Great to visit with Linda Montalto Patterson– Coastside artist (landscape painter) whose historic Miramar residence & beautiful rose gardens (now in bloom) is also home to well known hastingshouseweddings.com/
(Photo at right: Coastside artist Linda Montalto Patterson in my garden).
(Photo below) Former Coastsider Jerry Koontz may have moved to Oroville (jerrysphotos.com) but he’s still snapping great pictures. Here he’s taking a break from shooting in my cacti garden. He’s been working on a project for me and you can see that I’m driving him crazy.
What little i’ve read about Ernest J. Sweetland sounds like material for an article, book or even a movie.
Does anyone know about this man described as a “basement hobbyist who became a top-flight inventor” and died at age 70 in San Francisco in 1950?
Among his 30 “successful inventions”– one of which was “sleep therapy”– was the Sweetland Cast Warmer, used in hospitals.
He invented the cast warmer after a car accident in which he injured his arm requiring a cast. It took four days for the plaster to dry out. And the experience prompted him to invest in a cast warmer which dried out casts in just four hours, not four days.
His best known invention was the Purolator, once used in cars.
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June, I am Ernest J. Sweetland’s great grand daughter. There is a book about him by Dale Z. Kirby called, “Ernest John Sweetland and his Fifty Years of Invention”. It tell’s about his poor childhood, with a drinking cobbler dad, making a camera and other things out of the junk yard as a child, his teen years, education, Nevada Mines, winning over the Irish nurse,making sugar filters in Hawaiia, the amazing 25,000 sq ft home he built for his 7 children in Piedmont Ca, the law suit he won against General Motors in 1938 for his Purolater oil filter, he also played the violin and painted as well as worked secretly for the government during the war. That’s a quick overview of a very interesting life. How did you know of him?? Brenda Smith ~ Calif.
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Photographer Ed Davis has lived in Half Moon Bay since 1979–and he says he’s “been recording (photographically) my impressions of California since 1964, when I escaped the Texas panhandle (courtesy of the U.S.Navy). Tonight, I was researching the origins of the name of Pillar Point (for an accompaniment for one of my photographs), and I stumbled upon your website. If you could give me any information on that, or point me in the right direction, I would be very much in your debt.
“I’m a little surprised that we haven’t met, given the number of people you mentioned in your site that I know. Carol DelMar, Connie Malach, Chad and January Hooker I saw today at a housewarming party in El Granada, Jerry Koontz, Richard English (now gone), Richard Henry, Tom Monaghan, Cathy Duncan (former lady friend, post divorce, now gone also), numerous others. I admire your website,and I regret that I haven’t recorded the people in my life as well as the places…”
And if you’re wondering about the origin of the name, Pillar Point, here’s what I’ve got:
“Pillar Point: (The north end of Half Moon Bay.) The Portola
expedition in 1769 gave this a name that did not survive, punta de los
Angeles Custodios. The present name first appears, in the present
form, on the Coast Survey field sheet of 1861; but presumably it had
been in use since the 1790s in some Spanish form, say perhaps punta or
rincon de los Pilares or del Pilar, for the Sail or Pillar rock here.
The headland at the point was called in Spanish the Corral de Tierra
and in early American times the Snake’s Head from its shape.”
From “Place Names of San Mateo County” by Dr. Alan K. Brown (San Mateo
County Historical Assn: 1975)
I was ten-years-old when I had monoâI still remember my dad looking at me and talking secretly with my grave-faced mother. I felt fine but they were talking about glands near my neck. The glands were swollen distorting the lines in my face.
My parents could see what I couldnât.
I was scared.
Dad took me to Childrenâs Hospital on Lake Street in San Francisco; later he said that he had to sell his car– I think it was a gray Studebaker– to pay the medical bills.
The diagnosis was mono, mononucleosis, then commonly called âthe kissing disease.â? When I heard thatâs what it was called I racked my 10-year-old memory trying to think of whom I had kissed.
Nobody!
Ten-years-old I might have been but I also had thought of kissing a couple of boys that lived in the neighborhood, the lower Sunset District in San Francisco, between the streetcar tracks on Judah and the ice cream store on the corner of Irving and 24th avenue.
Mom couldnât bear to come with dad and me to the hospital. I was deposited, and I did feel âdeposited,â? and my greatest fear was that I would not return home ever again. Maybe the hospital would be my new home, maybe home would be no place. Maybe my parents didnât want me.
The next thing I knew I was in a bed in a large childrenâs ward. Good thing my eyesight wasnât that good because I didnât want to see them anyway. I could feel their eyes on me, though.
My mother never came to visit, and my dad did when he couldâin those days you had to show up for work and I guess they couldnât get away. What I call a âfakeâ? aunt and uncle did come to see me. They lived nearby and were retired and always had books for me to read.
Thatâs what I did. I read book after book about kids older than me, enjoying life, dating and having adventures.
During the day in the big childrenâs ward room, a doctor came by and injected me with shots. When one arm became so used-up, so black and blue, the doc started on the other. At night when the room was black, without light, another doctor came by and injected my butt with something.
The shots hurt, and forever after, I did not look forward to anyone wielding a needle.
Two very lonely and long weeks after being a kid trapped in hospital, I was released looking forward to playing in the street–but now I learned that I couldnât leave the house for several months. I couldnât to school, play with other children; I was housebound with my non-English speaking grandmother as my guard. The doctorâs fear, I guess, was that I was contagious.
That was a bad year and it got worse. After I was released from the house, summer was over, and my parents had missed their vacation with me. It was the fall and while the other healthy kids went back to school, I went away for two weeks, not to Lake Tahoe, like we usually did, but, truth is, I canât remember. Was it Clear Lake? Was it Chico?
We stayed in a little cabin and I was left alone again and was walking around when I saw a big German Shepherd. On the ground near him was a long stick. My biggest mistake was to point at that stickâthe dog lunged at me and took a chunk out of my hand. The blood oozed up and started bleeding and it wouldnât stop.
I was scared.
If I told my parents, I thought, they would get mad at me, so I kept my bloody wound a secret. I ran back to the cabin (not knowing that while I thought I could move about unseen, I was dead-wrong, children are always watched) got some toilet paper and wrapped my hand in it. It was bleeding so much that I finally had no choice but to find my parents and tell them what happened.
Fortunately, everybody was loving and sympathetic. The big fear was that I would have to have the long series of shots for rabiesâbut the dog had had his shots. For a long time I had a scar on my right hand where the dog had taken a bit out of me.
I am looking at my hand now and I see that the scar has faded away.
Not just determination–but fate was with Theodore Hoover. The Ocean Shore Land Co. changed its mind about selling its Coastside holdings after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire dealt the railroad business a heavy financial blow.
Now the land Hoover coveted was up for sale and negotiations went quickly. He got the other half of “the Waddell,” property Theodore and Mildred called the “Rancho del Oso.” And what a property it was. Their next door neighbor was Big Basin State Park–a magnificent redwood forest acquired by California in 1902.
Mildred’s study of “the Waddell” proved to be a labor of love. She learned its name was derived from William W. Waddell, a Kentucky woodsman who established a sawmill at what was then called “Big Gulch.”
To move the lumber from deep within the Waddell canyon to a wharf near Ano Nuevo on the Pacific Ocean, Waddell constructed a five-mile tramway, marked with more than 10 bridges–an amazing achievement.
(Photo at right: Coastside artist Linda Montalto Patterson in my garden).
