What happened to Bonzagni Lodge in La Honda? Was it bombed in the 1930s?
Did it burn?
Too Too Gorgeous to Work
November in El Granada: Enjoy the warm weather.
Is that a foghorn I hear? I hope not.
Update: Patricia Cornwell’s “Predator” & A Personal Note
I’m almost finished with Patricia Cornwell’s latest book, "Predator," and, I know, I know I complained about the work in an earlier post. But after I got through that rough spot the book turned into a real page-turner, a gory page-turner, you just can’t take that stuff seriously. I don’t let the gory stuff penetrate…I must have missed one of her earlier books because her niece, Lucy, and former cop-now "co-worker", Marino, sure have gone through some serious personality changes. Cornwell also has former FBI man Benton bitterly complain about how the effect of the Patriot Act on personal privacy.
Do you remember when President Clinton was defending himself from yet another womanizing charge–I forget her name, she was doing volunteer work, fundraising, her husband had committed suicide because he was bankrupt, and she said she told Clinton and he touched her improperly. Remember? She even went on 60 minutes with her charges.
In the heat of all this embarrassment Clinton said something like: go ask Patricia Cornwell, down in Virginia ask her what people think (of this woman who was bringing charges against the President).
In Cornwell’s new book, one evil character wears a hood, and that could be what put me off.
I remember a frightening incident, the first time such a thing had happened to me, oh, in the early 1980s. I was working for a little over-the-hill newspaper, free-lancing, and I was assigned to do a story on a few bars with character, historic. I took a girlfriend with me. As I recall there was a cowboy bar on Canada Road in Woodside and another on Skyline.
And then around 10 p.m. we headed over Highway 92, back home to the Coastside. I was driving and I intended to drop my friend off at her home in Half Moon Bay when I looked in the rear view mirror and told her: "I think we’re being followed."
I wasn’t sure; I’d never been followed before.
"That car’s still there. I’m not taking you home."
I decided to drive to El Granada; I was looking for police.
My friend said, "Why don’t you go to the ‘quick stop’. There’s a phone there." 
The ‘quick stop’, that’s what we called it, was open ’til midnight and all lit up and outside there was a phone booth (an almost extinct species now).
It was dark driving along the road paralleling Highway 1, and nobody else was around, and when I looked in the rearview mirror, the car was still there, not sitting on my bumper, back back a few car-lengths. But now instead of it just being a car and not being able to see anything but the car, there was a frightening change—the man, it must have been a man, had turned the interior light on and had covered his head with a hood!
I don’t remember if I screamed but I knew I was close to the "quick-stop" and the lights and the phone and that gave me confidence. The man in the car behind us must not have known. Had he followed us from one of the bars we visited? He must have!
Seconds later I saw the lights, we were safe (and the car that had followed us vanished back into the darkness). I ran to the phone and called the police and they came right away and they followed my car as I took my friend home and they followed me home and said they would be checking my house all night long. Which the police did, shining a search light on my house every so many minutes.
A Poster To Read By
My favorite poster, circa 1920s.
1946: Murder in Montara: Part I
Warning: If you don’t like gruesome murders, please don’t read this true story.
WW II was over, and it was the early summer of 1946, a time to feel happy to be alive.
John Kyne, well known oldtimer in Moss Beach and Montara, was walking in Wagner Canyon–named after the publisher who “founded Montara”– near the Coastside Nursery when he had one of those horrific life-changing encounters–the kind you wish you never had. He ran into a pretty young woman stumbling about in a daze. She was barefoot and could barely stand; she kept falling to her knees. It looked like she was wounded. Kyne heard her mumbling, calling out unfamiliar names, calling for Vorhas, Caroline and Barbara–but she was calling into the wind because there was nobody else there. At least no one else who was alive.
John Kyne walked in the direction the woman had come from and discovered the horror: two tiny children, two little girls, dead. Their fully clothed bodies lay nine feet apart with a layer of leaves covering them. Kyne shielded the injured woman from seeing them.
Apparently the dead girls’ mother, the woman had a deep skull fracture and it didn’t take much for Kyne to realize a terrible crime had been committed in his neighborhood, and he tried to make the woman comfortable while calling the local authorities. Meanwhile the pretty young lady, no more than 25 -years- old, fell into and out of conciousness. Kyne hoped medical help would arrive quickly.
Kyne’s son, Peter, was a famous novelist, whose subjects were lighthearted, and John couldn’t help but wonder what Peter would think of this real-life drama his father had been thrust into the middle of.
Half Moon Bay Constable Fred Simmons was one of the first to arrive and took the woman to the nearby Community Hospital. She had a deep five-inch gash in her skull, the weapon, some kind of blunt instrument.
Her condition was extremely serious, said Colonel Harold Roycroft, the medical superintendent at Community Hospital, giving her a 50-50 chance of survival. Interrogating her was discouraged but Chief Deputy Sheriff Walter H. Moore did get a few questions in before she lapsed into semi-consiciousness. Within hours he learned that her name was Lorraine Newton, that she was from Alameda, that she had been crawling around all night and that she remembered little other than driving to Rockaway Beach in Pacifica with her husband and two daughters.
Lorraine Newton had also mumbled about looking at the waves in the afternoon or was it in the evening. She was confused; she couldn’t remember. She didn’t know her little girls were dead and that horrible reality was going to be kept from her until she fully recovered.
Sheriff Moore wanted to know where the husband, Vorhas Newton, was, and detectives fanned out to find him. Was the husband the perpetrator of this vicious, senseless crime?
