By Michael Shannon

A Curtis JN-4

My grandfather was a promoter and a booster. He spent time running the family dairy but his heart was with those men who were joiners and community doers. He was a Rotarian and an Odd Fellow. Mens and women’s service clubs were very active in the days of small towns; long before television. People needed a way to get out of the house. My grandmother was a charter member of the Arroyo Grande Women’s club. My grandad spent every Wednesday night at the old IOOF Hall on Bridge St, playing pool, chewing the cud and sharing some conviviality with his lodge brothers.

Memberships like this brought men together. One of the results was the organization of community events and fundraisers. In the days before government assistance and a small town needed something it had to plan, raise money and do the work itself. The fraternal organizations sponsored many events to do just that. In Arroyo Grande they sponsored the “Pea Festival” in the early days when bush peas were a major crop in the hills and valley. The old “Pea Festival” became the “Gay Nineties” and is now called the “Harvest Festival.”

International Order of Odd Fellows Hall no. 258, Arroyo Grande, California.

In 1928 a group of local business men got together in order to act on the idea that if automobile  races were held on the beach, speed hungry auto fiends would flock to Pismo to watch. My grandfather connived with Asa “Ace” Porter his old altar boy buddy who was a county supervisor and they organized a group of boosters to put on the first annual Pismo Beach Speed Races.The contracted with many race teams including Barney Oldfield, the famous race driver who first drove a car a “Mile a Minute,” to come and do a flat out speed demonstration on the sands that they advertised as the smoothest and straightest in the country. New speed records were sure to be set.

The goup arranged trains to ship the race cars to the railroad docks in Oceano. Hotels were booked, meals arranged and the county sheriff agreed to provide crowd control. They did this by stringing rope along the beachfront as a safety measure. Ticket booths were set up along the old coast highway where a fan could purchase admission. The local papers all ran paid ads and articles to drum up excitement.

Santa Maria Times photo*

As an added attraction the organizers contracted with a barnstormer to fly in and give rides to spectators and to perform some death defying aerobatics as a warm up.

Barnstorming was the first major form of civil aviation in the history of flying. It was also one of the most popular forms of entertainment during the Roaring Twenties. The United States and other countries had trained thousands of pilots during the great war and many of them had no desire to quit flying. Surplus planes were cheap, so cheap that the Navy and army practically gave them away. A young flyer could buy a surplus trainer such as the Curtis JN-4 “Jenny,”  some still in their unopened packing crates, for as little as $50, essentially “flooding” the market. With private and commercial flying in North America unhampered by any regulations concerning their use, pilots found the Jenny’s stability and slow speed made it ideal for stunt flying and aerobatic displays in the barnstorming era between the world wars. Some were still flying into the 1930s.

Need a mechanic? I’ll lend you mine. National Archives

Flyers could scrape out a living doing local show and giving rides while bouncing from town to town. Living under the wings, camping out or trading rides for food and accommodation, these universally young men and women introduced people all over the country to their first experience in flying. Barnstorming “provided an exciting and challenging way to make a living, as well as an outlet for creativity and showmanship. Jimmy Doolittle, Amelia Earhart, Pancho Barnes, Roscoe Turner and Jackie Cochran were all barnstormers. Flying allowed Charles Lindbergh to make a marginal living, and he always spoke fondly of the “old flying days” and the freedom of movement.

Take a ride Mister? $5.00 for 15 minutes. National Archives photo**

By the time my dad took his ride, barnstorming was slowly being regulated out of existence. The US Aeronautical agency was taking control of the air and essentially creating the rules that would eventually kill the business. Furthermore, the planes themselves were getting old. Some of the “Jennys” had been flying for close to a decade, maintained by the pilot-mechanic who worked on the planes wherever it was convenient. No such thing as the FAA inspection. The plane needed to fly to make a living, and in todays environment its hard to believe how casual the business was. Planes crashed all the time. Luckily they flew low and very slowly.

Even though Lincoln Beachey, one of the first barnstormers had landed on the beach at Pismo nearly 20 years before, flying was still a novelty. A Curtis Jenny sitting on the sand, it’s OX-5 V8 90 horse engine ticking over as the pilot loaded two people into the front cockpit was not an everyday sight.

Like many boys, my father wanted to be with his father whenever he could. His religious career was over the minute my grandfather asked him if he would rather stay home and help with the cows or go to Sunday school with mommy. So when he asked dad if he wanted to go see the airplane he jumped at the chance. They took the model T milk truck along the old highway to Pismo creek, just over the SP tracks at the grade crossing on the edge of monte, then over the Pismo creek bridge and left into town. Leaving the car at the foot of the Main St. ramp,  My grandfather said, “Let’s go have a look.” Up close, the aircraft was huge, squatting like a buzzard drying its wings in the morning sun. The odors it gave off were both strange and familiar. The faint banana like odor of the doping compound used to stretch the linen fabric that covered the fuselage and wings and the, oh too familiar smell of grandmothers spoon of Castor oil for before breakfast. Castor the oil used to lubricate the open valves of the engine because it would not mix with gasoline, The old aircraft engines were known for their loose fit and leaked from everywhere. Most if not all aviators of that period wore silk scarves over their faces to help protect from pollutants such as smoke, Castor oil spray, , bugs, ETC. The likelihood exists that some castor oil was inhaled by aircrew, simply breathing the aromatics likely would not have a strong laxative effect unlike my grandmothers attempt tp promote regularity. Considering what was about to happen, that morning spoonful might not be a good thing for a boy about to fly for the first time.     

My dad George in short pants with his brother Jackie the year of the first flight. Shannon family photo.

As my grandfather spoke quietly with the pilot, dad walked around the plane, having no idea that something which he was never to forget was about to happen. His father gestured him over to the plane and almost before he knew it, he was being boosted into the front cockpit. He was speechless, this wasn’t part of the plan. Grandpa climbed in right after him, settling into the modified seat built for two. The pilot leaned in and checked that the lap belts were secure. Handing them two leather helmets and goggles, he jumped down from the wing, conversed briefly with the mechanic, then hopped on the wing and climbed into the rear cockpit. He moved the stick and rudder pedals around to make sure they were in working order then signaled the mechanic to pull the prop over a couple time to load the cylinders with gasoline. “Ready, contact,” the mechanic spun the prop and the motor caught, spraying my dad and grandfather with castor oil and belching a cloud of smoke that reeked of gasoline.  Having no brakes, the Jenny immediately began rolling down the beach, bumping up and down a little as it ran over the sand. At about 25 miles per hour the tail came up and soon after the bumping stopped and they were flying. At the glorious speed of 60 mph, the pilot banked out over the ocean and flew out to sea briefly before turning back over Oceano towards Arroyo Grande where they got a birds-eye view of the ranch and their home. The pilot completed the circle, back over Pismo, setting the plane down in almost the exact spot they left from.

