San Diego Historical Society

Fifth Avenue looking south: the brick buildings, the telephone wires, the tracks for a horse-drawn trolley, and the arc lights — all evidence of permanence,

On the morning of December 15, 1878 jailer George Nickel at the San Diego County Jail on Third Street inserted a key into the cell door of Jose Laguna, a.k.a. Ramon. Through the barred window he could see that Ramon, whose back was turned to him, was directly in front of the door. ‘'Barring the door, are you, Ramon?” grunted Nickel. He received no response, and when he entered the cell found out why; Ramon was dangling from the top of the door like a bag of wet sand — hanged by a hair rope. Though still warm, Ramon was decidedly dead, and both his hands and feet were bound by buckskin shoestring. Nickel cut him down and immediately informed his supervisor. Sheriff Campbell, that the desperado Ramon had hanged himself.

Two women with parasols, 1885

San Diego Historical Society

Campbell arrived posthaste and surveyed the scene. No slouch as frontier sheriffs go, he was not a man to jump to conclusions, but sure enough, it looked as though Ramon had done himself in. Campbell nonetheless registered something mighty curious — downright unusual! — about this suicidal hanging. “Hmmm,” he wondered aloud. “How did that sneaky rascal Ramon get that hair rope into his cell?”

Alonzo Horton, 1895. He decided he had never encountered in all his travels a site so perfectly suited to build a city.

San Diego Historical Society

“I have no idea where the deceascd got the rope,” testified Campbell at the coroner’s inquest, as he pointed to the sole exhibit in the case, a twisted heap of woven hair that had recently throttled the life out of a man.

John D. Spreckels and grandchildren, 1895. He noticed three days after arriving here in 1887 that the nagging cough that had plagued him in San Francisco was gone

San Diego Historical Society

“Never saw a rope like that before about the jail,” exclaimed Nickel to the jury, also gesturing toward Exhibit One. “Prisoners are not allowed to have such things as rope with them. ... I never saw the rope until I found it about his neck. ... I can’t account for the presence of that rope.”

Arbor Day, Balboa Park, 1904

San Diego Historical Society

After further testimony from the jail keeper, the night guard, the janitor, and the arresting officer, the jury concluded that Ramon “came to his death by hanging himself to the door of his cell in the county jail on or about December 15, 1878.”

George W. Marston. "What he left as a legacy is remarkable.”

San Diego Historical Society

Of the five witnesses from the jail, only two even mentioned the tied hands and feet, which the jury was apparently in no mood to hear about. But the ever-vigilant press saw the elephant in this affair, exposed it, and came up with an explanation. According to the San Diego Union (December 17, 1878), Ramon tied his own hands and feet with buckskin shoestring; “He had evidently made up his mind with perfect coolness, as the ingenuity with which he guarded against any faltering, testifies." Little did Campbell. Nickel, the jury or anyone else suspect that 106 years later we"would still be wondering who in the devil brought that hair rope into Ramon's cell.

Downtown San Diego, 1883

San Diego Historical Society

Ramon’s is one of thousands upon thousands of stories buried deep in the boxed darkness of the San Diego Historical Society’s research archives, in the twelve volumes of coroner’s inquests, in-depth records of all the violent or suspicious deaths that occurred in San Diego County between 1853 and 1904. Not such a bad fate when you think about it. Immortality. Ramon lives forever on brittle, yellowed paper protected in a polyester sleeve, boxed snugly on the ground floor of the Casa de Balboa in Balboa Park.

Zoro Gardens, 1935

San Diego Historical Society

“Our purpose is to collect, preserve, and make available documents and other evidence of San Diego's past," explains Gregg Hennessey, research archive administrator at the San Diego Historical Society. In addition to secondary materials about San Diego history (books, journals, magazines, and other publications), the archives contain an immense accumulation of primary sources.

Rick Crawford, Gregg Hennessey. “When did San Diego finally connect with the East by rail?” “Eighteen eighty-three, of course,” replies Crawford.

Photo by Craig Carlson

The heart of the archives is the huge public records collection, which contains original documents from the city, the county, and the courts dating back to 1850. There are numerous manuscript collections (diaries, comprehensive records of businesses, private individuals, churches, social organizations, and families), hundreds of oral histories and unpublished theses, maps, architectural drawings, biographical files, more than one million photographs, and vast quantities of ephemera dating back to the Spanish mission period.

Archive storage area. The heart of the archives is the huge public records collection dating back to 1850.

Photo by Craig Carlson

Along with the Historical Society’s museums - the Serra and the Villa Montezuma — the research archives constitute San Diego’s memory, a bank of stories, some happy, some sad, some entertaining, some tedious, some trivial, and some essential to an understanding of our city's past and present. If any town in this nation could be called a temple of modernity, it's San Diego, unabashed spawner of condo enclaves on barren tracts just waiting to bear the stamp of the Eighties, coveted turf of high-tech industry, unequivocal supporter of the belief that anything old and dingy can be stuccoed over and made to look nice. Who cares about history in San Diego anyway? We are primarily a city of newcomers, deracines who have left behind, in this town or that, pieces of our segmented ancestral thread. Half of us came here to escape the past, to live free of the shackles of tradition, custom, and convention.

