A Criminal Past

Throughout the survey we have run across many sets of historic prison records from California's prisons, including the famous examples of Alcatraz, San Quentin, and Folsom.  There are at least four sets of records from San Quentin alone, and several other more general prison record books.

The mug shots from some of these collections are pretty intriguing and, at least on the surface, they appear to reflect the personalities of their subjects.  There are also records of prison inmates, descriptions of criminals in custody and at large, and criminal culture, such as the "Alphabet of Thief Slang" index below.

Above is a page from Prison Record Book for San Quentin and Folsom prisons, 1904-1911 (BANC MSS 89/44). One volume of this collection contains prisoners' pictures, while the other has their records and descriptions of their crimes. More from this collection below:

(Can you profile a criminal based on the shape and style of his- or her- hat?! Hmm, let's see, we've got bowlers, pork pies, and even a floral ladies hat. With all these fashion choices it's impossible to tell the bank robbers from the cold-blooded assassins!)

A particularly interesting piece of prison history also exists in the Bancroft's manuscript collections in the form of a scrapbook of various criminals, composed by the Sheriff's Office of Woodland, in Yolo County, California.  Titled the Edward F. Boyle Mug Book, 1875-1899 [BANC MSS 91/26], it contains some very rich descriptions. I particularly like the "Bad Egg" page. Transcriptions are included:

Robert May
Alias
Robt. Sullivan
at Alcatraz Island
Bad Egg

American 20 years of age- 5 feet 9 1/4 inches in stockings- 
dark complexion- [blear?] skin- no whiskers- small black eyes- black hair- small mouth. [R.S.M.] and the American Flag in Indian Ink on left arm.

John Thompson
Alias
Old Man Winnie
Burglar
at large

American 44 years of age- 5 feet 2 1/2 inches high- light complexion- blue eyes- hair turning gray bald head- Rum Nose- face covered with Rum Blotches. Served 1 term of 4 years in San Quentin.

Index of Thief Slang: [note that the columns switch]
Burn a House = Glim a Crib
Pistol = Pop
Tumbled or Dropped = Got Suspicious
Jimmy = a Chisel for Prying
Hand Cuffs = [Darbies]
Pete =  Lock
Breaking a Lock = Make Pete Laugh
Crabs = Shoes or Mockisins (sic)

--- D. Miller

Conservation challenges

It can be hard to care for scrapbooks since they often have brittle acidic pages and many items glued to them. But when you starting adding objects like cigarettes and berries, it ups the ante a little!

The berries in the scrapbook below were decorations on a Christmas tree - too bad they didn't just take a photo...

Scrapbooks from the Pringle Family Papers, Banc mss 72/203


-A. Croft

More Label Humor

Hats off to whoever is responsible for this next set of hilarious extraneous container labels. While I can't know who or what drove them to type out such wonderful absurdities, I can enjoy the results and definitely appreciate being jerked out of the sometime mundane work of the survey.

I came across the following silly label on box 3 of a collection of documents relating to missions in New Mexico, circa 1605-1720 (BANC MSS M-A 4:1).  While the box itself was labeled as a box, the library MARC record described all the containers as cartons; apparently this discrepancy didn't sit well with the label's creator.

This next label defies description. It is located on box 1 of a collection of documents reflecting relations of Indians and Spaniards over tribute, wool mills, treatment of the natives, and government regulations, 1544-1608 (BANC MSS M-A 7). What any of those subjects could have to do with bologna sandwiches or chocolate cake is beyond my ability to figure out. The incongruity kills me.

--E. Van Lith

Redwood Reforestation in Lumber's Halcyon Days

Possibly my favorite part of this job, surveying The Bancroft's myriad manuscript collections, is how one is continually immersed in different people's stories, different realities, and so many of California's many different incarnations. In the late part of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, one important part of California's economy and story was lumber, especially redwood, and many of Bancroft's collections from the period relate directly to the lumber industry, among them, records from some of California's largest lumber companies, including Union Lumber, Pacific Lumber, and the Redwood Manufacturers Company (RMC). While surveying this last collection (BANC MSS C-G 202) I came across a binder of redwood advertising materials from the 1930s that took me right back to lumber's heyday when the industry's biggest problem was probably not being able to cut the trees down fast enough.

The binder was assembled by the California Redwood Association especially for RMC and generally touts the superiority of redwood over all other lumber, using such tag lines as, "California Redwood: The World's most durable Lumber," as can be seen in the image to the left. The text just below the image reads, "Count of annual rings shows down log … to have been exposed to wind and weather, ON THE GROUND SINCE THE YEAR 571 B. C.! Redwood log is still sound and solid."Other images in the binder show redwood shingles taken off of houses in damp coastal cities which despite being between 50 and 75 years old, are still in nearly new condition, while still other images show buildings made of redwood which had survived fire. Over and over, the sales materials tout redwood's durability. Which, of course, is hardly surprising, any industry wants to sell as much of its product as possible. But I was surprised by a piece titled "Supply Reforestation" that started off with the headline, "The Coast Redwood is California's Perpetual Crop ~ and Her Oldest," and concluded with the following optimistic quote:

"With the economical utilization of the timber supply that, growing for centuries, is still sufficient to last for 100 years, and the present reforestation operations, which assure a crop of second growth Redwood within sixty years, there is no chance whatsoever that Redwoods will become extinct as was predicted some years ago [sic]. Consequently, California can look forward to being perpetually in the Redwood lumber business, users of Redwood may count upon a continuous supply of this quality material and at the same time tourists will always have, in addition to parks of virgin trees, great timbered areas in which the grandeur of Nature has been enhanced by the hand of man."