Many years later when I was a young man myself, dad asked me how I liked flying. Sitting at that old kitchen table where so much of my life was formed, I told him that I had flown tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of planes and that I liked it. It was safe and comfortable and took you to marvelous places you had always dreamed of, a magic carpet, if you will. Of course, I didn’t mention that last part because I was never quite sure where he stood on things like that; you know, approval. Home was always where he wanted to be.

I was living in a tropical paradise then. And in the spirit of hospitality I asked him why he and mom didn’t fly down to see me. Thats when he told me the story about his two flights. “A flight off Pismo in a JN-4, seeing our little community from above I thought would be a delight,” I said. Dad did not, and I repeat, did not, see it that way. He told Me, “That old plane was like a skeleton with one of your grandmothers bedsheets stretched over it,” “It stunk to high heaven and I got covered with grease and oil.” He made me laugh, so I said, “But wasn’t the view beautiful, couldn’t you see everything?” He gave me a look, then said, “You could see everything all right, the canvas was full of holes and you could look right down between your feet and see the ground.” By this time I was laughing out loud, so he threw me a dirty look and said, “It was the worst two flights I ever took.” “What do you mean two flights,” I said, “it was only one” And he said. “Yeah, two flights, the first, and, the last.”

He never came to see me in Hawaii. He said it was too far to swim and boats made him nervous.

PS: The great Pismo automobile races were a bust, the sand beach is not flat enough and the cars would get airborne going over the humps. The promoters forgot to check the tide tables and low tide was simply too high to give the cars enough room.The spectators just walked around the ropes and didn’t pay admission. The promoters  lost their shirts. Back to the ranch for my grandfather and his friend “Ace” Porter. Fifty years later they could both laugh about it though because they had a whale of a good time.

* All four of the drivers pictured in the Santa Maria Times article would be killed in race cars before the end of 1938. Auto racing was an extremely dangerous sport in its early days before helmets, lap belts and open cockpits. Drivers felt it was safer to be thrown from the car than be strapped in. A perfect application of Hobson’s Choice.

Five dollars was a goodly amount in 1928 when a day laborer averaged about fifty cents and hour. It was a little more than a good days work. In 2023 dollars it’s equivalent to $ 8.57 and a ride might set you back a cool $85.70. A small boy on the lap; free.

Michael Shannon is a World Citizen, Surfer, Sailor, Teacher, Builder and Story Teller. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California, USA. He writes for his children.

E-Mail: Michaelshannonstable@Gmail.com

The back door to our house was unpainted. It was unlike Lewis Carrolls or Frances Burnetts fanciful portals, just an ordinary wooden three panel door with an old metal handle. No key, it hadn’t been locked in anybodies lifetime. Common knowledge held that it was the country custom to never lock a door, seeing it as a a black mark on hospitality. It’s a possibility that we simply had nothing to take. None of this mattered to us. It just was.

The adult world has forgotten the mysteries of childhood or at least recalls them by seeing them through a gauze curtain, looking back through dimly recalled and fragmented memory. We’ve forgotten how real it all was.

My friend Nancy Brown on the old porch in 1947.

Inside our house there were two parents and three boys, usually a dog or two, maybe a kitty, surrounded by all the things a family acquires. A predictable place for us, a warm, comfortable place where you were safe and loved. We found our adventures in books, for like our parents, we were readers. We lived on the cusp of a revolution in which reading was gradually replaced by the ominous eye in the living room. I didn’t realize that it came to kill a child’s imagination. Perhaps I wasn’t particularly aware until I had children of my own and observed how their lives were different than ours. But “Oh My,” outside that old door… was EVERYTHING! A world in which there were no boundaries.

“Go outside and play” was my mother’s frequent refrain, being in our little house with three young children bouncing off the walls was enough to try a saint. Basically, if the sun was out, we were out the door after breakfast. If  we were reluctant to stay there she’d simply lock the screen door.

That was never much of a problem because we lived in a wonderland for children. It had few rules as my parents were content to let us find our own way.

No Rule: We could build fires and watch them burn. We learned to set the trash in the burn barrels afire. The barrels were 55 gallon drums with no top and a series of holes chopped in the bottom with cold chisels. Garbage was thrown inside and set on fire every couple of days until the barrels were full of ash and debris. Literally everything was burned with the exception of food scraps which were for the dogs. Every so often the barrels were loaded into the pick-up and hauled to the dump on highway 227. Kids were encouraged to tip the barrels over on the piles of trash there. The dump was always burning and had a sort of flat, ashy odor that was vaguely pleasant. You couldn’t mind odors if you were farm kids. Just think of that, you get to go for a ride with your dad; three little boys scrunched up on the seat where he could reach out and tousle your hair so you knew he loved you, explaing the sights along the way, Your great-grandparents old house, then over the Ice Cream Hills where your grandfather Jack used to peddle his bicycle on his way to San Luis in the 1890’s, right by Patchettland and the Buzzard’s Nest Rock which seemed to loom over the road with its myriad little cave where the birds roosted, and when you arrived you got to dump barrels of garbage over the back of the truck, Six little feet straining and slipping on the pick-up bed’s wooden slats, straining to push the heavy barrel off the back of the tailgate. Oh, and then; with a stop at Kirk’s liquor for the candy bar of your choice, you drove home where the dogs would greet you as if you had been gone forever. Boy!

No Rule: Build a fort. Any kind would do. We were under constant attack from any number of bad men and we needed to have a place to stand and fight. Perhaps a dugout, deep enough to stand in with seats carved around the edges and a narrow passage for entry. Covered with boards from the old tumble down barn, laid across the top and covered with dirt, it could withstand the heaviest of attacks.

