John is a history detective who digs beneath the legends, folklore, and myths to learn what’s either been hidden from the common narrative or else lost to time, in hopes of enlarging the collective understanding of our culture and communities.
Three San Francisco women casting their ballots in the first election California women were able to vote in, April, 1912—Elizabeth Gerberding, Mary Sperry, and Nellie Eyester (photo by Hamilton Henry Dobbin, California State Library Collection)
One unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic may be voting rights. Given the opposition in some quarters to voting by mail, efforts to politicize the U.S. Post Office, and a likely shortage of poll workers, especially those over the age of 60 at heightened risk from the virus, many Americans are wondering if they will be able to exercise their vote this fall, including those who have never had to face systemic voter suppression.
It’s an ironic twist to a year commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which extended nationally to women the right to vote, a right that until this year many may have come to take for granted.
In California, woman suffrage actually occurred nine years before ratification of the 19th Amendment. On October 13, 1911, three days after passage of the state proposition granting women the vote, the first woman to register in Sonoma County was twenty-four year old Agatha Starke of Petaluma. An ardent suffragist, she represented a new, upcoming generation of working women.
A third-generation Petaluman—Agatha’s grandfather Augustus Starke was of one of the town’s earliest settlers in 1850 after finding success in the gold fields—Agatha attended Santa Rosa Business College, graduating in 1910. Her first job out of college was as a cub reporter for the Petaluma Argus, where one of her older sisters, Isabel, ran the business office.
Petaluma Argus office at 146 Main Street, 1934 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
At the turn of the century, journalism increasingly offered career paths to women, as publishers learned that news or features written from a feminine perspective—not merely mimicking male journalists—sold newspapers. After a year as a reporter, Agatha took over her sister’s position as office accountant when Isabel left for another job, finding office work preferable to covering the town news beat.
After California’s Proposition 4 narrowly passed with 50.7% of the vote on October 10th, women across the state scrambled to become the first in their city or county to register to vote. On October 12th, the Argus staff learned that a lawyer named Estelle Kirk had been the first woman to register in San Diego County and perhaps the state.
Spotswood & Lovejoy Cigar store at 145 Main Street, 1913, renamed Lovejoy & Schluneggar following Spotswood’s death (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
The next day, the staff, led by editor James Olmsted, persuaded Agatha, whom the Argus described as “plucky,” to take up the challenge. Across the street from the newspaper’s Main Street office, Spotswood & Lovejoy, a cigar store (site of Della Fattoria today), served as an agent for voter registration. Escorted into the establishment by a reporter—cigar stores at the time were male lairs—Agatha walked up to proprietor Robert Spotswood and “meekly” said, “I would like to register.”
Spotswood pulled out a blank registration form and began asking Agatha for her pertinent details. Unmarried, she was living with her widowed mother and eight of her nine siblings at 610 E Street, which her father had purchased shortly before his death in 1902. When the question of age came up, Agatha answered promptly, although the reporter noted, “the popular accountant at the Argus is not very aged.”
The sort of setting Agatha had to register in—Scuhler’s Cigar Store at 108 Main Street, across from Spotswood & Lovejoy.
Returning to the Argus office, Agatha reported there had been nothing horrible about the experience, and that she was pleased with having been persuaded to make history. The Argus staff then went about documenting the event, asking the linotype operator to work late to get the item into the next day’s edition.
However, it turns out that Agatha jumped the gun on her registration. Although passed on October 10th, Proposition 4 did not go into effect until January 1, 1912. That meant Agatha’s initial registration was invalid, and she would have to re-register once the cigar store opened after New Year’s Day. Unfortunately, she took an extended leave from her job at that time, possibly due to illness, leaving Jennie Colvin, a woman from Santa Rosa who operated the Alpha Rooming House with her husband, Reverend Peter Colvin, to officially lay claim to being Sonoma County’s first registered woman voter.
Four months later, in April, 1912, California women went to the polls for the first time.
In 1916, Agatha Starke hired her younger sister Marguerite to replace her at the Argus because she was quitting to secretly marry William Kaiser of San Francisco.
Marguerite leaked the news to reporters, who adorned the Argus’ official automobile as “Cupid’s chariot,” and intercepted the newlyweds on their way to the train station after a private wedding at St. Vincent de Paul church. The couple were whisked to the newspaper’s office for a brief celebration before being conveyed in Cupid’s chariot to the train station, where they set out for their honeymoon in Santa Cruz.
Starke family home, 610 E Street, Petaluma
Agatha moved back to Petaluma in 1964 to be with her extended family. She died at the age of 84 on October 21, 1971, almost sixty years to the day that she first registered to vote, and just a week after the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment for ratification by the states, an initiative originally launched by suffragists in 1923 that remains ongoing.
A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
SOURCES:
Petaluma Argus: “The Death of Augustus Starke at San Bernardino,” May 29, 1900; “Local Notes,” April 27, 1910; “Changes in the Argus Staff,” March 22, 1911; “First Woman to Register,” October 13, 1911; “First Lady to Register in Sonoma County,” October 14, 1911; “Local Notes,” January 9, 1912; “Were Wedded at St. Vincent’s,” September 2, 1916.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Starke is Called to Eternal Rest,” August 27, 1927; “Agatha Starke Kaiser,” October 22, 1971.
Petaluma Courier: “Father of F.J. Starke is Dead,” May 19, 1900; “Answered the Last Call,” October 31, 1902; “First Woman Candidate for Assembly,” July 18, 1914; “Re-elected Secretary of W.C.T.U.,” October 3, 1914.
“Many Were Called, But Few Were Chosen,” Oakland Tribune, August 25, 1914.
“The Santa Rosa Business College,” Santa Rosa Republican, August 7, 1900.
“Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 5, 1995.
Catherine “Kate” Hutton Lovejoy was born in 1833, in Malone, Franklin County, New York, just a stone’s throw away from the Quebec border. Her father, George H. Hutton, was Scottish immigrant who made chairs, her mother, Samantha (Barnes) Hutton, a spinner. Kate grew up in Malone with three siblings: sisters Emma and Belle, and brother Charles.
In 1855, she married Allen P. Lovejoy, a dentist, and moved to Springfield, Vermont, where Allen established a dental practice. In 1863, during the Civil War, the couple came west to Petaluma to join Allen’s father, John Lovejoy, also a dentist, who established a practice there in 1860. They were joined by Allen’s younger brother George, yet another dentist, and George’s wife Elizabeth.
After working briefly for their father, Allen and George established the Lovejoy Brothers Dentistry on Main Street. Beginning in 1864, Allen also became the town’s sole Western Union telegraph operator, having worked in the trade back east before studying dentistry. He set up a telegraph in his dental office. Kate and Allen purchased a home at 22 Sixth Street between A and B streets.
In 1869, Kate participated in forming the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association (SCWSA), and served as one of five delegates from the county to the inaugural California Woman Suffrage Association convention held at Dashaway Hall in San Francisco, on January 27-31, 1870. Kate was joined by Abigail Haskell, Lucretia Hatch, and Sarah R. Latimer of Petaluma, and Fanny M. Wertz of Healdsburg. In the spring of 1870, Kate became the second president of the SCWSA.
Dashaway Hall, Post Street, San Francisco, 1867 (photo by Eadweard J. Muybridge, Online Archive of California)
In January, 1871, she was a Sonoma County delegate to the Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association Convention held in San Jose. The new association was formed after the SCWSA and other suffrage groups broke away from the California Woman Suffrage Association due to internal conflicts.
In 1878, Kate and Allen Lovejoy signed their names to a woman suffrage petition sent to the California State Legislature demanding they enact a law enabling women to vote in presidential elections and amend the California State Constitution to establish equal political rights for all American citizens, irrespective of sex. Kate had signed a similar petition in 1870. Both petitions were buried in legislative committees, with no action taken.
It appears that Kate and Allen separated after June, 1880. Both left Petaluma, while retaining ownership of their Sixth Street house, which they rented out. Allen relocated briefly to Ferndale, before embarking on an occupation as a traveling dentist in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, with regular visits to Petaluma. Kate returned to her family in Malone to tend to the needs of her aging parents—her mother died in 1881, and her father in 1889—and to her sister Belle, who lived in Petaluma with the Lovejoys in the early 1870s, but by the end of the decade was committed to the Willard Asylum for the insane in Ovid, New York.
In 1885, Allen hung himself in the American Hotel while visiting Petaluma on an extended stay to remodel the Lovejoy house. The cause of death was attributed to his drinking and his being “short of coin,” i.e. deeply in debt. The house was left to Kate, who died in 1890 at the age of 57, after being stricken with erysipelas, a skin infection also known as St. Anthony’s Fire.
The Lovejoys’ house was sold to the owner of the Petaluma Argus, H. L. Weston, the following year. Weston moved it to the back of the lot, facing Post Street, and built a new house in its place. In the early 1970s, the Lovejoys’ house was torn down and replaced by a modern duplex.
SOURCES:
Letter from Ellen Dumas at the Franklin County Historical and Museum Society to Katherine J. Rinehart, July 22, 2020.
J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), “A.P. Lovejoy,” pp. 564-565.
