In the 1940s and 1950s, California had many female motorcycle riders who formed “ladies’ auxiliaries” to assist local men’s motorcycle clubs.The Lodi Comets were different. They were the first all-female incorporated motorcycle club in California to be independently chartered by the […]
Lillian Pleas Cunningham Rees was born in Lodi in 1880. Lillian studied voice and appeared locally in many shows before moving to San Francisco to sing at the Tivoli Theater. There she met and married Tivoli’s star Arthur Cunningham, a celebrated […]
Yoshino Nakano (d. 1946) was a Japanese picture bride. She represents Japanese women who lived in Lodi following arranged marriages to the Japanese immigrant men who had settled in the Lodi area beginning in 1890. She married Seijiro (Joe) Masui, […]
Addine LeMoin Beckman (1880-1936) was only 27 years old with three small children when her husband died in 1907. In an unusual move, she decided to assume her husband’s full partnership in the thriving mercantile business of Beckman, Welch, and […]
Santos Rios Olvera (1886 – 1961) was a Mexican American boarding house owner in Acampo who gave sustenance and counsel to anyone who asked. As a young widow in 1923, she walked from her home in Nayarit, Mexico to Nogales, […]
Sabra Hopper Housh was born in Pennsylvania in 1845. Married in 1861, she had five children but by 1877, three children and her first husband had died. In 1897, she came to Lodi where one of her surviving daughters had settled. […]
Mary Sollars Ralls (1876-1971) was the original telephone “operator” in Lodi. In 1887 a hand-crank telephone was installed at Ferguson’s Tailor shop where she worked as a seamstress. Mary answered the telephone when it rang and delivered messages on paper to […]
In the 1890s, Lodi women couldn’t vote but they longed to have a voice in improving their lives and community. Some women organized small lodges; some joined suffrage and temperance groups but their desire to use their collective energy finally […]
Mabel Yank (1903-1999) married Carl Richey in 1927 and the couple settled in Lodi in 1929 where they owned grape orchards and she taught at Woods School. After her husband drowned in 1948, Mabel Richey managed the vineyard and their other […]
By Alane K. Dashner of Lodi, CA [Culture Vulture Magazine] Oh my goodness, you’re even more handsome in real life! Wood you have time for an interview, Mr. Wood Duck? [Wood Duck] Please, call me WD. Yes, I’m between shootings. […]