Archive for the ‘Looking Back in Time’ Category

First American Margarita?

Friday, December 11th, 2009

MargaritaCould the first American version of the margarita truly have been served on the current site of La Jolla United Methodist Church? That’s the story recounted on the wall of the newly inaugurated Bird Rock History Museum (located within the Bird Rock Coffee Roasters facility at 5627 La Jolla Boulevard).

The brief account cites a 2006 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as one source for the claim, but a little online sleuthing reveals that the Post-Gazette account appeared just days after a lengthy obituary for 91-year-old “margarita pioneer” Albert Hernandez Sr. was published  in the San Diego Union-Tribune.  As obit writer Jack Williams told the story, Hernandez in 1947 had been working as a bartender at the La Plaza restaurant, which occupied a mission-style building on La Jolla Boulevard. (Originally used as a station on the trolley line connecting downtown San Diego with La Jolla, the building later housed the restaurant and an arts and crafts school, then in 1953 became the home of the church that occupies the much-expanded complex today.)

According to the obituary, Hernandez’s boss in 1947 spent a lot of time in Mexico and told his bartender about a drink being served in Rancho La Gloria, “midway on the old road that connected Tijuana with Rosarito Beach.” Supposedly the bartender there, one Carlos “Danny” Herrera, had concocted a drink for an actress named Marjorie King, who claimed to be allergic to all hard liquor except for tequila. In her honor, he named it the margarita.

Hernandez then began trying  to reproduce the drink, as his boss recalled it, and eventually settled on a formula of 1 ounce of Jose Cuervo Gold tequila, a half-ounce of Cointreau, and an ounce of fresh lime juice. Originally mixed with crushed ice, he later began processing the ingredients in a blender. In a 1986 interview, Hernandez credited the restaurant owner with coming up with the idea of dipping the glass rim in salt, adding that by the mid-1950s, every bar in San Diego was serving some variation on this theme.

Alternative claims for the margarita’s origins do exist, but enough of them include a connection to Herrera or at least Baja that I find it at least possible that the drink’s US incarnation did first take shape at the La Jolla location.Bird Rock Museum.jpg

Although it’s a bit of a stretch to call the new historical repository a “museum” (it consists of a number of large posters that have been mounted on the southern interior wall of the coffeehouse), it includes many other interesting tidbits, particularly for Bird Rock residents. Particularly charming is the chronicle of the white-washed stones that once announced the name of the community on one of the local hillsides. The only problem is that it can be impossible to read the posters, if patrons are sitting at the tables next to them.  But that’s also an incentive to come back.

St. Diego

Friday, November 13th, 2009

DiegoalcalaWhy isn’t this blog called Travels in San Miguel?  That’s what Juan Cabrillo named the big bay and the place around it when he landed here in 1542.  But 60 years later, when explorer Sebastian Vizcaino arrived, he renamed everything San Diego, after the fellow pictured to the right. Although he’d been dead for almost 140 years, St. Diego de Alcala had recently captured European imaginations.  Indeed, one of Vizcaino’s ships was named after him.  Here’s why.

A humble Franciscan monk who never learned to read or write, Diego’s holiness and charity evidently impressed those who knew him.  According to local historian Thomas Case, who wrote about the Spanish monk in a 1988 issue of the Journal of San Diego History, some had even begun to consider him a saint, and his burial place drew sick and lame individuals seeking miraculous cures. But Rome didn’t sanction any of this until after what happened to the 17-year-old son of King Phillip II of Spain.

Named Carlos, the prince was “an infirm and moody lad who neglected his studies and preferred to spend a good part of his day in bed,” according to Case. Carlos also “delighted in amorous escapades.” While attempting to sneak out of the palace one night, he fell down a rickety staircase, landed on his head, and fell into a deep coma. Even the best doctors couldn’t do anything to relieve the pressure on his brain, so the king ordered Fray Diego’s coffin to be opened and his body put in bed with the unconscious boy. “The following day,” Case writes, “the prince awoke and told of a dream in which he had seen the Franciscan friar holding a cane cross in his hand. Soon after, he was up and around, the beneficiary, many thought, of a miracle.”

