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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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter Twenty

Michael Shannon

The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn that lasted from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty. Everywhere. It was the first major indication that depressions was not just something that happened to the USA but were in fact global. America began a chain reaction that affected every industrialized countriy on Earth.

My grandmother Eileen belonged to the book of the Month club for decades and some of my first adult books came from her library. Though she had only a sixth grade education she was a voracious reader. The book I borrowed in 1958 was “Out of Africa.”

The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, commonly known as British Kenya or British East Africa, was a colonial possession of the British Empire located in East Africa. Americans for the most part are unfamiliar with the country unless they’ve seen the film “Out of Africa” loosely based on a memoir by Karen Dinensen (Blixen)* about her time as a coffee planter during the depression. Heavily fictionalized the story does demonstrate the connections between powerful nations who were unable to adapt to the new reality of the international collapse of trade in general and for the Dinensen plantation, coffee in particular.

Karen Dinensen Blixen and Denys Fitch Hatton, 1917′

Beginning with the end of the first World War** when the triumphant victors stopped spending like drunken sailors and begin to realize that the monumental debt they had incurred needed to be paid for somehow.

Instead of a dedicated policy to address the problem President Wilson and his advisors simply decided that markets would stabilize on their own and took a Leissez Faire approach. The immediate cancellation of war contracts struck at the heart of the American economic system particularly farmers who lost most of their markets.

My paternal grandfather Jack Shannon and most of the farming and ranching families in our county who had supplied beans and peas for the war effort had to abandon their crops for which suddenly, there was no market. For my grandfather, it spelled the end of his farming operations and forced him to find another use for the land. Things got very tight very fast. From the late ‘teens until Hitler brought him another war the family lived on the edge financially.

Grandpa Bruce and Signal Oil faced the same financial monster. Too much production and shrinking markets. Surviving banks, thousands of U.S. banks disappeared between 1929 and 1932, with 2,293 failing in 1932 alone were hit by falling incomes, mortgage defaults, especially rural, business failures, and general economic collapse weakened banks and millions lost their life savings. Personal savings were erased as if they never existed.

“Once I built a railroad, made it run / Made it race against time, Brother, can you spare a Dime?”***

As you know from previous chapters of The Twelve Hour Tour, Bruce lost his job with Barnsdall Oil, they could not qualify for Relief because he owned a car, the family had to move in with his brother’s family and when he did get another job this time with Signal Oil in 1933, he had his wages cut in half. “Half of something is better than all of nothing though,” He said, and he went back to the Twelve Hour Tour.

The Halls were living the worst financial depression in our history. As people moved through the 1920’s interest rates were kept low to make money cheap and encourage people to borrow. There was a housing boom and construction was in high gear all across the country. There is an old Wall Street “Saw” that when skirts go up so does the market, times are good. They did too. Skirts went way up, silk stockings and Jazzin’ babies. FitzGerald wrote about it and it made him famous. He also wrote the cautionary tale of Jay Gatsby and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. He drew the future but no one listened. American finance ran right of the cliff.

The The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was a U.S. law that drastically raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to protect American farmers and businesses during the Great Depression. Not surprisingly it triggered retaliatory tariffs from other nations, causing a collapse in global trade, worsening the Depression, and becoming a symbol of disastrous protectionist policies. The act significantly increased import duties, leading to a global trade war and a roughly 66% drop in world trade between 1929 and 1934, demonstrating the dangers of such economic nationalism.****

That was the darkest side. There wasn’t much light if you were a working man with a family. By the summer of 1933, Bruce and Eileen had a new baby girl, Patricia, Bob who was 13, my mother, who had just turned fifteen and the oldest Mariel who was sixteen. Like most they were a single income family.

Struggling in hard times is pretty personal. There is little time to ponder world events even though they affect you because the imperative is just to figure out how to survive them. Depending on your perspective the farmer had been struggling since the end of the war. They were ten years in. Manufacturing , including the oil business continued to prosper. Smaller companies without financial reserves did fall by the wayside but individual spending by those who could just seemed to get better and better. It was the Jazz age, until it wasn’t.

In The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972, author and historian William Manchester argued that Herbert Hoover deliberately chose to use the word “depression” when discussing the economic situation of the time. Similar economic downturns in American history had been referred to as panics or crises but the Hoover White House decided, and continually referred to the financial slide as depression. Hoover believed that the word depression sounded less alarming. History shows that any efforts they took to slow the economic crises were in vain and did little to reassure the public. At the beginning stages of the Great Depression, Hoover remained in a state of denial over worsening economic conditions. Shortly following Black Tuesday, Hoover remarked that the “conditions are fundamentally sound.” Even as late as December 1930, Hoover maintained that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.” It was not until 1931, when it became impossible to deny the economic train wreck transpiring, that Hoover began to refer to the economic situation of his own time as a “great depression.”

Herbert Hoover’s famous slogan was “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” which he used in his successful 1928 presidential campaign promised prosperity, though it became ironic after the 1929 crash. In his 1932 re-election campaign, facing economic ruin, his slogans shifted to defending his limited government approach against FDR’s activism, emphasizing “ordered liberty” versus “new deal” government. Opponents hung the phrase, “Hoover, we trusted—now we’re busted”.

My father, a very sharp man could distill problems to a single phrase, something he did often. The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United States was a decline in spending, which led to a decline in production as manufacturers and merchandisers saw an unintended rise in inventories. The sources of the contraction in spending in the United States varied over the course of the Depression, but they cumulated in a monumental decline in demand. My Dad said, “People had money but they wouldn’t spend it because they had lost faith in the government’s ability to respond to the crisis.” He said, “It became a point of pride to be frugal.” Something I learned about at our kitchen table, instilled in his children by his personal action. A not uncommon trait in the adults we all grew up with.

