A PETALUMA SHOE SALESMAN’S TRIP TO CHINATOWN
On March 12, 1925, Homer O. Webster abruptly left the shoe factory he operated in Petaluma to take an overnight trip to San Francisco. When he failed to return home two days later, his wife Mary, filed a missing persons report with San Francisco police.
That same morning, the police received another missing persons report from the wife of a San Francisco chemist named Fred Kormann. Officers located Kormann’s car in a city parking garage, where it had been sitting for days. By coincidence, the garage was near the hotel Webster had checked into. His bags were found in his room, unpacked.[1]
Later that day, a detective spotted a man matching Webster’s description wandering the streets of Chinatown in a daze. Webster told the detective he had been partying the night before in Chinatown with Kormann. He promised to find Kormann and see to it that he got home safely.[2]
He then disappeared without a trace.
The next day, Kormann’s wife Ida called in an international private detective firm. Her husband—an internationally known inventor— had left the house with patent papers, planning to officially file them the following day. They were for a new secret formula he had developed for a deadly poison gas.[3]
Through tips, the private detectives were able to determine Kormann had been kidnapped by a band of international conspirators from China looking to gain possession of his new invention. Webster’s involvement in the abduction was unclear, which led the detectives to Petaluma.[4]
A descendant of Daniel Webster, Homer Webster grew up in Boston, where he followed in the footsteps of his father, who also ran a shoe factory. In 1922, he decided to team up with A.H. Crafts, a traveling shoe salesman from Boston, in leasing the Nolan-Earle Shoe Factory in Petaluma.[5]
The factory opened its doors in 1898. Located beside the city’s silk mill, it was part of a campaign led by local capitalist John A. McNear to create a local Factory District on the east side of the city that would transform Petaluma into the manufacturing hub of the North Bay. Instead, after the turn of the century, McNear found his efforts overtaken by the local poultry industry, which transformed the city into the Egg Basket of the World.[6]
Webster and Crafts sold off most of the factory’s machinery to Petaluma’s former mayor William Keig, for his shoe factory in Napa. Keig also operated a shoe store on Petaluma’s Main Street.
After completely renovating the building, Webster and Crafts shipped in from the east coast all new, state-of-the-art machinery for manufacturing high-end work boots, their niche in the highly competitive shoe market, using tanned leather sourced largely from Sonoma County.[7]
The upfront investment and initial slow sales led Crafts to sell his interest within the first year to A.W. Green, a San Francisco investor. By 1924, factory production tripled to more than 600 pairs a day, with the boots selling all along the west coast and in Hawaii.
To keep up with demand, Webster and his new partner Green had to invest in frequent upgrades to the factory’s machinery. Cash-strapped, the 33-year old Webster was forced to declare personal bankruptcy in order to stave off creditors. That ultimately led him to Kormann.[8]
Like Webster, the 43-year old Kormann was an entrepreneur in financial trouble.
He first made his mark as a young chemist in San Francisco during World War I, when he developed a chemical compound for increasing eight-fold the amount of gasoline that could be extracted from a barrel of crude oil. In a patriotic gesture, he donated his patent to the government, allowing them to meet their gasoline needs in the war effort.[9]
After working for a large oil company back east, Kormann returned to the Bay Area in 1923 to launch a company for manufacturing a new synthetic gasoline he developed. He capitalized the company on the promise that it would solve the country’s gasoline shortfalls which were being created by the increase in automobile sales during the Roaring Twenties. He continued selling shares to new investors after it became clear the company was financially underwater.[10]
By early 1925, he was battling lawsuits from disgruntled investors who charged him with grand larceny. He was banking on restoring his finances with a new poisonous gas formula he had just invented. The day before he planned to file the patent for the gas formula, he got a call from a representative of the Chinese government expressing an interest in his earlier synthetic gas venture.[11]
Kormann contacted Webster, who he apparently knew from investing circles, asking him to come to the city that evening to serve as his witness in the meeting with the representative. He also dangled before him the possibility of providing him with a connection for exporting his work boots to China.[12]
Trade with China was tricky at the time. The country was undergoing a period of civil wars waged by regional warlords. Following World War I, China began flooding the U.S. with cheap exports, including eggs, which undermined Petaluma’s booming poultry industry.
