San Joaquin County Local News: History

11/28/2023
Political wonks in California, Florida and maybe a few states in between, will be glued to their screens Thursday night to watch Gov. Gavin Newsom and Gov. Ron Desantis square off in a highly-anticipated Blue vs. Red State debate that’s been brewing since the summer.

11/22/2023
Hundreds of people are expected at Alcatraz on Thanksgiving morning to commemorate Native Americans occupying the island from 1969-71. The event is known as the Indigenous Peoples Sunrise Gathering.

11/07/2023
A statue of Miwok elder William J. Franklin has been installed on California State Capitol grounds. The monument replaces a statue of Father Junípero Serra, which protestors toppled in 2020.

11/03/2023
Tribes like the Muwekma Ohlone have been asking UC Berkeley for decades to give back ancestral remains from burial sites around the Bay Area. The school is in the process of repatriating 4,400 remains and 25,000 tribal items.

10/30/2023
Robert Irwin, an artist and MacArthur genius grant recipient, died in San Diego at 95 on Oct. 25. Michael Govan, who heads the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, offers a colorful retrospective on Irwin's work.

10/27/2023
Marc R. Marchini, who combined his vocation as a Union Island farmer and a leader of the California asparagus industry, with service as a school trustee, has been inducted posthumously into the San Joaquin County Agricultural Hall of Fame.

10/27/2023
Camille Dixon, the announcer for Disney California Adventure, and her husband, Bill Rogers, the voice of Disneyland, are moving on from this work. They have been at the parks for more than 40 years combined.

10/12/2023
Fourteen months ago, the Lodi Historical Society first proposed renovating the old firehouse and city hall.

09/29/2023
It has been 100 years since the Grand Theatre became a fixture in Tracy. The Grand Foundation hosted a formal gala to mark the occasion and raise money for arts programs at The Grand.

09/23/2023
For more than a decade, the aroma of pies, sweet breads and cookies wafted from a small bakery at 623 E. Oak St. in Lodi.

09/13/2023
After 114 years atop the city’s arched entrance, it’s had more than one brush with death—and most recently almost allowed to simply rot in place.

09/10/2023
As Tracy’s largest rural residential development, Parker Acres changed the face of the town, starting 100 years ago.

09/07/2023
Wheat—not almonds, pumpkins or even grapes—is what attracted farmers to the Manteca region after the Gold Rush in a bid to make a living. Manteca Bulletin editor Dennis Wyatt looks back at how irrigation changed everything.

09/04/2023
California wildfires every year emit as much carbon as almost 2 million cars, posing a threat to efforts to battle climate change.

08/18/2023
The city of Placerville is looking for ways to attract more visitors. Councilmember John Clerici came up with the idea to transform the Bell Tower Plaza, located on Historic Main Street, into a wedding venue.

08/17/2023
In a new study published Aug. 17 in the journal Science, fossil records at La Brea Tar Pits indicate that the disappearance of California’s sabertooth cats, dire wolves and other large mammals nearly 13,000 years ago was linked to rising temperatures and fire activity spurred by people.

08/17/2023
Chabad of Tracy Jewish Center founder Rabbi Levi Meijers says, “it’s almost hard to believe this but there are people that deny the Holocaust and where we’re heading, in a direction of hate and anti-semitism.”

08/12/2023
It was 50 years ago this week, in 1973, that the last three World War II housing units that had been Tracy’s temporary city hall were demolished. Tracy Press reporter Pat Craig then began sorting through the mutilated records and found a number of interesting documents.

07/01/2023
Next year, pink cherry blossom petals in Robert T. Matsui Park—a grove called the Hanami Line—will blanket the Sacramento waterfront. They’ll fulfill the promise of Japanese Sacramentans’ nickname for the city: Sakuramento, after the cherry blossom.

05/15/2023
Dick and Mac McDonald came to California to seek opportunities in the movie business and wound up owning a drive-in BBQ restaurant in San Bernardino. On May 15, 1948, they opened their revamped restaurant with a Speedee Service System featuring hamburgers.