Ferndale Enterprise, “Notice,” January 6, 1882.
Franklin Gazette: “People vs. Lovejoy,” September 21, 1888; Kate Lovejoy obituary, May 16, 1890.
Petaluma Argus: Ad for George E. Lovejoy, dentist, June 24, 1863; “Telegraph,” March 10, 1864; “Dental Rooms,” July 23, 1868; “Good,” December 25, 1868; “Offices and Operators,” February 20, 1874; “Local Brevities,” April 15, 1881; “Personal and Social,” April 7, 1882; “Death of A.P. Lovejoy,” April 18, 1885.
Petaluma Courier: “Courierlets,” March 30, 1881; “Death from Suicide,” April 22, 1885; Kate Lovejoy estate, June 10, 1891; Kate Lovejoy estate, November 18, 1891; “Dr. George E. Lovejoy,” January 15, 1906.
Petaluma Argus-Courier, Bill Soberanes column, July 18, 1991.
San Francisco Chronicle, “Woman,” January 28, 1870.
Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel: “Card to the Public,” July 9, 1870; “Woman Suffrage Convention,” January 7, 1871.
Sonoma County Journal: ad for J. Lovejoy, dentist, July 27, 1860.
Anna Morrison Reed dressed in a Greco-Roman tunic for the Circus Maximus event at the State Agricultural Society Fair, 1893 (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)
A charismatic poet and journalist, Anna Morrison Reed captivated the nation as a young woman with her electrifying lectures on temperance and a woman’s place in the home. By the time she reached middle age however, Reed had become one of California’s leading suffragists as well as a spokesperson for beer and wine industry.
Anna Moreda Morrison was born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1849. Shortly after her birth, her father departed with a wagon train bound for the California and the gold rush, leaving behind his wife and child. In 1854, four-year-old Anna and her mother boarded a ship in New York for California, where they reunited with her father, who was working the mines in remote Butte County.
Homeschooled by her mother, Anna demonstrated an early talent for poetry, publishing her first poems in local newspapers when she was fifteen. At seventeen, she began teaching in a rural school and writing articles for the local press. At nineteen, she gained entry to Mrs. Perry’s Seminary in Sacramento, but had to withdraw after two months and return home to take care of her parents and three younger siblings, who were all afflicted with malaria.
To support her family, Anna joined the temperance lecture circuit as the opening act for her mother’s cousin, Col. E.Z.C. Judson, a recovering alcoholic and the originator of the western “dime novel,” who later started Buffalo Bill Cody on the path to fame. Anna learned from Judson the formula for an entertaining presentation, combining speaking, poetry recitations, music, and dancing.
Reed performing as a young woman on the temperance speakers circuit, c. 1870 (public domain)
After learning the ropes, Anna went on the road as a solo act, speaking to small-town residents in every Northern California county except Modoc, traveling either on horseback or by stagecoach, accompanied by only her younger brother Eddie. Espousing traditional roles for women in the home, she quickly gained notoriety for her opposition to the women suffragists working the temperance circuit, many of whom were Spiritualists originally from the east coast. She drew large crowds and the attention of prominent politicians as well as the national press, who dubbed her the “California Girl.”
One newspaper described her as “an unusually attractive personality with sparkling brown eyes, finely molded features, and luxuriant dark hair … a striking illustration of what pluck and native talent can do in spite of adverse circumstances in early life.”
Anna’s speaking tour, which continued non-stop for two-and-a-half years, generated enough money for her to purchase a house for her family. Her events usually ended with a community dance that she happily participated in, garnering her several suitors and marriage proposals. In 1872, after a whirlwind romance that began at a dance, she married John Smith Reed, a successful miner twenty years her senior.
The Reeds made their home in Ukiah, where John became involved in ranching as one of the largest landholders in Mendocino County, as well as politics and founding the Bank of Ukiah, where he served as president for many years. Anna, following the message of her lectures, became a stay-at-home mother, giving birth to five children in her first eight years of marriage.
Reed at the family ranch in Laytonville (Mendocino County Historical Society)
She remained active in the local and state temperance movement, using her political connections in Sacramento to draft California’s first local option law in 1874, which proposed allowing communities to determine whether they would be wet or dry when it came to selling alcohol. After passing the legislature, the law was quickly struck down by the state high court.
Anna also continued to write. Deemed the “Poetess of the North” by the San Francisco press, she published her first book of poetry in 1880, followed by two more well-received volumes in the 1890s. She also became a founding member of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, which provided support to women writers and journalists.
After a large fire destroyed their Ukiah home in 1889, the Reeds bought a sheep ranch near Laytonville in Mendocino County. Anna returned to the public eye as a rancher, becoming the first woman to deliver the annual address before the State Agricultural Society of California, as well as at Cloverdale’s Citrus Fair and Petaluma’s Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Fair. In 1892, the California legislature appointed her to the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. To raise money for the exposition’s California exhibits, Anna returned to the speaking circuit of Northern California, sometimes with a child in tow.
Reed on the circuit in the 1890s (public domain)
In the 1890s, a financial downturn in the sheep business led to repossession of the family’s ranch by John’s former colleagues at the Bank of Ukiah. The action, which Anna complained was part of a property swindle by the bank, broke John, and in 1900 he died of a heart aneurism, leaving his family penniless. To make money, she began selling ads and subscriptions to a Ukiah newspaper, as well as writing a weekly column. She also remained active in the California Women’s Press Association.
By 1904, she had made enough money to purchase a house for her extended family, and to fund a magazine, The Northern Crown, which covered the people, politics, arts, and travel of Northern California. In the first issue she made it clear that life had made her a staunch supporter of suffrage and social justice reform for women. In the years that followed, she became a prominent advocate for the California suffragist movement.
In 1908, Anna moved her family from Ukiah to Petaluma, where she continued to publish The Northern Crown, while launching her own daily newspaper, The Sonoma County Independent, which she declared to be the “paper of the people.” In 1911, she was chosen to serve as one of the official speakers of California’s Equal Suffrage Association’s campaign for passage of the state suffrage amendment, Proposition 4, which passed that year by a narrow margin of 50.7%.
After selling The Sonoma County Independent in 1912, she returned to the California lecture circuit to spearheaded fundraising for the erection of the Pioneer Mother monument, a testament to early women settlers at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (it can be seen today in Golden Gate Park).
Reed advocating for the Grape Growers Association, 1915
Anna also became a paid spokesperson for both the United Brewery Workers and the Grape Growers of Northern California, arguing that while she remained a supporter of temperance in terms of drinking in moderation—she herself enjoyed an evening glass of port—she opposed the “warped and Puritanical minds” intent upon suppressing individual liberty and stealing the livelihoods of the thousands who labored in California vineyards, hopyards, wineries, and breweries through prohibition, noting that “the professional good” have the habit of believing evil of all who differ with them.
In 1916, due to the health of her son Jack, who contracted TB from the carbon-based inks he used operating his mother’s printing presses, Anna and her family left foggy Petaluma to return to Ukiah, where she took a job editing the Ukiah Times Journal while continuing to publish The Northern Crown.
In 1918, she ran on an anti-prohibition platform as a Democratic nominee for a seat in the California State Assembly, losing by only a few hundred votes. Having witnessed passage of the 19th Amendment extending to women the right to vote in 1920, she died at her daughter’s home in San Francisco on May 23, 1921, and was buried in Laytonville.
******
SOURCES:
Thanks to Simone Kremkau of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library for her research assistance on this article.
Books John E. Keller, Anna Morrison Reed 1849-1921 (California Historical Society, 1978)
Richard Mendelson, From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America (University of California, 2010), p. 32
Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, Mary Ann Irwin, “The California Girl,” The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, Fourth Edition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland press, 2017). p. 317-318.
Pauline C. Thompson (1993). A ‘California Girl’: The Life and Times of Anna Morrison Reed, 1849-1921 (Unpublished master’s thesis). California State University, Hayward.
Nan Towle Yamane, Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1999, edited by Elizabeth V. Burt, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000).
Newspapers & Blogs
“For the Ladies,” syndicated in: Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1870; Vermont Journal, August 13, 1870; Daily Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), August 14, 1870; Brooklyn Eagle, August 11, 1870; Hartford Courant, August 23, 1870.
The Golden Coast,” Akron Daily Democrat, December 29, 1892.
“’Prohibition is Piracy’ says Mrs. Reed,” Cloverdale Reveille, February 19, 1916.
Petaluma Argus: “Jack Reed is Home Again,” June 4, 1914; “Will Soon Move the Plant up to Ukiah,” June 14, 1916.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: Mrs. Anna M. Reed Gave Address,” February 15, 1916; “Rear-View Mirror Column,” August 20, 1960; “Anna Medora Morrison Reed,” March 4, 1987.
Petaluma Courier: “Peggy’s Penciling” column, August 25, 1891; “Installed New Press,” May 14, 1909; “Mrs. Anna Reed Will Speak on Monument,” June 19, 1914.
“Wet Speaker Shows Endorsement of Prohibition Woman,” Sacramento Bee, September 10, 1914.
“Suffragette Appeals to Workers,” San Francisco Examiner, August 31, 1911.
“Mrs. Reed to Take Platform,” Santa Rosa Republican, July 25, 1911.
