SANTA ROSA, SUMMER OF 1925

Read any good old newspapers recently? We live in a golden age for anyone interested in exploring our past. There are many tens of thousands of different newspapers now online with over a billion pages to prowl, much of it either free or accessible at no cost via your library.

So how are people taking advantage of these myriad resources? Judging from the trail of digital breadcrumbs left by search results, it seems we’re mostly using heritage newspapers for amateur genealogy. Nab a clip of great-grandmum Tillie’s obituary and move on to lookup the next ancestor on the list. Rarely do I see traces of any further curiosity about what else might have been written about Tillie.

And pity that. Up to about fifty years ago, newspapers chronicled a wide variety of doings, large and small, around the community. Who had a surprise birthday party, who had their appendix removed; where firemen extinguished a trashcan fire, which gas station changed hands. Go back further still and the papers might mention who stopped by to visit Tillie after supper and when she stayed the weekend at her daughter’s house. This sort of stuff was daily meat-and-potatoes news reporting in towns the size of Santa Rosa.

Other than overlooking glimpses of how Tillie spent some of her days, the parachuting genealogist doesn’t see the context of the world in which she lived. Sure, we can dip into Wikipedia or history books to see what was happening in those particular times, but reading old newspapers is a completely different experience. Lost is the immediacy – the suspense of what the next day might bring, the scenery of the setting and the nuance of whatever melody was then being sung.

When this blog-journal began in 2007 I read old Santa Rosa papers front to back on microfilm. There wasn’t any other choice at the time; few historic newspapers were online and there’s no index or search options for microfilm. Sure, some of it was a slog to wade through (particularly when the library’s film was nearly illegible because of scratches), but it gifted me with a first-class education about the town and its character. The best way to understand terrain is not by studying maps but by walking the land yourself.

Beyond the rich and famous who are found in history books I got to know many people like Tillie who are not. Sometimes the City of Roses seemed a cute little town like River City in “The Music Man” marked by a comfortable routine of church socials and ladies’ afternoon card games – but I also learned city leaders encouraged gambling and prostitution, which turned this into the “Sin City” of the Bay Area.

Once online searches grew more reliable there were fewer reasons to roam about hoping to stumble across nuggets of gold, but for a change I decided to revisit that kind of research and look at local newspaper coverage from a single month: July 1925.

Aside from the novelty of it being exactly 99 years ago, I chose it because that was the month of the Scopes “monkey trial.” Newspapers in even the smallest communities reported and editorialized about the proceedings with the same depth and intensity as might serve a major war or other earth-shaking event, and I was curious if the Santa Rosa papers followed suit. Without getting ahead of the analysis herein, let’s just say the Press Democrat did not disappoint.

July 1925 also happened to be at the nexus of several points of interest in local history. There was heated debate over whether someday a Golden Gate bridge might be built and if Santa Rosa would create a huge public park on the property that eventually became the SRJC campus. It was the summer before Luther Burbank’s approval tanked over his “infidel” remarks and when Robert Ripley’s popularity grew with a Believe it or Not-like travel series. We were reminded Japanese immigrants couldn’t legally harvest fruit while children as young as seven still could be brought in to pick crops.

None of these items are particularly long, but taken together create a file that might take an uncomfortable time to load, particularly on phones. Lumping all of them together would also make tagging subjects mostly useless, so I’ve broken them apart into individual posts.

A note on sources: Normally a media study like this would incorporate material from both the PD and Santa Rosa Republican. But by that July the Republican was in sad shape, mainly printing rewrites from other newspapers and submissions from social clubs. Two months later editor/publisher J. Elmer Mobley would sell the paper, effectively making Santa Rosa a one-newspaper town for the first time in 45 years.

HEADLINES   As typical for sensationalized newspapers of the day, there was a banner headline in each edition. Top headlines in the July 1925 Press Democrat covered issues related to Prohibition, violent deaths and the Santa Barbara earthquake that happened at the end of June. Weather was average for the month except for rain on the morning of the 4th and a freak shower on the 18th, making it the wettest July in Santa Rosa until 1946. The PD ran the same weather forecast cartoon every day.