- [Announcer] Ken Kramer's "About San Diego," made possible in part by Walter Anderson Nursery.

With two locations, San Diego and Poway, a local resource offering plants and products for all your gardening and outdoor care needs.

Walter Anderson Nursery, independent and family-owned since 1928.

Caring for a loved one with memory problems can be challenging.

Alzheimer's San Diego can help.

Offering support, education, resources and social activities at no cost and without a diagnosis.

Visit alzsd.org to learn more or donate.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

- [Ken] What do you think it would be like if this were your office?

This was your desk, this was your phone, and you went to and from your job always in the dark, but your coworkers a century ago were friendly, I guess.

We go east of Interstate 15, north of Escondido, to zip code 92026.

A place inspired by postal code NE77BQ, 5,278 miles away, and there and here, both places are beautiful as you will see.

Plus, preserving at least a little bit of some beloved San Diego history.

- We needed to grab and save the shells from the shell house.

- [Ken] Honoring the Portuguese tuna fishermen who gained wide fame for having put together works of art in the yard of his Point Loma home.

They're gone now.

What happened?

And through changing times in one South Park business neighborhood, we remember a man who broke the color barrier and is recognized for it even yet.

And it may or may not feel like it right now, but San Diego County gets snow now and then and you know it because you showed us the proof.

A snow day, rare and kind of fun.

- [Woman] Get it, get it, get it!

- [Ken] Plus, other things from you, and more stories too, all of them true, about San Diego.

- [Speaker] Ken Kramer's "About San Diego," the history and people of the area we call home.

Here's Ken Kramer.

- From San Ysidro to Oceanside and from Encinitas to Ranche to Julian, where we happen to be this time for a couple of stories coming up, welcome to "About San Diego."

So many stories to get to.

Let's begin as we go to a place to meet a man who was well-known, in fact, beloved through the years, because he was part of a remarkable team.

(gentle music) For this story, let's go to Old Town to meet please, Mr. Dick Miller.

Now, go back into the 1980s and '90s, you'd see him all the time here in the park in Old Town on a horse, part of the Mounted Patrol.

- I was the Mounted Patrol.

- [Ken] And the thing is, for most of a decade, he and his horse became so familiar around this park.

Cody was the horse's name, and Dick can tell you that horse was special.

- How do you say it?

He was smart.

- [Ken] Cody lived here at the Seeley Stables in Old Town where Cody and Dick worked as a team on patrol.

The two of them were like one entity, perfectly suited to their role.

Cody never got rattled by crowds.

- I used to take him in buildings and into garages, the parking garages and stuff like that.

- [Ken] Over the years, they were such a familiar site in the park that visitors, kids got to know them.

Looked forward to Dick Miller and Cody always being there.

- I used to dance with him.

You know, during Cinco de Mayo, we'd go out in the middle of the plaza, you know, in front of the stage and the Mariachis or whoever was up there playing music, you know, and I danced to the music.

These are photos, you know, from visitors, you know, that sent me copies.

- [Ken] In fact, the image of Dick Miller on horseback became so widely distributed, such a popular souvenir.

- At one point, I thought perhaps my image and the horse image was on every refrigerator in every country in the world.

- [Ken] So it was very hard, very difficult for all the friends that horse had made in Old Town when in 1995, at the age of 21 years, Cody developed an intestinal blockage and died.

- We had created such a bond.

It's the same thing you do with your dog.

I mean, if you're really a dog person and you become a unit.

It's kinda like losing an arm.

- [Ken] And that might be where the story ends, but I do wanna show you something.

Let's take a walk over to the east side of the Old Town Transit Center and just where you come up the stairs from the underpass heading into Old Town, look.

- There it is.

- [Ken] It's a little memorial placed back then by trolley construction workers and others who came to know Cody, Old Town's favorite horse.

Look for it, and when you find it, remember Cody and Dick Miller who loved him and their story about San Diego.

I love when we can find stories like that that connect something you can see today with a story about its history.

