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The Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 14

Michael Shannon

Bruce listened intently. With his left hand braced against the wall, head down and the receiver jammed aginst his right ear. He softly repeated, “Yes sir” several times. After a few minutes he said “Thank you Sam, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

He hung up the phone, turned, took off his hat and held it as he put his hands on his hips and arched his back as he exhaled.

He looked at Eileen then Marion and said “That was Sam Mosher, I’m going back to work. I have to be in Long Beach as soon as I can. I’ll leave tonight I gotta go gas up the Ford. Eileen can you pack me a bag and something to eat?”

Bruce rattled down the Cahuenga pass into Los Angeles. He’d been on the road for a day and a half, slept in the back of the Ford last night and woke this morning sliding into the drivers set, setting the Magneto and advancing the spark, he kicked the starter button and turned her over. He figured with a quick stop for breakfast he’d roll down Alameda Street and into Long Beach just after sunup.

Rolling through Huntington Park then South Gate he drove into the fields and scattered houses of Compton and he could smell it. Drifting east on the morning breeze, the unmistakeable heady mixture of crude oil perfume. A strong, pungent, and a little bit sweet, the odor can be reminiscent of a mix of gasoline and tar, with a distinct earthy or petroleum scent. Some people find the smell unpleasant, but to an oilman It smelled like home.

Exhausted by the drive the odor washed over Bruce and caused his energy to start flowing. With his hopes soaring he drove down Alameda until he entered Long Beach. The City of Long Beach had a population pushing 150,000 and had doubled since the census of 1920. Once it was primarily a Beach resort for the retired and wealthy but the discovery of Alameda no.1 up on Signal Hill had changed the city drastically. Midwesterners flocked to the Hill to get rich. Leasemen, Drillers, Salesman, factories that built steam boilers and rolled pipe quickly surrounded Long Beach. Houses went up as fast as they could be built. The Navy was moving part of the fleet to the new Navy Yard on Terminal Island. During the booming twenties Long Beach became the home of sailors, oil field workers, workers in auto assembly plants, soap makers, a vast fishing fleet made up of Japanese immigrants and people coming to the edge of America looking for the main chance.

Signal Hill with The San Gabriel Mountains to the north. 1931 Calisphere photo.

Long Beach city was part of the Mexican land grant Ranchos Los Cerritos, the Little Hills and Rancho Los Alamitos. the Little Cottonwoods. It had been for two centuries dedicated to cattle raising. The small villages of the area were distinctly rural and grew slowly over time. Wildcat drillers began poking around in the 1890’s and when Edward Doheny brought in the first well in 1the Los Angeles field* in 1892 it was “Katie, bar the door.” The Los Angeles Oil Field made Edward Doheny one of the richest men on earth. “Richer than Rockefeller” as the song “Sunny Side of the Street” says from the old Fats Waller tune and it was true. Richer than Rockefeller.

Beginning in the late 15th century, Spanish explorers arrived in the New World and worked their way to the California coast by 1542. The colonization process included “civilizing” the native populations in California by establishing various missions. Soon afterward, a tiny pueblo called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula would be founded and prosper with the aid of subjects from New Spain and Native American slave labor.

One Mestizo Spanish soldier, José Manuel Nieto, was granted a large plot of land by the Spanish King Carlos III, which he named Rancho Los Nietos. (The Grandchildren) It covered 300,000 acres of what are today the cities of Cerritos, Long Beach, Lakewood, Downey, Norwalk, Santa Fe Springs, part of Whittier, Huntington Beach, Buena Park and Garden Grove. It was the largest Spanish or Mexican land grant issued being nearly ten times the size if Catalina Island.

Soon prospectors started putting down hole everywhere. They found Oil in Santa Fe Springs and in a couple of decades were pumping in Beverly Hills, Torrance, Southgate Dominguez Hills and Seal Beach.

But Alamitos #1 was the biggie. She came in with a roar heard in downtown 24 miles away. Drilled on the at the northeast corner of Temple Avenue and Hill Street in Signal Hill. Spudded in on March 23, 1921, it flowed 590 barrels of oil a day when it was completed June 25, 1921, at a depth of 3,114 feet. The discovery well led to the development of one of the most productive oil fields in the world and helped to establish California as a major oil producing state.

Alamitos no. 1. Discovery Well, June 25th 1921. Signal Hill, Long Beach

Ten years later Bruce made the turn from Alameda onto Willow, passing the Sunnyyside* Cemetery and headed east towards the Signal Oil and Gas headquarters building. Building isn’t exactly the right word though. Years later Signal would move into a modern building on Beach Boulevard and later still build its’ own headquarters building on Wilshire and 7th in downtown Los Angeles. This headquarters was was no more than a tin shack in the middle of the field itself. It may be a slight exaggeration to call it that but Signal was just eight years old and had begun life as a refiner of natural gas and owned no wells of its own in the beginning.

In the run up to the great depression Sam Mosher’s nascent company was struggling mightily to raise money to stay in business. Consequently they were using bond sales, private money, partnering with large oil companies like Standard Oil of California and banks trying to stay afloat. Independent companies were failing on nearly a daily basis as the price of oil tumbled. The big companies were cancelling contracts to the independents in order to protect their own. Breaking bonafide contracts was illegal but they had the money and lawyers so the attitude was independents be damned. Crocker Bank pulled its loans and a loan agreement with Giannini’s Bank of America kept them afloat.

The company under Mosher’s leadership invested in oil leases in Texas, the Westside of the San Joaquin, Summerland and a few abandoned leases in Elwood near Goleta. The idea was to diversify their holdings into drilling in order to provide product for their little refinery.

As the Ford toiled up Signal Hill the couldn’t help but wonder what the job would be. It didn’t matter that much, whatever it was he needed it.

Bruce and the Ford were both tired, it had been and long lonely drive He wanted to show Mosher that he had extraordinary drive hence the immediate drive down to Long Beach. It was very important to demonstrate that he was always ready to go. He had met the man a few times but had mainly dealt with his drillers and superintendents when he was working the Goleta and Summerland fields.

He pulled into the yard which was filled with trucks, automobiles parked any whichaway. Climbing down from the car he stretched than walked quickly toward the headquarters building. He could see, hear and see welders pipefitters, draymen, ditch diggers, bricklayers concrete masons, electricians, carpenters and plumbers at work everywhere. They were coming and going, these skilled laborers moving between rigs, some working for just one company but most were day laborers or were moonlighting, paid cash money they represented the itinerant workers seen all over any oil fields. Bruce stepped over some drill pipe and paused turning to take in the hustle and bustle and chatter of the men around. The sound of boiler valves popping off extra pressure, steam whistles, the chug chug of diesel engines pulling the linked chains that spun the drill string, sucker rods in an endless rise and fall lifting the crude from near a mile underground. When the wind blew the massive wooden derricks bent to it, creaking and groaning with a dismal sound. An ordinary man would be cautious and afraid his ears ringing, eyes stung by the constant blend of exhausts, the sewer gas coming from the drill pipes with its semi-putrid odor all of it wafting about lighting on and tainting every surface. Grandpa once said you didn’t need any hair oil in the patch, it was provided for free. Always buy a black car and never wear a white shirt.

