20, 1939, into the waiting arms of a Hollywood star who had swept her off her feet.

She was but a “starlet” at the time, starlet being an archaic term used to describe glamorous, young actresses with aspirations for stardom. Joan Fontaine’s career dreams would come true, as she would become the youngest woman, to that point, to win a Best Actress Oscar. With her success, she navigated her career on her own terms. But first she had to learn the hard way.

For instance, she was only 21 years old when she exchanged wedding vows with a ridiculous British cad named Brian Aherne at St. John’s Chapel. They had known one another only six weeks, but in Aherne, who was 17 years older than her, Fontaine apparently thought she had finally found a reliable father figure.

Fontaine was on contract with RKO Pictures at the time, slogging through a series of inconsequential roles until she was cast as Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s love interest in Gunga Din, released several months before her wedding. Aherne was an established actor of stage and screen, having recently starred in Hal Roach’s Captain Fury.

Joan and Brian met at a party he had hosted in his Beverly Hills home. A fortune teller at the party read her palms, told her that she would become Aherne’s wife. It was foretold.

They planned the ceremony in a fever, flying back and forth to Monterey in his open-cockpit airplane to make arrangements. Her meddling mother was in charge of many of the details.

It was a fairy tale wedding, at least on the surface. According to a fawning account published in the Monterey Peninsula Herald the next day, Fontaine was “petite and beautiful,” her red gold hair brushed up her neck and worn in flat curls atop her head. Her elder sister, actress Olivia de Havilland, was her only attendant. Fontaine’s wedding gown was an adorned period duchess satin, with a hoop skirt that was supposed to extend into a long circular train. MGM executive Louis Lighton served as Aherne’s best man. Hundreds of celebrity seekers gathered outside St. John’s to catch a glimpse of the happy newlyweds. Life magazine even sent a photographer to record the wedding, and the glitzy church ceremony was spread over four pages inside Life’s Sept. 11, 1939, edition, headlined “A HOLLYWOOD WEDDING.”

But signs of trouble were lurking not far behind the glittery surface. Decades later, in her autobiography, Joan Fontaine pulled few punches in her description of the foreboding circumstances that plagued the wedding.

Her spicy memoir, No Bed of Roses, was published in 1978.

According to Fontaine, her sister Olivia, at the time of the wedding, had been dating Howard Hughes, the handsome and eccentric Hollywood weirdo. But one evening, a few days before the wedding, Hughes aggressively came on to Joan at a Hollywood party. Hughes told Fontaine that she mustn’t marry that jerk Aherne, that the two of them should run off and get married instead. Hughes handed her a note with his phone number. Joan was infuriated, and she showed the note to Olivia. The sisters had long despised one another, so Joan must have relished telling Olivia that the man she was dating was a creep. The Howard Hughes mess lingered awkwardly over Joan’s wedding ceremony.

And then, on the evening before the scheduled wedding, the Romanian film director Jean Negulesco awakened Fontaine with a midnight telephone call. Negulesco and Aherne had been sharing a room down the hall from Fontaine at the elegant Hotel Del Monte, located just down the road from St. John’s. Negulesco told Fontaine that Aherne wanted to cancel the wedding, that he had developed cold feet. Aherne wouldn’t come to the phone himself. What sort of man would do such a thing? Fontaine told Negulesco that it was too late for nonsense, that she’d be at the church at noon, with or without the groom.

Aherne showed up for the wedding, obviously, but his cowardly unwillingness to talk to Fontaine the previous night was an ominous signal that maybe she was making a mistake.

And then came a series of disastrous wedding-day wardrobe malfunctions.

While dressing for the big event, Fontaine put the petticoat under — instead of over — the hoop of her gorgeous gown. In a panic, she asked the hotel switchboard operator to connect her to the I. Magnin representative, someone named Russell Carpenter, to help her fix the problem. The man who answered listened attentively, but responded with a string of profanity before telling Fontaine that he would do nothing of the sort. “Who the ___ do you think I am, anyway?” he reportedly said. It turns out that Fontaine had been patched through to a Floyd Russell, San Francisco’s betting commissioner, who happened to be staying at the hotel at the time. The hoop problem was never resolved, and it was noticeable (but unmentioned) in the photo spread published in Life.

Next came Fontaine’s mother, who apparently made a scene because she had misplaced a brooch that she considered an essential accoutrement to the gray lace Schiaparelli gown she was wearing. This became an insurmountable problem, apparently, and the search for the brooch extended well beyond the wedding’s scheduled noon starting time.

All the while, Aherne waited at the altar with his best man, while the organist repeated Wagner’s “Wedding March” over and over until Fontaine and her broochless mother finally showed up at the chapel.

Once the bride finally arrived at the altar, Aherne muttered out of the side of his mouth, “That’s the last time you’ll ever keep me waiting.”

The marriage ended in divorce after six years.

More than 70 years after that glitzy Monterey wedding, a proper gentleman tapped me on the shoulder while I dug into a grilled slab of steak at a crowded table at La Merienda, the traditional “birthday” celebration for the City of Monterey, held annually in Memory Garden off Custom House Plaza.

“Mrs. Joan Fontaine would like to meet you,” the gentleman said, in a rather imperious tone.

I was dumbfounded, of course, but also a bit tickled, in an admittedly vainglorious way. “Me?” I asked. “Why would she want to meet me?”

“You’re the editor of The Herald, right?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

“Then Mrs. Fontaine would like to speak to you.”

I was aware at the time that Joan Fontaine had been residing in a fantastic home in the Carmel Highlands for several years by then. She was one of many aging American icons who wished to live out their existences in reclusive solitude in Monterey County. I was acquainted with local people who considered Fontaine a friend, and who protected that solitude as though her privacy was Fort Knox.

Joan Fontaine was the quintessence of old romantic Hollywood. She was the one-in-a-million starlet who had made it big. She was a three-time Oscar nominee, winning an Academy Award for her leading role in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Suspicion in 1942. Also in the running that year was her sister, Olivia, for her work in a film called Hold Back the Dawn. During her career, Fontaine had survived Hitchcock. She had endured four bad marriages. She had worked through a difficult childhood that sparked a life-long feud with her equally famous sister. She fought through the cruelty of a Hollywood culture that harshly disposed of women as they showed signs of age, not always successfully.

It was a storied career, really, but Fontaine’s personal life was fraught with a series of relationships that almost always ended in bitter estrangements. Her childhood was a nightmare, marked by emotional and physical abuse. After Aherne, she tried marriage three more times and those unions also ended in divorce. Later in life, in 1951, she assumed legal guardianship of a four-year-old Peruvian girl named Martita, promising her father that she would return Martita to her birthright family at the age of 16. Rather than return to Peru, Martita ran away and Fontaine broke all ties with the girl.

But the terrible and high-profile feud between Fontaine and her equally famous sister was perhaps the most dramatic. It was the stuff of Hollywood lore, grist for gossip columnists and analyzed in detail by Hollywood historians. Fontaine talked openly about the feud, blaming her mother for pitting one against the other at an early age, and acknowledging that the rivalry was aggravated by their professional competition over film roles.

The autobiography Fontaine published in 1978 certainly didn’t help their relationship. Much of the account of her first wedding in this story, including the Howard Hughes incident, is from that memoir, No Bed of Roses. Among the litany of slights and accusations rampant in the book, Fontaine wrote that her sister didn’t inform her of their mother’s death until she’d been dead two weeks, and didn’t invite her to the memorial service.

Olivia de Havilland referred to the book as No Shred of Truth.

The feud continued throughout their entire lives. “She is a lion and I am a tigress,” Fontaine told a TV interviewer in 1991, “and they don’t get along.”

If nothing else, the memoir was evidence that Fontaine was a strong-willed woman who sacrificed loving relationships in pursuit of her career. “There is much in my life that might make me the envy of many … fame, fortune, romance, yet I have found no lasting romance, no marriage that I could salvage,” she wrote.