“Human beings have an urge inside them to know the past,” says Hennessey. “They need a sense of place, a sense that they belong. That is what makes us human. It’s the same desire that scientists have to know what makes the world turn — it’s what makes us civilized.” Indeed there is something eminently civilized about standing downtown at Broadway and Fourth Avenue and knowing who Alonzo Horton was, knowing that when he arrived from San Francisco in 1867 he commented that San Diego Harbor was the finest he’d ever seen; that he surveyed the flat sagebrush dustbowl that is now downtown, a vast expanse of southwest desert hardpan, and had a great vision — he decided he had never encountered in all his travels a site so perfectly suited to build a city. People thought he was crazy, but he bought the land for a trifle — 960 acres for $265 — and built San Diego anyway. How civilized to be aware that John D. Spreckels, sugar family heir, noticed three days after arriving here in 1887 that the nagging cough that had plagued him for months in the dampness of San Francisco was gone, or that the photographer Herbert Fitch came to San Diego in 1895 at age twenty-nine to die of tuberculosis, but due to our salubrious climate lived to see ninety — and in his life provided this city with some of its most precious photographs, many of which now hang in the lobbies of restaurants and businesses all over town.

And how eminently human to feel, as you drive down Island Street between First and Third, the perverse pulse of history’s underbelly, to imagine the sounds of yesterday’s rabble as they reveled in what was called at the turn of the century “the Stingaree,’’ the grungiest, sleaziest, wildest, knee-slappingest place in town — the red-light district near the old Horton’s Wharf, where briny sailors and dusty cowboys whooped it up in seedy bars and chased after five-dollar floozies in San Diego’s First bona fide slum.

Rick Crawford, an archivist at the Historical Society, really knows his stuff. He’s in the business of history, and when you tell him you want information about a particular person, place, or event in San Diego’s past, he disappears briefly into the shadows, performing God knows what investigative machinations, then reappears with journals, catalogues, photos, brochures, scrapbooks, maps, tax rolls, minutes to city council meetings, oral histories, jail registers, or whatever you need. If that doesn’t satisfy you, he disappears again and comes back with more. Crawford, a calm, easygoing fellow with a broad face, knows much of what there is to know about San Diego history, and what he doesn’t know he can Find in nothing flat; the extent of factual baggage he carries in his thirty-year-old brain is truly astounding. He dismisses easy historical trivia questions such as “What hotel was razed to make way for the U.S. Grant?” (the Horton) or “What did Mission Bay used to be called?” (False Bay) or “What survivor of the shootout at the OK Corral lived briefly in San Diego?” (Wyatt Earp). Child’s stuff! Grade B trivia. So I hit Crawford with some grade A. He snagged on “What year did the fountain in Horton Plaza freeze?” His face wrinkled in thought as he waited for a date to light up the darkness of his mind; but since the right answer, 1913, failed to appear, he played it safe; “Sometime in the nineteen teens.” Not bad. I cheated when I asked him why the Indian Tall Poop had been jailed in Julian during the late Nineteenth Century (I’d discovered Tall Poop in an obscure court docket among hundreds of other insignificant names), but Crawford, though he’d never heard of Tall Poop, nonetheless guessed correctly that he had stolen and eaten a cow, a practice common among Indians during that period. I thought I might stump him with “What famous anarchist spoke here in the early Twentieth Century,” but he came back with “Emma Goldman” before I could draw my next breath. And he told me a story to boot.

In the early 1900s some of San Diego's most upstanding citizens were involved in one of the more sordid chapters of this city's history, the vigilante attacks against members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the “Wobblies.” Persecution of the alleged “anarchists” became so bad in 1912 that Governor Hiram Johnson sent an envoy, Harris Weinstock, here to investigate. Weinstock's report, “Disturbances in the City of San Diego and the County of San Diego, California,” expresses alarm at the paralegal means that San Diegans were using to deal with civic unrest. In this frayed, cracked, and yellowed document from the archive library, Weinstock tells the story of IWW member John Wallace, whose experience was apparently typical. Wallace was arrested one afternoon while casually reading at the IWW headquarters downtown, and taken to the police station. Later that night fourteen vigilantes, wearing constable badges and white handkerchiefs around their left arms, took him from his cell in the company of a police ofFicer and drove him to the city limits at Sorrento Valley. There they made Wallace kneel, kiss the American flag, and sing the national anthem. When Wallace said he’d forgotten the tune, he was, Weinstock wrote to the governor, “pounded until he remembered it, which he did.” The next morning, at the county line in San Onofre, Wallace was made to run the gauntlet — that is, pass through a double line of several dozen vigilantes, each of whom landed blows with fists, clubs, and whips. Then, after kissing the flag once more, the battered, bruised, and humiliated Wallace was released on the road to Los Angeles and warned never to return.

