Tag Archives: family

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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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 16

Michael Shannon

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:. A year 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.

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My Fathers Big Fish

by Michael Shannon.

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.

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THE NECESSARY

My Goodness, What to Do?

By Michael Shannon

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.

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Dear Dona

Chapter 13

The End And A New Beginning.

By Michael Shannon

Easter Sunday, April 1st, 1945, and where were you? I was resting in my mother’s arms in Sisters Hospital Santa Maria California. Staffed with sisters from the Poor Clares, a Irish enclosed order of the Holy Roman Catholic church. The sisters carried me to my mother from the nursery wrapped in a blue blanket and a small green ribbon tied in a bow in my sprig of blond hair, the only child born on that day. It’s been my luck.

Half a world away on the same date the tenth United States army made up of three Marine divisions and four army divisions started going ashore on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Supported by the Navy’s Fifth fleet made up of three separate task force units and the British, Australian Royal Canadians and New Zealanders. The combined forces numbered nearly 541,000 troops, 184,000 thousand of them combat infantry. The invasion was supported by a fleet consisting of 18 battleships, 27 cruisers, 177 destroyers/destroyer escorts, 39 aircraft carriers (11 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers and 22 escort carriers) and various support and troop transport ships.

One of the great euphonius names of WWII commanded at Okinawa. Lt. General Simon Boliver Buckner jr. Named for his father he commanded the entire 10th Army. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute and the US Military Academy at West Point he had served in WWI and The Philippine Insurrection which I’m sure the Filipinos considered a war. His father Buckner sr. served in the Mexican war, the Civil war, was a Confederate General and Governor of Kentucky. General Buckner had iron clad credentials. Considered a soldiers General he was on the front lines with the 2nd Marine Division when he was warned by marines to remove his helmet with it’s three gold stars because they could see them a half mile away. He did. Moments later a small artillery shell hit near him and he was wounded by coral shards and died less than an hour later while being operated on in an aid station located in a shell hole.. He was one of four US Generals killed in WWII.

General Buckner was just one of the 200,000 deaths, including both military personnel and civilians. It was an orgy of killing and the newspapers back home listed casualties of such high numbers that the public which had become inured to the death toll was shocked into a stunned numbness. Marine casualties exceeded the total number of a single fully manned division. It was as if one of the three Marine divisions, the 1st, 2nd and 6th has been completely wiped off the face of the earth. The army suffered equally with over 19,000 dead and wounded. The Navy lost thirteen destroyers sunk by Kamikazes. Nearly sunk, the Essex class carrier USS Franklin, CV-13, the “Big Ben” lost 1,294 with 807 killed in the greatest single ships loss since the USS Arizona. Lest any one should think that support personnel were relatively safe 35,000 cooks, seabees, truck drivers, labor detachments, hospital corpsman and doctors were killed and wounded. The dead included two war correspondents.*

When the “Butchers Bill” was presented to the population of the United States and its government they were aghast. What was it going to cost to invade the Japanese homeland? You could scarcely drive down a street in the countries small towns without seeing small banners with gold and blue stars hanging in windows.

The Battle of Okinawa was a victory for the US but resulted in massive casualties on both sides. Japanese forces fought with the same fanaticism the Americans had witnessed in battles such as Iwo Jima and Peleliu. Rather than be taken prisoner, defenders often chose suicide. Okinawa was so close to home, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action. The battle created a humanitarian disaster for civilians as well. It is believed that the number of civilians casualties was greater than all battle casualties combined. Combatants on both sides, after three years of war were completely numb, bereft of any kind of humanity. Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge both wrote books about their experiences and told the same story. Marines and soldiers automatically shot Imperial Japanese soldiers who were wounded, they also shot the dead to be sure they stayed that way. They told of the absolute necessity in a cold, pragmatic way, emotionless. No combat rifleman wanted an enemy soldier playing dead to suddenly come back to life and jump into their foxhole at night.

Later in Vietnam, a marine sergeant told Lieutenant Phillip Caputo. “Sir, before you leave here you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy. Phillip Caputo was Marine officer who served as a platoon leader in Vietnam. He was right. It is a quote that describes soldiers as far back in antiquity as you choose to go. It could have been said by a Hoplite in Alexander the Greats Macedonian/Greek army two and a half thousand years ago.

For the last time the Nisei boys boarded assault ships and sailed for the islands of the Ryukyu Group of which Okinawa was the largest island, 66 miles long and seven miles wide on average it was to be the last major battle of the Pacific war though no one knew it yet. It was also going to be the deadliest.

