June 8, 1978
A. David Chan asked about Carol Hallett and by good fortune I had her photo in the “someday soon” stack. Her biography says she was field office representative for Assemblyman, later Congressman, William M. Ketchum. Speak up if you know for sure, my guess is that she was the first woman elected from the area to state assembly.
She later served in President Reagan’s administration as Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. She also headed the Customs Dept. in the George Herbert Walker Bush administration.
When these pictures were made Proposition 13 had just passed attendees at a fund raising luncheon were in a fine mood. About 1,200 people paid $15 each to eat and hear speeches by Carol Hallett and Ronald Reagan.
Quoting Jeanne Huber’s story:

An Atascadero Republican, Mrs. Hallett is seeking election to a second term in the 16th Assembly District.
Thursday’s event turned out to be as much a celebration of the voters decision to limit property taxes through Proposition 13 as it was a campaign rally for Mrs. Hallett, who is considered a shoo-in for re-election by political observers.
***
Reagan got a standing ovation with his response to a question of whether he planned to run for president in 1980: “I haven’t closed the door yet, so stay loose.”

Photos were by Thom Halls

ShareThis

November 24, 1973

Time gets measured in different scales. Geologic time runs in cycles with spans of hundreds, thousands or millions of years, hard to put in a human context because the Earth’s pace is not a human pace.
A few signposts of 1973: Richard Nixon was president, and the jaws of the Watergate scandal were closing on him. Telegram-Tribune cost 15 cents and did not have a Sunday edition. Graphics were drawn by hand then photographed, not created on a computer. Thrifty was the name of a drug store. The nuclear power industry answered to the Atomic Energy Commission.
Almost exactly 35 years ago the discovery of what would be called the Hosgri fault was reported in the then Telegram-Tribune.
The United States Geological Survey and the AEC had commissioned a study of the seabed off of Diablo Canyon after scientist Gary Greene had discovered an active fault offshore from Davenport in Santa Cruz. PG&E dropped plans to build a nuclear power there in the wake of that report.
Staff writer Jim Hayes quoted Greene:
“Of course, PG&E had other problems there. There was the fault at Ano Nuevo and then they had a landslide.”
Later in the article the scientist spoke about the newly discovered Hosgri,
“Length, becomes a critical factor, generally the longer the fault the more recent and active we think it is.”
A PG&E spokesman Frederick R Draeger downplayed the discovery saying Diablo Canyon had been designed “to handle the greatest earthquake that could occur.”
In 1973 both units of the plant were expected to open within two years and the price tag stood at $650 million dollars. Both numbers would balloon as the plant was retrofitted in the wake of the discovery.

Today David Sneed has an article on a new fault discovered closer to the plant.

ShareThis

Death penalty trials are grim stories.
Over the last 20 years I have worked at the paper I have covered portions of
3 of the 4 active county death row stories.

In 1971 there was a wave of 3 death penalty convictions within 9 months.
Joseph Deb Tregeagle was convicted of murdering a 17-year-old Van Nuys boy
at Montaña de Oro State Park.

Quoting from staff writer Walt Beesley’s story,

While courthouse employees stared intently out of their windows, convicted
murder Joseph Deb Tregeagle was led unceremoniously from the county jail
Wednesday to a waiting sheriff’s car which whisked him away to San Quentin’s
Death Row.
The route to San Quentin was the same taken by two other slayers convicted
here within the last nine months.
Tregeagle’s predecessors were Andrew Herschel Gay, 26, of Fresno.
Gay was convicted last March of the slayings of Eve Hindin, 19, of
Laurelton, N.Y. and John Volpi, 18, of Van Nuys, both hitchhikers.
Coincidentally, it was Ronald Allen Payton, another Van Nuys hitchhiker, who
became Tregeagle’s victim.
Archa was convicted last December of the murders of a Shandon couple and
their four-year-old daughter.

The picture here shows when the jail was under the old courthouse on Osos Street.
I am assuming the guy with the hat and cigarette holder was the reporter Walt Beesley.

There was no courtroom picture because cameras were not allowed in California courtrooms until the mid 1980’s. If you wanted a picture you had to wait outside the courthouse or the jail for the convict to be walked to the car.

