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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 21: At School

Michael Shannon

On the flyleaf of the 1936 Olive and Gold Santa Barbara High School yearbook is written in fine cursive, “Barb, Best wishes to my best friend and good luck in the future, as always your friend Blanche.”

With this inscription my mother closed her school career on a high note. There could have been no finer school in California.

She was there for two school years, the first time in her twelve years of school that she had spent an entire year in a single school. The list of schools she attended is too long to list but if you drew lines between places it would look like a cobweb. From Kernville, Oildale to Taft, Maricopa and Orcutt/Santa Maria, or Wilmington/Artesia and Long Beach/Compton up to Goleta and Santa Barbara a meandering school journey driven by the random rush to find oil.

I used to think that that was such a sad experience. I soon learned that the kids developed a strategy to deal with it and that was to seek out the popular kids and make friends with them right away. Bruce and Eillen made a point of always living outside the shanty towns where laborers lived or the Silk Stocking Rows where the big bosses lived.

Landscape

Oil camp, Kernville, ca and Silk Stocking Row McKittrick Ca. Used by permission.

If they could live in what would now be a middle class area, they did. No one would be able to call their kids Oil Field Trash nor be considered of the Snooty sort either.

As assistant drilling superintendant Bruce was off the Twelve Hour Tour. Grandma had run the household for most of their married life but Bruce was mostly still away, Running regular tours meant he could be counted on to be at home for half a day at least. Now that he was supervising wells that was no longer true. The automobile had changed the way the company operated. A Tool Pusher could now supervise wells that were far distance from each other. From their home in Hope Ranch Bruce could drive south to Signals wells in Bolsa Chica or Signal Hill or north to the Kern river and operations in the Westside around Taft. Moving was not quite the necessity it once was. Besides, Bruce liked to drive and he found the road not a bad place to be. He even gave his kids lessons on the proper, cool way to go. He said, “Put the wrist of your right hand on the top of the wheel and let the fingers dangle. Let your left arm hang outside the drivers side door and always go as fast as you can.”

The phone hanging on the wall would give its peculiar ring the way they used to do, most people being on party lines where a call for your home would be announced by code, two long rings then a short or perhaps a short and a one long. Most of the job shacks had one now and the roughnecks could call Bruce at home 24 hour a day.

He kept the company car fueled and parked in the driveway so he could get away quickly. Problems at the well couldn’t wait. A shutdown could cost the company volume which was contracted to the refineries and distributors and needed to be delivered to keep the money rolling in.

After fifteen years or so working the rigs the Halls were used to constant movement. The kids knew no other life. My mother, Barbara started the first grade at Bloomfield elementary school in 1924. Bloomfield was a tiny school on donated land, land donated by Fredrick “Sheep” Smith and true to his nickname he grazed huge flocks of sheep on his 360 acre ranch. Once a year he grazed them north to San Francisco, a three months round trip where they were sold to feed a hungry population.

Around the turn of the century “Sheep” donated a block of land for a school to be named after the city in his native Indiana. He wanted a school where his children and the children of his neighbors could get an education.

Mom always referred to the area as Artesia though it would be many years before it would incorporate as such. The Halls lived in a section which was to be called Hawaiian Gardens. A name first used to describe an old fruit and vegetable stand built with palm fronds along what is now the intersection of Norwalk Blvd and Carson St. A local farmer sold his produce there fro a couple of decades and it was rumored that during prohibition you might get some bootlegged spirits along with your fruit if you knew how to ask.

Bruce and Eileen lived out there because after the big discovery well on Signal Hill in 1921 wildcatters were scrambling all over Los Angeles County hoping to strike it rich. The next year, 1922, hoping to alleviate a serious drought in the Artesia area farmers began sinking wells. Artesia was named for its abundant Artesian wells, a nice bit of irony considering that the Los Angeles basin is semi-desert, the drillers quite accidentally struck oil and the boom was on. The little town went from farm and dairy land to oil town in a heartbeat.

