More about Santa Rosa in the summer of 1925. See INTRO for overview and index.
During the early 1920s Robert Ripley was making a name for himself at the New York Globe as a sports writer and cartoonist, but despite his success at one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world the Press Democrat oddly ignored this hometown boy who became a minor celebrity.
All that changed in July 1925 when the PD boasted Ripley would now “write for Press Democrat,” meaning that the paper was going to run his syndicated travel column, “Ripley’s Ramble.” The 75 article series can be viewed as a clear prototype of his Believe it or Not! comic strip which would feature facts meant to astonish, often drawn from his travels (or really, the travels of his researchers). In the teaser for the series the PD featured his friendship with a man from Santa Rosa, Peru, who supposedly gave Ripley an authentic shrunken head.
There were no clues that was to be Luther Burbank’s last summer. In July 1925 his health seemed fine (for a 77 year-old) and the Press Democrat regularly printed small items about him receiving a steady procession of visitors. People came here from all over the country to shake his hand and get a garden tour – a busload of East Coast teachers enrolled in a program at UC/Berkeley, a batch of ministers, plain folks and all sorts of celebrities. Helen Keller stopped by for lunch.
The PD was already blurbing that three months from then Burbank would be celebrating his 50th year in Santa Rosa, which would be mentioned in dozens of papers nationwide. Ever the publicity maven, he would use that occasion to announce he had six new roses and a new kind of sweet corn available for sale.
But come early 1926, his fortunes would quickly change. Burbank found himself receiving the heaviest criticism of his life after telling a reporter that he didn’t have conventional religious views or believe in life after death: “I am an infidel today…I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic…” He defended his beliefs until he suffered a heart attack and died not long after.
FORMER SANTA ROSAN, NOW FAMOUS CARTOONIST, WILL WRITE FOR PRESS DEMOCRAT – Robert L. Ripley, world famous cartoonist and a native of this city, is coming back to Santa Rosa.
Not in person, but through a series of articles, a departure from the sporting field in which he made his first reputation as artist and writer. Ripley will in the near future greet the readers of the Press Democrat in and near his home town.
The cartoonist recently returned from a trip through the American continent on the other side of the isthmus, and is perfecting a series of articles on his experiences and observations there. Under the title, “Rambles Through South America,” Ripley’s stories will start soon in the Press Democrat and will be continued until complete, running 75 days in all.
Robert L. Ripley, known here as Le Roy Ripley, was born and educated in Santa Rosa. With a natural ability in art work and an ambition to conquer in his chosen line, he progressed rapidly, and 15 years ago left this city for east. He quickly became noted, not only as an artist, but as a writer of pungent, authoritative items on sporting topics.
His return to Santa Rosa, through the Press Democrat, will be received with interest not only by his old friends, but by other readers as well, who will find his articles sparkling with wit and bulging with pertinent facts.
In the picture above Ripley is seen with another native of Santa Rosa. The one is a Native Son of Santa Rosa. Calif., the other an Inca, Son of the Sun, and a native of Santa Rosa, Peru.
Ripley met the Peruvano during the tour of which he tells in “Rambles Through Soutn America” and the two became such firm friends that the Peruvian Santa Rosan insisted upon presenting the California Santa Rosan with a gift of a “reduced” human head, which had been shrunk to the size of a baseball. Watch for the Ripley “Rambles.” (July 28)
BURBANK TO RECEIVE MANY VISITORS HERE – Luther Burbank is planning to receive a large number of visitors at his gardens in Santa Rosa avenue during July and August. The majority of the visitors will come from the eastern states. Included among those in the delegations will be a number of teachers in California for summer school work. A number of ministers will arrive here this month to visit Mr. Burbank. In addition, there are always prominent tourists who visit at the Burbank home, some of them making appointments to see the plant scientist months in advance. (July 2)
EXCEPTIONAL WIT OF MISS KELLER PLEASES BURBANK – Equal honor befell both Luther Burbank, noted scientist, and Miss Helen Keller, yesterday, when Miss Keller and her secretary, Miss Polly Thompson, were luncheon guests at the Burbank residence in Tupper street. Miss Keller returned to Santa Rosa yesterday, after appearing here publicly several weeks ago, to obtain photographs of herself and her host for the national magazine for the blind… (July 9)
NOTED WRITER SEES BURBANK – Annie Laurie (Mrs. Bonfils), noted San Francisco newspaperwoman, accompanied by a number of friends, including General Terry, United States army, and his wife, called on Luther Burbank at his experimental gardens here yesterday. The writer, who had visited the Burbank home several times in the past, and her friends were shown through the gardens by the plant scientist. A delegation of eastern school teachers, who are attending summer school at the University of California, were also visitors at the Burbank home yesterday, and a number of educators from eastern and southern states will visit at the experimental gardens today. (July 11)
Guess which of these men is fake. Hint: It’s the one whose smile actually seems genuine.
