Peeks [ Persona ] Pop Ernest and the Rest December 2006

by Tim Thomas
Images by R. Byrne

Tim Thomas’ family ties stretch back more than a century into the peninsula area’s past. He’s dedicated his professional life to uncovering and telling the country’s maritime history.

I grew up in a family whose Monterey-area lineage stretched back four generations. My mother’s grandfather was a conductor on the Southern Pacific Railroad that began hauling supplies into and sardines out of the region before the end of the 19th century. During the depression his son-in-law managed camps for the displaced Grapes of Wrath people who were escaping calamities caused by the interminable Midwest dust storms. Later he went on to manage a campground/hotel called the 17 Mile Drive Court.

Turning Towards the Past
I became an employee of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and had the assignment of creating the living history aspect of an exhibit displaying an historical overview of the local whaling industry. I hadn’t even known of the local whaling industry, but before long I had become something of an expert on the subject.

While working on the whaling project a light seemed to go off in my head. I moved from having an interest in the story of our family to being absolutely caught up in our area’s rich and compelling history.

For the past 15 years I have been the Historian and Director of Public Programs at the Monterey Maritime and History Museum.

I do a lot of oral history — gathering the stories and harvesting the memories of people who can recall details about a past that would otherwise be gone forever. I’ve spent two decades involved in researching the Monterey Bay fishing industry.

I’ve also spent the past ten years collecting and analyzing documents, artifacts, and memorabilia from the life of “Pop” Ernest Doelter. His life seemed to connect with almost everything that happened in Monterey during most of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

The Life and Times of Pop Ernest
Pop Ernest Doelter was a big man who was accustomed to greeting visitors to his restaurant with a signature red fez perched upon his head. Newspaper reports and his own advertising sometimes portrayed him as a buffoonish character, but he was a brilliant and energetic man who almost single-handedly created a delicacy that is prized by gourmet diners and revived what was becoming a dying Japanese fishing business.

Pop Ernest came to America from Germany and opened a hotel in Hollister. He moved to Monterey in May of 1908 when he opened a restaurant, called Café Ernest, on Alvarado Street. The small European style restaurant was designed to capture the attention of bohemian society people who were moving into the area following the 1906 earthquake.

Ten years earlier a band of Japanese abalone divers had arrived from Japan’s Chiba Prefecture. They came to harvest the abalone that in those days covered the shallow sea floor around our peninsula like paving stones on a Roman road.

The Japanese fishermen were drying the meat and sending it back to Japan. Nobody in California was eating abalone or even knew they were edible. Nobody in the world ate abalone that hadn’t been dried and salted.

The problem is that unless you prepare it properly, abalone meat tastes like an old boot. Pop was fascinated by the shellfish and was trying to figure out how to get people in California to eat it.

He began experimenting and quickly discovered that only the “foot” was edible, and then only by slicing it thinly, pounding it, rolling the meat in breadcrumbs, and lightly frying it. Pop claimed to have an ingredient that he called his secret “Abalone Nectar,” which, in fact, was simply the juice from the abalone that he mixed into the breadcrumbs.

Pop Ernest had discovered a dish that people began to fall in love with. Diners flocked to Café Ernest in order to be welcomed by Pop in his fez and then to sit down to dine on his succulent abalone specialty. Aficionados began to write poems and songs in praise of Pop’s abalone. A notable poet of the day, George Sterling, got the movement off to a good start in 1913 when he wrote:

Some folks boast of quail on toast
Because they think it tony.
But I’m content to owe my rent
And live on abalone.

Pop’s restaurant became a popular destination, but the whole thing collapsed when The City of Monterey, in an ill-advised attempt to cash in on the restaurant’s popularity, raised the fee for Pop’s liquor license. He promptly shut the place down and moved himself and his family to San Francisco.

Everything changed in 1915 when the Panama Pacific Exposition came to town. Pop Ernest secured some space in the Exposition’s popular food pavilion where he began serving the fresh abalone and mussels that were being shipped to him from his Monterey Bay suppliers. The abalone became very popular.

World War I came, bringing with it a lot of unsavory anti-German sentiment, so Pop left the City and moved back to Point Lobos just south of the town of Carmel where he lived with the people from the Monterey Abalone Company and began brokering fresh abalone to restaurants throughout California.

The Abalone King
In 1913 the US outlawed the export of abalone out of California so Pop Ernest figured out how to preserve fresh abalone by canning it and saved the industry together with the livelihood of many people from the Japanese community. By 1920 no fewer than ten separate Japanese fishing companies were working out of Monterey’s Wharf #1. By the beginning of the Second World War Japanese owned no less than 80 percent of the businesses on the wharf.

