Stories of Colorful Characters Pack 1890s Journalistic Punch

I think I’ve discovered my San Diego hero: Walter Gifford Smith.

Smith, a ruddy-faced New Yorker who “resembled more the neighborhood butcher than a fire-eating editor,” was editor of the San Diego Sun in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Talk about journalism with a point of view! It was an era when newspapers packed a wallop and sometimes provoked a counter-punch.

One day the targets of some of Smith’s waspishness went to the Sun office, across from Horton Plaza, and threw Smith out a window. His fall was broken by a balcony, saving his life.

Later, Smith wrote that the unofficial mayor of San Diego’s Chinatown was keeping an underage girl for immoral purposes.

The unofficial mayor sued for $20,000. Smith called his attorney “a legal bird of prey and a preternatural ass.”

He wrote a history of San Diego, started the Cabrillo Festival, and regularly hacked away at local corruption and vice.

He was an unabashed believer in Manifest Destiny. A Mexican colonel challenged him to a duel in Tijuana. Suspecting trickery, Smith dared the colonel to come to the Sun, and the colonel backed off.

He conspired with a free-lancing major from the British Army to take over Baja California and make San Diego the capital of the Republic of Lower California.

The plot went awry only after the rival San Diego Union published the details on May 21, 1890, causing a binational uproar.

The U.S. secretary of state tried to soothe the Mexicans by promising to put Smith and the major in prison for 20 years. Passions cooled and Smith eluded prosecution.

I know all of this because of a marvelous new paperback by San Diego historian Henry Schwartz: “Madam Ida & Other Gaslamp Tales,” published by Rand Editions of Leucadia.

It’s a breezy collection of 23 stories about various 19th-Century San Diego characters and humbugs.

Among them: Ida Bailey and her Canary Cottage, Bum the town dog, lawman-turned-casino owner Wyatt Earp, and The Great Jaguarina, the lady sword fighter whose horseback joust with a Bavarian military officer attracted a crowd of 7,000 to Rose Canyon in 1888.

Now back to Smith.

He migrated to San Francisco and became editor of the Chronicle. He covered the Sino-Japanese War.

He went to Hawaii in 1893 to write about Queen Liliuokalani’s struggle to maintain her throne.

He joined forces opposed to the queen and was named editor of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. A judge put him in jail.

On Jan. 14, 1894, The Union carried a story updating Smith’s antics. The subheads read: “Walter G. Smith spoken for the vice-presidency,” and “The queen also has him on the list to be beheaded.”

Both honors eluded him. He died in 1914 at age 55.

His daughter said that Smith “had a way of stimulating people.”

Never Let Facts Spoil a Good Story

Press on.

* When the San Diego Business Journal reported that publisher/president Ted Owen was resigning to head the publishing arm of San Diego’s TCS Enterprises, a couple of things were left out of the story.

Like the news that Owen tried to buy the journal for $10 million but was rebuffed. And that the journal has 12,500 paid subscribers and 1989 revenues of $800,000.

And the background fact that TCS has financial ties to the failed savings and loan of Charles Keating.

Owen said he had all these things cut from the story as written.

He said he was just following the orders of journal owner Larry Bridges, the Kansas City developer, to keep the story short and not to reveal any financial information about the paper.

* Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko may take aim at the fish tacos being served at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

Last season, he lashed the sushi. On Opening Day, a press agent-provocateur sent him a fax about the tacos.

* On April Fool’s Day, The Daily Aztec at San Diego State published the Daily Spaztec, and the (Escondido) Times Advocate gave us “Steamed Broccoli Storms White House.”

The San Diego-based Wholistic Living News ran an ad, “Club Dead Presents Recreation Through Reincarnation.”