HOW WE LOST THE COURTHOUSE

September 22, 2019February 1, 2021 Jeff Elliott 2 Comments

Ask baby boomers who grew up in Santa Rosa what they miss from downtown: Chances are many will name the courthouse. Now climb into a time machine. Go back to the years those boomers were born and ask anyone working downtown what they wouldn’t miss if it were gone: Chances are most would name the courthouse.

In the mid-1950s downtown Santa Rosa was bustling, but not in a particularly healthy way. The population had grown by about 150 percent over the previous ten years¹ and more people meant more businesses. But since this was also the Sonoma county seat, those retail stores or professional services were competing with city, county and state offices. Making matters worse, any available space was extremely tight because the downtown core still had the same footprint as the original tiny 1853 village as discussed in the intro to this series, “Yesterday is Just Around the Corner.”

As a result, government offices were mainly scattered between Third and Fifth streets with addresses subject to change. The county probation office was above the Topaz Room (Santa Rosa’s premier cocktail lounge) until it was moved to the Rosenberg building; you paid the water bill at the City Hall Annex before the Water Dept. was shuffled a block away to Third st. and the Annex – a small, one story building which was originally a gas station – became the Police Identification Bureau. Got all that? And this was just a small sample of the ongoing game of municipal musical chairs; when you see photos from that era with lots of people downtown, assume that a goodly portion are simply wandering about trying to find where the hell they’ve moved Parks & Rec.

But even before the population boom made matters so much worse, the courthouse was bursting at the seams from all the county offices housed in there. In 1945 they considered adding a third floor “penthouse on stilts” to the existing building, with most of the expense going to reinforce the structure. The solution settled upon in 1954 was to build a new county center (the present location) and migrate all administrative offices out there starting in 1956.² By the year 1970, downtown Santa Rosa would only have the county jail and the courthouse which would still house the County Clerk, Tax Collector, and other offices that dealt with the public over a counter.

And then came the 1957 earthquake.

The March 22 quake was magnitude 5.5, which was the worst seen here since 1906. People were rattled but no one was injured and no buildings fell. The only damages reported at the courthouse initially were some fine paint cracks in one section of the building.

Then someone noticed the quake had “jiggled the overhanging cornice blocks a little farther out from the building,” according to the Press Democrat (They really meant the corbels underneath the cornice) and a contractor was hired to do a preliminary inspection.

County administrator Neal D. Smith told the PD the situation appeared “a lot worse than we thought,” and the contractor was afraid to touch them because it “might start a chain reaction” causing a hail of heavy, hard blocks, Smith added.

Smith continued by saying he was worried about the entire exterior veneer of the building, according to the paper. “We don’t know, frankly, what we’re getting into.”

Structural engineers from San Francisco were brought in and their report dropped the Supervisor’s jaws. Estimated cost of repairs was up to $452k – equivalent to over $4 million today. They found the corbels – which were only ornamental – were hollow and made of terra cotta so they weren’t very heavy, but they were attached to the building using tie wires, which were now badly rusted and wedged into holes held by wooden pegs that had rotted. Also, the 10-foot high concrete parapet wall above the cornice was generally in “poor condition,” was “apparently of low strength when built” and at risk of falling from its own weight as well as earthquake and high wind. Beyond that, they said further study was needed to see if the concrete in the building itself was similarly low grade and to see how well the pretty terra cotta cladding was attached to the concrete beneath.

Sonoma County Courthouse in 1957, before the corbels were removed. Photo Sonoma County Library

Objectively it wasn’t really a terrible report, other than the decorative corbels had to be fixed or taken off. The big price tag was for stripping off all the terra cotta, bracing the underlying concrete and putting on modern ceramic cladding. If the county chose to simply do repairs the bill would be much smaller, as shown by the Supervisors approving an emergency $25,000 contract to have the corbels removed.

But that report was the camel’s nose; from that point onwards, the sad – and supposedly dangerous – condition of the courthouse became a recurring item on the Supervisor’s agenda and a running theme in the Press Democrat. The newspaper hyped the discovery of a ceiling crack in the Coroner’s office by noting it was directly below the “massive safe” in the treasurer’s office and new bracing was required because of the “questionably strong floors.” (Finalist in the competition for worst PD headline ever: “Engineers Find Many Bad Faults”.)