So why did this legendary aging movie star want to meet me, a piddling community journalist who schlepped around town in an off-the-rack sports coat? At that particular moment in my own career as editor of The Monterey County Herald, I was warding off a ridiculous but angry campaign waged against me among readers because I was the flaming imbecile responsible for pulling For Better or For Worse from the Herald’s comics page.

For Better or For Worse is a comic strip created by Lynn Johnston that features a pleasant Canadian family named the Pattersons. The everyman father-husband was a dentist named John, and his wife Elly was a librarian. They have three children and a dog named Farley. Their chuckle-inducing foibles and family antics are splayed out daily for the world to see in the funny papers.

For a time there, For Better or For Worse was one of the most popular comic strips on the planet, appearing in about 2,000 daily newspapers. And I was the editor who pulled the plug on the comic at the Monterey daily newspaper. It was an unpardonable sin, evidenced by the reaction from voluble readers who wanted my head on a pike. In my defense, I had good reason for this decision, but then newspaper editors always have rational reasons for the dumb shit they do.

I thought La Merienda would be a safe place, away from my detractors. Traditionally, La Merienda is a fine bit of frivolous drollery and excusable day drinking, a good escape from comic-strip nerds on the warpath. And — bonus! — I had just been invited to meet the great Joan Fontaine.

As the proper gentleman led me to her table near the back of the venue, he crisply reminded me that Mrs. Fontaine was in her 90s. While she was still smart as a whip, I was told, I might have to speak up during my audience with her. I was also instructed not to make a nuisance of myself, not to ask inappropriate questions and not to linger longer than absolutely necessary.

After what seemed like a graceful introduction, I was invited to sit on the folding metal chair next to her. She turned to give me her full attention. She got to the point immediately, sharply, gravely.

“Mr. Livernois,” she said, “why in heaven’s name did you remove For Better or For Worse from the comics page? What were you thinking? Or were you not thinking at all?”

Notes:

• Joan Fontaine died in her Carmel Highlands’ home on December 15, 2013, at the age of 96. Olivia de Havilland died July 26, 2020, in Paris. Olivia was 104.

• The La Merienda dialogue contained in this story may not be verbatim, but it accurately characterizes the gist of the conversations.

• Born a de Havilland, Fontaine used her stepfather’s surname as a stage name to avoid confusion with her older sister.

• No Bed of Roses is a fun, juicy read for any cinephile, truthful or not. Vanity Fair magazine last year called the memoir “delightfully bitchy and self-serving.”

• For a deep dive into the terrible relationship Fontaine had with Olivia de Havilland, see Sister, Sister: Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine’s Lifelong Feud, in Vanity Fair.

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The following is a transcript of a presentation delivered at the Carmel City Library Foundation’s Local History lecture series on Oct. 22 at Carpenter Hall in Sunset Center. A video of the presentation is here.

Lincoln Steffens was an original raker of muck. During his long and distinguished career as a journalist, he uncovered corruption and he exposed terrible flaws in society before and after the turn of the 20th Century.

Lincoln Steffens was a writer. He was an essayist. He was an opinionator. He was an internationalist, a bon vivant, a muckraker and a social justice warrior. Lincoln Steffens was a philosopher. He was a polemicist. He was an idealist. He was a public nag.

He seemed to know everyone, from J.P. Morgan to Clarence Darrow, from Sinclair Lewis to Teddy Roosevelt to Langston Hughes. He interviewed Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini. He chased down and exposed the mob bosses and Tammany Hall criminals he covered early in his career.

Steffens also became a bona fide communist sympathizer who naively espoused the Soviet ideal. After his interview with Lenin during an extended stay in the Soviet Union, Steffens returned to the United States and famously announced to one and all that he had seen the future, and, he declared, “it works.”

Lincoln Steffens might have been a flame-throwing radical. But even militant extremists sometimes feel the need to settle into the comforts of domesticity in their old age. And that’s what Lincoln Steffens did. At the age of 58, he married a young, like-minded radical. Together they had a kid. He prepared to write his memoirs. And in 1927 the cozy little radical family moved to comfortable little Carmel.

So what did the good people of Carmel think of this rabble-rousing curiosity? Did they reject him as a lunatic libtard? Were they frightened that he spread crazy ideals that challenged their conventional thinking? Did they ostracize him and his family for being an independent thinker?

I’ll get to all that later. But first, I should to explain who this peculiar character was, and why he had become so notoriously famous.

Joseph Lincoln Steffens was a California native son, born April 6, 1866, in San Francisco. He admits to being what he called “well-born.” His mother was an English seamstress who immigrated to the West Coast; his father was the youngest of 16 children from eastern Canada who joined up with a wagon train to immigrate to San Francisco.

The Steffens family moved to Sacramento when his father made a comfortable living selling hardware. Lincoln Steffens recalled a happy childhood filled with silly adventures and what he called keen interests “for horses, guns, dogs, and the range of an open country.”

Steffens attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he rebelled against the rote memorization of soulless information he was getting from professors. He was looking for something better, something to challenge his intellect and to satisfy his curiosities. So Steffens convinced his father to finance a couple of years of study in the great universities of Germany.

And there he gadded about, absorbing philosophy and music in Berlin, ethics and morality in Heidelberg, music, science and love in Leipzig. The European highlights included time spent with free-thinking bohemians on the Left Bank in Paris — and then London, where Steffens married Josephine Bontecou, a French woman he had met in Leipzig.

At the age of 26, he and Josephine returned to the United States. Steffens took a job at the Evening Post in New York City, and then at the New York Globe. He reported the Wall Street panic of 1893, police corruption under Tammany Hall, and the reform-oriented administration of Theodore Roosevelt’s police commissioner’s office.

At the universities, Steffens had been a student of philosophy. He applied his own brand of philosophy to the folly and the people he covered. He also loved a good story. Not just the who-what-when-where-and-whys, but he was always digging for and hoped to discover some revelatory truth in everything he did.

And then a peculiar thing happened that changed the fortunes of his life. A roommate and partner-in-crime from his college days in Germany died after an extended illness and left his fortune to him. Steffens then made some savvy investments, which allowed him to enjoy a comfortable existence, to promote his radical ideals, and to finance his global travels for the rest of his life.

But Steffens was still a reporter at heart, so after settling his friend’s estate he returned to New York and became an editor of a moribund newspaper called the Commercial Advertiser. That publication was on its last legs, so he had nothing to lose.

The first thing Steffens did at the Commercial Advertiser was to get rid bland, old derelicts and rummies that typically inhabited the newsrooms at the time, Steffens chased down the youngest and most talented writers he could find. He was careful to ensure that the writers he hired did not care all that much about journalism. He was looking for “anyone who, openly or secretly, hoped to be a poet, a novelist, or an essayist. And the Commercial Advertiser suddenly became relevant again, a cultural voice in New York City with these early New Journalists.

Watch the full presentation.

And then came the muckraker boom. And for the youngsters in the audience, I should take a moment to describe what a muckraker is.

Up until the turn of the century, newspapers were mostly a hodgepodge of facts, figures and information that might be occasionally useful to an average reader. Not all, but some of the courageous newspapers and magazines of the era encouraged intrepid, talented and brave writers to investigate, to expose and to raise hell.

Nellie Bly went undercover to expose the terrible abuse of factory women and the horrifying conditions inside mental hospitals. Ida Tarbell went after Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller. Upton Sinclair mucked about the slaughterhouses and wrote The Jungle. Ida B. Wells was among the original civil rights activists who wrote about the brutality of racism in America.

Their mission was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and their work was wildly popular.

But the word “muckraker” had not been applied to these aggressive reporters until 1906. That’s when then-president Theodore Roosevelt, while laying the cornerstone of an extension to the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., for some reason used the occasion to talk about these intrepid reporters.

Taking as metaphor the term that John Bunyan coined in Pilgrim’s Progress, Roosevelt used the muck-rake label to describe writers like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. “Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing,” Roosevelt said. “There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed.” Steffens wore Roosevelt’s sobriquet as a badge of honor.