MIS camp, Okinawa, 1945. Signal Corps photo

The Japanese Imperial Army wasn’t nearly on it’s last legs. The Military leaders in Tokyo had determined that they would not engage in offensive battle but rather set up defense in depth and attempt to bleed the Americans dry. They well knew that after three years of increasingly brutal fighting the American public was losing heart. Printed in the nations newspapers casualty lists were enormous. Though newsmen tried to put a positive spin on war news, the Battle of the Bulge had just ended and cost the American army 81,000 casualties. People were war weary. We were running out of children to sacrifice. The High School class of 1944 was just finishing training and was headed for the front.

Mom’s cousin Don Polhemus, lost on the USS Spence during typhoon Cobra, her brother headed for the western Pacific on a destroyer. My dad’s best friend Sgt. Harry Chapek, killed in France, and his cousin Bill Marriott had just left New Guinea and was headed for Okinawa . Jim Moore, son of the judge and my grandparent’s closest friends LST was bombed in the Pacific.The war was everywhere in our little county. There were military posts in literally every town and all along the coast. People don’t think about it much anymore but there were P-38’s at Santa Maria, flying cadets at Hancock field, Coast artillery units above Pismo Beach, a Rec. Center in Grover City where my mother volunteered. There was a Coast Guard bases in Morro Bay and Avila beach. Amphibious landing were practiced along the Atascadero Beach. Camp San Luis Obispo was the largest infantry training base in the country turning out ten thousand soldiers with every cycle. Camp Roberts in north county on the Hearst ranch and just to the south Camp Cooke where Patton’s tank Divisions had trained on the dunes above Lompoc before North Africa.. Mom said military convoys clogged the old highway and would go through Arroyo Grande, rumbling people awake at all hours. The list carried in the old Arroyo Grande Herald Recorder titled “Our Boys in the Service” was filled with nearly four hundred names in August of 1943. They were the last names of kids I would go to school with. The bus drivers, librarians and teachers in our schools, the postman, truck drivers, housewives, doctors and pharmacists, all listed. Those that would never come home marked with a small black star. There were more than a few. All from a town with a population of less than five thousand people.

The troops were weary too. The American leadership put no real censorship on the news and the people at home and their families wrote of neighbor boys who were dead, wounded and captured. Every day, every thought grounded in the agony of a war that seemed to have no end.

Hilo and his team must have worked frantically to translate all the information coming in from the Army and Marines. The temptation is to think that all this emphasis on information was at this point useless. We al know the end of the story. Thats the problem with history. Though we can study events for their meaning there is one thing we cannot do and that is see the future. Hilo and his team hadn’t the least inkling of where it would end. The man at the center of the hurricane has no idea where the way out is. Even the big brass in the Phillipines, Pearl Harbor and Washington DC had no crystal ball. The only thing they could do was to press ahead.

Planning for the invasion of the Japanese islands was well under way. The war in Europe would soon be over, there was no doubt of that. Germany was finished. The only question was how much longer would the insane self destruction continue. Even the Dogface trudging along German roads, still dying daily knew it was over. They all wanted to live, Japan was waiting. They knew that is was different fighting the Japanese than the Germans. No one wanted to go. But they did. The first Army Air Corps units had already arrived from England. The Generals had no doubt that when the time came they would go. Bill Matousek, some day to be my family doctor, as a fresh replacement tank driver who arrived on the line just days before the battle of the Bulge knew it. My sister in laws father had fought all the way from Sicily to Anzio to southern France, he knew it too. Del Holloway, Orville Shultz, John Loomis*** Arch and Leo Harloe, your father too, they all knew what the next step was going to be. It’s all they talked about. It seemed to them that it would last for years. “Golden Gate in ’48” they said.

They knew nothing of the Manhattan Project and the bomb. During the fight for Okinawa, FDR died .On April 12th the day of his death the first order of business for the new President, Harry Truman was to be told about the bomb. It would be up to him to decide.

Ernest “Ernie” Pyle, the soldiers friend killed on Okinawa April 18, 1945 RIP National Cemetery of he Pacific, “Punchbowl” 2177 Puowaina Dr. Honolulu, Oahu, Hawai’i

They lie supine in their regimented rows where once they stood. They are the waste. The war dead. Those who know nothing pass them by on the road. Only as long as the markers, the holy grail of the left living, be visited by those who remember will they signify the personal cost. On memorial days and anniversaries families may gather at the stones to remember their children who all too often were in their teens or early twenties when they died. But during the rest of the year they are noticed only by the caretakers who mow between the stones.