Artesia, Los Angeles County, Ca Artesia historic Society photo about 1921.

In 1924 the Halls moved down from the Casmalia field and mom started first grade at Bloomfield elementary. From the old photos it looks to be a very new and nice building with a large impressive arcade in the center and two classroom wings, one on each side. Oil booms will do that to a town. In those days people wanted their kids educated, they didn’t care much about curriculum, it was still just the three R’s. It was simple and direct. The old textbooks are pretty narrow in their scope. It was a time before mass production of texts and curriculum which, in a sense has taken much of the personal touch out in favor of cramming as much information down kid’s throats as we can. what they wanted was for their kids to have a better life. Mothers in particular carried much of the weight of running a school. Bake sales, costumes, organizing activities for kids were mostly the work of parents. My mother had a fine hand, which was considered important, she read fluently all of her life. Those grammar school skills were considered to be enough to prosper in higher education and the work place.

EPSON MFP image
EPSON MFP image

Bloomfield Elementary School 1923-1924 First Grade report card. Hawaiian Gardens, Los Angeles County California.

Take note of the difference in reporting. There are subjects for which she has grades which are no longer on any report card. Also of note her mother had to sign the card and return it to school to be recorded something else which is no longer done.

A decade later, back in Santa Barbara where Bruce and uncle Henry were busy whipstocking and slant drilling out off the Santa Barbara channel Eileen and Bruce decided that with his new job at Signal and his promotion, that they would do their best to stay in one place long enough so the girls, Mariel and Barbara could go to Santa Barbara High School for their last two years. It was quite the luxury.

Now that might be all well and good but their itinerant ways remained and a check of census, voting and city directories shows they lived in six different house in those three years.

733 W. Islay, Santa Barbara. A modern photo of the house where they lived in 1933. Zillow photo.

West Micheltorena, North Garden, North Nopal, West Quinto, a P O Box in Goleta and one in Santa Barbara and finally West Cota street near the train station. Other than Goleta they cover an area less than a mile square. Once I asked my dad why they moved so much and he said that grandma hated to clean house which is probably “Apocryphal” but it makes a good story. Maybe there was some small truth to it. It’s a lot of moving.

By ninth grade mom’s transitions from school to school were seamless. Experience and planning with her parents had set the table for finding her way in a new school. If the new school asigned her a first day monitor to show her around she had learned that that girl would not be one of the popular girls and that as she made her tour of campus to keep an eye out for who was popular and who was not.

Up to high school she always knew that if she faced difficulties in school she would be out of there soon. As sad as it sounds she also had to accept that her new friends would soon be left behind. She had walked away from other kids all of her school years and for the first time she had to learn to maintain a friendship.

Mom had saved her pennies and nickels and in Santa Barbara she snuck away from the house and walked uptown to a beauty parlor and for the first time had her hair cut and styled. She always said it gave her a lot of confidence, she liked looking pretty and the way it helped her making friends.

Barabara Hall. self portrait. 1937. Family collection

Towns like Santa Barbara weathered the depression pretty well. Known a the Riviera of the west it was home to many, many wealthy people who lived in or on the the more exclusive areas. Part of Santa Barbara such as the Riviera, Montecito were filthy with movie stars, authors, business magnates and inherited wealth. Those whose children didn’t go to private schools went to Santa Barbara High. Mom had class with Jordanos, Lagamarsinos, Carrillos, some families dated back to Spanish California. She played tennis at the exclusive Montecito tennis club and loved to tell the story about getting a ride to school in the cream colored Cord convertible of Leo Carrillo, the movie star whose family was one of the founders of the pueblo of Santa Barbara.

High school is where you make some of the friends you will cherish for the rest of your life. She did that too. She went to her high school reunion for the rest of her life.

The yearbook inscription in the opening is from Blanche Belle Baker my mothers life long friend.

Michael Shannon lives in California and writes for his family.

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The Suitcase

Michael Shannon.