By 1904, Steffens had left newspapers and was writing exposés for some of the leading general interest magazines of the time. After his experience investigating the corruption of Tammany Hall in New York City, Steffens set out to show that deceit and fraud weren’t limited to the Big Apple. He crisscrossed the country and produced unvarnished investigations of cities like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago.

His articles were carried in national magazines, and they later appeared in book form as “The Shame of the Cities,” a sensational book that reenergized the Progressive Era at the turn of the last century.

In the conclusion of that book, Steffens argued that, when it comes to efficient governing systems, business and politics are a terrible mix.

This is what he said: “There is hardly an office from United States senator down to Alderman in any part of the country to which the business man has not been elected, yet politics remain corrupt, government pretty bad. The business man has failed in politics as he has in citizenship. Why? Because that’s what’s the matter with it. That’s what’s the matter with everything,—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine,—they’re all business. The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering; not principle.”

Steffens and his wife, Josephine, lived in Connecticut so she could devote herself to the care of her ailing mother, while he was dashing off on investigative assignments and speaking engagements across the country. And then Josephine Steffens died in her home. Her dear mother died a couple of months later. And both of Steffens’ parents also died around that same time.

He went into an understandable funk. He was what he called “homeless, jobless and lonely.” He turned cynical and his politics hardened. He was invited to join a bunch of chamber of commerce business types on a grand tour of Europe. He went along, but he was mostly a skeptical pain in the neck to his travel companions.

Upon his return to New York City, he found a room in Washington Square. He got cozy with radical labor leaders like Bill Haywood, socialists like Max Eastman, poets, anarchists, bohemians and wobblies. He befriended John Reed, who lived in the flat upstairs, and Steffens got Reed a job writing for American Magazine. Reed, you might remember, was a journalist who was swept up with the revolutionary idealogues in the Soviet Union, and ended up buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis after his death.

Steffens then became obsessed with the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on the night of Oct. 1, 1910. Lots of factories were being dynamited in the day, and it was no big secret that exploited and angry workers were behind those acts of destruction. At the Los Angeles Times, the late-night explosion killed 21 men. It was a shocking attack on the most influential tycoons to ever roam Southern California, Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler. And the high-profile legal entanglement that followed became a seminal event in West Coast labor relations history.

After convincing 21 newspapers to let him cover the trial, Steffens rushed off to Los Angeles and super-imposed himself in the case. He tried to convince Clarence Darrow to stage crazy defense strategy. Darrow represented the two chumps the DA had dragged into court on multiple murder charges. The chumps were a couple of brothers named McNamara.

Steffens suggested that Darrow mount a defense around the notion that the chumps certainly blew up the building — they were indeed guilty as sin — but that it was what he called a “justifiable dynamiting.” Steffens argued that evil industrialists in the United States were treating their employees so badly that the violent destruction of their businesses was “a social manifestation of a condition, not a mere legal offense.”

Clarence Darrow rejected the justifiable-dynamiting defense, though he didn’t have much else to work with.

Nevertheless, Steffens covered the trial from a perspective that the murderous acts were, in fact, justified.

Through it all, Steffens actively negotiated behind-the-scenes with everyone involved with the case to work out some sort of plea deal that would free the McNamaras. The judge ultimately accepted the plea, except for the part that actually benefited the defendants. Not only that, but Darrow was accused of bribing a jury. The entire case was a mess, and a lot of it had to do with Steffens’ meddling. The thing was so botched up that Steffens lost a lot of credibility among other radicals and anarchists. His fatal error was in naively assuming the system would work in favor of the McNamaras.

From there, he then launched himself into bigger arenas, tackling global issues. He involved himself in wars and revolutions. He visited Mexico, Italy and Russia. He was enamored by Lenin, Trotsky and the Mexican revolutionaries. At the start of World War I, he was convinced that the “inevitable war” would bring on the “inevitable revolution.”

In 1919, after hanging out with Trotsky and interviewing Lenin, he returned to the United States and faced another round of controversy. He wrote the introduction to Trotsky’s tract on revolution called “The Bolsheviski and World Peace.” And then he launched a lecture tour across the country that offended the prevailing social order. Several cities ordered the cancellation of his scheduled talks. Newspapers condemned his rhetoric.

Editorial writers called Steffens a “parlor Bolshevist,” a “coupon-clipping intellectual” and a crazed radical who spent his time “beating his luminous wings into the void.”

Even the Sacramento Bee bitterly denounced Steffens, the local boy. “The proper place for Lincoln Steffens,” it wrote, “is in jail.”

Steffens then hustled off to Russia, invited by a State Department official named William Bullitt. Bullitt asked him to serve as a “political observer” during the tail end of the Russian Revolution and the transition of power. That trip was a miserable failure for both men.

Bullitt returned home, but Steffens encamped in Paris, so that he might see for himself the repercussions of the Versailles Treaty.

And then he gravitated to Italy, where he fell head over heels in love with two different political animals. The first was Benito Mussolini, of all people. Steffens greatly admired il Duce as he watched him kick-start a fascist response to the humiliation his country had experienced during World War I. Mussolini appeared, Steffens wrote, “as a romantic figure …, like thunder on the right.”

It was also in Italy where Steffens fell for a radical Englishwoman named Ella Winter. Ella would be the great love of his life, his thought partner and the mother of his only child. (By the way, Steffens for a while had also been romantically involved with Mary Austin, Carmel’s own cosmic charmer.)

Steffens and Ella went to Paris for a while, where they hung out with Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Ella was 26 at the time, and Steffens was in his 50s. Steffens started calling her Peter, a pet name that stuck. They hunkered down, got married in a Paris registry office, moved to San Remo in Italy and soon had a son, who they named Pete.

Not long after their son was born, and at the urging of his publisher, Steffens started writing his memoirs. But he soon fell into a funk, and he asked Ella to take Pete on a long vacation so he could sort out his emotional turmoil. Regaining his balance, he gathered the family in 1927 and they all moved to the United States, specifically to Carmel.

Once back in California, Steffens had quixotically hoped to secure pardons for the McNamaras, the brothers from Los Angeles that Steffens had called “my dynamiters.” But that effort was quickly dashed, so he started to concentrate again on his autobiography and his family life. Having been introduced to Carmel by Mary Austin years earlier, he sought out a Carmel rental for the summer. Several months later the Steffens bought a house on San Antonio that he called The Getaway.

The Getaway commanded a view of Carmel Bay, and the house had a large living room and studio, four bedrooms and lots and lots of closet space (a premium for old homes around here).

He showed up in Carmel without fanfare, but quietly introduced himself around town. He was certainly a curiosity to people who weren’t sure what to expect from the aging anarchist. He began to accept invitations to speak to local organizations anxious to know his thoughts in old age.

Steffens stunned the audience at his first appearance in Carmel, at Unity Hall, where he spoke to a Women’s Peace Club. The women apparently assumed he was a like-minded pacifist. Instead, he told the assembly that they should support an increase of America’s naval defenses in anticipation of another war. His words, according to the Carmel Cymbal, were a “considerable shock.”

But that was Steffens for you. He was always hard to peg. Over his long career, he had mystified both his fans and his enemies. It was always difficult to know exactly where he was coming from.

But there was also this: Lincoln Steffens he might have been the most charming crazed wild-eyed communist-anarchist-radical anyone had ever known. He was quick with the disarming wit, always with a twinkle in his eye, always armed with the sly joke. From the beginning of his career, he went out of his way to charm his way into places he knew he wasn’t welcome. Early in his career, after learning that certain tycoons and politicians wished him dead, he made a practice of scheduling meetings with them in their offices, and he won them over with his relentless charm and his quick intellect.

He confronted the corrupt politicians and the crime bosses with friendly humor and a willingness to listen to their point of view. And he ultimately won their hearts, if not their minds.