Not long thereafter both Phillip and the prince began petitioning Rome to recognize  Diego.  But more than just the creepy miracle deserves credit for the monk’s eventual canonization. As Case explains, powerful political forces also were at work; the timing was right for Rome and Spain to team up against the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. In fact Diego’s canonization ceremonies unfolded in Rome as the Spanish Armada sailed toward the English Channel, and later celebrations in Spain took a bit of the sting out of the Spanish fleet’s defeat.

The good vibes associated with Diego must have persisted a dozen years later, when Vizcaino was building and naming the ships for his exploratory voyage. When he landed just two days before San Diego feast day, the temptation to rename “San Miguel” as San Diego must have been irresistible. Later Diego’s feast day was changed to November 13, and although I’ve read one account that says it was later changed back to November 12 (the anniversary of the saint’s death), both the website Catholic Online, the local Catholic diocese, and Case say it’s on the 13th. So I say, happy feast day, St. Diego!

 

Itchy Camouflage

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

ConvairOne of the more prominent landmarks along I-5 as you pass Old Town heading south toward downtown San Diego is the jagged-roofed complex that now houses the Navy’s SpaWar (Space and Naval Warfare) center. Today the Navy works on tactical and non-tactical information technology within these buildings, but during World War II this was where the Consolidated Aircraft Company (Convair) assembled some of America’s most powerful war machines.  At a San Diego Professional Tour Guide Association meeting the other night, Mike Ryan (a former SDPTGA president and local writer who served in the Navy during the Vietnam War), talked about San Diego’s military history and included a tidbit about the plant’s wartime operation I’ll probably think of every time I drive past.

Ryan mentioned that the locals were so concerned about the possibility of a Japanese air strike against the aircraft factory that workers hung acres of chicken wire over the building roofs. Then they glued chicken feathers to the wire for camouflage. Neither Ryan nor Lucinda Eddy, the local historian who in 1993 wrote a detailed article for the Journal of San Diego History about the war years, mentioned what the chicken feathers were supposed to simulate. (Why not use burlap?) And indeed the feathers proved problematic, harboring fleas and lice that infested the workers below, until delousing and insecticidal spraying ended the infestations.

Far more impressive was the staggering productivity achieved by the Convair workers under their feathery cover. By the beginning of 1944, they were cranking out 11 B-24 “Liberator” bombers every day, ultimately building 6,724 of them at the San Diego plant. (A significant number of the assembly-line workers were women.)

 

Dead Man’s Point

Monday, September 28th, 2009

plague-closeupOne of the most grisly historic sites in downtown San Diego is also one of the least known. Even worse, the inconspicuous plaque that marks the location of Punta de los Muertos (Dead Man’s Point) is almost certainly wrong. That’s too bad; the true story is much more interesting.

The plaque is mounted on a stone wall on the southeast corner of Market Street and Harbor Drive, at the edge of the now-abandoned property that once housed  San Diego Police Department headquarters. It announces the putative burial site of some of the sailors of Juan Pantoja’s 1782 expedition to survey San Diego Bay. (Pantoja used the Spanish name Punta de los Muertos on the map produced by his expedition.) But local historian Harry Crosby points out that Pantoja’s log never mentions any of his sailors dying, an event that on his small ship would scarcely have been overlooked. Instead Crosby is convinced the site is the last resting place of some of the first Europeans to set foot in San Diego.

No one knows more about the earliest San Diego settlers than Crosby. A one-time high school science teacher turned photographer, Crosby in the early 1970s began documenting Baja California’s extensive network of cave paintings. In the course of those explorations, he became fascinated by the descendants of the peninsula’s early Spanish settlers, and research into their lives led him to even deeper historical documentation of the region. He became caught up in the question of just who is buried at Dead Man’s Point while writing his 2002 Gateway to Alta California. But because his findings lay outside the scope of that work, he wrote them up for the San Diego Journal of History. That article’s publication is pending.