Pop Ernest’s efforts in growing the area’s abalone business into a thriving industry set up a trans-Pacific “Abalone Connection” and made an impact upon a segment of Japanese society that is still recalled in Japan itself.

I’ve already been to Japan three times this year in an effort to trace down the threads that lead from Monterey to the Chiba Prefecture where the original Japanese abalone divers came from. Over the past few years I’ve been developing a sister relationship between our museum and a museum there.

Pop opened the first restaurant ever located on Wharf #1 (which was the only wharf at that time), and provided his clients with a look at an actual working wharf as they came and went from their meals. Before long he had become the recognized Abalone King.

He discovered other ways of serving the delicacy. For example, diners could feast on abalone stew, and have it served to them using the shells of the abalones for bowls. Pop filled the abalone holes with lead to keep them from leaking.

Pop’s restaurant remained his main business. He became immensely popular in his role of big fat jolly restaurateur welcoming diners while dressed in his red fez. It seemed that everybody who came to Monterey would head for Pop’s. Movie stars, artists, writers, and sports figures of the day flocked to his restaurant and signed his guest book, which is still on display at the Monterey Maritime and History Museum.

Sharks and Harpoons and Snake Oil, Oh My!
Another opportunity for making money presented itself to Pop’s entrepreneurial mind at that time. Monterey Bay began to be visited by vast numbers of basking sharks. These harmless filter-feeding creatures are actually the world’s second largest fish. They earned their name “basking” or “sun” sharks because they fed on the surface.

The sharks began coming into the bay by the hundreds and thousands. Monterey Bay is the only place in the world where basking sharks can be found year-round. The Monterey Canyon provides the species with an excellent source of food.

Pop and his partner in the abalone business, a blacksmith named Henry Leppert, got the idea of providing tours from the Hotel Del Monte, which is now the Naval Postgraduate School. For 50 cents a tourist could go out on a launch, also called The Pop Ernest, and harpoon a basking shark.

A number of retired Portuguese whalers living in the area would go on the boat with the tourists recounting exciting whaling stories, and teaching tourists how to harpoon their own whale-size prey.

After a tourist had killed a shark, the boat crew would sometimes hook a hose to an air compressor, stick the other end of the hose into the dead creature, pump it full of air, flip it over, and Henry Leppert would dance on the shark’s carcass for the amusement of the astonished tourists.

The supply of basking sharks began to decline in 1937. They continue to come into the Bay in small numbers, and still do so year around. Jo Mora, who was a well-known artist and local resident during that time, designed Pop’s menu in exchange for free dinners and basking shark hunts.

An entrepreneur by the name of Mack Schaffer opened a reduction company, which is a business that consists of grinding up fish entrails to make into other products.

Schaffer “reduced” the slain sharks to pet food, but also produced Sun Shark Liver Oil out of the animal’s livers. A basking shark’s liver might weigh as much as 3,500 pounds and produce up to 400 gallons of oil.

Schaffer’s Shark Liver Oil was a source of low grade Vitamin A. It was sold as a snake-oil-type potion that was advertised to cure whatever ailed you, including taking its place as the Viagra of its day. The “cures” were mere coincidences or the results of a placebo effect.

Schaffer’s reduction company burnt down in 1937, but another industry began booming shortly thereafter based on the soupfin shark. This creature is only eight feet long and, therefore, much smaller than the basking shark, but it provided a rich source of Vitamin A.

During the Second World War, while the Atlantic U-boat threat virtually extinguished Vitamin A-rich cod, the California Soupfin industry grew so large that people began to refer to it as California’s “Second Gold Rush.”

In 1941 the demand was so great that one fisherman could sometimes make $100,000 during a single day of fishing. Following the war, Vitamin A began to be synthesized and the soupfin industry died. And it was a good death since by then the soupfin shark population had been almost completely wiped out.

The reduction business for basking sharks had a revival for a few years, beginning in 1948 at Moss Landing. Basking shark hunts were modernized and planes were used as spotters. They converted the meat into dog and cat food. They tried using the shark to make oil for paint and soap manufacturers. But the paint wouldn’t dry and the soap wouldn’t lather. They found another use for the products in tanning leather.

After his death in 1934 Pop Ernest’s sons continued to run his restaurant until it was finally sold in 1952 bringing to a close what had been an interesting chapter in Monterey history.

I have sufficient challenges to last me a lifetime. My job as chronicler of Monterey History will never be finished; I’m always discovering new and amazing information that I had never before imagined existed!

A fascinating reality of our peninsula life is that our modern story began with Japanese and Italian fishermen — and with the entrepreneurs who created the markets that made our fishing-based economy boom.

We should never forget the history of our peninsula. I’ve dedicated myself to helping people remember. °