peppertitle

THAT’S MARSHAL PEPPER TO YOU, LIZARDHEAD

Let the record show: In 1968, Santa Rosa achieved Peak Pepper. That was the year when the local Grand Poobahs gave a badge to our town character and proclaimed she was henceforth the town marshal. What could possibly go wrong?

This is part two of the story of Pepper Dardon. Her backstory was hashed in “I, PEPPER” which I urge you to read before continuing. Starting sometime in the mid-1950s she became a noisy and (mostly) cheerful fixture around the downtown district. How well someone got along with her depended on who they were and which Pepper they met. “She could be obnoxious or sweet, depending on the street persona she adopted that day,” her 1992 Press Democrat obituary noted.

She was invariably kind to children who seemed to view her as silly, a grownup who didn’t act like the usual sort of adult and wasn’t much taller than they were. Older kids might think she was scary or mean because she teased them. Teenagers with smart mouths sometimes recognized her as one of their own ilk.

If you were a store clerk or bank teller having a busy day you did not want to see Pepper coming through your door. “Santa Rosa merchants, who endured her tirades as she made her daily rounds, considered her either a charming looney or a public nuisance,” the PD obit also recalled. She was sure to do something disruptive; “Topping it all off, she yodeled, sang and played the harmonica. But not very well.” Should there be a candy jar on the counter she would shoplift fistfuls to hand out later – see above, Children: Kindness to.

The men and women who were active in social clubs and charities appreciated her as an indefatigable volunteer. Pepper’s self-appointed downtown duties included collecting money for good causes, which often were a sizable portion of all money raised during a fundraising drive. She sold lapel pins for the Lions Club’s White Cane Day, ersatz red poppies for the VFW, candy for the Santa Rosa Jewish Women’s Club (she wasn’t Jewish), tickets to the Kiwanis pancake breakfast, rattled donation cans for the American Cancer Society and probably begged donations for still other groups forgotten.

When the campaign was over and the club held its inevitable self-congratulatory luncheon Pepper was often invited because of her outsized contribution. For a long time those orgs treated her as something like their own poster child, as did the Chamber of Commerce and particularly the Police Department.

“There’s no question she got away with a lot. She was a kind of mascot to our smaller-town Police Department. The officers treated her like a pet.” Gaye LeBaron wrote in a must-read 2005 column. Even before the town marshal gag, Pepper was chummy with the officers personally and they did favors for each other; cops would give her a lift in patrol cars and she would run errands for them, such as fetching a raincoat from the police station, according to a different column by Gaye. Nor did it hurt that she prowled downtown with a sharp eye for lawbreakers, like the top elephant enforcing good behavior on her unruly herd. Woe to anyone she caught jaywalking or dropping a gum wrapper – people were astonished such a tiny woman could holler so loud.

But Pepper had no greater champion than the Press Democrat, particularly columnist Gaye LeBaron. Pepper’s birthday was usually heralded in the column, as were the impressive sums she collected for the fundraiser de jour. There were items when she broke her thumb and when she adopted a kitten. After husband Paul lost his job of twelve years as Occidental Hotel janitor, readers learned the Lions Club passed the hat and raised $36 to help them out. Updates followed as he was hired twice again as a janitor and lost those jobs as well. At one point an anonymous caller sniped to LeBaron’s editor she should “stop talking so much about Pepper.”

It was early in 1968 when a Pepper fan wrote to LeBaron suggesting they lobby to have Pepper chosen as Grand Marshal for that year’s Rose Parade: “Riding in an open car down Fourth street would perhaps repay her in some small way for all the time she’s donated.” Gaye liked the proposal and hoped Pepper would get the nod – but a quirk of fate caused her to end up as a different kind of marshal instead.

Undated photo courtesy Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com
Undated photo courtesy Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com

The Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce decided the town needed lots of parties to commemorate its centennial year of 1968. There would be fine speeches from VIPs on Centennial Day in March, followed in May by a whole Centennial Week highlighted by the Rose Parade. Yessir, we would spare no effort to celebrate the town’s 100th birthday in style. (Ignore for the moment that Santa Rosa was actually founded in 1854 and 1868 was only the year of incorporation, which was a legal formality that went almost unnoticed.)

Those festivities were lightly covered in an earlier article but considering the focus was a specific event around the time of the Civil War, it’s surprising the doings in 1968 were such an ahistorical mess. People dressed up in turn-of-the century garb, rode old bicycles or drove antique cars and a barbershop quartet sang, all stuff from a half century later. Or maybe Santa Rosa was more like a cowtown in the Wild West – there was a two-day “western extravaganza” at the racetrack with stunt riding and a race between a horse and a motorcycle. There was also a Centennial Year Marshal because…they always looked cool in TV westerns, I guess.

The selection of the marshal was intended to be a rollicking funfest because everyone knew and liked the candidates – everyone who was part of Santa Rosa’s clubby businessmen’s world, that is. The Downtown Development Association nominated Datsun auto dealer Bob Torvick. In response, a Chamber of Commerce leader said the honor should instead go to Dave “Bugsy” Hill. It was agreed the matter would be settled by an election with votes mailed to the Press Democrat.

For nearly two weeks they bantered in the newspaper. Torvick assured voters he had a full head of hair and was “kind to children very often.” “I am real relaxed,” promised Hill. “I can go to bed sooner, sleep later, and get up feeling fresher.” Oh, you crazy kids.

The votes were counted on April Fool’s Day and it was a tie, each of them pulling a whopping ten votes (there were two write-ins for Pepper). A committee was formed to decide what to do. The agreed solution was for the two to face off in a showdown at high noon at Courthouse Square – using real guns firing soft wax bullets. Only Torvick and Hill voted against the notion. Mayor Hugh Codding was named as the referee.

The shootout was scheduled for the sixth of April and everyone in town was invited – until fate intervened. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. There were waves of rioting nationwide on the following days and the Golden Gate bridge was closed following a bomb threat. The faux showdown was cancelled because playing at shooting someone was no longer funny. There was a memorial ceremony at Courthouse Square that day instead.