It’s important to understand the mindset of those times. The earthquake had left the town unnerved and learning that the courthouse may be in structurally “poor condition” was not reassuring to all those who worked there or just needed to do business there. Second: The new County Administration Center was still nearly a year away from having even the first building ready; should the courthouse be condemned as unsafe, there was no place to relocate all those many county employees.

Further complicating matters was another big issue which the Board of Supervisors was simultaneously grappling in the spring and summer of 1957: The creation of the county’s first set of uniform building codes. In one part of a meeting the discussion might be the politically hot potato of whether the new standards should be applied to older buildings that were being altered in some way – a scenario which would very much fit the courthouse. Later in the same meeting they might be wringing hands over the latest developments in the courthouse situation, particularly how far they should go with repairs. Petaluma’s Leigh Shoemaker was the first to say explicitly that it should be demolished, but all of the Supervisors joined in spitballing “what-if” scenarios about what should be done with Courthouse Square sans courthouse.³ Here was the first mention of splitting it in half with a roadway connecting Santa Rosa and Mendocino avenues.

More engineers were called in. This company drilled core samples and found the average strength of the concrete was around two-thirds of the minimum required in 1957 standards (the PD again pushed a negative angle, calling this “very low”). They also found that the huge slabs of terra cotta cladding were secured to the building in the same funky manner as the corbels – rusty tie wires held in place by dowels hammered into holes in the concrete wall. They reported there was a gap between 2-8 inches behind the terra cotta, but it was not explained whether that appeared to be caused by new slippage or how it was constructed.

Even the subpar concrete and discovery of the wall gap was not (yet) a death sentence for the courthouse. County administrator Smith told the Supes that for as little as $50k the terra cotta could be anchored to the back wall with the space between filled with an adhesive grout.⁴

And all was not bad news – addressing the earthquake safety risk, the final engineering report said the courthouse “is capable of withstanding only relatively minor earthquake shocks,” but cryptically added that like many similar buildings in the state, it “will no doubt remain in use for many years to come.” No, the building wasn’t up to modern building codes, but based on the average concrete strength found in the core samples it “just about” met the state’s standards for public buildings.

The year 1957 ended with the Board of Supervisors indecisive, agreeing only that the Fourth street scaffolding should be left standing and places where the terra cotta had been removed by the engineers should protected with plastic sheets until the end of the rainy season. It was expected that all of the cladding would come off the following year and the building would be covered in plaster.

Sonoma County Courthouse in 1958, with all the terra cotta cladding removed. Photo Sonoma County Library

Had all of this played out a year or two or three earlier, I have little doubt that the courthouse would have been repaired and preserved – that was, after all, the most economic route. At the start of 1958, four out of the five Supervisors agreed. But that was the year Santa Rosa caught a serious case of redevelopment fever and the Supes were not immune. Plus, they had a new prestigious consultant.

The recommendations from Ernst & Ernst were more radical than expected. Their experts guesstimated it would cost over one million dollars to rehabilitate the building; better to abandon it ASAP and sell Courthouse Square. (Hugh Codding had already made an offer of $350k – I’m sure Gentle Reader was waiting for him to pop up somewhere in this story about development, just as Alfred Hitchcock always made a cameo appearance in all of his movies.)

All hope of saving the courthouse was now dead, even though there was no clear path forward. The rest of the cladding was removed along with the parapet wall. The building was waterproofed and the scaffolding removed, leaving the once-beautiful building stripped down to its unlovely concrete bones.

Little happened for more than a year, but it was still desired to keep the courthouse near downtown. Santa Rosa’s newly formed Urban Renewal Agency (URA) had enormous powers to declare parts of the town “blighted” and had hired New Jersey architects to come up with an urban redesign that incorporated the courthouse and jail. A drawing of this plan can be found in the recent article about Santa Rosa Creek because the courthouse/jail were to be built on the south side of the waterway.

But the Supervisors – who had agreed to delay a decision for six months to give the URA a chance to present that plan – voted unanimously (with one abstention) to rebuild at the new County Administration Center instead. Now all they had to do was raise $3+ million to pay for it. The county put a bond measure on the ballot in 1960 and it was voted down. In 1961 they tried again and it was voted down. In 1962 it was voted down. Twice. In 1963 it was voted down. Methinks a pattern was beginning to emerge.

