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.