The consequences, the blind, the amputees, the depressed, the suicidal, these insane, these jobless, these homeless, the side effects and delayed effects whose very existence keeps memories of the war alive when most citizens can’t wait to forget, or, remember in a circumscribed vision for the burial of the dead is a burial of memory. The National Cemeteries fulfill a desire to set it all aside. No one can say that they are not moving places but the arranged beauty does not evoke any memory of terrible battles.

Perfectly aligned marble does not resemble the memory of the men who lived them, but rather masks the heaps of the dead and wounded, They lay in piles, in fragments, limbs broken and contorted, Burned, muddy clothes shredded or ripped from bodies by the sheer velocity of the man made forces that took their lives. This, the veteran of combat knows and of which he will not speak. The impossible knowledge cannot be conveyed to the living, the wives and children and grandchildren. Thats the secret, the wilderness of slaughter and death, put away as if in a box to be gradually forgotten. It speaks to the resiliency of memory, the ability by some to bury the scars so deep they can never be found.**

Punchbowl

Next, Chapter 14. Home, it’s all changed.

*During the Battle of Okinawa in World War II, Ernie Pyle, a renowned American war correspondent, was killed by enemy fire. He was covering the battle for American newspapers and was known for his deeply humanizing accounts of soldiers’ experiences. Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of the “dogface” infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Ie jima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa. Another journalist, John Cashman, was killed in an aircraft crash on Okinawa on July 31, 1945,

**As far as I know I am the only living member of my family who recalls Corporal Edgar Green of the 2nd Australian Infantry whose grave is in the Baghdad North Gate military cemetery in Iraq. When I am gone so is Edgar, his incredible and brutal goes story with me. Markers are not for the dead but for the living.

***https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-arroyo-grande-valley-herald-recorder/179529347/ Follow this link to a letter home from a local Marine on Okinawa.

Cover Photo: Private Bob Hoichi Kubo United States Army MIS

Below is the link to “letters to Dona” page one.

https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/1226

Michael Shannon writes so his children will know where they come from. He lives in Arroyo Grande California

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The Twelve Hour Tour.

Chapter 15

The Desperados

By Michael Shannon

Grandpa called Grandma from the phone in the Signal office on Orizaba Street. He gave her good news. She especially liked the idea of going back to Santa Barbara. As was the custom with them she started getting all that the little family would be taking with them together. Clothes for the girls and Bob, toiletries and whatnots, just what could be packed in a suitcase. The kids carried their own. My mother was twelve and Mariel thirteen. Bob had just turned ten so whatever they could carry was what they took. Moms piano and a little furniture would have to be shipped later. Uncle Marion would drive them down by the same route they had gone up to Madera. Marion was counting on Bruce to put him on a crew so it seemed like a good bet.

Following the work was the name of the game then just as it is today. My mother said it was normal for kids who had never known any other way. They kids knew how to make new friends and were all sociable at that age. It would never change as they grew.

Grandma could shake and bake. Get ’em packed, sacked and on the road. Rent a house, bring the goods and move ’em in. Enroll in school, do it in jig time too.

733 East Islay St, Santa Barbara. The 1930, Home to the Hall’s, Zillow photo

She had the whole thing down to a science. Grandpa would come home from work or get a phone call telling him he had to be at another rig the next day or two and he would leave right away, Eileen and the kids would follow. The house shown above was their home after arriving from Madera in 1930.

Sam Mosher had a specific purpose in mind when he hired Bruce. Whipstocking. Although the Ellwood field was already operating he had bought some abandoned and unproved leases at the very edge of the Ellwood field.

Other companies geologists had determined there was no oil to be had. It was a big gamble for a small operator but the leases were cheap and his geologist thought that there were oil deposits if they went just a bit deeper. There was also a possibility that the so-called safe lease would be a total disaster. One thing about Sam Mosher, he was not risk averse.

Mosher who was born in Pasadena in in 1892, just three years younger than my grandfather. His father sent him to the University of California at Berkekly where he earned a BS in Agriculture. Right out of university he leased and began farming seventeen acres of Lemons and Avocados in Pico Rivera. In 1918 all of what is now western Los Angeles was farmland with a few small towns dotted about. It was a struggle and Sam worked sixty to seventy hours a week and then used his Ford tractor to plow and disc for other farmers near by. He always said afterward that he “Didn’t know a darn thing about oil wells or the business.