Same thing now as we go to the North County, to a place that you might have seen on a map or seen signs for it and thought, "That's an unusual name."

And it is.

And it's also a story about San Diego.

Beautiful area up here, don't you think?

The sun sparkling through a canopy of trees.

Roads so picturesque, just like the place it's named for in England.

That's right.

In England, in New Castle, amidst the old buildings dripping with tradition in history, there is a public park called Jesmond Dene.

You can look at the tourist brochures and see it is beautiful, Jesmond Dene.

Well, when Mr. WG Moore came to San Diego County and started developing this area on what is today the east side of Interstate 15 north of Highway 78, it made him think of that place so far away.

So he called his project Jesmond Dene Estates.

In 1932, he wrote that he was planning a couple of dozen homes.

He had already spent more than $10,000 on two of them already.

Where the Jesmond Dene Park of England could offer croquet, swimming, boating, dancing, and rustic walking, the Jesmond Dene of San Diego County would offer beauty in its own way.

That was the promise.

Well, a couple of years later, in 1934, it was sold again, the new owner pledging to make further improvements, and he did, and after all these years and much more development, the name has stuck.

Look on maps near Escondido.

If you've ever seen it and wondered, that's how it's pronounced by the way, Jesmond Dene.

Decades later, I bet Mr. Moore would appreciate that it's still remembered and perhaps especially so that there's our county's own Jesmond Dene Park there.

A few thousand miles away from its British namesake maybe, but in its own way, something beautiful and historic about San Diego.

(cheerful music) All right, we are in Julian, a community with so much history as a mining town.

Dating back to the year 1869, when a man by the name of Mr. Fred Coleman, a former slave, was watering his horses and he saw something.

Turns out that little flashing glimmer was gold.

And within weeks the Julian Gold Rush was underway.

There's a creek and a street that bear Fred Coleman's name.

And the truth is that the boom town that Julian became in all of its mining history for decades that followed can be traced back to that one discovery.

And even though it's a tourist town now, Julian is, you can still get the feel for what it was like for generations of miners to go about their daily business.

You can still go in a mine.

Want to see?

Let's go back in time.

Back to the 1870s when there were as many as 200 gold mines in San Diego's back country.

Here's one that's still around and here we go.

Carl Nelson is taking us into the Eagle Mine, which his family has owned for more than a half century.

And this mine, by the way, was still producing gold up until the early 1940s.

- This is where the gold's found in these veins of quartz, not to rock around it.

- [Ken] If you were a miner and you wanted to find gold, you had to follow those veins of quartz back farther into the mountain, creating hundreds of feet of tunnels as you went.

- There's five levels above and five below us.

We're in the middle level of the mine.

- [Ken] Walking through here, you get a sense of what it must have been like.

This was hard rock mining and this was hard work.

The tunnels snaked through the mountain and you can imagine the men who labored here every day, digging, drilling and blasting with small charges of explosives, all to extract gold, that in the early days of this mine was worth about $17 an ounce.

Something like one 100th of what it is today.

So we talked with Carl Nelson, we wondered what about that?

Has all the gold been taken out of here?

- There's still gold here, it's just old-fashioned today.

Modern money is, you know, large companies, they move mountain ranges, they don't dig tunnels.

- [Ken] The Eagle Mine, though, was never a big corporate operation.

It was one of dozens of mines scattered from Julian down to Banner, and it provided work for a few men.

- Maybe a dozen, but not all at the same time.

Maybe in shifts, you know?

'Cause underground you're working in confined areas.

- [Ken] Yes, confined is a good word for it.

And if you're curious what it must have been like, there are clues everywhere here inside this mine.

The leftover remnants of what was a going operation up until the second World War.

Here's the mine office, hundreds of feet within the mountain looking like somebody just walked away from it one day, 70 years ago.

Connected to the outside world only by a telephone, an air-powered drill that when operated must have made a deafening noise in this rock tunnel left at the spot where it was last used.

And a lift used to transport miners and equipment from one floor to the next.

