Stories from the past
50 years ago
An angry Harry Free, county clerk, fired off telegrams to Sens. Alan Cranston and George Murphy, protesting the Senate vote to extend the Civil Rights voting act to Imperial County.
The Senate voted to include in the coverage parts of six states where less than 50 percent of the eligible voters are registered to vote.
Imperial County was on the list because “federal bureaucrats” based their statistics on the federal census, which did not consider the large number of non-citizens residents of the county, Free said.
His own figures compiled from local records show that of the 83,000 residents in the county, only 31,334 are eligible to vote. Of those eligible, 68 percent are registered, Free said.
Some 15,407 residents are aliens, most of them from Mexico, Free said. This includes 10,570 agricultural workers (green carders), 750 domestic workers and 4,150 other residents who are not citizens, he claimed.
He said that Sen. Murphy told the Senate Wednesday that Imperial County, using figures bases on the 1960 census, had 60 percent of the eligible voters registered.
Murphy’s figures of 41,215 eligible voters and 24,963 registered — although favorable to the county — are in error, Free said, because the 1960 census-takers neglected to ask if the residents were citizens.
Free said the latest action by the Senate is part of a continuing harassment of local government by the “federal bureaucrats.” He called the act “discrimination against the county.
“They have been investigating the county since 1960 and have not yet found any illegal discrimination against voters,” he charged.
Investigators were in the Valley in 1966 and again the county was not found to be discriminating against voters, he said.
The Civil Rights Act, if extended here, would nullify the literacy test provided for in the state constitution, the clerk said.
The test requires that eligible voters must be able to write their names and read the constitution in English. Free said federal registrars could be sent in at election time and all new election laws would have to be cleared in advance by the attorney general or a three-judge federal court in Washington.
40 years ago
Whatever happened to Julianne Hamilton Leslie Rice, 74, who vanished from a San Diego apartment two years ago, taking a friend’s car, and leaving not a trace since her disappearance?
Julianne Rice, also known as Anne, Jeri or Granny Annie, the widow of the late Harry Rice, a Holtville farmer, cut herself off from the income of an inherited farm.
Less than a month after she left, she inherited a second estate, estimated from $84,000 to several hundred thousand dollars.
Tucked inside her purse, when she vanished, was about $5,000 in cash. The day she left, a Holtville woman had delivered two checks to her, one $3,600 from Holtville farmer, John Chimits, as payment for a year’s rent on the 40acre Rice farm.
The check cleared the bank the following day. The signature was later identified as Julianne Rice’s.
Did she meet with foul play? Or did she flee to avoid a court fight to replace her as executor of her husband’s estate? She lost that fight because she failed to show up for the first hearing a few days before she disappeared.
At least one friend believes that Julianne engineered her disappearance by carefully planting hints that she had been kidnapped or had met with foul play.