afasign

A RED CARPET FOR THE WILD BLUE YONDER

Forget Charles Schulz and Peanuts; forget Luther Burbank and his garden. Forget tourism, with its spas and wine tasting (and for that matter, forget boutique wineries). Santa Rosa and the surrounding area are known for one thing alone – it’s the home of the Air Force Academy.

Oh, you say, that’s in Colorado Springs – and notice how quickly the name of that city comes to mind – but in 1950 the Academy didn’t yet exist and its future location was very much up in the air (sorry), with Santa Rosa among the top contenders. The Chamber of Commerce waged a year-long campaign to bring it here, even though it quickly turned neighbor against neighbor and pitted the city against the county Farm Bureau.

When the new year of 1950 began, the whereabouts of a future Air Force Academy was a much discussed topic nationwide. There were already 150 communities in the running, in part because the search criteria were so broad. Col. Freeman Tandy, chairman of the task force screening possible sites in California, said basic requirements were that it be within fifty miles of a major city, be close to all means of transportation, have utilities available and sport natural beauty. He explained they wanted a place suitable for a university more than an airfield with lots of noisy flight operations.

And there was this: Colonel Tandy said the government expected to spend up to $300M to acquire land and build the campus – the equivalent of spending $3.2 BILLION today. When the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce invited the selection board to come here and look around we can only hope there was no obvious drool on the letter.

A survey team from the Army Corps of Engineers was slated to visit in mid-January but there was one teensy problem: We hadn’t settled on a location to show them.

With only three days to spare, the Santa Rosa Chamber met with the Petaluma Chamber and agreed they would offer a site between the cities. “It’s now a Sonoma county project,” said the Petaluma Chamber.

The property was directly across from modern-day SSU on the east side of Petaluma Hill Road. The Air Force was looking for 9,000 acres and the four square miles would be less than a third of that, so maybe they were counting a large chunk of land on the west side of the road – there was no Rohnert Park at the time, remember. It was pointed out that buildings could be on the scenic slope of Sonoma Mountain and part of the site was “a natural football bowl.” Sell the sizzle, not the steak.

When the two guys arrived for the tour, a throng of local poobahs swarmed over them like a pack of dumpster raccoons. Reps from the city and/or Chamber for Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Cotati, Forestville and Sebastopol trailed the caravan driving up and down Petaluma Hill Road and out to Crane Canyon Road – although they couldn’t see much because of heavy rain. Then it was off to Santa Rosa and its lush Topaz Room for lunch and fine speeches about how everyone thought it would be the bestest choice the Air Force could ever make. Afterwards they all piled back into cars and went off to see the “Sonoma County Airport tract.”

Normally you’d expect it would be the last anyone heard of a project like this; competition was fierce from more prominent cities in California and other states in the West. Then suddenly the North Bay became a top contender because General “Hap” Arnold happened to die right then.

Hap Arnold was the indisputable father of the U.S. Air Force. Besides wrenching it away from the Army as its own military branch (no small task, that), he won highest praise for leadership during WWII, winning the air war against both Germany and Japan. Hap retired to his 35-acre “El Rancho Feliz” on the eastern side of Sonoma Mountain and wrote a 1948 article for National Geographic, “My Life in the Valley of the Moon” which spoke of his contentment there. The Santa Rosa-Petaluma site might have been easily extended to encompass his little homestead. He also kept an office at Hamilton Field.

Our congressman lobbied the Air Force Secretary to bring here the “Arnold Air Academy” or somesuch, and letter writers to the Press Democrat urged we take the initiative, beginning with a “General Arnold Day” countywide holiday and a military parade, maybe. We could also start naming things after him – which we did a few months later when the Board of Supervisors changed Glen Ellen Road to Arnold Drive. The Napa Chamber of Commerce, which had its own bid for the Academy, insisted they, too, wanted a nod to “Arnold” should they be given the Golden Ticket (which would have created absolutely no hard feelings over here, I’m sure).

