USA > California > San Diego County > San Diego > City of San Diego and San Diego County : the birthplace of California, Volume I > Part 36
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The Herald remained with the new town for about two years and then moved north to Old Town. The new town had begun to decline. Old Town had remained the county seat and also was the social centre of San Diego. When he moved, Ames enlarged the Herald from four colums to five and reduced his subscription rate from $10 a year to $5. He also announced with evident satisfaction that the Herald had been made the official newspaper of San Diego and San Bernardino counties; this meant that the Herald was to receive all legal notices or advertisements of those two vast sections of the Golden State.
Enter here George H. Derby, of whom more Americans probably have heard than of any other man who ever resided in San Diego.
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The story of what he did has been told often, but a history of San Diego would be far from complete without at least a sketch of his career in San Diego, so here that is given :
Derby was a lieutenant in the army. But he was far more than an army man ; he was a rollicking blade, a man to whom apparently no day was complete without its joke, sometimes absurdly "practical" and often somewhat forced and crude and sometimes, it has been said, rather rough. But with all his pranks, this droll madcap seems to have no real enemies, showing that a kindness of heart went with his play.
Lieutenant Derby came to San Diego to throw the channel of the San Diego river back into False (now Mission) Bay from which it had wandered, carrying much silt into the real harbor. One story told to explain his presence here at the time is that he had offended the dignity of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, by submitting some ludicrous suggestions for changes in the army uniform. One sug- gested innovation was the substitution of an orange for the pompon atop the army cap : in support of this Derby declared that the orange looked quite as good as the regulation pompon and in addition could be removed and sucked if the soldier grew thirsty. Another suggestion he made was for a hook in the seat of each pair of army trousers ; this, said Derby, could serve to keep the mounted man in his saddle and in battle could be used by the file closers, with ringed poles, in keeping infantrymen from leaving the front. And. so the story has it. the irate Secretary of War was dissuaded by his associates from punish- ing the irreverent officer openly, but did execute a plan to "exile" him far from the madding crowd at Washington and its official and unofficial gayeties. Hence Derby's appearance at the southwest corner of the nation's rim. Whether the story is true matters not much, for it easily could have been true as far as Derby was concerned: this was just the kind of drollery in which he delighted and from which he became known pretty much as was Artemus Ward of his time.
Derby seems to have arrived in San Diego on his engineering tack about the first of August, 1853. Soon after Derby reached the town, Ames, who knew the army wag well, was seized with a desire to go to San Francisco and persuaded Derby to "sit in" as editor, describ- ing Derby in the Herald as "a friend of acknowledged ability and literary acquirements." Derby must have turned his face aside to grin quietly as he accepted the responsibility, for before Ames had gone on the steamer the irrepressible joker had determined on an editorial riot whose merry echoes rang across the continent. Derby promptly changed the politics of the paper from Democratic to Whig. jested unmercifully at staid and respectable citizens and had all manner of fun with the names and aspirations of John Bigler. the Democratic candidate for Governer of California, and his Whig opponent, William Waldo. Derby's upset of policy and politics made a lot of fun in San Diego, but it probably did not strengthen Ames' position in his party or with the Democratic candidate for governor. When Ames returned. Derby sat down and wrote a purely imaginary story of a fight between Ames and the substitute editor, and this made more enjoyment for all who read the paper.
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On October 1, 1853, Derby issued his famous "illustrated Herald," an issue filled with humorous stories with some local settings or il- lusions and embellished with "Illustrations" consisting of old woodcuts culled from the "ad alley," or advertising section, of the Herald plant. This droll conceit was reproduced later in the book of Derby's humor, "Phoenixiana," so called because Derby wrote under the name "John Phoenix." Two ballet dancers, for instance, were labeled as Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Duchess of Sutherland in conference; several cuts of houses were captioned with different imposing names, although the cuts were exactly alike. An imaginary railroad accident was illustrated with a small locomotive, two large cars, one upside down. and a set of false teeth to denote the wreckage.
