John Davis Wagenet (1892–1974) Architect with ties to Julia Morgan

Ruth & John Wagener

Plot 52D

John Davis Wagenet was an architect whose career unfolded largely out of public view, yet whose work and training places him squarely within one of the most important architectural lineages in California history.

Born on November 24, 1892, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wagenet came of age at precisely the moment when architecture in the American West was professionalizing, formalizing, and finding its voice. He made his way west and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied architecture during the 1910s, a period when Beaux-Arts principles, structural rigor, and regional adaptation were being actively debated and refined. 

San Simeon (San Simeon Chamber of Commerce ©)

After Berkeley, Wagenet entered the professional orbit of Julia Morgan, the pioneering architect whose office trained a generation of designers. Working as a draftsman in Morgan’s design office, Wagenet was exposed to large-scale institutional work, exacting construction standards, and the collaborative studio culture required for projects of national ambition. Contemporary references and later historical accounts credit him with participating—at least in part—in work connected to Hearst Castle, placing him among the many skilled but largely anonymous hands behind that extraordinary enterprise.

By the 1920s, Wagenet had established his own architectural practice in Oakland, maintaining offices in the Financial Center Building downtown. His work focused primarily on residential and neighborhood-scale commissions, particularly in the East Bay and Contra Costa County, where new suburbs were rising amid rolling hills and newly subdivided tracts.

The Wagenet Home, 1597 Fernwood in Oakland

One of his most personal commissions appears to have been his own family home at 1597 Fernwood Drive in Oakland’s Montclair district, a picturesque Tudor-style residence completed in 1928. With its steeply pitched roof, half-timbering, and careful siting among mature trees, the house reflects both Morgan’s influence and Wagenet’s own sensitivity to landscape and domestic scale. It stands today as a rare, tangible signature of an architect who otherwise left few overt calling cards.

Wagenet’s most prominent known public project emerged just over the Berkeley hills in Walnut Creek. In the early 1930s, local developer Robert Noble Burgess commissioned Wagenet to design an adobe-brick clubhouse for the newly developing Lakewood neighborhood. Envisioned as both a social center and a sales tool, the roughly 4,000-square-foot structure was, at the time, reportedly the most expensive house ever sold in Walnut Creek. With its Mediterranean-influenced massing and dramatic lakeside setting, the building served as a focal point for community life and a showcase for aspirational suburban living.

Despite these accomplishments, Wagenet never sought architectural celebrity. He joined the American Institute of Architects later in his career and appears to have practiced steadily but quietly, content to build well rather than build a reputation. Like many architects trained in the Morgan office, his legacy survives more clearly in buildings than in headlines.

In 1924, Wagenet married Ruth Roselle Macomber, and the couple remained together for decades, sharing a life that spanned profound changes in California’s built environment—from pre-automobile suburbs to the postwar boom. John Davis Wagenet died in Oakland on July 21, 1974, at the age of 81, and was buried alongside Ruth at Mountain View Cemetery, surrounded many of the architects and planners of his era, including Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck, Geoffrey Bangs and Carl Warneke.

Sources: Find a Grave memorial for John Davis Wagenet; UC Berkeley “Blue & Gold” yearbook listing “John D. at Berkeley 1914”; Walnut Creek Historical Society Lakewood clubhouse description; historical real-estate documentation and images for 1597 Fernwood Drive, Oakland; Julia Morgan Architectural History Project references.

Robert Hunter (1941–2019): Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lyricist for the Grateful Dead

Robert Hunter and Grateful Dead album cover

Plot 11A Grave 245

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) never took the stage with the band that made him famous, yet few figures loom larger in American popular music. As the principal lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Hunter gave voice to a singular mythic America—restless, haunted, tender, and perpetually on the road.

Born Robert C. Burns in 1941, Hunter found an early kindred spirit in Jerry Garcia. When Garcia and friends formed the Grateful Dead in 1965, Hunter was already writing poems and songs steeped in folk balladry, Beat surrealism, and biblical cadence. What followed was one of the most enduring collaborations in modern songwriting: Garcia supplied the melodies; Hunter supplied the worlds.

Robert Hunger and Jerry Garcia (photo: Jay Blakesberg)

Beginning with Aoxomoxoa (1969), Hunter’s lyrics became inseparable from the Dead’s identity. He wrote the words to songs that would become touchstones for generations—Dark Star, Ripple, Truckin', China Cat Sunflower, Uncle John's Band, and Terrapin Station. These were not merely lyrics but living texts—sung, argued over, annotated, and carried like talismans.

Hunter’s words were literary without being precious. They drew freely from Americana, the King James Bible, frontier lore, tarot, and the blues, yet always sounded spoken rather than written. His songs held space for ambiguity, inviting listeners to find themselves inside the lines. As Rolling Stone later observed, he was “one of rock’s most ambitious and dazzling lyricists.”

Though forever linked to the Dead, Hunter’s reach extended far beyond them. He collaborated repeatedly with Bob Dylan, co-writing songs for Dylan’s albums Down in the Groove, Together Through Life, and Tempest. He also wrote with artists as varied as Jim Lauderdale, Little Feat, Los Lobos, and Mickey Hart, always bringing his unmistakable voice to new musical landscapes.

Recognition came—eventually. In 1994, Hunter was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Grateful Dead, the only non-performer ever inducted as a full member of a band. In 2013, he received the Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award, performing “Ripple” himself. Two years later, Hunter and Garcia were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, with Garcia’s daughter Trixie accepting on her father’s behalf as Hunter once again sang the song that had become his benediction.

Late in life, Hunter toured solo not for acclaim but necessity, facing mounting medical bills after a spinal cord abscess and subsequent surgeries. It was a quietly poignant coda for a man whose words had enriched millions.

Robert Hunter died in 2019 at his home in San Rafael, California, at age 78. He left behind no single creed—only verses, fragments, riddles, and invitations. Like the best folk poets, he trusted the listener to finish the song.

