Grab Bag #56
Parades, grizzlies, and a new San Francisco time-machine destination.
This, that, and the other thing from San Francisco’s past... here comes the every-three-weeks-or-so Grab Bag. We start with the very popular feature...
Guess Where
There’s a big clue in this photo where we are, but maybe you have more to add? And can we encourage these gentlemen to loosen their ties by the pool?
Answer at the end for Friends of Woody (who get to read that far). Not a friend? No worries, this is a sadly capitalistic society and my friendship is for sale.
I Love a Parade, Part I
On September 27, 1858, the young city of San Francisco threw a parade in commemoration of the news that the Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable had been laid connecting the old world with the new.
Never mind that San Francisco itself wasn’t part of this connection or that what all the local merchants really wanted was a cross-continental railroad to send their goods far and wide. (That wouldn’t come for a decade and sadly did the opposite of what the commercial classes hoped for.)
Also never mind that the cable had already broken and had stopped working. (San Franciscans probably did not know that because, well, poor telegraph service.)
In the end, the reason wasn’t important; a party is a party.
The city’s fire companies, militias, schoolchildren, brass bands, machinists, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers (well, candle makers at least) all turned out with floats, wagons, and gussied-up buggies to take part in the three-hour-long parade down Market Street. The Bulletin called the celebration “the greatest civic display ever known in California.”
Two local telegraph companies with their own high hopes cooperated to have side-by-side floats connected by a symbolic cable and signs reading in Yoda-like phrasing “We the globe will compass soon!”
One hundred and twenty waving girls in white dresses and blue ribbons filled a line of wagons. Cricket clubs marched. A team of carpenters showed off their skills by building a frame house from scratch while their float moved along. They almost finished it by parade’s end. Shipwrights rode upon a two-masted schooner set on wheels. The Alta California’s wagon had a printing press running off handbills. Cigar-makers, confectioners, and brewers handed out their products along the route and don’t you kind of wish you had been there?
Among several illustrations on a lettersheet issued to commemorate the event is one showing an actual bear walking in the parade and another riding in a wagon. It is captioned “Adams, with his family of Native Californians.”
Could this Adams be Grizzly Adams from the 1970s movie and short-lived television show, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams?
Turns out, yes, real person, and in San Francisco in the late 1850s trying to make a buck. Let me tell you more...