Apr 28
Obispan Dodges Death As Bolt Hits Pillow One San Luis Obispo man escaped death by the bare margin of a whim during the heavy electrical storm her Tuesday night. If Andrew Chessmar, 1841 Slack street hadn’t decided to leave the comfort of the davenport in his living room to read in a nearby chair, he …
Feb 22
Periodically big storms come in and wreak havoc with piers. For example in 1907 the Oilport pier, in what is now known as Shell Beach was demolished by a fierce storm. The pier at Port San Luis is usually the most sheltered in the region but thirty years ago no place was immune. The winter …
Dec 05
Humans like to build on flat level land. Problem is the water likes it too. We can go decades between floods in San Luis County but when a cloud bursts the results can be swift. Any time rain falls faster than one inch per hour flooding is likely to follow. Parts of South Higuera Street …
Mar 15
Afternoon papers put special pressure on finding images the same day. If snow fell a phone call might come in before sunrise to get out and find a picture by first light and hustle back to the paper to develop, edit and print so the presses could run at noon with a picture from the …
Feb 22
The epic flooding of 1914 has been covered in two previous posts. One shows flooding as Tally Ho Creek cuts through Branch Street in Arroyo Grande. The other shows the structure that gives Bridge Street a name, undermined by flooding. This looks to be the same bridge from the opposite point of view and view …
Jan 06
Seventy years ago San Luis Obispo County was changing in many ways into the place we know today. One army base was expanding and two new ones were being built. The navy was building in Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo was paving the Mill Street district. A city job was lost when the gas …
Oct 24
Avila Beach 1941 ©The Tribune Lifeguards sponsored by the WPA, County and chamber of commerce appeared for the first time tin 1941 on county beaches. One August day it was estimated that there were 10,000 enjoying the sun and sand at Avila Beach.
Mar 20
San Luis Obispo Tribune, November 23, 1878 Tsunami story A wave big enough to come over the sandspit in Morro Bay? Really? Pat Pemberton recently wrote a fascinating overview of the history of tsunamis on the Central Coast. I wanted to go back and pull original newspapers and see what they said at the time …
Jan 17
One line stopped me cold as I was scanning the Crocker’s department store advertisement in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, July 1, 1890. Dog-Skin Derby Gloves, 5 button length….$1.25 Uh? Did they really skin dogs to make gloves? That’s got to be a euphemism, right? Apparently not. According to a British history website dog leather …
Dec 20
The joke about California is that there are only two seasons, fire and mudslide. The season totals in mid-March 1958 were about two inches under our annual average of 24.36 inches for San Luis Obispo. At least two storms that year produced newsworthy flooding. The storm shown there hit Nipomo hard. Before tract homes and …
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