Smith: Who recalls the trouble that brewed in Sebastopol in 1955?

The Teapot Dome scandal it was not.

But I was piqued to discover, quite accidentally, that 60-some years ago hisses, boos and hurtful accusations roiled Sebastopol with the boiling over of the issue of how long city workers idled on coffee breaks.

“Sebastopol Men Employees Refused Coffee Breaks,” declared a headline in The Press Democrat on Oct. 5, 1955.

A story in the next day’s Sebastopol Times was bannered, “City Wants 8 Hours Work For 8 Hours Pay.”

The papers reported that an uncommonly large and worked-up crowd packed City Hall to protest the council’s decision to relieve municipal workers of their coffee breaks.

Only about 2,600 people lived in Sebastopol then. Some stood to defend Cliff Schultz, the town’s public works boss and the only employee called out by name for alleged dawdling.

City Councilman George Groves announced in open session that some businessmen in town complained to him that Schultz sometimes spent “most of the day” in Joe and Grace Tomei’s sporting goods and hardware store.

The council responded by prohibiting Sebastopol’s male employees from taking coffee breaks. The order didn’t extend to women on the town payroll.

Somebody in Guerneville reacted to the work-break brouhaha by mailing a package to Sebastopol City Hall. Mayor Art Janssen later held the gift aloft from the council dais.

It was an aluminum percolator.

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OLD NEWS CLIPS about Coffeegate are among the scrapbook keepsakes the Santa Rosa-born Art Janssen gave me last year before we traveled to the Hollywood Christmas Parade.

Art, you may recall, was 109 years old and was invited to ride in the parade entry celebrating the 100th anniversary of Santa Rosa native Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not!” empire.

I didn’t open the scrapbook until after Art died on Dec. 14, 19 days after the Hollywood trip. Reminder: A celebration of his life is at 2 p.m. Jan. 27 at the Scottish Rite Temple on Santa Rosa’s Acacia Lane.

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ART WAS SMACK in the middle of the coffee-break uproar. The PD and Sebastopol Times quoted him as saying Sebastopol’s general fund was $9,000 in the red, so the council had to assure that city employees were fully earning their pay.

“We have had to change things here,” he said, “and some of these changes are not to everybody’s liking and are not meeting with favoritism.”

The council adopted a resolution requiring Sebastopol employees to file a request with their supervisor before taking time off from work for any reason.

Rather than create a situation in which workers must formally request a coffee break, the council banned the breaks.

That action brought an outcry from Sebastopol residents and others who pleaded that the council treat the city’s employees more respectfully. There followed a period of healing.

In a letter to the Sebastopol Times, the Mark Twainishly brilliant Bob Wells, a PD reporter I worked with a quarter of a century later, urged:

“Let’s let these men have their breaks, there’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil and we don’t want to upset the Good Neighbor Policy.

“Who knows, it could spread to Sebastopol!”

You can contact columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.