Joanna Kolosov, “A Northern California ‘Pioneer’ in Her Own Right,” Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, March 28, 2018. https://sonomalibrary.org/blogs/history/a-northern-california-pioneer-in-her-own-right
Ad for Anna and Col. E.Z.C. Judson, Stockton Independent, December 9, 1868.
Ukiah Daily Journal: “The Petaluma Fair,” September 4, 1891; “World’s Fair Lecture,” March 31, 1893.
“A Wise Appointment,” Ukiah Republican Press, February 12, 1892.
“Inter Poenia,” Weekly Butte Record, June 9, 1866.
Mariano Vallejo, Sonoma home, 1885 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
Enthralled with the legend of General Marino Vallejo, at the age of ten I set off with a friend on a pilgrimage to the Petaluma Adobe. I had attended Old Adobe Fiesta Days with my parents and seen the square dancing, Indian dances, and the whiskerino contests, but after reading a short biography of the general, my friend and I became determined to ride our sting-ray bikes up Casa Grande Road, the route Vallejo used for hauling cattle hides and tallow to his dock on the Petaluma slough, our own Yellow Brick Road to the local Land of Oz.
Fifty years later, I struggle to reconcile my early admiration of Vallejo with what I’ve since come to learn about the man. While September 27th each year is intended as a day to honor the historic and cultural contributions of California Native Americans, it’s difficult to do so without also acknowledging the tragic losses they incurred at the hands of colonists like Vallejo.
State parks archaeologist Breck Parkman touches upon some of that legacy in his recent studies of the trade relationship between Vallejo and the Russian mercantile colony at Fort Ross. Citing new English translations of archival Russian documents, Parkman highlights the different approaches Vallejo and the Russians took with the native community, particularly during the smallpox epidemic of 1837-39. Spread by one of Vallejo’s soldiers after he returned from a cargo-run to Fort Ross with the disease, the epidemic decimated most of the natives in the Sonoma-Napa region. Their bones, often left unburied, “bleached the hills.”
Parkman began exploring the epidemic back in 2006, after the New Year’s Eve Storm that flooded parts of Petaluma. Concerned about an earlier excavation of a native camp along Adobe Creek, Parkman went to the site and found that a good part of the creekbank had collapsed during the flood, exposing the “New Year Feature”— a long trench into which burned native homes and their contents had been buried. No body remains were found, but along with his colleague Susan Alvarez, Parkman determined that the trench (since destroyed) was most likely used by Vallejo in trying to contain the smallpox epidemic.
Vallejo with elderly Pomo woman, 1878 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
In the Vallejo biography I read as a boy, the epidemic was depicted as a natural tragedy, one the general was helpless to prevent. Except that he wasn’t. Vaccine for smallpox had been available in California since the early 1800s. According to historian S.F. Cook, after a smallpox (or perhaps measles) outbreak in 1828, the Mexican government had inoculated an estimated 12,000-16,000 clerics, soldiers, and native mission acolytes from San Diego to Sonoma.
When smallpox first appeared in 1837, the Russians quickly vaccinated their native workers at Fort Ross, suffering only a few deaths. Vallejo did not. Except for inoculating a few allies like Chief Solano, he reserved the vaccine for fellow Californios. As a result, most of Vallejo’s 2,000 workers at the Adobe died. The Petaluma Adobe, which Vallejo operated more as a factory than a military fort, exporting grain, livestock, and woolen textiles, never fully recovered.
Vallejo’s reasons for not providing natives with the vaccine are unknown. As one of the most powerful men in California, it’s doubtful he lacked the clout to obtain it (the Russians had reportedly supplied Mexicans the vaccine for the 1828 epidemic). But while revered as one of California’s most enlightened men, Vallejo was also at times egotistical, autocratic, and Machiavellian. An admirer of the Romans, he saw echoes of their empire building in the Spanish-Mexican conquest of California’s native “barbarians” by a small group of “civilized men.”
That was evident at times in his treatment of the natives. After Vallejo converted the Petaluma Valley into a vast ranch of 12,000 to 15,000 cattle, eliminating much of its wild game, natives who had resisted indentured servitude at his factory resorted to killing cattle to feed themselves. In one case, after 35 cattle went missing, Vallejo ordered 35 natives indiscriminately rounded up and shot. Other acts of cruelty—murder, rape, and abduction—were carried out by his brother Salvador and main enforcer Chief Solano.
Petaluma Adobe from Casa Grande Road, 1970 (photo Sherman Bolvin, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
On our personal sojourn to the Petaluma Adobe some fifty years ago, my friend and I only made it as far as Casa Grande Road, then a rural lane, before being stopped by falling darkness. A deputy sheriff found us and drove us home. In retrospect, that was probably best, given what Dorothy found when she reached the Land of Oz and pulled back the curtain on the wizard.
Jesse Stahl and his signature “backward ride” at the rodeo (photo Oakland Black Cowboy Association)
The sight of Jesse Stahl whirling atop a bucking bronc surprised the crowd of 4,000 gathered at the 1912 Salinas rodeo, where Stahl was featured as its first Black contestant. Despite his first place performance, he was awarded second place. After the judge announced his decision, Stahl jumped on an exhibition horse and, either out of protest or merely mockery, set off on a victory lap around the arena, riding backwards to the thrill of the crowd.
Stahl’s backward exhibition became a popular spectacle in subsequent competitions, where he continued to place second or third, but never first, until the day he competed in a rodeo judged by Tommy Caulfield, Jr.
“Regardless of nationality or color,” Caulfield announced in awarding Stahl his first place winnings, “the man who makes the most points deserves the most money.” Glancing at the other contestants, some of whom had refused to compete against Stahl because he was Black, Caulfield added, “If there is anybody looking for an argument, I’ll be glad to meet him right after the show.”
No one took him up on his offer, probably because, in addition to judging rodeos, the redheaded Caulfield also judged boxing matches, having spent time as a prizefighter himself.
After the rodeo, Stahl became a regular visitor to Petaluma, either breaking wild horses shipped in from Nevada to Caulfield’s corral beside the trainyard, or competing in rodeos at Kenilworth Park (now the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds). He made it clear he considered Caulfield not only one of the best rodeo judges, but also the fairest, an opinion shared by many.
But there was another side to Caulfield, one that clouds this image of him as a principled man without prejudice: he liked to perform in blackface at minstrel shows. In one review, a Petaluma newspaper reported that “as a coon, Tommy is in a class all by himself.”
Petaluma’s minstrel troupe and their band and chorus, 1931. Tom Caulfield in blackface, far right. (photo Sonoma County Library)
Like most white performers who donned blackface’s coal-black makeup, woolly wigs, and outlandishly red lips, Caulfield grew up far from the racial prejudice of the South. The sixth child of a fiery Irish immigrant who became Petaluma’s largest cattle dealer, Caulfield did his best after high school to escape the confines of his hometown.
Following a failed attempt at medical school, he knocked around railroading, playing semi-pro baseball, boxing, and touring the country with a vaudeville theater troupe, before finally returning to Petaluma and the family cattle business.
Tommy Caulfield, second row, far right, with the 1903 Petaluma Alerts baseball team (photo Sonoma County Library)
The consummate Irish storyteller, he continued to perform in local vaudeville shows, often in blackface.Following one of his performances, the author Jack London invited Caulfield and his fellow cast members to dinner. Throughout the evening, London made many offers of whiskey and wine, all of which Caulfield, a lifelong teetotaler, politely declined. “Son,” London finally said, “you’re the first man I’ve ever met who stands by his principles.”
Caulfield subsequently became a good friend of London’s and his personal cattle buyer. He also served as the basis of a character in Valley of the Moon, London’s 1913 novel that expresses the happiness he found at his Glen Ellen ranch, as well as his xenophobia and white supremacy.
Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon
By the time Caulfield and his brother Will inherited their father’s cattle business, he had become one of the Petaluma’s best liked and most illustrious citizens, known for making generous loans of livestock, acreage, and cash to new ranchers, and also for providing an annual Christmas dinner to the migrant workers who lived in camps near the train yards. Petaluma’s annual cattle drive, which extended from the Caulfield Stockyards on Lakeville Street to the Caulfield’s slaughterhouse on McDowell Road east of town, was a revered tradition for ranchers. But for the broader public, Caulfield’s popularity stemmed primarily from his role in Petaluma’s minstrel troupe.
Champion riders who competed in Petaluma rodeos, posing at a Northern California roundup rodeo in the early 1920s. Left to right: Don Tate, Hippy Burmister, Bill Errbone, Perry Ivory (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
Minstrelsy—comedic performances in which white men blackened their faces, adopted heavy dialects, and performed what they claimed to be Black songs, dances, and jokes—began in 1830 when a white performer in New York City named Thomas Dartmouth Rice created a blackface character called “Jumping Jim Crow.”
Minstrel shows quickly became a national sensation, influencing white composers of the day like Stephen Foster, who wrote “Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” and other popular songs for the shows, and eventually leading to the development of vaudeville.
