Todd Rice, left, and Drew Herron of Cal Poly celebrate moments after the Mustangs captured the NCAA Division II National Championship in their first-ever trip to the College World Series. Cal Poly snapped a 5-5 tie with a four-run eighth inning to beat New Haven 9-5 in Friday night's championship game to cap a 38-25 season.

June 3, 1989
One story that slipped past the anniversary date at Photos from the Vault this year was the 20th anniversary of Cal Poly’s baseball national championship held in Montgomery, Alabama. Before 2009 is over, imagine it is last June…
Back then Cal Poly was a Division II program coached by Steve McFarland.
Sports writer Peter J. Wallner takes it from here:

In one magical inning all the years of mediocrity disappeared from the Cal Poly baseball team.
In a span of eight batters, the Mustangs went from nervous collegiates representing a college with a meager baseball past to a group of young men — playing a kids game — with stomachs jumping like little boys on Christmas Eve.
Within 15 minutes or so minutes in that inning, Cal Poly scored four runs and transformed itself from just another team to a 9-5 winner over New Haven to become the NCAA Division II College World Series national champion.
“I would hope that people will now recognize us as having a quality program at Cal Poly,” sixth year coach Steve McFarland said by telephone following the game.
“There have been people who doubted us,” he added, “who doubted we could even win the conference. And I know we’ve been close in the past but we’ve faded in the end.
“But you got to give credit to these kids. They’ve been under a tremendous amount of tension and pressure. There’ll be a lot of celebrating but I bet they don’t last as long as they think. They’re tired.”
Cal Poly, a team that had never won the California Collegiate Athletic Association title, never won more than one game in regional competition, and had only dreamed of a spot in the World Series, is now forever changed.
Remember the ‘69 Amazin’ Mets?
Welcome to the ‘89 Magical Mustangs.
“It’s just an unbelievable feeling,” said outfielder Robert Hale. “When we started out (this year), nobody gave us a chance for this. And we did it.”
And things will never be the same.

***

Students of newspapering can see how the raw print arrived, transmitted via laserphoto technology by the Associated Press. (MY7) means this is the 7th black and white photo from Montgomery transmitted that day.The red grease pencil marks were a guide for the person making halftones in the composing room. Missing is the paper tag that gave the size percentage, run date, and page information. Prints would spit out of the laserphoto machine every few minutes all day long but the images would fade if exposed to sunlight for a long time.

On the sending side it could take as little as ten minutes or as long as an hour to transmit one photo from San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles. A dirty phone signal would force resends until a clean image came through. The machine had a singing ping that would let you know it was doing something but just in case you marked the print with a pencil to see if it was feeding slowly through the machine.

Today’s digital is so much better than yesterday’s analog.
***
A source close to Josh Scroggin tells me he will post about the championship on his blog as well.

I quoted Mark Twain in a recent comment, and for what its worth, here are some statistics.
These were the most popular posts of 2009. Six were actually posted this year and four were greatest hits from 2008. Google, no surprise, was the lead search engine bringing viewers to the pages and Internet Explorer was the top web browser.

The James Dean and Tex Watson posts had twice the traffic of any other entry. I expected them to be well read but the traffic for those pages never seems to slow down. It will be hard to find something with more drawing power next year.

Vietnam war posts have had steady traffic and the Fort Ord post at #3 has the most comments of any on Photos from the vault, with 53 at this writing. Clearly people have vivid memories of their time there and want to reconnect to others.
One thing I found interesting is that none of the war protest posts cracked the top 10 though there was strong interest at times in Timothy Leary and Huey P. Newton.

Categorized by decade:
One item straddled the decades 60′-70’s.
Five from 1960’s.
One from 1950’s.
Three from 1900’s.

The newspaper logo from the winning decade is at the top.

Here is an invitation to share your thoughts, did you have a favorite story from last year?

1. James Dean Death an Accident Jury Finds

2. Charles “Tex” Watson Wedding, the Manson murders 40 years later

3. Vietnam basic training Ft. Ord

4. 1966 Viet Nam War draft

5. 1965 men’s fashion

6. Greyhound Bus Station

7. 1900’s Pacific Telephone & Telegraph operators

8. 1907 steam engine wreck

9. Lark Train Wreck

10. 1966 25th annual Crosby Clambake

A special moment Dora Baines, San Luis Obispo, registers to vote in the San Luis Obispo County clerk's office, a big moment in her life after being denied this right for more than 35 years in Mississippi.

