NOT THE SAME WYATT EARP

December 8, 2021December 9, 2021 Jeff Elliott 1 Comment

Yes, Wyatt Earp was in Santa Rosa! His brother, Virgil Earp, was too! But, uh, not the ones you think – they were the nephews of the famous lawman and gunslinger. Yet it’s also true their legendary uncle Wyatt passed through town at times.

On one of those occasions the Santa Rosa Democrat interviewed the famed man in 1889 and wrote, “Wyatt Earp is little given to talking about himself. And yet he has a reputation as wide as the continent — a fame made by deeds rather than words.” Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp (let’s call him “Wyatt B.” for short) may have been modest, but since his death in 1929 there have been hundreds of books, movies and TV shows about him, Tombstone Arizona and the iconic gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A simple Google search on his name currently returns almost eight million hits.

(Above: Lawmen Wyatt Earp and Virgil Earp, uncles to the Earp men with the same names who lived in and around Santa Rosa)

Just scratch the surface of that enormous canon of work and you’ll find there’s lots of misinformation – a common theme includes authors insisting other authors are lazy, liars, if not bonafide idiots – and one of those false claims is that he owned or managed a stable in Santa Rosa, which you’ll even find in his biographical Wikipedia entry. It’s conceivable one of the nephews did so, although there’s no evidence of that either. Here’s what we know of Wyatt B. Earp in Santa Rosa from the newspapers of the time:

While San Francisco was homebase during most of the 1890s, Wyatt B. and his wife, Josie, were traveling and racing his horses. There are several articles available in the 1895 San Francisco Call that mention Earp then had a stable of trotters. Josie described Santa Rosa being on “the California circuit.” She explicitly mentioned winning in Santa Rosa because Wyatt B. was driving his primary racing horse, “Jim Leach,” and they had expected another of their horses in the same race would win instead.

Besides competing in Santa Rosa, Wyatt Earp had another reason to be here: Buying horseflesh. While Jim Leach came from the huge Rancho Del Paso stud farm near Sacramento, Wyatt was at the Santa Rosa racetrack in August 1889 to watch the races because he was “interested in the ownership of several horses,” as he told the Sonoma Democrat.

In an article in the Dec. 9 1896 Call over a lawsuit against him, Wyatt B. told the judge “he had some race horses, but they were leased by him for three years from a woman who lives in Santa Rosa.” That followed his claim of being penniless and owned only the clothes on his back. (If he thought it might work, I’ll bet he would have plead hardship because his poor wife was a widow.)

That’s the limit of what we know for a fact about Wyatt B. in Sonoma county. So what about those nephews who lived in or around Santa Rosa?

The eldest brother of Wyatt B. Earp was Newton Jasper Earp. He had two sons who he named after his famous siblings: Wyatt Clyde Earp (“Wyatt C.”) and Virgil Edwin Earp. As Newton was a half-brother to Wyatt B. the boys were really half-nephews to the lawman.

Wyatt C. (1872-1937) first appeared in local history living in “Mendocino Township, Sonoma” (Skaggs Springs/Dry Creek) in the 1900 census. He and his new bride were staying with her father and aunt. (The census taker mistakenly identifies Wyatt C. and wife Virginia as the farmer’s nephew and niece.)

In the 1903 county directory, Wyatt C. was a Healdsburg laborer, as he was similarly listed in Geyserville, 1905. (UPDATE: In 1904 he applied for a liquor license to open a saloon on Geyserville Road, next to the Petray Brothers’ Stable. h/t Katherine Rinehart.) As Wyatt C. was in his mid twenties in the years while Wyatt B. was racing, that guy could well have operated a livery stable in Santa Rosa. How he felt about his renowned namesake is unknown, but he usually dropped the Wyatt part of his name and went by Clyde. Make of that what you will.

The 1910 census found Wyatt C. farming in Snake River Wyoming (near Jackson Hole), but from the 1920s onward he was a carpenter living mainly around Sacramento. His was apparently a quiet life.

Not so his brother, Virgil Edwin Earp (1879-1959). He was known as Eddie at times but later embraced his “Virgil Earp-ness” with gusto.

He seemed unable to settle down and had at least five wives 1902-1946. And that’s not counting the incident in 1905, when he ran off with his cousin’s wife.

Virgil took the Santa Rosa woman and her two daughters to San Francisco – although they left her son behind with his father. As he was still married to someone else, an arrest warrant for adultery was issued by our local constable. The papers in the city had a field day with the scandalous story, but the Santa Rosa papers wrote little. The woman reconciled with her husband a week later and returned, but there was no word of what transpired between Virgil and his wife, or even if he ever returned to Santa Rosa.