When Emma Goldman attempted to speak (unsuccessfully) in San Diego that same year, 1912, her road manager Ben Reitman was kidnapped and subjected to abuse similar to Wallace’s; according to Goldman’s autobiography, Reitman had to perform the gauntlet ritual naked, and while doing so had his testicles squeezed by a vigilante thug. Before releasing him, the vigilantes branded the letters IWW into the flesh of Reitman’s rump with a lighted cigar.

There are, of course, many documents concerning San Diego’s past that the Historical Society would love to stumble upon. Although a list of the San Diegans who wore the vigilante white handkerchief might not be of pre-eminent historical value, it would certainly raise eyebrows and cause some excitement. But no such list exists, and all we have is some testimony that “very prominent” San Diegans were involved.

Weinstock, who had visited Russia, likened San Diego’s treatment of the IWW to pogroms against the Jews. He quotes at length San Diego newspapers, all supporters of the vigilante cause. The Evening Tribune wrote on March 4, 1912 that “hanging is none too good for them (Wobblies J and they would be much better dead; for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are the waste material of creation and should be drained off .. into the sewer of oblivion there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.”

Two more tough trivia questions for Crawford; “Why,” I ask him, “was Mary C. Walker Fired from her position as schoolteacher in 1865?”

Crawford smiles and shakes his head, not because he doesn’t know the answer but because the question is too easy. “Because she dined with a black student,” he replies. “Apparently, a black girl had helped her when she was ill on a boat trip. Walker dined with her to return a courtesy.”

“Which San Diego mayor entertained the Prince of Wales in 1920?”

“Why, Louis ‘Wildman’ Wilde, of course.”

The Historical Society was founded in 1928, during a period when urban growth was obliterating historical landmarks throughout the region and burying the signs of a past many felt was well worth preserving. San Diego, after all, was the site of Cabrillo’s brief landing in 1542, the First point of discovery by Europeans on the west coast of what is now the United States. Presidio Hill was the site of the First mission in California (established in 1769), and was considered by some to be of historical interest equal to that of Plymouth Rock, where the Pilgrims first landed. Wealthy philanthropist George White Marston was particularly concerned. So in 1928 he acquired the land on Presidio Hill and hired John Nolen, a noted planner and architect from Massachusetts to design Presidio Park. In the park Marston built the Serra Museum, a structure that imitates the Spanish architecture of the mission period. He also established there the offices of the San Diego Historical Society, which he founded. Then, in what archive administrator Gregg Hennessey calls “an act of philanthropy of the highest kind,” he gave the whole thing to the city.

“George Marston is for me a hero,” continues Hennessey. “He was a generous spirit, he had vision, and he had an active social conscience. He did many things for this community, giving of his time, money, and effort with no concern for his own personal gain. What he left as a legacy is remarkable.” Marston came to San Diego from Wisconsin in 1870 at age twenty and began working as a clerk in a market downtown. He eventually acquired his own store, which grew to become “Marston’s,” the largest department store in the city; it made him a very wealthy man and a leading public figure in San Diego. In 1917 he ran for mayor on an antigrowth platform against Louis Wilde, who turned the campaign into a metaphorical battle between smokestacks (Wilde) and geraniums (Marston). Geraniums lost. But Marston remained an important San Diegan until his death in 1946. In addition to his contribution of Presidio Park and the founding of the Historical Society, Marston is remembered for his work in building the San Diego Public Library and the YMCA, his efforts to preserve Balboa Park, and his influence in the establishment of Torrey Pines and Anza Borrego state parks.

Though the Historical Society has documents and artifacts from the Spanish period (1769 to 1821) and Mexican period (1821 to 1848) of San Diego history, the bulk of its possessions reflect the American period. “The reason,” Hennessey explains, “is that there were very few people in San Diego before 1850. The local Mexican and Spanish governments had much less structured bureaucracies than the later Americans, so they didn’t produce near the quantities of documents. And of those they did produce, many were lost or made their way back to Mexico.” Hennessey, a soft-spoken man of forty who has master's degrees in history and library science, has been with the Historical Society for six years. He has a passion for history that grew out of his involvement in politics during the Sixties, and he laments the fact that the Historical Society doesn’t get more attention in the community from those who share his passion. “We're one of the best research archives in the West, but nobody knows about us,” he says. “Academics sure don’t. Those who do know about us are surprised, even overwhelmed by what we have. We’d like to see more students, history buffs, novelists, journalists, people interested in genealogical research, and others who want to know about San Diego’s past. What we have here belongs to the people of San Diego, and we want them to use it.”

