PIONEERS AND
TRAILBLAZERS
Many contemporary American Jews, descendants of immigrants from the Great Migration from Eastern Europe, don’t realize that the first significant community of Jews in the United States were Sephardim—many of them ‘Marranos’ (secret Jews), refugees from Inquisition persecution in Spain and Portugal. So deeply ingrained, it is said, were Marrano customs in the Newport, Rhode Island, Sephardic community of the eighteenth century that it was normal to see Jewish women on the street counting their Jewish daily prayers on necklaces of rosary beads.
The first synagogue building in the United States was the Sephardic Touro Synagogue in Newport, built by this early group of Sephardim in the 1760s. Aaron ‘Duarte’ Lopez was one of the prominent members of this community, and probably the wealthiest Jew in the American colonies at this time, having lived in Portugal with his family as an apparent Christian (as had his family before him for centuries) before fleeing in 1752 to Newport, where a half brother had settled.
On arriving in the New World, Duarte took the name Aaron; he was circumcised, and he and his wife remarried in a Jewish ceremony. He tried to make a living through maritime commerce, as did many Newport Jews, dealing at first mainly with whale spermaceti for candles, whaling and fishery.
At first he had little luck, but over the years he grew very wealthy; by the 1770s he owned thirty ships. He met with heavy losses during the American Revolution, when part of his fleet was captured and taken to Britain.
When he tried to become a citizen of Rhode Island in 1761, his petition was denied, a court ruling that only Christians could become full citizens of the colony. Massachusetts, however, accepted Lopez, although he continued living in Newport until the Revolution, when he was forced by a British advance to flee to Leicester, Massachusetts.
When the Revolutionary War had ended and Lopez was returning to Newport from Leicester, he drowned en route. Folklore has it that about five miles outside Providence, he stopped to water his horse. Suddenly the animal stepped out of its depth and plunged into the pond. Lopez was flung forward. He could not swim and drowned.
Daniel Boone, the pioneer who blazed the Wilderness Trail, was commissioned by Isaiah Isaacs and Jacob I. Cohen in the 1780s to locate some land for them; they gave him six pounds gold specie as an advance payment.
After Boone signed the receipt for the land warrants and cash, a brief description of the contents was scrawled on the back of the document in American Yiddish: “Resit fun Komel Bon for 10,000 agir lanit” (“Receipt of Colonel Boone for 10,000 acres land”).
Cohen and Isaacs later commissioned Boone to survey other lands for them, this time on the Licking River in Kentucky.
Boone did his job and presented his bill for a little more than twenty-two pounds specie. “Send the money by the first opertunety,” the frontiersman wrote. “Mr. Samuel Grant, my sister’s sun, will lykly hand you this letter. If so, he will be a good hand to send by, and I will be accountable for any money put into his hands inless kild by the Indins.”
People who had never before seen a Jew came as far as a hundred miles to look at Joseph Jonas when he reached Cincinnati in March 1817, after journeying by wagon over the mountains to Pittsburgh and then by flatboat down the ice-flecked Ohio River.
“Art thou a Jew?” an old Quaker woman asked him.
“Yes,” Jonas answered.
“Thou art one of God’s chosen people,” she said. “Wilt thou let me examine thee?”
Jonas consented. After turning him around and around, she exclaimed in disappointment, “Thou are no different to other people!”
Jonas was the first professing Jew to settle in Ohio.
Jacob De Cordova was a descendant of Spanish knights. He followed the Texas Revolution with keen interest and rejoiced when he learned the new republic welcomed Jews as well as Christians. He saw the recently-written Texas Declaration of Independence and was moved to read the Texans were rebelling against “the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.”
He arrived in Galveston in 1837, and within a few weeks became a naturalized citizen of Texas. He engaged in a variety of business ventures and officiated as hazzan (reader) for Jewish religious services held in various homes. (He moved to Houston, where he became a leading merchant and helped that city become the main trading center for the half of Texas east of the Brazos River. But the tubercular De Cordova’s health deteriorated, and a doctor warned him his only chance for life was a long stay in the high, dry, almost uninhabited areas west of the Brazos.
