Spells, magic, crystal gazing and hypnotism

 ABOVE: A Halloween costume party at Huntington Beach city hall, mid 1970s. Then-city council member Harriet Weider is at far right, seated. (City of Huntington Beach archives, circa 1974-1978)

   Look up Huntington Beach Municipal Code Chapter 9.60, "hypnotism." This is the ethereal section of the local government code. It was there for almost four decades, then, poof! One day in 2013 it vanished. 

   Orange County cities in the 1970s were freaked out by what were then called "new age" practices. So much so that in October 1976, Huntington Beach passed Ordinance 2116 prohibiting, among other practices, phrenology, crystal gazing, augury, divination, magic and fortune telling (excerpt of Ordinance 2116 below). There would be no Hogwarts in Huntington Beach.

   

   In 1975, astrologist Zelda Pryor, head of Church of the Astrolight, was convicted of violating a Costa Mesa ordinance prohibiting fortune telling for a fee. Pryor was fined $150 by Harbor Municipal Court, later upheld by an appeals court in Superior Court.  In December 1975, the Santa Ana Register reported Pryor was appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds she was denied freedom of religion, equal protection under the law, and due process. Pryor, 76, said Costa Mesa had kept "an old lady from her livelihood and from practicing her religion."

RIGHT: The 1970s were the height of leisure suit fashion, which works for Halloween in 2021. (Santa Ana Register, June 17, 1976)

   In March 1976, a Garden Grove woman was to go on trial for violating an ordinance against fortune telling. She reportedly was practicing what she called, "Huna," claiming it was a religion of the ancient Hawaiians. Patricia Ann Roberts, who went  by the professional name of Zalithea de Racon, was doing business under the Scarab Society psychic workshop. She explained her ancestry was Welsh and French, and that she was "brought up in a psychic world where astrology, dream analysis, spirits and the like were as much a part of me as my arms and legs." 

   The Santa Ana Register reported Zalithea's practices included "divination, the act or practice of trying to foretell future events or the unknown by secret and mysterious means." The judge was concerned that if Huna was a religion whether the city statute had been applied in a way that infringed on her first amendment rights. (Huna is considered a "new age" movement created in the 1930s by Max Freedom Long--like Zalithea, not Hawaiian--and is not considered a Hawaiian religion.)  

LEFT: Zalithea was back in a 1977 "Trouble Shooter" column, offering her services as a lecturer or entertainer. (Santa Ana Register, February 17, 1977)

   Zalithea, aka Patricia Roberts, was convicted, sentenced to one-year probation, and fined $125 for illegal fortune telling by West Orange County Municipal Judge Ragnar H. Engebretsen. The conviction prompted one of Zalithea's followers in June 1976 to publicly call on the Garden Grove city council to outlaw their "blue laws" and if they did not "the council should change the city's name from Garden Grove to Salem." Garden Grove's city attorney Eric Lauterer informed the council that "Priestess Zalithea-Patricia Roberts had appealed her fortune telling conviction" and that the council should not respond until the court case was settled.

    Meanwhile, next door in Westminster and Huntington Beach, the mystical drama that had overtaken the Garden Grove and Costa Mesa city councils was not lost on local officials. Best to nip this stuff in the bud and pass an ordinance outlawing anything with a hint of old magic or new age. 

  In June 1976, the Westminster city council passed an urgency ordinance with restrictions covering fortune telling, astrology, palmistry, phrenology, card reading, crystal gazing, clairvoyance, hypnotism, and magic or necromancy.

RIGHT: Westminster moved quickly to curtail magical powers inside its jurisdiction. (Santa Ana Register,  June 254, 1976)

   In October 1976, just in time for Halloween, the Huntington Beach city council passed Ordinance 2116.

