MEHITABEL

Michael Shannon

Letters to my Sons.

I SEEMED TO HAVE LOVED YOU IN NUMBERLESS FORMS, NUMBERLESS TIMES…
LIFE AFTER LIFE, IN AGE AFTER AGE…FOREVER.
Rabindranath Tagore*

The tombstone speaks. It might be surprising to you that they do indeed speak to historians. Mankind’s desire to be remembered after death is an element of our collective history. Remembered by many when fresh, time slowly erodes those who knew the people lying under them until only the curious, someone who never knew the living person seeks out those that tell a story.

Cemetery’s are everywhere. During Vietnam I was stationed at Naval Hospital annex Pearl Harbor. Another sailor and I toured around the islands and visited whatever site we might find interesting. There are great things to see no matter where you live. Hawaii has its share. Long the home of the US military’s mid- Pacific’s home, there are more bases than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve seen the huge veterans cemetery nestled in the crater of the “Punchbowl” in Honolulu. The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located in Honolulu’s Punchbowl Crater, is the final resting place for over 53,000 veterans of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The “Punchbowl’s,” 116-acre site serves as a major Honolulu landmark.

The cemetery holds nearly 13,000 World War II dead from the Pacific theater. It is the resting place of numerous Medal of Honor recipients, including Pvt. Mikio Hasemoto of the all-nisei Japanese American 100th all Nisei infantry regiment.


It holds the remains of Medal of Honor recipient Senator Daniel Inouye, “Spark” Matsunaga also rests there. Both men veterans of the brutal Italian campaign up the boot of Italy. Both of them were later elected to the United States Senate from Hawaii.

The first time I went there it went to see the grave of Ernie Pyle who I knew from reading some of my mothers books which he wrote when he was a war correspondent in the Big One WWII. He is buried between two unknown soldiers, reflecting his desire to be with the ordinary soldiers he covered and who loved him.

There is also a memorial in Okinawa on the site where he was killed by a sniper that states, “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945”. He is a person well worth reading if you want to know about your great uncles and fathers who called themselves “Dogfaces” and who, for five years ground down and finally defeated the worlds three great fascist powers. He literally carried his little typewriter into the lines and wrote about the sons of American families. He shared foxholes, slept in the mud and rain. He was bombed, strafed and lived as the riflemen did. He was revered by soldiers because he both spoke and wrote about their lives which were rarely featured in the big press of the time. He saw the tragedy of war right up front with the troops who lived and waged it. He knew the “Doggie’ who wore a stained and dirty khaki shirt, broken down boots and carried an M-1 rifle. They saved our country for $1.67 a day.

So thats how I became a “Haunt.” Someone who haunts graveyards. You can walk through one and try and imagine what the lives of the people who lie there were like. Those who came before you all have a story to tell. Some important, some not so much but a story nevertheless. It’s all those stories connected that comprise history.

Perhaps it’s in the genes. My father and uncle jack literally grew up on an old cemetery on our ranch. The dairy my grandparents owned had its milking barn and silos built right over the site of some of the earliest burials in our little community of Arroyo Grande, California. Before the dedication of the Odd Fellows cemetery which lay just west of the townsite itself many rural ranch folks were buried on their own property and this county has dozens of very old burial grounds dating to the earliest inhabitants including the original native population.

When I was in grammar school we could slip through the three wire Bob wire fence hustle up the hill and on the other side, visit the small burial site of our early pioneer Francis Ziba Branch, his wife Manuela and his three young daughters, Maria Josefa, 15 Manuela, 13 and Ysabel, 5. They all died within days of each other in 1862. The Smallpox that killed them brought by a visitor availing himself of the legendary hospitality of the Californio Rancheros.

That old story is marked by tombstones inside a dilapidated wire fence under an ancient and gnarled Oak that was there before any Branch and guards their memory today..

Just outside the fence, the Hemmi’s, father Peter and son, 15 year old PJ, who shot a neighbor to death in a land dispute. They were hanged from the Pacific Coast RR bridge in town for the suspected murder. It was a scene right out of an old western movie, the rope with its 13 loops slipped over the heads of the accused before they were and pushed off the edge. After the pair, man and boy were sufficiently strangled the upright local leaders went home and slept the sleep of the righteous. The next morning children coming down Crown Hill headed for school found the still, limp bodies swaying gently in the morning breeze. Coming together like a flock of birds, chirping and chattering at a sight the knew they might never see again.

The tombstone speaks. It might be surprising to you that they do indeed speak to historians. Mankind’s desire to be remembered after death is an element of our collective history. Remembered by many when fresh, time slowly erodes those who knew the people lying under them until only the curious, someone who never knew the living person seeks out those that tell a story.

Cemetery’s are everywhere. During Vietnam I was stationed at Naval Hospital annex Pearl Harbor. Another sailor and I toured around the islands and visited whatever site we might find interesting. There are great things to see no matter where you live. Hawaii has its share. Long the home of the US military’s mid- Pacific’s home, there are more bases than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve seen the huge veterans cemetery nestled in the crater of the “Punchbowl” in Honolulu. The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located in Honolulu’s Punchbowl Crater, is the final resting place for over 53,000 veterans of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The “Punchbowl’s,” 116-acre site serves as a major Honolulu landmark.

The cemetery holds nearly 13,000 World War II dead from the Pacific theater. It is the resting place of numerous Medal of Honor recipients, including Pvt. Mikio Hasemoto of the all-nisei Japanese American 100th all Nisei infantry regiment.
It holds the remains of Medal of Honor recipient Senator Daniel Inouye, “Spark” Matsunaga also rests there. Both men veterans of the brutal Italian campaign up the boot of Italy. Both of them were later elected to the United States Senate from Hawaii.

The first time I went there it went to see the grave of Ernie Pyle who I knew from reading some of my mothers books which he wrote when he was a war correspondent in the Big One, WWII. He is buried between two unknown soldiers, reflecting his desire to be with the ordinary soldiers he covered and who loved him.

So thats how I became a “Haunt.” Someone who haunts graveyards. You can walk through one and try and imagine what the lives of the people who lie there were like. Those who came before you all have a story to tell. Some important, some not so much but a story nevertheless. It’s all those stories connected that comprise history.

Perhaps it’s in the genes. My father and uncle jack literally grew up on an old cemetery on our ranch. The dairy my grandparents owned had its milking barn and silos built right over the site of some of the earliest burials in our little community of Arroyo Grande, California. Before the dedication of the Odd Fellows cemetery which lay just west of the townsite itself many rural ranch folks were buried on their own property and this county has dozens of very old burial grounds dating to the earliest inhabitants including the original native population.

When I was in grammar school we could slip through the three wire Bob wire fence hustle up the hill and on the other side, visit the small burial site of our early pioneer Francis Ziba Branch, his wife Manuela and his three young daughters, Maria Josefa, 15 Manuela, 13 and Ysabel, 5. They all died within days of each other in 1862. The Smallpox that killed them brought by a visitor availing himself of the legendary hospitality of the Californio Rancheros.

That old story is marked by tombstones inside a dilapidated wire fence under an ancient and gnarled Oak that was there before any Branch and guards their memory today..

Just outside the fence, the Hemmi’s, father Peter and son,15 year old PJ, who shot a neighbor to death in a land dispute. They were hanged from the Pacific Coast Railway bridge in town for the suspected murder. It was a scene right out of an old western movie, the rope with its 13 loops slipped over the heads of the accused before they were and pushed off the edge. After the pair, man and boy were sufficiently strangled the upright local leaders went home and slept the sleep of the righteous.

