The Odor of Sanctity
Pacific Grove burnished its reputation in 1906, and a writer of satire was there to record it
Say what you will about Pacific Grove, but its reputation always precedes it.
It’s a reputation first recorded in a published account shared across Northern California back in 1906. That’s when The San Francisco Examiner skewered the town in hilarious fashion while reporting upon the tribulation and trial of a Pacific Grove High School principal. The case of Professor Albert C. Morse rocked the city, thus burnishing a reputation that continues to this day.
And before I continue merrily along this narrative path, I wish to make clear that I value the rock-solid people from Pacific Grove I count as friends. What’s more, I join the entire world in its assessment that Pacific Grove is among the most charming of places. Further, I recognize that some unquantifiable majority of Pagrovians are happy, rational citizens who manage to get along easily with others. Many of them don’t even own pearls to clutch.
But it only takes a few overbearing weirdos to perpetuate a town’s fossilized reputation. Certainly, wackos and gadflies exist in every American city, from Bangor, Maine, to Hilo, Hawaii. In fact, every municipality worth its salt is populated with nosy neighbors, numb-skulled nabobs and nattering know-it-alls.
And Pacific Grove has plenty of salt.
Pacific Grove’s reputation as a righteous enclave is rooted in Ancient Methodism, and it has flourished with the oppressive regularity of coastal fog. Professor Morse might not have been the first to absorb the onslaught of PG’s fussbudgets with axes to grind almost 120 years ago, but his tortured tale was related to thousands of readers within The Examiner’s circulation area.
Morse’s miseries were captured for posterity by a humor writer posing as a newspaper reporter at The Examiner, with a series of stories published over three consecutive days in January 1906.
The identity of that humorist is lost to the ages. Most newspaper stories of that era were published without bylines, which is a shame because in my opinion this anonymous scribe composed the most elegant, most precisely descriptive lead paragraph in the history of news stories that involve Pacific Grove.
The following paragraph, from the writer’s second story, published on Jan. 5, 1906, sets the scene:
This quiet temperance town, over which the odor of sanctity commonly floats like the fragrance of roses in a moonlit garden, is split wide open with dissension. It is divided into two bitter factions, for and against the professor; and the uproar of their clashing steel drowns the music of church choirs. A seer, a prophet, an interpreter of the double entendre whose judgment shall be final alone can hush the strife and induce peace to return once more to sunny Pacific Grove.
The balance of the lengthy story is rich in mordant humor and delicious snark.
Professor Morse, for the record, was accused of polluting the minds of high school students by telling mildly indecorous jokes. That’s it. That’s what all the fuss was about. He told jokes. Bad jokes. Unfunny jokes. Like this one:
“A man was teaching a girl to swim, supporting her the while under the chin. The girl said: ‘Do you think I shall soon learn to swim?’ The man answered: ‘I hope not.’”
Or this one:
“Why does a hen cross the road? Answer — Because there’s a rooster on the other side.”
Students accused Morse of telling other “bawdy” jokes, including a Barbary coast bar room story that was so indecent that even the Examiner deigned not print it. Morse would later cop to all the other stupid jokes, but he flatly denied “disgracing himself” by uttering the indecent one.
This being Pacific Grove, it turns out that the case against Professor Morse was steeped in the fact that students simply didn’t like the guy. The senior boys in particular didn’t care for him, mainly because he wouldn’t put up with their bullshit and misbehavior, after recently replacing a principal who would.
So students went after him by seizing on his dumb jokes. On cue, their pearl-clutching parents sprung into action and turned Morse’s life into a PG nightmare.
What’s more, there was something about the cut of Morse’s jib the parents didn’t care for. And so the Examiner’s writer described the professor’s jib thusly:
Professor Morse is thirty-seven years old, of medium height, rather inclined to stoutness, a trifle bald, smooth-shaven, with a ruddy face and a twinkling eye. He is, it is said here, pleased with his personal pulchritude. In the summer, when the air is balmy and the water warm, he bathes, it is alleged, in an abbreviated suit imported from Narragansett pier.
The story goes on to say that the pleasure of passersby on the beach was “augmented by the glad sight of the pedagogue reclining at ease on the sands, or standing upon the pinnacle of a high rock.”
The Examiner‘s writer concluded, “Now, in January, when he is on trial, they talk about his bathing suit.”
They called it a “trial,” but it really wasn’t. At least not in the sense that it involved a judge in a courtroom. Instead, trustees for the school district spent nearly two days hearing testimony from students and parents before deciding whether to tarnish Professor Morse’s reputation and destroy his livelihood by ruling that he indeed shared profane jokes with his students, and, if so, whether the crime warranted his removal from the school.
An attorney from Monterey was hired to prosecute. More than 50 students and several teachers were summoned as witnesses. Morse had to secure an attorney from Salinas to defend against the charges. The matter was the talk of the town. A large hall was secured on the campus to accommodate the numbers of citizens who listened intently to the overwrought testimony.
It was quite a show. Every joke in the professor’s arsenal was aired at least three times: by the witnesses, by the prosecutor, by the teachers and by the professor himself. “So the townspeople now know the jokes by heart and are eminently qualified to discuss them in all their phases,” observed The Examiner’s writer.
Morse didn’t pull punches in his defense. The principal testified that he had been harassed mercilessly by student leaders since the day he took the job. He told the crowd that he showed up one morning to find his effigy hanging from the flagpole atop the schoolhouse. Someone also once rolled an outhouse to the front door of his home on Pine Street. Students were suspected.
Reading between the PG-rated lines in The Examiner’s description, Morse testified that someone evidently had taken a big dump on his front porch and then rolled a buggy over the excrement to track it all over the porch.
It sounded awful, actually, what the students did to him.
In the end, the board of trustees determined that Professor Morse was not in fact profane.
“We do not consider the stories or anecdotes either vulgar or indecent,” read the judgment of the trustees, “but we recommend that Professor Morse be instructed to discontinue the telling of stories or anecdotes in the presence of his pupils.”
And so it goes in Pacific Grove.
An editorial footnote:
I was reminded of Pacific Grove’s reputation recently after a Facebook friend tossed out an offhand comment on social media about the cultural awkwardness manifested by the city’s Feast of Lanterns celebration. Her comment unleashed an outsized shriek of reaction among folks who insisted that she didn’t know what she was talking about. She was lectured that woke malcontents and radical leftists were responsible for killing off the once-agreeable tradition that was Feast of Lanterns, an annual event which ostensibly celebrated the illumination of darkness with many dozens of Chinese lanterns and with queen contestants dressed in East-Asian costumes. This from a town where the entire population of its Chinese fishing village was chased out of Pacific Grove after a suspicious fire burned the village to the ground, also in 1906.
The response to my Facebook friend’s snarky comment was weird and uncomfortable … and wholly predictable. I mean, if a shriek of reaction about anything “woke” is heard anywhere on the Central Coast, it’s most likely to emanate from the place that calls itself America’s Last Hometown.
Illustration above: Professor Albert C. Morse and the old Pacific Grove Methodist Church
Thanks for a hearty laugh of recognition.
Very interesting.
I noticed just one thing that was a little off, and that was the description of PG as "sunny." When I was growing up there, from 1941-1962, the sky was white with overcast most of the time, to the point that I would hop in my car and drive off to Carmel Valley or Big Sur in search of a little sun.