Cannery Crime Blotter II: Getting Under a Canner's Skin

This is the second in an ongoing series of true crime from the annals of San Jose canneries. This article was lifted from the front page page of the March 22, 1928 San Jose Evening News.

Canning's always been a risky business: weather, greedy farmers, cheating wholesalers, and shifty-eyed socialists were always a concern. But did you ever hear about the time the Captain Kidd gang tried to break into the Greco cannery?

"The Big San Jose tunnel mystery is solved.

For a short time yesterday, it looked like a gang of bold, bad yeggs had tunneled under the Greco Cannery on Howard Street with the idea of getting a crack at the safe.

A squad of bluecoats was rushed to the scene by Chief of Police Black. They found - not a band of desperadoes but the "Captain Kidd Gang" - six lively youngsters who attacked the policemen in the "pirate cave" with its 75-foot exit.

It was a brief skirmish and not a shot was fired. The battle was waged in words, between the group of small boys who stood right up and talked straight from the shoulder to the big policemen. But the policemen won, for what can young 'pirates' do against big policemen in this day and age?

WORKMAN FINDS TUNNEL

Author's reconstruction of likely "Captain Kidd" tunnel path.

The story of the tunnel mystery is as follows: Late yesterday afternoon a workman sent under the Greco Cannery building to make some repairs came upon a heavy board trapdoor in the ground, well under the cannery. He investigated, and on giving the door a few kicks, it gave way and revealed a sloping entrance to a tunnel through which a grown man could easily crawl.

Quivering with excitement and thinking the secret entry was the work of robbers laying plans for robbing the company office, the workman rushed into the cannery office and told the story of his discovery. V. V. Greco of the canning firm crawled under the building and looked for himself. He lost no time in getting Chief of Police Black on the telephone.

THREE-ROOM DUGOUT

The officer sent Captain of Detectives John Guerin, Officer Covill, and Traffic Officer William E. Snow to the cannery. The traffic cop was sent as a committee of one to crawl through the tunnel and find where it led to. Traffic Officer Snow slid down the sloping entrance to the tunnel and crawled and crawled and crawled - about 75 feet - finally coming out into a three-room dugout.

He sought an exit and found it, coming out into the open air in the chicken yard of the Roumasset home, 374 North Autumn Street. Hurrying back to the other officers, Officer Snow told what he had found. After a hasty conference it was decided to have cannery officials and police keep a watch on the tunnel, it being the natural supposition that yeggs were burrowing under the cannery in a clever plot to reach the office safe undetected and blast the strong box.

"PIRATES" ATTACK

But while the three officers were standing over the dugout they were rushed by several small boys, including the younger members of the Roumasset family. The boys indignantly demanded what the cops were doing, trying to cave in their dugout. The mystery was solved.

And then from the lips of the "culprits" poured the story. The dugout, with its three rooms, was their "fort". They had started digging the tunnel some months ago, planning it as a secret exit in the event the "army" or "gang" should become besieged in the underground fort.

MISSED BEARINGS Originally it was planned to have the tunnel open into a hidden place near a spur track in the railroad yards, but the "chief engineer" in charge of the underground workings missed his bearings and when the tunnel broke through the ground, it was right under the floor of the Greco Cannery. The boys had no intention of doing any harm and no one but the gang knew about the tunnel, although parents of some knew of the dugout in the back yard.

The police ordered them to seal the tunnel, which the boys reluctantly agreed to do, if the police would rush reinforcements in case of a raid by an opposing gang.

ancestry.com confirms that the Roumasset house was at 374 North Autumn, and a Sanborne map shows the house was right next to the tracks, just west of the Greco cannery. Charles Roumasset was the patriarch, born in New Almaden, and a meat cutter by trade. His wife was Lillian. They lived with her mother, Maria Magistretti, who was born in the italian part of Switzerland. ancestry.com also names the likely "Captain Kidd gang" members: Charles (15 at the time), John P. (12), Robert (11), and Eugene (9). Considering their father's birth in the midst of miners, I'm a bit disappointed they didn't aim their tunnel better. There's a bit on the four boys on the Internet, but they never got caught again tunneling into a cannery - apparently the Captain Kidd gang got scared straight.

The Hollywood Gas Station, or Robert Breaks His Unbreakable Rule Again

Final model

Robert’s Rule of Making Structures in a 3d Printer is simple: don’t make HO scale buildings with a 3d printer. Buildings aren’t particularly interesting for 3d printing; you don’t need multiple models, the models are too big for the printer, and the buildings usually have plain surfaces that are easier to make in other materials. The prohibition doesn’t hold for details - window or door castings can be used for other projects. Smaller parts that are hard to fabricate might be worth a quick 3d print. But don’t try printing a whole building.

Though even if it’s my rule… that doesn’t mean I won’t try.

The inspiring photo

The Hollywood gas station

Years ago, I’d run across this photo of an early gas station in Los Angeles. It appeared in Larry Harnisch’s “Los Angeles Daily Mirror” history blog; he’d found the photo in a back issue of the Daily Mirror from 1915, showing the filming of a new movie at D.W. Griffith’s Fine Arts Studio. Griffith later filmed his silent masterpiece, Intolerance, and the sets for that movie are visible in the background of the original photo.

But between the crowd scene and the sets for the future movie, there’s this tiny little gas station. It’s the dawn of the auto revolution in Los Angeles, and cars need gasoline. This corner (Hollywood and Sunset) is on the edge of suburbia - the sets for Intolerance over there are being built in a former fig orchard. Photos of the studio behind the photographer show scattered buildings and empty lots. In a few years, this will be a very urban corner. Little gas stations like this would have been scrapped for the huge service stations that would appear in the 1920’s.

One sign of its age is the lack of any gas pumps visible in the photo; it's almost as if the pump machinery was hidden in the posts.

There's little sign of the gas station remaining. The site of this photo was almost certainly 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, right where Sunset and Hollywood Blvd come together. The former movie studio is now a Von's supermarket, and the nearby Monogram Pictures is now a Church of Scientology video studio. The corner does have a small gas station, but the style doesn't match (art deco), plus it's triangular instead of square. I'm guessing our little gas station got torn down when a road was widened... or when newfangled gas pumps couldn't fit in the arch.

For a model railroad, and a model railroad set in the 1930’s, it’s a neat bit of architecture. The building itself is remarkably simple - a fifteen foot square office and similarly sized roofed porch covering the fueling area. There’s a lot of ‘teens era gas stations that appeared to be simple boxes to protect the attendant when he wasn’t checking your oil or putting air in your tires. (What a crazy time!) As a modest gas station, it’s also appropriate for the area down by the railroad tracks - this isn’t a high rent building.

However, unlike those dusty country corner gas stations, the Hollywood gas station dresses itself up by stealing details from every flavor of Spanish Revival it can. The most obvious feature are the silhouetted bell gables on each side, traditionally from Romanesque architecture. The fueling area has looks like the arched porte cocheres seen in any of the stucco spanish revival bungalows getting built out in Westwood. The wooden beams sticking out are vigas, straight from New Mexico and Pueblo Revival architecture. Floor to ceiling windows light the office; I’m guessing there are similar french doors on the front side to enter the office.

Man, I’m really a sucker for Spanish Revival. Show me a Spanish Revival gas station, and I’ll try to build a model of it.

Construction Like all my 3d printed models, I designed this in SketchUp. The model is one piece - walls, bell towers, and port-cochere. I omitted the roof - it’s easy enough to do with sheet styrene or cardboard. The viga beams are styrene, set into sockets in the walls. The posts are hollow to limit the amount of resin needed.

Beyond the issues of architecture, this was an interesting model because it reminded me of the challenges of 3d printing and manufacturing. Getting this model printed involved a chain of challenges; as easy as 3d printing seems, there’s always snags trying to make more than one.

I’d initially sketched up this model after seeing Harnisch’s photo. I’d liked the model and thought it would be a good exercise to practice in SketchUp. That initial model messed up a few angles, making the model have some minor holes in it. When we try to print a 3d model, the slicing software needs to figure out which bits are the inside of the model (where the plastic or resin goes) and which parts are outside. A good 3d model is “watertight” - all the exterior faces touch, there’s no holes that will make the software confuse the inside and outside of the model, and there’s no extraneous faces to make the software question which counts as the exterior surface. Cleaning up the holes in an existing model is always a tedious process as you try to get rid of some incorrect angle or out-of-parallel plane without tearing apart the whole model.

It's a lot like real home improvement, except with more straight lines and flat planes than reality.

The next big challenge was how to print the model. By default, the Form One wants to print models on a support structure. You take your model, choose the face-up direction, and the Form One automatically chooses how to place supports (sprues) to support the first few layers as the surface is built. Support structures are important because it lets us build items that aren’t flat; it also lets us build hollow objects without pressure from the liquid resin pushing walls out. However, support structure require a lot of material - sometimes as much resin as the model, and the bottom of models isn’t always flat.