Thanks to persistent campaigning by Petaluma poultry leaders and the city’s Chamber of Commerce, a tariff was imposed on Chinese eggs in late 1922, reducing their importation from more than 3 million dozen a year to less than half a million, and ending their threat to Petaluma’s prosperity.[13]
After meeting up with Kormann in San Francisco, Webster accompanied him to a luxurious apartment in Chinatown. There, they were royally entertained, feted with an elaborate banquet, and served exotic drinks, which turned out to be spiked with drugs. Aside from Webster’s brief escape into Chinatown where he encountered the police detective, the two men were drugged and held as prisoners for a week, after which they were both discovered aimlessly wandering the side streets of Chinatown.[14]
Webster was able to return home, but Kormann was admitted to the hospital, suffering from side effects of the drugs. The patent papers were missing. From that point on, the investigation became a matter of national security, and was conducted covertly.[15]
A month after the incident, Webster sold his interest in the Petaluma shoe factory to his partner, A.W. Green, and moved to Los Angeles. A few months later, he and his wife divorced. Kormann also moved to Los Angeles, where he became the chief chemist of a lubricant company.[16]
In 1927, the Webster-Green Shoe Factory was purchased by Keig, who shut down the plant, consolidating operations at his Napa factory. The factory building was repurposed for other uses until 1957, when it was torn down.[17]
As for the secret poison gas formula, it was never heard of again.
A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian, September 2023.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Police Asked to Hunt Missing Inventor,” San Francisco Examiner, Saturday, March 14, 1925; “Police Solve Two Mysteries,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 15, 1925; “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.
[2] “Police Solve Two Mysteries,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 15, 1925.
[3] “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.
[4] “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.
[5] “H.O. Webster,” Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County (S.J. Clarke Publications, 1926), pps. 807-808; “City Council Changes License Ordinance to One Dollar Per Quarter,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1922.
[6] “Shoe Factory to Pass into History,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1927.
[7] “Shoe Concern Leases Factory,” Petaluma Courier, December 30, 1921; “Machinery Expected from the East,” Petaluma Courier, March 11, 1922.
[8] “Shoe Company Has Organized,” Petaluma Courier, July 26, 1922; “Shoe Factory Enlarging and Installing Costly and Wonderful Machinery,” Petaluma Argus, April 1, 1924; “H.O. Webster,” Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County (S.J. Clarke Publications, 1926), pps. 807-808; “In Bankruptcy,” The Recorder, February 10, 1923.
[9] “Believes it Will Settle the Gas Problem,” Santa Cruz Evening News, September 29, 1917; Discovery Ends Threatened Shortage of Gasoline,” Santa Ana Register, September 29, 1917.
[10] “Oil Company is Organized for Plant at Benicia,” Daily Gazette-Martinez, September 18, 1922; “San Francisco Rich Chemist in Mystery Disappearance,” Victor Valley News Herald, March 20, 1925.
[11] “Superior Court,” The Recorder, May 31, 1923; “Oil Company Head Held,” Fresno Bee, February 28, 1924; “Missing Petaluma Man Returns Home,” Santa Rosa Republican,” March 20, 1925.
[12] “H.O. Webster Home After Experience,” Petaluma Argus, March 19, 1925.
[13] Thea Lowry, Empty Shells, (Manifold Press, Novato, CA, 2000), pp. 124-125; John P. Dunn, Matthew R. Portwood, “A Tale of Two Warlords: Republican China During the 1920s,” Association for Asian Studies, Vol. 19:3, Winter 2014; “What the Tariff Had Done for the Poultrymen,” Petaluma Argus, July 24, 1924.
[14] “Missing Petaluma Man Returns Home,” Santa Rosa Republican,” March 20, 1925.
[15] “H.O. Webster Home After Experience,” Petaluma Argus, March 19, 1925.
[16] “Greens Now Control Webster and Greens,” Petaluma Courier, April 14, 1925; “New Civil Suits,” The Recorder, November 2, 1925; “Oil Lubricant Company Here Recapitalizes,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1931; “F.A. Kormann Services,” Valley Times, February 9, 1948.
[17] “Wm. C. Keig Buys Controlling Interest in Webster-Green Shoe Factory,” Petaluma Argus, October 11, 1926; “Monday’s Meeting of the City Council Brief, But Important,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 17, 1927; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 23, 1963.