After that episode Virgil can be traced to Napa, Fairfield, Vacaville, Cloverdale, Washington state and Nevada. Like his older brother Wyatt C. he hovered mostly around Sacramento, although they did not live together.

Because he was in the Army Quartermaster Corps around the turn of the century, Virgil applied for a military pension in 1932 as an invalid and for Social Security in 1941. He seemed on track to end his days as a forgotten, impoverished, and probably friendless old man feeding pigeons on a park bench.

But then in 1958, fate came calling for Virgil Edwin Earp.

What launched this chain of events is unknown, but in March of that year Virgil and his daughter, Alice, found themselves on an airplane for New York City. He was invited to be a contestant on “The $64,000 Question.”

That was the most popular TV quiz show of them all, and there was plenty of competition. According to its Wikipedia entry it even beat I Love Lucy in the ratings; crime rates dropped when the show was on. And for five Tuesday nights Virgil Earp was the star, winning $32,000 for answering questions about the Wild West. One of those appearances can be viewed below.

Those shows turned Virgil into a celebrity – a real, live, rootin’ tootin’ relic of the Old West, and the press swarmed around him. The Sacramento Bee showed him cradling a .38 Colt that supposedly was the last one owned by uncle Wyatt. He talked some about his life (“I was raised right at the knee of Bat Masterson and poor old Doc Holliday”) and how he was gonna write a book someday.

A news service offered a three-part feature series “The Real Wild West” about his life – “a story of fighting men, of liquor and sporting women, stud poker and revenge.” He said he was born in Tombstone, Arizona inside a covered wagon, that he was named sheriff of Paradise Valley Nevada at 18 and killed three men before he reached age 21. He was part of the posse uncle Wyatt B. formed to ride down to Mexico and avenge the death of Morgan Earp. He operated two gambling halls in Sacramento.

It was all complete bullshit.

In truth, he wasted his life bouncing between nondescript jobs – a laborer when he was young, a carpenter, grocer, salesman (both retail and door-to-door selling sewing machines) and collector for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was born at the family home in Kansas, as were his brothers and sisters. Virgil knew about Paradise Valley because his parents lived there when he was a quartermaster; he wasn’t a sheriff or law enforcement officer there or anywhere else. A researcher has put together more details debunking other lies.

No one questioned his fable then (and very few do now, for that matter) and when he died a year after his quiz show glory, newspapers nationwide ran the Associated Press obituary repeating his tall tales and glorifying him as “the last of the fighting Earps.”

Now almost completely forgotten personally, he happened to die when there was enormous interest in the Old West. It’s doubtless some of the widely-printed nonsense he spewed in 1958 about his uncles, their friends and the Genteel Art of Gunfighting seeped into resources about the Frontier West accepted as fact.

The $64,000 Question was cancelled months after his appearance when it was discovered some of the other quiz shows were rigged. Virgil was asked if he had been coached on the answers and he snorted indignantly: “Who could tell me anything about the West?”

Actually, Virgil, you were really no closer to the West than any other salesman or store clerk who read popular cowboy or “historical” magazines and dreamed of being Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickock or that great lawman, Wyatt Earp. Unfortunately, people believed everything you said because of that famous name.

ELOPES WITH COUSIN’S WIFE

Virgil Earp Runs Away From Santa Rosa With Mrs. W. F. McCombs and Her Children

Special Dispatch to The Call.

SANTA ROSA, Oct. 2. — W. F. McCombs returned here from Sacramento last night to find that his wife, Mrs. Maude McCombs, had left the family home on Thursday with his two daughters in company with his cousin, Virgil E. Earp. Earp left a wife here. The couple went to San Francisco, from where Earp sent back $100 of his wife’s money, which he took with him when he left. In the same letter he said he would send later for her clothing.

This afternoon McCombs and Mrs. Earp appeared before Justice A. J. Atchinson and told their story, after which McCombs swore to a warrant for the arrest of the couple. In speaking of the matter McCombs said:

“I am done with my wife and will never take her back, but I want the children, and will fight for them to the last ditch. She took the two girls and left the boy. One of the girls is 2 years old and the other between 6 and 8.”