Meanwhile, it came to the attention of the State Division of Industrial Safety that people were still working and being held behind bars in those buildings, even though the county was no longer making improvements or doing needed maintenance. An investigation began just days before the first of the 1962 bond votes. The safety department’s report gave the county two months to submit an detailed schedule for making repairs or to evacuate both the jail and the courthouse. The Supervisors instead raised the county’s liability insurance by a million bucks.

The standoff intensified, with the state issuing still more fixit orders and the county appealing for delays until the next bond vote. Some of the repair demands were fairly trivial – move filing cabinets further apart so the weight wasn’t concentrated in one place – but others would have involved extensive work, such as rewiring parts of the courthouse so electrical office equipment would be grounded. The state had the Santa Rosa Fire Department do an inspection and the Fire Marshal found the courthouse to be an “extreme hazard.”

After the bond failed for the fifth time in 1963 the county finally gave up trying, and that summer a non-profit corporation was formed to provide funding (much to the ire of anti-tax activists).⁵ The Industrial Safety office stopped saber rattling.

Sonoma County Courthouse c. 1963. Photo Sonoma County Library

And so we come to 1966 and the end of our tale, with the judges and clericals and supervisors all nestled snugly into their new digs at county central. It was time to knock down the courthouse.

There’s a story I’ve heard ever since I came to Sonoma county. Maybe you’ve come across it too; supposedly that old courthouse – which was supposed to fall down at the slightest earthquake – turned out to be so sturdy the company hired to demolish it went bankrupt trying to do the job. Welp, that story’s true. Sort of.

(LEFT: The courthouse under construction in 1908. Image courtesy Sonoma County Library)

A company called Bay Cities Excavators was hired and given 75 days to finish the job. Around day 18 the PD interviewed the wrecking-ball crane operator. “There’s a little more steel than I thought, but it doesn’t create too much of a problem,” adding that the courthouse would be down by the end of the following week. Had any of the workers bothered to look at the photos of the building when it was under construction they would have known there were tons and tons of steel inside that crumbly concrete – if anything, the structure had been overbuilt for strength.

A week passes. Another month passes. Eight days from the deadline, the job still isn’t finished and the company has stopped work, claiming to have encountered a “sizable underground structure” which was unanticipated. (I’m guessing it was the old cesspool from the previous courthouse, a topic mentioned here earlier.) After the county whacked them on the nose with the rolled-up contract they continued work “under protest” and threatened to sue. Bay Cities Excavators likely lost money on the job but they didn’t go bankrupt and did several more projects in Santa Rosa over the following years.

The same day demolition began, there was a ceremony where the county sold Courthouse Square to the city of Santa Rosa and its URA. That moment was long the fevered dream of developers; very soon half of it would be up for sale.

NEXT: IT WILL BE A RESPLENDENT CITY

¹ Santa Rosa population 1946: 14.9k (within city) 39.4k (metropolitan area). Santa Rosa population 1957: 32.5k (within city) 56.8k (metropolitan area). Source: Polk city directories

² The Recorder’s office was the first to move out of the courthouse to the County Administration Center in April, 1958. Strangely, the original 1953 plan called for the County Library to be relocated there as well.

³ It was presumed in 1957 that Courthouse Square was county property, although the question of title would not be even addressed until 1963.

⁴ Smith later mentioned using gunite on the building, which would have worked well to fill the gap between the concrete wall and the terra cotta cladding.

⁵ Sonoma County Courthouse Inc. was founded to solicit about $5 million from private individuals to pay for the estimated $4.5 million cost of the building, which would be leased to the county for about $350k/mo for twenty years.

THE 1964 HANLY FIRE

September 11, 2019September 13, 2019 Jeff Elliott 7 Comments

You the boys from Rincon?” The man asked the three teenagers. They said yes.

“You better get your butts back home,” the Fire Captain told them. “The Calistoga Fire is heading to Santa Rosa fast.”

Edd Vinci and his friends were stunned. They were there in the Glen Ellen Forestry Station because they were waiting for a truck to give them a ride to the fire line in the nearby hills, where a blaze had everyone worried because it was headed for the town of Sonoma. What would be more important than fighting that danger? And what could a fire over in Napa have to do with his neighborhood in Rincon Valley?

Edd and the Fisher brothers did as they were told, hopping on the firetruck heading back to Santa Rosa. It was around 4PM on Monday, September 21, 1964.