Signal was on the edge of bankruptcy. One of Mosher’s company goals was an attempt to streamline the organization and to adapt quickly to new technologies in order to reduce the cost of operations. The big boys like Standard played the independents off against one another. If Signal could not meet the price and volume dictated by the far larger company somebody else would.

A key factor wa the fact that contracts were paid out on monthly, bi-monthly or other timelines that favored the buyer. For example if Standard of California contracted to buy from an independent the price agreed on would be budgeted by the accounting department and paid after delivery. If SOCAL was late on payment or decided for some reason to crush an independent they could. The money set to be disbursed was always a month or more behind delivery of the oil so if the little guy failed they still had ample funds to buy from someone else. Big companies actively looked for aggressive suppliers who they believed would not be able to deliver the amount contracted or do it on time. There was always a strapped supplier who would take a chance in order to stay alive. The big companies were predatory and showed no mercy. As my father once said, “If you get into business with the big guys you are going to get more than a good nights sleep.”

So it was. Sam Mosher and his “Varsity” team, a nice turn of phrase meant to convey confidence in men who were expected to be unconventional and aggressive in seeing to the health of the small outfit that was Signal. Wells that were underperforming or “Wildcats” that had never reached oil sands, small operators trying to unload underperforming debt were all meat for Signal. Sharp geologists who could see something in core samples or location that gave some promise of oil turned over reports to Signals Landmen who slipped right in and bought up the land leases for underperforming or dry holes for pennies on the dollar.

Bruce’s great value was his innate sense of direction; something inherent to the basic nature of the man, something originating from the mind rather than experience. It informed ability to whipstock and read a well. In the early thirties much of the modern equipment you see today had not been developed. The Hughes Tool Company’s two cone rotary bit was developed in 1909 and had revolutionized drilling. In 1930 Hughes also began marketing the so-called “Christmas Tree” a system of valves designed to control the flow of wells. That ended the day of the gusher, the uncontrolled blow out that did so much damage to operations. Though they look spectacular in old photos and in movies, they did terrible damage. Entire casing runs were blown out of wells, drill rigs were destroyed. They often caught fire or simply blew up because of the gas content.Hhundreds of thousands of barrels of oil just ran onto the ground. Bruce said that if a tool pusher let a well get away he was likely to lose his job. With too many men and not enough jobs he would likely be finished for good.

Signal Hill oil sumps, Long Beach California.

Legal theory determined that every lease be contained within the confines of it’s surface dimensions. This mean that as the drill string moved deeper into the earth it had to stay within it’s contracted boundaries. Oilmen said simply “legal-schmegal “and let their bits wander or better yet they had men like Bruce Hall who could wield a whipstock inserted in the casing to send the bit and its string meandering like a blind worm. At the once quiet and empty Ellwood bluffs were now a hub of activity, 24 hours a day. Long accepted rules of conservation in a new oil discovery were thrown out the window. It was a case of “get the oil out of the ground before your neighbor beats you to it”. New roads, buildings, vehicles, machinery and storage tanks were popping up every day. New technology was constantly being introduced to increase the output. Obviously, aesthetics was not a concern.

The piers at Ellwood crept farther and farther out into the Santa Barbara channel following the slant drilling rigs. There were no instruments to track the location of the bits, it was all done by guess and by gosh. Those like my grandfather who could simply touch and listen were highly valued. They didn’t speak of piracy but they certainly were that. An inspector could measure the amount of pipe tripping in and out of the hole but there was no way to know exactly where it was going.

Long Beach was the same, drill streams were snaking out under Ocean Boulevard towards the Pacific. Even though the Oil business was strangling on itself by over producing the operators just could not stop.

With three teenagers and a new baby up in Hope Ranch the Halls seemed to be on an upswing in their fortunes. They were about to make some decisions about their itinerant lives that would have a profound impact on the lives of their kids.

Next, Chapter 21

High School

Cover: Thomas Hart Benton painting, “Boomtown” Borger, Texas 1928

*It is a pity that Hollywood got her deliberately wrong. One must wonder what this woman, who spent her life writing and wondering about the role of fate in controlling human lives, would have thought of that throw of the dice? Karen loved telling stories in her low, husky voice and would do so at any opportunity. In 1952 her book Out of Africa lost the Nobel Prize to Ernest Hemingway. “I would have been happy, happier, today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer, Isak Dinesen.”
– Ernest Hemingway

**World War One was hardly the first instance of a world war, the Hundred years war, The Seven years war, the muslin conquest of most of the so-called civilized world and even Tamir, Ghengis Khan and the Emperor Babu head of the Mughal Empire would all qualify as World Warriors.

**”Brother, can you spare a dime?” Written by Yip Harburg who was working as a lyricist and the melody which derives from a Jewish lullaby that the composer Jay Gorney heard as a child in Russia. The song has been covered by at least 52 artists in the United States including Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Rudy Valee, Judy Collins and Tom Waits. Click link to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63OBM3kuejc

****Something we should have learned from.

Michael Shannon lives and writes in Arroyo Grande, California.

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The Full Circle

Michael Shannon

So this is kind of an acknowledgment. There was something my father did in casual conversation that I found mystifying. He used to do this thing when talking to my mother or people he knew that were of his own generation and that thing was to refer to women by their maiden names.

