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Early Years. When he was three years old, his father went on strike, lost his job and moved to Bakersfield, where he became a chief inspector of shops in the Southern Pacific yards. Young Earl was brought up in a tough, frontier atmosphere, was riding his pet burro down the main street of Bakersfield on the day an outlaw shot & killed Deputy Sheriff William E. Tibbett, father of Baritone Lawrence Tibbett. He earned pocket money as a newsboy, later as a cub reporter for the Bakersfield Californian. In high school he spent summers as a call-boy waking up railroaders for the S.P., did odd jobs as a freight hustler and farm hand, learned to play the clarinet in the school band. He still carries a card in the musicians' union.
His father's dabbling in real estate turned out well enough to send him to college in return for a promise to become a lawyer. At the university in Berkeley he was a steady but not brilliant student (he flunked second year Greek), was too wild to pitch on the baseball team, became a gregarious member of a club named La Junta (later Sigma Phi). After law school and three years of private practice in Oakland, he jumped into World War I as an infantry private at Camp Lewis, Wash. He was sent to the Central Infantry Officers' Training Camp at Waco, Tex., was a first lieutenant when the armistice was signed. After the war he got a job as clerk on the state legislature's judiciary committee. In 1938 he paid a tragic return visit to his home town. His father, who had turned into a miserly hermit with a reputation for ruthless mortgage foreclosures, had been bludgeoned to death with a length of gaspipe. The murder is still unsolved.
Public Record, As a prosecutor, he swept up shoals of bootleggers, con men, grifters, oil stock swindlers, bunco artists; jailed the county sheriff for gambling graft; jailed the Alameda mayor, city manager, and councilmen for bribery and theft of public funds; became the recognized legislative spokesman for the state's 58 district attorneys. None of his convictions was ever reversed after appeal to higher courts. His most famous case: the 1936 dockside murder of the nonunion chief engineer of the freighter Point Lobos, for which three union officials and one fingerman were convicted. The trial was conducted amid cries of "frame-up" from labor, and followed by an admission that one juror had lent $24,000 to a deputy district attorney.
As attorney general, he organized the state's wartime civilian defense; backed exclusion of Japanese from the West Coast; staged a dramatic raid with a fleet of Fish & Game Commission boats on four offshore gambling ships, had them closed down after an all-night battle with fire hoses.