HUMBOLDT HISTORY: An Inside Look at County Bureaucracy in the Early 1950s, From the Beautiful Old Courthouse and the Viewpoint of the Dog Licensing Desk | Lost Coast Outpost

My one claim to fame growing
up in Eureka was the title of
Humboldt County’s Miss Dog Tag.
Other girls, dressed in one-piece
swim suits and high heels, told of
their dreams of a better world as
they competed for the title of Miss
Humboldt County, a preliminary to
the Miss California Contest, which
could even lead to the National Miss
America Pageant with Bert Parks as
master of ceremonies.

But not I.

For three summers, from 1951
through 1953, my title was Miss Dog
Tag of Humboldt County. How did I
come to claim such a title?

In 1951, after four years of marriage, I was divorced and on my
own. To my relief, my mother insisted I move in with her. We agreed
that I would pay her fifty dollars a month for room and board.
I was earning $300 a month in my
new position teaching upper grades
at Rolph Elementary School in
Fairhaven. Since I had more college credits than the primary grade
teacher, I was paid an additional five
dollars a month to be principal of
the school. This job involved making out attendance records for the
county each month, ordering school
supplies, putting them away in the
school storeroom, and taking inventory of supplies at the beginning and
end of each school year. I loved my
teaching position at Rolph School
and felt that it was my school. Janice
Lansing taught the primary grades
the first year I was there, Winnie Hill
the next, and Glenna Davis the following two years.

Although there was a workmen’s
ferry from the docks in Eureka to
Mutual Plywood, a mill adjacent
to the Rolph School, there was no
bridge across the bay from Eureka to
Samoa and Fairhaven in the 1950s. I
had to drive all the way around the
bay to get to school. World War II
had not been over long in 1951. Factories were still gearing up to civilian needs. I worried that any car that
had survived four years of wartime
use, plus nearly six years post-war
use, would not be reliable, so I put a
down payment on a new 1951 baby
blue Ford sedan. My car payments
were $90 a month. At that time,
beginning teachers in Humboldt
County schools were paid only for
the months that school was in session. This left me with no income for
the three summer months.

I doubled the car payments so I
would not lose my car during the
summer. By the time I made double
car payments, paid my mother for
room and board, bought gas that ran
$20 a month, paid my dentist $10
a month, and shopped for necessary things like shampoo, I had five
dollars a month left to do with as I
pleased. Even if I saved every spare
dollar, it would not be enough to
tide me over the summer. I needed a
summer job.

An opportunity for temporary
work turned up in the County Clerk’s
office at the court house. Fred J.
Moore, Jr., the County Clerk, offered
to stop by my mother’s house at 1521
Sixth Street in Eureka, and interview
me. Fred was a brother of Franny
Moore, tbe football coach at Arcata
High School, and also a brother of
Herb Moore, an Arcata physician
who, during one rainy winter while
I attended Humboldt State College,
had removed my infected tonsils for
a fee of fifty dollars. Fred Moore was
a medium-sized man with sandy-
colored hair. He sat on my mother’s
flowered chintz-covered sofa while
she served coftee in her best Haviland china cups. After chatting
awhile. Fred J. Moore offered me the
job of selling dog licenses during the
summer at the legal minimum wage
of fifty cents an hour.

The old courthouse took up
one city block and stood like
a wedding cake frosted in pale yellow butter-cream icing, surrounded
by lawns, shrubs, trees, and paths.
Broad staircases rose from Fourth
and Fifth Streets to the second fioor,
where the county offices were located. The old courthouse looked to me
like a courthouse should look, with
a clock tower that served as a landmark, even if it did not always tell
the correct time.

Each morning, I climbed the
broad Fifth Street staircase of the
old courthouse. Tall, double doors
opened into a high-ceilinged hallway. The County Clerk’s office was
the ñrst one on the left and took up
one quarter of the second floor. The
tall door to this office was wrapped
with grooved, milled, straight-vertical-grain redwood molding, stained
and varnished dark hrown, as were
all the other windows and doors in
the court house. Emma Cox Alcala was the County Recorder, with an
office across the hall on the east side
of the building. Judges’ chambers,
courtrooms and court reporter offices were on the third floor.

