Editor’s note: Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and stores all over Avalon.
If you’re like me, you keep a “bucket list” of sorts in your head or, in my case, on an actual Excel spreadsheet sortable by priority, to-do date, etc.
The items on this list are kept within reason (“visit the moon” is not one of them), yet challenging enough to where I won’t finish them all too early and end up spending the rest of my life twiddling my thumbs.
Editor’s note: Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and stores all over Avalon.
If you’re like me, you keep a “bucket list” of sorts in your head or, in my case, on an actual Excel spreadsheet sortable by priority, to-do date, etc.
The items on this list are kept within reason (“visit the moon” is not one of them), yet challenging enough to where I won’t finish them all too early and end up spending the rest of my life twiddling my thumbs.
Generally speaking, most of the items revolve around travel or quests that in some way or other require travel to complete, such as “visit every continent on earth at least once” (I’ve got four out of the seven) reach proficiency in 10 languages (I’m four for 10 on that), be in a hurricane, see a tornado, been there done that and so on and so forth.
But one of the more exciting and, so far, elusive items on this list has been to see a total eclipse of the sun.
I’ve seen plenty of partial eclipses and a fair number of total eclipses of the moon, but experiencing the totality of a solar eclipse is something not to be missed, I have been told.
On Sept. 10, 1923, the people of Catalina Island were getting all excited about just such an astronomical event; a rare solar eclipse whose path of totality would make a perfect bee-line straight down the California coast.
More than 40 scientists from all over the world—most-notably the Yerkes, Carlton and Dearborn observatories—came to Catalina in anticipation of good, dry late summer weather and, they hoped, perfect conditions for viewing and studying the event. Some had come from as far away as Japan.
“On every boat came those students of the other worlds,” wrote the Catalina Islander’s Alma Overholt, “super-scientists whose laboratory is the Universe—to our little island, which took such an important place in the ‘shadow’ Monday.”
But, almost as rare as a solar eclipse, was an early September day on Catalina of “big, black forbidding clouds” that threatened to eclipse the eclipse.
According to Ernest Windle’s front page account of the event in the Catalina Islander, as the eclipse began behind the clouds the temperature began dropping and the “darkness” began enveloping the world. But clouds continued to obscure the sun and someone even remarked that they felt a drop of rain.
“If we have a few drops of rain,” announced an optimistic Dr. Edwin Frost of Wisconsin’s Yerkes Observatory, “it will clear off. Stand by to be ready, ladies and gentleman.”
But all the time, travel and toil on the part of the astronomical researchers was for naught, as the weather refused to cooperate.
The gathered scientists and Islanders got only a brief glimpse of a not-quite-total eclipse at 12:50 p.m. when there was “a sudden rift in the clouds. In a perfect silvery crescent the sun appeared,” said the Catalina Islander article. “Then it was lost.”
Despite the disappointment, the eclipse still put on something of a show. “From the northwest came the darkness…the whole sky above turned a purple-ish green.”
Song birds began singing their tunes normally reserved for sunset and the gathered observers “commented upon the beauties of the cloud with its ‘silver lining’.” Now that’s looking at the glass half full, I’d say.
The sun never again made another appearance through the clouds until after the eclipse was over leaving the little camp of observers silent and disappointed.
But all was not lost. Harold Foote of Avalon produced a five-gallon bucket of ice cream, townspeople gathered to sing songs and Dr. Philip Fox of the Dearborn Observatory sat on a stack of lumber and with a saw and block of wood “furnished music that greatly resembled that of an Hawaiian stringed instrument.
“When he played ‘Aloha’,” continued Judge Windle’s article, “nearly everybody in the camp sang or hummed the tune.”
There have not been any total solar eclipses visible on Catalina since that date and there aren’t going to be any for a long, long time—at least not until the 22nd Century.
We had our chance in 1923 and it came and went. To cross that particular item off my bucket list will require travelling somewhere else.
As I have said before in this column, the Island doesn’t give up her secrets easily.
