King walked over to Carlisle and slapped his face. Carlisle returned the blow. The men hit one another until friends separated them. King then left the bar to return to the wedding celebration, but an enraged Carlisle followed him. He pulled out a long dagger. Carlisle lurched to stab King, but missed his chest and plunged the knife into King’s hand. Carlisle then took out his gun, but before he could fire a shot, King ran away. Right before he exited the bar, King pulled out his pistol and shot at Carlisle. The bullet missed.
When King’s two brothers arrived in Los Angeles the next morning and heard about the fight, they vowed revenge. Carlisle had insulted the family’s dignity; he must be forced to pay. Although A. J. King asked them to forget the slight, the two other King brothers saw the opportunity to resolve the bitterness festering between the family and Carlisle.
Houston and Frank King walked into the Bella Union around noon. They spotted Carlisle at a table with his friend, James H. Lander, the attorney who had helped persuade Merced years earlier to give a power of attorney to Carlisle. Frank King ran over to Carlisle, whipped out his pistol and started to beat Carlisle around the head, hammering his gun so many times he bent the trigger. Carlisle got out of his chair and grabbed Frank King. They fought their way out the front door. Frank King managed to shoot four bullets into Carlisle. Houston King also fired at Carlisle. Sheriff Sánchez arrived at that point and pulled apart the rivals. Carlisle fell to the ground, blood seeping from his wounds. Despite his injuries, he pulled out his gun and shot at Frank King. The bullet pierced King’s heart, killing him instantly. He collapsed on the dusty street, his colorful Mexican serape falling over his face. Houston King had been shot in the chest, but the wound was not life threatening. Lander had been shot in the leg. A stray bullet had killed a horse standing on the street.
A group of men carried Carlisle to a billiard table inside the hotel where he lay in agony, blood rushing from his wounds. But he was still furious at the King brothers and repeated his threats to kill them. Just before he died three hours later, he told his friends “Good-bye, all.”
Two more men had died because of their rivalry over Rancho Cucamonga.
* * *
Things didn’t go much better for Merced. In 1870, a judge ordered a foreclosure on Rancho Cucamonga so Merced could pay back the $14,600 mortgage Rains had taken out on the property. The debt, with interest, had grown to almost $42,000. With taxes, court fees, and assessments, Merced’s total bill was almost $49,000. There was no way she could pay.
* * *
More than 150 years have passed since John Rains died, but his unsolved murder is still remembered in Rancho Cucamonga. The killing has become one of the city’s defining stories, told on the city’s official website as an example of the violent past of a city now tamed.
Rains’s brick house, the one he built with such anticipation for his family, still stands. It no longer sits in isolation, the only home around, right above the vineyard that brought the rancho such fame. Asphalt streets and stucco houses now surround his home. It sits close to the Thomas Winery shopping center.
Rains’s house might have gone the way of Tapia’s—“disintegrated into its native earth”—if it hadn’t been for the efforts of a history teacher and her students. Dõna Merced moved out in 1876 and the house passed through a series of owners after that. For a long time it was a boardinghouse. Laborers working in the vineyard also slept there. The last private family to live in Rains’s old home sold the property in 1969 to a developer from Orange County. The population in the region was exploding and the emphasis was on the future, on a modern city, not on the past. The developer planned to tear down the house and install a trailer park. The location was prime because it sat between two major east-west freeways leading to Los Angeles and San Bernardino.
The brick house, with its links to the nineteenth century, began to fall apart. Vandals stole valuable historic artifacts. Hippies squatted and burned the wooden mantelpieces. The plumbing and electricity were ripped out. Taggers painted graffiti on the house’s walls.
Maxine Strane, a social studies teacher at Cucamonga Junior High School, loved local history, particularly the sordid story of Rains’s murder. She was always trying to show her students that history was all around them. All they had to do was look.