February 10, 1965
We set the fireworks off on July 4th celebrating a unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. The second sentence is the one quoted most often.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson wrote it and likely had copy editing assistance from Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. That is an excellent group of writers.

The majestic language is a big improvement over the rough draft’s run on sentence.

self-evident,
We hold these truths to be^ sacred & undeniable; that all Men

they are endowed by their creator with
are created equal & independent; that ^from that equal creation they

equal rights, some of which are rights; that these
derive in rights inherent & inalienable ^ among ^which are the

preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;

rights
that to secure these ^ends, governments are instituted among men,

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that

whenever any form of government shall becomes destructive of these

ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to

institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles,

& organizing it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most

likely to effect their safety & happiness.

The irony behind the creation of this beautiful document was that two of the three had owned slaves. Franklin would later in life become an outspoken abolitionist. During Jefferson’s lifetime he would have the names of 600 slaves listed in inventory. Late 20th century DNA testing indicates a male in the Jefferson line was the fathered a child with his late wife’s slave half-sister Sally Hemings. Some Jefferson descendants dispute these findings but his last inventory counted 187 slaves and among the few he freed were the children of Hemings.

The failure of the founding fathers to directly address the evils of slavery would be resolved 85 years later in bloody Civil War. On some issues the nation’s founders were ordinary politicians, compromising for votes.

It would take 189 years for the soaring language to ring true for Dora Baines, documented in the then Telegram-Tribune.

Fears lifted, Negro woman registers

By Bill King
Staff Writer

The right to vote-a common place thing to most Americans and ignored by many-has become a reality for a 54-year-old Negro woman living in San Luis Obispo.
Wednesday, Dora Baines walked into the county courthouse and into the clerk’s office to register to vote.
No one was standing in the doorway blocking her entrance.
There were no shouts of protests or name-calling.
There were no lines of jeering whites along the walk, held back by helmeted policemen.
It was quiet-a normal afternoon at the clerk’s office. Mrs. Baines simply walked in, announced her intentions, signed an affidavit and walked out. It took less than five minutes.
This simple, short ceremony was a remarkable thing to Mrs. Baines who has been denied the right to vote for more than 35 years in Mississippi under threat of reprisal.
She was openly amazed at the simplicity of registering-no tests to take, no difficult questions to answer and, most of all, with no fear of having her house burned or suffering bodily harm.
For 53 years Mrs. Baines lived in Mississippi, in a small town near Natchez, in the deep, deep south, she said. “A poor area.”
She was married when she was 15 and three years later took her first job. “I cleaned a 60-80 room hotel for $5 a week,” she recalled. “Most people back there never had much,” she said. “Even most of the white folks were poor.”
Her life was routine for the next 35 years as she raised a son and went about her daily cleaning chores. She managed to buy a little home in Roxie Miss. She has never driven or had a car.
Then things started changing. Racial strife was spreading as Negros began demanding their rights and started voter registration drives. People were killed and the Ku Klux Klan burned homes, she said.
“I never tried to vote or register. I was afraid of trouble.”
With the situation in Mississippi growing more dangerous, she decided to leave about a year ago when she heard that her brother was dying of leukemia in Compton, where her son was living. She moved to Compton, bringing her invalid mother with her.
Her brother died last May and the following September she decided to move to San Luis Obispo and work. Since then she has been doing domestic housework when she can find it while still caring for invalid mother.
“I make $1.50 an hour here,” she said proudly, “and people here are as sweet as they can be.”
Registering to vote was a big moment in her life and the same may soon be possible for her mother, Rose, who is 81 and has never registered or voted.

In other front page news Dan De Vaul was not the only landlord to run afoul of county planners. In Nipomo over 200 residents signed a petition to deny expansion of a farm labor camp.

Bridge construction Avila Beach 1966ish.

This view over San Luis Creek in Avila Beach comes from a box that has mostly 1966 negatives. Unfortunately I can’t find the article, if anyone can determine the correct date I may be able to find the news clipping. There is no golf course or kids park but the Union Oil tanks are in full flower atop the hill.
It looks like construction has begun on the new bridge, this would fit in with the new nuclear power plant construction getting underway in this general time frame. Two years later archeological studies were being done at the power plant site in advance of construction.

The remains of rail bridge Dec. 2009.

