History Repeats Itself
By Wendy Hinman | Photos by Sam Wells, courtesy of the Carlsbad City Library Carlsbad History Room
Local authors explore different facets of the city in history books.

Human beings are the storytelling species. There is something in us drawn to it. A morning surf session is not all it could be until the story of the best wave is told in the Tamarack parking lot. Talking about the one that got away on the banks of Agua Hedionda helps the time pass before the next fish bites. History is just storytelling in a formal font.

Carlsbad has a new history book for its shelves. Arcadia Publishing has put out a series called Images of America that uses regional writers in an attempt to go town by town, and sometimes by neighborhood—Los Angeles’s Chinatown gets its own book—to “make history accessible and meaningful.” Its Carlsbad offering has been written by local Jeannie Sprague-Bentley, and is available at www.amazon.com, www.arcadiapublishing.com and Costco, among other locations.

Carlsbad was Sprague-Bentley’s childhood playground and she returned to it by choice after getting her journalism degree at San Diego State University. An appreciation for nostalgia and a journalist‘s eye gave her the ideal background to record Carlsbad’s past. “I have been watching open space, landmarks such as the raceway and skate park, and the fields of flowers in both Carlsbad and Encinitas all disappear,” she says. “I had a strong desire to document these places [with photographs] before they were gone.”

The pictures form the centerpiece of Sprague-Bentley’s book. There are more than 200 photographs—some of these, from personal collections of longtime residents, have never been published before. And this new book offers sections on history still in the making when other histories had already gone to press.

“My mom was a photographer, so I grew up watching her document life,” Sprague-Bentley says. “For me, it connects me to the world around me. I am acutely aware that we are all living history; what we are doing will be history tomorrow. I am the one at parties that always has a camera. I just have always had the desire to be part of and to document events and people with photography. But as a journalist, I always feel it is my job to tell the stories of others in a balanced, comprehensive way.”

Our own personalities influence not only how we make history, but how we interpret it. Marje Howard-Jones wrote a popular history of Carlsbad in 1982. Seekers of the Spring: A History of Carlsbad put weight “on the people who lived here and what their stories were.” It is more of a poet’s version of history; Howard-Jones can turn a phrase with the best of us and she knows how to drop a metaphor. It has fewer pictures, though some excellent line drawings by John Goddard. Having been immersed in village life for so many years, Howard-Jones’s writing speaks to the heart of community.

Howard-Jones was set on this project by Georgina Cole, the city’s first library director and the namesake of the downtown branch. “Georgina asked me to rewrite the little green book,” Howard-Jones says, that being more of an oral history containing some great primary source interviews. “I didn’t know what I was in for when I said yes,” she adds. Looking for a place to start, Howard-Jones took a class on writing local history. In the class she discovered a couple of others who were writing a history of Carlsbad as well. “It was a pilot project of LASCO [the precursor to SANDAG] and their focus was going to be on land use.” That’s when Howard-Jones decided to focus on the people.
“There are not a lot of scholarly references in my book. I just wanted a book people would enjoy reading,” she says. She succeeded with élan. But she adds, “My copy has all sorts of corrections written on it. [History] is never written for the last time.”

In 2002, Susan Schnebelen Gutierrez wrote a Carlsbad history titled Windows on the Past: An Illustrated History of Carlsbad, California. The Carlsbad City Library wanted an update to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Carlsbad’s incorporation as a city. Since Gutierrez worked in the library’s History Room the job fell to her “sort of by default.”

“Initially, the thing was going to be like [Sprague-Bentley’s book],” Gutierrez says. “Lots of photos with mostly extended captions.” But as she began her research, she started to feel about as overwhelmed as Howard-Jones. She went to the green book, she read her good friend’s Seekers of the Spring, but came at it with yet a different angle. Like all the historians she says, “We all try to complement, not redo, each other’s work.”

Gutierrez says if Howard-Jones focused on people, she stuck to “the chronology and political aspect, not so much individuals.” Though every writer starts with the Portola Expedition, Gutierrez spotlights the history since incorporation. Where Sprague-Bentley is the photojournalist and Howard-Jones the poet, Gutierrez brings a librarian’s sense of order and another form of erudition.

Carlsbad has been blessed to have an abundance of histories compiled for our easy access. All of these histories are available at the library, for check out and for sale. They are also for sale by the Carlsbad Historical Society at the Magee House.

There is another book, Carlsbad: An Unabashed History of the Village by the Sea, written in 1987 by Charles Wesley Orton. (It is really not required to have three names to write a history of Carlsbad—it just seems that way.) His take is a bit of a surprised Midwesterner. Having landed in Carlsbad by a flip of a coin, Orton was pleasantly startled by the friendliness he found here. In his preface he wrote, “Carlsbad has, throughout its history attracted men and women who, even in the pursuit of their own goals and dreams, have kept a larger-than-common sense of community, compassion and kindness.”

Orton presents his version in a magazine style, with articles more than chapters, and some were written by others. (There is one by Allen O. Kelly that is not to be missed.) It even has ads throughout that have, by now, become their own display of history. Orton’s book can be checked out at the Cole Library, but is not for sale there and the historical society is down to just one or two copies.

If history is a prism through which we see the past, the colors change with which way we slant it toward the light. That so many good writers have turned their hand to this task has brought out Carlsbad’s different shades. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and American historian David McCullough wrote, “To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn’t just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.” •