Between 1971 and 1998, Santa Rosa had a Ripley museum near downtown. No, it wasn’t one of the amusement halls as can be visited down on Fisherman’s Wharf, with its shrunken heads and other curiosities. This was a museum dedicated to the memory of Robert Ripley, whose popular “Believe it or Not!” syndicated cartoons made him a celebrity. He was also a Santa Rosa native and is buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery.
Despite his fame, it’s a bit of a puzzle why anyone would want to create a museum in his honor. A biography was published a few years ago which I reviewed here; Ripley, I wrote, was “a creepy, manipulative jerk that seemed to fundamentally dislike people, probably himself most of all.” He had few (if any) friends and when he died in 1949 he passed mostly unmourned, with hardly anyone turning out for his funeral other than immediate family.
Still, his was a household name even after death and Santa Rosa enthusiastically endorsed the idea of the museum. No surprise; after all, if this city is known for anything it’s for leeching off the names of famous people who lived here, so Robert Ripley slips in neatly post-Luther Burbank and pre-Charles Schulz.
A Ripley museum had been proposed twice while he was still alive, both times by Ripley himself. And he specified it had to be in a particular building – the Church From One Tree.
Portion of the “Believe it or Not!” cartoon published on Nov. 5, 1928Even before Ripley was born in 1890, the church was a local landmark and a West Coast tourist attraction (see sidebar below). It was actually the First Baptist Church, located at the corner of Ross and B streets, and the Ripley family were members – well, his mother, at least. His father Isaac was among those who helped build it in 1873. The church gained much wider recognition when Ripley included it in one of his cartoons that appeared in newspapers everywhere.
Ripley’s first bid for the church came in 1940, when he wrote to the pastor and political leaders that he wished to buy it “to house the relics, records and mementoes of early California days” alongside his own “exhibits sufficient to make a complete and interesting museum.” (Decades later, Hugh Codding tried the same feint by claiming he planned to donate a museum to the Historical Society while just a “remainder would be devoted” to his taxidermy collection, which ended up glomming most of the building.)
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THE CHURCH BUILT FROM ONE TREE
Before the Ripley museum and even before Ripley’s Believe it or Not! cartoon with the church, it was a tourist attraction; by the turn of the century they had a gift shop selling souvenirs and postcards, such as the one seen below.
The original redwood tree was as tall as a 25 story building and was logged in 1873 by the Murphy Bros. company in Guerneville. Knowing they had an order for wood to be used in building a church from ground up, Rufus Murphy kept lumber cut from that tree separated. Only when the church was dedicated the following year did he reveal it all came from a single tree.
In the mid-1890s an article in Pacific Baptist magazine questioned the origin story. By then the church was so well known that disputing item was widely printed nationwide. To refute the charges, Santa Rosa attorney Thomas J. Butts, who had worked at the sawmill as a youth, published in 1900 an affidavit (reproduced at the end of this article) specifying all particulars related to the tree and the millwork, including names of all men involved. Butts wrote the Murphys decided to use the tree in order to promote California redwood as high quality lumber and also “as an advertisement for his mill,” which was then lagging behind its Guerneville competition as the #3 sawmill in the area.