The Historical Society isn’t limited to its archival and museum functions. Though it tries to avoid political controversy, it carries on the tradition of George Marston by actively striving to protect the remnants of San Diego’s past from the imperatives of progress. If, for example, a house of historical interest is to be destroyed, the Historical Society will provide advice and documentation necessary to have it declared a historic site; that way, not only will the house be saved, but the owner will receive significant tax incentives to restore it. To protect the facades of several old buildings in the Gaslamp Quarter (two of which are the Grand Pacific Hotel at Fifth and J and the Hotel Lester at Fourth and Market), the Historical Society has contracted with building owners and obtained a “facade easement.” This mutually beneficial arrangement stipulates that in exchange for significant tax benefits, the building owner must restore and maintain the facade, which he “donates” to the Historical Society.

In any nonprofit cultural organization, obtaining money is difficult, but particularly, Hennessey insists, for a historical society. “It’s relatively — and I stress “relatively’ — easy to raise money for an art museum, an opera, or a symphony. They are identified with the fine arts and you derive immediate aesthetic pleasure from them. People seem to agree that these things are important to a community. It’s more difficult to convince these same people that history is important. When people think of history, they think of that course taught by the coach back in high school. Nonetheless, I think people like to contemplate the past; few subscribe to Henry Ford’s assertion that ‘History is bunk.’ ”

Due in part to San Diego’s growth and to an increased awareness of history during the 1970s — thanks to the nation’s bicentennial celebrations and to Roots, says Hennessey — the San Diego Historical Society has expanded dramatically in recent years. Its staff has quadrupled since 1969, and its annual budget of $60,000 has grown to more than $500,000, a figure achieved through contributions, revenue from exhibits, fundraising activities, monies from the Transient Occupancy Tax (a levy paid by tourists staying at San Diego hotels), and grants. The Historical Society recently received a $250,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is hoping soon to obtain a different grant of $314,000. These grants are part of an ambitious campaign to raise $2.5 million for future Historical Society projects.

The Historical Society’s most fortuitous gain has been its new locale, the Casa de Balboa, previously the site of the aerospace museum; the building, like the Old Globe, was torched by an arsonist in 1979 and recently rebuilt with federal funds. “It’s been a great boon for us to occupy this building,” says Hennessey. “Before, our archives, our photo collection, and our curatorial department were in very cramped facilities spread out all over the city.” Most of the public records weren’t even available to the public. Decades worth of accumulated documents were piled in the old fire alarm station in Balboa Park, which is where Rick Crawford found them when he was hired two years ago. “It was a nightmare,” Crawford recalls, “a total maze. There were just stacks and stacks of records, and I was told, ‘Here, organize them.’ It took a year and a half to get the public records in order, and when we finally came to the Casa de Balboa last February, it took a Mayflower moving van two days to move them.”

“Since we’ve been centralized,” Hennessey says, “we’ve become much more accessible to the public. Being in Balboa Park, where foot traffic is tremendous, really helps. In most towns the museums of science, photography, art, anthropology, and history are scattered through the city. Here we’re all together. As far as we know, the mall in Washington, D.C. may be the only place in the country with a denser concentration of museums and cultural attractions.”

It is appropriate that the Historical Society will soon move its administrative offices to Balboa Park, probably the most historic site in “new” San Diego, a monument to change, to civilization putting its thumbprint on nature, yet at the same time a secure mark of permanence. How easy to forget that that beautiful chunk of manicured green wasn’t always so. In 1909, the year the United States government announced the construction of the Panama Canal, most of Balboa Park was windswept terrain covered with wild grass, chaparral, rattlesnakes, and a handful of thirsty oaks, willows, and sycamores. In fact, it wasn't even called Balboa Park; not until a year later did “Balboa” win out over Horton, Silvergate, Pacific, and Darien in a contest to name the park that would host San Diego's finest hour, its grand entrance into world culture: the 1915 Panama-Califomia Exposition. This event was timed to coincide with the opening of the canal that would bring trade and tourism to Southern California and would — all hoped — make San Diego a smudge instead of a mere dot on the map. New York architect Bertram Goodhue was called in to design a series of buildings, all in Spanish Colonial style, to house the various exhibits. (Though the buildings have survived to this day, they were intended only for temporary use during the exposition.) The construction of the Cabrillo Bridge was commissioned. John D. Spreckels offered to build the organ pavilion. And San Diego’s horticulturists, including Kate Sessions, the “mother of Balboa Park,” had their botanical dreams come true. One hundred thousand holes were blasted into hardpan to plant trees in an ambitious landscaping project, and 50,000 shrubs were planted. By 1915 San Diego’s “park’’ had earned its name. The exposition was a success, even if it was overshadowed by the San Francisco World’s Fair.

