Some weeks ago, I was curious about how Davis reacted to the
passage of Proposition 13 in June of 1978.
So I hauled out my 20-some pound April-June hardcopy, bound copy of the Davis Enterprise and began to read the June
issues.
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| 1. 14" wide, 22" tall, 15" deep |
(In image 1, that volume is shown as one of four volumes for 1978.
Together, the four measure 14 inches wide and 22 inches tall--as can be seen on
the carpenter’s square placed in the photograph. Also, the set is 15 inches
deep.)
Once into the four weeks of June Prop 13 materials, I was
hooked. 1978 had so many striking stories that I did not resist the urge to
read the entire four volumes and take high-resolution pictures of selected
stories.
At first, I thought I would only publish a handful of 1978
items. But now that I am up to seven posts, I see that I have hardly started to
depict the many fascinating aspects of 1978.
Retrospectively numbered these seven have been:
# 1 Prop 13 scramble
in the second week of June (174)
# 2 Prop 13 scramble
in the third week of June (175)
# 3 Prop 13 scramble
in fourth week of June (176)
# 4 Prop 13 scramble
in the fifth week of June (177)
# 5 Council almost eliminates its own salary (178)
# 6 call for Davis businesses
to “flex muscles” in politics (179)
# 7 end of the liquor
limit in Davis (180)
Beginning with this post as number eight and with the logo
shown, I will intermittingly be posting additional 1978 posts and numbering
them under the title “Davis in 1978 . .
. .”
Bound Davis
Enterprise Volumes. My ownership of these bound volumes explains why I embarked on a series of stories on a single year.
Having the materials physically at hand made the project much easier than working
with microfilm at local libraries or reading the originals in Special
Collections at Shields Library.
The fact that I own these volumes might itself be seen as a
rather curious matter that merits explanation. Here it is.
In January of 2001, I received a message from Davis
Enterprise editor Debbie Davis telling me that she had a pallet of bound
Enterprise volumes in the paper’s printing plant that she had offered to UCD’s
Special Collections, which turned down all but one volume it did not already
have.
Therefore, she was now offering me the volumes minus the one
going to Special Collections. If I did not take them, they were bound for a
paper recycling plant.
This corpus filled a standard forklift wooden pallet rising
several feet and weighed the better part of a ton. I arranged for a pickup
truck on which the Enterprise printing plant forklift placed the pallet.
For purposes of a story on to my discovery of a set of
1964 Enterprises (a year for which there were previously no known copies), an Enterprise
photographer was on hand at this loading, as was University Archivist John
Skarstad (there to take possession of the one volume Special Collections lacked).
Image 2 is reproduced from the January 15, 2001 Enterprise.
In it we see the fork lift on the left and the “table” formed by the bound
volumes on the pallet.
Four of volumes were of a Woodland paper, which I gave to
the Yolo County Archives, leaving 79 Enterprise volumes covering the 18 years
1966-1983. I kept them in a storage locker for a time, but soon moved them to
more convenient place (image 3). Image 4 shows a portion of them in their current
dark and cool location.
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| 2. Davis Enterprise, January 15, 2001 |
* * *
In equally fortuitous ways I have
also come to own additional hardcopies of the Enterprise--from
the estates of Hubert Heitman and Miriam Hummel (special thanks to Elisabeth
Sherwin for the latter).
In the decade and more I have owned most of these materials,
I have been able to review them conveniently and at leisure. As such, they have
provided me a unique physical and psychological relation to Davis history.
Although many factors have been at play, I doubt that the accounts I have assembled could have been
done as well or at all without the many days of ink-stained hands I have acquired
from again and again handling some of the many thousands of these fragile pages.
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