Gin Chow was a strawberry farmer and "weather prophet" whose reputed prediction of the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake went unheeded. But everything he said thereafter was recorded by the scribes of the period, who considered him a kind of seismic Nostradamus.
Southern California has had boatloads of seers, from cricket-listeners and stargazers to rainmakers and palm readers.
But stories about Chow's predictions caught the attention of the press, which helped make a California legend of the man who once sold strawberries and casaba melons on the streets of Santa Barbara.
All the accounts came after the fact, but the gist of them is this: Two days before Christmas in 1920 or 1923, depending on the source, Chow supposedly posted a notice in the Santa Barbara post office stating that the city would be flattened by an earthquake on June 29, 1925.
Sure enough, the biggest and deadliest temblor since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire struck at 6:44 a.m. that day. The ground shuddered for 19 seconds, about the time it takes to draw three or four slow, deep breaths.
When it stopped, nearly a dozen people were dead and hundreds injured.
Almost every stone and brick chimney was shaken loose by the 6.3-magnitude temblor, and 70 buildings in the commercial district were leveled.
Part of the 1797 Spanish presidio was destroyed, and one of the Santa Barbara Mission's two famous bell towers crumbled.
Parts of the luxurious Arlington Hotel collapsed, injuring Capt. George Allan Hancock and killing his 22-year-old son, Bertram, who was asleep in an adjoining room. (Nine years earlier, Hancock had donated 23 acres of Hancock Park's La Brea Tar Pits to the citizens of Los Angeles.)
The capriciousness of the disaster was sobering: A maid who ran to a doorway in answer to her rich employer's screams saw the elderly woman plunge several floors to her death as the floor gave way beneath her bed.
In the midst of the chaos, a Times reporter filed his story via telegraph from a table set up in the middle of the street.
But it was Santa Barbara newspaper publisher Thomas More Storke and Times columnist Harry Carr who fashioned Gin Chow's reputation.
Beginning six years after the earthquake, in books and eventually hundreds of newspaper articles, the two praised Chow as a "weather prophet."
In late 1931, Carr encouraged Chow, an immigrant from Canton, China, to write a book of forecasts: "Gin Chow's First Annual Almanac," with a foreword written by Carr.
