Unforgettable: Long Ago San Diego
Six men abducted Abraham R. Sauer, 65-year-old publisher of the San Diego Herald and an outspoken opponent of the police’s “Cossack” tactics. Just south of Escondido, they slipped a noose around Sauer’s neck.
Forster became Supervisor of the First District of San Diego — representing San Luis Rey, San Jacinto, Temecula, and San Pasqual. “He traveled to Sacramento to lobby for anew courthouse, a new jail…”
Bruschi invested in mines in Baja California, a ranch in Otay Mesa, and an interest in the Hotel L’Europe on Fifth Avenue and H Street. When the Ginocchio Company opened its store, in 1876, Bruschi managed it.
In an article for Mother Earth, Alexander Berkman said troopers reminded him of Russian Cossacks. The term “Cossack” became popular with Wobblies, “who used it frequently to describe the policemen they confronted.”
He rode his horse south, from San Diego around the southern shore of the bay. “The beach bordering the Pacific Ocean offered him a smooth path northward,” and he rode along a “crescent-shaped peninsula.”
When he returned to Minnesota, the malaria returned. So he made a systematic study of America's climates, found the most temperate, and, in January 1874, booked passage on a steamer for San Diego.
One group of neophytes at Mission San Diego refused to speak Spanish. Even when Fathers Fernando Martin and Jose Sanchez threatened punishment, the neophytes would not obey. The priests couldn’t understand “what reasons keep them from Spanish.”
While slavery was a part of Indian culture (“tribes throughout California captured individuals from enemy Indian groups and used them to cultivate crops”), most ethnographers agree that “prostitution did not exist in California aboriginal societies.”
Frank Klaiger, owner of a bar on Sixth Avenue, accused Ada Maxwell of stealing $65. Klaiger went to Ada’s home at Fourth and island, and fired through a window. J. “Bull" Conrad, raced outside and punched Klaiger.
Wartenberg testified that he saw Andronica Sepulveda riding toward San Diego from San Juan Capistrano earlier that week. Sepulveda asked the stage driver “if Estudillo was in San Diego. The driver told him ’No.’"
Soldiers from Company D, Third Artillery, formed the American Dramatic Club and performed the first “theatricals" in 1858. Officers’ wives and “local senoritas" played the female parts. Shows included The Lady of Lyons and The Idiot Witness.
Between 1854 and 1865, rented rooms and parlors of homes became temporary sites of education. Then, in 1865, the city erected its first building: the Little Green School on Mason Street.
Davistown: "Settlement named after William Heath Davis, who was the first to feel that the site of the city should be near the harbor. The settlement failed and Old Town remained 'San Diego' until 1868.”
During the 1930s, the black community began to have clearly defined borders. Blacks mostly resided in the area from 30th Street to 32nd Street, between Woolman (now Oceanview) Avenue and Logan Avenue.
Under an overcast sky, at 10:30 a.m. two dull explosions—a “rumble like distant thunder” — echoed across San Diego Bay. Steam erupted through the Bennington s deck amidships. Men splayed about, “tossed by the detonation.”
Robert Decatur Israel was born Thursday, March 23, 1826, in Pittsburgh. Son of a bricklayer — his parents were Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch — he came to San Diego as a young man and, from …