The next morning children coming down Crown Hill headed for school found the still, limp bodies swaying gently in the morning breeze. The little group of kids stood chirping and chattering like a flock of little birds as they took in a scene never to be forgotten.

The Hemmi’s were refused burial in the cemetery on our property by our most upright of citizens, for Arroyo Grande had at the time almost as many churches as saloons. By the good graces of Mrs. Manuela Branch they were buried next to her family. A series of tragedies told in old stone and wooden markers.

In later days, a grandson of Manuela Josefa Branch talked of the lynching, he being a witness, saying that the two went quietly, no blindfolds, no Priest with a last prayer, simply shoved over the edge of the Railway bridge. Fred Jones was just fifteen himself and accompanied his father and the other men. Years later he said he had always wished he had stayed home. Mrs. Hemmi was sitting in the shed that passed for the make shift jail house. The look on her face revealed that she knew exactly what was about to happen. The old man had never forgotten the look of horror on her face at that moment

Fred Jones 1871-1967. Grandson to Manuela Josefa Branch. Witness to a hanging.

So, it has always been a human practice to celebrate or memorialize lives, to leave a mark that one has existed literally from mankind’s beginnings. Roughly 110 billion people have lived on earth. Most of their stories are unknown to us. The idea that an individual would have a personal marker is only a couple of centuries old. Gravestones, or headstones, evolved from ancient megalithic markers used around 3,000 B.C. to identify communal burial chambers, with individualized markers becoming widespread in the 17th century. While early markers focused on marking family sites, modern inscribed headstones grew popular with churchyard burials and, eventually, in cemeteries for the general population by the 19th century.

In my travels, what had started as just a curiosity has become more than that. A visit to graves has become a prominent feature of anywhere we go. Just the simple inscriptions can trigger a desire to find who and what that person was or did.

Somewhere behind the inscription is a life and a history, a story to be told. A man who immigrates from Ireland to the Hughes ranch on the wild Sixes river, never married and lived out his life and was buried in the family graveyard up on the ridge overlooking the wild Pacific Ocean.

Link to the Immigrants Tale: https://atthetable2015.com/2021/03/13/an-immigrants-tale/

If you ever travel to western Europe walk the old residential streets of Amsterdam or Vienna’s streets where the houses, chock-a-block as they are will have small brass markers set into the cobbled sidewalks, “She stumbling Stones,” or Stolpersteine, the brainchild of German artist Gunter Demnig. For years he’s been traveling across Europe placing plaques in front of houses where Jews lived before they were deported by the Nazis. The small memorial consists of a 4 x 4 inch stone with a brass plaque stating the Jewish victim’s name, date of birth and death and the name of the camp in which he or she was murdered. The aim is to make the magnitude and triviality of the Holocaust tangible and to commemorate the victims at the place they were taken from their lives. Demnig also likes the idea of bringing relatives ‘back together’ by placing their stones together after they were transported and murdered in the different camps.

Stolperstein, Wien, Austria.

In case you are wondering, there is a stone in front of Anne Frank’s home at Westermarkt 20, 1016 GV Amsterdam, Netherlands.

There are parts of Vienna where literally every house has a plaque by the door with the names of the boys who went to war, were killed in WWI and WWII. They bring home the monumental sacrifice made by those boys to the megalomanic, suicidal vanities of old men. No history book can do this. It is simply stunning.

Cpl Edgar Green 2nd Australian Infantry, Gallipoli, WW1 North Gate cemetery, Baghdad, Iraq.

My wife’s great uncle Edgar Green’s body lies in the North Gate Cemetery in Baghdad, Iraq. “A little piece of England” as the British were wont to say when they were a worldwide empire. No one in our family has ever stood before it and prayed for his 24 year old soul. He was just 20 when he left Australia and traveled half way around the world to defend his country against the Turks and Germans. A stomach wound at the battle of Lone Pine on the Gallipoli peninsula and the 1918 Influenza epidemic ended him. Just an individual tragedy whose by product was the war to end all wars.”

As we grow closer to home, in Bridgeport, California there is a tiny grave that has the inscription,”The first white baby born in Bridgeport.” There is a subtle message there. I’ve seen the same inscription in the old Yosemite cemetery and another one up in Bodie. It’s a not so subtle statement that more than hints at America’s built in racism.

A couple years ago we traveled in Nevada and drove up to Virginia City. My family had stayed overnight there in 1955 when it was just a few inches from being a ghost town. We stayed in a room at the old Silver Queen hotel. I still remember the plaques on the doors that listed the Silver Kings, John William Mackay, James Graham Fair, James Clair Flood, and William S. O’Brien. The hotel was also the home of Samuel Clemons.

It is not the same today. It’s packed with tourists and its main type of business seems to be modeled on the cheap traveling carnival. For myself. a trip to the graveyard was the pièce de résistance. There are ten, thats right, ten cemeteries in the thirty acre plot. It’s built on a series of small hills and the paths that wander around, up and down between the different graves. There are Irish grave sites, two of them. One likely for the poor mine workers, the Hoi-Pallois, the other for the Hoity-Toity They’re all still Irish except for the cost of the stones. There is a section for Mormons another for Cornishmen and still another for Jews and Catholics. They do not abut.

Juliette “Julia” Bulette. 1832-1867. Note the Captain’s fire helmet.

There is a part near the top and outside the fence for the sad Soiled Doves. The exception is Julia Bulette, a madam who famously nursed dying miners during Virginia cities many epidemics. She was also made an honorary fireman by the city’s fire companies. She had many friends, some in high places, some in low.  Bulette had entire fire companies as friends, and interestingly, some of Virginia City’s upper crust women.  Bulette was an accomplished seamstress, and many of her frocks found their way to places like Piper’s Opera House and the International Hotel. You can still see a few in the city’s museum.

Stories today insist that Bulette was murdered for her jewels and money, the problem being, she had little of each.  A Frenchman with little command of the English language, John Millian, 38 years old, was arrested when it was discovered he had some of Bulette’s possessions, including a dress pattern she had ordered.  Millian was judged to be guilty by an impromptu court and quickly hanged for her murder.
Bulette’s remains were buried in a silk lined mahogany casket, at the cost of $149.  Every penny was raised by the people who cared for her. Her funeral procession was said to be the largest funeral in the city’s history. The Virginia and Truckee Railroad named a passenger car after her which still exists at the Nevada state RR museum in Carson city.

There is a headstone and a inside a small fenced area but her actual grave has been lost. You see, the Ladies of the city refused to let her rest with the people who loved her.

People who know the story still make sure there are flowers on the grave 159 years after her death.**

So, it has always been a human practice to celebrate or memorialize lives, to leave a mark that one has existed literally from mankind’s beginnings. Roughly 110 billion people have lived on earth. Most of their stories are unknown to us. The idea that an individual would have a personal marker is only a couple of centuries old. Gravestones, or headstones, evolved from ancient megalithic markers used around 3,000 B.C. to identify communal burial chambers, with individualized markers becoming widespread in the 17th century. While early markers focused on marking family sites, modern inscribed headstones grew popular with churchyard burials and, eventually, in cemeteries for the general population by the 19th century.

In my travels, what had started as just a curiosity has become more than that. A visit to graves has become a prominent feature of anywhere we go. Just the simple inscriptions can trigger a desire to find who and what that person was or what they did.