De Cordova set out toward the wilderness, traveling beyond Austin to where the last faint traces of white civilization gradually faded into unmapped Indian hunting grounds. As he rode seemingly endless miles, De Cordova understood the shape of his future career; he would bring people to Texas.
In 1846, Texas gave up its independence to become the twenty-eighth state of the Union. The new state, twice the size of Germany, had far fewer people than tiny Rhode Island. De Cordova opened a land and emigration agency that concentrated on bringing families to the vast spaces of the new state. He published the first descriptive map of Texas.
On a platform of “More Families for Texas,” he was elected in 1847 to the second state Legislature convening in Austin. Governor Peter Bell invited De Cordova to move his agency to the state capital. Within a few months, it became the largest land agency that ever operated in the American Southwest.
De Cordova embarked on an extensive program of advertising, marketing and publicity to persuade people to “Come to Texas.” A prime selling point: “Come where your children can get a start on rich land that can be bought at a poor man’s price.” Throughout Texas, thriving settlements rose on once desolate sites.
De Cordova founded the town of Waco, which became a trading center of both the cotton and cattle belts. To each Christian denomination in Waco, he deeded a free lot for a church. He helped organize the state’s first synagogue in Houston and was called to read the Torah wherever he visited his former community. A number of Jews followed De Cordova to Waco and helped him develop it commercially and culturally.
De Cordova invested his money in bringing Texas its first railroads after prophesying the ox-drawn wagons would vanish entirely “when the snort of the iron horse shall awaken the solitude of the prairies.”
Until the Civil War, De Cordova was the acknowledged “Mr. Texas”—his state’s leading land developer and its unofficial ambassador to the outside world. After Texas seceded from the Union, settlers stopped coming. Those who had settled couldn’t ship their cotton to Europe or make their installment payments on land purchases.
De Cordova could have foreclosed on many of them: he said instead, “If I share good times with them, I have to share the hard times, too.”
He went bankrupt. His health collapsed. He died in 1868 on a little ranch west of Waco. Jacob De Cordova had explored more Texas territory than its first European discoverer, Cabeza de Vaca; he brought more settlers into Texas than did Stephen F. Austin, its first American colonizer.
Long ago a High Holiday service was scheduled in the Brownsville, Texas, Masonic Hall, and a Mr. Marx north of the border asked his brother-in law, a Mr. Cain, who lived in the Mexican border town of Matamoros, to bring Torah scrolls. It was about a mile between the two communities on opposite sides of the Rio Grande River. When Mr. Cain came to the customs house on his side of the river, he wanted to register the scrolls so there would be no question that he would be allowed to return with them when he returned to Matamoros. But the Mexican border guards wouldn’t approach the scrolls and moved away from Cain in fear, saying they were afraid to touch the Jewish God.
Isaac A. Isaacs was an early Cleveland haberdasher who went into business in 1845, claiming “the largest and most magnificent clothing wear house in the western country.” He also acquired exclusive local rights to sell Singer’s Sewing Machines, “Strong’s Patent Army Trunk and Bed Combined,” and other products. One announcement stated modestly in 1855:
On entering the tenth year of our establishment in Cleveland, we have many causes for congratulation. We congratulate the public on the perfection which we have attained in the manufacture of ready made clothing . . . and in confirmation of our assertion you have merely to contrast the appearance of the people of the present day with the dress of the same community ten years ago on the advent of Isaac A. Isaacs in Cleveland.
One of Isaacs’ poetic ads reads:
I have only one objection,
Said a maiden to her lover;
I have only one objection
To the matters you propose;
I would no longer tarry,
I am ready now to marry;
But I cannot wed a lover
In those unwelcome clothes. . . .
He went back unto his charmer,
With a suit of Isaacs’ latest,
And the maiden, filled with rapture,
In his open arms did fall. . . .
Another, which appeared during the panic of 1857, took a different tack:
Give the producing classes help;
Sustain the men of toil;
Avoiding those who rob the till,
Aid those who till the soil. . . .
You have no cause to be alarmed,
Except about your diet,
If you should want a suit of Clothes,
A little cash will buy it. . . .
