So this is kind of an acknowledgment. There was something my father did in casual conversation that I found mystifying. He used to do this thing when talking to my mother or people he knew that were of his own generation and that thing was to refer to women by their maiden names.
He would say things to my mother, like,”I saw Georgie Hendrixs at Bennett’s grocery today and she said to say hello.” Thats all well and good, my mother understood who he meant but I didn’t. Now I knew only one Georgie and that was Georgie O’Conner. Bills’ wife. As I grew up and began to learn the ins and outs of social life in my hometown it finally occurred to me that the two Georgie’s were the same person.
One of these two women I knew well, she had a son my age, they lived on what once was Leedham Lane on the west side of town. The family still lives there, you know, the old house with the pair of big Fig trees in front. My dad knew that too. Then why did he call her Georgie Hendricks?
Georgia “Georgie” Hendrix, 17 Arroyo Grande HS yearbook 1943.
The mystery deepened when my mother always referred to her as Georgie O’Conner. Now it’s hard to be two people unless you are a criminal or a politician. Actors must count too, but here in the neighborhood it doesn’t happen. The mystery deepened.
When I was a teenager I asked him. We were at the table eating dinner and I said, Dad, why do you call your woman friends by the wrong name? It was always pretty hard to stump my father. I can count the times in my life when I did. I was probably around fourteen or so and he was forty seven, roughly. Dad was a college graduate and well read. He had a lifetime of experience in business so it was nearly impossible to confuse him which delighted me because like all the young I somehow thought we were equal in education and experience. I know better now.
He looked at me for a bit and you could practically see the marbles rolling around in his head as he tried to find an answer to my question. It was kind of a ridiculous question anyway, I mean what name he used was simply normal to him and I don’t think he had given it much thought one way or the other. Georgie had a name and it was Hendrix just like Marylee Baxter was Marylee Zeyen or Mrs Fuchiwaki was Iso Kobara. Make any sense to you? Me neither.
Rather than come up with a credible answer he gave me the usual, “You wouldn’t understand, or That’s just the way it is” or especially, “Those are their names.”
So there I was ignorant about something I heard my dad do all the time.
So here’s an example, when I was twelve or thirteen my parents took me to a party up on Sierra Drive. It was my father’s friend Cyril Phelan and his wife Kathryn’s home. It was a nervous experience because my mother had been sure to let me know that these people had daughters my age which made me a, twelve year old nervous wreck because it meant she had something sneaky in mind. The girls mother who I was meeting for the first time was called Kay, not Kathryn and my dad jokingly said something to her and called her Routzhan which made her laugh. Made no sense to me. Besides I was doing my best to avoid strange girls and was puzzling over this thing about the names. So, if you can follow, this Gus guy was really Cyril which seemed at the time a very unfamiliar and strange sort of name. He was married to Katherine or Kay whose last name was Phelan or was it Routzhan. See what I mean?
There was another woman there who was married to my dad’s poker playing buddy J. Vard, another strange name, who was apparently married to my mother’s friend “Happy Bottom” which I assumed was not her real name but…*
I guess it hadn’t yet occurred to me that adults did what we did in school. I had friends named Squeaky, Dumbo, big ears of course, and Woody. Tookie, his mom said he had just the cutest little Fanny when he was a babe. That one has stuck and it’s become practically his only name more than seventy years later.
All of course was explained by my mother. She told me my dad did it for several reasons. First of all many of the people he knew he had grown up with. The women who were once in school with him or he knew when they were just maids had married his friends or a stranger to our town and their married names were not the same as he remembered them and he just unconsciously recalled their maiden names and used them.
I guess these are things that make small towns special. Think of this. When I was sixteen I traded my job at Mattie’s restaurant for a better one at Baxter’s service station in Pismo Beach. It was owned by Walter Baxter and his sons. WA Baxter and sons Chevron where the bookeeper was “Granny” who had no other name that I knew of and her sons Bill and Tom. Take a breath and try and follow this. Tom Baxter’s wife was Mary Lee but her maiden name was Zeyen which is the name my dad used. Her father owned a clothing store on Branch street for eighty years and my mother worked there. Tom called my parents by their last names, Shannon and because when I went to work for him he apparently couldn’t remember my first name, though I have always believed that it was a compliment to my father, called me “George.” He called me George until the day he died.
Marylee Zeyen Baxter, Arroyo Grande High School, 1944.
It finally occurred to me that he did it because he considered it a marker that divided his young life from his older. He also did it because he really could not remembered some of their married names. He did it from affection too.
Kathryn Routzhan and my father went all the way through school together, first grade through Junior College and would have attended Berkeley together until Gus came along. He knew her for nearly thirty years of the most impressionable time of their lives. Routzhan was the correct name for him.
Kathryn Routzhan, Santa Maria Junior College, 1931
Eventually after enough questions were asked some semblance of order was established, at least by me. Apparently these women existed in parallel universes, the before and after. I can understand it now. In memory people exist in block of time and we recognize that.
I suppose, in a bookend, the same thing has happened to me. At school reunions I see the women of today as the girl of yesterday. Just like my dad did. Thats the name I use, the real one.
Cover: Georgia “Georgie Hendrix and Agness “Billie” Records who you may have known as Georgie O’Conner and Billie Swigert..
Happenstance accounts for some things in my life but most were things I thought I might want to do or to be. No matter, whatever it was the one constant was the feeling was that I would be safe at home.
I figured out pretty early that it wasn’t the same for all kids.
In our little two room school tucked into a hillside named for and not too far from the nearly forgotten home of the pioneer family that put Arroyo Grande on the map the homogenous group of children, six to fourteen lived in a kind of time warp where we all felt safe. We knew little of each others home life. The parents of our classmates were ciphers, tall figures who were nice to kids, mother images who steered us in the direction that adults believed we should go. How they were at home only their own children knew.
We were a school of the children of immigrants. some recent some dating back to the shadowy beginnings of the country. Indentured servants from Ireland, Chumash kids that predated those. There were children whose ancestors built the Mexican ranchos. The children’s family’s whose parents or grandparents were from Japan, the Phillipines, the Azores, Brazil, Poland, Europe and Scandinavia, maybe too many to count.
Branch Grade School 1943. Miss Elizabeth Holland Principal. The single graduate that year was Bill Quaresma the boy withthe puppy.
Believe it or not there was no child who attended school with us that could call themselves rich.
Some families owned wide swaths of land but that didn’t make the rich by any means. “Land Poor” was the term. You might have a ranch which numbered its size in acres by the thousand but still live in a house nearly a hundred years old. Dad drove an old pick up truck, mother not at all. The family sedan used only for shopping and Sunday churching. Parents in our district almost always worked the land. Dirt farmers, cattlemen and the folks who worked for them. None of us growing up knew that it was the last gasp of the family farm. Nearly every family lived and worked on their own acreage. Few understood that within a decade most of those families would be pushed out by consolidation as the business was changing from supplying locally to shipping produce nationally. The cattle ranches were under assault by the feedlots who could fatten faster and more efficiently.
Grade School 1926. Miss Elizabeth Holland principal, the only teacher. Graduates that year were Miss Marry Donovan, Olivia Reis and Charles Fink. Next years grads are Carl Quaresma and Manuel Silva.
There was little about our farms and ranches that was idyllic. We were not Norman Rockwell people. Kids in my grammar school had parents who were desperate, the kids undereducated, poorly dressed, ate paste for breakfast when they could. Some were lucky to have a single pair of shoes. They could come to school with the bruises gifted by angry parents who were up against it and understood that there was no way out.
Branch Grade School. Miss Elizabeth Holland, the year she retired.*
For all of that we were a remarkably homogenous group. I recall no teasing or meanness amongst us. Isolated in a small community before television we had nowhere to learn about race hatred or were we typically exposed to the differences in wealth.
Of course, in all sadness that all changed when we got to high school and lessons about inequalities, race, money and power have never ceased.
Those children still bound by a shared experience have grown in every direction. Our little school produced mechanics, scholars, housewives, teachers and truck drivers. We even had a murderer. As with all people, we were divergent into adulthood.
A kid was a kid was a kid was a kid. The nastiness of life was not yet before us.
That part of our lives in which we felt safe is a gift which we hold dear. We can never hold it in our hands again or get it back but on a cold darkling night, slip into your cotton jammies, crawl deep under the covers with only your nose exposed and if you concentrate you can touch it in memory and once again you can, for a brief time be safe at home.
*Authors class. Far right 2nd row down.
Michael Shannon is an alumnus of the old Branch Grade School. He writes so hi boys will know where they came from.
So which is it , maynaze or mayonnaise? There’s nothing better than the smooth, creamy texture and one-of-a-kind flavor of Duke’s Mayonnaise, made with Eugenia Duke’s original recipe since 1917. Duke’s notably containing no sugar and using apple cider vinegar for a tart, more “vinegary” flavor, while Hellmann’s has a balanced, neutral, and somewhat sweeter profile due to its sugar content and white vinegar. You can use them interchangeably in many recipes, but their different tastes will subtly alter the final dish.
They can also alter relationships. Now say you’re a southern boy or girl from one of the old secessionist Confederate states, right? Well, we gonna disagree.
At our kitchen table we had a girl, my mother whose family dated back to the beginnings of America, not the United State, understand, but the older one. She had an ancestor who signed the Declaration, Another ancestor, actually a whole passel* of ’em took up arms against their brothers in the north. Nearly finished the family right there. Three of them four boys give their lives for that “monstrous system”. The family came down from the one soldier survivor and another’s daughter born eight months after her father was kilt at Malvern Hill in the Seven Days fight in Virginia with the 43rd North Carolinas. In his final letter from the hospital in Richmond he echoed every soldier, ever, “I want to go home.”
At the opposite end sat my Pop. He came from an indentured Irishman, a indentured transport sent across after the battle of the Boyne which finally crushed the Irish kings and turned Ireland into a vassal state. They were farmers mostly, those people who essentially invented conservatism. Before this was a country they latched onto a good deal when they farmed just outside Lower Mount Bethel Township, Pennsylvania. They bought a tavern and inn from the King’s colonial courts because the previous man who tended the bar and rented the rooms was convicted of counterfeiting and strung up by the neck until dead, dead, dead. When the Kings Magistrate puts his little black hankie over his powdered curls you’re in trouble. It worked out for us though. To show their gratitude Atlanta Shannon and his son William enlisted in the 1st Pennsylvania regiment, company F from Northampton County and fought with George’s Continental Army.
