Occidental

altamontoccidental1914

LAST CALL FOR THE ROADHOUSE

Jeff Elliott 1 Comment

In Sonoma county, the most important outcome of election day 1912 wasn’t who would become president; it was whether voters would kill the roadhouses.

Before launching into this topic, I need to offer a mea culpa; a few articles here regarding the year 1912 are being updated. Accuracy is important (or should be) to anyone who cares about history, and events that happened around New Year 1913 shine a different light on some earlier stories. My small consolation is those late developments even caught local newspapers by surprise, as you’ll read below.

In June 1912, voters in the unincorporated parts of the second district elected to go “dry” (the second district was then a north-south strip west of the Laguna, from the Russian River to Petaluma). Saloons were still allowed in the towns of Sebastopol and Petaluma but country roadhouses were forced to close, or at least stop serving alcohol. While the temperance movement was locally gathering steam in 1912 and 1913, both Santa Rosa newspapers expected the law to pass because roadhouses were harming property values and reducing productivity of farmworkers.

There were only about a dozen places in rural West County impacted by the closures, but the roadhouse scene was expanding closer to the county’s more urban areas. It’s not hard to understand why; more people had cars to escape the city, roads were being improved for autos, and towns (particularly Petaluma) were discouraging – and even banning – dancing to popular music. At the country roadhouse, anything goes.

Churches loudly condemned the roadhouses but community leaders only wrung hands. The Press Democrat lamented, “The number of saloons and road-houses in the Sonoma valley is out of all reason. No self-respecting community could be expected to continue forever to put up with conditions such as exist there.” As a speaker in a series of talks called “What’s the Matter with Santa Rosa?,” attorney Thomas J. Butts complained the town was not growing as fast as it could “because of our surrounding roadhouses.”

But as 1912 rolled on, nearly every week brought stories in the Bay Area papers about serious accidents, even deaths, because of roadhouse drunks “joy riding.” Women were found to be drinking in public (horrors!) and some were prostitutes who were arrested. And on July 1, the governor of Oregon declared martial law as a platoon of cops laid siege to a pair of particularly notorious roadhouses outside Portland. Increasingly counties around the state were banning roadhouses.

Thus it was no great surprise to read the announcement of an “Anti-Roadhouse League” being formed here to get an item on the November ballot calling for prohibition throughout all parts of the unincorporated county. “The league is formed solely for the purpose of eliminating the road houses from the county,” read the statement in the Santa Rosa Republican, “and is not dominated by any religious sect or temperance organization, and does not propose to interfere with licenses now held by hotels or summer resorts now in business or which may hereafter desire a retail license.” This was the text of the proposed ordinance:


No person, corporation, firm or association shall sell, or engage in the business of selling, offering for sale or giving away distilled, fermented, malt, vinous or other spiritous or intoxicating liquors or wines or beers in any portion of Sonoma county lying without the corporate limits of any city or town of said Sonoma county, except such person, corporation, firm or association engaged in the business of conducting a bona fide hotel, having at least thirty-five separate sleeping apartments properly furnished for the accommodation of guests, and having dining room at which meals are served at regular hours to boarders and the traveling public.

That was at the end of August. Over the next two months before the vote, I can’t find a single op/ed in either Santa Rosa paper concerning the proposal, pro or con. Make of that what you will; my interpretation is that they didn’t think it had a chance in hell of passage. Unlike the earlier second district vote where ballots were cast only by those who lived within the affected rural areas, this was to be decided at a high-profile, November election where every voter in the county could have a say. And the city folk liked saloons (or at least the menfolk, who were allowed to drink inside, did).

Surprise! The ordinance passed easily – thirteen points, 56 to 43. All of the towns voted for it by a comfortable margin including Santa Rosa.

But actually that was only the first surprise; no one knew how to implement the new law, or whether it was really legal. A few days later, the Press Democrat offered an article headlined, “ANTI-ROAD HOUSE ELECTION NOW HELD TO BE INVALID.” The Presiding Justice of the Appeals Court said it violated the “local option” law, where only a community could choose  to make itself “wet” or “dry,” as happened in the earlier second district vote. Towns had no say on the matter; Petaluma voters, for example, couldn’t set the rules for distant Geyserville.

“The anti-roadhouse ordinance, carried at the election held in Sonoma county a week ago last Tuesday, is null and void,” the PD declared, “there is no doubt whatever but that the election in this county on the matter is invalid.” There were still no op/eds on the matter in either Santa Rosa paper, which is why I was lulled into presuming this really was not a Big Deal.