He would say things to my mother, like,”I saw Georgie Hendrixs at Bennett’s grocery today and she said to say hello.” Thats all well and good, my mother understood who he meant but I didn’t. Now I knew only one Georgie and that was Georgie O’Conner. Bills’ wife. As I grew up and began to learn the ins and outs of social life in my hometown it finally occurred to me that the two Georgie’s were the same person.

One of these two women I knew well, she had a son my age, they lived on what once was Leedham Lane on the west side of town. The family still lives there, you know, the old house with the pair of big Fig trees in front. My dad knew that too. Then why did he call her Georgie Hendricks?

Georgia “Georgie” Hendrix, 17 Arroyo Grande HS yearbook 1943.

The mystery deepened when my mother always referred to her as Georgie O’Conner. Now it’s hard to be two people unless you are a criminal or a politician. Actors must count too, but here in the neighborhood it doesn’t happen. The mystery deepened.

When I was a teenager I asked him. We were at the table eating dinner and I said, Dad, why do you call your woman friends by the wrong name? It was always pretty hard to stump my father. I can count the times in my life when I did. I was probably around fourteen or so and he was forty seven, roughly. Dad was a college graduate and well read. He had a lifetime of experience in business so it was nearly impossible to confuse him which delighted me because like all the young I somehow thought we were equal in education and experience. I know better now.

He looked at me for a bit and you could practically see the marbles rolling around in his head as he tried to find an answer to my question. It was kind of a ridiculous question anyway, I mean what name he used was simply normal to him and I don’t think he had given it much thought one way or the other. Georgie had a name and it was Hendrix just like Marylee Baxter was Marylee Zeyen or Mrs Fuchiwaki was Iso Kobara. Make any sense to you? Me neither.

Rather than come up with a credible answer he gave me the usual, “You wouldn’t understand, or That’s just the way it is” or especially, “Those are their names.”

So there I was ignorant about something I heard my dad do all the time.

So here’s an example, when I was twelve or thirteen my parents took me to a party up on Sierra Drive. It was my father’s friend Cyril Phelan and his wife Kathryn’s home. It was a nervous experience because my mother had been sure to let me know that these people had daughters my age which made me a, twelve year old nervous wreck because it meant she had something sneaky in mind. The girls mother who I was meeting for the first time was called Kay, not Kathryn and my dad jokingly said something to her and called her Routzhan which made her laugh. Made no sense to me. Besides I was doing my best to avoid strange girls and was puzzling over this thing about the names. So, if you can follow, this Gus guy was really Cyril which seemed at the time a very unfamiliar and strange sort of name. He was married to Katherine or Kay whose last name was Phelan or was it Routzhan. See what I mean?

There was another woman there who was married to my dad’s poker playing buddy J. Vard, another strange name, who was apparently married to my mother’s friend “Happy Bottom” which I assumed was not her real name but…*

I guess it hadn’t yet occurred to me that adults did what we did in school. I had friends named Squeaky, Dumbo, big ears of course, and Woody. Tookie, his mom said he had just the cutest little Fanny when he was a babe. That one has stuck and it’s become practically his only name more than seventy years later.

All of course was explained by my mother. She told me my dad did it for several reasons. First of all many of the people he knew he had grown up with. The women who were once in school with him or he knew when they were just maids had married his friends or a stranger to our town and their married names were not the same as he remembered them and he just unconsciously recalled their maiden names and used them.

I guess these are things that make small towns special. Think of this. When I was sixteen I traded my job at Mattie’s restaurant for a better one at Baxter’s service station in Pismo Beach. It was owned by Walter Baxter and his sons. WA Baxter and sons Chevron where the bookeeper was “Granny” who had no other name that I knew of and her sons Bill and Tom. Take a breath and try and follow this. Tom Baxter’s wife was Mary Lee but her maiden name was Zeyen which is the name my dad used. Her father owned a clothing store on Branch street for eighty years and my mother worked there. Tom called my parents by their last names, Shannon and because when I went to work for him he apparently couldn’t remember my first name, though I have always believed that it was a compliment to my father, called me “George.” He called me George until the day he died.

Marylee Zeyen Baxter, Arroyo Grande High School, 1944.

It finally occurred to me that he did it because he considered it a marker that divided his young life from his older. He also did it because he really could not remembered some of their married names. He did it from affection too.

Kathryn Routzhan and my father went all the way through school together, first grade through Junior College and would have attended Berkeley together until Gus came along. He knew her for nearly thirty years of the most impressionable time of their lives. Routzhan was the correct name for him.

Kathryn Routzhan, Santa Maria Junior College, 1931

Eventually after enough questions were asked some semblance of order was established, at least by me. Apparently these women existed in parallel universes, the before and after. I can understand it now. In memory people exist in block of time and we recognize that.

I suppose, in a bookend, the same thing has happened to me. At school reunions I see the women of today as the girl of yesterday. Just like my dad did. Thats the name I use, the real one.

Cover: Georgia “Georgie Hendrix and Agness “Billie” Records who you may have known as Georgie O’Conner and Billie Swigert..

*Gladys, get it?

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NPR

Michael Shannon

I once lived in a place at the end of a long dusty red road surrounded by cane fields that reached twelve feet into the air. Seen from my window towering Mount Ka’ala soared into the painfully blue sky. Often wreathed in towering cumulous clouds that could turn angry at the end of the day, flashing lightning above the rugged canyon that made up the fragment of the once immense Wai’anae volcano. Lightning was sometimes accompanied by the contrapuntal booming of 155mm cannon from the upper reaches of Schofield barracks near Kole Kole pass where the Japanese Imperial Navy’s aircraft flew on their way to Pearl Harbor on that Infamous day. The old stuccoed barracks at Hickam Field still bore the scars of Japanese machine guns.