Headed for the steps he hopped over every kind of detritus, crushed cans, butts, random paper blowing about, there were gobs of crude oil everywhere and the wooden surfaces of the buildings and derricks were soaked with it. It was no place for a fastidious man. A very careful man but not one overly finicky.

Bruce climbed the steps stepped to the door and knocked on the door trim, there was no door, someone found a better use for it he guessed.

Inside at an old desk scarred by hard use, its edges burned by cigarette butts left too long, sat a man. Dressed in stained Khakis and hard used work boots. He wore a green long sleeved work shirt, cuffs buttoned against the dirt and grime, no man exposed any more of his body than was necessary on the job. Pants held up by braces, no man working in 1931 wore belts, too restrictive. He rose from behind the desk sliding back the bent wood chair that served as a seat with a rasping screech, he reached up with his right hand and pushed back his typically stained and dirty Fedora. The smile above his jowls flashed as he held out his hand and said “Hello Bruce, damned good to see you.” Grandpa smiled back and took the hand, “Good to see you too Bob.”

It was Robert M. Pyles, Signals drilling superintendant for Huntington Beach. He said, “Sit down Bruce.” Bruce pulled up the only other chair and sat. Bob pushed up his black heavy rimmed glasses, used his forearm to sweep the piles of paper on the desk to the side, reached down opened a drawer and pulled out a binder and laid it on the desk. “These are our reports for Elwood, I want you to take a look at them and tell me what you think.” Bruce slipped his reading glasses out of their case, put them on and slid his chair closer to the desk.

He pulled a crushed pack of Chesterfields from his left front pocket and offered one to Bob who declined. Picking a match from a box on the desk he scratched it with his thumb held it to the smoke. Fired up he leaned back blew the match out and closed his eyes for a moment to let the smoke from the phosphorus match head clear and then bent to the binder and began to read.

After an hour or so and some discussion the two men sat back in their chairs. Bob pulled open a desk drawer and snagged a fifth he kept there, blew the dust from two coffee cups and poured a couple fingers in each one. He took one and slid the other one to Bruce and said “So you’ll take the job?” Bruce grinned, nodded. They reached out and clinked the cups and threw it back. They stood up reached across the desk and shook again. Bob said, “You’d better call Eileen and tell her to pack up and get down to Santa Barbara.”

That is how the employment contract was signed. The old way.

Cover Photo: Willow Street and Sunnyside Cemetery in Long Beach 1930. Long Beach History photo

*The Los Angeles field is is still pumping. It runs from the east near Dodger Stadium into downtown at Alvarado Street.

**The Sunnyside Cemetery would not lease its ground for oil drilling for obvious reasons. It was completely surrounded by forests of wells. More on that later.

Michael Shannon is the spawn of drillers and ranchers. He write so his children know who they are.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Come the Little Giant.

Michael Shannon

Madera, California. Madera was founded in 1876 as a lumber town at the terminus of a flume built by the California Lumber Company. The town’s name, meaning “wood” in Spanish, reflected the timber industry that spurred its growth. But if you were looking for a job in the mills you could forget that. The Depression ultimately brought an end to the lumber era. A collapsing market for wood forced the Madera Sugar Pine Company to cut its last log in 1931, and the mountain sawmill closed shortly thereafter. The marvelous 63 mill long flume from the mountain mill to the planing mill in Madera went dry. By 1933, the company’s assets were liquidated, marking the end of nearly six decades of logging that had been the foundation of Madera’s economy.

When the timber industry died, agriculture emerged as Madera’s primary business. Farming had already begun in the late 19th century, with irrigation from the San Joaquin River boosting crop production. The 1930s marked a significant shift from sawmills to farms. Unemployed lumbermen and mill workers left for more likely places and were replaced by migrant farmworkers, including many Dust Bowl refugees, who found seasonal work the fields and orchards which now dominated the economy.

The big cattle ranches who grew their own feed were being squeezed out by the terrible drop in meat prices and consumption. There was so little cowboying to be done that they got off their horses and began working the stockyards and packing plants. Most of th the big ranchers failed and the land was sold or just abandoned for unpaid taxes.

Henry Miller a former San Francisco butcher began buying land in the central valley. Miller built up a thriving butcher business in San Francisco, later going into partnership with Charles Lux, a former competitor, in 1858. The Miller and Lux company expanded rapidly, shifting emphasis from meat products to cattle raising, and soon became the largest producer of cattle in California and one of the largest landowners in the United States, owning 1,400,000 acres directly and controlling nearly 22,000 square miles of cattle and farm land in California, Nevada, and Oregon. Madera was smack dab in the middle of the Miller and Lux holdings and Henry Miller was ruthless in controlling not only the land he owned by any adjacent properties. He also used bribery especially keeping tax assessors and town officials in line. Miller and Lux also became owners of the lakebed of the Buena Vista Lake. Miller played a major role in the development of much of the San Joaquin Valley during the late 19th century and early 20th century. His role in maintaining and managing his corporate farming empire illustrates the growing trend of industrial barons during the Gilded Age.

Bruce and Marion were aware of the terrors associated with industrial operations in the oil fields. Keep wages as low as possible provide nothing but temporary and work keep the unions a bay. Company loyalty only went one way, up. After more than ten years in the wells Bruce had thought that he would be protected by his superiors but with Barnsdall closing down it’s wells in Santa Barbara and literally sneaking out of town and back to Texas both men were left adrift. By the middle of 1930 there were a dozen or more men for every job. Having to retreat to Madera took them far away from the areas that were still operating.

Looking for work by telephone was frustrating. How many times did he spin the crank on the old wall phone and try to contact some one from the rumpled list of operators, contractors and owners taped to the wall in the farm house kitchen with pieces of yellowing Scotch Tape.

“Bruce, we might have something coming up in a couple months if the big boss can rustle up some financing so we can afford to drill, but I don’t know. Wyncha give me your number and I’ll call ya if sumpin breaks.”

They tried driving down the 130 miles to Bakersfield and the westside around Taft but that turned out be just a waste of gasoline.

So it was back to farming. They worked the ranch for grandpa Sam Hall and hired out for the various harvest seasons. Spending days climbing ladders to pick Apricots, working the Walnut orchards and the nut processing plants. There was a vast amount of cotton to hand pick too. They got by.