When Benjamin II of Tudela, noted Jewish world traveler and adventurer, visited the Mother Lode country of California in the 1850s, he picked up this then-current and foreboding story of two brothers who refused to contribute toward a Jewish cemetery:
In the town of Mokelumne Hill, the Mayer brothers were the wealthiest of the community’s thirty Jews, but they refused to pay their share for a communal burial ground, caustically saying they had no intention of staying there. No sooner did the rest of the community buy the cemetery than two-year-old Emma, daughter of Fredrick Mayer, one of the brothers, died.
Fredrick asked permission to bury the child in the Jewish cemetery and was turned down. He then arranged for her burial in the nearby Protestant cemetery and voiced public satisfaction in doing so. On returning home from the interment, Fredrick’s remaining child, one-year-old Luisa, suddenly took sick and died the next day. Distraught, Fredrick offered the Jewish community a large sum if he could bury his second child in its cemetery. His request was again refused, and he buried Luisa next to her sister in the Christian graveyard. Immediately after this, his brother’s only child collapsed and died.
One of the many problems faced by men in the mining towns of 1850s California was the dearth of women. This problem seemed particularly acute for Jewish men. One Jewish resident of the Mother Lode reported that if one could not gain the honor of accompanying a “grown lady” (meaning a girl more than twelve years old) to a ball, he might succeed only in arranging for the escort of a “young lady” (age six to twelve) by inviting her at least a week in advance. Another recalled that “it was a proud privilege to be introduced to a Jewish girl in this country, particularly in California, where the Jewish girls in short dresses were addressed as ladies.”
“His stock of goods [was] two boxes of crackers, a few boxes of sardines, a few knives, and two barrels of the youngest whiskey I had ever tasted. The counter was the head of an empty barrel, set off with a broken tumbler, tin cup, and a junk bottle of the ardent [sic]. . . . A drink was paid for by his taking a pinch of gold dust with his thumb and forefinger from the miner’s bag, or sorting out a lump the size and value of a dollar according to the Jewish ideas of such things. Before taking the pinch from the bag, John’s fingers could be seen sliding down his throat (as far as the balance of the hand would permit) for the purpose of covering them with saliva to make the gold stick, and he then thrust it into the miner’s pile—The amount of such a pinch was from 4 to 8 dollars! ‘Gott und Himmel,’ John, if we have an account to settle in the next world, won’t the clerks have a time of it with yours! This mode of settling was looked upon as a source of fun for the miners, [rather] than an imposition.”
—Description by miner James H. Carson of business
at a store in a mining camp on the road to
Wearverville, California, in the 1850s.
One of the few diversions in the violent, virtually all-male Mother Lode gold mining towns were “bull and bear” fights. Grizzly bears were matched against bulls, whose horns were normally sawed off before the contest.
These were cruel, though often thrilling, fights, and the highly valued grizzlies had an unfair advantage. After the fight, “the ugly mood of the brooding, beastly spectators was dissipated in a shoot-out and a drunken binge,” reports historian I. Harold Sharfman. Jews generally condemned the whole practice, but their disapproval didn’t exempt them from its consequences.
In a particularly memorable fight in the town of Jackson, California, a grizzly was mauling a bull. The bull had been lassoed, his horns sawed off, and the fight apparently taken out of him before he even got into the ring. The miners, angry at the unfairness of the contest, demanded that a new untamed bull, horns and all, be let in to take over and give the grizzly a real battle.
More prone to direct action than contemporary sports fans, some hundred spectators reportedly drew their pistols and threatened to shoot the grizzly if their request was not granted promptly. The cowboys who kept the animals complied, and an energetic new bull charged in. The grizzly, however, was undisturbed; he stripped off one of the new bull’s ears and methodically tore at the animal’s trunk. After five minutes the bull was howling so loudly he was heard a mile away.
The grizzly, a spectator said, “entertaining no malice,” let the bull loose; the crazed animal charged at the picket fence that separated the crowd from the arena and ripped through it, scattering spectators in all directions.
