I fell for Ed Kripp when I learned he buried his favorite racehorse at Buffalo Park, the stadium Kripp built for his baseball team.
The horse was entombed at Broadway and Riverside Boulevard, 6 feet under home plate. Or under first base. Or centerfield. As I wrote in 2023, the truth is unclear.
Kripp was not an average sportsman. He was a high roller who ran gambling parlors in cigar shops and a Downtown dance hall called Dreamland.
He settled arguments with his fists and bet on anything that moved. He never seemed to sleep. Two weaknesses were baseball and the stallion entombed at Broadway and Riverside, a champion named Yolo King.
Yolo King had another name—the Big Horse with the Gold Tooth. When Yolo King developed an infected incisor, Kripp paid a dentist to extract the animal’s tooth and replace it with a golden bridge. Or so legend says.
I fell for Kripp because it’s impossible to imagine anyone like him today.
He was honestly dishonest and wildly successful. He loved vice and never denied it. He was loyal to friends. Enemies were scorned or punched in the face.
Among his friends were sober judges and crooked cops, Irish priests and tattooed prostitutes, hefty bartenders and minuscule jockeys and boxers with smashed noses and ballplayers with waxed mustaches.
Kripp was a capitalist whose ambitions made baseball successful on the West Coast. He turned a sandlot game into a marketable attraction in the early 1900s and helped establish the Pacific Coast League. He paved the way for the Giants and Dodgers a half-century later.
But who remembers Ed Kripp? His name looks like a typo. No streets, schools or libraries honor him, even though he was Sacramento’s entertainment prince 120 years ago.
Now Ed Kripp is back. With her book “The Gilt Edge of Ambition,” Lisa Jonsson, Kripp’s great-granddaughter, examines the businessman whose life straddled the gutters, ballparks, courthouses, saloons, boxing rings and racetracks of adolescent Sacramento.
The story soars with authority and intrigue as Jonsson explores what made her great-grandfather tick.
“One of my favorite quotes from him was, ‘I was born on this side of the river,’ in regard to it being the more lawless Yolo side,” she says.
As she chronicles Kripp’s life, Jonsson tracks a brute, scoundrel, hustler, merchant, husband, father and sports tycoon who encompassed Sacramento’s tarnished, disheveled ambitions from the 1890s into World War II.
Kripp leaves his great-granddaughter a lens to explore grimy, forgotten alleys of California history. A century ago, he was a household name, loved and despised.
Newspaper reporters wallowed in tales from the Kripp. They mixed fact with fancy. Jonsson does her best to untangle conflicting reports. A determined historian and captivating writer, she admits what she can’t prove.
Historians can fall into categories. Some are relentless researchers and ponderous writers. Others are slick wordsmiths who glide around factual roadblocks. When Jonsson began her research, she realized other California historians missed the vein left behind by her great-grandfather.
Baseball forms the heart of her story, but Jonsson moves beyond the game and reveals an overlooked time when Sacramento transitioned from muddy, gold rush boomtown into a true city.
Ed Kripp died in 1942, aged 72. He’s buried in Sacramento City Cemetery, across Riverside from Yolo King’s final resting place.
Today the old Buffalo Park ballpark site is the Broadway Target store. Yolo King’s gold dentures might sit there under the parking lot. Lisa Jonsson isn’t sure, but nothing about her great-grandfather would surprise her.
For information on Lisa Jonsson’s book, visit giltedgeofambition.com.
R.E. Graswich can be reached at regraswich@icloud.com. Follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