Lieutenant Derby lived in San Diego for about two years, he and Mrs. Derby occupying a house which in later years was pointed out to visitors for that reason. He was in many ways a remarkable man, having a memory which enabled him to recite chapter after chapter from the Bible, and possessing also no mean engineering ability, a knack for quaint illustration and the ability to make an impromptu address : also he was a versifier of no mean merit and, as related, had a rich vein of humor. He was graduated from West Point with dis- tinction in 1846, and served through the Mexican war. Ames compiled the first edition of Derby's "Phoenixiana" in 1855, Derby having gone East. Lieutenant Derby died May 15, 1861, at the age of thirty-eight, as the first shots of the Civil War were still resounding.
In 1856, Ames made a long visit to the East, returning with a bride, Mrs. Eliza A. Ames. She died on March 14, of the next year. A year or two later he married again, but by that time the many disappointments he had suffered had saddened him considerably, and the old fire of the editor was subdued. His first wife's grave had been desecrated by vandals; his home had been blown down in a gale ; San Diego, instead of becoming a great city, was still a mere little village, and sleepy at that : there was little business for a news- paper and no prospect of improvement.
The last issue of the Herald was April 7, 1860. In several months before that the life of the paper was very much in the balance. Some- times it was not published at all; sometimes it was printed on brown wrapping paper ; some issues were only half-sheets.
Ames moved his plant to San Bernardino, where he published the San Bernardino Herald for about a year. He died July 28, 1861.
The press which Ames brought from New Orleans and which he fished out of the Chagres River in crossing the isthmus and on which the San Diego Herald was printed for nine years, is said to be the oldest in continuous use in the world. It is a Washington hand press. No. 2327, made by R. Hoe & Co., of New York in 1848. Ames used it first in printing a newspaper at Baton Rouge, La. After it served nine years at San Diego and a year at San Bernardino it was taken to Aurora, Nevada, then to California and printed the Esmeralda Star for about three years. Then it was taken to Independence, up in Inyo County, and on it has been printed the Inyo Independent ever since-more than half a century. There is a piece of printing ma- chinery with a history !.
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In the days when there was no telegraph line to San Diego and news from the East had to come by steamer or stage, meaning a delay of weeks at best, the editor was hard put to it to fill his columns-a task much different from that of the modern editor, who frequently discards as much news or potential news matter as he sends to the printer. Eastern exchanges, often disappointingly slow in arriving, were the main source of information from the "back home" sections. Even these, however, did not always suffice to fill. Perhaps the printer of the old hand-set days was not equal to the task of putting enough into type. Then there were such "fillers" as the "official direc- tory" of federal, state, county and local officers, and a list of Cali- fornia post offices, "with all corrections and additions," and these frequently filled up a column and a half on the front page.
All through the Civil war period and for several years after the great struggle San Diego had no newspaper; there was little business reason for one in San Diego at that time ; there would have been few readers for any periodical. In 1868, came the San Diego Union, started as a weekly, but, since 1871, a daily newspaper and one of the best morning newspapers on the Pacific coast. It was founded by Col. William Jeff Gatewood and Edward W. Bushyhead of San Andreas, Calaveras County. Mrs. Gatewood was a sister of Philip Crosthwaite, San Diego pioneer. He persuaded Gatewood to come to Old Town, where the northern man received assurances of support if he could start a paper there. He decided to make the move and persuaded Bushyhead, who was his foreman, to be his partner in the venture. Bushyhead on his arrival here was not enthusiastic over the little place, and his name as an owner did not appear on the paper at first. The Union, a modest four-page paper, made its bow to San Diego on October 10, 1868. It did not have an easy time, and the next spring Gatewood sold his interest to Charles P. Taggart, an attorney who did much in a short time to brighten the financial side of the venture. He sold out, however, in January 1, 1870. On June 30, of that year the Union was first issued from the new town started by Horton, having gone to it at Horton's solicitation. On March 20, 1871, the Union began to issue a daily newspaper in addition to the weekly, and publication of both has continued ever since. It is not within the province of this chapter to recount all of the history of the Union ; space does not allow that. But some further mention of the men who have made it is necessary. Douglas Gunn, a man of real ability and a tireless worker, acquired an interest with Bushyhead on September 22, 1870. He remained with the paper until August, 1886. For some time under the Bushyhead-Gunn regime John P. Young, later managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was on the Union staff. Bushyhead retired in June. 1873. He was well known not only for his newspaper work but as sheriff and chief of police. He died in March, 1907, at Alpine. Gatewood died March 27. 1888, having achieved much local fame as an attorney.
