08-22-24

www.montereycountynow.com august 22-28, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 15 ulia Platt was furious. Mattie McDougall, the owner of the Lovers Point bathhouse concessions, had blocked public access to the beach, directly across the street from Platt’s Pacific Grove home. Platt would not have it. Access to the beach was a public right through a deed, she argued to the P.G. City Council, in a letter she sent in early January 1930. The city should tear down the barrier, no matter how many times McDougall replaced it. The council chose to do nothing during its Jan. 16 meeting. The city was already embroiled in a legal dispute with McDougall over the property—let a court decide the issue, they said. If the council wouldn’t take action, then Platt, 72, would. On Jan. 17, she brought a file and sawed off the lock. She tacked a sign on the opened gate: Opened by Julia B. Platt. This entrance to the beach must be left open at all hours when the public might presumably wish to pass through. I act in the matter because the council and police department of Pacific Grove are men and possibly somewhat timid. McDougall had a new lock put on, which Platt filed off again, according to an article in the Monterey Peninsula Herald at the time. The gate was then nailed shut from the inside. Platt told the Herald that she made sure her ax and saw were sharpened in preparation to take the gate down. “The gate shall be open if I have to make a shambles of it. The public right must be protected,” she said. Platt returned ready to do battle. Along with her sharpened tools, she brought a hammer and a stepstool. She also brought a news photographer and a crowd of onlookers. Platt demolished the gate. McDougall gave up, and the gate remained open. Platt’s championing of public beach access, now the stuff of local legend, pre-dated the California Coastal Act, codifying public access to the state’s beaches, by 46 years. Platt, it seems, was always ahead of her time and breaking down barriers. As a comparative embryologist and early neurologist from 1889-1899, she made discoveries scoffed at by male scientists but confirmed by others decades later. She earned a PhD in zoology from a German university in 1898, when there were no opportunities at U.S. universities. In 1927 Platt wrote the city charter that Pacific Grove is guided by today, and in 1931 she became the town’s first woman mayor by an overwhelming majority. Perhaps her greatest contribution was her vision to protect Monterey Bay from pollution created by the fishing and canning industries. Her appeal to the state for protected areas off P.G.’s coast planted the seeds for what today is the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. “She’s an amazing person, and was one of those people that had so many different skills and so much impact, even on the way people are living here now,” says Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at the Hopkins Marine Station who co-wrote the book The Death & Life of Monterey Bay, published in 2011. Steven J. Zottoli, a retired neurobiologist from Williams College in Massachusetts, studied Platt’s life extensively, with great admiration for her contributions to science, as well as her civic accomplishments in Pacific Grove. “She was a force to be reckoned with,” Zottoli says. As outspoken and nonconforming as Platt could be, she managed to collect fans both in life and in the 91 years since she died in 1935. Zottoli might be one of her biggest, having co-authored a detailed article about Platt’s scientific career and co-founded the Julia Platt Club, a short-lived scientific speaker series at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Zottoli had never heard of Platt until he overheard a conversation at dinner with other scientists. One of the scientists said he had read the “incredible” papers of Julia Barlow Platt, but, “‘she’s disappeared. I can’t find out where she went and what she did,’” Zottoli remembers him saying. The chance comment launched Zottoli on an investigation to find out more. He traveled to archives, Platt’s childhood home in Vermont, and to P.G., where he spent the night at her former home on the corner of Ocean View and Grand avenues, now part of the Seven Gables Inn. Along with Ernst-August Seyfarth, who handled the German portion of Platt’s work, Zottoli wrote the authoritative biography of Platt’s scientific accomplishments in a paper entitled, “Julia B. Platt (1857-1935): Pioneer Comparative Embryologist and Neuroscientist,” published in 1994 in the journal Brain, Behavior and Evolution. Zottoli and Seyfarth were able to uncover much about Platt’s scientific career, but her childhood was a bit of mystery and there were other gaps in her personal life. What is known is that she was born Julia Barlow Platt on Sept. 14, 1857 in San Francisco. Her father, George King Platt, died nine days after her birth. He had previously been state’s attorney for Vermont from 1840-1842. Zottoli says it’s not clear how he and the family Julia Platt, Pacific Grove’s first woman mayor, made an indelible mark locally and in the world of science. By Pam Marino J There aren’t many photos of Julia Platt. The one above was possibly taken around the time Platt ran for mayor of Pacific Grove in 1931, when she was 73. “She stood her ground.”

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