“Since the cancellation of the town marshal contest and even before there has been a veritable groundswell of support for Pepper to assume the title,” wrote LeBaron a few days later. “I was all for Pepper being given a place of honor in the Rose Parade. Now, perhaps, I’ll modify my stand to include a town marshal’s badge.”

And so it came to pass; Pepper put on her badge, which thereafter became as much a part of her as body and soul.1

Pepper at a Rose Parade in the 1970s. Photo courtesy Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com
Pepper at a Rose Parade in the 1970s. Photo courtesy Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com

Had she not been cast to play the role of Santa Rosa’s official fake town marshal, 1968 was still a banner year for Pepper.

She was at (or near) her peak for doing street fundraising; “she has collected literally thousands of dollars for charity and while her methods may be unorthodox there’s no denying their effectiveness,” remarked Gaye LeBaron. She was fêted at luncheons both by the Lions Club and the Rotary Club at the Flamingo Hotel, where she had never been inside. And maybe most importantly. Paul finally had a stable job, then in his fourth year as janitor at Community Hospital.

But the year ended with Paul changing from being an employee to a cancer patient at the hospital on Chanate Road. Despite not having a car, Pepper visited him every day for three months, most of her rides courtesy city police “who happened to be going out that way.”

Paul died there in early 1969. The Press Democrat gave him a front page obituary although most of it was about Pepper. Eggen & Lance donated his funeral service and burial with Police Chief Dutch Flohr and other officers acting as pallbearers. It was all quite a tribute, given that few apparently knew him except as the man married to Pepper.

His salary was meager, but losing it created a financial crisis for Pepper. Those who were closest to her – LeBaron, Helen and Dr. Bill Rudee, along with Ford car dealer Bob Bishop – created a “Pepper Pot” fund that carried her over for several months until Bishop, a former mayor who “had some political clout,” as Gaye later wrote, was able to get her a state pension for being certifiably “unemployable handicapped.”

Pepper was then 55 but gave no signs of slowing down in the years following, often topping her previous charity collection records. In 1973 she pulled in a quarter of all money raised by the Lions during their White Cane benefit. Police and firefighters remained devoted to her; when she was in the hospital for gallbladder surgery they made a plaque declaring her Santa Rosa’s “Official Firebelle,” just as the San Francisco firemen once honored Lillie Coit.

She fully embraced the Marshal Pepper routine, never seen without her badge. At some point in the 1970s her usual ensemble included a vest with text on the back reading:

PEPPER
TOWN
MARSHAL
SANTA ROSA
CALIF

“She really believed she was the Marshal,” her PD obituary said.2 Gaye LeBaron wrote much the same in a 1975 column: “I think the problem is that Pepper, like so many other controversial people, is beginning to believe her press clippings. Call someone the town character long enough and they begin to try to live up to it.”

peppervest(RIGHT: Detail of photo from the Macy’s Coddingtown grand opening, courtesy Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com)

Then in 1975 the unthinkable happened: Pepper was no longer allowed to collect money for any of the charities or social clubs.

Apparently the first to break ties was the Lions Club, the group she was always closest to. LeBaron spent an entire Sunday column explaining the issue.3 The Lions said she was dropped because of “too many negative responses” to her methods, browbeating people to donate. “Don’t try to run away lady, I see you trying to keep from giving me money” or “Whatsamatter, lizard? Too cheap to help the blind people?”

Yeah, she could be pushy, but the Lions and everyone else knew that before letting her shake their collection cans. A more serious issue was that she was skimming. “She would get five times more [money] than anyone else, in spite of the fact she pocketed probably half,” said Lon Kaufmann, a Pepper supporter who had known her since she arrived in Santa Rosa.4

Nor was she doing all her marshalling for free. She didn’t just scream at jaywalkers but began demanding they pay a 50¢ fine, which she kept. She waited for drivers with expired parking meters in order to fine them too (the PD didn’t say whether or not she fed the meter in the interim). She yanked packages from the arms of shoppers “to carry them for you.” By any definition it was a shakedown, made all the more disturbing because the police sanctioned it by looking away.

Pepper surely missed the applause and praise from the Lions and other groups for being their top donation collector, but she also spoke about it being a tough job. “I was born and raised to be nice and courteous to everyone. But to some people in Santa Rosa you can’t be,” she was quoted in her obituary. In her postmortem column, LeBaron recalled she was cussed at. People would order her to get away from them. “Lots of people aren’t pleasant when you ask them for money on the street,” Pepper once told her.

It wouldn’t be surprising to learn those rude encounters contributed to her infamous habit of name-calling; “lizard” was her favorite putdown, which could be teasing, affectionate or a sharp slap across the face. Pepper’s lexicon also included “jungle boy” (Gaye makes it clear this was a swipe at businessmen and not a racial slur), “Butterball” for someone overweight, “snakehead” and plenty more. Another part of her regular shtick was to tag locals with nicknames, usually insulting in some way – which might go far in explaining why some strongly disliked her. It’s too late to put her on a psychiatrist’s couch and probe exactly why she thought this acceptable, but Gentle Reader might recall comedian Don Rickles was constantly on TV during those years because many thought his insult humor was funny (certainly not me).

There’s no record of how she felt being blackballed by the social clubs, but her routine didn’t seem to change much. She continued patrolling downtown, Montgomery Village and Coddingtown yelling at litterers, jaywalkers, skateboarders, kids who rode their bikes on the sidewalk (when they switched to the street she’d yell at them for riding in the street) and people in cars who weren’t wearing seatbelts. She yodeled and whistled and told really dumb jokes. She was a regular guest on Jim Grady’s popular KSRO morning show where she would sing and play the harmonica.

The Jaycees never allowed her to ride in a Rose Parade car much less naming her Grand Marshal, snubs that irked Gaye LeBaron no end. But every year Pepper would arrive at the grandstand long before anyone else in order to claim a prime spot (she said she went early in order to keep “lizards” away). Once the event began there was a sweet tradition where emcee John Bugbee would introduce her and the crowd would roar, “HELLO, PEPPER!” and clap for her.