Blacks also performed in minstrel shows, forced ironically to don blackface, as it was often their only way to break into the entertainment business. Some subverted blackface’s primitive representations with political commentary in their comedic minstrel routines, while others blended cultural influences, like William Henry Lane—better known as “Master Juba”—who set an Irish jig and reel dance to syncopated African rhythms, giving birth to tap dancing.
Although intended to be light, meaningless entertainment, minstrel shows also perpetuated negative stereotypes of Blacks as being lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, criminal, and cowardly. They depicted the South as a genteel land of benevolent planters and happy servants, the most popular of whom were the caricatures of the mammy and the old uncle. The underlying message was that Blacks belonged on Southern plantations. Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, minstrels still sang of pining for the old plantation.
The shows were most popular outside the South. By providing a means of looking down upon and laughing at Blacks, blackface helped ease the discomfort and fear many whites felt toward them, while at the same time allowing them to enjoy and appreciate Black culture.
Many of the early blackface actors were working-class Irish from the Northeast. As Catholic immigrants, they were consigned to a low social, political, and economic status. Blackface became their means of Americanization, authenticating their whiteness by comically dehumanizing those who were not white.
The Egg City Minstrels and their band and chorus, 1931. Tommy Caulfield in blackface, seated far left; George Ott in white tuxedo, seated in center (photo Sonoma County Library)
Petaluma’s first blackface minstrel troupe, the Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels, was formed by a group of white amateurs for a Christmas benefit in 1875, just as Reconstruction was coming to an end and many of the 44 members of Petaluma’s small Black community were moving on to friendlier enclaves in Oakland and Vallejo.
The troupe followed the traditional three-act format of the minstrel show, opening with a band and chorus followed by the grand entrance of fourteen minstrels strutting, singing, waving their arms, banging tambourines, and prancing around a semicircle of chairs, until the interlocutor, a white man not in blackface dressed in formal attire, finally called out, “Gentlemen, be seated!”
Occupying his place in the middle of the semicircle, the interlocutor moved the first act along by asking questions of the “end” men at either edge of the semicircle—Mr. Tambo, who played the tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled a pair of clappers known as “the bones.”
“Mr. Bones, I understand you went to the ball game yesterday afternoon. You told me you wanted to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral.” “I did want to,” Bones answered back, “but she ain’t dead yet.”
These fast-moving exchanges were interspersed with ballads, comic songs, and instrumental numbers, chiefly on banjo and violin. The second and third acts usually consisted of a series of individual performances—the Petaluma Ethiopians premiered with “Rascal Billy,” “The Stage-Struck Darkey,” “Uncle Tom’s Visit,” and “Woman’s Rights”—concluding with a hoedown or walk-around, in which every member did a specialty number while the others sang and clapped.
The immense popularity of minstrel shows during the late 19th century paralleled the passage of “black codes” meant to restrict Black behavior by southern state legislators, who, in a nod to minstrelsy, referred to them as “Jim Crow laws.” In parts of the country that had small Black populations like Sonoma County, blackface caricatures took on semblances of truth, with older Black men commonly designated with the title “uncle.”
The Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels reigned as the most popular entertainment troupe in town until the turn of the 20th century, when local minstrel shows were displaced by nickelodeons, which featured silent short films interspaced with vaudeville acts, many of which included blackface routines.
As society modernized, so did the ways in which blackface was portrayed, particularly in the film industry. In 1915, “The Birth of a Nation,” the epic silent film about the Civil War and Reconstruction that glorified white supremacism, featured white actors in blackface portraying Blacks as sexual predators and simpletons. The film became a box office blockbuster, inspiring a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which by the 1920s grew to more than two million members across the country.
Still photo from the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” directed by D.W. Griffin (photo Alamy.com)
Petaluma’s chapter, established in 1924, staged a night time cross-burning beside the Petaluma Adobe for the initiation of new members. Given that Petaluma’s Black population in 1920 consisted of just six individuals, the local KKK largely focused their nativist attention on Sonoma Country’s Mexican, Mexican-American, and Japanese-American field laborers.
That same year, George Ott, owner of a Petaluma stationery store and president of the local Chamber of Commerce, decided to revive the Petaluma Minstrels as a means of raising money for charitable organizations. For help, he called upon his best friend and the town’s most popular blackface performer, Tom Caulfield. With Ott serving as the interlocutor and Caulfield as an end man, they recruited 14 local merchants to the group, including businesswomen, and adopted as their motto “to scatter sunshine.”
In 1926, the Petaluma Minstrels made their radio debut on an Oakland broadcasting station, after which they were inundated with booking requests from all over California. Playing on Petaluma’s egg boom at the time, they changed their name to the Egg City Minstrels, and began performing at benefits around the state for hospitals, orphanages, fire departments, military bases, and prisons.
The Egg City Minstrels’ popularity coincided with a minstrelsy craze on radio and film, most notably 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” which ushered in the talkies. Featuring a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Al Jolson performing as an aspiring singer in blackface, it became a huge hit.
Although Jolson positioned himself as an ally of Blacks in helping to popularize Black jazz, his designation as the “king of blackface” echoed for cinematic historian Nic Sammond the Americanization that Irish blackface performers before him had sought with the white Protestant majority.
Poster for 1927’s “The Jazz Singer” (photo Pinterest)
After Petaluma’s egg boom foundered during the Depression, the Egg City Minstrels changed their name to the Redwood Empire Minstrels. They continued to stage benefit performances until the start of World War II, by which time minstrel shows had fallen out of favor. Ott estimated that during their seventeen years together the troupe had raised $44,000 for charity ($750,000 in today’s currency), none of which they pocketed themselves.
In 1948, Petaluma’s minstrel troupe reunited for one final benefit performance at the local Masonic Lodge, giving 60-year old Caulfield his last opportunity to perform in blackface. That same year, Caulfield led local ranchers on the last annual cattle drive across the flat prairie east of town. Beginning in 1950, the prairie began to fill up with new suburban homes as Petaluma transformed into a bedroom community for San Francisco. Caulfield’s roundups became the fodder of local legend, as did Jesse Stahl, the Black cowboy who had once ridden broncs in Caulfield’s corrals.
Stories about Stahl usually underscored the lack of prejudice Petaluma had toward the cowboy. Henry Howe, a cousin of Caulfield’s who competed against Stahl on the rodeo circuit and later worked as a horse wrangler for Hollywood filmmakers, recalled that he and Stahl were drinking at a bar with other cowboys after a particular rodeo in Texas, when a group of local Ku Klux Klan members walked in. “If you don’t want a fight,” they said, “hand us that n—– cowboy.” Instead of handing over Stahl, Howe and the rodeo cowboys beat the daylights out of the Klan members.
Or, so the legend goes. The sad truth is that Stahl, having retired from the rodeo circuit in 1929, died poor and alone in Sacramento in 1935, at the age of 55. He was destined for a pauper’s grave until old rodeo friends chipped in to give him a proper burial. In 1979, he was posthumously inducted into Oklahoma City’s Rodeo Hall of Fame, only the second Black cowboy to receive that honor.
Rodeo Hall of Fame member Jesse Stahl, 1879-1935 (photo Oakland Black Cowboy Association)
Caulfield, the man who had once bravely stood up for Stahl on the rodeo circuit, died in 1960, twelve years after his last blackface performance and his last cattle drive. Not long afterward, the Caulfield Stockyards were converted into a shopping mall.
Tom Caulfield at his stockyard (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)
Edwin S. Grosvenor, Robert C. Toll, “Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows,” American Heritage, Winter 2019, Vol. 64, Issue 1.
The Atlantic: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “New Racism Museum Reveals the Ugly Truth Behind Aunt Jemima,” April 23, 2012; Tony Horowitz, “The Mammy Washington Almost Had,” May 31, 2013.
“Minstrel Show, American Theater,” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 19, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show
Johann Hari, “Jack London: Not Just the Voice of the Wild,” The Independent, August 23, 2010.
New York Times: Holland Cotter, “We Don’t Have to Like Them, We Just Need to Understand Them,” June 25, 2020; Riché Richardson, “Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of ‘Aunt Jemima?” June 24, 2015.
Susan J.P. O’Hara, Alex Service, “Champions of the Rodeo,” North Coast Journal, July 19, 2018.
Petaluma Argus: Petaluma Minstrels Ad, December 17, 1875; “The Vaudeville At the Hi School,” October 18, 1923; “Klan Principles Disclosed to Large Assemblage,” October 24, 1924;
Petaluma Courier: “Will Study Medicine,” July 23, 1902; “Native Sons Vaudeville Show a Great Success,” April 17, 1912; “Petalumans Give Minstrel Show at Kenwood,” February 8, 1924; “Initiation of KKK Before Guests,” June 2, 1925.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Ku Klux Klan Visit Petaluma,” April 21, 1930; “Noonie, Mike Monroy Train Hard for Bout,” May 15, 1930; “Remember Petaluma’s First Theater?” April 15, 1954; “Tom Caulfield is Packed with Stories,” October 27, 1955; “Tom Caulfield—His Story,” So They Tell Me column, May 3, 1960; “Ex-Petaluma Horse Trainer Hangs Up His Spurs,” February 3, 1972; “The Last Round-up,” Bill Soberanes column, April 16, 1980; “Tom Caulfield, Livestock Yard Owner,” December 29, 1990; “Petaluma’s Fabulous and Versatile Tom Caulfield,” December 8, 1998.