1st Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line. 1776-1783
Like most family’s they hatched the occasional scoundrel. My great grandfather Shannon served a spell in Sing Sing for stealing from the boxcars of the railroad he worked for, the New York Central. They never recovered the goods but they got even. He spent a year inside.
My other great grandfather Ernest Stone Cayce was a swell. He often traveled in a private rail car and dressed to the nines. He sat at the Bridge table with Bill Vanderbilt and lived in the same hotel. He lost it all and ended up busted, a transient who died in a flophouse in Fort Worth and is buried in an unmarked grave in Paupers Field there. The Texas Transient Bureau sent a telegram to my grandmother asking if she wanted the body sent to California for burial she replied with one word, No.
Dapper Robert Ernest Stone Cayce 1866-1935
We were just kids having dinner at our kitchen table and didn’t know any of that but we did witness the culture difference. A family from northern Pennsylvania versus a Mississippi family.
Take Cornbread for example. My Pop liked it hot, sliced in half and slathered and I do mean slathered in real butter not the oily, slimy margarine made from the grease leftover from Tanks used in WWII. He being a child of dairy farmers liked the real stuff. He would carefully slice the cornbread lengthwise and top it with enough butter to stop an unhealthy heart. Shannons drank whole milk, not the pig swill called skim. Whipped cream must cover all of the pumpkin pie, no visible pie and you must add an extra dollop for good luck. In our house all cornbread was made from scratch. Mom didn’t use cook books for such a fundamental thing. Dashes, a pinch, palms full of flour which we kids had to sift by hand and cornmeal, a teensy bit of sugar and Crisco. Never ever came out the same way twice. Hence my dad’s care in the cutting. Just on the edge of crumbling, ahh perfect. Drop on a quarter inch slab of real butter and he’d be ready to go. A spoon full of beans in one hand and the bread in the other.
James M Cayce, Quartermaster Sergeant Co E 2nd Mississippi Regiment Army of northern Virginia. Served in nearly every battle in the eastern theater of operation. Captured at Gettysburg, paroled, returned to duty and surrendered at Appomattox, one of only 19 2nd Mississippi soldiers remaining. He died in Robertson Texas in 1904. His granddaughter, my grandmother was born in Santa Barbara in 1895.
At the opposite end of the table, the unreconstructed Confederate took hers, and giving my dad the fish eye, ripped hers to pieces and threw them in a tall glass. She did it like her ancestor Cpl. James Cayce of the 2nd Mississippi did to the Yanks at Spotsylvania Court House, “tore ’em up.” She’d pour in a spoonful of sugar, add whole milk, stir it to the right consistency and then use her spoon to ladle it into her mouth with the same care with which she did everything. When we were up at aunt Mariels ranch she used fresh buttermilk which she claimed was much superior to whole milk. She picked the odd fly off the buttermilk because the fresh buttermilk went into the ice box straight from the cow. No homogenizing or Pasteurizing for my aunt and uncle, no sir. Uncle Ray was the real deal and didn’t put on any airs or fuss about things like science or flys. He likely ran more flys on his ranch than cows anyway.
When I’d grown some many of those little quirks in the family were explained. I joined the Navy in 1966 and all of this was brought to a boil and hammered home when I spent twelve weeks in a boot camp company with almost all of our companies recruits were from the deep south, the Bible belt and Texas. It was a master class in regional language, food and histories. It’s when I learned that there is always another version of everything.
If nothing else it explained corned bread preferences. I’ll tell you about it sometime.
*Passel is a nineteenth century invention, a U.S. dialect version of parcel, Also a group of opossums is called a “passel.” Say: “Dagnab it, there’s that Passel O’ Possums rat now!”
Michael Shannon is a writer and writes just what he wants to no matter what the English teacher says. He also writes for his sons so they will know where they came from.
“Bee Jackson was a honey. The Bee’s knees, the original. She was the Berries…..an ankling Baby, the Cat’s pajamas.”
The photo, Beatrice “Bee” Jackson (1903 – 1933) was an actress and dancer. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Her mother was a former actress. As a child, Jackson loved to make up dances to the music of her toy phonograph.
She was known as the Charleston Queen, and while she didn’t invent the dance (some believe the dance originated from an African-American dance called the Juba), she was one of the dance’s most prominent advocates. Blonde and vivacious, Bee Jackson had the world in the palm of her hand. At fifteen years old, she was a chorus dancer in the Zeigfield Follies. Eventually, she toured Europe, had royalty chasing after her, and was a member of high society. A celebrity of the highest degree, Jackson’s legs were insured for $100,000, almost 25 years before Betty Grable did it.
She danced through her early years with her favorite toy, a phonograph. ‘I danced because I loved it’ she said and simply worked out steps to her favorite tunes even though she had no conception of routine; that intricate pattern that is weaved into a dance.
Bee’s mother, Grace Jackson, a former actress, acted as her manager and influenced her decision to focus on the exciting new steps. The popularity of the “Charleston” dance was taking off like a skyrocket in 1924. At that moment, Bee was at, or at least very near, the epicenter of the phenomenon and was equipped with the right skills to capitalize on its success. She was just one average dancer among a herd of competitors, however, and she needed a clever angle to carve out a path to fame and fortune. Their solution was to strike out as touring act and show the dance to audiences far beyond the Big Apple. To increase Bee’s marketing appeal, she began presenting herself in 1925 as the originator of the “Charleston” dance, or at least the person responsible for transferring it from South Carolina migrant former slaves to New York and the white community.
She might not be a household name any more, but images of Miss Jackson have been reproduced in hundreds-perhaps thousands-of books, magazines, and webpages devoted to the effervescent “Roaring Twenties.”
My mom and her sister Mariel were right on time. The best of pals, born just a year apart. They were oil patch kids and moved from place to place in California depending on where there father, a Driller happened to be sent. My grandfather said they lived in every God forsaken town in southern California. The oil business was populated by some pretty rough characters. Out on the lease you never knew what you were going to get. There were pistols carried, a sheath knife was de riguer both for the work and perhaps to settle a dispute. Most roughnecks, a perfect name for the men who traveled looking for work, mostly single, not much education and half exhausted most of the time. Add the booze and the hootchie coothie girls and things were ripe for trouble. My grandparents never liked living on the leases mostly to protect their three kids.
They were pretty lucky when the girls were entering their teens, most of the work of my grandfather stretched from Huntington Beach north to San Luis Obispo county. They bounced around a lot, Compton, Long Beach, Belmont Shores, Artesia, Signal Hills, Bolsa Chic and Wilmington , wherever there was a rig, they were.
In those days Los Angeles had a street railroad mock lovingly dubbed the Red Cars. The red may have been flashy when they were new but that had long since faded to the color of a red shirt too long washed and worn.The electric street cars were everywhere and for small change you could ride from Balboa out to Redlands or up as far as San Fernando, a thousand miles of track that covered all of Los Angeles county.
Pacific Railway was a private company originally built by the company to promote new suburbs in the outer reaches of the city. It was a boon to property developers and served it’s purpose for many years. The rise of the automobile eventually drove the line into bankruptcy.
LA is the quintessential car city. This is ironic, given that LA was built around the largest electric railway system in the world. The suburbs that you see all over greater LA, the 1920s copy-pasted bungalows which are everywhere, were designed to function in tandem with the old Pacific Electric Railway. You can still see the traces today. For example, if something is named “Huntington”, like Huntington Park, Huntington Beach, the Huntington Library and so on, it’s pretty likely named after Henry Huntington, the Pacific Electric Railway’s owner.*
In my mothers teenage years most kids did not own cars. It was the Red Cars or nothing; or you could walk. It was only 33 miles from Long Beach to downtown.
So my aunt Mariel, my mother and their friends like to hop the cars and rattle around all the hot spots of the time. On weekends they would go dancing at Santa Monica or Ocean Park or best of all all the way to the Biltmore. In downtown LA the Biltmore Hotel was the largest hotel west of Chicago. Built in 1923 it was considered the finest in California. With more than a thousand rooms it was located opposite Pershing Square in the heart of downtown.**
Most importantly for my mother and her friends was the basement nightclub known as the Biltmore Bowl. With it’s two story ceiling and with a size that would accomodate 2,000 dancers and guests, it had hosted 8 Academy Awards ceremonies since its opening. Saturday nights it would be standing room only. The girls played dress up trying to look like stars themselves. Oh so suave, smoking in the days fashion, mom said they were swivel necks looking to see if any famous Hollywood stars were to be seen. The saw Olivia De Havilland and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on occasion.
Dancing was the point though. Dressed in their best they nursed their Ginger Ales, mom said that the Shirley Temples were too sweet and “Icky” a sentiment echoed by Shirley herself.
The depression was the heyday of the big bands, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman or the Glen Miller touring orchestra belting out the hits of the day. Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine*** just as smooth as velvet, begging you for a dance. My mother spinning across the floor, ankle length skirt swirling, hem clutched in one hand her low heeled pumps gliding over the corn starched floors, head flung. back hair flying and smiling to beat the band.
Exhausted girls sleeping in the Red Car, piled like tired puppies dreaming of future glamorous nights.
When my grandfather was transferred to Arroyo Grande in 1940 she met my father. While they were courting they used to take his little grey Plymouth coupe down to Pismo Beach to go dancing at the Pavilion. Though Pismo was a tiny little town it had it’s full compliment of Saloons, bars and dance halls. A soupcon of titillating danger hung over it all, especially at the beginning of the war when herds of soldiers from all the military bases flocked to the place. My Dad always said was where the “Debris meets the sea.” There was anything a young man from the sticks could imagine. Pool halls filled with slickers, the filipino gambling halls with, convenient cribs out back and the Beer bars like Mattie’s where, dressed in a silk blouse and velvet trousers. she would hustle those boys by buyin’ the first round for free and pointing out her apartment building down by the pavilion where her Taxi dancers dwelled.****
During the war masses of soldiers in training meant that the ballrooms and dance halls did a booming business. There was no slackening of business for the big touring bands like the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman who swung through town on their way to the big cities. Every forty miles or so there was a stop on the railroad as they traveled around the country, from Tijuana to Seattle and points east.
It’s hard to imagine my Dad trippin’ across the floor but he was a young man in his prime, loved to write music and was captivated by this glamorous girl from the big city. If she wanted to go dancing, they would.
Barbara Hall and husband to be George Shannon 1943.
