There’s irony in the timing of two seemingly unrelated news
events this week.
Former president Bill Clinton’s memoir
”
My Life
”
hit bookstores on Tuesday, a couple of days after news reports
confirmed San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales will wed his girlfriend
Guisselle Nu
ñez in September.
There’s irony in the timing of two seemingly unrelated news events this week.
Former president Bill Clinton’s memoir “My Life” hit bookstores on Tuesday, a couple of days after news reports confirmed San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales will wed his girlfriend Guisselle Nuñez in September.
The connection, of course, is an old story: politicians having extramarital affairs with the help.
Clinton’s wife Hillary stood by her man even after Bill’s dallying with intern Monica Lewinsky became national gossip fodder.
But Gonzales’s wife Alvina decided to call the marriage quits when the media disclosed His Honor’s less-than-honorable behavior with Nuñez, a subordinate half his age.
Perhaps Gonzales just wanted to keep with another San Jose politico with a reputation for roguishness. I’m referring to the 19th-century San Jose mayor named Thomas Fallon. Portraits of Fallon depict a good-looking man with thick, curly dark hair, a mustache and a devilish goatee.
Fallon was born in Ireland in 1825 and sent as a boy to a town on Canada’s eastern seaboard. There, he started an apprenticeship in the trade of saddle making.
At the age of 18, the quest for adventure took him to Texas. There in 1844, he met explorer John C. Fremont and marched with him to the Pacific, arriving in the spring at what is now Santa Cruz.
He settled there to begin a business making ornate Mexican saddles.
In June 1846, the high-strung Fallon heard about the Bear Flag Revolt and, awarding himself the title of captain, raised a troop of 22 volunteers to join the American revolution for control of California.
He and his men crossed the Santa Cruz Mountains and entered San Jose on July 11 to find it virtually unprotected.
Encountering little resistance from the sleepy village’s inhabitants, he took the pueblo’s juzgado, the Mexican government house on the plaza’s northern end.
Commander Sloat, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Navy in San Francisco Bay, sent Fallon an American flag, which he raised on the juzgado’s 25-foot pole on July 14.
This was an aggressive signal that the Americans had taken control of Mexico’s San Jose territory.
Although Fallon was lauded in his time as a man of “courage and distinction,” he somehow managed to avoid any real confrontation with Mexican soldiers. Somehow, their paths never seemed to cross.
In 1848, the socially ambitious Fallon married Carmelita Lodge, the beautiful daughter of one of the region’s largest landowners.
That year, he made a small fortune in the Sierra goldfields, then returned to make his home in Santa Cruz. He built a large frame house that served as a store and hotel, but soon grew restless and move his family back to Texas for a couple of years.
After three of his children died there, he returned to California and began to buy land around San Jose, growing wealthy from real estate ventures.
Off San Pedro Square, he built his 15-room home, which, with its surrounding formal gardens, was one of the town’s finest houses. In 1859, he was elected mayor of the city.
Fallon was notorious for having an eye for the women. One day, his wife Carmelita came home to find him in a compromising position with Annie, their Irish servant.
Carmelita picked up the fireplace poker and began to beat the pair with it. The next day, she took the children to San Francisco and filed for divorce. She told the court he had frequently beat her and threatened her with a pistol.
Mayor Fallon’s behavior didn’t give his office much respect. He was thrown out of a local hotel at least once for “distasteful habits,” and could be often found in city parks sleeping off drinking sprees.
He married again, but after a second divorce, left San Jose for good. He moved to San Francisco and died there in 1885 at the age of 60.
The notorious Fallon continues to elicit a mixture of reactions in Santa Clara Valley.
In the 1980s, Mayor Thomas McEnery commission an $820,000 equestrian statue of Fallon. After being shipped over from its foundry in Italy, it sat boxed up for many years in an Oakland warehouse.
The city’s politicians were too apprehensive to display it publicly. They feared offending the city’s Hispanic population by honoring Fallon – whose treatment of the city’s Mexican inhabitants during the Mexican-American conflict in the late 1840s wasn’t exactly politically correct.
San Jose Mayor Gonzales finally unveiled the Fallon statue in September 2002 in the out-of-way Pellier Park.
Fallon’s house became a historic site for the city and somewhat of a tourist attraction.
After his honor’s disreputable departure from the city, the house remained vacant for several years. It became a kindergarten for a short time and a boardinghouse in 1894.
In the 20th century, the house began slowly decaying.
The cellar became an Italian restaurant and bar that proved popular with San Jose State University students in the 1980s.
In the 1990s, the house underwent a major renovation, restoring it to the splendor of the past.
The Fallon House is now run by the San Jose Historical Museum, and docents regularly provide tours, telling tales about the intriguing city major who once lived in it.
Martin Cheek is the author of ‘The Silicon Valley Handbook.’
