Have you ever set out looking for something and then found some other random thing, and that new thing becomes such a distraction that you forget what you were looking for in the first place? It happens to me all the time. Especially when I’m digging around old newspaper morgues.
Back in the ancient days of newspapers, back when grandma had teeth, every story that appeared in a newspaper was filed away in little envelopes and stashed in drawers in a musty old chamber next to the newsroom. The room where these stories were stashed was known as the “morgue.” The files were kept for future reference and to preserve historical records.
Because I’m a damn weirdo, I spent a lot of time in the morgue when I worked for newspapers. I dug through morgue files randomly, tripping across a world of lost oddities, expecting to uncover the secrets of a forgotten universe.
Most of those old morgues are gone now, as are most community newspapers. So now I dig through the electronic versions from my laptop.
Below are nine archeological relics about Monterey County I’ve tripped across while digging through the morgue. — Joe Livernois
The Salinas California, March 1, 1902. The baby here was named John Ernst. His father was the county treasurer for many years. Young John attended Salinas High School, did some time at Stanford, and grew up to write significant works of nonfiction. He won a Pulitzer and a Nobel because of his depth and his insight. Not everyone cared for him, though; in regards to Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” a long-forgotten congressman from Oklahoma once referred to it as a “dirty, lying, filthy manuscript.”
The Sacramento Bee, May 4, 1865. Many curious circumstances certainly led to this tragedy, I’m sure, but I haven’t found another thing about it. And I’ve been looking. By the way, the blatant racism that colors the two simple sentences in this item was normal to newspapers of the time.
The Salinas Californian, June 28, 1899. If I lived in Salinas in 1899 and saw this advertisement in my local newspaper, I would have eagerly booked passage to San Francisco just to see Dr. Jordan’s Great Museum of Anatomy. Would you have joined me?
The Sacramento Bee, Nov. 7, 1865. Good for The Watsonville Times for speaking up about this. I suspect, however, that the editor’s primary complaint about the bull-versus-bear exhibitions was that they were scheduled on Sundays, in violation of the so-called blue laws that banned all sorts of fun on The Lord’s Day. Blue laws were to U.S. jurisprudence what Leviticus is to the Bible.
The New York Times, March 26, 1873. Nobody likes a lynching, unless you’re a screwball, and there were some serious shenanigans leading up to this bit of nasty business. The “Doomed Wretch” was a guy named Matt Tarpy, an Irish badass who settled in the northern reaches of Monterey County and made a lot of enemies. His death is the stuff of lore around these parts. I hope to write about it soon because, from what I’ve read so far in my research, this story is bonkers.
The New York Times, Aug. 12, 1888. I’m assuming the doctors didn’t get to Monterey in time. Crocker died two days after this notice appeared in the NYT. The final two years of Crocker’s life was a misery for him, after he sustained serious injuries in a carriage accident in New York. He died at Hotel Del Monte, the joint he built.
Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 16, 1940. This is simply embarrassing. John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts embarked on a storied and groundbreaking research voyage, and some idiot editor at The Herald decides to document the trip through the eyes of a one-legged seagull? Ugh.
The Salinas Californian, March 15, 1960. Before founding the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez cut his teeth as an activist/organizer with Fred Ross’s Community Service Organization, out of a neighborhood church in San Jose. This is the first time Chavez’s name appeared in print in The Salinas Californian, but it wouldn’t be the last time.
The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 1900. David Jack was a big cheese around these parts. He was best known for skeezy land deals and for a stealing the recipe for a particular white cheese from Franciscan priests in the area and claiming it as his own. The publisher of the Monterey Cypress once wrote that Jack’s “octopus-like arms have extended in every direction, and he has gobbled up the land everywhere.” But apparently Jack wasn’t able to bully Ethan Hitchcock, the Secretary of the Interior under President William McKinley.