By Michael Shannon

CHAPTER THREE

1899

Arroyo Grande Oracle: The Arroyo Grande High School class of ’99 will have no commencement this year. Arrangements were being made for the affair and undoubtedly it would have been a grand affair and would certainly have obliterated much of the ill feeling towards the school by our neighbors who dominate the school’s board of control. Certain comments by students and faculty in the Herald caused the ceremony to be declared off by Willis Buck, chairman of the Board of Control. Buck was quoted as saying, “If the students and teachers are not willing to work to build up the school they cannot blame those who are prejudiced for trying to wreck the institution and cause disbandment of the High School district.” Hypocrisy at its grandest, say we.

The Oracle, voice of the Republican party in Arroyo Grande published by Pete Olohan, Saloon keeper, was quick to place the blame.. The Oracle, spinning the coming closing of the school as somehow being the fault of the students and the staff who knew they would be out of a job come June. No one was going to teach at the salaries they were being offered and no one would apply to fill the vacant teaching jobs. The school would be effectively closed. The “Wreckers” put up a smokescreen blaming the blameless and not the miscreants themselves. Why do that? Politics is not a new invention by any means.

The graduates, misses Edith Jatta and Edna Conrad, who would become a teacher in Los Osos, Edith Carpenter and the two young men, the red haired Archer “Arch” Beckett whose father owns most of the western Arroyo Grande district which runs from the sea to the Methodist camp and is an opponent of the High School and Albert Ore who will Study at St Mary’s college to become a pastor. All will receive their diplomas from Principal A. F. Parsons at their homes on Saturday. This could quite possibly be the last class to ever graduate from Arroyo’s high school.

The winsome Miss Edna Conrad, Arroyo Grande High School, class of 1899. Family photo

And so it looked to be, at least for a while.The classes of 1900-1904 were likely to be canceled for lack of funds. Next, the schoolhouse where the high school classes were being held promptly burned down. Less than a month after the board of control apparently ensured the closure of the high school, the building where all classes were taught was destroyed. Now wasn’t that a piece of serendipity. The “Wreckers” were having all the luck.

Arroyo Grande Herald: Oct. 14, 1899. At 3 o’clock this morning the public school building here was completely destroyed by fire, only a very small portion of the furniture being saved.

The Arroyo Grande Union School, 1898. It was the largest building in town and citizens took great pride in it. San Luis Obispo Historical Society.

The loss is estimated at $ 11,00.00 and the building was only insured for $ 7,500.00. The pupils of the school lost all their books, etc. The cause of the fire is said to be a stroke of lighting, but there are some who strongly hint at incendiarism. There is no probability of the fire being caused by a stove in the building as none had been lit since last winter. Principle Parsons stated that all coal-oil lanterns had been extinguished at the end of the day. The schools lightening rod was found in the wreckage, undamaged. Lightning is a very rare occurrence in Arroyo Grande and this raises serious questions. There was no chance to save the building and the walls soon fell in. There is still $ 2,500.00 due on the bond issued to build the school just six years ago.

San Luis Obispo Tribune: Cambria has the wheel craze once more. There are quite a number of new wheels recently purchased and now it boasts over thirty within the city itself, then there are a great many on the outside. It is rumored that the war has caused even some people to have wheels in their head. But we don’t believe that.

On an outing, 1899. National Archives Photo.

The Board of Control was now faced with a problem unanticipated. Luckily, the citizens of the town were quick to rally around the school. A meeting was called for the evening of the 18th at the Good Samaritan’s Hall where over four hundred dollars ($14,780.00) were pledged. The County Schools Superintendent, Mr. Messer spoke and assured the crowd that the county would beg, borrow and steal to provide books and school supplies. William Ryan offered rooms in his hotel for classrooms. The Good Samaritan Hall, The Library and the Union Hotel* also donated space. Classes would be held in the Columia Hall too. A call was put out for all the benches, chairs and tables that citizens could spare. The planned re-opening would be in just ten days.

The Good Samaritan Hall. Site of the High School and Temperance Meetings. SCHS photo. Note that Arroyo Grande had few sidewalks just before the turn of the century and those were wooden. Branch Street was a dusty and muddy place.

Within a week the Board of Control, in a public meeting discussed plans for building a new school house. Public speakers wanted a new building and were suspicious the “Wreckers” on the board would seek to delay rebuilding. Patrick Moore, who owned three rock quarries offered to donate enough stone and the labor to put up the building without charge. Public speakers supported this but the majority of the board voted it down, saying the process would take too long. Within a few days, overheard in Pete Olohan’s saloon, a meeting of the “wreckers” was overheard saying that Olohan had plans to open a brickyard at his property on Bridge Street and it was said that he planned to put Patrick Moore’s quarries out of business.* Without a doubt this news quickly became fodder for discussion around town and further turned public opinion against Willis Buck and his gang. If Pat Moore took note of it, he never said.

Arroyo Grande Recorder: Died: Egan, near Arroyo Grande, Thursday May 19th, Mary Agnes beloved wife of W H Egan a native of Londonderry, Ireland aged 27 years. (Childbirth)

The board decided that using the blueprints from the burnt school would be the most expedient way to begin. Expedient yes, but in 1899 the plans for a building were rudimentary at best and the builders were quite competent in putting up a structure without them. Two of the quarry stone buildings built over the next three years were built using the simplest of sketches numbering two or three pages at most. There would have been a set of simple dimensions, notes on the location of the foundation and perhaps two or three elevations showing the eventual look of the building.

The Reverend Bell of the First United Methodist church who had designed the church on Branch Street was chosen to update and modify the burnt school’s blueprints.

The First United Methodist Church, Arroyo Grande. Photographer unknown.

A call for bids was posted. Builders from counties north and south responded with estimates on the cost of putting up a new school. David Blosser of Santa Maria who came in as the lowest bidder has relinquished his right to claim the contract, stating that he forgot to figure the cost of plastering and that he must withdraw. Will Terry was the next lowest bidder but the board decided to award the contract to William Smith of San Luis Obispo.

Arroyo Grande Herald: John Poole who lives near the Branch School house, has been very ill for several weeks. Thursday he was operated on by Dr’s Norton and Paulding who found a large cancerous growth in his side. The size of the growth is of such a character that there is no hope for him.

Smith took the job in hand and quickly order redwood lumber from the mill in Cambria. Oak floors were ordered from San Francisco and would be shipped down by train along with window sashes, kegs of nails, and roofing materials. Stains and paint were supplied by local hardware stores.

Arroyo Grande Herald: Born to Mr and Mrs. JW Bennett, April 17th, a son. Bennett, a son, died, near Arroyo Grande, April 19th, Aged 2 days.

Smith began foundation work on December 4th. The floors were quickly done as the school was built over the existing concrete work left from the destroyed school. Contractor Smith expects to have the school framed up and completed, ready for students on March 1st 1900. The board of control has sent the students home for ten weeks, using the salaries saved to buy new furniture for the building.

San Luis Obispo Superintendant of schools, Mrs Woods published a notice encouraging her district’s schools, the parents and pupils, donate any textbook or school materials they can spare. She stated that they should be dropped off at the county courthouse in San Luis where they would be collected and sent down to Arroyo Grande by train. She said the sign of a good community is the desire to help those less fortunate.

San Luis Obispo Tribune: Osgood Guilty. John Osgood was found guity by a jury in the Superior Court last evening on a charge of seduction. The jury took only two ballots. That will teach the beast.

School districts all over the county, including northern Santa Barbara county all pitched in. Slate boards, erasers, extra desks, paper, pencils, ink and pens came from everywhere. Citizens and parents quickly turned their attention from the plans of the “Wreckers,” though that wouldn’t last long.

Mister Clevenger, publisher and editor of the Herald has made a very generous offer to the students of the high school. Editorial and writing duties for the Christmas edition will be turned over to the students of the school. All the proceeds from the edition will be donated to the students for the purchase of a new telescope to replace the one lost in the fire this October. The students have heartily entered into the spirit of the enterprise and have organized and selected the following committee to manage the holiday edition. Editorial will be Archie Haskins, Amy Hodges and Albert Ore. The advertising committee is made up of Chance Dana, Fred Phoenix, Addie Gibson, Edith Jatta and George Runyon. Archie Beckett, Gay Parsons and Clarence Waterman who will staff the Literary Committee and local reporters are Robert Forkner, Clara Conrad, Phoebe Poole, Albert Fowler and Fanny Taylor.

Stephen Clevenger, wife Edith (Fanny) and son Porter. About 1895. Clevenger was the founder and publisher of the Arroyo Grande Herald (1886) and Santa Maria Times.(1882). Santa Maria Valley Historical Society.

San Luis Obispo Tribune: The Celestials are at War: Some of the celestials declared war and have proceeded to do battle. Yu Kee, a Highbinder from San Francisco fired a shot at a brother chink in the store of Wing Sang Wan on Palm Street. He succeeded in perforating a door. Marshall Cook was called and made a thorough search through the rookeries of chinatown but could not locate him. There are rumors of more trouble to follow in chinatown.

Arroyo Grande Herald: As a fundraising event the students of the high school have put together another party. Next Friday they plan to stage a masked ball to raise money for their school. The student committee has written the invitations for the event to be held at Columbia Hall. The young people expect a large turn out. Much money is expected to be donated towards the high school. The students are to be commended for their public spirit.

Arroyo Grande Herald: Objections by the board of Control have been issued forbidding the students of the high school to us the school name in connection with parties and other events outside the school. Invitations to attend a fund raising masquerade to be given next Friday have been issued by the “Entre Nous Club*. It appears the students will not be suppressed.

The pettiness of the majority on the Board of Control finally tipped the balance. Another citizens meeting was called at the Good Samaritan Hall. About thirty concerned citizens showed up and after some debate a committee was formed for the purpose of exploring the possibility of raising private funds to increase the school budget for 1900. The plan was to raise enough to keep the school in operation. Stephen Clevenger of the Herald was named chairman. Thomas Hodges and Aron Henry along with Clevenger were tasked with exploring the legal issues involved. Another group was tasked with writing a flyer representing the right side of the matter. The flyer would be delivered to every household in the district. That committee was to be chaired by a local school teacher of more than formidable resolve, Mrs E. L. Paulding, Clara to her friends, a woman who could take the measure of any man. It would prove to be a master stroke.

NOTES:

$14,756.00 today.