A year passed before it was agreed the city would buy the land and Ripley would move the church elsewhere. Gone was any mention of objects of historical interest; now the whole museum would be Ripley’s “curioddities” which the mayor gushed would make it “one of the principal tourist attractions in the state.” Ripley was expected to arrive here in a few days to seal the deal – but everyone forgot about it five days later, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Ripley’s next bid came in 1947. Now it was proposed to be “a shrine in memory of the cartoonist’s mother” while “housing a museum of California pioneer life,” according to the Press Democrat, and moved to an undetermined city park. Robert L. Ripley died before this plan was seriously considered.
Anyone who lived in Santa Rosa during the mid-1950s will recall the next chapter of our story. The Baptists had outgrown the church and planned to build a new one at the corner of Sonoma Ave and Yulupa Ave (today it’s the New Vintage Church). The city, meanwhile, really, really, wanted the B and Ross street location for a new parking lot. Thus in 1956 it was agreed Santa Rosa would buy the property while the church would give away the building to any non-profit, non-sectarian group that vowed to preserve it (or any portion of it).
But this time there was no Robert Ripley ridin’ to the rescue – no group said, “yes, please, we’d like to move an 83 year-old building which is already known to have structural problems” and that the Baptists refused to consider offers from other churches certainly cut down on the already limited options. As time passed it increasingly looked like demolition was in store.
The city of Santa Rosa finally agreed to take the building, justifying the donation of a church because it was an historical monument and tourist attraction. There was still no firm decision on where to put it; the leading contender was Franklin Park, followed by Burbank Gardens, the Junior College and Juilliard Park. One letter-writer to the PD suggested leaving it where it was, just raising it and building a parking lot underneath.
Also, the city council said it would not use public money to pay the projected $13,500 moving costs (about $138k today). To its credit the Press Democrat spearheaded a major fundraising campaign, publishing dozens of stories about the effort and listing names of donors. The biggest single event was a gigantic rummage sale on the west side of Courthouse Square, where $3,300 was raised. Among items sold were women’s fur coats and an automobile; it was considered to be the largest event of its kind ever held in the North Bay.
An estimated 5,000 people attended the June 1, 1957 rummage sale to raise funds for moving the Church From One Tree. Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library
The rummage sale was held less than three weeks before an option would expire on a choice parcel adjacent to Juilliard Park, and the fund was still short. The PD redoubled its efforts by running coupons for 1,000 readers to send in one dollar to save the church, donor names to appear on a “permanent plaque”. It was a nail-biter, but the fund crossed the threshold a single day before the deadline. The building was moved to its present location (technically 492 Sonoma Avenue) during the autumn of 1957.
At the close of the 1960 Rose Festival there was an official dedication ceremony and about a hundred visitors per day stopped by during the monthlong open house. Then after that…zip. It was available for $5/day to educational or cultural groups, but if there were any events they weren’t publicized. The rest of the 1960s went by with hardly any mention of it in the papers aside from “on this day in the past” nostalgia items.
Come 1970, when the Church of One Tree was more likely the Church of Many Cobwebs for having sat undisturbed over a decade, someone recalled how Robert Ripley was hankering to use it as a museum. Santa Rosa was already Ripley-curious; in 1967 Ripley International Inc. opened its “Believe It Or Not” museum at Fisherman’s Wharf and the PD reported “plans are being made to bring part of the museum to Santa Rosa. It will be placed on display in a downtown location.” While that didn’t happen, a deal between the city and the corporation was made with remarkable speed, and by October 1970 it was settled the church would be rechristened as the “Robert L. Ripley Memorial Museum and Library.”
A group calling itself “Friends of Robert L. Ripley” was formed. Together with the Sonoma County Historical Society and Press Democrat, they declared “a worldwide search is underway for Ripley letters, cartoons and other items to display in the church,” the PD reported. For months the paper published the coupon shown at right to solicit donations.
Mementoes and ephemera trickled in but the gleanings were thin. Ripley’s nephews donated christmas cards received by his sister and snapshots of his homes. There were autographed copies of his cartoon books. Someone had letters an armless boy wrote to Ripley. There was a note sent to him by a Santa Rosa man asking why there was a Ripley street in town; Ripley replied it was named after himself (that was a lie – the street dates back at least to the 1870s).