Sources: Find a Grave memorial for Robert Hunter; Rolling Stone obituary; Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award citation; Songwriters Hall of Fame records; Alan Paul, “Eyes of the World: An Interview with Robert Hunter,” Substack.

Joseph E. Baker (1847-1914): Civil War Veteran and Oakland Tribune Editorial Writer

Plot 17, Lots 77-78

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Joseph Eugene Baker was one of those men whose influence was felt daily by thousands, yet whose name rarely traveled beyond the byline. For years, Oakland readers encountered his mind more often than his face—through editorials that shaped civic opinion, sharpened political debate, and reflected the moral confidence of a city still defining itself.

Born in the East in the early 1840s, Baker came of age during the turmoil of the Civil War. Like many of his generation, the conflict marked him permanently. He served during the war years and emerged with a lifelong seriousness about public duty, politics, and the responsibilities of citizenship—qualities that later infused his editorial work with a tone both principled and forceful. By the time he reached California, he was already a man formed by national crisis.

Baker’s early years in the West were restless and varied. He moved through mining camps and frontier towns—Ploche, Tybo, Sonora, Bodie—absorbing the landscapes, the dangers, and the personalities of the Sierra and desert regions. These experiences sharpened his descriptive powers. One of his most celebrated pieces was a firsthand account of a massive avalanche near a mountain lake, a scene he rendered with such precision and force that contemporaries compared it favorably to the great European accounts of Alpine disasters. The episode revealed what would become his hallmark: the ability to combine vivid observation with disciplined prose.

Journalism became his true vocation. Baker worked for a succession of newspapers, including the Alta California, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Oakland Times. Eventually, he found his professional home at The Oakland Tribune, where he rose to prominence as an editorial writer. His columns were widely read and deeply respected, not only for their clarity but for their moral certainty. He wrote as a man convinced that journalism was a public trust, and that newspapers existed to serve the general good—not merely to entertain or inflame.

In the broader landscape of American journalism, Baker belonged to a golden age of editorial writing. Nationally, figures such as Horace Greeley, E. L. Godkin, Henry Watterson, and Joseph Pulitzer shaped public debate with essays that blended politics, philosophy, and moral instruction. Baker was not a household name like Greeley or Pulitzer, but within California—and especially Oakland—he occupied a similar role: a trusted interpreter of events, a guardian of standards, and a reminder that democracy depended on informed readers. 

Politically, Baker was a staunch Democrat, but not a blind partisan. Friends noted that his loyalty to the party never eclipsed his judgment. He supported candidates he believed to be honest and capable, even when doing so placed him at odds with political expediency. The esteem in which he was held was such that when Governor George Pardee appointed him to a position at Folsom State Prison, it was accepted as a mark of trust rather than patronage—the only public office he ever held, and one he neither sought nor exploited.

On March 19, 1914, Joseph Eugene Baker died at his Oakland home following a stroke of apoplexy. He was in his early seventies. His death prompted an outpouring of respect from colleagues and rivals alike. Newspapers across California remarked not only on his intellectual power, but on his integrity, his loyalty to friends, and his unwavering belief in the civic mission of the press.

All three of his children became notable public figures in their own right. His daughter Margaret Baker Woodson became president and then board chairman of A.P. Woodson Oil Company, his son Cecil Baker was a Major in the Marines during WWI, and his daughter Gene Baker McComas became a noted landscape painter, muralist and journalist. 

Today, Baker rests quietly, remembered mostly through the fading columns of old newspapers and a modest grave marker. Yet for decades, his words helped shape the conscience of Oakland. In a city growing rapidly and sometimes recklessly, Joseph E. Baker stood as a steady voice—firm, literate, and unafraid to tell his readers what he believed the truth to be.

Sources: Oakland Tribune obituary (March 19–20, 1914); Oakland Los Angeles Journal obituary; NewspaperArchive.com; Find a Grave, Joseph Eugene Baker memorial; National Park Service's Civil War records.

Simeon Meads (1849-1940): Inventor and Prohibition Candidate for Governor

Simeon Meads and Grave marker

Plot 25, Lot 186

Simeon Pease Meads was born on January 11, 1849, in South Limington, Maine, at a moment when the boundaries between science, moral reform, and public life were far more porous than they would later become. He belonged to a recognizable American type of the late nineteenth century: the earnest educator–inventor who believed that rational instruction and personal virtue could improve not only individual lives, but the republic itself.

Meads made his professional home in California, where he built a long career in public education. By the late 1880s he was teaching at Oakland High School, and in 1891 he rose to the post of vice-principal. His interests extended well beyond classroom management. A practical scientist by temperament, he devised and patented an electric alarm clock designed to ring bells simultaneously throughout a school building—an innovation meant to impose order and efficiency on the daily rhythms of education.

Mead's Autobiography

His intellectual ambitions were equally evident in print. In 1884 he published Chemical Primer: An Elementary Work for Use in High Schools, Academies, and Medical Colleges, a concise and methodical introduction that reflected the period’s confidence in structured scientific learning. He later revised and expanded this work as Elements of Chemistry (1891), and followed it with Elements of Physics for Use in Secondary Schools in 1894. These textbooks placed Meads squarely within a generation of educators who sought to bring modern science into American classrooms at a time when chemistry and physics were still novel subjects for many students.

From 1908 to 1916, Meads served as principal of Cole Grammar School in West Oakland, closing out his formal educational career as an administrator rather than a polemicist. Yet outside the schoolhouse, he was increasingly drawn to moral reform—specifically temperance. Like many educators of his era, Meads believed that alcohol undermined personal discipline, family stability, and civic virtue, and that scientific reasoning supported total abstinence.

That conviction carried him into politics under the banner of the Prohibition Party. In 1902 he was the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor of California, and in 1910 he headed the Prohibition ticket as its candidate for governor. His 1910 campaign included street-corner speeches, church appearances, and factory-gate addresses, reflecting the party’s reliance on moral suasion rather than political machinery. Meads did not come close to victory. The election was dominated by Republican Hiram Johnson, who won decisively amid the progressive wave sweeping California, while Democratic and Socialist candidates divided much of the remaining vote. Meads finished far back in the totals, his support amounting to only a small fraction of the electorate.