But amid the national mourning for Hap Arnold and locals Burbank-inizing him into our new Favorite Son, the county quietly took the Santa Rosa-Petaluma site out of the running, despite it being the showcase of the presentation to the inspection team – as well as being the only landmark connection to the famed general. From the Jan. 21 Press Democrat:

Sonoma county has pinned all its hopes for the “West Point of the Air” being located here on the former army air base near Windsor, it was indicated at the county Board of Supervisors’ meeting yesterday. J. Mervyn Daw, Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce president, and A. M. Lewis, secretary-manager of the chamber, appeared before the board to ask that the county’s master plan of airports booklet be revised to include detailed maps of the proposed air academy site. They said that Col. F. S. Tandy, district engineer of the Corps of Army Engineers, personally picked the Windsor site over one located east of Penngrove…

There are several shaky details in that clip, although some may be due to lousy journalism. Was the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce (not the city) really directing the Supervisors to make historic, sweeping changes in county planning? Col. Tandy was not part of the survey party that was here the previous week, so when did he evaluate the sites? Did he officially issue this opinion or was it an offhand remark made to someone? Previously, his only comment was that he didn’t think there was an adequate water supply in Sonoma County, which led the PD to boast there would be more than enough once Lake Mendocino was created (as of this writing in 2021, drought has reduced the lake to little more than a mud puddle).

The proposed site encompassed 14,000 acres, of which 5k would be actively used as the Air Force campus. Roughly all of the Russian River between Windsor and Hacienda Bridge would now belong to the government, with a dam somewhere to create a lake (hey, we could name it Arnold Beach!) for boating and freshwater supply. The site also included the area which is now the Sonoma County Airport, requiring us to develop a different airfield.*

Proposed site for the Air Force Academy as presented to the Air Force's site selection committee in 1950. The location of the Sonoma County Airport shown in red. (CLICK HERE for a full size version of the map)
Proposed site for the Air Force Academy as presented to the Air Force’s site selection committee in 1950. The location of the Sonoma County Airport shown in red. (CLICK HERE for a full size and unedited version of the map)

But the Academy’s greatest impact on the county wouldn’t be its whopping size – it would be the sudden pop in population. The Air Force planned to begin with 2,000 cadets and ramp up to 5,000. Together with the staff required to support operations it would add 20,000 people to Sonoma County. That was more than lived in Santa Rosa, which then was under eighteen thousand.

It’s no wonder why the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce was racing after this project; it was said the Air Force expected a town of about 8,000 would be built nearby. Whether that would be North Santa Rosa or West Windsor didn’t really matter – those newbies would still have few shopping options except for the City of Roses’ downtown stores.

The big loser in this switcheroo of preferred sites was Petaluma, of course, and it’s a wonder it didn’t destroy what comity remained between Santa Rosa and the egg city. The Argus-Courier assured the Petaluma Hill road site wasn’t fully out of the running and would still be submitted as an alternate. “At least we are not going to give up hope yet,” an editorial said. Yet the 62-page brochure presented to Washington D.C. on behalf of “Sonoma County in the Redwood Empire” had no mention of it, while including several pages just on school districts in and north of Santa Rosa.

Not surrendering graciously were many small farmers who would be required to sell their land. Nor did the Press Democrat soothe their irk by printing op/eds like this: “By far the greatest amount of land taken over by the Academy would be so-called ‘marginal land,’ much of which is now used as pasture or not used at all.”

Leading the opposition was Fulton hops farmer Lawrence (L. M.) Meredith, spokesman for “The Committee on Public Relations” and frequent letter writer to the PD. He insisted this would take out of production “thousands of acres of the most highly cultivated land in Sonoma county river bottom land that is equal to any in the state,” with an annual revenue of about $22 million today. A pro-Academy rancher with a spread in the target area called BS; farmers were no longer getting the big bucks seen “during the lush war years period” and prune growers worried prices were so low their fruit was barely worth the picking.

About a month after the site was announced, Meredith and other protesters had back-to-back meetings with the Santa Rosa Chamber and the Farm Bureau. The Chamber president said they wouldn’t comment “until ‘all the facts’ are learned about the exact site proposed for the academy,” according to the PD. (Hey, bub, YOU were the one who drew the map!) The next night the protesters met with the Hall Farm Center, which was one of the Farm Bureau’s regional branches. Members voted against the site.

afacolorado(RIGHT: The Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. Imagine this on the west side of Highway 101 near Windsor)

Tensions continued to rise between the Chamber and the farmers. On March 2nd there was a big meeting at the Windsor Grange where around 200 farmers attended, supposedly representing 10X more people living within the site borders. The Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce snubbed an invitation to attend. Asked why, Al Lewis, secretary-manager of the Chamber gave an answer certain to further antagonize protesters: “If anyone requests you to talk at a meeting, they generally write you a letter asking you to attend. This notice invited me to listen to an explanation of the proposed Air Force academy. I already know about the academy.”

