In 1904 John Peter Strohbeen (1884-1976) arrived in the city of Santa Cruz. John’s first job was with J. B. Bias Grocers. He married Carolyn Hertz (1887-1973) in 1913. In 1918 he went to work as an installer for the telephone company, where he continued until retirement in 1946. John and Carolyn were charter members, in 1954, of the Santa Cruz Historical Society. In addition to his contributions to preserving local history, John was also a self-taught naturalist. In 1923 on a fishing trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he collected an unknown butterfly named for him, Strohbeen’s Parnassian butterfly (Parnassius clodius strohbeeni), now extinct. He built museum-quality collections, donating many of them to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and to the Smithsonian, as well as to the Santa Cruz City Museum (now the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History). The John Strohbeen collection of scrapbooks represents his interest in regional history as well as his personal interests in nature, science, and Hollywood.
