In honor of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game tomorrow, the History Seeker recalls a county family that produced a trio of local baseball stars, one of whom became an All-Star in the Show, as some call the major leagues.

“The Prides of Escondido,” was the headline over a photo of three young Escondido High School baseball players in the San Diego Union on April 18, 1928.

“Escondido is proud of its Coscarart boys, and with plenty of reason,” began the article accompanying the photo, describing Joe, Steve and Pete Coscarart as “ball playing fools.”

“Joe is shortstop and cleanup hitter for the Escondido High team,” explained the article, while “Steve holds down second base and is second in the batting order. Pete, the little fellow, is lead off hitter and plays left field or wherever you want to put him.”

A few days later the Union reported the victory of the Escondido High team over ‘the Naval Training Station nine,” 3 to 1, “in a fast game featured by the bang-up playing of the Coscarart trio…” Pete, playing second base, “made a fast double-play in the fifth inning and halted a rally by the Boots. He caught a sizzling liner and threw out a runner at third base, retiring the side. Joe and Steve played right field and shortstop, respectively, and showed good form at bat and afield.”

All three brothers would star on minor league teams. An injury cut short Steve’s career. Joe and Pete would go on to the major leagues, Joe with the Boston Braves and Pete with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pete would last in the majors the longest, playing for the Dodgers and then the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1938 to 1946. In 1939, Pete was considered the top defensive second baseman in the National League. He was considered pretty good on offense too, with a .277 batting average, 22 doubles and 10 stolen bases. The following year he made the National League All-Star team. He was later named to the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, and is memorialized locally in Pete Coscarart Field, home of Escondido High’s baseball teams.

Sources for this post included historic San Diego and Escondido newspapers and the Society for American Baseball Research.

The San Diego Union of November 21, 1905 included this item on page 6, which I present in its entirety:

“The liquor license muddle has at last been untangled. Joe Jost was awarded the license formerly held by John Conklin for 468 Fifth street. The council looked with favor upon the application of Smith and Steinmann as partners for the license for the saloon at 1420 E street. And granted their application. Meyer and Heckler we granted a transfer of the license formerly held by George Wahl for the saloon at the corner of Fourth and E streets. The license of the Imperial Saloon was transferred to A. B. Gifford and the license for the saloon at 568 Fifth street was transferred to A. A. Finley.”

If you read it all you could count a total of five saloon licenses being granted for establishments within a few blocks of each other in downtown San Diego at one city council session. The “muddle” in the licensing process had to do with an ordinance passed earlier in the year that was part of a campaign by the Anti-Saloon League and other organizations promoting prohibition. That ordinance, among other things, limited the number of saloons legally permitted in the city to 55.

It certainly didn’t stop the development of saloons, not to mention the sale of liquor at restaurants and at wholesale operations. In December of 1905, the ordinance was reversed after a contentious city council session packed by representatives of both “wets” and “drys.” While setback locally, the “drys” would continue their campaign on the state and national level, culminating in the passing of national prohibition with the 18th amendment in 1919.

And we all know how that turned out.

Sources for this post included historic San Diego newspapers and the archives of the San Diego City Clerk’s office.

It’s never been easy being the city of San Diego’s Civic Organist. There’s the technical challenge of playing one of the largest pipe organs in the world. Then there’s the matter of selecting the repertoire for the weekly concert programs, taking into account everything from the tastes of a diverse audience to weather conditions.

Below is a photo, courtesy of the digital archives of the San Diego City Clerk’s office, showing Royal A. Brown at the Spreckels keyboard in 1935.

Brown served as the civic organist from 1932 to 1954. He was an accomplished musician and also a composer in his own right. Among his compositions were a number of masses as well as a suite entitled “Balboa Park,” which he described to a San Diego Union reporter in 1942 as a portrayal of “things, scenes, events and impressions of beautiful Balboa Park in San Diego.”

His Balboa Park Suite and some other original compositions can be seen on programs in local newspapers for organ concerts at the pavilion during his tenure, interspersed with selections of other classical and popular works, from Mozart and Bach to Victor Herbert and Richard Rogers.

An extensive article San Diego Union article in June of 1942 talked about the challenges Brown faced.

Constance Herreshoff, the reporter regularly covering the music and theater scene for the Union at that time, wrote, “In the course of giving four weekly concerts on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 2:30 [the concert schedule at that time], Brown figures that he plays about 3,000 different pieces a year. Sometimes he changes a set program after sizing up his audience.”

“On cold foggy days….Brown finds that marches go well, and that Souza, especially, warms people up.”

By June of 1942, with San Diego mobilizing for the war effort, an increasing number of Brown’s audiences included servicemembers. He told the Union reporter that “sailors want majesty,” and Herreshoff noted that “if he sees more sailors than usual in the crowd, he pulls out lots of stops and plays important things with plenty of form and backbone.”

Brown noted that he got a lot of requests for Bach, but “he plays Bach on only 50 percent of his programs, out of deference for those who don’t like Bach.”

“You have to watch your bridges after playing Bach,” he told Herreshoff. “You can’t play Souza right after Bach.”

He also gave an insight into the relationship between the organist and the maintenance crew. While pointing out the need for a good mechanic “In case a key sticks or something goes wrong,” Brown added that sometimes he had to tell the repair crew to hold off.

“But when I play a piece called ‘March of the Magi Kings’ by Dubois,” Brown said, “I put up a notice for the mechanic saying, ‘Don’t Shut Off.” Brown explained that in that particular piece “a high note is held for a long time to represent a star, while the hands play about the Magi in the lower part of the organ. I stick in a peg to hold the high note down. The mechanics worry when they hear this high note and will start in ‘killing’ the cipher’ if I don’t flag them.”

Royal Brown was at the keyboard until October of 1954. He passed away unexpectedly of a heart ailment at his home just three days after playing his regular concert date. His musical heritage lives on in the work of his successors both at and behind the keyboard.

The photo above was taken in 1887 and appears in the book, Picturesque San Diego, which was published that year. The caption on the photo reads, “Santa Margarita Ranch House,-from the Vineyard.”

 Formally called Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, the tract was the largest of the Mexican land grants and would continue to function as a working ranch for another 55 years until the entry of the United States into World War II would give it the name we know it by today: Camp Pendleton.

When I give lectures about Picturesque San Diego, my slide show includes that image of old Rancho Santa Margarita. Among all the photos and passages from the book that I present, that photo is one of the few on which audiences often make the connection between the rural photo and the name of the present-day location. That may be at least partly a tribute to the Camp Pendleton Historical Society. Their most recent newsletter offered up a surprising fact about the man for whom the base is named, Major General Joseph H. Pendleton, USMC: “Surprisingly, except for hundreds of signs featuring his name, there is no public display of him as a person.”

The society has inaugurated a project to erect a permanent monument to General Pendleton on base grounds. Click on the link below to learn more about the project and the life of the man who helped to secure a permanent presence for the U.S. Marines in San Diego:

San Diego Union May 27, 1882

Memorial Day was marked for the first time in San Diego in 1882.  As was true elsewhere across the country, the commemoration  originated in the last decades of the 19th century with people decorating the graves of Civil War soldiers. A national organization of Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR, played a strong role in honoring its fallen comrades, as shown in the notice above. As preparations for the San Diego commemoration were made, the GAR also invited veterans of an earlier conflict, the Mexican War, to participate.

On May 30th, veterans of both wars decorated the graves of their fallen compatriots, then marched to Armory Hall for a commemorative ceremony that included prayers, a concert by the City Guard Band and poetry readings before ending with the singing of “America the Beautiful.”