The Archives: Squinting at The Union

A view of downtown below from the ninth floor

of the San Diego Central Library, where the stacks

for the old San Diego Union and San Diego

Evening Tribune are located.

(Photo by Ed Piper)

By Ed Piper

In the Friday, September 1, 1922 edition of the San Diego Union, City Schools announced that ninth-graders in Pacific Beach (as well as the rest of the La Jolla attendance area) would attend the "La Jolla junior high school" (which would become Muirlands).

In an initial foray (June 11) into the stacks of the old morning Union (and evening Tribune, which I didn't get to) for Sept. 1-2-3, 1922--the beginnings of La Jolla High School--City Schools' announcement (more likely a reminder or clarification) in the low-resolution microfilm of the original editions was surrounded by:

--Baseball news that Ty Cobb went hitless for the Philadelphia A's in the second game of a doubleheader against the Yankees. The Yankees split the doubleheader.

--An ad for Rudolph Valentino's new silent movie, with a well-known musician playing live "at the Organ".

--Front-page headlines of a police raid on a alleged liquor still in the Imperial Valley, in which the supposed bootlegger/rancher was shot dead "instantly" after he refused not to threaten deputies with his gun. This was early in Prohibition.

I've never actually read newspaper accounts of such goings-on from the actual pages of the newspapers themselves, other than reproductions of the original newspapers in history class. This was truly the "golden age" of newspapers, with a morning and an evening paper in San Diego, as well as intensive coverage on everything from people's love lives to a local pastor returning from vacation.