Avila Truss Bridge No. 5 was an artifact of the Pacific Coast Railroad. In an ironic twist of fate, a railroad killed by the automobile provided a bridge for cars to use. It is a measure of thin traffic counts and meager county road building funds that a 90-year-old right of way still being used.
The first train whistle to sound in San Luis Obispo came from a wood burning narrow gauge steam engine in August of 1876. What would come to be called the Pacific Coast Railroad had arrived connecting Port Harford’s steam ships with the county seat. Most other counties in the region had their eponymous city on the coast, San Diego, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco but San Luis Obispo proved to be an exception. Mission San Luis Obispo had the economic hardship of being 3 miles away from port and hemmed in on the other side by the Santa Lucia range.
Next time it rains try walking a dirt trail to Avila Beach. It won’t take long before the mud sticking to your feet is several times heavier than your shoes.
In the first week of October 1899 the Morning Tribune was positively giddy about the railroad in this item compiled by Wilmar Tognazzini in his 100 Years Ago column.

Never before have there been such scenes of activity as there are these days at Port Harford. Thousands upon thousands of sacks are piled there. Every vessel that can be utilized has been pressured into service to carry the grain away. And as fast as one pile is removed, another is dumped in its place from the cars of the Pacific Coast Railroad company……Excellent as the transportation and storage facilities (are), they are utterly inadequate. Both railroad companies, however, have increased their working forces and are working night and day to prevent any serious delay in shipments. There is no rest for the time being for the threshers, shippers and railroad men.

The rail line eventually ran south ending in Los Olivos. Dreamers and schemers floated plans to connect to Bakersfield and Santa Barbara but the rugged terrain made investors skittish.
My grandmother Mary (Patchett) Hill recalled setting out milk cans to send to the creamery in town when she was a child. The train crossed the family ranch south of where Cold Canyon Landfill is today. If you know where to look you can still find rail cuts in the hillside.
The rail line had some good years but the arrival of the Southern Pacific and the steady improvement of highways and automobiles would doom the little railroad. Some PCRR stories are collected here. The railroads crossed paths at the community of Edna and the older narrow gauge would force the Southern Pacific to build and staff the Hadley Tower to prevent train wrecks. Curtiss H. Johnson has an interesting slide show of the railroad’s brief life.
By 1941 after many years of cutbacks on the Pacific Coast Railway, all service was abandoned and the rails were soon pulled up to provide steel for the war effort.

Southern Pacific took their time completing the coast route, though the narrow gauge spurred them to greater effort. The SP predecessor Central Pacific had completed the transcontinental link with Union Pacific 7 years before the Pacific Coast Railroad came to San Luis Obispo. SP would finish links to Oregon, Los Angeles and New Orleans before turning their full attention to the coast line. The Southern Pacific would arrive from the north with service to San Francisco on May 5, 1894. Even the mighty rail giant struggled to complete the coast route to Santa Barbara working from both ends, closing the gap in March 1901. (Even then there would be changes in the route with new routes being constructed Bayshore cutoff into San Fransico, 1907 and the Montalvo Cutoff built through the Santa Susana Mountains to Los Angeles finished 1904.)
The little railroad would change the local landscape on a cultural level as well as an economic level. Much of the difficult construction had been made with Chinese labor and Historian Dan Krieger wrote just before a monument was dedicated in San Luis Obispo.

Sunday, March 5, 2006
In our region, much of the economic development — from the first county roads, the Pacific Coast railroad that stretched to the Santa Ynez valley, the construction of the piers at Port San Luis, Cayucos and San Simeon, the mercury mining that kept our county’s economy healthy during the 1870s, the origins of the local seed farming industry and the truck farming of vegetables later carried on by Japanese-American farmers — all can be tied to one man.
Wong On left his village near the city of Canton in the late 1850s. He paid his own passage to America and was free to travel wherever he could get work. By 1870, he arrived in San Luis Obispo, attracted by the climate that was good for his chronic asthma. He found work as a cook in the French Hotel, which faced the Old Mission at the intersection of Chorro and Monterey streets.
Within several years he formed a series of partnerships that made him the principal Chinese labor contractor of our region. Captain John Harford, the “father” of Port San Luis, gave him the name Ah Louis. The Ah Louis Store at Palm and Chorro streets is constructed from bricks fired in Ah Louis’ brickyard. It is one of the oldest buildings in California still owned by the family of the original builder.

