Train wreck aimed to lure folks to 1919 fair

Posted at 10:33 PM on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009

Question: What is the story behind the train wreck staged at the Fresno Fair in 1919?

-- Tom Harrison, Clovis

Answer: When Clyde G. Eberhart became secretary-manager of the Fresno District Fair in 1910, he decided "folks needed something more than the commonplace" to entice them to visit the small agricultural fair.

So Eberhart planned extravaganzas -- the 1915 Fiesta De Oro rodeo with 700 actors and hundreds of horses, the Raisin Day parades, auto racing, and the 1919 train wreck.

In a 1951 Bee story, Eberhart recalled how the collision of two steam engines was planned as the opening ceremony of the fair.

"We bought two passenger locomotives from the Santa Fe Railway along with some track for $8,000," he said.

Before the fair, a Fresno Morning Republican story said that "for days, steam has been kept up in the locomotives," which were named Fair Special and Raisin Express.

The stunt "really packed the crowds in," Eberhart recalled. "The grandstand was jammed -- people were sitting on the roof."

Santa Fe engineers M.J. Funch and C.I. Parker started the locomotives and jumped clear after the engines picked up speed.

Eberhart described the collision: "The locomotives approached with whistles blowing and smoke billowing from the stacks... Bombs placed on [the] front of the engines enveloped the steel giants in black clouds of smoke as they came together with a deafening crash."

Famed Fresno author William Saroyan, who was 11 when he watched the train wreck, recalled the collision as "more of a nudge." In a 1969 letter to The Bee, Saroyan wrote "only one of [the engines] got up enough steam to move at about 6 miles an hour. The other just stood there ... everybody who witnessed the event felt let down."

Whether the wreck was a deafening crash or a nudge, more than 25,000 people came to see the two locomotives collide.

Q: Was there once a school at Hazelwood Boulevard and El Monte Way? There's a ponding basin there now.

-- Robert Armstrong, Fresno

A: The two-story red brick main building at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Junior High School was built at 868 S. Hazelwood Blvd. in 1914-15.

Over its 50-year history, the school had some famous graduates, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan, newsman Roger Tatarian and actors Mike Connors (Krikor Ohanian) and Jon Hall (Charles Felix Locher).

By 1966, building inspectors said minor earthquakes in the mid-1960s, sonic booms and even vibrations from trains two blocks away had made the school unsafe. The Fresno City School Board ordered the school abandoned in July 1966.

In 1968, the school board voted to sell the campus to the Fresno Metropolitan Flood Control District for use as a recharge basin, and the school was torn down.

More on the Fresno County Orphanage: After an answer about the Fresno County Orphanage ran on Nov. 16, Patricia Hicks of Fresno wrote about her family's connection with the orphanage.

"My grandmother, Clara Blanche Henderson, was born Dec. 25, 1908, in Fresno. In June 1911, her mother died and she and her sisters, Mary Pearl and Laura Bell Henderson, were put into the Fresno County Orphanage," Hicks wrote in an e-mail.

"Their father, Silva Henderson, was still alive, but unable to take care of his three daughters due to his work with the railroad, so they became three of the 'half-orphans.'

"The story does have a happy ending," Hicks wrote. "In July 1917, one of the lady managers, Tessie Jane McMann, married my great grandfather, and the three sisters were removed from the orphanage to live with their father and new stepmother."