My mother first met Billy Soberanes in the summer of 1944, while he was home on leave from the Merchant Marine. Single, her fiancé having been killed while fighting in the Pacific, she was working behind the soda fountain at Pete Fundas’ Candy Store beside the Mystic Theater. She thought he was handsome and good-hearted, but somewhat jittery, speaking in such excited bursts she had trouble following what he was saying. That wasn’t unusual, as a number of men home on leave from the war seemed rattled.
After striking up a conversation, Soberanes invited her out for dinner and a movie. She accepted, thinking it was the least she could do before he returned to sea. Following the movie, he took her to the top of the hill west of town to view the stars above the evening fog layer. He drove like he talked—fast and skittish. They were still shrouded in fog when they reached the top of the hill. He parked the car and awkwardly leaned over to kiss her. She slapped him across the face, and ordered him to drive her home.
A few weeks later, Soberanes smashed up the family car before returning to sea.[1] He never drove again. Neither did he ever date my mother again, although they became lifelong friends, bonding over a shared love of local gossip.
Soberanes was, by most measures, an odd duck. My father, a classmate of his at St. Vincent’s Academy, regarded him as something of a buzzing fly, firing off stray ideas and offbeat jokes with the rapidity of a machine gun. My aunt, who also attended school with him, said he was a mischievous prankster who nervously ate through a pencil a day at school. As a grown man, Soberanes traded in his pencils for a briar pipe, although he often smoked more matches than tobacco, incessantly tamping down and relighting his pipe.[2]
Born in 1921, William Caulfield Soberanes grew up in Petaluma’s Old East neighborhood extending from the railroad tracks to Payran Street, among an enclave of Irish relatives orbiting around the home of his grandfather, Thomas A. Caulfield, on East Washington Street between Wilson and Lakeville streets. Caulfield, who immigrated to California from Ireland in 1876, was Petaluma’s top cattle dealer, with a 32-acre stockyard operation that extended along Lakeville Street from Wilson Street to Caulfield Lane.[3]
In 1900, one of Caulfield’s three daughters, Maggie, married Ed Soberanes, an accountant for a shoe manufacturer that had recently relocated a new factory from Oakland to the Old East.[4] A native of St. Helena, Soberanes descended from a family of early 19th century Californios with ties to General Mariano Vallejo, who built the Petaluma Adobe in 1836.[5]
Ed and Maggie purchased a house at 421 East Washington Street, two doors down from Thomas Caulfield’s home. The Old East was then a working-class neighborhood, populated largely by Italian and German immigrants, many of whom worked in Petaluma’s eastside factory district, the railroad yard, the grain mills, and the shipping docks of McNear Canal. On the corner across the street from the Soberanes house sat the Tivoli Hotel, whose restaurant, bar, and backlot bocce ball court served as an Italian hub in the neighborhood.
Ed Soberanes eventually became manager of the shoe factory. He and Maggie had five children, of which Bill was fourth in the birth order, born ten years after their third child. After the shoe factory closed in 1927, Ed went to work for his two brothers-in-laws, Will and Tom Caulfield, Jr., who had taken over their father’s cattle trade business and also opened a chain of local meat markets, one of which sat beside the Tivoli, directly across from the Soberanes house.
Ed died when his son Billy was 15. He was looked after by his uncles on the block, in particular Tom Caulfield, who, in addition to trading cattle, was one of the town’s preeminent storytellers and vaudeville performers. He also judged rodeos and refereed boxing matches throughout the state, both of which Soberanes engaged in as a young man.
After graduating from high school in 1941, Soberanes briefly followed his two older brothers and cousins into the family cattle business. Then came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After initially enlisting in the National Guard, in 1943 Soberanes joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, whose ships kept overseas troops armed and fed during the war.[6]
It was undoubtedly a colorful experience for the young Soberanes. With most able-bodied men enlisted in the military, the Merchant Marine was forced to lower their standards, filling out their civilian crews with drunks, idlers, thieves, brawlers, and card sharps who went by nicknames like Low Life McCormick, No Pants Jones, Screwball McCarthy, Foghorn Russell, and Soapbox Smitty.[7]
Following the war, Soberanes tried his hand at a variety of jobs around Petaluma, including buying and selling hay, and working for his uncles in the cattle business. But nothing caught his fancy. “The trouble with work,” he told a friend, “is that it stops a fellow from talking.”[8]
That wasn’t the case at Gilardi’s Corner, the town’s swanky cocktail lounge at the northeast corner of Washington and Kentucky streets where talking was the primary pastime, when one wasn’t rolling bar dice or placing discreet bets on horse races and boxing matches in the back room. The atmosphere in Gilardi’s was relaxed, playful, and open to possibilities. Men wore fitted suits and narrow ties, while women were dressed in high heels and cocktail dresses.
