Early days of The Chronicle: showbiz, self-abuse cure-alls
The newspaper you are reading came into existence because San Francisco was crazy about the theater.
From its beginnings, San Francisco was stagestruck. The city’s young, mostly male, rough-and-tumble denizens were addicted to excitement and entertainment, and one of the ways they satisfied their craving was by flocking to theaters.
In those pretelevision, premovie days, theaters played an infinitely larger cultural role than they do today. Between 1850 and 1859, no fewer than 1,105 theatrical productions were given in San Francisco: 907 plays, 48 operas in five different languages, 84 “extravaganzas,” ballets and pantomimes, and 66 minstrel shows.
In January 1865, two brothers, 17-year-old Michael de Young and 19-year-old Charles de Young, capitalized on the city’s mania for theater to start a newspaper. According to John Bruce in “Gaudy Century: The Story of San Francisco’s Hundred Years of Robust Journalism,” Michael was simultaneously a sophomore in high school and a senior in grammar school, “having decided to clean up” both of his academic shortcomings at once. Charles was already an expert printer.
The two borrowed a $20 gold piece from their landlord, which they used as a down payment for the $75 weekly rental of space at 417 Clay St., a printing press, two stands of type, a battered redwood desk and some newsprint. On Jan. 16, 1865, the first issue of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle rolled off the press.
It was a cross between a theater guide and an advertiser, with a potpourri of editorial content mixed in. The paper enjoyed a cozy relationship with a vaudeville house called Worrell’s Olympic. Under a page two announcement called out by a pointing finger, the editors informed potential advertisers that “The Daily Dramatic Chronicle is distributed GRATUITOUSLY in all the restaurants, saloons, hotels, readingrooms, stores, boats, cars, and among the audiences at WORRELL’S OLYMPIC.”
Directly underneath, a news item read, “WORRELL’S OLYMPIC. This cozy little theater has been crowded nightly since its opening with people who rejoiced to see those favorite artistes, Sophie, Irene and little Jennie Worrell once more upon our boards. The entertainment offered, by far, exceeds in elegance anything of the kind in the city.”
The center columns on the front page of the four-page tabloid were entirely taken up by an advertisement for the show offered at Worrell’s Olympic. The evening’s offerings included the Worrell children in a play called “The Fairy Sisters,” a “screaming farce” called “Crossing the Line,” and a “Nondescript Fantastico Morceau of Absurdity, arranged expressly for this House,” called “The Grotto Nymph” and featuring “Sylva, the Fairy Queen (with a conventional brevity of skirts.)”
Flanking the Worrell’s ad were two advertisements for Dr. J.C. Young’s Private Medical and Surgical Institute, one of the quack sexual-health enterprises popular at the time. One ad informed the reader that Dr. Young’s institute specialized in “the cure of all diseases of a private, special or chronic nature, whether arising from impure connections or the degrading and destructive habit of self-abuse.”
The other ad delved further into the onerous consequences of onanism, warning, “There is no disease more common, nor more dangerous, than that arising from the weakness of the generative organs (as a result of self-abuse) … I set it down as an incontrovertible fact that no one who has practiced that vice, even in the slightest degree, is free
of the seeds of that disease.”
The rest of the paper was a mishmash, featuring lengthy jokes (most of them excruciatingly bad), miscellaneous facts (“There are 50,000 Chinese now in America”) and bits of local news, such as a report on a fire on the Stewart Street pier. As Simon Read notes in “War of Words: A True Tale of Newsprint and Murder,” the brothers could not afford the Associated Press feed, so they scraped together national news from dispatches they gathered at the local Western Union office and rewrote.
The Chronicle also printed pieces by unknown bohemian scribes like Mark Twain (who had recently been fired as a reporter by the rival Morning Call) and Bret Harte. After a month, its mix of social commentary, barbed comments on other papers’ writers, local news and risque items gained it a respectable circulation of 2,000.
The de Young brothers folded and distributed the paper themselves, delivering it to saloons, hotels, restaurants and, of course, at the box office of Worrell’s Olympic. At the end of the day, they scoured saloons and went down the aisles at Worrell’s, gathering up discarded newspapers. After smoothing and drying out the beer-dampened pages, they would mail them to hotels outside the city.
The brothers’ enterprise paid off on April 15, 1865, when Michael de Young learned that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. Since the paper’s rivals had already published, The Chronicle had a golden opportunity to scoop the competition. The paper rushed out three extras.
What really put The Chronicle on the map, however, was a review by its drama critic, a whiskey-loving scribe who rejoiced in the name Tremenhere Johns. According to John P. Young’s “Journalism in California,” when a large actress named Matilda Heron appeared as the tragic heroine Camille in Dumas’ “La Dame Aux Camelias” at the city’s leading theater, Tom Maguire’s Opera House, Johns downed his usual prereview bottle and “ventured the opinion that 200 pounds of adipose were not calculated to create the impression that she was suffering from consumption.”
Heron demanded that The Chronicle be barred from the theater. The combative impresario Maguire, a former New York hackman, took his star’s side, kicking off what turned out to be a 20-year feud in the course of which The Chronicle, among other things, accused Maguire of routinely drugging and sexually abusing his actresses.
The publicity from the feud “made us,” Michael de Young said.
A few years later, the fledgling paper had sufficiently prospered to move beyond its origins as a free theater advertiser. On Sept. 1, 1868, the de Youngs turned the Daily Dramatic Chronicle into a regular daily newspaper, renamed the Daily Morning Chronicle. It has been in operation ever since. Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com