District Attorney Clarence Lea filed two complaints to test the ordinance in Superior Court. One was against Everett N. Ellsworth, who had a commonplace roadhouse just two blocks north of Santa Rosa city limits at the corner of Mendocino and Carr avenues, right across from today’s SRJC. (Obl. Comstock House connection: A few years later, John A. Comstock, the divorced husband of Nellie and father of Hilliard Comstock et. al. would live in this house as a border with the Fisk family.)

The other suit was against John D’Arcy Connolly, an Irishman who had been on the Board of Supervisors in the 1880s and served as U.S. Consul in Auckland for eight years in the 1890s. Connolly owned the Hotel Altamont in Occidental, which was the nexus of West County social life.

(RIGHT: Hotel Altamont in Occidental, c. 1914. J. D. Connolly is to the right of man in white shirt and vest. Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library)

The Hotel Altamont was a challenge to a very particular part of the ordinance, requiring a place to be a “bona fide hotel, having at least thirty-five separate sleeping apartments properly furnished for the accommodation of guests, and having dining room at which meals are served at regular hours.” The Altamont qualified in every way – except it did not quite have the 35 guest rooms required. One has to believe the Anti-Roadhouse League chose that very precise, arbitrary number because they knew no place had that many beds.

A week before Christmas, the Connolly case was presented to Superior Court Judge Denny in a courtroom packed with an audience representing both sides. Denny ruled in favor of the ordinance immediately after arguments in order to expedite it proceeding to the California Supreme Court.

Confusion reigned. Most (all?) liquor licenses were to expire in just a few days, on January 1. The Board of Supervisors had stated no licenses would be issued “until the courts have passed upon the validity” of the ordinance. Since the matter was still headed to the State Supreme Court, was the law in effect or not?

District Attorney Clarence F. Lea declared on Dec. 28 that the ordinance would be followed. No new liquor licenses for roadhouses. No alcohol to be served after midnight on New Year’s Eve anywhere outside of a handful of towns in the central part of the county. D.A. Lea would have been reckless if he didn’t request a police guard that night.

All of this is prelude to the fallout in the following year, which will unfold in the following item. It’s the wildest political story I’ve encountered for Sonoma county – emotions ran high on both sides. I’ll close with this teaser: Six days into the new year, the Board met to consider the “injury being done to the legitimate business in the county.” This was followed by a motion granting liquor licenses to fourteen country saloons who had filed affidavits with the county clerk swearing their hotels indeed have the required 35 rooms. One of the licenses went to J. D. Connolly – apparently he somehow discovered over the Christmas holidays the Altamont had enough rooms after all, and the Supervisors were more than happy to take his word for it.

 

(Sources will be transcribed at the end of the following article)

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muttandjeffcast

MUTT AND THE JEFF IN OCCIDENTAL

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Everyone in Santa Rosa was expecting a good time that Sunday in 1913: Mutt and Jeff were coming to town.

The Press Democrat could barely contain its excitement over the musical comedy. “The mere announcement of this sterling piece of laughter and mirth should occasion considerable pleasure,” gushed the PD, “for it is a rarity nowadays to witness a play that can really tickle one’s risibilties.” After readers paused to consult a dictionary and check if risibilties were something you would want strangers messing with, the article continued by promising the audience “infinite joy…’Mutt and Jeff’ were created to make this gloomy mundane sphere of ours happy and contented.”

Well, golly. Although this was the most expensive theatrical event in Santa Rosa for the year – with best seats going for the equivalent of forty bucks now – it was still a bargain price for the promise of infinite joy.

The show had been a broadway hit a couple of years earlier, but it wasn’t that reputation which drew the Sonoma county crowd: It was the excitement of seeing Mutt and Jeff – or at least a couple of guys who looked and acted like the pair.

For around a quarter century (roughly 1910-1935) Mutt and Jeff enjoyed an unprecedented popularity we probably can’t imagine today. Besides the daily comic strip and Sunday funnies, their animated cartoons were big hits at the movies. They were the first characters to have a line of spinoff merchandise – toys, games, dolls, figurines, playing cards, cigars, golf balls, and lord help them, Mutt brand oranges.