For those researching the topic the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has a good overview of the history of the Death Penalty in California. Tregeagle was fortunate to be convicted when he was, according to the CDC website:
“In 1972, the California Supreme Court found that the death penalty
constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the state constitution. As a
result, 107 individuals had their sentences changed to other than death.”

Charles Manson and Tex Watson were among those with commuted sentences;
Manson and Watson have had parole hearings but are still in prison. At one
point Watson was incarcerated at CMC. Fellow Manson family member Bruce
Davis is still at CMC and though he has had over a dozen parole hearings but
has not been released. Tregeagle likely had his sentence commuted and was at
some point paroled.

Joseph Deb Tregeagle is a unique name and it turns up again in a ruling from
February 1992 United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The
criminal history appears to match and in this ruling Tregeagle is sentenced
to 18 months in prison for possession of a firearm. He claimed took the gun
from his nephew, preventing his nephew from doing harm with the gun. Appeals
court judges upheld the conviction.

Times have changed and we have fewer death penalty cases today. The
Tregeagle trial took about 5 days and he was bound for Death row a little
over 7 months after the crime. Capital punishment trials now can take years
to prepare and months to try. It isn’t that prosecutors have become softer.
There are now specific circumstances that must be met to qualify for capital
punishment and more stringent procedures. Conviction is only the start of a
long appeals process. The system has slowed down in the wake of revelations
that courts have convicted and executed the innocent. This system also
delays final judgment for the guilty.

San Luis Obispo County now has four men on death row:

As of midnight November 5, 2008 there were 628 condemned men in San Quentin
with 637 beds available. There were 15 condemned women at the Central
California Women’s Facility with design capacity of 17.

Whether you are for or against the death penalty a report released in the
summer of 2008 states that the largest and slowest death row in America has
broken down costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Today more California
death row inmates die of old age than execution.

Wayne Nicholls made the photos.

ShareThis

 Raven Schlossberg clutches her hands and screams at a costumed Bruce Smith at Theta Chi haunted house in San Luis Obispo. Her friend, Tawny Claussen, also let out a shriek.
Mark Aronoff/Telegram-Tribune

October 31, 1979
On Halloween, we are allowed to drop our mask of fearlessness for a day and be afraid, very afraid.
People like to be scared, ask Stephen King.
You won’t find me at a showing of Saw, but I’d rent a Hitchcock film or T.V. show any day.
The language of fear can become a lucrative career as a Hollywood director, cable news pundit or political consultant.
Every other television drama is a true crime and punishment show. I am looking forward to the season of Law & Order, Parking Infractions Division.
Only a fearful people could make worst-case scenarios a series of best sellers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said it best in his first inaugural address; the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Joe Biden said I could find it on YouTube.

ShareThis

Do you recognize these guys?
They were two of the most powerful congressmen of their time. Leon Panetta was profiled last week and to the right is Republican congressman Bill Thomas from Bakersfield.

Panetta chaired the House Budget committee from 1989-1993 and later served in Bill Clinton’s White House. A few years later, in 2001, after the majority of the House had shifted Republican, Thomas became chairman of the all-powerful Ways and Means Committee. He retained that position until he retired in 2006. At times the Monterey and Bakersfield district lines were drawn so that they touched, often here within San Luis Obispo county. It is remarkable to have that much power in the office of a local representative but to have it with two reps from the same area under two different majorities is unique.

Thomas’ career was remembered in a editorial published Tuesday, March 14, 2006:

Rep. Bill Thomas’ retirement next year will leave this area without some major federal clout. As the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee for the past five years, he’s achieved some laudable local legislation while securing his reputation as one of the brightest policy wonks in Washington where federal tax and trade issues are concerned.

Thomas has been gerrymandered in and out of the Central Coast since 1979, with his most recent stint beginning in 2002. At that time, he picked up northern and southern San Luis Obispo County along with the rest of his constituency in District 22.