There was an old redwood water barrel, a big one, half concealed by the mammoth pepper tree next to the corn crib. I took one of the hatchets used for nailing the lids on lettuce crates and laboriously chopped a hole just big enough to crawl inside. It was the perfect hiding place.

My dad bought different types of crates and boxes from the Arroyo Grande Box Company for use in packing our vegetable crops. Delivered on flat bed sets of doubles, a semi with two flat bed trailers, they were unloaded and stacked in huge piles next to our packing shed where vegetables were sorted and packed, ready for shipping. There were different boxes for different crops. Tomatoes and Chinese peas were packed in flats, small boxes made of fragrant pine, so fresh that the pitch was still leaking from them. There were wire bound crates for string beans which were shipped flat and had to be unfolded in order to be filled. Lug boxes were primarily used to transport vegetables that bruised easily from the fields. They were very sturdy. Celery crates were large, lightweight crates used to pack in the fields. A length of butcher paper with a big blue stripe down the center, was placed down the center of the empty crate and the cut and trimmed heads of celery neatly packed. The excess paper was then folded over the top and the lid nailed on. They weighed close to ninety pounds complete and it was a delight to see with what grace the loaders swung them onto the trucks for shipping. The big crates almost flew up and it seemed as if the loaders used sleight of hand instead of muscle.

We kids used most of the types to build with. Flats boxes were shipped nested. One box laid face up, two placed standing inside and one laid upside down on top. A unit of four, stacked ten high they formed a block of perhaps a thousand. If you can imagine carefully removing sets to form stairs and hollows inside the stack in the same way you play Jenga, then you can imagine a labyrinth for little boys to play in. A very fragrant one too.

Our place knew no age. The house had no foundation, just post set upright in the ground. This gave it a certain elasticity so that it conformed to soil conditions, winter and summer. We had a horse barn but no horses. Horses were long gone from farming in the early fifties. There was an old tool shed with two small rooms attached. Each room had a wooden floor and was littered with old machines, dried out shoes and scraps of clothing lying about. No one knew who had lived and worked there. The roof was partially caved in and the whole structure covered by old pepper trees. Perfect for boys to explore, imagine what had gone on there and learn to avoid Black Widows lurking in dark corners. We had a corn crib too, though no adult could tell you the last time corn was grown on our place. Likely it was built before row crops when the valley was dominated by orchards and stock raised for food. Old ranches and farms are history books, recording the changes in technology, crop science and production and the pace at which people live. For boys, seeking out old abandoned spaces is delicious.

Cars, trucks and tractors littered our yard, always good for a drive. Bouncing up and down on the seats, yanking the wheel to and fro, grinding out motor noise, splattering spit all over the inside of the windshield while doing so, adding in screeching tire sounds while we cornered at hundreds of miles an hour, two wheels only, the dogs barking madly in paroxysms of joy, what could be better.

Hours of kick the can and prisoners base played until too dark to see, madly racing our bikes around and between the buildings, playing catch with baseballs thrown over the roof, bouncing on the tin roof and best of all playing in the irrigation ditches. The great adobe mud you could hold in your fist and squeeze between your fingers like slimy glistening worms.

Children don’t have to be taught how to navigate the dark. When dinner was done, we were shooed outside until bedtime. You soon learned that the dark was the same as daylight, everything was in the same place just hidden from view. You had to develop your other senses to navigate. We used to practice by walking around with our eyes closed, shuffling our feet forward like tentacles and waving our arms trying to feel obstacles in our path. Hide and go seek games could be played by moonlight by careful listening or the sense that something was moving in the shadows. Just us, together.

 

 

 

Written By Michael Shannon

Time is a human invention. We just made it up. It was for grown ups when I was little, though not in ways you might recognize today.

Cakes. My mom could make a great cake and she marked the passing of the years with them. Each year was a candle. She did this every year until she died. Your first perception, that passages were marked, came from these, those cakes with their ever increasing candles.

My dad had a wristwatch but he didn’t wear it to work. With his hands in the irrigation water or working around machinery it wouldn’t have lasted long. A lifetime of getting up with the cows was enough. Each day before dawn he would be sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cup warming those hands, listening to the mornings crop report on the radio. You might remember those old vacuum tube radios, a chocolate brown Bakelite case with a round dial for finding the station you wanted to listen to. The speaker was covered with a hard coppery fabric that looked as if it was made from WWII surplus torpedo nets. The whole thing was indestructible. It was  that particular time before the veil of planned obsolescence descended on us. If it quit, you could fix it yourself. Goodness, my dad knew how to build a radio. It’s what kids did in the 1920’s. If you recall all the prison camp movies of the world war, the americans always built a radio, almost literally from thin air. Sergeant Schultz could never find it either.

Time wasn’t defined by lines and figures on a clock face or by blinking blue numbers. Yes, you could listen to the Naval Observatory time hack beamed from WWV radio in Fort Collins, Colorado if you must know the exact time but other local factors did just as well.

The little schoolhouse we went to was about a mile from our house. Every school day, the teachers went into the hallway and pulled the bell rope at 7:30, signaling kids and parents all over the valley that it was time to get ready for school. The second bell warned that classes were about to begin. On Sundays we could hear the old churches in town pealing the call to prayer. Keeping time like this was essentially unchanged from the time in the 11th century when the first bell towers were built. Fifty years before I was born, you would have heard these bells pealing from the little schools all over the valley. Our school, Branch, was the last, as they took the bell tower down in the middle fifties. The same time that I got my first wristwatch, a for real, Davy Crockett.

At one o’clock sharp, the mail plane flying from the old army air field in Santa Maria toMcChesny Field in San Luis Obispo  passed over our farm, Douglas DC 3’s hauling the mail and telling the workers who ate in the fields that it was time to get back to work. It was, except for the crop dusting bi-planes, just about the only aircraft we ever saw. Not only did it tell time, but reminded us that there was a world far away that we had never seen. Occasionally a letter would come, written on a blue, folded, almost tissue paper thin envelope with an address from a far away place and we understood time could be measured, not just in minutes, but in distances. We imagined.

The SP ran just before the sand dunes in the little town of Oceano. The railroad still ran a full schedule of trains then. Freights, vegetables and passenger trains like “The most beautiful passenger train in the world,” the Coast Daylight that roared through the little town at two o’clock, the big orange and black GS-4 locomotive thundering past the old depot, the engineer laying on the steam whistle at the grade crossings. Grand Ave, Railroad Street, River Ave, 22nd St and all the other farm roads in the western valley. The steam whistle blasted the letter Q, Morse code, dot-dot-dash-dot for the “Queen’s” train. Some were musical artists in the way they caressed the pull rope, making the letter sing it’s lonesome song. These were ticks on the clock for us, marking time. The trains are still there, but the steamers are long gone and the diesels can only honk.

The most reliable clock we had was our tummy clock. Mom made our breakfast, dry cereal in the summer and “mush” in the winter. The winter breakfast rotated between Cream of Wheat and Quaker Oats. It seemed different every day, for our mother was of a generation that didn’t rely on the measuring cup. Sometimes it was slimy and starchy and maybe, dry and flaky, you just never knew. It set your clock for the day though. Wherever you were, playing in the yard, down the field, the creek or in the sheds, a growling stomach was a sure sign that you should run for the kitchen. Repeat for dinner.

Dad set our time too. He marked our clocks when he went out the back door to work, again at nine o’clock when he drove into town to get the Times and Examiner at Kirk’s Liquor. Sometimes we went too and he’d buy us a candy bar. Lunch came and went. They loaded the trucks and in the late afternoon he drove to the trucking company dock to unload. Our crops were then shipped overnight to the produce market in LA or SF. Checking the irrigation, moving the pipe, packing celery or broccoli, all steps around the daily clock.

We’ve grown up into a world where time is like a row of boxes that make up your day. This box at eight o’clock, that one at three. Time has sped up and at times is just a blur, like the windows on that passing Daylight. Right place, right time. I prefer the old way, it’s better for you.

Winter and summer, the sun tracked across the sky telling us the time by it’s angle above the horizon. My dad could tell time within a few minutes just by looking up.  We, his kids,  lived by daylight and the dark of night. Children run with a different set of hours. We weren’t yet tyrannized by the clock. Time was a vague and amorphous thing that still had little shape for us. In the winter we got up, ate, went to school and came home. In the summer, we got up, ate and then drifted from thing to thing like leaves on a pond, following the riffles of a breeze.

Michael Shannon is a World Citizen, Surfer, Sailor, Teacher, Builder and Story Teller. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California, USA. He writes for his children. 

E-Mail: Michaelshannonstable@Gmail.com

TWELVE HOUR TOUR

Chapter Eleven

THE MOUSE KING. Life in the Californias Oil Fields.

Written By Michael Shannon

The vast mouse army stirred in the grasses surrounding Tulare lake. A hurricane of life’s force filled the world of the southern San Joaquin.

Tulare Lake, in the great San Joaquin valley of California was once the second largest freshwater lake in the United States west of Lake Superior. It was fed by the magnificent rivers, born in the great Sierra to the east that flowed west into great basin at the foot of the valley. In the spring the lake was fed with the waters of the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers. Before the Isabella dam on the Kern river was built in 1953 they ran freely into the depression at the foot of the valley. One of three major seasonal lakes, Tulare was a major stopping place for migrant wildlife moving north and south through the inter-coastal region of California. Buena Vista lake, to the northeast of Taft was planted in wheat and corn as the lake diminished in the spring of each year.

Located just to the southwest were the oilfield towns of Taft, Ford City, Maricopa, McKittrick, Fellows and Reward. At the eastern foot of the Elk Hills, they comprised the greatest producing oilfields on earth. Once upon a time in the mid 1920’s over 7000 wooden derricks covered the landscape from Sunset (Southeast of Maricopa), through the Midway Valley, the Elk Hills to McKittrick and Reward, a distance of approximately 21 miles in Southwest Kern County. It was indeed a veritable forest of derricks.  From the Monkey boards at the top of an oil derrick the White capped Sierra Nevada seemed to be within touching distance in those days before pollution and smog. To the south, the Tehachapi’s and rounding to the west, the Temblor range.  Three quarters of a circle, verdant green east, sere and barren to the west, they enfolded a sea of oil derricks seemingly without end in the early part of the century.

There were modern rotary and old fashioned cable tool rigs by the thousands and my grandfather Bruce Hall was there to work them. He began his drilling career working for Associated oil in Casmalia California in 1919. By 1926 he was a veteran oilman. He had moved his wife, two daughters and six year old son to Taft, following the job. Now working for Barnsdahl Oil Company, he had risen to be a driller. Rope Chokers is a derisive term used for cable tool drillers by rotary drillers in areas where the two forms of oil well drilling were in competition. Rotary drillers were called swivel necks by the cable tool drilling people. Grandpa Bruce was an expert cable tool man and ran those rigs into the fifties for Signal Oil.

Maricopa about 1920

Writer, Michael Shannon. Arroyo Grande High School class of 1963

Thank you, wherever you are. I hope you are in a place where the very best of you go. You are certainly in my heart and my mind.

Ruth Teague was a teacher, specifically an English teacher at my high school, one of three that I had during the early 1960’s. The others were Mrs. Gladys Loomis, known as “happy bottom” in our house and Mrs. Francis, “Frankie” Campbell. “Happy bottom” was one of my dad’s little jokes as Vard and Gladys were among my parents closest friends. This was a happy circumstance for me because my mom could pull a string or two as I was chronically late with my writing. I would and did, jump from my fathers pickup and race to Mrs Loomis’s kitchen door, prop my missing report against it and race back, hoping to escape detection,  hoping to avoid any kind of embarrassment, if possible. Didn’t work though, as she would bring it up occasionally over the next fifty years. Always with a laugh though.

I had Mrs Teague three times, once for english and twice for Journalism. My most important memories of her was the journalism class. We published the school newspaper, known at the time as the Hi-Chatter. We  studied the art of communication through the written word. She taught all the usual stuff,of course, but thats not why I remember her. It was how she related to her students and particularly to me.

As a high school kid I was just so so as an academic. A college prep guy who worked just hard enough to get by with B’s and C’s. As with most kids I was unable to see the my future  as an adult. Not uncommon, of course, but one of the most difficult things to relate to, young people who see the future as perhaps a dream of someday.  Mrs. Teague took the time to try and relate in a way I could understand, what life would be like after high school. It didn’t go exactly as planned. Ending up a high school teacher myself was not something I would have imagined.

In the 1960’s, high school was as stratified as igneous rock, very hard, divided into distinct layers and easily identified by its structure. Freshman, trying to maintain as low a profile as humanly possible, sophomores who might have their heads just above the surface of social order, juniors as the lady in waiting, and seniors, cocks of the walk. The students lived in this well ordered world but never quite gave credit to the teachers who made it so. Big man on campus Terry might by the king athlete, or Fred, the academic wonder but they had no vote. Teachers ruled. The teachers word was law and if you didn’t do what you were told you might have to go to the office to see the principle. That, was not to be contemplated with any degree of comfort.  Mr. Douglas Hitchen was the dean of boys my senior year and nothing, and I mean nothing got by him. If you saw him coming, have your pass ready or else. Don’t try to grow a mustache, it got you a trip to his office. Senior boys once packed the senior bathroom in a protest over some minor issue and Mr Hitchen just stuck his head in the door, said not a word and we immediately vacated the premises with just a whimper. Tough guys, we were.

Someone I knew chalked a bad word on Mr Wells Smiths green board and then quickly wiped it off, when the teacher walked in, saw the shadow of the four letters, and immediately knew who the culprit was and sent him away for punishment. Like I said, they were in charge. We didn’t have conversations about divers things with them. They were adults, we were not. Respect was the order of the day. Today, even if you saw him do it, you’d still need forensic evidence to prove it because the kid would just say you were lying and it would be his word against yours. Case closed.

Mrs Loomis once said to me as I contemplated an english essay, “Mr Shannon, the answers are NOT on the ceiling.” I wished they were, but I didn’t look at the ceiling again. “They are not on Miss Nelson’s knees either.” No more knees.

Their pictures in my yearbook make them look very severe, but they weren’t really. As with all great teachers they cared for their students, well, most of them anyway. I’m sure they recognized those kids with whom they were simpatico.

Those three women are the reason I can put words in the proper order, organize a thought and possibly put the comma where it belongs. Couldn’t teach me how to diagram though, that, thankfully, is a torture device that has disappeared from academics. Mrs Teague sat me down once and said that the reason I could get away with being lazy, was that I read so much that I instinctively knew what went where. She gave me two pieces of advice. The first was to make the writing personal. As a high school sportswriter and a stringer for the old Herald Recorder that wasn’t really my job, to be personal, I was just supposed to interview a player and report the scores. Pretty dull stuff. In the movie Bull Durham Crash Davis gives Ebby LaLoosh some helpful advice on how to talk to sportswriters. The advice, of course, is to only talk in cliches, something you can see on ESPN every day. Honestly, not very interesting stuff. She said, “Make a connection between the reader and the material.” I’m seventeen, I think, this might just be rocket science and I’m no scientist. She also said, “People read quietly, they don’t read aloud. You must provide them with the material to build a world in their heads.” This of course was the norm in 1963, though reading quietly, as a habit was only a couple of centuries old. She explained this by saying that in the past, the written word was, not surprisingly, meant to be read aloud, which is why readings from the King James bible sound so much better pronounced from the pulpit.

While I’m thinking this, she gives me the second bit, “Carry a notebook and use it.” I still do. Many, many notebooks. Some I have, some are lost. A museum of them, written on every available surface, loose leaf , ring, padded, perfect, spiral, comb, sewn, clasp, disc, and pressured. Written in pencil, pen, marker, sometimes a piece of writing stapled in, little drawings, cartoons or just a word. Lists of books to read or books read, even, in this modern day, discs and thumb drives; though they are not remotely as satisfying as words on paper. Incomprehensible they are to you, dear reader, but they follow me like the cloud of dust around Pig Pen.

Some entries were made for reasons I no longer remember. Some are just plain odd, such as the two small newspaper clipping from 1975 that describe the voyage of the Can Tiki. A sailing raft made of empty beer cans or “Tinnies” as the Aussies would say, which two blokes sailed from Darwin to Singapore. I might use it someday, maybe.

My english teachers stressed the importance of reading and research. Mrs Teague would say, “Put something personal in your articles. People want to know the personalities not just the score. Personality endures, score is gone tomorrow.”

Though I knew them all as an adult person; saw them occasionally over the next 40 years, it’s what they said in a few short hours in a high school classroom that still counts. I tried to remember that effect when I became a high school teacher myself. Just a little bit of personal interest in a young persons life can cast a long shadow.

30

Cover Photo: Miss Ruth Williams (Teague), 1929 graduate of the Teachers College at San Jose, CA

Michael Shannon is a World Citizen, Surfer, Sailor, Teacher, Builder and Story Teller. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California, USA. He writes for his children.

E-Mail: Michaelshannonstable@Gmail.com

 

 

By Michael Shannon.

Being a surfer is like being in the Mafia, once you’re in you can never leave. In the 1960’s and 70’s it was the central pin around which my life revolved. I traveled to find waves, Mexico, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji and up and down the coast of California and Mexico. Surfing populations were still small, particularly in the early days. With just a few thousand surfers along the entire Pacific coast. You rarely surfed in a crowd, and when you did; why, they were all your friends. We traveled in groups, exploring anywhere we thought we might find good waves.  Long distance travel wasn’t common just yet. What travel we did was in our cars, usually someone else’s cheap old junker that only a kid would have the nerve to drive. The front row of the parking lot at Pismo was populated with old woodies from the forties and fifties and a collection of mom and dads cast-offs. Younger surfers arrived at the beach in packs, delivered by Mrs Carnate’s station wagon or Beth Fossaceca’s Studebaker. Gary and David McDonald left their boards at dad’s optometry office on old highway one next to the A & W. Bootsie could walk out on the deck of his house to check the waves.  There were no rich kids. I don’t recall anyone thinking that way, we were all democratic, money gave you no status and neither did education or family connections. Really, only one thing counted, did you want to surf. Pecking order was established by skill. At the beginning, before Gidget, if you knew someone who had been in the water for more than a year or two, you knew an old timer.

I can’t remember when I didn’t want to be in the water. Mom would take us to the high school pool in the summer when we were young and I never wanted to leave, When we were older she took us to the beach where she would rent those inflatable mats for us to play on, you remember, yellow on one side blue on the other. Wade out as deep as you could and then ride the whitewater. What a thrill for a 12 year old. When I entered high school surf culture was just beginning. Jon Macom, Ralph Miller, Larry Hill, Sehon Powers and John Steele made up a group who had been surfing for a bit in 1961 when I started shortly after my 16th birthday. They were one of a very small group of kids who hung out at the beach and rode surfboards. For some reason I was desperate to try it so I bought a used Velzy surfboard for twenty five dollars from Sheriff Mansfield’s son, loaded it in my car, and with my friends Andy Harp and Mike Senuik, went to the beach after school, ran down a stairway known as the thousand steps. actually less than a hundred, truth be told, and paddled out into the coldest, windiest and absolutely miserable surf you could imagine. A blustery winter afternoon. We really didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t surf an actual wave but we did get pushed around by the whitewater and even managed to stand up; briefly. So cold and miserable, wretched conditions, but I loved it and never looked back.

Pismo Beach 1961

That sort of existential excitement fades with time and responsibility. The standard of wave type grows narrow with experience, which is kind of sad. Maybe it’s not big enough, glassy enough or the water is too cold in March so the veteran may go home. The other day though, I sat in the Addie Street parking lot and watched as an old orange Datsun, that had seen much better days wheel into the lot and before it could come to a stop, boys were piling out, hopping around on one foot trying to pull their wetsuits on, frantic to get in the water. It resembled a circus clown car act. Yanking surfboards of the roof they jumped the seawall and ran into the surf. It was freezing cold, onshore and the waves were small, but they were stoked to the gills. That__is__surfing. Fundamental, visceral, the best. If those kids ever stop feeling that way, they are done.

My timing was perfect. The following spring, 1962, the Beach Boys released their first record and the sport became a nationwide phenomenon.  If you surfed you were suddenly “Cool,” even if you weren’t. Funny. My high school was still full of guys with Ducktails and Flattops.

As with all  surf spots, there were the locals. Kids you saw on a daily basis, checking out the waves and deciding if it was good enough to surf now, or maybe later, was it better at Saint Andrews, maybe Oceano, if the tide was out; perhaps a run down to Refugio or El Capitan. As boys will do, we would spontaneously take off for some distant place without giving it a thought. Who has a little gas money? Anyone who did could go. Maybe for the day to “C” Street in Ventura where the dirt parking lot right at the edge of the water had  some old telephone poles to keep the your front wheels from running over the edge and into the water. Or maybe the Rincon, the best surf in California, where you had to park right on the edge of the freeway, opening the drivers side door carefully so it wouldn’t be removed by cars and trucks whipping by, staggering the car with their blast of air and flipping a surfboard or two over the guardrail to the rocks below. We lived on hope, Twinkies and chocolate milk.

Nobody locked their cars. I didn’t seem necessary, there was little to steal. Except towels, yes towels. John Steele was the master towel thief, the back of his woodie was the home of a smelly pile, taken from anyone who was reckless enough to leave theirs on the hood of the car or hung on the handrail to dry. Johnny’s car was saturated with the odor of slowly moldering, still wet terrycloth, warm with decay at the bottom, not unlike the nuclear pile at the lab in Los Alamos. You could have extracted Penicillin from it. Jealously guarded, towels helped to stave of the bone chilling cold before wetsuits. Seawater at Pismo dips into the high 40’s in the winter. Walking with Harry Hoover down to the water, frozen sand crackling under our feet, Knee paddling out to the lineup using only our fingertips, anything to stay out of the water as long as possible. So awfully cold. In the font seat, motor idling, those old heaters going full blast trying to warm feet and hands which were literally purple with cold. Going to the Seaview for a cup of coffee after, eat a donut from the plastic case on the counter. All better now, right? A small price to pay for a wave.

In 1964 I made my first trip to Hawai’i, going home to Kailua on O’ahu with a college friend and spending the summer at Waikiki Beach. Richard got a job at McWayne Marine, owned by the then state Senator Hiram Fong and I worked part time for Nathan Napoleon at the Halikulani Hotel beach services in Waikiki. The two of us tooled around in a 1959 bug eye Sprite, which, if loaded with Nathan’s son Nihi hiding in the trunk, would agonizingly  make its way up the grade to and from the Tavares house in Kailua town, which was on the opposite side of the mountains from Honolulu. The old Pali road was a two lane switchback then, unlike the bustling freeway of today.

The  Hawaia’n families who ran the beach services at the hotels there were very old fashioned, get your hair cut short every week by the Japanese girl barber in the basement of the Reef hotel or else. This was my introduction to the scissor cut, dressed with a straight razor, so unlike the old barbers in Arroyo Grande, Kelly and Buzz, who hacked away with electric trimmers, in Buzz’s case, I’ m sure he used the same ones to trim the bushes at his house on West Branch Street.

Mr Napoleon, always mister, never Nathan, was a big man and a former California Highway Patrolman who had returned to the islands to take over his fathers business. The families that worked the beach had done so for generations and do to this day. I became a friend to his son and was welcomed into their home and a life I had never seen  in Arroyo Grande. I never saw a potato on that table, only rice . This was something entirely new. My only real experience with rice was Uncle Ben’s, hardly the sine qua non of the rice world. This spelled, then, the end of my meat and potatoes world. There were hundreds of ways to prepare fish, fruits that were so good they make your mouth water and they grew everywhere, bananas, passion fruit, papaya and mango ripe for the picking on every street corner. There is a saying in Polynesia that they had to invent war so they would have something to do besides sit around and eat. They weren’t far wrong. At my house you could step out on the front porch and pick fresh Papaya for breakfast. In the rear, banana trees. I once lived in a house in Makiki that had three Mango trees. There was so much fruit we had to haul it away in 30 gallon trash cans. We could not eat them fast enough.

Makiki, Oahu. 1967, The $100.00 Pepsi surf car.

On Waikiki, each day you put out the folding chairs, umbrellas, got the surfboards out of the lockers, put the paddle’s in the Koa wood outrigger canoes and helped pull the big Woody Brown sailing catamaran up on the sand to ready the day for the guests who would soon arrive. For me, the best part was an introduction to local culture and the people who made it so interesting. In the 60’s Hawaii was a segregated society. Whites ran the banks, big plantations, and shipping companies. The Japanese were state legislators, medium sized business and the labor unions. The Chinese were spread across most areas as they were the first immigrants to be brought to the islands in the 1840’s. The native Hawaiian’s worked labor jobs and were the police. Like many cities and states you could travel from one ethnic enclave to another where customs were as different as night and day. Growing up in Arroyo Grande in the fifties and sixties I never gave much thought to that kind of thing. Our little town was so small and the schools I attended so homogenous that it never occurred to me other kids where any different than me. I surfed with Filipino, Japanese, and Black kids every day at Pismo. On the islands it was Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Peruvians, Aussies, Brazilians, and South Africans, all these distinct cultures to learn about.