In April 1970, Strane brought one of her classes to the old house. As she and her students arrived, they had a shock: a bulldozer was tearing down an outbuilding. A demolition crew had already punched a hole in the north side of the Rains house and had ripped down a portico covering the brick patio. The bulldozer was preparing to knock down the entire building.
Strane rushed over to the foreman and pleaded with him to stop the demolition. She explained that the old brick house was a historic building constructed in the nineteenth century. She said she knew someone interested in buying it. The foreman turned off the engine to the bulldozer and agreed to postpone the demolition if Strane got the property owner’s okay. Strane and two students rushed back to the school and hurriedly called the developer, who said he did not know the house was of historic importance. He agreed to postpone demolition and talk to the prospective buyer.
The interested buyer fell through. Strane didn’t stop her campaign, though. She and her students flooded county and state officials with letters asking them to protect the historic home. They pointed out the house’s virtues, its architectural distinctiveness, its important role in the development of Rancho Cucamonga. The students and Strane spent hours at the house as well, cleaning out debris and painting over graffiti.
Finally, on June 1, 1971, a county museum commission came to assess the old home. Strane and more than 250 students from the junior high school marched to the house carrying placards calling for the house’s preservation. One student made a speech. Strane was so worried the students would be disruptive and interrupt the commission that she threatened to give an F to any student who spoke out of turn. She needn’t have worried. The students were quiet. They were polite. They had developed a deep respect for the home.
After the museum commissioners toured the property, they voted to recommend that San Bernardino County buy the Rains house.58 The county purchased the property in October 1971. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
I visited the Rains house a number of times. The scraggly grapevines that I first encountered while coming to Rancho Cucamonga are planted in front of Rains’s house, a nod to the winemaking business that was begun in 1839 and continued by Rains and others. The entire house has been restored and decorated with furniture of the mid-nineteenth century. There are dark mahogany armoires, wooden beds with horsehair mattresses held up by ropes, and silk-covered settees and chairs.
As I wandered the house behind a tour guide, I noted the room that Doña Merced sat in when her brother-in-law Robert Carlisle and his cronies pushed her to sign that destructive power of attorney. I thought of Ramón Carrillo when I went out on to the patio, now decorated with historic implements like Native American mortars and pestles and an old carriage. His was a long, agonizing death. And what about John Rains? Did he know the men who ambushed him? Did he know why they wanted him to die? No one ever figured out who took his guns, weapons he might have used to defend himself.
Five men died in a battle for control of this house and its surrounding 13,000 acres. Three of those killings—of Rains, of Carrillo, of Ceredel, killed by vigilantes—are unsolved. So everything that came from this spot—the renowned wine, the historic home, the history—is drenched in blood, at least metaphorically. That violence would extend into the twenty-first century.
PART THREE
FABRICATION
CHAPTER NINE
SAUSALITO CELLARS
Mark Anderson stood in front of the ramshackle building and considered his options. The shack, with its peeling white paint, wasn’t much to look at. The piercing salt air and fog that rolled in off Richardson Bay had weathered it and the other small storage sheds and bunga
lows in the shipyard. The structures were neglected and worn down. They looked like they hadn’t been touched since the heady days of World War II when the area bustled with shipbuilders, steelworkers, and riveters.
But Anderson probably didn’t focus on the front door, awkwardly positioned under a stairway, or the broken, potholed pavement. None of those defects mattered. Instead, Anderson must have thought of what was inside. Rather, what would soon be inside.
Anderson envisioned the space at 2350 Marinship Way in Sausalito as a state-of-the-art wine storage cellar. He imagined small collectors, wine clubs, even three-star restaurants storing their wine in a temperature-controlled environment, one that kept wine at precisely 55 degrees and 70 percent humidity. Wine is volatile, extremely sensitive to swings of hot and cold, and can get a cooked taste if it even reaches 85 degrees—which can happen if it is left in the trunk of a car on a hot day. So serious collectors, restaurants, and dealers store wine correctly to maintain its longevity.