Pepper received an honor (of sorts) in 1982 when cartoonist Dale Messick used her as the inspiration for a character in the soapy “Brenda Starr” comic strip. Messick, who lived in Oakmont, created “Granny Pineapple,” a squat elderly woman who went barefoot, wore a grass skirt and Hawaiian leis along with half a pineapple for a hat. The storyline that appeared in June involved G.P. being so pissed off at the Gas & Electric company she paid her bill in pennies. Brenda and other journalists at the Flash daily paper gave the stunt lots of publicity and soon half the town was doing the same. Ironically, the Press Democrat didn’t carry the strip so we don’t know if Pepper ever saw her sort-of doppelganger, but KPIX sent a crew here to interview Messick and Pepper for its “Evening Magazine” show that aired June 30.

Panels from "Brenda Starr" comic strip, June 1982
Panels from “Brenda Starr” comic strip, June 1982

Mentions of Pepper slacked off in the PD after she turned seventy in 1984. “Pepper won’t like me saying this, but the town marshal is not getting any younger,” lamented Gaye. “She’s losing some of that old enthusiasm, a note or two of the old yodel.” She began having trouble with her legs and had to skip the Rose Parade for the first time in decades. Then in 1990 she suffered a bad fall and was bedridden. She was sent to a Petaluma nursing home where she died of pneumonia, August 8, 1992.

Eggen & Lance again donated a casket and the funeral service, which about fifty people attended. The PD gave her an obituary plus columns by LeBaron and Chris Smith sprinkled with Pepper stories. She is buried next to husband Paul in Santa Rosa Memorial Park.

Pepper had no family and it appears the only property she left was her marshal vest, her harmonica (which had to be pretty rusty by then) and a few pictures of her with cops and firemen. But given it was presumed she was intellectually challenged or maybe bedbug crazy, she also left behind something that might surprise: Children’s stories.

She wrote letters and cards to her friends, even though they lived in Santa Rosa and she could visit them anytime she liked. Among the correspondence are stories about her cat Spunky and its seven kittens. The kitties take a vacation to Disneyland, visit Richard Nixon in the White House, have dinner with Roy Rogers and enjoy other splendid adventures. I haven’t read them but Gaye says they are well written, charming and funny. I’ll take her word on that.

The stories she sent to LeBaron and Helen Rudee were handwritten and Pepper also drew illustrations. They’re now in a folder at Sonoma State as part of the Gaye LeBaron Collection and since May 2, 2024 is the 110th anniversary of Pepper’s birth, perhaps SSU might consider transcribing them into eBook format or digitizing them for online reading.

In her Press Democrat obit, a caregiver at the Petaluma nursing home said, “She was a character here, too. She liked to joke. She was a very happy person.” For much of her life she was a ward of the state, spending her childhood stuck in orphanages and her prime years locked away in a horrific institution. As she approached middle age her future appeared just as dismal; she had a 5th grade education (supposedly) and no skills. She was not on track to end up as an independent and “very happy person.” More likely she would live on the margins, remaining a charity case or working some menial and thankless job where nobody knew her name.

Yet today in Santa Rosa here we are, sitting around the internet’s unflickering campfire and swapping half century-old stories about the woman Linda Garcia Dardon invented called “Pepper.”

And that is simply remarkable, if you think about it.


1 FindAGrave.com has a photo from the April 23 1968, Press Democrat showing Dave “Bugsy” Hill, Pepper and Bob Torvick together.

2 Longtime SR Street Character Dies At 78 by Tim Tesconi, August 9 1992 Press Democrat

3 Gaye LeBaron column, September 21, 1975 Press Democrat

4 Salty Pepper Lived Life Her Way by Chris Smith, August 13 1992 Press Democrat

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peppertitle

I, PEPPER

She was funny, she was annoying, she was quirky and she terrorized a generation of kids. Her name was Pepper.

Everyone who lived in Santa Rosa between (roughly) 1955 and 1985 knew her, if not through a personal encounter then from Gaye LeBaron’s columns where her antics were often chronicled. And although she passed away in 1992 Pepper has achieved a kind of immortality via social media, particularly in the FaceBook nostalgia groups where stories about her pop up regularly.

(TOP: Pepper Dardon watching the Rose Parade in the early 1980s. This is the last known photo of her. Image courtesy of Linn Eikenberry)

Pepper was called the “town character” but that doesn’t ring quite true, as that usually describes someone genuinely eccentric. In Pepper’s day Santa Rosa did have those sort of people too, such as the woman who burned off nervous energy by walking miles every day wearing ballet tights, a scarf and floppy hat. Or the Russian man who handed out malt balls wrapped in handwritten prayers and liked to perform scenes from Othello.

No, Pepper was better described as the town jester – it was as if she thought the Marx Brothers’ movies were instructional films. She did things she hoped people would think funny. She would yodel in the Exchange Bank or into the microphone at a store’s checkout register. She would stand next to the Post Office and ask people where the Post Office was. She would pretend to direct traffic at the corner of Mendocino and Fourth. She would plop herself in the backseat of cars waiting for a stoplight to change and expect the driver to take her somewhere. Once she pulled that stunt with a convertible and when they drove down the street she royally waved at pedestrians. They waved back.

Another of her hallmarks were the cornball jokes that would only tickle the funnybone of a very young child. “Squirrels are looking for you. They think you’re nuts!” Instead of saying goodbye she might make the lame quip, “If I don’t see you in the mattress, I’ll see you in the spring.” And then there was her perpetual favorite: “Hey, you dropped something. Your footsteps.”

She would be considered a little person today, about the height of a smallish 12 year-old girl. It’s not cruel to say she dressed clownish (but not always) and her usual attire was so garish she appeared to glow radioactive. She wore neon-bright Hawaiian blouses and shirts, muumuus so baggy she could have shoplifted half a store underneath, and invariably had children’s moccasins on her feet with plastic flowers poking out of her hair. After she had gall bladder surgery in 1970 she carried her 45 gallstones in a jar to show people.