Items loaned by Ripley Int’l were mostly photos of Ripley globetrotting or schmoozing with celebs in nightclubs. The museum borrowed a suitcase with stickers from all over the world, his pith helmet and the Chinese dressing gown and slippers he liked to wear while drawing. For some reason known only to himself, Ripley hung onto the front door from his childhood home at 117 Orchard street and now that was coming back to Santa Rosa, too.
And then there was the creepy wax figure of Ripley sitting at a drawing board.
It didn’t look much like him; as I wrote earlier, what defined his appearance were his buck teeth, which flipped outward in such a disturbing manner it appeared he was wearing something from a joke shop. The eyes and nose were also wrong and the real Ripley had a doughy face. In short, the wax model was extremely flattering to how he really looked. And then there was the bizarre expression, simultaneously wary and bemused.
The Ripley museum opened June 1971. What few photos can found of the interior shows the walls lined with standard museum display cases and blowups of some of his cartoon panels resting on easels. A panel told the history of the church. There were also some oddities on loan from the “Believe it or Not” collections including a fur-covered trout, a porcupine fish and a stuffed calf with two heads.
(LEFT: Crawford Brooks looks on as raccoon owner Drew Goetjen makes a paw print in front of the Ripley dummy. Press Democrat, Sept. 9 1971)
The museum had a promising start; in the first three months the Ripley museum drew over 5,000 visitors. Curator Crawford Brooks had a talent for dreaming up PR stunts, such as establishing the world’s only “museum pet register.” Brooks appeared on Johnny Carson in 1973 and a few years later several people who had been immortalized by Ripley were invited to the museum for a photo op. The star was Plennie Wingo, who walked from Santa Monica to Boston – backwards. (He made other backward treks in Europe and backwalked again from California to Texas.)
But there were also problems. Someone stole the left arm off the wax figure in 1972 and in 1974 two 16 year-olds broke in and ransacked the place, turning over display cases and pulling both arms off the Ripley figure after stripping it. (I am astonished those boys didn’t think to steal the head. All the young punks I knew when I was that age would have realized it was an opportunity for some truly epic prank.)
(RIGHT: Vandals disarmed the Robert Ripley wax model. Press Democrat, April 14 1974)
Attendance steadily dwindled over the following years. There was a call for volunteers to become docents but it appears no one wanted to. It was no longer open seven days a week, hours became restricted to midday and it was closed except during warm weather months. It wasn’t open at all for most of 1984 because repairs were being made after a fire damaged the steeple and roof. (It started on the outside wall by the men’s restroom and believed to have been arson, but never proven.) The interior and Ripley exhibits were unharmed, including the wax cartoonist.
By 1988 there was talk at City Hall about either moving the church again or kicking out the museum so it could be rented for weddings, concerts and such. City Manager Ken Blackman told City Council the building “will never amount to much” at that location, and $20k was approved for a consultant to study the issue (of course).
In fairness, some measure of those problems were the city’s fault – the place wasn’t easy for visitors to find. There was no signage and out-of-towners were given directions it was “across from Burbank Gardens” or “in Juilliard Park.” People were upset enough about this that they wrote letters to the Press Democrat once they were back home.
The Robert L. Ripley Memorial Museum and Library closed in 1997 or 1998. The exact date isn’t known because its closing wasn’t noted by the PD – it hadn’t been mentioned in the paper for years, in fact.
Moving the church – sans museum – came up again in 2001. (When it was being considered earlier, Gaye LeBaron’s city-hall-know-it-all, Sam the Shark, quipped they should just put the thing on rollers and start promoting it as the “Church Built on Four Wheels.”)
This time the proposal was to send it three blocks east to Rae Park as part of a new “Heritage Park” that would stretch from the Burbank Gardens to E street on the south side of Sonoma Ave. Also to be moved there was the Hoag house, which has since been demolished. The project received unanimous approval from the city Planning Commission but the estimated $1.5M price tag was too much for even our spendthrift City Council.
With the Church From One Tree about to celebrate its 150th birthday in 2023, the Old Dear is probably ready for another century-plus after recent major renovations to stabilize the structure and restore the stained glass windows. It can be rented via the Santa Rosa city website, which also has a very good virtual tour of the interior.