The little collection of five army surplus Quonset huts standing in a row each one with it’s front porch, all in a line like the dusty boots of the soldiers who once lived in them. They faced a dirt road lined with long thorn Kiawe bush which defined the hidden enclave. It was surfer heaven and had been occupied by itinerant surfers for years. Behind them an orchard of Papaya trees surrounded by ponds where Mister Domingo grew Taro in a large pond which with the right light shimmered like Edouard Manet’s lillies.

Painted a dusty olive green, faded from thirty years of Hawaiian winters and summers they were perfect living for young people who didn’t require much. My house had two bedrooms a bath, kitchen and living room. Windows down each side from which the glass had been removed and replaced with screen. When it was hot in the summer it doubled the ventilation and when it was simply too hot a lawn sprinkler on the metal roof cooled things down.

Except for one thing. The rampart of the Wai’anae rose above us like a looming wave blocking television and AM radio signals beamed from Honolulu. The only radio, the only radio was FM and the only FM was NPR. Hawai’i Public Radio.

Somehow the long waves of the FM signal crested the mountains and the great saddle where the road came down from the Dole pineapple fields and Wahiawa town to Haleiwa.

It might seem like this lack of entertainment was a burden but in fact for me a veteran of long sailing voyages where the main entertainment was reading it provide no great burden. A good turntable and stacks of albums to listen to and a valid library card hours were filled with a sort of self education uninterrupted by images of Thomas Magnum driving his red car the wrong way on local roads. I didn’t know Archie Bunker though if I had I might have considered that a loss, the same for MASH* but I’d grown up in a family where there were several Archies and a couple of Batchelor farmers who could have given Garrison Keillor’s a run for their money so that base was pretty much covered. Chief petty officers and crusty old Bosu’ns mates served as part of the cynics education.

With a mind undisturbed by television it left radio as the only real outside over the air entertainment. Think of what you could do with just a couple hours of the day not occupied with essentially mindless TV shows which were and are nearly identical to one another. Perhaps not exactly carbon copies but they certainly rhyme.

Think about how different your life might be without those kinds of entertainments. I moved away from my hometown when I was 19 and never owned a television until 18 years later. How might your education have be different.

Fiona Ritchie, yes that Fiona Ritchie. Growing up in an American Irish family I rarely ever heard anything about the actual Irish. My grandfather would stand by the old piano that was my grandmothers* and sing of Mother Machree, a song from 1910. The song lyrics contain the words “I kiss the dear fingers so toil worn for me. Oh God bless you and keep you Mother Machree”. “Machree” is an Anglicization of the Irish mo chroí, an exclamation meaning “my heart.”

Fiona Ritchie hosted a program on NPR for 40 years which highlighted Celtic music and history. What other Radio station can say that?

Nights in the “Country” as it was called, that rural stretch of homes and villages along Oahu’s north shore were on Saturday night, was highlighted by Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion.” It could only be called a variety radio show patterned in the old style by musical guests, skits, there was Guy Noir, private eye, where Guy dodged bullets, defeated the villain and escaped the clutches of fallen women reminiscent of the fabulous Gloria Grahame at the hight of her evil powers.

Gloria Grahame, Hard Luck Woman.

Birthdays were celebrated on NP. Such as the birthday of French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , born in Lyons in 1900. He joined the French army in 1921, and that’s where he flew his first plane. He left the military five yearsR later and began flying airmail routes into the Sahara Desert, eventually becoming the director of a remote airfield in Rio de Oro. Living conditions were Spartan, but he said, “I have never loved my house more than when I lived in the desert.” He wrote his first novel, Southern Mail (1929), in the Sahara and never lost his love for the desert.

In 1929, he moved to South America to fly the mail through the Andes, and he later returned to carry the post between Casablanca and Port-Étienne. He worked as a test pilot and a journalist throughout the 1930s, and survived several plane crashes. He also got married in 1931, to Consuelo Gómez Carrillo. She wrote of him in her memoir, “He wasn’t like other people, but like a child or an angel who has fallen down from the sky.”

He rejoined the French army upon the outbreak of World War II, but when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to the United States, hoping to serve the U.S. forces as a fighter pilot. He was turned down because of his age, and, homesick and discouraged, he began his best-known book, The Little Prince (1943). The following year, he returned to North Africa to fly a warplane for France. He took off on a mission on July 31, 1944, and was never heard from again.

Both the event and the dream are the same.

The thing about NPR programs is how esoteric the subjects could be. Who in the world today ever thinks about Maud Gonne, well someone at National Public Radio did.

They celebrated the birthday of the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, the lifelong muse of poet W.B. Yeats, born in Surrey, England (1865). She and Yeats first met when they were both 25 years old. He fell in love with her immediately and remained in love for the rest of his life. William Butler Yeats introduced me to the saying “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,” something which has stuck with me all my life. I first heard it read over NPR.

Maud and W B.

Yeats, one of the finest poets who has ever written in the English language said of her, Maud was tall and exquisitely beautiful. He wrote, “I had never thought to see in a living woman such great beauty. A complexion like the blossom of apples. Her movements were worthy of her form.”

NPR was divided into blocks of time. Disc Jockeys, though they never seemed to me to be exactly that because they seemingly invited youu into their homes where you could relax on the couch, close your eyes and feast on music from all across the globe. Mexican Corridos, traditional Mexican narrative ballads, essentially story-songs that chronicle heroic deeds, historical events, outlaws, love, or current affairs, acting as an oral history of Mexican and Mexican-American culture. Radio is where I first heard the Corridos de la Revolución Mexicana.** Victor Jara’s haunting ballad of the life of Francisco Villa.