Fast forward to 1960 and as Kevin Bacon so aptly said, “lets dance.” Boys entering teengedom needed to learn to shake a leg. Mom was right there. She put on an old vinyl record that she kept in the huge piece of furniture, the squatting beast of Cherry wood the television lived in, along with it’s companion the radio and phonograph. In the cabinet below were records kept and carried for decades. Dance tunes, crooners like Der Bingle, Bing Crosby whose hot buttered voice poured like chocolate syrup when he sang. As music went he was the be all and end all of music for my dad who looked on Sinatra and Elvis fwith suspicion. Not so for my mother.
She had me help her roll the hooked rug in our living room. She mopped the wooden floor boards underneath and when they dried she sprinkled cornstarch across it.
She turned to the cabinet, swung the needle arm, set it on an old, old record so brittle it might crack at a hard look. A quick move to the toggle to start and the high pitched tone of clarinets sprang from the speakers clothed with that nubbly brownish fabric sprinkled with flecks of gold spun music like the notes in a Disney cartoon.
Bum bump, bum bump, bum bumpa bump bump bump, the beginning notes of the Charleston jumped from the beast with the beat that moved the feets. I stood facing her as she danced, stopping every so often to explain what to do.
She taught the Lindy Hop, named for Charles Lindbergh’s hop across the Atlantic, the Black Bottom, the Fox Trot and how to Waltz. She could even Twist.
“Shake it, shake it, Baby, let’s do the twist,” yeah, a forty two year old farm wife, a woman with her hair in rollers, dressed in peddle pushers, apron swaying with the beat, shoes slippin” across those old hardwood floors of the house I grew up in. I can still see her. Close your eyes and you can too.
*Henry Edwards Huntington (February 27, 1850 – May 23, 1927) was an American railroad magnate and collector of art and rare books. He settled in Los Angeles, where he owned the Pacific Electric Railway and substantial real estate interests. He was a major booster for Los Angeles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and many places in California are named after him. His uncle Collis P. Huntington became one of The Big Four who built the Central Pacific Railroad, one of the two railroads that built the transcontinental railway in 1869. His greatest legacy is the world famous Huntington Library Museum in San Marino California. He is buried in the gardens there. https://www.huntington.org/
**Pershing Square is a small public park in Downtown Los Angeles, California, one square block in size, bounded by 5th Street to the north, 6th to the south, Hill to the east, and Olive to the west. Originally dedicated in 1866 by Mayor Cristóbal Aguilar as La Plaza Abaja, the square has had numerous names over the years until it was finally dedicated in honor of General John J. Pershing in 1918.
****Taxi Dancers is a term applied to young women who danced for a dime at dance halls. “Dime a Dance.” It was a flexible world if you know what I mean.
Cover Photo: Beatrice “Bee” Jackson
Michael Shannon is a writer, surfer and traveler. He writes so his children will know where they came from.
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Out in California shakin’ is a fact of life. If you live here long enough your going to be in one. People can date their lives, just like reading a clock. Which one did you ride out. Was it the Great Fort Tejon in 1857, the Hayward in 1868, or Santa Barbara in 1927. California recorded 9 severe to catastrophic quakes between 1900 and 1933. My grandfather Shannon and his wife to be Annie Gray rode out the San Francisco in 1906 which they never forgot and over time they generated dozens of stories. It went, in the telling, from a catastrophe to legendary status in our family.
Family histories are bookmarked with these. Time, day and place vividly recalled.
Call Newspaper tower on Market Street in flames, April 18, 1906. Hearst photo.
In 1933 Eileen was nearing her term. In a mark of the times she would deliver in a hospital. This child would be the first in the family not born at home. No midwife, no husband or sister-in-law, no mother-in-law. What could be safer or more modern?
Eileen was checked in Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. Built in the Spanish Colonial style it was to be a new and unique experience for Bruce and Eileen and baby to be.
Santa Barbaras Cottage Hospital, 1930. News Press photo.
Delivering a baby at 38 was a dicey proposition in 1933. There had been many improvements in in pre-natal care in Eileens lifetime, infant death rates had dropped significantly since 1900. The diminished numbers of home births was a major contributor along with the acceptance of theories on anti-sepsis and the rise of hospital culture.
In 1888, a group of 50 prominent Santa Barbara women recognized it was time for the growing community to have a hospital — a not-for-profit facility dedicated to the well-being and good health of all residents, regardless of one’s ability to pay or ethnic background. It was a major milestone in the communities history as the population was just five thousand people when the little 25 bed facility opened its doors in 1891.
In ’33 Bruce had a steady job but his pay could barely cover expenses. The depression had reached its lowest point for American people. March 1933 saw the highest number of unemployed, estimated at around 15.5 million. Those numbers represented just under 25% of the workforce. New Mexico jobless numbers were pushing 40%, the highest in the nation. For those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs, wage income had fallen 42.5% between 1929 and 1933. The country had no social security system, no unemployment insurance the unemployed had to rely on themselves and the overwhelmed relief agencies. People resorted to desperate measures to find work or earn money, such as waiting for a day’s wage or selling goods on the street. Children were turned out of their homes to fend for themselves. There was a great deal of unrest across the country.
In San Francisco, the hiring of day laborers called a “Shape up” in which those chosen from a crowd of the hopeful were employed for just a day rather than long term led to the violence of the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, particularly the events of “Bloody Thursday” on July 5, 1934. During Bloody Thursday, San Francisco police open fire on striking longshoremen, resulting in the deaths of two strikers and hundreds of injuries. This escalated the strike into a citywide general strike, where over 100,000 workers in solidarity with the longshoremen walked out and shut the city down.
The majority of the population in the country were bordering on frantic, not knowing where the next meal would come from or how and where they might live.
The Halls had three teenaged children who needed to be clothed and fed. They lived in a small rented house and were by some slight miracle were just getting by. Timing for the new baby couldn’t have been worse.
Not just bad timing either. Eileen had nearly bled to death when Bob was born in 1920. Only aunt Grace’s sprint into Orcutt for the doctor had saved her life. She was very weak for months afterword. Bruce and Eileen told each other that there could not be anymore babies. It was much much too dangerous. The thing is, nature will find a way and it did.
Though the first human to human transfusion was successfully done in 1818 the classification of blood types was only codified in 1900. WWI led to the first mass use of the life saving procedure. Like most things the ability to do a transfusion became routine but the underlying structure which provided the actual blood was not. Blood could not be stored for long periods of time, just days in the best of circumstances. It wasn’t until that the first blood bank was established in a Leningrad, Russia hospital. National organizations did not exist. The first was by Bernard Fantus, director of therapeutics at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States in 1937. In creating a hospital laboratory that can preserve and store donor blood, Fantus originates the term “blood bank.” Within a few years, hospital and community blood banks begin to be established across the United States. It was much too late for Eileen as Santa Barbara had only a very small supply of whole blood on hand in March of ’33 .
Not only is childbirth for most women life threatening but in 1920 when Bob was born the chances of finding blood for a transfusion were unlikely. The doctor ran his small practice in an office above a little shoemakers shop in Orcutt and had no way to store blood of any type. The fact that he was able to get to the lease and find and tie off the bleeder in time was a miracle. The lack of transfusion was the main reason for her long recovery.
If Eileen were to hemorrhage she could well die and her doctor in Santa Barbara insisted she deliver at Cottage. They had no money to pay so Eileen went down to the welfare, they called it relief then and applied for help to pay the hospital. They gave her such a hard time that she felt ashamed that they though she was just another chiseler. She went home in tears and told Bruce that in order to qualify they would have to sell the car which he needed to go to work.*
She told the doctor that they had decided that the baby would be born at home just as the others were. The doctor was adamant and said, he and some other doctors had gotten together and agreed to get together and take care of people who were in need and that the hospital had established a fund for the same reason.
“Eileen, you will be treated the same as if you lived in Montecito with the rich folks.” He said, “No one will ever know.”
Perhaps the sun was about to break out.
They were in Santa Barbara after the layoff and then bankruptcy of Barnsdhal oil. There were no oil field jobs in the Los Angeles basin, absolutely none. They had bought a small house in Wilmington near Bruce’s brother Bill and his wife Anna. When Bruce lost his job and couldn’t find a new one they called Eileen’s brother Henry Cayce who lived with his wife Martha and their three kids in Goleta. Henry had a good job as a mechanic and in the way of family they said come on up, we’ll find room for you all.
So the house in Wilmington was lost, the first they ever owned but they couldn’t make the payments so they turned in the keys and just walked away as so many others did during the depression. By late 1932 it was being called the great depression because there was no doubt that it was the one.
They closed and locked the door for the last time, loaded their suitcases and whatever they could carry, drove to the filling station, gassed her up and they still had .50 cents left. Always responsible and money conscious but with nothing to lose, they said “To hell with it and went to the movies.” They saw “Tarzan the Ape Man” with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Hara. When it was over they took their popcorn and dead broke, hopped in the car and headed to Santa Barbara. They had this way about them where they looked on life as if it was a big adventure. They would do their best, come what may.
At Henry and Martha’s Bruce got up the next day and went looking for work. There wasn’t any possible way that he would find work in the oil fields so anything would do. At thirty eight half of his working life had been in oil and though it was rough it was all highly technical and built almost entirely on experience. He could not read a book on how to do the work. It was learn by doing. All of that seemed out the window now.
Steinbeck’s story about the Joad family would not be published until 1939 but the reality of it was being played out across America every day. The novel explores themes of social injustice, economic hardship, the loss of the American Dream. The power of community and collective action in the face of suffering was for the Hall’s, the way out.
Henry Cayce was Eileen’s uncle and by coincidence an oil worker. He had worked for Barnsdal in Elwood as a mechanic but had also lost his job. He now worked as a garage mechanic in Santa Barbara. They rented a big house in Hope Ranch and had three kids of their own which made six at home. Eileen ran the house and took care of the kids and Martha worked in her mother’s little grocery store. The house was in a walnut grove so Eileen and the six kids shucked walnuts and sold them downtown for extra money. They did whatever they could find.
Bruce took any kind of job he could find mostly doing day labor. A few hours here and a few there most not lasting very long and bringing in a little money to keep them going. He finally got on a a garbage man, humping trash all day. His bad back was murder, but it was life or death, up at four and home at four. He continued looking for oil field work. Call after call hoping that something would turn up. My mother said, she was going on fourteen, at the time that she really didn’t know much about that part of her life just that it was fun to be with her family and cousins and that it was a happy home. Such is how parents shield their kids from harm.
Finally in late February 1933 Bruce got the call from Signal and both he and uncle Henry went back up to Elwood. They would both stay with Signal for the rest of their working lives.
