LeBaron: The “Jewel City” and Santa Rosa’s red-letter day

San Francisco officials threw a switch this week, turning spotlights on the tower of the Ferry Building to make it shine as it did in 1915, when such a show of electric light was something new and wonderful to behold.

The historic building at the foot of Market Street will hold that glow for the rest of the year, just one of many steps taken to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

As my mother liked to say, “Nothing gets done around the house until you’re having a party.” We see it now on a regular basis - the Olympics, a Super Bowl, every once in a while a World’s Fair. The cities of the world clean up, build anew, get ready for a party.

San Francisco started planning in 1904, when construction began on the canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the long-awaited link between the seas. This great leap forward in transportation, city leaders felt, would firmly establish San Francisco as the most important port city on the Pacific Coast and, more esoterically, “The Paris of the West.”

But on its way to its destiny, San Francisco fell down. The earthquake and fire of 1906 made a lot of people think twice about a party. But no natural disaster, not even a war in Europe, would derail this celebration. The Panama Canal opened in August 1914 and, In February of ‘15, the fabulous “Jewel City” San Francisco had constructed by the bay, opened to the public.

(“San Francisco’s Jewel City” is the title of Marin County author Laura Ackley’s book on the PPIE, which she will discuss on March 22 at the Sonoma County Historical Society’s annual luncheon at the Flamingo Hotel. Reservations required.)

Impressive displays

It was something all right. It comprised more than 600 acres of bay front, from architect Bernard Maybeck’s elaborate Palace of Fine Arts to an area - much of it landfill - that is now the upscale district known as the Marina. Some 19 million people attended the exposition. They not only celebrated the canal, they saw the future.

Thomas Watson placed the first transcontinental telephone call from the exposition, calling, of course, his boss, Alexander Graham Bell, with a never-before-link to Washington, D.C. for a chat with President Woodrow Wilson.

Ford Motors set up a small assembly line producing shiny black 1915 Model Ts. Despite the Gay Nineties-style frivolity of the entertainment “Zone,” there was serious business, reaching out to the nations of the world, beyond Europe, with special attention to Japan and China.

Kanaye Nagasawa of Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove Ranch was an unofficial representative of the Empire of Japan in Northern California and was enlisted by the Japanese government to assist in the installation of its exhibit, a task for which he was later awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the emperor.

Former Santa Rosan Abigail Markwyn’s new book entitled “Empress San Francisco,” explores the role Asians played in the PPIE and the rise of the immigration and trade area now known as the Pacific Rim.

(Abby will talk about it all Monday night in a sold-out program at the Sonoma County Museum, co-sponsored by the Friends of the Sonoma County Library.)

Burbank gets top billing

Except for Nagasawa’s role and the scramble to provide appropriate proof of our agricultural wonders, Sonoma County’s part in the exposition was not a huge one. Much of the attention directed here came to “favorite son” Luther Burbank, who had achieved national fame for his horticultural wonders. He was honored at a “Burbank Day” in July and there was a “Sonoma County Day” in March, shared with Humboldt and Mendocino. This was hardly adequate for Santa Rosans, who had planned (although it never came to pass) a flashing electric sign near the exposition reading “Visit Santa Rosa, Home of Luther Burbank.”

But this was a “cow county” barely 50,000 people on the fringes of the Bay Area, with a bridge over the Golden Gate still 22 years in the future.

Santa Rosa, fighting its own earthquake recovery battles, had perhaps 8,000 residents. A promised paved road between Petaluma and Santa Rosa didn’t get built in time to bring in the outside world. In fact, in 1916, Ernest Finley, the editor of The Press Democrat, complained bitterly in an editorial: “Very few tourists got to this part of the country. They couldn’t.”

Famous visitors

There were, however, some very famous “tourists“ who found Santa Rosa in the PPIE year.

When a trio of the most famous men in the United States, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone - he of the first inflatable tire - came to the exposition in October, Burbank, who was a self-described “long-distance friend” of Edison was named by the PPIE committee to head a delegation of distinguished Californians who met the men and their families in Sacramento and escorted them to San Francisco.

Luther, who was not an excitable guy, was excited at the prospect of a visit with Edison, whom he said “has shed more light on the Earth, expedited business and made home life more comfortable than any other man who has ever trod this planet.”

Edison was equally complimentary to Burbank. Reporter - and state Senator - Herbert Slater put it succinctly in The Press Democrat, saying that the Wizard of Menlo Park was meeting The Plant Wizard.

Arrangements were made for the party to come to Santa Rosa to visit Burbank on the following Friday. The telegram that Burbank sent to Slater said “No bands. No racket. They wish to come quietly.”

He might as well have saved the price of Western Union. Walter Nagle, secretary of the relatively new Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, was not about to let the visit pass unnoticed. He had two private Pullman cars barged to Sausalito to meet the ferry and he borrowed the finest automobiles in town to meet the train.

The request for “no fanfare” ignored, cheering, waving crowds lined the streets and school children - by special invitation from Edison - assembled outside Burbank’s home on Tupper Street at Santa Rosa Avenue (think City Hall today).

Reliving memories

One of the advantages of growing old in one town is the opportunity to have known people born long before your time and to record for posterity what they remembered.

Attorney Charles DeMeo told me, 30 years ago, that he was 7 years old and went by himself from Lincoln School to stand outside Burbank’s house and watch it all. (Ironically, 11 years later, DeMeo, working his way through college on his way to becoming a lawyer, a developer and a philanthropist, would take a job digging Burbank’s grave.)

Contractor Ed Lindsey and his wife, Ethel, remember marching in straight lines from their schools - Ed from Fremont, Ethel (Walker) from Burbank. Edison shook children’s hands, including Ethel’s. Burbank she remembered as a gentleman who “always tipped his hat to little girls. He didn’t just touch it; he picked it up. To show that we were important.”

Burgess Titus was 11 years old and came from Burbank School, right up Tupper Street (think Sonoma Avenue today) to watch the whole group come out on the porch to wave to the crowd.

The big press cameras with their mighty flashes recorded the trio wading into the mob of kids. There were motion picture cameras, too, and the cameramen asked them to go back and walk down the path several times, causing Ford to say that he was “beginning to feel like a politician” and Edison to joke “Darn those movies,” which delighted the crowd because they all knew they were his invention.

Edison later sent every school in Santa Rosa and Sebastopol phonographs - gramophones, they were in those days - and Helen Finley Comstock remembered Burbank coming to Santa Rosa High School to make the presentation of Mr. Edison’s talking machine.

It was one red-letter day in Santa Rosa, one that produced as many memories as did the visits to San Francisco’s “Jewel City” to see the wonders of the world.