Sacramento Bee: “Jesse Stahl Will Be Given a Decent Burial,” April 20, 1935.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Lou Leal, “Let the Public Speak: Jack London’s Evolution,” June 29, 2020.
“Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype,” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/blackface-birth-american-stereotype
U.S. Census Data, 1870 and 1820, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.
Books
William Courtright, The Complete Minstrel Guide: Containing Gags, Jokes, Parodies, Speeches, Farces, and Full Directions for a Complete Minstrel Show (Dramatic Publishing Company, 1901)
William Loren Katz, The Black West (New York: Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996)
Jack London, Valley of the Moon, 1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 17.
Gina M. Rosetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), p. 36.
Nic Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press Books, 2015).
Yuval Taylor, Jake Austin, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).
How the Running Fence tipped the political balance in Sonoma County
The Running Fence , September 8-22, 1976 (photo Wolfgang Volz)
Given the traditional symbolism of fences with divisiveness, it should have come as no surprise that when an artist showed up in Petaluma in early 1974 with a proposed exhibit called the Running Fence, he would have his work cut out for him.
Bulgarian-born artist Christo asserted that his installation—a 18-foot high nylon fence stretching 24.5 miles across Sonoma and Marin counties from Highway 101 in Cotati to the Pacific Ocean in Bodega Bay—would foster a sense of “togetherness” by creating with a new, shared vision of the area’s rolling pastureland.
Instead, Christo’s proposal quickly became a lightning rod in a turf war between local environmentalists and outside developers that would impact the region for decades to come.
That, of course, is not the common story of how the Running Fence saga unfolds in documentaries and tributes to Christo, who died in 2020 at the age of 84. Those narratives commonly borrow from the storybook narrative of the hero’s journey, with Christo cast in a Sisyphean struggle against incredible opposition as he persistently pursues his artistic vision, the manifestation of which ultimately brings about the transformation of hearts and minds he sought, thanks to the mind-changing epiphany that only beauty can inspire.
One problem with this storyline is it buries the subversive manner with which Christo ultimately undermined the coalition of pro-development supporters who welcomed him to town, effectively tipping the political balance in favor of the environmentalists, who did not, in preserving the pastures he showcased in his exhibit.
The artist Christo (photo Morrie Camhi)
Held aloft by steel poles and cables, the Running Fence exhibit opened for two weeks in September 1976to an estimated two million visitors. This brief exhibit however was preceded by four years of planning and drama, during which the proposal was subjected to 18 public hearings, three sessions in California superior courts, and a 465-page environmental impact report.
For much of that time, Christo and his exhibit partner and spouse Jeanne-Claude operated out of their headquarters at the Petaluma Inn, commuting back and forth from their home in New York City. As the legal battles dragged on, Christo made it clear didn’t consider the physical Running Fence itself to be the art of the exhibit, but rather the process of the fence coming into being.
“You are all part of my work,” Christo explained in his Bulgarian accent to supporters and distractors alike.
Yet, despite his pledge to foster a sense of togetherness with the project, his focus quickly turned to assembling a partisan coalition in helping to get it approved. Whether he went about it as the “arrogant, wheeler-dealer egomaniac” local artist Mary McChesney accused him of being, or merely a pragmatic opportunist, the coalition of developers, anti-tax proponents, and ranchers Christo assembled, was, like most coalitions, a mixed bag. The one thing uniting them was a common desire to eliminate government restrictions on land use, including restrictions on absurd art installations like the Running Fence, which none of them confessed to understanding.
The most enchanting part of project’s storybook narrative is the charm offensive Christo and Jeanne-Claude mounted over coffee and fresh-baked pie around the kitchen tables of local dairy ranchers upon whose land they wished to erect the fence.
Sheepdog trainer and former rancher, Lester Bruhn (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)
In reality, the couple, with their foreign accents, New York avant-garde airs, and free-spirited hippie looks, were an oddball mismatch to the conservative, no-nonsense personalities of the ranchers and their wives, many of them direct descendants of Swiss-Italian, Danish, and German immigrants. They received a cold shoulder until a former sheep rancher and sheepdog trainer, Lester Bruhn, recognized in the couple’s harebrained scheme a money-making opportunity for cash-strapped ranchers.
With Bruhn opening doors, Christo and Jeanne-Claude made the opening pitch to 59 ranchers around their kitchen tables, followed up by a battery of nine lawyers who negotiated leases for the fence to run across their properties. The opening lease offer for a modest size ranch was $200 ($1,000 in today’s currency). Some ranchers held out for more, including one large ranch that received $5,500 ($28,000 in today’s currency). The ranchers were also promised the fence’s nylon curtains, posts, and cabling once the exhibit came down.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude employed a similar approach in gaining the support of the conservative Sonoma County Taxpayers Association. “They came to us, hat in hand, money in pocket,” said the group’s president Jim Groom. “We like that.”
The one constituency Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not seek to court were local artists. Instead, they snubbed them. In turn, many artists condemned the Running Fence as a silly gimmick and a form of “fascist art,” seeking to dominate the landscape instead of complement it.
“We later realized,” said Jeanne-Claude, “the local artists saw us as an invasion of their turf.”
Jeanne-Claude (photo Morrie Camhi)
The dustup over artistic integrity may have also been part of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s strategy, as it allowed them to shift the media’s focus from the relatively tedious machinations of negotiating land use policy, to a theatrical sideshow over the nature of public art itself.
Yet, while Christo commonly referred to the Running Fence as “public art,” technically there was nothing public about it. Mounted on private land, it’s $3 million price tag ($13.5 million in today’s currency) was money Christo raised through the sale of his art works, not public monies. Despite Christo’s claims of everyone being part of the aesthetic process, no members of the public were formally involved in its physical creation or procurement, nor were any government-appointed public art commissions engaged in its review and approval.
Like a visiting carnival, the only official review of the Running Fence’s installation by the public or public agencies was restricted to its land use.
Christo at Sonoma County public hearing, 1975 (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)
Concurrent with Christo’s four-year campaign to secure land use approval, the city of Petaluma was enmeshed in a legal battle of its own, fighting outside developers over limiting the city’s growth to 500 new houses per year. The developers maintained that imposing such a restriction was an infringement of the right of people to live where they wanted.
In February 1976, just two months before Christo received the final go-ahead from Sonoma County for his installation, Petaluma was granted a landmark decision when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected reviewing a lower appellate court ruling that upheld the city’s growth limits. The ruling had national consequences, and made Petaluma the darling of the slow growth movement.
By that time, savvy housing developers had already shifted their focus to subdividing the unregulated rural countryside surrounding Petaluma. One of their most contentious proposals was a 994-unit housing development slated for the Watson Ranch, a 1,000-area property north of town on Pepper Road between Stony Point and Mecham roads. The ranch sat just a mile south of Cotati’s Meacham Hill where Christo intended to launch his Running Fence installation from.
Like many local ranchers, John Watson was a second-generation dairyman, his family having leased the one-time Mecham family ranch since 1926, before purchasing it in 1965. Five years later, faced with rising property taxes, Watson sold a majority interest in the property to developers from Palo Alto.
It wasn’t Watson’s only option. Thanks to the Williamson Act, a California land conservation bill passed in 1965, ranchers could reduce their taxes by legally restricting their land to agricultural or open space use. Some, like Watson, were reluctant to do so given the instability of the local dairy industry, which, by the early 1970s, was facing the perfect storm in terms of financial sustainability.
In addition to being financially squeezed by rising feed prices while the state kept a lid on milk prices, national milk consumption was declining due to new dietary concerns about cholesterol. At the same time, dairy competition was increasing due to large factory farms in California’s central valley, where feed was cheaper and property taxes lower. To make matters worse, a historic two-year drought hit the area in the mid-1970s, forcing many ranchers to pay for trucking in water for their cows, each of whom drank an average of 50 gallons a day.
Barbara and Wilbur Volkerts at their Pepper Road ranch that the Running Fence ran across (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)
The largest existential threat facing dairymen however was California’s new waste treatment regulations.
Most local dairies were situated near streams into which they washed the waste from their milking operations. With the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, new regulations were adopted to stop dairy waste from polluting waterways. Ranchers were given until 1977 to install closed waste disposal systems and open-stall barns. The cost of doing so ranged between $100,000 for a medium-sized dairy to $300,000 for a large dairy ($500,000 to $1,500,00 in today’s currency).
For many ranchers, the waste regulations were the final nail in the coffin. Beginning in the early 1970s, “dairy for sale” became a sign of the times in Sonoma and Marin counties. Larger dairies resorted to swallowing up their smaller neighbors in an effort to remain competitive with the larger farms in the central valley. For some ranchers, the only viable alternative was the choice Watson made to subdivide the ranch with outside developers.
Between World War II and the early 1970s, Petaluma’s population surged from 8,000 to 30,000 residents, as the area became an attractive bedroom community for commuters working in San Francisco, a forty-five minute drive away.