Eileen had been in the hospital for a couple of days. She had intermittent contractions but nothing too serious until later in the day Tuesday the tenth of March. Bruce arrived at the maternity ward just after four o’clock. It was a fine day, one of those familiar California winters near the end of the rainy season. No fog in Santa Barbara, a riffling breeze drifting out of the desert to the east bringing a promise of warmer temperatures and springtime. A fortunate time to bring a new life into the world.
There was no sound. Six miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, rock stirred. Billions of tons of the earths crusts, caught along a crack, Jerked, lurched as they slid by one another at around a sixteenth of an inch a year. The immensity of caught forces gave way at 5:54 pm.
While her parents were at the hospital Barbara, Bob and Mariel and the Cayce cousins had just sat down to dinner, forks clinking against plates, the girls dicing up some boy at school, Bob rolling his eyes, trapped in a world of girls, when suddenly the table was gone, plates forks, knives and the stew Eileen had made just for the occasion splattered across the floor peppered with flakes of china. Too stunned to act they froze as the old wooden house began to shake and sway to a rhythm of its own. They were fortunate. Old wooden structures might skip and jump about in a quake but most survived with little damage.
At the hospital, as Eileen went into labor. Bruce paced the waiting room. In 1933 no man was allowed anywhere near the birthing room. He chained smoked Chesterfields and he waited. He’d heard nothing from upstairs and at 5:50 he decided enough was enough and he would go see what was going on. He was a few steps up the stairs when the Long Beach Quake of 1933 slammed into Santa Barbara. Bruce was staggered in mid-step, fell to his knees and tumbled back down the steps.
Eileen was in bed and had just delivered a baby girl. She was lying on her mothers belly as the doctor reached to cut the umbilical cord when the quake roared in. The bed skidded one way and the other with the nurses and the doctor desperately holding on, trying to keep the new mother and her child in it. The Long Beach quake** which was a terrible event shook Santa Barbara in a gentile way but that little girl who grew up to be my aunt Patsy was always ever after referred to by her father as an earth shaking event.
And that she was.
Coming: Chapter 19. The Depression
Cover Photo: Living outside, post earthquake, Santa Barbara California 1933.
*This is one of the events in our family history which has caused us to be pretty qualified government haters.
**In the early evening hours on March 10, 1933, the treacherous Newport-Inglewood fault ruptured, jolting the local citizenry just as the evening meals were being prepared. The Magnitude 6.4 earthquake caused extensive damage (approximately $50 million in 1933 dollars) throughout the City of Long Beach and surrounding communities. Damage was most significant to poorly designed and unreinforced brick structures. Sadly, the earthquake caused 120 fatalities.
Within a few seconds, 120 schools in and around the Long Beach area were damaged, of which 70 were destroyed. Experts concluded that if children and their teachers were in school at the time of the earthquake, casualties would have been in the thousands.
Michael Shannon is a writer, former teacher and a surfer. He write so his children will know where they came from.
Eileen stood in the kitchen of the little rented house in Compton.* Her right hand still held the receiver, silent. She didn’t move for the longest time. She stared at the yellow wall where the telephone hung. Softly she said to herself, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. Heaven was silent on the matter.
When her three children bundled in the back door fresh from school their mother was nowhere to be found.
Bruce was working some Signal wells on the east side of the hill. Mosher had bought six leases that hadn’t paid off but his engineers thought that if they went a little deeper there were provable amounts of crude.
Compton was one of the older little towns that dotted the Los Angeles area. There were numbers of them. Carson, Torrance, Monrovia, South Pasadena, Santa Monica and Whittier. Compton established by a migrant group of farmers in 1888 predated its larger neighbor Long Beach. When Bruce and Eileen moved there in 1931 the population was around 15 thousand and was surrounded by family farms. It was an entirely agricultural community.
Aerial View of Compton in 1930.
In those days it was supposedly almost entirely white. In the 1930 census, only one African American was listed. There is no doubt that census takers skewed the results as photos of elementary and high school classes taken at the time indicate otherwise. Both my mother and her sister Mariel spoke of this. Their classes were full of Japanese American and Hispanic kids, all of them certainly citizens particularly the Hispanic kids whose families for the most part had lived on this land for at least a century and some much longer.
McKinley school, 3rd grade. Compton Ca 1930 Calisphere photo
The City of Los Angeles predated the establishment of the United States by a decade. The Spanish had arrived in the LA basin on September 4, 1781. A group of settlers consisting of 14 families numbering 44 individuals of Native American, African and European heritage journeyed more than one-thousand miles across the desert from present-day northern Mexico and established a farming community in the area naming it “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles”.
Even though we tend to think only in modern terms, most of Los Angeles County was still rural. LA’s population had just topped 1.2 million but the second largest city, Long Beach was ten times smaller. Signal Hill stood by itself in the last stages of the pastoral land it had been in the time of the great Ranchos which were no longer things but only names.
Signal Oil derricks, Eastside. 1932
The sense of anticipation. Not the emotional side of anticipation which is the wishing and hoping, no, the nuts and bolts of it. It is a gift that when its amplified by experience, of the hands on job that lets a person see beyond the immediate thing at hand. It’s the ability to look at something, a job, a technical problem and make a reasonable prediction as to what might happen down the road. Success at any job that requires a positive result is less about what is going on in the “right now” and what is likely going to happen if you continue. This is the path that every successful workman pursues.
Here is what I mean. When I worked my first “Real” job and by that, I mean I was paid for it, I bucked hay for a man named Dinny Sheehy, I was just turning fifteen. Loading flat bed trucks with hay bales is a rough way to start. Baled hay come in many forms. My uncle Jack used a baler that pumped out hay that was tied with two loops of twine. Dinny had one that produced 3-wire. The difference, you might ask is in the weight. Uncle Jackies were around 50 plus pounds, the 3-wire topped 90 lbs. The problem for me was that I weighed about 120 pounds myself and was being told to hump a 90 pound bale of hay from the ground up onto the bed of a flat bed truck that was at my chest. You can’t deadlift one. I had to figure out how to do it by myself. The old timer driving the truck had nothing to say. He looked straight ahead, smoked, sipped from a pint and drove. If he had a secret he kept it. Solving the problem is the anticipatory you see? If I couldn’t figure it out by lunch time I’d be gone.
Bruce Hall. On the rotary rig, Ellwood ,California 1930**
The secret of Bruce’s success was the ability to see ahead, plan for and manage the work. The thinking goes like this, how can I produce more, how can we be more efficient, how can we cut costs and still increase production? Believe it or not that ability isn’t that common. “Getting in your own way” is the phrase we might use to describe the someone who cannot and there are many of those.
Bruce drove into the little dirt driveway, shut of the engine of the Cheverolet and for a moment sat quietly while the cooling engine banged and sputtered as it cooled while he put aside any workplace blues and replaced it with anticipation of seeing his wife and kids. There was homework at the kitchen table, dinner simmering on the stove.
The kids were indeed at the table. “Where is your mother?”
In the way teenagers think, my mother simply answered, “She’s in the closet.”
“Why is she in the closet?”
All three looked up. My aunt Mariel, being the oldest at fifteen spoke with the wisdom of her age, “Don’t know.”
Bruce strode quickly to the hall closet and pulled at the knob. It didn’t budge. Eileen was holding it tight with both hands. Bruce asked her to please let him open the door and eventually she did. There she sat, arms crossed across her knees. She lifted her face toward him, it was streaked with the tracks of tears.
“Oh Bruce,” she sobbed, “I’m pregnant.”
He got down on his knees and held her. Eileen was 37. She already had three half grown children. It was all too much to bear.
So much for careful planning and the anticipatory abilities of Bruce and Eileen.
Chapter 18, The Big Shake
Cover Photo: No one in the family knows exactly what this photo means. It was taken the year she was married, likely on the ranch Eileen’s mother managed near Creston, California. Eileen is just 20. The antique table, doilies, tea set and the little rug set the stage. She is dressed in a style soon to be gone. She wrote on the back “An old lady.” She’s using her maiden name so she’s not yet married. Maybe he’s worried that people will call her a spinster. It’s a mystery but it captures the mood of this story. In the way of genetics both her granddaughter and great-grandaughter are dead ringers for her. They both have the same spirit and “the forge ahead no matter what genius.”
*The house on Western Avenue still exists.
**Bruce is just 34 but the toll on his body is already showing. The stance is that of a man who has back problems. The hands on the back of his hips and the slight arch are visible signs of a bad back that will plague him all the rest of his life. The blackened coveralls, soaked with oil and the unfiltered Chesterfield habit are going to have very serious consequences. Heavy labor is called back-breaking for good reason.
For a good start, be sure to be born on Easter Sunday. You might want to be the only child, a boy child at that, born that day. You should be born at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Hospital, better known as Sisters Hospital.
Staffed with The Poor Clares an austere Roman Catholic religious order of nuns, co-founded in 1212 by Saint Clare of Assisi and Saint Francis of Assisi. The order is dedicated to a contemplative life of prayer, and poverty. They were all good Irish girls. Many of them spent their entire working lives in Santa Maria and when they retired they returned to Ireland from whence they came.
They delivered the newborn to my mother with a blue bow tied in my blond locks. They told my mother it was an omen from God. It must have been because Dr. Case had given my parents some very bad news the year before, he said, “Barbara you will never be able to conceive.”
Born on Easter Sunday? Perhaps a subtle message to Harold Case. Who knows.
So thats a good start.
Now be sure your parents are from Farm and Ranch families. There are scads of reasons for this. The first is general health. To build a child’s immune system it’s important for them to drink from the irrigation ditch and the hose. In my case we drank from the kitchen faucet too, even when the water tank had dead Screech Owl chicks floating in it. The hard water in the valley had coated the inside of irrigation and all the other water pipe with a whitish hard scale that eventually caused the kitchen faucets to close up to the point where you could not stick a pencil in them. A soupcon of fertilizer in the irrigation pipe was good for kids too.
We learned that planting Roly-poly bugs does not grow snapdragons but that Nasturtiums are pretty tasty. We had oodles because they grew insanely lush over the septic pit behind the house. Leaves of three. let them be, we learned that the hard way and that Horse Nettles could be touched in the center of the leaf but not on the edge. We learned to remove our socks in the presence of foxtails and cockle burrs, that is if we happened to be wearing them and that there was only one kind of bad snake. If we saw one in the yard we just told mom, the woman whoo was terrified of spiders and she would come out and dispatch it with a shovel something she learned growing up in the oil fields. Mice in the house were pretty OK; Dad said they didn’t eat much anyway.
Kitties were tolerated for their mouser abilities but seldom coddled, dogs were loved beyond any reasonable amount. Dogs went everywhere we did, showing us the way.