LEFT: Meanwhile in south Orange County, Laguna Beach kept doing its thing. A women's philanthropy group, the Ebell Club, hosted a crystal ball gazing and palm reading reception. That same year, the San Juan Capistrano city council was asked to allow the Sun Sign astrology school prohibited by their fortune telling ordinance. Councilman John Sweeny said he read his horoscope daily, but an astrology school was a bridge too far. (Santa Ana Register, October 2, 1977)

   But, then an odd thing happened the following year, with accusations the Huntington Beach city council was attempting to fast-track an ordinance to allow hypnotism for someone not licensed to practice hypnotism. The city clerk said it was if the city council was brainwashed. The University of California Irvine (UCI) student newspaper, New University, covered the drama which involved UCI executive program director James McCann, Council Member Harriet Weider, and city administrator Floyd Belsito.

   According to New University, James McCann sent Harriet Weider a letter requesting the ordinance prohibiting hypnosis be changed. Wieder directed it to city attorney Ron Bonfa to draft a new ordinance and "within two days after Weider received McCann's request, City Administrator Floyd Belsito prepared a letter recommending the council adopt a new ordinance Bonfa had prepared allowing hypnotism in the city."

   "I've never seen an ordinance move so fast," city clerk Alicia Wentworth is reported as commenting. "Usually when the council considers an ordinance they will study it first. But, in this case it never happened. No study was ever made by the council."

RIGHT: Huntington Beach city clerk Alicia Wentworth was baffled by the attempt to fast-track an ordinance to permit hypnosis, alluding to a little hocus pocus. (New University, University of California Irvine, November 18, 1977)

   A complaint was filed by the Medical Quality Board of Assurance with the West Orange County Municipal Court that McCann was not a licensed physician or psychologist and not permitted to practice hypnosis, the Huntington Beach police department was called to investigate, and city councilman Richard Siebert charged that the investigation was inadequate. City administrator Floyd Belsito--who in 1970 managed to get the city council to approve Ordinance 1552 to name a street not even owned by the City after himself--said he had recommended the council allow "vocational and advocational hypnotism" in Huntington Beach at city attorney Bonfa's direction. 

ABOVE: Huntington Beach city council minutes for July 18, 1977, reflect some "how did we get here" drama. (City of Huntington Beach archives)

  The blue law ordinance prohibiting fortune telling and all the practices categorized as "magical" arts and new age "voodoo" remained on the books in Huntington Beach until June 17, 2013, when the city council repealed it. Four decades later, we'd kind of embraced crystals, essential oils, and become more open about what people choose to believe. An entire generation went to Hogwarts and wanted to believe in a little good magic. However, the placeholder for Municipal Code Chapter 9.60, "hypnotism," is still there just in case we get freaked out again.

 © All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Huntington Beach blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima.  

The mayor who took a stand against the Klan

 When Samuel Bowen decided to run for Huntington Beach board of trustees (city council) in 1928, there were a couple issues troubling local residents.  One was municipal restrictions about where oil drilling could occur and the encroachment of oil drilling in residential areas. With the discovery of oil in 1920, the booming proliferation of oil wells and sumps created a concern the residential areas would become blighted.

   Another growing issue was the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Orange County. During the 1920s, the Klan made efforts to integrate into local government, churches and civic organizations.

LEFT: Samuel R. Bowen, prior to his stand against the Klan in 1925 and his run for city council in 1928. (Image, Huntington Beach News, April 27, 1923)  

   In August 1924, a couple weeks before the Klan organized a community "spectacle" in Huntington Beach, Reverend Horace Lackey, a lecturer for the Klan, stirred up a large crowd at the corner of 3rd and Birch streets in Santa Ana "from a truck which bore the fiery cross and the American flag" ("Thousands here listen as Klan called organization built up on Americanism", Santa Ana Register, August 12, 1924).  The City of Santa Ana had refused him a permit to speak in Birch Park.

   The Santa Ana Register reported Lackey's stated purpose was "to preserve the rights of the white race." Lackey critized newspapers as being owned by "Catholics and Jews and 'not a single line of news that reflects credit to the klan is ever sent over the wire.'" 