In that time, he’s gone to bat for post-earthquake FEMA funding in Paso Robles, entered legislation that curbs frivolous lawsuits connected to the Americans with Disabilities Act and secured funding to make the Ahearn Ranch on Cuesta Grade an ecological preserve.

At the federal level, he’s credited with pushing through President Bush’s $1.3 trillion tax cut, and he is regarded as the lead architect of the $400 million Medicare Prescription Drug Bill.

But there’s been a flaw in Thomas’ otherwise intelligent public policy-making style. The chairmanship of Ways and Means calls for finesse and a deft diplomatic touch when dealing with trade and health care issues. Thomas on occasion has opted for an axe rather than a scalpel approach to passing legislation — many times for no discernible reason. He’s been called the smartest man in Congress — and one of the meanest. Bottom line? He doesn’t suffer fools lightly.

A memorable episode when Thomas’ patience was tried occurred three years ago when he called down the Capitol police on his Democratic committee colleagues. He later tearfully apologized, saying to a hushed House: “As my mother would have put it, ‘When they were passing out moderation, you were hiding behind the door.’ “

The photograph is from an interview on CNN in 1991 by Robert Dyer. It is rare to see policy makers on television today, they seem more interested in showing entertaining pundits rather than the folks that will actually make decisions.

ShareThis

With the Obama/McCain presidential campaign getting ugly and the economy uncertain, let’s take a moment to look back at a local politician who was almost as popular with Republicans as Democrats. Not many can say both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton appointed them to their posts. Fewer can say they balanced the federal budget.

Leon Panetta came to Washington in 1966 as a legislative assistant to Republican Sen. Thomas Kuchel. Kuchel was appointed to fill Nixon’s vacant seat when Dwight Eisenhower tapped the Yorba Linda resident to be his vice-president in 1952.

By the late 1960s, Panetta believed Nixon’s stump promises to enforce civil rights laws and accepted an appointment in 1969 to join his staff as the director of the office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Problem was Nixon said a lot of things he didn’t really believe.

Nixon was scheming to split Democratic voters and part of his strategy in 1968 was to say nice things to civil rights supporters while behind the scenes wooing segregationists like South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond. Having a civil rights director who enforced the law was a problem for a president who billed himself a law-and-order politician. Panetta was forced to resign.

This era was a struggle for voters and the souls of both parties. The evolutionary result was that many voters who thought like Thurmond changed their affiliation to Republican; many who thought like Panetta became Democrats.

Today’s TV talk show circuit often features voices like Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter, but you won’t see moderate Republicans in the tradition of John Lindsay or Nelson Rockefeller; they are almost extinct.

In 1976, the now-Democrat Panetta ran for the 16th Congressional district and won. During the 16 years he represented Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito and San Luis Obispo counties in Congress, he rose to chair the House Budget Committee and became an expert in the arcane federal budget process.

My introduction to the congressman was as a Cal Poly student. College campuses are not at the top of the list for visiting politicians. And why would they? Why waste time traveling to the corner of the district, talking to voters who have notoriously low turnout numbers, don’t have money to contribute and are always asking for lower student fees and more programs?

Could the answer be public service? Panetta was a good listener who answered pointed questions. He had both a sense of humor and was able to tell people what was realistic to expect.

He won over constituents by running an efficient office, returning money to the treasury rather than building a Washington empire. Quoting from a New York Times story from April 15, 1992:

“Mr. Panetta operates with unusual frugality, using his frequent-flyer mileage to finance much of his official travel and buying some of his own office furniture. He elicited snickering from some colleagues when he returned to the Treasury this year’s 4.2 percent cost-of-living raise.”

In a December 1992 perspective column longtime Telegram-Tribune staffer Warren Groshong wrote about the response the congressman gave to a letter from Wilmar Tognazzini.

“Less than a month later, Tognazzini found in his rural mailbox a three-page, single spaced personal letter – about 1,000 words- from Panetta.
The congressman said many of Tognazzini’s concerns were the same as his own.
“You may be interested to know,” Panetta wrote, “that my office has contacted the Postal Service to relate the concerns you have expressed.”
Panetta responded to each point of Tognazzini’s letter, explaining the background of each problem, what Congress has done about the problem and proposals about future solutions.
…
The letter was far more that Tognazzini ever expected to get from a busy congressman who was chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee.”

Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 he needed Washington D.C. experience on his team and appointed Panetta as White House budget director.

When Clinton’s first year began to drift and stall, he named Panetta as his chief of staff to help sharpen his policies and message. Clinton became the first president in a generation to balance the budget thanks in part to Panetta and averted a trajectory that doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Panetta resigned at the end of Clinton’s first term and now runs a nonpartisan center in Monterey for the study of public policy.

He is the only politician with more biography folders than Ronald Reagan in the Tribune library.

Panetta was quoted in a Jan Greene story from April 12 of 1991.

Although Panetta obviously loves his work, he acknowledges the 16-hour days can only go on for so long.

“You can’t keep it up forever,” he says with a smile. “It makes it hard to sit down and enjoy life.”

Fiscal responsibility, competence, hard work and a sense of fairness for all constituents, that’s what I want from my elected officials.

ShareThis

June 3, 1978

In the newpaper business it’s called wild art, a self contained photo that does not require a story. Wayne Nicholls spotted a scofflaw duck at Laguna Lake and made this feature photo.

ShareThis

June 30, 1979
It was San Luis Obispo County’s Woodstock only with less mud, sex, drugs or rock and roll but more politics. They estimated 20,000 would attend.
Over 30,000 people jammed Highway 1 for a combination music festival and anti-nuclear rally.
It was held on the Army airstrip behind Cuesta College almost three months to the day of the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. With the prospect of a new nuclear power plant opening soon at Diablo Canyon tensions were high.
The seven hour rally featured Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., actor Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H, Daniel Ellsburg, County Supervisor Richard J. Krejsa, Friends of the Earth founder David Brower and U.C. Berkley professor John Gofman.
The singers included Bonnie Raitt, Peter Yarrow, Jesse Colin Young, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash.
Quoting the lede of the page 1 story by Carl Neiburger:

Before Edmund G. Brown Jr. was allowed to walk on state at Saturday’s anti-nuclear rally at Camp San Luis Obispo, the Democratic Governor had to assure rally organizers that he would do everything in his power to stop the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
The five-member Abalone Alliance ‘rally collective’ had spend about an hour listening to what the governor wanted to say, discussing it with him and then- in Brown’s absence- coming to a “consensus” that he should be allowed to address the audience.
Brown told the crowd of about 30,000 people, “I’ve just decided to join your effort to deny a license to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. I personally intend to pursue every avenue of appeal if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ignores the will of this community.”

He got a minute long standing ovation before and after the speech.
Some members of the alliance, a confederation of anti nuclear groups throughout the state, were less-than-enthusiastic.

Spokeswoman Marcy Darnovsky of Berkley quit, saying, “The Abalone Alliance was not formed to be a platform for candidates for elective office.”

Tom Hayden wasn’t allowed to speak because he hadn’t been invited to the rally and hadn’t taken a firm stand against the plant according to another Abalone Alliance spokeswoman.
At this point it was estimated that PG&E had $1.6 billion invested in the plant.
By 1982 Brown was out of office, Unit 1 opened in November 1984 and Unit 2 in August 1985.
Bonnie Raitt is returning to the county for a concert on October 5 with Cambria singer songwriter Jude Johnstone opening.
Aerial photos by Wayne Nicholls, rally photos by Tony Hertz

ShareThis

Ronald Reagan at a fundrasier for assemblywoman Carol Hallett June 9, 1978. She later served in Washington in his administration. Above photo by Thom Halls/The Tribune

