Near the end of the film “A river runs through it,” Norman Maclean tells his friend Jessie Burns that he has been offered a job as an english professor at the University of Chicago. Jessie’s whole face lights up and she says “Oh Norman, that’s the berries!” For the first time you know she is in love with him. The delightful rendering of this simple phrase is one of my favorite movies scenes because, to me, it not just a scene in a film, but a fully rendered and perfect example of a phrase no longer used by anybody but my Uncle Jackie.

John Patrick Shannon was born of John William “Big Jack” Shannon and Annie Gray, nee Shannon in 1909. Little Jackie was their first child and remained for the rest of her life, Annie’s favorite. Not to say she didn’t love her son George, for she surely did,  but the love of a mothers heart goes to the needy one and George was never that. Raised on the ranch the boys never lacked for something to do, for a ranchers life is one of constant work. Cattle and crops do not respect the days. Milking and feeding is done relentlessly, twice a day seven days a week. Church and school demand time but the work swirls around them and draws you in. The land and its needs create a universe of its own.

Annie Shannon and little Jackie in 1910

Jackie was 9 when my grandparents moved to their ranch south of Arroyo Grande and he was introduced to a life he would never leave. He and George grew up in a world that is hardly remembered today. They lived, until High school in a four room house that had no electricity, and for the first part of their time there, no inside plumbing. Cooking was on a wood stove in the kitchen. Bathing was done Saturday night, once a week in a washtub filled with water heated in the reservoir of that old stove. My grandmother bathed first, then my grandfather and the two boys in order of age. Same water for all.

The Old House in 1919

I suppose today you might call that old house just a shack and if you judge by todays standards it was, but my family never saw it as such. There were nicer houses in town but the size of a house has nothing to do with with whether its a home or not. In the early part of the 20th century boys were pretty much on their own to find things to do and I still remember the old cages the boys built to house their collection of animals they trapped and raised. They had squirrels, raccoons, mice and almost any other varmint they could trap or catch. They roamed the ranches of their neighbors looking for adventure as little boys will do, digging in the caves of Mt  Picacho for pirate treasure, visiting the Fernamburg boys who lived where the Leticia Winery is now or seeing the Buss kids who lived on another ranch up behind the mountain.

Jackie and George went to the old Arroyo Grande Grammar School on Bridge Street.  Every day they caught a ride with the Buss kids and rode in the back of the buckboard. Its not as if there were no cars, for of course, there were, but a horse on pasture and an old spring wagon did just as well and was far cheaper. The old school had horses tied up until well into the 1920’s.  Other times they walked the 2 miles to school. When the highway was paved with asphalt they had roller skates to get to school. They would wait for Fritz and Shorty to race down Shannon Hill, meeting them where the old ranch road met the highway and then skate to school.

As it is today, much of the persona is shaped by the experience of youth. Jackie started high school in in 1923. Though Arroyo Grande was a very small town, far from anywhere, newspapers and movies brought the culture of the Roaring Twenties home. My grandfather paid to have electricity extended from town to the ranch in 1922. He needed to be able to operate the new machines that enabled him to operate his dairy more efficiently. Interestingly, he didn’t pay to have the wire strung to the house which was several hundred yards away. I once asked my dad what my grandmother must have thought of this, seeing that her household chores would have been lightened and my dad said, “She was used to doing things the way they were.” The most influential thing that electricity brought was the radio. Of all the changes radio brought to the Shannon’s, live music, drama, instant news and a much more expanded world view, the one thing that ultimately was passed down to me was the language of the time.

The twenties was one of the most socially revolutionary in our history. Skirts were going up for women, morals, down.  Popular music began to reflect the beginnings of Jazz, and F Scott FitzGerald and Ernest Hemingway were giving voice to a new age. The art world, couture, and nearly all aspects of popular culture were reacting to the events of the World War. A generation  was inventing its own language and customs.