Yet his defeat was typical rather than exceptional. Prohibitionists in the early twentieth century rarely won high office, but they exerted an influence disproportionate to their vote totals. By keeping temperance before the public, pressing the issue in churches and schools, and aligning themselves with reformist causes, they helped normalize the idea that alcohol was a social problem requiring legislative solutions. Figures like Meads functioned less as viable governors than as moral advocates, laying groundwork that would eventually culminate in statewide and national prohibition a decade later.

Simeon Pease Meads never achieved political power, but his life traced a coherent arc: science in service of education, education in service of moral reform, and moral reform in service of the state. In that sense, his unsuccessful campaigns were not failures so much as extensions of a lifelong belief that knowledge, discipline, and virtue could—and should—be engineered into the fabric of everyday life.

Sources: Prohibitionists.org, “Simeon P. Meads Bio and Vote Totals”; Chemical Primer (1884); Elements of Chemistry (1891); Elements of Physics for Use in Secondary Schools (1894); Oakland public school records; Los Angeles Herald, Oct. 23, 1910; California Secretary of State election returns (1910).

Doc Jennison (1834-1884): Jayhawker Who Fought Slavery Without Restraint

Plot 36. Lot 163

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Charles Ransford “Doc” Jennison began as one of the most ardent Free-State men in Kansas, at a moment when Free-State meant armed, hunted, and convinced that violence was not only justified but necessary. In the 1850s he stood among the principal supporters of John Brown, helping supply money, manpower, and protection to a movement that believed slavery could be destroyed only by blood.

Where Brown was apocalyptic and self-sacrificing, Jennison was practical and ambitious. Brown accepted martyrdom as inevitable; Jennison expected victory — and spoils.

During the Kansas–Missouri border war, Jennison organized armed bands whose name soon became their reputation. To Kansans, a Jayhawker was an anti-slavery guerrilla; to Missourians, a thief and arsonist. Jennison collapsed the distinction so completely that his name itself became a term of art. A “Jennison Jayhawker” was understood to mean a Free-State fighter who did not merely defeat the enemy but destroyed his home, his property, and his future.

When the Civil War began, Jennison raised cavalry units that operated along the Missouri border under Union authority. His men burned dwellings, seized livestock and goods, entered private homes without cause, and punished suspected disloyalty without trial. Even within the brutal logic of border warfare, his conduct stood out.

Federal authorities eventually intervened. Jennison was formally charged with ordering the destruction of civilian homes, permitting widespread pillage, allowing prisoners in Union custody to be lynched, selling government property for personal benefit, encouraging desertion, and publicly denouncing Union leadership. In 1862, he was court-martialed at Leavenworth and dishonorably dismissed from the United States Army — a rare and pointed rebuke for a man who claimed to embody loyalty.

Jennison occupies the uneasy ground between two better-known figures of the border war. William Quantrill, his Confederate counterpart, embraced terror openly and made no claim to moral restraint. Quantrill slaughtered in the name of the South and never pretended otherwise. Brown, at the opposite pole, killed for principle and accepted death as payment. Jennison insisted he was righteous — and entitled. His violence was ideological, but also personal; political, but also profitable.

After the war, Jennison reinvented himself as a respectable public figure. In 1871 he served a term in the Kansas State Senate, a testament to how porous the line between wartime brutality and peacetime legitimacy could be on the frontier. His legislative career, however, was undistinguished. He sponsored no major reforms, authored no landmark statutes, and left little record beyond his presence. His value lay less in governance than in symbolism — a reminder that the Free-State cause had been won by men willing to do what others would not.

His end was abrupt and unheroic. In 1875, Jennison was shot and killed during a saloon altercation in Colorado. He was buried at Mount Muncie Cemetery in Leavenworth, Kansas, among the people who best remembered both his zeal and his excesses.

Jennison's final resting place (unmarked)

In 1916, decades after his death, his body was disinterred and reburied at Mountain View Cemetery beside his wife, who had recently died there. The move carried him far from the borderlands he once terrorized, depositing a Kansas guerrilla on the Pacific edge of the country he tried to save by fire.

Jennison fought slavery — and in doing so, became something the Union itself could not tolerate. He was neither martyr nor mere outlaw, but something more unsettling: a man whose cause was just, whose methods were not, and whose name became shorthand for the moment when righteousness curdled into license.

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Sources:

Leavenworth Times (KS), May 9, 1916; Emporia News, May 17, 1862; Daily Milwaukee News, July 8, 1865; Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye Gazette, March 26, 1875; Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 1, 1878; Washington National Tribune, July 10, 1884; Kansas Adjutant General Records; U.S. Army court-martial proceedings; Find A Grave, Charles Ransford Jennison; contemporary Kansas–Missouri border war histories.

Ernest Granville Booth (1898-1959): The Double Life of a Convict Author

Plot 5, Grave 63, S 1/2

Ernest Granville Booth lived as if he were one of his own characters—half in shadow, half in print, always one bad decision away from the bars closing behind him again. Born in 1898, Booth became one of the strangest literary success stories of the Depression era: a man who robbed banks by day, broke bones trying to escape by night, and wrote with such clarity and bite that America briefly forgot he was doing it all from inside Folsom and San Quentin.

He entered prison young and stayed long. In 1924, the same day he married Valverda, a former San Francisco schoolteacher, Booth robbed an Oakland bank. The honeymoon never happened. Within hours he was arrested, sentenced to twenty-five years, and sent into California’s hardest institutions. What should have been the beginning of domestic life became instead a long correspondence conducted through bars, censors, and parole boards. Thirteen years later, when he finally walked free, newspapers called it a “belated honeymoon,” as if time itself had merely been paused rather than destroyed.