Somewhere behind the inscription is a life and a history, a story to be told.

In my travels, what had started as just a curiosity has become more than that. A visit to graves has become a prominent feature of anywhere we go. Just the simple inscriptions can trigger a desire to find who and what that person was or what they did.

You don’t have to travel far either. The Odd Fellows cemetery here at home tells a story with every stone and in some cases graves that have no stone.


There are sixteen markers for my family alone. We also have graves in San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria and both cemeteries in Guadalupe.

EPSON MFP image
EPSON MFP image

Mehitabel and John Corbit

One of my favorites are a pair of graves just 50 feet from my parents. John Corbit or Corbett, different spellings from a time when things like spelling and pronunciation were a little more flexible. Next to him is his wife Mehitabel. Now this isn’t some grand story of war or politics though he was a successful businessman, ran for county sheriff and was a mainstay of the horse racing community, which in those days was a major enterprise in the Cow Counties, livestock being the chief economic driver. He owned extensive lands in what is now called Corbett Canyon and was considered not only a very early pioneer, they came here about 1860 when most of the land was still owned by the original Rancheros, but also a fine upstanding citizen. He was a friend of Francis Ziba Branch, Michael Price, David Mallagh and Captain William Dana. They propered in an area of California that was still in a semi-wild state. John Corbit who was from Cavan Ireland by way of upstate New York farmed and ranched in the eponymous canyon populated by many, many Irish families as you can see on a tour of the old graveyard.

The whipped cream on the top of the Corbits story is the inscription at the base of her tombstone. In small script written at the bottom, it says “A charitable and faithful woman” How about that.

It tells you in no uncertain terms who she was and what she meant to her husband. They are both buried in section A just feet from my family in section B along the old Halcyon road.

Drop by sometime and see them. I’m sure they would enjoy the company.

NOTES:

*Rabindranath Thakur FRAS, also known by his pseudonym Bhanusimha was a Bengali polymath of the Bengal Renaissance period. In 1913, Tagore became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any category, and also the first lyricist and non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. B 1861-D 1941

**Julia’s grave has been lost in history. Those who actually knew where it was are long dead. There was a false grave put up years later which is not her real burial spot. It is thought that the original location is based on a mention of the pioneer cemetery known then as Flowery Hill from an old book printed the 1860s just a few years after her death.

The Corbit Photos are from a cherished family album. Bound in faded red velvet, it contains their photos and the printed announcement of her death. The album belonged to Patrick and Sarah Moore who were their contemporaries and were my grandmothers aunt and uncle.

Michael Shannon lives and writes in Arroyo Grande, California.

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Ka$h Patel and the Day of Infamy

Michael Shannon

Dedicated to all the swabs whove served particularly Richard Waller, Rod Gibson and Donald Polhemus.

I was a Swab. A Medical Corpsman and it was my good fortune to be stationed at the medical clinic at Pearl in 1969. I was finishing out my five year tour and I guess the Bureau had decided that I deserved some minor reward for some rough times.

No one quite knew what to do with me because all the available billets were filled so I spent the last six months of my enlistment doing whatever the Captain wanted done. I didn’t mind and in fact I got to do some interesting things that weren’t on the normal duty roster for a Corpsman who was a trained scrub nurse and had spent most of his enlistment standing on a little stainless steel stool passing instruments and counting sponges. At one duty station it wasn’t even a stool butt a plastic milk box. But that’s another story for another time.

Lots of freedom which is hardly a concept acknowledged by any service. For a time I was on loan to an Admiral as his driver. The job was to wash, wax and polish the Navy Blue automobile and drive his majesty wherever and whenever he needed to go. I wore white gloves and kept my uniform spiffy.

Now you might think Admirals being right up there with the Pope would be unapproachable, and believe me many of the Academy Boys were all that but not this one. This Admiral was relaxed and chatty and, all in all it was a good gig for someone who had seen too much seeing nasty business. He was part of the command structure so I spent a lot of time going places I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Meetings at Tripler hospital, or up at Schofield Barracks in Wahiawa, sometimes for a command lunch at Hickam Field as it was still known. Park the car, open the door, salute his highness and then carry the Admirals briefcase and do the most military duty of all, wait.

I explored many of the nooks and crannies most sailors never see. Still today you can see the bullet pocked stucco walls of the old barracks at Schofield stitched by the 303 caliber machine guns mounted on the Zero fighters as they dove in from Kole Kole pass on their swing down towards Pearl and battleship row. There is even a small memorial to James Joyce an Army private who was there and wrote “From Here to Eternity.” The best first person account of that terrible morning.

The slugs from the 20mm’s shattered concrete revetments a the Kaneohe Marine base where the Catalina flying boats were parked are visible reminders of the absolute devastation. Near the Arizona is the rusted out hull of the Utah BB-31 unsalvageable and designated a war grave with its one hundred plus US sailors and Marines still trapped inside. An Arroyo Grande boy was trapped inside the capsized ship for days until the cutting torches finally freed him. I went to school with his son.

There are reminders everywhere of that “Day of Infamy.”
When I was at Pearl Harbor there were many WWII veterans in the services. The civilian cooks truck drivers and other contractors employed people who were there on that day. Not words in a book, but someone who had seen, heard and still had vivid memories of it. It was still just 28 years after the bombs ended it all.

Our warehouse had a janitor who was a veteran of nearly every part of the War. He had worked at the naval base and was on duty the morning of the attack. He served in the US Army with the famous 100th Infantry battalion which fought in the incredibly vicious battles up the spine of Italy and in southern France.**

After his return from Europe in 1946 he went back to his old job. He was still doing it in 1969.

People might be surprised today to know that he was only 22 years older than I was. An easy man to like and chat with.

But there was a day when that changed. Mid-morning on a Monday we were at the coffee pot together, ready to start the day, him swabbing decks and emptying cans and me waiting for the Admirals aide to call to get the car ready when in the distance we heard a faint throbbing growl of radial engines coming down from the north. A very unusual occurrence in the jet age. We walked outside and turning toward the saddle which connects Oahu’s two mountain ranges. We saw a gaggle of aircraft headed for us. Nearly indistinguishable at first they gradual grew in size as they came nearer. As the planes came in over the East Loch of Pearl, the old destroyer anchorage they peeled off to our right and for the first time we could see the red meatballs of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s attack aircraft.

Frank froze in place, you could hear his breath as he began to softly gasp. He dropped his coffee, the cup broke as it hit the deck. He did not just look stunned, he was. Time stood still, just for a moment.

After a moment of watching we could see that the planes were not really Japanese but American trainers painted to look like them.

The pretty Wave from West Virginia came out and down the steps and said, “I heard they are making a Movie.”

I didn’t know exactly why they were there but for young man who read I knew what they were supposed to be and was thrilled because I had never seen one in actual flight. There was one on the roof of a service station in Easton, near Fresno on the way to my aunt Mickeys house but I’d never seen the real thing.

Frank came back from wherever he was, looked down at the mess on the deck, looked over at me and whispered,

“Jesus, oh Jesus, I thought it was real.” So silly, so silly of me.”

I understood in that moment that there is something real behind the history books. Frank showed me that.

Across the glistening surface of the Pearl Harbor, over there by Ford Island are the Tears. The Black Tears rimmed with the rainbow crown that shines in the tropical sun. Every day the Arizona weeps for her children entombed in the blackened steel coffin that knows no time which was once the glory of the fleet.