And this natural predilection quickly won over the people of Carmel. Poet Robinson Jeffers, a friend of the Steffens family, once wrote this about Steffens: “No one can be thoroughly bad with a smile like that.”

It also helped that Steffens’ presence — and the famously erudite people who came to visit him — helped to sustain Carmel’s reputation as a bohemian enclave — just as the George Sterlings and the Mary Austins were disappearing.

Steffens hunkered down with his autobiography in Carmel. He doted on his son. He and Ella entertained their famous visitors. They spent quality time over dinners and picnics on the beach with Robinson and Una Jeffers.

It was clear that Steffens had found his forever home in Carmel. “I may even go into the politics of the place,” he wrote in a letter to a friend soon after his arrival. In another letter, he told his sister that he thought of The Getaway as a “refuge for safety and quiet. If that fails me, I’ll be a goner.”

He and Ella also started writing, editing and/or publishing weekly newspapers in Carmel. He might have put away his muck rake, but he still liked to rouse the rabble, even if the rabble were simply the local yokels. With those newspapers, Steffens and Ella were able to apply their militant barking for rabidly radical causes while addressing the provincial municipal issues of the day in Carmel. They were an outsized voice for change in a community that had just begun to settle into its conventional conservative self.

He accepted speaking opportunities at many other local civic organizations, places like the Rotary Club. His home became a salon for progressive thinkers of the time. He even started a local chapter of the John Reed Club, in commemoration of his old friend and neighbor.

In the summer of 1928, Lincoln and Ella Winter were invited to debate one another to illuminate upon the topic of whether Democracy will ever yield to Dictatorship. (Oh my! Why does that seem relevant 97 years later?) Lincoln Steffens had been traveling the country debating the issue with leading political leaders of the day for years, but this was a chance for Ella to debate her famous husband, face-to-face.

Ella was a character in her own right. Born in Germany and raised in England, she seemed to be much more practical in her activism, more thoughtful in her public statements. She also spent considerable time in Russia. She published several books about the Russia during her life and spoke about the politics of the region on the lecture circuit.

An audience of more than 160 people turned out to watch the husband-wife debate in Carmel. After the debate, an informal show of hands indicated that Ella Winter clearly won. “She was good,” Lincoln admitted in a letter to a friend. Ella won the debate even though she was “too honest to say any insincere thing.” This, I suppose, he considered a weakness.

While writing his autobiography, editing weekly newspapers, delivering lectures and hosting famous people in his home, Lincoln Steffens was a devoted father. Pete was a late-in-life child, and Lincoln spoiled him something fierce. He filled columns in the newspapers he edited with the amusingly mundane things Pete had said or done.

When Pete broke a leg or after Pete’s dog was struck by a car, a full account of the incidents could be found in the local rag. While doting over his son, Steffens also encouraged him to think for himself, to learn his own lessons without deferring to those who have influence over him.

A long-time friend, noted sculptor Jo Davidson, gifted the Steffens with a life-size representation of a young and naked Pete. Davidson was known for his statues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin and countless others, including Mussolini. The statue of Pete Steffens became the centerpiece in the front garden at The Getaway.

Pete Steffens was also the subject of numerous national magazine articles his father wrote about fatherhood. He was fascinated by this child.

Ella once wrote that “Steffens love for Pete, so deep and so tender, was inseparable from his passionate interest in the future.”

Among the things that people in Carmel seemed to admire about the Steffens family was the clear affection that Lincoln and Ella had for one another. Despite their significant age difference, they appeared to work as a great team, with common interests and similar beliefs.

And so it came as a shock when, in 1929, headlines appeared across the country indicating that Ella had filed for divorce. The Associated Press story used by most of the newspapers in the day suggested a terrible rift. Among other things, the story said Mrs. Steffens charged extreme cruelty and added that her husband objected to her attending dances or having other social relations.

But letters that Lincoln and Ella exchanged during that period tell an entirely different story. They indicate that Lincoln and Ella were still in love with one another. But, aware of their age difference, Lincoln encouraged Ella to experience life to the fullest without the drag of the old man to slow her down. He indicated that was their intention when they had married, and that the divorce was an “experiment” to test their relationship.

In letters to friends, Steffens explained that he and Ella had hoped to file for divorce secretly, so no one would notice. But a nosy reporter in Salinas found the petition and wrote a story that got picked up by the wire services.

Ella and young Pete travelled across Europe soon after that, working on their separation. Lincoln and Ella continued to correspond with sweet little love letters. Those letters, he declared, made this experimental divorce worthwhile.

Sure enough, divorce or not, Lincoln and Ella remained a couple until the end of his life.

Steffens’ reputation in town was boosted after the publication of his memoir. A massive tome of 873 pages over two volumes, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens was a massive success.

The book is literate, funny, incisive, self-deprecating, and filled with incredible anecdotes. The publisher blew through at least five printings in the months following its release in 1931. It earned rave reviews. According to the front-page review in the New York Times Review of Books, “There are one or two books a season which no intelligent person can afford to miss. Mr. Steffens’s is one of them.”

“I guess I am a success,” Steffens told his wife. “I guess I’ll go down in history now.”

Meanwhile, he plugged along with his local newspapers, appeared here and there on the lecture tour and continued agitating on behalf of the communist party. He did work for the Carmelite for several years, and later with a Carmel publication called Pacific Weekly. Both publications competed with the Carmel Pine Cone, and they all engaged in friendly, civilized feuding.

But then, on February 16, 1934, the Pine Cone, then edited by Perry Newberry, surprised Steffens by devoting nearly its entire publication to an extraordinary tribute to Lincoln Steffens. By then, Steffens was freelancing for yet another local paper, Herb Heron’s The Villager, and was rumored to be suffering from some unknown malady. Newberry had quietly asked Carmel luminaries to submit their individual tributes about Steffens, and the Pine Cone that date filled 11 of its 18 pages in accolades.

The front-page illustration, submitted by the great Jo Mora, perfectly summarizes the cautious admiration the people in Carmel had for Lincoln Steffens. It was all a loving tribute.

Wrote one Carmelite, Laidlaw Williams:

“Lincoln Steffens laughs at the foolish antics of society,” wrote Laidlaw Williams. “But he never laughs at you, or me, or the other fellow. And after you leave him you go away full of confidence for yourself and bursting with laughter at society and systems.”

Another neighbor summed up Steffens in a single line: “Often wrong but always interesting.”

The tribute edition included an open letter to Steffens from Robinson Jeffers, who often disagreed with his neighbor’s politics. But this is what he wrote: “Your readers know your tolerance, the breadth of your sympathies, the activity and acuteness of your mind,” he wrote. “But print is limited at best, and they can hardly realize as your neighbors do, how warmly tolerant you are — towards criminals, millionaires, artists, even writers of verse — how rapid as well as active your mind is, and how humane with its keenness.”

Steffens health had been failing, and for the final year he was confined to his bed. But he continued to write, continued to insinuate himself in labor issues with his pen. Lincoln Steffens died in his home of a heart attack on Aug. 9, 1936, at the age of 70. Ella and Pete were at his bedside.

In its obituary, The New York Times referred to Lincoln Steffens as “one of the most relentless searchers after truth in his generation.”

Sources:
* The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
* The Letters of Lincoln Steffens
* The Shame of the Cities
* The Carmel Cymbal
* The Carmel Pine Cone
* The Carmelite
* Pacific Weekly
* The New York Times
* The Associated Press
* The Monterey Peninsula Herald
* Voices of Monterey Bay
* The San Francisco Chronicle
* The Sacramento Bee
* The Oakland Tribune
* The Atlantic Magazine
* Voices of Democracy, University of Maryland
* “Lincoln Steffens,” by Justin Kaplan
* “I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens,” by Peter Hartshorn

“The Muckraker” was a presentation of the Carmel City Library Foundation’s Henry Meade Williams Local History Lecture Series, sponsored by the Frank & Eva Buck Foundation and Robert & Lacy Buck. Special thanks to Alexandra Fallon, executive director of the library foundation; Nancy Middleton, the foundation’s program director; and Katie O’Connell, Carmel’s local history librarian.