Still more trivia for Rick Crawford: “It was the site of the great gunfight in 1875 that took the lives' of twice as many men as the OK Corral. ’’

“Campo.”

“This San Diegan was hanged in 1853 for stealing a rowboat.’’

“Yankee Jim Robinson.’’

“This gold mining town in the Imperial Valley, the largest in the state in the 1890s, folded in 1905.’’

“Hedges.”

Crawford is brushing off my questions like importunate flies. But I’ve got more. “This famous person remained seated during his entire stay at the 1935 Exposition.”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

Exasperated, I pull out my secret weapon, my last hope to defeat this deadpan fact machine. “Who was Queen Zorine?”

Crawford looks me flat in the eye.

“She was the queen of the Zoro Gardens Nudist Colony, an exhibit at the 1935 Exposition.”

Of course. Right in there with the Midget Village, a million-year-old whale, a human hair splitter, an alligator-skinned lady, a life-size diorama of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and John Dillinger’s blood-stained hat, was a singularly bizarre exhibit called Zoro Gardens. In the gully between the Space Theater and the Historical Society, a mere siren’s call from the park’s fountain, one could pay to see naked women (and an occasional man) basking in the puritan sun of prewar San Diego. Naked women in Balboa Park in 1935? By what tortuous reasoning could one have clothed such an exhibit in respectability? It is perhaps our own puritanism that makes us believe that the past was purer than the present, and that tortuous reasoning was ever necessary to justify lying about in the buff. Nevertheless, the whole affair seems puzzling, all the more so when Crawford hands me an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of several blissful Zoro Gardens nudists, including one who is sprawled headlong with her back arched seductively over a rock in what might be called a “proto-pornographic” pose.

To clear up the mystery I pore over an enormous scrapbook of the 1935 Exposition, speedily provided by Crawford. “There are several clippings from newspapers referring to Zoro Gardens,” he tells me. Sure enough, amid countless memorabilia of the fair I come across several articles, one of which is accompanied by a picture of several men and boys peeking mischievously through knotholes in the fence. Curiously, none of the articles addressed the propriety of the exhibit, although in one photo propriety was clearly on the mind of the editor, who had an artist paint a bikini on a young nudist holding a parrot. Crawford, who has disappeared into the archival bowels, returns with a huge grin on his face. “You’re going to love this,” he says, handing me a photocopy of a ten-page pamphlet put out by the Zoro Gardens Nudist Colony itself. Written by the gardens’ founder, George Barr, it explains the health cult’s philosophy, which advocates a life free of both clothes and neuroses, promising the healthy full-body hue of the naked women (few men, strangely) in the numerous photos that complement the text. According to Barr, the Zoro Gardens nudists came to San Diego so that “healthy young men and women, indulging in the freedom of outdoor living in which they so devoutly believe, [might] open their colony to the friendly, curious gaze of the public.” The friendly and curious visitors to Zoro Gardens would watch from raised seats so they would have “an open, frank view of the life and habits of the colony,” whose members, Barr insists, represent “an average cross-section of life — stenographers, artists, and professional workers.” A typical day would find the nudists gaily frolicking in their leafy bower as the benevolent rays of the life-giving sun caressed their bare skin; they would eat oranges and other fruits (all were vegetarians) and play frivolous games such as medicine ball — all this while friendly and curious observers looked on dumbfounded, seated in the grandstands.

Barr’s prose is sappy, but rings with naive sincerity. His group seems to represent an honest attempt, however precocious, to initiate the new age.

Crawford, who has been going through another volume of the huge scrapbook, points to an article in which San Diego’s newspapers were finally compelled to call a scandal by its name. In response to complaints about Zoro Gardens from civic groups and churches, police chief George Sears held a press conference at which he exclaimed, “Put some clothing on those girls!”

As I sit leafing through the photocopied pamphlet by Barr, a white-haired lady, possibly old enough to have attended the exposition, passes behind me and taps my shoulder. With a smile that is not altogether unambiguous, she says, “We have eight-by-ten glossies of all those photos if you’d like to see them.” A thoughtful and efficient bunch, these archivists.

One of the most fascinating collections in the public records, according to Crawford, are the coroner’s inquest files (1853 to 1904), from which the case of Ramon was taken. They came to the Historical Society in 1937 when Serra Museum curator John Davidson received a call from county supervisor John Faddis, who had orders to “dispose” of them. It wasn’t until the early Seventies that they were finally indexed and made available to the public. In the Nineteenth Century the coroner’s office held an inquest presided over by a jury to determine the cause and circumstances of deaths. Decisions were made on the basis of autopsies and testimony from witnesses. A look at the index proves interesting; some of the common causes of death listed are gunshot, hanging, fatty degeneration of the heart, lynching by unknown party, bludgeoning, hit by train, run over by streetcar, drowning, and — with surprising frequency — suicide. On August 11, 1882, coroner T. G. Stockton received along with the dead body of Henry Eldridge the following suicide note:

• Enclosed find my will, by which you may see
• I have made you my heir and sole legatee
• I likewise enclose of the Keen place the key (sic)
• Which I pray you deliver to Mr. M.D.
• Since dissection would prove highly pleasing to me
• Deliver my carcass to any M.D.
• If none of them want it, then under a tree
• Or a grapevine, please plant the old remnant of me
• And now my dear fellow believe me to be
• With kindest regards
• Yours truly,
• HE.