Arroyo stone, the particular light sandy/red colored sandstone was used in the IOOF Hall, 1903 and Mankins Building, 1904. A walk down Olohan’s Alley shows the rear of several brick and cast iron fronted building built of the same material. Pat Moor’s Quarries would not go out of business just yet.

The Good Samaritan Hall was located where todays City Council Chambers are on Branch Street.

The Union Hall on Bridge Street was across the street from the Odd Fellows Hall.

The grammar school was located on the old Nipomo road, Bridge St, where the Ford agency is today.

Entre Nous: Between ourselves.

Cover Photo: The Old Verde School once located at the head of Corbit Canyon.

Michael Shannon lives in Arroyo Grande, California and writes so his children will know where they came from.

Link to Chapter one: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/11202

Link to chapter two: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/11890

Chapter four: Clara Paulding goes to war. Coming next.

By Michael Shannon

When I was a little guy I would sit at the kitchen table and listen to my parents talk. I wasn’t home schooled, I went to a regular school, a two room one nearly a century old but my real education came as I sat at that grey Formica table and listened to lessons from my parents and their friends. I don’t think they saw themselves as teachers but those little lessons have been rattling around in my head. I’ve been trying to catch up with that time all of my life.

My dad was a big teaser. He loved to tease his mother, my grandmother, who was easily embarrassed and would blush at the drop of a hat. He especially he liked to work on us, his three boys. Almost every thing he said had some little joke woven into it. Some play on words that he knew would confound us. Teach us too. What would you expect from a man who kept a very well thumbed World Almanac right on the kitchen table next to the salt and pepper.

Some of his talk made no sense to me. Such as, who was Leonard Rong and why was he the opposite of Leonard Wright. I heard right and wrong. No one explained this to me. They just tossed out names as they spoke with no explanation added. I’m sure mom and dad never thought twice about explaining who these people were, we were just little kids and didn’t know those men. I had seen Leonard Rong and he looked all right to me, nothing about him seemed wrong. When I asked why he was wrong, dad said, “Why he’s a man out standing in his fields.” What did standing in the field have to do with it. The little mind tried to fill in the gaps.

I mean, did “Dick Dock” have a real name or was the eponymous one just too good not to use. And how about George Arita? George, what Japanese man used the name George? I knew Kaz, Stone, Sab, Haruo and Aki, but George, it didn’t seem correct. There was no explanation for “Jinks” either, or “Ace,” “Bunny” “or “Arza.” Ace was a cool name, Arza seemed weird and what grown up is named Bunny. Seriously, we just though they were making a joke.

My dad sold some of his vegetables to a Mister Get in Los Angeles. I gathered that he was a Chinese man which confused me because I wasn’t sure whether Mister was Chinese or not, and did he go get something, was that his job, getting things. So confusing. Later on I went with my father to Mister Get’s home in Silverlake and had dinner with he and Mrs. Get. It was pressed duck. What! What did they mean pressed duck? Did they mean it was picked up off the highway or was it smashed by a heavy weight. Dad said it was cooked with a brick. How is that even possible. There was no telling.

What about “Coot?” I didn’t think that was real name for a person. I mean the little black ducks with yellow feet that swam in the Oceano lagoon were Coots, but a person. I didn’t think so but when I asked Pop about it he just laughed and said, “Silly Boy.”

My great aunt Anna lived in Santa Ana. Well, OK, but who was she and why was she ever mentioned? Dad said she was a spinster. A What? Was she good at spinning around, did she spin webs? Please explain. I saw her once, she was dumpy, another confusing word, had her hair tightly curled as maiden aunts did in 1955 and turned out to be a seriously vague person, at least to me. She wore a blue dress, pointy spectacles and sturdy shoes. There was no spinning.

We wondered why aunt Mickey was named after Mickey Mouse and my aunt June after the sixth month. Was she born then? Were grownups deliberately trying to confuse their children? Maybe it was a trick my aunt started so that we’d remember her birthday and get her a present.

My dad did not swear, or if he did he sure didn’t do it in front of us. He did have a few choice words he used though. Once he called a man a chiseler. I thought that meant he was a carpenter and built things but at the same time I knew the man sold groceries so how could he be chiseling? It just didn’t make any sense. Dad once called someone and S. B. in my hearing and being about six or seven, I said, “Daddy, whats an S.B.?” He explained that it meant the Silva Brothers, Manuel and Johnny who farmed next to us. When I mentioned it at school, Manny jr. took a swing at me which made it all the more confusing.

My uncle Jackie had some phrases he liked to use. He would say “It’s the Berries.” What in the world were the berries? Did he mean we were going to eat some or pick them, he never explained. How big was a bunch of malarkey? Was it something that needed to be counted or possibly weighed. I once heard him call someone a “Dumb Dora,” to which my dad replied, “She ain’t so dumb.” They both laughed at this. Was it some kind of secret code? We didn’t know. Made me feel like a “Dumb Cluck.”

My mom told dad that my cousin Brucie was a Holy Terror. I thought she meant he tore up hymn books or Bibles in church. Later on I learned from himself that he really was, he smashed my toy truck and hit me with the same stick for telling on him. Mom was right as she so often was.

Gobbledygook, Hodgepodge and flabbergasted were enough to make your head hurt. Parents could talk in a language that was almost foreign or maybe it was and children were not supposed to understand.

My aunt Eva talked to me about her dog Skipper and said that after Thanksgiving dinner she was going to walk him. What in the world did that mean? Every dog I knew could already walk. We never had any dogs that couldn’t. Matter of fact they almost always ran. From here to there and after the pickup, the tractors or they ran in circles around my dad when he was in the fields. Aunt Eva lived on Orange Street in Santa Maria which was the largest city I had ever seen so I assumed that strange goings on happened there which I knew nothing about. The street wasn’t orange either, it was grey colored, so, see what I mean?

My parents being silly. 1943. Shannon Family Photo

Then there was the cornbread. Cornbread was a staple of our diet in the fifties and I’d say all the kids liked it. My mom didn’t use recipes much, she cooked from scratch, another word that didn’t seem to make any sense but cornbread was easy and in lean years it might be the main course. The kids ate it with butter, my dad did too but my mother put it in a glass of milk, stirred it and ate it with a spoon. That seemed so strange to me, I mean, we were four against one when it came to eating it the right way I think. She said it was because she was from the south but like all confusion she wasn’t from the south, she was from California, born and raised. Her great grandparents were from Mississippi and came through Texas to Anaheim but that wasn’t her. She never traveled there. I just though that parents would naturally be on the same page. Boy was I wrong about that. And what exactly is the same page?

Another one; what’s a Mairzy Doat? It simply could not be explained. Dad said it was a song. Must be in a foreign language because I’d never seen either a Doat or a Mairzy. Maybe like a horse? I don’t know.

When my dad got a little transistor radio he told me that, “It was the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Come on Pop, everybody knows all bread is sliced. It comes in a blue and white checked plastic wrapper and its in pieces, nobody has to slice it. I knew he was pulling my leg then.

He once told me he drove out to the See Ranch and that it was out past Bunny’s on the way to Stony Creek. See the problem?

Was there no end to it? Please explain these things to me Dad. He said “I’ll do it when the cows come home, O K?”

He didn’t though, we lived in a time where children were seen but rarely heard. We would have to figure it all out ourselves. Maybe it would all be clear under the Blue Moon. I don’t know. I could be Rong.

30

• Just in case you’ve never heard this pronounced open this link. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1fb702aa-351d-401e-bb5b-ec5c99f50d19

Michael Shannon is a writer, surfer, teacher and a world citizen. He writes so his children will know about their family.

By Michael Shannon

Chapter One

THE OLD SCHOOL

Set the dial for late spring 1898, Arroyo Grande, San Luis Obispo County California. Deep in the center of the old Cow Counties.

We got our news from the local papers, the saloon, the cafe and the poker table. Wheels (Bicycles) are all the rage. It’s a small world in the Bloody Fourth. The fourth supervisors district had a well deserved bad reputation as does the rest of San Luis County. The last armed holdup of a stagecoach occurred on the Cuesta grade in 1888. Arroyo Grande men lynched a fifteen year old boy and his father in 1886. They left them hanging from the Pacific Coast Railroad bridge for all to see, including children on their way to school. The illegal lynchings far outnumbered the legal ones. (Just one legal ) Nearly the entire male population of Arroyo Grand had descended on its little Chinatown and sent the 25 residence running. They burned it to the ground. Saloons, Arroyo had eleven, were frequent scenes of gunplay. The town constable of Arroyo Grande was gunned down in the Capitol Saloon and the shooter got off on self-defense. Soiled Doves thrived in all of our the counties little towns and San Luis Obispo’s was reportedly first class. My great grandfather John Shannon still occasionally carried his Smith and Wesson .41, left over from his days as a Santa Clara County sheriffs deputy. My great, great uncle Patrick Moore, a native of Cavan, Ireland, sits in the fourth’s seat at the Board of Supervisors.

The Arroyo Grande Herald: publishes a report by the U S Navy recognizing the existence of Sea Serpents. We’re glad this vexatious matter is closed.

As it is, it has ever been. Styles change, Technology does too, people don’t. In 1900, San Luis Obispo counted over a hundred schools. Names like, Liberty, Banning, Freedom, Cienega, Nipomo, and Branch. There was Allaince and Eagle in Shandon, Edna and Freedom, York Mountain and La Paloma in the upper Los Berros Canyon. Each one served children who lived within short distances. Some had enrollments where almost every child had same the last name. Oak Park school was full of Patchetts, Nipomo sported Dana’s, some were filled with children of almost every ethic or immigrant group you could imagine. Most saw the importance of education for their children. Some citizens saw waste and fraud and were determined to set things “Right.”

Built at a cost of $ 793.50 by B F Stewart of Arroyo Grande. “26 x 40 feet and of a pretty design.” SLO County Schools photo.

It’s a drought year and warnings of reduced water use are rampant. In those days there were no dams or state water projects to take up the slack. Periodic droughts had devastated the cattle ranches over the previous two decades and led to the economy diversifying. Farming, particularly orchards and dairy had picked up the slack. Dried fruits shipped from Port Harford and dairy from Spooners landing on the Pecho Rancho were thriving business’s. Hopes for the Southern Pacific’s completion of its line between San Francisco and Los Angeles was rampant but “The Gap,” as it was referred to was still in the future. Freight could only travel by wagon north from tracks end at the tiny town of Surf in the Lompoc Valley.

The Evening Breeze: County supervisors pass an ordinance restricting the harvest of Abalone in the north county.