Together with the Hotel Petaluma’s Redwood Room across the street, Gilardi’s comprised Petaluma’s “night club row,” where the post-war “smart set” gathered to listen to jazz, dance, and imbibe highballs served by mixologists like “Happy” Merango, “Red” Cockrill, and “The Sheik” Sheehy, my father.[9]
“Diamond Mike” Gilardi opened the lounge in 1937, looking to bring a touch of class to the cluster of local bars and taverns opening up after Prohibition. Having refashioned himself from the son of a Swiss-Italian dairy rancher in Hicks Valley into one of the town’s preeminent Dapper Dans, Gilardi became a mentor to the young Soberanes.[10]
But while Soberanes was naturally drawn to the glamour and excitement of night club row, his quirky nature and awkwardness with women left him somewhat on the periphery. That is, until he found his way to the inside through the camera.
As a boy, Soberanes redeemed a bunch of cereal box tops through the mail to help purchase his first Brownie camera.[11] Photography soon became not just a hobby but an obsession, the attraction not in the aesthetics of what he captured on film, but in the charged excitement of people he caught in the spotlight.
With the predatory instincts of a paparazzo, Soberanes began covering sporting competitions, political rallies, theatrical events, music performances, parades, and even fires, coaxing his way into some events, sneaking into others.[12] As a charm offensive, he employed his natural sense of curiosity, learning a little about practically everything, just enough to ask seemingly informed questions of boxers, baseball players, rodeo cowboys, politicians, movie stars, labor leaders, poets, policemen, gamblers, and outlaws.
Once he photographed them, he posed to be photographed with them, like a hunter showing off his trophy kill. Those who refused his cameo request, he photobombed.[13]
By 1950, Soberanes was ready to turn his avocation into a full-time profession. Assisted by his cousin Nettie Rose Caulfield, a freelancer who wrote for rodeo and motorcycle racing publications, as well as Cat Fancy magazine, he began writing a weekly column for the Petaluma News, a local newspaper.[14]
Called “So They Tell Me,” the column featured Soberanes’ photographs paired with short, snappy items readers could quickly skim. A cornucopia of scoops, sightings, sports, social events, politics, personalities, and historical trivia, it bristled with as many names as he could squeeze in, having learned that readers scanned for either their name or the name of someone they knew for a bit of gossip to share with friends over lunch.
As his model, Soberanes turned to popular San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, whose rapid-fire “three-dot journalism”—named for the ellipses separating his column’s short items—was itself a blatant imitation of Walter Winchell, the syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator known for having turned journalism into a form of entertainment.
Soberanes used his new column as a launch pad for his first big public campaign: building a second firehouse in town on the east side. A new, postwar suburban housing boom had descended upon Petaluma, beginning with subdivisions along Payran and Madison streets, inundating the Old East neighborhood with new young families. That created an access issue for the fire department located on the west side of the Petaluma River, which was sometimes hampered by raised drawbridges at D and Washington streets due to riverboat traffic.
For Soberanes, the campaign held personal meaning, as his father had been a long-serving fire commissioner. After the bond issue passed in June 1951 for constructing a new firehouse at Payran and D streets, the 29-year-old Soberanes was honored by town leaders at a special banquet dinner. He was now in the spotlight himself.[15]
A few months later, the Petaluma News closed down. Soberanes’s weekly column was quickly picked up by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, who expanded it to three times a week.[16] He now had a profession, but not a lucrative one, as he was paid no more than $5 a column.[17] To get by, he continued living at home with his mother and older sister Margaret, a teacher at McKinley School.