Sadly the Tribune of that era failed to recognize the Chinese contributions and began running stories that favored limits on Chinese immigration even as it touted the economic benefits of the railroad. These will be the subject of future posts.

December 23, 1966 Telegram-Tribune staff.

The Telegram-Tribune had a tradition that carried through the 1980’s with a full page house ad thanking the readers and advertisers for their support from the previous year. It was a chance to give some recognition to folks who worked putting out six papers a week Monday through Saturday. Most never saw a byline in print.
Over 40 years after 1966, the advent of personal computers has abolished the composition department. Today a copy editor can press a button and send completely designed pages directly to our prepress department who place the advertisements on the page, clear digital files for output and send the information directly to output printing plates.
Intermediate steps of Linotype operation or paste up and blue pencils are a relic of the past.
Looks like technology eliminates the stereotyping jobs as well. Oh well, no one likes to be stereotyped anymore.
A job not on this list is blogger or web producer. The good old days weren’t all good.
It still takes a lot of folks who don’t get bylines to bring you the most complete source of local information on the Central Coast.
On behalf of today’s staff, thanks everyone for your support of The Tribune both print and online and we look forward to bringing you next year’s stories.

Rexall Ad Dec. 7, 1966

These were my prime Christmas years, and Rexall had it all.
It would still be a few years before I moved up to the Kodak instamatic camera outfit with flashcubes and automatic film advance. Later models would include a flash cube tower to help eliminate red eye. My first camera was the Kodak Brownie. Forget to wind it, or fail to fully wind the film forward and the exposures would stack up on the same frame. For those of you who just can’t wait to develop film you can get a Polariod Swinger.
Check out the other stuff absent from today’s shelves.
Broilmaster oven, toasts up to 6 slices of bread, $12.88.
Solid State AM radio, enjoyment for years to come, $14.95.
Jade East masculine scent, worlds apart from the ordinary, $2.50.
New General Electric slicing knives, $13.88 or go cordless with storage rack for$25.88
Walnut spice rack with two utility drawers $3.98.

The most disturbing image is the Ideal THRUSH Weapon pointed at Santa Claus.
As we all know THRUSH stands for Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. (That is if you read the companion 4th paperback to the television series. Show producers insisted the acronym had no meaning.) THRUSH wouldn’t hesitate a moment if rubbing out the jolly old elf advanced their nefarious goals.
The United Network Command for Law and Enforcement or UNCLE was on our side. “The Man From UNCLE” was great teevee of the time. I also enjoyed Mission Impossible and Mod Squad when they came along. I probably would not have watched the Woman from UNCLE though. Girls just weren’t that interesting at the time. That show only lasted one season.

Post a comment if you have a favorite holiday gift or vintage teevee memory.

Gotta go, still have Christmas shopping finish.

Thirty-six people died in the May 11, 1907, 'Shriner's Special' wreck at Honda. Photos courtesy from the George McCarron Collection.

Morning Tribune May 12, 1907. Two Extra editions were published that day.

May 12, 1907

An earlier post covered the career of the early twentieth century surgeon Dr. William Stover and mentioned what was perhaps the biggest challenge of his career, the train wreck of the Shriners special.

Historian Dan Krieger picks up the story in a column published June 13, 2004 with headlines from Morning Tribune of Sunday May, 14, 1907. The paper would publish an unprecedented two Extra editions that day.