Surfing itself had little time for ethnic or national division then, there just weren’t enough surfers to make any place too crowded. Besides, I have always been fascinated by people who were unlike me.

In 1968, when I moved to the islands permanently, I left all my old surfing buddies behind. Five years after high school they were married or in college, following a career and the surf life gradually left behind, in most cases, for good.

For many years I lived a life most of them could only imagine. I had a house near Haleiwa on the North Shore of O’ahu at that time the destination surf mecca for the entire surfing world. Home of Sunset Beach, Wiamea Bay, The Banzai pipeline and other equally near perfect wave sites. There were few fall, winter and spring day where perfect warm water waves could not be found. I was a AFL/CIO union carpenter, made a good living and had a reasonable amount of time off in the winter. It rains a lot, so lots of days off.

Leaving in the dark for work made it difficult to know what the surf was like. You could hear it from my house and the number of decibels or the amount of ground shake gave you some idea of its size but the work day had to pass before you really knew. A sight never to be forgotten is the view out the windshield as you top the high saddle just north of the little town of Wahiawa and look down on Haleiwa bay, seeing the surf conditions for the first time that day. Excitement or disappointment being your lot. If it looked good it was just four miles downhill to my house, grab your trunks and a surfboard or two, it was necessary to have more than one to suit the

66179B Achiu Lane, Haleiwa.

many conditions you could encounter on your drive along the coast. Turn left from Achiu Lane onto Kam highway then drive through Haleiwa, past the IGA store, Country Surfboards, Matsumoto store where they had good Hawaiian style shave ice and could make you a custom shirt or pair of trunks, cross the old bridge over Anahulu Stream and then along Kamehameha Highway past the old Army Air Corps airfield past Jocko’s, Chun’s reef and Laniakea up to and around Wiamea Bay, turn off on Ke Nui drive, a dirt road actually, then a quick stop at the public access by John Steele’s house to check out the Pipe, Backdoor, Off the Walls and Log Cabins, maybe another drive to Stefan Schweitzer’s place to check Pupukea and Gas Chambers, then to Rocky Point and finally the bay at Sunset. I surfed them all. Not bad for a boy from cold, foggy beach break Pismo Beach I thought.

I recall paddling around the lineup at Sunset or Pipe thinking about the friends I had who had dropped out of surfing and wishing I might surf with them again. We had some good times in the water as teenagers. The camaraderie of a shared delight. Surfing is not a team sport. My high school coaches looked down on surfing as something that losers did. Regimentation is for football or baseball. It allows for the shared experience, but none of the, ” Do this, do that” of team sports. As kids our entire social experience in the surf world was what we did together by choice.

John Steele, Pupukea.

Besides the surf conditions  which had the effect of neutralizing the social aspect of being in the water together, surfing in Hawaii requires that you paddle constantly to stay in the spot that you must take-off from. There are currents everywhere resulting from the vast amounts of water moving around the surf itself. The area where the best location for catching a wave is pretty small and the currents push you around so you must work to maintain your position. Constantly looking towards the beach and watching the relative positions of houses on the shore in order to “line up” the proper spot to be in. You must keep one eye on the other surfers around you in order to judge their skill level, their familiarity with the surf spot, and aggressiveness, plotting the pecking order so you can be in the perfect spot. If you can lay a psych job on someone, all the better.

There is no thrill like being in the perfect spot for a takeoff at big Sunset, paddling hard, using all your skill to force your board to go fast enough to begin the free falling slide down the face of the massive wall of water. Once moving you can  hear the first sharp hiss of water against fiberglass as the board picks up speed and begins the run down the moving face of the water that can only be likened to a living thing. Sliding swiftly to the bottom and pulling a turn much like a fighter pilot does in a High G turn. Turning at the bottom, using the energy of the wave to fly up the face, and then the near weightlesness  as, near the top of the wave, you  snap the turn downward again. dropping to near vertical, heading down again, looking ahead, trying to gauge the exact moment to begin the run towards the end of the wave. There is no perceived sound, in the midst of all the movement and crashing of the wave behind you, you move in a bubble of silence. At Sunset, the last section of a good wave hooks back towards you as you approach and the timing needed to fly through the tunnel formed by thousands of tons of moving water arching up and over your head can only be learned by not making it out, smashed, tumbled and crushed by the self destruction every wave, ever, goes through. Adrenaline is addictive.

These swells are formed by winter storms in the Bering sea, three thousand miles northwest of Hawai’i. They are deep ridges of energy, each traveling as an underwater pulse, barely noticeable in the open ocean, just a ripple at the surface. An invisible wave, traveling over the north Pacific abyssal plain which averages over 14,000 feet deep. As this wave of energy approaches the Hawaiian Emperor Seamount, whose exposed mountainous tip form the Hawaiian Islands, the lower edge of the energy wave begins to drag along the shelving bottom of the sea forcing the excess energy to rise from the surface and form visible swells. What is unique about the North Shore of O’ahu is this shelving bottom rises very quickly, nearly four thousand feet in just a few miles. This forces the enormous amount of energy in a pressure wave straight up, as the drag on the bottom is so minimal that the wave can’t slow down but must rise. The water just offshore from the Banzai pipeline and Sunset beach is more than a thousand feet deep. These particular conditions are what creates such massive waves. The prevailing wind blows straight from the shore, perpendicular to the surf causing the wave to stand up longer making for nearly perfect surf conditions.

The term waterman wasn’t in common use in those days but we all certainly fit the bill. We dove the deep water off of south point on the big island. I could cast a throw net, a beautiful thing, hand made of the finest line used to catch reef fish in the early mornings and evenings when the sun was off the water. We sailed. We sailed the islands for no other reason than to see what was over the horizon. Polynesia invites you in. The ancient Hawaiians were a water culture and it always seemed strange to me that people who lived there worked in high rise buildings and wore suits to work.

You had to be a strong swimmer because in the 1960’s and 70’s no one wore a leg rope in large waves. A wipeout meant a swim to the beach to retrieve your board. The more chances you took, the more you swam and it wasn’t just the swim itself, no, you had to stay in the whitewater to get to the shore. Crashing in a wave can be rough enough but the act of getting to shore can be just as perilous. White water, or the broken wave itself can be many feet deep, a churning, spinning whirlpool where, as it goes over you, can pick you up and completely disorient you. It goes dark, the water over your head is suddenly not a foot deep, but ten or fifteen feet deep, increasing the pressure in your ears to painful levels. Your arms and legs are yanked and pulled away from your body, you can be not only held under for minutes but sometimes held against the coral bottom, unable to move because of the water pressure as it rolls over you. When you surface, if you’ve been down long enough the next wave is likely to be breaking right on top of you.  Luckily each wave that passes over, pushes you in towards the beach. A small section of a wave of these dimensions weighs hundreds or thousands tons and. its all moving adding to the dynamic. Add that the wave itself is rushing at 15 to 20 miles and hour toward shore and you, the surfer can be moving as fast as 30 mph. So, moving in at least three different directions at once you must know your business. The good part  is that the better you get the less likely you will have to experience the long swim in. The question has always been, are you strong enough, can you hold your breath long enough, can you swim, are you loose enough. As a friend was wont to say, “Don’t______Be______Afraid.”

On the other hand, the water is warm, low eighties in the winter during surf season. The offshore breeze is always balmy and fresh. Friends with a common interests are all around you. Nobody I ever knew talked like Jeff Spicoli or Ted Logan. That part of surfing is a commercial construct. Avoid it all costs.

Lest you think that it’s too dangerous don’t forget that women do it.There weren’t many women surfers in the late sixties and early seventies but they were about to break out in a big way.  My friend Sally Prange started surfing big Sunset in the seventies and went on to be one of the best women surfers in the world. I’ve always admired her for that. Not easy in the face of a male dominated sport filled with aggressive, ego driven men. Part of the social fabric of the north shore, she practically grew up in the water. You are surrounded by it. It would be hard to avoid.
Sally Prange, Sunset Beach.

What I have learned is to become a citizen of the places you travel. Meet the local people, eat the local food, speak the language, immerse yourself in the culture and you will find that people everywhere have the same cares and needs. There are museums and libraries full of books on any place you might live. Nothing will seem strange if you do your homework. Eat Poi, the two fingered kind for me, Lomilomi Salmon, Swordfish Sashimi, pit cooked pork, pipi kaula, Portuguese sweetbread, malasala, and the semi-official state food, Spam. Spam, a million ways to cook it, one for each culture. I’ve lived with Egyptian Muslims, Samoan Catholics, Fijian Hindus, Japanese Buddhists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses and I’ve found that the basic tenants of each religion are faith and caring. We all got along just fine. It’s not necessary to make someone over into your own image.

My mom and dad at that kitchen table where I grew up never seemed to, nor want to understand what I did. It might have been the Lassiez Faire way we were raised. They seemed content to let us find our own way and didn’t plant many road blocks. Maybe that was all in my own mind, my dad wasn’t emotional, at least not visibly. There are only one or two times when I saw him shaken by an event. I don’t think my father ever asked me one question about surfing or traveling and I always felt he was disappointed in my choices. He always said that you “could live your life in San Luis County and never see all there is to see.” He once asked me, “what is it that you do over there?” But he wasn’t really interested in an answer. A determined child is difficult to sway. Remember the Norman Rockwell painting “Breaking Home Ties?” The boy, with his chin up looks to the future and the father, leaning, his elbows on his knees, looks the opposite direction, into the past. It’s my favorite Rockwell. It perfectly illustrates the severing of  home ties and the infinite promise of the young.

The prevailing wisdom then was that surfers had no ambition. They lived day to day, not caring about tomorrow. They let their hair grow, they didn’t wear shoes, they in dressed funny, clothes  from thrift stores for goodness sakes. Look at the cars they drove, junkers and hand me downs. The local paper even published an article with a list of words or phrases used by surfers. It explained each one in all seriousness. The problem was, they all came from Hollywood movies, made up by screenwriters and were almost never used by people I knew. It would have been embarrassing for us.

We were, and are, real people, just like you. We had jobs. My neighbors in Haleiwa were professionals, a nurse, a stockbroker, an eventual university professor. On one side a anti-war activist, on the other, a Vietnam veteran brought together by a common bond. Writers, photographers, surfboard builders; roofers, architects, international dealers in Persian rugs, airline stewards and engineers. The principle of Sunset Beach Elementary school surfed. I have a friend who is an internationally renowned marine geologist. We were all young and living in that wonderful place. Our bond was the water.

Sometimes living that life was almost too wonderful to believe and I wished I could share it with those whom I started out with in foggy, cold and flat Pismo Beach. Surfers would just pull up to the beach and sit, drinking it all in. The soft Hawaiian breeze, The sparkling sand with the keiki frolicking in the shore break where a tourist from Iowa might drown, the endless sky peppered with towering cumulonimbus clouds drifting down from the Koolaus, the brah’s, doing the same as you. Because of those, as I waited and watched  the approaching walls of water, pushing themselves high and higher as the rushed  towards me, I would say to myself, this one is for you Terry, you Andy, and for you Phil. All yours baby.

Clockwise from upper left: John Steele, Pupukea.  Mike Shannon, Sunset. Mike Shannon Sunset, Jock, Sunset, Vance Akinaka, Honolua. 

Thousands of surfers have explored every corner of any ocean or sea where there might be waves. We’ve trekked into the farthest reaches. It’s not a life anyone would forget. Yes, there are famous professional surfers and those that have made millions by advertising and exploiting the business but the world of surf is still and will always belong to the the not-famous who did it for the adventure. 

Terry Bailey, a Pismo Beach boy lost in the far reaches of the south Pacific. Tuitila, Western Samoa.

Dedicated to Phil Harwick, Lifelong friend, surfer all around good guy, Rest in Peace Brother. 

Read William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days, a surfing life”  It’s a great book. Published by     Penguin Press, N.Y. 2015

…And Susan Casey’s “The Wave” Doubleday, N.Y. 2010

Michael Shannon is a writer and lifelong surfer.