Articles by Richard Crawford

For the first time in the history of aviation, Glenn H. Curtiss yesterday performed the feat of launching his hydro-aeroplane from the water into the air, and after remaining in the air one minute and 21 seconds, alighted upon the water. He repeated his performance at will, skipping about Spanish Bight, off North Island, and circling around the craft in the harbor, with the ease and grace of the ordinary sea-bird. –San Diego Union, January 27, 1911.

The early months of 1911 would be a remarkable time in the history of aviation, particularly for pioneer flyer Glenn Curtiss. The 33-year-old former motorcycle racer was America’s most accomplished aviator: winner of prestigious speed races, a successful aircraft builder, a respected consultant to the military, and the first aviator to fly and land a plane on water. The story of The Aviator.

The Curtiss airplane on Spanish Bight at Coronado.

San Diego by nature offers the finest spot in the United States for tourists. And tourism is our largest non-government business. [Mission] Valley is part of the Planning Department’s future plan for the tourist, and we are considering throwing it down the drain . . . –Arthur Jessop, downtown merchant, June 26, 1958.

Controversial decisions in city planning are not new in San Diego but perhaps no action has ever been more consequential than a City Council vote in June 1958 to rezone 90 acres of farmland along Interstate 8–a decision that green-lighted construction of the Mission Valley Shopping Center.

Read May Co. Comes to Mission Valley.

Mission Valley Shopping Center opens, February 20, 1961.

The great need of this town is about to be supplied by A. E. Horton, Esq., who will immediately erect, on the northwest corner of Fourth and D Streets, a palatial brick edifice, for hotel purposes. It is to contain a hundred rooms and to be fitted up with elegant furniture and all modern improvements. –The San Diego Bulletin, December 18, 1869

The story of San Diego’s first hotel, the luxurious Horton House Hotel.

The Horton House Hotel, circa 1870.

A number of quite prominent San Diegans attended a seance given by Elsie Reynolds in a room at Dr. Barnes’s residence; Friday evening . . . a lady spirit was materialized and came into the audience to shake hands. A lady present, at an opportune moment, seized the spirit around the waist with one arm and clinched its wrist with the other hand. The spirit shrieked and attempted to tear itself away. . . . The seance ended abruptly.  –San Diego Union, January 20, 1889.

The religion of “Spiritualism” claimed millions of followers in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth century. Believers included Mary Todd Lincoln who hosted seances in the White House to reach her departed sons Eddie and Willie. Spiritualist demonstrations could also be entertaining, profitable for the “mediums,” and more often than not, fraudulent, as San Diegans would discover in the summer of 1888: The Spooks in San Diego

A Victorian era seance.

A postman wearing protective gauze. National Archives.

In the fall of 1918, San Diego children skipped rope to a popular rhyme:

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza

I opened the window

And in-flew-enza

In the last weeks of World War I and in the months that followed, an influenza outbreak swept the world, infecting a billion people and killing as many as 50 million. It was one of the deadliest pandemics in history. In San Diego the scourge reached epidemic proportions . . .

Read the story of The Spanish Flu.

The Board of Education has just had their attention directed to a most deplorable state of morals existing in our schools, and the evil has been traced to some degraded persons . . . poisoning the minds of boys and girls.  —Reverend Samuel J. Shaw, United Presbyterian Church, San Diego.

In 1903 San Diego, the 14th-century novel The Decameron, was the target of the book censors.  Read about the Deplorable State of Morals.

Reverend Samuel Shaw. From Smythe, History of San Diego.

A grove of eucalyptus in Rancho Santa Fe.

San Diegans planted olive trees by the hundred, citrus by the thousand and eucalyptus trees by the multi-million . . . the coming of the eucalyptus from Australia was the long awaited Millenniumâ practically a supernatural beneficence to every area of life: economical, medicinal, and ethereal. –Leland G. Stanford, San Diego librarian and author.

The story of San Diego’s eucalyptus trees.

Yesterday Tent City had a big crowd as the forerunner of the record breaker which is expected today. Every tent was crowded to capacity and day visitors packed the boats on every trip across the bay.  –San Diego Union, July 4, 1910

Fourth of July celebrations in the early 1900s were huge civic affairs. And no city did it better than Coronado in 1910. Read about Coronado’s 4th of July.

Coronado’s Tent City in the early 1900s.

Alonzo Horton, ca. 1868.

Mr. A. E. Horton yesterday donated to the San Diego Free Reading Room Association his fine library. It will be remembered by old residents that this library was bought as the nucleus for a public institution some time ago, Mr. Horton having paid a large sum of money for it.  –San Diego Union, May 21, 1873.

San Diego’s first public library struggled to open its doors. A large book donation by city father Alonzo Horton was a start. But there were strings attached. . .

The story of San Diego’s First Library.

With a roar that rocked the walls of the Savage Tire Company three hundred yards away, shook a trolley car on the rails five blocks off, and rattled the windows in the houses within the radius of over a mile, the Standard Oil Company’s 250,000-gallon distillate tanks blew up yesterday just before noon . . . –San Diego Union, October 6, 1913.

It was the most spectacular fire San Diego had ever seen. On Sunday morning, October 5, 1913, oil tanks at the Standard Oil Company plant at the foot of 26th Street exploded. The story of The Great Standard Oil Fire.

San Diegans raced to scene of the city’s spectacular oil fire.