Lewis continued his perfectly tone-deaf reply: “At the present time the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce is not plugging the Santa Rosa area at all as a location for the academy. We are merely working with other state chambers in getting the academy located somewhere in California.” Um, yeah.

At another Grange meeting a few months later the Chamber president attended “on a mission of good will” (per the PD) and listened to people voice their opposition to the project. During the meeting a farmer proposed a boycott of Santa Rosa businesses, which was met with applause. A pro-academy resident described the toxic mood at that meeting:

My husband and I attended the meeting on the Air Force Academy site at the Windsor Grange the other evening. When we entered the hall, it looked like a lions den, There was one gentleman in particular who seemed like the leader. He has been in the community only 2 years and really doesn’t know as yet where he is living. There were all kinds of objections, so I thought I’d sit tight and listen, because if I had got up and really told them what was in my mind I know well that they would have pounced on me.

By that time there had been 580 sites proposed for the academy and when the first cut was announced before Thanksgiving, Santa Rosa was among 29 semi-finalists. We were now so close to the jackpot that the Press Democrat editorial writer lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction and began spewing numbers: “A $3,344,000 annual payroll, a livelihood for 4,000 persons, a $4,300,000 retail market, opportunities for 75 retail stores, sales and service for 1,300 automobiles…”

The site selection commission visited here and took a 90 minute tour of the site, followed by a Chamber luncheon at the Topaz Room where Hap Arnold’s widow was a featured guest. The day before the PD had dedicated a large portion of the Sunday edition to extolling the county’s virtues, including an editorial with a lengthy quote from her late husband’s National Geographic article. The op/ed closed with a reminder Hap lived only “a few miles from the Air Academy site.”

But come March 1951, the list of potential sites was winnowed to seven – and Santa Rosa was no longer in the running. Sad! (Or not.)

It came out years later the commission appeared more interested in the Petaluma Hill Road site than the one close to Santa Rosa. From the June 3, 1954 UP wire: “The group inspected the Windsor site by auto and flew over the southeastern site twice. That location included the Sonoma Valley estate of the late Gen. H. H. Arnold, war-time chief of the Air Force.”

In hindsight, there are a few different ways to look at the Misadventure of the Air Force Academy:

*
  It’s a Believe–it-or-Not! story because the whole episode is nearly forgotten. At the next picnic or holiday party you can spritz up the conversation with, “hey, did’ja hear about the time they tried to sell a big piece of West County to the government and build a big military academy?”
*
  It might be a kind of Aesop’s fable where the moral is, “He who gets greedy may end up with nothing.” Santa Rosa was quick to elbow Petaluma out of the contest, but maybe the generals ordered the Petaluma Hill Road flyovers because they were giving the location serious consideration as a better place for the academy – or perhaps they were just sentimental about seeing where their old pal had happily retired. We don’t know.
*
  This was the second time in as many years that the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce meddled in county planning issues – the first being the disastrous decision to split the town in half with the highway. In the following decades the Chamber similarly had an outsized influence on city planning, particularly the redevelopment that destroyed most of the downtown core. A Chamber of Commerce should never function as a shadow government, but for too much of our history that’s been the case.

 

* In 1950 the other choices for a commercial airfield included the Santa Rosa Airpark, which was near today’s Coddingtown and had a single runway about 2,000′ long. The more likely option was the Santa Rosa Air Center (the decommissioned Naval Auxiliary Air Station) just west of modern Corporate Center Parkway with a tower and two concrete 7,000′ runways.