Mom ducked her head around the kitchen door, a red bandana tied up around her short dark hair the tag ends making a little pair of bunny ears in the front. She wiped a smudge from her nose with the back of her wrist then began wiping her hands on the blue and white flowered apron she wore, her tired brown eyes sweeping the hall looking for child labor. That would be me.

We were moving. The big old two story house that grandpa bought before the war was being torn down for a shopping mall and mom had us kids scouring ever nook and cranny, digging out every little thing we could find. It seemed to me at seventeen a useless thing, what did we need all that junk for anyway. Grandpa’s old Ford truck was already piled high with heaps of old stuff left from a long life in the same house.

My brother and I were in the hallway. He had scrambled up the ladder into the attic and I waited at the bottom for him to toss down everything he could find. For boys it had always been a treasure trove of discarded things, the old five finger baseball glove, my sisters dented old pink tricycle with the dangling sprouts of plastic string on the handle bars, it was missing a wheel. There was a cardboard box of old vinyl records in sleeves printed with oriental characters which meant nothin to us, they must have been grandpa’s. Dust and spiderwebs rained down every time he sent something down. It seemed to take forever and the complaints about how hot it was up there were never ending. After an hour of catching and running to the truck and back I yelled up for him to hurry up I wanted to go surfing. In the way of little brothers he snapped, “I don’t care what you want.” He stuck his head, wreathed with tendrils of silk web and seven kinds of dust and said, “Just one more thing.” He threw a suitcase at me.

It was an old blue black wooden case, crossed with scratches, splattered by faded white paint, it’s fillets dented and on one corner torn completely torn. The leather wrapped handle was chewed by rats. I though, who would keep such a thing?

“Ma, what is this thing?”

“Why did grandma Iso keep a piece of junk like this?”

My mother turned from wrapping glasses in newspaper and placing them in a cardboard box, looking to see what it was I was talking about. I held up the old case for her to see. She froze. The air seemed to come out of her as she slowly sagged and then fell to her knees, burying her head under her crossed arms she she made a sound between a sob and a wail.

It was terrifying. What was happening? I’d never seen mother do anything like this in my whole life. Allan let out a howl, “Donna, Donna” he shouted for my big sister to come.

she must have heard all the commotion because she came in a hurry. She came boiling around the corner in what she called her working clothes, Rolled to the calf levi’s below a sleeveless white blouse with Peter Pan collar. Her penny loafers complete with the penny in the slot squeaked on the hardwood as she made the turn into the hall. Her ducktail with curls on top sweaty, dirt streaked and her cat’s eye glasses askew. She knelt next to mom put her arms around her and helped her to her feet softly murmuring to her. They stumbled toward the bedroom, mom moaning in Japanese with my sister tut tutting softly,

“Mommy, mommy, it’s alright, shhh, shhh. You’re scaring me.”

We didn’t speak and could only understand just a little. It didn’t do any good.

“Must be the suitcase made her crazy.” Allan said. We had no idea.

“Lets open it.” I knelt down and snapped the latches, lifted the top which didn’t move easily, couldna been opened in a long time. It had some old folded clothes inside. There was short coat maybe an Army jacket. It was a faded green color with some medaly thingys on it and sewed on the sleeve, tired looking sergeant’s stripes. On the other shoulder was a patch with an arm holding up a torch.

Under that a crinkly old army shirt and some pants, at the bottom, a well used old wallet and a small black case that had Purple Heart printed on the cover. Allan was pushing on me, trying to see what was in it. It was a small heart shaped medal. With it was a golden five pointed star. It must have been on a ribbon but that was gone. On the back was printed, For Gallantry in Action.”

“Move over Kenji, let me see.”

Inside the yellowed cover it had a name I didn’t know. A name and an army serial number. What was this stuff? Who was this person?

Next to the old wallet was a paper tag, a string through at one end and hand written was our name Sasaki. It also said “Family 40571,” Sasaki, Seirin, Instruction were hand written in pencil, report ready to travel at 10:00 am, Tuesday Feb. 24, 1942, destination, Lone Pine, California.”

