Posts Tagged ‘San Diego Herald’

Much of what we know about San Diego’s first decade as an American town is found in the files of our first newspaper, the San Diego Herald. Original copies of the Herald are exceedingly rare but a complete file is preserved in Special Collections at the San Diego Public Library. We owe that complete file to the foresight of Ephraim W. Morse, who preserved a whole run and sold it to the library for $100 in 1901. The letter below documents that important transaction. The library’s run of the Herald was microfilmed many years ago and can be viewed at the San Diego Central Library. The newspaper has also been digitized and is available for research at the Internet site of the California Digital Newspaper Collection: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/

The first issue of the Herald.

After surmounting difficulties and suffering anxieties that would have disheartened any but a live Yankee, we are enabled to present the first number of the Herald to the public. –John Judson Ames, editor, San Diego Herald.

San Diego’s first newspaper, the Herald, appeared on May 29, 1851, only twelve days after the first issue of the Los Angeles Star, the earliest newspaper in Southern California. The editor and publisher of the Herald was thirty-year-old John Judson Ames, a towering, six-foot six-inch “live Yankee” from Calais, Maine.

Read the story of John Judson Ames and the San Diego Herald.

Sister Aimee, ca. 1920

When Aimee dived into the Pacific Ocean and emerged on the Mexican desert, thus performing a feat which will not be duplicated until babies grow on walnut trees, she reckoned that the rest of the world was as foolish as she. –San Diego Herald, July 29, 1926

The apparent drowning death of famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson off the coast of Santa Monica in 1926 shocked the world. Even more stunning was her reappearance weeks later in the Sonora desert. The sensational story she told of her kidnapping and miraculous escape spawned front-page news coverage that lasted for months. But for a fearless San Diego newspaper editor, the reporting of Aimee’s “ten days in a love shack,” meant Federal indictment and a lurid court trial.

The story of The Evangelist and the Muckraker.

George Horatio Derby

We found ourselves in a large bar and billiard-room . . . Here I saw Lieutenant Derby, of the Topographical Engineers, an elderly gentlemen of emaciated appearance and serious cast of features. . .