Gaye LeBaron wrote a further description in a 2005 column: “She was a sight to behold — built like a fireplug, heavy on the makeup, including glitter and those gold stick-um stars the teacher puts on very good tests; heavier yet on the perfume, which she applied from test bottles on the counters at Rosenberg’s and the several drugstores on Fourth Street.”

LeBaron knew Pepper better than anyone else, and that column is a wonderful tribute which I urge you to read straightaway. “People have always had mixed feelings about Pepper,” she wrote in an earlier profile. “Some people, sad to say, hate her. I have mail to attest to that. But mostly people grin at her, shake their heads in wonder, and pass by amused because that’s just Pepper and everybody knows Pepper.”

Judging by comments on social media over the years the jury’s still out. Folks (like me) who weren’t around in her heyday fifty years ago only know her through anecdotes, so it’s easy for us to view her as a goofball who made downtown Santa Rosa a fun place to be. But to those growing up here a common complaint was “she scared me to death.” To kids Pepper could seem crazy and acted like a police-sanctioned bully.

Pepper Dardon in 1974. Photo originals Santa Rosa News Herald via Helen Rudee: Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com
Pepper Dardon in 1974. Photo originals Santa Rosa News Herald via Helen Rudee: Michael Sawyer/FindAGrave.com

Pepper already was a downtown denizen for several years by the time Gaye LeBaron formerly introduced her to readers in a February 29, 1960 column. “Pepper fills a number of roles primarily those of town greeter, semi-official courier and court jester,” Gaye wrote. One of her stunts at the time was “shouting good morning to the telephone workers down manholes in such a voice that brings them up out of their hole with their ears ringing.” Pepper sought only a “grin and pleasant word” for her good deeds, but wouldn’t turn down a few coins in thanks:

…she is one of very few citizens around these days, who offers to help old, crippled or blind people across intersections or up and down curbs. She excels as an errand girl, bringing coffee and doughnuts to busy office workers or running to the bank or the post office for a clerk who just can’t get away. Sometimes she gets a tip for her efforts, and immediately spends it on candy to pass out to her friends. A crying child will bring Pepper running from a block away to assist the harried mother with offers of cookies and condolences…

pepper1960Hotpot(RIGHT: Pepper Dardon as seen in the February 29, 1960 Press Democrat. Photo enhanced using HotPot AI)

Almost nothing was known about her at the time except she was married; she claimed her name was Florence but wouldn’t give her age. Over time a few biographical tidbits leaked out yet even in her PD obituary many details were wrong or questionable. The dust didn’t clear until Michael Sawyer researched her genealogy (available on Ancestry), thus making him the world’s first certified Pepperologist.

Her name was originally Linda Garcia and was the youngest of eight children when she was born May 2, 1914 in Salinas.1 Sawyer found she was a direct descendant of the Californio family who had the first Mexican land grant in the Carmel Valley (thank them the next time you enjoy Monterey Jack cheese). Her father was an illiterate farm laborer who mainly worked around southern Monterey County.

She was only eight months old when her mother died of cancer. The children were probably taken in by relatives but there’s no evidence of where any of them were until 1920, when Linda and three of her sisters can be spotted in the census at the Santa Cruz Female Orphan Asylum. At age fourteen she and five siblings were listed as half Native American on an Indian census roll.2

Two years later she was living at the Castroville Detention Home. Before jumping to conclusions she was there because of some wrongdoing, consider at that time a “detention home” was more like what we would call a “group home” today. It might house orphans, children who temporarily did not have adults to care for them, and yes, “mild delinquents”.3 Locally Lytton Springs was just such an institution run by the Salvation Army.

Comes the 1930s and she along with all her brothers and sisters were now adults. Those who can be traced were still living around southern Monterey County, mostly near their dad in Peachtree Valley. The exception was Linda. She was sent away to the Sonoma State Home for the Feeble Minded.

Gaye LeBaron says today it was recognized she was intellectually challenged, but locking her up in an institution – particularly the Sonoma State Home, where she was expected to remain for the rest of her life – was no act of kindness.

As discussed here earlier, the medical abuse done on the sprawling campus at Glen Ellen (also known as Eldridge and now called the Sonoma Developmental Center) played a significant role in the eugenics movement in the United States. Linda Garcia, like other women inmates, would have been forcibly sterilized because of a lack of “mental hygiene” and/or being classified as “oversexed.” She was at the Sonoma State Home for at least fifteen years but more likely was there from 1932 to 1951, admitted when she was around 18 years old and staying until her mid-thirties.4

By the late 1940s the institution was hopelessly overcrowded with over three thousand inmates. Benches were pushed together to become impromptu beds, recreation rooms became wards and infants were sleeping two to a crib. There was some state funding available for new construction but not nearly enough. About half of the inmates were committed there for life because of severe mental or physical disability, but it was decided that after training and treatment (especially sterilization) the rest were eligible for release to live with relatives or take jobs.5

And as Gaye wrote in her 2005 column, Linda Garcia was among those allowed to leave: “She lived for a time in a household where she cared for children and did housework.” She also met her future husband, Paul.

Very little is known about Paul Dardon; he was born in Arkansas in 1911 and mainly grew up in small Oklahoma towns. A note on his high school records stated he was “feeble minded” and while he went to school until age seventeen he still may have been illiterate – on his WWII draft registration card he signed his name with an “X”.

He came to Santa Rosa around 1944 and was a member of the Foursquare Gospel Church, attending their national convention at Los Angeles in 1949 as one of two Santa Rosa delegates. He and Linda were married September 1952 by a Justice of the Peace at the old courthouse.