If the names are unfamiliar, Mutt was pencil-thin with a long nose, bristly moustache and devoid of chin; Jeff was a little person, balding with ear-to-ear whiskers and usually dressed like the Monopoly game tycoon for no apparent reason. Both were always drawn wearing white gloves, even to bed. In later years the comic books and strips were churned out in cartoon artist sweatshops and became merely gags and jokes; the old stuff was zany and sometimes more bizarre than funny. There was also frequent political satire: A series of 1908 dailies had Mutt running for president for the “Bughouse” party.

Both Santa Rosa newspapers ran publicity photos for the show and ads promised a cast of fifty with enough scenery to fill two train cars. We know from reviews the production had a chorus, pretty showgirls, lots of singing and dancing numbers and a slapstick bit with collapsible stairs. There was a series of souvenir postcards (seen here) portraying various scenes and the cast in full makeup, including Mutt with an absurdly long putty nose.

The Santa Rosa performance bombed. “All who attended the performance of ‘Mutt and Jeff’ at the Columbia theater Sunday evening and paid a dollar and a half for a seat, or even a dollar, to use a slang phase, not elegant, but expressive, were ‘stung,'” The Santa Rosa Republican complained the next day. Never before in the old papers have I seen a negative review like that.

“[A]ll the members of the company evidently thought they were performing in a fifty acre field and were required to yell as loud as they could in order to be heard,” the Republican continued, and “all of them talked so fast that nobody could understand what they said.” The review also said the curtain didn’t go up until 9:45 and by then the audience’s patience was worn out. “There were some good musical numbers, and if everybody had not been tired out, they probably would have been enjoyed.” Had the theater manager been smart, he could have killed time during the long wait by calling Jacques Fehr to the stage. He must have been in the audience that evening, and it was common knowledge around Sonoma county (although possibly not as early as 1913) that the Jeff character was based on him.

Jacques, or Jacob, or “Jakie” Fehr ran a bodega in Occidental with his wife, Tillie. They sold the whatnot such stores always sold – things like soda pop, candy, tobacco, magazines and newspapers. Jakie picked up the San Francisco papers when they arrived on the train that came up the valley from the Sausalito ferry. As the often-told story goes, one morning in 1908 a passenger en route to Bohemian Grove stepped off the train to stretch his legs when the train stopped in the village. San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Bud Fisher watched as Jakie bantered or argued with the railroad’s “candy butcher” (the person who walked the aisles selling snacks and smokes) and was amused by the contrast between the tall and lanky salesman and the four-foot-nine storekeeper. Thus sprang in his mind the inspiration for Mutt and Jeff.

(RIGHT: Tille and “Jakie” Fehr in front of their store, c. 1914. Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library)

Harry Lapham grew up in Occidental in the 1930s and memorialized Jakie in a 1991 profile for The Sonoma Historian. By trade Fehr was a Swiss-born watchmaker and still did repairs; half the front window displayed watches and clocks for sale. He was actually four-foot-eight according to Lapham, and a hunchback – apparently the kids in town had “animated conversations” worrying whether his condition might be contagious, as he always licked the ice cream scoop before putting it back in the water.

It’s not known when or how Fehr learned he was the model for the cartoon character, but Lapham quotes an Occidental old-timer as recalling Jakie say, “I think I will sue this man Fisher. He has put me in his comic strip as this man, Jeff.” When Fehr died in 1938, the Press Democrat headline was, “‘Jeff’ of Famous Comic Strip Dies In S. R. Hospital” and the obituary rehashes the origin story. “From that scene,” the PD wrote, “Fisher is quoted as having said the idea of creating the strip that brought him fame and wealth was born.”

There’s only one problem with the story: I can find no proof it’s true – but lots of evidence that it isn’t. And I’m very sorry to write that; originally this article was going to be another celebration of the little storekeep with the big claim to fame.

The first problem is that the bones of the story don’t fit. Jeff first appeared in March-April 1908 comic strips (more about that in a minute) so the encounter had to happen sometime before that. As the Bohemian Club hosts its annual camp in mid-July of each year, either Fisher was passing through Occidental for a reason other than going to Bohemian Grove in early 1908 or it all happened some time before. Regardless, this wrong timeline is only a quibbling detail.