Those boys are gone. their mothers are gone too. Only our collective memory keeps them alive. Arizona is the most sacred monument we have. To go there, as the locals say, “Geeve you chicken skin.”

My generation gave it’s fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and cousins to this country. The Arizona belongs to them, not to you Mister FBI.

So, Ka$h Patel, Fuck You. Just Fuck You to the ends of the earth.

Seaman 1st, US Navy, 1966.

*Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) is widely regarded as one of the most historically accurate war films ever made, particularly for its balanced, dual-perspective approach to the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. While dramatized, it heavily researched events, using both American and Japanese technical advisors, and is known for meticulous attention to operational detail and communication failures

**The 100th Infantry Battalion is a historic U.S. Army unit comprised mostly of Japanese Americans (Nisei) from Hawaii. Formed during World War II, it earned the moniker “Purple Heart Battalion” for its valor and heavy casualties. Today, it operates as the Army Reserve’s only infantry unit.

Michael Shannon lives and writes in California. Navy Veteran and proud of it.

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The Twelve Hour Tour.

Michael Shannon

Chapter 24,

Six Months in Billings.

They rolled the old Hog down the eastern palisades of the Rocky Mountains and down onto the high western prairies of central Montana, The ancestral home of the Lakota, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Flathead, and Crow who had roamed horseback across the undulating prairies of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas for more than three centuries.

The difference was stark. The foothills of the Rockies, bathed in the late summer heat with Billings nestled in the fertile valley of the Yellowstone river and framed on three sides by scenic mountain ranges, Billings is a blend of plains and mountain geographies. The environment is rugged and wild just beyond the city with the spectacular Rimrock standing like stone fence on the north and east.

Fed by numerous tributaries, the Yellowstone River flows in a northeasterly direction through the Yellowstone valley. The valley measures from a few yards to twelve miles in width. Valley soils are deep, well-drained loams and silty clays. Sandstone cliffs, from 300 to 500 feet high, form a landmark border known as the “Rimrocks” to the north and east of the city. Above the Rimrocks, the land is primarily rolling hills with shallow to moderately deep soils of sandy and clay loams. South of Billings, the terrain is characterized by rolling steep hills with high, flat tablelands.

They’d left Arroyo Grande in September when it was still nice California weather but they weren’t prepared for the weather on the great plains. They hit a blizzard and Bruce and Eileen wee very concerned about wether they could get through. Bruce couldn’t see where the road was and so he had Bob walking ahead on the muddy snow covered road to guide the car. It was very cold. The Nash had only a little box heater under the dash board that ran on hot water from the radiator. Little Patsy sat on her mothers lap bundled in blankets trying to keep warm. They finally found an Auto Court and decided to wait it out. There is an old saying in Montana that if you don’t like the weather just wait a few minutes and it will change.

Bruce paid for the room and and sloshed his way to the door and used the key to open the door. Patsy was wearing a little dress and a pair of Maryjanes so Bob, who was already wet and muddy carried his sister in. Bruce had to help Eileen walk, the heels she always wore didn’t help much in the slush. They realized that the were completely Californian in their experience and that this might just be a completely new amd different way to live..

Eileen was born at a ranch in Anaheim. Her family were pioneers there and the Polhemus Ranch was partly on the site of todays Disneyland. Called the Miramonte, the ranch had wonderful views of the mountains to the east, a pretty rare sight today. Bruce grew up in Arroyo Grande so neither of them had any experience in the snow.

All the little room had for heat was a little electic hot plate so Eileen put on a pot and boiled water so the steam would send the temperature and humidity up. Bundled in their clothes and blankets they spent a miserable night huddled together on the bed, Mister Beans too.

As the old saying goes just wait a bit and sure as little green apples they awoke to clear skies and a warm breeze out of the east. It had been a freakish introduction to the vagaries of early Montana winter weather. Before instant communication, long distance travel in the west always had a hint of the disaster hanging about and they felt lucky that they had escaped from a blizzard that might easily have killed them.

It was nice when they finally rolled into Billings. After asking for directions they drove up 31st street to an apartment building on the tree lined and shaded street. Checking in with the landlady they rented an apartment in the otherwise vacant building. Eight rooms and they were the only residents which suited them just fine.*

Patsy standing on the stoop still wearing her short skirt and Maryjanes. Late September 1938.

They had a day or two to settle in and get organized before Bruce had to go to work. The apartment had two little kitchen chairs and a round table which proudly showed the scars, scrapes and dents of a long useful life. They also inherited an old crippled three legged dresser with a sort of peg leg nailed to the side with a folded matchbook strategically positioned to keep it level most of the time. There was a stand alone wardrobe for clothes which stood alongside an old iron framed double bed painted white. The mattress had seen some hard use and would have to go which presented no problem for them. It was just part of the deal when you lived in temporary houses and they were used to that sort of thing. The rent was only eight dollars a month so at least it wasn’t going to break the bank.

Grandma brought a box of dishes and some cooking utensils with her and some folded sheets and blankets. A night or two on the floor presented no problem. Billings was a nice little town and with a little nosing around she would find what ever she needed.

My aunt who had just turned five had the run of the place because her mother thought it was perfectly safe with no other residents. People were a little more casual with their kids then and paid less attention to the occasional bumps, scrapes and bruises. Years of itinerant life had taught them the important thing was to teach children how to look out for themselves.

Billings had a population which hovered around 20,00 souls in 1938 and qualified as Montana’s 3rd largest city behind Butte and Great Falls. The town was slowly climbing out of the depression with the introduction of some light industry, particularly the new sugar beet factory and the local refinery.

One of the most brutal labor intensive crops grown at the time, sugar beets used a legion of itinerant laborers who did almost all of the planting, weeding and production by hand. The infamous “Cortito” or short handled hoe was prominent in the fields. Known by Mexican laborers as the “Brazo de Diablo,” or the devils arm, it was the only weeding tool in use at the time.** It would be forty years before it was phased out of existence.

Thinning sugar beets in the Yellowstone valley, Treasure County Montana near Billings Montana 1939

There were around twenty refineries in Montana at the time though most people wouldn’t likely think of the state as a major oil producer. Yale Oil ran a refinery right outside Billings and received crude from the wells which had been drilled in the southeastern part of the state.

Signal landmen had contracted for some leases near the small town of Broadview which was about forty miles northwest of Billings and Bruce and his crew were sent to set up and drill a wildcat. The region is in the northern portion of the Crazy Horse Mountain Basin/Bull Mountain Basin region, which was surveyed for oil potential during that the thirties. Montana was well known for its light crude which was a high quality product and when refined made a very good quality gasoline. Cars in the late thirties were far more sophisticated than they had been twenty years before. V8 motors needed a higher grade of gasoline than the old four banger Model T’s. Signal was advertising its Purepull gasoline which had lead added and known as Tetrathyl which ran smoother in the new and modern engines.***

With a long history of drilling and production Signal geologists believed that a wildcat might be worth a try and Mosher agreed to sent my grandfather and his crew up to Montana to have a go on the chance that a new field could be brought in.

Walt and Ray would be flying in to Billings soon so setting up the household was going to be done in a hurry.

Chapter 25

How its done.