First attempt

I’d printed an initial version of the gas station on a support structure, but it doubled the amount of resin needed, and I ended up with a not-quite flat base. If I instead printed straight on the build platform - ok for surfaces with a flat bottom large enough to hold the model to the build platform - I could cut resin use and get a flat bottom surface.

So I tried it - I printed one directly on the build platform, but fluid pressure (as the build platform peeled the part away from the tank then put it back against the tank) caused one side to blow out, and the window muntions to break. If I did things the way the manufacturer intended, and wasn't trying to cut corners to save resin and time, I'd have better results, but if I'm concerned about economics, I might try pushing the machine a bit harder than it really can take.

On a second attempt, I gave up and printed again on support structure. The windows again didn’t print perfectly, but I made new windows by drawing white lines on clear plastic using a technical drawing pen.

Failed print

That final model was good enough for me, but if I wanted to sell the models, I’d need to do a lot more work on the process so the models were perfect coming out of the printer. Making these efficiently would also mean cutting the resin needed, and that means limiting the support structure. Finishing On the first model, I used my usual trick of white glue and gesso, stippled onto the model. It dries quickly and adds a lot of texture, but I found the surface much too rough to my eyes. I ended up coating the second model with an acrylic gel with pumice (from Golden Acrylics) which was much more subdued. In both cases, I had to be careful to only coat the stucco surfaces with the fake stucco.

Just like resin building kits, cast structures are great for assembly, but frustrating to paint. My first attempt at the lanterns left black paint everywhere. For the second try, I painted the lanterns orange, then used a very fine tip to color the metal parts black. Similarly, painting the bells, inset into the walls, definitely required a bit of care.

So now, I've got two very cute 1915-era gas stations that mix up way too many architectural styles. They don't quite have a place on the layout, and I don't really need two, but they'll be great reminders not to break "Robert’s Rule of Making Structures in a 3d Printer".

Cannery Crime Blotter I: Bye-Bye Buick!

This is the first in an ongoing series of true crime from the annals of San Jose canneries. This article was lifted from the editorial page of the August 10, 1919 San Jose Evening News.

F. H. Daley, is actually Fred Daley, better known as the husband of Edith Daley, San Jose News writer. In the 1920 census, he listed his job title as "cashier", but later described himself as a manager. In 1920, Fred and Edith lived at 179 9th Street, just behind San Jose State. Edith and Fred moved into the new Palm Haven neighborhood in the 1920's. If we wonder how Jack heard this story, a likely guess is straight from his spouse.

Edward. L. Perrault lists himself as a cashier at the Hunt Brothers cannery in 1920 (the actual owner of Golden Gate at the time.) He's listed as 21 years old in the 1920 census, and living in San Francisco with family by 1921.

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Call the Police!

by Jack Wright.

Contrary to custom at some former times in this column, the following story is a TRUE one, but it seemed so good that even two columns in large ten-point type doesn't seem too much to give it.

Its moral is the danger of absent mindedness and its characters are local folks. It happened yesterday. Let's go!

E. L. Perrault is the efficient accountant of the Golden Gate Packing company. He has been so for years, and his mental completeness has never been questioned. Never has he come into contact with the local police, either as accused or accusing.

Yesterday, he made his first trip to the police station - two of them, in fact. The reason was as follows.

F. H. Daley, also of the Golden Gate company, is the proud owner of a new Buick. It has a self-starter, gas and electricity, side curtains, and would have hot and cold running water if those were common equipment. He is quite proud of his car - naturally.

Yesterday Perrault had to make a hurry trip to the bank. Perhaps payment for a few boxes of those worth-their-weight-in-gold 'cots had been made. What was more natural that he should borrow the resplendent new Buick for the trip?

In the machine, Mr. Daley had left a small cushion and his coat.

When Perrault left the bank for the return trip the coat and cushion were gone!

Upon his return to the packing house he went shamefacedly to the owner of the car, passed back the key, and said "Er - what did you have in the pockets of your coat?"

"I don't know; bankbooks, letters, etc. I guess." was the answer.

"W-w-was it a valuable coat?"

"About the only coat I've got. Why?"

"Well, someone must have been a fast worker because I wasn't in the bank more than five minutes and when I came out the coat and cushion were gone. I went to the police and they are working on the case."

Mr Daley didn't worry, particularly, but had occasion to go out to his car in the packing house garage a little later in the afternoon. He couldn't find the car! It was gone!! Heavens, was an organized band of thieves set on pursuing him and taking everything he possessed? He wondered if his house was still on its foundation.

He summoned Perrault hurriedly. "Well, the car's gone too." he said.

"No it isn't. I just drove it back here."

"It's not here now. They sure MUST have been fast workers."

Starting forward Perrault exclaimed "but there's your car!" He pointed to the Buick standing in the Daley compartment.

How the old bus had changed - aged! Gone were its new side curtains; gone its bright luster; the spare tire was no longer present; a crack slanted across the wind-shield and a fender was badly wrinkled.

Gradually a light commenced to dawn on F. H. Daley.

"Is this the car you drove home?" he questioned.

"Why yes. It's yours, isn't it?"

Bright day broke in the mind of Daley. "Young man you'd better hustle back to the corner of First and Santa Clara streets with that car or the police will transfer their attention from the thieves who stole the coat, to you! I don't know whose car this is. The only thing I know is that it's not mine!"

One leap carried Perrault to the seat. One motion started the car out of the garage. One dash skimmed through streets to the center of town, just in time to waylay a bewildered-looking man who was gazing where his car ought to be. One long explanation was all that was required to settle with the police.

And of course, this story has a moral: be very careful about doing silly things when your boss's wife works for the local paper.

My Yardmaster Has a +4 Rulebook of Smiting

When I was a kid, I played a fair amount of Dungeons and Dragons.  At its core, D&D is interactive, co-operative storytelling.  You get a bunch of folks together around a table; one person (the “game master”) describes a situation (usually something dramatic from a fantasy novel involving saving the village from a dragon, or breaking into the Thieves’ Guild, or exploring an underground labyrinth full of monsters and treasure). You each describe what your character does, and the gamemaster describes what happens. At its best, it's like writing an adventure novel on the fly.

Dungeons and Dragons - the initial version - was originally created by war gamers. That lineage shows up as lots of statistics and lots of dice. How much damage can my fighter take before he’s disabled? How much extra damage does my extra-good sword give? What saving throw must I roll to avoid being turned to stone by a medusa? The randomness adds to the fun of role-playing, but it's easy for the dice-rolling to take over.  Worse, some folks start thinking the points are what matters rather than the story.  Min-max'ers start making decisions on the game based on the probabilities, acting out of character in order to get the best results.  “Why rescue the princess? It won't give me enough experience to reach level 7.” Munchkins - the stereotypical kid playing only to score more than their buddies - ignore the puzzles and atmosphere in order to kick in the door, kill the monsters, and collect a +16 vorpal sword.

Dungeons and Dragons is a good forty years old now.  (Note to self: keep an eye out for retirement communities with active gaming groups).  Those forty years of game play also means that role playing games have evolved. The latest versions of Dungeons and Dragons still have voluminous rule books, odd dice, and lots of mathematical tables to decide whether your thief can climb to the top of the castle wall. Other games go much more towards the story telling. One of the more extreme examples, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, has the players pretend to be the famous Baron von Munchausen of tall-tales fame; each tries to tell a story to outdo the others in the 17th century German tavern…. er, sitting around the table.

And some games stress the interactive storytelling but still have some of those random mechanics. One example is Fate Core. In Fate Core, you still create an alter-ego, and catalog down some of that character’s attributes on a “character sheet”. However, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, you generally use words instead of numbers. You choose a subset of skills that your character is good at (“Very good at athletics and investigation, poor at deceiving.”) You name aspects of your character - one liners - naming both how you generally respond, and an obvious weakness. (“Thief with a heart of gold”, “always jumps in to help the underdog”, “afraid of zombies”). Fate Core uses a simpler mechanic for deciding if you succeed, with simple dice with pluses and minuses for the random angle, and a range of success where you get to narrate the result.  Most importantly, the Fate Core rules includes the simple statement:

“Both players and gamemasters have a secondary job: make everyone around you look awesome. Fate is best as a collaborative endeavor, with everyone sharing ideas and looking for opportunities to make the events as entertaining as possible… Fate works best when you use it to tell stories about people who are proactive, competent, and pragmatic. A game about librarians spending all their time among dusty tomes and learning things isn’t Fate. A game about librarians using forgotten knowledge to save the world is... Characters in a game of Fate always lead dramatic lives. The stakes are always high for them, both in terms of what they have to deal with in their world, and what they're dealing with in the six inches of space between their ears.”