The Spanish American War had begun on April 21st after the American battleship main blew itself up in Havana Cuba. The California National Guards Rangers, Company “G” was actively recruiting in the county. As usual Patriotic Fever was driving young men to sign up in order to go punish the dastardly Spaniards. “How dare they spit on our noble flag.” Thats an actual quote from our own Arroyo Grande Herald newspaper, the Democratic voice of our community. The Republican newspaper, the Recorder published by a local saloonkeeper and brick maker was equally strident. Peter”Pete” Olohan, what bartender was ever called Peter, was a very successful saloon keeper and ran the towns first brick kiln behind his business along Arroyo Grande creek. His bricks made from clay silt deposited on Tallyho creek just below Becketts lake. His bricks transformed the town as merchants quickly replaced many of the old western style buildings with new brick structures.

San Luis Obispo Tribune:The news of Arroyo Grande states that a firewood famine is imminent. Most of the dry wood has been shipped to San Francisco and due to the over cutting of Oak trees, little will be available for winter.

Every paper in the county was beating The Long Roll as hard as they could, war fever was everywhere. Flags and red, white and Blue bunting were on sale at Wardens store in San Luis and at Aron and Alexanders in Arroyo Grande.

The Arroyo Grande Recorder: The nefarious Spanish overlords of Cuba have used and infernal Device to blow up the battle ship Maine and school children are sending their pennies to build a new one.

Young men like Joe Bristol, George and Frank Dana, Joe Dominguez who, along with Ed and Burnett Knotts, a cafe owner from Nipomo drove up to the courthouse and took out enlistment papers. Shipping out for Cuba would end Nipomo’s superb local baseball team as the players, in a fever pitch for war made their way north to volunteer.

Arroyo Grande Herald: Mrs J.D. Skidmore grew a tremendous Strawberry more than ten inches in diameter. We think it would take a couple big bites.

A June 1998 notice in the Herald listed the names of the graduates from the Arroyo Grande Elementary School. Annie Grey and John “Jack” Shannon are among the eighth graders. My future grandparents. If you look at their birthdates, his being three years before hers, you might wonder why they are in the same class of graduates at all.

Arroyo Grande Elementary school. Annie Gray in all white, 1st row, . Jack Shannon 2nd from right back row.

If you are counting there are 27 girls and only six boys. Not uncommon for the time, education not being entirely necessary for boys and what did you do with a girl until she married and had children anyway?

My grandfather, like many boys at the time was considered grownup and able to do a mans work. He knew this. His parents did too. They owned an orchard and raced chickens for eggs and meat and 14 year old boys were essentially free labor. There is a family story that illustrates this to a tee. My grandfather once asked my father if he would rather go to church with mommy or stay home and milk cows with his father. He chose cows. He was eight. That was 1920. The idea still persisted that if you were old enough to do work; you did.

Arroyo Grande Recorder: Hunting season has opened and the boys are determined to make the Quail and Ducks less numerous.

My grandfather wasn’t resistant to education, after all my he sent my father to Cal, Class of 1934, it’s just that the times didn’t require that most men be able to do more than read, write and do arithmetic. “The lack of education didn’t hurt me none”.* Jack Shannon didn’t have the patience to read the law or be a professor of anything though he certainly could have. He just couldn’t sit still. Dad once said of him; “When your grandfather cut hay, he cut hay,” meaning he was all in on anything he did.

John William “Jack” Shannon about 1897. Shannon Family photo.

It wouldn’t have made any difference to him anyway because that same year the Arroyo Grande High School was savagely disenfranchised and closed and it looked like it was for good. San Luis Obispo High School had just recently barely survived the vote to close it. Education for children past fourteen was under attack.

San Luis Obispo Breeze: The board of Supervisors has voted to allow the purchase of a typewriter for the office of education.

Somehow the past always seems be much more idyllic than the present. Not as messy. A Norman Rockwell dream, a Horatio Alger, poor but noble boy pulling himself up by his bootstraps to run a railroad kind of story. Certainly not the Sinclair Lewis “Hey, lets go work in the Chicago slaughter houses” kind. Think of the plowboys wiping their brows, attached to the nether ends of horses, trudging through the fields for hours and days on end. You don’t need much education for that.

Boys from wealth should be educated because, after all, someone had to run the country. Working class kids were needed for other things. Hard rows needed hoeing.

Arroyo Grande Weekly Herald: The citizens of Arroyo Grande have subscribed money to buy leg irons to be used on vagrants who refuse to move on. The miscreants will be sentenced to work at hard labor on the roads

The local newspapers tell the story. In the style of the late 19th and early 20th century features and opinion pieces chronicle the story of how all this destruction of education happened. In the snarky, joking writing style of the day in which papers didn’t try to hide their politics behind professed fairness, after all they needed advertising revenue to stay profitable and news was crafted to satisfy the politics of men. To wit; in Arroyo Grande there were two newspapers, The Herald, a Democratically inclined publishing house and The Recorder owned by brick maker and saloon keeper Pete Olohan a staunch Republican. From opposite ends of Branch Street they hurled barbs at each other, a distance of three blocks, the entire length of the little town. Both papers were read and discussed in the saloons and mens fraternal associations like the Odd Fellows and Masons. The talked in the dining houses and with other men leaning on their buggies of a Saturday morning as they waited for the little woman to do the shopping. Chewing on five cent cigars they tossed their opinions about like baseballs, some lobbed, some fired like bullets. If women had any opinions they weren’t listened to for it would still be a decade before they were able to vote. Political power was still out of reach unless it came from the kitchen or bedroom.

San Luis Obispo Tribune: Mrs M. T’ Runels of Nipomo made a hasty trip to north yesterday to attend to the affairs of her son, Harry T Talmadge who was crushed to death by the wheels of a train in the Santa Clara yards while making a hasty escape from the attendants of the St Agnew Insane Asylum.

It is an historical fact that the first state in the union which gave women the right to vote, Wyoming in 1869, believed that suffrage would attract women to move there. Men outnumbered women six to one at the time and it was exceedingly lonely out on the big ranches. That may be so but it should be noted that the wives of the state put their feet down; “Clem if you don’t vote for suffrage, its going to be a long, lean and very cold winter for you out here on the ranch.”

In fact it was the farm and ranch vote that put it over the top. The movers and shakers in the towns didn’t want women meddling in their affairs but they were beaten by ranchers wives. It would be another fifty years after Wyoming that the woman of Arroyo Grande were legally able to vote.

Arroyo Grande Oracle: Two young men named Scott and Foster were arrested yesterday and fined ten dollars each for using rough language to Mrs Donovan who was in her yard as they passed her house in Los Berros. The fine likely hurt less than the horsewhipping administered by the town constable.

So it was money that did the school in. The Cow Counties of Central California were still a farm and ranch economy. The days of the Rancheros was a decade or two in the past but many of the old Ranchos were still operating. New owners in the cattle, dairy or orchard business were being assessed by the school district in order to fund the schools. They didn’t like it. At fifteen dollars per hundred acres it was considered a terrible burden to carry and the whining and screeching was carried on in the papers of the day.

Several years of drought and crop failures had ranchers and farmers on edge. The thought that the county might raise taxes to support schools some though were useless set their teeth on edge. A ground swell to close down the Arroyo high school was growing with prominent men leading the charge. If a man was wealthy enough he could send his children to private high school in San Francisco or closer to home in San Luis Obispo’s Mission school. It wasn’t long before battle lines were clearly drawn.

“The Arroyo. Grande Herald noted in February 1898 that a petition has gone before School Superintendent Meese asking for a special election on the question of disincorporating the Arroyo Grande High School District. The law requires that a petition can only be signed by the heads of families but that many who signed the papers were were not. Many signatures were by men who, no women of course, were in favor of continuing the schools operation. It can be assumed that these men wish the matter brought to a vote and bring this vexing matter before the people of the district and settle the matter once and for all. A few ignorant screechers have been howling against the school for some time and would have succeeded in closing the high school if it wasn’t for the determined fight put up by the Herald last fall, the institution would not now be running. The opponents are proceeding in proper form this time and the Herald gladly accepts the gage of battle and will abide by the will of the people.“

The town of Arroyo Grande was a prosperous community and had a thriving downtown. Three blocks of businesses lined Branch Street where you could purchase almost everything you needed. The Pacific Coast narrow gauge railroad connected it to the harbor at Port Harfod, to San Luis Obispo and points south and east. Oil drilling, quarries and agricultural produce were its main cargo. A person could take a steamer from Port Harford to San Francisco which was California’s largest city. Los Angeles was still a dusty pueblo of no particular note. From the Southern Pacific railroads terminal at San Luis Obispo you could travel north to any place in the country you wished.

Arroyo Grande was a wooden, false fronted frontier town with more saloons than you could shake a stick at. There were small hotels, two hardware stores, a pair of blacksmiths and a bakery. At Aaron and Alexander’s store you could buy just about anything. Today it would be called a department store. The idea that you could do all your shopping in one place was still a novel idea in the little town.

Arroyo Grande Herald: A charge of battery is being held against two toughs for hitting a young Portuguese boy with their whip. There was not the slightest provocation for the offense.

Though the streets were still dirt with a sprinkling of gravel or covered with hay in the winter because the wet adobe soil was a thick as peanut butter and your buggy could sink up to its hubs after a rain storm. A water wagon patrolled the town in the summer sprinkling to keep the dust down. Most houses had running water supplied by the water companies who pumped it from the creek but most were without indoor bathrooms and the tin tub and outhouse were still behind nearly every house.

Martin Fly’s Arroyo Grande Water Wagon on Bridge St. Photographer unknown, about 1900

The highway to the south called the Nipomo Road, which began at Bridge Street was corduroyed with cottonwood logs and covered with gravel from the creek until it passed Supervisor Moore’s home which overlooked the east side of the valley. Not that many years before, most of the valley was an almost impenetrable marsh, dense with Encino and Alamo trees stitched together with wild blackberry. Horse nettle and the long branches of Poison Oak, it’s glossy dark green leaves inviting the unwary to touch. The Penstemon, Coyote Bush and Monkey Flower so thick that it was impassable for a horseman. The thick mass of vegetation was, until the 1860’s patrolled by the Grizzly Bear, Ursus Horribillus. (Horrible Bear) who might find you and your horse a tasty meal.

San Luis Obispo Tribune: John Barenburg jr. returned home last Saturday evening after an absence of over a year, during which time he has visited the Klondike and worked the mines of the frozen north. His friends are glad to see him again.