Uncle Jackie Shannon’s HS graduation picture 1928

I graduated Arroyo Grande in 1963. My dad in 1930 and although I thought at the time that my dad was hopelessly old fashioned he told me stories that taught me that the more we seemed different the more we were the same. There might, and I stress the might, have been one pregnant girl in my high school class. There were several in my dads class. Thank goodness they are all gone now or I couldn’t say that without getting myself in trouble. Those girls seemed hopelessly staid in the old pictures but my dad told me that girls wouldn’t wear “shimmies” under their dresses and when they stood in the sunlight you could see right through them. He claimed that imagination was the sexier thing and short skirts left too little to the imagination. Theirs was the first generation to have automobiles and all that meant. It was prohibition and it was in full swing here. Remember both my uncle Jack and my dad “ran the milk wagon” delivering to homes and all, and I mean all the businesses from Shell Beach and throughout what is now know as the five cities. They delivered to the speaks and the “houses” where the working girls lived. My dad told me  how the girls used to tease my uncle Jackie. No one thought too much about a 14 year old boy driving the milk truck with his 12 year old brother standing on the running board. Except the state of California.

When I was born my uncle Jack was 36. When I was old enough to know him well he sprinkled his conversation with words and phrases that I was unfamiliar with and it wasn’t until I was more educated did I begin to realize that what I was hearing was the sound of a time gone by. Both he and my dad would describe something unusually good as the “berries.” I was pleased to hear the phrase spoken in the film because it was delivered with such enthusiasm and delight, exactly the way it was meant to be. “If you knew your onions, it didn’t take cheaters to spot a four flusher. You could ankle down to the bakery and put up the mazuma to buy your tomata a sinker and a cuppa joe. If a sheik tried to fork over a wooden nickel you’d know it was bushwa.”

He peppered his speech with words like those all of his life and we learned them because as a lifelong bachelor, my brothers and I were in a way his children. He loved us and took us exploring all over the county. We climbed Eagle Rock together, explored the Nacimiento and the creeks all around. We explored the pirates cave on Mt Picacho, swam in the pool at big falls and had divers other adventures. We learned about his life.

My uncle Jack never married. Perhaps time stopped for him. He lived at home with my grandparents until my grandmother Annie died in 1977. The ranch was sold in 1980 . When he retired and I went to visit him I noticed an old photograph on his bedside table. It was a girl dressed in 20’s style. I asked him who it was and he said, “Oh, you don’t want to know about that.” I should have insisted. I wish I had.

The phone rang. Nancy was still at work, I told the caller. She explained that she was calling from the rest home where Nancy’s aunt Edie had lived her final years and she needed to know where to send her personal possessions. With no one at home , I told her it would be fine to send them here and we would take care of them. She thanked me and rung off.

Not thinking too much about it I let it slip my mind until two weeks later a small box about the size of your kitchen toaster arrived on our doorstep. Seeing by the address it was the promised package, I set it aside for Nancy to open.

Aunt Edith Green, or aunt Edie as she was called was the sister of Nancy’s grandmother, Hilda. She was one of those semi-obscure maiden aunt’s that used to populate families, particularly in the decades after WWII. I had my own aunt Iva Jean Fee, my aunt Anna and my Uncle Jack Shannon, all of whom never married. I’ve always thought that in small towns, if you don’t marry young, the pickings are slim to none as you grow older. Spinsterhood becomes a habit, not by choice, but by lack of opportunity.

After our little boys were snug in their beds we sat down at the kitchen table and slit the tape holding the box closed and looked inside to see what might be the accumulation of a long life. Sorting through the box we found some old costume jewelry, a hand tatted lace handkerchief and at the bottom a pack of old and yellowed letters and post cards bound up carefully with a narrow maroon ribbon tied in a neat bow.

Today, no one writes personal letters and written communications has devolved to emoticons, tweets, less than 140 characters if you please, and the occasional e-mail. Phone calls are quick but are lost to history upon “hanging up,” a phrase itself soon to disappear from our lexicon. So why would a person  who was 97 years old, keep letters in a small box and carry them from London, where she was born, to Vancouver Canada in 1919 and finally to Santa Monica where she spent the rest of her life.

“Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or precious things that are not looked for.” That definition of serendipity perhaps explains how aunt Edie’s precious letters ended up with me. Of course, they had to be given to Nancy’s mother as the closest living relative. Anne  was momentarily  interested  in them but soon confined them to a remote and seldom opened drawer where they were to reside for another 25 years.