The instructions for sounding alarm bells still posted.

All of this buried deep within a mountain.

When Carl takes people through here, he sometimes finds out it's not for those who hate close places.

- Some people are claustrophobic.

Yeah, yeah.

You can usually tell.

They turn sweaty and get all white, you know?

- [Ken] You can't tell from in here, but really, what we have here are two mines hooked together by tunnels.

The Eagle Mine and the High Peak Mine, which came in from the other side of the mountain.

But from inside, it's just one long series of tunnels.

And something else, as you walk toward the center of the mountain, you notice you're going very slightly uphill.

It's so the ore cars that ran on rails could be pushed out easily when they were full and uphill when they were coming back in empty.

And also so water could run out too, Carl says.

He still meets people every once in a while who have worked in a place like this.

- Oh yeah.

And I talk to a lot of them.

I meet a lot of interesting old-timers too that have done this as a living.

They, you know, fill me in on stuff that I don't know even.

- [Ken] There have been accidents.

Two miners died here many years ago, and earthquakes, some big ones, but over 140 years of being here, it's rock solid.

And that's good to know, especially when Carl turns off the lights just so visitors can experience the darkness.

I mean, total darkness.

Quiet too.

Very, very quiet.

- A lot of times, supposedly, if you go in there and sit long enough and still enough, eventually it starts sound like raining.

What you're hearing is the dust fall.

- [Ken] It took a certain kind of person to do this, work in here under these conditions, breathing the rock dust, loading the ore, pushing it outside to the stamping mill, and doing it year after year.

You kind of admire their spirit and enterprise.

This was not a big mine as commercial operations go, but it paid its way.

All told, maybe $100,000 worth of gold was removed from the Eagle and High Peak mines.

And that was in the days when that really was a lot of money.

You think about that in a place like this, what working days must have been like here and how after eight or 10 hours drilling, blasting, and hoping that the gold continued, how welcome must have been the light at the end of the tunnel.

(cheerful music) It is "About San Diego" and I'm Ken Kramer.

Time changes things, and sometimes, it removes all traces of history that we really wanna preserve.

I'll just let that serve as an introduction to what you're about to see.

(pleasant music) This is Tunaville, Driscoll's Wharf off Harbor Drive in Point Loma, where fishing boats unload their catch and the home of the seafood market where Tommy Gomes is the owner.

His family of Portuguese tuna fishermen first settled in San Diego in 1892.

- Yeah, we've been around a long time.

You know, they call this area of Point Loma Tunaville in honor of the men and women that worked the tuna boats and worked the canneries of the Portuguese community.

- [Ken] Tommy is passionate about preserving the history of San Diego's tuna fleet, at one time, our city's third largest industry.

- We fed 90% of the world, ate our tuna.

We had Boston, Purina, AJ Hines, Checkerboard Square, Bumble Bee, StarKist, everybody was here.

- [Ken] He's got a model of a tuna seiner and other fishing boats, all the old photos running on the TV.

Now meantime, few miles away, 2000 block of Rosecrans in Point Loma is a house that, until pretty recently, was a landmark.

You know, if you ever saw the shell house of Point Loma, it was a front yard completely covered in seashells.

Tens of thousands of them fashioned into towers and intricate designs.

So well known that it appeared on tourist maps, the fantastic creation of the late Frank Mendes, a Portuguese tuna fisherman who made his living in the old-school way.

(old-fashioned music) Bait and hook on the open sea in the warm blue waters south of San Diego.

- [Speaker] Hey, here's a big one.

Oh say, it takes skill and muscle to bring in a fish that size, but our tuna fishermen have both.

- [Ken] That's the way it was done when Frank Mendes and his wife Elisa bought their home on Rosecrans Street 75 years ago.

The Portuguese tradition of tile work of our Lady of Fatima by the front door.

And Elisa, who died recently, just short of her 104th birthday.

Their son Dan Mendes talked with us a while back.

He grew up in the house on Rosecrans Street.

He told us if you go back years and years ago, the front yard was pretty average.