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Subscriptions are free, but you may express your appreciation by treating me to a coffee via my Ko-Fi page. I get my coffee at East Village Cafe.

Lincoln Steffens had lots of detractors during his career as a muckraker, but he was also drew a some interesting admirers. One of his biggest fans was Marilyn Monroe.

In her biographry, Monroe said that the Lincoln Steffens’ autobiography was the first book she’d ever read that told the truth about people and life.

She was reading “The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens” on the set while making All About Eve, the film directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1950, long after the famous radical muckraker died. When Mankiewicz asked her what she was reading, she started raving about it.

“Mr. Mankiewicz took me aside and gave me a quiet lecture. “I wouldn’t go around raving about Lincoln Steffens,” he said. “It’s certain to get you into trouble. People will begin to tak of you as a radical.”

“A radical what?” Monroe asked.

“A political radical,” Mankiewicz said.

The Red Scare being what it was at the time, when artists’ careers were ruined because of their political views, Monroe did what she was told.

“But,” she said, “I continued to read the second volume secretly and kept both volumes hidden under my bed. Hiding Lincoln Steffens undeer my bed was the first underhanded thing I’d ever done.”

To learn more about Lincoln Steffens, the agitating muckraker who made a splash in Carmel when he and his wife moved there in the 1920s, drop by Carpenter Hall at Sunset Center today at 7:30 p.m. The event is free, but the sponsors ask that attendees register in advance. Learn more about the event here.

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As an original raker of muck, Lincoln Steffens kicked ass and took names. He uncovered corruption and he exposed flaws in the system. He was an investigative reporter, back before the Mythic Gods of Journalism attached a name to the professional specialty. Steffens was a social justice warrior, a California native son, and an international bon vivant who knew everyone from J.P. Morgan to Clarence Darrow, from Vladimir Lenin to Benito Mussolini.

He was also a bona fide communist sympathizer who naively espoused the Soviet doctrine. After a visit to the Soviet Union, Steffens famously announced to the world that he had seen the future, and, he declared, “it works.” The signature Van Dyke beard he sported seemed a tribute to Lenin.

He was a proud muckraker, a term President Theodore Roosevelt coined to describe Steffens and other writers of his ilk. Taking as metaphor the term John Bunyan used in Pilgrim’s Progress, Roosevelt acknowledged the usefulness of muckrakers who exposed corrupt politicians and heartless tycoons. “Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing,” Roosevelt said. “There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed.”

Steffens wore Roosevelt’s sobriquet as a badge of honor.

“Everybody was calling me a red in those days, except the reds,” Steffens remembered in his autobiography, “and I accepted the name as I had that of muckraker — as a compliment.”

But even flame-throwing radicals need to settle into the comforts of domesticity in their old age. And that’s what Lincoln Steffens did. At the age of 58, he married a young, like-minded radical. Together they had a kid. He prepared to write his memoirs. And in 1927 the cozy little family moved to comfortable little Carmel.

And on Wednesday, Oct. 22, I will describe Steffens’ final years in Carmel at a presentation for the Carmel Public Library Foundation in Carpenter Hall at Sunset Center. As a journalist, I have long been intrigued by kick-ass reporters like Steffens, and once wrote a feature about Steffens and Carmel. There is much more to the Steffens’ story, particularly his relationship with the people of Carmel.

My presentation on Oct. 22 is part of the library foundation’s Henry Meade Williams Local History Lecture Series sponsored by the Frank & Eva Buck Foundation and Robert & Lacy Buck. This year’s lecture series’ theme is “The Power of Language.”

The event is free but space is limited. The foundation requests that reservations be made through its website.

Make Reservation Here

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Jerry Fujikawa earned a living in Hollywood as the go-to character actor called to the studio whenever a casting director needed a Japanese gardener. Or an enemy soldier. Or an amusing doctor. He became a reliable bit player in dozens of films, TV shows and Broadway productions. The road Fujikawa navigated from his humble beginnings in Castroville to Hollywood is a unique American journey, fraught with personal tragedy, the politics of war and the lamentable biases ingrained in Hollywood.

Fujikawa is an unheralded Monterey County native with a colorful biography and a filmography steeped in vintage memories. He was an actor pigeonholed into the only roles available to Asian actors during most of the Twentieth Century.

He is probably best remembered as the stooped and obedient gardener who fished a pair of bifocals from a saltwater pond for Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974. By then roles like that were second nature to Fujikawa; he was often cast as a gardener. But he also took plenty of other roles typically reserved for Asian actors: enemy soldiers, trusted doctors, house servants. Notably, he portrayed seven completely different soldiers, doctors or farmers while making seven separate guest appearances on M*A*S*H during its 12-year run.

Fujikawa’s IMDb credits are a trippy trip down a goofy MeTV rabbit hole.

Hatsuo “Jerry” Fujikawa was born Feb. 13, 1912, the son of Japanese nationals from Hiroshima, the product of an arranged marriage between his father, Hatsutaro, who had immigrated to Monterey County several years earlier, and Hatsutaro’s “picture bride,” Miwa. His father was a sharecropper near Castroville, where Hatsuo attended elementary and high school.

While a child, young Hatsuo adopted the Western nickname “Harlan.” The first recorded appearance of Hatsuo as an actor came at the age of 15, when he was cast as a gypsy in an operetta produced for the grand opening of Castroville School in 1927.

His life in the years between Castroville and World War II is a mystery. In fact, gaps in Fujikawa’s life have frustrated even his daughter, Cynthia Gates Fujikawa. “He successfully buried himself away from all of us,” she said, in a one-woman show she produced about her enigmatic father and their complicated relationship. All she really learned about her dad’s life in Monterey County was that he navigated what she called a “culture clash” between his immigrant parents and his American life.

There is some indication that Hatsuo was a bit of an activist in his 20s, and he once represented Salinas as a delegate to a Japanese-American Citizens League convention in San Francisco in 1934.

Harlan Hatsuo Fujikawa’s biographical record picks up in the early years of World War II. While in his early 30s and living in Los Angeles, Fujikawa suffered the indignity of forced incarceration at the Manzanar War Relocation Center after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order, a reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorized the mass incarceration of up to 120,000 Japanese living in the Western United States at the time.

By then, Fujikawa was married and had three children. His wife, a Caucasian woman, took custody of the children to keep them out of the camps. Meanwhile, Fujikawa volunteered to join the U.S. Army to free himself from forced imprisonment. He was an American, after all, a native of the soil.

Meanwhile, his parents had been incarcerated in Poston, another relocation camp near Yuma, Ariz. Fujikawa’s father died in a Poston hospital, at the age of 77, on April 19, 1943. Two months later, another tragedy struck when one of Fujikawa’s kids, Gerald, was killed in an automobile accident in Denver, only days before the family was scheduled to attend Fujikawa’s military induction ceremony.

After the funeral for his son, Fujikawa left for basic training and was eventually assigned as a messenger to the famed 100th Infantry Battalion. The unit was mostly composed of Nisei soldiers who had enlisted during the war, and it took terrible losses in the Italian Campaign. The regiment was among the most decorated in the U.S. Army during the war; Fujikawa earned a Purple Heart during his service.

He returned from the war to find his wife with another man, and a divorce quickly followed.

For a time, Fujikawa worked as a carnival barker and a concession operator — at least that’s what he once told a newspaper reporter. He also ran a watch repair shop until he sold the business to chase his dream of becoming a movie star. He changed his name to “Jerry” and picked up parts as a Hollywood extra. His first known role was as an uncredited Japanese soldier in The Sands of Iwo Jima in 1949.

It was a curiosity, at the time, an American-born war veteran portraying an enemy Japanese soldier in a major motion picture. A Hollywood reporter asked Fujikawa what he thought about that. “It’s just a job of acting,” he answered. “I don’t feel anything. I thought it would, but it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s because I was raised around Caucasians. I feel more comfortable around Caucasians than I do around other people. I know other Nisei who feel the same way.”

