As Good as He is Beautiful: John H. McCarty and the McCarty Wireless Telephone Company

John Henry McCarty, 1855-1924?

“Hello! Hello! Is this Mr. Seidenberg? Is this Mr. Davis? Is this Mr. McAlfrey? This is McCarty at the Cliff House.” ¹

My cousin Francis Joseph McCarty occupies an interesting place in the history of emerging mass communications technology in the early 20th century. Francis is credited with manufacturing and demonstrating the first wireless telephone in San Francisco, and founding the first wireless telephone company on the west coast, making him an unlikely forerunner of today’s tech bros and their famously disruptive culture. 

He was only able to invent one thing before his death at the age of  17 in 1906, but that one thing — a patented wireless telephone—had an immediate impact. The bulky device spawned two more wireless companies, both short-lived, a silent movie, now lost, and a starting point, not the basis, for the founding of the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto by Cyril Elwell, who launched a new generation of wireless voice transmission.  

I was in my thirties when I met my cousin posthumously because of a writer’s inadvertent biographical error. In the AWA Review article “Wireless Comes of Age on the West Coast”, writer and California Historical Radio Society member Bart Lee mistakenly identified Daniel “Whitehat” McCarty as Francis’s father.  I’m grateful to Lee for this excellent article, and happy about the error. Researching anyone named McCarty in San Francisco is tough work, however, Whitehat acts as a sort of indicator species for our family—when his name appears in a newspaper article, you know you’ve found the right McCarty. Too, there’s been on-going confusion about who did what wirelessly, with more than one writer accepting the origin story put forth by Francis’s older brothers, Ignatius and John, who, riding hard on Francis’s coat tails, identified themselves as the founding inventors of the telephone, as each man tried, and failed, to continue their brother’s work.

Francis probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the idea that his Whitehat was his father, whose zany notoriety attached itself to anyone in his orbit. His connections with city hall and San Francisco’s high rollers made it easy for Francis to court media attention for his device, then, as now, an important strategy for attracting investors.  But Whitehat was not Francis’s father. 

That honor belongs to John Henry McCarty, Whitehat’s jealous younger brother, who lived a pale life in his brother’s exuberant shadow and in the aftermath of his son’s invention. Francis’s paternity was uncertain, not because he didn’t know who his father was, but because as far as we can know, his father didn’t appear to care that he had a son. John began to leave his family sometime in 1904, depriving his wife and four young children, including Francis, of a source of income, and a crucial skill: the ability to handle a horse. 

John had been absent for years before he actually left, according to Mary Eunice McCarty, Francis’s younger sister, a screenwriter in Hollywood, and the sole source of information about the interior life of the McCarty family.  Mary was a redoubtable woman, once called the “Joan of Arc for the Democratic party” for her impassioned campaign on behalf of Al Smith, the Democratic candidate in the 1928 Presidential election. She wrote at least 13 screenplays, and two books, one of which was a biography entitled “Meet Kitty”, about her high-spirited, resilient mother, Catherine “Kitty” Lynch McCarty. 

Kitty Lynch arrived in San Francisco in 1867 as a nine-year old with her Irish immigrant parents, and married John, a blacksmith and farrier in 1878. Two years later, the McCarty family was living at 3 Rausch Street in the South of Market. John and his brother James, who lived with the family, were both horseshoers, then the official family business. John, who once pointed a gun at a crowd of angry men from the horseshoer’s union in front of his forge on Golden Gate Avenue, was not a nice man or a good father, according to Mary.

“It is impossible to be temperate in describing John Henry McCarthy,” wrote Mary. “There are not enough words in the English language to give him the full measure of condemnation.” 

Mary Eunice McCarty/McCarthy*, 1899-1969, screenwriter and author.

The exact source of John’s discontent is lost to time. John, who left Bedford, Massachusetts after 1870, and followed his siblings west, carried an enormous chip on his shoulder, and liked to throw it at other people, especially his tiny wife, who weighed less than 100 pounds and survived 14 pregnancies. Eight of her children grew to adulthood. 

Mary thought that John’s problem was easily explained: he was an envious, status-conscious man who was more defined by his relationship to his brother Whitehat — and later his dead son—than he was for anything he did. 

“Practically every book written about San Francisco devotes pages to Whitehat,” she wrote.  “His brother is not even mentioned.” 

John and Whitehat did have a lot in common, namely bad habits that ballooned into big problems. They gambled on everything: horses, mostly, and once the outcome of the 1888 Presidential election. They made extravagant “gold-flinging” gestures of bonhomie that they could not really afford in establishments like the Palace Hotel, and the Poodle Dog. Neither Whitehat or John seemed to be concerned with the future—gamblers tend to live in the moment— or could have predicted it as clearly as Francis did, who often spoke of a time when voices would be transmitted by tiny devices.

But at least one of the brothers was smart enough to see that the McCarty Wireless Telephone Co. could be a springboard to wealth and fame. Whitehat was an early investor in his nephew’s start-up. John seems only to have become interested in it after his son’s death.

Hey! Here comes John Henry! 

John did try to make his mark. “My father…accomplished something that Whitehat never attempted,” wrote Mary. “He was elected to the California State Legislature.”  In 1889, John H. McCarty served as the California State Assemblyman from San Francisco’s 39th Assembly district in the 28th session. This should have provided him some sort of distinction, and yet, as Mary remarks caustically, “…the spotlight eluded him. No one ever said, Hey! Here comes John Henry!” John’s single term in the State Legislature failed to make any lasting difference to his life, perhaps making his already large chip even bigger. 

In 1888-89, San Francisco’s 39th Assembly district encompassed the 8th and 11th wards in the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. These crowded districts were home to laborers, sometimes skilled, and sometimes not, often from immigrant Irish backgrounds. John first owned a horseshoeing business with his brother James, and later with another Irish-American blacksmith, Francis O’Neill in the Civic Center, the perfect locale to meet and mingle with ward bosses and city supervisors. 

Like his nephew Edward Creely, John took his political cues from where he was at: a dense, socially intertwined neighborhood where the electorate were met at the polling place on election day by a prepared ballot, or ticket, and a ballot box guarded by “…the watchful eye of party workers”.

Which party they voted for was a question. In the fall of 1888, there were plenty. This was the era of the independent party in San Francisco. In the excellent book on San Francisco politics entitled “San Francisco 1865-1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development”, historians William Issel and Robert Cherny describe the electoral system as “unregulated” and vulnerable —or responsive depending on one’s perspective— to the ambitions of electoral entrepreneurs who, seeking a path to power, founded new political parties if they commanded a sizable constituency, could pay for ballots, and deliver votes.  

The ephemeral nature of political clubs in San Francisco at this time is head-spinning and hard to document 135 years later, but there was one consistent theme in the fall of 1888: the exclusion of the Chinese and the passage of the Scott Act, which expanded the powers of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by barring resident Chinese laborers who had traveled back to China, from returning to the United States, even if they had certificates allowing them to return. 

The Scott Act was signed by President Grover Cleveland in October 1888, just eleven years after San Francisco’s Chinese community was subjected to the terrifying Sandlot riots in 1877. Bellicose speeches delivered by Charles C. O’Donnell, and later Denis Kearney, whipped up mobs of white laborers who swept through the city’s east side, destroying Chinese-owned businesses and killing four Chinese men. The riots coalesced into the Workingmen’s Party of California, led by Kearny, which left an indelible stamp on city politics, and cadres of men eager to continue the business of the WPC, long after its end by 1881. In light of John H. McCarty’s brief legislative career, one wonders where he was during the Sandlot riots. It’s a fair question. 

It was this tradition of immigrant nativism that swept the “horseshoer”, as McCarty was described, into office as the candidate from the newly formed “Foreign American Independent Party”. John was nominated on October 11th, 1888 at the Thirty-ninth Assembly District Democratic Convention. 

Patrick A. Dolan headed the new party, but the party actually had two daddies, the other being the former Sandlot orator, Charles C. O’Donnell, a physician, and former head of the Sarsfield Rifles, a National Guard company.  “Dr.” O’Donnell, as he was mockingly known (historian and author Beth Wingarner delves into his sideline occupation as an abortionist here), frequently appeared on the sandlots to shout that the Chinese must go. O’Donnell himself isn’t mentioned in the lists of the officer’s names of the Foreign American Independent Party, but it bore the imprint of his sinophobia so firmly that the candidates were called “O’Donnellites” by the Daily Alta. 

This was John’s ticket into government: populist bigotry and nativist rancor. How horribly ironic that its first meeting was held in the huge Irish American hall of San Francisco². 

Cleveland’s Anti-Chinese wall

On November 3, 1888, three days before the election, the democratic clubs in San Francisco organized a parade to show support for the presidential incumbent, Grover Cleveland, tariff reform and the Scott Act. The massive march was designed to rouse the voters and strike terror into the hearts of the city’s Chinese residents, who were treated to a display of 15-20,000 white men walking in military formation dressed as Zouaves, Vaqueros and “Iroquois”, complete with guns, torches, and incendiary devices. The march started from Montgomery and Kearny Streets and proceeded down Market to Franklin. 

The Daily Examiner reported on the spectacle with pleasure. “The city of 400,00 white people got its 6 o’clock dinner over as quickly as possible, sent its servants about their business, locked up its house and started for the streets”. Spectators lined Market to watch the procession of Democratic clubs, and their assembly candidates make their way down Market Street. 

McCarty’s future colleagues Henry C. Dibble, Thomas Seary and Thomas Brannan, all from neighboring districts, walked in the parade. John joined the other members of his trade, the Ironworkers of the city, on a horse drawn wagon.  The boilermakers’ exhibit featured a huge boiler being riveted by workmen, whose brawny muscles stood out in bold relief under the glare of the furnaces.  McCarty, the nominee from the 39th district, struck a pose atop the float with eight other men, “lustily” pounding out a horseshoe on an anvil. 

“Cleveland’s Anti-Chinese wall” San Francisco Daily Examiner Saturday morning, Nov.3, 1888

There were other floats, too. One, captioned by the Examiner as “Cleveland’s Anti-Chinese wall” featured a wall, encased in a wooden box with the words “Harrison’s Idea of Protection” and “Indiana, sure you bet” painted on the side.  Two figures were painted on the banner sitting on scaffolding. The digitized images available online have lost some detail, but one of the figures appears to have a queue hanging down their back. Taken in the wider context of its appearance in an anti-Chinese parade, the message seems clear. 

The red glare from the torches, and the fiery trails of mortars fired into the air lit the upturned faces of the spectators who were transfixed by the fantasy spectacle of the whites-only march. In an adjoining story, the Examiner stated that their “canvassing corps” had polled over 3,000 people to discover the mood of the voters. “The results of yesterday’s canvass shows that among the working people and those of small capital the Chinese question seems to overshadow all other issues.” 

Polls, as we know, can be wrong. The canvassing results may have given Cleveland the edge, but to no avail. Benjamin Harrison won. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. It was a bad day for the Dems at the federal level; however at the city level, things went well for John and his Foreign American Independent party confreres. The party won 15 out of 20 assembly seats in San Francisco.  Out of 2,715 registered voters, John won 1,249 votes against his republican opponent J.H. Goldman, who secured 1,141 from registered voters, all of whom began voting “unusually early” (Daily Alta Nov 6, 1888) Of the 19 assemblymen sent from San Francisco to Sacramento for the 28th session, fully half were first-generation Irish Americans.

“We have the Chinese locked out …,” said the Daily Alta, “and we want them to stay locked out.”  

The Hibernian Parrot

John was promptly appointed Chairman to the standing committee on Chinese immigration and Emigration. Joining him was Thomas Seary, J.A. Mullaney, Hamilton H. Dobbin, E.C. Tully, M.C. Chapman, C.H. Porter, H.M. Brickwedal, and Philo Hersey. The remit of the Committee was to “take into consideration all propositions relative to the tendencies of Chinese labor upon the political, social, physical and moral conditions and affairs of the State.”

John started off promisingly enough. Dubbed “the learned blacksmith”, he was praised by the Sacramento Daily Union as “…one of the prominent statesmen on the Democrat side of the house. As Chairman of the Committee on Chinese Immigration and Emigration, he strikes terror to the pagan hordes who seek our shores…. Mr. McCarty is a bosom friend to the leading millionaires who frequent the Palace Hotel, and it is understood that he aspires to some of the highest offices within the gift of the people. And well he may, for he is as good as he is beautiful³,” proving the adage that beauty is ever in the eye of the beholder. 

On January 25th, 1889, John and other committee members visited San Francisco’s Chinatown, ostensibly to report on the living conditions of the area, but in reality to push for the full enforcement of the Scott Act. In his February 11th address to the Assembly, he wasted no time leveling the Three F’s of nativism at the Chinese: filth, foreignness and fecundity. 

“The Chinese are foreign to our living, race and language,” said McCarty “They have little regard for morality, decency or law. They are an ignorant and superstitious race.”⁴ He concluded his speech with a forceful plea for the Scott Act to be fully enforced, stating that only when the “Oriental invader” was barred from entry would the “sweet voices and joyous laughter” of happy children ring out. 