I learned to swim in the creek and the watering ponds on the cattle ranches. I could throw tomatoes, bell peppers and dirt clods with deadly accuracy. It was a mile walk through the fields and a dirt clod fight could and did last the whole way. My friend Kenny and I stalked Old Man Parrish’s apple orchards with our Red Ryders. Everything we did was a made up game of the imagination.
Every old building, corn crib, horse barn, tractor shed harbored an army of spiders. The dark places were home to Black Widows. There were Tarantulas living in holes in the ground, The Daddy Long Legs, so delicate and harmless, the Orb Weaver who weaves those delicate circular webs that can be so striking in the morning when dripping with the morning dew that are so striking that we used to duck under them so as not to harm them. Besides they were natural born fly killers. The nasty brown recluse which, if it bit you it was a sure trip to Doctor Cookson’s office.
When Warners came to dust the crops with clouds of sulphur and DDT filled the air. Not unpleasant odors went you sniffed it floating on the breeze. Sulphur was sprayed on Tomatoes and peas to fight mildew and DDT. It just killed everything but kids. We could imgine WWI watching those old Stearman biplanes zooming ten feet off the ground and then pulling nearly straight up after flying under Lester Sullivan’s power lines. He flew a Chandell and came right back the way he came and did it again. Dad said he was WWII fighter pilot and wishes he still was. He would call the kitchen phone to say when he was leaving Santa Maria so we knew when to rush out and get as close as possible to the crop he was dusting.
When we were big enough we stood on the cultivator bars of my dads tractors to hitch a ride into the fields. This wasn’t thought of as any great danger. Two of us would jump up and down on the bars to make the tractor buck a little which dad never seemed to mind much. Falling, losing your grip or footing and being dragged to death seemed a small price for some adventure.
We dug in the dirt, wallowed in the good rich mud of our adobe fields. Mom said the clogged pores in our skin prevented germs from entering. Being hosed of on the front lawn wasn’t such a bad thing in the summer.
The families ranches introduced us to livestock, “Bob” wire fences, the wonderful cow flop, cows must have the biggest bladders on earth. Have you ever seen a steer pee? My goodness! We knew what a salt block tasted like. The smell of new mown hay, used all the time in poetry but I think seldom experienced by most, the feel of the curly hair on a Hereford calf’s head and the rough feel of a cows tongue when she gives you a kiss.
My mother made sure we had a good clean shirt every day but Levi’s were worn until they were dirty and greasy enough to stand on their own. I mean, she had an old Westinghouse tub style washer with a wringer on the top which we were warned about but that hardly mattered and the occasional fingertip was squshed, carefully, so just to see how it felt. No one minded hanging out the wash because the clothsline was a great place to run through when the clothes were till wet. Had to be careful though, that was a switching offense. If you ran though and made good your escape mom soon pardoned you with a hug and a promise not to do it again.
Kids did get sick though. We got infected from the other kids at Branch school. In the winter. Mrs Brown’s lower grade classroom could at times be fogged with microscopic beads of snotty goo and desk tops were glazed with phlegm from sticky fingers.
Mom and dad took disease very seriously. We had all the modern doctor mom tools, the humidifier that chuffed a fog of Vicks Vapo-Rub mist, A bottle of Iodine, Aspirin and band-Aids. She kept a handy rubber hot water bottle and if it was serious you might repose in their bed during the day and simply be cured by that treat and the smell of them as you slipped in and out of your fever dreams.
Our parents grew up in an age where the death of children was an omnipresent occurrence. When my father was born, one in five children died before their fifth birthday. Smallpox still wasn’t eradicated though the vaccine had been around for more than a century. My dad nearly died from Scarlett fever when he was seven. There was no cure. Children died from Whooping Cough, Measles, Influenza, Pneumonia, and infections from ordinary cuts and scrapes. A broken bone could become septic and a child would be lost. If you lived in the country there was little access to medical care, schools did not have nurses in attendance. The life of a child was precious but there were few ways to protect them. My own aunt was infected with polio when she was just nineteen. She survived but had a game leg for the rest of her life. Did I mention he was married with two small children and pregnant with a third when it happened.
Today we seem to have lost the institutional mamory of what pre-antibiotic medicine was like. My parents never did and neither have I.
No one asked me if I wanted to be stabbed by the nurse from the County Schools Office as we lined up at the schools gate and waited in line to go up the steps of the little school van and be stuck. Nope, any squawking would have been completely ignored. Parents knew the cost, nobody complained.
We learned from our parents that most things were not crying offenses. Dad never complained about anything, neither did my mother who if she sniped about her friends she didn’t do it around us. We lived in the kids world, all of us. Adventure was something homemade. You polished your imagination with no help from television because in the very beginning it wasn’t made for you. Reading was the drug of choice. We had all the Hardy Boys adventures, The Three Musketeers, Mark Twain, Jack London, Franklin W. Dixons Frank Merriwell’s adventures which in and of itself made us want to go to college. We knew little or nothing of war or politics. Those were of the adult world.
Looking back you can see that we were free to make our own adventures. We had little supervision. We knew the rules laid out for us but they were few. We were expected to have a good time, explore, learn to swim in the creek, fish for our dinner and follow the dogs wherever they went.
It was in many ways a simpler time for kids. You had time to learn and form yourself. To put on some the armor of self before you had to inevitably step over the threshold of young adulthood. It took me a long time to catch up with the town kids when I went to high school. I wasn’t prepared for smoking, fighting, sex or any of the other thing that can bring kids to grief.
A friend once told me that he found it admirable that I went my own way. Growing up on the farm had vaccinated me so to speak. Thoughtfulness was simply ground in you by experience. We were vaccinated by the tenet that you should “Look before you leap.”
Growing up on the land and understanding that the most wonderful thing was that my parents were alway there. My dad in our fields and mom in the kitchen. We were safe and secure in the knowledge that we were loved and cared for.
Cover Photo: My aunt Patsy at 17, she of the polio. My two brothers and myself. We were one, four and six. Shannon family photo
Michael Shannon is at heart, still a farm boy. He writes so his children will know where they come from.
The Twelve Hour Tour was over. As the old saying goes don’t buy a Pig in a Poke sack. Except of course you’ll end up doing it anyway.
Bruce accepted the job as a superintendant of drilling and went to work on the Signal piers at Hydrocarbon Gulch. After they had cleared a platform to build a small and shaky derrick on the edge of the Pacific ocean the cable tool bit was dropped a few times which qualified as spudding in a well and the terms of the one year contract were fulfilled. They made it by the skin of their teeth.
Because Bruce was a whipstock expert he was busy at the Gulch. No derrick could be erected on the beach because of the tidal shifts so a pier was begun immediately in order to begin drilling out in the Santa Barbara channel. The oil pool was offshore and in order to reach it they would need to slant drill.
A pile driver building the piers for the validation well. The validation well, Appleford No. 1, October 1929.
Bruce’s new position came with a raise and lots more responsibility. After nearly twelve years the twelve hour tour was a thing of the past. The twelve hour was now 24 hour and then some. Supervising more than one well could take a great deal of time. If his crews were lucky they had a shack or small shed where they could wrap themselves around boxes and equipment and sleep the sleep of exhaustion between tripping pipe. Pulling all the pipe in the casing, “Making a round trip” or simply “Making a trip” is the physical act of pulling the drill string out of the well-bore and then running it back in. This is done by physically breaking out or disconnecting the drill string when pulling out of the hole every other 2 or 3 joints of drill pipe at a time. The pipe pulled, called a stand is then racked vertically in the derrick. Up on a small platform near the top of the derrick called a “Monkey Board” is the The Derrick-man. the derrick-man walks the board to guide, stack, and secure drill pipe as it is lowered into or pulled from the bore hole.
Tripping pipe in the early 1930’s. The stack is behind the man on the right. Calisphere
A typical reason for tripping pipe is to replace a worn-out drill bit. Another common reason for tripping is to replace damaged drill pipe. It is important to get the pipe out of the well-bore quickly and safely before it can snap. My grandfather could place his gloved hand on the rotating pipe and tell you what was going on deep underground. In the thirties there was little in the way of scientific measurement. No electronics were yet available for measuring hole. The drillers still relied on taste, feel and smell to understand what was happening deep underground.
The drilling floor was a dangerous place to work, slippery with drilling mud, oil and water. Ninety feet above the floor hung all kinds of equipment that could fall and kill a man. Hands were crushed by heavy machinery, steam boilers could rupture and cook a man. Heavy chains could snap and take your legs off. No one wore a hard hat. They were not in common use yet. No self-respecting work man would were one anyway out of pure cussedness. Men were careful enough, within reason, but idiots were not tolerated and would be quickly run off lucky to just get a beating on the way. Avoiding death caused by an idiot is in itself likely to make a crew furious. It was every man for himself.
When Bruce left for work Eileen never knew when she would see him again. It could could be days. Raising the girls was mostly her job. House wifing was a different job in the thirties. There were no labor saving devices in the home. Few had a washing machines, only 8% of American homes had a refrigerator in 1930. If your house was electrified, about 90% were in urban areas, you had an opportunity to buy home appliances if you could afford it but if you lived out of town, if you lived on a farm or out in the country that dropped to roughly 10%. A woman lived little different than her grandmother had before the civil war. Things were still done by hand. Itinerant oil workers, because they moved so much weren’t likely to be moving with heavy appliances. It was by this time jusy normal life for grandma Hall. My mom talked about taking the rugs out to beat the dust out of them. She said she could really wrangle the floor sweeper around. She remembered that she was twelve when her mom retired the old Sad Iron. Mom also was the carwash, something she did until she married. Grandpa had a car which he liked to keep clean. Muddy roads meant a lot of washing. The car meant you could get to work and back and was an important as any other tool.
School was within walking distance. The old Benjamin Franklin grammar school had just been rebuilt and served the central section of Santa Barbara. Opened in 1899 it added to the legacy of education in Santa Barbara begun by the holding of formal classes in the home of Don Domingo Carrillo who had used local Chumash Indians labor to build his home in 1807. He built the house for his wife Concepción Pico Carrillo who established the school.*
Mom said she loved Santa Barbara and like every time they moved she hoped they would stay. Her reality was they were oil nomads. Grandpa went where the work was because he loved the work I guess. Thats thing not uncommon amongst those that work with their hands. Trapped by experience and the need to provide you’d better make the most of it. The rest of the family is along for the ride.