After all, isn't that what we want in fantasy stories? Conan the Barbarian fighting off the invading hordes? Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser thwarting the evil Overlord? A conflicted Batman deciding whether to go after the Joker? Academic psychologists defeating the Blatant Beast in the world of Spencer’s Faerie Queene?

Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop show on YouTube shows what an actual game is like; if I’ve made you curious, go check it out.

But this blog is about model railroading.

I’ve said before that model railroad operation is pretty close to roleplaying - a bunch of us come together in a scenario planned by someone else, and try to tell a story about a day on the railroad.  Switchlists and train sheets give some of the war-gaming randomness.  But we also have a much different mission than Fate Core.  We don't want drama and excitement - we want to be recreating the action of the model railroad in a day-to-day, get-it-done model. We’re coming together to get the jobs done and keep the trains moving.

I think of it as more than a game; I’d like folks to get an appreciation of working on the railroad in the 1930s - what the jobs were like, how busy the railroad was, and where the other San Jose residents was working. The role playing is also a reminder of the difficult parts of railroading - the times you're stuck at the top of Tehachapi Pass at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum,  and can't get permission from the dispatcher to leave the siding, or wondering what a switch job would have been like in the rain or snow. It also determines whether we just re-rail those cars that fell in the canyon, or if the dispatcher immediately shuts down the railroad and sends the Big Hook to fix the derailment.

A war-gaming style doesn’t work for us; Joe can’t be a level 5 hostler; if you run over your switchman, that doesn't mean you have a half-effective switchman. But we can try to name ourselves by adjectives, just like in Fate Core. A particular tower man might be “crotchety” and "slow". A yardmaster might be “helpful”. An engineer may be “selfish” and try to tie up his train ahead of others; another engineer may be “know-it-all” and may push the schedule and safety to get to the next siding. A brakeman might be “sleepless” after ten days working without a break. The jobs might have Fate-style aspects, too. A switch job on the edge of the layout might be slow-speed: “don’t sweat it too much”, while a switchman working in the yard might want to feel as if he’s “micromanaged”. Chuck Hitchcock’s Argentine Industrial District Railway sets adjectives like this for certain jobs, with the AT&SF tower man encouraged to favor his own trains and ruin the plans for the crossing railroaders.

But just like the real railroad jobs, some of the role-playing on the layout comes from our own experience. If I operate on Rick Fortin's layout, I know there's experienced crews who know what they're doing, and newbies who make lots of mistakes, and I’m likely to plan for that behavior when I switch the yard. Some of that role-playing falls back on indivdual personality; there's going to be crochety members of the operating session, and mellow coworkers.  If Sam’s the yard master at Keyser on David Parks’ layout, then the yard’s going to be run strictly by the book. If Falkenburg is an engineer, he'll be no-nonsense. If Seth's running the yard, we'll be working double-speed, but he’ll be teaching the newbies out the whole time.

So we're kinda not role-playing - we're just running trains and letting some of our own personality bleed out. That’s not surprising; I suspect the folks who tend to play thieves in D&D probably tend towards the clever and sneaky personality, and the folks playing a paladin probably have a strong sense (or secret inclination) to make sure Things Are Done Correctly And Properly.  We'll role-play a bit outside our normal roles, but most of us probably tend towards acting in a way that has some parallel with our real self.

But model railroading is still role-playing; we need to describe a setting and provide some hints. Our operators need to know whether the rulebook is “more like guidelines” on this layout, or if breaking a rule gets you banished. Our operators need hints about the job and the role, both so they know if it’s a character they want to play, and so they know how to behave towards the others in the session. We can have a bit of randomness to make the system heroic. Perhaps some maintenance work shuts down an important stretch of track, and we all need to pull together to make it through the day. Maybe we should imagine that it’s a winter day, and getting the trains over the hill is a bit of heroism.

Sometimes we just play up the drama. I often describe my own Vasona Branch model railroad as a "high speed, thrill ride switching layout", for I personally like challenging switching puzzles, and I want to invite operators who are interested both in the prototype and in the switching challenges. Like Fate, most of my operators are "proactive, competent, and pragmatic", and if they're not saving the world with their switching, at least they're removing a bit of chaos from the tracks next to the cannery. The real crews, with thirty years of experience switching these same tracks, were probably just as adept at dispelling the chaos.

If I want to inspire my operators with a bit of drama, I can be blunt in my introduction to the layout:

"It's June 15, 1932; apricots are ripe, and everyone's running full-out to can the crop. The canneries have been running double shifts since April on different crops, and you all have been working with hardly a break since then. You've got all the shifts you would want; you don't dare try to take time off, and you've had enough practice so you're confident and working together as a team.

It's six in the morning; the canneries start up in two hours. You need to get the boxcars in position so all those guys on the dock can load the cars up. Go show those guys on the loading docks how railroaders get things done.

But not all my operators are like that; some of my visiting operators, either by choice or by a random roll of the invite list, can be sedate, challenged by puzzles, or are new model railroaders getting thrown into the deep end of the San Jose extra board switching pool. Sometimes, those folks play the role of the new hire on the railroad, destined in his or her first shift to decide whether railroading is the right profession, or if he's going back to the farm where they won't need to distinguish between thirty boxcars in various shades of brown. Some folks might play the character of the old hand who needs some help in the role, which might frustrate the other folks on his train, or might remind folks of how the railroaders protected their own. Hopefully, no one's playing the rest of Ed Gibson's crew on that infamous trip on the Hayward Turn. Sometimes the operator having a hard time on the layout reminds us of crews the real railroad. Sometimes, we hope they'll fall asleep under the layout. Sometimes we'll just want to scream - just like on the real railroad.

To help our operators play the correct role on the railroad, we need to give them hints. We can suggest the tone of the operating session in our introduction and in how we explain our layout, the way the game master does. Just like Fate Core, we can use adjectives to give our operators hints about their roles or their characters. We can also let each operator's personality reflect into the game, either by letting the operators be themselves, or carefully inviting the folks who match the tone for our layout. No matter which way we provide those role-playing hints, our operators will end up making the operating session awesome, and as entertaining as possible... even if they're not a level 5 hostler.

Interested in other story-style role playing games? Check out Tabletop's video of Dread, where characters need to pull a block from an unstable Jinga block stack to avoid bad things happening, or Fiasco's story-telling based on 1970's dance clubs. And if you'd prefer that +16 vorpal sword, check out the card game Munchkin.

Movie Night XXVI: Buy a Bit of the South Pacific Coast!

And for all you fans of the Santa Cruz branch of the SP who have a bit of money burning a hole in your pocket, be aware that the south end of the Summit tunnel (the Laurel end) is up for sale at $1.6 million for 110 acres. (That's less than what you'd pay for a 3 bedroom, 2 bath rancher on a 6000 SF lot in Sunnyvale!)

Property listing for 23411 Deerfield Road available on Redfin, or check out this video showing your potential new home. Note that if you plan on laying some track and running some trains, you'll need to rebuild a wooden trestle immediately in front of the tunnel. And if you do run some trains up there, invite me over.

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Spotted by Derek Whaley, and originally posted on Santa Cruz Trains. If you haven't already checked out his Santa Cruz Trains" book, go get a copy.

Coupon-Cutting Thursday II: Sweet Deals on a Track-Pull Tractor

One advantage of living in the early 20th century is you didn't need to go far to test-drive a tractor. Forget all those Internet-based car sales places that will bring a beige sedan for you to test drive at home; back in the 'teens, you could go down the block and test out a tractor at a local ranch.

November 3, 1916 San Jose Mercury Herald

Here, for example, is an ad from a November, 1916 issue of the Mercury Herald, highlighting upcoming demonstrations of the Bean Track-Pull Tractor:

• November 3 at W. P. Lyon's orchard in Edenvale
• the next day at Mrs. Post's ranch on McLaughlin Ave.,
• the Flickinger orchard on Berryessa Road on the 6th,
• November 7 at the Dutard ranch in Campbell ("Junction Santa Clara-Los Gatos Road with Payne Ave.", better known today as "that strip mall with the Togo's"),
• F. E. Goodrich's ranch in Cupertino on the 9th,
• the Thompson Ranch on El Camino near Santa Clara on the 10th, and
• A. W. Ehrhorn's ranch in Mountain View, "just beyond the school buildings own November 10.

And place your order early, for there's only a limited number available for Santa Clara County. The Track-Pull was going for a thrifty $930, or $20 more for an installment plan - $50 down, $455 on delivery, and the remainder paid within a year. That's a sweet price for a tiny tractor, and with luck, you'd even be able to drive it around William Lyons' ranch to convince yourself it's just the right thing for the modern fruit ranch.