- That's all it was.

Just green lawn.

Typical home with the green grass in front.

- [Ken] For years, when his dad would come back from fishing, he'd often have a sack of shells, mostly from the Galapagos Islands.

All kinds of shells.

- He got mollusc, abalone, clamshells, shells that I don't even know the names of.

I mean, they're specific to those islands, you know?

- [Ken] He just kept adding and storing up more sacks year after year.

And then when he retired, he tore out the front lawn and started transforming his front yard into this landscape of shells.

- When you look at it and you see that all the intricate work that he had to put into it, I mean each piece is put in individually into cement.

- [Ken] Looking back, doesn't seem like anybody ever asked Frank Mendes, "Why are you doing this?"

I'm guessing it must have been something he imagined during long hours at sea.

And we don't know if he thought it would last forever.

A couple of generations of San Diegans, from Point Loma to far beyond who loved the shell house, wish it could have.

But with Elisa's death, the house was put up for sale.

I guess in the world of real estate, curiosities don't sell.

Curb appeal is everything.

A few neighbors and some in the Portuguese fishing community heard the front yard would be cleared and they were able to save some shells.

Which brings us back here to Tunaville on Driscoll's Wharf.

Tommy Gomes heard what was happening to the shell house and felt he had to save at least some of it, so he did.

- We needed to grab and save the shells from the shell house.

- [Ken] A couple of the elaborate shell creations will remain at Tunaville now.

When your family has been fishing here for 132 years, you love history and you know when you've got step in to preserve it.

- Because it really truly is a part of San Diego history and we're losing a little bit more and more each day.

- [Ken] Okay, over to South Park now, 1500 block of 30th Street, which if you see this in the future, will be a new space with new businesses.

But when we stopped by seeing all that take shape, it reminded us of some South Park history that was made right here.

Let's go back and take a look.

You see here a man named Hamilton, Herman Hamilton, American Patriot, served his country as a member of the Montfort Point Marines at the end of World War II.

A man who knew what segregation was like in South Carolina before he moved to San Diego in 1974.

And so Mr. Hamilton, United States Marine arrives in San Diego and he comes to this on 30th Street and you know what happens?

- And I came in and they didn't serve me, but I stayed anyhow.

- [Ken] They didn't serve you?

- No.

They didn't serve Black people.

No Black people came in there.

- [Ken] Even though he lived right next door, he was completely ignored.

- They look at me and said, "What you want?"

I said, "I want a beer.

What do you think?"

- [Ken] Herman Hamilton stood his ground and eventually not only was served but ended up staying, became a regular customer even after he quit drinking alcohol.

34 years.

Outlasted everybody.

Sad to say, in 2011, Herman Hamilton passed away sometime after we spoke with him.

However briefly, we felt lucky to have gotten to know him, and one thing more, call it poetic justice or karma or whatever, times, attitudes and owners changed over the decades.

And that name, his name, Hamilton, came to stand for something.

He told us.

- I feel good.

I ain't get no money, but my name is more important than the money.

- [Ken] Yes, because you see, the new owners wanted to know, would it be all right if we renamed the place for him?

And so for years in the 1500 block of 30th Street, there was Hamilton's Tavern.

A fire took it out in November of 2020.

It was a total loss.

New business replaces the old.

But Herman Hamilton's story remains part of the history about this South Park neighborhood and about San Diego.

(cheerful music) Coming up, the mountains around here are very occasionally kissed by a beautiful gift of nature, which you have gone out and captured in film and video and we will see that.

But first, other things that you have found for us all to see, it's your part of the show, so let's see.

Gotta start with this one.

From 1918, this is Navy recruit training learning to row a regulation 25-foot cutter in the pond in front of the Balboa Park Botanical Building.

Here's Joseph Jacinto Mora, who came from Uruguay to California.

Super talented sculptor, photographer and cartoonist.

In the 1920s and '30s, he'd create these whimsical maps that were very popular, like this one of Yosemite.

