 |
|
|
|
Los Gatos Weekly-Times file illustration
Unlike his famous contraption drawings, this image by old-time newspaper cartoonist Rube Goldberg was simple.
|
Picture from the Past
The Bay Area was once home to sensationalistic newspapers
By John S. Baggerly
As San Francisco enters the next century, it appears the City by the Bay may be down to one newspaper. Or perhaps, two--the Chronicle and Examiner under one ownership. By contrast, during much of this century, several independent papers battled for readership.
Two others, The Bulletin and The News, the latter a Scripps Howard product, were in the field near midcentury. The Call-Bulletin was a William Randolph Hearst product with Fremont Older as its head.
In the early days of San Francisco, one publisher had a nasty practice of getting the goods on a citizen and informing the citizen that the publisher would be in his carriage at a certain corner at a certain time. To keep his name out of print, said subject was to drop cash in a bag on the floorboard of the carriage. This worked dandy until one victim drew a pistol and shot the publisher dead. Another early publisher was picked up in a brothel raid and phoned his office to insist his name remain on the list--he feared an editor might scratch his name, thus causing a cry of coverup.
As a seaport town, San Francisco spawned a "Barbary Coast" where saloon keepers, in hand with ship owners, drugged the drinks of men who were then loaded onto ships as an instant crew; they didn't come to until the ship was well out to sea.
When the Chronicle and Examiner were battling for supremacy, their Sunday supplements carried spectacular stories of the past, such as the above. They also covered Chinatown's battle over the sale of opium and exposed its child prostitution. Los Gatos had a front row seat for this horrid tale. Happily, many Chinese girls were secretly brought to the Ming Quong Home, then at the top of Loma Alta Avenue.
The floundering Examiner received life when Hearst prevailed upon his silver king father to buy him this limp newspaper. Hearst had flunked out of Harvard and left his name in legend by placing a chamber pot under the statue of John Harvard. To the surprise of the senior Hearst and general public, the younger Hearst turned his Examiner into a money maker and flagship of his nationwide chain that was given credit (or discredit) for starting the Spanish-American War.
As for spawning newspaper artists, that distinction goes to Fremont Older, a Civil War orphan whose mother wisely had him learn printing. He found himself at the head of the Bulletin, where he started the nation's first sports page, which he dressed up with kid artists such as Robert Ripley, Rube Goldberg and T.A.D. Dorgan. Dorgan later moved to the New York Evening Journal's great sports page and became the highest paid newspaperman in the country.
Ripley, born in Santa Rosa, enjoyed drawing and was thought to have a future in pro baseball. In 1905, he signed with Older's sports page and went on to world syndication with his "Believe It or Not" drawings.
Rube Goldberg, famous for his complicated contraptions performing simple tasks, was born in 1883 in San Francisco. He was pushed by his father to study engineering, worked for the San Francisco Water and Sewer Department, continued drawing and became an office boy for the Bulletin sports department, for which he submitted drawings. He later moved on to the New York City Mail, where his cartoons became syndicated.
|
|
|
|
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