Crosby has based his current opinion of what happened on his meticulous review of the eyewitness accounts of the 1769 expedition that led to San Diego’s settlement, in conjunction with the earliest maps of the bayfront. Those documents make it clear, he’s convinced, that the two ships that anchored in the bay in April of 1769 — well before the arrival of Fr. Juniperso Serra and the scouting party that preceded him — established only one camp ashore. It was located just north of the point that once existed at the foot of what today is Market Street.  (This is all a bit hard to imagine now that so much of the bayfront has been filled in.)

The evidence is indisputable that four sailors on the two ships died while at sea, and numerous other crew members were gravely ill. Many more died in the weeks that followed, 2 to 3 per day, according to one credible witness. It would have made sense to bury them right next to the camp, Crosby points out. With so many men weakened and no pack animals, transporting the bodies any farther would not have made sense. The point would have thus acquired its macabre moniker right at the start of the fledgling settlement’s existence. And when Pantoja arrived on his surveying mission 13 years later and used that designation on his map, he would have been simply following the local nomenclature.

Crosby, by the way, isn’t certain it was scurvy alone that fwideshotelled the unfortunate sailors. Their illness, referred to as escorbuto or loanda in the ships’ logs, likely was due to dietary deficiencies beyond just Vitamin C, he believes. Bacterial or fungal contamination of their food supply is also conceivable.  The crews had only flour, beans, and dried meat to sustain them — for 59 days in the case of one of the ships and 110 days for the other. And their ordeal wasn’t the worst experienced by the sailors who set off from the tip of Baja California on the mission to create a settlement in San Diego.  A third vessel disappeared at sea without a trace.

Ft. What?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
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Colonial Revival duplex

Ask a dozen randomly chosen San Diegans the location of Ft. Rosecrans or — tougher still — Ft. Guijarros, and if more than one could come up with the answer, I’d be surprised. The irony is that anyone who’s ever gazed out over San Diego Bay from downtown has looked right at it. More ironic is the fact that the land today is some of the most scenic and historic in Southern California. But the Navy owns and occupies it, and in these security-conscious times that means most folks most of the time can’t set foot there.

I was happy to take advantage of an exception last week, when the Navy permitted the Save Our Heritage Organization, in conjunction with the Ft. Guijarros Museum Foundation, to present a public tour on the Point Loma base. Ron May, chairman of the Foundation’s board of directors, served as the hugely knowledgeable guide for the two-hour-plus outing. May was the archeologist and historian who for 15 years led the excavations of Ft. Guijarros, the fortifications established by the Spanish in 1796 just a few paces away from where Cabrillo had landed at Ballast Point (”guijarros” means “pebbles”) The archaeological dig ended in 1996, and there’s not a lot today to mark the dig site, so the tour didn’t stop there. But we did visit the laboratory where Foundation volunteers have since processed and archived hundreds of thousands of historic artifacts.

Not all have come from the old Spanish fort. Some are from the nearby location where the Packard Whaling Company from 1865-1880 slaughtered gray whales and rendered their fat into oil. Other items – ceramics, toys, pismo clam shells and more – came from the fishing camp inhabited by Chinese immigrants in the 1860s and early 1870s. After being recorded and bagged and placed in archival boxes, all the artifacts are stored in a climate-controlled bunker that once served as the military’s hospital morgue.

The tour also took us to three other intriguing places on the base:

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Pressed tin ceiling
– The row of Colonial Revival buildings. This is a style popularized by the 1893 world expo in Chicago. Gabled dormers and roof ends, corbelled chimneys, classical porch columns, ornamental pressed-tin ceilings, and symetrically balanced windows and doors are among its distinguishing elements. The tour group got to visit one of the largest officers’ houses built in this style, and May pointed out two other large buildings that he says represent the finest examples in all of San Diego.

– Battery Wilkeson, the oldest standing US military battery in San Diego, was built in 1898 and once trained four 10-inch rifles on San Diego Bay to discourage would-be invaders.  The guns are gone now, but the 32-foot-thick walls studded with huge boulder’s from San Diego’s backcountry are still impressive.