The gap between Anderson’s vision and reality was large in the late spring of 1999. The building he had selected for his new business, which he planned to name Sausalito Cellars, needed an overhaul before wine connoisseurs would find it appealing. So Anderson transformed the space. He hauled out the junk left by previous tenants. He swept out cobwebs and dust mites. He replaced lightbulbs. He stuffed silver-backed pink rolls of insulation between the wall studs. He added lights and sorting benches.
For the public face of his business, Anderson hired a designer to make an arresting website with a purple and blue color scheme. Bannered across the home page was the declaration: “Fine Wine Storage. Setting the Standard Nationally and Internationally.”
Anderson also promised a number of other bells and whistles on the website, like an online inventory that was accessible by a password. In the late 1990s, the Internet was just becoming broadly popular and the idea of a computerized inventory system was novel. Anderson thought it would set his company apart. It would mean a client could check out his holdings from the comfort of his office or home, and see at a glance exactly what varietal and vintage he had.
There was just one problem: the computer program didn’t exist. It never would exist.59 Sausalito Cellars was built on a lie.
* * *
Anderson must have thought it was an auspicious time to open a new business. His reputation in Sausalito had never been better. Just a year earlier, after penning his “Joe Sausalito” column for years for The Signal, he made it into the big leagues, at least by Sausalito standards. Anderson had been invited to write a column for the Marin Scope, a weekly newspaper with broad circulation. He named the column “Mark My Words: A Marin Notebook.” Anderson used a folksy style full of homilies and jokes to recount his adventures traveling around the world, eating his way through the better restaurants in the Bay Area, and rubbing shoulders with the town’s A-list crowd. The prose could be dull and convoluted and Anderson sometimes repeated himself (and would eventually be accused of lifting from the Internet), but the column gave Anderson a prominent platform. And he wasn’t shy about his accomplishments. “Mark C. Anderson is a longtime resident of Sausalito, a local artist and an internationally recognized expert on everything,” read the short bio at the end of his first column in September 1998.
Anderson could be seen all over Sausalito. His chunky frame was a familiar sight, not only at lunch or late at night at Sushi Ran, but at meetings of the Sausalito Arts Commission, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Rotary Club. He was part of a group of businessmen who organized the Marin Technology Forum in 1998, Sausalito’s attempt to lure technology companies to town.
Anderson was particularly proud of his involvement with Sausalito’s Sister City Commission. For the last six years, he had been traveling with a group of high school students every other year to Sakaide, Japan, a city of about 70,000 people on the northern edge of Shikoku Island. The students would live with Japanese families, attend Kabuki theater, and tour the sights and museums. Japanese dignitaries would hold lengthy dinners and celebrations for their Sausalito visitors, which frequently included the mayor and other Marin County officials. Anderson was chair of the commission. He loved being at the center of all the activity and felt a special bond with his hosts.
Anderson had been fascinated with Japan ever since he was four, when his mother hired a Japanese caregiver in Berkeley to take care of him. The babysitter, Toshie, had come to the U.S. after World War II and barely spoke English, so Anderson picked up Japanese from her. During the six years she watched over Anderson, Toshie told the young boy tales about her life in Japan, recounted Japanese folktales and myths, and spun stories about the Japanese woodblock prints that hung on the walls of Anderson’s home. “She taught me how to see things,” said Anderson.60
Anderson had moved Hong Kong in his late twenties, and then spent five years in Japan, working for a bank in Tokyo. He enjoyed walking through the old parts of Tokyo, past shrines and houses. He even joined a sumo-wrestling club in an old part of the city called Sumida-Ku and competed using the stage name “Arase,” which means “the strength of the power of the ocean’s waves striking the rocks during a storm.”
Anderson relished any opportunity to return to Japan and revisit his favorite Shinto shrines and eat authentic Japanese food. Some of the other members of the Sausalito Sister City Commission thought Anderson was too fond of Japanese culture. They said he would ditch the students as soon as he arrived in Sakaide to indulge his passions.