When Gunn retired. the newspaper went into the control of the San Diego Union Company, of which John R. Berry was manager. Gunn about three years later became the city's first mayor under its new charter. There were several changes in the ownership of the Union in the next few years, but the most important came in 1890,
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when the Spreckels interests acquired the paper. In 1899, James MacMullen, who had become one of the foremost newspaper men of California, came from the San Francisco Call, of which he was managing editor, to become general manager of the Union, and he has remained in that post ever since. Closely associated with him is Edmund F. Parmelee, business and advertising manager of the newspaper, who has held that place since January, 1888, and who has been dean of the San Diego newspaper corps for more than a decade. George S. Bates was editorial writer for the Union for more than twenty years. He died January 3, 1917, his place being taken by the talented Edwin H. Clough, widely known also by his pen name "Yorick."
The Union in 1888, purchased the Daily Bee and in 1900 bought the plant of the Morning Call, which had been the San Diego Vidette. In September, 1901, the Spreckels interests acquired the Evening Tri- bune, which had been established in December, 1895. The Union and Tribune have been issued practically ever since from the same plant, although they are edited by separate staffs. The Union, according to the latest annual "A. B. C." audit, has an average daily circulation of 17,871, and a Sunday circulation of 25,757, while the Tribune circula- tion, according to the same audit, is 15,562. Each of these two papers has the full leased wire service of the Associated Press; in addition the Union has the Universal Service wire, and the Evening Tribune has the International News Service. Both the Union and Evening Tri- bune are Republican in politics.
When the Spreckels interests acquired the Union, that newspaper was published at 933 Fourth Street, between Broadway and E streets. In November, 1901, the plant was removed to the old Horton bank building at the southwest corner of Third and D streets and the build- ing thereafter was known as the Union building. In 1907, the old structure was torn down to make room for the present Union building, first of the series of office structures erected in San Diego by John D. Spreckels. In 1914, the Union building annex, south of the main structure on Second Street, was built, and the Union and Evening Tribune occupy quarters in that. Their plant is thoroughly modern in every respect and one of the finest in the southwest.
The San Diego Sun, the other survivor in the list of newspapers started in San Diego, dates back to July 19, 1881. It was started as an evening newspaper by Mrs. Charles P. Taggart, wife of the well known attorney. Several well known San Diegans, including Horace Stevens, were identified with this newspaper in its early years. Its first office was in a small frame building on the east side of the plaza. In 1886, the paper was purchased by Warren Wilson of San Bernardino, who built the Sun building at the southeast corner of the plaza and thus made a new home for the paper. In February, 1889, the Sun was bought by Walter G. Smith and W. S. Simpson with money put up by the California National Bank. The bank took over the paper in January, 1891, and when the bank's failure came a few months later Wilson bought it back again. He in turn sold it in a few months to Paul H. Blades and E. C. Hickman, who obtained their money, or most of it, from E. W. Scripps, the newspaper publisher who later made his home at Miramar in San Diego County. In No-
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vember, 1892, the Sun bought the San Diegan, which had been started in 1885. From the San Diegan there went to the Sun Frank D. Waite as editor, and he served in that capacity until 1908, remaining on the staff as associate editor for several years after that. Waite, who is still residing in San Diego, was one of the ablest and most respected editorial writers in Southern California. After the pur- chase of the San Diegan, the paper was issued for several years as the San Diegan-Sun. It became the Sun again in 1909. In March, 1901, Scripps and W. H. Porterfield, who had been a newspaper man for several years in the city, became joint owners of the property, Scripps acquiring control. Porterfield since then has been actively identified for most of the time in the management and direction of the newspaper and has been connected similarly with several other Scripps newspapers in California. George H. Thomas has been editor of the Sun since December, 1915, succeeding C. A. McGrew, who resigned to become city editor of the Union. The Sun's business manager since January 1, 1913, has been Walter S. Dayton.