A single event changed all that. On June 23rd, 1921, a wildcat well on the lower slope of Signal Hill announced itself with a massive plume of crude oil. Coming in with a roar like the passing of a steam locomotive and the unbelievable shaking and rumbling of an earthquake, Alamitos no. 1 borned itself and set off the mad scramble for discovery on what became the richest field ever found.*

A drifting fog of micro dots of oil spread eastward on the back of the northwest ocean breeze, depositing crude on every surface. Clothesline’s, cars in the driveway and the houses themselves soon were coated with the sticky black residue of decomposed plant life from a tropical earth gone away millions of years ago.

Bumper to bumper lines of cars from Los Angeles came out to see the well. It was an event that would grow the city in ways none anticipated. The 25 miles to Signal Hill were dotted with small towns and orchards like Mosher’s in Pico Rivera. Looking up from his tractor’s seat, Sam Mosher couldn’t have helped thinking that the drudgery of farming could be traded for riches from the oil patch.

Alamitos number one set off a frenzy of drilling that within a few years saw wells in the Dominguez Hills, Torrance, Santa Fe Springs, Long Beach, Belmont shores, Seal Beach, The Bolsa Chica and Huntington Beach. Bruce would work them all.

The Halls were getting settled in Santa Barbara, kids enrolled in school and Bruce was back at work. Lucky for them too. Because of the depression unemployment was pushing 25%. There was no unemployment insurance or Federal minimum wage and hordes of desperate men and boys, women too, hopped the side door pullmans as they rattled back and forth across the country. Midwest farmers abandoned their farms because if you could find a bank to loan you “Crop Money” the crop itself would, more than likely not sell for enough to pay off the loan. More farms abandoned or foreclosed every week. Banks failed because there was no FDIC to guarantee money to keep them solvent. Factories cut wages to the bone, seeing it as the only way to turn a profit. In many cases it just didn’t work. More families took to the road than ever before in our history searching for work, just something to put food on the tables. The government of president Hoover blamed it on the workers. “They are Communists, Unionists, Fascists, they don’t want to work” he said. Sound familiar?

The Knight Riders, the Ku Klux Klan which had existed in the old Confederacy rose up from its deathbed and reappeared all across the county. Burning, looting and lynchings occurred for the first time in decades. Their target, Blacks, immigrants, Jews and unionists. The government did very little to stop it. The FBI focused it’s energies on these same people as Hoover acted as an enforcer for the wealthy entrenched establishment.

Business, finance, the law and government acted as if it was business as usual. unable or unwilling to do anything except support the status quo. Hoover, promising “A chicken in every pot” was one of the more callous election promises ever made in this country. He couldn’t produce the promise and wouldn’t seriously try. The callousness of the sitting government was focus on protecting those that had and not those that didn’t. It would cost him the Presidency in 1932.

The Oil Patch was no different, wages were sinking, drilling was slowing dramatically. With car sales plummeting no one needed the gasoline no matter how cheap. Every one in oil production understood this but at first they could not slow down. Pure greed, especially by the big companies like Standard, Sinclair, Richfield who could only survive by drilling held sway. When it got to the point where high production was unsustainable they cut costs to the point where the independents were forced to quit, putting thousands of roughnecks, toolies and supers on the road with laid the off factory workers, tractored out farmers and small business failures.

Everyone went from unbridled optimism, where no amount of oil seemed too much to the point where wells were simply pumping it into earthen pits waiting for a price hike and when they didn’t come, they walking away from their wells. In many cases no one bothered to even plug the casings leaving the well heads wide open.

An oil sump, Signal Hill, 1930. Long Beach Historical Society

The land owners who had leased their mineral rights to oil companies took it in the shorts too. Your little farm where you had some fruit trees an a few acres of vegetables were suddenly covered in waste oil, abandoned machinery, derricks and muddy roads everywhere. The trees were long dead, the house coated in oil mist and you never saw a dime from your share of production. You were abandoned too.

So, fortunate Bruce was. After twelve years traveling the state chasing crude you at least had a job with a small company which was hell bent on surviving by taking on the riskiest of projects on the chance that they might, could, or would pay off. Sam Mosher had given up the lease on his little seventeen acres of fruit trees in Pico Rivera so for him it was do or die.

With some Signal stock and promise of a piece of production for capital he didn’t have he bought a lease north of Elwood, near Goleta that had never been “Proved.” At what geologists thought was the end of the underground pool at Elwood, he bought from a local attorney in Santa Barbara who had leased some ranch land right at the foot of the tidal bluff just north of Tecolote canyon. The attorney had no luck and wasn’t able to find anyone who would even contract to drill there.