By then, he had remarried, this time to an actress named Marion "Skeeter" Gates, the daughter of vaudeville actors. Unlike Fujikawa, she had studied drama, at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City. Gates had made her Broadway debut in Mae West's Diamond Lil in 1952, but apparently gave it up to follow Fujikawa to Hollywood and to raise their three children.

After Iwo Jima, Fujikawa’s next couple of roles were uncredited parts as Japanese soldiers in World War II movies, including Three Came Home and Halls of Montezuma.

For the next 30 years he took guest slots in a wide range of episodic TV shows, from The Man from Uncle to I Spy, from Love, American Style to Green Acres. In addition to his multiple roles in M*A*S*H, he played three different characters in three different episodes of The Bill Cosby Show, three characters in episodes of The Wackiest Ship in the Army and two characters in episodes of The Twilight Zone. He twice appeared with David Carradine on the groundbreaking TV curiosity called Kung Fu.

He’d also pop up for bit parts in feature films and comedies like The End and The Cat from Outer Space.

And Fujikawa appeared on Broadway, in productions like The Teahouse of the August Moon, which enjoyed a two-and-a-half-year run, and It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman.

His meatiest role came in 1958, on Broadway, when he was cast as a houseboy in The Playwrights’ Company production of The Pleasure of His Company. After a 57-week Broadway run, the comedy hit the road on stages from Ohio to San Francisco. Fujikawa earned rave reviews wherever he went. A Los Angeles critic said Fujikawa “gets all the laughs available as the crotchety, loyal family retainer.”

By the time he died, he had accumulated 63 film or TV credits to his name, and that does not include the multiple roles he played on some sitcoms or television dramas.

Throughout his career, his characters played to a certain stereotype: the servile and slightly hunched Japanese gardener, the bucktoothed comic foil who spoke pidgin English, the clipboard-carrying doctor, the menacing Japanese soldier, the amusing “Oriental” romantic foil.

Even his brief speaking part in Chinatown was troublesome. “Salt water bad for grass,” he told Nicholson’s Jake Gittes, in a thick, broken Japanese accent. Nicholson responded with a mimic: “Sure, bad for the glass.”

But Fujikawa took what he could get. His opportunities were limited by the prevalent clichés that throttled the chances of Asian actors to secure better roles. “Despite attempts at diversity in Hollywood movies and TV, Asian characters have often been portrayed as weak, nerdy, exotic, incompetent, powerless, and are seldom in the spotlight as leads,” according to Nicole Park, writing for the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA.

More insulting was the occasional Hollywood “whitewashing,” a term that refers to the practice of casting a known Caucasian actor as blatantly racist versions of persons of color. The most egregious example, at least among Asians, was Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of a “yellowface” landlord in the filmed version of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Fujikawa didn’t complain publicly. And he eagerly took the role of the aging old-country uncle in Mr. T and Tina, in 1976. That show was promoted as the first TV sitcom featuring a Japanese-American family. Pat Morita was lured from the great gig he had as the diner owner on Happy Days to take the starring role in Mr. T.

“There were so few opportunities for Asian-American actors,” Fujikawa told Marilyn Beck, a New York Times columnist, days before the pilot aired. “That’s why I’m so glad to see a series like Mr. T provide more jobs.”

The sitcom could have been Fujikawa’s big break, and it could have become a worthy vehicle to portray Japanese culture to the rest of America. Unfortunately, Mr. T’s showrunners botched the assignment. The executives and writers were mostly Anglos who managed to turn negative Asian stereotypes into one big tasteless sitcom nightmare. Critics ravaged the pilot, and the activist Asian community denounced the show. One critic noted that Fujikawa’s character “goes around pounding a gong, reciting haikus and doing Kabuki dances.”

The show was cancelled after four cringy episodes. “It didn’t pan out,” Morita said many years later. “We shot ten (episodes), they showed four, and we were off the air.”

The criticism of the show must have hurt. Soon after the cancellation, Fujikawa told a reporter that “we are all too quick to condemn others without realizing the struggle an Asian-American has in getting the job. We had a chance to be viewed nationally every week, an opportunity to establish ourselves within the business of acting.”

He also said he hoped to create an Asian-American theater that would allow people of color to workshop and present their own stories. “We need to get our foot in the door and then, once securely established, work at correcting stereotypes.” It never happened.

Fujikawa died on April 30, 1983. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica.

Illustration (above) features Jerry Fujikawa as a young U.S. Army soldier, and in roles for M*A*S*H, The Twilight Zone and Love, American Style.

Sources

• “Old Man River,” a film by Cynthia Gates Fujikawa, 1997

• The Salinas Californian

• The New York Times

• Manzanar Free Press

• The Japanese-American Courier

• The Oregonian

• Shin Nichi-Bei: New Japanese American News

• Densho Encyclopedia

• Playbill

• Los Angeles Evening Citizen News

• HOLLYWOOD, by columnist Gene Handsaker

• IMDb: Jerry Fujikawa

• Fandom.com

• Marilyn Beck’s Hollywood, Associated Press

• Internet Broadway Database: Jerry Fujikawa

• Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA.

• Village Preservation Blog

• Travalanche: Cyndy Fuj’s Vaudeville Family #6

• Grateful acknowledgment to Kathy McKenzie for introducing me to Jerry Fujikawa after watching an episode of Kung Fu.

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| FICTION

My name is Peter J. Bursa and my address is 580 Jefferson Street in Monterey, California. I hereby swear under penalty of law that the following declaration is a true and accurate description of an assault-and-battery incident resulting in injuries to various parties, innocent and otherwise, sustained at the aforementioned address on the evening of September 23, 1944. I also hereby swear that I am mostly sober.

The first thing I want to say before I say anything is that we wasn’t expecting those guys to show up but they just came out of nowhere anyhow. They sure as shit weren’t invited. In fact, that son of a bitch Steinbeck is the last son of a bitch I’d want in my house.

I just wanted to say that in my own defense. And, there, I said it.

So what happened was this: We was minding our own business last night, playing Canasta, drinking Schlitz and listening to the Philco in the sanctity of our humble abode when I heard a bunch of noisy buggers on the front porch. I peeked out the window and I seen them four strangers standing on the stoop and making a nuisance of themselves.

I call them strangers, but of course right away I knew who them two fellows was. Steinbeck and Ed. Who around here don’t know them two? But I ain’t never seen them other two folks before in my whole life. There was that drunk lady hanging all over Ed like a wet blanket. And there was that other guy who talked funny — like he was Russian or Turkish or something. He had a long greasy moustache. And he wore one of them capes like he was Bela Lugosi or the Count of Monte Crisco.

All four of them were liquored up something fierce and they was creating a disturbance on my porch. I figured we were in for some trouble when I seen who was out there, especially Steinbeck. I’ve heard all the stories around town and I’ll bet you have too.

I opened the door and Steinbeck stuck out his hand right away like he thought I wanted to shake it. And then he announced for all the neighborhood to hear that he heard we was having a hooptedoodle. I said “no” we wasn’t having no hooptedoodle. I said I don’t even know what a hooptedoodle is, much less having one.

You see, it was just me and Sylvia — you met Sylvia just now, she’s my wife — and my brother Frankie and his old lady Betsy, having a pleasant time, minding our own beeswax. I wouldn’t call that a hooptedoodle, but what do I know? And then out of the clear blue sky Steinbeck and his drunken buddies showed up for no reason whatsoever.

I wondered out loud about what they were doing there. I said to Steinbeck, I said maybe you got the wrong address.

But Steinbeck wasn’t hearing me or at least he wasn’t paying me any mind. Instead he looked past me and he seen the wine on the dining room table. He also seen Betsy sitting there looking like a million bucks in gold bullion, because Betsy is a looker, and Steinbeck didn’t wait to get invited in. Those friends of his followed him through the door uninvited. They was all like a pack of wild goats rushing through an open gate before you get a chance to kick them.