The Sun has a large and substantial home at Seventh and B streets which it has occupied since 1908. Its plant is an excellent one throughout. For about ten years the Sun has had the full leased wire service of the United Press. In politics it is independent. The latest annual "A. B. C." audit gives it an average daily circulation of 14,918.
At least fifty newspapers other than those named have been started in San Diego, but all have been absorbed by more successful publications or have fallen by the wayside.
The pioneer editor and publisher of the new city was William H. Gould, who started the weekly Bulletin on August 21, 1869. Major Ben C. Truman bought a half interest in June. 1870. and remained with the paper for about a year and a half. W. W. Bowers, later congressman, was its business manager for a time. Early in 1872, it became a daily newspaper. Col. W. Jeff Gatewood bought the plant in 1872, and began issuing the World from it on July 25, of that year, the weekly and daily Bulletin being discontinued a few days before that. The World later was merged with the News. which was started in 1875, by Jacob M. Julian. The News was con- tinued until 1882, when it was bought by the Sun, then about a year old. Among men who have been active in newspaper life in the city is Harr Wagner, well known in the educational field, who came to San Diego in 1887, to make a new home for the Golden Era. an old monthly magazine which had been published in San Francisco since 1852. His wife, who wrote under her maiden name, Madge Marris, was one of the most prominent contributors ; others were Joaquin Miller, the poet, and Rose Hartwick Thorpe. Wagner for a short time leased the Vidette. The Golden Era, which long held a reputation as a magazine of western fiction and of literary merit, was moved back to San Francisco in 1895, becoming soon thereafter the Western Journal of Education.
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CHAPTER XXV
SAN DIEGO'S WRITERS.
Given a region like that about San Diego-a land as alluring as the Greek islands, bathed by a sea as colorful as the Aegean and canopied by an Italian sky-a land redolent of the romantic past and throbbing with the life of the present-it was inevitable that hither would come poets and novelists, dramatists and essayists, historians and the tellers of tales.
And come they did.
Environment is vital to imagination. Lovers of letters are lovers of the beautiful; their inspiration is born of their surroundings; and nowhere more than in and around San Diego do land and sea and sky, history and hope, man and nature, provide richer material for the creative literary artist.
So they have come here. Some for a season ; some for good ; and all for inspiration.
And they began to come very early. San Diego had achieved a place in literature long before the present modern city had risen on the curving shore of the great Bay. .
As long ago as 1835, Richard Henry Dana's immortal classic, "Two Years Before the Mast," introduced San Diego to the reading world and "put her on the map" of literature. His long sojourn at the little Portuguese fishing village of La Playa, near the ancient Spanish Pueblo of San Diego de Alcala (the "Old Town" quarter of the present city) furnished him with the materials for his fascinating pictures of life in California before it had become a part of the United States.
It was to this same "Old Town" of San Diego that Helen Hunt Jackson, the poet and novelist, turned, fifty years later, for the dramatic closing scenes of that other immortal classic-"Ramona." In Father Ubach, the parish priest of the Old Mission (established in 1769, by the apostolic Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra), Mrs. Jackson found the model for her remarkable portrait of her "Padre Gaspara." There, too, in the old adobe mansion of the Estudillo family (now known to tourists as Ramona's Marriage Place, and used as a museum of local antiquities) the heroine and Alessandro were wed. The fame of "Ramona" has perhaps given many the impression that "H. H.," as Mrs. Jackson used to sign herself, will be remembered rather as a novelist than as a poet. Critics, however, dispute this. Emerson, in the preface to "Parnassus," and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in "Contemporaries," both pay high tribute to her poetic genius.
A few years later, in 1894, another world-famous novelist came to San Diego in search of health and fresh inspiration-Beatrice Har-
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raden. Fame had come to her the year before with the publication of her "Ships That Pass in the Night." She spent the winter of 1894-5, in "Windemere," a quaint cottage in La Jolla, where she developed her next novel, "Varying Moods."