This speech, a fine example of the Irish becoming white (it’s very possible he attained fluency in the language of exclusion, growing up as a child of Irish immigrants on the East Coast) may have been the high point of his legislative career. Other than this report, and two bills, which were just resolutions, he seems to have fallen back to earth. After being described as “beautiful”, the media adulation stopped. A journalist with the Sacramento Bee mocked both his national origins, and his lack of independent thought by dubbing him the “Hibernian Parrot”. McCarty earned a reprimand from speaker Robert Howe after wiping his feet on the top of his desk. “McCarthy is not used to being among gentlemen,” the Sacramento Bee concluded. Later that year, some wag nailed John’s hat to his desk. 

Either the fickleness of the party (which seems to have evaporated), or perhaps his personal shortcomings prevented him from gaining the nomination a second time. The 28th session of the California state assembly only met from January to March that year.  In late 1889, Charles S. Arms, who went on to become the State Senator from the 23rd district, replaced McCarty in the 39th Assembly district. 

For a man so profoundly fond of “the sweet voices” of children, it’s likely he didn’t hear Francis’s voice very often, who was less than a year old when his father invoked the happiness of children as a reason to harrass and exclude the Chinese. After his brief success in electoral politics, John filed for bankruptcy in 1891, and worked as a horseshoer for the next decade. 

The Boy who Died

On May 8, 1906, 20 days after the San Francisco earthquake, Francis lost control of his horse on the corner of Fourth and Broadway Street in Oakland, where he had relocated the McCarty Wireless Telephone company. He was thrown headfirst from the cart he was driving, into the concrete curb. He died three days later of pneumonia after sustaining compound fractures in his jaw and broken ribs. His mother was inconsolable. His father’s reaction was more pragmatic. He sold the patent on his son’s invention, and, taking the proceeds with him, finally moved in with his inamorata, a woman named Minnie E. Douglas.

John spent the next several years ducking child support, allegedly with the help of his mistress, and constructing a series of hastily improvised identities. He claimed that he was just a poor chauffeur when Kitty finally hauled him into court for child support in 1907. Kitty, who sought $200.00 a month for herself and her four children, told the judge that with the connivance of Ms. Douglass, that John was hiding at least 50,000 dollars, and probably more, in a dummy corporation called the “National Vulcanizing Rubber Company”⁵ that included an interest in his late son’s estate valued at $40,000 dollars. John Henry got thrown in jail, but “aided by his own glib tongue and an expensive lawyer”, he never paid a cent in child support. Later, he described himself to the press as the “president” of the “Universal Wireless Telephone Company”, an abortive attempt by McCarty Sr. and his son, John P. McCarty, to cash in on Francis’s invention. By 1914, father and son concluded there was nothing more to wring out of Francis’s invention. Both moved to Los Angeles.  

J.P. McCarty stayed in mass communications by becoming a film director in the growing entertainment industry in Hollywood. In 1914, he made a silent movie entitled “The Wireless Voice” starring himself and a wireless apparatus, perhaps of his brother’s design (it’s unclear whether J.P ever built a wireless telephone himself.) His sister Mary and brother Henry A , both screenwriters, enjoyed moderate success. Mary wrote “Theodora Goes Wild”, a comedy starring Irene Dunne, who won an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

John Patrick McCarty/McCarthy, film director and occasional actor.

It’s not clear what happened to John in the last decades of his life. Probably not a lot. In 1921, as a 66-year old, he lived with his son J.P., at 7521 Emelita St in North Hollywood. He was alive in 1924, when he was mentioned in his brother James’s obituary. But after that, nothing. No death notice, no loving obituary, at least none that I can find.

It’s hard to write about the son without writing about the father and in Francis’s case this is especially true. Much of what he accomplished was in spite of what he didn’t have: money, a lengthy formal education, and a father who was also a parent. 

Retrospectively, John’s absence seems to be the most glaring on the day of his son’s death. It’s unfair to blame John for the road conditions (the culprit was the consequence of a horse sharing the road with cars) but it’s hard to wonder what might have been if he’d been around more. Would Francis have been able to control his horse? They were the family concern: Mary attributes her father’s stint as Leland Stanford’s ranch manager in 1887 to his “expert knowledge of horses”, an expertise shared throughout the McCarty-Creely family. Did John teach his son the art of horsemanship? Or did he mostly slap him away “for his importunate questionings”, as he once admitted to a reporter?

Francis will always be the Boy Who Died. If the details of his life had been reworked into a work of science fiction with the same sad ending – Boy Wonder Projects Voice Through the Air! Boy Wonder Dies! – then surely a work of fan fiction would have emerged, too, one with an alternative ending, in which Francis did not die, but lived long enough perfect his wireless telephone, grow his startup and maybe as a very old man, get a glimpse of the era he knew was coming- a time of tiny phones, small enough to sit in a pocket, and powerful enough to effortlessly transmit voices through space and time. “We have had to fight the hard knocks of disbelief all the time,” he told an Examiner reporter in the fall of 1905. It was a very hard knock that killed him; the disbelief he encountered, including his father’s, he survived. Aside from inventing his wireless telephone, this is perhaps his greatest achievement. Rejection has disabled more than one would-be Great Innovator. Francis died with his sense of purpose intact. That is heroic. 

 

Francis J. McCarty, 1888-1906. Founder of the first wireless telephone company in San Francisco

 

 

 

*About the name: it’s spelled McCarty. The Hollywood McCarty’s used the extra “H”, probably because they got tired of correcting everyone. I’m very sorry I never met Mary. She deserves some ink spilled on her behalf.  Her book “Meet Kitty” is as much about rejecting her father’s anti-Chinese bullshit, as it is about telling the world about her fabulous mother. Watch “I Hate Women”, a baldly titled B-film that Mary wrote in 1934– it’s got some snappy dialogue in it.
Written with love to Kitty Lynch McCarty, who clapped back at the limits of tolerance when it mattered, and to my boy-genius cousin, Francis.

Thank you to Beth Winegarner, whose book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” is a must-read. And big, big thanks to Bob Rydzewski and the crew at the Bay Area Radio Museum in Alameda. Without their care and attention to the story of the McCarty Wireless Telephone Co. this tiny tale of early San Francisco tech might not be as well known. I am grateful.

 

 

The McCarty Wireless Telephone station, built sometime after April 3,1906 by Thomas Lorenzen, and erected on the NE corner of 45th and Lawton in the Sunset District of San Francisco. https://www.sowp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/LR-The-McCarty-Wireless-Telephone.pdf

 

 

1. “Talks Through the Air without Wires” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 3, 1905 ↩︎
2. September 21, 1888 (page 6 of 8). (1888, Sep 21). Daily Examiner (1865-1889) Retrieved from https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/september-21-1888-page-6-8/docview/2132264028/se-2
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3. Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 61, Number 5, 27 February 1889 ↩︎
4. California State Assembly Journals 1889 Session,https://clerk.assembly.ca.gov/historical-information/archive-list/california-state-assembly-journals-1889-session?field_archive_type_value=Journals p. 345
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5. San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California), September 19, 1908: 14. NewsBank: America’s News – Historical and Current. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A142051F45F422A02%40EANX-NB-14DC40A41A695CF8%402418204-14DA452198CDEFC6%4013-14DA452198CDEFC6%40.
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January 6 Rune reading on the eve of Epiphany.

I made up my own reading structure, which is borrowed from the arc of la pièce bien faite, the well-made play. There is a plot (rising action, culmination, falling action, and conclusion) and it is tightly and formulaically structured. However, runes are indirect and enigmatic, the exact opposite of a well-made play which delivers endings the audience expects. Runes don’t do that.

Depending on further contemplation, there might be other interpretations of this reading. But it’s early days yet, and I have all year. Quotes from all three rune poems, and the Prose and Poetic Eddas are italicized. 

Reading from left

Ihwaz: a yew tree, old & venerable, with a thick trunk, gnarled branches and a root system that’s capable of penetrating stone. It is attacked by time and the elements, and is “the greenest in winter,” as the Norwegian rune poem points out, meaning it thrives even during the season of death. The yew stands solidly in churchyards, and also in Golden Gate Park where the San Francisco Call praised it. “One of the prettiest of the smaller trees are the specimens of the English yew, the same wood from which merry Robin Hood is said to have fashioned his bow. This tree is scarcely more than shrub here yet. It belongs to the genus Taxus and is a slow-growing, long-lived evergreen of moderate height and spread of branches. In Europe the yew is much used in graveyards.” The yew stands for thousands of years, doubled down into its strength and toughened by its resolve, a guardian of flame.

Tiwaz: the first appearance by a god in this reading. Did you know that Tyr took care of Fenrir, tenderly, like a parent? Only Tyr had the courage to approach it and feed it. When the wolf was bound, Tyr laid his right hand in the wolf’s mouth as surety. When the wolf realized his betrayal, he bit off the hand that fed him. All the gods laughed, except Tyr who understood what was at stake: the honor of the gods (honor is everything). Wrong action is met by right, and imbalance corrected when justice steps in. This action involves everyone.

Kenaz: it sits at the apex of this reading, as something inflamed, something that has collected itself fully to blaze forth, to erupt. Whether that causes a disgusting pimple, a painful lesion, or becomes a flame that provides warmth and light is one question. What caused it to combust? Did it emerge from Ihwaz, the tough old yew? What does it encourage? What does it expel? 

Mannaz: it descends from Kenaz, which feels right; those who gather within a hall value the bright pale flame. There is a clear warning in the Anglo Saxon rune poem: every man is doomed to fail his fellow. To be beloved among kin is comforting (and in these days of pandemic surges, possibly hazardous.)  Augmentation of earth; augmentation of dust. We were without fate once, inanimate, without vitality. We relish our illuminated/inflamed consciousness. But hubris may hound us. Awaken your fate.

Ansuz: (If you offer an invitation and hospitality, the gods will attend you.) Hail, Odin, All Father, ancestor, son of Bor, son of Buri and Bestla, giver of breath and life.

Dagaz: Either Nótt or Jörð gave birth to Day (or maybe Jörð was his sister), but he was as bright and beautiful as his father’s people. We have never stopped waiting for the sun to rise, (and have noted when it appears not to) to make his way through the sky with his horse Shining Mane. Dagr is beloved… a source of hope and happiness to rich and poor, and of service to all. What do we sing before his father’s doors? How glad is our song?

How completely does a new day put paid to the errors of the past?

Do you understand yet, or what more?

A English yew (Taxxus bacata) directly across from the Conservatory of Flowers on the south side of JFK Drive.

Edward Creely and the changing city, 1870-1920 Part 3: The Great Cow Cull of 1896

Map of the Excelsior Homestead, 1869. Image from The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

In 1896, the Excelsior Homestead was only partially mapped. Russia Avenue was the southernmost boundary on the Sanborn Perris maps; beyond that, the largely undeveloped land lay far beyond the municipal pale. With few or no structures such as schools, churches, or homes, there was little to insure. There were dairies of course, almost 60 of them, but in those days, dairies were so improvised and ramshackle that insuring them was perhaps beside the point. What mattered to the dairymen, latter-day versions of the bóaire, an Irish term meaning “cow lord”, was the wealth their cows created because of the milk they gave. 

The Excelsior Homestead was the place of the cows, Ait na Bo, a shifting and uncertain territory, hard to map, and difficult to regulate. Back then, the Excelsior would have looked like a prairie in the wet springtime, and the hooves of the cattle cratered the place, looking for something to eat other than brewery slops, which they were accustomed to being fed. There wasn’t too much space for the cattle to wander; the dairymen needed to get their cows back, as Sunnyside historian Amy O’Hair pointed out to me in a recent conversation, so that they could be fed and milked.

“These were urban dairies, remember,” O’Hair said. “They weren’t riding after their cows on horseback, like they had done on the Ranchos.” 

Nicholas Hansen’s dairy, the California dairy, was located at the intersection of Amazon and Vienna Avenue, across from John Linehan’s dairy, the Green Valley Dairy, also on Vienna Avenue. Although spacious by today’s reckoning, there were still opportunities for Hanson and Linehan to have neighborly chats, perhaps over the fences that bordered their properties, where they may have found time to discuss topics pertinent to urban dairying, such as which breed of cattle was best suited for the scrubby grass land of the Excelsior or how to prevent milk fever, or even comparing notes on the best way to evade inspection by Milk Inspector James Dockery, then hot on the trail of all impure milk.

The Excelsior, a great place to conspire because of its remote location, was also the perfect place to spread zoonotic diseases, like tuberculosis. Opportunities abounded for the bacteria in the hinterlands of the Excelsior, no matter how open the place was. A cow, infected with the bacteria, could easily infect a dairyman, leaning against its flank in a milking shed, or a child, if that child drank its milk.

As we’ve spent the last year learning, the Victorian fear of unclean miasmas has some basis in truth: the viral load of the Delta variant of COVID-19 lingers in the air with the power to infect the pulmonary system of other human beings and so does tuberculosis, specifically Mycobacterium bovis (Bovine Tuberculosis) a strain discovered by the American epidemiologist Theobold Smith between 1896-98, four years after the tubercle bacillus had been first identified by the German epidemiologist Robert Koch. During the drive to regulate dairies in San Francisco, there were contemporaneous debates over the exact pathogenicity of M bovis and its connnection to pulmonary tuberculosis. Koch, who vacillated on this last point (he doubted the connection) developed tuberculin in 1890, and while it didn’t cure human tuberculosis (he had claimed it would), it did, and still does, detect the presence of the bacilli.

