Pescadero Memories

By June Morrall

The year is 1919

Suddenly Sarah had seconds thoughts about her attorney John McNab’s advice. With Wally’s future welfare on her mind, she walked across the road to Carl Littlefield’s home. He had worked for her millionaire husband and she now asked him to call a certain lawyer in San Francisco and ask him to come to Pescadero immediately.

Why didn’t Sarah use her own telephone?

She was afraid to make a call from her own home because all calls went through the local village operator, who, it was rumored, often listened in on Sarah’s line.

Later that evening Sarah’s neighbors, the blacksmith Manual Goularte, and his son, Frank, a ladies’ man, who wore a glass “diamond” ring and favored white straw hats, sat on their porch directly across from the Coburn house. Although electric lights had not yet reached Pescadero, and it was dark, the Goulartes said they watched Sarah lock her front door for the night. They waved a friendly goodnight and she waved back for the last time.

………………more……………….

By June Morrall

After enjoying a home-delivered roast chicken dinner on the evening June 3, 1919, Sarah Coburn wasn’t feeling so well. She was feeling downright sick. She was old, feeble, losing her health and aware that death was ready to snatch her.

But tonight was different; she was ill and she wanted to lie down. That was hard to do because Wally was on her mind, what would happen to Wally, who would take care of him?

She also remembered what one of her attorneys said the other day. John McNab voiced concern about her safety in the house. In his 90s, Loren Coburn had died during the Influenza Pandemic the year before. McNab told her to take special precautions, hire a bodyguard, he said, draw up a will.

He also said that it was well known she kept a big safe containing a large amount of cash in the dining room –but she hadn’t taken McNab’s advice.

What Sarah had done was announce she was going to buy a limousine and hire a chauffeur. She had planned to discuss this with her housekeeper, Margaret Harrison–but Margaret had gone to San Francisco to shop for new clothes for a trip she and Sarah were taking back East where the Coburn’s relatives lived. They were scheduled to leave in a few days.

Now Sarah was sick and Margaret hadn’t come back from San Francisco.

…more….

By June Morrall

[The year is 1919]

Andy Stirling, a personable fellow in his late 30s, was supposedly a trusted friend of Sarah Coburn. While holding court at the Elkhorn Saloon on San Gregorio St., Andy told his buddies that Wally had become unpredictable. He would get mad over nothing and start hammering nails in the walls. Andy added that the way things were going, Wally was capable of anything–even of killing his stepmother!

To bring home his point, Andy held up a pair of restraints, straps that he claimed Sarah used to restrain her stepson from harming others.

…more…

And some notes:

The year is 1919.

Jobs were hard to come by. If you were in with the right clique in the old days you had your own way. Nobody had money to buy land here [Pescadero] until after WWII.

By June Morrall

When Sarah’s husband, Loren, was alive, he confided that his personal life was a “living hell.”

Not only was Sarah bossy but sadly his son, Wally, whom he dearly loved, was not like most other children. Wally had to be protected and taking care of her step-son had become Sarah’s purpose in life.

By June Morrall (1988)

The teenagers in the village of Pescadero thought that Mrs. Sarah Coburn–who told everybody she was 68 when she was actually 82– the kids thought she was a very rich, polite and proper lady. But sometimes they couldn’t resist looking in the windows of her house to see if they could see anything.

With her steel gray hair pulled back tightly into a bun, Sarah Coburn occasionally stood at the front gate of her wood frame ranch home on San Gregorio St and watched the schoolchildren walk by. She might say, “Good Morning,” or single out the prettiest flowers in bloom tended by the Portuguese ranchhand Joe Quilla. Sometimes her 68-year-old mentally challenged stepson, Wally, was at her side.

Sarah was frugal, rumored by the other housewives to fry potatoes, with watered-down lard and to hide money in the walls behind the wallpaper and then forget about it. Everybody knew there was a lot of cash in the house but Sarah felt safe; she always locked all the doors.

While the kids didn’t pay much attention to Sarah, the grown-ups had their own ideas about her. Through their eyes she was an old lady who loved to wear gingham dresses and boss people around and nobody likes to be bossed around. She couldn’t take her own medicine, though, and everybody knew you “couldn’t tell her to do anything.”

If there was one word to describe Sarah Coburn, locals said it was “testy.”

…more…

By June Morrall

The Body is Discovered

June 3, 1919

Frank “Kid” Zug, a mediocre pugilist, former sailor and sometime house painter, couldn’t sleep.

The hands of the clock in his hotel room read past midnight. He’d downed a few stiff drinks at the Social Hall, a hidden villa, two miles east of town and had a bite of dinner at the old Swanton House in the center of Pescadero where he was living at the moment.

“Kid” Zug couldn’t complain about Pescadero, he liked the atmosphere. With a wall of tree-covered mountains to the east, “Lincoln Hill” to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west, Pescadero was the end of the line, a wild west town.