People had to eat no matter how poor they might be so agriculture stumbled ahead. My dad said that during the depressions farmers didn’t starve in California. My family in Arroyo Grande had a dairy, kept pigs, chickens and a goat. They grew their own feed and he said the old fashioned barter system kept them in vegetables which people traded for milk. They traded beef with the butcher Paul Wilkinson instead of cash. Milk was good for bread at the bakery and my grandmother’s little bag of coin which she got from her milk deliveries was enough for the Commercial Market. He said it was rough but everybody got by unlike people in the cities and industrial areas. He said people got used to having less, they didn’t travel as much and simply entertained themselves with local theaters and the goings on at schools and picnics put on by the lodges and clubs. He siad the the community was closer and better of for it.

Bruce, Eileen and the kids muddled on. Madera was a good place to live. There was swimming in the river with their cousin Don Williams though for some odd reason neither my mother or my aunt Mariel ever learned to swim but there were boys there and they were just getting to that age. There are few things better than lazying about a slow moving California River on a frying hot and dusty day. Slathered in baby lotion and olive oil, Mariel and mom would lie in the cool water slipping down from the high Sierra and bake.

And bake it was. The San Joaquin valley is a hot place in the summer. In old farmhouses built out on the flat ground west of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada where the land acts like a mirror radiating the heat like a flatiron. Kids who ran barefoot had to sprint from shade three to shade tree to keep from burning their feet. The old Hall ranch house was a single wall place, no such thing as insulation unless you counted the folded newspapers stuffed in the spaces between the vertical sugar pine boards that held it up. AC was not even a dream yet. At night they would open the sash windows to hopefully cool the inside a bit and in the morning close all the blinds to try and keep the night’s cooler air from escaping. “Close the door” was the call, trying to get the kids to close the door as they went in and out on their endless imaginary errands. Mom said they hauled the mattresses outside onto the porch to sleep at night if they could. Their sheets were soaked in water when it was unbearably hot. In July and August temperatures at the metal Coca Cola thermometer nailed to the wall out on the covered porch hit over 100 degrees every single day. It was cooler at night, somewhere in the seventies but that wasn’t til long after dark.

Bruce, Marion and grandpa Sam Hall would sit out on the covered porch as the air cooled, smoking drinking and talking about the days affairs and the state of the country and oil in particular. Passing a pint around the talked about the terrible bog the industry was mired in and not only the oil business but the entire western world. They wouldn’t have known it then but it would go down in history as the worst economic depression ever recorded. Breadlines and soup kitchens were already forming in California, there was even one on Yosemite Avenue in downtown Madera. Unemployed men, many from the the professions or fresh out of college were forced to live in “Hoovervilles,” gatherings of shacks, tents and cars while they desperately looked for work of any kind. Migrant workers and their families began swarming into the Milk and honey mirage that was California to escape the dust bowl and failing cities of the east. Highway 99 was seeing a massive caravan of the hopeful and desperate heading north and south looking for work. It was nothing less than a tidal wave of the unfortunate flooding the state and willing to take any kind of employment.

Banks and business firms were closing their doors. Runs on banks by people desperate to withdraw what money they had caused bank runs all over the country. Nine thousand bank failed. With no reserves a bank could not lend money or earn money. Farmers were defaulting on the annual loans, business firm too. Many banks instituted foreclosures against oil businesses, the fear this caused in the highly speculative business sent companies running for cover.

The smaller independent oil companies were the hardest hit. Hundreds in California simply disappeared, walking away and leaving wells half drilled or simply capped. The majors just quit drilling altogether. The price of gasoline hit .09 cents a gallon in 1930, less than the cost to bring in and put a well online. It would get worse.

For Bruce and uncle Marion it was hard to see a way out. Bruce Hall was just thirty five years old with a wife and three children and what seemed the bleakest of prospects. The burden must have been nearly impossible to bear, but bear it he must.

The phone rang. It was two longs and a short, the Hall distinctive ring. Thats the way it was on the old party lines. Aunt Grace got up from the table where she was peeling peaches for pie, wiped her hands on her apron and lifted the receiver and put it to her ear, “Hello,” she said. “Yes this is the Hall residence, Bruce Hall? Yes he lives here, can I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is O. P. Yowell, Bruce knows me as “Happy, Is he around, they gave me this number to call at the office.”

“Why yes he is here, he’s down in the orchard. I can send someone to fetch him if you can wait a few minutes.”

“That would be fine Mrs. Hall, I’ll hold.”

Aunt Grace looked over her shoulder for the nearest available kid and spotting Barbara playing solitaire she said “Barb, can you run down to the orchard and tell your father he has a call. Tell him it’s a man named Happy.” She winked at her niece, “a man named Happy, how about that.”

She turned back to the phone and asked what the call was about then said “O K, I understand. It will be just a minute”

Barbara, she yelled as she heard the screen door slam, “Tell your father it’s a man called Happy from Signal Oil, he says that Sam Mosher wants to talk to you.”

“And hurry honey, It’s important.

Michael Shannon is surfer, teacher and World Citizen. He writes so his children will know where they came from.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 13

Down In The Dumps

Michael Shannon

They pulled out of Goleta, the two 1927 model T’s loaded with whatever they could fit in around the kids the rest tied on the trunk platform at the rear. North from Goleta. The road, not by any means a highway yet wandered along the coast, a fine view of the Pacific Ocean until they entered the little valley at Gaviota where they would turn inland.

Entering Gaviota pass. Goleta Historical Society

The sharp little valley named by the Portola expedition for the unfortunate seagull it’s hungry soldiers killed and ate there in 1769 was little changed. The narrow break in the Santa Lucia mountains, the only one for a hundred miles in any direction was now wide enough for vehicles but just barely. Bruce and Eilleen were slowed by road work through the narrow pass because the old rusty steel bridge over Gaviota creek was being replaced by a modern one and contractors had begun laying asphalt north from Santa Barbara but once they were north of Refugio canyon where the hide droughers had once loaded Richard Henry Dana’s Bark Pilgrim with dried cow hide, there was only a graveled road for the next 45 miles.

They drove under the Indian Head rock at Gaviota which my mother didn’t like, she though it might fall down on their car, something she never got over. Then up the hill to Nojoqui pass and down to Buell’s, from there on it was going to be a dusty trip and they wouldn’t see another paved road until Santa Maria. They stopped at the tiny town on Rufus Buell’s Ranch where ate they lunch at the only cafe in town, Anton and Juliette Andersen’s Electric Cafe, featuring Juliette’s soon to be famous pea soup recipe.

The two cars burdened with most all they had, two couples and four kids passed by the Pacific Coast Rail road warehouse in Los Alamos where Bruce had once worked humping 90 pound sacks of grain from the ranches nearby and then they turned up the Los Alamos valley headed for Santa Maria. On the way they rolled through the old Graciosa townsite, Casmalia, and Orcutt where the men had their first jobs in the oil fields more than ten years before. The little company town where they had lived was still up on the hill above Orcutt but was falling into ruin as nearby towns with rented houses had sprung up where you could live in a little more comfort than the old Shebangs they had first lived in. There were still wells but many were shut down because oil was too cheap to pump. Oil Companies had not followed their own advice or any warnings about the financial crush that had already started in the early twenties. Casmalia oil companies were lucky to get 0.65 cents a barrel for crude at the wellhead. Compared to $3.07 in the early twenties this was a disaster for oil companies and Marion and Bruce and their families knew it well. It was the reason for this trip after all.