*North 31st street is still there. Built in 1910 a room can be rented for just 875 a month. Eight rooms, four baths, one with a tub. when the Halls lived there. It now has two apartments with full baths and is estimated to be around four hundred thousand if it was on the market. It’s walking distance to McKinley Elementary school where Patsy went to the first grade while they lived there. It’s one of the few old survivors left in downtown Billings.

**Kaz Ikeda who volunteered to go north to Idaho to work the beets in 1944, said, “Anything to get out of the concentration camp at Poston, Arizona,” Kaz told me it was the most brutal work he ever did and this from a farm boy who grew up in the fields of Arroyo Grande, California. He always said,”The joke was on me.”

***Ethyl gasoline, introduced in 1923, was a leaded fuel additive developed by General Motors and Standard Oil to eliminate engine knock and increase efficiency, using tetraethyl lead. Despite early cases of severe lead poisoning among workers, the product was marketed heavily as “Ethyl” to hide its lead content. It dominated the market for decades before being phased out starting in the 1970s due to extreme environmental and public health risks.

Michael Shannon comes from an oil field family. Bruce and Eileen Hall were his mothers parents.

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EVERYTHING TENDS TO REMIND ME OF SOMETHING.

Michael Shannon

One Decade in America.

Voting Rights Act. March on Washington. Has anybody seen my old friend John, or Martin or Bobby, where have they gone? The Prague Spring. The Mop Tops, Surfin’ USA. The Tet Offensive, Rolling Thunder, The Au Shau Valley, My Lai. Walter Reed, Letterman, Tripler, Balboa, Aiea. The Evacs, 71st, 93rd, 312th, NSA Da Nang. Steppin’ into Darkness. Riots. Cleveland, Miami, Los Angeles. Watts Towers. School Busing. Hippies, Yippies and Nixon Comin’. Last Prince of Camelot takes a girl for a swim. The Silent Majority. Apollo 11. The Hog Farm. The Chicago Seven, Judge Sirica. The Days of Rage. Winterland, Carousel and the Fillmore. Soul on Ice. The Panthers. The Weathermen. I came across a child of God. Monterey Pop. Yagur’s Farm. Altamont, The Grateful Dead, Hells Angels and the end of the The Summer. The Lizard King dies, Janis, Jimi, Cass Elliot. Manson Family, Bugliosi, Squeaky Fromme. Cambodia, Laos. Tin Soldiers. Four dead in Ohio. Angela Davis, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Apollo 13. Granny glasses. Tie Dye. Attica. Watergate. Nixon Quits, Flees. No gas. Vietnam ends. Welcome Home Boys and Girls.

Just One Decade in America.

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THE TWELVE HOUR TOUR

Chapter 22, Out of State

Michael Shannon

Grandpa called her the “Oil Hog.”*

This story is not really about a trip to Montana in 1938 to drill an oil well as much as it is about certain women in my family who always had their sights set on the far distance. Dreamers and carriers of hope in baskets. They saw something off in the far distance that drew them outward and forward.

In the mid-thirties Signal Oil Company was developing along sevral lines of business in an attempt to survive. Like many companies in the boom and bust business, whichever it might have been, growth was the only bastion of continuance.

By 1938 Signal’s primary business was refining. In order to refine they needed crude oil which they cracked and distilled and supplied to the filling stations that Sam Mosher had acquired up and down the west coast. The key to it all was oil and that meant control of enough wells to adequately supply the refineries. Drilling the first company well at Hydrocarben Gulch in Goleta had been a success, a near thing but still a series of good producing wells. Carefully buying up likely leases or abandoned wells in Long Beach, Santa Fe Springs and in the Elk Hills around Maricopa he had developed a sort of insurance that allowed the company to assure a steady supply of crude.

Mosher and his team were one of the first west coast outfits to pursue serious vertical integration. This is a strategic business model where a company gains control over multiple stages of its supply chain such as production, distribution, and retail, rather than relying on external suppliers. By acquiring or developing these stages, firms improve efficiency, reduce costs, enhance quality control, and insure supply chain stability.

To that end Signal was casting a net of geologists far and wide across the US looking for possibilities. For a primarily west coast operation they saw that expanding their map could be a positive move. Mosher acquired a number of wells in west Texas. In May of 1923, diggers struck oil in Big Lake, and it became the first commercial oil site in the Permian Basin. The discovery of oil in the region propelled Big Lake into a thriving oil production center, and the area still has a rich history connected to the industry to this day.

The first big Wildcat in Big Lake was the so-called Santa Ria No. 1, which was named for the Patron Saint of the Impossible, was the first commercial oil site in Big Lake. Wildcatters who live by boom and bust have a perfectly tuned sense of Irony as can be seen by tales of life along the cutting edge of discovery. Lucky Seven, Devils Hole and Six Shooter being examples of Oil Patch whimsey.

In September of 1938 Bruce and Eileen were living on Short Street in Arroyo Grande while Bruce tended wells from Maricopa to Casmalia where he first started in 1919. He was on the road all the time flying back and forth on a moments notice when word came down from headquarters in Long Beach that he was being sent to Montana. He was to take over drilling operations on a new well outside of Billings Montana. Just like all the other moves they packed up, rented out the house and hit the road. Bruce Eileen, Bob who had just moved home from his sister Mariel and her husband Ray Long’s ranch where he had gone to live and attend Sierra high school, the idea being that he would not be moved around as much as the girls had. Patsy who had just turned six was along for the ride too and don’t forget, Mister Beans the Boston Terrier who sat on grandma’s lap for the trip.

Robert (B0b) Hall up on Brownie with Bobby dog, Miramonte, California 1937

It was a long lonely trip by car. What was once referred to as the wild west was stil lightly populated and the road to Montana was long, lonely and mostly unpaved. In fact there was no direct route between central California and Billings.

Flying was also out of the question. There was no direct air service from California. Only Northwest Airlines flew to Billings and that was from Seattle to Chicago with a stop in Billings. The plane itself was a Lockheed Electra model 10 which had famously carried the aviatrix Amelia Earhart to her doom the year before, not an uncommon thing at the dawn of commercial air before radar and GPS.

In any case paying for a flight to the middle of nowhere wouldn’t have been the company way so drive it was. There were only two ways to go, north to Portland along highway 5 then east up the Columbia River. Turn at Umatilla, go north again to Holmes Washington and then head east again towards Spokane.

On the trip up the Columbia they stopped and wondered at the brand new Bonneville dam. At a cost of 88.4 million dollars it was, at the time the most expensive federal project ever built. Boulder dam on the Colorado completed just two years before came in at 50 million and in 1940 the Missouri River’s Fort Peck topped out at nearly a hundred million dollars. All three were paid for by the Public Works Administration and built under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers. Designed for flood control and generation of electricity they served some of the more remote parts of the country, they were also designed to put Americans back to work during the depression. An added bonus that these huge projects provided was a skilled engineering workforce leading up to the second world war.

Crossing the panhandle of Idaho they hit Butte Montana once known as the Richest Hill on Earth. In 1938 it was just a ghost of what it once was. Much of it abandoned and boarded up but its fame and decadence was well known western history.

Butte was first settled in 1864 as a mining camp. Right along on the Continental Divide, Butte exploded the late 19th century with the discovery of Gold, Silver and Copper. I was Montana’s first major industrial city. In its heyday between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was one of the largest copper boom towns in the American West. Employment opportunities in the mines attracted surges of European and Asian immigrants, particularly the Irish. Today Butte still has the largest population of Irish Americans per capita of any U.S. city.