Barbara Hall. She carried that winsome look her entire life. Santa Barbara California 1931
Both my parents told me that when the were in the depression they didn’t really know it. No one called it that, It was just hard times and most people got by as best they could. They said ordinary people, which they were, took care of their money. Savings banks were a pretty new concept and most people didn’t use them anyway even if they had cash to spare. Because my dad was a farmer and dairyman they grew and made things people needed and saw as necessities. They were lucky in that way.
In the rest of the country one in four people were out of a job, over five thousand banks across the country closed forever taking peoples life saving with them, suicides increased by 30% and there were more than two million people homeless. Thirteen billion dollars of the American economy had absolutely evaporated in 1929 with the stock market crash. No one knew that the recovery would take a decade and with help from Adolf Hitler and the fascists governments of Europe.
Mom knew how to run a sewing machine and read patterns so she made her own clothes. So did her sister. Bob, her brother couldn’t sew but more than adequately filled the role of general all around pest which they both said he was pretty good at. They owned a car, which was a little bit of luxury but was necessary for Bruce to get to work. Mostly the kids walked to school, downtown or to shop. The Santa Barbara street railway had closed in 1929 killed off by car ownership but it wasn’t a large town, just 33 thousand in 1930 and especially for kids Shanks Mare got them around just fine. The most luxurious thing they owned was a radio. Radios were a new phenomenon that “Do you own a radio?” was a question on the 1930 census. The Hall’s said they did.
In addition to the music, news, and sports programming that present-day listeners are familiar with, radio during this period included scripted dramas, action-adventure series such as The Lone Ranger, science fiction shows such as Flash Gordon, soap operas, comedies, and live reads of movie scripts. Major film stars including Orson Welles got their start in radio Welles became a household name in the wake of the infamous panic sparked by his 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Both my parents said he didn’t really fool anybody.
Music filled many hours of programming, singers of all kinds, radio orchestras played popular music and symphonies. Popular 1930s radio shows included dramas and comedies like The Shadow, Little Orphan Annie, and Fibber McGee and Molly, variety and music shows like The Chase and Sanborn Hour and Kraft Music Hall, and children’s programs such as The Adventures of Superman. Radio was a booming entertainment medium during the decade.
Taking a break to listen.
The future of the Hall family wasn’t all that rosy though. Grandpa had a good job near the top of the earnings curve but life in oil was still tenuous. Crude oil price were through the floor. Some independant companies were dumping oil on the ground. It cost more to pump it than it was worth. New exploratory wells were at a standstill. If there is no hope of profit, don’t invest.
Signal had made up it’s mind that the only hope for the company now that their sales of gasoline to the big producers had been cut off was to plow ahead with the Elwood field hoping to strike enough crude to at least break even so that a hoped for upturn would still find the company afloat.
Like pirates fleeing the law, they pressed on, mortgaging what they owned, makeing frantic rounds of private investors and sending a steady stream of executives to what banks were still in business hoping to find at least a dribble of cash. They began selling their crude at a loss. It was an enormous bet on the company and Sam Mosher’s “Varsity Team” of engineers, superintendents and drillers to innovate, cut the fat and and walk the knife edge of safety to survive another day.
As fast as the piles for the piers at Hydrocarbon gulch were driven, derricks were thrown up, spudded in and the turntables began to whirl. Sometimes the drillers worked over parts of the pier that had almost no planking such was the rush. They wasted no time on guardrails. If you fell, it was in the water if you were lucky and you would simply be fished out. “Joining the Birds” was how they put it.”
From the small field in Maricopa, Chief Engineer R W Heath organized the teardown and loading of the refinery and processing plant which was moved by truck to Tecolote canyon where it was reassembled in just eighteen days. Eighteen, think of that, all moved by truck. There was no Hwy 166 in those days, it all came by 41 and down the Cuesta Grade in tired oil field trucks whose brakes were always suspect. That kind of job that could not be done today. Everyone who worked on the crew did whatever job was required. There was no specialization, if you could turn a wrench, you did. If sweat and grit could move tanks and towers it was done. In it’s early days Signal was like a team working to a common goal. A Varsity Team Sam Mosher liked to call it. Grandpa was one.
Signal had one toe over the line into bankruptcy. If they didn’t find a well which produced marketable quantities of crude they would be unable to meet their contracts and would be forced into receivership. Working overtime to keep the comany in business was the source of heart attacks. If the company failed no one had anywhere to turn. No jobs were available anywhere in oil. Mosher had nowhere to go except to work every day and trying to dream up a way out while sleeping.
Appleford number two did not bring in a heavy enough flow to be profitable. The head field engineer Walt Greenfield was sure that there was plenty of oil just a little farther offshore and said if he was able to whipstock a well he knew he could find it. Whipstocking used a heavy iron device shaped like a shoehorn that when lowered into the drill casing at about a hundred feet could guide the drill bit and its pipe in a lateral direction. They would be able to send the drill spinning out below the sea bed ahead of the pier into deeper water offshore. The problem for the front office is that the cost was thought prohibitive, as much as $35,000 instead of a typical $25,000 for a vertical hole. Management slammed the hammer down and said no, too expensive.
Bruce was a master of the Whipstock and drill bits were moving in all directions underground just like worms in the compost. Signal engineers believed that there was an ever larger pool just a little bit farther from shore. They believed that if they could just go a little bit farther out there was a fortune there for sure. They just had to find it.
The pile driver at work, Mahoney’s pier, 1930.
The family was pretty settled in those two years, Grandpa had steady work. The kids who were about to be teenagers and were happy in school, one of the few times where they stayed long enough make friends. Santa Barbara city was at it’s finest. Because of the generational wealth which was mostly depression proof stores stayed open, the streets were clean and safe. What was euphemistically called Riff Raff was quickly showed the way out of town.
Any minorities persevered in the face of direct and indirect discrimination. People who served in wealthy homes or worked the many fashionable hotels were allowed north to work but not to live.
The descendants of the original Spanish/Mexican and Barbareno Chumash were pushed down into the lower eastside south of Cabrillo street and east of State. Over the middle part of the twentieth century discrimination concentrated the non-white population into the area of temporary shacks, cheap houses** and a service area that held the laundries, shoe repair shops, blacksmiths and auto repair garages. In the depression there was a literal line at Cabrillo Street where people who dwelled in the lower east where most definitely not encouraged to cross.The Eastside neighborhood, was for the marginalized racial and ethnic minorities.
In an interesting twist the school my mother attended was fully integrated though it was outside those neighborhoods entirely.
Born at the end of the 19th century my grandparent’s had that sort of mild racist mindset common at the time. On a simple scale they felt that somehow they were better than the marginalized. In her old age, my grandmother occasionally referred to African Americans as “Coons” which set my teeth on edge. The thing about it was that she had no evil intent. She might have been just referring to the fact that African Americans were undereducated and had less opportunity or lived in poorer neighborhoods. It seemed to be just as if she was describing any object of note. It certainly goes to the complexity of experience. It would be decades before African Americans or Hispanics started showing up in the oilfields. In their married life that had lived in more than one “Sundowner” town.***
State street, Santa Barbara, California June 29th, 1925. Calisphere
In a fortunate piece of timing after the devastating earthquake of 1925 it was decided to rebuild the city in a quasi-California Mission Style. Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona written in the late nineteenth century had kindled and polished a romantic version of old California. Though the novel became popular and did, for some, shine a light on injustices toward Indigenous peoples, the fact remains that the novel, rather than initiating a movement of change, romanticized a tragic story where the ones who lost the most were those of Indigenous descent. The largest impact the novel had was in tourism—creating a road map of California that the characters traveled, thus making these locations popular and lucrative. The Rancho life has endured until today as a visible symbol of old California which never truly existed. The fantasy, the connection between the novel Ramona and Lummis’s Sunset Magazine is through tourism: the book became so popular it inspired a wave of travel in Southern California, which Sunset Magazine later helped promote and document. Focusing on the region’s “Old California” romantic image led to design requirements for rebuilding the downtown. Santa Barbara remade itself into a popular vision and because the country was postwar prosperous it became the best example of a Hollywood style fantasy of any California city.
Construction of the nearly destroyed Mission had been completed just two years before my mothers family moved there. The harbor was completed in 1929 and was family inaugurated the following year when my Aunt Mariel pushed my mother off the breakwater onto the boulders below and knocked out her front teeth. Never found they are still there as a sort of family talisman.
As a child I was fascinated that she could detach her bridge, take out her teeth which she scrubbed in the kitchen sink. I knew of no other mother who could do such a marvelous thing. Such are the connections that make a life I suppose.
Mission Santa Barbara 1925 after the quake.
The company could at least make payroll and service all it’s notes. Sam was busy looking around for more possibilities. He found some on Signal Hill.
The driller’s had no choice but to wait until things became absolutely desperate. Holding on by the skin of his teeth, Mosher operated a grand total of eighteen wells in the Los Angeles basin, the Midway-Sunset in the southern San Jaoquin and the Elwood field Mosher decided to slow exploration in Ellwood and buy more leases in and around Long Beach. So in late 1931 the Halls rolled up the carpets and trekked south.
Chapter 17 Next:. Ayear of ups and downs with a major surprise
NOTES
*Leopoldo Antonio Carrillo August 6, 1880 – September 10, 1961) was an American actor, vaudevillian, political cartoonist, and conservationist. He was notable for playing Pancho in the television series The Cisco Kid (1950–1956) and in several films. His signature line was “Cisco, lets went.” His character has since been memorialized and the catch phrase Lets Went” taken its place as a bit of California iconography. We will meet him again later in the story.
**My oldest son rented a studio apartment in an old house which had been divided into apartments in the old eastside neighborhood. This was when he was working in management at a beachside hotel in the early 2000s. Rent was nine hundred a months which was a very substantial sum for a bedroom that had a toilet in it. The house should have been condemned long ago but ghettos are not torn down in one night.
***A sundown town was an all-white community that intentionally excluded people of color, typically African Americans, using discriminatory laws, harassment, threats, or violence. The term comes from signs posted at town borders that warned non-white people to leave before sundown or face consequences. Many California oilfield towns had active KKK chapters until after WWII and later. My grandparents would have been familiar with the term and life in them.
Michael Shannon writes and lives in Arroyo Grande California. He tells these stories so his children will know where they came from.
The River of the Kings was my father’s place of choice. Fast running, deep, frigid and isolated and in a most remote part of the formidable Sierra Nevada. The Snowy Mountains* are part of the American Cordillera, an almost continuous chain of mountain ranges that forms the western “backbone” of the Americas. He and his brother began going there in the late 1920’s. Still in high school, my uncle just 18 and my dad 16, both from a little town in coastal California over 200 miles from the Kings River canyon.