Butte County arrest notice

Prison broke Booth physically before it refined him intellectually. In 1928, attempting to escape over the wall at San Quentin, he shattered both legs and lay immobilized in casts. It was there, staring at a ceiling and his own limits, that Booth decided he was finished going nowhere fast. He began to write seriously—short stories, essays, and prison sketches hammered out after quarry work and by dim lights at night. What he produced was unsparing and exact: prison not as melodrama, but as bureaucracy, boredom, cruelty, and absurdity.

Editors noticed. Most notably, Henry L. Mencken took Booth seriously enough to publish him in The American Mercury, a stamp of legitimacy few inmates ever received. Mencken admired Booth’s prose for its lack of sentimentality and its refusal to moralize. Booth wrote as a man who knew exactly how easy it was to fall, and how hard it was to stand back up when the system preferred you prone.

Booth's book "Stealing Through Life"

Booth’s major works followed a consistent theme: crime stripped of romance and prison stripped of illusion. His best-known works included We Rob a Bank and Ladies of the Mob, both published in The American Mercury, and the books Stealing Through Life and With Sirens Screaming. These were not confessions so much as anatomies—cool dissections of criminal logic, prison routine, and the thin line between competence and catastrophe. Ladies of the Mob attracted Hollywood attention and was adapted into a motion picture starring Clara Bow, turning Booth, briefly, into a profitable commodity rather than a state expense.

Booth's book With Sirens Screaming

That success helped him win parole in 1937. He walked out of Folsom a famous man, greeted by Valverda, who had waited since 1924 and served as his typist, editor, and anchor. The terms of his release were cruelly ironic: Booth was forbidden for two and a half years from writing about prisons, prison officials, or parole boards—the very subjects that had made his name. Still, he complied, settled in California’s mountain country to recover from tuberculosis, and tried to live like someone who would never hear a cell door close again.

It did not last. Booth’s life followed a pattern familiar to parole officers and noir novelists alike: reform, recognition, relapse. In the 1940s he drifted back into crime, serving both state and federal sentences for theft and bank robbery. By 1947 he was again in San Quentin, and later at Terminal Island Hospital, his lungs failing where his resolve already had. Newspapers that once celebrated his freedom now ran headlines about “new trouble,” as if trouble had ever truly left him.

Even in decline, Booth retained his acid clarity. In 1957, long after parole boards and publishers alike had tired of him, he made a small splash by complaining—almost cheerfully—about Los Angeles smog. He admitted he had once pleaded guilty to a federal charge because he preferred prison air to the brown haze hanging over the city. Later, he changed his mind. The smog, he said, was “not so bad” after all. It was a line that could have come straight from one of his books: dry, resigned, amused by the absurdity of choosing between poisons.

Article on prison authors including Booth

Booth died in 1959, worn down by illness, confinement, and the long erosion of second chances. His career places him among a small, unsettling fraternity: criminals whose intelligence and talent flourished in mainstream culture even as their lives collapsed outside it. Like the forger and memoirist Edward Bunker, or the brilliant con man Charles Ponzi, Booth proved that genius does not redeem character, and talent does not guarantee escape. Skill can sharpen the fall as easily as prevent it.

What remains is the work—lean, unsentimental, and steeped in the moral fog of its time. Booth wrote crime the way film noir would soon film it: with sympathy but no illusions, style without forgiveness. He understood prisons because he lived them, understood criminals because he was one, and understood freedom only as something briefly tasted, then lost. In the end, Ernest Granville Booth did what few men behind bars ever manage. He made himself heard. He just never learned how to stop listening to the voice that kept calling him back inside.

Sources: contemporary newspaper coverage (Associated Press, United Press, INS, Oakland Tribune, Long Beach Independent, Ogden Standard-Examiner, South Haven Daily Tribune, Corona Daily Independent, Star-News, 1917–1957); Wikipedia entry on Ernest Granville Booth; Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland) burial and interment records; California Department of Corrections historical files (Folsom Prison and San Quentin); American Mercury magazine archives; Alfred A. Knopf publication records; contemporary film and literary trade reporting. 

Russ Westover (1886-1966): Cartoonist who Drew the Rise of the Working Girl

Tillie the Tailor and Russ Westover

Main Mausoleum

Russell Channing Westover was an American cartoonist best known for creating the long-running comic strip Tillie the Toiler, one of the most successful and influential newspaper features of the twentieth century. Born in Los Angeles on August 3, 1886, Westover developed an early aptitude for drawing that repeatedly brought him into conflict with employers and instructors, but ultimately shaped his professional life. His career traced the evolution of American newspaper cartooning from local sports illustration to international syndication, and his work helped define the modern “working girl” comic strip at a moment of profound social change.

Born on August 3, 1886, in Los Angeles, the son of Channing Clisson Westover and Alice Aldrich, Westover grew up in California and attended high school in Oakland. His earliest professional break came when his refusal to stop doodling finally worked in his favor. The San Francisco Bulletin hired him as a sports illustrator, recognizing that his quick hand and sharp eye could animate box scores and ballfields. From there he moved through a carousel of Bay Area newspapers—the Oakland Herald, the Globe, the Chronicle, and the San Francisco Post—producing editorial cartoons, show-business caricatures, and his first comic strip, a baseball feature called Daffy Dan.

Daffy Dan was a modest, loosely drawn strip, but it revealed the direction Westover was headed. It was rooted in everyday American life, populated by ordinary figures with exaggerated impulses, and driven more by character than by punchline. The strip never achieved the fame of his later work, but it trained him to tell a story in panels and to find humor in routine occupations. Even as he struggled to sell gag cartoons to national magazines like Life, Judge, and Collier’s—mostly without success—Westover was quietly developing the observational style that would define his career.

In 1908 he married Genesta Grace DeLancey, who would remain his wife for nearly six decades and quietly shape his most famous creation. Five years later, when the San Francisco Post merged with the Call, Westover joined the westward migration of ambitious cartoonists and moved to New York City. There he found steady work at the New York Herald, drawing a Sunday feature called Betty, an early example of the “girl strip,” a form still finding its footing in American newspapers. Readers responded warmly. The Herald gave him a daily strip as well, Fat Chance, and soon after he launched Snapshot Bill, his first nationally syndicated feature, about an aspiring photographer whose enthusiasm routinely exceeded his talent.