I picked up an old dog collar with a small, round brass tag with the name King stamped on it, a school notebook with pressed flowers inside and a small polished rock, granite, I think.

It was a sure enough mystery, alright. Dad would know so I told Allan to go get him.

“This is so cool, so cool.” he squeaked in his little boy voice as he bolted down the hall towards the front door at full speed.

“Papa, Papa come quick, I found a mystery.

The screen door banged.

Michael Shannon is writer from California.

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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter Twenty

Michael Shannon

The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn that lasted from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty. Everywhere. It was the first major indication that depressions was not just something that happened to the USA but were in fact global. America began a chain reaction that affected every industrialized countriy on Earth.

My grandmother Eileen belonged to the book of the Month club for decades and some of my first adult books came from her library. Though she had only a sixth grade education she was a voracious reader. The book I borrowed in 1958 was “Out of Africa.”

The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, commonly known as British Kenya or British East Africa, was a colonial possession of the British Empire located in East Africa. Americans for the most part are unfamiliar with the country unless they’ve seen the film “Out of Africa” loosely based on a memoir by Karen Dinensen (Blixen)* about her time as a coffee planter during the depression. Heavily fictionalized the story does demonstrate the connections between powerful nations who were unable to adapt to the new reality of the international collapse of trade in general and for the Dinensen plantation, coffee in particular.

Karen Dinensen Blixen and Denys Fitch Hatton, 1917′

Beginning with the end of the first World War** when the triumphant victors stopped spending like drunken sailors and begin to realize that the monumental debt they had incurred needed to be paid for somehow.

Instead of a dedicated policy to address the problem President Wilson and his advisors simply decided that markets would stabilize on their own and took a Leissez Faire approach. The immediate cancellation of war contracts struck at the heart of the American economic system particularly farmers who lost most of their markets.

My paternal grandfather Jack Shannon and most of the farming and ranching families in our county who had supplied beans and peas for the war effort had to abandon their crops for which suddenly, there was no market. For my grandfather, it spelled the end of his farming operations and forced him to find another use for the land. Things got very tight very fast. From the late ‘teens until Hitler brought him another war the family lived on the edge financially.

Grandpa Bruce and Signal Oil faced the same financial monster. Too much production and shrinking markets. Surviving banks, thousands of U.S. banks disappeared between 1929 and 1932, with 2,293 failing in 1932 alone were hit by falling incomes, mortgage defaults, especially rural, business failures, and general economic collapse weakened banks and millions lost their life savings. Personal savings were erased as if they never existed.

“Once I built a railroad, made it run / Made it race against time, Brother, can you spare a Dime?”***

As you know from previous chapters of The Twelve Hour Tour, Bruce lost his job with Barnsdall Oil, they could not qualify for Relief because he owned a car, the family had to move in with his brother’s family and when he did get another job this time with Signal Oil in 1933, he had his wages cut in half. “Half of something is better than all of nothing though,” He said, and he went back to the Twelve Hour Tour.

The Halls were living the worst financial depression in our history. As people moved through the 1920’s interest rates were kept low to make money cheap and encourage people to borrow. There was a housing boom and construction was in high gear all across the country. There is an old Wall Street “Saw” that when skirts go up so does the market, times are good. They did too. Skirts went way up, silk stockings and Jazzin’ babies. FitzGerald wrote about it and it made him famous. He also wrote the cautionary tale of Jay Gatsby and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. He drew the future but no one listened. American finance ran right of the cliff.

The The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was a U.S. law that drastically raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to protect American farmers and businesses during the Great Depression. Not surprisingly it triggered retaliatory tariffs from other nations, causing a collapse in global trade, worsening the Depression, and becoming a symbol of disastrous protectionist policies. The act significantly increased import duties, leading to a global trade war and a roughly 66% drop in world trade between 1929 and 1934, demonstrating the dangers of such economic nationalism.****

That was the darkest side. There wasn’t much light if you were a working man with a family. By the summer of 1933, Bruce and Eileen had a new baby girl, Patricia, Bob who was 13, my mother, who had just turned fifteen and the oldest Mariel who was sixteen. Like most they were a single income family.

