One in a series of historical nuggets that local author, historian, and teacher Jim Gregory has mined from our rich, robust, and sometimes rowdy past here on the Central Coast of California.
German cousins Isador Aron and Siegfried Alexander came to Arroyo Grande as merchants in the 1880s, setting up a haberdashery and dry goods store on the corner of Branch and Bridge Streets.
They were foreigners and so exotic: educated, cultivated men. And they were handsome. The venerable local historian Madge Ditmas wrote in one of her 1941 Herald-Recorder columns that these foreigners weren’t foreigners at all:
No native born of this valley ever had greater love for it than these two pioneer merchants, and they had just as much to do with the progress and the betterment of the valley as did the farmers and ranchers who cleared the monte [thick willow scrub] from the land.”
Farming was then, and remains, chancy. In bad years, the cousins extended credit to local farmers or let their bills slide for another year, until another crop could be brought in.
These men of the valley, as Ditmas portrays them, were in fact German immigrants at a time when German immigrants were not popular. And they were Jewish. It would be 45 years before Louis Sinsheimer became perhaps the most popular mayor in San Luis Obispo history—his Arroyo Grande equivalent was Frank Bennett, our mayor from 1911 until 1928—but Sinsheimer, unlike Bennett, was Jewish.
Before either mayor’s time, Aron and Alexander’s display ads in the old Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder are delightful: everything from back-to-school shoes to gentlemen’s fedoras to the less-delightful corsets that conferred hourglass figures on Victorian women, but suffocated them, too. Despite that abominable women’s undergarment, it was women, a local reporter wrote, who descended in numbers on the Oceano train station in 1905 to wish them farewell as the two embarked on the Grand Tour of Europe—obligatory for educated Americans of means in those days.
They traveled together, but sadly, the cousins died far apart: Aron in Los Angeles in 1909, Alexander in San Francisco in 1922. That separation would be erased. The two are buried next to each other in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery. Beneath the little tribute stones that admirers still leave atop their tombstones, there is an inscription in Hebrew: Here lies a son of God.
Of that, there is no doubt.