Mrs. Earp, who is a slender, delicate looking little blonde, said:

“We have found that Mrs. McCombs and my husband left for Petaluma last Thursday and stayed there all night. They then went to San Francisco. From there my husband sent me the $100 of my money which he took away with him when he left. I would not turn my hand over to stop him, but am willing to do what I can to help Mr. McCombs to get his children. I am done with Earp.”

The warrant was placed in the hands of Constable S. J. Gilliam and he will make every effort to capture the runaway couple.

– San Francisco Call, October 3 1905

Has Returned Home

Mrs. Mande McCombs, who eloped from this city last week with Virgil Earp, taking her two children with her, returned home yesterday. Earp is still absent.

– Santa Rosa Republican, October 7 1905

WILL WE EVER GET TO SEE TV?

September 29, 2021September 29, 2021 Jeff Elliott 1 Comment

Santa Rosa waited twenty years for it to happen. Twenty years! Yet when the big day arrived almost no one was able to enjoy it.

The date was December 22, 1948; the event was the first TV broadcast in the Bay Area (except for test patterns and other experiments). In Santa Rosa, the lucky folks who had a television got to watch an episode of Howdy Doody, a travelogue about Santa Clara county and a hockey match between the San Francisco Shamrocks and Oakland.

During the game Santa Rosa received a shout-out from the station for getting calls from local viewers. The Press Democrat remarked the KPIX broadcast came in “surprisingly well” while the Argus-Courier noted reception was “first class…[with] a number of excellent clearcut, contrasty pictures on the screen. Such deficiencies as loss of the sound component and flickering were still noticeable.” So aside from no audio and a lousy picture, everything went just swell.

Few were watching that night because there was no reason to have a TV unless something was being broadcast – and it was difficult to justify the enormous cost of building a station without a large audience to watch commercials. Chicken, egg, repeat. Television sets were also extremely expensive; the Admiral console shown at right with its massive 10″ screen cost the modern (2021) equivalent of over $6,000.

Over the prior two decades, however, Santa Rosa was told that television would transform us. Speculating about this brave new world was a frequent topic at Rotary lunches and other club meetings; the Press Democrat used barrels of ink printing editorials and columns on What It Would All Mean – despite, of course, probably no one around here having actually seen a television.

PD editor Ernest Finley seemed determine to wish it into existence. “Television radio” (as many called it in the early 1930s) “will come into common household use, just as the telephone and radio are today. And it will not be long,” he wrote in 1931. Later that year he speculated it was “about three years away” and said it was still “at least three years away” in 1938 and “still far away” the following year.

Finley, who founded KSRO in 1937, had muddled ideas TV would operate like radio with specialized bands, such as used by police: “Crime detection would be greatly facilitated if officers could send a row of suspects across a television screen…’Is the man you are looking for among these suspects?'”

Or maybe it would be more like today’s live webcams, where we could dial in the frequency of places around the world: “…we can view St. Peter’s, Rome, visit Niagara Falls, see the pyramids of Egypt by moonlight without subjecting ourselves to the annoyance and expense of making a long journey…We may be doing a lot of things differently a hundred years from now than we do them today.” Well, he got that much right.

But pundits in the 1930s said it was certain: Television broadcasts would destroy the motion picture industry, wipe out newspapers and empty the sports stadiums. Or maybe television broadcasts would be completely controlled by Hollywood, daily papers would thrive and ballgames would attract far more viewers than could possibly fit in a stadium. It was definitely going to be the best and/or worst of times.

(RIGHT: 1937 ad for “Celovision,” a hair treatment which used cellophane. The name became simplified as the “television permanent wave” when it was still available at the Uptown Beauty Salon on Exchange Avenue in 1948)

Oddly, “television” became a buzzword slapped on things which had nothing to do with, you know, television. There was the women’s hair wave shown at right and also in 1937 the White House toy dept. sold the $1.98 battery-operated “Irwin Television Rifle” which flashed a sharp beam of light when the trigger was pulled. And then there was chiropractor W. T. Abell and his “television radionic instrument” hokum, discussed below.

(LEFT: Bruner’s ad in Oct. 15, 1939 Press Democrat)

Come the late 1930s, all the talk of TV being right around the corner was badly hurting the sale of radios, particularly after it became clear the FCC was about to approve TV stations on the East Coast (commercial broadcasting began in New York City and Philadelphia in September 1941).

To their discredit, manufacturers suckered in consumers by promising their radios were “television ready,” “built to receive television sound” or had a “television audio key.” Pedersen’s sold a radio/phono console advertising “Magnavox television can be added to your Magnavox at any time.”

