Santa Rosa High School - Echo Yearbook (Santa Rosa, CA)

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THE ECHO OF THE SANTA ROSA HIGH SCHOOL but not one in a hundred thousand has or will use them with such intelligence and skill as this great Magician of California. One may ask, who is this great man? The name which to- day rings in every ear is Luther Burbank. He was born in Lan- caster, Worcester County, Massachusetts, on March 7, 1849, the day which California, and especially Santa Rosa, celebrate an- nually. His ancestry is Scotch-English. He was educated in the common schools and in the academy. During his! boyhood he worked in the Ames Plow Factory. Mr. Burbank enjoyed boys’ sports, too. He played games. He fished and hunted; but he was happiest when in the com- pany of Nature herself. His eyes were so bright they saw many things that others passed by. From his childhood Burbank was passionately devoted to flowers and to all forms of plant life. His mother and sisters had noticed that whenever he was given a flower, while lying in his cradle, he always held it with certain childish tenderness, never crushing nor dropping it but keeping it, if allowed, until its bloom was faded or its fragrance gone. One day when his sister had given him a flower he held it in his usual earnestness until a petal fell off. Then, with infinite childish patience, he strove to put the petal back in place and thus restore the flower. hen a little older and able to toddle about, he chose plants for pets instead of animals. He was given a plant in a pot, so-called lobster cactus as the variety of cactus was locally known, and for hours at a time he trudged about house and yard carrying the cactus plant in his little arms. One day he stumbled and fell, broke the plant from. its stem and destroyed the pot. It was a day of great sadness, ior he greived so over the loss of the pet plant as another child would have greived over the death of a bird or a faithful dog. When the time came for him to choose his life-work, he desired to help Nature make old things better than they were, and new things better than the old. He began to raise seeds and vegetables in a little market-garden, and then a great day

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THE ECHO OF THE SANTA ROSA HIGH SCHOOL Lai Y SSS SS === SS = The Wonder Worker and Flower Magician HAT has been the most interesting to you in the fairy stories you have read? Was it not the magic wand by means of which common stones were turned into gold ,and rags into silk and satin garments? It was very wonderful, and no doubt you wished for such a wand yourself, but believed it was quite impossible to find one, even if you hunted the world over. There lives, in beautiful and dear old California, a quiet man, who has found such a wand and uses it for the good of others. This wand which he possesses was given him by no fairy godmother. It is his own patient observing mind which he has knocked so persistently at Dame Nature’s door that she has been forced to open and reveal her secrets. For years this magician has kept thousands of different experiments going with the idea that in plant crossing there will be as many gains as losses, as many tremendous improve- ments as utter failures. Thousands have used patents before

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THE ECHO OF THE SANTA ROSA HIGH SCHOOL came in the young man’s life. For sometime he had heen watching very closely the potatoes in his garden, The green tops were not all alike, and one of them had something not found in any of the others. It was a seed ball. Mr. Burbank watched this very carefully and one day he said to himself. “If I plant this seedball, quite different po- iatoes will grow from it than from the other potatoes. The country was nearly on the verge of a potato famine. It is said today that our country has gained twenty millions of dollars through Mr. Burbank’s discovery, while he himself sold the seed he had raised for one hundred and fifty dollars. Not long afterwards, at the age of twenty-one, he started for California, taking with him ten of his new potatoes. After reaching San Francisco, it was to our city of Santa Rosa that this man, whom the world honors as a benefactor of mankind, came and to this day makes his home here. Not being able to hire lodgings ,he slept in a damp room above a steaming hot house. This constant exposure and lack of proper nourishment brought on a fever. A poor woman in the neighborhood found him one day in such condition. She insisted in sharing with him the small portion of milk which she could afford to spare from the one cow that supplied her family. He protested against taking it because he might never be able to repay her, and there was scant hope to do it, but the woman insisted, and the pint of milk a day which she brought him saved the life of this great man. The man who was to become the foremost figure in the world in his line of work, and who was to pave the way by his own discoveries and creations, who had already done what would gain for his country ‘millions of dollars, was a stranger in a strange land, close to starvation, penniless, being kept alive only by the generosity of a poor woman. Never for an instant did this heroic figure lose hope, never once did he swerve from the path he had marked out. It was a wan and haggard figure that rose once more to start work.