LeBaron: Odd life of Robert Ripley was colored by Santa Rosa connections

The story of Robert Leroy Ripley’s remarkable life, in all its quirkiness, was the subject of public television’s highly regarded “American Experience” series last Tuesday. Viewers were offered footage of the “Believe it or Not” creator’s casket coming home to Santa Rosa for burial in 1949. But the hourlong documentary that preceded the graveyard scene was strictly what the name implies - a national experience.

Ripley’s “Santa Rosa Experience” - what we in the trade refer to as the “local angle” - was treated in the TV production as nothing more than before-and-after brackets around the very strange life story of that buck-toothed kid from Orchard Street who created a daily newspaper slideshow with people and animals and things he preferred to call odd instead of freakish.

But Ripley clearly considered his hometown more important than the place the show characterized as “a dusty, frontier town north of San Francisco.”

Ripley’s Santa Rosa boyhood and lifelong connections can be found in The Press Democrat’s microfilm archives, in the multiple stories of his life written by Mike Pardee, a reporter who knew him and was afforded the honor, along with the lawyer-brothers, Charles and Nick DeMeo, of accompanying his body from the train terminal in Oakland to lie in state at Welti’s Funeral Parlor at the corner of Fourth and E streets.

(The DeMeos had experience with the funerals of the famous. In 1926, working their way through school, they dug the grave of Luther Burbank. Consider this a footnote. We’re talking Ripley here.)

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In the last days of May and the first of June of ’49, Pardee assembled everything there was to say about Ripley’s Santa Rosa.

He interviewed classmates from Lewis School and Santa Rosa High School where Ripley was a member of the class of 1908 but left before graduation when his father died and he took a job polishing tombstones at Kinslow’s monument company. Kenwood poet Nell Griffith Wilson was a special friend who cherished many of the drawings he had given her, including one depicting the manner in which he was stung by bees on her father’s ranch (today’s Griffith Woods) on Vine Hill Road. Clara Black, one of the Van Wormer sisters from Lewis School days, shared a drawing of the Madonna and Child he had given her.

Each had a story to tell to reporter Pardee about the Leroy Ripley they called Roy or Rip. Many could tell of their visits to his palatial Long Island estate on trips to New York.

(Another footnote: Pardee, who stayed on the PD staff until the 1960s, shared that 1949 front page space with another reporter who didn’t stick around as long. His name was Frank Herbert and he left Santa Rosa and journalism behind with a flourish when he sold his science fiction novel, a book entitled “Dune.”)

Roy Ripley played baseball on school and town teams with many of the men who became Santa Rosa’s policemen, judges, hop brokers and community leaders. They recalled him as an outstanding pitcher, second basemen or shortstop, depending on who was asked. Nell Wilson remembered that he earned $6 a game playing shortstop for the town team. Everyone agreed that what the boy they knew as “Rip” really wanted to be was a professional baseball player.

All of his school friends, including Wilson and Harriet Parrish Barnes, who would become a well-known radio personality on KSRO, remembered that he spent his study time drawing in the margins of math problems left undone and essays unwritten.

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None knew this better than his English teacher, Frances O’Meara. She was the sister-in-law of Frank Doyle, the paternalistic banker who guided the city out of the ruins of the 1906 earthquake and established a trust that still provides millions in scholarships to Sonoma County students. O’Meara was something of a legend in her own right - a tiny woman who was a stern taskmaster.

Despairing of getting the Ripley boy to write his reflections of the classics, she allowed him to illustrate them instead. His drawings from “The Iliad” and “Idylls of the King” were classics in their own right and led him to success as an artist in the school’s literary magazine, known as The Porcupine. Sadly, those early drawings were lost when the old high school on Humboldt Street burned in the early 1920s.

He never forgot the debt he owed Miss O’Meara for recognizing his talent and encouraging him. In 1932, on his way home from one of his trips to the Far East, he visited the school and paid her tribute in a full assembly, presenting her with a rare and expensive jade and gold necklace. Later, when he learned she was coming to New York on her way to Europe, he arranged to meet her train and take her to a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria he had reserved for her comfort while she waited for her ship to sail.

The cast of characters in Ripley’s Santa Rosa makes a long and noteworthy list. Besides the aforementioned, there is Herbert Slater, the blind journalist and legislator who got Rip his first job as an artist on the old San Francisco Bulletin. And we cannot forget Charles C. ”Cash & Carry” Pyle, the Santa Rosa promotional genius who was an agent for Harold “Red” Grange, the most famous football player in the nation in the 1920s. Pyle staged the Indian Marathons from San Francisco to Grants Pass, Ore., to “introduce” the new Redwood Highway to tourists and, in 1934, partnered with Ripley to establish the “Believe it or Not Odditorium” at the Chicago World’s Fair, the first of many sites where a fascinated public could view a fish with fur, a three-headed calf and other wonders.

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There is one last Ripley story that completes this “local angle” stuff. That’s the saga of the Church Built from One Tree.

It was the First Baptist Church in Ripley’s day, a redwood frame structure firmly situated at the corner of B and Ross streets where it had stood since 1873, when a Guerneville mill owner named Rufus Murphy decided to fill the Baptists’ order with lumber made from just one tree and one tree only.

Murphy intended it to be not merely a curiosity but a clear statement about the wonders of California redwood.

The care taken, the measurements recorded, the affidavits filed by all concerned guaranteed that there would be no doubt about the authenticity of the claim.

As it happened, Ripley’s carpenter father, Isaac Davis Ripley, was among the workmen on the job. And his mother, Lillie Bell, worshiped there.

In 1929, Roy, now Robert, immortalized it forever with a drawing in his “Believe it or Not” strip.

In 1932, with both his parents departed, he offered to pay half the cost of turning the church he had made famous into a museum for his “Oddities” in memory of his mother.

The City Council agreed to pay the other half, pleased at the prospect of being the world center of Ripley fame. But the city manager, a man named Ed Bloom, feared the cost of moving it would be beyond the city’s scope in those Depression years and the idea died.

Well, not really. In 1957, when the city appropriated the church site for parking, it was “saved” by a community fund drive, conducted by The Press Democrat, and moved with considerable fanfare to the northern edge of Juilliard Park, where it became, for a time, a Ripley Museum, and has since been refurbished by Parks and Recreation as a wedding and meeting site.

Still the subject of civic discourse, the church has become an ongoing Santa Rosa story. Like Robert Ripley.