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Artillery Ordnance Repair Facility

– All sorts of guns and mortars were set up on Pt. Loma over the decades, and only once or twice did any of them ever fire upon an enemy.  But the soldiers sometimes practiced with them (shattering windows as far away as downtown). To repair and maintain the enormous 16-inch rifles installed in underground bunkers during World War II, the Army built a repair facility equipped with huge, ceiling-mounted cranes that could move tons of equipment. Never before opened to the public, we got to visit this barn-like structure. Its rich mahogany-colored rough-hewn wooden ceiling is oddly beautiful.

Being on the base feels like stepping back in time, so it seems fitting that another opportunity to visit it will be a World-War-II-themed swing dance from 7 to 11 p.m. Saturday, November 14. A fundraiser for the Foundation, this will be held in the base’s Argonaut Hall. May says when the dance was first held, last year, people came from as far as San Francisco wearing 1940s military uniform costumes to play the part of Air Corps pilots, nurses, and soldiers, as well as civilians from the period. (Although the Foundation’s website is still under construction, May can be contacted through his history consulting company, Legacy 106.)

Two other opportunities to visit the base will occur from 3 to 6 p.m. September 19, when the Foundation holds its annual Fort Guijarros Fiesta fundraiser (authentic Spanish dancing and paella), and then on Sunday, September 27, when the annual  re-enactment of Cabrillo’s landing will take place starting at 1 p.m. For that and the accompanying festivities (music, dancing, children’s activities and demonstrations, and foods of Native Americans, Mexico, Portugal and Spain), the base will be open to the public with admission from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Our Plymouth Rock

Friday, July 10th, 2009
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Park Ranger Parish Rye

The locations where the first English immigrants settled on the east coast of North America are a big deal in Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts. But the site where the first Europeans settled on the west coast of North America gets no respect. Anyone who goes on the San Diego Insider Tours Time Travel Adventure gets to visit that historic spot, but otherwise it’s not so easy to experience it. That’s even truer now that budgetary constraints have forced the the San Diego Historical Society to suspend regular visiting hours at its Junipero Serra Museum, located just up the hill in Presidio Park from where Fr. Junipero Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcala almost 240 years ago (on July 16, 1769).

Lots of people mistakenly assume that the museum originally housed that first California mission. In fact, it was designed by architect William Templeton Johnson in Mission Revival style and built in 1929, a gift to the city from local philanthropist George Marston. All the original settlement buildings disappeared long ago, after the site was abandoned in 1830.  The ruins have been excavated at various times by several archeological teams, but the dig sites have always been buried to preserve them.

To appreciate the importance of this place, it thus takes a knowledgeable guide — like San Diego Park Ranger Parish Rye. Once a month, Rye gives a free hour-long tour of the original settlement. I was the only one who showed up for last month’s offering. But even for an audience of one, Rye deftly conjured up what life was like when several hundred people made their home on this hillside overlooking the San Diego River. Although the earliest missionaries left the site just 5 years after arriving and moved upriver to better land and a more predictable water source, the soldiers of the presidio (the fort) remained. Eventually the Spanish government permitted wives and children to join them. Rye can point out where the unmarried soldiers quarters were, the foundation of the dwelling inhabited by governor Gaspar de Portolá (He lived on the site now marked by a tall cross built from some of the settlement’s original adobe bricks), and a lot more.

Presidio Park is also an important botanical repository, and Rye knows a lot about what it includes. He’s been working to compile a comprehensive plant index for several years. His next free tour will be given this coming Sunday at 1 p.m. Find him near the museum doors.

 

Marshall South Online

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Few of us have had as flamboyantly romantic a vision as Marshal South. Around 1930, with the US sinking ever deeper inmarshallto Depression, South and his young wife Tanya packed their few possessions into their Model T Ford, drove to the desert east of San Diego, found a mountaintop that appealed to them, and decided to live on it, as simply and naturally as the native Americans who once preceded them. They called the place Ghost Mountain and within five years they’d constructed a compact adobe home that they christened Yaquitepec (after the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico.)