Then, once again, the ground shifted beneath him. When the Herald merged with the Tribune in 1924, Westover was out of a job. This time, however, he had a reputation. He freelanced successfully for national magazines that had once rejected him, refining his line and building confidence in his instincts. In 1920, sensing that American life itself had changed, he approached King Features Syndicate with an idea that would transform his career.

The war was over. Skirts were shorter. Offices were filling with women who earned their own wages. Westover proposed a strip about a working girl—not a society debutante or a domestic cipher, but a self-supporting office employee navigating modern life. The concept was not entirely new, but the character was. King Features accepted the strip, retitled it Tillie the Toiler, and on January 3, 1921, it debuted in the New York American.

Tillie Jones was a stenographer, a sometime fashion model, and a figure of startling modernity. She flirted, schemed, and dressed impeccably, managing to keep both her job and her independence with minimal visible “toil.” Early versions of Tillie leaned toward girlish frivolity, but she quickly evolved into a competent, capable worker who understood how to maneuver within a male-dominated workplace. Westover later acknowledged that her appearance was modeled on Genesta, though Tillie’s confidence and appetite for independence reflected a broader cultural shift rather than a single muse.

 Tillie the Toiler was not the first comic-strip working woman, but it was the first to celebrate the office girl as a social type worth admiring. At its height, the strip ran in more than six hundred newspapers worldwide. Readers wrote in asking where Tillie bought her clothes; Westover responded by creating a dress-pattern service. The strip spawned collected volumes, comic books, a novel, and two feature films—one silent, starring Marion Davies in 1927, and another in 1941. Through all of it, Tillie remained Tillie: stylish, self-supporting, and quietly subversive.

Westover supplemented Tillie with other work, including The Van Swaggers, a strip that skewered high-society pretensions, but his legacy rested firmly on Miss Jones. Offers came from rival syndicates promising more money, but he stayed with King Features. In 1951 he entered semiretirement, turning much of the daily labor over to his assistant, Bob Gustafson. By 1954 Westover withdrew entirely, allowing Gustafson to sign the strip. Tillie the Toiler continued until 1959, closing out a remarkable thirty-eight-year run.

That same year Westover and Genesta left New Rochelle, New York, where they had lived for decades, and moved to Ross, California. They had married in 1908 and celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1958, with Mount Tamalpais rising behind their home. In retirement, Westover returned to the habit that had never left him: drawing. He spent long hours at the board, sketching without deadlines or syndicates, just as he had when he was young and unemployable.

Russ Westover

Russell C. Westover died on March 6, 1966, in San Rafael, California, after a short illness. He was seventy-nine years old. Newspapers remembered him as the creator of Tillie the Toiler, an internationally known strip that once ran in hundreds of papers from Spain to Japan. His earlier work—Daffy Dan, Snapshot Bill, the years of anonymous freelancing—was largely forgotten, absorbed into the prehistory of a medium he helped define.

Westover’s career traced the arc of American cartooning itself: from newspaper sports pages to mass syndication, from local humor to global circulation, from hand-drawn panels to a fully industrialized cultural form. Yet his story also carries a quieter irony. The man repeatedly fired for drawing on the job ultimately created one of the most enduring images of American working life—a woman who made her living with style, wit, and just enough mischief to keep things interesting.

Sources: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, March 7, 1966; New York Times obituary, March 7, 1966; Martin Sheridan, Comics and Their Creators (1942); Coulton Waugh, The Comics (1947); Stephen D. Becker, Comic Art in America (1959); Ron Goulart, The Funnies (1995); Wikipedia entry on Russ Westover.; Find a Grave; Mountain View Cemetery records; Wikipedia

 

Addie GIlmour (1865-1893); Cut to Pieces and Cast into the Bay: The Terrible Death of Addie Gilmour

Strangers Plot, Grave 676

 

Addie Regent Gilmour was twenty-eight years old when she left Colusa for San Francisco in the late summer of 1893. She was a milliner by trade, a careful young businesswoman, engaged to be married, and accustomed to carrying cash for her work. To her family she said she was going to purchase stock for her shop. What she did not say—what she likely could not say—was that she was pregnant and desperate.

San Francisco was a city where such secrets could be kept, at least for a time.

When Addie failed to return home and her letters stopped abruptly, her family began to worry. Days passed, then weeks. Her sister Emma and her father searched first in Colusa, then farther south. By early September, the search had spread to San Francisco, where rumors began to circulate of a missing young woman last seen entering a doctor’s office on Turk Street.

Then the Bay began to speak.

Near Sausalito, a human head surfaced—stripped of flesh, unrecognizable except by teeth and general shape. A few days later, boys playing along the Oakland waterfront discovered a five-gallon coal-oil can half buried in the sand. When the coroner forced it open, he began pulling out what remained of a woman: thighs, calves, portions of the torso, internal organs, all compressed tightly into the can and weighted down. The remains were badly decomposed and bore unmistakable signs of dismemberment.

Inside the can were personal effects that told a quieter, more devastating story—hair, fragments of clothing, buttons, ornaments, a purse. These small domestic objects, far more than the mutilated flesh, convinced investigators and family alike that the dead woman was Addie Gilmour.

Emma Gilmour was summoned to view the items. She collapsed in grief and had to be led from the room. “Those poor Addie’s,” she cried, according to one account, before being taken away.

At first, uncertainty lingered. Witnesses came forward claiming they had seen Addie alive days after the head was found—walking through San Francisco shops, attending the State Fair in Sacramento, pale and thin, as if recovering from illness. Newspapers fed on these sightings, printing them eagerly. But physical evidence outweighed rumor. The body parts, the clothing, and the timing told a different story.