The price of oil meant gasoline was cheap, about .20 cents a gallon but money itself was losing it’s value. You could buy gasoline for pennies but you couldn’t afford to go anywhere either. The worst time was coming like a fast freight and the price of oil was going to fall even more as the depression deepened. No one can see into the future. My grandparents couldn’t have imagined what they and the country were in for.

They rolled through Santa Maria, crossed the Santa Maria river, dry at this time of year, and over the wooden bridge and the flats of the old Rancho Nipomo onto the mesa planted with, it seemed an endless forest of Eucalyptus trees marching in their perfect straight military rows all the way to the western horizon then down to the sea at Guadalupe beach. Finally cresting the edge of the mesa they rolled down Shannon Hill past the little house where the Shannon’s lived and where my father, future husband of Barbara Hall was finishing up his senior year of High School. They wouldn’t meet for another 13 years.*

Shannon’s 1928. Family Photo

It was a long long trip for the time but because the cars were loaded with what was left of their belongings Grandma and aunt Grace insisted they stay the night at Bruce’s father Sam Hall’s lot on Short street right in Arroyo Grande town. The motor court was just short distance away but money could be saved. There was no house on the lot yet but they said at least staying there no one would think they were “Tractored Out Okies.” In truth they were hardly better off but appearances were important. They had passed the pea pickers camps in Nipomo where Dorthea Lange’s photo of the migrant mother would be taken in a couple years and before they got to Madera they would see many squatters camps and desperate peopled camped on the roadside. You and your neighbor may be equally destitute but al least you have pretense and thats something people hold onto.

Today no one thinks much about traveling in Model T’s. Just another old car, right? Old yes but at the time of this story a modern form of transportation. In old photographs they look pretty large, certainly taller than the average man but compared to your nice SUV pretty small inside. The front seat could barely hold two adults and the rear not much larger. Mechanically they were pretty robust. They were built of steel and could take a great deal of exterior punishment. Someone like my grandfather could fix nearly any part of it. It came with a tool box with a couple of wrenches and you could add a hammer, some baling wire, clevis pins and cotter keys, a piece of leather for the fuel pump if it failed and the odd nail. A tire patching kit which you would definitely need, spare tire(s) jack and a can of lubricating oil. Those things were about all you needed to solve most problems.

Most importantly they didn’t have brakes as we know them. Breaking was done by shifting into low gear. A Model T Ford had only two gears high and low. When got off the gas you shifted into to low gear to slow the car The clutch was actually the primary braking system strange as it may seem today and without too much ado suffice it to say braking was a sort of multi-tasking operation which involved three pedals, the handbrake which was also a gear shifter and two levers on the steering column, one which slowed the motor electrically and the other the throttle. I’ll let you imagine how all this was done simultaneously. It was akin to a circus act and was very dangerous especially on a downgrade. Add some mud or rain and you could become just a large roller skate sliding faster and faster no matter what you did at the wheel.

Shannon hill, on the down hill side was well known in the Arroyo Grande area for the number of deadly wrecks that occurred at the bottom. It’s still there today and is no problem for a modern car. My father who grew up in the little house at the foot of it was well acquainted with racing to the wrecks and pulling damaged people out of those smashed up old cars.**

They chose to travel up the State Highway 1, today’s 101 because the road through Cuyama was still just a two track dirt, unimproved road. There were no gas stations along the way and though it led directly to Taft where he could perhaps find work it was decided to go around by way of the the highway leading east from Paso Robles, today’s Hwy 46. At the time it had no official name. It was a gravel road east of Shandon al the way through the Lost Hills to Blackwells Corners and then due south to Taft where there might be work. Blackwells Corner is, of course famous for the last place James Dean put gas in his little race car. A dubious distinction to say the least. Dean had less than a hour to live until Mister Turnipseed ended him.

The entire trip was notable for the fact that there was nothing that wasn’t tan or brown and usually covered with a fine sandy dust that came from the incessant blast furnace wind so hot that every living thing was in a state of perpetual dryness. The wooden window frames on houses would dry and shrink until it seemed there wasn’t enough newspaper on earth to stuff all the cracks. There was no paint that could stand the heat in the summer and the cold of winter. Dreary isn’t a good enough word to describe those wishful oasis, the end result of a man’s ambition.

Traveling by night out there you might as well have been on Mars. It was so dark out that there was nothing to be seen but the occasional tiny light in the far distance that marked one of the few ranch houses where cattleman desperately tried to scratch out a living on huge ranches which had little water, shade or permanent pasture. Droughts were frequent and devastating and as the depression advanced even those lights would disappear. Sheepherder’s abandoned wagons along the road would be one of the few pieces of evidence that anyone had ever lived among the Russian Thistle.

All along the Kettleman, Lost and Elk Hills from Avenal to McKittrick you could feel the desperation of those that lived there in hard times. Wives ended their own lives by suicide, so desperate for company that taking your own life seemed almost necessary. You could travel fifty miles and see nary a soul. At the end of the twenties it was still a two day trip to buy groceries.

There was no AC of course. You could push the bottom half of the windshield up and lock it if you were desperate for a little cooling breeze but you had to face forward into the blast furnace of wind. No wind wings and the rear windows didn’t roll down. Mom said they would soak a towel in water and wear it around their necks to cool off. Grandpa and uncle Marion were they only drivers and both had bad backs from heavy labor so once in a while Bruce would ask Eileen to hold the wheel and he would get out and walk. The cars were only able to make walking speed going uphill anyway. Mom and aunt Mariel would squeeze out in the space behind the front seats and ride the running boards or lay out over the fenders. Kids weren’t so precious then and could mostly fend for themselves.

Grandpa and grandpa and their children knew it well though for as bad as it was, it was filthy with oil. It was the only reason to live out there and as grandpa once said the whole region was nothing but a “Hellhole.” They had moved from one to another for twenty years and with the coming of hard times in the oil patch perhaps there was some hope that life back on a ranch would be better.

Mom said bouncing along in the back seat with the dust and noise and temperature spiking the thermometer made it the most miserable trip she ever took. She said that while stopped to let the cars cool she was sweating so much, the heat made her dizzy and she put her hands behind her head as girls will do and was fluffing her hair trying to get her neck to cool when she got a look from grandpa who grinned at her, lifted his cap and ran his handkerchief over his shiny bald head and said, “You should have a bald head like me.” That made them both laugh. She surely loved her father.

Give some thought to how it was to ride along on the trip which lasted three days in a car that could only do about 25 MPH on the dirt and gravel roads of the time. Crossing the Kettleman and Lost Hills, speeds were just 4 or 5 miles an hour on the many grades and hang on for dear life on the down hill and all with many stops to top off the radiators and let the motor cool and perhaps add a little oil.