Before that day was over, the 16 year-old Edd Vinci would face a wall of flames rushing towards him faster than he could possibly run, and in that moment felt certain he was about to die.¹

This is the story of Santa Rosa’s 1964 Hanly fire. There were other major fires burning at the same time; the Rincon Valley boys were originally headed to the one which was called the Nunns Canyon/Kenwood/Sonoma Valley fire, which threatened Sonoma City and would nearly wipe out the Springs villages. There was the Mt. George fire burning through the canyons east of Napa City, headed for Fairfield. All told, there were 94 wildfires in the North Bay during the ten days between September 18-28. There are many interesting and exciting stories to tell of those days, but this is not the place. This is just the story of the 1964 Hanly fire and how it descended upon Santa Rosa.

Of particular interest is that the 1964 Hanly fire almost exactly matches the path of the 2017 Tubbs fire. As far as can be determined, this was also the path of the Great Fire of 1870. As mentioned in that article, once can be an accident; twice could be a coincidence but three times is a pattern.

Comparison of Hanly and Tubbs fires. Map courtesy city of Santa Rosa

The Hanly fire was first spotted at 10:15AM on Saturday, September 19. It was the end of a fairly typical Wine Country autumn week; days in the upper 80s, cool nights with a marine layer hugging the coast. The Press Democrat weather forecast called it “picnic weather.” The forecast also mentioned “very high fire danger” and the State Forestry Dept. told the PD the fuel moisture index was at 3, which is “about as low as it gets.”

The earliest record of the Hanly fire came from the Napa Register. Most of the short article concerned two Napa homes endangered by grass fires elsewhere, but mentioned there was a fire on top of Mt. St Helena which was “…reported spreading rapidly because of high winds on the peak.” An eyewitness told the newspaper the fire “seems to be swirling around on itself” and watched as a stand of trees at the top of the mountain went up in flames.

Harriett Madsen, who wrote the occasional “Napa Valleyhoo” society and gossip column for the Press Democrat, later gave a fuller account of Day One:

[It] started on Mt. St. Helena in the high rocks and timber…to the right of the Lake County Highway, north of Hanly’s on the Mountain about 3/4 of a mile. It was not thought to be too serious at the time. Calistoga Fire Department responded and held the situation until the Forestry units began arriving. The fire, during that day, was contained in about 40 acres of timber and rocks. As time went on, the fire refused to be contained…it kept creeping and popping up where one would least expect it.

How the fire started will be forever unknown, unless someone spits out a deathbed confession. It was a wild, incredibly steep area only familiar to deer hunters, who instantly became the prime suspects. In a wrapup story that went over the AP wire it was speculated a “carelessly tossed cigarette butt would have been enough” to start the blaze. In the years since, the “careless hunter” theory has become baked into the Hanly fire story as established fact.

(RIGHT: Weekly Calistogan ad from August, 1958)

But in the Press Democrat’s first edition on the day after the fire began, another possibility was mentioned: Some deer hunters burn grass on the last day of hunting season, both to promote new growth to feed the deer in the spring and for clearing tall grass at favorite hunting spots to give the hunter better sight lines. The Hanly fire indeed began on the closing day of deer hunting season – a season which hunters had found disappointing, with the number of deer killed down 20 percent.

And while fires are commonly named after some landmark near their origin, calling it Hanly was particularly apropos. Hanly’s-on-the-Mountain was a roadhouse off of Highway 29 that catered to deer hunters; shooters brought their kill there to be weighed and measured for the deer pool to see who bagged the largest buck that season, with several dozen being carted in some weeks. The place rented cabins to hunters from outside the area and hosted an annual venison BBQ that drew tourists. Whether the fire began with a dropped cigarette or as a deliberate act to improve next year’s hunting, you can bet the man responsible was a regular at Hanly’s place.

It was that later AP story which first called it the Hanly fire, likely getting the name from the same person in the Forestry Dept. who thought it might have been caused by a cigarette. That first day it was just called the “Mount St. Helena fire.” On day two it became known as the “Calistoga fire.”

Conditions were bad again that Sunday with only 15 percent humidity, but it looked as if the danger was minimal from this fire. It was considered to be contained at least once, having burned only about 40 acres. All of the serious action was in Sonoma county fighting the blaze around Kenwood.

Then around sunset came the Diablo Winds, gusting over 70MPH.

Before firefighters could be brought into position, the front was bearing down on Calistoga from the north and east sides. Burned to the ground was the Tubbs Mansion, near where the 2017 fire would later originate. Forty other houses disappeared.