Paul had menial jobs as a restaurant worker and janitor – although he curiously had himself listed as a “horseman” in the city directory during the mid-1950s, when he was really a janitor at the Occidental Hotel. While they didn’t have much, she quit (or lost) her domestic job and reinvented herself as She Who Shall Not Be Ignored. “While Paul was on the job, Pepper was around town, at her life’s work, which was assisting the police in keeping law and order and annoying those who found her annoying,” penned Gaye LeBaron.

“You’d see them walking hand in hand to their apartment on College Avenue when Paul’s workday ended,” Gaye also wrote in 2005. “They made a pair. Pepper was perhaps 4-foot-10 in her shoes. Paul was a loose-limbed 6 feet tall and dressed exclusively in bib overalls.”

Thus “Pepper” was born. And for the next thirty years, the mean streets of Santa Rosa would never be the same. Lizards, beware.

NEXT: THAT’S MARSHAL PEPPER TO YOU, LIZARDHEAD

 


1 Salinas was named on her Social Security application and her mother died there, suggesting the town was where the Garcias sought medical care. Michael Sawyer believes it is more likely she was born in King City or other small unincorporated place in southern Monterey County. Her mother was strongly linked to San Lucas in her obituary. LeBaron and others have broadly stated she was born in the Salinas Valley.

2 The 1928 Indian census roll list them as associated with the “Digger” tribe, which may be shocking because that name was commonly used as a racial slur in the Old West during the 19th century. But there was a federally recognized Digger Reservation in Amador county which is now part of the Jackson Rancheria.

3 Evidence that the Castroville Detention Home was like a group home is shown by three of the 15 residents being children ages 4-8 who share the same last name.

4 The federal census identifies her as being at the Sonoma State Home in 1935, 1940 and 1950. Michael Sawyer believes it is likely she was sent there once she turned 18 (I concur). In March 1951 she applied for Social Security, which would not have been necessary if she were still at the Home. LeBaron has stated variously she came to Santa Rosa and became a domestic worker in 1942 or 1948 and it is possible she returned to Eldridge before 1950, either willingly or not. The Feb. 9, 1949 article in the series discussed in fn. 5 says some inmates were discharged temporarily on “leave of absence.”

5 In Feb. 1949 the Press Democrat produced an excellent three part series on Eldridge written by Phyllis Seidkin (“Inside Sonoma State Home“) which stated 1,313 inmates during 1944-45 were “with relatives or for employment under supervised conditions or for family care in private homes” (Feb. 6). “…life at the institution is aimed at quickening arrival of the time when those patients who are mentally and physically capable, may rejoin the outside community from which they have been separated. Of the total of 3,200 patients, Dr. Porter estimates that about 50 per cent are custodial patients, lower imbeciles and idiots who participate in institution life dances, movies, church services but cannot ever leave the home” (Feb. 9).

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iva eyes2

CRAZY EYES

There were 49 prisoners awaiting execution but only one was a woman. That woman was Iva Kroeger.

On May 1, 1963 she was sentenced to death for the murders of Mildred and Jay Arneson and sent to the California Institution for Women at Frontera (AKA Corona State Prison) to await a decision on her appeal to the California Supreme Court. And to the surprise of many, the justices ordered her sentence be reconsidered on a technicality.

The court agreed her trial was fair and did not dispute her first degree murder conviction. But when giving instructions to the jury during the penalty phase of the trial, the judge erred by telling them a sentence to life imprisonment would make Iva eligible for parole, so there was a chance – however microscopic – she could be back on the streets in as little as seven years. Iva soon found herself headed back to San Francisco for a new (partial) trial.

But first: More medical reports – and guess what? The new experts contradicted all the previous experts!

Doctors at the state prison declared Iva had “chronic brain syndrome and central nervous system syphilis.” Her history of syphilis came up during the trial. A quarter-century earlier she was treated at a hospital and the medic at the San Francisco jail infirmary thought she had signs of paresis, which is a kind of chronic brain inflammation often found in late neurosyphilis. A doctor at the trial testified he didn’t believe it because she didn’t display the typical symptoms: “I won’t mention them unless you make me,” he said, “because she might have them tomorrow if I do.”

Iva was also seen by two new court-ordered psychiatrists. The three who had examined her before the trial said in court she was a “pathological liar” and a criminal sociopath putting on a show in hopes of avoiding punishment. The new crop of experts diagnosed her as fully psychotic.

Now certifiably physically and psychologically impaired, Iva was once again before Judge Neubarth, who had sentenced her to death almost exactly a year prior. This time she had two lawyers, one of them being famed litigator Melvin Belli whose law firm had also represented her in the damage suit over the injury that caused her incurable limp, which seemed to come and go.

Neubarth and the prosecutor had already agreed it would be a bench trial, as she was such a “mental defect” it would be inhumane to risk a new jury condemning her to death because such a verdict would be easily overturned on appeal. With no objections from her lawyers, Judge Neubarth reduced her sentence to life without parole. “When I say life, I mean life,” Neubarth stated. “She should never be returned to society. I am going to file a special report in which I will urge that she never be released.”

The hearing was over in 25 minutes and the shortened proceedings deprived Iva of a stage where she could perform for her fan club in the gallery. Still, she “…trundled into court in a wheelchair with her left leg bandaged heavily (apparently her own idea and not that of Corona physicians),” according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Afterwards she spoke with reporters in the hallway. “I never had a trial…I don’t believe the judge knowed the truth. I have 108 witnesses to prove my innocence.”

(Curiously, the Press Democrat didn’t have Bony Saludes or any other reporter at the hearing, choosing to print only a 150-word wire service brief which appeared in many other papers.)


HOW GUILTY WAS RALPH?

Iva and Ralph Kroeger were tried together for the Arneson murders, shared the same lawyer and both received a death penalty, but their trial judge rejected the jury’s decision and commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. The couple also filed their appeals to the California Supreme Court together – although the reasons asking for a mistrial were quite different.

Iva’s appeal had eight arguments that a white shoe lawyer might call desperatis precibus – let’s throw everything against the wall and see if anything sticks. Some of them were that she was forced to testify against herself, she didn’t have her own attorney, Ralph testified although he was her spouse and she deserved a sanity hearing even though the experts said she was not crazy. Most of these pleas were rejected because she had not brought them up as objections during the trial.