It was all taken in stride though because to my grandparents who were both born before the automobile it was all quite modern and needed no comment or complaint.

Like all siblings the two girls who were barely a year apart fought. “Don’t touch meee, mom he touched me” was a frequent refrain. the girls were sneaky enough but they said the worst was uncle Bob who wasn’t ten yet and liked setting off his sisters. Bruce and Eileen treated this with good humor. Neither one was inclined to fight with their kids and all their children later said their parents never laid a hand on any of them.

When they could they stopped for sodas or fresh fruit from stands along the highways. There is nothing like opening the cooler on the service station porch and dipping your arm into the ice water and fishing around for just the right soda pop. Might stick your face in too. There is also the great pleasure of slipping an ice cube down the back of your brothers shirt.

They were a tight knit little family. They followed the wells and sometimes changed houses or towns as oftenas a month or two. The depended on each other to get by and they remained that way all their lives.***

There was no work in Taft, Maricopa or any of the other fields around what was known as the “Westside.” There were forests of rigs simply sitting idle so they turned east around Buena Vista lake* and headed for Bakersfield and the Kern River fields around Kerndon and Oildale. When you’re on the road headed for a new place spirits rise, things seemed possible, grandpa had worked those fields and knew practically everyone there but again his hopes were dashed. More idle wells, the people he knew had moved on just as he was, scrabbling for a job, families to feed, following the inevitable ups and downs of hope.

Bruce and Marion wheeled the two Fords out onto highway 99 and headed north up the valley. Money dwindling, hope lying exhausted on the floors of the cars and the kids tired and cranky the families rolled up the finest highway in California. Completely paved, the 99 was easy driving as they passed through all those little towns that sing a song of Californias agricultural heritage, Famoso, Delano, Tipton to Tulare, Kingsburg and Fowler to Fresno, click, clack the hard rubber tires tapping out a tune of the road as they bumped over the joints in the concrete roadway. After Fresno it was back to the old home, The house where my mother was born in 1918, just 23 miles more.

* This link below will take you to the story of how Barbara met George. The Milkman in four parts.

https://atthetable2015.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=5632&action=edit

**Family letters, link below.

https://atthetable2015.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=586&action=edit

**File under Grief, link Below

https://atthetable2015.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=5713&action=edit

***Family letters, link below.

https://atthetable2015.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=586&action=edit

Michael Shannon is busy telling the story of his California family.

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Four Men

The long polished Mahogany table as seen through the little nook off the living room, an opening on the left where the swinging door to the kitchen stood propped open with a fold of newspaper and at the end of the room a window with its Venetian blinds open looked out to the side of Mrs Lake’s home stuccoed in beige and with a little imagination you could see a long stretch of featureless desert sand. Before the glass, sat four grown men.

I could watch them at a distance and have always wondered what it was of which they spoke. Hand on fist I would sit on the little brick hearth of my grandparents home in Lakewood and try to listen.

Gathered together around the every day tablecloth that would be changed for Thanksgiving dinner later that day sat my Grandfather Bruce Hall. A man who had labored nearly four decades in the oilfields of California. He was now the superintendant of drilling for the state of California. From oilfield roustabout to the top of the heap at Signal Oil and Gas. He wore his rumpled, baggy khakis and a white long sleeve shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled halfway. Spectacles over the lower half of the nose, his bald head encircled by a fringe of hair smelling of Wildroot. He seemed to me to be perpetually tired. He’d already had the first of the heart attacks that would in a couple of years kill him. A lifetime of filterless Chesterfields, one of which, smoldering he held with three fingers, idly scraping the ash from on the edge of the ashtray, a green baize bag filled with bird shot and a shallow brass bowl. He leaned forward on his elbows a half smile on his face.

My Dad sat next to him in his ever present flannel shirt and blue Levi’s his uniform of sorts the mark of a farmer. He was forty three. He sat in his customary pose, elbows braced on the table a half smoked cigarette in his right hand pinched behind his upper knuckles, I can’t remember ever seeing him sitting any other way. At his elbow a half filled bottle of bourbon being occasionally lifted with the comment, “Another drop?” No ice either, whiskey straight no frills, or as my dad told me, “Ice dilutes and pollutes the Bourbon. Bartender puts it in to short the pour.”

There was a glass at each mans hand, no fancy fat little crystal glasses, grandma had them but they mostly sat in the sideboard gathering dust. No, these man drank from kitchen glasses and in those days it was likely a jelly jar, not the canning Mason or Kerr but the old fashioned one that came from the Jewel Tea truck, full of, and always in that household, blackberry jelly, the kind that you had to pry the lid off with a church key. Practical men they were but at the same time would never drink straight from a bottle. Class of a sort.

Uncle Ray sat at grandpa’s other hand. His dark blue shirt with the mother of pearl buttons marked him as a cowman. In his late forties he was a little on the portly side, the shirt held in with a plain leather belt and a small not so fancy buckle. His old fashioned black levi’s turned up at the cuff a good four or five inches covered most of what were hand-tooled cowboy boots for thats what he was, a dyed in the wool, genuine cowman who could fork a horse as good as any. Better than most really for he was known through the Sierra Nevada as “Powerhouse” after, on a bet, put his horse Brownie over the side of the hill at the Kings river penstocks and rode her almost straight down as if it was nothing. A feat of horsemanship that gave him the name. If you ever get up there you’ll see what I mean.

I remember him most for his laugh, a sort of lung deep basso cackle, really indescribable but still one of the greatest laughs I have ever heard. He didn’t hog it either it was as if it was just idling down in his throat ready to spring to the surface on any occasion.

Ray Long was such an original cowman, at that time already a vanishing breed that he had taken on the characteristics of the horses he rode. He was missing the molars on one side of his jaw and when he tipped his head back to laugh he looked just like a horse did. Horse laugh my dad called it.

The fourth that made up the quartet was my uncle Bob, Robert Preston Hall. At thirty five just a youngster. My mother’s youngest sibling, the only boy of that generation. He grew up with two older sisters and one younger who adored him. My aunt Patsy always said he was as caring as any parent.

He leaned back in his chair right arm hooked over the back with an elbow, his legs crossed at the knee. His white shirt collar unbuttoned had short sleeves, something I never saw the other three wear, ever. Cigerette pack in the pocket, he held one in is right hand. His jet black hair, slicked back shone in the light and sitting on his nose, old-fashioned steel rim, round spectacles. Topping it all off, he wore a thin mustache, the kind we used to call the “Boston Blackie.” He had an elegant long straight nose and a family trait inherited from grandpas’ family, Jug Handle ears. Mom said they were like airplane flaps and would slow you down when you came in for a landing.

Uncle Ray loved to tease and used the family ears as nicknames for one of his sons and me. Ears like that, guess they didn’t hurt Clark Gable none. He was an oil man too in his younger days. They had that in common.

