The Origin of the Capitola Begonia Festival
By Carolyn Swift
Former Director, Capitola Historical Museum
Flamboyant and graceful, Peggy Slatter Matthews was the championship swimmer who set the stage for the Capitola Begonia Festival back in 1950. She did so at the same moment the newly incorporated City of Capitola was getting its feet wet with the effort to build a new municipality.
Times were tough for a city so young and rambunctious that it was nicknamed "Scrapitola" on the eve of its first city council meeting. It was equally difficult then for a woman to tread political waters in a place that shuffled females toward a lady's auxiliary for the Chamber of Commerce.
Nonetheless, Matthews threw herself into the opportunity to make a splash in Capitola. She taught swimming, a pleasure throughout her life. Renovating the old Pleasure Point Plunge, she turned it into the Santa Cruz Athletic Club with a huge, 80 degree pool. Soon she was chosen to serve not only as president of the previously all-male Chamber, but was to be (within the first five years of cityhood) Capitola's first woman city council member.
"I sincerely hope that I can live up to the confidence that the voters have placed in me," she said after a total of 203 votes put her in office, "It is my aim to help increase the popularity of Capitola and bring more people to the local beach. By working with the Chamber of Commerce and the Council I will put all my efforts into this project."
She paid a price, however, for her insistence that women take an active role in local government. Shortly after she took office, Matthews went out to her new convertible one day and discovered someone had poured lye on the seats.
Matthew's athletic club and plunge was a great idea as a forerunner of the spas so popular today, but in 1954 Capitola the idea was too far ahead of its time. The plunge was a financial disaster.
Capitola's first councilwoman served only a year before leaving to take a job at the University of Mexico, where she taught synchronized swimming. Still, she had kept her campaign promise, and brought recreation to Capitola. Her legacy would be the Capitola Water Fantasy.
Matthews got her strength from her father Herman Kraft. He was a native of Boulder Creek who learned to swim at the Boardwalk. In his elder years, he became "the world's oldest lifeguard." From 1950 through the mid-Sixties, Kraft's loud voice assured swimmers at Capitola that, if he had to, he could scare kids out of drowning, and his bellows from the shore proved it more than once.
Kraft was a boilermaker by trade and a showman in talent, using his booming voice as a popular emcee. Margaret (Peggy) Kraft was born in San Francisco and raised in Seattle, where she grew up in front of an audience practicing ballet and figure skating.
She learned to swim in Puget Sound. Once she hit the water, young Peggy swam her way into a stint at the World's Fair in 1939. She then became a student of Charlie Sava at the Crystal Plunge in San Francisco, performing with stars such as Esther Williams, Johnny Weismuller (Tarzan), and Buster Crabbe.
During World War II, Matthews was one of the first women accepted into the Women's Army Corps (WACs) and gained a reputation as "the rifle-packin' WAC" when she taught recruits how to swim with a loaded pack and rifle through treacherous water.
Discharged from military service as a first lieutenant, she returned to San Francisco and was married to Vann Hale Slatter II. A year or so later, her father's health drew her to his home in Capitola. After the birth of her son Vann, she spent more and more time here. When she decided to stay, the swimmer approached Skip Littlefield, manager of the Seaside Company. He gave her a job teaching at the Neptune Plunge, the Boardwalk saltwater pool.
The idea of an aquacade water show at Capitola was the natural outcome of her knowledge of synchronized swimming and her desire to "create a better beach." Matthews designed the first show as both a daytime and evening performance, held under floodlights in September, 1950. Swim races for boys and girls, an around-the-pier contest, a Begonia trimmed boat parade and a water ballet were featured attractions.
This Labor Day carnival was hailed as the first water event held in Capitola in 28 years. Little did the audience know it was watching a historical event.
By 1952, a dozen floats trimmed with begonias were judged in the water parade. The aquacade lasted two and a half hours, topped by a spectacular "fire dive." It was a stunt that can't be repeated today, but Don Patterson, known as "the Mighty Bosco" had no trouble.
He plunged from the concrete bridge over the lagoon, his heavy clothing flaming. Littlefied noted the dive had been done 311 times over the last 25 years at the Boardwalk, but this was the first at Capitola. Spectators were were delighted.
Before Matthews left town in 1954, she staged one last Capitola Water Fantasy carnival, with "15 acts of grace, comedy and thrills." For this event, 14 begonia-trimmed floats made it down the creek in a nautical parade.
The first annual Capitola Begonia Festival co-existed that summer with the water carnival. Sponsored by the Capitola Businessmen's Association, the nautical parade featured Queen Jeanette Hayford and her royal court. Six floats in the parade were towed through Soquel Creek by the underwater swimmers of Matthew's Santa Cruz Athletic Club.
The end-of-summer begonia parade tradition was inaugurated by the woman who achieved exactly what she set out to do--give Capitola Beach a recognition that would extend worldwide.