An emergency evacuation of all 2,500 residents was called, with Calistoga police driving through town with bullhorns announcing there were school buses waiting to take everyone to St. Helena. Ranchers opened gates for their animals to run free and hopefully not burn to death. Several owners of resorts around the geysers uncapped the vents to allow the hot water to shoot 75 feet into the air and douse their buildings. Later it was agreed the only thing that saved the town was a sudden shift of wind direction.

Day three. When the sun came up Monday morning the winds were still over 50MPH at higher elevations, and the Sonoma Valley situation was now a firestorm, creating its own winds. Air tankers could no longer fly over it to do water drops; the only way the fire chiefs could get a good view of the battlefield was by borrowing a giant helicopter from PG&E.

The Hanly-Calistoga fire kept burning eastward, while some late morning winds were also starting to blow the other side of the fire west toward Knights Valley. That western front grew. It kept growing. “By late afternoon the astonishing fact was clear: The fire was uncontrollable in the rich, dry fuels of the timber country and if it was to be stopped it would be at Santa Rosa,” the Press Democrat wrote the next day.

By 6PM there were flames on both side of Franz Valley School Road and when the sun finally surrendered to the fire-lit darkness, again came the Diablo Winds. The monster was now in Mark West Canyon. “From Calistoga Road the fire could be seen racing over the ridges, sweeping down on Santa Rosa,” the PD reported.

While this crisis was swiftly building, paving contractors working on Mark West Springs Road kept to their schedule for oiling the road in the late afternoon and early evening. Because of the closed lane bottleneck, there were backups in both directions as evacuees sought to flee and trucks tried to reach the firelines. County resident engineer Carroll Campbell discovered the situation and argued with the company superintendent, who blithely insisted they weren’t causing a problem. Campbell later fumed over their stupidity to the PD: “They went ahead blindly…it was inexcusable.” There are some stories no fiction writer can make up.

Now began the trying time. Some that night were calm, some were frantic; some were on the street mesmerized by the sight of burning ridgelines, some were urgently pushing children and pets into the family station wagon, some were standing on their roofs with a garden hose while leaning into the powerful and horrible wind which carried the charcoal and chemical smells of homes already lost.

In the hours around midnight the fires touched or threatened everything around Santa Rosa north and east. There were an estimated 500-600 firefighters and volunteers defending the city, including teenagers like Edd Vinci and his pals.

The Montgomery High junior had skipped school that day along with about a quarter of the other students, same as Santa Rosa High. As a Rincon Valley volunteer, Edd had strapped on a five-gallon water tank and backed up the fire dept. by spraying down hotspots when there were neighborhood grass fires. This was far, far different, as the proverbial flames of hell came rushing at breakneck speed down the Rincon Grade.

Vinci and a tiny crew were near the corner of Wallace and Riebli Roads where there was no protection, no place to hide. He wore no firefighter gear nor mask, just his t-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. He was fuel. “Wow, this is it, we were all going to die,” he remembers thinking more than a couple of times.

“It was a wall of fire coming right at us, coming so fast,” he recalls, and it was as if time stopped – he has no precise memory of how long it took for the firestorm to reach him, seconds or minutes.

There was a roaring sound, he can recall, but not the moment when jets of flames flashed over their heads. “It was on us, and then past us just as fast.” Today he still speaks about it in awe, as if he had been invited onstage by a great magician to participate in one amazing damn trick.

The terrible night crawled on into Tuesday, day four of the Hanly fire. There was a full moon, orange and almost hidden by smoke and raining ash. The fire kept the air in Santa Rosa from cooling off, with the low that night being 84°. You can be sure no one was sleeping.

The mood was grim. About 5,000 homes had been evacuated on the north end of town, from Chanate to Ribeli Roads. Dick Torkelson, the PD news editor was at city hall command center, where the “…gloom is as stifling as the atmosphere. There are no smiles, no jokes; the situation is too serious. Just quiet talk, black coffee and chains of cigarette smoking even by men who quit months ago.”

The immediate concern was the County Hospital on Chanate – unless there was a sudden and drastic shift in the winds the fire would soon reach the campus, where hundreds of patients were still inside.²

In June, Santa Rosa Fire Marshal Michael Turnick had warned the Board of Supervisors that the hospital was a “definite fire hazard…a greater than normal hazard to life” because there was no sprinkler system in the main section. Supervisor “Nin” Guidotti said he objected to Turnick’s “scare approach” and thought the county should punt on a decision until the next year. The matter was tabled.