Río de los Santos Reyes headwaters originate along the Sierra Crest in and around Kings Canyon National Park and form Kings Canyon, one of the deepest river gorges in North America. The river was named by Gabriel Moraga, the commander of a Spanish military expedition in 1806, but it was not until California became a U.S. state in 1850 that many Europeans arrived and settled along the Kings River, driving out the original inhabitants the Yokuts. The Middle Fork flows for only 37 miles through some of the Sierras most difficult-to-access backcountry, including Simpson Meadow and Tehipite Valley.
Tehipite Dome
Two hundred miles of mostly dirt roads which they had to navigate into the mountains in my grandfathers old 1918 Model T Ford. Arroyo Grande to Paso de Robles, east on hwy. 41 through the central valley to Lemoore, Hanford and Visalia turning at Woodlake and starting the climb through the foothills and up to Badger and Pinehurst to the road junction east of Dunlap then following the winding one lane dirt track up to Grants Grove, past Hume Station and then down to the turnout at Yucca Point.
The road was so narrow that on sharp turns there would be a hand painted wooden sign tacked to a tree cautioning the driver to “Sound Klaxon” on all the blind corners. If you heard another horn, the downhill driver had to back uphill until there was enough room to pass. Dad said the driver going uphill would have a great view straight downhill to the canyons below.
The Ford had been outfitted with everything a wilderness fisherman might need. Two sleeping bags, a couple canteens though in those days you could still drink from the river, no Giardia. Couple loaves of homemade bread baked by grandmother, jam and a jar of peanut butter, small can of lard for frying fish, salt and pepper, skillet and a knife to serve all the purposes a knife might. Only one problem. In a hurry to get away the sleeping bags were forgotten on the back porch. Neither of them noticed until they got to Grant Grove where they had to dig into the back to get a water bag to hang on the radiator.
This created a little bitty problem for the nights in September in the high sierra can be a wee bit cold or very hot, you never know. You want to count on both. The went in a talked to the man in the little store there but they didn’t sell sleeping bags or blankets. He did suggest they might talk to the owner of the pack station just up the road he might be able to help. Sure as shootin’ he could and did. See, he had a stack of horse blankets which he was willing to part with for say, five bucks each, used of course. Knowing the were in desperate straits the two boys agreed. They riffle through the pile trying to find the least objectionable. They all reeked of horse sweat, some were raggedy and many sported holes where they sat up on the horses’s withers. Picking out two they forked over a double sawbuck and carried the loot back to the care uttering what passed for polite boy’s curses the whole way. The old cowpoke reckoned it was a mighty good day.
The two boys wore long sleeved shirts because of the mosquitos and yellow jackets, one pair of trousers and believe it or not high top canvas sneakers with rubber soles. No hiking boots, too much to carry, but they did have a coil of rope in case they needed to cross in high water coming down from the south fork. In some years the water was still dangerously swift and deep even on Labor Day. The river bed was entirely rocks and scattered boulders. Fording the river was always and adventure. The current was swift and everything slippery and in the twenties there was nothing or no one to help you if you were hurt. The trail back up to yucca point was very steep and unimproved and the only way out was walking. It would have been a walk out for the uninjured and then seek help and the return trip with someone else and again the return by stretcher up a treacherous steep trail crossed by tree roots, half embedded stone, mud and all in the early September heat and don’t forget the deer fly trying to drink from your sweat and tears. You could soak your handkerchief in water from your canteen and tie it over your face above the eyes, it was the only way to keep them out. The view through the wet bandana was minimal so you’d better step carefully. The first rule was to be very careful.
At the bottom of the trail they tried fording the river but it was too swift and deep though it was barely more than knee deep. They figured if they could get the rope across the be able to ford. My dad was an excellent swimmer and body surfer. He’d spent a great deal of his youth swimming in the ocean and had the confidence to give it a try. He said he couldn’t really swim at the ford but determined that he could get across at the deep hole just upstream. The best thing was to swim the center where the current was a little slower so he stripped off all his clothes, tied the rope around his waist and waded in.
Left to Right, Jackie, Jack Shannon and George in 1928, Family Photo.
The water was cold, cold, cold, so cold that he could hardly breath. He was really glad to crawl out at the other side. The sand bar he came out on had three sycamore trees just a little set back form the shore so he walked to the trees and tied the rope around the closest one. His brother tied off the other on the opposite shore. Now they could use the rope to steady themselves as they crossed and recrossed to move their packs across.
After spending the night on the sand bar where the middle and south fork came together they cooked up a little breakfast then hit the trail. That is if you could call it a trail. Even today it is marked as unmaintained by the forest service and in those days it was nothing more than a narrow single wide path scratched out by miners during the gold rush.
The middle fork drops hundreds of feet per mile bounding and crashing around boulders where it forms eddys and small falls around the great deep pools. To get upstream the original trail blazers had cut a very steep trail up the side of the mountain ridges that formed the canyon. They had to climb this switchback trail for several hundred feet to get to a spot where the trail leveled out. It was just impossible to go upstream along the river below because the canyon walls ended where the river ran. The only way was to climb up to a little bench in the mountainside where they had cut the original trail. Unmaintained no wider than a couple feet you could look down a near vertical slope to the river below and straight up at your shoulder. Boulders clung to the slopes by some mysterious force for there wasn’t any visible means that kept them from flinging themselves headlong into the water below.
About two miles along they found a rusted, crumbling piece of one inch twisted steel cable. Puzzled by the find they at first couldn’t figure out why it should be in a place where it made no sense. Who dragged it up there and why? You couldn’t get much farther from anywhere than this place. Standing together they looked around but they couldn’t find any reason for it until they noticed, way across the river on the opposite cliff side the mouth of a small tunnel that could only be a mine entrance. They could see some rotted old timbers in the entrance and a few rusted tinned cans scattered about. The cable had to be the remnants of a pulley system that head been built to ferry supplies to the men who worked the mine and to haul whatever ore they found back across. How in the world did those old forty-niners get up there while prospecting and once they found some color how did they ever get the cable across? With only a small bench of mine tailings at the mouth of the tunnel they must have actually lived in the mine itself. Just visible down slope of the mine they could see a small rectangular iron bucket with a pulley still attached which explained how they got across.
Dad said they tried to imagine how a couple prospectors in the 1850’s hauled all the gear up there. Did they come by horseback and a packtrain? Did they walk in with a donkey? There is no forage nearby, little vegetation other than stunted trees clinging to the mountainside and where would the animals go when they were working the mine?
Those old prospectors explored every inch of the Sierra, getting into places where you would think no one could. There are abandoned mines all over the mountains. No one knows who found them or worked them and the only clue is a dark tunnel and scattered and broken old shovels, picks and empty cans of tomatoes.*
Finally at the end of a hot and dusty hike the train crossed a monumental rock slide where there was no walking but a semi-stumbling, one hand for yourself crossing to a sandbar along the river. The trail had caught up with the Kings where Lost Canyon creek came tumbling down from the nearly twelve thousand foot height of the Sentinel.
La Cuidadela, the Sentinel peak.
They told fish tails about the trips, how the fishing was fantastic. There were no planted trout up on the Kings, and there are none today. A man had to be full of tricks to land one of the veteran, wily Rainbow and Brown trout. Always fish going upstream, never let your shadow fall on the water, when the sun is high enough retire to the shade and take a nap because the fish cannot see whats on the surface and won’t rise. Don’t fish when it’s windy which it normally is in the afternoon. Find a deep hole which is partially shaded and bordered by an eddy which delivers insects right to the fish and delicately lay a dry fly on its edge. Make your pole dance the fly in an irregular pattern just as if it was real and you might be rewarded.
Dad even had a favorite place. High on a rock where the river was scrunched between a nest of huge boulders that had tumbled down the canyon walls you cold climb on top of the largest and flip your Grey Hackle right under and overhang formed by a split boulder where, he always believed, the King of Brown trout lived. Deep down in the dark cavern of still water he would only rise to feed under the most perfect of conditions.
Since their first trip in 1929, they returned again and again over the decades. They began to take me along when I was thirteen. What we carried was about the same, peanut butter, Webers bread, some butter and a small bag of flour and the cheapest frying pan possible because it didn’t weigh much. My uncle Jackie always took his old sleeping bag. I’m sure it was the first one he ever owned.*** No one in the family though that fancy gear like waders and basket creels were necessary. They considered that kind of stuff an affectation. The were there to fish and they knew the fish didn’t care. A bed of willow leaves in a flour sack worked well enough for the fish who would be dinner and your Levis had pockets anyway.
Lying on top of your bag at night, it was too hot to get inside, my dad and uncle talked quietly about nothing important and I listened. We watched the heavens for our American satellite Explorer I as it passed overhead. When finally it moved quickly across the sky and didn’t twinkle you could wonder at it all. In a time where space was all new to us, I felt safe in the knowledge that our country was the best place. I was thirteen then and all seemed possible. A boy and his father sleeping in the remote wilderness of the King’s River. No sound but the melodious chortling of the river and the owl.
*The Sierra Nevada.
**Tomato processing began in 1847, when Harrison Woodhull Crosby, the chief gardener at Lafayette College developed a crude method of canning tomatoes. Prior to 1890 all tomato canning was done by hand. It was said that you could follow the empty cans from Kansas to California.
***We still have it.
Michael Shannon writes of his family so his children will know from whom they came.
My grandmother was born in 1885. Things were different then. The little Red house she was born in down in the Oso Flaco is long gone now like most old houses built in the days before electricity and indoor plumbing. She didn’t live there too long for her father was a fortunate man and found oil on his little ranch in Graciosa, todays Orcutt. he became an instant rich man and soon built himself a large modern home on west Guadalupe road. Though rich, he was still a farmer and he worked his land which stretched all the way back to the Santa Maria River. For an landless Irishman, which most were, the land held more importance than the oil.
When my grandma Annie was eight years old she came to Arroyo Grande to live with her aunt and uncle, Sarah and Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore had come to Guadalupe from Ireland and prospered in the sheep business. Though he had little education he was a cunning man and made himself a fortune with which he built a big house on the edge of little Arroyo Grande. He bought a big book of the collected works of William Shakespeare which he kept in the foyer of his house where all could see it as they entered. That was all the education he needed.
So, my grandmother grew in a life of privilege. Servants, beautiful clothes and the best of Arroyo Grande pioneer society. Her girlhood friends were, Phoenix, Harloe, Rice, Lierly, Porters, and the descendants of Don Francisco Branch. Families that sent their children to private schools in San Francisco and San Luis Obispo.