Despite the horrific circumstances, there was a light moment when Constable Simmons asked Sheriff Moore how his son, Gordon, was doing. Moore loved this question; he couldn’t believe his son, Gordon, born in Pescadero, (and the future founder of the high tech blockbuster Intel) was a genius, and he told everyone so, this time being no exception.
Meanwhile the two little dead girls were taken to the A.P. Dutra Chapel in Half Moon Bay. The autopsy performed there revealed that both children, seven- month- old Caroline and the almost two- year- old Barbara had died of skull fractures.
John Kyne may have had the missing link: He saw a car drive up the trail into Wagner canyon the day before and saw the same car speed down the road later. A man was driving and surely Kyne was able to describe the man as well as the make and model of the car, just what the police needed to track down the possible killer. And they were bearing down fast.
….to be continued
In the neighborhood, is there a collective heartbeat?
My neighbors, the couple who had lived in the house across the street for 16 years, put their home up for sale, sold it in about a week and a month later moved to Hawaii.
We knew each other well enough to cross the street (both ways) and have dinner and there was a party or two. On my walks I saw one of them every day.
When I learned they were moving, I felt funny….change was coming, and I felt unsettled,my heart beat a little faster, and I wondered “Is there a collective heartbeat on the block?”
All these years, all of us who live on this block in ten houses have had an understanding…we come and go predictably, there’s no unexpected noise, and well, what else is there? Ultimately, doesn’t this predictability turn into a kind of heartbeat, even a collective heartbeat?
And when someone moves, doesn’t that heartbeat change until the new coming and going is established?
Postal Order Model
The sign beside this lovely Coastsider reads: Postal Order, etc. She’s probably posing at the old Moss Beach post office. Although too dark, this image has always been a favorite of mine and so I am sharing it with you.
Incident at Billy Grosskurth’s Hotel: Part III
On New Years Eve 1934 the superrich, eccentric George Whittell slipped into his chauffeur-driven automobile and began the bumpy ride from his Woodside estate, where at least one lion roamed about, and headed over a squiqqly road to the Coastside, to the Marine View Tavern in Moss Beach, and its host, Billy Grosskurth, the man with a showbiz past.
Since the end of prohibition business had grown quiet at both the Marine View and its neighbor, Franks, a llively roadhouse which had been built six years earlier. At the peak of prohibition, in the late 1920s, politicians and silent film stars wandered back and forth, between Billy’s hotel and the newer place next door.
The final minutes of 1934 were ticking away when George Whittell pulled up in front of Billy’s three-story hotel overlooking the Pacific. We can only imagine how shocked and stunned witnesses were when the elegantly dressed millionaire got out of the car with a lion cub on a leash–it was as though he were walking his pet dog.
I don’t know what brought George Whittell to Billy’s hotel. Maybe it was on a whim, to celebrate the closing of the old year in Moss Beach. What they talked about I haven’t a clue.
Charles P. Tammany, Whittell’s chauffeur, said that Billy invited Whittell and the adorable five month old pet lion into the hotel. Against the advise of Whittell, added the chauffeur, Billy began to play and tease the lion. The lion was so cuddly cute, but at that moment it wasn’t feeling playful–and started to maul poor Billy. Or so he said in the lawsuit that followed.
“It was a wild African lion of vicious and irascible nature,” testified Billy Grosskurth.
“It was a friendly gentle little lion kitten of kind and amiable temperament,” countered George Whittell.
For the terror and mauling he suffered, Billy sued the Woodside millionaire for $250,000. He added that Whittell was of a depraved and vicious character and delighted in the animal’s attack.
But Billy was no match for George. Whittell, playing a game he was long familiar with, responded that he was a Nevada resident which may have technically protected him from Californian litigation at the time– (remember, Whittell had built the spectacular Thunderbird Lodge at Lake Tahoe, on the Nevada side, which I have visited, and can assure the reader of its uniqueness, in particular, the underground tunnel where Bill, the lion roamed freely, and where George, after a late night of drinking and gambling took his friends on a tour–).
A year later Billy Grosskurth’s lawsuit was dismissed.
As for the Marine View Tavern, the glory of what it had been during Prohibition continued to fade but Billy refused to sell the property. By the 1950s the building was decaying–and Billy became a familiar sight on the porch, playing solitaire and reminiscing about the past.
During the summer of 1958 there was a fire in Moss Beach and the Marine View Tavern hotel was torn down. The hotel had been Billy’s life and a year later he died at age 75.
Last look at the Marine View Tavern
Is This a Dangerous Place for A Bus Stop?
Is this a dangerous place for a bus stop?
The bus stops at Coronado and Plaza Alhambra in El Granada, across the street from the Wilkinson School and a couple of blocks from the El Granada school. There’s no crosswalk anywhere so if you cross the street when the big bus, with the right-of-way, is coming, headed for the bus stop, you’re in big trouble. You could run, but….
There’s another much safer bus stop a couple of blocks down the street.
Shouldn’t this bus stop be eliminated?
That’s the bus stop on the left.
The Singularity
The Singularity is one of those mind-boggling things. I understand it but I can’t explain it clearly. It’s like you’re standing at the Apple Store counter, the clerk just took your money for the most up-to-date, latest IPOD and the new, latest up-to-date IPOD appears right then at that very moment. It’s like change is….
Am I getting that right? Close?
There’s nothing but change. Change takes on a whole new meaning, there’s no time in beween change. My example was a technological one-but what if EVERYTHING is changing as it’s changing.
Whew! Please.
I can’t remember where I first read about “the singularity” but there is a new book out by Ray Kurzweil called “The Singularity is Near”. I believe Kurzweil invented a reading machine for the legally blind, it enlarges (really big) book and magazine and newspaper print. Pretty cool.