Suspicion soon focused on Dr. Eugene F. West, a physician with offices at 132 Turk Street. Addie had been in his care shortly before her disappearance. West admitted she had visited him and acknowledged performing a medical operation. What he did not do—according to prosecutors—was report her death.

Instead, the state argued, he cut her body apart, removed identifying features, packed the remains into a can, and consigned them to the Bay.

West was charged not merely with performing an illegal abortion, but with murder.

The trial transfixed San Francisco. Jurors heard how Addie had sought relief from her condition, how the operation ended in death, and how the doctor responded not with confession or aid, but with concealment. The prosecution argued that intent could be read not only in the operation itself, but in the calculated destruction of her body afterward. No innocent man, they said, dismembers a woman and throws her into the sea.

The defense countered that West had not intended to kill Addie Gilmour, that the operation was undertaken to help her, and that panic—not malice—guided his actions once she died. Witnesses were disputed. Testimony was excluded. Legal arguments tangled with medical ones.

Judge Wallace ultimately ruled that West had not acted with intent to murder. But the law was unforgiving. Because Addie Gilmour died during the commission of a criminal act—an illegal abortion—West was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in San Quentin.

It was not the end of the case.

On February 12, 1894, the California Supreme Court issued its decision in People v. West, 106 Cal. 89, 39 P. 207 (Supreme Court docket no. 21162). The court held that the trial judge had erred by excluding testimony on the grounds of physician–patient privilege, a rule that did not apply in criminal prosecutions. The evidentiary error was deemed sufficiently serious to require reversal of the conviction and a remand for a new trial. The case remains historically significant and is still cited in discussions of privilege under California law.

The conviction was set aside.

Whether the state retried West, reached a plea, or failed to secure another conviction is not conclusively established in surviving published court opinions.

What is certain is that Addie Gilmour never received a second chance.

Her body had been torn apart and scattered in the Bay, her private life laid bare in court, her death debated as a legal abstraction. She became one of San Francisco’s early symbols of what could happen to young women who vanished into the city seeking secrecy and mercy. Decades later, when the Bay yielded other bodies—most famously that of Laci Peterson and her unborn child—Californians would again be reminded that the water keeps its own grim archives.

Addie Gilmour’s story is not only about violence, or law, or scandal. It is about a world in which silence was safer than survival, and about how the dead can be argued over long after their voices are gone.

Sources: Sacramento Daily Record-Union, September 1893–February 1894; San Francisco Morning Call, 1894–1895; Woodland Daily Democrat, September 1893; California Supreme Court, People v. West (1894); Find a Grave memorial 216177643.

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Legal context: abortion penalties in California, 1893

Under California Penal Code §§ 274–275 (in force at the time), performing an abortion was a felony, punishable by two to five years in state prison, unless necessary to save the woman’s life. If the woman died as a result of the procedure, the act could elevate to manslaughter or murder, depending on intent and circumstances. In Addie Gilmour’s case, the death occurring during an illegal operation formed the basis for the second-degree murder conviction that was later reversed on evidentiary grounds.

Anthony Azoff (1863-1895): Executed for Role in Murder of Railroad Detective

San Quentin photos of Anthony Azoff

Plot 4, Grave 94

Anthony Azoff entered California’s criminal record through a murder that was at once sordid, confused, and fiercely contested, and he left it on the gallows at San Quentin in the summer of 1895, insisting to the end that he was not the man who fired the fatal shot.

Azoff was convicted of the murder of Len Harris, a detective employed by the Southern Pacific Company, who was killed near Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County* in May 1894. Harris had been involved in investigating a planned robbery of the Boulder Creek railroad station. The prosecution’s theory was that Azoff, working with George Sprague and others, helped plan the crime and was present when Harris was shot. Sprague fired the revolver, according to Azoff’s own later account, but the state argued that Azoff was an active participant in a conspiracy that led directly to Harris’s death. Under California law at the time, that was enough to condemn him to hang.

From the moment of his conviction, Azoff maintained that while he had associated with Sprague, he neither fired the shot nor intended that anyone be killed. In a lengthy confession published shortly before his execution, he described himself as drawn into the affair by promises of money and by Sprague’s assurances that no violence would occur. When Harris appeared unexpectedly, Azoff claimed, events spiraled beyond his control. He admitted moral weakness and poor judgment, but not murder. “I did not fire that shot,” he repeated in interview after interview, swearing “before God and man” that he was innocent of the killing itself.

Azoff’s case quickly became a magnet for public fascination. Newspapers portrayed him as calm, articulate, and strangely cheerful for a condemned man. Reporters noted that he was a “star boarder” on Murderers’ Row at San Quentin, courteous to guards and fellow prisoners, willing to discuss almost anything except his own inner life and the precise moment of the crime. This demeanor fed both sympathy and suspicion: some readers saw stoic resignation; others saw a chilling lack of remorse.

One persistent misconception about Azoff was his supposed identity as a “raw and ignorant Russian nihilist,” a label that circulated widely in the press. Several papers went out of their way to correct the record. Anthony Azoff, they emphasized, was an American by birth, descended from old Virginia stock, and of more than ordinary intelligence. The foreign-sounding surname, combined with the era’s anxieties about anarchists and nihilists, had turned him into a convenient caricature. In reality, nothing in his background supported the image of a foreign radical bent on violence.

Inside his cell, Azoff passed the time with small acts of order and invention. The walls were decorated with paper birds, baskets, flowers, pendants, and grotesque pencil sketches, all fashioned by his own hands. He devised a crude pendulum from rolled tin foil suspended on a string, using its swings to guess the time of day. Above his bunk, he printed a motto in large letters that reporters faithfully transcribed:

What need have I to fear so soon to die?
’Tis but a lifetime, and the end is nigh.

The verse captured the fatalism that marked his final months. “If I must hang, what use is there to cry about it?” he remarked at one point, smiling. “A sudden drop, a moment’s struggle, and all is over.”

