San Sebastian Avenue
Copyright
John Presco
I now believe the photograph of the group above was taken in Twin Pines Park in Belmont California. The gentleman in the center is William Augustus Janke. The woman on his right, is Alice Stuttmiester. The name to her right, is William Broderick. These are the parents of Melba Charlotte Broderick, the mother of Victor William Presco, the father of the world famous artist, Christine Rosamond Benton Nee’ Presco. Christine and I lived in the Victorian house the Broderick lived in. They had moved to Oakland because of the famous San Francisco Earthquake. William was an executive of the California Barrell Company located in Dogpatch, about five miles from Belmont. Alice Broderick was fully away of her Belmont roots – that I do get to write about – un-molest by any member of the Belmont Historic Society that does call for the history of Belmont, San Mateo County, and California.
At 8:41 on July 12, 2024, I returned a call and talked to the Bullhead Police Department. I got a case number regarding the death of Drew Benton the daughter of Christine Rosamond Benton who is seen sitting with her two siblings on a very expensive table once owned by the Brodericks. We are looking at my painting that sits on a bookcase that was once owned by William Stuttemister. It contains rare books. I called Detective Holstrum, and left a message. I am waiting for his call. There is an investigation.
I just copyrighted this post because Christine, and her family, have been preyed on by parasites’ from the very beginning of her success. NOT ONCE did Denny Lawherrn, or Cynthia McCarthy, ask about Christine, nor did they utter the name Stuttmeister – but they tried to control and manipulate OUR FAMILY INFORMATION. People who murder – try to do the same thing! It is a fact that famous people are treated like sub-humans, who do not own real authentic feelings. We are depicted as un-feeling…..and not quite human. There is a body. The police are interested in how Drew -ended up dead. I demand to know where the remains of Carl Janke and his wife – are!
I took a break and was going to call the South Carolina Historic Society and ask this question;
“Is it common for authors researching a book, to call you in order to get historic details?”
Any minute, I’m going to get details on how Drew died. Drew lived in the house with her mother’s artwork on the wall,
I Lived On Bella Vista
Posted on May 27, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
I found the house Sue Villiani and I lived in on Bella Vista in 1968. There was a little balcony outside our bedroom. It was very romantic. Our landlady took the painting I did on 13th. Street for back payment of rent. I was living with the Loading Zone when I painted it. We paid $250.00 a month and owed her two months. It was a very celestial seascape of McClure’s Beach. The Broderick-Stuttmeister home was a couple of blocks away were the Presco family dwelt for a year. We walked down Bella Vista to go to Bella Vista School. This house may have been one of the cottages built by Francis Marion Smith. Gertrude Stein lived four blocks away on 13th. Avenue. My grandparents must have known the Stein family. Did Gertrude attend the functions at Arbor Villa?
We bought a 1942 Ford from a older woman in Berkeley who looked a Beat. To see it parked in front of our abode, took you back. It cost a hundred dollars.
John Presco
Arbor Villa – Oakland – LocalWiki
Francis Marion Smith – Wikipedia
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, notable writer and art collector Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) lived in Oakland from 1880-1891. Their first year in The O, Stein and her family stayed in the Tubbs Hotel before moving to their farmhouse, which was located at what is now the intersection of 13th Avenue and East 25th Street. 1 Arriving at the age of 6, Stein moved to Baltimore (aka the East Coast’s Oakland 2) when she was 17, following the death of her parents. 3
“No ‘What’ Where”?!
Ohhh snap. And just when everything was cooling out, she had to go and make the biggest dis ever against Tha Town … or did she?
What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
—from Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4
Ouch. One shudders to think what she must’ve thought of Pittsburgh …! (And by the way, before anyone asks: yes, the above is just how she (usually) wrote – in a minimally punctuated, “cubist” style, not entirely un-reminiscent of the rambling, stream-of-consciousness circumlocutions of your typical Berkeley street person, and/or possibly James Joyce.)
Hold Up!
Though made infamous, Stein’s notorious statement about visiting Oakland was not, in fact, her assessment of the city itself!
Rather, these words reflect her return to Oakland in 1935 while on a lecture tour in the United States. During the trip, Stein went to visit her childhood home and farm, only to find the house had been demolished, and the farmland converted to housing developments:
The house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were no longer existing, what was the use, if I had been then my little dog would know me but if I had not been I then that place would not be the place that I could see. I did not like the feeling, who has to be themselves inside them, not any one and what is the use of having been if you are to go on being and if not why is it different and if it is different why not.
Since her absence, the city had grown nearly tenfold, expanding from a population of just 35,000 in 1880, to nearly 300,000 by 1935.2 In her book, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), the following paragraph continues:
It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember. 4
When put that way, what else can anyone (especially if they’ve been around long enough to forget!) reply, but “I feel ya, uh … what’d you say your name was, again?”
Gertrude Stein’s Old Address
Posted by Alexis Madrigal10AUG
Gertrude Stein, one of the most famous writers of the 20th century, once lived in East Oakland. In her 1937 autobiography, she described a trip back to her old neighborhood, long after she’d become a celebrity and development had transformed it.
