Spite House

In 1955, the playground at Edison Elementary School, in Alameda, California, would have been a rollicking place. One of the moms just knew how to get a laugh, she always had the ladies rolling. She was the housewife from Ohio, the one with five kids. The one with the husband who wasn't so great. It wouldn't be too long before Mrs. Phyllis Driver Diller would be known for other things.

We walk past dozens of houses, every day, and never realize that the people who have occupied them over the years were chock full of hopes, dreams, tragedies, dramas. That the people who occupy them, now and then, are each the center of their own human drama. This is true of every single house, and this is true of every single person. It's good to be reminded. We so often don't see each other. And so this is the story of one house, as told through four mishaps, from the 1890s through the 1940s, with a reminder that every person, and every house, has context.

The story of a Japanese American family, and a little something called vitreous marble (with a million flowers, a baby-judging contest, and some 1930s cops who learned yawara-jitsu on the off-chance they would stop beating people upside the head thrown in for good measure)

People tend to remember that time John F. Kennedy paid a visit to Dallas in 1963. But that quick visit, the speeches he gave (and didn't give), the crowds, even the convertible shared with a state governor - all of that was par for the course for this particular president. He visited many towns in nearly the same way.  But in March of 1962, when he visited Alameda, CA, it turns out he was gearing up for a slightly more memorable week. 

Not all stories have happy endings. People die, people split up, kids don’t go to college after all, women’s social clubs come to a quiet end.  The good news is that the flu pandemic ended, never to return…Oh wait.  Nevermind.  At least I met some nice people at a church.  The conclusion of our four-part series on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Dr. Arthur Shirmer Hieronymus, and the Ladies Adelphian Hall.

We like our heroes to be straight out of the comic books: flawless, noble, and generally great. But sometimes really good things are accomplished by people who are kind of jerks. Alameda was lucky enough to have one such jerk, at just the right time. Meet Arthur Shirmer Hieronymus, aka Motorcycle Mike, aka  your favorite High Priest of the Royal Arch Masons, aka Alameda’s City Physician during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

An extended sidenote episode about mask-wearing (and non-mask-wearing) in the Bay Area during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

A Hospital that Was Never Meant to be a Hospital. A women's clubhouse inadvertently becomes a hospital during the 1918 Spanish Flu.

A 1973 plane crash, at the former Tahoe Apartments, re-examined.

Spite House re-examined.