whal a fasciiialinjr place it was for small boys, particularly when one of them lived there and took advantage of his position as son of the proprietor. We roamed over llie entire establishment and played all kinds of wonderful games. We seemed to be in awe of the guests and left them pretty much alone, but we very unfairly set traps for the employees and tormented them no end. However, they were our friends and usually entered into the game and did not mind too seriously, although Alfred Edwards reminded me of one occasion when we dumped buckets of water from a roof on two of the Chinese cooks and they pursued us, wielding knives and shouting impreca tions in Chinese, through various passageways until we finally lost ourselves in a hideaway that was secret and inaccessible to all but us. Then there were the animals and the birds. The hotel raised its own chickens—and strange as it seems now, its own turtles. Evidently in those days soups and other delicacies made from turtles were very popular—and the ingredients could not readily be bought in stores. We had a small menagerie near the State atul Sola Street corner to interest the tourists and their children—deer, rab bits, harmless snakes, parrots, pigeons and sometimes small wildcats and mountain lions. All wonderful for restless and adventurous boys. Arcjiie Edwards, Edward Starbuck, Jack and Winthrop Austin, Alfred Edwards and his brother Jack, and Jack McKinley were the regulars, but there were many more, and when the hotel guests had sons young enough for our gang we added them as nonresident members. All of this was before 1908. In that year my father gave up the Arlington and moved to San Francisco where he took over another hotel. In 1909 the old Arlington burned. A new hotel was built on the same grounds, and. in 1911 my father was asked to return and be its lessee-proprietor. So we moved into the New Arlington and stayed there until my father retired in 1920. But that is another story, and a more adult one—the story of the New Arlington.
Santa Barbara Youth in the Nineties By Frances Cooper Kroll It was a big day for Santa Barbara: The coastal steamer Santa Rosa, had just arrived from the north. Among the passengers were my brother. Bill Cooper, Wilson Dibblee, Johnny More and Sam Stow. They were re turning for their summer vacation from Belmont, a preparatory school near San Mateo. After collecting their luggage, with a superiority that made their cal lowness more apparent, they tilted their new stiff straw hats to a highly sophisticated angle, and, following several tourists, climbed into the Ar lington Hotel bus, one of the few vehicles allowed on the wharf. The driver cracked his whip and they started. Off to the left, sharply interrupting the long line of the curving beach, Castle Rock stood out, dark, craggy against the shifting lights of the water. Above it. back from the point, one could see the large white house that Thomas Dibblee had built for his family some years before. In the early Spanish days, a fort had stood there, and for that reason they called their home Punta del Castillo. It was a stately, impressive house, and, standing 4