To keep up with developer demand, the city was forced to periodically annex surrounding farmland. With new subdivisions butting up against farmland, ranchers became besieged with complaints from new suburban residents of the smells, flies, and noise coming from the ranches. In addition to the increased scrutiny of county health inspectors, ranchers were adversely impacted by rising property tax assessments as their land value substantially increased when a subdivision moved in next door.
The opposition to the encroaching housing developments in the rural area was led in part by Dr. Bill Kortum, a Petaluma rancher and large animal veterinarian. elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in 1974 on a platform of growth control and agricultural preservation, Kortum fought to prevent wall-to-wall subdivisions stretching across his district in Southern Sonoma County by creating greenbelt zones between the incorporated cities.
Sonoma County Supervisor Dr. Bill Kortum (photo Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
In 1975, his proposal became part of a new interim general plan to manage growth that the board began developing. The planning process would ultimately take three years to complete. In the meantime, Kortum and the board’s other environmentalist, Chuck Hinkle, requested a moratorium on new property lot divisions. Developers immediately went on the offensive, working behind the scenes to launch a recall campaign against Kortum and Hinkle.
As a proxy attack dog, they enlisted Jim Groom, president of the Sonoma County Taxpayers Association. A Rohnert Park developer and former Santa Rosa city councilman, Groom had invested heavily in coastal lands for subdivision following the Sea Ranch housing development in the 1960s, which stretched along ten miles of Sonoma County’s coastline. In 1972, before Groom could begin his own coastal housing development, voters approved a ballot initiative Kortum had helped to launch, establishing a California Coastal Commission to reign in coastal developments. The new initiative left Groom’s investment under water.
In retaliation, Groom crafted the recall against Kortum and Hinkle ostensibly as a protest of the Board of Supervisors’ decision in 1975 to increase property taxes. He enlisted the support of local ranchers, pointing out to them that Kortum’s proposed greenbelt zones would not only diminish their land value, but also eliminate their retirement or rainy-day options of selling their land to developers.
While Groom’s contentious recall campaign was underway, Christo appeared before the Board of Supervisors for approval of the Running Fence exhibit. Kortum was the only board member to vote against it.
As it turned out, most of the 59 ranchers who signed leases for Christo’s installation had also previously agreed to restrict their land to agricultural use or open space in exchange for lower taxes under the Williamson Act. Like other environmentalists, Kortum was concerned that, in approving Christo’s project, the county would be potentially opening the door to more exclusions to the Williamson Act in the farmlands, such as commercial billboards, outdoor concert arenas, carnivals, and motorcycle raceways.
Pro-growth supervisors on the board dismissed Kortum’s concern. One member pointed out that a fence, “running or not,” was technically agricultural by nature.
Running Fence installation (photo from the film Running Fence by by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin)
In April 1976, Christo and Jeanne-Claude broke ground for their installation on Bruhn’s Valley Ford property. A month later, Kortum and Hinkle were recalled in a special election engineered by Groom. In August, developers of the Watson Ranch’s 994-unit subdivision on Pepper Road, apparently hoping for a quick approval given the recent recall of Kortum and Hinkle, presented their plans to the Sonoma County Planning Commission.
On September 8th, Christo and Jeanne-Claude opened their two-week exhibit of the Running Fence by unfurling the nylon panels on the same day with one final, dramatic twist.
A few months before the opening, the Coastal Commission rescinded its approval the fence’s final 1,000 yards that were slated to run across protected coastal land into the Pacific Ocean. That particular patch of land at Bodega Bay belonged to developers who originally purchased it for a subdivision, only to be thwarted by creation of the Coastal Commission. Christo’s lawyers appealed the decision, and a new hearing was negotiated for September 23rd, a day after the Running Fence exhibit was scheduled to come down.
The Running Fence’s “illegal leap” into the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay (photo Wolfgang Volz)
Christo didn’t wait for the near hearing, but instead defiantly extended his fence the final 1,000 yards into the sea.
Alfred Frankenstein, a prominent San Francisco art critic, who had watched Christo work patiently and diligently over the years to secure the necessary approvals, called his “illegal leap” into the ocean not only a violation of the law, but a violation of the spirit of the artwork. Christo disagreed.
“Illegality is essential to [the] American system, don’t you see?” he told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins. “I completely work within [the] American system by being illegal, like everyone else—if there is no illegal part, the project is less reflective of the system. It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here.”
The day after Christo’s opening, 700 developers, anti-tax proponents, and regional Republican leaders gathered at Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building to honor Groom as citizen of the year for his leadership in the recall campaign of Kortum and Hinkle. A telegram of appreciation for his good work was read to the assembly from U.S. President Gerald Ford.
For the next two weeks, the Running Fence turned the Sonoma-Marin dairylands into the world’s largest museum, drawing large, appreciative crowds. The installation was far more beautiful than anyone anticipated, even Christo himself, who dubbed it “a ribbon of light” as he watched its billowing nylon panels move with the wind. For many local viewers, it helped them to see the landscape they were so familiar with in an entirely new way.
The Running Fence (photo Wolfgang Volz)
Christo didn’t wait for the near hearing, but instead defiantly extended his fence the final 1,000 yards into the sea.
Alfred Frankenstein, a prominent San Francisco art critic, who had watched Christo work patiently and diligently over the years to secure the necessary approvals, called his “illegal leap” into the ocean not only a violation of the law, but a violation of the spirit of the artwork. Christo disagreed.
“Illegality is essential to [the] American system, don’t you see?” he told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins. “I completely work within [the] American system by being illegal, like everyone else—if there is no illegal part, the project is less reflective of the system. It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here.”
The day after Christo’s opening, 700 developers, anti-tax proponents, and regional Republican leaders gathered at Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building to honor Groom as citizen of the year for his leadership in the recall campaign of Kortum and Hinkle. A telegram of appreciation for his good work was read to the assembly from U.S. President Gerald Ford.
For the next two weeks, the Running Fence turned the Sonoma-Marin dairylands into the world’s largest museum, drawing large, appreciative crowds. The installation was far more beautiful than anyone anticipated, even Christo himself, who dubbed it “a ribbon of light” as he watched its billowing nylon panels move with the wind. For many local viewers, it helped them to see the landscape they were so familiar with in an entirely new way.
Christo and the Running Fence (photo Morrie Camhi)
On May 31, 2020, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a headline that most likely would have pleased Christo’s subversive character. It read, “Famed environmental artist behind the Running Fence dies at 84.
Los Angeles Times: “Petaluma is Doing ‘Just Fine’ After 17 Years of Controls,” April 11, 1988.
Eric Stanley, “Christo: Legacy Remembered,” Museum of Sonoma County, June 9, 2020. https://museumsc.org/christo-legacy-remembered/
New York Times: “Christo, Artist Known for Massive, Fleeting Displays, Dies,” May 31, 2020.
The New Yorker: Calvin Tompkins, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Running Fence,” March 28, 1977.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Christo’s Fence Now Under Construction,” May 4, 1976; “Planners: House Report Had Holes,” August 25, 1976; “Late Housing Report Draws Criticism,” August 18, 1976; “Petaluma Farms Draws Criticism at Hearing,” September 3, 1976; “Fence Triggers Debate,” September 11, 1976; “Opposition Defeats Subdivision,” September 17, 1976; “Fence Artist is Gone,” September 30, 1976; “Open Space, Park EDP Changes Studied,” July 13, 1978; “Watson Ranch Remains Open Land Under Trust,” December 10, 1979; “Environmental Icon’s Legacy Remembered,” December 25, 2014.
San Francisco Examiner, “Good for Business, But is it Art?” September 9, 1976.
San Rafael Daily Independent Journal: “Christo’s Fence Granted Sonoma Board’s Approval,” May 19, 1975.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Supervisors Clear Christo’s Fence,” March 19, 1975; “Christo’s Fence Clears Coast Committee,” April 25, 1975; “Groom, SCTA Supported,” September 17, 1975; “Kortum Vows to Defeat Recall,” December 17, 1975; “Second District,” May 26, 1976; “Kortum: An Opportunist’s Copout,” June 2, 1976; “Christo’s $2 Million Fence Almost Reader for Sept. 8 Hanging,” August 30, 1976; “Christo’s Fence Takes Illegal Dip,” September 8, 1976; Gaye LeBaron column, September 12, 1976; “Ford Praises Groom as Citizen of Year,” September 12, 1976; “Delong Bitter Blast at General Plan, Kahn,” January 11, 1978; “Jim Groom Still Packs a Mean Punch,” June 23, 1993; “Christo, Famed Environmental Artist Behind ‘Running Fence’ in Sonoma and Marin counties, Dies at 84,” (pick up from Washington Post), May 31, 2020.
Smithsonian magazine: “Q&A: Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” December, 2008; “Christo’s California Dreamin’,” June 2010.
Sonoma West Times and News: “Running Fence Has its Problems,” July 26, 1976; “Artists Speak from Both Sides of the Fence,” July 26, 1976; “Recall Elections, New Faces Were Part of the County’s First General Plan Debates,” August 15, 2007.
Caitlin O’Hara, “The Journey to the Running Fence,” UC Press Blog, https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/9847/the-journey-to-running-fence/
Brian Doherty, et al, Remembering the Running Fence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Anne Schuhart, “Keeping Dairy Waste Under Control,” Soil Conservation, Volume 43; Volumes 1977-1978 (Information Division, Soil Conservation Service, 1977), pp. 15-17.
