4th shift
My last shift in the Historical Society Museum turned out a lot more information than all of my previous shifts. I changed my research strategy by focusing my research on news articles from San Luis Obispo from around 100 years ago that were stored in a very well indexed collection appropriately titled “100 years ago”. A woman from the Santa Margarita Historical Society actually pointed me in the direction of these articles, and showed me the very complete index. After this I just went from year to year and looked up words like Chinese, Japanese, etc. and just read the corresponding articles. Most of the information I found was on the Chinese residents of San Luis Obispo, with the content of the articles varying greatly. To give an idea of this variance, one article was describing the funeral of an esteemed member of a Chinese society called “King’s High Masons”, and the reporter commented, “On the whole it was a grand affair, and we have no recollection in our thirty or forty years of life in California of seeing it excelled.” Another article was titled “The Chinese Must Go! – The latest effort to persuade the obnoxious people to keep away.” You can imagine what the gist of this article was. It’s good to know San Luis Obispo has come a long way since then.
-Tyler Hushing-Kline