Ralph’s appeal had a single point: He should have had a separate trial. As summed up by the Supreme Court, he argued “…it is reasonable to believe he would have received a different verdict had the case been tried in the usual tranquil atmosphere of the courtroom, but that Iva’s misconduct during the trial so inflamed the jury that it returned its verdict against him out of passion and bias.” Again the high court tossed the argument because there weren’t earlier objections.

No one considered Ralph had any role in planning or committing the murders, and two of the newspaper reporters who covered the entire trial expected him to be acquitted. But he did tell deliberate lies in court and during questioning. Some of his statements and actions were likely to appease his volatile wife (see “The Hapless Husband” section in chapter two) but others point to him covering up crimes or suggest he knew more than he was willing to admit. Some examples:

*   In the summer of 1962 he claimed not to know the whereabouts of Iva, which he told authorities probably meant she was dead. In truth she was apparently hiding at the San Francisco house until she left on her cross-country bus trip in late June. Similarly Ralph said he never knew about or saw her two grandsons, even though a neighbor viewed Iva and Ralph with the kids through a window in August.

*   He said he believed Iva when she told him she was managing the Santa Rosa motel for a physician who bought it from Mildred Arneson in February, 1962. The prosecutor confronted Ralph for having said the mysterious doctor was paying for motel equipment two months before his supposed involvement.

*   Ralph denied cosigning bank loans from the Santa Rosa branch of Bank of America and the Exchange Bank. Handwriting experts testified it was indeed his signature under the name “Ralph Long,” the alias he and Iva used in Santa Rosa.

*   He never noticed the two crude concrete patches in his garage/basement, he insisted. Yet when the cement contractor came to pour a new floor and “picked up a sledgehammer and began to break some of the old cement,” stated the Supreme Court case overview, “The Kroegers angrily stopped him and said they did not want the concrete broken.”

So Iva went back to prison where she was supposed to stay until she died. Not that she minded it much; also in her hallway interview she said, “…I’ll be happy when I go back [to Corona] because they treat people like human beings down there.” In that era it was described as being like a college campus and the cell blocks like dormitories. It’s not hard to find interviews with prisoners insisting that no, it wasn’t all lollipops and puppies and yes, taxpayers should be assured they were being adequately punished.

A 1966 profile quoted the superintendent as saying she “looks very well.” Iva was being her usual sociable self according to the Oakland Tribune, “acting as a runner for the other sixty inmates in her cottage, carrying notes or going on errands.” Ralph wrote to her weekly and tapped his small pension to send her pin money to get cosmetics and such at the prison canteen. Later that year Ralph died of cancer at Folsom State Prison; he is buried at the Lakeside Memorial Lawn Cemetery in Folsom.

The article didn’t mention Iva’s trademark limp, but the superintendent said she was using crutches. She also told the paper that Iva was going blind. “She can’t see from one eye at all. We’re getting her started learning Braille.”

Gentle Reader may recall Iva had a permanently blown out left pupil (a condition known as anisocoria) but neither eye reacted to light. There are several possible causes of the condition; most often it’s from some sort of traumatic brain injury. During her months in Santa Rosa Iva incessantly complained she had to have an operation to fix her gimpy leg, but immediately after being apprehended by the FBI she switched gears – now some sort of expensive eye surgery was needed to save her vision. Anisocoria does not cause blindness.

Time passed. Iva and her horrible deeds were still rehashed in tabloid crime magazines. When reporters and cops who worked on the case retired or died, new details or observations emerged from interviews and obits: “She had 97 different personae. She could be anything she wanted to be.” “Every day was something new. She turned out to be a class A psychopath.” “She even admitted in court, when her husband was sentenced with her, that she had done it all by herself. ‘I lowered them into the hole with wires,’ she screamed.” Were all of those things true? Yeah, maybe. Sure.

The San Francisco Examiner kept track of her for awhile, with little items noting her first parole hearing in 1972 and how she always sent a Christmas poem to Judge Neubarth and birthday greetings to prosecutor Frank Shaw. When Governor Pat Brown made an inspection tour she told him “I was convicted by the newspapers,” and he muttered something that encouraged her to start boasting she would “have a job in the Brown administration” once she got out of the joint.

But it was the Press Democrat and not the Examiner that turned up the real scoop. Gaye LeBaron made an idle query in 1977 to find out how the state might treat a geriatric psychopathic killer. She was surprised to hear “the strange, stumpy, gabby little woman” was paroled in August, 1975. She had served 12 years and three months.


She’s 56 now [Ed: she was actually 59] and totally blind, perhaps from the same disease that killed her husband. Her parole officer says she uses her middle name, Lucille, makes no trouble, “she’s just a bit of a nuisance.” She rides all over Riverside on the city buses with her white cane and likes to tell people how she “served 13 years for a crime she didn’t commit.” She’s going to college, taking sociology classes at UC Riverside and UCLA both, and writing a book about her life which ought to be some story. She has become an active Scientologist and holds much hope for the future…

LeBaron remarked the terms of Iva’s parole (supposedly) legally enjoined her from returning to Northern California, but news that “Grandma” Kroeger was loose still caused “some sweaty palms in town.” The widow of Herbert Willsmore, the tradesman Iva threatened to shoot, said he believed to his dying day he was going to be her next murder victim. The Forestville couple who held the actual mortgage on the Santa Rosa Ave. motel likewise feared she was going to come after them.

In a subsequent column Gaye explained she tried to find out why the parole board released Iva despite her lack of contrition for the gruesome crimes and Judge Neubarth’s plea to toss away the cell door key after locking her up forever. Alas, LeBaron was told details of those prison records were lost in a fire. All we know is the board’s decision was “based on her behavior while she was incarcerated.”