In 1954, the “So They Tell Me” column moved to the Petaluma Argus-Courier. In his first column on June 2nd, Soberanes announced his intentions: “We will tell you about local happenings, about the many people we chance to meet from all walks of life, the famous, near famous, the characters, and the everyday citizen.”[18]
Since he no longer drove, Soberanes made his daily rounds around town on foot. Nattily dressed in suit and tie, a camera bag slung over his shoulder, coat pockets filled with pens and spiral-bound notebooks, a pipe held between his teeth or left smoldering in his coat pocket, he covered an average 20 miles a day, checking in with his network of tipsters.[19]
Able to get by on little sleep, Soberanes devoted the wee hours of the morning to sitting down at his Royal typewriter and, with two fingers, pounding out his column from a pocketful of notes.[20] Although he was careful to avoid expressing malice toward anyone, his column was largely hearsay, and not fact-checked. He relied on readers to set him straight, happily publishing their letters, in the belief that a complaining reader was better than no reader at all.
He also regularly featured reports in his column from anonymous “correspondents,” using pennames like Desert Dan Delaney, The Dreamer, Turkeylegs Thomas, and Fast Walking Charley.[21] To help keep Petaluma tangentially connected to the national stage, he took regular trips to San Francisco, returning with first-hand gossip and trophy pictures of himself with high-profile actors, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.[22]
In 1954, he began hosting a weekly 15-minute show on KAFP, the local radio station located at the south end of town, whose call letters were anecdotally said to stand for “Krowing Always For Petaluma.”[23] He interviewed sports figures and colorful local characters like Pop Pickle, an old woodsman who responded to his questions with a variety of bird calls.[24] Soberanes himself was often introduced as the “man who talks faster than the speed of sound.”[25]
On good days, Soberanes’ column offered everything one might expect from an entire newspaper—only in 1,100 words. Much as John Steinbeck said about Herb Caen, Soberanes made a many-faceted character of Petaluma.[26] It wasn’t long before people were calling him the “Walter Winchell of Petaluma.”
That proved a valuable service during the 1950s and 1960s, as Petaluma transformed from an agriculturally based town of 8,000, into a sprawling suburb of more than 30,000. The poultry and dairy industries that had powered the city’s prosperity for half a century were declining due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere, and the downtown business district was being decimated by new shopping malls erected on the east side of town.
A city used to proudly punching above its weight, first as the third busiest river port in the state, and then as the Egg Basket of the World, Petaluma suddenly found itself facing an existential crisis. For Soberanes, that spelled opportunity. Despite his love of old-time Petaluma, he wasn’t interested in living in a museum, he relished the excitement of the new too much.
To help stave off the city’s fear of becoming ordinary, he devoted his column to celebrating all that was eccentric, wonderful, and unique about Petaluma. In doing so, he provided long-time residents with reassurance that their small-town values remained intact, and offered newcomers an introduction to the town’s idiosyncratic nature as well as a path to local acceptance—to be mentioned in Soberanes’ column was to have arrived in the clubby city.
The one thing missing for him was excitement, the sort local promoter Bert Kerrigan had brought to town following World War I, when he put the city’s chicken industry on the map nationally.[27] Kerrigan advised Soberanes not to “put all his eggs in one basket”—while reminiscing about the past was fun, one couldn’t base one’s future on it, as change was inevitable.[28]
One evening in the fall of 1954, Soberanes dropped by Gilardi’s Corner to find two men preparing to engage in a common barroom bout of wristwrestling. As he watched customers lay down their bets and cheer on the two competitors, he had an idea.
Jack Homel, a trainer for the Detroit Tigers baseball team, wintered in Boyes Hot Springs during the off-season and was a frequent Gilardi’s patron. Soberanes had heard him boast many times of having never lost a wristwrestling match, despite having faced hundreds of opponents, including football players, boxers, steel workers, and longshoremen. The same claim was made by Lakeville rancher Oliver Kullberg who, at two-hundred-and-something-pounds, was reputedly the strongest man in Petaluma.
Soberanes proposed to Gilardi they pit Homel and Kullberg against each other in a fundraising match during the annual Sports Show that raised money for the March of Dimes.
On the evening of January 27, 1955, Homel and Kullberg sat down for their match at a round table in the back room of Gilardi’s Corner and clasped hands. For almost three minutes, the two men struggled to best one another before the table reportedly collapsed beneath them. The referee declared the match a draw.