(TOP PHOTO: “Believe it or Not” TV shows have been a mainstay of the broadcast industry since 1949, when the earliest version was hosted by Ripley himself. This photo was from the 1981 revival on ABC, when host Jack Palance filmed a segment at the Santa Rosa museum. Palance is most remembered as the gangster or cowboy who killed someone and/or was killed himself in that movie you watched for a few minutes on TCM some time ago.)
Robert L. Ripley was the most famous man born in Santa Rosa, and the town really should apologize for that.
The first-ever biography of Mr. Believe It Or Not! is out (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley by Neal Thompson, Crown Archetype 2013) and our hometown boy is revealed to be quite a piece of work. He was a roly-poly (yet athletic) bundle of wild contradictions; he repeatedly said he abhorred “freaks” yet made his fortune exploiting what he called “oddities,” such as the baby with a cyclops eye and the man who smoked cigarettes through a hole in his back. He was probably the most well-traveled man of his day to exotic lands, yet refused to utter a single word in a local language, presuming that everyone could understand English if he only spoke loud enough. For a man in his racket, he was curiously incurious; he didn’t seem to care what caused a weird medical peculiarity or why someone would inflict tortuous pain or mutilation upon themselves (“their folly is my fortune,” he said, “I’ll get rich off the ridiculous yet”). He was a real-life Charles Foster Kane mixed with eccentric Howard Hughes, employing a team to search out priceless objects for his mansion as he obsessively kept redecorating it, spending part of each day personally moving furniture, objets d’art, deformed skeletons and whatnot from room to room in the quest for the perfect spot.
With such rich material available, you’d think this bio would be impossible to put down. You would be wrong. Much of this book is a slog and sometimes hagiography. (“Ripley was becoming the country’s know-it-all professor of history, geography, science and anthropology. His offbeat lessons gave people hope.”)
(RIGHT: Image courtesy, A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley)
Leroy Robert Ripley was born in 1890 on Glenn street, the family moving three years later into a house on Orchard street (no longer existing) built by his father. The characteristic that defined him was his appearance – his upper teeth flipped outward in a disturbing manner; biographer Thompson references him looking like “Dracula,” but it was more like a kid wearing a pair of absurdly comic wax teeth. His buck teeth were so bad that you can enter variations of “worst example overbite” into a Google images search and not see anything nearly so extreme, even in Photoshopped pictures that are supposed to be horrible. As a result of his disability he was unable to form certain sounds. Being insecure because of that and stuttering made his childhood even more miserable. He escaped his problems by drawing.
In high school he gained a measure of popularity through his caricatures and skill at baseball, even playing for the local semi-pro team and dreaming of a career with the New York Giants. His education lagged because he was a poor writer and turned into a stammering train wreck when required to speak before the class. His salvation was English teacher “Fanny” O’Meara, who allowed him to turn in drawings for homework instead of written reports, even posting his sketches in the classroom and using them as teaching aids. Still, he dropped out of school in the middle of his senior year. Later he floated the excuse that he had to go to work to support his family, but it appears he mainly played ball. (Much more below about this book’s problems concerning his Santa Rosa years.)
Five days after the rest of his class of 1908 graduated, his first cartoon was published, LIFE magazine paying him eight dollars, which was nearly a week’s pay for most Santa Rosans. Also that summer, in a true believe-it-or-not coincidence, the Ripley family rented a room to a journalist writing a feature on Luther Burbank. Impressed with the drawings of her landlady’s son, she took his portfolio back to San Francisco and by early 1909 he was hired by the San Francisco Bulletin as a cartoonist for the sporting page. He was fired after four months but quickly found a new position at the Chronicle (see item below) while taking art classes for the first time in his life.
Ripley’s talent blossomed at the Chronicle, and a year later he was given the coveted assignment to cover the Jim Jeffries-Jack Johnson “fight of the century,” where he rubbed elbows with Jack London and top newspaper writers and cartoonists from New York. Emboldened to ask for a raise, he was fired instead.