 

Aerial photo of the proposed academy site taken by Charles Ackley and the Santa Rosa School of Aviation. Regrettably, the artist who drew the overlay flipped the east and west borders, creating a mirror image. PD, Feb. 12 1950
Aerial photo of the proposed academy site taken by Charles Ackley and the Santa Rosa School of Aviation. Regrettably, the artist who drew the overlay flipped the east and west borders, creating a mirror image. PD, Feb. 12 1950

 

Front page of the Press Democrat, Dec. 10 1950
Front page of the Press Democrat, Dec. 10 1950

Read More

jeromeboothpreview

JOHN WILKES BOOTH OF FORESTVILLE

John Wilkes Booth escaped after assassinating Lincoln and spent his last 25 years living comfortably in Forestville. Believe it or …no, don’t believe it. Not a chance it’s true. But many locals were convinced he really was hiding there and were eager to shield him.

The tale of Thomas Jerome, the man supposed to be Booth, has more angles than a funhouse mirror. A superficial writer could look at the funny side of it all, as if today the denizens of a trailer park convinced themselves an elderly newcomer was actually Elvis. Or it could be viewed as an interesting 150 year-old conspiracy theory which won’t go away – the History Channel and other cable shows have produced sensationalized “Booth Escaped” programs in recent years. But peer deeper at the story and it reveals how strongly our ancestors clung to every awfulness the Confederacy represented, even decades after the Civil War. And that side of the story is a revealing insight which doesn’t appear in our Sonoma county history books.

In the decades after the assassination there was no shortage of men who were whispered to be Booth. The most famous one died in 1903; a friend not only wrote a book about his supposed confession, but afterwards had the presumed J.W.B. mummified – remains which were later dragged around Midwestern carnival sideshows for decades. Other Booth sightings had him in England, Brazil, Italy, Mexico and every other continent except Antartica. He supposedly turned up in China where he fought for the emperor; he became a famous Episcopalian minster preaching all over the South under a different name. A guy in Missouri contacted the predecessor to the FBI in 1922 because he was certain his 80-something neighbor either was Booth or knew where the hideout was.1

In 1937 Izola Forrester, a prolific newspaper and magazine journalist as well as a pioneer screenwriter, wrote “This One Mad Act: The Unknown Story of John Wilkes Booth and His Family” where she claimed Booth escaped, hiding in Southern California before heading to Asia and dying in India. What makes her book particularly interesting is that she claimed to be Booth’s granddaughter. Spoiler alert: That’s very unlikely.2

Historians point out that Forrester’s book is filled with errors and misconceptions regarding the assassination and the Booth family, but what interests us in Sonoma county is her section about a Booth look-alike who had lived in Forestville. This part of her book is mostly oral history, as she is not straining to prove Thomas Jerome fits into her elaborate conspiracy theory. The majority of mistakes there are probably due to the faulty memories of her interviewees who were recalling a man who had died some forty years earlier.

Here she mainly interviewed Elisha Shortridge who was close to 90 at the time, living in a log cabin somewhere deep in the redwoods outside Forestville. He was a fascinating character; he had a Zelig-like quality to pop up at some of the most interesting local events in the 1880s and 1890s. I’ll certainly be writing about him again, and soon; watch for the story of the Wirt Travis murder.

“Pioneer” Shortridge (as he seemed to be universally called) didn’t need much encouragement to talk about Thomas Jerome. “Yes, I knew him,” he told Forrester. “He came into the valley in 1870. You mean the feller they say shot Lincoln, don’t you?”

“…From the first time he showed up, we all noticed his resemblance to the man who had shot Lincoln, and it was whispered about he was actually Booth himself. I’ve seen him often. Talked to him over and over again, and I can remember just how he looked. He was very handsome, and sort of stately, and he wore good clothes. Always looked dressed up, and he had big black eyes, and wavy black hair off a high forehead. When he did drink, he drank hard. He’d seem to stand up just so long, then he’d have to get away from up here. He liked to ride horseback, and he’d go away down to San Francisco by himself, and stay by himself for a few days, but he always came back. He could talk to you on anything you wanted to know. Didn’t mind saying he’d been an actor once. He was a fine man, and everyone liked and respected him, but we all thought he was Booth just the same…

When she showed him a photograph of Booth, Shortridge replied, “if I was shown those pictures off-hand, and asked who that man was, I’d say I used to know him up here, and his name was Tom Jerome. Looks just like he did when he first came up. Wore his hair and moustache the same way, same eyes, same air about him. Same man, I’d say, only younger.”