The first entry in the coroner’s inquests concerns John Warren, who died in January, 1853 of “wounds inflicted by jawbone of an ox by persons unknown.” Thomas Hess succumbed in September, 1874 to “softening of the brain.” Only days later Barbara Garcia met her end in an “unnecessary cutting operation by Juan Manuel Silva upon a cancerous tumor of the breast.” The cause of Elizabeth Duncan’s death in May of 1903 was “suicide — scissors to the neck! ” One cringes to think how Edward Schaefer must have suffered before dying of “strangulation of the bowels.” A more beneficent death was awarded to James Sotta, who in April, 1884 was escorted to the pearly gates in a “natural way by the visitation of God.”

The coroner’s inquests are a typical “primary” source, documents kept, originally for administrative purposes that acquired their historical value with the passage of time. “Many types of historians are interested in this kind of collection,” explains Crawford. “Legal historians can see how investigations were handled in those days, how extensive crime was, and how efficient the law enforcement system was. Medical historians can learn what diseases people frequently died of, and how doctors labeled diseases. Though some of the causes of death seem ridiculous. I’m surprised to see how good the doctors were, how much they knew. Social historians can gain all kinds of insights into how people lived back then. The testimony in the coroner’s inquests is very nonelitist stuff, a view of society from the bottom up. It’s mostly the common man giving his reaction to a crime as it happened, and it tells us a lot about the way people expressed themselves and about their attitudes.”

In the late Fifties the Historical Society began accumulating a different sort of “common man” testimony, oral interviews with San Diego old-timers willing to sit down and reminisce about the past. Unfortunately, Charles Hatfield, San Diego’s famed “rainmaker,” died in 1958 before the Historical Society could talk to him; but his brother Paul was interviewed in 1965. Charles Hatfield’s story is one of the most popular in the history of San Diego. In December of 1915 he contracted with the city council to end several years of drought in the county. Using his twenty-four-foot towers containing a mysterious blend of chemicals, the sewing machine salesman would make it rain and fill the Morena Reservoir with billions of gallons of water — all for only $10,000. To everyone’s surprise but Hatfield’s, the rain started in early January, but it didn’t quit until the reservoir had overflowed and caused San Diego’s worst flood ever. When Hatfield asked to be paid for his successful rainmaking, the city council countered by demanding he pay $3.5 million in flood damages.

“The oral histories are of great value because they provide testimony from eyewitnesses to events, and they are a good way to get impressions of a given historical period,’’ explains Crawford, “but you must be careful only to use them in conjunction with other sources.’’ Certainly no one would be likely to take Paul Hatfield’s words at face value. Fifty years of technological progress had greatly reduced the power of superstition, but Hatfield, who assisted his brother, still believed in 1965 that he and Charles had “induced” rain, as this excerpt from his interview shows:

Q. What do you intend to do with the secret, Mr. Hatfield?

A. Well, that’s it. I might turn it over to the government.

Q. Do you think this secret has some real commercial value? Has anyone tried to buy it from you. . .?

A. Well, it isn’t that, the price would be immense, you know, what it’s really worth. But the government could handle it and have different rain-inducing plants here and there all over the United States.

When asked if he was angry about not being paid the promised fee for inducing rain, Hatfield replied, “I felt sorry for them [the city council] because when we started there were 112 bridges in San Diego County and when we got through there were only two left. Imagine that! Well, there wasn’t a train into San Diego County from Los Angeles for thirty-two days. Imagine that!”

The Historical Society interviewers did their best to pry the ancestral secret of rain inducement out of Hatfield, but he was too sly an old fox for them, and all they got were these closing words: “Well, we just add to or augment our conditions and keep that up. If we do that you could almost flood the whole country out. We have plenty of conditions every year — even the dry years when there are clouds overhead — heavily laden formations — but they fail to condense. You see the point?” Well, sort of. Despite the efforts of the Historical Society, Hatfield held his tongue until his death, and the great alchemical mystery of the 1916 flood remains unsolved.

We’re sitting in Hennessey’s office at the Casa de Balboa when the phone rings. “Hello, San Diego Historical Society, Gregg Hennessey speaking.” Brief silence. “When did Hannibal cross the Alps?” repeats Hennessey incredulously. “Sometime around 200 B.C.” He hangs up and says that such calls, which are not uncommon, demonstrate how poorly most people understand what a historical society does. “One lady called and asked what law prohibited her from getting cable TV in her trailer in Vista,” he says with a laugh. “But we have to take all calls seriously. You never know when someone will call and offer us something valuable.”