(RIGHT: Ripley illustration from “Joe Taylor, Barnstormer”)
Hoping to parlay his connections into a position with one of the big New York papers, “Rip” prepared to leave the West Coast for the first time. His last work here was a freelance assignment illustrating an autobiography, “Joe Taylor, Barnstormer.” Ripley’s biographer passes over that event quickly dismissing it as a job to earn a much-needed $100 for the cross-country trip, which makes it doubtful he ever saw the book. As an artist, the Robert L. Ripley we knew from the Believe It Or Not! columns was a very skilled draughtsman, but nothing more; as illustrator of that book, Ripley demonstrated his originality and depth of talent for caricature. The drawings remind of the brilliant Edward W. Kemble illustrations for the first edition of Huckleberry Finn (which received mixed critical reviews for the story, but universal praise for the art). A better biographer – one less determined to shoehorn Ripley’s life into a simple rags-to-riches story – would have recognized this work as Ripley’s moment at the crossroads. He was 21 years old, unmarried with no obligations and about to depart for the publishing capitol of the world. Had he considered a career in book and magazine illustration, we might well be speaking today of Ripley as a memorable artist of the early 20th century. Or, he could have arrived in New York City and sought another gig drawing fearsome boxers and baseball sluggers. Guess which path he chose.
At the prestigious New York Globe, Ripley’s star was ascendant. His cartoons were featured several times a month and his paychecks grew fatter as the paper began promoting his name. His was the life of a minor celebrity; evenings spent salooning with pals, dinner dates at nightclubs. He lived at the New York Athletic Club in a closet-sized room large enough for him to change his clothes and sleep, at least when he had no better offers for the night.
He married a chorus girl in 1919 but the relationship quickly fell apart. Ripley refused to move out of his lodgings at the Club, the couple spending increasingly fewer evenings together at nice midtown hotels. Ripley was always off on assignment somewhere, chasing baseball teams or boxers in training camps. He went to Europe without her to cover the 1920 Olympics. He was also producing the very first cartoons with the Believe It or Not! title, most of them about sports history, with a particular interest into the quirky and odd events. By their first wedding anniversary they had been apart more often than not. She filed for divorce about a year later citing cruelty, excessive drinking, and “fondness for other young women.” Ripley did not contest the charges – she had caught him in a hotel room with a woman.
From the 1920s onward, Ripley’s name and fame became legend. The Globe made him a globetrotter with the popular syndicated series, “Ripley’s Ramble ‘Round the World.” William Randolph Hearst made him one of the highest paid journalists in the world when he lured Ripley to his newspapers for $100,000 a year. Book collections of his Believe It Or Not! columns made him richer still. Newsreel and radio appearances further established the Ripley brand. He became a millionaire many times over. He bought an island north of New York City with a 28-room mansion.
The wildly successful years from 1929 to his death in 1949 are densely covered in the book, thanks in part to that era of his life being so thoroughly documented as one of the most well-known men in the world. What emerges from those years is a private portrait of a man that is less one of Horatio Alger’s plucky heroes and closer to a villain in a Dickens novel, such as Mr. Quilp of The Old Curiosity Shop – a creepy, manipulative jerk that seemed to fundamentally dislike people, probably himself most of all.
Hearst-like, he was unable to control his passion for collecting. “Friends assumed there was something chemical at work,” biographer Thompson writes. “Ripley was neurotic and compulsive, perpetually sophomoric and impetuous, that he simply couldn’t help himself or control his urges. Empty floor or wall space? It seemed to make him uncomfortable and needed to be filled with a stature or a weapon or a chair or a painting.”
(RIGHT: Ripley and Frances O’Meara during his 1936 visit to Santa Rosa. Image courtesy Sonoma County Library)
More disturbing was that he also collected women. In the island mansion were always found a few models, starlets, and other pretty young things who were titularly his “secretary” or “research assistant,” signing a waiver acknowledging they were staying there voluntarily. “One writer speculated that Ripley stocked his life with women so he wouldn’t have to choose just one,” writes his biographer. A member of his inner circle commented the mansion “looked just like a harem,” and later said Ripley “lived in open concubinage.”
Ripley himself told interviewers, “women are wonderful, simply wonderful–in their place” and “the only time women are happy is when they are completely under the domination of men.” Yet at the same time Ripley had women buddies, apparently fell deeply in love at least three times, and was utterly devoted to his high school teacher, Frances O’Meara, whom he called “mother.”