A month earlier a serious case of pneumonia had landed the 60-year-old Zug in the hospital on the other side of the tree-covered mountains–and he was still feeling weak. That and the drinks he had should have helped him sleep soundly.

He flicked off the light at 7 p.m. but after midnight a neighbor’s bloodhounds and a pack of local dogs began barking in front of Zug’s hotel on San Gregorio Road [now Stage Road] startling him out of his fitful sleep. The dogs were barking and running from one end of the dirt road to the other; they must have done so a dozen times. After an hour the barking finally stopped and the “Kid” sank into a welcome deep sleep.

——–more——–

By June Morrall

The San Francisco newspapers splashed the murder story across the front page; there were photos of Sarah and the house where she had lived in Pescadero.

Sarah Coburn’s murder came at an inopportune time for Franklin Swart, the busy San Mateo County District Attorney. The San Francisco police were poking their nose into the Inez Reed affair [a nasty case involving a botched abortion], and Captain Duncan Matheson, chief of the San Francisco Detective Bureau would be sitting next to him in the courtroom, breathing down his neck.

There had been a longtime rivalry between the two police departments–with the San Francisco police believing themselves vastly superior to their counterparts in San Mateo County. The cops from the City were growing impatient with progress on the Inez Reed case, one which they thought they could solve much faster, if only they could lose the cops from San Mateo where the murder occurred.

SF Police Chief D.A. White gloated: “If we can get the body [of Inez Reed]…

[Note: this stops here and I change gears to begin the story again…see next post…]

By June Morrall

Wednesday, June 4, 1919

San Mateo County District Attorney Franklin Swart had his hands full with the sensational Inez Reed murder case. Jury selection was to begin in a few days. Now, when the eyes of voters were fixed on his every move, he was called to investigate an equally headline-grabbing murder.

The new victim was Mrs. Sarah Satira Coburn, the rich, elderly widow of an eccentric Pescadero landowner. The killing took place in her ranch home in the tiny, remote South Coast farming village. She had been clubbed to death.

The D.A. knew the Coburn name very well. There were few who didn’t know the Coburn name in San Mateo County.

For years and years the Coburn’s private and public lives had provide the seeds of gossip. Their public life steered them in and out of courtrooms. Mrs. Coburn’s husband, Loren, should have been a lawyer–he earned the distinction of being the most litigious individual in the county.

Rich–as he was–Loren Coburn often didn’t pay his lawyers when their work was done and they often had to sue in order to collect their fees.

….more….

Historic photos of Pescadero are hard to come by. The San Mateo County History Museum, my favorite charity, may have the most complete collection–but more would be very welcome.

*Pescadero: In 1833 ‘el Pescadero’ (the Fishing Place) was the name of the valley place around the present town. By the middle 1850s the Spanish village here was called ‘the’ Pescadero. In the late ’50s American settlers took over the place, which they were inclined to call Piscadero; this pronunciation can still be heard. The present form of the name was standard by the middle ’60s.

The land grant record of 1833 states that the place had been ‘previously called San Antonio’: this may be the same as the Indian village San Antonio mentioned in the Santa Cruz Mission register between 1795 and 1802.–Place Names of San Mateo County by Dr. Alan K. Brown, (SMCHA, 1975)

**The Pescadero Basin: The Santa Cruz Lumber Company has for around 30 years used this term for their properties in the upper Pescadero Creek valley above Memorial Park.–Place Names of San Mateo County by Dr. Alan K. Brown (SMCHA, 1975)

***Pescadero Beach: The small beach was so named when it was made a county park in 1954. Previously the name had been applied by the motorists to the large sand beach on the other side of the creek.–Place Names of San Mateo County by Dr. Alan K. Brown (SMCHA, 1975)

****Pescadero Creek: This was the ‘arroyo del Pescadero’ by the late 1830s, and probably long before (the Santa Cruz mission had ranches not far off by 1800 or 1810). The present form of the name appeared with the first American settlers; ‘the Pescadera creek’ is mentioned in a record of 1854. The name is considered to extend up the farthest headwater branch, although this has occasionally been regarded as a separate tributary and called after one or two settlers. — Place Names of San Mateo County by Dr. Alan K. Brown

*****Pescadero Junction: (Intersection of the Coast highway and the Pebble Beach road.) The name is occasionally used. When the new highway was built in 1941 the old Pebble Beach road (which since then no longer runs all the way to Pebble Beach) became the main road into Pescadero. –Place Names of San Mateo County by Dr. Alan K. Brown.

******Pescadero Road: (From Pescadero to just S of La Honda.) Most of the present route was surveyed in 1870 as part of the Redwood City and Pescadero Road project, which was to link the new Pescadero annexation to the county seat. North of La Honda the route followed previously established and named roads, and so the name did not stick.–Place Names of San Mateo County by Dr. Alan K. Brown (SMCHA, 1975)