Running Fence, film documentary by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1977.
Jim Agius and Tom Gaffey welcome historians Katie Watts and John Sheehy for a deep dive into Petaluma’s history from the the 1920s to the 1970s. We explore how Petaluma became known as the world’s egg basket, Prohibition, speakeasies, massive bootlegging rings, famous people-meeter and Petaluma booster Bill Soberanes, the post-war boom, Gilardi’s, Mayor Helen Putnam, the near decimation of Petaluma’s downtown, how the east side developed and much more.
Writer, historian, Petaluma Good Egg Katie Watts
Katie Watts is a writer, editor, and Petaluma historian, who as features editor for the Petaluma Argus-Courier, for years edited the popular “Yesteryears” column highlighting local history.
Writer, historian, Petaluma Good Egg John Sheehy (photo Anthony Tusler)
John Sheehy is the author of On a River Winding Home: Stories and Visions of the Petaluma River Watershed, which features intimate historical stories of the Petaluma River Watershed paired with the stunning photography of Scott Hess.
Tom Gaffey is the general manager and Jim Agius the talent buyer of the Phoenix Theater, where Onstage with Jim & Tom is produced.
“To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.” —Bob Dylan
Right-to-left, Frederick Geers, Jon Rankin, Tom Gaffey (seated) and John Sheehy, in a still shot for a student film set at Donahue’s Landing, 1972 (photo by Brigham Denison)
Friendships forged while growing up usually change as time passes, but memories made together in youth often create bonds for life. Frederick Gardiner Geers, who recently passed away, was such a friend. Although we grew up in Petaluma in the 1960s, we didn’t become friends until high school in the early 1970s, when I joined two of the cliques where Fred played a central role, journalism and theater.
Creative and whip-smart, he was wired with an intense energy softened by a satiric wit. Behind his coke-bottle glasses and tight-lip smile—used to hide his bad teeth until he had them all replaced in high school—Fred was our enigmatic Peter Sellers, a private person who presented himself in a series of different guises, sometimes playing Inspector Clouseau; at other times, Dr. Strangelove. During the rare instances he dropped his thespian guard, he revealed a poet’s sensitivity to the world around him.
From time to time, Fred’s natural intensity got the better of him, and he would erupt in head jerking, eye blinking, and uncontrollable cussing. When Fred fell under one of his spells—an event that often occurred while we were riding aimlessly around in someone’s car—it was like being caged with a seething bobcat. “Time to let Fred out,” became our a customary fire drill. In retrospect, it’s possible that he may have been touched in adolescence by Tourette Syndrome.
Frederick Geers, Petaluma, 1978 (photo John Sheehy)
Like many in our high school gang, Fred was something of an “at-risk kid.” We all had troubles at home that we tacitly acknowledged but never discussed, in something of an unspoken bond. In Fred’s case, life centered around his mother Jean, as his father was not in the picture.
Jean Gardiner was the daughter of the president of Heald’s Business College in Fresno, who was also a fig farmer. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, she moved to Hawaii to work for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian medical secretary. On the morning of December 7, 1941, she was driving to work at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base when a Japanese plane dropped a bomb onto the road in front of her. She survived the blast, but experience stayed with her for life, fueling a lifelong animosity toward the Japanese.
Jean remained in Hawaii until after the war, giving birth to a daughter with her first husband, an army major. After their divorce, she returned to California, where in 1950 she married John Geers, an Army private, and took a job working at Hamilton Air Force Base. Their son Frederick was born in Fresno in 1955, when Jean was forty-six, after which she and her husband purchased a small ranchette in Cotati, and Jean acquired a horse named Thunder.
The Geers divorced in 1958, when Fred was three. Jean took Thunder and her two children back to Hawaii for a couple of years, then returned with them to Petaluma. She rented a farmhouse west of town where they could board Thunder, and took a job as a medical transcriber at Letterman Hospital in the Presidio. Fred attended rural Wilson School were he became a devoted Cub Scout.
Fred as a Cub Scout at Wilson School
I first became aware of Fred during a Washington’s Birthday Cherry Pie Eating Contest in junior high, in which he placed a close second. By that time, Thunder was gone, Jean’s daughter was married, and Fred and his mother were living in an old Victorian on Petaluma Boulevard, a block away from Walnut Park. At the beginning of his sophomore year, Fred moved to Hawaii to try living with his father, who managed a hotel in Hilo. He returned after a semester, scarred by the physically bullying he received from the local Hawaiian kids who tormented him for being a mainlander.
At Petaluma High, Fred and I both worked on the school’s newspaper, the Trojan, where a fellow member of our gang, Tom Gaffey, was the top editor. Tom and Fred helped form an Explorer journalism troop in the Boy Scouts led by Ralph Thompson, managing editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Soon after I joined the troop, we launched a newspaper, TheBugle, for the Boy Scouts of the Sonoma-Mendocino Area Council, with Fred serving as editor.
Fred and I also collaborated on an underground newspaper in high school, inspired in part by “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, which, much to our delight, became a source of controversy for the school administration.
Along with journalism, Fred engaged himself in theater, where his shape-changing theatrics translated well to the stage. He appeared in almost all of our school productions, most notably in the musical Carnival as B.F. Schlegel, the larger-than-life ringmaster who creates a sense of family for a group of quirky performers working his rinky-dink carnival.
Melinda Orchard as Rosalie and Frederick Geers as B.F. Schlegel in the musical Carnival, 1973
While the drama club on campus was populated with colorful personalities, few matched Fred for true eccentricity. At cast parties he distinguished himself on the dance floor, often dancing solo to his own ecstatic rhythms for hours on end. His own taste in music tended toward progressive rock, especially the band Yes, who provided the soundtrack to his teenage years.
After graduating with honors from Petaluma High in 1973, Fred enrolled at San Francisco State. In the years that followed, he remained in the Bay Area, working as a freelance writer and a chef, and for a brief time, running the historic Lorenzo Theater in San Leandro as a repertory venue, featuring both films and live performances. During opening night’s musical concert, Fred took a lit cigarette away from a defiant customer, who responded by stabbing him with a knife, setting off a melee that the police had to break up.
In the early 1980s, Fred worked as a chef at the first farm-to-table gourmet restaurant on the Healdsburg Plaza, just as the town was beginning to draw wine tourists to the area. Over the next decade it wasn’t unusual to find him cooking at some tony restaurant in San Francisco, whirling around the kitchen with his sous chefs like a dancing dervish ringmaster.
Although Fred never married, he had a number of long-term relationships, including with actress Diane Varsi, who was nominated while still a teenager for her role in the film Peyton Place.
Fred left the culinary business in the mid-1990s to become a technical writer at a software company. After the company merged with the open source software developer Red Hat, Fred was suddenly worth millions, at least in stock options. His paper fortune evaporated in the dot com bust of the early 2000s, after which he returned to cooking and freelance writing. During the 2010s, he served as the longtime chef at Ireland’s 32, San Francisco’s legendary Irish pub on Geary Street.
Frederick Geers, San Francisco, 2018
One of the last times I saw Fred was at an open house celebration for Tiburon attorney Jon Rankin, a charter member of our high school gang. Fred and his female partner at the time arrived by Uber, dressed in long, black overcoats as characters from the film the Matrix. True to his Peter Sellers nature, Fred never broke character the entire evening.
At the time of his death, Fred was employed at Episcopal Community Services in San Francisco, running a kitchen for feeding the homeless and the needy. After his 65th birthday on March 18th, he was sent home to the Inner Richmond apartment where he lived alone, to self-quarantine during to the Covid-19 pandemic. He died two weeks later of a heart attack while asleep in bed. In a final gesture so characteristic of Fred, he exited the stage on April Fool’s Day.
(l to r) Bernice, Roy, Vernon, and Doris Casarotti at the family farm on Magnolia Avenue, Petaluma, 1918. Their uncle, Henry Casarotti, died from the influenza on November 19, 1918. (Courtesy of Kris Rossi)
The Friday before Christmas of 1918, Gladys Goodwin came down with a cold while commuting home on the electric train from Sebastopol, where she worked as a secretary for the Western Apple Vinegar Company. Disembarking at the Petaluma train depot, she walked the two blocks to her family’s home at East D and Edith streets. It was the last time she would leave the house. Within days her cold developed into pneumonia, and in a week she was dead, a victim of the influenza pandemic.
It had been two months since the pandemic hit Petaluma, and just one month since the mandatory mask order and social distancing restrictions shuttering all theaters, dance halls, libraries, schools, and churches, had been lifted. Like many others, with the steep decline in the infection rate, Gladys Goodwin was looking forward to a relatively normal Christmas, especially in the aftermath of Armistice Day, which had marked the official end of World War I on November 11th.
According to records kept by the California Board of Health, the two-month influenza outbreak had been devasting to Sonoma County, with 18,635 report cases and 258 related deaths. Twenty-four of those deaths occurred in Petaluma, whose population stood at 7,550. California as a whole reported 230,845 cases and 13,340 deaths. Pneumonia, which became the largest secondary infection of the influenza, killed another 5,285. Together, the two diseases resulted in a 37 percent increase in the state’s mortality rate in 1918.