Though Geologists at the time had more than a century of practical experience in finding oil the devices used today where nonexistent in 1930. They looked for areas where surface indications showed the presence of undersea creatures. Fossils, like Trilobites on the surface especially on a hill or hills called Anticlines** sometimes indicated oil pools below. Ancient seabeds where plant life once flourished turned out to be where you could get rich drilling. The San Jaoquin Valley and the southern coastal regions of California had massive oil pools if you could find them.

We have a box of prehistoric sharks teeth that grandpa Bruce collected from the many leases he worked, mostly from the Elk Hills which runs along the valley’s westside. He would come home and thrill his children with tales of an ancient world where enormous sharks patrolled a sea which was now dry and dusty hills baking in the San Jaoquin valley’s brutal summer heat. My mother kept the teeth all of her life and the little box now resides in a drawer of the desk I’m writing this story on.

In the get rich quick culture of the oil business, landsmen would go out to areas where oil was discovered or about to be and for a fee or a promise of a percentage of production for a specified time the underground rights to said property were purchased. This meant that the oilman could drill on the property and if they found enough oil and it was worth producing, they would kick back to the actual owner of the land a specified percentage of sales. Leases on Signal Hill were sometimes negotiated by the square foot and even, in a few instances, by the square inch. How anyone could understand this complex and inherently crooked system is anyones guess. Of course that was a win for the oil men and their lawyers.

There were almost no rules. Oil companies with sharp lawyers and accountants ran roughshod over property owners all the time. Getting the right to drill without any up front money was the key for the Landsmen and many an owner ended up with his lot trashed, steeped in waste and marked with an abandoned wooden derrick as tall as 82′ feet looming over his house. An absolute frenzy occurred every time their was a big strike. On Signal hill and the west Los Angeles fields most of the leases were on standard house lots. Each lot might be a different wildcatter. Some derricks on the hill were so close together that their legs were intertwined. Drill stings became entangled hundreds of feet underground with one company drilling right through the pipe and casing of another. It was fertile ground for lawyers. Fertile ground for roughnecks too who went to war with their neighbors, fists, pipe, ball bats and six shooters were not uncommon and close to hand.

Signal Hill, east Willow street, California 1930. Calisphere.

Property owners were basically ignorant of the actual doings of companies. Fast talking lease buyers, shifty drillers and sharp lawyers could end up, through slight of hand, leaving the poor small farmer householder holding the bag. There was a property owner in Long Beach who told his friend at the barbershop that he was no fool, “That danged lease man offered me 10 points of the profits, but I ain’t nobody’s fool I’m holding out for a 20th.” He was getting more than one shave he just didn’t know it yet.

Mosher and his company signed the documents for the lease in Goleta but in so doing apparently no one read the docs very carefully. Under California the law at the time a leaseholder had 12 months to “prove” a lease by beginning drilling before time ran out. After signing the documents a sharp eyed engineer noted that all but 28 days of the year had gone by. Signal had just 28 days in which to prove the lease on a piece of property with no access, no road and at the foot of a steep bluff that ran down to the hight tide mark. To make matters worse they would have to seek permission to cross the tracks of the Southern Pacific RR tracks which meant red tape that could take a year or more. The Southern Pacific was once known as the Octopus and for good reason. There was no doubt on Orizaba street that they would do just that, squeeze as much out of Signal as they could.

It would seem to be a lost cause. Mosher sent his Varsity Team a he called it, the first gathering of the young experts he had hired at Signal to scout out ways to to spud in a well before the 28 days ran out. There was no road down to the beach just a brush choked gully. Maybe an access road could be bulldozed down it to get equipment in but there was no way to cross the RR tracks legally. No dozer, no road, no road, no steam shovel to cut down to the beach, checkmate. The property owner keeps the payment and Sam Mosher takes it in the shorts as the old saying goes.

After a couple days of nosing around one of the engineers walking the track had to cross a gully alongside the tracks and found back in the brush, a stone culvert the SP had built in order to throw the track across the ravine which was active in the winter and couldn’t be blocked. He looked over, scrambled down the slope to the creek bottom, took out his measuring tape did a few calculations and then high tailed it back to Goleta and called Orizaba street and talked to Garth Young, Mosher’s young, chief engineer.

“Garth, I found a way in where we don’t have to get permission from the railroad. I figure our shovel will just fit with about five inches to spare, we can just drive her in.”

Sam Mosher and Garth Young. 1930. Signal Oil Company photos.

Young replied, “Well we can’t do that it’s still railroad property and we have to have permission.”

