LeBaron: Present-day headlines spur trip back through North Coast’s annals

Returning from a week away from my morning paper, I find that I’ve missed a lot of memory joggers - stories that remind me of other stories.

Oh, I know. I can read the newspaper online. And I do, when I’m out of town. But it isn’t the same. You read the headlines, browse the topics. Scroll on down. And miss a whole lot.

It’s not really an acceptable substitute for sitting down with the paper, turning the pages, finding surprises. But, as my offspring will attest, I’m a dinosaur. What do I know?

At any rate, upon return, I spent a quiet morning leafing through the week’s supply of newspapers and I found a number of things I’d missed online that seem to beg for some brief historical commentary.

...

The first was the story about shipwrecks - Staff Writer Guy Kovner’s story about the start of a scientific search for shipwrecks off our coast. Right up a historian’s alley, that one.

I learned about The Oxford, which missed the turn into San Francisco Bay in 1852 and got stuck in the mud near Dillon Beach - a real disaster since the three-master carried 90 barrels of whiskey.

The prospect of learning more about these early maritime disasters around San Francisco Bay holds promise. But the 1,300-square-mile area to be studied doesn’t go far enough north to include The Frolic. I doubt that any of these new sea tales match the impact of that legendary “silk ship” that wrecked on the reef at Point Cabrillo, near present-day Caspar on the Mendocino Coast in 1850.

The Frolic, a sleek, speedy clipper ship heading home to Baltimore to be scuttled after six years in the opium trade between India and China, had an exotic cargo of fine silks and precious Chinese lacquer ware and, inexplicably, about 6,000 bottles of Scottish ale.

What makes the wreck of The Frolic so special came after the shipwreck. Most of the 26 crewman made their way down the coast to Fort Ross and then to San Francisco where they told tales to all who listened about the precious cargo sitting on the reef.

It sounded good to all those unsuccessful gold miners hanging out around the waterfront and they set out in Boston whalers to row up the coast and collect the treasure.

It was the first sight that new Californians had at the forests stretching from the ridges to the sea, from the Russian River north.

The stories they took back to San Francisco sent more boats - and an overland ox team with a portable sawmill - and the Timber Rush that began the settlement of the North Coast was underway.

...

There was also a business section story on wine industry worries about the next generation, known to demographers as millennials - a sociologist’s shorthand for people currently between 18 and 34 years of age.

Is it possible that other “adult beverages,” like beer, hard cider, fancy and flavored vodkas and designer bourbons, will tickle their palates more than wine?

History tells us that this could be a real concern. The great lesson of Prohibition is not only that it was a truly dumb idea, but also that its effects lingered long after Prohibition had run its course. And I’m not talking about the rise of Al Capone. I’m talking about the dramatic change in drinking habits.

Between 1919 and 1932, the younger generation of Americans - the “millennials” of their day - abandoned the habits of their parents and grandparents, many of them immigrants, who considered wine as food, a part of the evening meal.

The kids went with the times, to speakeasies and house parties where high balls and cocktails were the drinks of choice; to bathtub gin (about as unappetizing a term as one can imagine); to smuggled Canadian whisky. Forget wine. If they tell us we can’t have it, we want the stronger stuff. We’ll show ’em.

Show ’em they did. The older wine-drinkers died off and the cocktail party survived.

It took 50 years and more for the medical and health science community to start to talking about how wine was better for us than booze and for a phenomenon nicknamed “The French Paradox,” which set forth the premise that wine - red wine, particularly - might prevent heart attacks, slow the aging process, help us live longer. Only then did wine experience a full-fledged renaissance and become the social drink of choice.

Can we pull another paradox out of our chapeaux?

...

The renaissance of the railroad is an iron horse of a different color. The trains left us at Prohibition because we had thriving automobile and oil industries calling the shots.

We ripped up the rails, built more freeway lanes and ever so slowly faced up to the possibility that we might have been too hasty.

Now, 80 years later, the train, one single train, is on track to come back.

The current news is that city officials are unhappy with the plans for the rail stops. Old-time trains stopped just about anywhere there was someone to pick up or load freight. The new ones will be a sleeker, faster, more important sort of trains. Only scheduled stops. And, if you don’t have a station, you make do with a platform with a roof.

That’s the squabble. SMART - Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit - doesn’t have money to build stations. It doesn’t even have the money to get to some stations that are ready and waiting for them, like Healdsburg and Cloverdale.

San Rafael is not happy. Rohnert Park is not happy. But most of us just want to hear that whistle down the line. We await the train.

But we cannot help but be reminded of the stories told about the first time the trains came to Santa Rosa. It was 1870.

The citizens had been waiting for 15 years, hearing one plan after another. “Paper railroads,” they called them. Lots of maps and even investment certificates, but no train whistle. They had a depot all ready and waiting. (Not the stone depot we have now but an earlier, wood-frame one at the end of Third Street.)

The San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad began service between Petaluma and Santa Rosa in October of 1870 and, on the last day of the year, the first through passage (by boat and train) from San Francisco arrived.

It was an excursion train filled with San Francisco and state officials. Sadly, the railroad forgot to mention that they were coming.

Santa Rosans were embarrassed. The visitors had expected to be greeted with food and festivities. They were hungry. But good-natured, according to railroad historian Gilbert Kneiss. “The famished visitors scampered down the road and across the fields toward town to forage for eatables among the shops.”

And the moral of this story? Better have vending machines on the platforms.

...

Finally, how about Petaluma being ranked the top “fall travel destination” by Harper’s Bazaar magazine?

That’s No.1 - to Paris’s No. 10.

My, my, my. Once glorified as The World’s Egg Basket, nicknamed Chickaluma by Sonomans and raided periodically by Santa Rosa High marauders who painted the giant white leghorn at the southern end of town orange and black, Petaluma has become a niche in the world’s tourist market.

Not everyone sees the logic in it. “They don’t have chickens in Paris,” said a puzzled Parisian expat who lives in Santa Rosa - of course.

But the headline on that story was perfection. WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PETALUMA was the masterful work of Local Editor Lisa Ostroski. Headline writers don’t get enough credit.

For those beer-drinking millennials who don’t get it, the reference is from the film “Casablanca.” Bogie and Bergman. Classy. Like Petaluma.