How do we preserve someone’s memory?

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—The continuing column “Adventures in San Diego Jewish History,” which is compiled from issues of the Southwestern Jewish Press, has,  in recent postings, been dealing with the construction and development in the 1950s of two adjoining properties on 54^th Street: the Hebrew Home for the Aged and the Jewish Community Center.  In late 1955, the Hebrew Home had just been opened and a fund-raising drive was being planned to build the JCC.

Modern-day readers re-visit these columns knowing that both Jewish facilities would eventually be replaced because of the demographic shift in San Diego’s Jewish population from central and eastern San Diego to La Jolla and northern San Diego County.   As we read about all the excitement, and take in all the hyperbole about how wonderful the “permanent”  54^th Street facilities would be for the community, there’s a feeling of sadness for the reader.  Nothing, we realize, is permanent.  Both structures have long since been torn down, having been sold by the Jewish community to help finance new infrastructure.

Fundraising schemes in the Jewish community often depend on rewarding donors with rooms, buildings, even campuses named for them.  But eventually, as the needs of the community change, these structures are demolished, and the memory of the people whose names once graced them fades.  You can still find the names of the people who gave money for the old Hebrew Home on a wall of plaques at Seacrest Village Retirement Community in Encinitas.  And if someday, the Lawrence Family JCC, Jacobs Family Campus, has to be replaced, along with such rooms inside as the Gotthelf Gallery and the Garfield Theatre, new donors will be sought, and their names will be displayed with prominence at a new facility  and those of previous contributors will become part of the art work, or a history wall.  Such is the way of a community—nothing is permanent, not even a physical memorial.

Now, the Louis Rose Society for the Preservation of Jewish History—a group on which I serve on the steering committee—is about to dedicate “Louis Rose Point,” a tiny piece of land set aside by the City of San Diego to honor San Diego’s first Jewish settler.   Many people don’t realize that Rose is already honored in the city because they assume that “Rose Canyon” and “Roseville” are named for the flower, not for the man who, at Rose Canyon, operated the area’s first tannery, and at Roseville, developed a town along the shore of San Diego Bay.

A simple plaque in Rose’s honor will be unveiled at the ceremony at 10 a.m., Thursday, March 24.   We hope that Thomas Brothers and other map producers will take cognizance of the official name given to this tiny point of land at the foot of Womble Road, where it meets the Boat Channel, and add the legend “Louis Rose Point” in tiny letters to their cartography.  We hope “Louis Rose Point” will remain a permanent place name in San Diego geography.   But one never knows.   “Roseville” can be found on maps of San Diego, but as a geographic area it is  generally is unknown, having been subsumed under the name “Point Loma.”   As for Rose Canyon, well, it lies along a fault line—and if ever a major earthquake hit, there’s no telling what names the re-building would bring.

Monuments, place names, land forms – they can help to preserve a memory—but they do not come with guarantees.  Like human life itself, they can be “here today, gone tomorrow.”

I wrote a book about Louis Rose, which was far from a best seller.  As long as it is in libraries, or available in electronic format, the memory of Rose will, to some degree, continue.  But there are many books about people we’ve never heard of in libraries and in the Library of Congress.  They wait and wait to be read.  Newspaper articles, books, the printed word – these also don’t guarantee permanency.

Of course, there are superstars of the world whose memories will be preserved into the foreseeable future.  These are the great religious and national leaders.  The scientists whose discoveries changed the world like Galileo, Copernicus, and Einstein.  But what about the rest of us?  How fleeting is regional, local or organizational fame?   How many generations does it take before even the most prominent of us are forgotten in whatever sphere we labored?

In considering ways to remember Louis Rose, we became fascinated with the concept of a living legacy.  Instead of building him a passive statue—which perhaps only birds would appreciate – why not honor Rose in some active way?  We thought about his life and the contributions he made to San Diego, and the idea came to us of developing a sister-school relationship between a school in the town where he was born, and the town that he helped to develop.

Rose was born on March 24, 1807 in Neuhaus-an-der-Oste, a small town not far from Cuxhaven, Germany.  It sits near the confluence of the Elbe and Oste Rivers where they flow into the North Sea.   Rose grew up appreciating the role shipping plays in commerce.  He immigrated to the United States in 1840 via New Orleans, which sits on the Mississippi River, another great commercial waterway.   By wagon train he eventually came to San Diego, arriving here in 1850, the year California became the 31^st State of the United States.

Rose was surprised to find that the town of San Diego did not sit on San Diego Bay, but instead sprawled under the Presidio.  Instead of welcoming water commerce, San Diego made it very difficult.  There were no piers or wharves.  If a passenger wanted to come ashore, he or she waded, or was carried on the back of a sailor, to dry ground.  Goods had to be transferred from small boats to wagons and pushed about two miles to Old Town

The Spaniards had built the Presidio where it was because it was high, was close to the fresh water of the San Diego River, and had nearby Indian villages to which missionaries could carry the message of Christianity.  When Mexico became independent of Spain, soldiers moved down the hill from their quarters at the fort. And so the city grew.  Commerce simply wasn’t a priority either of the early Spaniards or the first Mexicans.

Rose figured with San Diego’s deep bay, and the possibility that a transcontinental railroad might come here, shore-side development was the key to San Diego’s commercial future.  He purchased land as he could, first in an informal partnership with James W. Robinson, and later from Robinson’s widow.  He laid out the town of Roseville in 1869.  However, Los Angeles, not San Diego, became the terminus of the transcontinental railroad, notwithstanding San Diego’s beautiful deepwater bay.  And Alonzo Horton built a bigger and more practical town site on the part of the bay where downtown San Diego now sits.  Rose’s big dream was never realized, but he had contributed to the transformation of San Diego into the city it is today.

The school in Roseville once was called Roseville Elementary School.  Its first teacher was Rose’s own daughter, Henrietta.  Eventually the school was replaced by Cabrillo Elementary School.

Now the Grundschule of Neuahus-an-der-Oste and Cabrillo Elementary School are in the process of becoming sister schools.  Their teachers and students will decide what programs are feasible, but pen-pal correspondence, teacher exchanges and perhaps some joint studies are likely possibilities.  Because the relationship will be an active, rather than passive, process, it has the chance to grow into its own kind of adulthood.   Like that of any baby, the program’s future is unknown – but limitless.  In time, it can create its own memory.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com