They were different looking men really, no two looked alike but they had things in common. They could be absurdly funny and the well jest turned earned high praise in our family. The were men of the land all of them farmers and ranchers at heart with deep roots in the ground. Practical and pragmatic, they wasted no energy on frills. None of them liked to wear suits if they could avoid it and they did at all costs. The best you could get out of my dad was a sports coat and slacks.

They were all good with kids. I have friends I grew up with who still remember my dad handing out quarters at gatherings which meant something in those days. Uncle Ray made you feel like you were a grownup but wasn’t above squirting you with milk while milking either. Uncle Bob had the salesman gift and told me very first dirty joke though it barely made the grade as such.

The thing I most remember is they were grownups who stood for something. Kids were great but still kids. They shared very little about adult life. They did their best to keep all that at a distance to keep you safe. Your were a kid and they were adults, it was important that they kept it that way. They taught much more by example and were pretty content for their children to find their own way with as little guidance as possible.

Once my oldest cousin who was about fourteen and though pretty well of himself sauntered in and pulled out a chair and sat. He interjected some comment into the conversation and they all turned to look at him. No one answered. A moment or two passed as they sat silent until it occurred to him that maybe he wasn’t as old or important as he though and he soundlessly slithered out of the chair and beat a retreat.

They bookended an entire generation from one end to the other. They had seen two world wars, the greatest depression, the Korean War, the atomic bomb and each had weathered severe up and downs in the family.

That thanksgiving saw a dozen kids and five families shoehorned into that little house on Pepperwood Avenue in Long Beach, just about the last time we would all be together. Other than seeing them I really didn’t know what they talked about. I wish I had been older so I could really listen but I wasn’t.

Years have past and the questions were never asked. I had other interests and they were famously recalcitrant anyway in the way men of that generation could be. “Oh, you don’t want to know about that,” my uncle Jackie Shannon once said. I did but he just changed the subject. Every person you will ever know dies with secrets and stories you will never hear. It’s a shame.

Michael Shannon is a writer. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 14

Oct 24th 1929

In ’29 Bruce was transferred to the new field up at Elwood. Barnsdall-Rio Grande gave him a raise and he became a field supervisor. The Mesa and Ellwood fields needed men who could whipstock as the wells were being pushed out into deeper water. Bruce was good at that.

Elwood. Goleta Historical Society photo.

Bruce and Eileen moved up to a little wide spot in the road called Goleta. Sometime after the De Anza expeditions, a sailing ship (“goleta”) was wrecked at the mouth of the lagoon, and remained visible for many years, giving the area its current name. After Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821, most of the former mission ranch lands were divided up into large grants. Nicholas Den was granted this 16,500 acre rancho in 1842. The Rancho was named Dos Pueblos for the two Barbarino Chumash rancherias which were on the bluffs above the beaches. Below that was what would become one of the largest oil producing fields in California.

Barnsdall-Rio Grande added the Elwood field to Bruces territory. His skill with whipstock was doubly important because at Elwood there were no actual wells onshore. Every well was turned out into the oil sand under the Santa Barbara Channel.

Goleta wan’t much of a town in the late 20’s but they decided to move closer to the wells because exploration in Summerland was nearly done and his chief job there was to monitor production.

Bruce’s half-brother Marion who originally got him in the job in Casmalia was giving the oilfields another go. Marion and his wife Grace with their son Bill moved in with Bruce and Eileen. The kids were attending Goleta Elementary school. Mariel the oldest was just thirteen, my mother, a year younger and uncle Bob was nine. In the old photos you can see that they are better dressed surely as the result of Bruce’s promotions.

That same year Bruce and Eillen gave my mother a piano. It is, we still have it by the way an upright Gulbranson, it cost the princely sum of $300.00, and I do mean princely. The equivalent sum today would be over five grand. The original receipt calls for ten monthly payments of $30.00 each. As a Tool Pusher or Farm Boss Bruce would have been making as much as ten dollars a day. That was a very high wage for men employed in the oil fields and good pay for any man who worked with his hands.

Derrick and wells, Tecolote Canyon, 1930.

Below the horizon though a financial wave was slowly gathering and like the music played in the movie Jaws, it was building quietly but would soon turn their entire world upside down.

In November the entire house of cards came crashing down. Out of control oil companies who pumped more oil than the public could use. Banks which loaned far more money than they actually had, 650 failed in 1929 and over thirteen hundred by then end of the next year. There was no FDIC to protect your money. Millions of people lost their life savings. Wall street’s frenzy of buying and selling on margin,* the residual cancellations of industrial war equipment and the end of farm price supports put the economy in the tank where it would stay for nearly ten long years. Money that vanishes is not easily replaced. Within a year, 25% of the population was unemployed and completely adrift. Men were desperate for work and just the rumor of a job put them on the road. Children too, they were forced out of families or left on their own because feeding them was a burden to their parents.**

In 1930 Bruce reported to work at Elwood where he was abruptly fired along with his entire crew. Barnsdahll-Rio Grande had pulled in their horns, declared bankruptcy in order to escape their creditors, the banks and private investors. Then they simply walked away from California. It’s leases in Summerland and Santa Barbara were sold, it equipment simply abandoned. Oil companies, finally accepting their fate fell like dominoes. Thousands and thousands of roustabouts, worms, toolies and farm boss jobs evaporated almost over night. Your hard won skills were useless. This pull back on labor was across the board, factories, big farms, the shipping industries all pulled back.

After ten years of continuous employment Bruce’s career was simply yanked out from under him. He called in favors, got on the phone, calling everywhere, every company he had ever worked for, Associated, Standard Oil, Union and every operator from Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos and Signal Hill to the coastal companies and east to the San Joaquin valley, drillers in Oildale, Kern River and the West side and the Elk Hills; Maricopa, McKittrick, Reward and Fellows. There was nothing moving. Drilling for new oil was dead, only maintenance and pumpers had any hope of a job.

Thirty four years old, wife and three children and desperate. He was lucky to land a job with Santa Barbara Garbage Company, slinging ash cans. He rode the trucks standing on the foot plate, jumping off at every stop and hefting the loaded bins onto his shoulder and tossing them up on to the back of the truck as it idled up and down the streets of Santa Barbara and Montecito, two of the richest towns in California. A self-made man humping the garbage of the rich. It must have been galling. His brother Henry said Bruce worked like a mad man. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, sun up to sun down for $16.00 dollars a week, roughly .22 cents an hour. The cut in pay by more than three quarters put them on a collision course with poverty. It came pretty soon.

Eileen finally took the desperate measure and I mean desperate measure of going to the government office in downtown Santa Barbara and applying for relief. Under President Roosevelt’s series of assistance programs, established by the New Deal, provided federal funds to state and local governments for direct relief to the unemployed, including cash payments and food assistance. These programs aimed to provide immediate assistance to those who were unemployed, impoverished, or facing economic hardship. Like any good idea it was soon run by petty bureaucrats who wielded absolute authority over people who were guilty of nothing except being poor. They didn’t want to be poor and were shamed by the very thought of asking for help.

Just as today, those better off considered thee programs as a “Giveaway.” Relief had strict guidelines for eligibility. To meet qualifications the applicant had to fill out a questionnaire and be evaluated as to need. The Halls had the need alright. Three kids, a wife and a husband with a very low paying job which he could lose at any time. There were thousands of others who would gladly take it if they could. They stood on the steps of the company office every day, smoking, nervously, hoping for the smallest break. Mostly they would get none.

For a proud family, which we still are it was agonizing for my grandma to sit in the chair and “Beg” for help. Beg, a word that was loathed by my grandparents. Grandpa Bruce had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and was rightfully a prideful man. There is no adjective strong enough to describe how it must have felt to sit in that straight back, hard bottom chair, in front of the desk where the woman who would decide your family’s fate sat.

The conversation was short. “You qualify for food and rent assistance with just one stipulation,” she said. “Your husband will have to sell the car.” My grandmother couldn’t believe her ears. “But he needs the car to go to work,” she said. The woman looked up from her paperwork and said, “Thems the rules. He has to sell the car.”

When grandma Hall told that story it cinched a hatred for the government that still exists in our family. It’s not that it can’t help people in need but the way they do it.

My mother remembers them talking in quiet tones at the kitchen table that night. They’d sent the kids out of the room for they lived in a time when children were seen but not heard. Mom was scared because she didn’t understand what was happening. Her parents were as kind as they had always been but she said the kids knew something scary was happening. Bruce and Eileen were tense and very quiet. After ten years on the road with oil this was brand new territory. Grandpa had the assurance of a man who labors at his trade but the thought of losing all of that, though never said out loud had changed the dynamic of the family. Grandma and grandpa never had a harsh word for one another but to see her mother with tears was something she never forgot.

The only thing they thought possible was to join the family in Madera on grandpa Sam Hall’s ranch where they could at least eat and live under a dry roof.

So, they packed up what they could fit in and on the car, arranged for a friend to haul the piano and simply left the rest, furniture, dishes and all and pulled out for Madera.

The Halls on the road to Madera. From left to right, Mariel, Robert, Barbara, Eileen, and Bruce. In the rear uncle Marion. 1930 Photo Grace Williams. These old photo make people look older than they were. Bruce and Eileen are both thirty four. Grandpa has his foot on the bumper to relieve his back, a problem he had all his working life.

*In the 1920s, buying on margin meant investors could purchase stocks by paying only a small portion of the stock price with their own money, and borrowing the rest from a broker. This allowed them to control a larger investment than they could otherwise afford, potentially magnifying profits. However, it also significantly increased the risk, as losses could exceed the initial investment if the stock price declined. When the broker called the margin the buyer had to make up the difference between the money spent and the difference owed the broker. It was a dangerous investment strategy if the buyer was unable to make up the difference. In 1929 it was a financial disaster.

**Wild Boys of the Road is a 1933 pre-Code Depression-era American drama film directed by William Wellman and starring Frankie Darro, Rochelle Hudson, and Grant Mitchell. It tells the story of several teens forced into becoming hobos. The screenplay by Earl Baldwin is based on the story Desperate Youth by Daniel Ahern. In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically. Available on Apple TV.

Michael Shannon is a writer and former teacher. He writes so his children will know their history.

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The Old Cow

Requiem for old Cancer Eye

George sent the boy out to his brothers cattle ranch because he needed help. At thirteen he could do most of a man’s work.

After morning coffee with his grandparents he climbed in the old Chevy pickup with his uncle Jack and drove down the hill from the house and over to the barnyard, the old milking barn and ice house, the big hay barn, the tractor sheds and the calf shed where the business would be done.

The big cow was in the corral next to the old squeeze, for these ancient corrals and buildings dated back more than a hundred years. The fence posts marked those decades, some railroad ties from the old narrow gauge railroad, some from the wrecked steam ship SS Elg which went aground on the sandy beach south of Oceano. To lighten the ship, the crew had thrown thousands of board feet of fresh cut lumber shipped from Vancouver, Canada, over the side. There was scarcely a ranch in the valley which didn’t have some.

The boy opened the gate and backed the truck into the corral while his uncle fitted the handmade manila halter around the cows head. A rope was led to a tie-down hook and attached with a double half hitch.

Driving at walking speed they proceeded up the rock hard and dusty adobe road. The went past the gulley where all the abandoned farm equipment lay, The old Model T which had brought the family down from Berkeley in 1918, The first of the Chevrolet milk trucks slowly rusting away, hemmed in by miles of rusty Bob wire, dented five gallon milk cans with rusted out bottoms, all of it shining with the dusty red color of death.

At the top of the hill a slow right turn east towards Pat William’s ranch and just short of the fence line, the bone yard. To the boy, his imagination active in the way that boys of no particular serious education works, it seemed as if they had stumbled on what was left of Custer’s 7th. The troopers bones lying adrift, aglow with mornings sunlight. Scattered, each one a sign of change.

Stopped at just the edge of the field, they got out of the truck and the boy turned off the hitches while Uncle Jack pulled a couple of flakes of hay out of the back, tossing them to the side. He said, “Lead her over there and let her eat.”

He went to the open door of the truck and reached behind the seat for the old J C Higgins .22 he had traded for when he was just a boy. Long since relegated to just this duty, he pulled the bolt and inserted the single Long Rifle Cartridge.

The red and white Hereford cow, her hide still beautiful the way cattle are when they are taken care of and loved. Her dusky deep red hide with its little white bib and four pure white socks all special to her breed was topped off with the curls adorning her forehead, beautiful as if she had just come from Rae Langenbeck’s beauty parlor. The one behind her husband Buzz’s barber shop, hidden behind the pink curtain where the boys mother and grandmother went for their curls.

With purpose uncle Jack walked to the cow. raised the rifle to her forehead and pulled the trigger. Without a shudder she collapsed on the ground her body giving a little sigh, faint. One of her hind legs shivered a moment but she was already gone. Uncle Jack stood a moment looking down at her and then softly gave her the only benediction he could. He turned slightly, looked at the boy and said, “She was a good cow.”

Michael Shannon writes of his family’s life. A family which lived on the ground.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter Eleven.

Shooters and Torpedos

Michael Shannon.

The Shooter arrived in his Studebaker truck. His Torpedos rolling back and forth as he bounced up the road from Bakersfield. The wooden boxes which held the twenty, ten quart cans of Glycerine, all packed tightly in a wads of excelsior, held securely in place by the sideboards, strapped down. Roped in tight. His was a job that allowed no mistakes. A job for a calm and very careful man. Perhaps a man who liked to blow things up. The boy who blew up coffee cans with firecracker was a natural.