The valley was alive with a riot of color in the spring, with yellows, purples, red, dusty white and best of all the golden California Poppy. Don Francisco Branch and his 23 year old bride Manuela were stunned when they came over the low hill at the back of our ranch and first saw it in flower in late February of 1837.

The original maps of the three Ranchos on which Arroyo Grande was built were the Bolsa de Chamisal, Corral de Piedra and the Santa Manuela which all listed nearly the entire valley as a Cienega. The Cienega, or marshy bog had to be cleared for farming and at the turn of the century during the school crisis, the clearing was still incomplete. Remnants of this Cienega still remain along the upper Pismo lake preserve which is along North 4th Street today.

Cayucos Vigilent: The Swiss- Italian Hotel has been renamed the Cottage Hotel. It will be repainted and will soon look as pretty as the spring millenary.

When the county board of supervisors was formed and met for the first time on December 13,1852, the very first order of business was to form a county school system. The vote was unanimous with supervisors Francisco Branch, Captain William Dana, Joaquin Estrada and Samuel Adams Pollard all voting aye. The first three were rancheros holding considerable lands and Sam Pollard was married to Captain Dana’s daughter Maria Josefa Antonia Sirila. Though from widely distant places and having little to no formal education themselves they knew the value of schools and they meant to provide for a good education for their families. Initially children were taught in the home because the population was very small and distances between the isolated ranches was so great. The entire county population was just 360 souls though the census forms list only property owners, their families and servants. Rough and ready, the county was thick with bandidos, murderers and other criminals on the run from gold fields and cities and towns farther north. For years after establishing a school system few school houses were actually built. Isolated school houses weren’t safe for children for another decade until the trash had been taken out or hung up; by the neck.

San Luis Obispo Tribune: The Hon: C.H. Johnson has closed a deal with Ah Luis for all the brick owned by the latter at his kiln north of the city. The towns first mayor intends to build a magnificent two story building on Higuera Street at Chorro.

Arroyo Grande’s school district dated back to the famous Oak Tree school, the areas first. In 1860 a young man was hired to teach the children of the Rancheros. Don Francisco Branch who owned David Mallaghs old adobe house, which was on the hillside below Crown Hill, donated the house for the first school building in the valley. The decrepit old building, built in the 1840’s, was swept, rats, bats and owls expelled and resident raccoons and possum beat a hasty retreat down to the creek. Rough made furniture for desks and chairs were donated by the families who wanted their kids to be educated. Somehow a slate board was found and hung from a wall. Hitching posts were built for the children who came on horseback, for many lived more than walking distance away. When school was in session the old adobe was ringed about with horses and a buggy or two, horses chewing on corn from their feedbags or standing hipshot, dozing while they patiently waited for the kids.

The David Mallagh Adobe, 1880’s San Luis Historical Society photo

Thirty years later the town of Arroyo Grande had been established and was now ringed with one and two roomed grade schools. A one room school in upper Verde Canyon, A two room in the Oak Park district, Santa Manuela at the entrance to Lopez Canyon, a school in the upper Lopez, Branch school near the old Francisco Branch adobe; up the Huasna, a one room in Los Berros Canyon and La Cienega along the lower Arroyo Grande creek. Pismo and Oso Flaco schools rounded out the district. If there were enough children living within an eight or so mile diameter there was a school. Most residents saw a necessity in educating their children.

Arroyo Grande Herald: Aron and Alexander announce the Grand Midsummer Display in cotton dress goods. See the new Ebilenes, Eolines, Gaze de Soie, and Figured Lawns, Roidered Waist Patterns, Ladies and Children’s tan shoes and lace hosiery to match.Ask for prices.

Frank Newsom opened the first official school in district one and taught classes at the old mission. In a dusty room, children sat with chalk and slate on wooden benches made by the Indian neophytes for the padres, decades old. Newsom taught in Spanish with a little English thrown in because almost all the children were descendants of marriages between the Ranchero’s and their Californio wives. The occasional Indian child was almost always a Spanish speaker. There was no such thing as a textbook and reading material were limited to a few donated books. Any kind of book would have had to come by ship from the east coast so there weren’t many.

Old San Luis Obispo Mission in 1865. Photo: Calisphere

Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Newsom was all of 18 years old. He arrived in old San Luis Obispo and being a literate man and nearly penniless he gladly took the teaching job. Three years later he was teaching school at the Branch family’s Mallagh adobe just downhill from todays Paulding Middle School. In 1863 he married Francisco Branch’s daughter Anna and by 1870 was running a farming operation on the lands that had been deeded to his wife by her father. He established a small school there for his own children which eventually numbered eleven; poor Anna. He also taught the children of his neighbors. They were still taught in Spanish. In the 1880 census he listed himself as a hotel keeper because with the discovery of the hot sulphur springs in the upper Guayal canyon he had built a small hotel where people could come and “Take the waters.” No longer a poor man his politics had changed concerning schools, especially High Schools.

Newsom Springs school, Frank Newsom in the big hat. 1870’s. Historical Society Photo.

Newspapers began reporting in 1898 dissatisfaction with the high school. Bernardo Miossi, a farmer and rancher and owner of the Sycamore Springs ranch near Pismo Beach and a member of the board of control, school board in todays terms, who represented the Pismo Area, Frank Newsom, former pioneer teacher, Dan Donovan of the Los Berros district and Willis B Buck who farmed in the Oak Park section of south county were all vocally opposed to the continuation of the Arroyo Grande high school. “A waste of time and money,” Dan Donovan said, quoted in the Herald.

They were out to get rid of it, By hook or by crook. Very quickly, the gloves were off.

Arroyo Grande Herald: The board of Supervisors today granted 84 liquor licenses countywide. They expect to continue the review tomorrow as there are many more applications. At this place, License for Frank Babcock, Frank Cochran, Knotts brothers. E. Knotts, Bernardino Souza, and Peter Olohan. (2)**

Coming, Chapter two.

Arroyo Grande Herald: September 16, 1898. There are a number of citizens who are anxious on one ground or another that the educational facilities of the Arroyo Grande region should be continued….

(*Paul Simon, “Kodachrome”)

(**Arroyo Grande Valley Districts population, 1900 was 3,399. At the time it boasted over a dozen places to get a drink.)

Michael Shannon is a world citizen, teacher, and surfer. He attended a two room Grammar school himself. He write so his children will know where they came from.

The link to chapter two: https://atthetable2015.com/2024/01/14/the-wayback-machine-2/?fbclid=IwAR1jRdvlqfAUoXq_zNMR5sP5Zhf9MxErqcSDMaPkFP5gAcPMqjwzYRZBlJQ

The Third Part

THE GRADUATION TRIP

By Michael Shannon

Family relationships can be so hard to untangle even when you’re part of the family. Being a “Borrowed” child, Nita lived with her maternal aunt and uncle from the time she was eight. She moved up to Arroyo Grande in 1893 to live with Uncle Patrick Moore and his wife Sarah. After seven years there and at the age of fifteen, Nita saw her aunt Sarah die of Stomach Cancer. For much of the early 20th century, stomach cancer was the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, particularly amongst women. Heavily salted and smoked foods and the lack of refrigeration were thought to be the leading causes.

The San Luis Obispo Tribune wrote that, “The sad news reached this city yesterday of the death of Mrs. Patrick Moore, wife of Supervisor Moore, in San Francisco where she went from her home in Arroyo Grande for treatment of cancer of the stomach. She was a good woman and her death will be mourned by many.” *

Nita was just about to enter high school. At fourteen it was a tragedy for her and though Sarah was not her mother she ran a very close second. Nita had come live with the Moores when she was about to turn eight, just at the age where serious long lasting memory begins. Nita knew her mother Jeannie Grey well enough and saw her family regularly, but her daily life marched to Sarah Moore’s heartbeat.

Sarah Moore, left, with Annie “Nita” Grey in the white shirtwaist 1899. Shannon Family Photo

As the big house was always full of her friends and the family servants she stayed with uncle Pat rather than returning home to the ranch in Santa Maria with her parents, brothers and sisters. Part of the families agreement was that Nita be educated and receive a substantial property upon Pat Moore’s passing.

Just two years later Uncle Patrick remarried. He chose a popular local schoolteacher, Miss Mollie O’Conner. The papers made a great joke about this by slyly stating that it was a May December romance and it may have been though in family lore the they were happy together.

The following is from the Salinas Index of July 15, 1903. “It needs no particular explanation to residents of SLO County except that perhaps some would like to know why the genial supervisor did not face the music at home instead of going away to Salinas to get married. “Today at 10 o’clock Judge J H Brown performed a marriage ceremony which united the hearts and lives of Patrick R Moore of Arroyo Grande and Mary “Mollie” O’Conner of Washington. The ceremony was performed in the parlors of the Abbott house and the host and John Lavery and were witnesses to the ceremony.“

“The groom is a prominent resident and supervisor of SLO county and the bride is a schoolteacher. Although well advanced in years at 73, the happy couple boarded yesterday’s southbound train with a happy smile and sprightly step of a couple who might have been just old enough to procure a license. Mollie “O” was all of 42.“

Annie “Nita” Grey, Patrick Moore and Mollie “O” 1904. Shannon Family Photo

Nita had lived her entire life except for the four years in Berkeley and she was very familiar with the beauty of the sand of Pismo Beach. Smooth, satiny; fine as snow drifts turned to gold, carved into wavelets by the wind racing in from the Pacific, polishing each grain to a satiny sheen. The gently rolling hills dusted with yellow mustard and dense clumps of coastal sage, called Chamiso by the Spaniards, covered the north slopes. Dotted on the south and west by groves of ancient Oak trees, this was the land she grew up in. It was the land of Ramona, Zorro, Jacquin Murrieta and was not long ago the pride of the Rancheros; Californios whose Vaqueros rode the slopes and canyons moving the cattle which formed the backbone of their economy. Their heyday just a decade before her birth. She was born on Rancho Guadalupe, she grew up on the old Bolsa de Chamisal Rancho of Francisco Quijada, a large portion of which was then owned by Patrick Moore her maternal uncle in whose home she was raised. She would spent most of her life right there, just a stones throw from the house she grew up in.

In a letter to her childhood friend Mamie, she wrote of her excitement at graduation and the extraordinary gift that Mollie “O” had planned for her. Nita and three of her friends were going to go up to the Yosemite Valley, a place she knew was completely unlike her home in San Luis Obispo county. She was to see the National Park which had just been designated as such by President Teddy Roosevelt four years earlier.