From Everybody’s Autobiography (1937):
“It was funny when we went back one day when I was in America to see how East Oakland, that is Thirteenth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street as it was then looked. The little houses on Thirteenth Avenue looked very much the same, a good many of them quite as neglected as I remembered them and the hill quite the same but the old Stratton house as they called it where we had lived was of course gone and had been built over with little houses, they looked as if they were the only new houses in all that region. When they used to ask me in America whether I had not found America changed I said no of course it had not changed what could it change to…
It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was a name like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it it is not a name any more but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.”
Our Oakland History | Rosamond Press
Oakland, Fairmont, and Harris | Rosamond Press
Laurel District | Rosamond Press
“Every story deserves to be told.” | Rosamond Press
The Old California Barrel Company | Rosamond Press
The Royal Crockett Gallery | Rosamond Press
Thirteenth to San Sebastian | Rosamond Press
Thirteenth to San Sebastian
Posted on November 27, 2014 by Royal Rosamond Press
William Broderick married Alice Stuttmeister, the daughter of William Stuttmeister and Augusta Janke, and lived on 13th. Avenue and 31st. St. in the large Victorian seen above. The Prescos moved there in 1953 and lived in the top half of this beautiful house. I am going to take you on a tour of the Oakland the four Presco children had come to dearly love. Leaving here was a tragedy we never recovered from. These is a light, a bubble around our neighborhoods.
William Oltman Stuttmeister, born 1862. He married Augusta Janke June 1888. Alice L. Stuttmeister, born October 13, 1868 in San Francisco, CA; died February 13, 1953 in Roseville Community Hospital in Oakland, CA. She married William Broderick October 02, 1897. He was born Abt. 1871 in Ohio.
Children of Alice Stuttmeister and William Broderick are:
Frederick William Broderick. Melba Charlotte Broderick.
Melba married Victor Hugo Presco and born one child, Victor William Presco who married Rosemary Rosamond who born:
Mark Presco. John Presco. Christine Presco. Victoria Presco
Two houses down on 13th. is the Beatnik house Bill Arnold and used to visit after school when we were thirteen. There were crutches hanging in the large tree, and a grave marker under the branches. There was a Beat living in a shed in the backyard were used to talk to. Someone needs to do the history of this house whose owners owned the small gas station across from us. I will be sending our family photos to the Oakland Library.
Mark, John, and Christine went to McCheznie Junior High six block up the street on 13th.
Going up Park Boulevard you arrive at the Glenview shopping area. We used to get food on credit at the Savemore Market. The hungry Presco children were sent there to get hamburger meat and milk after our limit was reached. This is why Christine overloaded her refrigerator after she became rich and famous.
The California Barrel Company of San Francisco
Posted on March 9, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
Bohemian Club Members of the Bohemian Club, including California Gov. Ronald Reagan (centre left) and U.S. Vice Pres. Richard Nixon (centre right), at Bohemian Grove, California, 1967.The California Barrell Company
The California Barrel Company
by
John Presco: President of Royal Rosamond Press
Copyright 2020
An idea for a book, movie, and cable series.
William Broderick supervised the loading of two hundred barrels onto the freight car in Dogpatch, and now accompanied them on the barge to the dock in Oakland. He could just make out Joaquin Miller’s white home in the hills that sat as a Bohemian Beacon above the Stuttemeister orchard. Bill had picked a fight with the old curmudgeon and fraud about having his brigades of artistic circus clowns marching up and down the road they shared that was in theory, the Stuttmeister Road, that was later changed to Berlin Way. Now there were Japanese poets coming and going, and this made Bill’s German kindred, nervous. After the great earthquake, the Suttmiesters found sanctuary in Oakland, along with a couple of hundred well to do German Pioneers that had gone to the San Francisco Opera to hear Caruso sing.
When Miller took a keen interest in his daughter, Melba Broderick, who he carried on his knee when they took the trolley Frisco, Bill bought a new Victorian home on 13th. Street in Oakland. To his chagrin, Melba found out Gertrude Stein lived down the street and had known her idol, Isadora Duncan. At ten, Melba was found having tea and scones with literary greats, she helping Gertrude conduct her salon just before it moved to Paris. She was paid to do the dishes. There was no escaping the influence of Joaquin, who Bill had run into at the Bohemian Club, and, had to indure his non-stop bragging about the royalty he met when he went to Europe, and the Pre-Raphaelite artists he had dinner with at Gabriel Rossettis.
Bill celebrated Miller’s death in his own way. When he heard Bohemian Club members had built a funeral pyre and were going to burn the bloated braggard, he notified the authorities. Broderick had complained about the outdoor Japanese barbeques that filled the air with the stench of all kinds of meat, that wafted downhill under certain conditions, and wiped out the beautiful smell of cherry blossoms on the ranch When the cherries were ripe, they were sold for a pretty penny in Jingle Town, a cannery located on the Oakland Estuary where Jack London docked his oyster boat.