“Frightful Wreck on the Coast Line.”
“Three Cars in Splinters — the List of the Dead Now Numbers Twenty and Will Probably Reach Thirty. While Many Were Injured — Escaping Steam Carried Death with it — Injured Brought to this City.”
***
We sometimes forget how accidents and natural disasters can affect our lines of communication. But when there is a death toll, such accidents truly hit us where we live.
Such was the case in 1907.
The headlines of the Morning Tribune for Sunday, May 12, 1907, shocked this railroad town where news of wrecks was common. This was the worst disaster in the history of the Central Coast before more recent aircraft crashes. The death toll reached 36.
Before airliners, giant dams and large buildings, shipwrecks and train wrecks were the source of the worst peacetime man-made disasters.
San Luis Obispo was along a rugged coast. Since 1901, the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Coast Route went through the length of our region. Accidents could happen even in good weather.
The 1907 accident on the Southern Pacific’s Coast Route had happened in clear weather. Honda, the site of the derailment, was along a wind-swept stretch of barren sand dunes 65 miles north of Santa Barbara between Point Conception and the mouth of the Santa Ynez River at Surf.
This lonely spot would later host another great tragedy when seven U.S. Navy destroyers plowed into the rocky jaws of Honda’s coastline in 1923.
Like the naval tragedy that took 23 lives 16 years later, the Honda train wreck involves both irony and mystery. There was only one train involved in the accident. It was pulling six passenger cars, a luggage car, diner and sleepers.
Normally, passenger train No. 21 consisted of a single train, but on May 11, it had been broken up into several sections consisting of separate trains to accommodate a greatly increased clientele. The train was serving as a “Shriner’s Special.”
Its passengers were mostly nobles of the Mystic Shrine and their wives on a pleasure trip west from Reading, Pa., and Buffalo, N.Y.
What had been planned as the outing of a lifetime abruptly turned into a calamity of the worst sort just as the passengers were enjoying the scenery of the stark and rugged coast.
John Calvin Hoffeditz from Reading, Pa., survived the wreck and was taken to the San Luis Sanitarium (later the “old” French Hospital, which still stands as an office building on the west side of the 1100 block of Marsh Street near Toro Street) where he was treated for a fractured ankle, a 4-inch scalp wound and numerous facial abrasions.
Hoffeditz was among the lucky ones who were not scalded with steam from the engine’s ruptured boiler. He reported that he was in the diner at the time of the wreck:
“I had been seated at the table about 20 minutes when I felt a sudden lurch of the car and the next thing I knew I was wedged in with a mess of car timbers and all about me the moans and sobs of the injured could be heard.”
The Morning Tribune’s reporter added that:
“Mingled with these heart-rending cries came the noise of escaping steam from the engine and its shower of death brought forth the greatest horrors of the awful catastrophe.
“People who would have had some chance to escape or later to have recovered from their injuries were so scalded that death soon resulted.
“Indeed, … third degree burns resulting from escaping steam appear to have been the greatest single killer and crippler in the disaster.”
Because San Luis Obispo was the closest city of any size, physicians and hospital-sanitariums here took on the monumental job of treating the injured.
A Mr. Johns, the train’s conductor, telegraphed the first news of the wreck into San Luis Obispo by shinning up a telegraph pole and employing a special telegraphone to tap his signal up the line.
Four physicians from San Luis Obispo were on the relief train that reached the wreck site within two hours: Drs. Paul Jackson, J. Knowlton, W. M. Stover and C. J. McGovern.
The bodies of those found dead at the scene were removed by a train that had come from Santa Barbara.
The San Luis Obispo train took the injured to the quickly overcrowded San Luis and Hageman sanitariums, which were located on Marsh Street.
Dr. Stover recalled his experiences on the ride back to San Luis Obispo:
“The moans and cries of the injured and dying filled the car. Four of those on board died en route. … During their last moments [they] were calling for loved ones far away.
“With the nurses we were kept busy trying to alleviate as much as possible the intense suffering of those in the two cars.”
San Luis Obispo’s doctors and nurses performed heroically during this emergency situation.
The accident’s survivors had only praise for our community and the medical care that they received here. Their greatest anxieties were over not wanting to be transferred to the Southern Pacific Railroad’s hospital in San Francisco.

I’m not sure what it says about the state of health care in Santa Barbara when the medical help was dispatched from San Luis Obispo and the dead were sent south.

The train was estimated to be traveling at 30 miles per hour when the accident happened, the third section of an at least four section special. Author of the book “Southern Pacific’s Coast Line”, John R. Signor describes the event as the worst tragedy on the coast route between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
When the engine derailed, cars telescoped into the boiler releasing steam and killing passengers trapped in the splintered cars. Most were the diners who had just sat down for lunch.
Grand juries in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara could not agree on the cause. Early theories included a boulder on the tracks or a failed axle in the engine. San Luis Obispo coroner’s jurors investigating the accident cited faulty equipment, Santa Barbara’s could find no cause.
The wreck would be the worst loss of life recorded on the Central Coast until Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 crashed near Cayucos killing all 43 on board on December 7, 1987.

