Where everyone knows your name.

By Michael Shannon

Whatever happened to those names? Names my grandfather gave to his milk cows. My grandmother Annie’s friends from the bridge club she played with for over 50 years was his favorite source.  The names carefully penciled onto the milking charts thumbtacked to the wooden walls of the old milking barn on the hill. Names etched into the living memories of the their descendants of this place. Names familiar to the kids that grew up in our valley in the first half of the century. Names etched into the fabric of the descendants that live here today.

How is it that they have vanished? Generations of names have disappeared as completely as a breath of wind. People we remember from our time as kids. The mothers and grandmothers of people that populated our community whose given names suddenly vanished. Minta, Mazie, Sadie, Birdie, Jessie, Muriel, Maude, Cornelia, Florence, Wilda, Bernice, Mamie and Maybelle, gone from the directory. Belva, Elsie, Blossom, Myrtle and Florita “Cushie”Harloe, who today, gives their children names like that? How about Frederick “Shorty” Fernamburg and the wonderfully rhythmic Morris Pruess who was married to Claudia. They owned the drugstore downtown. And Claude and Wilhelmina “Willy” Devereaux who owned the log cabin market. My grandfather didn’t give the cows those names because he though they were odd, they were perfectly normal at the time. He was a funny guy and he did it to amuse his Annie, my grandmother. Knowing him I’m sure he amused himself too. And the women, they took it as a compliment.

• Hazel Miller, Stanford ’16, High School Teacher
• Rebecca Denham married Hubert “Hu” Thatcher who was in the hardware business. Her second marriage was to James Mineau, also in the hardware business, fancy that.
• Margherita “Nellie” Diffenbacher whose son was Carl “Buzz” Langenbeck, future town Barber who cut my hair when I was a little boy.  They didn’t call him Buzz for nothing.
• Muriel Loomis married Ralph “Rusty” Bennett, Storekeeper. She always gave me a piece of candy from one of the jars on the counter when I was little.
• Lenora Clark, Cal ’18 She never married, She was high school teacher in Alameda, CA. Her father, the towns “Baby” Doctor delivered my aunt Mariel
• Ronnie Swall, graduated from the San Jose Normal School, ’15 and began her teaching career on Maui, Territory of Hawaii in 1915.
• Cora Bennett married Porter Clevenger whose father started and owned both the Santa Maria Times and the Arroyo Grande Herald newspaper.

Miss Lenora Clark, Cal Berkeley Yearbook. Class of 1918.

Michael Shannon lives and write from his hometown, Arroyo Grande California.