A small army of firefighters were gathering to defend the hospital including 85 fire units from as far away as Redding. On the line were experienced firemen, National Guardsmen and many teenage students – as many as 600 were there to make a last stand to save Santa Rosa. “Old timers in the fire fighting business and the law enforcement business said they never saw so many policemen and firemen in action in Northern California,” wrote Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes.³

With flames as high as a three or four story building licking up the trees and brush, the orders were given to stand by to evacuate the patients…the doctors and hospital attendants held a meeting as the fire approached and made plans for the evacuation. Despite the nerve shattering situation no one panicked, not even the patients, some of whom were very old, bedridden and in wheelchairs. – Bill Soberanes

Nurses from all three shifts and the entire staff of eleven doctors awaited orders; there were buses and Army Reserve trucks waiting to carry patients to the National Guard Armory and hospitals. “At one point some 30 patients were loaded on buses for evacuation,” the PD reported, “but they were ordered back.” Turnick had made a bold decision not to evacuate patients unless the hospital actually caught on fire.

The Hanly fire announced itself when a bush in the middle of the parking lot burst into flames along with two eucalyptus trees on the edge of the lot.

The Press Democrat: “…The fire raged closer and closer, encircling the hospital on three sides and coming as close as 100 yards.⁴ Sparks showered the building’s walls but fire fighters bulldozed the area to the West and North and soaked nearby trees.”

Bill Soberanes: “The massive flames continued to literally leap towards the hospital, and we joined the volunteers who climbed on top of it and with wet towels beat out the large cinders that were landing all over the roof.”

The fight to save the county hospital went on for hours while the doctors and nurses comforted the patients who were undoubtedly anxious and fearful. “Inside, the air was stifling hot and smoky. The staff was acting as nonchalant as possible so no panic would arise,” wrote PD reporter Don Engdahl.

The hospital was declared safe around three in the morning, but Hanly would not let go of Santa Rosa so easily. It reached as far west as the modern-day crossing of Mendocino Ave and Fountaingrove Parkway, and on the other side of town it was stopped just north of Badger Road. By 4:30AM authorities said they were starting to get it all under control. By the end of the day it was said to be about 60% controlled.

No story of the Hanly fire has been retold as often as the hospital fight, which has become the stuff of myth. Since then it’s been said Turnick virtually saved the place himself by jumping on a bulldozer to cut a fire break, while others credit Frank Rackerby, the hospital’s building operating engineer for doing same with a tractor. There was nothing in the newspapers at the time supporting either claim, but there were about twelve bulldozers on the line fighting fires here that day.

The takeaway from the 1964 Hanly fire should be how it demonstrated personal courage of so many and not just a few. Assistant Chief George Elliott: “We just had to make a wall to save the city. And that’s what we did. We put everything we had, hands, tools, fingers and sacks. We had wonderful assistance from all the people,” he told the PD, adding without all that help the fire would have burned deep into Santa Rosa.

One of those uncelebrated heroes was Edd Vinci, who worked all night and made it back to the main Rincon Valley firehouse around dawn. He had something to eat and then walked home. The streets were quiet and deserted. Lawn sprinklers splashing water on the roofs of empty homes only added to the surreal quality of that morning, with the City of Roses bathed in dim, red shadowless light.

Map courtesy NASA, “A Partnership Forged by Fire.” Their website has a moveable curtain to compare the 1964 fires with 2017, but the effect will not work on all web browsers.

There are two videos related to the Hanly fire. Roger Halverson made a home movie from the Redwood Village Mobile Home Park on Airport Blvd. which mainly shows air tankers, but there are two views of the fire, probably taken in the late afternoon and evening of Sept. 21. The other short was apparently filmed by the Highway Patrol and mostly shows fire trucks and crews, but there is aerial footage of the fires burning in the timberland.

¹ All Edd Vinci quotes from interview, Sept. 6, 2019

²Newspapers reported the patient count from 230 to “over 300.” About ten pediatric patients had already been taken to Memorial as a precaution.

³All Bill Soberanes quotes from Redwood Rancher magazine, October, 1964.

⁴Other accounts say the flames came within 200 yards and even 20 feet of the buildings.

Month: September 2019

HOW WE LOST THE COURTHOUSE

THE 1964 HANLY FIRE

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