She was a child of the late Victorian Age and all it represented. A hundred years after the first American civil war or The Revolution as it’s now styled, fashionable society still looked to the European continent for guidance in societal affairs. We will dress this way, walk this way, speak this way and adopt the mores and shibboleths that decree customs, principles, or a belief that distinguish a particular class or group of people. The majority, under the influence of vague nineteenth-century shibboleths, understood that by associating oneself with these doctrines implied sophistication to the nth degree.
I never knew my grandmother as a girl though she certainly was one. She was 60 years old when I was born. She wore sensible low heeled shoes, cats eye glasses, plain print house dresses covered by an apron with the ubiquitous hankies in the pocket. If she wore any jewelry other than her slim wedding ring I don’t recall. She wasn’t overly solicitous of my attention but she was a calm presence rocking in her chair darning socks or knitting. It was the chair my grandfather bought her when she was first pregnant with my uncle Jackie in 1908, the year she graduated from California Berkeley. She would offer her hand with its delicate skin which had hardly ever seen the sun because in the forties women still wore gloves everywhere. A little cheek was offered for a boy’s kiss which was as soft as a down feather. She always smelled of White shoulders, powder not perfume for perfume was considered vulgar and only worn by “Soiled Doves or low class strumpets.
She played the piano in church, always wore a hat to go to town no matter how mundane or routine the purpose was and was unfailingly polite, no gossip that I ever heard. If there was it was confined to her bridge club, women who had sat at those old folding tables together for nearly fifty years and likely chewed, although the word chewed which she viewed as vulgar would never have passed any of their lips, they chewed on the same old conversations until they were polished to a soft sheen. Safe, familiar and soothing.
She was raised in a quite remarkable era which is almost unbelievable today. Things we take for granted were forbidden or lived under a series of shadow words that said one thing but implied another. Society had developed euphemisms to mask words and phrase which the well-educated and socially prominent practiced.
women were as energetic as they are today but har far fewer things to occupy their minds. A contemporary woman would hardly recognize my grandmothers life in 1900. She couldn’t own property under her own name, she couldn’t vote, there were few places she could go unaccompanied. She couldn’t initiate divorce nor was she protected from domestic abuse. She couldn’t wear trousers, smoke a cigarette, she couldn’t handle money even if she had some, that was her husbands job.
She a had an Irish servant girl, her name was Clara. Clara washed ironed, served dinner and kept house for the Moore’s. She is in one photo kept in the families collection. She was apparently a scandalous girl who’s secret my grandmother kept to herself for nearly her entire life. She let it slip in her mid-nineties when her memory of the present faded and the memories of the past sharpened.
When a girl reached puberty she was likely to be 16 or 17. Poor nutrition, increased physical stress from industrial work, and other poor living conditions during the Victorian era contributed to this delayed onset. Social standing at the turn of the century figured in the timing. Children went straight to adulthood as there was no concept of adolescent until roughly 1905 when the concept was published in a book. The word teenage was completely unknown. My grandmother graduated high school in 1904 and would have been constrained to act and dress as an adult. You can see in old photographs children dressed exactly like their parents.
As a young single woman which she was until graduation from college she wore her hair up. Nearly every woman did. She put her hair up as a young teen and it stayed up until she bobbed it in 1920. Wearing the hair down as an adult woman was a scandalous thing and indicated that you were of a lower class or a, horrors to even think about it, “Lady of the night.” A fallen woman in fact and if my grandmother and her friends saw you on the street in San Luis Obispo which by the way had a rich and teeming Red-Light district, they would turn away and point there noses skyward at the scandal of it. Hmph.
The girl in the rear, Margaret “Maggie” Phoenix. Our Margaret Harloe for which the school is named. Note the ubiquitous hankies.
This developmental stage was deeply shaped by Victorian social and moral codes, which emphasized female purity and restricted young people’s autonomy. Victorian culture strongly discouraged public discussion of sexuality and puberty. This lack of frankness contributed to a cultural “prudery” surrounding these topics. Some late-Victorian medical and social commentators viewed puberty with apprehension, seeing it as a time when girls were susceptible to disease or irrationality, swooning and the “vapors” more than likely brought on by too-tight corsets. There was a push for female health and physical activity for some, but this was often met with resistance from those who preferred to preserve traditional ideals of fragile femininity. Social mores were set by the extreme upper classes in order to distance themselves from the lower or even worse, the depraved gutter Irish.
Grandma of course was just like the girls of today. They aped the manners and dress of their elders but they still found occasion for hi-jinks. Dressing up as their fathers was apparently a regular pastime. We have many photos of she and her friends posing for pictures taken with her new Kodak Brownie camera in front of her home. No lawn though as a front lawn wasn’t even a concept in 1903.
Annie Gray and Tootsie Lierley in 1903. Patrick Moore residence Arroyo Grande
You might notice that they both are both hatted. No self-respecting woman would ever be caught outside without a hat. Notice too that the skirts hem is touching the ground. It was thought that the sight of a shoe or God forbid, an ankle would drive men crazy. One of her classmates at Cal in 1907 was expelled for wearing her skirts short enough to expose he ankles. A length of fabric called a flounce was whip stitched to the hem of dresses with a small loop that could be grasped and delicately lifted just a little if she stepped over a curb or ascended the stairs. I could be removed for cleaning as often as needed since hems touched the ground and could get very dirty in a town which had no paved streets.
My grandmother is the girl in the checked dress on the left. 1907. University of California Berkeley campus.
When a woman was menstruating she was “Indisposed.” Women were such a fragile things that too much stimulation of any kind could cause her to swoon. Those darn corsets again. If a man referred to a woman’s leg as anything but a limb he might be cast out of polite society. A woman could not be touched in any fashion other than to take her arm if the road was too rough for walking. Sitting on a buggy seat, the heat from a woman’s limb was known to cause temporary blindness in men.
When she was in her nineties she still wouldn’t cross her ankles since that was considered suggestive. My grandfather didn’t cross his legs either, at least in the presence of women. You had to be careful because you were surrounded by vulgarity, it’s nasty fingers aching to clutch the unwary sophisticate.
Grandma frowned on anyone mentioning the number six, I think for obvious reasons. Animal horns were considered obscene, vulgar to the point of being devilish. Once I found a beautiful copper chaffing dish she had received as a wedding gift in 1908. That dish spent it’s entire life in the barn because the handle was a section of Elk horn which she wouldn’t touch. No goats either. My dad and uncle Jackie had to give their pet goat away, it had those devilish cloven hooves. The milk cows and bulls were also polled or dehorned, either for utility or because she wanted it that way.
She wore a silk chemise and pantaloons for underwear called, always, unmentionables. They were never seen by men. The pantaloons were basically a set of short leggings with no, dare I say, crotch. Probably shouldn’t. They wore so many layers of clothes that they simply could not undress quickly. A woman doing her business would have looked the same as a woman sitting in a chair. You see, this was because there were a couple things about feminine hygiene which were quite unknown at the time. Most homes had no toilet and many no running water. Finding and using the “Necessary” cold be very difficult when out and about. This was a woman’s dilemma. No business had a public toilet, Toilet comes from the French Toilette by the way. Toilet is French in origin and is derived from the word ‘toilette’, which translates as “dressing room”, rather than today’s meaning. This was another dodge around a seemingly vulgar term such as “The Jakes”, the outhouse, the Crapper* or the chamber pot. If I may, there was no toilet paper in a necessary unless the owner was well off . Paper for the toilet was invented by the Chinese in the fourth century BC. It took until 1857 until it first appeared in America and was sold in individual packs of five hundred and, of course quite expensive. Think of this, splinter free toilet paper first appeared in the 1930’s, multiply paper in 1942 and thanks to modern inventiveness, scented in 1964. Speaking of this would have been absolutely taboo in front of my grandmother. No lady could possibly utter the word toilet. She went to the bathroom where she did things that were secret from the world of men.
Remember that ancient Rome, Greece and Persia over three thousand or more years ago had running water, sewers and public baths and “Necessaries.” Arroyo Grande at the turn of the twentieth century did not, certainly did not.
This somewhat limited the distance a woman could go from her home. Timing was of the essence. She certainly could not just drop in to the Capitol Saloon on Branch street. She and her friends would have been forever shunned.
Saloons were places where Demon Rum lived. The men inside were considered vulgar beyond description. A woman who approached too closely would likely be subject to catcalls** and other unwanted comments.
I cannot imagine what she would think of our house when we had two rambunctious boys and one bathroom. On school days the door never closed and no one though anything about it. You all know what I mean. All that would have been incomprehensible to grandma.
As to engage in man woman stuff or Amorous Congress there was simply no word in her vocabulary that sufficed and it was never mentioned in any context, not even animals. She was a dairymen’s wife so she had to make her peace with sort of thing. She was seriously uncomfortable with both words and I’ve heard the act itself was only practiced twice, resulting in two children. Or so my father said, tongue in cheek, I hope.
Girls and boys didn’t have to wonder what the rules of courtship were, you could buy a printed card.
So my grandmother, her name was Annie Shannon was a steady presence in my life growing up. She never raised her voice, she always dressed the same, she never ever went out without hat and gloves even if she was going to buy groceries. She taught her grandchildren not to masticate with their mouths open, keep our elbows off the table, not to speak unless spoken too and keep our opinions to ourselves. I’ve done poorly with the latter but I hope she will forgive me.
I loved her for who she was and I miss her.
Jack and Annie Shannon as I remember them. Arroyo Grande about 1950.
Cover Photo: Annie Gray formal portrait high school graduation 1904. Stoneheart Studios Santa Maria California.
*Thomas Crapper was an English plumber and businessman. He founded Thomas Crapper & Co in London, a plumbing equipment company. In 1861, Crapper patented his first invention – an improved ballcock mechanism. The device was used to regulate the flow of water in cisterns and is still used today in toilets across the world. I cannot not imagine my grandmothers reaction to the word ballcock, it may have killed heron the spot. Crapper’s notability with regard to toilets has often been overstated, mostly due to the publication in 1969 of a tongue-in-cheek biography by New Zealand satirist Wallace Reyburn.
**Catcalling is a form of street harassment, typically sexual in nature, where a man makes unwanted comments, gestures, or sounds toward a woman in public. It is not a compliment but a demeaning act that makes the target feel threatened, degraded, and unsafe. The motivations behind it can include asserting power, misogyny, or a desire to express sexual interest, but it is always a form of harassment that infringes on the target’s dignity and right to feel secure in public.
Michael Shannon, the author of this piece loved his grandmother. Both of them actually because they were characters in their own right.
atthetable2015 