There I first heard the hauntingly beautiful ballads of Edith Piaf and the Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, both of whom sat at a cafe table outside Les Duex Magots with the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter and the exquisitely beautiful and brilliant Martha Gellhorn who was the only woman to have sense enough to divorce Ernest.

I drifted in dreams of West African music. Fela Kuti, Niwel Tsumbu, and Habib Koite,*** both from central west Africa. Music from Turkiye, Egypt and the ancient kingdoms of Persia. North African Taureg ballads made your hair stand on end. Japanese recordings of western music played on traditional instruments include the Koto (zither), Shamisen (lute), Shakuhachi (bamboo flute), and the Taiko (drums). Imagine John Lennon’s music and Handel played that way.

Sunday afternoon opera, wow, wow, wow. Bertold Brecht and his modern day, 1931 mind you, “Three Penny opera.” My introduction to lotte Lenya, Lucy Brown and Macheath with his blood slippery blade. Bobby Darin can’t hold a candle to the original. “The Threepenny Opera” was banned by Hitler’s propaganda office because of its socialist themes. This was an attack on Bertolt Brecht’s writing but also an attack on performing actors and the audiences attending musical theatre.

Mozarts Don Giovanni, Its subject is a centuries-old Spanish legend about a the Libertine as told by playwright Tirso de Molina in his 1630 play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. The opera lives in popular culture with the pejorative “He’s acting like he thinks he’s a Don Juan.” I was prompted to actually go see it at the HIC, the Honolulu International Concert Hall. I didn’t own a suit, being a surfer and all. I wore my best silky shirt and a pair of long pants, you live in Hawaii, you don’t need much of a wardrobe. They let me in anyway. That concert is on my list of life changing events.

Hawai’i Public Radio also gets some credit for exposing the wonderful blend of musical styles personified by Gabby Pahinui and his extended family and friends who helped kick start a resurgence of Hawai’ian culture amongst the residents of the islands.*****

Talk show, documentaries, history and music from every corner of the globe. No; no commercials or advertisements of any kind.

Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, “A Private Corporation Funded by the American People for the American people” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped to turn a public good into public media that informs, educates, and connects all Americans.

It’s not just NPR radio either, Mister Rogers, Sesame Street and the fabulous Miss Frizzle and her magic School Bus on which kids explored the universe. Reading Rainbow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Arthur, Barney & Friends, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, and 3-2-1 Contact, alongside This Old House, and Wall $treet Week, offering a blend of entertainment and learning for all ages. Oh my goodness, Newton’s Apple. This pioneering PBS family science series answered basic science questions from viewers with hands-on experiments and field trips.

All of Ken Burns, Lucy Worsley where you could hear the background story of Henry 8 and his doomed bride Ann. How about Nova and the American Experience, Finding Your Roots and Call the Midwife?

As an individual I have supported local public radio for nearly fifty years and have been amply rewarded. Think about the Live Oak festival. What for profit station would do something like that. Music festivals all over the country are used as fund raisers to keep Public Radio stations alive. In the big western states NPR is quite possibly the only radio station where people can get the local news, disaster information or any radio programming at all.

As you may know public broadcasting is now on its own financially. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been killed by a government who has no interest in any communication that isn’t owned by corporate interests and filtered through the White House. Fox can send a very big check to a politician’s re-election fund but you can bet that KCBX in San Luis Obispo cannot, it’s not allowed. Getting rid of CPB is a national disgrace. The idea is to shut them up. Intelligent programming might cause the voting public to stop and think, “What is going on here?” Children’s minds might be set aflame as my old friend Bill Donovan once said. Every thing else is targeted, censured information controlled by special interests. You are going to know what those interests want you to know.

Newton Minow a member of JFK’s FCC became one of the best-known and respected—if sometimes controversial—political figures of the early 1960s because of his criticism of commercial television. In a speech given to the National Association of Broadcasters convention on May 9, 1961, he was extremely critical of television broadcasters for not doing more, in Minow’s view, to serve the public interest. His phrase “vast wasteland” is remembered years after the speech.

Nevertheless he was instrumental in crafting the law that became the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which I believe has served this country will for over half a century. It has certainly brought my family a great deal.

Two last things, the current president didn’t bother with congressional debate he simply took it upon himself to strip away it’s budget. The White House does not care. The idea is to stifle dissent in order to get it’s way. You can bet on that if you study history. It’s not the first or last time something like this has been done.

A group of people in Hawai’i who felt the need for an independant voice decided to launch a station to carry National Public Radio’s programming. In 1976, they incorporated, calling themselves Hawaii Islands Public Radio. “We were an enthusiastic bunch,” “Plenty of enthusiasm … not much accomplished.” Business leaders and cultural groups stepped up and in 1976, flipped a switch in a jury-rigged studio on the University of Hawaii’s Manoa’s wrestling room and Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”*** streamed out on Hawaii Public Radio’s first broadcast. That was our station on the North Shore.

I will certainly be reminded by people I know that any fidelity to NPR makes me Liberal Scum, there are those I know who love to “Own the Libs” and will take any opportunity to do so. To them I say dig a little deeper and don’t just parrot the company line.

And by the way, turn off Downton Abbey. You won’t get it for free anymore. Commercial, commercial commercial.

Send in a pledge at Pledge time, please.