They all went down to the depot and took the Southern Pacific passenger train down to Merced. As early as 1908, the city of Merced, California adopted “Gateway to Yosemite” as its tourism slogan. It was a time when a trip from the coast to the Sierra Nevada took days instead of hours.

It was a nine hour trip because the train was what was known as a local. That meant it stopped at every town on the way. From Oakland, the old phrase “You can’t get there from here” was close to being true. They took the train south to Niles where they changed cars to head east on a spur through Livermore and Tracy to Lathrop and changed again to the local heading down through Turlock, Modesto the Merced where they would detrain again, wait for their luggage to be transferred, and there was a pile of that. Well off women did not travel lightly in 1908. They would need to dress for dinner at the hotels which required fine clothes and all the trimmings which would be unsuitable for adventuring. They packed dresses and sensible low heels. The hiking clothes would have been light canvas or sturdy cotton duck to combat the shrubbery, trees and the ever present dust. The dust, or duff as it’s called is everywhere when the weather was dry. Straw hats, kerchiefs and a vail to keep the insects away. And gloves, certainly, to keep delicate hands free from stickers and nettles.

Merced Depot, Nita in the light colored straw hat. Excitement on her face. 1908 Shannon Family Photo.

They stepped down from the cars and had supper at the cafe in the depot while the suitcases and trunks were unloaded and then placed in the baggage car of the short line Yosemite Valley Railroad for the trip up to El Portal where they would spend the night. The little train pulled out of the depot at 2 pm headed up the tracks for the eighty mile trip to tracks end at El Portal. She waddled along at about twenty miles an hour and made fourteen stops along the way arriving at the end of the line around 6 pm.

Del Portal Hotel, El Portal CA. Terminus, Yosemite Valley Railroad at the gateway to Yosemite. NPS Photo

Hotel Del Portal was one of the early first-class hotels established by the Yosemite Valley Railroad to accommodate passengers coming up from Merced to the terminus at El Portal, California, just outside of Yosemite National Park. The hotel set the standard for elegance in the Yosemite area. A trip up to the park was expensive and the formal hotels were built to serve those with the means to come and tour the valley.

The four-story Hotel Del Portal at the eastern terminus attracted celebrities and politicians alike, including William Randolph Hearst of the newspaper game. J.B. Duke head of the American Tobacco Company who introduced “Taylor Made” cigarettes in the 1880’s was one of the wealthiest men in America. Introducing what were originally called pre-rolled cigarettes in the late 1880’s made him. Strangely enough “Taylor Mades” reduced the use of plug or chaw tobacco and the constant spitting it required and is credited with a vast reduction in the transmission of Tuberculosis a disease which is airborne. People could now swap one form of death for another.

Another frequent traveler was John Muir. Muir spent as much time in the park as possible. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited Yosemite. He was guided by the naturalist. Roosevelt came up to the Wawona Hotel by stage. Rather than checking in to the elegant new hotel he insisted on camping under the “Grizzly Giant” Redwood tree where he slept comfortably on a pile of forty wool blankets. The two men spent three memorable nights camping, first under the outstretched arms of the Grizzly Giant in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, then in a snowstorm atop five feet of snow near Sentinel Dome, and finally in a meadow near the base of Bridal Veil Fall. Their conversations and shared joy with the beauty and magnificence of Yosemite led Roosevelt to expand federal protection of Yosemite, and it inspired him to sign into existence five national parks, 18 national monuments, 55 national bird sanctuaries and wildlife refuges, and 150 national forests. Muir’s guided tour for Theodore Roosevelt was the catalysts for the president to declare the valley a National Park in 1906.

President Teddy Roosevelt and party standing at the base of the Grizzly Giant tree in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, Yosemite, 1903. Left to right, two secret service agents; William H. Moody, Secretary of Navy; George Pardee, California Governor; Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. President; Dr. Presley N. Rixey, Surgeon General; John Muir; Nicholas Murray Butler, President Columbia University; William Loeb, Jr., Private Secretary; Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President University of California. Photo Joseph LeConte, Collection of the San Joaquin Library system, Mariposa Library

Muir declared in an article in the Sacramento Record-Union in 1876 “In God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” The articles he wrote began to draw attention to the destruction of California forests. Muir who had worked as a cattle herder in the valley and later the sawmill at the base of Yosemite Falls was a first hand witness to the evolution from wilderness to exploitation at any cost.

Roosevelt himself wrote that, “It is vandalism to wantonly destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals — not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people are awakening.” or so he wished. More than one hundred years have passed and if my grandmother was here to read the news she would say that little has changed.

Nita and her California University friends were unwitting witnesses to the almost total destruction of the Oaks that gave Oakland its name. The original Ranchero family, the Peraltas referred to the area as “”El Encinal” for its dense stand of California live oaks which are the dominant tree of the coast live oak woodland habitat.This was translated more loosely as “Oakland” in the subsequent naming of the town, as recounted by Horace Carpentier in his first address as mayor: “The chief ornament and attraction of this city consists, doubtless, in the magnificent grove of evergreen oaks which covers its present site and from which it takes both its former name of ‘Encinal’ and its present one of ‘Oakland.” By Nitas time the forest had been completely logged off, as was the five square mile Redwood grove, once considered as most dense in the state, which had occupied the area which was now the Berkeley campus.

Nita, Mollie “O” and Blanche were part of a constant parade of well known and wealthy people who could arrive at the entrance of the valley by train instead of the twelve to fourteen hour stagecoach ride up from Merced as had been done until the previous year. The coaches were taken out of service in 1907 when the Yosemite ran its first trains to the edge of the park.

The following morning Nita breakfasted at the Del Portal and then saw her luggage loaded aboard the coach which would take her party up through the entrance to the park and the Sentinel Hotel where they would stay. After the turn of the century, The Sentinel was the only operating hotel in the valley. Because it was not winterized it remained closed during the winter season and only operated during summer.. This made little difference since the valleys total attendance was fairly low somewhere between two and five thousand a year before the railroad opened in 1907. The Yosemite RR made the trip up much easier. After the railroad arrived, along with the opening of the Del Portal Hotel, visitor numbers grew significantly . From 1908 to 1909 attendance grew to over 13,000, a leap of 5,000 from the year before. It doubled in attendance in 1915 to over 33,000 . Numbers would rise dramatically when automobiles were first let into the park beginning in 1913. In 1919 at the end of The Great War attendance jumped to over 58,000. Last year, 2022 the number was over 3.5 million.

Nita saw the park in the last days before automobiles, high numbers of people and a proliferation of new hotels, camps, paved roads, restaurants and visitor centers began the clogging the valley floor.

Risng earlyNita and her party took breakfast and then watched the loading of their luggage in the boot of the Mahta Wagon on which they would travel the rest of the way to the valley.

Manufactured in Merced, the Mahta was an 11-passenger stagecoach. Manufactured by Schofield & Alvord, it was a type of coach known as a Mud Wagon. Lighter than a Concord coach which is the coach featured in western movies, the Mud Wagon was the most common stagecoach seen in California. The Mahta was specifically designed for the Yosemite run. With comfortable upholstered seats it made several daily trips between El Portal and the valley. The road along the river was fairly level and the seventeen mile trip could be made in a day.

With picnic lunches supplied by the hotel, Blanche, Molly “O” and Nita settled into their seats excited by the day to come. They had dressed for the trip in sturdy side button shoes and skirts made of duck designed for the outdoors. Bonnets secured by hat pins and veiled against the dust and flies they laughed with anticipation as the coachmen shook the ribbons and clicked his tongue to set the four horse team in motion.

Traditionally coachmen who drove the California stages were called whips, and some, Jehu’s. In the Bible, it is noted of King Jehu that “he drives furiously” (II Kings 9:20). In the 17th century, English speakers began using jehu as a generic term meaning “coachman” or, specifically, “a fast or reckless coachman.” California had its share too. Charley Parkhurst known as “Six Horse” or one eye, for he’d lost his left eye to a horses hoof, drove his stage horses hard and like Hank Monk’s drive with Horace Greeley across the Sierra on the old Overland stage which was chronicled in Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.” For Sam Clemens, that was Twains real name, wrote, “I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture in Placerville, and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace’s coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier–said he warn’t in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, ‘Keep your seat, Horace, and I’ll get you there on time!’–and you bet, you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!”

By Nita’s time coaches no longer carried the mail or Wells Fargo strongboxes. The last stage robbers were long gone as were the Jehu’s. Her coach traveled at a sedate pace, bumping and rattling up the road. Any jostling was done by the seat-mates craning their necks to see the increasingly spectacular scenery as the canyon cut by the Merced River, which they were following began to narrow, nearly sheer cliffs rising high above them.

Stepping down from the mud wagon, the party took a quick lunch break sitting on fallen logs with the rivers chuckling in the background. The scent of pines filled the air, so different than the smells and sounds of the city of Oakland. Boarding the coach and settling down they continued towards Arch Rock, the entry to the valley. Two huge granite boulders had tumbled down and formed an arch through which the road traveled. A quick photo stop and then they moved on. The very tall trees closing in on the road created a vibrant green tunnel dappled by sunlight.

They traveled the road for a couple of miles when suddenly after a slight turn to the right, in an opening directly ahead, Bridal Veil Falls appeared as if by magic. Falling in a graceful sweep and wreathed by sunlight and sprays of water, it took their breath away. The gasps of his passengers caused the driver to smile, he himself felt the same awe each day as he entered the valley.

Soon the valley began to open up and on their left, El Capitan rose nearly a mile and one half straight up, towering over the valley, it sent a shiver of dread through the women. None of them had ever experienced anything like it. Off in the distance, Half Dome, rose more than a thousand feet higher than El Capitan. Nestled in the valley below sat the Sentinel Hotel, their destination.

The Sentinel Hotel and the Merced River. Library of Congress

The stage pulled to a stop in front of the verandah, the driver stepped down and helped the ladies alight. He then opened the boot for the bell boys to begin hauling luggage up the steps and into the hotel. Molly “O” was excited because she had a surprise for the girls, she had reserved the most spectacular room in the hotel for the princely sum of $ 5.00 a night.

The Big Tree Room, Sentinel Hotel postcard addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Grey, Nita’s parents. Shannon Family Collection.

The room was built around a 175 foot Incense Cedar tree. Not a piece of a dead tree but a live one. When they settled down after dinner the smell of cedar lulled them off to sleep.

