4.0 out of 5 stars
The stately homes of Fresno, May 10, 2004
This review is from: The Valley's Legends & Legacies II (Paperback)
This is another good Catherine Rehart contribution to the history of California's Central Valley - especially metropolitan Fresno and surrounding areas.
I am especially pleased with her descriptions of Fresno's contributions to the world of sports; they are a little more comprehensive than her treatments of this subject in her other works.
Tom Seaver and Frank Chance of Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance fame, both Hall of Famers, are Fresno's two most famous baseballers, but she includes a list of a number of other players, as well, including journeyman pitcher Dick Selma.
She did neglect to include Gus Zernial, who had successful careers in both the major leagues and the old Pacific Coast League. An octogenarian now, since this book was published in 1997, Gus became visible recently as a sometime color commentator for the Fresno Grizzlies, and I trust that Ms. Rehart has included an appropriate homage to him in one of her later volumes in this series.
And my curiosity has not yet been satisfied as to whether Dick's family's surname is, in fact, taken from the city of Selma - or if the city was named after one of his ancestors.
I don't know how they found their way to Fresno from New York in the year 1927, but there is an honest-to-God picture of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at a Fresno train station, posing with a Catholic priest who resembles Barry Fitzgerald. If one didn't know better, one would swear that this was a scene out of a Hollywood movie.
Ms. Rehart informs her readers that other baseball luminaries such as Ty Cobb and Joe DiMaggio also visited Fresno.
Sports aside, Ms. Rehart's stories include the usual number of prominent citizens and exuberant frontiersman, as well as the usual struggles to combat the elements that threatened the Valley's farm produce and to maintain law and order and bring civilization to a frontier town.
I am slightly less enthusiastic about this volume than others because I think that there is too much focus on the area's older historic homes. This is certainly a fit subject matter for discussion, but for those of us who are not architecturally minded or designer-minded, the various descriptions of these homes tend to blur in our minds, and there are very few pictures in this collection. Pictures should be included of all of the old homes that have yet been preserved.
But this isn't a universal necessity. The details concerning the natural disasters, the fistfights, the gun battles, and the soirees are supplied to us by our imaginations.
The book ends at an appropriate juncture. I applaud the author's choice to include a description of the "Fresno plaque" - the stone carving that once stood at the entrance to the old Fresno courthouse (and now stands adjacent to the new one). Carved in 1954, its description of the city's heritage well repays the time spent reading it and is an excellent closure to this volume.
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