Engineering a Legend
An electrician from a mill town, 1883–1925
Herman William Eichbaum was born in December 1883 at Mahoningtown, a mill district of New Castle, Pennsylvania. His father, Thomas Sample Eichbaum, had served through the Civil War and spent thirty years with the federal Census Office; a Washington paper called him “patriarch of the Census Office” in 1902. His mother Harriet was born in Wales. In June 1900 the census found the family in a mortgaged house in Taylor Township, with sixteen-year-old “Hermann” working as a tin plate stacker. Three months later he went to college.
The college was Virginia Polytechnic Institute at Blacksburg, a land-grant military school. The 1901 yearbook lists him in cadet uniform among the Class of 1904, the only Pennsylvanian on the page. Whether he finished is an open question; the roster records membership, not a degree. The “University of Virginia” of the standard histories, and the “University of West Virginia” of a 1933 magazine profile, are both wrong. The last trace of him in the East is a Christmas dance at Radford, Virginia, on December 27, 1905, where he was still “of Newcastle, Pa.”
Within nine months he was in California, working as an electrician for Abbot Kinney’s company at Venice, the new amusement resort on the beach. His boss was a man named W. S. Ball. In December 1906 a motor blew out in the Venice power house and nearly killed him, and the following month he and Ball left for Rhyolite, Nevada, “where they will indulge in the game of frenzied finance, among the other gold seekers,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. They went as partners in fourteen Death Valley mining claims bought a few weeks earlier. By November 1907 Rhyolite’s own paper named him a co-owner of the B & B group at Goldbelt Spring, and in December he was doing assessment work in the Black Mountains. That is the first time the record puts him inside Death Valley.
Here the legend needs a correction. Every later history says Eichbaum built Rhyolite’s first electric plant in 1905 or 1906. No newspaper of the time says so. Rhyolite had no electric light until the plant went into service in May 1907; the company’s officers did not include him; and by July 1907 the Los Angeles Times named its owner as Fred Remick. The claim first appears in print in 1929, written by the resort’s own publicist. What the record does show is that a “Superintendent Ball” completed the Rhyolite power house in March 1907, six weeks after Ball and Eichbaum left Venice together. The likeliest reading is that the senior man built the plant and the story attached itself to the famous partner, and slid back a year. That is a reading, not a fact.
He came back to the beach. In 1908 he filed two patents for an electric street-railway switching system and was appointed city electrician of Ocean Park. He lost that contract in a political fight in 1910, went into business for himself wiring amusement rides, and in 1911 made the papers as president of a Venice aero club that meant to buy an aeroplane, paint the city’s name on it and fly it across the country as an advertisement. The Los Angeles Express ran his photograph: straw boater, bow tie, about twenty-seven. The aeroplane was never bought. Then he went East for three years, working on hydroelectric construction on the New River in Virginia, where the men already called him “Bob.”
Helene had her own story. Born Helen Williams in Evansville, Indiana, in September 1883, she grew up in Springfield, Illinois, in a household supported by her mother’s state job, married a Colorado Springs doctor at eighteen, and divorced him in Los Angeles in 1911 for desertion. She and Eichbaum married in San Francisco on Saturday, October 31, 1914. The histories say Venice; the license says San Francisco. How they met is not recorded.
From 1915 they lived on the Venice oceanfront, and from 1916 he ran the Venice Electric Tram Company, an electric garage that became the operator of the little trams on the boardwalk. He designed the cars himself. In 1918 he bought the five-year boardwalk franchise for $4,100, his first transportation franchise. In 1922 he bought a sixty-five-foot wartime patrol boat, renamed it the Emma S, and announced excursions to the islands “to make Venice the great sea port of the Southwest.” By 1924 he was running the Catalina Jaunting Car Company at Avalon, the sightseeing cars and the stage line to the Isthmus on William Wrigley’s island, and the Eichbaums had a house at the top of West Whittley Avenue. The pattern was set before he ever asked Inyo County for anything: move people to a destination, and make the trip worth it.
Sources
Twelfth Census (1900), Taylor Township, Lawrence County, Pa.; The Bugle (VPI), 1901; Times Herald (Washington), May 4, 1902; The News (Lynchburg), Dec 30, 1905; Los Angeles Express, Oct 13 and Dec 22, 1906 and Jan 8, 1907; Los Angeles Times, Jan 20, May 5 and Jul 31, 1907; Reno Evening Gazette, Mar 5, 1907; Tonopah Daily Bonanza, Nov 19, 1907; Goldfield News, Jan 4, 1908; U.S. Patents 908,981 and 916,958; Los Angeles Herald, Mar 9 and Apr 16, 1910; Venice Evening Vanguard, 1911–1924; Los Angeles Evening Express, Sep 5, 1911; Roanoke Times, Oct 1, 1912; San Francisco marriage license, Oct 31, 1914; Santa Monica city directories, 1915–1925; Catalina Islander, 1924–1926; U.S. passport application, Jan 22, 1924.
