bjgreen
By Betsy J. Green
The local constabulary brought in several colorful characters this month. One, who was too drunk to walk, was described as, “minus a home, a shirt, and so many baths that the police could not decide whether his last dip was before or since the flood.” (Not sure if they meant the Santa Barbara flood of January 1914 or the biblical flood.)
Then there was another miscreant that the coppers thought looked like “an escaped lunatic … He wore ragged shoes, a silk hat, a Prince Albert coat, and an overcoat with a handsome silk lining. And he had plodded all the way down the coast from San Francisco … ‘He was too comical to look at, and so we run him in. He was too darn funny to be loose.’”
A third one was easier to figure out. He was described as “drunk enough to lay in the gutter and let the water run over him. Second time in 24 hours.”
A looney on the loose? (Image: New York Public Library)
My next Way Back When book — 1918 — is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. This is the fifth book in my series of the history of Santa Barbara, one year at a time.
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