The enraged bull charged through town, down Main Street, and came to a halt at the Jewish-owned clothing shops. Apparently attracted to the prominently displayed bright red flannel shirts, the wounded bull charged through the shops, destroying one after the other. Cowboys finally lassoed the bull. As the Jewish merchants denounced the animal, the crowd expressed its admiration for the powerful grizzly, the verdict being, “That thar bar’s some, you bet.”
Five-foot, one-eyed Morris Shloss rode shotgun on a California stagecoach carrying gold dust for an express company. He arrived in San Francisco in 1849 after being narrowly missed by a monster shark when he jumped overboard into the Pacific Ocean for a swim.
Shloss brought with him a wagon packed in a large shipping container. At the landing, a man asked him what was in the big box.
“A wagon,” Shloss answered.
“How much do you want for it?” Shloss had paid $15 for the wagon and $3 more for the container.
“One hundred twenty-five dollars.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
Shloss agreed. The man paid him in gold dust, without even asking to see the wagon first.
In opening the box the man took great care not to break the lid. Taking out the wagon, he said to Shloss, “Stranger, you can keep the wagon. I only want the box. I am a cobbler, and in the daytime it will be my shop, and at night, my residence.” The box measured seven by four feet.
Shloss got a job playing piano at the El Dorado gambling house every evening from seven to ten o’clock for $16 plus a “grab,” a handful of silver from the monte table, for an additional hour of overtime.
Shloss opened a store, buying trunks from passengers who were “wild to go to the mines” and reselling them. In seven or eight weeks, he made more than $5,000. But just as fortunes were quickly made in the Old West, it seemed they could be lost even quicker. A fire broke out in back of Shloss’s store. He recalled, “As I had (accidentally) scattered gunpowder all over my store, I had to run for my life, and lost all I had made.”
Reports that gold nuggets had been found all along the bay shore led Shloss to board a ship bound for Trinidad Bay, California.
“When I landed, I found Digger Indians, but no signs of gold and no ship to return on; so I had to remain there four months, living on beans, crackers and clams.”
After returning to San Francisco, Shloss opened another store. A customer by the name of Joaquin Murrieta visited him every day and read the newspaper. When Murrieta became sick, Shloss saw that he got food and medical care. When he recovered, he offered to repay Shloss, but Shloss refused.
“Consider me your everlasting friend,” Murrieta said. A monte gambler, Murrieta became a notorious bandit; there was a $10,000 reward for his head.
Later, Shloss joined the Vigilante Committee. He was on guard when Yankee Sullivan, a ballot box stuffer, committed suicide by cutting off his arm. In 1856, more than 5,000 Vigilantes marched and demonstrated.
“We dispersed the thieves. Then we elected honest judges, banished all ballot box stuffers, and San Francisco was saved,” Shloss concluded his memoirs.
Levi Strauss, a young Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, came to California in 1850 and struck gold—with a pair of pants.
Levi had peddled for a couple of years back East. When he got to San Francisco, demand for his goods was strong; in those days, materials couldn’t get out West fast enough to meet the needs of the new settlers.
One story of what happened next goes like this:
All Levi had left of the supplies he’d brought from New York was canvas he planned to sell for tents. He’d set himself up selling on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street. A prospector happened by and asked what Levi was selling; when told tenting, the man was uninterested. What he needed were pants. Pants weren’t made that fit the rough work of a miner; they were always coming apart, the knees and seat wore out, and soon they’d be in tatters.
“Pants don’t wear worth a damn in the diggings,” the miner said. “Can’t get a pair strong enough to last.”
Levi thought fast and brought the man and the canvas to a tailor and asked him to cut a pair of pants from it. The bemused tailor set to work and soon there was a new kind of pants in San Francisco. The miner was happy. He hit his usual bars, boasting, “Doggone it, if a man ever had a pair of pants as strong as Levi’s before!”
The Levi’s name stuck. Other miners began looking for the fellow with the Levi’s. Levi Strauss pioneered a new kind of durable pants that suited the rough-and-tumble Western life—out of canvas, ‘duck,’ a similar but lighter material—and later, denim. Word-of-mouth advertising deluged Levi with orders. Soon he was sending to his brothers back East for more material and starting the huge company that still bears his name.
