Life Since the Baby Boom

I let the Fremont Older series languish while I attended to other things, but there’s more to say. If you live in Santa Clara County, you’ve probably heard of Fremont Older Open Space Preserve. You probably think it must have something to do with the city of Fremont. It doesn’t; it was a guy’s name. He was a significant figure in San Francisco politics in the early 20th century

In the last article, we saw Older campaign ceaselessly to nail Mayor Schmitz, his puppet master Abe Ruef, and railroad boss Patrick Calhoun. He brought in a top prosecutor Francis Heney and his ace detective William Burns just to get them, and they did, sort of. Calhoun took it personally and tried to have him killed. We now resume the story .

Ruef was entangled with Burns and with the law. He had been questioned extensively and felt that he’d been offered immunity for everything, as long as he testified against Schmitz. Burns, on the other hand, felt that he’d agreed to testify to certain things and then welshed on the agreement. Older came around to Ruef’s point of view.

The judge did not agree that Ruef should get off entirely, and was willing to give him a one-year sentence for the “French restaurant affair” (where he had taken a bribe to make a city issue go away), so at least he’d spend some time behind bars. This was not acceptable to Ruef, who went to trial. The jury could not agree, and they had to have a second trial.

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