(Photo Steve Farley, courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)
In the days following, wristwrestling became the most talked about sporting event in town. People clamored for more. Happy to oblige, Soberanes, Gilardi, and Homel formed a three-man committee to create an annual wristwrestling tournament, with Soberanes’ cousin, Nettie Rose Caulfield serving the tournament’s secretary.
Within a few years the tournament’s popularity outgrew Gilardi’s Corner, moving first to Hermann Sons Hall and then to the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Building, where it played to thousands of attendees, including a variety of movie stars, public officials, and celebrity athletes recruited by Soberanes.[29] In 1969, ABC’s Wide World of Sports began televising it.[30]
Wristwrestling, Petaluma’s answer to the Calaveras frog jumping contest, became the biggest thing to happen to the town since Bert Kerrigan declared it the Egg Basket of the World.[31]
Its success spawned a more annual events for Soberanes—the Walkathon from Sonoma to Petaluma, the Whiskerino Contest, Petaluma River Rowboat Contest, the Table Tennis Championship Tournament, the Ugly Dog Contest, and the Harry Houdini Séance—but none of them matched the worldwide appeal of the Wristwrestling Tournament.[32]
In 1964, at the age of 42, Soberanes married his longtime girlfriend, 39-year-old Jane Edgerton Turner, and began dividing his time between Jane’s house in Santa Rosa and his mother’s house on East Washington Street.[33]
Like many others, my mother would always stop to give him a lift when she spotted him shuffling along the street. He would climb into the car with his camera bag and pipe, the two of them engaged in a breakneck exchange of gossip as we rode along.
Soberanes was a regular guest at my parents’ cocktail parties, his rapid-fire voice carrying throughout the house to my bedroom. Some nights he would showed up unannounced at the family dinner table, regaling us with a scattershot of news he’d gathered that day mixed with memories of people and places from the old days in Petaluma.
After dinner, my parents retired to the living room to watch television, leaving my sister and me to clean up in the kitchen while Soberanes smoked his pipe and rambled on. Growing up in an Irish family, I was used to colorful raconteurs, but nothing prepared me for his erratic, pinball manner of storytelling—except perhaps watching a Marx brothers movie.
The 1970s marked a turning point in Soberanes’ reporting. After two decades on the beat, many of his reliable tipsters had aged into retirement or the grave. A number of his old haunts were likewise gone, including Gilardi’s Corner, torn down in 1967 to make way for a new bank’s parking lot.[34]
In 1971, he changed the name of his column from “So They Tell Me” to simply “Bill Soberanes,” and increasingly turned his focus to local history and nostalgia, creating a new running feature called “My Fascinating World of People,” which featured a personality profile of someone he had interviewed in the past, along with a photo taken of himself with the subject.[35]
Commonly referred to as “Mr. Petaluma” by this time, he sought to distinguish himself from other columnists by coining the term “peopleologist,” which he defined as a person who studies people from all walks of life. Unlike a traditional journalist who tries to remain invisible behind the camera, a peopleoglogist liked to be in front of the lens, taking part in the action.[36] To underscore the point, he began laying claim to having been photographed with “more famous, infamous, usual and unusual people than anyone in the world.”[37]
In his own way, Soberanes was rebranding himself with the times, which was seeing the rise of a “new journalism” practiced by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, who placed themselves in the stories they reported.
In 1983, he moved back to town with his wife, taking up residency in a house his father had built beside the family home at 421 East Washington Street, which was now occupied by just his sister Margaret, his mother having died a decade before.
Much had changed. East Washington Street was now a four-lane artery connecting the east and west sides of town. The Tivoli Hotel was gone, as was Caulfield’s Meat Market and Thomas Caulfield’s house on the corner. The old block Soberanes had grown up on was now host to a gas station, a carpet store, and a couple of fast food restaurants.
When not making his rounds around town, Soberanes spent his days sitting on the front porch of his house with his pipe and typewriter, entertaining visitors and waving to people as they honked their horns while driving past. When with my mother and I visited him, he was much the same as I remembered him as a boy, jumping around from topic to topic like a pinball. Having created a many-faceted character of Petaluma, I realized he had also created a character of himself. At the end of the day, I wondered if anyone could say they actually knew him beneath the mask.