Forrester also interviewed the son of William Clarke, the man who undoubtedly knew Jerome better than anyone else. He recalled hearing Jerome read or recite Shakespeare and poetry. Shown photographs of Booth, the younger Clarke said “Mr. Jerome might have sat for any of them.”

“…I’ve heard the talk about him, and he did look exactly like Booth, but he never claimed to be him. There was a mystery around him that no one, not even my father, could solve. He had plenty of money, and was always well dressed, and he looked distinguished… My father was the only person he talked much with, and he died in our home.”

Clarke (or someone) showed Forrester a picture of Thomas Jerome taken in the early 1880s. She agreed he was a dead ringer, if you account for a few extra pounds added over the 15+ years that had passed since Booth’s last portraits. “[It] might well have been his likeness, far more so in resemblance than any other persons who have claimed to have been Booth…when I left Forestville I almost believed they belonged to the same person.”

As mentioned earlier, the flaw in Izola Forrester’s book was that her historical research skills were weak. Had she done a little digging, there was more to learn about Tom Jerome.

He was supposedly about the same age as Booth, although we can’t be sure – I can find nothing about him before he appeared in California in 1868, working as a photographer in Eureka. He claimed variously to be from Alabama or Virginia.

He was still a photographer when he appeared in Sonoma county in 1870 living near the Russian River, but by the next year he stated he was an artist. This is how he identified himself in the voter rolls for the next 17 years, changing his occupation more specifically to painter in 1888. He was described as being 5′ 9″ tall, dark complexion with dark eyes and “arms both crooked”, whatever that meant.

In a nutshell then, here is the recipe for a John Wilkes Booth: Take one (1) Southerner with dark hair born in the mid-1830s, stir in enough education to be well-spoken and enough vanity to be well dressed, add a dollop of mystery (dark past preferred) and mix well. Serve in any community still hot over the Confederate cause and where people thought it was cool to harbor the man who might have killed Lincoln.

And in 1870 California, Santa Rosa and its surrounding region was just such a place. “There wasn’t anyone who’d ever have given him away up here,” Elisha Shortridge said.

When Thomas Jerome came to Sonoma county he stayed with the Myers, according to Shortridge, and a few years later Jerome married one of their seven girls. Dillon Preston Myers was likely happy to approve of his daughter’s wedding to an ersatz Booth and “unreconstructed rebel” – according to Shortridge, Myers was a well-known “Secesh.”3

Shortridge continued:

California was full of them in those days,” he stated reflectively. “They all stuck together, had their own meeting and drinking places and their own ways. Feelings ran mighty high up here in war time, and long afterwards. Folks were divided in sentiment even when Jerome came up and he belonged to the ‘Secesh’ sympathizers…in those days and in my time up here, there was something bigger and mightier in this land that the law or government; something that bound men together in a tie of secret brotherhood stronger than family or country, even to the death. It stretched everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it even if you wanted to. I ain’t saying anything, mind, against it. It was all around this part of the country, and it was ‘Secesh…'”

Forrester asked if he was referring to the Knights of the Golden Circle, the most prominent of the Confederate secret societies which were the direct ancestors of the Ku Klux Klan. In California during the Civil War the group encouraged sedition, including training militia groups that went to fight for the South in the Civil War. The KGC’s propaganda efforts undermined Union support in the West (Santa Rosa’s weekly Sonoma Democrat was long rumored to be financed by KGC backers) and was involved in an attempt to split off Southern California into a separate, slave-holding state. Immediately after Lincoln’s assassination it was presumed the KGC was behind it, and that John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators were part of it.

Shortridge confirmed the KGC was active in Sonoma county during the war and remained a presence afterwards:

“That’s what they called themselves, but there was more to it than the name. You never knew who belonged to it, and who didn’t, but it held the Southerners together. There were plenty of them up here. Even by the time Jerome came to live up here, the sentiment still burned low and deep like that fire there. Southerners and Northeners hated each other for years and years after Lincoln was shot. All you had to do was start an argument on slavery or States’ rights, and the war was on again.”

Even those who didn’t believe Tom Jerome was secretly Booth assumed he had some sort of high-status position during the war. Shortridge said, “It was generally believed that he had been in the Confederate Army, as a spy. But nobody asked him questions. You couldn’t take liberties with him. He was friendly enough, but stand-offish, very dignified and usually alone.”