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Dedicated to my friends Andrew Harp and Steve Dorsey, people who made it happen.

*See “The Old Eighty Eight” in the contents. https://atthetable2015.com/2022/01/08/the-old-88/

**https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=699604152486917 Jara was brutally tortured in the Estadio Nacional and died on September 15, 1973. His lifeless body was found in a pile of corpses, his hands and wrists broken, and his body riddled with 44 bullet wounds. He was 40 years old at the time of his execution.

***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5_HfjcjR_M “Wassiye” Habib Koite.

****https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xbcvp0ATAY Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde

*****https://www.tiktok.com/@pbshawaii/video/7173784093128150315 Gabby Pahinui and Peter Moon jr.

Michael Shannon lives and writes in Arroyo Grande, California.

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SAFE AT HOME

Happenstance accounts for some things in my life but most were things I thought I might want to do or to be. No matter, whatever it was the one constant was the feeling was that I would be safe at home.

I figured out pretty early that it wasn’t the same for all kids.

In our little two room school tucked into a hillside named for and not too far from the nearly forgotten home of the pioneer family that put Arroyo Grande on the map the homogenous group of children, six to fourteen lived in a kind of time warp where we all felt safe. We knew little of each others home life. The parents of our classmates were ciphers, tall figures who were nice to kids, mother images who steered us in the direction that adults believed we should go. How they were at home only their own children knew.

We were a school of the children of immigrants. some recent some dating back to the shadowy beginnings of the country. Indentured servants from Ireland, Chumash kids that predated those. There were children whose ancestors built the Mexican ranchos. The children’s family’s whose parents or grandparents were from Japan, the Phillipines, the Azores, Brazil, Poland, Europe and Scandinavia, maybe too many to count.

Branch Grade School 1943. Miss Elizabeth Holland Principal. The single graduate that year was Bill Quaresma the boy withthe puppy.

Believe it or not there was no child who attended school with us that could call themselves rich.

Some families owned wide swaths of land but that didn’t make the rich by any means. “Land Poor” was the term. You might have a ranch which numbered its size in acres by the thousand but still live in a house nearly a hundred years old. Dad drove an old pick up truck, mother not at all. The family sedan used only for shopping and Sunday churching. Parents in our district almost always worked the land. Dirt farmers, cattlemen and the folks who worked for them. None of us growing up knew that it was the last gasp of the family farm. Nearly every family lived and worked on their own acreage. Few understood that within a decade most of those families would be pushed out by consolidation as the business was changing from supplying locally to shipping produce nationally. The cattle ranches were under assault by the feedlots who could fatten faster and more efficiently.

Grade School 1926. Miss Elizabeth Holland principal, the only teacher. Graduates that year were Miss Marry Donovan, Olivia Reis and Charles Fink. Next years grads are Carl Quaresma and Manuel Silva.

There was little about our farms and ranches that was idyllic. We were not Norman Rockwell people. Kids in my grammar school had parents who were desperate, the kids undereducated, poorly dressed, ate paste for breakfast when they could. Some were lucky to have a single pair of shoes. They could come to school with the bruises gifted by angry parents who were up against it and understood that there was no way out.

Branch Grade School. Miss Elizabeth Holland, the year she retired.*

For all of that we were a remarkably homogenous group. I recall no teasing or meanness amongst us. Isolated in a small community before television we had nowhere to learn about race hatred or were we typically exposed to the differences in wealth.

Of course, in all sadness that all changed when we got to high school and lessons about inequalities, race, money and power have never ceased.

Those children still bound by a shared experience have grown in every direction. Our little school produced mechanics, scholars, housewives, teachers and truck drivers. We even had a murderer. As with all people, we were divergent into adulthood.

A kid was a kid was a kid was a kid. The nastiness of life was not yet before us.

That part of our lives in which we felt safe is a gift which we hold dear. We can never hold it in our hands again or get it back but on a cold darkling night, slip into your cotton jammies, crawl deep under the covers with only your nose exposed and if you concentrate you can touch it in memory and once again you can, for a brief time be safe at home.

*Authors class. Far right 2nd row down.

Michael Shannon is an alumnus of the old Branch Grade School. He writes so hi boys will know where they came from.

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The Endless Debate

Michael Shannon

So which is it , maynaze or mayonnaise? There’s nothing better than the smooth, creamy texture and one-of-a-kind flavor of Duke’s Mayonnaise, made with Eugenia Duke’s original recipe since 1917. Duke’s notably containing no sugar and using apple cider vinegar for a tart, more “vinegary” flavor, while Hellmann’s has a balanced, neutral, and somewhat sweeter profile due to its sugar content and white vinegar. You can use them interchangeably in many recipes, but their different tastes will subtly alter the final dish.

They can also alter relationships. Now say you’re a southern boy or girl from one of the old secessionist Confederate states, right? Well, we gonna disagree.

At our kitchen table we had a girl, my mother whose family dated back to the beginnings of America, not the United State, understand, but the older one. She had an ancestor who signed the Declaration, Another ancestor, actually a whole passel* of ’em took up arms against their brothers in the north. Nearly finished the family right there. Three of them four boys give their lives for that “monstrous system”. The family came down from the one soldier survivor and another’s daughter born eight months after her father was kilt at Malvern Hill in the Seven Days fight in Virginia with the 43rd North Carolinas. In his final letter from the hospital in Richmond he echoed every soldier, ever, “I want to go home.”