Butte is in the wonderfully named Silver Bow county. Famous for as being the site of various historical events involving the mining industry and active labor unions and socialist politics, the most famous of which was the labor riot of 1914. Despite the dominance of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, Butte was never a company town. Other major events in the city’s history include the 1917 Speculator Mine disaster, the largest hard rock mining disaster in world history.

Every miner’s family knew what the sound of the screeching steam whistle meant when it was yanked hard and tied down. The high pitched scream pierced the Butte valley for those to know that men had died under the rock.

The Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine disaster of June 8, 1917, occurred as a result of a fire in a copper mine, and was the most deadly event in underground hard rock mining in United States history. Most men died of suffocation underground as the fire consumed their oxygen. A total of 168 miners were killed. Some left notes written while they waited in hopes of rescue. A few managed to barricade themselves behind bulkheads in the mine and were found after as long as 55 hours. Some of the notes written by the miners while they waited to be rescued can be viewed at the site of the memorial to those that died.

“It takes my heart to be taken from you so suddenly and unexpectedly, but think not of me, for if death comes, it will be in a sleep without suffering …” – Manus Dugan to his wife and mother in a note written as he waited behind a bulkhead to die.

Disaster was always on the menu in those old mining towns but the wages were good and a man new to the country with little education was willing to roll the dice to feed his family.

The Dumas House circa 1905. Montana historical photo

In a walk around the old town in September of 1938 took them down to the rows of whiskey bars and saloons known as the Line or “The Copper Block”, centered on Mercury Street, where the elegant bordellos included the famous Dumas House. Behind the brothel was the equally famous Venus Alley where women plied their trade in small cubicles called “cribs.” The red-light district brought miners and other men from all over the region and remained open in 1938. Pretty scandalous but Bruce and Eileen hardly turned a hair as nearly twenty years in and around the oil patch left few surprises when it came to what people had and did do to survive

The Spectator Mine. Montana Historical photo.

They stayed the night then saddled up and drove on down to Bozeman. Bozeman in 1938 was an entirely different town that the rolicking, rowdy ex-boomtown of Butte. In July 1806, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, took a side trip, visiting the Gallatin Valley as he traveled east from Three Forks, Montana, following the Gallatin River. Journal entries from Clark’s party briefly describe the future Bozeman as the “Valley of the Flowers,” which came from the southwest Montana native tribe’s apt description of the pristine Gallatin Valley land. It was known as “The Garden Spot of Montana.”

When the Halls passed through the valley it was still a major wheat producer and one of the largest pea producers canning and shipping peas all over the country. For Bruce and Eileen and their kids the attraction was certainly not the peas. Hating peas, boiled, baked or steamed is major point of pride in our family. ***

Bozeman had been the gateway to Butte for the Boomers heading up to the richest hill to strike it rich. It was a much more hospitable place and in the late 30’s and was already home to the States University. The Northern Pacific railroad had a division point there and the fertile lands in the Gallatin Valley were host to large cattle and wheat ranching operations. 120 miles east, Billings was going to be a different experience altogether.


Before motels there were auto courts One or two room cabins for rent by the night. Bozeman Montana 1938

The next morning they headed east towards Billings. The Nash’s hood was thrown open and she got a couple quarts of oil for breakfast and leaving behind her calling card on the motor courts parking lot they motored out leaving a plume of fragrant oil drifting on the cool mornings air. Broadview Dome #1 waited, so did a vastly different life than the one they had lived in California.

1700 miles of every kind of road imaginable from dirt and mud holes, gravel much of it unpaved and now it was just 120 miles to Billings and the new well.


Traveling Eest towards Billings, Montana 1938. Robert Hall Photo

Next it’s on to Billings and Back to Work,

Chapter 23 of the Twelve Hour Tour.

*In 1932, when the Oil Hog was new, Nash prices varied by series, with the Series 980 4-Door Town Sedan having a base price around $895. Six years old, ancient for a 1930’s car she leaked motor oil like a sieve and needed pretty careful attention. It was quite a trip to take through lonesome and wild country but that was Bruce and Eileens way. It seems like adventure always called to them.

*Most of the photos in this chapter are from two albums of photos taken by Bruce and his son Bob and compiled by my grandmother. The beautifully annotated photos are described in by mother’s fine hand with white India ink on black felted album paper. It is a cherished family keepsake as you might well imagine.

**Many Many of the snapshots in the albums are the exact same ones that a traveler may well take today.

***The family Pea History. https://atthetable2015.com/2025/10/16/the-great-pea-war-2/

Michael Shannon lives in California and is a grandson of Bruce and Eileen Hall.

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FAMILY DOG

Michael Shannon

Little Aunt Patsy and Bobby Dog. Santa Barbara California. 1934

Nancy and Brownie. Sonoma California.

Uncle Jerry and Gus. Reading “Call of the Wild.” Auburn California.

Gracie the Carolina Yellow Dog.

Colin and Lucy, Weott, California.

Phantom, Wild Pig Hunter. Hilo Hawaii.1973

Will and River, Arroyo Grande, California.

George and Barbara Shannon and Bitsy, the first child 1944

Benny, Arroyo Grande, California.

Robert Hall and Bobby Dog, Miramonte, California 1937

Will, Dina and River, Christmas 2020

Ron and Ann and Wiley the Seadog. Cal Shasta. Nacimiento Lake CA

Roy at sunrise, Port San Luis 2026

Mom and Mister Beans, Poole Street, Arroyo Grande. 1941.

Life without dogs would be tragic.

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Please Play It Again Mister Shannon.

Michael Shannon

A funny thing happened on the way to the classroom. In the classroom actually since that’s where teachers spend most of their time.

This is not a story about how hard working or smart teachers are, no it’s about the students and I use that term pretty loosely. Like all endeavors the number of good bad and indifferent teachers stays about the same. Carpenters, electricians, truck drivers and most trades and professions have people who should be given a bonus, be ignored or be fired. Humans are humans across the board. Your kids are no exception to the rule.

I once had a boy whose only ambition was to be a gangster, not a pretend one but the real thing. He did no classwork, turned in papers covered with personal insults and made himself the center of attention whenever he could. This of course called for a parent teacher conference which is the polite way to say you are about to have your wisdom teeth pulled without anesthetic. At the agreed upon time his mother walked in the door . We introduced ourselves. I didn’t ask about the father since few fathers ever show, These things appear to be almost exclusively mom’s job. I don’t say this lightly either. I attended a “Scared Straight” presentation at the California Mens Colony prison in San Luis Obispo and the audience who had come to witness their boys be scared straight by a tag team of convicted murderers were nearly all mothers. The Killers immediately noted this and made a very big deal of it. As a high school teacher I can only recall one couple even coming to back to school night. It was always the mother. My personal belief is that this is a huge problem particularly with boys.

So, back to the Mrs and her gangster son. After introduction I showed her to my desk and its adjacent visitors chair. Before we arrived she said to me, “You know, Bobby’s my baby boy.*” I stopped in my tracks, turned and ordered her out because I knew that any further conversation would be a complete waste. At least in fantasy teacher world I might have done so but of course I couldn’t nor wouldn’t. Instead we had a pleasant meeting. She talked about the hopes for her youngest, suggestions were made and we parted on a high note. You won’t be surprised that the boy achieved his goal and spent a couple of years in the joint on gun and drug charges. The kicker is that when he got out he came back to school, met me in the parking lot when I was heading home, shook my hand and apologized for his behavior. This kind of thing only happens in the teaching trade.

