Paul Elder published this beautiful booklet during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It’s a real gem, with striking full-color drawings by Audley B. Wells, sold with a matching envelope.
Perhaps only after admiring the booklet do we notice the poem it contains, California, by Fred Emerson Brooks (1850-1923). Though Brooks and his poetry have been forgotten, he was very popular a century ago as a writer and speaker. Modesty, it would seem, was not one of Brooks’s character flaws. Billed in a promotional flyer as “The Man Who Never Disappoints, Always Smiling, Always There,” his Chicago publisher gushes:
Fred Emerson Brooks is one of the great men in the lyceum world … Phenomenal health, a clean life and a sunny nature give him a remarkable record. Brooks has a marvelous breadth of thought and expression—there is no passion or feeling he does not portray. He is a gifted orator with a voice ranging from that of thunder to the softness of a summer zephyr.
The flyer also includes endorsements from Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt (“I’ve heard Brooks, and he’s bully!”) and Taft.
Fred Emerson Brooks was born in Waverly, New York on 5 December 1848, the son of William Brooks and Matilda C. Stone. His great-grandfather John Broad Brooks was He was educated at the Waverly Academy before going on to Colgate University, where earned his bachelor’s degree in 1873. He married Mary Emma Tregidgo, a native of Cornwall, England, on 1 December 1884 in the remote mining boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona, just three years after the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Fred and Mary had three daughters before her death in 1907. He married Emma Frederika Jahn in 1913 in San Francisco. Fred Brooks died suddenly at his home in Berkeley, California on 31 May 1923.
Updated 2026-01-27
