In SLO, silent movies and noisy cars marked the start of the Roaring ’20s
Definitionists pick fights about when a decade starts, but they have already lost.
No one brags about an odometer rolled over to 300,001. Hallmark doesn’t make cards for the 81st birthday.
It is the even numbers that people remember.
Here’s to 2020.
On a more solemn note, 2019 brought two sad personal milestone events.
Each of my grandmothers were survived by a sister who passed away in 2019. Ruth and Lorraine each grew up on different farms in large families.
When they were born, the Patchett and Righetti rural homes had no phone or electric power. Their early education was in one-room schoolhouses.
But newspapers from their infancy showed a changing world.
The Daily Telegram carried art from the cartoonist Bob Satterfield welcoming 1920 with the traditional baby taking over from the bearded old man. The world was horse-driven, but not for much longer.
Automobile advertising began to fill the pages of the Telegram at an accelerating rate, and county residents were advocating for better roads.
On Jan. 3, 1920, an Automobile Club of Southern California survey showed that only New York and Ohio had more cars than California but the Golden State had knocked Illinois out of third place. California had a population of about 3,000,000 — about half the size of New York City at the time.
Cayucos did not have a Polar Bear Plunge, but they did hang two effigies — “the Noes.”
Apparently the Noes had something to do with a group that had opposed spending on improving roads, and had lost in the recent election.
The next week the Tribune wrote that a funeral was held for the Noes, complete with pallbearers, and they were thrown into the ocean from the Cayucos Pier.
The Elmo Theater advertised a new pipe organ to accompany the 1919 New Year’s Eve showing of the Tom Mix black-and-white silent film “The Wilderness Trail.”
The western actor’s picture was one of the 58 cardboard celebrities seen standing with the Beatles on their 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.
The El Monterey was featuring Bessie Barriscale in “Beckoning Roads.”
Her acting career faded with talkies in the 1920s, but she was a film pioneer, establishing her own movie production company in 1919. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Movie tickets were up to 35 cents for adults, and a newspaper cost 5 cents.
The weekly Tribune advertised in December 1919 about “Some Good Victor Records for Xmas Giving, including Silent Night performed by the Trinity Choir $1.00.”
Labor-saving devices were coming to the rescue of city dwellers.
Advertising touted: “Electric washing machine a Real Servant” and “An end to the worry, exasperation and mess of washday.”
Other headlines were precursors to today’s stories.
A front page story Jan. 2, 1920, in the Daily Telegram warned communist Russians were a threat to invade Afghanistan and threaten British control of the Middle East.
“Bolsheviki threatening to invade the Far East”
The Dec. 31, 1919, Daily Telegram said 28,000 seats had been sold in Pasadena for the Harvard-Oregon football game.
The Daily Telegram carried this boosterish tag line in the masthead: “There may be a better climate than San Luis Obispo’s — but not on Earth.”
Prohibition was about to become law, but that’s a topic of a future column.
A belated Happy New Year to all. May your 2020s roar, in a good way.