Despite his apparent composure, serious efforts were made to save his life. Appeals for clemency were directed to Governor James H. Budd, including personal pleas from Belle Dorner, a woman who became convinced of Azoff’s innocence and visited him repeatedly at San Quentin. Dorner argued that Azoff had been swept up by Sprague and that executing him would be a grave injustice. Azoff himself claimed to have influential friends both in California and in the East and believed, at least early on, that his sentence might be commuted to life imprisonment.

One dramatic twist came when Azoff asserted that a letter existed proving his innocence, allegedly written by the man who actually fired the fatal shot. The letter was said to have been mailed in Oakland and delivered to Sheriff McElroy of San Mateo County. Azoff insisted that he had been shown the letter but could not identify the handwriting with certainty. His attorney pursued the matter, hinting at altered signatures and missing evidence, but nothing sufficient to halt the execution ever materialized. Governor Budd ultimately declined to intervene.

Azoff’s connection to Oakland appears fleeting but significant. Contemporary accounts state that his wife and young child were living in Oakland during his imprisonment, and that he was deeply concerned about sparing his daughter the shame of knowing her father had been confined in San Quentin. He spoke of Oakland as a place of domestic life now irretrievably lost to him, a quiet counterpoint to the notoriety of his case. After his execution, reports indicated that his body was to be interred in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, fulfilling what was described as one of his last wishes.

On June 7, 1895, Anthony Azoff was hanged at San Quentin alongside Emilio Garcia and Patrick J. Collins, the three men condemned for separate murders. Witnesses remarked on Azoff’s steadiness as he walked to the scaffold. He sang briefly in his cell earlier that day, wrote farewell letters, and gave away his few possessions. When the trap was sprung, he died quickly.

Whether Anthony Azoff was a willing conspirator who escaped full moral responsibility in his own mind, or a lesser figure caught in a crime that ended in death, remains unresolved. The courts decided his fate, but doubt lingered in the public imagination long after his body was cut down from the gallows. His case sits uneasily in California’s nineteenth-century history of capital punishment—a story of circumstantial guilt, contested truth, and a man who went to his death clinging to the belief that history might yet judge him differently.

Current view of shooting site

*The current location of the shooting site is identified as the vacant lot behind the Boulder Creek Pizza & Pub. 

Sources: Sacramento-Record-Union-June,8-1895; San Francisco Morning Call, issues from March–June 1895; contemporary news accounts; San Quentin prison reports; Mountain View Cemetery records; Find a Grave

 

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors (1837-1884): Double-Murder Mastermind Lynched for Crime

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors

Strangers' Plot, Plot 41

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors was one of the most unlikely architects of a nineteenth-century California murder. A Civil War veteran, trained lawyer, Methodist minister, temperance advocate, and hotel keeper, Majors cultivated the appearance of moral reform even as he quietly planned a crime of extraordinary brutality. His downfall followed the murders that shocked Los Gatos and the Santa Cruz Mountains in March of 1883, a crime remembered locally as the “Lexington murders.”

Majors was born in Ohio around 1837, near the town of Garfield, and was educated at Ann Arbor, where he studied law. He practiced briefly before abandoning the profession for the ministry, becoming a traveling Methodist preacher in the Midwest. Those who later testified about him described a man of intelligence and ambition, but also of restlessness and contradiction. He preached against alcohol while operating saloons, spoke publicly about virtue while privately displaying a capacity for deception, and styled himself a reformer even as his life moved steadily toward criminality.

By the late 1870s Majors had drifted west and settled in Los Gatos, where he operated a hotel and saloon and was well known in the small town. He was regarded as articulate, intense, and persuasive, a man who could command attention in conversation and bend others to his will. Behind the scenes, however, he was deeply in debt and increasingly obsessed with the idea that an elderly mountain recluse possessed hidden gold.

That man was William Peter Renowden, who lived in a remote cabin in the Lexington district of the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of Los Gatos. Renowden was known to neighbors as a solitary figure, rumored to have money but living simply. In early March 1883, Majors devised a plan to rob him and recruited two men to carry it out while keeping his own hands ostensibly clean.

John Showers & Joseph Jewell

The accomplices were John Franklin Showers and Joseph Jewell, men of sharply contrasting personalities. Jewell was a small, soft-spoken English immigrant, a painter by trade, new to the area and largely unnoticed. Showers, by contrast, was notorious. He arrived in Los Gatos in 1876 with his widowed mother and cultivated a reputation as a violent braggart, referring to himself as a “bad man from Bodie” and rarely appearing unarmed. Newspapers portrayed him as crude, volatile, and eager for notoriety.

Majors supplied the plan, the weapons, and the tools. According to trial testimony, he gave Jewell and Showers pistols and a pair of pincers, instructing them to use the latter to pull out Renowden’s fingernails if he refused to surrender his gold. The instructions were explicit, chilling, and deliberate. Majors remained in Los Gatos while the two men rode into the mountains under cover of darkness.

On the night of March 11, 1883, Jewell and Showers reached Renowden’s cabin. Inside they found not only Renowden but also Archibald McIntyre, a friend visiting him. What followed was a scene of prolonged violence. Both men were beaten, tortured, and ultimately shot. Their bodies were left inside the cabin, which was then set on fire in an effort to conceal the crime.

Double-Murder Scene in Los Gatos

The next morning, smoke rising from the mountains drew attention. The burned cabin was discovered, along with the charred remains of the two victims. The brutality of the murders, combined with the attempt to destroy the evidence, horrified the region. Los Gatos was thrown into alarm, posses formed, and the search for the killers began almost immediately.

Suspicion quickly fell on Jewell and Showers, whose movements before and after the murders aroused notice. Within days they were arrested. Under questioning, Showers confessed and implicated Jewell and Majors. Jewell, confronted with the evidence, also confessed, confirming Majors as the mastermind who had planned the robbery and supplied the means.

Majors was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree. His trial, held in Alameda County, became one of the most closely watched criminal proceedings in California. The prosecution portrayed him as the calculating brain behind the crime, a man who cloaked himself in religion and respectability while directing others to commit murder. The defense attempted to cast doubt on the testimony of confessed killers, but the evidence was overwhelming.