1893 Grover, er, Huntington Beach promotional poster

SOUTH COUNTY– In 1887, Southern California was experiencing an unprecedented boom in real estate values. lAt the height of the boom, land values in some areas were doubling monthly.
The South County was not immune to the excitement, and many new communities were laid out in anticipation of hordes of new residents. Many new developments were promoted, each hoping to be in on the next big community.
The boom was fueled by a rate war between the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific railroads. At its height on March 6 1887 the cost of a ticket from Kansas City to Los Angeles was lowered to $1.00. Though fares quickly went back up they stayed much lower than they had been, and thousands of new immigrants flocked to California.
Among the developers who hoped to cash in on the influx of new settlers was a 35-year-old Santa Cruz native who was involved in many promotions. One, though, he decided to name for himself. It was to be a beachfront community with wide boulevards, a train station for the eagerly awaited Southern Pacific Railroad, a resort hotel and many hundreds of residents. This was the dream of Dwight W. Grover.
Grover was also involved in the founding of Templeton, and the expansion of Nipomo, and the founding of Los Alamos. But it was not until he and George Gates purchased land from John M. Price and Adam Spath, that grover developed a community he named for himself.
The new community seemed to have everything going for it. It was the height of the boom.
Grover and Gates had the community laid out with broad streets named for famous worldwide resorts. The grand hotel was started by AMr. Laird. a retail liquor store was started by Adam Spath, who had sold Grover and Gates part of the property, and a grand auction was held.
The initial offering was a great success, with $15,000 paid for 133 lots on the first day and an additional $7,500 for 75 lots on the second. The future looked rosey for the new town.
Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. Grover and Gates were counting on the arrival of the Southern Pacific to help their new community grow. The SP however, stopped at Santa Margarita in 1889 and did not make it to San Luis Obispo until 1894. In 1895 it finally made it through Grover–without stopping.
The SP got a better deal in Oceano, and located its depot there. Before this, in 1888, California experienced the worst bust in its history. Land values plummeted on a scale that up to that time had been unimaginable. Many developers and promoters of new communities and subdivisions, including Grover and Gates, were caught with land that was worth a fraction of what they paid for it.
Grover and Gates, while losing their interest in Los Alamos and Nipomo, managed to hold onto their property at the Town of Grover for a few years. They left the area, but continued to sell a few lots now and then.
many local businessmen had purchased land in the new town, and some continued to do so. Aron and Alexander, merchants from Arroyo Grande, and C.L. St. Clair, an news stand and tobacco dealer from San Luis Obispo, were among those who purchased lots in the new town after 1890.
In 1893, Grover returned to his namesake community to try to promote it a second time. His timing again was bad, though as that was the year of one of the worst depressions of the 19th century. After this last attempt Grover sold out.
On Jan. 23 1894, The unsold property in the Grover Townsite, about 1,000 acres in total had new owners.
Charles J. Russell, Moses Cerf and a Mr. Mowry, purchased D.W. Grover’s interest in his namesake community. They felt they would be more successful than Grover and Gates, and had quite a promotional effort in mind.
A bird’s eye artist’s view of the community was commissioned and printed for distribution to prospective buyers. The beach, which had heretofore been known as part of the great Pismo Beach, was renamed where it abutted the townsite. Henceforth this part of the beach was to be known as Huntington Beach.
The Tribune described the new view in an article in its July 25, 1893, issue:
“Yesterday, Mr. C.J. Russell handed us one of the early proofs of a new picture, a lithographed bird’s eye view of the bay of San Luis Obispo and its surroundings…We think the object has been quite well attained and concur in the endorsement given the view by a great number of the principal citizens of this city and Arroyo Grande.
The lithograph is obviously gotten up in the interests of the projected town of Grover, and the surrounding country is laid down with reference to that town.”
The train was coming and everything seemed poised for success again. By 1895 John Dockery started running a stage line to Grover, in addition to the Pismo Beach and Arroyo Grande. Russell, Cerf and Mowry were probably congratulating themselves on a job well done, expecting great things of their community.
However as we already know, the train bypassed Grover. The community failed to grow as anticipated, though a few sales did continue to occur. The end of the century brought the townsite back on the market.

Grover Beach gets the last laugh. Southern Pacific no longer exists, bought out by bitter rival Union Pacific, and the city now has the rail station. Happy birthday Grover Beach.

The West Coast Land Company was a major advertiser of the late 1800's.

May 14, 1890

Recent stories have featured included new proposals for development near San Miguel and the nationwide speculative real estate bubble that burst affecting hard money lenders and their investors.

Over the decades the only constant in the market has been that it does not go in the same direction forever.