Most (all?) of these c. 1940 radios were probably just providing an input jack so the television’s audio could play through the radio speaker – assuming the TV came with a matching output jack, of course. But by the time KPIX and other stations began broadcasting here, terms like “television attachment” nearly disappeared from newspapers, except in For Sale ads of people wanting to unload their ten year old radios for which they paid a premium price.

Sonoma county was certainly TV-curious; the Ward’s ad shown here was in the Press Democrat August 5, 1948 and invited customers to see an actual television set, although nothing would be onscreen since nothing was being aired yet. Until that first KPIX broadcast in December, the PD continued to write about television as if it were some exotic curiosity, even though stations on the East Coast had been broadcasting for seven years. As a result, the paper still sometimes spouted hyperbolic nonsense.

After a 1946 news item appeared about a BBC experiment to see if subjects could be hypnotized remotely, a PD editorial called for legislation against “hypnotic commercials,” writing “it will no doubt be necessary to set up a new set of regulations to govern practices in presentation of television programs when that science reaches out generally into the homes of America.” PD sports columnist Bill Claus in 1948 called for laws against watching TV while driving – although such a rig would’ve filled up the passenger side; the smallest set available weighed 26 pounds, was the size of today’s microwave ovens and would have required its own auto battery plus DC-AC inverter.

After New Year’s 1949 the paper began writing about television more realistically, including a little item on the Brandeburg family of Santa Rosa visiting relatives in Los Angeles where they watched the Rose Bowl game and Rose Parade on TV. A front page box titled “Television Tonight” announced where the public could stop by and see it for themselves: Berger’s Cigar Store, the Tack Room on Redwood Highway South, The Office on Third street.

Even after KGO began broadcasting in May, only thin gruel was offered for viewing. The broadcast day was typically just from 6:45PM until signoff around 10 o’clock, although there would sometimes be a Saturday afternoon ballgame.

In the early part of 1949 there would be a kid’s show at 7, usually film of an episode of Howdy Doody or Kukla, Fran & Ollie. There were many open slots in the schedule “to be announced” or filled by newsreels or promo material (“Washington State: Appleland”). Some shows were seemingly about as interesting as watching paint dry (Clem’s Barbershop, Tele-Tales). There was 10-15 minutes of news on KPIX and a weekly five minute program called Wanted Persons (oh, the late Ernest Finley would have been so tickled).

But later in the year the programming on KPIX, KGO, and newcomer KRON was much improved and the same as seen on the East Coast, albeit a week or so later: Milton Berle, The Goldbergs, Ed Wynn, Arthur Godfrey, Lone Ranger, Studio One. It was a mix of filmed studio productions and poor quality kinescopes of live shows, as there was no coast-to-coast broadcast until 1952 (although a speech by President Truman aired a year before).

By the end of the year likely the entire town had seen sports or a program at someone’s home “television party,” in a tavern or club or in a store window. The most talked about demonstration happened in November, when Armand Saare, who had a radio and TV dealership, rented a hall which was large enough to seat 300 people to watch the Big Game between Cal and Stanford. At either end of the NSGW lodge on Mendocino Ave. (this lovely building from 1909 is still there, but often overlooked) he set up two televisions with 19½ inch screens, which would have seemed huge at the time.

Every family in Santa Rosa didn’t rush to buy televisions in 1949, of course, but enough did to spawn a new little industry: TV installation and repair. Newspaper ads from the dealerships increasingly emphasized their service departments, particularly skill in antenna installation. Anyone paying (the modern equivalent of) thousands of dollars for a set was not going to scrimp on adding an antenna, which was no simple thing. Besides properly mounting it to the house or mast and aligning it for best reception, Santa Rosa then required payment of a $9 building permit per antenna, plus inspection.

Looking backward, it seems we didn’t notice that a kind of earthquake was rippling through the Bay Area in 1949. A new technology had arrived which began disrupting the pattern of our daily lives; it demanded more of our attention than radio ever had and we wasted time watching it even when there was nothing of particular interest to see. TV crept into our lives because we thought of it as just a simple entertainment upgrade, “radio with pictures.”

Everyone of a certain age can recall the year their family got that first television. I certainly do, as well as some of my favorite shows from the time (what I can’t remember is how many countless hours were spent watching dreck). Having a TV gave kids important things to talk about the next day at school – funny things heard on a cartoon show, new toy commercials, who could do the best Klem Kadiddlehopper imitation and whether TV wrestling was phony or not.

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