Teacher Tails - Karrer Shorts
Short stories. No annoying ads. No mercenary pitches. Just stories to warm your heart. Vetted published articles/tales/short stories (L.A.Times, Newsweek, Seattle Times, Teacher Magazine, Chicken Soup, Miami Herald, etc.) by Paul H.Karrer about: Kids, Teachers, Parents, Education, Korea, Incarceration, Samoa, Peace Corps, New Zealand, California, Connecticut, Teaching, Dogs, Chess, Multicultural Marriage, Foods-real or imagined and more. Most are light-hearted.
Teacher Tails - Karrer Shorts
BIXBY BRIDGE - BIG SUR - MASS MURDER 1948
The author goes over the infamous and little known 1948 mass murder at Bixby Bridge (Gallatin Restaurant)
Gallatin’s Restaurant Mass Murder
Bixby Bridge, Big Sur. 1948
If you park on the north side of the famous Bixby bridge and take a few steps to peer down the 262 foot drop you may notice the remnants of a stone wall and some cement foundation blocks. That wall and those cement blocks are all that’s left of an infamous mass murder site. The restaurant that used to sit on that site had a variety of names. Officially it was called Gallitin’s restaurant. But it had knick names - The Rainbow Inn, and The Alligator’s Tail. The last one supposedly due to a trail shaped like an alligator’s tail began at the restaurant and meandered down to the cliff.
The well-known and tourist magnet restaurant precipitously hung over the edge of the cliff. The view from the restaurant, was and still is unparalleled.
There are two versions of the murders. In August of 1948 one of the employees Augustine Lavina , a bus boy at the restaurant outraged over some real or imagined slight at a poker game - killed five other employees by locking the top of the Dutch doors. That forced the five Filipino employees to crawl out from the lower section of the Dutch door one at a time. As they did so Augustin, slit their throats, pulled their bodies out, and waited for the next victim. Then he tossed them down the cliff.
Another version, the more likely one and nearly as gristly claims Augustine shot each of the men with a rifle after a heated discussion as they played Chinese dominoes in a tiny room. Three probably died immediately two others were shot and bludgeoned to death with the rifle. A bludgeoning so fierce that the rifle barrel was horribly bent. Mr Lavina fled and was finally arrested in Walnut Creek in January of 1949.
The restaurant was later condemned, looted repeatedly, and purportedly finally pushed over the side of the cliff.
Hard to believe when one peers over the edge at Bixby Bridge but it happened. I’m still looking into the fate of Mr. Lavina, but a fair guess is he got the death penalty.