That year, in Stockton, California, C. A. Ruggles, President of the State Board of Health and Dr. Orvis, a veterinarian, administered the first tuberculin test in California to a herd of cows at the state insane asylum, determining that out of 11 cows, eight were afflicted with the disease. One calf was found to be “literally filled with” the large, very disgusting granulomas characteristic of M. bovis, which develop as a defense against the invading bacteria. The sick cows were quickly killed. “These tests are said to be the first in the state,” reported the SF Chronicle, promising that more tests would be done.

And it was so. Relieved to have something- anything!- to control the incidence of the pathogen, and the intransigence of the bóaire, Koch’s failed cure was put to good use to regulate the health of the city’s cows, who lived wherever a plot of land could be staked out. Actual pasturage was negotiable; historian Khaled Bloom estimated that a total of 4,324 cows were kept in the city’s 106 known dairies in 1880, many of which were located in the middle of the city. Four thousand cows, a number that came from the 1880 federal agricultural census, was likely an undercount, something Bloom acknowledges, and a fact lamented in 1888 by Richard G. Sneath, owner of the Jersey Farm Dairy in San Bruno. He claimed there were as many as 7,000 to 8,000 cows in the county of San Francisco. Sneath called these places “filthy” and complained that they were controlled by “foreigners” who fed their cows on brewery slops.

These slop-fed cattle produced more than 22,000 gallons of milk from the city dairies in Cow Hollow, Corona Heights and along the Mission and San Bruno roads, from urban “milk dealers” like Hansen and Linehan, whose dairies were about hour away from downtown San Francisco on horseback. Milk inspections had started the year before, enraging the dealers, but at Dockery hadn’t visited the dairies themselves. Hansen and Linehan may have felt protected from Dockery’s intrusions by the remoteness of their dairies. But things were about to change. Had Hansen or Linehan read the San Francisco Chronicle on the morning of January 4, 1896, they may have realized that new round of inspections was about to descend on their dairies.

“Hundreds of Cows Must Be Killed” ran a story in the SF Call, advising city residents of the decision taken by the Board of Health to apply the tuberculin test throughout the county. At least 300 cows in the city and county were said to be afflicted. The board, who had been “quietly gathering information” on feral dairymen and their diseased cattle-Linehan, a known scofflaw, was probably at the top of this list – assured the public that everything was under control. Rules and regulations were being formulated to govern the actions of Board of Health inspectors Dockery, Meat Inspector Ben Davis and Dr. Creely, who had been hired that week as the Board’s veterinary surgeon. It took more than three months for the plan to be put into action. 

Sick Cows at the Almshouse

On April 17th, the Board of Health’s Great Cow Cull of 1896 began. That day, Creely, Dockery, and Davis arrived at the San Francisco Almshouse to test the cows who provided the inmates with milk. Politics may have dictated the Almshouse as the first stop in the Cow Cull:  Philip L. Weaver, the superintendent, was on his way out after James H. Budd, the newly elected Democratic Governor, took office a year earlier. Budd had political favors to pay back after his election, and the Almshouse was a gift he intended to give to his friend Edward “Ned” Reddy, a “close friend” of the governor, and brother to former State Senator Patrick Reddy, both born into an immigrant Irish family from County Carlow.

Mayor Sutro defended the beleagured superintendent, charging Governor Budd, and the governor’s men on the Board of Health with shutting Sutro out of the ensuing investigation into the health issues afflicting the almshouse. Weaver, an “overbearing man who gave himself airs”, according to a former Almshouse doctor, had spent his year prior to the inspection simultaneously fending off calls for his removal and begging the city for money to feed the Almshouse cattle, as well as his inmates, an awful state of affairs brought about for the simplest of reasons. There was no money in the city’s treasury, it having been exhausted after unrestrained election spending.

As Weaver explained in a letter sent to Mayor Sutro on April 26, 1895, “Our cattle and horses are hungry and we have no feed. We have three days’ stock of flour on hand and no more will be delivered on your contract when that is gone, and 900 people crying for bread.”

Dr. Fitzgibbon from the Board of Health candidly admitted that Weaver’s tenure was at an end, simply because of the patronage politics and the ruthlessness of the Democratic machine.

“It has practically been decided…to make the change and give the place to Mr. Reddy, whose brother secured Governor Budd’s promise to that effect. We have nothing to say about Mr. Weaver’s management of the institution, which I believe to have been excellent, but things have shaped them that way, and unless something is brought  up to change the present condition of affairs the change will be made.”

Hence the inspection: although it was in line with official policy and reflected real anxieties over public health, it was also politically expedient. The Chronicle called the inspection a “hecatomb.” They weren’t wrong about the sacrificial aspect of it: the victims were all unwilling. The cows, who suffered, were sacrificed to public welfare; the resentful superintendent saw his career killed, and the city’s dairymen saw their financial well-being offered up for a still-shaky theory that M bovis killed children, a hypothesis that was being debated in academic conferences, far from the rural fields of the Excelsior District, where all that the dairy men understood was that they were going to lose a lot of money.

On the evening of April 15, the hecatomb commenced. Testing cows with tuberculin was a lengthy and arduous process. It took Creely, Dockery and Creely’s nephew, Andrew Harrigan, three full days to test 34 cows. After securing the cows in the barn- partly to ensure none of them were let loose by Weaver- the men took the cow’s temperatures on the hour for eight hours. On Thursday morning, a sample of milk was taken for the city bacteriologist Mr. Spencer to inspect, and 2 centimeters of tuberculin was injected into the neck of each cow. There was another eight-hour wait, to see if there was a rise in temperature, which was a sign that the cow was infected. If the temperature had risen above 104, the cow’s fate was decided.

Meat Inspector Davis, who had clashed with Creely before, declared that there was a simpler way to tell if a cow was consumptive.

“Before they used tuberculin,” Davis said, “I would just run a cow on a jump (line) for about thirty yards, and if she coughed, why, I would just hit her on the head with an ax. It never failed, and I will guarantee a man to pay him the value of his cow every time I kill one under that test and no consumption is found.” It was a quicker way of doing the work, he opined, but since the government had stepped in, the old way of doing things had to change.

The old way of killing cows hadn’t changed. Humane methods of dispatch depended on the slaughterer’s skill with a gun, or an axe. The cows, after having needles stuck in their necks and thermometers thrust up their bums, were in no mood to play nice with the health officials. On the first day of the inspection, Davis got kicked and Creely had to jump down a drain hole to escape the bovine wrath of the cows. 

The three-day inspection was over by 4 pm on Friday April 17th. 31 cows were declared unfit. The next day, on a windy and sunny Saturday afternoon, the cows were led outside to the pasture. 

For four grim and bloody hours, each cow was dispatched. Creely, a humane man, who was described by the Chronicle as “the Ko-Ko of the occasion” (the Mikado had opened the year before) killed the first cow with an axe. It was not a clean kill. The cow kicked as it died, almost striking the face of an Almshouse attendant. After that, Creely insisted that a single shot to the head was the most humane method. 

The next cow, old and white, understood what was afoot and ran around the yard in a panic. After calming the animal with some alfalfa, Creely drew a police revolver “borrowed so long ago from the police department that he imagines it’s his own,” the Chronicle reported snidely. (The editors of the Chronicle plainly despised Edward Creely, and never missed an opportunity to throw a jibe his way.) Creely took aim, and fired. The shot went wide of the mark, causing the cow to panic, and run. Creely followed her with the drawn gun, trying to find his mark as the chaotically moving target dashed back and forth. Wheeling around with the loaded gun in his hand, which prompted his colleagues scatter, Creely shot the cow point blank through the brain. This went on until he ran out of ammunition. Then he used an axe. In this terrible way, the cows were slaughtered, the men and the grass splashed with blood and the carcasses of the cows dissected then and there in the gruesome pasture. 

The lungs of the cows were displayed to the journalists from the Call and the Chronicle as proof of the necessity of the slaughter. “The little white patches and protruding buttons told their own story,” reported the Call, which also mentioned the financial toll the sacrifice had taken from the Almshouse. In all, it would cost $1,200 to replace the dead cows. The 70 to 80 gallons of milk they provided daily for the inmates needed to be sourced elsewhere.

Superintendent Weaver fretted over this and other things, too, namely his regret that inspections hadn’t happened sooner. His regret was probably real, although he was also in mourning for his career. According to the SF Call, the inspection came about because of a tip from a disgruntled ex-inmate, who’d been evicted by Weaver on the grounds that he was fit enough to work. Weaver blamed the poor condition of the cows on another Almshouse employee who hadn’t bought the bran feed Weaver had told him to, though with what money is unclear. In any case, the superintendent’s protestations were in vain. He was relieved of his position as superintendent by the Board of Health the next month and formally replaced by Reddy. Weaver argued his case until the year he died, in 1902.

So much was sacrificed that day- a man’s career, as well as the cow’s lives. The elderly white cow running for her life at the end of a rope in the city of St. Francis was no longer a symbol of wealth and prosperity, but instead a symbol of disease, city corruption, and death. Her destruction should have assured the good fortune of her executioner, Dr. Creely. But “politics” does often creep toward an uncertain end, and there is certainly nothing new about unscrupulous or morally weak individuals seeking personal gain in newly created political environments. The cow lords, while on the defense, still had power.

Instead of seeing the Board of Health as a tool to fight disease, Creely may also have seen it as a new platform to burnish his reputation, and strengthen his influence. The glanders controversy four years earlier had shown him that without status and influence, telling the truth could create the kind of trouble that brought men like Philip Weaver down. Public health and the truth mattered to Edward Creely, but he was aware, crucially, of its often high cost: community censure and opprobrium from those on the wrong side of reform. Navigating the entrenched influence of the milk dealers was a tricky business, as Creely’s next inspection at Nicholas Hansen’s dairy–his last–would show. 

Sept 26, 2021: posted as the shadows lengthen and the air chills. Ironically, I became lactose intolerant this summer. Mooo. Many thanks to Amy O’Hair, a true Dairy girl, for her meticulous work, listening ear, and wonderful writing. Also Hiya Swanhuyser, LisaRuth Elliott, & Tarin Towers. Also you, for reading.

Sources and recommended reading are:

Sunnyside History Project https://sunnysidehistory.org/

“Market-Oriented Agriculture in Nineteenth Century San Francisco” by Khaled Bloom
Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Vol. 44 (1982), pp. 75-91
Published by: University of Hawai’i Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24040265

“Dairying in California” by Richard G. Sneath, The Overland Monthly,1888 ,https://archive.org/details/sim_overland-monthly-and-out-west-magazine_1888-04_11_64/page/386/mode/2up

I believe tuberculin was distributed by the Bureau of Animal Industry, a branch of the USDA created by an act of congress on May 29, 1884, to establish “reliable official information concerning the nature and prevalence of animal diseases and of the means required to control and to eradicate them, and, also, the necessity of having an executive agency to put into effect the measures necessary to stop the spread of disease and to protect the animal industry of the nation”.

From Feminism to Famine: LookHuman and the meming of St. Patrick’s Day

(NOTE: This is an essay I wrote on St Patricks Day in 2017 and posted on Medium, and am reposting here four year later. LookHuman still have really stupid tee shirts for sale, but not the tee shirt discussed below. )

This month, Irish America was alerted to the fact that LookHuman, an online retailer based in Columbus, Ohio, had created a special tee-shirt for St. Patrick’s Day with the following message: “My potatoes bring all the Irish to the Yard. And they’re like that famine was hard”. I looked at the shirt, and wondered how much anger (and I got some: outrage is a natural resource I’m rich in) I should expend. I have to pick my battles. There’s no shortage of bullshit in America these days and the badly punctuated meme-shirt was so loutish, and stupid that it was hard feeling anything other than scorn.

It’s seasonal, this outrage. It starts in February when retailers start selling their supremely crappy St. Patrick’s Day-themed merchandise. Cinco de Mayo gets it just as bad. As soon as we get clear of the green-tinted juggernaut that is St. Patrick’s Day, shirts with messages like “Keep Calm and Swallow the Worm” or “Drinko de Mayo” will become available.

I was familiar with LookHuman’s meme-y-merchandise because their shirts were being worn at the Women’s March in San Francisco. So how did this company get from Feminism to Famine? Why did someone think of combining Kelis’s song of sexual confidence with the worst disaster ever to befall Ireland? Did some designer, high on the reality of living in a Trumpian world, decide to design the most offensive tee-shirt they could think of? That’ll teach those dead people to whine about their lack of food! And what, pray tell, does LookHuman’s stated mission of giving “everyone the ability to express their passions, personalities, and identities, no matter what kind of nerd they are” mean? Are Famine nerds a thing?

Not so coincidentally, my friend Vicky had given me a pile of vintage St. Patrick’s Day-themed postcards a week earlier, and in the aftermath of the Famine/Milkshake shirt, I developed a new-found respect for the artisanal quality of the postcards and their messages, which wished good things for people, like health, wealth, and safety. Among the cards were several ink-tinted images of the lakes of Killarney that were printed around the turn of the 19th century. I squinted at the tiny words printed on the margin: “Lawrence, Publisher, Dublin”, it read.