In the years that followed, the couple had three children who grew up naked, home-schooled by their parents and playing with lizards and packrats instead of conventional toys. Amidst the backbreaking work of trying to maintain a household in the absence of any modern conveniences (or even water), Tanya wrote poetry, and in 1939 Marshall chronicled the family’s grand experiment in the Saturday Evening Post. He later launched a series of articles in Desert Magazine that throbbed with enthusiasm for the primitive lifestyle, and he delighted the magazine’s readers with tales of the family’s ingenious adaptations to their harsh environment. But the adventures came to an end in 1946 when Tanya filed for divorce and moved the children back to the city. Two years later Marshall died of heart disease at the age of 59.

Today Ghost Mountain is a part of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and although most of Yaquitepec has melted back into the earth, traces of the family’s peculiar domicile remain in the site. It’s a popular hiking destination, and for anyone interested in learning about the man who put it on the map, a rich new resource has just become available in the form of a website, www.marshalsouth.com.

The site was created by Diana Lindsay. A co-founder of the El Cajon-based Sunbelt Publications, Lindsay has long been transfixed by the saga of the South family. She mentioned it in her 1973 history of the desert state park (published by Copley Books). Eighteen years later, I myself wrote a much more extensive account of the story for the Reader, “The Hermits of Ghost Mountain.”  But Lindsay felt there was still more to be unearthed, and in 2001 shdianabooke plunged into several years of serious sleuthing that culminated in her 2005 book, Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment in Primitive Living.

Hardcore Southophiles can pay a $9.95 annual membership, available through the site, that gives them unlimited access to published and unpublished articles, novels, poems, artwork, and photographs by and pertaining to the sage of the desert. But the site also offers a lot of excellent free material, including two rare film clips of the South family, directions to and maps of the area, and extensive information about the family’s experience.

I have to chuckle at the thought of Marshal, who heaped so much scorn on the trappings of modernity, having his own little homestead in cyberpace. At the same time, I’m pretty sure he would have loved it.

 

Time Travelers

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Alright, alright. We’ll concede that the San Diego Inside Tours Time Travel Adventure probably isn’t as… cinematic as Will Ferrell’s latest flick. But we think it’s at least as entertaining.  And it did get us a spot on one of the morning news shows this week.

100 Years of Positive Spin

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

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We’re still a half-dozen years from the celebrations that will doubtless erupt in Balboa Park to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition (the influential event that, among other things, made the park what it is today). But one institution within the park is fast approaching centenarian status: the classic wood carousel located at Zoo Place and Park Boulevard. It was built in 1910 by the Herschell-Spillman company in North Tonawanda, New York, and the current owners aren’t sure what month it was completed and shipped west (to an LA amusement center called Luna Park). But I figure if that happened in the spring, then this will be the 100th summer the old merry-go-round has been giving riders a mesmerizing whirl.

Like the carousel’s exact date of construction, the record of when it made its way south to San Diego has been lost. The 1915 Expo included a carousel, but that one may have been a Dentzel that was later moved to San Francisco. (The San Diego Union-Tribune’s critic-at-large, Welton Jones, reported in a 1993 article that he’d heard this from “the national carousel grapevine.”) Virginia Long, a long-time owner of the carousel, believed that an Englishman by the name of H.D. Simpson bought it from the Luna Park operators and operated it periodically both at Coronado’s Tent City and in Balboa Park during the mid- to late-19-teens and the beginning of the 1920s, according to Jones’ story.

I find it mind-boggling to imagine anyone back in those pre-18-wheeler days moving the carousel anywhere with any regularity. Unlike the merry-go-rounds designed for today’s county fairs, the local Herschell-Spillman was never intended to be portable. It’s what’s known as a “park” carousel – meant to occupy a space on a permanent basis.  By 1922, it had settled in near the site where the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center stands today. Most of its riders then were adults, passing the time while waiting for one of the trolleys that ran through the park back then, Bill Brown recently told me. In 1968, the merry-go-round moved to its current location where Brown oversees its operation in the decagonal building that looks “like a Bavarian farm building,” in the words of the current owners.