More significant is that Bud Fisher repeatedly insisted both Jeff and Mutt were invented out of whole cloth. Interviewed by a Duluth paper in 1912 and asked if they were based on two characters he knew in San Francisco, he replied: “Nothing to that. Mutt and Jeff are no one in particular except themselves. They were merely created for amusement purposes and in time came to be fixtures. They ‘growed’ in other words.” Asked a similar question in 1915 by the Washington DC Star he said of Jeff: “It is always a small ‘nut’ who believes he can whip any one in the world. The little filbert is constantly getting into musses [sic] and receiving the worst of it. To make him look more foolish I put whiskers on him.”

But that’s not quite true either – although he deserves full credit for developing two of the most memorable characters in comic history, he sure as hell didn’t invent them.

Before Jeff appeared, Fisher had a very popular strip in the San Francisco Chronicle called “A. Mutt” which appeared on the sports page. The comic had a gimmick: Every strip ended showing Mutt placing a bet on a real horse running that same day at a Bay Area racetrack. The concept wasn’t original; even back then people noticed this was exactly the same gimmick from an earlier comic strip, “A. Piker Clerk,” which had appeared in a paper in Chicago, Fisher’s hometown. The Clerk character could have been Mutt’s older brother – he likewise had a long nose, bushy moustache, no chin, and was string bean skinny.

A. Mutt was an instant hit and three weeks later Hearst hired him away to continue the comic for the San Francisco Examiner. Here the comic began turning political and moved away from being just a rip-off of the older cartoon. A story arc in early 1908 has Mutt sent to an asylum (“bughouse,” in slang) where he meets delusional patients who believe they are Napoleon, Shakespeare (etc.) and one says he is boxer Jim Jeffries. This was soon shortened to just “Jeff” and once Mutt is released, Jeff joined the strip’s cast of characters.

(LEFT: The “Jeffries” character drawn by Bud Fisher in March, 1908. RIGHT: Mr. Proones drawn by George Herriman in December, 1907. Other views of Mr. Proones can be seen here and here)

The original gag was that the guy who thought he was heavyweight champ Jeffries wore glasses and was probably an academic. In no way did he resemble the later Jeff character – he was slightly built but not extremely short. He did not have the top hat or formal suitcoat and shirt collar. All those elements, however, exactly match a character that appeared in Hearst’s Los Angeles paper at the exact same time Fisher began working for Hearst. The cartoon was “Mr. Proones the Plunger” drawn by George Herriman, who later created the acclaimed “Krazy Kat” comic stip. Like Mutt, Proones was also a racetrack gambler (“plunger” was slang for someone who lost on big wagers).

Today this would be called plagiarism – the equivalent of drawing Superman but replacing the “S” on his chest with a “Z” and writing he came from the planet “Clypton.” But in the day, comic artists did not own their own work, with the notable exception of Bud Fisher. Publisher Hearst owned A. Piker Clerk and Mr. Proones and was not about to sue his star cartoonist over a little matter of intellectual property theft. Still, Herriman and others knew what Fisher had done, as reported in a 1919 item in the Los Angeles Graphic, reprinted elsewhere as “The Inside on Mutt and Jeff:”


Discussion is renewed as to who was the creator of these supposedly humorous characters. Newspaper men from Chicago have told local newspaper artists that A. Mutt was a direct adaptation from A. Piker, one of the creations of Claire Briggs, once of Chicago, but now with the New York Tribune. Briggs is said to have run A. Piker for several months, twelve or thirteen years ago. In the same circles the original of Little Jeff is credited to George Herriman of Los Angeles, now on the Hearst Syndicate payroll as the parent of the entire Dingbat family. Herriman, I am told, ran a Little Jeff series which he later abandoned and Fisher adopted the character as a companion to Mutt. Herriman has never taken credit for Jeff, telling his friends ‘Bud got away with Jeff and I didn’t, so he deserves all the credit he can get out of it.’ I understand Herriman declined the drawing of a substitute Mutt and Jeff series for Hearst.

We’ve now probably wandered farther into the weeds of golden age comics than interests most Sonoma county history fans, but it’s all to make a point. Yes, Jakie Fehr looked just like comic strip Jeff. Most likely everyone passing through the village in those years commented on that. And the notion that Bud Fisher was only inspired by the confrontation between the shopkeeper and the trainman is a good GREAT story, which is why it’s repeated endlessly in writings about Occidental’s past as well as a multitude of comic history resources on the internet. But it’s going to take damn compelling evidence to show that all this “growed” out of a scene on a train platform in Occidental.

Promotional photo for “Mutt and Jeff.” February 15, 1913 Santa Rosa Republican

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