   Lackey credited the Klan for passage of recent immigration laws, which would have included the alien land laws prohibiting property ownership by Asian immigrants, but not immigrants from other countries. He stated the Klan was opposed to Catholic school teachers teaching in public schools "until after they made their first allegiance to the flag of the country." At the same time, Lackey stated "the klan was not fighting the newspapers, as they were not fighting the Catholics, Jews, or negroes."

   "The Ku Klux Klan is not in politics," Lackey continued, "and will resist every effort that is made to drag it into politics, but the 8,000,000 men and the 3,000,000 women who belong to the organization are in politics, and I want to say that no man opposed to the klan's ideals will ever be elected to office in Orange County, or in the United States."

BELOW RIGHT: A Klan meeting advertised in the Santa Ana Register, December 5, 1924.

   By January 1925, the Klan's efforts to take over local political offices had become the subject of an Orange County Grand Jury report. Local Klan leaders Reverend Leon Myers and William Starbuck had been instigating rumors about elected officials at public events. The Grand Jury released a special report "notable for its cool and dispassionate form of expression...that laxity charges made by klan leaders against public officials (were) wholly groundless and responsible for 'much injustice.'" 

   The 19-member Grand Jury unanimously agreed on the findings of their investigation that statements made by Klan leaders Myers and Starbuck at mass meetings were hearsay and "discounted to the vanishing point."

   Read more about Myers and Starbuck, and their efforts to slander local officials in Huntington Beach, "Prohibition and booze under the cornerstone" (January 8, 2018).

ABOVE: Samuel R. Bowen is responsible for hiring the City's first landscape architect to undertake a beautification program. The arches that once stood at the west end of Main Street at Pacific Coast Highway were installed at his direction. (Photo, City of Huntington Beach archives)

Taking a stand against the Klan

   Bowen's stand against the Klan became public in 1925, when he was president of the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce. The Klan was thought to be behind a recall of elected city council members. Bowen called upon the Chamber to vote on a resolution opposing the Klan's involvement and affirm their confidence in the elected office holders.

   "The troubles that seem to assail us are traceable  to the door of the Invisible Empire, the Ku Klux Klan," stated Bowen ("Huntington Beach Chamber Flays Ku Klux Klan Recall Movement Against Trustees," Santa Ana Register, April 7, 1925). "Immediately after a recent election, pressure was brought to bear upon city officials to have certain appointed offices declared vacant and klansmen appointed."

Bowen continued, "The Ku Klux Klan would take away the rights of American citizenship, and substitute instead secret political plots and methods by dictating to their members what they shall do. We should set ourselves against being dominated by an organization governed by prejudice, hatred and intolerance." 

LEFT: The Chamber of Commerce stand against the Klan came about eight months after the Klan "spectacle" in Huntington Beach on Labor Day 1924. (Santa Ana Register, August 30, 1924) 

   The Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce unanimously adopted the resolution, which also was to be introduced for adoption by the Lions Club, Women's Club, Rotary Club and Realty Board. The Santa Ana Register characterized it as "taking a determined stand against the Ku Klux Klan" and "an active stand in the political fight which is looming in this city."

  Three years later, Bowen ran for city council in 1928 with a winning slate of three candidates--including former newspaper man Elson Conrad and pharmacist Bayard Butcher--all of whom were aligned on enacting oil drilling restrictions and anti Klan positions.  They were sworn into office on April 16, 1928.

A diverse community

   Bowen's mother, Emilia Miranda--married to newspaper man Nathan Streeter Bowen--was Mexican American, Bowen had been tutored by a Belgian priest, and his neighbors were from all over the world. Spanish was his first language.  His granddaughter, Beverly Bowen Moeller, recalled him meeting "with a small group of friends on Wednesday nights to read Don Quixote in the original 17th Century Spanish and laugh at the adventures of the hapless knight."

