Historic Pinole: Awful Reporting or Awful Coincidence?

This week's Historic Pinole demands that we reprimand our colleagues from 105 years ago. A newspaper reporter, editor, and/or typesetter committed a journalisttic sin when reporting an accident about a Pinole driver who hit a women just after she got off a streetcar on San Pablo Avenue.

Incredibly, the driver and the victim seem to have shared a last name. Did a dead man run over his widow?

If the pair were related, that fact went ignored in the article. If they weren't related, the newspaper got one of the names wrong. Either way, an amazing error or an amazing but unmentioned coincidence occurred.

It's interesting to note that the car involved is referred to as a "machine" and that the presiding doctor was named Herrick, presumably the namesake of today's medical centers in Oakland and Berkeley.

The article comes from the June 3, 1907 edition of the San Francisco Call newspaper. We post it with the original spelling and punctuation.

WOMAN RUN DOWN BY AUTO MAY NOT SURVIVE

Victim Is Carried Fifteen Feet by Machine in Oakland

BERKELEY, June 2.— While alighting from a streetcar at San Pablo avenue and Isabella street in Oakland tonight Mrs. James G. Roblson, a widow of 1629 Hearst Avenue, was struck by an automobile driven by Ralph. P. Roblson of Pinole. The woman was carried 15 about feet by the machine and sustained injuries that may prove fatal. The chauffeur took the injured woman in his machine to her home, where Dr. Herrick  of Oakland gave her medical attention. Internal injuries evidently had been sustained by Mrs. Roblson, but  the physician refrained from predicting the outcome of the accident until a more thorough examination could be made.

This article comes from the California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc. The collection has digitzed more than 400,000 images from newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Images dated between 1846 and 1922 are in the public domain and not subject to copyright.