Brown isn’t one of them, though he has participated in a big chunk of the carousel’s history. A friendly fellow now in his early 50s, he first applied for a job there on his 16th birthday, and he still seems to enjoy working the mechanisms that bring the grand old contraption to life. He loosens a hand brake than slowly positions the clutch arm to match the speed of the central wheel.  This takes about 80 seconds. Then he flips a little 3-minute egg timer that the carousel’s operators have been using since the 1940s. Once the grains have run down, it takes another 45 seconds to apply the brake and stop the rotation — making the total ride a little more than six minutes long. “I think that’s relatively long for merry-go-rounds,” Brown told me.

The Balboa Park carousel stands out in other ways. It’s one of only a handful that’s been honored with a Historic Carousel Award by the National Carousel Association. The military band organ (similar to a player piano) near its center can still be coaxed into emitting jolly carousel music, though the antique music sheets read by the device tend to jam when the weather isn’t just right. (Music CDs do the job at other times.) The Balboa Park carousel is also one of only about a dozen carousels in the world that still tantalyzes riders with a brass ring. (Snatching it successfully earns the snatcher a free ride.)

Because of the advantage conferred by their height, the ride’s giraffes tend to be favored rose-horse-edited.jpgby clever children. “But the stork’s seat is pretty high too,” Brown confided. “A lot of people don’t notice that.” He told me that the “lead horse,” decorated with roses, has been a perennial favorite of little girls, while little boys often make a dash for the lion. But the on-board menagerie (which was hand-carved by European craftsmen who were paid $2 for a 10-hour workday) includes something for every taste: 12 jumping horses, 15 standing ones, a camel, 2 dogs and 2 cats, a dragon, 2 frogs, 2 giraffes, a goat, 2 mules, 2 ostriches, 2 pigs, 2 roosters, 1 tiger, 2 zebras, 3 chariots, and the stork and lion.

The merry-go-round is still on winter hours, operating from around 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. weekends. But the summer schedule will begin June 15 and continue till September 5. Rides cost $2 each or $10 will get you 6.  

 

Black History, SD-style

Monday, October 27th, 2008

black-historical-museum-edited.jpgThink of American cities with robust African-American communities, and San Diego probably doesn’t spring first to mind. But maybe it should. The Black Historical Society of San Diego boasts of being the largest such society in the US, judged by their collections, special events, and diverse holdings. In June the society also unveiled the  first museum here dedicated to San Diego’s rich African-American history. Open every daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., it’s well worth a visit.

Although small, the permanent exhibition installed on the museum’s walls communicates a number of intriguing tidbits. Arranged chronologically, it points out that, at least mythologically, the  first inhabitants of the “island” of California were black Amazons “decked in gold and pearls with strong bodies and ardent courage” and governed by a Queen named Califia (aka Calafia). The 1510 Spanish romance novel that recounted all this helped motivate the first Spanish conquistadors.califa.jpg

From the exhibit, you can also learn who was the very first African-American to settle here (a slave otter-hunter who jumped ship in 1804), how the African-American governer of Mexican California (Pio Pico) enriched himself (by giving himself huge land grants that included much of what’s now Camp Pendleton and Coronado), and what percentage of black San Diegans had moved to Logan Heights from downtown by 1960 (82%).

Memorable African-American pioneers including Nate Harrison, who lived to 101 and spent much of his life in a rustic cabin on Mt. Palomar, and Fred Coleman, who kicked off San Diego’s gold rush in 1869, receive attention, as do the glory years in the 1920s, when parts of San Diego’s downtown were known as the Harlem of the West.

The latter is also the subject of a 45-minute walking tour given every Saturday at 11 ($5). Other regular tours include a monthly African American City Tour. The society also hosts a half dozen festivals, including the San Diego Black Film Festival and the Julian Delta Blues Festival. A tiny gift store in the new museum is a good place to look for historical documents and Afro-centric art and figurines. For more information, call 619/232-1480.