The Mercury Herald even did a three-column piece on the Track-Pull on November 1, 1916, interviewing the company general manager, J.D. Crummey ("he is enthusiastic over the possibilities of the tractor field and the new machine which his firm is now making... no machine has yet been put on the market that fills the requirements of the orchard and vineyard conditions in the west.") "It is the first tractor that drives as a horse pulls, and hence is able to do what is impossible with other tractors." Crummey also pointed out that the demonstrations were only the beginning, and would be repeated at fruit grower conventions in Napa, Davis, and Fresno in upcoming months.

Bean Spray Pump claimed to have sold $400,000 in tractors that first year, and $700,000 the next - meaning that at least a thousand of the Track-Pulls should have been clattering around orchards and small farms across the nation.

Machinists Needed. December 23, 1916 San Jose Mercury Herald.

And if your yard isn't big enough for a Track-Pull -- and ours certainly isn't -- there's some other ads to check out as well. Two days before Christmas, 1916, you would have found the Bean Spray Pump Company advertising for machinists to come build the beasts:

On account of the demand for Bean Track PULL Tractors, we find it necessary to increase our factory force, and also to run most of our machines nights. We therefore invite application for positions from the following trades: Expert Machinists, Tool Makers, Good Lathe Hands, Milling Machine Hands, and Experienced Drill Press Hands.

And there still wasn't enough labor for all the tractors that needed to be built. An ad in the December 20, 1916 San Jose Mercury Herald declared "Our entire output for all of January and up to February 10 is already taken", so a fair number of orchardists were going to be disappointed when they didn't find Track-Pulls under the tree at Christmas. Crummey noted in the San Jose Mercury article that a second plant in Lansing, Michigan would start producing the tractor in May, 1917. Even if Crummey was exporting jobs out of California, he noted "the Lansing factory is entirely owned by Santa Clara County stockholders, so that all profits from there return to this community."

Now, this may all seem quaint - tractor demos, comparisons to horses, and questions of exporting Santa Clara county jobs to the quite-dubious midwest. But other tidbits remind us how much things aren't that different from today. An Ebay seller was recently selling the program from the June, 1917 Bean Spray Pump Company's employee dinner.

Now, the menu has its own little surprises - the dinner started out with fruit cocktail, for example, which seems like the most San Jose way to start an employee dinner I can think of.

But the list of speeches looked awfully familiar for an all-hands meeting at any high-tech company. They led off with an outside speaker. The evening led off with Ernest Richmond, formerly of the J.K. Armsby Company, and just recently the founder of his own dried-fruit company which he would soon merge to form Richmond-Chase. As an outsider, his speech title - "Loyalty" suggests something motherhood-and-apple-pie as a soft opening. There needed to be something about the key company strength of manufacturing; H. C. Lisle spoke about "Our Factory in Lansing, Michigan". H. C. Lassen spoke for the sales force. The remote offices - Los Angeles and Fresno - had their boosters reminding the head office folks that there was more to the company than San Jose. H. L. Austin and J. H. Delaney talked about future plans, improvements, and new investments. J. D. Crummey's talk on "What We Are and What We Stand For" was a classic leadership talk.

And right in the middle of it was the talk on the crazy new product that might change the company. J. H. McCollough, one of the Track-Pull tractor startup guys, spoke on "Our Tractor". He surely sold everyone in the room on how the Track-Pull would pull Bean Spray into a new and profitable business. I'm sure he had PowerPoint slides of happy Track-Pull owners rolling around their orchards, and I'm sure he had some graphs of sales showing the hockey stick growth curves so familiar to Silicon Valley types. He probably even raised the point that the tiny Track-Pulls would change the economics of small farms and bring prosperity to every corner of the nation, and put up a photo of a smiling child in an orchard.

And we know how that talk went because anyone who's been in Silicon Valley for any length of time has heard that talk and that dream. Sometimes, it even came true. The Track-Pull tractor may not have been a home run or game changer for the Bean Spray Pump Company, but it's a nice reminder that this crazy place isn't that different from the Santa Clara of 1917.

Market Street Station: The Pride of San Jose

"Southern Pacific Market Street station" float. Courtesy History San Jose.

Whenever I talk about the battles and intrigue involved with Southern Pacific's bypass around downtown San Jose in the 1930's, it's usually from the point of view of the critics. The SP's first routing went a bit too close to the new homes in Palm Haven, causing that new suburb to rise up in arms. They got their neighbors to agree with them, prompting the Willow Glen neighborhood to rise up and incorporate as its own city in 1927.

Thanks to some lost court battles and additional re-routing, the new line was finally built in the 1930's, and the old Market Street train station closed down on December 30, 1935. If they hadn't succeeded, we'd still be having trains running down Fourth Street right in front of San Jose State.

Old newspaper articles hint at the disdain for the old railroad station on Market Street, describing it as old, sooty, murky, smoky roundhouse. The above photo, though, highlights how old-fashioned some folks thought the old station was. They also apparently believed the depot would never be replaced, and we'd be stuck with the murky old station until its hundredth anniversary in 1986.

There's some obvious inaccuracies in the float's version of the station. From the floor plan I've seen, only the men's bathroom entrance was on the exterior; the "modern" women's restroom was reachable from the women's waiting room. The single waiting room door isn't correct either. The main public area, according to a 1910 floor plan was divided into a "men's" and "women's" waiting rooms, with the ticket seller's area separating the two. The sack nailed on the wall suggests that SP's trash bins were a bit primitive. I don't know if the half-moon cutouts were prototypical, but for safety, I'll add them to my model.

Or perhaps I should just park an HO model of the float out in front of my station?

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Thanks to History San Jose for permission to republish the photo.

You Don't Need To Know...

As Byron might say, "You don't need to know exactly what the three required after-market modifications for Ford Model Ts were..." But if you're modeling railroads at the dawn of the automobile age, you might still want to learn.

E. B. White ("Charlotte's Web") noticed that the 1936 Sears Roebuck catalog had lost its section of Ford Model T modifications and repair parts. His goodbye note talked through what made the Model T both good and bad: the parts that everyone bought, straight off. The repairs you were sure to make. The expectation of patching tires, or learning how to crank the car.

Read the full article over at the New Yorker magazine website.

The Tomato Paste Land Rush

When you search on canneries in San Jose, you'll find a sudden explosion in tomato canning starting around 1915, and lasting well into 1918 or 1919.  One cause was all the new Italian immigrants who considered tomatoes and tomato products to be essential for their dinner tables.  In previous years, those immigrants had been buying imported tomatoes from the old country, but World War I made those harder to get.

Actually, there's a fair amount more to the story, not only in terms of what happened to the imported tomatoes, but also in terms of what the American producers had to do in order to take that market. How those different canners attacked the the Great Tomato Paste Land Rush doesn’t sound that unlike things today in the Internet era.

The actual details come, of course, from a court case. (Scroll a third of the way through the PDF to hit the story of Pastene vs. Greco)  And it's a good one too - full of drama, and direct quotes, with a cast of canners stepping on the witness stand to support one side or another, horror stories from the engineer trying to make experimental machinery work, and arguments over a farmer’s size estimates for the “tomato crop that got away”.

Greco Canning Co. Ad from October 1921 Western Canner and Packer

Our two main characters are Victor Greco and P. Pastene of New York.  Greco was the Elon Musk of the Valley of Heart's Delight, continually was coming up with new ideas for products to can, and experimenting with the machines needed to make these.   In 1916, three years after he started the cannery, Greco figured out that he could make a fortune if he could figure out how to make tomato paste. Pastene was an east coast wholesaler looking desperately for a source of tomato paste.  And just like Silicon Valley, these two men ended up in court because sometimes plans don't go the way you want.

It's 1915; World War I is raging, and Austria and Italy are fighting toe-to-toe in the Alps.  In 1916, Italy realizes that food for its people is scarce, and places export restrictions on canned tomatoes.  France does the same. The U.S., with a huge Italian immigrant population (three million Italian immigrants arrived between 1900 and 1915), is now desperate for tomato paste. Prices double and triple to 10 cents a can, much more than the average immigrant can pay.

But Santa Clara Valley canners were already good at growing and canning tomatoes, and how hard could it be to evaporate a bit more water?  Victor Greco decides to see if he can make tomato paste; with a bit of work on the stovetop, he sees that the process of evaporating away the water is easy.

Greco and Pastene start trading letters in January, 1916, with Greco noting:

"Regarding Naples Tomato Sauce packed in small 6 oz. tins, in view of the present conditions in Europe which makes it almost impossible to receive any of this commodity from said country, we are contemplating to pack about 60,000 cases of the article above mentioned which will be sold as a substitute of the Imported.
As we are Italian and know what the Italian people must have and being very familiar with the method of manufacturing this article, you can rest assured it will be the equal of that imported from Italy..."
"P.S. We are located in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley where some of the finest tomatoes in the world are grown."

Pastene, on a visit to the West Coast in April, 1916, hears about the great plan, and signs a contract for 3,000 cases.