Struggling in hard times is pretty personal. There is little time to ponder world events even though they affect you because the imperative is just to figure out how to survive them. Depending on your perspective the farmer had been struggling since the end of the war. They were ten years in. Manufacturing , including the oil business continued to prosper. Smaller companies without financial reserves did fall by the wayside but individual spending by those who could just seemed to get better and better. It was the Jazz age, until it wasn’t.

In The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972, author and historian William Manchester argued that Herbert Hoover deliberately chose to use the word “depression” when discussing the economic situation of the time. Similar economic downturns in American history had been referred to as panics or crises but the Hoover White House decided, and continually referred to the financial slide as depression. Hoover believed that the word depression sounded less alarming. History shows that any efforts they took to slow the economic crises were in vain and did little to reassure the public. At the beginning stages of the Great Depression, Hoover remained in a state of denial over worsening economic conditions. Shortly following Black Tuesday, Hoover remarked that the “conditions are fundamentally sound.” Even as late as December 1930, Hoover maintained that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.” It was not until 1931, when it became impossible to deny the economic train wreck transpiring, that Hoover began to refer to the economic situation of his own time as a “great depression.”

Herbert Hoover’s famous slogan was “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” which he used in his successful 1928 presidential campaign promised prosperity, though it became ironic after the 1929 crash. In his 1932 re-election campaign, facing economic ruin, his slogans shifted to defending his limited government approach against FDR’s activism, emphasizing “ordered liberty” versus “new deal” government. Opponents hung the phrase, “Hoover, we trusted—now we’re busted”.

My father, a very sharp man could distill problems to a single phrase, something he did often. The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United States was a decline in spending, which led to a decline in production as manufacturers and merchandisers saw an unintended rise in inventories. The sources of the contraction in spending in the United States varied over the course of the Depression, but they cumulated in a monumental decline in demand. My Dad said, “People had money but they wouldn’t spend it because they had lost faith in the government’s ability to respond to the crisis.” He said, “It became a point of pride to be frugal.” Something I learned about at our kitchen table, instilled in his children by his personal action. A not uncommon trait in the adults we all grew up with.

Signal was on the edge of bankruptcy. One of Mosher’s company goals was an attempt to streamline the organization and to adapt quickly to new technologies in order to reduce the cost of operations. The big boys like Standard played the independents off against one another. If Signal could not meet the price and volume dictated by the far larger company somebody else would.

A key factor wa the fact that contracts were paid out on monthly, bi-monthly or other timelines that favored the buyer. For example if Standard of California contracted to buy from an independent the price agreed on would be budgeted by the accounting department and paid after delivery. If SOCAL was late on payment or decided for some reason to crush an independent they could. The money set to be disbursed was always a month or more behind delivery of the oil so if the little guy failed they still had ample funds to buy from someone else. Big companies actively looked for aggressive suppliers who they believed would not be able to deliver the amount contracted or do it on time. There was always a strapped supplier who would take a chance in order to stay alive. The big companies were predatory and showed no mercy. As my father once said, “If you get into business with the big guys you are going to get more than a good nights sleep.”

So it was. Sam Mosher and his “Varsity” team, a nice turn of phrase meant to convey confidence in men who were expected to be unconventional and aggressive in seeing to the health of the small outfit that was Signal. Wells that were underperforming or “Wildcats” that had never reached oil sands, small operators trying to unload underperforming debt were all meat for Signal. Sharp geologists who could see something in core samples or location that gave some promise of oil turned over reports to Signals Landmen who slipped right in and bought up the land leases for underperforming or dry holes for pennies on the dollar.

Bruce’s great value was his innate sense of direction; something inherent to the basic nature of the man, something originating from the mind rather than experience. It informed ability to whipstock and read a well. In the early thirties much of the modern equipment you see today had not been developed. The Hughes Tool Company’s two cone rotary bit was developed in 1909 and had revolutionized drilling. In 1930 Hughes also began marketing the so-called “Christmas Tree” a system of valves designed to control the flow of wells. That ended the day of the gusher, the uncontrolled blow out that did so much damage to operations. Though they look spectacular in old photos and in movies, they did terrible damage. Entire casing runs were blown out of wells, drill rigs were destroyed. They often caught fire or simply blew up because of the gas content.Hhundreds of thousands of barrels of oil just ran onto the ground. Bruce said that if a tool pusher let a well get away he was likely to lose his job. With too many men and not enough jobs he would likely be finished for good.

Signal Hill oil sumps, Long Beach California.

Legal theory determined that every lease be contained within the confines of it’s surface dimensions. This mean that as the drill string moved deeper into the earth it had to stay within it’s contracted boundaries. Oilmen said simply “legal-schmegal “and let their bits wander or better yet they had men like Bruce Hall who could wield a whipstock inserted in the casing to send the bit and its string meandering like a blind worm. At the once quiet and empty Ellwood bluffs were now a hub of activity, 24 hours a day. Long accepted rules of conservation in a new oil discovery were thrown out the window. It was a case of “get the oil out of the ground before your neighbor beats you to it”. New roads, buildings, vehicles, machinery and storage tanks were popping up every day. New technology was constantly being introduced to increase the output. Obviously, aesthetics was not a concern.

The piers at Ellwood crept farther and farther out into the Santa Barbara channel following the slant drilling rigs. There were no instruments to track the location of the bits, it was all done by guess and by gosh. Those like my grandfather who could simply touch and listen were highly valued. They didn’t speak of piracy but they certainly were that. An inspector could measure the amount of pipe tripping in and out of the hole but there was no way to know exactly where it was going.

Long Beach was the same, drill streams were snaking out under Ocean Boulevard towards the Pacific. Even though the Oil business was strangling on itself by over producing the operators just could not stop.

With three teenagers and a new baby up in Hope Ranch the Halls seemed to be on an upswing in their fortunes. They were about to make some decisions about their itinerant lives that would have a profound impact on the lives of their kids.

Next, Chapter 21

High School

Cover: Thomas Hart Benton painting, “Boomtown” Borger, Texas 1928

*It is a pity that Hollywood got her deliberately wrong. One must wonder what this woman, who spent her life writing and wondering about the role of fate in controlling human lives, would have thought of that throw of the dice? Karen loved telling stories in her low, husky voice and would do so at any opportunity. In 1952 her book Out of Africa lost the Nobel Prize to Ernest Hemingway. “I would have been happy, happier, today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer, Isak Dinesen.”
– Ernest Hemingway

**World War One was hardly the first instance of a world war, the Hundred years war, The Seven years war, the muslin conquest of most of the so-called civilized world and even Tamir, Ghengis Khan and the Emperor Babu head of the Mughal Empire would all qualify as World Warriors.

**”Brother, can you spare a dime?” Written by Yip Harburg who was working as a lyricist and the melody which derives from a Jewish lullaby that the composer Jay Gorney heard as a child in Russia. The song has been covered by at least 52 artists in the United States including Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Rudy Valee, Judy Collins and Tom Waits. Click link to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63OBM3kuejc

****Something we should have learned from.

Michael Shannon lives and writes in Arroyo Grande, California.

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The Full Circle

Michael Shannon

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..

*Gladys, get it?

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SAFE AT HOME

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.

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The Endless Debate

Michael Shannon

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.

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MOM THE HOOFER.

Michael Shannon

“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.

***Begin the Beguine, Artie Shaw, written by the inestimable Cole P rter,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCYGyg1H56s

****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.

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The Twelve Hour tour

Chapter 18

The Big Shake

Michael Shannon

“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.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Page 17

Big Surprise!

Michael Shannon

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.

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How To Live Forever

Michael Shannon.

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.

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