In November 1883, Lloyd L. Majors was convicted and sentenced to death. A series of appeals and a temporary reprieve delayed the execution, but the outcome was never seriously in doubt. While awaiting death in the Oakland jail, Majors made a dramatic and violent attempt to escape, overpowering guards and seizing keys before being confronted by firemen drawn by the noise. In the struggle his arm was broken, ending the attempt and leaving him badly injured.

Majors maintained his innocence to the end. On the morning of May 23, 1884, he was led from his cell to the gallows in Oakland. Witnesses noted his composure despite his injuries. He refused to make a final speech. The trap was sprung shortly after noon, and he died with his neck broken. Within minutes his body was cut down and placed in a coffin, the execution carried out in near silence inside the jail yard.

Majors was the first person legally lynched in Oakland and the third in Alameda County (the other two being in San Leandro). 

The lynching of Lloyd Majors

The men who carried out the killings fared little better. Jewell and Showers were convicted and sentenced to long terms in San Quentin. Showers died in prison; Jewell eventually disappeared from the historical record after serving his sentence. Majors alone paid with his life, executed not for pulling a trigger himself, but for planning, directing, and enabling a crime whose savagery shocked even a violent era.

The Lexington murders lingered in local memory as a cautionary tale about appearances and hypocrisy. Lloyd Leadbetter Majors, preacher and saloonkeeper, reformer and arsonist, embodied the contradictions of the Gilded Age West. His life demonstrated how intelligence and respectability could mask greed and cruelty, and how the distance between moral posturing and moral collapse could be terrifyingly short.

Footnote about the site of the crime: Renowden’s cabin was located in the Lexington district of the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of Los Gatos. The exact cabin site no longer exists; the area was later transformed by the creation of Lexington Reservoir. The murders occurred in what is now part of the Lexington Hills area near Alma Bridge Road, beneath or adjacent to land inundated or reshaped by the reservoir and surrounding parklands. 

Sources: San Francisco Call, Sacramento Daily Record-Union, Atchison Globe, Quincy Daily Whig, Omaha Daily Bee, and other contemporary California and national newspaper accounts, 1883–1884; Facebook: San Francisco Bay Area Memories; Find a Grave; Ancestry.com

Walter Parrish (1876-1918): Husband at Center of Courtroom Brawl Over Divorce

 

San Francisco Call rendering of courtroom brawl

Walter Noble Parrish lived a conventional civic life for his era, serving in key government roles and moving through the city without attracting much historical attention. His name survives not because of any great achievement or notorious failing, but because a single day in 1899 thrust him and his family into one of the most chaotic divorce hearings the city had seen. It was one of the few moments in his life that history bothered to record in any detail.

Walter married Maud Shafer with expectations of a quiet domestic life. Maud had hoped for something more. She longed for travel and adventure, believing her husband’s family connections in South America might open opportunities to see the world. Instead, she found herself confined to a routine existence in San Francisco, a marriage marked—according to her later testimony—by neglect, drinking, and disappointment. What Walter regarded as ordinary married life, she experienced as a suffocating restraint.

Their marriage unraveled in Judge Hebbard’s courtroom, where Maud sought a divorce and Walter resisted the accusations. What should have been a contained proceeding erupted almost instantly into mayhem. Maud’s mother, Mrs. D. M. Shafer, arrived already strained by months of marital discord and, upon hearing heated arguments about who had struck whom earlier in the day, suddenly lunged at her son-in-law. Striking Walter in the face, she ignited a chain reaction that sent the room into complete disorder.

The elderly Parrish father tried to intervene and was himself pulled into the commotion. Women screamed and fainted. Witnesses shoved one another. Clerks, litigants, and reporters found themselves scrambling out of the way as the chaos spilled into the hallway. Walter, his family members, Maud’s supporters, and even uninvolved citizens in the corridor were swept into a tangle of pushing, shouting, and blows before police and the bailiff could begin pulling people apart.

The violence continued outside the courtroom. Parrish’s father was hurled against a railing. Mrs. Shafer hurled insults and threats at Walter, going so far as to shout, “You coward! You are afraid of me—and right you are, for I will be revenged!” More women fainted as the commotion grew. Judge Hebbard emerged briefly from his chambers, saw the disorder, and retreated again until the officers restored some degree of control.

When the testimony resumed, Maud accused her husband of drunkenness, neglect, and cruelty. Walter denied it all. The judge ultimately refused to grant the divorce, determining that Maud had failed to meet the legal threshold required for dissolution. But the ruling did not seal the fate of the marriage in practice. Maud had already had enough.

Maud's 1921 passport photo and 1941 Brazilian travel visa

Not long after the court denied her petition, she left her husband, her parents, and San Francisco behind. Without telling a soul, she boarded a ship for Nome, Alaska, carrying little more than a banjo and the determination to reclaim her life. What had been denied her in marriage—movement, independence, possibility—she seized for herself with startling resolve.

In the Yukon, she supported herself by performing in mining towns with her banjo, and from there she began to travel the world. In 1939 she published her memoir, "Nine Pounds of Luggage," recounting her extraordinary path from a failed San Francisco marriage to a life defined by curiosity and adventure. In the book, she tells of working as a saloon girl in the Klondike, running gambling dens in China, and exploring places like South America, India, and Nazi Germany, all while carrying minimal belongings. She claimed to have circled the globe sixteen times and lived to the age of 98. Maud never remarried and is buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.

Oakland Tribune picture of Walter Parrish and Gravesite

Walter Parrish ended up working as the Deputy County Clerk in San Joaquin County, as a deputy in the San Joaquin County courts and by 1911 he was Secretary of the California State Senate. He rests today at Mountain View Cemetery. 

Sources: San Francisco Call, January 31, 1899; Wikipedia: Maud Parrish; Kirkus Reviews on Nine Pounds of Luggage: Brazilian Embassy; US Passport Agency; Wikipedia; Find a Grave; Oakland Tribune, January 25, 1911