His characters encountering all kinds of experiences in the park.

He came to be known as Joe, Joe Mora.

While Helen Nelson of Escondido was sorting through some of her mom's stuff, found this from 1928, Joe Mora's, whimsical map of San Diego.

And it does show us how very much farm and ranch land there was around.

From Chollas to Spring Valley, it's dairy, lemons, olives, bees, and wheat.

And from Otay to National City, celery, lemons, and chickens in 1928.

Chris Phillips sent a picture of her mom, Pat Wilson, and little Pat's grandfather in his chicken pen at their house on Louisiana Street.

Pat here would go on to have eight children, 19 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren with two more on the way.

♪ See my home in Pasadena ♪ Ah, Pasadena.

Well, in the 1920s, being like Pasadena was a selling point in the new development of La Mesa Springs, which advertised itself as San Diego's Pasadena.

In Kensington, developers in the 1920s added crowned streetlights, the same kind that could be found only in Pasadena.

A century later, many in the community are trying to save them.

On a postcard sent to us, thank you, new bank building in National City.

New in 19-6, dirt streets and in front there, hitching posts, free parking for your horse.

♪ Since you've gone ♪ 1957, singer Ferlin Husky released "Since You've Gone" and it was number one on the country charts for 10 weeks.

Still popular to this day, but the actual writer of the song and the man who first recorded it was San Diego's Smokey Rogers, mainstay of the Bostonian Dance Ballroom in El Cajon and host of a local TV show for kids in San Diego.

From Mark Harris, who says this photo has been in his family for decades.

His older brother Joe made it on to Smokey's show.

From our Department of Transportation, Don Strassibasco in Scripps Ranch sent a 1931 ad for the Ryan Flying School, which promised actual time at the controls of a Ford Trimotor, training in the use of parachutes.

Very important.

And if you sign up, free transportation to sunny San Diego by railroad.

From Victor B DeAugustino, looks like 1968, a huge billboard downtown for the Santa Fe.

And at the station, in the military, go to Chicago for $29.

And finally, 1930s postcard of La Valencia Hotel, sometimes referred to as the Pink Lady of La Jolla, an elegant Mediterranean-style landmark designed a century ago by the noted architect, Reginald Davis Johnson of Pasadena.

Finally, I don't know when you're seeing this, it may be blisteringly hot, but are you ready for something cool?

A few months ago, there was a cold front passing through San Diego and there was snow falling in these mountains around here down to about the 3000-foot level and we put out the call on social media: Send us some pictures, send us some video of what you see, and if you're ready for it, let's see what you sent in.

Let's call this a snow day.

(peaceful music) (woman laughing) - [Woman] Get it, get it, get it!

(peaceful music continues) - [Person] It's snowing.

(peaceful music continues) - [Woman] Lean to the left.

(laughs) (children laughing) (peaceful music continues) (peaceful music continues) - [Woman] Get it, get it, get it!

- Ah, that was very cool indeed.

And you're about to see the names of the people who took those pictures, our photographers and videographers.

Stand by, you'll see them parading by in just a moment.

And for this time, that's our "About San Diego" show.

As always, if you are interested in seeing these stories again, if you wanna find out more information about the stories that you've seen, if you wanna get some merchandise, a cup or a T-shirt to represent for the show, we very much appreciate that.

Until next time, and as always, I am Ken Kramer.

Thank you for watching and for caring about San Diego.

Bye-bye.

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) - [Announcer] Support for this program comes from the KPBS Explore Local Content Fund, supporting new ideas and programs for San Diego.

Ken Kramer's "About San Diego," made possible in part by Walter Anderson Nursery, with two locations, San Diego and Poway.

A local resource offering plants and products for all your gardening and outdoor care needs.

Walter Anderson Nursery, independent and family-owned since 1928.

Caring for a loved one with memory problems can be challenging.

Alzheimer's San Diego can help.

Offering support, education, resources, and social activities at no cost and without a diagnosis.

Visit alzsd.org to learn more or donate.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.