“Lawrence, Publisher” turned out to be an entrepreneur named William Mervin Lawrence, who was born in the GPO and opened a photo studio on Sackville Street opposite his birthplace in 1865. Lawrence hired a photographer named Robert French, who took nearly 30,000 images of Ireland, mostly landscapes, from about 1870 to 1910. French retired in 1914. Two years later, the events of the Easter Rising destroyed Lawrence’s studio and the images that were stored there. Thankfully, most of French’s landscapes survived, having been stored offsite.

French, a Dubliner, knew his country well. The Lakes of Killarney were a perennial favorite in cities like San Francisco, which hosted many immigrants from Kerry. French took full advantage of the landscape in Killarney, and the lakes that thread their way between the valleys. One postcard, entitled, “At Innisfallen”, shows a classic composition: the drama of the landscape and its lake is offset by a fisherman sitting quietly in his boat, near the shore. It is very peaceful.

French also took pictures of other things. “Eviction Kilrush” is the name of a picture he took in County Clare in July 1888. On that day, the cottage of Matthias McGrath was destroyed by a battering ram wielded by agents in the employ of McGrath’s landlord, who wanted to “clear” his estate of tenants. McGrath was evicted, and his family arrested for resisting the eviction process. “Eviction Kilrush” is one of a series of photos that shows evictions in County Clare during the Land Wars, a roughly thirty-year period of agrarian resistance. The period was defined by the struggle of Ireland’s tenant farmers to rid themselves of landlordism, the system by which the land of Ireland — and the lives of the Irish who depended on that land — were held in the grip of absentee landlords.

The Land War is a thrilling episode in Irish history and if you don’t know anything about it, you should. In comparison to earlier, unsuccessful movements for national sovereignty, the Land War is notable for its success. In his book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World“, Marxist historian Mike Davis lauds Michael Davitt, a supremely humane man with one arm, for his brilliance in organizing Ireland’s tenant farmers, many of whom only narrowly survived the famine. Davitt, and his champion in Parliament, Charles Stuart Parnell, launched the movment in 1878 in County Mayo, Davitt’s home county, with meetings between Davitt, Parnell, sympathetic clergy and tenant farmers. They organized tenant farmers into a sustained and disciplined movement that fought for and won the Three F’s: Fair Rent, Fixed Tenure and Freedom for the tenant farmer to sell his interest in his holding. In San Francisco, it was a popular cause: fundraisers were held at the Grand Opera House and local branches were quickly formed. Branch Number 1 of the Irish National Land League held a meeting in October of 1881, raising $136 dollars, which would be about $4,000 today.

• 

  ^{From the Daily Alta, December 31, 1879: advert for a benefit for the Land League.}

This wasn’t enough to help the tenants in County Clare. By the time French showed up with his huge camera and supply of glass plates, 200 tenants of Captain Hector S. Vandeleur who had been negotiating for reduced rent for over a year recived eviction notices. Later, the battering ram was dragged from cottage to cottage as the land clearances on Vandeleur’s estate began in earnest on the morning of July 18. Twenty-two people were evicted from Kilrush, and their homes destroyed. “Eviction Kilrush”, “The Battering Ram Does Its Work” and other pictures he took that day immortalize the abuses of the landlord system in Ireland, and depict very clearly what was at stake during the land wars. French’s attitude towards the brutal evictions he witnessed aren’t made explicit in the curatorial notes that accompany the images, which are held by the National Library of Ireland. But his photos show how picturesque ruins get made. Entire communities got disposed of, leaving destroyed cottages behind, which lived on in 20th-century postcards as symbols of Olde Ireland, in craggy, picturesque landscapes.

Mathias Magrath’s house, Moyasta, Co.Clare after destruction by the Battering Ram. French, Robert, 1841-1917 The Lawrence Photograph Collection

Ruins are a favored haunt of tourists, but the stories behind them are almost always terrible. An image of thatched cottage, complete with cows is quaintly pleasing. The picture entitled “Donegal Natives” taken by French is too: just look at the cottages, with their neat thatch, and the stone wall behind them. If you look long enough, though, your eyes might refocus on the chain of taut hands of the “natives” whose controlled anxiety emanates from this picture. Who looked at this picture? Did they see ruins?

“Donegal Natives”. French, Robert, 1841-1917 photographer.The Lawrence Photograph Collection, National Library of Ireland

Time does not heal all wounds, no matter how much of it has elapsed. Calling the famine “hard” shows that LookHuman, for all its edgy politically-themed “expressiveness” has no stomach for understanding anything, not feminism and certainly not famines. (Don’t buy your political slogans off the damn rack, people. Make your own tee shirt.) I wanted to know the story behind the tee-shirt, but unsurprisingly neither LookHuman, nor its parent company Print Syndicate, would answer requests for an interview from me, preferring to cower behind their hastily offered (we’re so sorry! we didn’t meant offend!) apologies.

A couple of days after mulling all this over, I ran into a friend on the street. I told him about the tee-shirt. We agreed that we missed the days when St. Patrick’s Day cards were just corny.

“What’s wrong with wishing people good health? Or good fortune?” he asked. “What’s wrong with wishing people luck?”

I agreed. But it’s funny: luck makes me feel wary. My family was lucky. But for every lucky family, there were thousands that were not. I know something about the famine and what it did to people, their families, their communities, customs, memories, their days and nights, the music they made, the love in their hearts, their gossips and quarrels and human needs, and their terrible fear, and bewildering grief. What kind of luck is that? I wonder whenever the subject of the famine comes up.

I never heard the famine called An Gorta Mor until I took a beginning Irish language class at New College. We learned it from Mrs. O’Hara, our Dublin-born múinteoir. The first sentence I ever said in Irish in her class was something I’ve said — along with billions of other human beings — so many times in my life, that I figured it would be a sentence I’d actually use.

Tá ocras orm, I said. I am hungry.

Reposted March 7, 2021

The Italian: Francisco Cerini and bottle dealing in San Francisco 1858-1880

“Information on the origin and early development of the secondhand bottle trade is elusive.” Jane Busch, Re-use in the Eighteenth Century Second Time Around: A Look at Bottle Re-use

Francisco Cerini, my great-great grandfather, was born in Florence Italy in 1836, and was living in San Francisco by 1858. An adult relative told me that Francisco, or “Frank” as he called himself in America, arrived in California with a bible and a gun, and on the run from Garibaldi, but this is doubtful. Francisco may have flounced out of Italy in a fit of anti-Republican pique, but both items were purchased in San Francisco. He probably bought the gun, a Colt 1851 Navy revolving pistol, first.

There was one object he did arrive with: a pendant with a portrait of himself as a child, wide-eyed, poised and dressed in a manner that looks vaguely orientalist, but is perhaps authentically Florentine. He looks like the son of a prosperous house, one well-off enough to commission a portrait of their young child. Much later, someone had the portrait made into a full-sized painting, which ultimately made its way to my grandparent’s house in Newport Beach, where it hung on the wall behind the sofa.

Francisco Cerini, circa 1844, as a child in Florence, Italy

I think it was from his avidly anti-Communist grandson, Bunster Creely, in whose house the portrait hung, that the dramatic story of Francisco’s escape from Italy originated. But it’s all guesswork. The guy who would know—Francisco—said nothing of the matter, nothing that survived the ages, anyway. He died of the DT’s in 1880 leaving behind a widow, four children and an empty bible, stripped of information and as meaningless as an unused date book.

Francisco must have had fond memories of Florence because he named his daughter, my great-grandmother, after the place. Both she and the name “Cerini” which we have since used as a first name, are the only signifiers of that long-ago home– that and polenta, which my father called “cornmeal mush” when I was a child. My grandfather Bunster called it by its real name and had a habit of saying “po-lenty of polenta,” in a resigned manner when my grandmother served it to him.

Florence Cerini Creely, age 18. Photo taken in Oakland, CA, 1888

Francisco left Italy as young man, maybe 20 or so, leaving behind a family history we know nothing of, only the trivial fact that his surname means  “candle” or “match”. Come appiccare un incendio senza cerini? How to start a fire without matches? How do you set your life aflame in a barely constructed city, far away from where you were born?

In those days, San Francisco did nothing but burn. In 1858, the year Francisco first appears in the city directory, seven fires ripped through the Barbary Coast, near Sullivan’s Alley, now called Jason Court, which was where he first lived. Sullivan’s Alley was a short walkway between Jackson and Pacific and a notoriously bad street. It’s easy to romanticize the Barbary Coast now that it’s been tamed by the passage of time and self-guided walking tours. But when Francisco was living there, it was a tense and terrible place where murder, robbery and rape frequently occurred. It was also full of saloons, which might have given him his metaphorical match. Francisco Cerini was a bottle dealer.

I don’t know if  Francisco mucked around in refuse heaps, or if he left that for others, but whatever he did, he wasn’t facing too much competition. Only five or six bottle dealers show up in the city directory during his twenty-two year career. Bottle dealing was apparently a niche trade in a sprawling recycling enterprise that mined the city for its rubbish, like the Sierra was mined for gold. In fact, the two are often compared to each other, in recognition of the fact that placer mining, and scavenging have a lot in common. When Francisco found an intact J.H. Cutter whiskey bottle, did he experience a sense of striking it rich? (Was he prone to compulsion?)

Discarded glass bottles were certainly easier to find than gold. In the first decade of the city’s existence, demand for bottles was high, and supply was low. When Francisco arrived in San Francisco, there were roughly 60,500 people in it, and none of them was making glass. It is a demanding medium that needs skilled labor and a large factory equipped with melting pots, furnaces and enough fuel to combine silica, lime and soda ash and coloring ingredients into glass. The resulting bottle had to be sturdy enough to hold whatever you were decanting into it, alcohol mostly, but also camphene, laudanum, linseed oil, vinegar, bitters and later, milk.

It took more than four months for anything to arrive from the east coast in those days, so until glass production kicked into gear in San Francisco, one had to make do with what one could find, or pay someone else to find.  Hence the bottle dealer: a man who knew where the bottles were buried, knew how to get them in bulk, and had enough determination to dominate the trade. My great-great grandfather, who was a highly motivated individual, must have walked around Chinatown and the waterfront among the brothels and saloons, looking for bottles, seeing glints of amber and green, and experiencing the same kick of visceral pleasure I feel when I find something of value that has been discarded in the Mission District.

1865 advertisement for broken glass from the Pacific Glass works.

Baker and Cutting, the first glassworks in San Francisco, opened in 1859, a year after Francisco got into the trade. They failed fast and closed in less than a year. A year later, the San Francisco Glass Works opened.  “Number of men employed, 10. Capacity, 4,000 pounds per day. An abundance of material for the manufacture is to be found in this State, and a remunerative field is thereby open to the enterprising proprietors of these works.” Francisco and his neighbor, a man named Joseph Zanetti who was also a bottle dealer in Sullivan’s Alley, were among those enterprising men, along with Guiseppe Tomosino who had a bottle depot in Sullivan’s Alley.

Francisco does not appear in the 1860 census or the city directory. He may have been displaced by a fire that broke out in the alley in July, or the neighborhood might have been so insane that census workers avoided it. He re-surfaces in the 1861 directory as an employer, with Guiseppe Tomosino as his sole employee. Both were living at 813 Montgomery. Francisco had since diversified and was also dealing in burlap bags that according to my grandmother’s precise notes were used for vegetables (One of his buddies was a vegetable dealer named Luigi Giannini, whose son Amadeo founded the Bank of Italy, later the Bank of America.) He also dealt in rags, which were valuable to paper mills, like the Pioneer Paper Mill, whose depot was at Davis and California, then as now, was a brisk 15-minute walk from Francisco’s place of business on Montgomery street.

Francisco was a relatively well-off man, and his career as a bottle dealer doesn’t square with my understanding of that. As a child I was told by another adult, dreaming of the lost past, of the Cerini house, which had a carriage stone with a large “C” engraved on it. The house and the stone was located in Oakland’s Central Homestead, on a city block that Francisco also owned. Bottle dealing might have been enough to start some kind of life in the growing city, but was it lucrative enough to allow Francisco to purchase a city block?

The Daily Alta reporting on the scavenging operations at Oregon street below Drumm, allowed as it might be.

“It is not a business to which a man of refined taste and a delicate sense of smell and touch would be expected to take with any degree of satisfaction, but nevertheless it is evidently a paying one,” the Alta reported in 1867, adding that “… many a miner delving wearily in the mud along the foothills of the Sierra, and even more of the more pretentious merchant and stock operators of our city would willingly exchange profits with these rank smelling rakers of refuse…”

Maybe. But turning a profit depended on how intact the bottle was. Francisco may have sold broken glass to the Pacific Glass Works, which used shattered bottles as “flux” in the clay pots used to manufacture glass. They paid one cent for a pound for green and black glass. 100 pounds of broken glass, which works out to about 30 dollars, is both a lot of glass and a lot of effort. But even if Francisco was a sinister “padrone”, a Fagan-type character who used child labor to scavenge for him (which hopefully he wasn’t) broken glass was not a stable foundation for financial security.

Family can be. It’s likely that Francisco met his future wife, Mary Cassandra Conley, because of trash. Mary was the daughter of Martin and Celia Conley, Irish immigrants from County Galway, who came to San Francisco before 1860 from Massachusetts, where Mary was born in 1848. Martin was a junk dealer who lived with his family on the opposite side of town from Francisco at 638 Brannan street between 5^th and 6^th streets, across from the trainyards and beyond those, the open and garbage-strewn banks of Mission Bay.