At the opposite end sat my Pop. He came from an indentured Irishman, a indentured transport sent across after the battle of the Boyne which finally crushed the Irish kings and turned Ireland into a vassal state. They were farmers mostly, those people who essentially invented conservatism. Before this was a country they latched onto a good deal when they farmed just outside Lower Mount Bethel Township, Pennsylvania. They bought a tavern and inn from the King’s colonial courts because the previous man who tended the bar and rented the rooms was convicted of counterfeiting and strung up by the neck until dead, dead, dead. When the Kings Magistrate puts his little black hankie over his powdered curls you’re in trouble. It worked out for us though. To show their gratitude Atlanta Shannon and his son William enlisted in the 1st Pennsylvania regiment, company F from Northampton County and fought with George’s Continental Army.

1st Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line. 1776-1783

Like most family’s they hatched the occasional scoundrel. My great grandfather Shannon served a spell in Sing Sing for stealing from the boxcars of the railroad he worked for, the New York Central. They never recovered the goods but they got even. He spent a year inside.

My other great grandfather Ernest Stone Cayce was a swell. He often traveled in a private rail car and dressed to the nines. He sat at the Bridge table with Bill Vanderbilt and lived in the same hotel. He lost it all and ended up busted, a transient who died in a flophouse in Fort Worth and is buried in an unmarked grave in Paupers Field there. The Texas Transient Bureau sent a telegram to my grandmother asking if she wanted the body sent to California for burial she replied with one word, No.

Dapper Robert Ernest Stone Cayce 1866-1935

We were just kids having dinner at our kitchen table and didn’t know any of that but we did witness the culture difference. A family from northern Pennsylvania versus a Mississippi family.

Take Cornbread for example. My Pop liked it hot, sliced in half and slathered and I do mean slathered in real butter not the oily, slimy margarine made from the grease leftover from Tanks used in WWII. He being a child of dairy farmers liked the real stuff. He would carefully slice the cornbread lengthwise and top it with enough butter to stop an unhealthy heart. Shannons drank whole milk, not the pig swill called skim. Whipped cream must cover all of the pumpkin pie, no visible pie and you must add an extra dollop for good luck. In our house all cornbread was made from scratch. Mom didn’t use cook books for such a fundamental thing. Dashes, a pinch, palms full of flour which we kids had to sift by hand and cornmeal, a teensy bit of sugar and Crisco. Never ever came out the same way twice. Hence my dad’s care in the cutting. Just on the edge of crumbling, ahh perfect. Drop on a quarter inch slab of real butter and he’d be ready to go. A spoon full of beans in one hand and the bread in the other.

James M Cayce, Quartermaster Sergeant Co E 2nd Mississippi Regiment Army of northern Virginia. Served in nearly every battle in the eastern theater of operation. Captured at Gettysburg, paroled, returned to duty and surrendered at Appomattox, one of only 19 2nd Mississippi soldiers remaining. He died in Robertson Texas in 1904. His granddaughter, my grandmother was born in Santa Barbara in 1895.

At the opposite end of the table, the unreconstructed Confederate took hers, and giving my dad the fish eye, ripped hers to pieces and threw them in a tall glass. She did it like her ancestor Cpl. James Cayce of the 2nd Mississippi did to the Yanks at Spotsylvania Court House, “tore ’em up.” She’d pour in a spoonful of sugar, add whole milk, stir it to the right consistency and then use her spoon to ladle it into her mouth with the same care with which she did everything. When we were up at aunt Mariels ranch she used fresh buttermilk which she claimed was much superior to whole milk. She picked the odd fly off the buttermilk because the fresh buttermilk went into the ice box straight from the cow. No homogenizing or Pasteurizing for my aunt and uncle, no sir. Uncle Ray was the real deal and didn’t put on any airs or fuss about things like science or flys. He likely ran more flys on his ranch than cows anyway.

When I’d grown some many of those little quirks in the family were explained. I joined the Navy in 1966 and all of this was brought to a boil and hammered home when I spent twelve weeks in a boot camp company with almost all of our companies recruits were from the deep south, the Bible belt and Texas. It was a master class in regional language, food and histories. It’s when I learned that there is always another version of everything.

If nothing else it explained corned bread preferences. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

*Passel is a nineteenth century invention, a U.S. dialect version of parcel, Also a group of opossums is called a “passel.” Say: “Dagnab it, there’s that Passel O’ Possums rat now!”

Michael Shannon is a writer and writes just what he wants to no matter what the English teacher says. He also writes for his sons so they will know where they came from.

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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 19

Michael Shannon.

Mans need to organize everything leads one to think that events you study are one off, a single illustration of consequential events. The events of the day, be they champagne cocktails at the round table in the Algonquin hotel, opening the package that came in the mail with the new Bennett Cerf book, fresh off the press, sitting at the radio and listening to the Amos and Andy the decades most popular show, or Tom Joad changing one worn out tire for another along the roadside between Oklahoma and California’s San Jaoquin valley. Life’s events for all for all of us are as diverse in experience as a flock of starlings twisting and turning in flight, each bird on it’s own yet part of the whole. History is like that.

Two weeks on the job with Signal Oil and he was down at the Ellwood pier using whipstocks to send the drill string out under the Santa Barbara channel like blind worms looking for food.

Soon after Bruce was promoted to assistant drill superintendant and he began to spend most of his time racing around California keeping an eye on production and solving problems at the wells.

Most have forgotten in the days of eight lane freeways what that mean in the thirties to drive in southern California. Most of the roads we are familiar with either didn’t exist. Those that did were barely improved. Highway 99 was the main highway connecting southern and northern California. Entire section of it were still just crushed gravel, a few sections were asphalt and the section from Los Angeles over the Grapevine to Bakersfield had been paved with concrete in 1932. It was the finest road in the state except for the Grapevine part.