The grind lasts for about 187 school days and if that seems pretty light weight as jobs go you’ve obviously never spent them in a classroom. The kids themselves can make your job easy if you help them or a living hell if you don’t. Whatever the annual mix of personalities, by the time you have run out the days of your contract everyone is more than ready for some relief. One year you might be contemplating suicide and others will put a bounce in your step that is unforgettable.

In 2004 the 187th day came. All the young men, still boys really were mentally if not quite physically out of there. The thirty or so kids were all seniors and were looking ahead and not behind. The usual thing in my classes were to order up some food and just let every one decompress, shake hands, say goodbye and be out the door at the bell, sixth period, it’s all over now.

This particular class was a rare one. Students all got along, most of them friends from the same Middle School, almost all with nicknames, a particular boy thing that is. There was J-Money, Diddy, John Boy and the day’s hero who was better know as Shaggy. That name not a mystery if you ever watched Scooby Doo. After roll was taken Mister Shaggy raised his hand and asked if the class could watch a movie. Not surprisingly he just happened to have one. Everyone thought that was a good idea so I cued it up and started to roll film.

To me it turned out to be a most astonishing experience. At the end you could have heard a pin drop. There was absolute silence then from the back row someone said “Mister Shannon, can we watch it again?” Mind you, the bell was about to ring ending high school for all of them and yet they wanted to spend nearly two hours watching the same movie! Did they secretly realize that the protected cocoon they had inhabited for nearly their entire lives, coddled, protected and treasurede, where all rules were understood and tomorrow was a known quantity was going away forever?

I understand now that it was and always will be the greatest young man movie of all time, bar none. The two main characters, played by two veteran character actors, quite unlike each other but played with such skill as to make the performance seem seamless. A Britisher and a US Navy brat, two of the most respected men, versatile actorswho were considered to be among the finest practitioners of their art.

A film that spoke directly to young men with dreams. The experience was one of the finest moments of my teaching career. You see, we all live on dreams but most reluctantly put them away in some dresser drawer where they are mostly forgotten.

This is not written to praise the actors though surely Michael Caine and Robert Duval made the roles of Hub and Garth genuine.


At its core, Secondhand Lions is about the courage to live fully, to dream without shame, and to stand for something—even if that something is fantastical. Garth and Hub may blur the line between reality and fiction, but their emotional truth is rock solid.

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

So fare thee well Mr. Duval and though my boys a I can never thank you in person for what you’ve done we will never forget the lessons. Dream on.

  • Not his real name

Michael Shannon is a former teacher. He lives and writes from California.

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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 21: At School

Michael Shannon

On the flyleaf of the 1936 Olive and Gold Santa Barbara High School yearbook is written in fine cursive, “Barb, Best wishes to my best friend and good luck in the future, as always your friend Blanche.”

With this inscription my mother closed her school career on a high note. There could have been no finer school in California.

She was there for two school years, the first time in her twelve years of school that she had spent an entire year in a single school. The list of schools she attended is too long to list but if you drew lines between places it would look like a cobweb. From Kernville, Oildale to Taft, Maricopa and Orcutt/Santa Maria, or Wilmington/Artesia and Long Beach/Compton up to Goleta and Santa Barbara a meandering school journey driven by the random rush to find oil.

I used to think that that was such a sad experience. I soon learned that the kids developed a strategy to deal with it and that was to seek out the popular kids and make friends with them right away. Bruce and Eillen made a point of always living outside the shanty towns where laborers lived or the Silk Stocking Rows where the big bosses lived.

Landscape

Oil camp, Kernville, ca and Silk Stocking Row McKittrick Ca. Used by permission.

If they could live in what would now be a middle class area, they did. No one would be able to call their kids Oil Field Trash nor be considered of the Snooty sort either.

As assistant drilling superintendant Bruce was off the Twelve Hour Tour. Grandma had run the household for most of their married life but Bruce was mostly still away, Running regular tours meant he could be counted on to be at home for half a day at least. Now that he was supervising wells that was no longer true. The automobile had changed the way the company operated. A Tool Pusher could now supervise wells that were far distance from each other. From their home in Hope Ranch Bruce could drive south to Signals wells in Bolsa Chica or Signal Hill or north to the Kern river and operations in the Westside around Taft. Moving was not quite the necessity it once was. Besides, Bruce liked to drive and he found the road not a bad place to be. He even gave his kids lessons on the proper, cool way to go. He said, “Put the wrist of your right hand on the top of the wheel and let the fingers dangle. Let your left arm hang outside the drivers side door and always go as fast as you can.”

The phone hanging on the wall would give its peculiar ring the way they used to do, most people being on party lines where a call for your home would be announced by code, two long rings then a short or perhaps a short and a one long. Most of the job shacks had one now and the roughnecks could call Bruce at home 24 hour a day.

He kept the company car fueled and parked in the driveway so he could get away quickly. Problems at the well couldn’t wait. A shutdown could cost the company volume which was contracted to the refineries and distributors and needed to be delivered to keep the money rolling in.

After fifteen years or so working the rigs the Halls were used to constant movement. The kids knew no other life. My mother, Barbara started the first grade at Bloomfield elementary school in 1924. Bloomfield was a tiny school on donated land, land donated by Fredrick “Sheep” Smith and true to his nickname he grazed huge flocks of sheep on his 360 acre ranch. Once a year he grazed them north to San Francisco, a three months round trip where they were sold to feed a hungry population.

Around the turn of the century “Sheep” donated a block of land for a school to be named after the city in his native Indiana. He wanted a school where his children and the children of his neighbors could get an education.

Mom always referred to the area as Artesia though it would be many years before it would incorporate as such. The Halls lived in a section which was to be called Hawaiian Gardens. A name first used to describe an old fruit and vegetable stand built with palm fronds along what is now the intersection of Norwalk Blvd and Carson St. A local farmer sold his produce there fro a couple of decades and it was rumored that during prohibition you might get some bootlegged spirits along with your fruit if you knew how to ask.

Bruce and Eileen lived out there because after the big discovery well on Signal Hill in 1921 wildcatters were scrambling all over Los Angeles County hoping to strike it rich. The next year, 1922, hoping to alleviate a serious drought in the Artesia area farmers began sinking wells. Artesia was named for its abundant Artesian wells, a nice bit of irony considering that the Los Angeles basin is semi-desert, the drillers quite accidentally struck oil and the boom was on. The little town went from farm and dairy land to oil town in a heartbeat.

Artesia, Los Angeles County, Ca Artesia historic Society photo about 1921.

In 1924 the Halls moved down from the Casmalia field and mom started first grade at Bloomfield elementary. From the old photos it looks to be a very new and nice building with a large impressive arcade in the center and two classroom wings, one on each side. Oil booms will do that to a town. In those days people wanted their kids educated, they didn’t care much about curriculum, it was still just the three R’s. It was simple and direct. The old textbooks are pretty narrow in their scope. It was a time before mass production of texts and curriculum which, in a sense has taken much of the personal touch out in favor of cramming as much information down kid’s throats as we can. what they wanted was for their kids to have a better life. Mothers in particular carried much of the weight of running a school. Bake sales, costumes, organizing activities for kids were mostly the work of parents. My mother had a fine hand, which was considered important, she read fluently all of her life. Those grammar school skills were considered to be enough to prosper in higher education and the work place.

