Three decades had passed since muddy San Francisco had been transformed to a city built on nuggets and gold dust. A new social order was being created; life was becoming stable; respectability and stolidity were in the air. But there were still those who lived high, wide & handsome. The old Poodle Dog, Tail's, the Cliff House and Coffee Dan's had no lack of carefree customers.
A leader of the merrier element was James Leary Flood. In his blood was an instinct for the fleshpots; in his bank, money for it. His father was James Clair ("Bonanza King") Flood, onetime saloon keeper, later owner of the Comstock Lode with William S. O'Brien, James G.
Fair and John W. Mackay, father of Postal Telegraph's Clarence Hungerford Mackay. Said to be richest claim in the world, the Comstock yielded $340,000,000 pay dirt between 1864 and 1884, brought Fame & Fortune to the combination of Mackay, Flood, O'Brien & Fair.
Jim Flood inherited the bulk of his father's estate in 1889. All San Francisco knew of his high living, of the beauty of "Jim Flood's girl, Pete Fritz," a German girl who got her start in Shanghai. In the same year his father died San Francisco was scandalized to hear that Jim Flood's girl had left her widely known occupation, that he had married her. His friends avoided him for a while, but he and his Girl lived together happily, adopted a child called Constance May. When Rosina ("Pete") Fritz Flood died her husband promised to marry her sister Maude Lee. The second Mrs. Flood was a plump, quiet homebody, well-liked in San Francisco. Yet scandal does not die. In the little Redwood City court house (in the fashionable Peninsula district) spectators thronged last week to hear the Flood Affair dragged into the open. It was story-of-the-week for the newspapers.
Cause of last week's ado was Baby Constance May. now Mrs. John P. Gavin, 38, wife of a Los Angeles bank teller. Since 1925 Mrs. Gavin has claimed to be Jim Flood's illegitimate daughter, has sought a daughter's share (two-ninths) in his $18,000,000 estate. At first she named the first Mrs. Flood as her mother. Later she claimed as her maternal parent a Mrs. Eudora Forde Willette, onetime music hall girl.
Heading the counsel for the defense were venerable, silver-haired, massive Garrett William McEnerney, once Jim Flood's personal attorney, and stocky, nervous Theodore Roche. Their arguments were that the first Mrs. Flood would not have adopted her husband's bastard, that Jim Flood would have given an adopted daughter all the affection and kindness which Mrs. Gavin said proved she was his real daughter. Thus did they refute old Flood retainers, coachmen, gardeners, nurses & neighbors who testified he had often called Constance May "My baby," "My little daughter."