RIGHT: Beverly Bowen Moeller, daughter of Mayor Samuel R. Bowen, Huntington Beach Grammar School class photo, 1934. (City of Huntington Beach archives)

   Bowen Moeller fondly recalled in her 1984 hand-typed history, titled Fifty Years Ago in Huntington Beach held at the Orange County Archives, that Huntington Beach was a diverse and close community.

   "...I would walk along the high-crowned oil road past the chili pepper drying houses, past an old wooden derrick with the fields of the small farms belonging to German, Japanese and Italian neighbors," wrote Bowen Moeller. "Across the street from our house was my favorite place in my small world, the nearly self-sufficient farm of the Armenian neighbors...These memories are akin to the proverbial fly caught in amber, caught and preserved unchanged..."

Remembering Samuel Bowen

   Samuel Bowen created a successful business producing oil production fishing tool technologies in Huntington Beach, with the S.R. Bowen Company. His company later moved to Texas and exists today, as NOV - Bowen. Bowen's Huntington Beach manufacturing business was steps away from present-day Huntington Beach City Hall, at Yorktown and Lake streets. 

LEFT: The S.R. Bowen buildings that stood at Yorktown and Lake streets, near present-day Huntington Beach City Hall. The Bowen buildings were lost to a fire in 1989. To this day, locals question the nature of the fire, as preservationists had mobilized an effort to create an oil museum utilizing the historic structures. (Photo, courtesy of Dennis Masuda). © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

   Today, where the S.R. Bowen buildings once stood, is a little-noticed, small bronze plaque next to the sidewalk. People drive by it every day. The identity for who the plaque honors is only visible from a couple feet away.

Inscription on the plaque:
   Three industrial buildings were located at 1980 Lake Street and were operated by Samuel R. Bowen and his partner, Sisti Siracusa, as the S.R. Bowen Company and the Bowen Fishing Tool Company. 

   The S.R. Bowen Company was founded in 1920 and was credited with numerous developments of tools used in oil production in Southern California and worldwide. Some noteworthy tools produced included the Bowen L&L Spear (used to retrieve pipe from oil wells). 

   The S.R. Bowen Company remained in Huntington Beach until the mid 1950's when they moved to Santa Fe Springs, CA. 

RIGHT: The small bronze plaque at Yorktown and Lake streets across from Huntington Beach City Hall for former Mayor Samuel Redman Bowen, who took a public stand against the Ku Klux Klan in April 1925. (Photo, M. Urashima, August 16, 2013) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The S.R. Bowen industrial buildings were locally significant because of the elaborate, interior exposed wood truss roof supports and corrugated metal ("Tin"), exterior siding and roofing. The buildings contained machine, welding and blacksmith shops, warehouse space and offices. The buildings were constructed in 1920-1928 and dismantled in July 1989.

Samuel Redman Bowen was born in Martinez, CA and spent his early life in the San Francisco area. he came to Huntington Beach from Coalinga, CA in 1920. In 1928 he was elected Mayor of the City and served one term. 

   He was a veteran of World War I and a member of the Huntington Beach American Legion Post. He was also a past president of both the Huntington Beach Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce. Samuel Bowen died August 6, 1944.  

   Presented to the City of Huntington Beach by the Huntington Beach Company - 1989

What monuments say about us

   The small plaque at the corner of Yorktown and Lake streets holds a much bigger story about Huntington Beach, its oil history and the fight against the Klan in the 1920s.  Samuel Bowen took his fight against the Klan public in April 1925. In April 2021, Klan flyers were distributed around downtown doorsteps advertising a "white lives matter" rally.

   It's time to create a larger monument at the corner of Yorktown and Lake, as a more prominent reminder for today's and tomorrow's generations that Huntington Beach can, in the words of Samuel Bowen, "set ourselves against being dominated by an organization governed by prejudice, hatred and intolerance."

Read a related history on Orange County historian and archivist Chris Jepsen's blog, O.C. History Roundup, about The Pacific Beach Club.

© All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Huntington Beach blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima.