Page 17

Big Surprise!

Michael Shannon

Eileen stood in the kitchen of the little rented house in Compton.* Her right hand still held the receiver, silent. She didn’t move for the longest time. She stared at the yellow wall where the telephone hung. Softly she said to herself, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. Heaven was silent on the matter.

When her three children bundled in the back door fresh from school their mother was nowhere to be found.

Bruce was working some Signal wells on the east side of the hill. Mosher had bought six leases that hadn’t paid off but his engineers thought that if they went a little deeper there were provable amounts of crude.

Compton was one of the older little towns that dotted the Los Angeles area. There were numbers of them. Carson, Torrance, Monrovia, South Pasadena, Santa Monica and Whittier. Compton established by a migrant group of farmers in 1888 predated its larger neighbor Long Beach. When Bruce and Eileen moved there in 1931 the population was around 15 thousand and was surrounded by family farms. It was an entirely agricultural community.

Aerial View of Compton in 1930.

In those days it was supposedly almost entirely white. In the 1930 census, only one African American was listed. There is no doubt that census takers skewed the results as photos of elementary and high school classes taken at the time indicate otherwise. Both my mother and her sister Mariel spoke of this. Their classes were full of Japanese American and Hispanic kids, all of them certainly citizens particularly the Hispanic kids whose families for the most part had lived on this land for at least a century and some much longer.

McKinley school, 3rd grade. Compton Ca 1930 Calisphere photo

The City of Los Angeles predated the establishment of the United States by a decade. The Spanish had arrived in the LA basin on September 4, 1781. A group of settlers consisting of 14 families numbering 44 individuals of Native American, African and European heritage journeyed more than one-thousand miles across the desert from present-day northern Mexico and established a farming community in the area naming it “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles”.

Even though we tend to think only in modern terms, most of Los Angeles County was still rural. LA’s population had just topped 1.2 million but the second largest city, Long Beach was ten times smaller. Signal Hill stood by itself in the last stages of the pastoral land it had been in the time of the great Ranchos which were no longer things but only names.

Signal Oil derricks, Eastside. 1932

The sense of anticipation. Not the emotional side of anticipation which is the wishing and hoping, no, the nuts and bolts of it. It is a gift that when its amplified by experience, of the hands on job that lets a person see beyond the immediate thing at hand. It’s the ability to look at something, a job, a technical problem and make a reasonable prediction as to what might happen down the road. Success at any job that requires a positive result is less about what is going on in the “right now” and what is likely going to happen if you continue. This is the path that every successful workman pursues.

Here is what I mean. When I worked my first “Real” job and by that, I mean I was paid for it, I bucked hay for a man named Dinny Sheehy, I was just turning fifteen. Loading flat bed trucks with hay bales is a rough way to start. Baled hay come in many forms. My uncle Jack used a baler that pumped out hay that was tied with two loops of twine. Dinny had one that produced 3-wire. The difference, you might ask is in the weight. Uncle Jackies were around 50 plus pounds, the 3-wire topped 90 lbs. The problem for me was that I weighed about 120 pounds myself and was being told to hump a 90 pound bale of hay from the ground up onto the bed of a flat bed truck that was at my chest. You can’t deadlift one. I had to figure out how to do it by myself. The old timer driving the truck had nothing to say. He looked straight ahead, smoked, sipped from a pint and drove. If he had a secret he kept it. Solving the problem is the anticipatory you see? If I couldn’t figure it out by lunch time I’d be gone.

Bruce Hall. On the rotary rig, Ellwood ,California 1930**

The secret of Bruce’s success was the ability to see ahead, plan for and manage the work. The thinking goes like this, how can I produce more, how can we be more efficient, how can we cut costs and still increase production? Believe it or not that ability isn’t that common. “Getting in your own way” is the phrase we might use to describe the someone who cannot and there are many of those.

Bruce drove into the little dirt driveway, shut of the engine of the Cheverolet and for a moment sat quietly while the cooling engine banged and sputtered as it cooled while he put aside any workplace blues and replaced it with anticipation of seeing his wife and kids. There was homework at the kitchen table, dinner simmering on the stove.

The kids were indeed at the table. “Where is your mother?”

In the way teenagers think, my mother simply answered, “She’s in the closet.”

“Why is she in the closet?”

All three looked up. My aunt Mariel, being the oldest at fifteen spoke with the wisdom of her age, “Don’t know.”

Bruce strode quickly to the hall closet and pulled at the knob. It didn’t budge. Eileen was holding it tight with both hands. Bruce asked her to please let him open the door and eventually she did. There she sat, arms crossed across her knees. She lifted her face toward him, it was streaked with the tracks of tears.

“Oh Bruce,” she sobbed, “I’m pregnant.”

He got down on his knees and held her. Eileen was 37. She already had three half grown children. It was all too much to bear.

So much for careful planning and the anticipatory abilities of Bruce and Eileen.

Chapter 18, The Big Shake

Cover Photo: No one in the family knows exactly what this photo means. It was taken the year she was married, likely on the ranch Eileen’s mother managed near Creston, California. Eileen is just 20. The antique table, doilies, tea set and the little rug set the stage. She is dressed in a style soon to be gone. She wrote on the back “An old lady.” She’s using her maiden name so she’s not yet married. Maybe he’s worried that people will call her a spinster. It’s a mystery but it captures the mood of this story. In the way of genetics both her granddaughter and great-grandaughter are dead ringers for her. They both have the same spirit and “the forge ahead no matter what genius.”

*The house on Western Avenue still exists.

**Bruce is just 34 but the toll on his body is already showing. The stance is that of a man who has back problems. The hands on the back of his hips and the slight arch are visible signs of a bad back that will plague him all the rest of his life. The blackened coveralls, soaked with oil and the unfiltered Chesterfield habit are going to have very serious consequences. Heavy labor is called back-breaking for good reason.