Gladys Goodwin, 1893-1918 (courtesy of Suzanne Miller)
Gladys Goodwin was a bright, attractive, 25-year old with a sunny disposition. Born in Petaluma, she was one of 12 children of Captain Billy Goodwin, who piloted scow schooners up and down the Petaluma River, and his wife Jennie. After local officials lifted social distancing restrictions just before Thanksgiving, she undoubtedly joined others afflicted with cabin fever in packing the city’s movie houses, theaters, parks, and churches.
It turned out to be a temporary reprieve. A second wave of influenza came at Christmas, claiming Goodwin as one of its first victims. It spiked in January with 69,053 cases in California, leading to 3,500 deaths. Petaluma health officials reinstated social distancing protocols, rescinding them once the second infection wave plunged at the end of February. Then came a third, relatively minor wave in April, forcing the closure of Petaluma schools for the remainder of the school year.
By the time summer arrived, California had experienced another 99,058 cases of influenza and pneumonia since January, resulting in 5,465 deaths, 24 of them in Petaluma. Gladys Goodwin was among those most vulnerable, as Californians most ravaged by the influenza were in the 25-to-34 age group. Their deaths dramatically lowered the state’s average life expectancy from 52 years in 1917 to 40.6 years in 1918.
State health officials reported feeling impotent in the face of the rapidly spreading infection, resulting in confusion and a lack of proper utilization of the scanty means of control they had available. Their efforts were further complicated by “slackers” practicing civil disobedience or merely adopting a lax attitude toward social distancing and wearing masks.
Health officials also deplored the useless and misguided efforts to check the pandemic, including the use of dubious tonics, whiskey prescribed by doctors, and snake oil concoctions. California historian Brendan Riley cited accounts of mothers telling their children to stuff salt up their noses and wear bags of camphor around their necks, and of a four-year-old girl in Oregon said to have recovered after being dosed by her mother with onion syrup and then covered in raw onions for three days.
The winter of 1920 brought with it a fourth and final wave of the disease. Although its mortality rate was half that of the previous winter’s wave, Petaluma was harder hit than other cities its size, reporting 319 cases and five deaths by February of 1920. The city health board issued another ban on social gatherings, once again closing theaters, dance halls, schools, and churches. But by the time the wave subsided, local influenza deaths in 1920 totaled 17.
Petaluma General Hospital, 619 Sixth Street, established 1912 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
Although a vaccine was discovered that reduced pneumonia as a secondary infection, no vaccine for the influenza itself was ever found. Instead, the pandemic eventually trailed off. Between 1918 and 1920, California experienced 20,801 influenza deaths, and another 10,424 related pneumonia deaths. Petaluma’s combined total was 66.
Like most small town hospitals at the time, Petaluma General at Sixth and I streets lacked intensive care doctors who really understood how to treat the very sickest patients. In the case of Gladys Goodwin, the rapid pace at which her infection was such that she never made it to the hospital. She died at her family’s home on East D Street.
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A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
SOURCES:
Twenty-sixth Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, For the Fiscal Years from July 1, 1918 to June 30, 1920, California State Printing Office, 1921.
Twenty-seventh Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, For the Fiscal Years from July 1, 1920 to June 30, 1922, California State Printing Office, 1923.
Petaluma Argus: “Petaluma Theaters Close Until Further Notice,” October 19, 1918; “Mask Order is Issued,” October 22, 1918; “An Appeal to the Women of Petaluma,” October 28, 1918; “Still Reasons for Concern On Endemic Says County Doctor,” October 30, 1918; “Masks Afford Much Merriment,” November 6, 1918; “Mask Slackers Are Fined,” November 9, 1918; “You Can Take Off Your Mask,” November 22, 1918; “The Programs at the Theaters,” November 25, 1918; “Says Cold Weather Brings Return of Influenza,” January 10, 1919; “School Closes for a Week,” April, 13, 1919; “Board Decides to Keep Schools Closed,” April 19, 1919; “Ban Will Soon Be Lifted,” February 24, 1920; “Somebody Will Get into Trouble,” February 24, 1920.
Petaluma Courier: “Many Cases of Influenza,” October 15, 1918; “Death at Lytton Home,” October 17, 1918; “Discuss Closing of Theaters,” October 19, 1918; “Precaution Taken by Board of Health,” October 20, 1918; “Funeral of J. Biaggi,” October 30, 1918; “Everyone Must Wear Masks in Petaluma,” November 2, 1918; “Petaluma’s Joyful Peace Parade,” November 12, 1918; “Many Masks Were Burned by Crowds,” November 23, 1918; “Health Board in Session,” February 14, 1920; “Ban Will be Lifted,” February 27, 1920.
Santa Rosa Republican: “Keeping Influenza Down,” February 3, 1919; “Influenza Ban May Not Lift Monday in Petaluma,” February 26, 1920.
Brendan Riley, “Old Reports Show Pandemic Impact in Solano County,” Vallejo Times-Herald, May 10, 2020.
Gaye LeBaron column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 28, 2020.
Jeff Elliott, Someone You Know Died Today, and Likewise Tomorrow,” Santa Rosa History, October 7, 2018, santarosahistory.com
I first became acquainted with Gary Snyder like millions of others—through a novel written by Jack Kerouac called Dharma Bums, which features a thinly fictionalized snapshot of Gary in the 1950s, five years out of Reed College, whole-heartedly engaged in many of the pursuits that he had cultivated while a student here—poetry, mountaineering, countercultural politics, Native American animism, and Zen Buddhism.
We also see a young man on the quest for self-authenticity, involved in what Gary has described as a process of “de-educating” himself after descending from the pinnacle of elite education at Reed College:
Hanging out in the bohemias and underworlds of San Francisco, returning to his working-class roots as a lumberjack, trail maker, and fire lookout in the Cascades, preparing for a sojourn to Japan, where he would spend 12 years studying Zen and writing poetry, returning home to the States to establish a farmstead with a community of family and friends on the San Juan Ridge of the Sierras foothills.
We also get a glimpse in the novel of Gary’s knack for combining the intellectual and the experiential; a knack that, through exploration of a wide range of social, ecological, and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose, he would weave into a new social mythology, one grounded in the most archaic values on earth, and shaped by his literary talent for synthesizing precise observations of nature with a deep insight of reality.
Of course, as a 17-year old reading Dharma Bums, I knew little of this. Sitting out on the porch of the house my great-grandmother built in my hometown of Petaluma, California, renowned as the one-time chicken Egg Basket of the World, I only knew that wherever Gary Snyder was, had to be better than the hell hole I was stuck in.
Gary’s message was simple: On the trail laid out before us, others have already picked all the berries. If you want your own berries, you have to carve out your own trail.
And so, a few months after finishing high school, I pulled together my meager savings and bought a one-way ticket to Europe—my first time on an airplane—and like millions before me joined the so-called “rucksack revolution” that had been inspired by Gary’s character in Dharma Bums.
I spent the next four years hitchhiking the world, working odd jobs, and, in what I took to be the Snyder model, studying everything that crossed my path.
Then I came to Reed. It was the only college I applied to. I wanted training in the skills Gary said that he had received there—the independent thinking, the rigorous discipline, the fearlessness required for holding your ground in any territory you choose to enter.
Reed College Library (Reed College Special Collections Library)
In the classical hero’s journey, after venturing out in search of adventure and self-exploration, the hero returns back home with what Joseph Campbell called the “boons” of his or her travels.
I wasn’t sure what boons I had acquired, but twenty-five years after leaving my hometown of Petaluma, I returned, seeking to recapture something of my roots in a place my family had resided for 150 years. About six months into my return, I was having a difficult time of it, wondering if it was in fact possible to go home again.
Then one evening I went to a book signing by a local author who had written a book entitled Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City. There were a number of old chicken ranchers I recognized there, sitting around with their prized hens on their laps. As the author signed my book, I noticed that she used a calligraphic style of writing.
“That’s Chancery Cursive,” I said.
“Yes, it is.” she said, “Where I went to school we all had to learn it.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Reed College?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, if you went to Reed, you must know my brother,” she said. “We called him ‘Mr. Reed College,’ and he’s standing right behind you.”
I turned around, and lo and behold, there was Gary Snyder, standing amidst the ranchers and their chickens . . . in my hometown.
The book author turned out to be Thea Snyder Lowry, Reed class of ‘53. Gary explained to me that their father had retired to Petaluma for a spell, and that, at about the time I was in high school, sitting out on the family porch reading Dharma Bums and thinking I was stuck in a hell hole, Gary was riding up to town on his motorcycle on the weekends to visit with his father.
He told me that sitting out on his old man’s front porch—a mere few blocks away from my family’s house—he would think to himself that he had found a bit of heaven.
Which goes to show that sometimes, a turning word from a poet is all it takes to bring us home.
The Snyder family home, 6 Sixth Street, Petaluma, built 1865 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
A version of this story was first delivered as an introduction for Gary Snyder at a ceremony held on the Reed College campus in which Snyder was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the college.