The next big step forward for blue jeans came twenty years later from another Western Jewish immigrant clothier meeting the needs of his hard-wearing customers. Jacob Davis was a Russian-born tailor in Virginia City in the Comstock mining country of Nevada. One particularly tough customer, an irritable and irritating prospector known as “Alkali Ike,” stopped by every time he came into town to berate Davis because his pants pockets had torn again.
Ike, like many miners, stuffed his pockets with ore, tools, and all the other things a miner needed, and the pockets were giving way all the time. Every time they ripped, Ike complained bitterly and drunkenly to the tailor, demanding he fix them right this time.
On one of Ike’s visits, he gave Davis so much trouble that the tailor, as a joke, sneaked out his back door, took Ike’s pants to a local harness-maker, and had the pockets reinforced with copper harness rivets. The pockets held, and on Ike’s next trip to town he was a happy, satisfied customer for a change and told everybody he knew. Soon Davis couldn’t keep up with the demand for riveted pockets. He feared his competitors would swoop in and take advantage of his idea. With the help of the town druggist, who wrote the letter, he contacted Levi Strauss in San Francisco, suggesting they go into partnership and get a patent for riveted pants, offering the company half the rights for $68—the cost of a patent application. Levi agreed and Davis went to San Francisco to manage the Strauss overall factory.
Soon the company was advertising its riveted pants as “so tough a team of plow horses could not tear them apart”; a corresponding two-horse logo became a Strauss trademark. Denim, dyed blue, replaced the then-popular ‘duck’ material, and the virtually indestructible work pants spread to cowboys, lumberjacks, construction men, farmers and factory workers—and, in the Twentieth Century, to college students and everyone else. The jeans were ‘guaranteed to shrink, wrinkle and fade’; according to tradition, miners, farmers and cowboys made their jeans fit by putting them on new and jumping straight into a watering trough. When the pants dried, the story goes, they fit.
Levi jeans are basically unchanged to this day. One of the few changes was made after a 1933 camping trip taken by Walter Haas, Sr., President of the company and husband of a Strauss great-niece. At that time, one reinforcing copper rivet was used on the crotch of the pants. One problem was that if the wearer crouched for a while too near a campfire, this rivet could suddenly grow painfully hot. After Haas reportedly learned first-hand of this “hot rivet” problem during the trip, that rivet was removed.
By the 1970s, the company used enough material each year, as Ed Cray put it in his book Levi’s, “to wrap a cummerbund of cloth six times around the Equator.”
Strauss was the first American clothing company to offer year-round jobs to its employees. When the Great Earthquake of 1906 hit San Francisco and destroyed Strauss factories, the company took out newspaper ads to advise employees their pay would be continued and retail dealers they could see the company for inexpensive loans to rebuild. Strauss integrated its Southern plants before the law required, adopted a policy of aggressively hiring blacks and other minorities and built a reputation for promoting the welfare of communities where its plants were located. Strauss remained something of a family business, owned largely by the Haases of San Francisco, Strauss’ indirect descendants (a bachelor, Strauss left most of his estate to his four nephews). In 1985, apparently to maintain the firm’s distinctive character and prevent future takeover bids, the family engineered a buyout of the company’s publicly traded shares, ‘going private’ only 14 years after first going public.
Adah Isaacs Menken, probably the highest paid and most gossiped-about actress of her day, leaped into international stardom before audiences from Vienna to San Francisco in the early 1860s as, clad only in flesh-colored tights, she climaxed the melodrama Mazeppa by riding an unsaddled horse tortuously up a papier-mâché mountain.
Menken’s performance scandalized prevalent Victorian sensibilities but her popularity was enormous. Nowhere was she greeted with wilder enthusiasm than in the American West, at performances in San Francisco and Virginia City, Nevada, in the heart of the Comstock Lode mining country. For a sixty-day run in San Francisco she was paid $500 a performance, reportedly the highest pay ever received by a stage performer until that time.
“A magnificent spectacle dazzled my vision,” Mark Twain wrote in Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise (March 8, 1864), “the whole constellation of the Great Menken came flaming out of the heavens like a vast spray of gas-jets, and shed a glory abroad over the universe as it fell!”