So now Greco Canning needs to scale up on the tomato paste project. Victor Greco goes to San Francisco, bringing drawings of the evaporators used by the finest canners in Naples. Greco convinces the Oscar Krenz Manufacturing Company, normally active in coppersmithing, to make some vacuum pan evaporators in the the Neapolitan style - no one else had tried making such equipment before in the U.S. Greco installs it in his cannery and gets to work making tomato paste, with engineers from Krenz helping get the machinery running smoothly.

But there’s risk here: there’s the usual questions about getting sufficient fruit, but Greco is also trying novel machinery to cook the tomato paste, a process that hasn't been tested at scale, smaller 6 oz cans to match the Italian style, and is even trying fiberboard boxes (instead of the traditional wooden boxes) to save weight. That’s very Silicon Valley - it’s a new product and a bit risky, but Greco thinks he can pull it off.

And they hit snags. Greco had chosen the vacuum pan approach (boiling the tomatoes at a lower temperature in a partial vacuum) because it concentrated the tomato flavor better with less heat. The Italians used to cook down tomato sauce in an open pot, but the better Italian canners have rejected that approach for the vacuum pan. Greco's variant on the machinery is a 750 gallon cooking vessel eight feet tall with one inch tubes to circulate the stuff being evaporated near the heat. Unfortunately, the prototype's narrow tubes - appropriate for reducing sugar solutions - are too small for the thick tomato pastes. The tomatoes keep sticking into the tubes and burning, forcing the repair crew to shut down the process and clean out the entire machine. Sometimes they need to use electric drills to remove the hardened paste, and once it took them five days to get the machinery back into action.

It didn’t help that it was a bad year for tomatoes. Late frosts in May killed off some seedlings, and early rains in October and November ruined the crops. The normally ten week season was a month shorter than usual, with many tomatoes failing to ripen. William Greer, farming on “Mr. Kell’s place” (probably along Almaden Road) delivered 3.5 tons per acre to the cannery, but six times that amount was left in the fields, spoiled. J. L. Mosher, a farmer and orchardist, testified to an equally bad year, delivering two tons per acre instead of 12. “I have not been in the tomato business since.”

And now there was a problem. Greco had sold 18,000 cases of tomato paste that season (down from the 60,000 case goal) for prices between $6.50 and $8.50; between the problems with the vacuum pans and lack of tomatoes, he managed 3,500. Pastene was unhappy from several angles. He didn’t get the tomato paste he’d ordered. He wasn’t happy with the quality (some of the tomato paste had a “consistency not much greater than water.”). He felt that Greco had tried out a risky project without warning him. To add insult to injury, when he did receive the tomato paste, the railroad had billed the shipment at the freight rate for tomato sauce, twice the shipping cost for catsup, canned tomatoes, and other tomato products. (Oh, the railroad tariffs were twisted in those days.)

And even with all that disappointment, Pastene closed his last letter to Greco asking about tomatoes. "We would like to treat with you for a purchase of next season's pack. What can you offer?"

When the lawsuit over the missing and substandard tomato paste made it to court in 1920, Greco testified. “It was a defect in the machinery.” The farmers came to the witness stand and lamented the horrible season where the rain and frost forced them to leave behind a good part of their crop. Several canners (including Elmer Chase for the Canner’s Assocation and Richmond Chase, R. W. Crary from the California Cooperative Canneries, and Charles E. Hume of the G. W. Hume company, defined a “short pack” and how equipment failure was a valid reason for a canner to not deliver product.

H.T. Rigg, the engineer hired away from San Jose Ice and Cold Storage to run the plant shared stories of drilling out blocked tubes and warning Greco that they weren’t going to meet deadlines:

“The first date is October 10th when I began [keeping a production diary]. That day I was delayed two hours and ten minutes on account of the pulper, that is, the machinery on the lower floor. Then we were delayed two hours cleaning the pans, No. 2 vacuum that same day. The delay of the pulper necessarily stopped the vacuum. There is a continuous feed from the pulper to the vacuum. There was a total stoppage on that day of four hours and ten minutes… And on the 11th we started at 6 a.m. in the morning and stopped at 9:20 in the evening and stopped two hours for the pulper again. Stopped another hour and 30 minutes for lunch. Then we stopped again to clean No. 2 vacuum pan. This was on the 11th. On the 12th No. 1 pan stopped 23 hours for cleaning. This 23 hours carried us into the night. We worked during the night cleaning the pans. Mr. Greco was there off and on around where I was working. I cleaned it out by using an electric drill. The product had so caked and burned inside of the tubes that it had to be drilled out by an electric drill…”

That went on for days: problems with the vacuum plans clogging, failures in the pulper, cans jamming in the sealer machinery. The rotary cooker broke. All-night repair sessions aren’t unique to modern-day Silicon Valley.

And just as things were working, a lack of tomatoes and nothing to work with.

For the other side, Charles Bentley, of the California Packing Corporation, declared that they’d had no problems finding tomatoes to pack in the 1916 season, and that it was truly a rare farm in the Santa Clara Valley that could manage 25 tons per acre. Charles Davis, the general manager for the California Conserving Company in Oakland, described that he’d had fine luck with the closed kettle style of tomato paste production in the 1916 season, and that he’d treated “salsa de pomidoro” as an experimental product in his first season. When the judge asked him about the Greco machinery, Davis sounded a bit mystified about why they were using such a complicated method.

Judge: “And the process involved a forcing of the material being treated through a set of tubes, instead of being boiled in pans…”
Davis: “No, that’s a new one on me.”
Judge: “Your method did not involve that?”
Davis: “No, nothing of the character.”


The lawsuit also contains many of the letters between Greco and Pastene, at first in the spring of 1916 with a an optimistic tone: "being very familiar with the method of manufacturing this article", then with Pastene hopeful in October: “We certainly trust that you will find that you have been over-conservative in making this (25% delivery) estimate. Greco responds stoically in October with what he can deliver. “Twenty per cent is about the very best that we are going to be able to fill. Regardless of this, so as to make up a minimum car[load] we have shipped you 665 cases for which enclosed find copy of invoice…. we are now planning for a new arrangement for next season and will install a different system of vacuum pans, and hope to be more fortunate in our pack.” And finally anger from Pastene in December 1916: “This is not a fair deal and one unworthy of yourselves and unjust to us who trusted you, and were one of the first to sign your order.”

Victor Greco’s 1916 dash into the tomato paste market may have ended awkwardly, but he managed to fix the line in future years. Halfway through the 1917 season, he junked the old vacuum pans and tried a new design that clogged much less often. Two years later, at the beginning of the 1919 season, Edith Daley visited Greco Canning. Toma-Butter Soon To Appear on Every Table”, the piece started, as Edith explained how Victor Greco would introduce tomato paste to the American home. She also hinted at the complexity of the machinery:




The “heart” of this equipment is a 500 horse power boiler, 55 feet high and containing 200 four inch tubes each 24 feet long. This tremendous energy producer is exhibited with pride by Mr. V. V. Greco who tells you that it is the “Biggest boiler on the Pacific Coast”. This leviathan of boilerdom is manufactured by the Wikes Boiler Company of Saginaw, Michigan. It looks big enough to “boil” Lake Michigan, Saginaw included!… Two immense storage tanks furnish food for a battery of twelve vacuum evaporators with a capacity of 1500 gallons each.”

After all he’d been through in 1916, Greco certainly would have shown off the new machinery with pride. With twelve vacuum pans and twice the capacity each, he could produce a thousand cases of tomato paste a day, and could have filled the fateful order from Pastene with a couple days work.

But Greco probably had competition now. Even Victor's brother, Anthony, got into the act, leaving Greco Canning to start his own "Anthony Greco Cannery", producing $105,000 in tomato paste in the 1917 season. Upstarts like Contadina and Salsina Canning both started canning tomato paste in San Jose in 1917. Gus Lambrosa, one of the founders of Salsina, explained his vision to the Evening News: '“This country sends every year about seven million dollars to Italy for tomato paste, which is used in macaroni”, said Lambrosa today. “There is no reason why this money should not be kept in this country.”'

Lambrosa got his wish. Contadina was canning 150,000 cases of tomato paste a season by 1922, and Americans (immigrant and non-immigrant) got their tomato paste from California fields.

As for the lawsuit, which finally got settled in the early 1920's, I'd probably agree with the verdict: Victor Greco took a chance on moving into tomato paste, but hadn't completely worked out the process and the machines he'd need to do the job. Pastene was right to demand payment.

"During the year 1916, the peeled tomato and hot sauce departments of our canning plant were operated during the daytime while the Salsa De Pomidoro department was operating day and night. We would have made more profit out of the Salsa De Pomidoro. It was our interest to run the Salsa De Pomidoro plant at full capacity. We ran it to the fullest capacity that we possibly could. In other words, while running it, we had considerable interruptions, and, therefore, the capacity was reduced, owing to those interruptions." -- Victor Greco, from his testimony.