Inside the County Clerk’s office, a
forty-inch-high railing ran from the
door to the counter, a distance of
about ten feet, with a small gate near
the counter. My little desk stood just
in front of this gate inside the railing. A small sign sitting on top of
the railing to one side of my desk
announced “DOG LICENSES.” On
the back of this sign, someone had
written my name and “Miss Dog
Tag 1951.” I sat at my desk facing the
door, and the first things people saw
when they walked into the County
Clerk’s offices were the dog license
sign and my smile.

Filing cabinets reached from floor
to ceiling on the west wall between
the tall windows of the County
Clerk’s office. Clerks had to use a ladder that ran along a railing to reach
the higher file drawers. Heavy wooden desks stood behind the counter
the length of the room. Fred’s desk
was centered between the windows.
situated so that he could see everyone who came in or out of the office,
but he rarely sat still at this desk. He
was always busy.

Gigantic legal ledgers, so huge I
don’t know if I could have picked
them up, were stored under the
counter. Beulah Wahlund, who became my good friend while I worked
there, is a petite person, but she was
able to handle these mighty ledgers,
in which the entries were hand-written, and to help people with legal
matters. Beulah said the heavy ledgers stored under the counter
on rollers instead of shelves, which
made it easier to slide them in and out
out.

Others
in the County Clerk’s Office at that time were Merlyn Allen, Barbara Anderson, Helen
Tierney, Rose Vossberg and Elizabeth Griffin. Sam Glenn and Dorothea Martell were courtroom clerks
who spent some of their time in the
County Clerk’s office and the rest of
their time in the courtrooms. Court
was very formal in those days, and
Sam and Dorothea always wore suits
when they had to appear in court,
although Dorothea might take her
jacket off when she came back into
the County Clerk’s office.

Two judges sat in the Humboldt
County Court House during this
period: Delos A. Mace and Carl L.
Christiansen, Jr. There were only
two female attorneys in Humboldt
County then: Grace Dempster in
Fortuna and Elizabeth Morrison in
Eureka. A very colorful attorney,
Blaine McGowan, wore western
suits, cowboy boots and a Stetson
hat; but ofcourse he did not wear the
hat in court. Former Senator Irwin
T. Quinn, Collis Mahon (Fortuna),
George Corbett, Chester Monette,
Jeremiah R. Scott, Sr., Arthur W Hill.
rested Francis B. Mathews, and many others were attorneys in the 1950s. Beulah Wahlund remembers Jeremiah
Scott, Sr. as a wonderful old gentleman who sometimes had a story to
tell the clerks. He always started out
with: “When I was a dashing young
lieutenant…” She did not remember
any of his stories, but did remember
his resounding voice that could be
heard in the second floor hallway
when he was trying a case in one of
the courtrooms on the third floor.

Fred J. Moore was a brilliant man
who had a virtual “kingdom” in that
he ran all the areas connected with
the County Clerk’s office from this
one room in the courthouse. Marriage licenses were issued, passport
applications accepted, naturalization
papers processed for new citizens,
and dog licenses issued. Fictitious
Names Statements and Articles of
Incorporation were also filed in the
County Clerk’s office. In addition,
Fred was in charge of the election
department. He had several extra
telephones installed on election
days, and the County Clerk employees worked through the evening and
night receiving calls from precincts
as they tallied the results. Reporters
from local newspapers and for KIEM
radio hustled in and out, keeping
tabs on the election.

The County Clerk’s office maintained all the court records and prepared the court calendars for civil,
prohate, criminal, juvenile courts,
and for adoptions. Fred used a color-
coded system for files: blue for civil
cases, brown for probate, green for
juvenile, yellow for criminal and red
for adoptions. Adoptions were closed
files. Fred J. Moore also served as ex
officio clerk to the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. Fred told
his staff, “The record must speak for
itself.” If someone made a mistake,
they could not change the record or
date of filing, but they could correct
it if a document should have been
filed at an earlier date by using the
term nunc pro tune—”now for then.”
Beulah remembers that when she
first went to work at the County
Clerk’s otfice, Fred scolded her
day for straightening his desk. Although it looked to her like his desk
needed to be organized, he knew
exactly where everything was in
clutter, and did not appreciate anyone moving things around.