His first step onto the national political stage was stumping for Barry Goldwater’s presidential run in 1964. Then two years later Ronald Reagan did what Richard Nixon could not. He unseated Edmund G. “Pat” Brown as governor of California.
It takes a better political carpenter than me to identify what planks are different in the Nixon-Reagan gubernatorial platforms.
Their biggest differences were not their ideology but their charisma.
Nixon always seemed to be working the angles, scrabbling for an advantage. Reagan never appeared he was working that hard.
Quoting Nixonland author Rick Perlstein, concluding a chapter on Ronald Reagan:
“He answered a need: he humiliated the liberals. He would tell young people harassing him with signs reading MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR, that the problem was they looked incapable of doing either. To him a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
In the four eventful years since Nixon challenged Brown in 1962, a lot had changed.
President John F. Kennedy had been murdered in 1963; in the aftermath a large number of Democrats won congressional seats. Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson arm-twisted Congress to pass civil rights legislation and anti-poverty programs in the memory of JFK. This, in addition to rioting in Watts and other black communities across the nation, galvanized suburban voters into a powerful backlash.
Brown had been on vacation in Europe when the riots broke out and the state’s response to the crisis was disjointed. The burning city was televised live via helicopter, a first.
If that weren’t enough to scare suburban voters, hippies were hitching rides along freeways, protesting the Vietnam War and generally making fun of values middle class voters held dear.
College professor Dr. Timothy Leary exhorted people to take LSD and “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Leary’s followers did not make it to the polls, Reagan’s did.
Almost 80 percent of the state’s registered voters showed up to turn out Brown.
A measure of the Reagan charisma was California’s single biggest tax increase was passed during his term, yet anti-tax conservatives still canonize his political memory.
Pat Brown’s son, Edmund G. Brown Jr. known as Jerry, would follow Reagan after two terms.

ShareThis

December 28, 1975

San Luis Obispo used to be home to two grand movie palaces, sadly today only the Fremont remains.

The Obispo used to be near the corner of Osos and Monterey Streets now the home of the Court Street Center.

Early on a Sunday morning fire struck the 65-year-old theater, built in 1911.

Battalion chief Jack Wainscott was in charge of the firefighting effort.

Quoting from the story by Pete Dunan [who later took a job running Goodwill]:

Wainscott said he almost lost three men through the second floor of the building when it began to collapse early in the fire.
He said the men escaped down the only stairway from two upstairs businesses next to the theater.
The entire roof of the theater and adjacent businesses collapsed at about 6:30 a.m. sending sparks and embers “a hundred feet into the sky over most of downtown, “ Battalion chief Elton Hall said.
Hall, one of the firemen called back to duty, said, “It was incredible, one of the most spectacular fires I’ve ever seen. Flames were shooting out everywhere when I arrived. That parking lot saved us from the flames spreading to the Anderson and God knows how many other buildings.”
Wainscott said, “I’ve been nervous just waiting for that building to go for the 22 years I’ve been in the department.”

Two days later fire investigators were still looking into the cause.

Quoting related story in the paper by Bob Anderson:

The interior contained irreplaceable chandeliers and a majestic painting of Morro Rock, which for many years had been completely hidden by dust.

The next day the city gave the building owner 10 days to demolish the unsafe structure.

Sully’s Cocktails and Osos Street Records moved to new locations. The Obispo was demolished to make a parking lot.

The Vault goes to edges of the Earth to bring you the story, here a former employee of the Obispo recalls working at the theater:

I started working at the Obispo Theater in 1957 when I was 14 (with required work permit).

By the time I left to go to Cal Poly in 1960 I was a cashier making a generous $1.25 an hour!
The manager was very fair about hiring, as half of the teens working there were from San Luis High and half were from Mission High (now Mission Prep.)
We had a friendly rivalry with the Fremont just up the street on Monterey. In order to pull in more customers and “out do” the Fremont on Monday nights, the manager, Mr. Taylor, started showing “art movies” that night.The tradition then moved to the Rainbow and continues at the Palm today.
I started as an usher, wearing a uniform and carrying a flashlight. I helped seat people and kept an eye out for “trouble” especially in the balcony!

One request often needed was, ” Please take your cigarette out to the lobby to smoke.”
We changed into and out of our uniforms in a very small dark musty room way up in the far corner of the balcony next to the projection room.
More than once there was some joking about getting caught up in that tiny room if a fire broke out. Little did I know how prophetic the thoughts of fire would be.
Recalled by Noel Middlecamp aka Kathy Hill

Thanks for the help with the blog mom.

Photos were by Wayne Nicholls

ShareThis