On the other hand, it's a very Silicon Valley story. Victor Greco's started a cannery; he's been running it for a few years, and he sees a big market opportunity. Grabbing for that - rushing to make tomato paste, and assuming that he'd work through any bugs - seems like the right choice for someone trying to make a big splash. All the other stories: toma-butter branded tomato paste, Grepo grape syrup, the Bottled Pure Juice Company making tomato and artichoke-based drinks - all suggests that Victor Greco was going to try for the big score. I think he'd fit right in to the modern Silicon Valley.

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(P. Pastene & Co., Inc. vs Greco Canning Co, case #16076, Southern Division of U.S. District Court for Northern District of California, Second Division, August 30, 1920. We get to see all the letters and testimony thanks to Greco's appeal of the initial ruling.) Scroll about a third of the way through the PDF to find the Pastene vs. Greco material.

Previous versions of this article declared that Victor Greco had made artichoke-based drinks and ran salt ponds. We were mistaken; the crazy inventor in the family seems to have been Victor's brother Anthony, who broke away from Greco Canning to make his own tomato paste cannery, fought his brother for a string bean canning tool, and believed that the quickest way to dispose of a debt was to tear the note up and flee to Oregon.

I'm Un-Friending Burrito Justice

Normally, I'm a big fan of Burrito Justice, a San Francisco blogger who spends equal time talking about burritos, fog, Sutro Tower, Mission District happenings, and San Francisco history. His posts on the SP's route through the Mission are definitely worth a read. But then his big-city parochialism appears. In the latest article on the stringing of the first telegraph line from San Francisco to San Jose, he makes the sarcastic comment:

Another way of looking at it — the people of San Francisco were so isolated they actually got excited about talking to people IN SAN JOSE. I mean, that’s pretty isolated.

I could make a smart-ass comment about that's just the sort of comment you'd get from folks who live in fog and don't eat enough prunes, but that would just be sinking to his level.

3d Printing: Not for the Claustrophobic

When I was a kid, I loved exploring - climbing the big cypress near our house and finding paths to the top, or figuring out ways to reach the roof of our house. I even crawled under our house a couple times, and only once because my dad needed help getting the TV antenna wire under the house. That kind of fun stuff isn't just for kids. I remember when my aunt first started using a computer, she was playing a 3d game and managed to get into a place that was *just outside* the virtual world. Suddenly, she was seeing the back side of all the scenery and models, and could see how the scenery is constructed.

I'm getting to do that crawling around and exploring with 3d modeling too. SketchUp, my favorite tool for 3d modeling, started as an architectural sketching tool. Although it can do three-dee models, one weakness is that it doesn't always make perfect models suitable for printing. Most 3d printers expect the model to be watertight: no holes in the faces making up the model, or gaps between faces. Most 3d printers also expect that there's no hidden faces embedded inside the model. These two requirements are needed so the various algorithms for figuring out the 3d shape can figure out what counts as inside the model, and what counts as outside. One of the simplest ways to determine inside/outside is to draw a line through the model, and count the walls you encounter. If you find an odd number, then your end point is inside the model; even, and you're outside. Extra faces and holes mean the software loses track of the model shape, and you end up with a model with either odd faces, or even odder parts missing. SketchUp doesn't enforce either of those rules, and while there's software to check and fix models for you, it's a pain to have to use the external tools to do a sanity check after each bit of creative drawing.

That means my three-d modeling habit involves a lot of what I did as a kid: crawling around in strange places looking for signs of extra faces that should have been deleted. The picture at the top shows the 3d model of the telephone booth model in SketchUp. I've deleted the faces making up the bottom surface of the model, but you can see the outer wall, the hollow inner surface (light gray), as well as all the inner surfaces marking the limits of where the printing material goes (in light blue). On the left is the reverse image of the doorway; the four cylinders sticking out are actually the ventilation holes on the right side of the model. Although the original model only took about 90 minutes to draw, probably half that time was trying to fix faces that were either on the hollow inside, or were incorrect faces on the inside of the model.

So if you ask me what 3d printing means to me, it means an awful lot of crawling around in confined spaces. Good thing I'm not claustrophobic.

Movie Night XVIII: Sprawl Isn't Just a California Thing

And in case you thought sprawl was just something that happened in California, listen to a Londoner talk about sprawl and a missing train line in tonight's movie night.

Torture! Torture in the Pages of the Evening News!

Honestly, who could blame him?

From the July 21, 1919 San Jose Evening News:

"'Scoop' M'Henry Objects to Some Forms of Torture"
It may be all right to work in the 'cots all day long---you get paid for that---but there is a limit to all things. Our esteemed friend, Murphy "Scoop" McHenry, son of Manager F. J. McHenry of the Hotel Montgomery and champion 'cot slinger of the Pratt-Low cannery, has reached that limit and he has objected---very seriously objected.
Since working in the big cannery this summer "Scoop" has been making his residence at the Montgomery, because of the fact that his family residence is a little far out.
Last night, tired and worn from an arduous day with the 'cots, our hero came ambling into the hotel lobby. He has no regular room.
"Where are you going to stick me tonight?" he queried of the clerk.
"Well, Murph," came the reply, "we are full up tonight and there isn't a room left, but we'll fix you up on a cot!"
"Scoop" assumed an air of great scorn and in a decidedly determined voice replied: "Not on your life you won't. What do you think I am? I'm perfectly willing to work in the 'cots all day, but when it comes to sleeping on one---well---just count Murphy McHenry out!"

"Do You Hear Me, Bowman?"

Ah, the fun of all that wacky new technology. From the September 11, 1885 San Jose Daily News comes the following story:

A CRIPPLED TELEPHONE
Agonizing Experience of a Business Man This Morning
A telephone in a certain business place in this city is in use so much by loud voiced manipulators, with strong breaths, that it is in crippled condition about half the time.
It was unusually bad this morning when the principal chin worker wanted to communicate with Superintendent Bowman, of the Golden Gate Packing Company.
Then the people within a circuit of fifty of sixty yards heard the following.
"Ting aling aling: Ting aling aling."
"Just give me the Golden Gate Packing Company."
"Hello! Hello! Hello!"
"Do you hear me Bowman? Hello? Hel-lo-o-o-o-o-o Bowman, can you hear me now? I can't hear you - I mean you can't hear me. Can you? Hel-lo-o-o-o-o-o. (aside.) There's something serious the matter with the thing. I can't make him hear to save my life!"
A News reporter who stood by, tried to help him out and said:
"Well, why don't you put it in?"
"Put what in?"
"Your mouth. You must put it into that funnel and then talk in a natural tone. In that way, the danger of explosion is considerably lessened."
"Put my mouth inside the tube? Why what in the world are you talking about? This tube is not more than an inch in diameter and-"
"Of course I understand that your mouth is about four inches across. You used it too much when you were young, and before your cheek got hard; but nevertheless, she says, that the mouth must go in if you want to do a satisfactory business over the Sunset line. You must wrap or fold your lips up somehow or you'll have to walk to the Golden Gate."
"What do you mean by 'she'?"
"The daisy at the Central, of course."
"You're joking?"
"Oh, no. She told me this morning. She don't know me; she might now have said it if she ever saw my mouth; for of course she knows that this is only an ordinary funnel on this telephone."
The man then grabbed a handful of his mouth, pushed it into the funnel and yelled "hello" so loud that all the bells on the line commenced ringing.
"Can you talk as loud as that any time you want to?" asked the reporter.
"Why, yes, even louder." said the man.
"Well, then. I don't see why you want to waste your time on that instrument when the man you want to talk to is less than a mile away. If I was you I'd go to the window and tell Bowman that you want to talk to him."
Then the man walked rapidly away while the silvery smile of the telephone girl floated gently across the line.

Too bad Verizon wasn't maintaining those telephones.

Golden Gate Packing got in the news a lot, and not just for crank phone calls. The San Jose Evening News managed to preserve for posterity that Elmer Chase, who learned the fruit business Golden Gate and refined his techniques at Richmond-Chase, was also a bit of an actor, playing the title role in a Spring 1886 production of The Mikado:

A MIDNIGHT ENCOUNTER
Elmer Chase is Chased by a Watch Dog on Third Street
About 11 o'clock last evening, as Mikado Chase was returning home from a rehearsal of the "Pirates,", he met with quite an adventure at the corner of Third and Julian street.
Mr Chase was softly humming: "From every kind of man obedience I expect. // I'm the Emperor of Japan and..."
The selection was interrupted at this point by Mr. Chase being seized by the left leg by a large dog, who had sneaked upon him from the rear.
It was nip and tuck between the Mikado and dog for a hundred yards, the latter succeeding in nipping off a piece of the Mikado's pants, while Mr. Chase jumped a fence eleven feet high, in the rear of the Golden Gate Packing Company, at one bound.
This dog has a very unpleasant way of nabbing passers-by in this locality in the still night hours, and he seems to enjoy it, as he never barks until he has taken the bark from the pedestrian's shin.
Mr. Chase sustained no serious injuries, but when he reached the other side of the fence his pants looked like a last years birds nest.