On the way through the door, Ed stopped for a minute, wrapped his arm around my neck and started whispering in my ear, all friendly-like. “We left an accordion in the back seat of the car,” he tells me, as if I give a shit about the location of accordions. “It’s not mine,” he said. “It belongs to Lucretia.” I assumed that Lucretia was the drunk lady he was dragging through the door. “She can make the accordion sound like a Stradivarius.”

The drunk lady giggled and gave Ed a big wet kiss, smack on his lips, which couldn’t have been very appetizing because her breath smelt like old cigars and tar paper. I could smell it from where I was.

I half wanted to throw them all out, of course. But what was I supposed to do? What would you do if you was in my boots? Steinbeck shows up at your front door at eleven o’clock on a Friday night, borracho and loud and just barging in your house like he was God’s gift to whatever he’s a gift to.

Let’s face it, nothing like this happens every day.

So then Steinbeck says, he says, “Looks like you got wine and a pretty woman in the house. That’s all any house needs for a proper hooptedoodle.” And then he says, he says, “And the woman don’t even need to be that pretty, as long as you’ve got enough wine.” He said it like he was making a proper speech to a bunch of drunken Rotarians or whatever. He also must’ve thought he said something hilarious, because he laughed like a son of a bitch after he said it, but he was apparently the only one who thought it was funny because none of his friends was laughing in any way, shape or form. I guess they was too busy being drunk.

Anyway, Steinbeck stuck out his hand again and this time I shook it. If you want to know the truth, though, I never cared much for the son of a bitch. And, no, I ain’t never read none of his literature and I don’t plan to anytime soon. Matter of fact, I don’t want nothing to do with him. I mean, look what he done to Pelon. He made Pelon famous all over the world in that Tortilla Flat book, except guys like Pelon don’t need to be famous for the things Steinbeck made Pelon famous for. Steinbeck made him out to be a stumbling drunk with a big heart, which may or may not be true, but the whole world don’t need to know it, especially the stumbling drunk part. I only met Pelon a time or two and we never had a big conversation about it, but it seems to me like Steinbeck fouled up Pelon’s life even worse than it already was by making him famous.

Like I said, Steinbeck is a son of a bitch in my mind. But that’s neither here nor there in regards to what happened last night. What happened happened regardless of what Steinbeck did to Pelon and what I think about it.

As I was saying, I’m shaking Steinbeck’s hand and the whole time I tried to formulate something in my head to tell Sylvia.

I could tell Sylvia wasn’t happy. I don’t know if Sylvia knows who Steinbeck is or not; she prefers romantic books about beautiful women who fall in love with handsome fellers in erotic places around the world, and all John Steinbeck writes about are Okies and drunken paisanos like Pelon. But I do know what Sylvia don’t prefer, and what she don’t prefer is when hooptedoodling strangers come barging into the house in the middle of the night.

I was tongue-tied, to be honest, because let’s face it, John Steinbeck was in the house, like it or not. I might not care for the son of a bitch, but he’s still a famous arthur. So I just tried to act civilized and I introduced him to the folks who were sitting around the table: Frankie, Sylvia and Frankie’s old lady, Betsy. I could see from their faces that they was as confused and astonished about what was going on as I was, about what the hell John Steinbeck was doing standing there in front of them.

Okay, well, he wasn’t exactly standing. More like he was letting the coat rack hold him up. What I mean to say is this: It was obvious without a shadow of a doubt that Steinbeck was shitfaced drunk. And his friends weren’t much better, in the shitface department.

Don’t get me wrong. I ain’t judging nobody about their drinking habits and whatnot. I myself have been known to tie one on now and again when conditions are right and the moon is in its different phases. But I got enough sense not to go invading the homes of strangers in the middle of the night looking for hooptedoodles, no matter how shitfaced I get.

When I finished my introductions, John must’ve figured it was his turn to tell us who they were. He tried real hard to look formal and polite, like he was talking to Rotarians again. He mentioned some names that I guessed were connected to the people he brought with him. I know Ed, for sure. Everybody knows him, the scientist. Steinbeck called the other fellow The Prince and I think he said he was the prince of Russia. Or maybe it was Turkey, I don’t know. I ain’t no geographer. The lady John called Lucretia was pretty far gone. When I watched her I thought maybe she was acting the way I heard about people on opium.

At that point John stumbled right up to the table, knocked over the chair I been sitting on, and takes a big swig from one of the wine bottles. Then he hands the bottle to Lucretia and I’ll be damned if she didn’t gulp down the whole rest of it in about thirty seconds. I ain’t never seen no one guzzle that much wine so quick in my life, much less a woman. Not without puking anyway.

Right then and there I could see that Sylvia was pissed. She was shooting daggers, expecting me to get these people out of the house pronto. To be fair to Sylvia, she’s supposed to be working the Saturday shift at the cannery this morning. Sylvia pays the rent with that sardine job, now that I’m studying to get me a captain’s license for Frankie’s fishing boat. So Sylvia wasn't wanting a long night of drunken surprises but that’s what she got anyhow.

But then I looked over at Frankie and he gives me a big smile and nodded, like he does when he knows that there’s gonna be a heap of fun around the corner. He uncorked another bottle of wine and poured a glass for Lucretia and topped off his old lady’s. Sylvia shot daggers at Frankie and held her hand over her wine glass like she was saying she'd had enough without saying it out loud.

I figured I better say something, you know, just to let John and his friends know that we appreciated them dropping by but that we wasn't looking for no party — or even a hooptedoodle. I barely got a few words out before I realized that nobody was paying me no mind. I looked at Sylvia and shrugged at her like what am I supposed to do, but she started shooting daggers my way again.

Sylvia always tells me I don't have a commanding presence. Says I’m sort of a wimp. But then if she really wanted them strangers out of the house she should've said something herself.

Just then, John grabbed his wallet from his jacket, pulled out a wad of cash, threw it on the table. Mostly twenties, and lots of them.

“Deal me in,” he said before picking up the chair he knocked over and plopping hisself on it.

We ain’t playing poker, I told him. Canasta.

At that point I can’t remember exactly what happened next. But I’m pretty sure Lucretia tripped, or passed out or something. Anyhow, she keeled over and we could hear her head when it bounced off the end table before it hit the floor.

Then, out of the blue and just like that, The Prince slugged Frankie square on the nose.

I don’t know why he done it but he did. Maybe he thought someone slugged Lucretia. Who knows what he was thinking? It happened fast, and all hell was breaking loose. All at once I seen Lucretia bleeding from her noggin on my floor, Sylvia was shrieking as she's prone to do, The Prince was jabbering something real loud in some language I never heard of, and Frankie was writhing around on the floor grabbing his broken schnozz.

Ed was the only one who had his wits about him, but then he’s a man of science. He run into the kitchen real quick to grab all the towels he could find to stanch all the bleeding that was going on.

That’s when I heard somebody laughing like a goddamned laughing hyena behind me. I turned and looked and there was John Steinbeck. And I thought, Jesus Christ Almighty, here we was minding our own business and these people walk into our house uninvited and turn the place into a barroom brawl in a matter of minutes. And here's John laughing his damn fool ass off like he just seen the funniest thing in the history of funny things.

He seen me shooting my own daggers at him and he said, “Well, friend, looks like the party’s started.”

I guess maybe I lost control of my senses just then, but I don't think anybody would blame me for what I did next. But what happened next is that John landed square on his ass on the linoleum on account of I smacked him in the eye with a quick jab. I don't believe I hit him that hard, but he fell down anyhow. Probably because he was shitfaced. As I’ve already mentioned.

The strange thing was he didn't stop laughing, even after his assbone hit the floor. He just kept laughing. Didn’t miss a beat. In fact, it seemed like knocking him down only made him laugh even harder.

“I pissed myself,” he told me when he was finally able to catch his breath for a minute.