Clarke’s son told Forrester almost the same thing: “No one ever took any liberties with him, or called him anything but ‘Mr. Jerome.’ He made no explanations about himself, but people believed he had been in the Secret Service of the South, and was an unreconstructed rebel who wouldn’t take the oath of allegiance to the North.”

The Jeromes had two children; the older daughter apparently didn’t want to talk about her father but her younger sister remembered him as austere and mysterious. She said he had been an actor, knew Booth when both were young and had “doubled” for him, but would not say exactly what that meant. She also mentioned the Confederate Secret Service, which suggests some (or all) of what she knew spilled out from the echo chamber.

However swashbuckling his past, his life in Sonoma county came to center upon relationships with the Myers family in Windsor and the Clarkes of Forestville.

He married Ida Myers in 1874, and a year later daughter Frances was born. The second girl, Edith, came along in 1880, the same year Ida died of TB. After that the Myers raised their grandchild Frances and Edith was sent to live with the Clarke family.

Art dealers tell me there are no records of Thomas Jerome paintings, so it’s doubtful he was good enough to make his living by the paintbrush. According to local newspapers he was a partner in a Windsor grocery store in the early 1870s and converted a Forestville saloon into a store in 1880. His friend William Clarke was Forestville’s Postmaster for most of the 1880s-90s and Jerome became his deputy PM in 1890. After that he no longer identified himself as an artist but a “clerk.”

Thomas Jerome’s death is as vague as his origin. Although he supposedly died at the Clarke home there is no Sonoma county death certificate for him, nor any newspaper obituary that can be found. The cemetery records list only that he died sometime in November 1894.

Izola Forrester believed she solved the puzzle after daughter Frances gave her the address of cousins in Philadelphia. Forrester contacted them and was told that yes, their uncle Thomas McGittigan was a Confederate sympathizer and believed to have gone to California, where he disappeared. But either the Philly cousins were out of touch with their own family or Forrester misunderstood what she was told. There was indeed a McGittigan generally matching the profile but he was an Irish immigrant who became a Union soldier, then spent the rest of his life around Philadelphia. A photo of McGittigan as a youth convinced Forrester he was neither Booth nor Jerome. As the Myers family came from Pennsylvania, perhaps Izola was confused by something Frances said concerning the other side of her family tree.

Frances Jerome’s family remained here and flourished; there are now great-great-great and 4-g grandchildren in West county, but the family only knows about the Booth story through Forrester’s retelling. That probably isn’t surprising, as Frances said “it would kill me” if it were proven she was the child of John Wilkes Booth, so it wasn’t a story she herself would have passed down. To some people, treason and murder are not points of pride. Imagine that.

Photo of Thomas Jerome grave marker: FindAGrave.com

 


1 The Booth-escaped conspiracy theories were collected in The Great American Myth by George S. Bryan, 1940. A Rolling Stone overview of the conspiracy stories commented, “author George S. Bryan made it clear that Booth was a favorite of the nut theorists.”

2 Following the assassination, women came forward claiming they were John Wilkes Booth’s wife and/or mother of his children. The Booth family dismissed these women as pretenders, and brother Edwin later said there were “twenty [widows] that wrote to me just after John’s death.” One of them, however, Izola Mills, had two children that she convinced a grown daughter of brother Junius were fathered by John Wilkes. Rose Booth generously supported Mills and her children whom she treated as if they were her own. It has since come out that Izola Mills was simultaneously drawing a U.S. Navy pension for the children claiming their father was her deceased husband. And as John Wilkes was performing hundreds of miles away when Izola Forrester’s mother was conceived, it is very unlikely he was the father. The only link between Forrester and the Booth family was Rose Booth’s willingness to accept her grandmother’s doubtful claims. Source: The Forgotten Daughter – Rosalie Ann Booth

3 Forrester refers to him as “Dr. Myers” which is clearly an error, as he was a farmer and contractor of some sort. My bet is she wrote “DP Myers” in her notes and when writing it up later, misread the “P” for an “R.” On the rare occasions when he was mentioned in the newspapers during his lifetime he was always called, “D. P. Myers.”

Read More