Those at the Historical Society don’t just sit back and wait for calls; Rick Crawford, for example, is always on the lookout for old public records. He’s a transtemporal scavenger, continually trying to fill in the gaps in his collection. Wouldn’t he love to get his hands on the booking logs of the county sheriff’s department in the late Nineteenth Century? Or some more justice court dockets from rural San Diego County during the same period? Or the minutes of the San Diego Common Council before 1889? “Finding old records is difficult because few people know what constitutes a historical document,” Crawford explains. “There may be people all over town sitting on treasures without knowing it.” So Crawford hunts. Recently he called the courthouse to inquire if any old documents might be lying around. After several people passed the bureaucratic nerf ball, he was finally put in touch with court administrator D. Kent Pederson, a history buff himself, who knew just what Crawford wanted. Pederson took him downstairs where a stack of old records sat shelved in a comer. Thirty volumes of court dockets from 1910 to 1940. Bingo! Nearby in another stack, more leather-bound volumes of jail registers from 1912 to 1920. Bingo!

“An important part of this job is making friends with records managers in businesses and in the public sector,” explains Crawford. “We have to make ourselves known to them so that when they have something to get rid of they'll think of us. Searching for records is the most satisfying part of this job. Sometimes it's frustrating when you come up with nothing, but other times you’ll score a real coup.”

A historical society is more than just a preserver of the past; it is also an editor of the present for future historians. “To some extent, what we’re doing to preserve the present is dictating the kind of history people will be writing fifty years from now,” Hennessey explains. “But it’s hard to predict what will be of historical value later on. Who could have guessed in 1940 that a Wurlitzer juke box would be an extremely valuable artifact today? The best we can do is keep an eye on trends. For example, there is a trend now toward local history, which has dictated new kinds of sources such as city directories, census reports, and other data sources that can be manipulated by a computer.” The greatest problem facing modem archives is the sheer quantities of records kept today. One archivist claims that the national archive in Washington, D.C. saves only one percent of contemporary documentation. In the future, the archivist’s task will likely become more one of selection than preservation.

The public records mentioned so far represent only a minuscule portion of an immense archive that includes 161 volumes of tax assessment rolls, fifty-three volumes of city council minutes, 180 volumes of board of supervisors records, forty volumes of articles of incorporation, 640 cubic feet of civil and criminal case files, and much more. Primary sources such as these, though of incomparable value, make the greatest demands on historians. Unlike photographs or oral histories, they are tongueless — mute and unruly, yellowing scrolls of no tone from which a story must be grudgingly extracted.

Gregg Hennessey is researching an article about San Diego water rights in the early Twentieth Century. Working in his spare time, he expects it will take two years. “It involves reading all the secondary material :— everything that’s been written about the problem,” he explains. “Next, I go to primary sources such as water developer Ed Fletcher’s manuscript collection; I have to read all his business records, his letters to city officials and engineers, and so on. Then I have to go to public records to review the legal and political issues. Finally I will probably have to look over all the newspapers published in San Diego over a period of fifteen years. So much of what you read in this business leads nowhere. An old professor of mine at SDSU used to say, ‘To be a historian, you have to have an asbestos ass.’ ”

Rick Crawford has had a long, hard day. More trivia: “What was the original name of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Building?” He looks at me suspiciously. “Is this a trick question?” I tell him no. “Oh, the San Diego Athletic Club, then.”

“When did San Diego finally connect with the East by rail?” This really is a trick question because although the tracks were laid from San Diego to Colton in 1882, the actual link-up with San Bernardino didn't take place until . . .

“Eighteen eighty-three, of course,” replies Crawford.

Directly behind Gregg Hennessey ’s desk is an enormous photograph of Fifth Avenue in the 1890s. A masterfully composed image, it draws the viewer’s eye along the slightly off-center trolley line into the vanishing perspective of the San Diego Harbor. One feels almost as if one could walk right into the scene. Hennessey calls the photograph “an exceedingly important historical document.” He describes it to me, emphasizing the brick buildings, the telephone wires, the tracks for a horse-drawn trolley, and the arc lights — all evidence of permanence, a new phenomenon only years after the railroad vitalized sleepy San Diego during the boomtide 1880s. “By this time we were no longer a frontier town,” Hennessey explains. “We were a growing urban center.” Certainly the density of construction suggests this, as well as the wide diversity of commercial enterprises. Next to the saloon is a Chinese-Japanese import shop, a doctor’s office, and a billboard advertising carpets. Winter and Scheutze’s Market is across the street next to a fancy goods store, a piano and organ shop, and an advertisement for “Marston Dry Goods” tacked to a telephone pole. A fashionably dressed little girl and several men in suits contrast sharply with the squalor of the dirt road and the dung heaps, signs of an era almost over “Those dung heaps caused very unhealthy conditions,” says Hennessey. “When it rained you had a quagmire, and when it dried, the wind would come up and blow dung dust everywhere. The good old days weren’t always so good.”