On January 27, 2003, my mother unexpectedly died of a sudden heart attack. In his column that week noting her passing, Soberanes recalled her working behind the soda fountain at Pete Fundas’ Candy Store, whose slogan was “We hire the prettiest girls in town.”[38]
Four months later, on June 2, 2003, Soberanes died of congestive heart failure. It was 49 years to the date that he published his first column in the Petaluma Argus-Courier. In all those years, he never missed a deadline, including for his final column, a remembrance of his meeting with the comedian Bob Hope.[39] The column’s title, “Thanks for the Memories,” was a fitting farewell for the man known as Mr. Petaluma.
*****
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “News of Our Men and Women in Uniform,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1944;
“Personal Items,” Petaluma Argus-Courier July 15, 1944.
[2] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970.
[3] “A Son Arrived at the Ed Soberanes Home, Petaluma Argus, October 20, 1921; “T.A. Caulfield Called by Death,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 19, 1928.
[4] “Shoe Factory to Pass into History,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1927.
[5] “Searching for the Elusive Howes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 25, 1997.
[6] “E.T. Soberanes Claimed by Death,” P, January 3, 1938; “St. Vincent High School Graduation,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1941; “Billy Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 7, 1943; “California State Assembly Resolution by the Honorable Bill Filantes, M.D., 9th Assembly District; Relative to commending Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.
[7] William Geroux, “The Merchant Marine Were the Unsung Heroes of World War II,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 28, 2016.
[8] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.
[9] Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Landmark Closes Doors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1967; Bill Soberanes, “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 22, 1969.
[10] “People You Should Know,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1937;
[11] “Bill Soberanes: Columnist, Petaluma Booster,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.
[12] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.
[13] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.
[14] Bill Soberanes, “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 22, 1969; Bill Soberanes, “Nettie Rose’s Writing Boosted Morale of WWII Servicemen,” AC, July 2, 1986; “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.
[15] “Thanks Given to Bill Soberanes in Promoting Fire Sub-Station,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 30, 1951.
[16] “Soberanes’ Column Now Three Times a Week,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 6, 1952.
[17] Interview with Lee Torliatt, fellow Press-Democrat columnist in 1954, September 2021; Torliatt reported they were paid 20 cents an inch.
[18] “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1954.
[19] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970; Prescott Sullivan sports column, San Francisco Examiner, January 30, 1963.
[20] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968; “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 31, 1996; “About Bill: Facts and Trivia,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 25, 2003.
[21] Prescott Sullivan sports column, San Francisco Examiner, January 26, 1966.
[22] “How Does Soberanes Manage to Get All Those Photos?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.
[23] “Sunday Column is Missed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 9, 1951; “KAFP Program—1490,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1954.
[24] Bob Wells, “Pop Is 70 but Spry as a Cricket,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 23, 1954.
[25] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970.
[26] “Cool Gray City Found its Voice in Herb Caen,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 2002.
[27] “1925 Egg Day Festival,” Petaluma Argus, August 8, 1925.
[28] “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1984.
[29] “Dimes Parade, Sports Show, Kick Off Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier: October 23, 1954, December 11, 1954, December 15, 1954, January 30, 1962, March 29, 1967, September 28, 1977; “The Early Days of Wristwrestling in Petaluma: How a Game Became a Sport,” ArmwrestlersOnly.com, December 5, 2013; “Dimes parade, Sports Show, Kick Off Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1954;
[30] “Big Show’s Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 1969.
[31] “The City,” Dick Nolan column, San Francisco Examiner, January 22, 1959.
[32] “Remembering Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 18, 2003.
[33] “Marriage Licenses,” San Francisco Examiner, March 13, 1964; DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970
[34] Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Landmark Closes Doors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1967.
[35] “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 29, 1971; “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 16, 1972, February 14, 1973.
[36] Carl Nolte, “Big Put Down at Petaluma,” San Francisco Examiner, February 12, 1967; Bill Soberanes, “A Columnist Reflects,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 20, 1971.
[37] “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 6, 1973.
[38] Bill Soberanes, “Go Fly a Kite,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 19, 2003; “Sweet Memories of Pete Fundas,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 2000; “Bill Sobernes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 1995.
[39] Katie Watts, “Bill ‘Mr. Petaluma’ Soberanes Dies,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 2003; “Thanks for the Memories,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 2003.