That's the problem with Silicon Valley these days. There's no problem in getting everyone out to Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, but you'll never get them to volunteer for Gilbert and Sullivan.

Irrational Exuberance in the Canning Industry

And they complain about crazy wages and perks in high tech.

The August 29, 1889 San Jose Evening News shared this magical fact:

The Colusa Herald says the head canner in John Bidwell's cannery at Chico gets more salary than a United States Senator at Washington.

Besides, when did you ever see a U.S. Senator who could solder a lid on a can of peaches?

Betweeen canning wages, orchestras playing for the packing house girls, and free transport to the canneries, it's surprising that folks in San Jose worked anywhere other than the cannery.

I'll also mention, without comment, how George Church drove his express wagon in from of the 10:21 Monterey train on Third Street. (Obviously, distracted drivers were a problem even back in the horse-and-buggy days.) It's not a particularly essential news article, but it's a nice reminder of how dangerous those crossings around the Market Street station could be. We also find about how the nice folks over at the Golden Gate Cannery on Fourth Street helped Church off the pilot of the locomotive.

West Side Story, set in Campbell

I wonder if Preiser makes HO teenage gang figurines? It looks like they may be a necessary part for building a model of a cannery. And for those of you who always feared that Campbell was a violent town: congrats, you've been proven right.

RIVAL FRUIT WORKERS IN A CLASH AT CAMPBELL PACKING HOUSE
A gang fight which has been culminating at the Ainsley cannery at Campbell some time past broke out last night and for a time threatened to develop into serious proportions.
The seat of the trouble is the animosity of the Campbell faction to the outsiders who are given employment at the cannery and there have been numerous indications of feeling within the past few days.
By a tacit agreement, it was decided to settle the contention last evening by permitting the leaders, Frank Weeks for the town boys and George Hyer for the aliens, to engage in fistie combat and the opposing gang lined up at the closing hour to witness the fray between the champions.
Weeks was outside the cannery ready to do battle when Hyer came forth, but instead of doffing his coat and rolling up his sleeves the alien leader drew a big revolver and fired point blank at Weeks.
The bullet whizzed just above Weeks shoulder so close that the clothing was penetrated. Hyer then held the other faction at bay with his weapon and made his escape from town.
Word of the shooting was sent to Sheriff Ross and Deputy Sheriff Cottle arrived at the cannery in time to prevent further trouble. A warrant was sworn out for the arrest of Hyer on the charge of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder, and he was captured while attempting to escape on an outbound train from Campbell shortly after midnight.
This morning Hyer was brought before Judge Benson for arraignment and his preliminary examination was set for Thursday morning at 10 o'clock.
It is stated that there is danger of further trouble at Campbell as the local boys declare that they should be given preference at work in the fruit over strangers.

Seriously, conflict between the locals and out-of-towners for jobs was a challenge for the canneries in lean years; in the 1930's, there's comments about Ainsley giving priority to workers who had been at the cannery in previous years. For the crops that didn't attract locals, such as the pea harvest in Alameda County, there was always the tension of huge numbers of outsiders appearing, especially if the workers showed up before the harvest started. (See, for example, Migratory Labor in the California Market Pea Crop by Raymond Barry.

Campbell: Roosevelt Slept Here!

You know, those San Francisco Examiner writers are awfully mean.

Ninety years ago, give or take, Teddy Roosvelt came through San Jose. I ran across the May 12, 1903 San Jose Evening News article about the visit during my search for anything about the Ham Packing fire. Oh, my it was eventful. Better yet, it had railroad content.

Along with the very proper and factual news article from the Evening News's own crew, the paper also quoted from what the big city journalists were writing, and I've got to say they seem awfully jealous of San Jose. I suspect it's living in that fog all the time that makes them bitter. Or they're not eating enough prunes.

The President Didn't Have a Good Time in the Garden City
This is what Edward H. Hamilton, of the San Francisco Examiner, who has been representing that paper as a member of the President's party since its arrival on the coast, has to say about the visit to San Jose yesterday:

President Roosvelt today had one of the pleasantest and one of the most unpleasant experiences of his entire journey. The pleasant experience was at the Felton Big Trees; the unpleasant one here at San Jose.

Santa Cruz managed her celebration with much tact; San Jose with none. As a consequence this Garden City is having unpleasant things said about it up and down the Presidential train, which has been shifted to a quiet siding at Campbells so the President can sleep.

LUNGS VS. STEAM WHISTLES

Nothing seemed to go just right here at San Jose. The stand for the speaking had been erected right at the station. [Broad gauge or narrow station? I'm guessing the narrow gauge station.] When the President was in the midst of a sentence a locomotive sent up two long, shrill blasts. Now, the human lungs are powerless against a steam whistle, and the President was worsted in the contest. Hardly was this annoyance over when another engine began clanking its bell. Then a third began puffing and coughing as it backed along the track. All this was within 200 feet or less of where the President was trying to make himself heard. Had I been President there would have been remarks not on my original program, but Mr. Roosvelt pulled through without any show of annoyance or temper. Harrison would have been very good under similar circumstances.

GAVE HIM A ROUGH RIDE

Hadly was this ordeal over when the President and his party were put to the torture of a drive of two hours in a thick dust. Whoever was responsible for that journey has something coming to him among the torments of the world beyond. The route was to Santa Clara, then to Campbells and then back by another way. Evidently the local committee thought that as the president had been a Rough Rider he would enjoy a rough ride. They gave it to him.

As if there would not be enough dust for the President in the ordinary nature of things, a gallant cavalcade of local riders rode out in front of the President's carriage and kicked up the dust in cloud after cloud. Citizens in carriages and automobiles kept along as near to his carriage as possible, just so there could be no doubt that he could hereafter say "I am of the soil of San Jose." And so for the greater part of two hours, the Presidential procession was a prostrated pillar of dust by day."

…

PRUNE TARIFF

Now I can only guess what the President said about that fearful penance, but I know what other members of the party said, and one of them put it tersely in this fashion:

"Hereafter, if you want to prevent a man from getting a Presidential appointment, just say he was on that committee which arranged the San Jose drive."

"There'll be no more tariff on prunes," laughed another.

On the positive side, it wasn't all noise and dust for Roosvelt, for the Evening News reported the following from its own ace reporters:

"Soon after the return of the Presidential party from the drive through the valley last evening the special train in which the night was spent was drawn to Campbell and side-tracked. President Roosvelt was tired with the days experiences and it was decided that his rest would be less disturbed away from the noise and bustle which prevails around the local yards.

So the next time you're out in downtown Campbell, look at the railroad tracks and remember that President Roosvelt slept there.

And a challenge for the South Pacific Coast fans among us: so do you think the Presidential train was a narrow gauge train or a standard gauge train? Newspaper articles say that there was standard gauge all the way to Wrights in 1903 (but not through the summit tunnel). Got a guess? Put it in the comments.

Life in a Packing Plant is Mighty Sweet

Bah. Those girls in the packing plant got everything. Rides to and from work. Fine meals in the cafeteria. And now George Frank & Co. is giving them music?

From the October 16, 1902 San Jose Evening News:

Prune Packers Listen to Music
In their desperation over lack of sufficient number of women and girls to pack the prune crop, the packers of the Santa Clara Valley are willing to make any reasonable concession.
The packing-house girl is becoming an autocrat.
More than 1000 girls are wanted in the various packing houses.
All kinds of inducements have been offered and the bidding has become so brisk for help that some of the packing houses are on the verge of being turned into drawing-rooms.
To the firm of George Frank & Co. is due the palm in this respect.
Besides a free ride to and from work with pay and long terms of employment, it is advertising that "an orchestra plays popular music at intervals during the day."
This installation of music in the packing-house is likely to cause a stampede from the other places.
In the packing houses the girls now earn from $1 to $2 a day.

Don't tell me those modern day Silicon Valley programmers are spoiled once you hear about the orchestras. Orchestras!

I haven't done much research on the "orchestral" George Frank packing house, for the business pre-dates my layout by quite a bit. George Frank and Company turns up around 1900, at a plant out on the "West Side", as we used to refer to Cupertino around these parts. Frank's packing house shows up in the San Francisco Call as a drop-off location for prunes being sold through the California Cured Fruit Association in 1900. Later city directories (1904, 1907) put the plant at "Meridian Road at the narrow gauge" and "Meridian at Paula", or in modern terms roughly at Meridian and 280. It only seems appropriate that the orchestras were playing in a packing house on the roads leading to beautiful Willow Glen.

