Warning to you saddlepals right up front. Don’t turn your back this morning on one particular varmint we’ll be visiting on today’s trail ride through Santa Clarita history. We’re going to be investigating our local connection to Charles Manson and look at a century of madness and suicide surrounding a small community to the north.
We’ll also say “howdy” to a none-too-happy Roy Rogers and to the biggest landowner in SCV history. Nope. It wasn’t Henry Mayo Newhall or one of the del Valles, either.
C’mon, folks. Hop into those saddles and try not to groan. It’s tres non-Westernly …
WAY, WAY BACK WHEN
PLATES FROM THE POKEY — Prior to 1914, all California license plates were privately made for individual customers. Since 1947, prisoners at Folsom Prison have been churning out millions of plates. A little trivia? Across America, prisoners also manufacture such things as women’s underwear, books for the blind, public picnic tables and benches, jeans, canoes and, in a bit of black irony, human-shaped targets on which law enforcement officers polish their target practicing skills.
ONE MEGA LAND OWNER — Prior to the government of Mexico giving Antonio del Valle most of the Santa Clarita Valley in lieu of back wages in 1839, the Camulos Ranch was owned by a Gen. Moreno. Moreno supposedly owned all the land in an 80-mile diameter centered at Camulos, to the Pacific Ocean and into the San Fernando Valley. The original road, before the Americans built the precursor to Highway 126, used to go behind the Camulos Ranch house, not in front of it as it is today.
ONE OF THOSE WINTER-SPRING RELATIONSHIPS — It was the year before the great war between the states started and on May 22 in 1860, Col. Thomas Finley Mitchell arrived to homestead up near Sand and Lost canyons. In 1865, he left his lean-to shanty to bring back a bride, 17-year-old Martha Catherine Taylor. (I heard a story that Col. Tom met Martha on a wagon train when she was a little girl and filed it away she might make a nice bride later; supposedly, Tom gave her a Teddy bear for a wedding present …) Tom and his neighbor John Lang built Sulphur Springs School (which today is the second oldest school district in Los Angeles County) and their wives taught all the kids in the neighborhood. Over the years, Mitchell’s holdings would expand to over 1,000 acres. Imagine owning 1,000-plus acres in Sand Canyon today. If you’d like to see the historic Mitchell home and what life was like in the mid-1800s, the adobe house has been re-created and awaits your perusal at Santa Clarita History Center (formerly Heritage Junction) in Newhall.
MAY 24, 1925
THEM LOUSY CHEATERS IN SANTA PAULA! — Heated controversy and sports are handmaidens. As case we cite the following description of the Newhall victory over Santa Paula: “The Santa Paula outfit don’t know what good sportsmanship means. They are as big a bunch of crybabies and rowdies as ever shamed a diamond by their presence. No team that deeply respects baseball would ever give them a return game.” Our reporter, Thornton Doelle, who was also the local forest ranger, lawman, on-again/off-again Signal editor and founder of local community theater, was rather miffed at the alleged shabby treatment by our neighbor to the west. They kept hitting batsmen and then threatened the umpire, an SP local, to yank six runs off the scoreboard in the ninth inning.
SERIOUS MAY RAIN — It rained an inch on this date, 100 years back.
MAY 24, 1935
ARNOLD HAD THE ITCHIES — We were such a small town and paper that one of the front-page stories from 90 years back was that Arnold Neufeld missed a week from elementary school. He had poison oak.
I’M STILL KINDA FOND OF INDEPENDENCE DAY — Our Fourth of July celebration and parade was just 3 years old. Famed silent film star William S. Hart came up with the idea of calling the fest “Placeritos Days.” It stuck for a few days.
AT LEAST WE’RE CONSISTENT — There were just nine cases in Judge Kennedy’s court this week 90 years ago. All of them were for drunk driving.
SUMMER, SUMMER, GO AWAY!! — August came early to the Santa Clarita, with the mercury passing the century-mark this week in May of 1935. Ouch!
MAY 24, 1945
A WILE E. COYOTE STYLED DEMISE — Willie Ruark hitched his last ride. On this date, the thumber bagged a lift from a double rig carrying 33,000 pounds of TNT. The brakes went out on the Grapevine downgrade and the truck went over the side into a deep ravine. The truck miraculously didn’t explode, but Ruark was crushed to a pulp under the tons of dynamite. The driver was unhurt.
MAY 24, 1955
THE LAST TIME HART WAS UNDER A MILLION BUCKS — The William S. Hart Union High School District, which, if you’re counting, has 40 letters and one punctuation mark. On this date, they set their budget for the next school year. A half-century ago, it was $937,000 — the last year the district was able to operate under a million bucks. In 1956, Hart crept over the seven-figure mark with a budget of $1,010,400.
GOOOOOO, MATADORS! — Speaking of schools, the state Senate voted to approve the final paperwork to open something called San Fernando Valley State College in 1956. Today, it’s called Cal State University Northridge — CSUN.