Frederick Jacob Koster had invited Bill Broderick to the Bohemian Grove Hijinks. It was while talking to a railroad magnet about how Prohibition was ruining many honest businessmen, that Bill came up with his brilliant plan to provide Bootleggers with barrels, and keep the profits of freightage rolling into the pocket of railroad owners.
“What if we put another product in our barrels that can be consumed. The Feds can not stop us. One is left with an empty barrel – to do with it you please. What if we shipped grapes? We can pack them in sawdust. We got plenty of that!”
“Sounds like a brilliant plan! I know an Italian who has planted a vineyard in Sonoma. Infact, there he is chatting with Frank Buck. You will want to talk to him, too. He’s becoming the biggest grower in California.”
Bill Broderick of Barrel and Box
Posted on February 26, 2019by Royal Rosamond Press
This morning I found an article about Bill Broderick and the California Barrel Company. What an historic account, that I have sent to the Mayor of San Francisco, and the Board of Supervisors. It’s all here, the elements that made San Francisco, and California – great!
William Frederick Broderick is trying to save a successful business, that due to prohibition, is on the ropes. My mother told me Bill traveled across America selling barrels. Bill has stopped in Chicago where Al Capone is making a fortune as a bootlegger, and arrives in Cleveland Ohio. Bill’s boss, Frederick Koster, must be furious to see organized crime families prospering, while he and his five hardworking bothers are desperate to keep their cooperage business afloat. Frederick is a member of the Bohemian Club, and the Law and Order Club. He may be one of the reasons the Mafia never got a foothold in the Bay Area. Frederick is ahead of his time in how he treated those who worked for him. They were like family. He shortened their work day, and paid good wages. Bill and Fred are promoting California Grapes. They made barrels for this billion dollar industry. They are Pioneers!
“One of the disciples of good barrel and service to meet the conditions of their customers, is William Broderick, sales manager of the California Barrel Company, San Francisco, Calif. Mr. Broderick attended the convention, stopping off at Chicago en route. Mr. Broderick is a natural born salesman, and certainly has the creative idea in salesmanship which is demonstrated by the fact not withstanding from the loss of business from wine and whiskey operations, the cooperage shops in the country and the manufactures supplying the same have kept busy even in maximum capacity during the past year and half, since prohibition arrived, which leads us all to do the same kind of constructive salesmanship. Malaga grapes have always been shipped in kegs and packed in ground cork, but in the last years, California has a become a great factor in furnishing the world with Malaga grapes packed in redwood sawdust. The California Barrel Company, as well as other cooperage institutions on the coast, are making kegs to deliver these grapes seasoned without moisture, to various markets of the world. Bill Broderick is one of the fellows who made this possible by demonstrating to our merchants the value of California grapes packed in the right way, in the right kind of packaging!”
Bravo!
I have put forth an idea for a Working Museum that preserves very valuable history, and creates jobs by giving new life to the ancient art of cooperage. I follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. It is my ambition to make the people of San Francisco – Big Winners!
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
Copyright 2019
Dear Mayor and Board;
My great grandfather, William F. Broderick, was a salesman and Director for the California Barrel Company that was located near the Portreo Power Plant that was just purchased for Redevelopment. The CBC got started by shipping Spreckels sugar. Claus Spreckels did business with president, Frederick Jacob Koster, and his four brothers. Their businesses were next to each other.
This morning I found an article about William who was interviewed by a reporter for . He speaks about shipping Malaga Grapes to cities across America – in barrels! Here is a merger with California grapes. Prohibition has just begun, and the cooperage industry is in crisis. Frederick Koster has gone abroad to map ut market in the Orient. Barrel and sailing ships go hand in hand. What I am proposing is a cooperage museum that would contribute to San Francisco’s tourist trade, and cooper college at the old site. There is a historic building and facade that could be used for this Trade College. The art of barrel making is coming back.
I have seen beautiful Japanese and Chinese packaging in museum. I saw wondrous labels on crates when I worked as lumper in the produce market in Jack London Square. Packaging is an art form, a craft that can give merchants new ideas.
To help fund this college a museum, I suggest quality prints be made of the amazing machinery invented to make barrels. I put a copyright in this book, but, your people may know how to do this. I have found no cooperage college in America. Meg Whitman purchased the PPP property and founded Qubi. She might want to imitate Alva Spreckels who was give the title ‘The Grandmother of San Francisco. The people around Meg have been selfish with information. Perhaps this is because I copyrighted the CBC name in 2011, and am the owner of californiabarrelcompany.co.
Associate Capital chose this name for a company that is floating around in Business Law World for reasons that are beyond my understanding. I have sent e-mails to several people offering my ideas. I got not response. The way I see it, the People of San Francisco deserve to see their history preserved, and, bring Civic Prosperity – now! Let’s build a dream – today!
https://www.potreropowerstation.com/about/
Sincerely
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
Victor Hugo – Last Bohemian
Posted on February 22, 2020by Royal Rosamond Press
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