“Hell with the railroad Garth, let’s just do it and deal with them later. What are they going to do after its done, sue us?”

“Probably, but what the hell lets just go ahead. Our times running out and we need the well or it’s all lost anyway.”

“OK boss, we’ll roll the shovel up tonight and we’ll be down to the bluff before sunlight. Those railroad stiffs will never know.” Getting permission from the railroad to pass through this culvert would have also held them up, so Garth Young decided to do it without telling his boss, relieving Mosher of any personal responsibility.

Mosher had already gotten permission to pass through the Eagle Canyon Ranch from the owner, Louis Dreyfus, while his Engineer, Garth Young’s boys had discovered a passageway to the shore.

The Culvert on Eagle Canyon. Goleta Historical photo.

The heavy-duty self propelled power shovel made its way through the dry Eagle Canyon creek bed. As it approached the culvert, the operator lowered the boom to horizontal, the huge clamshell shovel blades mere inches off the ground. The prehistoric looking iron beast slowly crept through the dark stone tunnel, foot by foot, as Garth Young watched in suspense. Without a hitch, the giant piece of machinery clanking and squealing crawled carefully through the dark tunnel and emerged into the dark of midnight. Walking alongside with flashlights they maneuvered the iron monster down the dry creek bed and onto a shelf above the driftwood littered beach.

Taking the first bite of the bluff. 1929. Goleta Historical Society.

Time to go to work. Times running out. Young explained to the operator that he would have to wait for the tide to go out, then clear a way down the beach to the foot of the cliff below Hydrocarbon Gulch. He would quickly dig a foothold at the base of the cliff before the tide comes back up. If he didn’t his shovel would sink into the wet sand and the job would be over. The driver laughed at the crazy plan and said it would likely take him 10 days. He would drive back to the culvert every high tide and return on the next low. But Garth Young told him they didn’t have 10 days, it needed to be done, and done today. And if he didn’t succeed, they had insurance for the power shovel anyway. No problem there except they, had no insurance which was a bit of a necessary fabrication as Garth saw it. If they lost the shovel it was a moot point anyway….

*The Long Beach Oil Field is a large oil field underneath the cities of Long Beach and Signal Hill, California, in the United States. Discovered in 1921, the field was enormously productive in the 1920s, with hundreds of oil derricks covering Signal Hill and adjacent parts of Long Beach; largely due to the huge output of this field. The Los Angeles Basin produced one-fifth of the nation’s oil supply during the early 1920s. In 1923 alone the field produced over 68 million barrels of oil, and in barrels produced by surface area, the field was the world’s richest. During the early stages of the field’s development, unlike most oil fields, land was leased by the square inch instead of by the acre. The field is eighth-largest by cumulative production in California, and although now largely depleted, still officially retains around 5 million barrels of recoverable oil and has produced 963 million out of 3,600 million barrels of original oil in place. 294 wells remained in operation as of the beginning of 2008, and in 2008 the field reported production of over 1.5 million barrels of oil. The field is currently run entirely by small independent oil companies, with the largest operator in 2009 being Signal Hill Petroleum, Inc. Sam Mosher’s old company.

**An anticline is simply the opposite of a decline, meaning a geographic feature characterized by a geological fold in rock strata where the layers bend upwards, forming a convex shape, resembling an arch or an inverted “U”. It’s the opposite of a syncline, which is a downward fold. Anticlines often form due to compressional forces that cause rocks to bend and buckle rather than break. In oil fields the fold is created by the upward and immense pressure from the gas created by the decomposition of vegetation underground. It’s important to know that not every hill overlies and oil field hence the often used word “Lucky” applied to wildcatters.

Michael Shannon is a grandson of Bruce and Eileen Hall. The life of oilmen was a serious topic when he was growing up and listening to his mother’s stories about growing up in the oil patch. He writes so his children will know where they came from and who they are.

A Notice to the Reader.

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I have been unable to find out why or actually speak to a real human person as to the cause. What this means to me is that though I reach over 50 countries through the WordPress platform I’m reaching only those that are on my friends list on Facebook. Readership has plunged from hundreds per post to around a dozen on a good day.

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The Calf Shed

Michael Shannon.

We had a small red shed on the ranch. It was the greatest place explore when I was a kid. It had cobwebs that had been spun a century earlier. There wer enough Black Widows to populate half San Luis County. My uncle Jackie said once that some of the spiders knew Captain Guillermo Dana who owned the old Nipomo Rancho. He was always saying stuff like that and you could never tell if it was true or just funny a uncle’s bushwa.