Miners threw thousands of dollars worth of gold dust at her feet after performances. A newly organized mining company named itself the Menken Shaft and Tunnel Company and printed her likeness on its stock certificates. A mine was renamed Mazeppa Mountain Lodge in her honor and a mining region dubbed “the Menken.” In Virginia City, miners presented her with a solid silver brick and made her an honorary member of the local fire brigade.
Menken combined her sensational stage career and personal life (she married and divorced four times in ten years, interspersed with numerous well-publicized affairs) with a reputation as a poet of some note, largely for Jewish publications and on Jewish subjects.
In response to questions about her background, she affirmed in a letter to the New York Illustrated News that she had been born a Jew, and that she had “adhered to it through all my erratic career. Through that pure and simple religion, I have found greatest comfort and blessing.”
Menken’s theatrical success came suddenly, after only a few years of acting experience, starting with a New Orleans amateur society. Her time in the spotlight was also brief; she died in London at the age of thirty-three after a short illness.
Banking in Southern California got started in a men’s clothing store. When Isaias Wolf Hellman came to Los Angeles in 1859 at the age of sixteen, he went to work in the business of his cousin, I. M. Hellman, but within six years, Isaias Wolf bought his own haberdashery. Hellman was to become known as the founder of banking in Los Angeles and the top financier on the West Coast until his death in 1920. He headed up Los Angeles’s Farmers and Merchants Bank, at the same time running the San Francisco—based Wells-Fargo Nevada Bank. But it all started in that clothing store.
In those days, merchants were often asked to care for others’ gold dust and valuables, which, it was felt, were not safe in private homes. Miners, particularly, would ask a trusted storekeeper to take care of their gold while they went “on the town.” Isaias Hellman even had a safe, which increased his attractiveness for such missions. This informal method of storing large quantities of wealth sometimes caused harrowing incidents, one of which prodded Hellman into banking.
The miners would typically drink heavily and gamble. Once out of money, they would return to the store where they’d left their gold, take more gold dust out of their purses, tie the purse back up again, and return it to the storekeeper.
One huge Irish miner, who’d drunk and spent generously, came back to Hellman’s to find his purse practically empty.
“You dirty Jew,” he accused Hellman, “you’ve stolen my gold.” Fortunately for the storekeeper, a friend was with the Irishman and calmed him down, saying, “You took this gold out yourself, and you must apologize to Mr. Hellman.”
Hellman told friends later that it had always been against his business judgment to have so much gold sitting idle. He realized there was nothing to keep an overwrought miner from drunkenly stabbing or shooting him. So he went to a friend who ran a newspaper; they printed up passbooks and deposit slips reading “I. W. Hellman, Banker.” He had a carpenter fence off a comer of the clothing store, put the safe there, and hung up a sign: “I. W. Hellman, Banker.”
The next miner who came with gold dust learned he couldn’t just leave it there any more. But, Hellman told him, he was now a banker. He would buy the gold dust at current rates. The miner could deposit his money, which would be recorded in a book. He could even write checks against it. The idea caught on and the miners spent noticeably less of their money than they had before. This stood them in good stead in later years after the mines gave out when the men had thousands of dollars stored up with which to buy land and homes. Hellman was to become director or stockholder of a dozen other Los Angeles banks as well as head of two of the state’s major banks, and he held vast other interests in real estate, public utilities, and other businesses.
Jackson A. Graves, an attorney and longtime associate of Hellman, felt the banker was at times excessively easy on debtors—for example, refusing to foreclose on mortgages until a statute of limitations was about to run out. Graves reported one of Hellman’s replies in Ira Cross’s book Financing an Empire: “Graves, I have to be a better man than you are, because I am a Jew. You can do things that I cannot do. If I did them, I would be criticized, while you will not be. . . . I have to keep that steadily in mind in all my dealings.”
I don’t know where I got the adventure in my blood. Certainly not from my parents, who were the soul of middle-class solid respectability. My upbringing was all directed toward taking my place some day as a proper matron in a middle-class setting.
