From the Los Angeles Times comes this article about the historic Mission Inn in Riverside, California which has just set up its much-cherished “Festival of Lights” for another holiday season. Nixon scholars know it as the place where the future President married Pat Ryan, but it has hosted many, many other weddings – including Bette Davis’s union with her third husband, William Grant Sherry, in 1945. The inn has also counted among its visitors the likes of Albert Einstein, Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, Amelia Earhart, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – and not just two-legged ones:
One of the more unusual guests was a circus elephant named Schneider, who escaped from a train and invaded the premises in 1909.
Apparently mistaking his reflection in the window of the hotel barber shop for another bull elephant, Schneider charged, bursting through the glass.
[Mission Inn founder Frank] Miller took the incident in stride. “He said that was the only guest that was ever allowed to carry his own trunk,” Gutierrez said.