Because Alonzo Horton built a wharf at the end of Fifth Avenue, that street, being the most convenient route for arriving goods and travelers, served as San Diego’s main thoroughfare for many years. But due to the efforts of another man, a new street, what we now call Broadway, would take over as San Diego's hub. In 1887 John D. Spreckels, on a trip to Central America from his hometown San Francisco, was forced to stop briefly in San Diego to restock his yacht. San Diegans, hungry for outside capital to fuel the land boom, urged Spreckels to invest here, so he did, acquiring among other things the whole of Coronado Island. For the next nineteen years he remained in San Francisco and maintained his business interests from afar. Then the great earthquake of 1906 hit San Francisco and, in the words of Gregg Hennessey, “Spreckels had religion scared into him.” The very next day he sailed to San Diego, never to set foot in San Francisco again. A smiling, cheeky man with a great bushy mustache, Spreckels was an empire builder, a shrewd but uninhibited spender of venture capital. Spreckels came right in and bought San Diego's hottest real estate, sizzling downtown prime. To complement his water works, Southern California Mountain Water Company, he organized a utility company. United Light & Power. He built the San Diego & Arizona Eastern Railroad. His investor’s eye landed on D Street, a nondescript thoroughfare just waiting to bear the imprint of a great nineteenth-century capitalist ego, so he bought the whole damn thing — every inch of property between Fifth Avenue and the water. And he started to build, not just mere houses but big buildings — the San Diego Hotel, the Union Building, the Spreckels Building and theater, and more. John D. Spreckels was making all the right moves in the decade after his arrival here, and D Street became the symbol of his success. In 1914 Louis “Wildman” Wilde, who had built a beautiful home at Tenth and D, decided he fancied living on a street called “Broadway” instead of “D.”

A few cranks of the administrative machine later, he did; the street that had already replaced Fifth Avenue as San Diego’s main drag was now Broadway.

That was the end of an era of great men, a golden age when one could see not only individual but social dreams materialize, when money could buy the flesh and blood of a city, when the anatomical limbs of a growing metropolis could be rearranged to fit one man's vision. Men such as Horton and Spreckels would be amused, if not enthralled, by the Historical Society’s latest project, an ambitious (by today’s standards) effort to re-create a portion of Fifth Avenue in the 1890s. Hennessey, the chief researcher, will use information from all the archive collections to achieve the project’s goal of “giving a sense of how people lived back then.” The Fifth Avenue recreation, to be located in the Casa de Balboa, will include a full-scale, two-story building on one side and a similar facade on the other — both with architectural detail and ornamentation characteristic of the 1890s. Visitors will be able to enter the full-scale building and view “period rooms” furnished and decorated with genuine antiques from the present curatorial collection. At the end of the street you'll see a large illusionistic mural of Horton’s Wharf, with steamships arriving in the distance on San Diego Bay. There will be a sky cyclorama, a horizon at daybreak with the sun rising and starry darkness receding down the street. By the wharf the sound of shorebirds will be heard over the gentle lapping of the harbor waves as stevedores unload packing crates from a ship with a huge crane. A construction crew at one end of Fifth Avenue will be seen laying cobblestones in dirt, while at the other end, decades later, another crew will be paving over the cobblestones. You ’ll be able to ride in a (stationary) trolley car that rocks back and forth, its lights dimming in sync with the fluctuations in electrical current as the trolley amis (seem to) move along the wires with intermittent sparks flashing. In the stagecoach you’ll hear the sound of galloping horses and turning wheels as (what seems to be) a female passenger reads a diary entry describing the very trip you're on. Says one person involved in the project, “After you’re out there five minutes on that street, you’re going to forget you're in Balboa Park in the Twentieth Century.”

The project, scheduled for completion in early 1986, will use the latest in exhibit technology. “We even hope to use smells,” says Hennessey, inspired by a twentieth-century vision of his own. “I’d like to have the smell of bread coming from a bakery, the smell of leather from a saddle, and the smell of the sea down by the wharf.

“The smell of manure from a stable? Hmmm. That might be going a bit too far.”

One last shot for Rick Crawford. A piece of trivia nobody could know about. Fished out of an obscure book concerning an obscure part of San Diego in the Nineteenth Century — a fact wrenched from a time warp. “What was Ocean Beach originally called?”

A wrinkled brow. Shifting eyes. You can hear his mind churning, scanning, furiously searching through those brain files. But nothing. With a smile that conveys the good-natured humility of defeat, Crawford replies, “I don’t know.”

‘‘Why, Mussel Beach, of course.”