Berkeley, a Look Back: Official praises city’s new summer camps in Sierra
Playgrounds Superintendent George Hjelte wrote an extensive 1923 article for the Daily Gazette detailing the Echo Lake and Tuolomne River facilities.
“Berkeley is the first city in Northern California to have two municipal vacation camps,” the city’s superintendent of playgrounds wrote in an article for the Berkeley Daily Gazette a century ago on June 16, 1923. He had contributed an extensive article profiling life in the new summer camps.
“The camps provide high-class but low-priced summer vacations for many who would otherwise be unable to enjoy the California Sierras,” Superintendent George Hjelte wrote.
“Board and lodging at the campus is provided at the rate of $1.25 per day and less for children, which when added to the excursion travel rates by railroad and stage makes it possible for an adult to take a two-weeks vacation at a total expense of about $30, and a child at about $20,” Hjelte said. “This low cost is made possible by business management, large numbers and low overhead cost.”
I’ve covered the history of these camps’ planning and construction — at Echo Lake, near Lake Tahoe, and on the Tuoluome River, near Yosemite — in previous columns. Hjelte said one advantage of the camps was the meal program. Otherwise, he said, the wife/mother in a camping family would have to “cook three meals a day (at camp) just as she does the rest of the 365 days of the year at home.”
The piece also praised the “democratic spirit” of the camps.
“No one seems to know or cares to know the at-home status of his camp neighbors,” he said.
Hjelte added that the camps were not like expensive private resorts in the mountains and were not in direct competition with them.
“One finds no white-coated flunkies at the camps, no hot running water piped to one’s tent, no chamber maids reporting each morning to make one’s bed and sweep one’s tent floor … .”
Hjelte also described the process of getting to Tuoluome Camp by rail in 1923. Trains went as far as Groveland, then the passenger “changes from the steam-driven train to the gasoline motor truck mounted upon railroad wheels.
“This car, with its open sides, enabling one to obtain a better view of the wide valleys and distant peaks, is better adapted to the sharp curves and steep slopes which it must travel than the steam-propelled train would be. Riding in it gives one all the thrills of the roller coaster at the amusement parks with the added advantage of grand mountain scenery.”
Another article in the same edition of the Gazette noted that Berkeley had also secured access to a small campground area in Yosemite Valley itself, near Camp Curry, where up to 20 Berkeley Tuoluome campers could stay overnight.
Stadium accident: Berkeley nearly had a rare drowning on June 14, 1923. A junior high school boy was watching construction work and slipped and fell into “the pool which furnishes the water for the University of California Memorial Stadium hydraulic work.” He was pulled out by a 16-year-old who jumped in to rescue him.
The pool was a temporary reservoir in Strawberry Canyon that supplied water pressure to operate hydraulic mining cannon blasting away the slope of Charter Hill on the stadium site. Hydraulic mining work had devastated much of California’s gold country in the 19th century.
City manager: New Berkeley City Manager John Edy spoke for the first time in public on June 15, 1923.
Among other things, he noted that government “is not the cold-blooded instrument it used to be. It is tempered by the humanitarian spirit of helpfulness. … Let those persons who directly benefit from an improvement pay more for it than those who indirectly are benefited.”
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.