My job at the County Clerk’s office began as soon as school
closed in June, but requests for dog
tags merely trickled in until the
deadline of July I approached. I spent
most of my first days helping recount
ballots for an election, the results of
which had been questioned. Two
women had been hired to do this
work. Fred asked me to help them
at their table when there were no
dog tags to issue. As a schoolteacher,
used to checking papers every day
after school or in the evening when
I got home, I had learned to be swift
and accurate. Right away, I earned a
one 25-cent-an-hour raise. I also unwittingly earned the animosity of these
women. After a few days I realized
the that because I worked so much faster
than they did, I made their job last
a shorter length of time. Although I
was helping to get the work done, the
amount of money they were able to
earn decreased. I felt relieved wben
the county deadline of July 1 for dog
tags grew closer, and I became busy
at my own tittle desk near the door.

This page from the 1946 Registry of Dogs, a large leather-bound ledger on file at the Historical Society, indicates some of the popular pet names of the era. The Snoopy on line two is not a namesake of the famous quadruped, who did not appear until 1950. Click to enlarge.

We were allowed a fifteen-minute
break every morning and afternoon,
and an hour for lunch. Our lunchroom was a narrow back room that
ran the width of the main room and
had one tall window. This storage
room contained a coffee pot, some
chairs, our lunches and snacks, as
well as shelves of office supplies
reaching to the ceiling, accessed by
a ladder running on an overhead
track. Beulah and I brought bits of
embroidery to work on while we sat
by the light of the tall, narrow window and talked during our fifteen-
minute breaks.

The summer of 1953 was my last
summer as Miss Dog Tag. The
following winter, the 1954 earthquake bit just after twelve oclock
noon on December 21. Most of the
staff had gone to lunch, but Beulah
was standing at the counter with Fred
Moore. Sam Merryman, a county supervisor, was leaving the office and
had gotten as far as the door that had
a glass transom over it. As Sam stood
in the doorway, Beulah expected the
glass to fall out of the transom onto
him. She tried to move around the
counter, to warn him, but with each
step the floor came up to her foot, so
she just hung on to the counter. Luckily, the glass transom did not fall. Behind Beulah, the metal file drawers
full of heavy files were moving in
and out. Above her head, suspended
by bars, the fluorescent ceiling lights
swayed crazily, scattering plaster
over everything. She expected the
lights to fall on her, but they stayed
suspended, hanging in a lopsided
fashion. Beulah, a young newlywed,
feared that she was going down in a
heap of rubble and that her husband,
Tom, would never know what had
happened to her.

That earthquake proved that the
building was unsafe. It would have
been very costly, and maybe impossible, to shore it up to meet new
earthquake codes. It was a shame
to have to tear down the old court
house after seventy years (its cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1884), even
though it was altogether too small
for the needs of Humboldt County
in the mid-twentieth century. The
County Clerk’s office had to be temporarily moved to the Veterans Memorial Building. Later, many of the
records were transferred to the Recorder’s office. The Post Office now
takes passport applications, and the
County Agricultural Department
handles dog licenses and animal
control. (The city of Eureka has its
own dog license department.)

I will always have fond memories of the three summers when
I “reigned” as Miss Dog Tag of
Humboldt County. To have been
able to work in the historical Victorian courthouse with the dedicated
people of the County Clerk’s office
was a special time for me. In addition, I found a lifetime friend in
Beulah Wahlund. Although we have
not been able to stay in close contact, for I moved away from Humboldt County, we have kept in touch
through Christmas cards all this
time—fifty-seven years. I could not
have written this account of working
at the old court house selling dog licenses without her help.

###

The story above is from the Winter 2008 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.