CASHING OUT — I might have to ask my pals over at the sheriff’s station to see if they have someone who has broken this record. But 70 years ago, Floyd A. Cash earned his eighth public intoxication arrest in two years. Adding to his resume, Floyd managed, on his eighth arrest, to vault out of the patrol car with his hands cuffed behind his back and disappear into the darkness. The local gendarmes didn’t capture him for a season and then some …
WHEN THE BOX OFFICE HERO LOST — In most of his movies, Roy Rogers came out on top in the end. Not so in real life. The Western film star was ordered by a Superior Court to pay $72,896 to Dr. Orwyn H. Ellis. Doc Ellis bought Roy’s 342-acre ranch near Lake Hughes in 1952. Rogers’ manager had represented the property had more than enough water to run agricultural operations. In landfault country, it sure didn’t. Doc Ellis had enough water to raise about $100 in crops. Doc sued. Doc won. Roy paid.
MAY 24, 1965
A RARE BIT OF FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY? — Remember how a decade ago was the last time the Hart district budget was under a million bucks? In 1965, they actually slashed the budget by a quarter-million. It ended up being around $2.5 million.
MAY 24, 1975
WISH THE GUY WOULD HAVE TRIED THIS BEFORE 1970 — It’s a small world. On this date, Bobby Augusta Davis, one of two men who shot and killed four California Highway Patrol officers in 1970, was involved in a prison brawl at Folsom. Kenneth Como attacked Charles Manson during one of his infrequent visits into the general prison population. Davis jumped in, but it was never made clear whether he was helping Manson or trying to hurt him with Como. At the time, Davis and Manson were on death row together. Davis ended up hanging himself in his cell in 2009.
MAY 24, 1985
NEXT, THEY WERE GOING TO CALL US ‘SAUGHALL’ — This is a pinch over the hill on Highway 138, but, it’s funny. You wonder if the darn road crews working on the sign were imported. But a new, HUGE sign stretching over two lanes and headed westbound had the typographical error of all time. The sign warned motorists that Interstate 5 was just 3/4-mile up ahead. To get to Los Angeles, get in the left lane. To go north, to “SACRASFIELD,” get in the right lane. “Sacrasfield?”
OUR FORGOTTEN NEIGHBOR TO THE NORTH — I’ll throw this in here because it’s convenient. That area of Highway 138 north of the Santa Clarita Valley by about a half-hour is called Neenach. I know the population of the area was around 80 in 1940 and it may have actually dropped 65 years later. There used to be a community of transplanted Danes from Wisconsin who founded it in the 1880s. In 1922, businessman John Shea built a castle for his wife Ellen out there. He built it hoping it would help his wife’s ill health. It didn’t. She died a year after moving into it. Shea later filed bankruptcy and committed suicide by jumping off the Santa Monica Pier, of all things. A few years later, a man by the name of Tommy Lee (no relation to my close saddlepal and former head of Newhall Land) bought the place. He too went bankrupt and killed himself. There are several other stories of people going mad in the area and that the place is haunted. All that’s left of Shea’s Castle today is rubble.
NO. YOU MAY NOT GO BIRD SHOOTING. — Daniel De Alba was a little too much the Good Son. His mother complained about a helicopter that was hovering over the wash near their Saugus home. De Alba took this as his cue to go outside with a .270 caliber rifle and take a shot at the whirlybird. It just missed. Sheriff’s deputies were called. They quickly found it was the 27-year-old man who was the culprit and arrested him without incident. Well. More incident.
HOPE IT WASN’T THE SAME DARN DRIVER — It wasn’t a good week for Calico Fuels of Bakersfield. One of their double-rig tankers rolled over on the southbound lane in Castaic, spilling thousands of gallons of oil. It was the second flip-over and spill by a Calico truck within two days.
LOCAL STREET NAME ORIGINS — A bombing of neighborhoods in Philadelphia by police made national headlines on this date. But locals were wondering about an odd similarity. Seems the streets listed in the news were Market, Pine, Spruce and Race. That’s where town founder Henry Mayo Newhall went to work after his childhood in Saugus, Massachusetts. When he founded Newhall, he brought the street names with him, according to Ruth Newhall. This somewhat contradicts an earlier item. Ted Lamkin said the name of “Race” street came from the “Human race.” Maybe it did, in Philadelphia.
• • •
Welp. What do you know. We made it back, safe and sound, despite bumping into all those outlaws and charlatans. Sure look forward to seeing you good friends, neighbors, buckaroos and buckaroo-ettes back here at The Mighty Signal hitching post in seven with another exciting Time Ranger adventure. Until then? Vayan con Dios, amigos!
Santa Clarita’s local historian and the world’s most prolific satirist/humorist John Boston hosts an eclectic bookstore and multimedia/commentary website at johnlovesamerica.com/bookstore. Pick up his two-volume set on SCV ghosts, maniacs, murderers and monsters about America’s most-haunted town — the Santa Clarita Valley — and other books.