Those letters are a treasure which has been  the key to unlocking one of the many threads that make up the generational stories that bind a family’s history together. What about this and how about that; and why?  For the letters, so carefully preserved were written by Edith’s younger brother Edgar who served with the Australian Imperial Forces or AIF in WWI. His Battalion, the 4th of the 15th Regiment fought throughout the Dardanelles campaign, or Gallipoli as it is more commonly know in the United States.

In the penultimate scene,  the movie Gallipoli portrays the horrific battle of the Nek fought against the Turks on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Australian and New Zealand troops, in attempting to close on the turkish trenches are sent forward into  withering machine-gun fire and are slaughtered. The letters from Edgar connect us with this singular event as he was there and wrote of it to his sister.

The letters and post cards connect us to Edgar and that family. They chronicle events. from his enlistment in 1915 until the end of the war. This little event, the opening of a postal parcel has opened a window on the life of our entire family. Things unthought of, things unseen and an opportunity to look back on events in our family lost for a more than a century.

Port Said, May 31st, 1915 Edgar’s port of embarkation

Off to Gallipoli.

Written by Michael Shannon

April 1st, 2024

James, you asked about the great grasshopper invasion of San Luis County. My mom took this photograph on the ranch. It’s Lester Falk holding a prize hopper, the one that didn’t get away. It was very difficult to hit them because they were jumped all over the place and you had to be very good at making a moving shot. You can see he used a 30-30, as a twenty-two slug wouldn’t do the job; the small slug couldn’t penetrate the exoskeleton of the grasshopper.

Exoskeleton, Lester would have laughed himself silly over that word. You see, he never went to school, at least not enough to read and write and words were like a foreign country to him. A very distant foreign country to boot.

His family was “Tractored Out” of Oklahoma in the thirties. They came out to California in ’37, everything they had on the back of a Model T flatbed truck, Grandma, husband, wife and three boys, Frank and the twins, Lester and Chester mixed in with the chairs, mattresses, and the detritus of a failed life. They were considered “no account” in Oklahoma and maybe worse in California. One of thousands of defeated families who would be the models for the Joads.

They were proud though, pride was all they had and they new the meaning of work. It was the only currency they had. That’s all my dad cared about; the work. People have forgotten that everyone was part of the depression. They were all in it up to their necks, particularly the farmers. My dad was no exception. He saw Lester, Lek as he was called, hanging around the Greyhound bus depot on Branch St in the summer of 1939. He was standing there, didn’t have a crown in his hat, broken down old shoes, pasteboard in the soles, his old shirt was torn. Dad needed hands that day and he asked him, “Done any farm work?” He said “Yeah, I have.” Dad asked, “could he drive a truck?” Lester said, “Well, I drove a truck over thar in Maricopa, in them oil fields.” “Well, you want to try and go out and help me?” He said he would. “Had any breakfast? “No” he said, “ain’t had no supper neither.” Dad took him over to Mutt’s cafe and told them to fix him up with breakfast and a lunch. He said that he had some overalls and maybe some old shoes he could wear and put him in the truck and took him out to the ranch. In a week he were showing the others a new way to go.

Skinny he was, couldn’t of weighed more than 150 pounds but he could work like a son-of-a-gun. Smart too, he could fix any kind of machinery, “make ’em go” as dad said. My dad had a university degree; an intelligent, educated man, he could do figures too, he used to figure out things like how many gallons of water it would take to cover all of California a foot deep. Really; he did, just pencil it out on the back of some old envelope he had on the kitchen table. He wasn’t a mechanical man though. How physical things like machinery worked was beyond him. He could turn a nut ok, but the inner workings of a transmission were as mysterious as the mountains of the moon. A boy like Lester, he said, “just goes to show you that an education can’t teach you everything thats important.” “That boy couldn’t read or write but he could take a tractor apart and put it back together blindfolded.” he said, “he could invent ways to do things, just give him an acetylene tank and a couple bucks to spend at the junk yard and you would get a piece of machinery that would cut your work in half.”

I can understand that. I’m smart enough but I was always pretty indifferent in school, noodled my way through with the help of my mothers teacher friends Frankie Campbell, Gladys Loomis and Ruth Teague. Not to forget Mrs. Otsugi. But I can turn a wrench, and I can see every part of a house and how they go together without even closing my eyes. The stories about Lester always made sense to me. Even as a boy, I was always making something, a fort, a boat to put in Arroyo creek and dozens of projects that only farm boys can do.

So Lester worked for my dad for five years until ’42. He was just 21 when they called him up and sent him off. Remember, he was smart and when he told them he couldn’t read or write, he figured they’d just let him go. They didn’t though, they put him in school. He still figured they’d let him go if he wouldn’t learn; but they didn’t. They said, “riflemen don’t need to read and we know you can shoot.” Lester still thought he could figure a way out. He survived the battles for Sicily. He fought with the Texans up the spine of Italy. They told my dad that he tried eating soap on the way to the landings at Anzio hoping he wouldn’t have to go ashore in that awful place. He  just knew he could find a way home.

But he didn’t. They killed him in Normandy. He’s still there.

Lester was just eighteen when the picture was taken.  My dad had the grasshopper stuffed then, and for many years it would turn up as a gag gift at house warming parties around Arroyo Grande. Kenny Talley and I used to play with it when his folks lived on McKinley Street. I think Oliver and Hazel gave it to John and Nancy Loomis when they moved out to the  house on the Tar Springs ranch. I last saw it on a shelf in Chris’s Saloon. Don’t know where it is now.

As the song said, “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”

Have a great April First.

Michael Shannon works and lives in Arroyo Grande California and was fortunate enough to be born on April Fools Day. On Easter Sunday to boot and in a Catholic Hospital attended by the Poor Claires from Ireland. What a great start to life.

I heard a story told, perhaps apocryphal, that at a dinner party Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, asked each person at the table to recount an encounter with some historical event or character within two generations of the present. She said “She wished to show how people are connected to well known events in history.”

 Alice Roosevelt about 1900

Her story illustrated the basic truth of the proposition. She said that an old gardener employed on her family’s estate “Oyster Bay” had been a rifleman in the Continental army and had rowed George Washington across the Delaware river to attack the Hessians in Trenton New Jersey on December 26, 1776. Her father knew the man when he was a youth and the old man recounted the tale of that cold and stormy night. So here you have a quite ordinary man participating in a historic event which Alice said went to prove her point.

In a personal example, one of my closest friends father was the roommate of Lt. Gerald R. Ford,  the future president. They served together on the carrier Monterey in the Pacific during WWII.

My grandfather Jack Shannon was raised in Arroyo Grande. As a teenager he ran away from home several times, finally making good his escape when he was 17. The stories he told of his journey across the country, riding the rails, working a cattle boat from New Orleans to Key West and his adventures as a roustabout in the circus delighted us kids when we were little. He could tell a great story too. Never having gone to high school, which was common for boys in the 1890’s and footloose as could be, he finally made it out of Arroyo Grande, taking the train across the country to New York city.

Jack Shannon at 18.

Both his mother and father’s family had relatives to introduce him to city life. This was in 1900 and New York was a rip roaring place, particularly to a boy from rural Arroyo Grande. At home, the streets weren’t paved, there were no street lights as electricity had not yet made its way here. Imagine how dark it was at night. The big city held wonders for a country boy that perhaps he couldn’t have imagined. That year the largest city in america had a population of over 3.4 million. Arroyo Grande township which included Nipomo to the Santa Maria river and Pismo, Halcyon and Oceano was just 3,319, why in New York entire tenements held more people than that.