Yet it’s très facile to picture the scene at the parole hearing – after all, she had rehearsed for this performance all of her adult life. Iva walks in – sorry, LIMPS in – with her white cane, probably leaning on the arm of an officer. She is so darn sweet and lovable and has suffered such a difficult life the most hard-hearted member of the parole board wants to reach out to give her a big hug and promise everything will be better. She is the kindest kind of grandmother and arises each dewy morn with a prayer that she will find new ways to inspire everyone to be their better selves. If such a saint doesn’t deserve clemency, then who?

(RIGHT: Iva Kroeger shortly after her 1962 arrest in San Diego. Photo enhanced using HotPot AI)ivaflutter

The most interesting question to debate is how much her near total blindness weighed in the board’s decision. It surely was impossible for her to offend again (not that she would!) and releasing a severely handicapped prisoner would save the Dept. of Corrections more than a few bucks – Gov. Brown was warning there was a need for “public sacrifice” in 1975 because of a very tight budget, even as the California prison population was growing year over year. On the flip side, she had no close family to help care for her and might require even more support from the state once freed.1

As Gaye LeBaron revealed, it turned out Iva was able to get along just fine. After her column appeared the Examiner followed with more details in its own Iva update. Her parole officer told the paper she lived alone in a small apartment in Riverside with an income of $334/mo. from Social Security and disability. “She has extremely limited vision, but she has gone to the Braille Institute and reads Braille very well.” Nonetheless, she had a B+ average at UC/Riverside and was majoring in sociology. And, of course, “she maintains her innocence to everyone.”

The saga of Iva Kroeger might have ended with her continuing on that path for the remainder of her life – content to be out of jail with no worries of being destitute, which seemed to be her driving fear. Free to pursue her offbeat metaphysical beliefs and pestering strangers for attention by wailing about her unjust fate.

But there’s a final chapter to her story that’s on par with many of the other outrageous stunts she pulled. Only this time there was an underlying question about herself that dwarfed the actual crime: Was Iva actually blind – or even visually impaired at all? Had she fooled prison officials, doctors and even the Braille Institute, she was unquestionably one of the greatest confidence artists of all time.

She disappeared after her parole ended in the early 1980s. Her former parole agent told LeBaron she was then living in Long Beach and a religious group in Hawaii offered a permanent administrative job (clue #1 she might not be totally blind). But she instead reverted to her original scam which was impersonating a nurse. She traveled around the country by bus, picking up convalescent jobs.

On one of those bus rides she met a real nurse from San Diego named Edna Weitzel and claimed to be a wealthy landlord who needed a trustworthy assistant to help manage her extensive real estate portfolio. Edna agreed to work for her and they spent a couple of days together gambling in Las Vegas before Iva disappeared. At the time Edna was unaware Iva had swiped her credentials until months later when she was notified by police looking for Iva.2


THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF IVA KROEGER

MURDER MOTEL ON SANTA ROSA AVE

GRANDMA’S MURDERS

ELUSIVE IVA, WHO IS EVERYWHERE

DISORDER IN THE COURT

CRAZY EYES

By 1983 she was mainly working in Florida, where she had relatives. Gentle Reader might recall when Iva was on the lam in 1962 she visited her son who lived near Fort Meyers, taking his young sons back to California with her, where she promptly abandoned them. Whether by coincidence or no, her brother and his extended family also had a home in a different Ft. Meyers suburb. That two branches of her family happened to be near each other would later confuse investigators and newspapers who assumed they must be the same.3

A crisis began in July 1986 when the 18 month-old daughter of Iva’s nephew drowned in a swimming pool. Her father was co-owner of a grocery in Cape Coral and was at work on the day of the child’s death. The nephew and his family didn’t believe his long hours played a role in the accident but Iva took the notion the toddler wouldn’t have died had he been home. Specifically, she blamed his partner Andy Pitcher for scheduling her nephew to be at the store at the time.

And then the death threats began. Instead of her usual M.O. of using an alias, she started calling the Pitcher home and making sure they knew it was Iva Kroeger on the line. “I’m an old woman and I’ve already served 16 years [sic] and the only thing I haven’t decided is how I’m going to kill you.” She had nothing to lose and “if you don’t believe me, check the records. I’ve killed before,” she reportedly said, before describing exactly how she murdered the Arnesons.

Iva told the family she knew “who took the kids to and from day care” and even “where he sat at church.” Pitcher bought a gun and told the kids not to play outside. Their housekeeper took their youngest children, age four and six, to stay with someone on the other side of the state.

Those harassing calls went on for weeks until there was a knock on the door at 12:30 AM. Andy Pitcher opened the door to see an elderly woman. When she asked if Andy lived there, he knew it was Iva. He noticed she was carrying a plastic bag with what appeared to be the barrel of a handgun sticking out the top.

“Hey, you’ve got the wrong house,” he told her.

Incredibly, the bluff worked. Iva wandered away and began waking up neighbors, claiming to be an aunt trying to find Andy’s house. He immediately called the police.

“This lady’s Iva Kroeger and she’s here to kill me!” Pitcher told the policeman answering the call, just as Iva was returning to his house.

Iva – always the most adroit of liars when cornered – gave the officer a fake name, said she was from out of town and lost, trying to find her nephew. She didn’t know anything about this Andy Pitcher fellow or why he was saying bad things about her.

The rookie cop believed the sweet old lady completely. He didn’t look in her bag and gave her a lift to a downtown Holiday Inn. And true to form, she disappeared. That was the last contact law enforcement would ever have with the infamous Iva Kroeger.

It took several weeks for word to reach California that Iva had resurfaced and was again threatening to kill someone. Both the Examiner and Press Democrat refreshed reader’s memories of the 25 year old Iva murder saga, while Gaye LeBaron tied up a crucial loose end: “Police in Cape Coral, Fla., said yesterday there was nothing to indicate she had difficulty seeing when she went to the home of a man she had declared responsible for the death of her grandnephew [sic] and threatened him with a gun.”

