LeBaron: Petaluma’s Silk Mill and the original khaki bandit

The classic old Petaluma Silk Mill building, empty and forlorn for more than a decade while plans were made and abandoned for its preservation, has a facelift and a future. It will be open for business early next month as a Hampton Inn hotel.

It’s been a dozen years since Sunset Line & Twine locked the doors on that 66-year-old business, which was only a piece of the building’s long history.

The distinctive red brick Georgian Colonial Revival building, a National Historic Landmark, was constructed as the Carlson-Currier Silk Mills in 1892, and has earned itself a place in the region’s history - architectural, industrial and agricultural.

That’s right, agriculture.

At the end of the 19th century farmers were coming from all directions, ready to exploit the fabled fertile fields of the valleys north of San Francisco Bay. They raised dairy cows and chickens and sheep and planted hops and apples and prunes and grapes. Some lasted for 100 years and more. Some are still very much around and some were strictly experimental, exotic to the point of unbelievable and disappeared without a trace.

Try this one: One of the “exotic” crops harvested with some success in the late 1870s was the opium poppy.

Sericulture was another trial-and-error adventure. In the 1890s, entrepreneur Adolph Spreckels, who made sweet money with his sugar refineries, planted fields of mulberry bushes, which is where silkworms live their lives, producing the raw material for the delicate fabric.

I don’t know what went wrong, whether it was the mulberries or the worms that didn’t like our climate, but the brief fling with sericulture ended.

The splendid silk mill not only survived, it prospered. And it earned Petaluma a secure spot in transportation and automotive history.

It was my friend and neighbor John Agnew, from the family who owned Sunset Line & Twine, who shared an old copy of a Commercial Car Journal magazine with an article about the first coast-to-coast delivery by truck.

In 1912, the American Locomotive Company, a pioneer in trucking, had an order to deliver Parrot Brand Olive Silk Soap to Carlson-Currier mills in Petaluma.

To promote the new service, they made the trip pointedly transcontinental, hauling the soap picked up in Philadelphia to New York on the Atlantic Ocean and then turning west toward Petaluma and the Pacific Ocean.

The photos in Agnew’s magazine show how hard it was: stretches with no visible road, chain-driven wheels hanging from a broken bridge, engineering a makeshift bridge to cross a flooding stream.

But 95 days from when it left New York, the ALC truck delivered the soap order intact to the brick building on Jefferson Street.

And then, I like to think, they went to the nearest watering hole and had a drink. Maybe two.

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Now, a pop quiz: Who or what is Sam the Shark?

Chances are if you know the answer, you’ve been around town for a decade or so. If you haven’t you wouldn’t have a clue about this intrepid observer of the local scene who invaded my office - when I had an office - demanded anonymity, hit the hallway coffeemaker on his way in and helped himself to my brown bag lunch and maybe even relit his stubby cigar (in a no-smoking building).

Once comfortable he would lay out his grievances about “wotthehell is going on around here.”

To my shock, Sam appeared on my front porch several weeks ago - with, I am pleased to report, a large Havana Cappuccino in his very own Peet’s cup.

“You’ve brought your own,” I said, failing to hide the astonishment in my tone.

“Don’t sound so surprised. I choked down that office brown water for too many years. Can I come in?”

“Well, OK,” I said, “but you have to promise you won’t light a cigar.”

“Oh, I gave up smoking,” he said, “or least tobacco.”

“Well, you can’t light a joint either,” I said. “This is an old-fashioned dwelling place.”

By this time he had settled into what is known around here as the “ancestor chair,” handed down through the LeBaron family.

“I have come to talk about pickleball and Black Bart,” he announced, in a tone of voice one might use to call the U.S. Senate to order. No shortage of pomposity.

“You’re not going to try to tell me that he invented the game between robberies, are you?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “Just outlining my agenda. All I have to say about pickleball is if the game didn’t have such a silly name, if it was called something more serious - as paddleball is, or something so exotic that most people don’t know where the name came from, like tennis - it wouldn’t cause the trouble it does.

“Or at least the general population would stop snickering every time they hear or read the word. Pickleball! Pickleball! Hee hee hee.”

“You have a point,” I said. “Maybe you could ask your friends to submit possible names. Offer a prize.”

Great idea!” he said. “The winner gets a permanent seat on the Oakmont Village Association board. Whataya think about that?”

“What do YOU think about being ridden out of Oakmont on a rail?”

“Hee Hee,” said Sam.

“Now on to the next matter,” he continued. “There was a story in your newspaper the other day about the ‘Khaki Bandit.’ Did you see it?”

I allowed that I had read in the CrimeBeat column about the bank robber who has gone unidentified and unchallenged for five years, averaging a bank robbery every five months, from Gualala and Glen Ellen to Napa and east into the Sierra foothills, hitting Groveland, near Yosemite, and a bank in Trinity County.

“Yep,” said Sam. “‘From the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific Coast!’ That’s what the story said. That’s where Bart operated, stopping and robbing every Wells Fargo stage he encountered from 1877 to 1883, from Duncans Mills to Sonora. And it said they call him the Khaki Bandit because he wears khaki pants. Do you get the connection? Black Bart rides again!”

“Black Bart didn’t ride before,” I pointed out. “He always walked out of the woods, carrying his shotgun, wearing a linen duster and a flour sack mask with eyeholes … never a horse in sight.”

“OK,” said Sam, “but think of that grimy flour sack, the dune-colored duster. You could call them both khaki. Bart wasn’t black. He was the original Khaki Bandit.”

“I guess you could say that,” I said, wondering how I was going to get him out the door and on his way to wherever it is he goes. I wasn’t about to remind him that the legendary stage robber had provided his own nickname - “The PO-8” - by leaving a verse in the cash box he emptied of $300 in a holdup of the Duncans Mills-to-Point Arena stage in 1877.

But Sam was way ahead of me. “Gimme those poems again,” he commanded. “I like to hear those Bart poems.”

“If I recite them, will you leave?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. And I figured it was worth a shot.

So, just for Sam, one more time (misspellings corrected). You can call it:

“Bart’s Lament.”

“I’ve labored long and hard for bread

“For honor and for riches

“But on my corns too long you’ve tread

“You fine-haired sons of bitches.”

A second verse - a further thought, if you will - turned up in the cash box after a robbery a year later between Quincy and Oroville in the foothills. The spelling is a little better and the form is closer to classic.

“Here I lay me down to Sleep

“To wait the coming morrow

“Perhaps Success perhaps defeat

“And everlasting Sorrow.

“Let come what will I’ll try it on

“My condition can’t be worse

“And if there’s money in that Box

‘Tis money in my purse.”

There you go, I said.

“It always gets me right here,” said Sam, clutching his chest. I thought I saw a tear in his eye.

He sighed. “They don’t make desperados like they once did. We haven’t seen a flower sack mask in years.”

He finished his fancy coffee, doffed his derby and headed for the door.

“Always a pleasure,” I called out to him. “So long, Sam. Keep an eye out for desperados – or anyone with a pickleball paddle.”