I have no idea exactly where Mary, who had enormous blue eyes, met her handsome Italian husband, but narrow streets with no cars make small towns out of growing cities and l’amore trova sempre la strada. In 1862, the two were married. By 1863, they had their first child Giovanni, and shortly after that, Francisco moved his business to a warehouse at 207 Davis and his family to 455 Tehama street near 6^th, where his daughter Florence was born in 1868. His in-laws lived less than a mile away, which is maybe why the family lived in the Irish South of Market and not in the Italian neighborhoods on the north side of the city.

In those days, the view down south on 6^th street was an uncomplicated one. When Francisco headed out in the morning to start his workday, he hitched his horse to his wagon in his barn, and made a decision about where he’d go that day. He could have turned left toward the sparkling waters of Mission Bay. Along its banks sprawled a community of les glaneurs, garbage gleaners living in ramshackle huts and making some kind of living from the city’s refuse. This area was called “Dumpville” and the Conleys lived on the edge of it. Dumpville spread over twenty acres from Channel street between 6th and 7th streets through the trainyards and wastelands of Mission Bay and was rich in raw–very raw– materials. Broken glass recovered from the site was shipped to China, and cans were smelted on the spot at a plant near Channel and 6th street.

Martin Conley and Francisco did business with this community of city miners, which formed the bottom tier of refuse collection.  Both men, however,  occupied the middle tier by virtue of being property owners. Francisco owned a five-room house and warehouse, and his father-in-law, who was once described as a “pedlar” in voter registration documents, declared ownership of $5,000 of real estate in the 1870 census.

“Dealing” and “peddling”, both relative descriptions, based on biases inherent in census- and self- reporting, are terms that conjure up images of itinerant, almost picaresque rootlessness. Neither word really captures the commercial or social nuance of a life supported by monetizing the city’s garbage, which is what allowed both men to purchase property–land and houses– in the city. This was the basis of real wealth and the ticket out of the environs of Dumpville.

Reselling bottles to wholesalers was probably how Francisco made his money. If he headed downtown in his horse-drawn wagon to his tin-roofed warehouse, he was there to do business with merchants in the wholesale district. His customers are now the legacy merchants of early San Francisco: Ernest R. Lilienthal who owned the Cyrus Noble Distillery, was a client and so was Arpad Haraszthy, the owner of Haraszthy & Co, and son of Agoston Haraszthy, the Hungarian who is credited with producing California’s first sparkling wine. To Haraszthy, Francisco sold his precious cache of used champagne bottles, making it possible for the family to bottle and sell their domestically produced champagne.

Francisco Daneri and Henry Casanova, importers and jobbers of wines and liquors, 27-29 California.

My energetic bottle-dealing great-great grandpa was one of many sole proprietors in the city at that time who helped develop something we like to call a “supply chain”, a mostly invisible amenity of cities (“invisible” until items like toilet paper vanish from market shelves.)  In the years before the advent of the transcontinental railroad, wine and liquor merchants needed supply chains to get their hooch in a bottle and into the hands of their paying customers. But how much money was a single bottle was worth? Who knows? As of this writing, this extremely granular fact has been impossible to pin down. Business records were destroyed en masse in the 1906 earthquake, along with everything else, and so the hypothetical line item in F. Daneri & Co’s business ledger showing how much they paid my great-great grandfather for a single bottle will have to remain a hypothetical.

But I have that exact rarity: business records that survived because Francisco died in Alameda County. Neither the handwritten inventory of his warehouse or the list of merchants who owed him money sheds any light on how much he made per bottle, simply the sums of money that Haraszthy, Lilienthal and other merchants owed his estate. The inventory does show the kind and quantity of bottles that Francisco had on hand at the time of his death: 1,000 champagne bottles, among others, as valuable as a dragon’s hoard because they cost more to manufacture. Champagne bottles needed extra glass to provide buttressing against the effervescent kick of the bubbles. A bottle could cost .10 to .12 cents to make. It’s reasonable to assume a resale value of .5 to .7 cents for a champagne bottle, and maybe more.

It was harder to resell a bottle if it had a business name and address stamped on it. These personalized bottles circulated through the city, like colorful business cards. A plain bottle with no label could be resold to anyone, but merchants who paid glassworks good money– $35 to $40 dollars– to have custom molds of their names and addresses made might have been tetchy about their stuff. A name is a promise of quality and a claim of ownership. The process of buying a personalized bottle back may have been seen as something shady, like paying a ransom.

B.F. Connelly thought so, anyway. Connelly, a man who sold soda water, ran a daily ad in the North Bay papers, declaring his determination to deal directly with the appropriation of his private property. Saloon keepers and others with a steady supply of bottles would also sell to bottle dealers, who in turn sold to anyone, including their client’s competitors. If you an imagine a Hoteling bottle being sold to Francisco by a saloon keeper, who then sold it to the Cyrus Noble Distillery, you’ll have some idea of the ways in which recycling undercut bottles becoming privatized, and also a reason that bottle dealers fell under suspicion.

Paying to get your property back might have been galling, but there were other reasons to look askance at refuse dealing, like theft. Bottle warehouses and junk shops were easy places to part with ill-gotten goods. Scrap metal stripped from train yards, books, jewelry, street furniture–anything that could be carried off–were often redeemed for at least a part of their value in junk shops.

In 1871, Assemblyman Charles Goodall introduced a bill to prevent junk dealers from fencing stolen goods received from “hoodlumatic” looking young men, demanding that no junk dealer purchase anything from anyone under the age of 16, unless they were accompanied by an adult who was 21 or older and who was prepared to vouch for the provenance of the items. The state adopted his legislation, which impelled junk dealers to register all sales in a “six quarto” notebook.

B.F. Connolly’s warning to bottle dealers.

Francisco fell afoul of this law in 1872 and was convicted on a misdemeanor charge for failing to “keep a record of his business purchases as a junk dealer” and ordered to appear for sentencing. This is the only time his business is mentioned in the city’s newspapers, a surprise for me. I have gotten used to seeing my other three great-great grandfathers’ businesses advertised. Francisco never ran a single ad, and after his slip up, never appears in the papers again.

In any case, glass was good to Francisco. That, and the rent he received from his house on Tehama street, allowed the Cerini family to move to Oakland, where Francisco made one of his characteristically expansive gestures by purchasing a city block bordered by Market and Myrtle streets, between 10th and 12th. He would live there for less than a decade.

Francisco’s bottle business could have been one of the enterprises that evolved into Recology, but he died of the delirium tremens in 1880, taking his dealership with him. His warehouse, which included a staggering array of bottles, including 35,000 absinthe bottles, was sold to C.J Pidwell and Co. He must have been on a daily bender for years–perhaps dealing in bottles led him to hitting the bottle. (Was drinking with his clients part of making a sale?) He was in very bad shape on May 11^th, the day he or his wife Mary, whose middle name was Cassandra, summoned his lawyer and set his affairs in order. He made his last will and testament as he suffered through the seizures and hallucinations that accompany the DT’s and could only mark a shaky “X” instead of his signature. That “X” marks the spot where something of the man himself- his signature-could have peeked through the impersonal facts of his life as recorded in census records, probate documents and directory listings. He died on May 13^th, at 8 pm, three days after making his will.

He was buried at St. Mary’s in Oakland, a quiet Catholic cemetery at the end of Howe Street. His estate paid nearly a thousand dollars for a 15-foot tall marble marker. This is his final resting place, and it contains multitudes, mostly Conleys: Mary and their still-born infant daughter are buried with him, as is Mary’s mother Celia, sister and brother-in-law Margaret and John Guerin, and children from her second marriage in 1883 to Nicholas Williams, a neighbor and witness to Francisco’s will.

Francisco’s untimely demise might actually have been quite timely. His death, and Mary’s marriage to Nicholas, a policeman and respected pillar of the community, allowed her to avoid the kind of fate that met other women whose husbands drank away the family fortune. Still, the site shows that his family mattered to Francisco. I think he wanted something simple and very human: to be with them. The grave and the empty bible survive as a post-mortem versions of the large house on Market street, which is long gone along with all the tensions it may have contained. For the man whose livelihood was built on glass, death came as a final, unbreakable certainty, unlike the pistol and the bottle, both only earthly defenses against life’s infinite unpredictability.

Francisco Cerini’s big marble marker in St. Mary’s Cemetary, Oakland, CA. Photo by Piet Bess, Francisco’s great-great grandson.

Written with love for my great-great grandfather Francisco Cerini who has always been a part of our family.

Busch, J. Second time around: A look at bottle reuse. Hist Arch 21, 67–80 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374080

Many thanks to Eric McGuire and Richard Siri of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors for answering my questions and generally setting me straight about bottle resuse in San Francisco. https://www.fohbc.org/

Thanks and love to mia cara Miriam Childs, for providing accurate translations.

Elizabeth Creely in Jason Court, aka Sullivan’s Alley, in Chinatown, San Francisco, February 2021.

Vivre sa vie

Let me tell you about a beautiful Cancerian man who had the soulfulness and swagger of a young Frank Sinatra/with phosphene blue eyes back in the days when we were in love.

Usually, he shows up in Dreamland to smirk at me, and sidle around & make it clear that booting him from my life (he didn’t do anything wrong, by the way: I could not love) did not clear him out of my dreaming mind. Apparently, that’s a different process.

In my dream last night, he showed up, but this time it was because I was in his house. He looked at me and said and here you are, accusingly, resignedly, and I said yes I know unhappily.

He lived in a house with a fantastic & illuminated portal that glowed, under which he stood like a young American titan. The portal was designed with Modernity in mind and was from that time during the Depression, when America needed to hold onto the past and look to the future, and sanctioned buildings and cars that (Janus-like) were vintage and futuristic, like the Citroën he drove.

I felt like a Goddard anti-heroine fragile & otherworldly & out of time in that car, never knowing where I was. Once, we left Los Angeles at 3 in the morning, and drove down the 405. The sky was murky, and gas flared from refineries in those tough little cities on the outskirts of LA, just before the river. My head was in his lap & his hand was on my head as he drove like a hero through a disaster zone.

I rooted around in his house. There were things of mine in there, I realized. I found a pair of black sling-back open-toed pumps. I took them, knowing they were old but still belonged to me, and that they had been point of friction for his soul, an irritant, a mote. In the meantime, he was stalking around, attending to other things, talking to other people, keeping me in his peripheral vision at all times.

Suddenly, I saw that the fantastic portal had gotten dismantled & pulled down. He was standing on the other side and laughing at me. To get out, he said mockingly, you will have to jump in, and pointed down to a moat filled with water that I hadn’t noticed before. It formed a barrier between his house and places that were not his house.

I don’t think I hesitated. I am not afraid of water. I jumped, and was fully submerged in the turbulent moat for several heartbeats. Water rushed around me & over me, and I fought back, pushing it out of my way. Then I swam to him and looked up. He put his hand out and I took it. He pulled me out of the water, and we embraced. We held each other closely, so closely.

We have never done this, I thought.

It is so sad, he said, holding me. It is just so sad.

San Francisco and the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic

Timothy Sarbaugh, the excellent historian of Irish America, noted in his 1987 essay about Eamon de Valera and Irish Republicanism in California that the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR) had, at its height, 150 branches or “councils” throughout the state and about 20,000 members. The AARIR– an unwieldy name that John Devoy, the cranky old Fenian who led the Clan Na Gael, immediately called “The Growl” because of the guttural tones suggested by the acronym– supplanted the Friends of Irish Freedom, Devoy’s organization which had been, until 1920, the primary vehicle for mobilizing Irish American monetary and political support.

The AARIR was organized into 14 district councils. District XII was based in San Francisco and the Bay Area and boasted of at least 68 councils by Sept 22, 1921. We know this because at that time and unknown individual typed up a list of all of the councils on a piece of legal paper. Entitled “Membership Roll Of Councils In District No. XII To And Including Sept 22, 1921” (it’s always so wonderful when anonymous scribes date their work), the paper is an invaluable source of information about the San Francisco councils of the AARIR. The membership roll and other clerical ephemera from that time lives in a box of stuff collected by Dr. Charles Albert Shumate, a dermatologist and local historian who had an Irish grandmother. Dr. Shumate’s collection of clippings from Irish newspapers and assorted AARIR ephemera is held in the Rare Book Room of the Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco.

The official membership roll written by the anonymous scribe has been mapped by me, here, using another undated council roster. Both lists give the names of individual supporters, and the addresses of the councils. The 68 councils collectively raised $14,410 in support of the new Irish Republic, which sprang into being on January 21^st 1919 when Sinn Fein met in Dublin as the Dail Eireann, adopted a provisional constitution and declared themselves an independent Republic.

These lists are the ephemeral residue of what was an intensely productive and busy period of time in San Francisco for Irish Americans. The councils committed themselves to more than just fundraising: there was an outpouring of citizen lobbying, speaker’s events, social evenings with whist parties and dansants and regularly scheduled meeting when the local councils met in order to get their heads around what was happening in Ireland. Many council members immigrated after the mid-1870’s, during the Cogadh na Talúnnd, the land war in which the collective action of Irish tenantry succeeded in undoing the hated and unjust system of tenant evictions, absentee landlords, and land usage and distribution. From this struggle came the boycott which was used in San Francisco during the 15-month period of AARIR council activity, at its height between November 1920 and February 1922. The Anglo-Irish Treaty brought an end to the era of AARIR community organizing, although a few branches held persisted: Council 17, the Terence McSwiney branch, which met in the Redman’s Hall on 16th Street, was planning new membership drives in the spring of 1922, even as branches in other parts of the nation were calling it quits.