It had two doors, one at each end. They were Dutch doors which was a true novelty as I had never seen or heard of one before. The only Dutch I knew was the woman on the Old Dutch Cleaner can who looked vaguely sinister with her purposeful stride and big stick, obviously out to punish the unclean. I can’t recall ever seeing the top half closed except during swallow season. In true country style no one wasted any time doing useless things so each door was closed and opened perhaps once a year.

The small building served four purposes. The left side was divided into small stalls which were occasionally used to house calves that needed hand feeding or just a little extra care for a bit. For kids having a small red and white Hereford calf that you cold bottle feed, well there’s not many things that can top that. The little heifer being quite naturally friendly who would cuddle up to you or suck milk from your fingers is hard to beat. Usually one stall would be full of feed sacks, special meal, seed and always a few blocks of salt lick. Red, white and pink depending on their us. Did we lick them, you know the answer. Seeing that saving was considered a virtue, there was one stall with heaps of used and empty gunny sacks just in case. There were cotton feed sacks too, piled in a corner some, no doubt as old as the feed and grain business my grandfather, Al Spooner and David Donovan once owned.*

The sacks were home to the Kitties. Kitties is really the wrong thing to say. They were fierce predators an not interested in little boys. Their job was to keep the shed clear of mice. There are few things more attractive to a mouse than a shed packed with grain to eat. They were shy cats and not always visible, hunting was their job and during hunting hours were occupied wherever they could find a victim. No names for them, for decades the cats went by Cat, all of them. They never ate from a can or bag of cat food. They had to pull their own weight. Domesticated animals like dogs and cats were mostly for utility and not human companionship.

The little place was fragrant beyond belief and it changed it’s perfume like an elegant woman dressing for a dinner. The rich heady smell of grain, the pungent manure from the little calves and in the cold of winter it exuded a musty smell of old redwood lumber and always the rich, sweet sweet smell of Hay. Depending on the time of year wisps of dust motes drifted in the light from the doorway’s like a veil on a beautiful Spanish maiden painted by Velasquez.

The best thing though was the little corner where the tools were kept. All those drawers filled with haphazard piles of metal we assumed to be tools of one sort or another. Most carried a patina of rust, some just dusted with and some stuck together by lumps of it, glued together for no one knew how long. Wrenches of indeterminant use perhaps from some long gone piece of farm machinery, like tractors and old milk trucks, some predating the electrical motors used in the milking barn. Ball peen hammers, an old fashioned straight clawed hammer at least a century old and in the bins rusted clumps of fence staples, nails, some porcelain insulators left over from putting in the electric fence and bolts with square heads that hadn’t seen a use for 75 years.

Unique to me, a child born after the big war, many of the tools were curvilinear, embossed with the names of the manufacturer, some with molded decoration that wasn’t just for utility but for beauty. Designed by the last generation that saw pride in the craftsmanship involved in the pure design of a useful object.

The 1950’s spelled the end of the “fix it” age. Men who were our fathers had grown up in the Great Depression and as adults went to war, the most destructive war in history. Historians have said that the US defeated the Germans, not with superior tactics but with the fact that American boys could fix a tank and the Germans couldn’t. Baked into them was a certain self sufficient attitude that they could take care of themselves. They didn’t need help and like my father would rather die than ask for it. If something broke they fixed it. If something was needed they made it. They didn’t go to trade school they learned from others or simply invented what they needed. They didn’t need much, things could be repurposed. Nothing was thrown away, we had a gully with trucks, cars, tractors and farm machinery rusting in the sun where a part might be salvaged and put to a better use. If my uncle Jackie needed a stock trailer, he hauled a rear axle from the ditch, got out his tanks and welded up a frame. He dragged some used lumber from the scrap pile of odds and ends some of it dating back to some time before my great-grandfather’s day, got a handful of nails from the rusty nail bin and when he was done mixed a few shades of green paint together, brushed it on and he had a perfectly useful trailer. Rolling down the 101 on the wheels from an old Buick and a taillight taken from a Model T, With mismatched hub caps one reading Buick and one Chevrolet, It served him well for fifty years. It’s not used anymore, it sits in the old hay barn, it’s tires flat and the green paint faded but if you needed it a little air in the tires and it would be good to go.

It was all wonderfully “Make Do.”

One of the first “Essential” stores in our little town was the first hardware store. If you are a regular at one of the modern hardware stores today you might be surprised by what those old places stocked. Those old places officially died in Arroyo Grande on February 21st, 1958. The Chief wasn’t quite sure what happened but the old building built in the 1889 was a total loss. A nearly 75 year old building where the amount of Case oil. Kerosene, Lamp oil and desiccated cardboard boxes holding assorted glass fuses or leather drive belts, frayed at the edges and emitting a small cloud of dust whenever touched was simply waiting to immolate itself.