So wrote Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus Earp, who left her parents’ well-off German-Jewish home in San Francisco in 1879 at the age of eighteen to perform with a traveling dance troupe in the Arizona Territory and soon marry famed lawman, entrepreneur, gambler and sharpshooter Wyatt Earp. “The thought of hurting my family was not as compelling as the thought of missing out on a chance for adventure and applause,” she continued in her memoirs.
On the way to Arizona she met lawman Johnny Behan, who helped the troupe avoid an ambush by Indians, and to whom Josephine became engaged. Later she became ill and went home to San Francisco. When she returned to Arizona, originally with the intention of marrying Behan, he introduced her to Earp, and the two soon became constant companions.
“I liked the traveling sort of man better than the kind that sat back in one town all his life and wrote down little rows of figures all day or hustled dry goods or groceries and that sort of thing,” she wrote. “I can see the need for solid citizens such as those, but they were never my type for a husband. My blood demanded excitement, variety and change.”
Wyatt and Sadie, as he called her, lived together for nearly fifty years until Earp’s death in 1929, traveling and working in Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Idaho, and Alaska. Later they returned to California and built a home in Los Angeles, though they continued their lifelong pastimes of hiking and gambling.
Morris Goldwater, one of the sons of Arizona pioneer “Big Mike” Goldwater and uncle of 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, served as mayor of Prescott, Arizona, for more than twenty years. In 1964, Prescott named him “Man of the Century.” He was founder of the city’s volunteer fire department, secretary of the Prescott Rifles, member of both houses of the Territorial Legislature, a prominent banker, and a “booster” of roads and railroads.
A pioneer telegraph operator, Morris was instrumental in bringing the first telegraph line into Prescott. The town was to be bypassed but Morris persuaded officials to change their route and bring the line into town through what came to be known as Telegraph Pass.
Folklore has it that Morris was able to persuade the authorities because he had a set of telegraph instruments that he offered to give them. He also offered to operate the telegraph himself without pay. The men in charge thought they had a bargain, but found out soon that Morris didn’t know as much about the telegraph as he let on he did. When the wire was installed and Morris began fiddling with the key, back along the line from the other end came an abrupt message—the first signal to travel along the brand new Prescott telegraph line: “Get the hell off the wire!”
Morris was soon replaced by an official representative of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
No longer a household word to baseball fans, in fact known to some as “Baseball’s Forgotten Hero,” Johnny Kling became the first Jew to play in the major leagues when he broke in with the Chicago Cubs in 1901. That first season, he alternated as a catcher with Frank Chance, who switched to first base to become the last part of the famed “Tinker to Evers to Chance” double play combo.
When Kling was first announced as the Cubs’ catcher, the opposing New York Giants wasted no time letting the rookie know he was in for it. Giant Wil Mercer had the job of seeing whether the young ballplayer could take it. Mercer slid into home plate with his spikes aimed at the new catcher’s face. Kling held his ground and tagged Mercer out with room to spare; Kling didn’t have a scratch but Mercer was so roughed up in the play he had to leave the game. No one bothered Kling after that.
Born Jonah Kline in Kansas City in 1875, he changed his name before starting in the majors. Due to an unusually strong throwing arm, he was known for being the first catcher in the majors to throw runners out from a crouching position. At this time, also, catchers usually stood at a distance behind the batter unless he had two strikes on him; Kling was the first to stand directly behind the batter at all times. Through his courage at the start and his solid reputation over a thirteen-year career in the majors, Kling was credited for smoothing the way for other Jewish ballplayers.
Kling became nationally known during the 1906–1908 period as the Cubs won three straight National League pennants. In 1907, as catcher, he held Tiger great Ty Cobb without a stolen base through the entire World Series. In 1908, after two straight Cub World Championships, Kling’s picture adorned national magazines and posters in saloons across Chicago. He was called the “guiding spirit” of the Cub championship teams. In 1909, he refused to play with the Cubs, and instead won the world’s pro pocket billiard championship. Chicago lost the pennant for the first time in four years. He rejoined the Cubs the next year and they again won the pennant.
In 1912, Kling became playing manager of the Boston Braves and the next year ended his playing days with Cincinnati. He returned to pro ball in the 1930s as owner of the minor league Kansas City Blues.