When they came in to breakfast they saw on the wall of the dining room the famous photo of two girls standing on the overhanging rock at Glacier Point. They stopped to take a closer look and were thrilled that they would be going there to see it for themselves.

Miss Kittie Tatsch, a maid and for a time head waitress at the Sentinel hotel in the late 1890s and early 1900s, obviously a young woman with a cool head and; apparently, entirely destitute of nerves went up to Glacier Point and did a high kick on this perilous perch with her friend Katherine Hazelston. Dressed in long wide skirts identifying them clearly as women, they danced and did high kicks at Overhanging Rock, 3,000 feet above the Valley floor at Glacier Point The photo known as the two Kitties was on sale at the hotel when Nita arrived. She could look up from the verandah and see the point high above her. She was eager to go and see it for herself. She wondered, did she want to go out on the Rock? Would she?

The Two Kitties on Glacier Point. Photo: George Fiske, Collection, Library of Congress

The Four Mile Trail, linked Yosemite Valley to McCauley’s Mountain House at Glacier Point. Helen Hunt Jackson, author of “A Century of Dishonor” (1881) which chronicled the injustices perpetrated against American Indians, described the trail as “broad, smooth, and well protected on the outer edge, at all the dangerous places, by large rocks forming a low wall. Although it is the steepest trail out of the Valley, zigzagging back and forth on a sheer granite wall, one rides up it with little alarm or giddiness, and with such a sense of gratitude to the builder that the one dollar toll seems much too small.”

All aboard for Glacier Point. Library of Congress

The coach left the Sentinel, everyone aboard anticipating an adventure. Turning left onto the Glacier Point road the passengers were aware that on one hand the granite cliffs rose almost vertically and dropped off into sheer cliff on the other. Helen Hunt Jackson’s description of the road notwithstanding, The women shared a little alarm and a lot of giddiness. Nita knew they were safe and she shared later that the quakes and fears were simply delicious. Soon enough the coach rolled onto the granite terrace behind the point and came to a stop. Stepping down, the whip pointed out the way to Overhanging Rock and they walked toward it.

As they neared the edge they began craning their necks and had begun to sidle like crabs as the drop off neared. Chins up and weight on the back foot they stopped at the base of the rock trying to see without leaning too far over. It was a long, long way down. Finally by clustering together and screwing up their courage they they began to sidle sideways out onto the rock, not daring to lift their feet, carefully sliding their feet until they finally got as far as they could bear and holding hands for balance, they sat down. They felt so brave. And why not.

Blanche, Nita and Molly “O” on Overhanging Rock, Glacier Point. June 1908. Shannon Family Photo

The next three days were spent walking about and exploring. Mirror lake was astonishing in the morning light when it lived up to it’s name and reflected both North Dome and Half Dome in its polished surface.

They walked across the Merced River on the old log bridge holding onto the single handrail as the river, still running high in early June speckled their clothes with droplets of water come from the highest ridges of the Sierra where the ice never melted.

Yosemite Falls was magnificent, tons of numbingly cold water pitched from the ledge at the top and falling in waves of lace shimmering in the midday sunlight, rainbows dancing in and about like a kaleidoscope.

Molly “O,” Nita and Blanche, Merced River crossing June 1908. Shannon Family Photo.

When they returned to Berkeley Nita rejoined her husband Jack whom she had married in April, just six weeks before graduation. They moved into their home at 1927 Dwight Way, just off campus. The singular adventure of University life and her trip to Yosemite were the capstone of her single life. As was common, then, she surrendered half her life to her husband and just ten months later to her first born, my uncle Jackie, she gave up the other half. As my father was wont to say, a first class education and the opportunities it brought, limited as they were for a late Victorian girl were set aside and a long life as a housewife began. She put her memories away in a white cardboard box kept in the cupboard for the rest of her life. Nita became Annie Gray Shannon again.

She was born 75 years too soon.

A bemused Annie “Nita” Shannon and her new husband, April 10th, 1908 in the pretend car. Shannon Family Photo

Epilogue:

Yosemite is a place the family has returned too again and again. It has a mystic power that causes the mind to soar. As children we stayed at camp Curry and walked out into the meadow, sat on the grass and saw the Fire Fall. We marveled at mirror lake and inched closer to the edge of Glacier Point just as our grandmother had. I held my mothers hand to peek over the edge. So delicious for a kid. My wife and I honeymooned there in the old Ahwahnee. We’ve been to the old LaConte Lodge which is now a museum and skied the pass in winter. We’ve been to the chapel where the first non-denominational services were held in 1879. We introduced our own children to its wonders. Such a marvelous place.

Grandmother and grandson at the Le Conte Lodge, 1908 and 2019

Many, many years later I found this little card in a box of my grandmothers things. The photos and postcards and letters all together tell the story. The fact that she kept these things for her entire life, moving them from home to home gives them a special significance. The are the foundation of this story.

Michael Shannon is a World Citizen, Surfer, Teacher and a writer. He writes so his children will remember the good family they come from.

By Michael Shannon

I know this to be true. Have you ever heard a truth, not shaded, parsed, paraphrased, but something that you know is clearly, purely, a truth?  They’re rare, to be cherished and recalled time and again. Something heard which is clear and polished to brightness; something so clear as to be marveled at, precisely because they are so rare.

Lou Gehrig:       

A tall man. Sloped shoulders, a baseball uniform of grey wool; pinstriped, his cap held before him as if in prayer, lifts his head and steps to the microphone planted on an impossibly green, manicured grass field, lowers his head and says softly, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Despite his wonderful achievements as a Yankee first baseman, he will forever be remembered by the thing that killed him, “Lou Gehrigs Disease.” On June 2nd, 1941, Lou Gehrig died of ALS, still believing himself to be that lucky man. A truth.

The  Brothers Van Gogh:       

Theodorus loved his brother so much.  They were, the two sides of the same coin. One successful, one not, one driven by ambition, one with none. Theo, self confident, the other without. Different worlds entirely but connected by brotherly love. One supported the other and was paid in useless paintings. Vincent wrote on the day he took his own life,

“Well, my work to me, I risk my life on it, and my reason has half foundered – all right – but you are not one of those dealers in men, as far as I know, and you can take sides, I find, truly acting with humanity, but what is the use? 

Vincent Van Gogh had one human thing, a brother who loved him. A truth.

Captain Henry T. Waskow:“       

‘This one is Captain Waskow,’” one of them said quietly.

“Two men unleashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zones. They just lie there in the shadows until someone comes after them.

“The unburdened mules moved off to their olive grove. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I could sense them moving, one by one, close to Captain Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.”

“One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, ‘God…damn, it!’

“That’s all he said, and then he walked away.

“Another one came, and he said, ‘God damn it to hell anyway!’ He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.

“Another man came. I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the dim light, for everybody was bearded and grimy. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face and then spoke directly to him, as though he were alive, ‘I’m sorry, old man.’

“Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said, ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’

“Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

“Finally he put the hand down. He reached over and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”*   

Written on the field at the Battle of San Pietro during the Italian campaign in December, 1943 by Ernie Pyle, war correspondent. A Truth.

Barbara Shannon:   

“Life is but a breath,” the Good Book says, and that is surely true. In the end, if you count money, houses and land, then she was poor. But if you count wealth as the love and affection of your family and friends then she was rich beyond counting.

She loved her husband, she loved her sons, she loved her son’s wives as the daughters she never had, and her grandchildren were the crown she wore in her old age.

Suddenly one day, she was used up and worn out and just as suddenly gone from our lives. Mom was not born in this valley, but for over fifty years this is where she lived and moved and had her being and here is where she died.

It is not such a sad thing really, to contemplate her laid to rest in our green and peaceful cemetery in the midst of her friends, neighbors and family whom she loved and who loved her. It is not such a sad thing, perhaps, to think of her lying in the shadows of the everlasting hills of this green and golden valley that we love so well.

The first time dad went to see her in the hospital, she was in a coma and was terribly ravaged by that awful, awful disease. When he walked into the room and saw her he said,

“No Mike, thats not my wife. Barbara is beautiful. I don’t want to remember her like this. Please take me home son.”

Now dad lies beside her, as one day, her sons will too.    A truth.

Ray and Mariel Long

He was a cowman, she was an oilfield girl. They were two of the most naturally funny people I have ever known. They lived in an ancient ranch house in Watt’s Valley California. The house was so old it resembled an old drunk leaning on a lamp post. Only faith held it up.**

In the summers of the fifties it was overrun with their kids and heaps of cousins who came up to the ranch for the summer. There were horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys and cattle. There were kitties in the barn where the milking was done. In the early ‘morn they had little beards of milk, uncle Ray was partial to cats you know.

He saddled every kid with a nickname. He spared not one of us. There was Jughead, Festus, Shebang, Jeb and knothead. My mom was “Sis.” He meant nothin’ by it except to say he loved us and we knew it.

Mariel, our aunt Mickie was no kind of cook, her mother turned her nose up at the housewife life and her girls were on their own growing up. Uncle Ray rustled the big old iron stove in the corner of the kitchen. Dough God biscuits, tall and flaked, rashers of bacon and fresh eggs gathered that morning. The kids set at the long table with the oilcloth cover devoured his breakfasts washed down with fresh milk, pored from an old tin pitcher. That’s fresh milk straight from the cow, gobs of yellow cream floating on top with an occasional dead fly as a garnish. No one was afraid of fresh cream then, still warm from the cow, no.

It’s hotter than Hades up there come summer and each morning the kids would suit up and walk down in the pasture to the little dam where the water was about a foot deep. We would pretend twe could swim, occasionally rising out to lie on the grass pasture to dry off in the dappled sunlight poking through the willow leaves. We ate sandwiches made with wonder bread, mustard and baloney, store bought sugar cookies and dreamed of growing up to be cowboys.

Like uncle Ray.

Ray Clarence Long with his firstborn, my cousin Bruce, better known as Jughead. Shannon Family photo.

He rode the Sierra his whole life long. Pushing cattle up to the high meadows in the spring, bringing them down in the fall. He worked the stockyards in the valley when times were lean; which was almost always. Dad said he knew every trail, crick, and cow camp from Mexico to Oregon and I never doubted it. There is a scene in the book Monte Walsh where the Stud Duck turns to his friend when they see a puncher ridin’ their way and says. “That’s Monte Walsh, nobody sits a horse like Monte Walsh.” He might as well have been talking about my uncle Ray.