In between, the item details what are most likely some of the lumber industry's earliest reforestation efforts in California and includes several photographs, including the following (enlarge the photographs to read the captions).






















Unfortunately for both the lumber industry and perhaps most importantly California's stands of redwoods, consumption did not stay at circa 1930 levels and redwood takes a long, long time, longer than 60 years, to fully mature and begin to replace the forest that has been lost.

--E. Van Lith

Poetry about a physist - who knew?

While surveying the other day, I came across a ballad someone wrote about the physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence.  Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1939 for his cyclotron, a machine which accelerates charged nuclear particles. These quickly moving particles were used to bombard atoms of various elements, disintegrating the atoms and sometimes forming completely new elements. Because of this, his cyclotron was also called the "atom smasher".

Lawrence’s work was very influential, but I was still a little surprised to come across a poem about him in one of his scrapbooks. It is called “The Ballad of the Cyclotron” and was written by Walter Weeks.

"The Ballad of the Cyclotron"
By Walter Weeks

There was a young professor in a college by the bay
Who believed that atoms could be smashed in some ingenious way
If he could make electrons go at twenty miles an hour
He thought there would be volts enough to give him ample power.

And so he took some auto springs and magnetized them well
And then he took some copper screen just why I cannot tell
And then he took a radio and a worn out rubber tire
And he tied them all together with a piece of baling wire.

The electrons came from the radio and started round the track
And every time they came around it kicked them in the back
When at the bung hole they arrived they'd had so many jolts
That their speed was the equivalent of a hundred million volts.

And thus evolved the cyclotron of which you all have heard
And of its wonders in a day I could not tell a third
This statement broad is heard today in every lecture hall
If it can't be done with a cyclotron it shouldn't be done at all.

The Prexy came around to see the gadget put to test
Of course the young professor wished to show it at its best
You may fire the thing when ready, boy, the eager Prexy cried
So Lawrence pushed the switches in and quickly stepped aside.

He aimed it at the window pane and knocked out all the glass
He swung it round the campus and it burnt up all the grass
He fired it at some students and it knocked them off their feet
Then he bombed the campanile and he moved it down the street.

And then he bombed some common lead and turned it into gold
The Prexy jumped around with joy and loudly shouted, hold,
I am convinced the thing is good, no more I'll have to go
To the solons up in Sacrement to beg them for some dough.

A Swedish scientist, Nobel, a man both great and kind
Left some prizes to bestow on any master mind
So forty thousand dollars and a big diploma too
They gave to Ernest Lawrence and with that my friends I'm through.

Here are some images of Lawrence with the cyclotron.

Perhaps poetry is used by physicists more often then you would think. Lawrence and his friend Rowan also wrote an ode to their friend Alfred on his 70th birthday.

More biographical information about Lawrence:
Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in 1901 in Canton, South Dakota. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of South Dakota (1922), his M.A. from the University of Minnesota (1923) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1925). Lawrence came to UC Berkeley in 1928 as Associate professor of Physics and became a full professor at age 30 – at that time the youngest professor at the University. Lawrence founded the Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley in 1936 and was its director until his death in 1958.

John Hundale Lawrence (6 months) and Ernest Orlando Lawrence (3 years) in 1904

If you are interested in other Nobel prize winners from UC Berkeley be sure to stop by and see “California Gold: The Nobel Tradition at UC Berkeley” in the exhibit case in the reading room!
(http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/permanent.html#nobel)

-A. Croft

BANC MSS 2005/200 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Papers
All photos and the “Ballad of the Cyclotron” are in oversize box 3; “Ode to Alfred” is in carton 1.

Labels We Have Loved (and Feared)

Fisher-Merriam Family papers (BANC MSS 2004/112)

Friends of the Earth records (BANC MSS 82/98)

---M. Bryer

"Thank God For California"

Joan Didion graduated from UC Berkeley in 1956 with a degree in English. Between 1955-1960, she wrote a number of letters to her friend Peggy La Violette detailing her cross-country train travels, life at home in Sacramento and as a senior at UC Berkeley, and her work at Vogue in New York. Her letters were great fun to read and I think fans of her writing will find her salutations particularly charming.


Written on a Thursday from her home in Sacramento

Written on a Wednesday evening from the La Salle Hotel in Chicago

--- M. Bryer