‘This Day’ a Sudoko-like puzzle for historian

This Day in San Diego History by Linda H. Pequegnat, Sunbelt Publications, 2009, ISBN 978-0-932653-90-1, $19.95

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — There are 478 years between 1513, when Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and  1991, the year of the death of Roger Revelle, the Scripps oceanographer who headed the planning committee for the establishment of UCSD.  Those five centuries encompassed lots of history, and for researcher Linda H. Pequegnat, they also posed some challenges.

Could she find something historically significant to say about each day of the calendar year, including a the  Feb. 29 of a Leap Year? At the same time, could she include most areas of San Diego County in the text?  The challenge that she set out for herself was an intellectual jigsaw puzzle, more complicated, and potentially more stimulating, than the crossword or Sudoko puzzles one finds in the daily newspapers.  It took her 10 years of off-and-one research to finally solve the puzzle.

Sometimes the calendar just wouldn’t cooperate!  There were days of the year when more than one interesting thing happened, but under Pequegnat’s rules for constructing the book, she could use only one.  Sometimes the author could slide around this restriction by using a follow-up date.  For example, on December 7, 1922, a U.S.  Army plane flown by 1st Lt. Charles F. Webber was taking Col. Francis C. Marshall on a flight from Coronado to Tucson when it crashed in what is today Rancho Cuyamaca State Park.

Now that might have been an event worth noting for December 7th, but for the fact that in 1941  an event  occurring on a December 7th was of far greater consequence for San Diego — the bombing by Japanese forces of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into World War II and prompting a build-up of military industries in San Diego.

Not wanting to give up the Webber-Marshall flight altogehter, nor the possibility of  a mention for Rancho Cuyamaca State Park, Pequegnat chose to record the fact that on December 19, 1922 — 12 days after the plane went missing, the military’s search was called off.   The plane was never spotted from the air, but on May 4, 1923, a local rancher on horseback  came across the wreckage as well as the two men’s charred bodies.   Had she so desired, Pequegnat could have used May 4th to tell about the ill-fated flight, but that would have meant giving up the May 4th item she already had: On May 4, 1883 Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Ramona, wrote a letter expressing her hope that the novel “would do for the Indian a thousandth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro.”

I counted at least 57 entries about La Jolla in the book, another 24 about Old Town and 23 about the Anza-Borrego Desert.   Other communities fared less well.  This, no doubt, is a reflection of where author Pequegnat’s interests lie; she resides in La Jolla and obtained her Master’s Degree at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.   There is nothing wrong with this; we all interpret and value history through our personal lenses.

As a historian of San Diego’s Jewish community, I was pleased that Louis Rose, San Diego’s first Jewish settler, was well-represented in the text. However,  if I were writing a similar day-in-history book, I might have selected the date of December 31, 1930, as being particularly interesting, as that was when Albert Einstein, arriving by ship, was given a tumultuous welcome by the Jewish and general communities of San Diego.  But I really can’t argue with Pequegnat’s choice for December 31, the day that ended her book.  She chose December 31, 1916, the day that the  Panama-California Exposition came to a close in Balboa Park.

The author fell victim to an embarrassing editing error, and I can see how it happened.   At the top of Page 271,  September 25, 1883, is given as the date for the horrendous midair crash between a PSA jet and a private Cessna plane, killing 144 people, including some into whose North Park homes the PSA jet crashed.  But wait, in 1883 airplanes hadn’t even been invented.  The correct date of this tragedy was September 25, 1978.

How could such a mistake have happened?   On the preceding page was the date September 24, 1883, on which the first postmaster was appointed for Nuevo, the town that became Ramona.  Whoever was  in charge of the page headings must have copied the one on Page 270, and then changed 24 to 25, while forgetting to change 1883 to 1978.  I’m willing to bet the person who made the error was fatigued from looking at the computer for too long.  I know I’ve made similar mistakes when my eyes have grown weary.

Although I may have made different choices, I consider Pequegnat’s work to be very valuable reference material — so valuable that I put the dates, page numbers, locales and brief description of the events onto a spread sheet, so that I could look at the data in various ways.  I found, for example, that the years 1775 and 1769 were tied for the lead with 10 entries each, followed closely by the years 1871 and 1888 with 9 entries.   In chronological order, we can say that 1769 was the year that Father Junipero Serra celebrated the mass  marking the founding of the City of San Diego, and 1775 was the year of the De Anza expedition through what would become the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Pequegnat followed both the Serra and De Anza expeditions closely,  mentioning them on multiple occasions

In 1871, among other events, were  the San Diego Union beginning daily publication, and courthouse records being stolen from the Whaley House in Old Town.  In 1888  were the openings of the Hotel Del Coronado, the Ocean Beach Railroad, and Oceanside’s first pier, as well as the death of Louis Rose.

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