Which brings us back to the deeper problems with “A Curious Man” – its portrayal of Ripley’s years in Santa Rosa.
“A few years past its cowboy-and-Indian days, Santa Rosa and nearby Sonoma and Napa could be dangerous and deadly,” the book exclaims, quoting an incident reported in the Sonoma Democrat about drunk Indians on a “wild debauch.” Huh? When was Santa Rosa ever mistaken for a Wild West cowtown like Dodge City? What does the Indian story – which the author concedes dated back to “when Ripley was a toddler” – have anything to do with him? The misportrayal continues:
Also full of debauch were the newspapers. LeRoy learned to read in a lively two-paper town whose editors practiced what would soon be called yellow journalism. The Democrat and its rival, the Santa Rosa Republican, cackled with stories of murderous deeds and accidental deaths, divorces, suicides, and all variety of lunacy, a daily ‘news of the weird.’ People plunged off railroad trestles, lost limbs beneath train wheels, became mangled by farm machines. They shot each other over card games, stole horses, robbed banks. The Democrat was especially poetic in its depictions of death, offering vivid descriptions of ‘putrescent’ bodies ‘lying in pools of blood.’
Boy, I’d like to go back and read them excitin’ papers! Wait a sec – I have read every single page of those newspapers on microfilm starting from 1904, when Leroy was fourteen, and I can assure you that the debauch was far and few. Yes, odd and horrible things sometimes happened, but it’s a gross fabrication to call the Santa Rosa papers “a daily ‘news of the weird,'” or even “yellow journalism,” for that matter. The author is confusing the Press Democrat and Republican with the more lurid big city papers such as the San Francisco Examiner and Oakland Tribune (although it’s quite possible Leroy did see those sensationalist newspapers, which were always for sale at the newsstand in town).
Ripley had a lifelong fascination with all things Chinese, which author Thompson traces back to his childhood explorations of Santa Rosa’s Chinatown, “where he’d peek into the laundries, restaurants, and shops.” Well, when Ripley was growing up, the maps show the town’s Chinese district on Second street was a half block long, with two laundries, a single restaurant and a building used as a temple. Unless he was barging into their residences (and presumably speaking loudly so they would understand his English), there wasn’t much at which to peek, but if Ripley claimed otherwise, it would be interesting to know what he really experienced.
But next to the Chinatown that Ripley supposedly prowled was another neighborhood that the book doesn’t mention at all: The red light district. When Ripley was growing up, there were eleven bordellos in Santa Rosa and when he was seventeen, the town legalized Nevada-style prostitution. If you’re writing about a guy whose personality is greatly defined by seriously conflicted views about women, it seems important to ponder what influence the proximity of dozens of local prostitutes might have had on the teenage boy.
But my teeth-grinding gripe with this author is that there are no notes, so Gentle Reader has no idea where he’s pulling some of this stuff from. Yes, there are endnotes, but they are generalized by chapter and not connected to specific assertions on specific pages. The promise that “more information on sources” is available at the author’s web site yields only reviews (the favorable ones) of his book and a short Ripley bio with pictures.
The endnotes do show, however, that too much of the book is drawn from newspapers and magazines, and much of the details specific to his early years comes from secondary sources published decades later. This is particularly maddening because the author had unrestricted access to Ripley’s extensive archive with his journals and diaries, as well the papers of his long-time agent and others confidantes.
As a result of these failings, the book tells us much about where Ripley went and what he did, with precious little insight into why he was how he was. It would have been better if author Neal Thompson had stuck to writing about NASCAR and high school football and spared us this poorly researched, sketchy biography.
Ripley With the Chronicle
Leroy Ripley of this city, who has been doing some creditable work as cartoonist for the Bulletin, has severed his connection with that paper to secure a much better one with the Chronicle. He has been here this week visiting his mother and enjoying his home.
During the early 1920s Robert Ripley was making a name for himself at the New York Globe as a sports writer and cartoonist, but despite his success at one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world the Press Democrat oddly ignored this hometown boy who became a minor celebrity.