But for that 15-month period, people were busy. They were ably assisted in their ability to respond to the situation in Ireland, thanks to the AARIR’s national press and publicity wing, the Benjamin Franklin Bureau, and later the Irish Press and Publicity Bureau, the California branch of the national bureau that was headquartered at the Hewes Building in San Francisco, and overseen by Father Peter Yorke. Both of these media projects printed pamphlets and bulletins that described — sometimes in horrifying graphic detail– the atrocities visited on Ireland and its people by the British troops, and the paramilitary units known as the Black and Tans, and the Auxies.

San Francisco had always been well-supplied with information. Yorke had almost two decades worth of publishing experience at that point. He founded The Leader, a weekly newspaper, in 1902 and had thereafter used the editorial column as a personal pulpit to comment on anything that caught his attention or displeased. For example, cars: Yorke was unimpressed by them and thought they were a dangerous addition to city life. (He was a smart guy.)

After the events of 1916, The Leader began to publish nonstop accounts of the terror and mayhem of British military occupation. In this he was helped by the editor of The Leader, Laurence De Lacey, who was a wily and indefatigable Fenian who figured in the power struggle between de Valera and John Devoy. De Lacey broke into the offices of the Gaelic American, the newspaper published by Devoy, as the power struggle between de Valera and Devoy intensified. (That’s a story for another time.)

De Lacey and Yorke made sure that Irish San Franciscans knew everything: the burning of factories, and homes, the examples of brutal torture meted out by British paramilitaries, and the wholesale destruction of cities and villages in Ireland. An editorial insert written by the New York-based American Committee for Relief in Ireland made the situation plain:

“In Ireland, today thousands of women and children have been driven to the pitiful refuge of the fields and open country. Balbriggan, Granard, Tralee, Templemore, Trim, Tobereurry, Lisburn, Thurles, and numerous other towns and villages have been burned and homes have been wiped out by fire…over forty creameries, the co-operative plants of great and small communities built by Irish farmers have been razed to the ground and the economic units they served have been paralyzed.”

Yorke, the resident cleric at St. Peter’s, filled every possible role an ambitious Irishman could fill: he was the Vice President of Sinn Fein in California, the former head of the Friends of Irish Freedom and the new State Director of AARIR after it was founded in November 17^th, 1920. Yorke toured the state in the latter capacity, commanding chapter members of the Friends of Irish Freedom to discontinue their work as FOIF’ers and immediately form new AARIR councils.

“To form a branch of the American Association for the Irish Republic is the easiest thing imaginable,” he advised Leader readers late in 1920. “You don’t need any mandate or credentials. You can start anytime or anywhere. You don’t have to hire a hall. You can meet in your own homes. Get twelve people to agree to work for the Recognition of the Irish Republic. Elect a President Secretary and Treasurer. Send their names to Father Yorke, 504 Grant Building, Market Street San Francisco. He will register your branch and send your Treasurer the official receipt book. On receiving stubs and per capita from you, he will send the credentials for your delegate or delegates.”

At other times, he was more direct. “The State Convention of the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic is only fourteen days away,” he wrote curtly in January, 1921. “Get busy.”

People did. They met in homes, in churches, in associational halls, in residential hotels and, as in the case of Mr. M.J. Jordan, at the County Jail No. 2 out in Ingleside. San Francisco AARIR council members were contending with a lot in those days: within a little more than a decade they’d endured a laborious and inconclusive graft investigation that upended a somnolent and corrupt city government, which deprived the laboring classes of a representative government and left the true boodlers untouched. There were two terrible strikes against the United Railroads that ended badly both times for labor, once in 1907—31 people were killed— and again in 1917.

Father Peter Yorke’s call to form AARIR councils from a December 1920 edition of The Leader

Many dues-paying council members were also dues-paying trade union members, and were frequently embroiled in labor disputes and strikes at this time: Michael McGuire, a boilermaker with Lodge #25, started striking for better wages and working conditions on October 1, 1919, and didn’t stop until sometime in 1920. McGuire, who housed Council 39 in his in-law’s residence on Guerrero Street, sent a letter and a picture of his striking brothers to the Boilermakers and Iron Ship Journal, a publication for union members, in the middle of the strike.

“Dear Sir and Brother: I am sending you herewith photograph taken on June 13th, of the striking members of the San Francisco Bay District after eight- and one-half months on strike. Hoping if possible that you will reproduce the photograph in the next Issue of our Journal. I am, Yours fraternally, M. J. McGuire, Business Agent No. 6.

But it wasn’t all bad news. The city was growing, and acquiring new amenities for city dwellers: the first municipally owned rail car ran down Geary Street in 1912, three years before the Panama Pacific International Exposition opened. There was yet more to come: municipally provided water, an expansion of transit lines and the tunnels to accommodate them, and the construction of new civic spaces. Sometimes, as was the case with acquiring rail lines on Geary Street, or boring a tunnel through the side of Twin Peaks, the passage of bonds or the creation of assessment districts caused some hand wringing over the money that was needed, but ultimately the city committed to the future and paid up. They knew the city was growing and changing.

But even as the scars of the earthquake healed and San Francisco was rebuilt, Ireland was being systematically dismantled. AARIR council members like McGuire, or Theresa Earles McCarthy, the President of Council 67, the Nurses Branch, angered by the destruction, must have also mused on the stark contrast between the renewed city they knew, and the vandalized cities of Ireland, a contrast that might have seemed vast and unbridgeable. But as union members, teachers, public health workers—as San Franciscans— they were accustomed to working on behalf of a future that broke with the past. Brought up within the atmosphere of communal benevolence and collective action, which characterized the Irish community in San Francisco since the city’s founding, they knew what to do. They got busy. 

Submitted September 17, 2019. Tonight, I’m honored to be a part of a panel hosted by the San Francisco Historical Society and the Consulate General of Ireland which will feature Eamon’s de Valera’s grandson, Éamon Ó Cuív, TD, former Minister of at least six departments, including the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. We’ll be marking the centenary of Eamon de Valera’s time in America, which included a trip to San Francisco in July and November of 1919. de Valera visited just about every state in the nation, I think, and had an exhausting schedule, which makes me wonder: Where was Eamon de Valera one hundred years ago today? (I think he may have been in Rhode Island.)

Edward J. Creely and the changing city, 1870-1920

Part One: The Cattle Raids of Creely

 

 

Edward J. Creely, looking pious. This is a tintype taken on August 4th, 1884 at Vans Department store, 111 4th street in San Francisco.

 

 

 

“The key to the understanding of Ireland – Irish history, Irish archaeology, Irish culture, the great sagas – everything is based on cattle. Cows are everything and everywhere.“ Dr Patrick Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland

 

One hundred and twenty-four years ago, on a cold December morning in 1894, Edward Creely, San Francisco’s veterinary surgeon, and his colleague James P. Dockery, the city’s newly appointed Milk Inspector, drove to Butchertown, on the outskirts of San Francisco. Once there, the men changed into working garb, holstered their guns, and walked into the mudflats of Islais Creek. Creely and Dockery were preparing to go on a cattle raid.

 

In the early eighteen-nineties, the year Edward Creely’s story begins, the sight of a cow was commonplace, and encouraged San Franciscans to believe that there was fresh milk to be had. There was, if you owned a cow, or lived near one of the sprawling 1000-acre dairies in the Excelsior Homestead or the Sunnyside district.

There were plenty of customers to be had, too, and unscrupulous dairy owners knew that. They sold milk from cows afflicted with tuberculosis, and laced with formalin, or hydrogen peroxide. To increase the volume of milk, and their bottom line, the dairies diluted the milk with water contaminated with fecal matter, a practice described by a dairyman in an 1894 San Francisco Chronicle article about a new proposal before the board of supervisors: a dairy inspection ordinance.

“Cows must be washed thoroughly”, a cartoon from the San Francisco Call, Oct. 22, 1896

 

“I have seen some of these milk mixers dip up water from a trough where horses drink and put it in the milk. At many of these cheap dairies the seepage from the barnyard has a deleterious effect on the water used for dilution.”

The free-range cows of San Francisco, eating and shitting freely, led to an even wider-ranging community of Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera. Dairymen like John Linehan, whose daughter Julia married a Creely, milked the public of their money as readily as the early merchants of San Francisco mined the miners. Edward, my great-granduncle, lived a pretty good life as a prosperous and renowned veterinary surgeon. But he hit a couple low points along the way, mostly because of cows and their white milk. Both were his bete noir.

“… a city is apt in the plenitude of its sanitary advantages, to pass through its early stages of growth and to develop into a metropolis before it awakens to a recognition of the truth that this heritage is exhaustible. ..ultimately it must throw around them the protective agencies of modern sanitary science.”

A.S. Lovelace, health officer for the Board of Public Health in San Francisco made this sober observation in 1896, after the first year of dairy inspections. It was likely the text version of an argument he’d made in city chambers trying to convince reluctant supervisors to spend money safeguarding public health. Lovelace must have known that the protective agency of “modern sanitary science” would be met with defensive indignation from industries that didn’t want, then as now, to be regulated.

The city’s first milk ordinance was introduced in 1893 by George Knight, attorney to the Board of Health. Smaller dairy owners opposed regulation, knowing that the cost of cleanliness would put them out of business. (San Francisco has always been steadfastly agnostic when grappling with the decision to regulate disruptive entrepreneurs.) Their stalling worked, for a time. The ordinance didn’t pass until 1896. But change was in the air. The standards proposed in 1893 provided a roadmap to a better, more hygienic future. Milk couldn’t contain less than 12 ½ percent of milk solids, among other things, and dairy owners couldn’t keep sick cows. But how was the city to keep track of the milk flowing from the thousands of cows ranged over 49 square miles?

James Patrick Dockery, 1864-1913, San Francisco’s first Milk Inspector.

 

What was needed was a city official who could perform inspections, enforce regulations, and keep wily dairy owners in check. In September of 1895, the city mustered the will to hire James P. Dockery, an energetic Irish-American, as San Francisco’s first ever Milk Inspector*. “He Will Destroy All Impure Milk,” promised the San Francisco Chronicle.

A mixture of virtue and outrage drove Dockery, a restaurateur who had experience dealing with crooked milkmen, who often paid thousands of dollars to secure the business of restaurant owners. They recovered their investment by selling the same restaurant adulterated milk. Dockery declared war on the dairies, declaring that they had “murdered infants” and could be tolerated no more.

He wasn’t wrong. Unsanitary milk was an inconvenience the city had learned to live with, along with deaths from infectious diseases. More than 20,000 San Franciscans died of “zymotic” or infectious diseases since the Board of Public Health started keeping records in 1871.

Dealing with the dairies was humane, but pragmatic, too. It’s tough building a city if a significant percentage of the population is constantly wracked by acute digestive disorders. If San Franciscans wanted more than just protection from fires and vigilance mobs, the frantic relationship between consumer and producer —I got what you want/you’ve got what I need–had to be intervened with, and a new approach to the city’s future mapped out.

Playtime was over for San Francisco. A reformist political movement called Progressivism played out in cities across the nation. The drive for hygienic dairies, and the concern for public health, signaled a sustained challenge to inefficient, corrupt “pay to play” politics and marked the onset of centralized city government, a strong mayor and a preference for regulation of industries. Pure milk could serve as proof that the city had shrugged off the florid uncleanliness of the Gilded Age that produced men like Chris Buckley, the Irish-born “Blind Boss” who ran San Francisco during the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties.

Cracking down on filthy dairies meant drafting municipal codes, antagonizing unscrupulous dairy owners, lobbying reluctant city supervisors and clashing with other men, equally intent on reforming San Francisco’s lackadaisical approach to public health. City Hall was a dumping ground for male ambition, and everyone sloshed around in it, including Dockery and Creely.

The city’s meat inspector, a man named Ben Davis, complained that Dockery’s vigilance was usurping his role as the meat health inspector. Creely, a political appointee who became the city’s veterinary surgeon in 1883, was charged with graft by “Doc” Burns, the former City Veterinarian who was replaced by my great uncle. None of this slowed Dockery or Creely down. It was a heady time in city government, a moment to stand in stark contrast to other, more inferior men. Men possessed of ambition and civic virtue (real or imagined) could hitch their wagons to the rising tide of reform, and gain a lifetime of public approbation.

J. Tomkinson Livery and Stable located at 57, 59 and 61 Minna street, circa 1871. The boarding house at 55 Minna street is directly to the left of the stable. Image from the California State Library.

 

In the beginning, Edward Creely was a part of the solution, not the problem. He was born in Stockton in 1867, the first son of James and Margaret McCarty Creely. His father, a farrier by trade, moved the family from Stockton to 55 Minna Street, Ward 11, in the South of Market in 1870. The family dwelling sat next to the J.Tompkinson Livery, a stable that spread over two city blocks, making the densely populated neighborhood a forerunner to today’s transit village.

Edward grew up in his father’s horseshoeing shop on Mission street. James Creely managed to corner a vital piece of the horseshoeing market: the horses owned by the city and county of San Francisco. The Creely forge became a hangout for city politicos, major and minor. Edward grew up listening to the political chatter of the adults as he fired the forge and helped control the restive bodies of horses as shoes were hammered onto their hooves.

When Edward was six, his father moved the family to the outskirts of Butchertown, a famously disgusting place, and began working for Zhan and Langermann, blacksmiths and wagon-makers. Butchertown, which roughly corresponds with the industrial area east of Bayshore and south of Cesar Chavez, was founded in 1868 by butchers after they were forbidden by the city from slaughtering animals inside city limits. They bought 81 acres of land from the State, and carried on until 1971 as the city’s abattoir, aided by Islais Creek and the bay which formed a natural dumping grounds for the blood and guts issuing from the slaughterhouses.

The Creelys lived on Railroad Avenue, a street platted on a narrow spit of land surrounded by mudflats. The smells and sounds of the animals on their way to slaughter must have been wretched: I can’t imagine how my great-great grandmother felt about living with four children in such noisome and sanguine isolation. (Or maybe I can. The family moved back to the South of Market within the year.)

Twenty years later, Edward Creely was back in Butchertown helping conduct Dockery’s war on toxic milk, which was well underway. Dockery began that fall by stopping dairy wagons on their way into the city. Brandishing his “lactometer” (you can purchase one for 9.99 on Amazon) he tested the milk on the spot, usually on the side of Mission road or San Bruno avenue and dumped the entire contents of the wagon if the milk failed the Babcock test, named after the 19th-century chemist who devised the test to determine levels of butter fat and adulterants.

In his first month on the job, Dockery stopped 450 wagons, and boasted of dumping 2,000 gallons of milk, usually around midnight, and almost always over the heated protests of the milkmen. After dumping 25 milk cans from John Linehan’s Green Valley dairy** and being threatened by Linehan and his sons, Dockery made his intentions clear:  “… I want it distinctly understood that so long as I am Milk Inspector, I will dump every can of milk not up to the standard prescribed by the Board of Health. I will do this if I have to hold a gun in one hand while I empty the cans with the other.”

The press, impressed with Dockery’s alacrity and mindful of the affront to the local dairy industry, called these inspections “raids” which was fitting. Both Creely and Dockery’s Irish roots lay in places famed for cattle raiding, Ulster and Connacht respectively, which is where the legendary Irish epic the Tain Bo Cuilgnne (the Cattle Raid of Cooley) took place. In the winter of 1895 and the spring of the following year, readers of San Francisco newspapers were treated to a local version of the Tain, minus a queen named Mebh, as Dockery and Creely raided dairies, impounded — and occasionally shot– tubercular cattle and skirmished with resentful milkmen in the green hills and wetlands of San Francisco.

Dockery and Creely were in Butchertown to stop dairymen from grazing their cattle on swamp grasses and pickleweed. Grazing livestock in wetlands isn’t unusual, as in France, where agneau de pré-salé–lamb grazed in salt marshes– is a delicacy. But salty milk that tastes like shit has never been popular. The cow’s fodder was liberally laced with human feces, a carrier of Salmonella enterica, a result of the five city sewers that emptied their contents into the marshes of Islais Creek. The dairymen who gazed their cattle there did so because they couldn’t afford (or didn’t want to purchase) quality feed.

Ambition drove Edward into the marsh to chase cows in 51-degree weather. He was a young man, with a growing family and a newly opened veterinary hospital grandly named the New York Veterinary Hospital, located at 510 Golden Gate avenue, around the corner from his uncle John McCarty, who was also a farrier.

Edward, and his younger brother James and Tom were college-educated (the Creely sisters were not) and busy men with work that tended more and more to the white collar world. In 1893, Edward became a weekly columnist for the Pacific Rural Press, an agricultural newspaper printed in San Francisco, and began dispensing medical advice to livestock owners in Northern California who needed his help solving the problems of the grubby, frequently gruesome world of animal husbandry. Chasing cows was all in a day’s work. But it was nasty work. Decomposition is the way of life in a wetland, but the process, which makes short work of a strand of eel grass, isn’t equal to the task of breaking down the body of a dead horse, a sight that greeted Dockery and Creely that morning.

Going to Butchertown was Dockery’s idea. There had been an outbreak of typhoid in Oakland and San Francisco, which prompted the Milk Inspector to crack down on the “Italian swamp ranch community” who were known to pasture their cows in the marsh, near the Golden City homestead at Tulare and Illinois Streets. Dockery’s plan was simple. He was going to drive the cows to the pound, about two miles away and arrest anyone who tried to claim them.

Accordingly, the men began their muddy cattle raid by shooing the cattle west toward San Bruno Road. This provoked an immediate response from the owners of the livestock who emerged half-naked from the depths of the muddy swamp –“most of them had very little wearing apparel on,” the paper noted disapprovingly– and rushed Dockery and Creely, with sticks and dogs. The milk inspector and the surgeon fended off enraged dairymen by firing shots in the air, which drove the men and most of the cows away. The Mission police were summoned and the remainder of the herd taken to the pound. Two hours later, dairymen Alessandro Di Sante, Edwino Del Sante and Bartholomew Mozetti were charged with a misdemeanor and taken to the 17th street police station. (Dockery later bailed Del Sante out of prison to the relief of his children and weeping wife.)

All in a day’s work and yet the loss of a cow, no matter how sickly, has never been a small matter. The Pacific Rural Press reported that a good Holstein calf could cost around about $500, about $4,000 adjusted for inflation. In the same San Francisco Chronicle article about the proposal to inspect dairies, an unnamed dairyman noted that good milk cost good money and cited the Guadaloupe Dairy, located on Valencia Street, as an example, stating that they invested about $150,000–more than 4 million–annually in their operations. The shirtless men pasturing their cows along the creek may have owned their cows, but maybe not much else, certainly nothing resembling a dairy. Fodder and water could be free if you weren’t too picky, but infrastructure was for the rich.

“Inspector Dockery interviews Mrs. O’Brian”, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 10, 1895. Uncle Edward and Bessie the cow look on.

 

Still, a sickly cow had some value. This was the case with a cow named Bessie who had been caught up in the December raid. She was claimed by her owner, Mrs. O’Brian, who explained that Bessie’s lacteal fluid nourished her and her four children. It might have infected them too. The cow had been declared consumptive by Dockery. But in Mrs.O’Brien’s view, milk from a tubercular cow was better than nothing. Dockery released the cow into Mrs. O’Brien’s custody, an act of graciousness that “took by storm the affections of the people of Ireland,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

It was an easy gesture to make. Bessie was doomed. Destined to give what milk she could with the feed available to her, probably far less than two gallons a day, she was likely slaughtered in Butchertown when her milk ran out, and dumped into the bay to be washed back into the marsh by the tides. Her flesh and the flesh of other cows littered the landscape, like the brawling bulls of the Tain Bo Cuilgne, but unlike those mythic beasts, their bodies had no value and didn’t name that awful landscape.

Dockery wrote a report for the 1895-96 San Francisco Municipal Report detailing the results of his busy year. Out of 3,784 cows inspected, 36 were killed. More than 7 thousand gallons of milk was dumped and 228 warrants for arrest issued.

The same year, infectious diseases killed 472 people, mostly infants in the 11th ward, the first place my family lived in San Francisco. To be a baby in the 11th ward, or a cow in the Islais swamp was to share a common fate: illness and death due to disease spread by San Francisco’s commercial dairies. It would be another decade before the dairy industry was brought to heel.

“Milk Drugged With Hair Dye Poisons A Baby Victim”. San Francisco Call, October 1905.

 

Milk and dairy inspection lagged during the Schmitz mayoralty. This was how it came to be that in October 1905, Gladys May Tumalty, Edith Hays, and Ruth and Francis Lent, all infants and toddlers, drank milk containing formalin and hydrogen peroxide that came from the dairies of two of the city’s worst offenders, Linehan, and another dairyman named George C. Smart, owner of the New York Dairy. Formalin was used to retard spoilage and hydrogen peroxide was a folk remedy thought to kill Mycobacterium bovis, the bacteria that causes bovine tuberculosis. (It didn’t.)

Smart was smart. After paying a fine of $200 dollars, and narrowly avoiding a jail sentence, he launched the Dairy Delivery Company with John Daly and other dairy owners. They published a pamphlet in 1906, the year the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed. It’s a masterpiece of re-branding. “Every operation is conducted on strict sanitary principles,” the company claims. The pamphlet shows clean rooms full of sparkling machinery, and not a single cow in sight.

Picture of the Dairy Delivery Company, sometime after 1906. The Mission District address, 3550 19th is clearly visible on the truck. Image courtesy of Glenn Koch.

 

In 1912, the Board of Supervisors passed city ordinance 2329 which set the standards for pasteurized milk. That year, just four children under one year of age died of cholera in San Francisco.

“To each cow, its calf,” said the High King of Ireland, Diarmait mac Cerbaill, in his famous 6th-century anti-copyright ruling, meaning all rights revert to the owner. mac Cerbaill’s ruling is about restoration, and so, too, is the idea that undergirds public health, which has always been both desperately needed and a hard sell. Disease and illness carry more than bacteria: they carry stigma, too, a suspicion that people are sick because of some moral failing.

This is why oral hygiene is not covered by public health care plans, incredible as it may seem. You could have flossed more, the thinking goes. Perhaps someone thought you could have paid more for your milk, as they read about Gladys May Tumalty, the infant poisoned by hydrogen peroxide. It’s an old problem, this ambivalence about what we owe one another. But from time to time, it’s been settled as a question.

San Francisco legislators, faced with the “necessity of sanitary reform”, made it clear in their ordinances that a defining characteristic of what it meant to be a San Franciscan, beyond the accident of birth, was having access to untainted milk and later, inexpensive public transportation and a water supply that’s one of the best in the country. To each San Franciscan, their health: this ruling is lettered nowhere within city limits, but its spirit remains in the mission statement of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The mission of the San Francisco Department of Public Health is to protect and promote the health of all San Franciscans.

It’s a tall order. But as long as we live together, linked by the fluidity of water, grounded by the turbulent earth, and impacted by rapidly destabilizing climate, it will always be a better approach, this idea that by considering ourselves as part of a greater whole, we stand a chance of surviving.

 

 

* How much the city paid Dockery is unclear. The municipal report for fiscal year 1895-96 notes his position as Milk Inspector, but doesn’t list a salary. In a San Francisco Chronicle article, Dockery claims that a state law empowers him; however, according to state librarian Angelica Illuca, the first state law that appears to directly reference Dairy Inspections is dated 1899. So, I don’t know. Was he a freelance milk inspector? In a San Francisco Call article dated November 1st 1895, it is noted that William Broderick, the city auditor has allowed JP Dockery’s “first salary warrant, in spite of all the talk to the contrary“. The city did pay him, but how much and under what conditions is, as of this writing, unclear to me.

** A digression (sorry!) John F. Linehan, 1841-1915, and his father, also named John, were major players in the dairy dynasties of San Francisco. The senior Linehan’s dairy was located at Laguna and Greenwich in Cow Hollow. After the city insisted that dairies remove themselves for hygienic reasons, the Linehan family opened the Green Valley Dairy in the Excelsior Homestead near Vienna and France streets. This move did not make them more hygienic, by the way. Delightfully, the Linehan family hailed from a town named Boherbue in County Cork, Ireland. “Bo” is the Irish word for cow, and the term “Bóthar” means cattle road. This is both utterly (udderly?) coincidental, and totally not.

 

With love and thanks to all who helped out with this piece, including Amy O’Hair, historian for the Sunnyside neighborhood, the lovely Glenn Koch for his help sourcing images of San Francisco’s dairies, Angelica Illuca, librarian at the Witkin State Law Library, Frances Kaplan, librarian at the California Historical Society, the Western Neighborhoods Project, whose podcast episode 289 is a must listen, the San Francisco Department of Memory, and Tarin Towers and Elyse Shafarman who have very good to me throughout this process.

 

Why Hannah got her gun: outtakes and postscripts

In June of 1910, Hannah McCarty Welsh stepped over the threshold of J.H. Kruse’s hardware store on the corner of 23rd Street and Shotwell and bought a gun. This seems like an act of reckless bravado. But what is more likely is that she was exhausted when she did it, and very frightened.

She and her husband John had been served with an eviction notice the day before, informing them that the homestead he’d established in 1879 on the north side of Bernal Hill, was no longer legally their home, due to a foreclosure by the Hibernia Bank, and the predatory practices of a Geary Street money lender named E.W. Lick.

Ew, indeed. John Welsh’s bitter comments to the press, two or three days later, as he stood in the street with his worldly possessions scattered around him, suggests that Lick talked Hannah into signing something she shouldn’t have. The result was an expulsion from the Edenic surroundings of Bernal Heights, then and now a serene and secluded spot in San Francisco.

Hannah had been arguing their case before the courts earlier that year. This earned her the attention of the San Francisco Call, which showed puzzled admiration for her after she spent two days in court in February, acting as her own lawyer. Calling her a “woman attorney”, the reporter reported that she showed a “knowledge of legal procedures that would surprise some members of the bar.” Did she want to go to law school? Where did her unsanctioned and raw expertise come from?

We’ll never know. Most of the media attention implied that what she really was, was a braying loudmouth. Although she “bravely essayed” to represent her case, and was described as “confident” and dexterous in her questioning, and unshaken by the technical questions from Lick’s lawyer, Mr. Gaylor, the surprise that greeted her confidence carried the unmistakable stink of misogyny. She was alternately derided and condescended to in the press. She “complained’ rather than reported the bribe she claimed had passed between her neighbor and a city surveyor, was called “noisy” and “lawless” as she objected to the eviction proceedings, and was declared insane for making “scenes” as she fought to stay in her home.

The whole sorry episode stinks to high heaven. The only comfort I can take is that two and a half years later, after her husband died, she was released from the asylum and cleared of all charges. By 1922, she was working as a “matron” (a professional shusher at movie theaters) at the Orpheum Theater and owned a house in Noe Valley. She lived with a man named George Hamilton Bohm, thirteen years younger than she, and an employee of the U.S. Post office. He’s described as a boarder in Hannah’s home in the census record from 1930. Four years before she died, he died. She reported his death to the H.F. Suhr & Co funeral home, who handled his remains, and is described in Bohm’s obit as his “dear friend.”

That is the substance of a happy ending: the restoration of home, the happy amity of friendship (maybe he was gay? I sort of hope he was) and the promise of a peaceful dotage. She even managed to be interred in San Francisco, due to her husband’s status as a Civil War vet.

Hannah stayed put in a city that shakes people off its back as effortlessly as a dog shakes water from its coat. But in order to do that, she had to face down the kind of fear that immobilizes people. Eviction at the age of fifty is a banishment to the margins of civilization, of society, of settled existence. She was facing that fear as she stepped over the threshold of J.H. Kruse’s hardware store and bought a gun. Was this necessary? Did it help? It depends.

It didn’t reverse the court’s decision that Lick could evict her. But if you take all events in a narrative as innately causative, and fate-shaping, then sure. It was necessary. So was her fear. So were the mistakes she undoubtedly made: signing papers, losing her temper, talking too much, caring too much, and probably ignoring her husband’s advice. The mistakes she made—and her husband’s pension— might have been necessary prerequisites that led her to 1538 Church street and an old age supported by a dear friend, and her extended family.

Maybe. That’s a nice summation, probably too nice. How Hannah got her gun was simple: she bought it from her friendly neighborhood gun dealer. How she got her resilience and determination to keep her hand in after she lost her home and was institutionalized is more of a mystery.

Some people are just really bloody-minded: by this, I mean that I think that the fiery instinct of Fuck You blazed within Hannah’s soul, granting her some protection from depression and inertia.

She’s in my heart these days. I, too, am in my fifties and have made many mistakes, wasted decades, been bumptious and ill-advised, ill-timed—hysterical even— and am very bloody minded. Fuck You is my rejoinder to all those mistakes, the rebuke they’re lobbing at me, and the fear they’re trying to instill in my soul of what I’ve become: a writer who makes no money. Hannah had her gun; I have my computer: both of us want to be heard.

What is prompting all this over identification with Hannah? you may be wondering. Reader, I’ll tell you. (and I’m sorry to be so outbursty on my blog.) I’ve recently had two or three long dark nights, and at least two days, of the soul, following some galvanic shocks only the universe is capable of delivering. I encountered some writing in major publications that I could have and should have done. And when I say “could have”, I’m not exaggerating.

One of these articles, which was very well written and needful of publication, told a story I began to tell back in 2004, and then abandoned. But here’s the kicker: it wasn’t until I saw the story, that I realized that I had, in fact, abandoned it.

Why did I abandon it?  Do you have all day? Neither do I. Chalk it up to a combination of confusion about what I was doing and how to do it, isolation from a peer group, and a lack of self-confidence, which looks and feels like laziness. In other words, the usual suspects hamstrung me and have continued to do so intermittently for the past fifteen years.

This is hard for me to admit. Like Hannah, I’m not a quitter, and yet… time that is unbound by the normal constraints (a nine-to-five job) appears to be closer in the rear view mirror than it really is. One, two, twenty years: I’m not sure what I’ve been doing since I graduated from San Francisco State University with an MFA and married Jay three years after that. Those seem to be the high points in a decade and half that now, in my current six-of-cups mood, feel mired in betwixt-dom.

The fact of the matter is, I’ve started more than I’ve finished (so far) and while these are terrible words to write, they are true.

Happily, I have friends and family who can remind me gently that I have done some things, and so thus endeth—sort of abruptly, cause I ain’t got no more insights to offer—my peroration. It’s all good. I’ll survive. Hannah survived. But I want more than survival, and I think Hannah did, too. What might she have been, had she been sprung from a culture that saw her as uncontrollable and therefore insane?

And where is Hannah now? She’s around. In the mid-eighties, during a divorce which tested her to her limits, my aunt—Hannah’s great-great grandniece—finished law school, passed the bar and practiced law until she retired. She has since retired to a house she owns, and is greatly loved by her family. We’ll be celebrating her 82nd birthday this month.

Into every generation a slayer is born. Hannah lives, I say, and has been sprung from the institutional constraints she struggled against. My aunt survived, I will as well, and my nieces and younger cousins will do that and more, I prophecy, while being as bold, talkative and as dammed obstreperous as they see fit to be.

Cue the music and let the credits roll.

3145 23rd Street, the (former) site of JH Kruse Hardware store.

 

Written in a highly reflective mood, and with love to Ania, Madeline, Delphina, Cosette,  and the littlest Creely of all, darling Becca.

December 7, San Francisco, CA

Bring out your dead: Dia de los Muertos

November 2nd was a warm day. The sun blazed, the air was still, and in the Mission people walked in a leisurely fashion, the way they do when they aren’t hurrying out of the cold.

But an autumnal bluster lurked behind the placid blueness of the sky. At 2 pm, the light shifted slightly. Long black shadows stretched to the north, cross-hatching the sidewalk with their silhouettes. In front of the Mission Language & Vocational School on 19th Street, old sycamore trees shook in the breeze. The dry leaves rattled once, and fell to the ground. Later that night, thousands of people walked to the corner of 22nd and Bryant Street to celebrate Dia de los Muertos.

Dia de los Muertos, also known as All Souls day—or Féile na Marbh if you’re Irish— always falls on November 2, the month of the Holy Souls in the Catholic Liturgical calendar. San Francisco celebrations have a tough time defending themselves against spectacle seekers, and every year I wonder if it will be the year that some fool ruins the evening for the rest of us.

This is what happened to Halloween in the Castro. It started life as a neighborhood event in the forties, and morphed into a whole-hearted expression of gaiety, drag and revelry when the neighborhood changed hands. Everything stopped in 2006, after someone brought a gun to a fight. Long before that, though, public drunkenness and the narcissistic practice of documenting yourself in a cast of thousands overtook the event. At the end, there were just too many people there, rubbernecking at queer men in brilliant, often very topical drag (you could read the year’s events by looking at the costumes. There was no limit to the commentary: I seem to recall someone costumed as two ruined Twin Towers in 2001.)

I think Dia de los Muertos might be protected from this. Mass memorials aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, as a 2008 Yelp review of the event from a freaked-out attendee makes clear:  “I thought this would be a fun event to check out, but it was way more somber than I was led to believe,” he wrote disapprovingly. “Yes, people do get really creative with the designing and building of the alters honoring their departed loved ones but this whole thing is way more creepy and satanic than people seem willing to admit.”

A sign with the names of founders of the Black Panther Party hangs on a chain link fence in Garfield Park on Dia de los Muertos, November 2, 2018

Um, ok. I’m pretty sure that the Church of Satan has never helped organize Dia de los Muertos. The Mission District doesn’t need outside assistance planning big festivals and celebrations. A loose-knit coalition of neighborhood group kicked things off in the seventies, and it’s been going strong ever since. A non-profit called The Marigold Project has for the last decade or so undertaken the project of bringing the dead to life. They fundraise throughout the year to pay for street permits, trash cans, and supplies for the altars. A day or so before November 2, volunteers and Mission residents transform Garfield Park into a city of the dead.

By nightfall, the park glows with candlelight, often electric. Tiny lights flicker on the tops of altars. Millions of bright orange marigold petals are scattered on the ground. Small alters are set up on adjoining streets. It’s extremely chill. People are hanging out with their dead.

The first sign that the procession is starting is the booming sound of drums. People gather on the corner outside King’s Market on the corner of Bryant and 22nd Street. Some people stand on the perimeter and watch as others walk past them and into the crowd to be a part of the procession.

This year, I costumed myself as my great-great Grandfather James Creely’s fine white horse, which involved a paper mache mask, his bridle and lots of white hair gel. The bridle kept shifting, and I kept having to re-adjust it, but that’s part of the bargain when you walk. Costumes aren’t obedient familiars: your costume might change, and should challenge you.

There’s a fine line to be walked when you’re in costume. Processing in costume should take you there, ritually speaking.  But “there” is a different place for different people.

An altar in Garfield Park on Dia de los Muertos, November 2, 2018

It turns some people into poseurs, not processors. My friends and I walked past a couple who were dressed to the nines, looking like extras from “Coco”. They stood rigidly on the corner, not moving, as people swarmed around them with cell phones. My friend snorted in disgust. They’re just here to get their pictures taken, she said. They’re not walking. That’s appropriation. I agreed. They have no one in their hearts, I said.

This was judge-y of us, but probably true. They didn’t appear to be thinking of anyone but themselves. (And let’s be clear about one thing: there’s a lot of dead people who would LOVE to be thought of). Turning the night into an endless Instagram moment kind of kills the spirit. I’m guilty of allowing people to stop me so that they could take  my picture. But the picture taking stops the action, literally: cameras interrupt the soulful process. After all, I’m not walking alone.

Instagramming everything takes, but doesn’t give. Could the murals in Balmy and Clarion alley but speak, I’m sure they’d agree with me. It’s nothing new. Contemporary urban behavior isn’t much different now than it was in Georgian England. Just as Jane Austen’s characters shopped, ate and lollygagged their way around Bath, so it is in the Mission. Day-trippers arranging themselves in Clarion Alley in front of images of the dispossessed, the incarcerated, and the newly dead is commonplace. But if you wish to avoid cultural vacuity during Dia de los Muertos, take my advice: walk with your dead. Have someone in your heart.

And know your history. The most popular costume for women is “La Calavera Catrina” the iconic, skeletal figure created by printmaker and political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada. La Catrina’s roots are explicitly political and anti-authoritarian: they express Posada’s political dissatisfaction with the government of Porfirio Diaz, the authoritarian President of Mexico who ruled Mexico with an iron fist for thirty five years, and the caste system that flourished because of him.

The woman who stood on the corner waiting for her close-up probably had no idea that she was animating a sharp satire: the image of the bourgeoisie as the living dead. But it works out, in the end. It makes sense to see La Catrina in a neighborhood that has struggled to maintain cultural continuity, amid an unprecedented influx of wealth and economic division.

Division and loss—and the efforts to bridge them with memory— is the working of the procession, in the company of others: weeping people, laughing people, everyone. Mourners and celebrants mingle in the procession, colliding their sorrow with another’s hilarity. It’s a night when the neighborhood greets itself honestly, and acknowledges the turn of the season toward the dark part of the year. I thought about all of this as I clutched my bridle to my head. I walked in memory of my great-great grandfather James, but I wasn’t mourning him. He was 101 years dead and was well out of harm’s way. So many of us are not. I walked, apparently resplendent in my horse costume, feeling foolishly human, very small and easily fucked with. This was a year in which many illusions died (for those of us who were dumb enough to have any) along with our friends, lovers, leaders and teachers.

It’s been a dark year. There was more than mortal death we had to face. This was the year that children were kidnapped from their parents by Trumpists and caged. This was the year that there were 307 mass shootings in America. This was the year that journalists were alternately derided and threatened in the White House Press room by the administration’s Cromwellian press secretary, and tortured and killed by clients of American armaments dealers. (I walked with you in my heart, dear Mr. Kashoggi.)This was the year the Republican party ran roughshod over the needs of this nation for equity and justice, in their haste to install a political operative on a ever-more compliant Supreme Court. This was the year that entire devotional communities were murdered in their places of worship.ע״ה

There didn’t seem to be as many people walking this year. Permits to close the streets to cars weren’t obtained, and cars ran through the streets to the detriment of the easy ambling pace of the night. I saw the police everywhere. The altars in Garfield Park started to get dismantled at 10 p.m. sharp. Things felt different. Or maybe it was just me.

But some things remained the same. People moved slowly down the sidewalks, taking in the altars, illuminated by candlelight as they looked at the pictures of the neighborhood’s beloved dead. Their expressions set the tone for the gathering: their faces were enraptured and soft. People gathered together chatting and laughing. Time moved  slowly; no one was in a hurry.

Dia de los Muertos carries its own time stamp, one in which the past brings the busy neighborhood and the agonized world we live in to heel for a few hours, to slow down, to look, to reflect, and most importantly, to remember.

Elizabeth Creely dressed in honor of her great-great grandfather, James Creely, a horseshoer and blacksmith, whose last forge was on the corner of 21st and Folsom.

Written on November 14, 2018, during the waxing moon. I’m tired. It was a hectic and high-spirited High Season. May the blue wave continue to roll.