EPSON MFP image
EPSON MFP image

Bloomfield Elementary School 1923-1924 First Grade report card. Hawaiian Gardens, Los Angeles County California.

Take note of the difference in reporting. There are subjects for which she has grades which are no longer on any report card. Also of note her mother had to sign the card and return it to school to be recorded something else which is no longer done.

A decade later, back in Santa Barbara where Bruce and uncle Henry were busy whipstocking and slant drilling out off the Santa Barbara channel Eileen and Bruce decided that with his new job at Signal and his promotion, that they would do their best to stay in one place long enough so the girls, Mariel and Barbara could go to Santa Barbara High School for their last two years. It was quite the luxury.

Now that might be all well and good but their itinerant ways remained and a check of census, voting and city directories shows they lived in six different house in those three years.

733 W. Islay, Santa Barbara. A modern photo of the house where they lived in 1933. Zillow photo.

West Micheltorena, North Garden, North Nopal, West Quinto, a P O Box in Goleta and one in Santa Barbara and finally West Cota street near the train station. Other than Goleta they cover an area less than a mile square. Once I asked my dad why they moved so much and he said that grandma hated to clean house which is probably “Apocryphal” but it makes a good story. Maybe there was some small truth to it. It’s a lot of moving.

By ninth grade mom’s transitions from school to school were seamless. Experience and planning with her parents had set the table for finding her way in a new school. If the new school asigned her a first day monitor to show her around she had learned that that girl would not be one of the popular girls and that as she made her tour of campus to keep an eye out for who was popular and who was not.

Up to high school she always knew that if she faced difficulties in school she would be out of there soon. As sad as it sounds she also had to accept that her new friends would soon be left behind. She had walked away from other kids all of her school years and for the first time she had to learn to maintain a friendship.

Mom had saved her pennies and nickels and in Santa Barbara she snuck away from the house and walked uptown to a beauty parlor and for the first time had her hair cut and styled. She always said it gave her a lot of confidence, she liked looking pretty and the way it helped her making friends.

Barabara Hall. self portrait. 1937. Family collection

Towns like Santa Barbara weathered the depression pretty well. Known a the Riviera of the west it was home to many, many wealthy people who lived in or on the the more exclusive areas. Part of Santa Barbara such as the Riviera, Montecito were filthy with movie stars, authors, business magnates and inherited wealth. Those whose children didn’t go to private schools went to Santa Barbara High. Mom had class with Jordanos, Lagamarsinos, Carrillos, some families dated back to Spanish California. She played tennis at the exclusive Montecito tennis club and loved to tell the story about getting a ride to school in the cream colored Cord convertible of Leo Carrillo, the movie star whose family was one of the founders of the pueblo of Santa Barbara.

High school is where you make some of the friends you will cherish for the rest of your life. She did that too. She went to her high school reunion for the rest of her life.

The yearbook inscription in the opening is from Blanche Belle Baker my mothers life long friend.

Michael Shannon lives in California and writes for his family.

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The Suitcase

Michael Shannon.

Mom ducked her head around the kitchen door, a red bandana tied up around her short dark hair the tag ends making a little pair of bunny ears in the front. She wiped a smudge from her nose with the back of her wrist then began wiping her hands on the blue and white flowered apron she wore, her tired brown eyes sweeping the hall looking for child labor. That would be me.

We were moving. The big old two story house that grandpa bought before the war was being torn down for a shopping mall and mom had us kids scouring ever nook and cranny, digging out every little thing we could find. It seemed to me at seventeen a useless thing, what did we need all that junk for anyway. Grandpa’s old Ford truck was already piled high with heaps of old stuff left from a long life in the same house.

My brother and I were in the hallway. He had scrambled up the ladder into the attic and I waited at the bottom for him to toss down everything he could find. For boys it had always been a treasure trove of discarded things, the old five finger baseball glove, my sisters dented old pink tricycle with the dangling sprouts of plastic string on the handle bars, it was missing a wheel. There was a cardboard box of old vinyl records in sleeves printed with oriental characters which meant nothin to us, they must have been grandpa’s. Dust and spiderwebs rained down every time he sent something down. It seemed to take forever and the complaints about how hot it was up there were never ending. After an hour of catching and running to the truck and back I yelled up for him to hurry up I wanted to go surfing. In the way of little brothers he snapped, “I don’t care what you want.” He stuck his head, wreathed with tendrils of silk web and seven kinds of dust and said, “Just one more thing.” He threw a suitcase at me.

It was an old blue black wooden case, crossed with scratches, splattered by faded white paint, it’s fillets dented and on one corner torn completely torn. The leather wrapped handle was chewed by rats. I though, who would keep such a thing?

“Ma, what is this thing?”

“Why did grandma Iso keep a piece of junk like this?”

My mother turned from wrapping glasses in newspaper and placing them in a cardboard box, looking to see what it was I was talking about. I held up the old case for her to see. She froze. The air seemed to come out of her as she slowly sagged and then fell to her knees, burying her head under her crossed arms she she made a sound between a sob and a wail.

It was terrifying. What was happening? I’d never seen mother do anything like this in my whole life. Allan let out a howl, “Donna, Donna” he shouted for my big sister to come.

she must have heard all the commotion because she came in a hurry. She came boiling around the corner in what she called her working clothes, Rolled to the calf levi’s below a sleeveless white blouse with Peter Pan collar. Her penny loafers complete with the penny in the slot squeaked on the hardwood as she made the turn into the hall. Her ducktail with curls on top sweaty, dirt streaked and her cat’s eye glasses askew. She knelt next to mom put her arms around her and helped her to her feet softly murmuring to her. They stumbled toward the bedroom, mom moaning in Japanese with my sister tut tutting softly,

“Mommy, mommy, it’s alright, shhh, shhh. You’re scaring me.”

We didn’t speak and could only understand just a little. It didn’t do any good.

“Must be the suitcase made her crazy.” Allan said. We had no idea.

“Lets open it.” I knelt down and snapped the latches, lifted the top which didn’t move easily, couldna been opened in a long time. It had some old folded clothes inside. There was short coat maybe an Army jacket. It was a faded green color with some medaly thingys on it and sewed on the sleeve, tired looking sergeant’s stripes. On the other shoulder was a patch with an arm holding up a torch.

Under that a crinkly old army shirt and some pants, at the bottom, a well used old wallet and a small black case that had Purple Heart printed on the cover. Allan was pushing on me, trying to see what was in it. It was a small heart shaped medal. With it was a golden five pointed star. It must have been on a ribbon but that was gone. On the back was printed, For Gallantry in Action.”

“Move over Kenji, let me see.”

Inside the yellowed cover it had a name I didn’t know. A name and an army serial number. What was this stuff? Who was this person?

Next to the old wallet was a paper tag, a string through at one end and hand written was our name Sasaki. It also said “Family 40571,” Sasaki, Seirin, Instruction were hand written in pencil, report ready to travel at 10:00 am, Tuesday Feb. 24, 1942, destination, Lone Pine, California.”

I picked up an old dog collar with a small, round brass tag with the name King stamped on it, a school notebook with pressed flowers inside and a small polished rock, granite, I think.

It was a sure enough mystery, alright. Dad would know so I told Allan to go get him.

“This is so cool, so cool.” he squeaked in his little boy voice as he bolted down the hall towards the front door at full speed.

“Papa, Papa come quick, I found a mystery.

The screen door banged.

Michael Shannon is writer from California.

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