I know he said he pissed hisself but I’m not so sure he did. He might have actually spilled wine on his crotch region while everybody was getting slugged in the face. Anyhow, I did notice that he had a big red wet splotch down there on his trousers, and we was drinking red wine, so maybe that's it.

Or maybe he was pissing blood. I don’t know. I ain’t a doctor.

But like I said, Steinbeck just kept laughing. He then proceeded to tell me I was a credit to paisanos everywhere, which made me want to pop him in the eye again because truth is I’m not paisano in the least. I’m mostly Polish, but that’s neither here nor there.

So anyway I guess my neighbor got tired of hearing all the raucous behavior and the sound of people falling and groaning out loud on the floor. So he went ahead and he called the police department. You guys showed up awful quick, and I’m grateful about that. Seems like things could’ve gotten a lot worse in a hurry until you guys showed up,.

By the way, I hope nothing comes of any of this. I know I popped John Steinbeck in the eye, and somebody told me that’s called assault. But it only happened after The Prince broke Frankie’s nose and John wouldn’t stop laughing. I ain’t the type to make any trouble, and I don't want to ruin my chances of getting a skipper’s license.

So if John and his friends are okay with letting bygones be bygones, then by God we are too.

This document is a complete and accurate transcript of the statement I made to Officer Edward Thornburg in the Monterey Police interrogation room during an interview beginning at 1:32 a.m. and ending at 2:15 a.m. on September 24, 1944.

s/Pete Bursa

(Addendum: Officer Thornburg notes that the interview was interrupted for approximately six minutes when he left the room to assist in settling a disturbance in the lobby caused by a mysterious caped man with a Russian accent. Or was it Turkish?)

Story and photo illustration by Joe Livernois

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State highway workers exorcised some haunted Prunedale spirits when they bulldozed one of Monterey County’s most notorious murder houses to make traffic-safety improvements to Highway 101 several decades ago.

The old building on Lavender Lane had served as a restaurant/tavern and home over the years, but it was best remembered in Prunedale for two unrelated incidents, 23 years apart, that claimed the lives of its business owners.

I’m reminded of that accursed spot this week after justice was finally served for the second of those brutal murders, a double homicide that remained one of the most notorious cold cases in Monterey County for 34 years.

Based on new DNA evidence, a jury convicted an 86-year-old from Fresno, Ira Ulysses Bastian, in the killing of his old boss, George Smith, and Smith’s mother-in-law Eva Thompson, on a chilly November night in 1991. George’s wife Anna returned home from a quick shopping trip to find their bloody bodies. Both had been stabbed to death.

The memory of that double homicide haunted Prunedale for decades.

The Smith’s restaurant was one of those “special occasion” restaurants built upon the bedrock of George Smith’s eager charm. He was known as “Smitty,” and he ran the place with his wife Anna, who did most of the kitchen work. Anna’s mother was an invalid who spent most of her time in a back bedroom in the adjoining house.

Dining at The Smith’s was certainly a unique Prunedale experience. The joint was right off the highway, and yet it was bafflingly difficult to locate; finding it was a relief and a joy. Reservations were required, mostly so that Smitty could emboss each diners’ name upon matchbooks that were awaiting them when Smitty seated them at their tables. Because nothing epitomizes elegance like personalized matchbooks.

The Smith’s was a white-tablecloth restaurant, a meat-and-potatoes diner with a full bar. Smitty was at your service, and if you were lucky he’d entertain your table with sleight-of-hand magic tricks while Anna prepared your meal. Smitty was unfailingly pleasant … until he disappeared into the kitchen to continue what seemed to be a series of furious quarrels with Anna, clearly audible to all in the dining hall.

The food wasn’t all that great, as I recall, but The Smith’s was one of the most memorably charming places I’ve ever dined, if only because Smitty tried so earnestly to make his customers feel at home.

Even then, the place had a haunted reputation, with a dark shadow hanging over it.

Twenty-three years before Smitty and his mother-in-law were killed, the proprietor of the tavern at the address was apparently abducted, shot twice in the head and dumped several miles away.

In 1968, the place was known as the Hilltop Bar, owned and operated by Mary Brooks and her husband, Robert. Mary Brooks was last seen alive while closing up the Hilltop around 2 p.m. on Jan. 19, 1968, and her body was found five hours later on Davis Road. She had been shot twice in the head.

A tow truck operator with a long rap sheet named Barry D. Simmons eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

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My friend Charles Davis observed that speed limits on most California’s roadways were still a “personal decision” back in 1903. And when two wealthy California sportsmen wagered over how long it would take to drive an automobile from Monterey to Oakland, the victor shattered a record that today seems little faster than a horse’s pace.

A bit of an auto fan, Davis came upon a newspaper report about this unique sprint to Oakland while he was researching the rich history of auto racing on the Central Coast. And seeing that it is now Car & Gridlock Week on the Monterey Peninsula, Davis wished to share this road adventure tale with Monterey Neighbors & Friends.

The Sunday road trip was such a unique event at the time that it was recorded for posterity by several Northern California newspapers. The most thorough report came from the San Francisco Examiner. I thank Charlie for letting me share this story, if only for the chance to use the word “automobilist” in a sentence.

The automobilists in this tale are Cuyler Lee, the pioneer California auto dealer (Cadillac and Packard) and C.C. Moore, a San Francisco shipping magnate. The wager was made at the “Del Monte,” site of the grand old hotel and club, then located at what is now the Naval Postgraduate School campus in Monterey. That’s also where the run started.

The maker of the automobile was not disclosed, but Davis is willing to bet it was a Cadillac. At the time, Lee had just opened the state’s first Cadillac dealership, in San Francisco.

By the way, $500 in 1903 equals a few hundred dollars more than $18,000 today — a serious wager indeed.

Here is the Examiner’s report:

MAKES QUICK AUTO
TRIP AND WINS
$500 BET
_________
Cuyler Lee Covers Distance
From Del Monte to Oakland
In Six Hours and Five Min-
utes, Despite Several Delays

OAKLAND, August 9 (1903) — By arriving at the Oakland office of “The Examiner” at forty minutes past 2 Sunday afternoon, after covering 150 miles of rugged country between here and Del Monte in six hours and five minutes, Cuyler Lee of the Automobile Club of San Francisco won a bet of $500. The loser of the wager was C.C. Moore, whom Lee could not convince, except by actual performance, that the distance between Del Monte and Oakland could be covered in less than eight hours.

Interest was lagging at Del Monte, after the members of the Automobile Club had completed their run to that place, when an argument arose between the two popular automobilists as to the time it would take to make the century and a half run. Moore contended that it would be impossible to cover the ground in less than eight hours, and Lee was willing to back his convictions to the contrary, that the time would faill inside the limit, by a gamble of half a thousand.

There was a large gathering of clubbers when Lee in his auto, with O.D. McNab as driver, started from Del Monte at precisely 8:35 o’clock this morning.

Two serious delays to the flying automobilists not only increased their time by a considerable amount, but in one instance came near to preventing their finishing the trip at all. While speeding through Gilroy at a tremendous rate, the clubmen were flagged by an irate marshal, who arrested them by virtue of a local ordinance related to the speed of automobiles. After considerable persuasion, during which it was cited by the arrested men that they were bent on making a record, the minion of the law allowed them to depart after furnishing bail to the amount of $25 each.

This incident consumed fifteen minutes, while thirteen minutes more were lost in San Jose in replenishing the gasoline tanks of the machine. Time was also squandered along the hills skirting San Juan, where the racers against time proceeded leisurely so as not to frighten the large number of carriage horses met along the thoroughfare …

… The Oakland office of “The Examiner” had been notified by telegraph that the men were on the way, and when the record-breaking automobilists, tired and dusty, came up Broadway, there was an enthusiastic reception awaiting them at the hands of local sportsmen, who had been notified of the event.

“I do not believe that our performance will be equalled for some time,” said Lee in conclusion. “So strongly am I impressed on this point that I will give $200 to any one who will either equal or eclipse this record.”

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