But none of those tensions were apparent on a clear and pleasant fall day in October 1998. It was the tenth anniversary of the Sausalito-Sakaide sister city relationship and a group of thirty-three Japanese dignitaries, including the mayor, had come to Sausalito to celebrate.
The Sister City Commission threw a huge party for the visiting Japanese delegation in a converted church rectory on the top of a hill facing out over Sausalito and the bay. The views from the house were spectacular; standing on the deck the guests could see the blue water, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco skyline with the Transamerica pyramid’s distinctive triangular shape. Lots of important people were at the party, from the mayor and members of the city council to top businessmen. Guests chatted and snacked on sushi and sashimi from Sushi Ran and freshly shucked oysters from Hog Island Oyster Farm on Tomales Bay.
Anderson was in the center of the activity, dipping in and out of Japanese to talk to the visitors, offering quick translations for their American hosts. He was charming and funny, full of stories of past trips to Japan and the adventures he and others had gone on. As chair of the Sausalito Sister City Commission, he was the man of the moment, the orbiting moon to the stars from Japan.
The mayor of Sakaide had hosted a large reception for the Sausalito delegation a year earlier. Now it was the Americans’ turn to show their visitors the sights of the Bay Area. The day after the party, Anderson took the Japanese delegation to the Napa Valley, which lay about an hour away. He had arranged for the group to tour Hess, a winery in the Mayacamas Mountain on the valley’s western flank. The winery, started by German businessman Donald Hess, not only made excellent red and white wines, it had an extensive modern art collection and beautiful gardens. The group spent the morning wine tasting and strolling the grounds, breathing in the rich scent of lavender and thyme crushed as they walked around the winery. They then headed to the Étoile restaurant at Domaine Chandon in Yountville for lunch, not far from where Anderson’s father was living in the veteran’s home. No doubt Anderson regaled the group with tales about his wine-tasting adventures and insights about what made a good Cabernet.
Anderson was a self-taught wine connoisseur. He loved wine. He loved the taste of it as it rolled over his tongue. He loved its scent as he swirled it in a glass, letting the fumes waft up to his nose. He loved the stories of how winemakers crafted a particular vintage. He loved the social cachet of bringing wine to events or ordering a special bottle off a wine list. He loved wine so much that he travel
ed regularly to Italy and France and spent much of his time eating and drinking. He also enjoyed taking friends out to dinner and surprising them with an excellent bottle of wine he had brought from home. “Mark was one of the most knowledgeable people about wine I ever met,” said Tom Johnson, who became friends with Anderson from their work together at the Chamber of Commerce.
* * *
Anderson grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in an era when most Americans didn’t drink wine, preferring beer or spirits instead. Wine was not associated with high culture or sophistication. Instead, Americans thought of it as something immigrants drank. “If the ordinary American had any notions about winemaking or winemakers in the 1950s, they were probably something like this: vineyards were native to Europe, where one might expect to meet brightly costumed natives singing and dancing at vintage time, especially if they were Italian; winemakers were sturdy peasants who might wear berets or lederhosen, according to the country in question,” wrote the wine historian Thomas Pinney.61
The wine business had never really recovered from Prohibition; in fact, the number of vineyards in the state in 1960, twenty-seven years after repeal, was lower than in 1920, right at the start of Prohibition. Around 200 California wineries went out of business from 1952 to 1970.62
When Americans did drink, they preferred fortified, sweet, or flavored wines with names like Thunderbird, Ripple, or Boone’s Farm Green Apple wine. A sweetened red jug wine, Paisano from E. & J. Gallo, was also popular. Americans might open a bottle of wine for a birthday dinner or wedding celebration. But it was not a beverage for every night at the dinner table.
It wasn’t until 1967 that table wines, the wine we think of today, outsold sweet wines. The shift in American perception about wine involved many factors, including growing American affluence and an increase in jet travel. American travelers in Europe saw how people there consumed wine regularly. In 1961, Julia Child published her wildly successful Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which introduced ordinary Americans to the idea that good food and good wine should be a part of everyday life.
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