One of the early developers who was able to glide over the ups and downs of the market was C.H. Phillips of the West Coast Land Company. Two other successful local businessmen involved were Morris Goldtree and R.E. Jack. You may have been to an event at the Jack House in San Luis Obispo. Goldtree was one of the 21 merchants that lobbied the Southern Pacific to build into San Luis Obispo and helped negotiate the rights of way over the Cuesta Grade through town. His family was honored with a flag stop name on the line on the opposite side of Stenner Creek from town when brother Issac donated land for the right of way.
Many people speculated on the combination of railroad construction and the breakup of the Spanish land grant ranchos.
The railroad enabled opened markets for farms and ranches and also brought jobs to towns lucky enough to become operations centers.
Phillips made clever investments and kept enough cash flow to ride out the financial panics that broke many other speculators. His company operated much like a bank financing sales over five to seven years.
No doubt today we all would like to have some land at $15 to $40 an acre.
This was in an era when a 5 room house near the courthouse was advertised for rent at $6 a month.
The copy trumpets the promise of an investment:

THE TRIUMPHANT SUCCESS of the West Coast Land Company in developing San Luis Obispo County has now become a matter of history and is a marvel in the development of the state. In plan, execution, and general results the work of the Company forms a brilliant exception to all other like undertakings. Beginning in 1884 with the purchase, subdivision and sale of the Huer Huero Ranch, and followed in 1865 by the purchase, subdivision and sale of the Paso Robles, Santa Ysabel and Eureka Ranches by the West Coast Land Company–comprising 100,000 broad acres of the Finest Section of the State for the production of Wheat, Oats, Barley, the vine, the Olive and all Deciduous Fruits–the six years have accomplished the settlement on these lands of five hundred fammilies of the most intelligent and enterprising of settler , have increased the population of the county ten thousand and the taxable wealth $10,000,000. In short have made

A VERITABLE GARDEN OF EDEN

out of an empire formerly used exclusively for sheep-grazing.

The advertisement went on to outline terms and suggest that the land could be paid for twice in seven years by any energetic wheat farmer. The ad claimed that San Luis Obispo County had the best average rainfall in the state, and requires no irrigation.
Loren Nicholson has written about this era in his book Rails Across the Ranchos.

An ad next door touts the availability of the trotting stallion Magic. For the price of an acre of land, ( $15) or three months rent you could have a colt sired. In this pre-automotive era horses were not only a way to get around but the subject of an active racing community as well. After several paragraphs on statistics and antecedents the advertisement concludes:

This happy combination of great trotting blood is too well known in this State to need further comment.
Apply to
H. Tracy, Agent.
C.M. Weeks, Owner.

Lastly at the bottom of the page, a little self promotion:

EVERYBODY READS THE WEEKLY TRIBUNE
A Premium with every Cash Subscription.

A premium! Goody!

Waiting in line at the main post office on Marsh St. in 1968.

December 3, 1968
One of the institutions that provide a foundation for a community is the Post Office.
Even with the advent of e-mail, alternative parcel delivery companies and electronic payment there is something special about getting a Christmas card delivered to your house.
Long time Telegram-Tribune reporter Warren Groshong also worked part time for the U.S. Postal Service and wrote this story for the Focus section. Michael Raphael took the photos.

The San Luis Obispo Post Office, like all the stores in the area, is all tooled up and ready for the annual Christmas rush.
“We expect nearly 12 million pieces of mail to go through this office during the month of December,” said Postmaster Edward F. Harrington.
The regular compliment of 183 employees is expected to handle the bulk o f the mail during the rush. However, the local office is hiring up to 40 additional workers for the heaviest six day period just before Christmas day.
Also, the government has rented 15,000 square feet in the old Rand Halpin wholesale grocery warehouse on Santa Barbara Avenue to handle the parcel post.
The main work section in the main office on Marsh Street has been filled with extra mail cases.
The local operation also has a carrier annex on lower Marsh Street as well as a warehouse for extra equipment at Camp San Luis Obispo.

This was before the postal facility was built off of Madonna Road. The story went on to encourage patrons to use the ZIP code that had been introduced five years earlier. About 70 per cent of the users had picked up the habit. Today my credit card uses the ZIP number to confirm purchases.
At the time the San Luis Obispo office was one of 550 section centers that shipped directly to Long Island, N.Y. without stopping for sorting. If I am not mistaken we now send to a regional sorting facility in Santa Barbara.

Name three things you won’t see in today’s post office. Lyndon Johnson’s photo, ash trays, large mechanical scales, hand lettered signs. Oops that’s four.