For those of us old enough to remember the dark, dusty stacks of shelve and boxes, greasy, oily wooden floors fronted by the long counter at the front, the varnish long turned to caked, flaked shreds of black chips resembling the dried mudflats of the lower valley where the adobe mud is completely tessellated in the dry late summer. The green enameled light shades hanging from the ceiling had a thick coat oily dust as they hung on the twisted copper “Rag Wire” so treasured by the rats who lived in the attics of old buildings. The tasty oil impregnated linen which passed for insulation just begged a rat to nibble on it exposing the wires which would short circuit and catch fire at a moments notice.

The fire, however she started left nothing but a heap of ashes, charcoal and twisted metal, It also ended the era of a type of store that doesn’t exist anymore except in small, isolated communities across the country.

Don Madsen was the last owner of the business which was started By Charles Kinney in ’85, thats 1885 by the way until it was passed on the Carmi Mosher in 1909. Carmi sold it to Harold Howard in 1919. Harold, a local boy having grown up with my grandfather kept the business going as Howard & McCabe until 1950 when he retired and sold it to Don whose son I went to school with. Small towns you know.

Don had worked in the hardware business since he was a high school student had returned from WWII where he served as an MP on occupation duty in Germany. He went right back to what he knew.

Occasionally my dad or uncle would need something in the way of bolts and nuts or hand tools that they couldn’t find in the tool maze of the calf shed and would be forced to actually buy something. Stores were the place for what you didn’t have. Take the broken piece to Don and lay it on the counter. He would pick it up, heft it to determine its weight then give it a serious look and say, “Yeah, we might have something like that. Let me go see.” He would disappear into the stacks of goods between the ceiling height wooden shelves and bins and begin his voyage of discovery. Assorted bangs and bumps would come from the back and finally he would return and lay a new one or close proximity on the counter. He didn’t have to say Eureka but there would be some head nodding and low noises as both customer and seller acknowledged that it was in fact “Just what I need.”

Dad would pull out his billfold, a term I have’t heard in decades and say, “How Much?”

“Six bits will do it George.”

Dad would put the billfold back in his right hand jeans pocket and then fish around in the one in front until had a small handfull of stuff, an old slotted screw with the slot turned out useless, but you never know, maybe hang on to it awhile just in case. In amongst the seeds, a piece of wrinkled Juicy Fruit gum and foxtails were some nickels, dimes and a few quarters, just enough.

Dad would ask about Clara and the boys and Don would return the favor.

Whatever that piece of hardware, it would someday, when it’s immediate usefulness was done, end up in the calf shed where it likely still resides.

After all that old hardware store was not a too distant kin to the calf sheds.

When she burned in ’58 it marked, in a real way the end of frugality nurtured by “Make Do” and the way we live now where everything has a date on which it will magically die.

Epilogue.

The though that planted the seed for this story was a trip to the local hardware store the other day. Big, bright and shiny, all the trim painted fire engine red and the first thing you see when the automatic doors open is a large open space with military straight rows of Barbecues. Stainless steel, black enamel, wood burning, pellet burning or gas or electric. Line up like they just graduated from boot camp they are surrounded by all the accouterments designed to make you a perfect cook. Tens of thousands of dollars worth.

There is a paint department where you can buy hundreds of different colors. Anything to suit your fancy. They have more cleaning supplies, mops, and brooms than you can conceive or could find at the grocery store. Every one is persistently helpful but no one knows much of anything about anything. But they wear a red vest to show that they might. Very official.

Unlike Don, they will look at your problem, scoff, and advise you to buy a new one, or a box of fifty when you need just the one. And believe me, the inferior new one that will never deserve a place in the calf shed.

Dad Shannon at the BBQ pit. Family Photo

For a kid that grew up with BBQ cooked over a pit which was just a handy hole behind the house and a grill made of heavy rods left over from some job they did and whose grandparents painted their dairy barn and silo pink because there wasn’t enough of either color available during WWII so they just mixed them up and it was good enough and a great lesson too.

“Make Do.” That was it.

Cover Photo: The old hardware store on the right in 1906.

Note: The Madsen’s moved their store across the street to the old Donati building and prospered for many years but it was never the same.

Michael Shannon has been known to keep random pieces of lumber for fifty years, you know, just in case.

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