EPILOGUE

We know about her Florida escapades thanks to Cape Coral police detective David Stadelman. After Pitcher’s complaint reached his desk, Stadelman tumbled down the Iva Kroeger rabbit hole, spending a month looking into the history of the killer grandma before seeking a warrant for felony aggravated assault.

Detective Stadelman was a thorough investigator, although delving into Iva-ology from Florida couldn’t have been easy in 1987, sans internet and the ability to read all the old newspaper coverage of her life and crimes. He presumably contacted the San Francisco police and likely the FBI and Sonoma County sheriff as well. He soaked up all he could from the Pitchers and the family of Iva’s nephew. He studied her diaries and mementos left behind when she fled. And one of the things he found revealed she had been back to Santa Rosa.

She may have been (supposedly) prohibited from returning to Northern California but that was just while on parole. So although there was no legal prohibition from her being here afterward, it raises the question why she would want to do so – it’s a strain to imagine she had any friends in the area dating back to her crime spree a couple of decades earlier. And how was she supporting herself? Was she working here in nursing homes under an alias, as she did elsewhere?

Let’s jump now to 1989, over two years since she was last seen in Florida. Charlie Raudebaugh, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who had covered all of Iva’s 1963 murder trial was now retired and living in Oakmont. One February morning he was at Montgomery Village where “he spotted two women about 10 feet away, obviously killing time waiting for a shop to open,” as he said to Gaye LeBaron. Here’s what else he told her:


… One was tall and white haired, quite well dressed. He said he thought, “There’s a dignified-looking middle-aged lady taking her mother out,” and then he realized the “mother” was Iva Kroeger. “Her gestures were the same. She had the same gimp (Kroeger was lame). She moves her hands in an unmistakable scoop-like fashion.” He is absolutely certain it is the same woman who led police on a nationwide chase and made horrifying headlines so many years ago. She realized she was being watched and looked at Raudebaugh. “There was a light of recognition,” Charlie said. “Her gaze intensified and then she turned away”…The woman Raudebaugh saw Monday had no white cane.

As with the Press Democrat’s Bony Saludes, the trial was arguably the biggest and most memorable story of his career. Counting the court hearings before and after, Raudebaugh spent about three months within a few feet of Iva. Sure, he possibly could have mistaken someone else for her – goddesses know so many people did when she was a fugitive – but there were few who could be considered a more reliable witness to identify her. But again, why in the world would she be comfortable being back in Santa Rosa?

Whether or not he really spotted Iva here in 1989, she was then 71 years old and a woman with few options left. It’s impossible to imagine the family would have anything more to do with her. She probably couldn’t get anyone to hire her; even with a stolen or fake ID stating she was younger (and you just know she would have had one) she was a petite and frail-looking old lady who hardly seemed capable of the long hours and physical rigors of convalescent nursing. Perhaps that “dignified-looking middle-aged lady” was someone she conned into supporting her, at least for the moment.

Hard times were on the horizon. We know that in Oct. 1991 she was in contact with Social Security, probably to update records on where her checks should be sent. She was then living in Boston at the Pine St. Inn. It was a homeless shelter.

The charity had a “Women in Transition” program, funded by HUD and the Massachusetts welfare dept. where indigent women could stay up to two years until permanent housing could be found. Iva had reverted to using her birth name Lucille and had also reverted to using a white cane. A May 20, 1993 article in the Boston Globe mentioned her: “Lucille Kroeger, 69, and a Women in Transition guest, is blind and listens to tapes from the Perkins School for the Blind in her cheerfully-decorated room. She has written 418 poems, many at the inn.”

Shortly after that she was moved to St. Helena’s House, a 73 apartment building for the elderly owned by the Boston Archdiocese. Iva lived there the rest of her life.

Iva Lucille Kroeger died June 26, 2000 at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, which was Harvard’s teaching hospital. She had cervical cancer but her cause of death was a heart attack. Her remains were cremated.

True to form, her death certificate contained multiple lies. She was 81 (not 77). She had taken a couple of years of college classes but had not completed two years towards a specific degree. She wasn’t a homemaker. She didn’t own a house. And her name was never legally Iva. In death as in life, she wrapped herself in fog.

 

1 A 1974 paper in Stanford Law Review stated paroled inmates in California were required to participate in a work or training furlough program on release. That article, however, was specifically about men and does not say what conditions were imposed on those who were disabled and/or elderly.

2 Curiously, no articles about the 1986 incidents can be found in any Florida newspapers currently online. Besides the Press Democrat items cited below, the main source of information came from the Feb. 15 1987 San Francisco Examiner.

3 “The Florida police say she isn’t a Grandma at all, that the children she traveled with in 1962 and abandoned in Oakland weren’t her grandsons but her nephews. One of them may be the father of the drowned child which set her off on her latest rampage.” Gaye LeBaron, Feb. 18 1987

 

sources

 

(Press Democrat articles related to this chapter only)

 

LAWYER HAGERTY TO APPEAL LIFE SENTENCE FOR RALPH (May 2 1963, no byline)

HIGH COURT REVERSES IVA’S DEATH SENTENCE (March 31 1964, UPI byline)

KROEGER RETRIAL TO START (May 13 1964, no byline)

IVA ESCAPES GAS CHAMBER (July 3 1964, no byline)

IVA KROEGER GOING BLIND IN PRISON (February 27 1966, Oakland Tribune reprint)

SR KILLER DIES IN PRISON (August 26 1966, no byline)

GAYE LEBARON (October 16 1977)

GAYE LEBARON (October 28 1977)

GAYE LEBARON (October 14 1984)

GAYE LEBARON (October 24 1984)

KILLER GRANDMA HUNTED IN FLORIDA (February 16 1987, Robert Digitale byline)

GAYE LEBARON (February 18 1987)

‘SWEET’ IVA KROEGER’S GRIM CAREER (February 22 1987, Bony Saludes byline)

FLORIDA POLICE STILL PURSUE ELUSIVE LITTLE OLD LADY (February 22 1987, no byline)

GAYE LEBARON (March 2 1987)

GAYE LEBARON (February 15 1989)

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