Arroyo Grande and The Bowery, New York, 1900

“The Gilded Age” it was called after a book by Mark Twain which satirized the period as a time of abject poverty gilded with a thin veneer of gold. New York. The majority of laborers families lived in tenements. Sections of the city were noted by the dominance of immigrant groups. Hells Kitchen on the lower west side and the old five points area of Manhattan where gangs such as the Bowery Boys, Whyo’s, and Five Points gang still ruled. Both heavily immigrant Irish. Upon arriving in New York City, most immigrants found themselves moving into the Lower East Side of the city. Most notably the East Village, Astor Place, Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), Alphabet City, the Five Points, Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Bowery. These neighborhoods were crammed together in the area bordered by Fourteenth Street on the north, Broadway and Pearl Street to the west, Fulton Street to the south, and the East River to the east. How different than Arroyo Grande could you get. Part of lower Manhattan was called the “Tenderloin” after a comment  by New York Police Department Captain Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams, who  gave the area its nickname in 1876, when he was transferred to a police precinct in the heart of “Hells hundred acres.”  Referring to the increased amount of bribes he would receive for police protection of both legitimate and illegitimate businesses there – especially the many brothels – Williams said, “Boys, I’ve been having the chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force, and now I’m going to have a wee bit of the tenderloin.”

The name became a generic term for a red-light district in an American city; San Francisco, California is among the other cities having a well-known “Tenderloin District”.

In mid-town the mansions of the rich were built cheek by jowl along fifth avenue. The John D Rockefeller’s, J P Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Jay Gould and the Cornelius Vanderbilts had enormous piles of stone along the exclusive area known then as “millionaires row.”

The Cornelius Vanderbilt home 5th Avenue and 72nd St, New York

My grandfather first took classes and then worked as a trainer at the MacLevy gymnasium on Henry St,  Brooklyn Heights in New York. The gymnasium was located in the old Saint George hotel, at the time advertised as the largest hotel in the world. Professor Levy as he called himself almost single-handedly invented the physical fitness culture as we know it today. He invented the first exercise machines and marketed them to the public. His rowing machines are still sold and the MacLevy company survives today as a manufacturer of gymnasium equipment. At the time my grandfather worked there he had three locations, one in Manhattan, one on Long Islands north shore and the Saint George.

The hotel had a huge heated salt water pool in the basement. Mac Levy invented a machine to aid in teaching swimming which, at the time, was not a common skill for city people. Several ferry and ship disasters in the New York area were exacerbated because hundreds of people drowned who couldn’t swim or otherwise they might have been saved. Classes were always full.

Hotel St. George – Clark Street – Brooklyn New York

Numbers of the wealthy and influential flocked to the gymnasium to learn the latest techniques in good physical and dietary health. Some of the most famous thespians, athletes and business owners of the day were customers. Consider that Charles Delmonico owner of Delmonico’s restaurant, at the time considered the best in New York and the place to be seen was a customer. He credited Mac Levy with saving his life. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer who owned the most influential newspapers in the world were habitués.

Hearst and Pulitzer

Former holder of both the world boxing championship and the last bare knuckle champion John L. Sullivan, “The Boston Strong Boy,” who had famously said “I can lick any son-of a-bitch in the house,” and proved it too, was often in the gym. Lillian Russell, the most famous actress of her day and her ” friend” Diamond Jim Brady were customers.

                          John L Sullivan  and   Lillian Russell

By 1903, Jack was working at the gymnasium in Manhattan. He was an instructor in gymnastics and even as an old man could still do one handed pull and push ups. Jack sent these two pictures below to my future grandmother Annie Gray in Arroyo Grande who was still in high school and she pasted them in her memories book.

Jack was held in high esteem by MacLevy and was featured in a book published by the entrepreneur in 1904.

By 1905 he was back on the west coast in San Francisco, living across the bay from my grandmother who was attending the University of California at Berkeley. They married in 1908, had two boys and later on three grand children who were always greeted by my grandfather with the phrase “there are my blessed boys” and you were invited to “shake the hand of the man who shook the hand of John L Sullivan.” No small thing when you consider that at the end of the 19th century John L was easily the most famous sportsman in America.  My grandfather loved to tell stories and this was one of his favorites and we loved it.  A family’s history is passed down the generations in oral form as it has always been. It’s the thread that connects John L Sullivan to me and mine.

    John L Sullivan the last bare knuckle champion of the world.

Michael Shannon writes about his family which is full of characters. The stories are to inform his children of where they come from.