As with most roads the highway was originally a game trail. Wild game always seeks the easiest route and the first people to settle here simply followed those trails. the Spanish and Mexicans widened the trails for wagons and our original roads simply did the same. That didn’t make it easy. Many cars built in the twenties and before didn’t have things we take for granted today. Brakes were mechanical and had little serious braking power. Older models still used wooden spoked wheels and narrow tires. Radiators and cooling systems couldn’t keep up with serious heat. You will notice old photos of cars that have a water bag hanging on the radiator as an extra precaution. Steep hills were a big job for underpowered engines.

The Grapevine looking down towards the Elk hills in the left background. The dark area is Tule Lake which no longer exists but was once the largest lake in the west. The oil fields are at the foot of and up the sides of those hills. The Oildale rigs outside Bakersfield are on the Kern river 57 miles to the right.

Near the Elk Hills and the Temblor range are Avenal, Coalinga, Maricopa, McKittrick, Fellows, Reward and Ford City. The Halls lived in them all. The Maricopa/Sunset fields the third largest fields in the US are still in operation today nearly 150 years after the initial discovery of the famous Lakeview gusher.

Variously called the Grapevine or the Ridge Route as it passed out of the San Fernando valley was a nasty twisted and turning road. Grapevine precisely described it. Twisting and turning back on it self as it navigated the mountains that divided Los Angeles county and the southern end of the San Jaoquin valley it was a road to be very wary of. Bruce Hall was familiar with every inch of it. It was nothing for him to get a phone call in the middle of the night and upon answering be ordered to go trouble shoot a well in the Sunset. Gassing up near the house in Compton, Artesia, Wilmington or Long Beach, they lived in all of those too, he would grab the lunch and thermos that Eileen made for him and drive straight through. It was a four hour trip in those days of the depression. He’d meet with the crews, figure out how to fix or solve the problem then turn around and drive right straight back. Sometimes he would cross over to the coast through Cuyama and down the Cuyama river through the old ranchos on all dirt roads to see his parents in the Verde district of Arroyo Grande. He could check Signals wells in the Arroyo Grande field out Price Canyon way then head home by the Santa Maria/Orcutt fields where Sam Mosher held some leases. Going back by the coast took him by Ellwood where he could stop in Hope Ranch to see Eileens brother Henry and his sister-in-law Martha. Henry also worked for Signal. He was a mechanic so the Cayce’s stayed put for most of his career.

Uncle Henry was famously at work when at around 7:00 pm on February 23, 1942, the Japanese submarine I-17 came to a stop opposite the Ellwood field on the Gaviota Coast. Captain Nishino ordered the deck gun readied for action. Its crew took aim at a Richfield aviation fuel tank just beyond the beach and opened fire about 15 minutes later with the first rounds landing near a storage facility. The oil field’s workmen had mostly left for the day, but a skeleton crew on duty heard the rounds hit. They took it to be an internal explosion until one man spotted the I-17 off the coast. An oiler named G. Brown later told reporters that the enemy submarine looked so big to him he thought it must be a cruiser or a destroyer until he realized that only one gun was firing.

Firing in the dark from a submarine rolling in the waves, it was inevitable that the rounds would miss their target. The 5.5 inch Japanese shells destroyed a derrick and a pump house, while the Ellwood Pier and a catwalk suffered minor damage. In a kind of cosmic joke they also obliterated an outhouse which after the bombardment uncle Henry said he sorely needed. After 20 minutes, the gunners ceased fire and the submarine sailed away. The workers did the only sensible thing, they called the police.

A funny little story at the beginning of a savage war. Santa Barbarans raised money to dedicate a P-51 fighter plane to the war effort, They called it the “Ellwood Avenger.” The Avenger went to a training base in Florida and never left the states. For the Japanese, they issued a postcard to raise war fervor at home. It was all a little silly and made an oft told story in the Hall and Cayce families.

Though Bruce’s job was pretty secure, Signal Oil had to continue to scramble to produce enough crude to satisfy the demands of its contracts with Standard. Not a minute nor a drop of oil could be wasted. The crews could not make a mistake so constant vigilance was the order of the day. Bruce’s company car was seldom home for very long and typically spent most of the time parked at a well site.

When he and Eileen sat down at the table the most important part of the conversation was liklely to be their kids. The constant worry for their children was the same then as it is now. They were very aware that with Mariel and Barbara entering high school and Bob right behind the constant moving was getting hard to bear for the kids. Moving seven times in just four years there was bound to be trouble or at least a great strain on education especially for the girls. Santa Barbara, Taft, Compton, and Wilmington high schools varied widely in quality and the kids couldn’t help but feeling apprehensive about what was coming next.

What they decided to do was to make every effort to somehow stay in Santa Barbara until both girls graduated high school. It was a choice my mother applauded.

Chapter 20 is next.

Surviving the depression.

Cover Photo: Taken in Anaheim California in 1934. L – R, Dean Polhemus,* Donald Polhemus jr, Mariel Hall, 16, Evelyn Polhemus, Aunt Christine Polhemus, Eileen Hall and Barbara Hall, 14. The Polhemus kids were first cousins. The Halll’s were spending two weeks with the family, down from Santa Barbara.

*Dean Polhemus figures in the story NAQT which is about his service aboard the USS Spence in WWII. You can follow the link below.

https://atthetable2015.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=6114&action=edit

Michael Shannon lives in Arroyo Grande California where he grew up. He writes so his children wiill know where they came from.

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