Ray Long up on Charm, Watts Valley 1952. Shannon Family Photo.

He hand rolled his smokes with the one hand and drank his bourbon straight. He was honest as the day is long and the good God has surely made no one like him since. He rode horseback ’til the day he died.

A Truth.

*Ernie Pyle seldom wrote about generals, he wrote about the ordinary people he cared for, the dirty shirt dollar sixty a day Dogface who marched from Tunisia to Germany.

**Surprisingly, that old house still stands under the Sycamore trees some some seventy years gone.

Micheal Shannon is a World Citizen, Surfer, teacher and writer. He writes so his kids will know their story..

By Michael Shannon

Part The Second

Graduation came in May of 1908. After four years of study, the death of her uncle Patrick Moore in 1905 and the following year the great San Francisco Earthquake, Nita walked onto the stage at the Greek theater, accepted her diploma from Benjamin Ide Wheele

Commencement week, a round of celebrations, fraternity and club open houses, receptions and Class Day concluded on Wednesday with graduation. Faculty, regents, honored guests and alumni met at North Hall and the Library.led the graduating class up to the Greek Theatre. Dressed in their finest, the boys in high starched collars, the girls in their finest formal gowns. Their chin high lace collars stitched with traceries done by hand with initials worked as was Nita’s. The silk and chiffon fabrics used for the long narrow skirt ended three or four inches above the waist line and was held by a belt of stiff Petersham Cotton tied with a large bow in the back. The girls wore their hair up in the style of the Gibson Girl. Rolled and fluffed held by pins exposing the neck, the style was considered the height of elegance for young women.

The Gibson Girl had an exaggerated S-curve torso shape achieved by wearing a swan-bill corset. Images of her epitomized the late 19th- and early 20th-century Western preoccupation with youthful features and ephemeral beauty. Her neck was thin and her hair piled high upon her head in the contemporary bouffant, pompadour, and chignon, the “waterfall of curls” fashion. The statuesque, narrow-waisted ideal feminine figure was portrayed as being at ease and stylish.

The illustrator Charle Dana Gibson is credited for popularizing the standard look of the girl. Many women posed for Gibson Girl-style illustrations, including Gibson’s wife, Irene Langhorne, who may have been the original model. Irene was a sister of Viscountess Nancy (Langhorne) Astor. Mrs Astor besides being the first female member of Britain’s parliament was equally famous for her sharp tongue and took great pleasure in skewering Winston Churchill with it on every possible occasion. During a dinner party she informed Churchill that, “If you were my husband I would poison you,” to which he replied, “If you did madam, I would take it”. He could give as good as he got.

The Langhorne girls were immensely rich and two bought husbands with titles, Viscount Lord Waldorf Astor son of the richest man in the world at the time and Robert, the first Baron Brand. Wealthy American girls who married poor but titled Englishmen were titled by the American press as the “Dollar Princesses.”

The most famous Gibson Girl was probably the American-British stage actress, Camille Clifford, whose high coiffure and long, elegant gowns that wrapped around her hourglass figure and tightly corseted wasp waist defined the style. Miss Clifford also made popular the oversize woman’s hat known at the “Merry Widow.”

Irene Langhorne Gibson. The Original Gibson Girl. Public Domain print.

In Gibson’s drawings there was no hint at pushing the boundaries of women’s roles; instead they often cemented the long-standing beliefs held by many from the old social orders, rarely depicting the Gibson Girl as taking part in any activity that could be seen as out of the ordinary for a woman.

Nita and her friends certainly were aware of these trendsetters as any young woman of today would be. Women’s magazines, films and books held them up as ideals and in the old family photos of her at this time of her life she epitomized the look. Popular culture was alive and well in 1908, even in tiny Arroyo Grande where she was from.

Nita always seemed to me a serious woman but once she explained to me why she had a thoroughly beat up plug hat hanging on the hatrack in her office. You see, it was the fancy of students who attended the University of California, Berkeley at the dawning of the twentieth century to wear them. Upperclassmen and women, of which my grandmother was one, wore the old beaten up hats as a fashion accessory, much as my father wore his beanie when he was a student at Cal in the 1930’s. They must have found them on trash heaps or second hand stores, useless to anyone but college students who delight in being contrarians. My grandmother and her friends would walk around campus, from the North Hall to the Bacon Library Hall, or gather at the Charter Oak, dressed in the style of 1908, wearing shirtwaists, high collars and long dresses over high button shoes. The stately look we imagine today as being their nature. It’s too easy to forget that they were twenty year old girls. Just as they are in college today, full of high spirits and dreams of a life yet to be lived.

Photo, Calisphere

Each senior draped in a blue university gown, the mortar board with its golden tassel swaying in time with the march as they made their way to their seats for the ceremony. The sound of sibilant silk and cotton dresses, the soft clack of shoes on pavement accompanied the students like an orchestra. In the gentle breeze coming up from the bay, the mingled scents of cologne and perfume heralded the coming of the graduates. Nita sat between Laurence Herbert Grant, his winged collar and cravat complete with stickpin marking him as a bit old fashioned. He would move up to Fort Bragg and join the clergy. He looks a serious young man with his earnest expression, his thick wavy hair ruffling in the breeze. On her other side, Sydney Baldwin Gray, She of the small round glasses. She has the competent straight forward look of a teacher which she went on to be. Next in line, Ruth Van Kampen Green, married right after graduation. Her husband worked for United Fruit as a packer and she ultimately bore him eight children and spent a good deal of her life in Mexico and Brazil. They followed the banana trade. Next to Ruth was Edith Montgomery Grey who became a third grade teacher at Oak Park primary school in Folsom California. She resigned in 1920 in order to marry. Expectations were such that women should not have a career other than be a homemaker. She died soon after childbirth in 1920

A large majority of the women became teachers. Superbly educated, graduates of Cal were a hot commodity. California was growing rapidly and desperately needed more educators. Just as today, they found their way to the Normal School, Santa Barbara College , todays UCSB where they took a course of study to prep for the state teachers qualifying exam. These women were not the one room schoolhouse teachers of popular fiction. The California State Teachers exam of 1910 was brutal and was the equal of modern teachers requirements. Just as today, it took a five year course of study to qualify for a credential.

The college of Social Sciences at Berkeley, Nita’s school, was the largest at Cal in 1908, numbering over one thousand students. A student was promised a first class education just as they are today. She was required to have taken Latin at Santa Maria High School though Cal did not insist on Greek for the College of Social Sciences. She had a wide choice of classes in humanistic studies. She could choose classes in the great field of literature, linguistics, history and economics. Geography and education were also requirements and from the list of women graduates it can be seen that the most likely career was education.

Her curriculum shatters the old saw about the schoolmarm and the one room schoolhouse. One of the orphan girls Nita was raised with who was also schooled by uncle Patrick Moore, Mamie Tyler took her degree at a school founded as a private institution, ‘Minns’ Evening Normal School founded in 1857. That school became a public institution by act of the State Legislature on May 2, 1862. In 1868 the board of trustees took up the matter of permanent location, and Washington Square in San Jose was chosen. Mamie graduated in 1900 and taught much of her career in a log cabin near Port Angeles, Washington State.

Martha “Mamie” Tyler Kolloch and her students at the log cabin school in the Olympic forest Washington State, 1921 Shannon Family Photo

The first in California was originally founded as a private institution, ‘Minns’ Evening Normal School,’ in 1857, the school became a public institution by act of the State Legislature on May 2, 1862. In 1868 the board of trustees took up the matter of permanent location, and Washington Square in San Jose was chosen. San Jose State Teachers College was born. The Normal Schools were changed to state colleges in 1935 which allowed them to offer degrees in subjects other than education. Those schools make up the majority of the original California State Colleges including UCLA, San Diego State, UCSB and San Jose.

Normal Schools derive their name from the French phrase ecole normale. These teacher-training institutions, the first of which was established in France by the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1685, were intended to set a pattern, establish a “norm” after which all other schools would be modeled, a pattern which has remained in effect until the present day.

Wether Nita’s goal was to teach we don’t know but many of the girls sponsored by Patrick Moore did become teachers. Education was important to the Moore’s and Nita’s parents, the Grays. Her entire extended family was made up of Irish immigrants for which education was the most cherished goal. A goal still shared by immigrants from all over the world.

Nita’s parents, her siblings, and friends had arrived in Oakland by train from home and waited anxiously in the tiered seats around the Theatre where the folding chairs awaited the arrival of the dignitaries and expectant graduates.

Baccalaureate, also in the Greek had been on Sunday in which Bishop Nichols sermon had emphasized the opportunity for “Men” of character and worth to make their stamp on the great state of California. No mention of women in 1908.

Class day on Monday saw seniors meeting at Senior Oak. A speech by class president Hartley followed by the progression of “Plugs and Parasols” which wound through the campus where they halted for speeches by fellow classmates who spoke on subjects they were most interested. Hardly anyone listened of course. Excitement was building to a fever pitch. Tuesday afternoon they sat for the final Symphony Concert of the year. Finally the last senior assembly in Harmon Gymnasium on Tuesday evening. Parasols were folded and Nita and her roommates went home a tried to get some sleep. Wednesday would be an early start. Gowns to be pressed, hair done up, shoes polished and then the process of dressing, the girls helping each other, pushing pulling and primping making everything “Just so.”

Wednesday, the graduates to be met and organized themselves for the procession up to the Greek. Waiting for the ceremony to begin was almost more than they could stand. Nervous chatter rose above the crowd, the occasional group of boys hooped and hollered to let of steam but finally, lined up in proper order they stepped out to the sound of the University Band and began to walk.

At the Greek they filed into the rows of chairs, carefully arranged in alphabetical order. The murmur of the crowd was underplayed by the chairs creaking as the soon to be graduates took their seats. The rise and fall of low voices marked the expectant crowd. For many this ceremony would be one of the highlights of their lives.

After the always interminable speeches, after four years of University life, Nita rose and joined the parade up the steps onto the stage at the Greek Theatre and received her diploma from the hand of President Benjamin Wheeler himself. Then polite congratulations from Mrs Hearst and the other regents and with that her book of education closed.

The “S” curve is still the mode for women in 1908 and the cut of Nita’s clothes emphasize that. Shannon Family Photo

And here’s to the ‘Naught eight co-eds, Our prettiest, sweetest and best.

Whose eyes laugh back with our laughter, Whose hearts glow warm with our zest.

To the girls who were women at entrance, But who will be girls ’til they die.

A toast! For we know they are loyal.

