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In the
Iroquois Theater orchestra was flute player,
Carlos Espiritu Arriola (1877-). Carlos survived the fire but for a few days his family in California, like many other
families around the country, did not know his fate. They pored over newspaper lists of the dead and awaited word from Chicago.
Carlos was one of six children born to Espirito Arriola (b.1855) and Loreto Arriola (b.1858). The family emigrated from
Hermosills, Mexico in 1892 and located in San Francisco.
Though Carlos worked briefly as a printer as a young man, music was the family business. Espirito, Alfred and Eugene all
taught music. Alfred was a trumpet soloist and conductor with the NBC orchestra, played in the orchestra at the Majestic
Theater in San Francisco and was a conductor of the Golden Gate Park Bank. Eugene played the double bass in the 1915 San
Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exhibition and performed in the Rialto Theater in San Francisco. Floyd and sister
Loreto played the piano.
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Carlos lived in San Francisco
most of his life, spending a few years in Seattle
and a few months in Chicago. In Seattle he was first
flute in Theodore Wagner's Wagner First Regiment
Band & Orchestra and in 1901 married Georgia
Winfred Scott (1883-1957), the widowed daughter of
George and Mary Scott, a family of Michigan
transplants.
In the years after the fire, Carlos and Georgia
returned to Seattle and had a daughter, Esther J.
Arriola (1908 — 1999). In 1909 Carlos became a
naturalized citizen. By 1920 he and Georgia
divorced, he married a Wisconsin native named Emma
and returned to San Francisco.
I've not yet learned about Carlos's
experiences at the Iroquois.
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