At that time and ever since, La Jolla, the most picturesque part of San Diego, has been a Mecca for a constant procession of writers and musicians and painters, pilgrims in quest of beauty, the stuff of all the arts. And there two well-known writers, one a poet and the other a novelist, have settled for good and all.
At the foot of Mount Soledad lives Walt Mason, whose homely common sense and pungent humor are daily carried to his millions of readers in his poems with a "punch." And in his bungalow perched high up on the slope of the same mountain, overlooking La Jolla and the Pacific, lives Edwin L. Sabin, whose breezy stories of adventure and invigorating tales of the Big Outdoors have endeared him to all lovers of nature and life.
In the city proper lives another and widely different poet. John Vance Cheney has long occupied a position of the highest distinction in the field of letters. His exquisite and stately poems sustain in the current madness of so-called "free verse" the noblest traditions of classic dignity and chastened beauty of form. His presence in the community makes for culture in the truest sense.
Yet another San Diego poet, less widely known perhaps, but deeply appreciated by the discerning, is Fanny Hodges Newman. Her first published volume, "Out of Bondage," contains poems of rare quality, meaty with meaning and clothed in limpid English. Mrs. Newman's sure grasp of life's profoundest truths, and her ability to voice her thought so aptly, place her securely among contemporary poets who signify.
For the past ten years or so San Diego has been the home of Edwin H. Clough (better known by his pen-name of "Yorick"), one of the most brilliant and scholarly minds in America. Unfortunately, Mr. Clough's contributions to literature have been mostly brief fugi- tive essays appearing in the daily press, as was the case with the late Ambrose Bierce, the only other American writer at all comparable with him. Bierce's friends finally succeeded in collecting into a dozen volumes his scattered writings. A like effort should be made to preserve in permanent form these rare fragments of criticism, philos- ophy, satire and humor, of Clough's, for they are far too rare to lose.
Since the war Peter B. Kyne. the well-known author of popular short stories and successful novels, has resided almost continuously in the neighboring village of Del Mar. he having discovered the charm of this locality while stationed at Camp Kearny before going to France as a captain of artillery. His latest novel, "The Pride of Palomar," is an outcome of his sojourn here.
An old-time resident of San Diego is Mrs. Rose Hartwick Thorpe. whose best known poem, "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight." has probably done more duty as a "recitation" for budding elocutionists than any other "piece" in the English language.
Mary Payson, whose home is in the section of San Diego known as Loma Portal, is the author of many exquisitely fascinating poems
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for children, as well as of several more significant poems whose words have been set to music and sung by prominent artists with marked success.
Another San Diegan whose work is rapidly widening his renown is William B. Hamby. Most of his stories, realistic tales of the South- west and of "men who do things," have appeared in that goal of all ambitious new writers-the Saturday Evening Post. Some of Mr. Hamby's work has also been presented on the screen.
Across the Bay, in Coronado, Elizabeth Dejeans, the novelist, has lived for the past two of three years. One of her early successes, "The Tiger's Coat," has recently been picturized. Her latest novel, "The Moreton Mystery," is among her most popular books.
Close by, at the naval station on North Island, lives yet another successful story writer, Harriet Welles, the wife of Rear Admiral Roger Welles. Her stories, which appear in Scribner's and other high-grade magazines, are distinguished from the common run of popular fiction by their subtlety and underlying intellectuality.
Lucy Stone Terrill, the author of "A Thing Apart" and other novels and short stories, has for several years lived in San Diego.
Out of the thousands of stories submitted some years ago in a competition invited by "Life" one of the few prize-winners was writ- ten in San Diego by a San Diegan, Bertha Lowry Gwynne. The story was entitled "Up and Down," and, like Mrs. Gwynne's other work, it revealed strength and originality.
Noted playwrights have from time to time spent a season in and about San Diego, seeking here either inspiration for possible new plays or a sympathetic environment in which to write those already in inind. Among these may be mentioned George Broadhurst, who passed a recent winter in Coronado while writing his next season's play ; and the late Frank Pixley, who passed away suddenly while busily at work in San Diego on another comedy.
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