A toast! With our glasses held high.

For a final deep pledge to our class, boys

O a fig would we care for fate!

In the same old way we would drink to our class,

In a toast to old “Naught-eight.

From the Blue and Gold Yearbook, University of California Berkeley class of 1908 by Sheldon Chaney, ’08

Coming next: Nita, the third. Senior trip to Yosemite Valley.

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Many thanks to my researcher Shirley Bennet Gibson from another old time local family. Couldn’t do it without her.

Michael Shannon is a surfer, traveler, teacher and writer.

The first part.

By Michael Shannon

She was a woman of sturdy shoes when I knew her. I cannot remember her without her apron, a sensible utilitarian piece of apparel worn by women of the early twentieth century to protect their clothes, a leftover from the days when, if you weren’t wealthy enough to have a laundress, you washed and ironed your own garments.

My grandmother was 60 years old when I was born. By the time I was old enough to know her she was well into her seventies. We never, ever talked about her life. Like many people she must have though it wasn’t very interesting which is how it must have looked from inside her head. The only things she ever shared with me came when she was in her nineties. I would sit on her sofa, the one with the pink roses pattern and from the space where she had retreated at the end of her life she would, with enough prompting, dispense snippets of it.

How the hired girl got “Knocked Up,” how uncle Pat would have to spend the night in the barn when he came home three sheets to the wind after a night at Ryan’s bar with his friends Daniel Rice and Patrick Donovan. The most interesting thing wasn’t that these things happened, both are pretty common in the human experience but for her use of the phrase which she would have consider extremely vulgar in her younger days or the story about Patrick Moore drinking which was something she had also disapproved off. She had reason to.

So I sat there with her, she in her bathrobe, something which would have horrified her when she was younger, she basking in the sun coming through the big picture window overlooking the places she had lived nearly all her life. Being ninety is being cold and the afternoon heat nearly put her to sleep, perhaps her guard was down.

When she was younger, every morning she would get up, start breakfast and then retire to her bedroom to complete her Toilette. Carefully combing her hair with the silver plated boars bristle brushes she had used since she was a girl, dusting herself lightly with White Shoulders and applying just a kiss of rouge to her lips with the tip of her Pinky. Girls who grew up at the end of the nineteenth century used almost no makeup; that would have been seen as vulgar in her circle. She had never changed.

Holding her little hand, the skin velvety soft and nearly translucent, having seldom ever seen the sun during her nine plus decades, for her complexion was her treasure. I cannot recall her ever going anywhere without gloves, long sleeves and a hat. Now she sat wrapped in her old pink terrycloth robe with the little embroidered roses on the collar, me listening carefully and giving her the a little spoken nudge to keep her talking, fascinated by what she told me.

My life was as different from hers as if I’d lived on the moon. Though we weren’t considered poor, the family had come down some financially since my grandmother was a girl. Families grow and money has to go farther. She was born to a moderately wealthy farming and ranching family from the Santa Maria area of California. Midwife delivered in a little house just off Division road and the old coast highway in Oso Flaco. She was the second of seven children of Irish immigrants Samuel and Jeannie Gray. Sam Gray and Jennie McKeen were married on May 12th, 1881 at the Orange Hall in Bailie Riobaird Doagh, county Antrim. They traveled to Belfast and boarded the States Line ship, SS State of Alabama and sailed to America on their honeymoon. Boarding at Belfast, they came ashore at Manhattan’s Castle Gardens. The State of Alabama was no Coffin ship like the vessels that delivered the first wave of famine Irish forty years earlier but she was no cruise ship either. Sam and his bride traveled third class, just a step above steerage. They never returned to Kilbride Parish, Upper Antrim, County Antrim, ever again. Like most Irish immigrants the family left behind was forever lost.

Like many they made the long hop across the country to California very quickly. Immigrant families followed a chain of family migration as they still do. Jeannie Gray’s Aunt Sarah, married to Patrick Moore of Cavan, Ireland, todays Cork, had come to America in 1850 when he was just 18. He moved west to Ohio from New York, became a naturalized citizen in 1868 and by Annies birth was living with his extended family in the Guadalupe and the Arroyo Grande Areas of central California.

The Moores by the eighties were a wealthy family, Patrick being what he called a capitalist had acquired thousands of acres of the old Mexican Land Grant Rancho’s. He had also invested in the nascent Oil business in Casmalia and the Orcutt area. He was a principle of the Pinal Oil Company and by the turn of the century had become not only a land owner but a private banker. Banks of the sort we are familiar with today didn’t exist then and most loans were made with a handshake. Uncle Pat was good at his work and scrupulously honest.

Pat and Sarah Moore had only one great sadness in their lives, they were childless and they loved children. Because Jennie Gray was Sarah Moore’s niece and by 1895 had seven living children, the Moore’s proposed that little Annie Gray, the second child come to live with them in Arroyo Grande. After some discussion a deal was worked out whereas the Moore’s would feed and cloth her, pay for her education at the California University at Berkeley, and upon passing, deed her a Quarter section of land and gift her a number of shares in the oil company. The custom of “Loaning” children out to relatives isn’t common anymore but was not unusual for the time.

In 1893 Annie came to live with the Moores. In the big house. On the Hill. She had, for the first time her own room on the second floor and servants to take care of her needs, It was quite a change. In the picture above, the two older girls on the left are the Tyler sisters. They lived with the Moore’s also. Their parents had both died within a year of each other and Sarah and Pat took it upon themselves to raise them too. It was always said by those who knew that the big house was always filled with the children of the town.

As Annie grew, these many friends shared their lives together as children and teenagers. The Kodak Box camera was invented just in time to chronicle much of their lives growing up. Annie was fifteen when the camera came on the market and we have albums of photos taken with what must have been, a marvelous new thing. They took pictures the way girls use their I-Phones today.

They chronicled all kinds of events, birthday parties, holidays or even any excuse to get together. Arroyo Grande was such a small town that you could walk across it in just a few minutes and like little places, everyone, they knew each other. One hundred and twenty years later most of the family names in her autograph books still reside here including my future grandfather whose beautiful copperplate signature is scattered throughout the pages of that little book.

As promised, Annie was off to Berkeley in 1904. She graduated from Santa Maria High School in 1904 in the same class with her oldest brother Robert Gray. Though she lived in Arroyo Grande with the Moore’s she would spend the week with her parents on their ranch on Guadalupe road, taking the narrow gauge railroad down on Monday morning and returning for the weekend. The high school in Arroyo Grande was not accredited for the university. It had a somewhat sketchy history and had ceased to exist for a few years as a group of wealthy ranchers refused to pay taxes to support a high school, deeming it an unnecessary level of education. “Boys need to go to work, not school, and girls need to marry and keep house,” said Harold Miossi. one of the ringleaders in the anti-school delegation. Daniel Donovan, big landowner and friend of Pat Moore was leader in defunding the school. The conversations between these and the other town leaders in the bar at the Ryan Hotel on Branch Street must have been interesting. According to family lore, uncle Pat and his crony’s could put it away in vast quantities and the arguments were detailed in the local papers. My grandfather Jack Shannon and his friends including “Ace” Porter, George Clevenger and Frank Bardin all ended their formal education at eighth grade. They all prospered in spite of going to do a grownups work at fourteen.

Pat and Sarah Moore were decidedly against the no-school crowd and not only sent Annie of to college but paid for the schooling of several of her friends including the girl below pictured in her high school graduation picture. She returned to Arroyo Grande and taught school. She was so well liked that a grammar school was named for her. She was my grandmother good friend and spent many hours in the big house just up the hill from her own next to Pig Tail Alley on old Bridge Street..

Berkeley was a far different school in 1904 than it is today. Girls had only a limited series of choices in which to study and like my grandmother, most would graduate with a Baccalaureate degree in Liberal Arts. There were few careers open to educated woman. The School of Architecture was founded only in 1903 by an endowment from Phoebe Apperson Hearst who was already championing women’s education, particularly women in Architecture. Mrs Hearst was a supporter of Julia Morgan, famously the architect of Hearst Castle. Morgan, herself was a woman of many firsts. She was one of the very first female graduates of the Engineering School at Berkeley and the very first woman to graduate from the prestigious French Ecole Nacionale Superiuere des Beaux-Artes. She was also the first licensed woman architect in California in 1903. In Annies sophomore year, The world famous Bancroft Library was added to the Universities collection that year and in 1905, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt endowed the school with funds to build a permanent building for the School of Jurisprudence.

The famous “Big C” was built in march of 1905, Annies 2nd year at Cal. Her classmates of ’07 and ’08 formed a human chain to haul the blocks of sandstone uphill in a heavy rain. The “C” represents the peaceful end of the Charter Hill Rush held between the freshman and sophomores. It is a symbol of peace and unity. The Sophs were in charge of keeping it in good repair and each year, “The Deed to the C” was transferred to the next years sophomore class in a ceremony each spring.

The “Big C” was and is considered legitimate game for opponents of California Athletics, particularly the private school boys of Stanford. Each year before the Cal/Stanford football game it is lit and guarded through the night by members of the Sophomore class.

During the time Annie was a Cal there were no dorms or sororities for women. Girls boarded in homes around campus and she was no exception. She had a room in the home of Doctor Arvan Meeks and his wife Minna, a well-to-do dentist practicing in Berkeley. He and his wife took in a number of boarders from the school each year.

As young girls still do, she chose her nickname or it was chosen for her by friends. Why Nita, no one ever said but she carried it from early girlhood until she finished at the University. A short name or nickname is a sign of intimacy, trust, and friendship. We see Nita in her autograph book which dates back to the 1890’s and even in a letter written to her by her friend Mamie, another nickname, from her old folks home in Washington state when they were both in their early nineties. It had staying power. Likely because they were childhood friends and raised together they never called each other anything else. Nita is a diminutive for Anita or Ana if you speak Spanish. It could have been either one or as is sometimes the case just a way to distance themselves from names they didn’t themselves choose. I never heard anyone call her anything but Annie, not Anne or Anita. Annie was her given name. Perhaps they though Annie was too much like a servants name or something she would say all of her life; “Thats Shanty Irish”, styling herself as the Lace Curtain kind. They were raised in style.

Whatever the reason it set the tone for the early part of her life. Born to a wealthy first generation Irish family, raised by a rich first generation Irish family. A good start.

Michael Shannon is a writer, teacher, surfer, and world traveler. He resides in Arroyo Grande California.

Coming next, Nita the second part.