By the late 'teen's, Frank appeared ready for a change; he started developing a plant in Sacramento at 12th and B (billed as "Smith Frank Packing"). He sold his holdings in San Jose in 1919 and 1920, with the dried fruit packing plant going to Sunsweet (as they opened their own packing plants), and the cannery going to George N. Herbert (after he'd sold his packing plant on Lincoln Ave. off to Sunsweet). Herbert, you might remember, hosted Edith Daley's cannery visit in July 1919, after which the Evening News retired the use of the exclamation point in news articles.

If you want to do your own browsing for San Jose Evening News stories, go over to the Google News Archive and specify the "San Jose Evening News" or "San Jose News" as the source. Pre-1924 issues are billed as The Evening News, and post-1923 issues get grouped by Google either as the San Jose Evening News or San Jose News. In a nice coincidence, one of my neighbors is the son of the Evening News's editor.

Go check out the old papers, and share any fun articles you find. We're lucky the Evening News is available online, both because they've billed themselves in editorials as "the voice of the growers" and because they paid Edith Daley's salary.

Ha Ha! You Fell Victim to One of the Classic Blunders!

Everyone remembers the Princess Bride, right? And Vizzini's famous gloat?

Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

And of course, there's also the slightly less-known classic blunder: "Never try to break a prune pool when every prune grower in the Santa Clara Valley is trying desperately to stay solvent."

We've heard previously how the Higgins-Hyde packing company, based out of that packing house at San Carlos St. and the narrow gauge line, tried just that and managed to get pretty much every prune grower in the Valley out in force with pitchforks and torches, and encouraged the Sacramento politicians to demonize them for misstatements. Good times, good times.

When I first wrote about Higgins-Hyde, all I knew was that they had occupied the packing house I've previously described as Abinante and Nola around 1930 or 1931, and that they'd pissed off pretty much the whole Valley in 1932. I also showed how their chattel mortgages - loans to growers against the upcoming prune crops - show up in county records, giving us a chance to both understand what farm equipment the growers had as collateral, as well as the agreements that started the anger towards the company.

Luckily, there's a bit more available with some more poking around at the Clerk/Recorder's office, census records, and city directories. If you're into that sort of thing.

The Higgins-Hyde Packing Company appears around 1929, leasing the former Pacific Fruit Products / Sunsweet packing house right at the railroad tracks and West San Carlos St. The principals are Albert A. Higgins and Warren Hyde. As we saw previously, J.S. (Jack) Roberts, a salesman and fruit buyer, was a vice president, and Jacks's name often appeared on the fruit contracts.

Albert seems like a newcomer to San Jose, born in 1890 in New York. I'm not sure where he's come from; there's an Albert A. Higgins in San Francisco in 1928, an A. A. Higgins in Los Altos listed as a rancher at the same time, and an Albert A. Higgins, fruit merchant in Los Angeles in 1920, but I'm not sure which would be our man. He's newly married to Edith (Bea) Rea (he's 40, she's 23), and living with her parents on South 13th St. in San Jose.

His father-in-law, Edwin Rea, is worth an aside; a well-known San Jose lawyer, he's remembered these days primarily for defending David Lamson in his murder trial, and for getting in a fist-fight with the district attorney during that trial. Justice may be blind, but those lawyers have enough eyesight to know how to connect with a strong right hook.

Warren Hyde, however, was a very well-known and respected local citizen: an early orchardist in the Saratoga area, and a former Sunsweet director during some organization troubles back in 1922. Warren Hyde and George A. Hyde appear to have had adjoining properties out by Prospect and Quito Road at various times, making me think they might be related, or even brothers.

The building and lot at 750 West San Carlos St. were owned by H. H. Kooser and his wife at the time of Higgins-Hyde's occupancy. We know about the Koosers thanks to the legal documents associated with the building of the San Carlos St. Viaduct in late 1934. The re-routing of the road required selling a small strip of land and removal of a garage and scale, and the sale agreement included $200 for Higgins-Hyde as compensation for these changes (5/29/1933, book 652, page 386). (The viaduct was allowed by the California Railroad Commission decision 20559, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Higgins-Hyde is listed in the 1929, 1930, 1931, and 1932 San Jose city directories, hinting that they'd been around for at least a few years before the big kerfuffle with the prune pool in the dark days of summer, 1932. There were at least six chattel mortgages filed in 1932 with Higgins-Hyde: the Leo, DiSalvo, Oliva, Galvin, Greco, Rose, and Lester orchards all borrowed against a crop they were planning to sell to Higgins-Hyde that year. But once Higgins-Hyde challenged the Prune Pool and lost, they released all their growers from their contracts so they could join the prune pool. Higgins-Hyde probably lost their chance for a crop to sell over the winter of '32. At that point, having a packing house and storage space wasn't terribly useful, so Higgins-Hyde leased their packing house on July 19, 1932 to the Lawrence Warehouse Company, much as Hyde had done a few years earlier.

Higgins-Hyde could only hope for the 1933 year to be better, but it wasn't. In May, they cancelled their lease of the Hyde Cannery as storage space (5/8/1933, book 683, pg 374). On May 27, they cancel Lawrence Warehouse's lease on the 750 West San Carlos St. plant. They also appear to have started wrapping up the company in bankruptcy court. On May 29, Albert and Bea transfer orchard land in Saratoga to T. J. Miller, the trustee in bankruptcy for the company; the bankruptcy case opens for real in San Francisco on June 3. And then it's all over, except for unwinding all the various deals. It doesn't sound happy, but there's probably some stories there.

Early the next year, during that unwinding, T. J. Miller finds that Higgins-Hyde may have made the classic legal blunder: Never annoy people who might be jurors on your trial. The May 9, 1934 San Jose News has a little blurb under the title "Packing Firm Trustee Loses $2578 Prune Suit":

T. J. Miller, trustee of the Higgins-Hyde Packing Company, lost his $2578 action involving a contract for the purchase of 800 tons of prunes against Nathan L. and William Lester, growers, in Superior Judge William F. James' court yesterday when a jury awarded judgement in favor of the defendants.

I can't imagine the locals were friendly to the company that tried to break the Prune Pool, regardless of how good the contract was. I also have no idea whether this was one of the lingering contracts left over from the no-good-very-bad summer of 1932.

Analysis

Warren Hyde's connection makes me wonder if the creation of Higgins-Hyde has anything to do with the demise of George E. Hyde Packing in Campbell. The reports that the company started fading in 1928 might suggest that Warren had been selling through his brother, but the looming demise of the Hyde Cannery and dried fruit packing meant that he needed a better place to sell his crop. I'll need to keep an eye out for more hints about the history of Higgins-Hyde.

Now, all this corporate information is quite fun for those of us with some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but it really does have an application to model railroading. For, after all, I've always been uncertain about exactly what business should exist at the site where I've now got Abinante and Nola. Now, I can lay out all the options:

• Before 1928: unsure.
• 1928 - summer 1932: active packing plant run by Higgins-Hyde.
• Summer 1932 - Summer 1933: Higgins-Hyde painted on the building, but used by Lawrence Warehouse.
• Summer 1933 - Summer 1934: Higgins-Hyde painted on building, but probably empty.
• May, 1934: San Carlos St. viaduct is being built.
• Late 1934: San Carlos St. viaduct is completed.
• Late 1934: Active plant run by J.S. Roberts. John C. Gordon takes photo of completed viaduct with old bridge still around, and J.S. Roberts painted on the packing house.
• Pre-1935: Bypass line around San Jose built. Old San Carlos St. bridge removed as seen in unpublished John C. Gordon photo.

So that's it: if I'm modeling before 1928, I need to do more research. If I'm modeling before summer 1934, I can put Higgins-Hyde on my layout, but I can't have the San Carlos St. viaduct. If I'm modeling after Summer 1934, I'll want both the viaduct and J.S. Roberts.

There's only one problem: I spent last week ripping out the track around the San Carlos St. viaduct to get rid of some frequent derailments. As part of getting the track running again, I redid the scenery at the same time to include Los Gatos Creek and the former site of the old San Carlos St. bridge. It looks like I've just post-dated my layout to late 1934... or at least one corner of the layout to that year. Doing so means that the Hyde Cannery shouldn't be running and the Hunts Cannery in Los Gatos needs to be abandoned, which either I've just lost two key industries... or I've just arranged my model railroad so that half the layout will be set in 1928, and half in 1934. I should put a tricked-out DeLorean on the road between San Jose and Campbell just so folks understand why they're moving six years when turning round that corner. Oh, what a tangled mess I've gotten myself into...

[Photo still taken from the movie The Princess Bride. If you haven't seen it yet, you've missed something amazing. Go watch it. J.S. Roberts photo from a John C. Gordon collection panorama at San Jose State.]