Berkeley, a Look Back: Christmas events, shopping well underway in 1925

Christmas was closely approaching this week a century ago in Berkeley, where both shopping excursions and local celebrations were well underway.

A “mammoth public holiday celebration” was planned for the Greek Theatre on Dec. 20, 1925. Firemen at Berkeley’s Durant Avenue station had built a sleigh for Santa to arrive in, and a fire captain had taken a “special municipal truck” to an area near Cloverdale to cut down a 40-foot tree for the event.

“Another (tree) of the same type will be illuminated with incandescent globes in front of the City Hall,” the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported.

The Greek Theatre event included community singing and hundreds of local school children in costumes performing a Christmas pageant. Santa Claus would also “personally greet” any Berkeley children who came to the event after he arrived in a parade up Telegraph Avenue.

Santa’s sleigh was supposedly pulled by reindeer in the procession, but I’m not certain from the news articles if they were actual reindeer or some other more commonplace ruminant, perhaps with faux antlers added.

New building: On Dec. 19, 1925, the new Mercantile Trust bank opened at the northeast corner of College and Ashby avenues (today it’s a Wells Fargo Bank branch).

“Striking in its combination of the utility and the aesthetic, the spacious banking room evoked many expressions of admiration from the visitors (during an open house),” the Gazette reported. “Modified Spanish might be taken as the term best fitted to describe the building.”

The main banking hall featured huge stuffed heads of buffalo, elk and caribou on the walls.

“These would seem to be an entirely new feature for a banking room,” according to the Gazette, which noted that a “pleasingly furnished ladies’ rest room” was also provided. Have you wondered if those pillars flanking the entrance are real stone? Yes, “they are of solid red Missouri granite,” the Gazette reported.

Robbery shooting: On Dec. 17, 1925, “An unidentified man, believed to have been the bandit who has held up two west end stores in the last month was shot and killed today by Albert Verzi, 55, proprietor of a shoe store at 2442 San Pablo Avenue. Verzi told police the the man entered the store and demanded the best shoes he had in the place,” according to the Gazette.

Verzi went into a back room and returned with a shotgun.

“When the supposed bandit saw Verzi was armed he shouted, ‘Don’t shoot!’ Verzi says he told the man to stand still, whereupon the man jumped toward him and made to seize the shotgun. Verzi fired one shot. The man dropped with a charge of shot through his heart.”

Police interviewed Verzi and then released him, stating that they believed he had shot in self-defense. Two other men recently robbed in West Berkeley were brought to see the body and identified it as that of a man who had recently robbed them.

The building where the shooting occurred still stands today (if the street numbering system is still the same). It’s a little wooden storefront currently painted bright red on San Pablo Avenue north of Dwight Way, next to a solar car wash.

Drowning: Two men, one of them from Berkeley, apparently drowned in the Pacific Ocean when their “fishing launch” broke up at night on Dec. 16, 1925. Wreckage was later found at the mouth of the Salinas River. The dead Berkeley man was Nicholas Romano, of 1115 Glen Ave., an “importer and exporter.”

His son had apparently been following his boat in another boat and saw the lights of his father’s craft suddenly disappear. Searchers later found broken pieces of the boat scattered along the shore.

Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.