The Shooter and his Torpedos.

Oil isn’t easy to find. Sometimes when you find it its impossible to get to it. When Bruce’s well got down into the oil sands he knew from the debris in the bailer. Sometimes, though the presence of oil in the samples was small and the decision was made to send a torpedo down the hole and try and fracture the formation by setting of a blast and setting the oil in the mineral free. Oil flow could be increased many times over if they were successful.

Contractors that did the “Shooting” were a highly evolved trade. Sending a hollow tube packed with a couple hundreds pounds of jellied Nitroglycerine down a well took some nerve and a great deal of skill. Men who made a career of shooting were few.

In 1867 the chemist Alfred Nobel found that by taking Nitroglycerine, an extremely unstable compound and combining it with diatomaceous earth in order to make it safer and more convenient to handle, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as “dynamite”. Nobel later combined nitroglycerin with various nitrocellulose compounds, similar to, Collodion, but settled on a more efficient recipe combining another nitrate explosive, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which was a more powerful explosive than dynamite. Gelignite, or blasting Gelignite, as it was named, was patented in 1876. Gelignite was more stable, transportable and conveniently formed to fit into bored holes, like those used in oil drilling.

The Shooter, Bruce and the other rig workers knew that even after all the improvements of the previous 60 years things could still go wrong. Bruce would clear his rig of all personnel, making sure that they moved as far away as they could from the rig to be “Shot.” No one argued.

Bruce was fortunate to work for companies who took this part of rig operations seriously. You had two choices, hire experienced outfits and pay the freight or independents who were cheap but had little experience and could be hazardous to the health of everyone around them, including themselves.

If your rig was down a bad road, they would send the drivers out, tell’ em to be careful, load the soup in the back of those old trucks and send ’em off. The trucks didn’t have any shock absorbers or padding or anything to give them protection, so those guys got more money than the Toolie and earned every cent. They could be driving down an old dirt road, headed to the well and the truck would fall in a chuck hole and that would be the last of them. Every once in a while if your ear was tuned to it you could hear one take off. Nothing to do for it but to hire a new driver.

Up at the north end a Wildcat well, Arnold No 3 hit oil sands but estimated production would not reach profitable levels so the decision was made to call in a Shooter and crack the formation at the bottom of the well in order to increase flow. It was well known that Wildcatters always hung from a shoestring financially and instead of hiring out to a reputable company the looked, instead for a Cheapo outfit. They soon found one, a father and son set-up who guaranteed they could bring Arnold No 3 in. They showed up on a Sunday, hauling their dope in an old cut down Cadillac car. They packed the torpedos with two hundred pounds each of Glycerine. Now, being either too inexperienced or too stupid and lazy to do the job right they hauled all their gear up onto the drilling floor. They used the sand line to hook up the first torpedo and lifted her up ready to send her down the hole. Too lazy to pull the Key from the rotary table, figuring the torpedo would just fit they lowered her down into the Key where she just barely fit. As they lowered away, the torpedo squeaking and scraping the sides of the Key. the drilling crew seeing what was going on backed away until they were a hundred yards away for safety’s sake.

Sure as shootin’ the torpedo stuck in the key with about a foot showing and after some kicking an shoving the father took up a section of small 3/4 inch pipe and commenced to banging away, trying to get it to move. The drill rig boys saw that and turned and began to hotfoot it as fast as they could, putting some distance between themselves and the fools on the rig. The boy took another piece of pipe and started hitting the other side of the torpedo from the father, banging and banging. The slowest, youngest roughneck got behind a small pepper tree and leaned against it hoping for the best. After a minute or two the Nitroglycerin in the torpedo got tired of being abused and lit up with a roar. Father, son, rig and the Caddie vaporized. The roughneck, more than a hundred yard away was killed by the Cadillac’s door slicing right through the tree and the boys neck.


The Blast Site, Oildale, California. 1936 Note the missing passenger door.

When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of the rig or the men on it, just a huge crater nearly thirty feet deep. No part of the father and son was ever found, not a finger or foot, though they looked all around wanting to find something the poor wife and mother could bury.

The next morning, driving to work along the Valley Road, now north Chester Avenue a pusher for Standard Oil found a wheel from the Cadillac lying in the road, more than two mile from the blast site.

With a little common sense and an abundance of caution Bruce had now survived in this dangerous business for nearly a decade. The danger you can see is avoidable but the danger you can’t is not. Looming on the horizon was something that would throw the family into crisis.

The price for barrel topped $ 3.00 in nineteen and twenty and had, because of massive over production, been sliding downward. By the 1920s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products. The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands. With no industry organization or government oversight established corporations led by the ever hopeful wildcatters drilled and drilled and drilled.

Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant had geared up for the new Model A in fall 1927 and by 1928 was rolling them off the assembly line at 9,000 cars a day. Mass produced and marketed you could get a snazzy Ford Roadster for $385.00. Didn’t have to be black either, unlike the venerable old Model T which came, as Henry said, “In any color as long as its black. By comparison. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, owners of their own studio and without a doubt the best known film stars in the world really tooled around in a Duesenberg Model J which retailed for $8,700.00 dollars or about the cost of five average homes. It’s not likely they actually owned the Model A they are standing with. If they did, the cook and the maid used it to run errands.

Doug and Mary, 1928, with the Model A Ford.

Bruce and Eileen were doing well enough. By 1928 the two girls, Barbara and Mariel were twelve and eleven about to enter high school and little brother Bob, nine. High school beckoned. They had moved from the fields in the valley where Bruce had worked for Barnsdall Oil Company wells on both the east and west side.

It was a good time to get out of the valley. Oil workers were staging strikes on the Westside in Taft, Maricopa, Coalinga. The oil companies countered by trying to bring in “Scabs” from the bay area. Southern Pacific was happy to help as they had a major stake in production. Since the end of the war when wages rose the big companies decided they would put the squeeze on their labor and had gradually driven pay down. Strikebreakers, “Scabs” were protected by armed men, paid gunsels. county sheriffs and the police who knew where their butter was. The Southern Pacific RR was happy to provide trainloads of strikebreakers to the producers. There was some nasty businewss that took place at the SP depot when these trains arrived. Bruce was always concerned about things like this and after Casmalia never lived in the housing provided by the oil companies. They rented houses away from the central retail and housing districts. Oil towns were rough as they continue to be today. Gunplay, knives, drunkenness, prostitution and the company store with it’s outrageous prices were to be avoided, especially with three young children.

Taft was a “sundowner” town, which meant that if you were black or Mexican you’d better be out of town by sundown. The Ku Klux Klan was well organized and made sure that everyone knew Taft was a White Man’s town. A Kern County Supervisor, a certain Republican named Stanley Abel even had a mountain in the Los Pinos Wilderness area nearby named after him. It still is.

The Bakersfield Californian May 6, 1922

When confronted with this revelation, Stanley Abel was unapologetic to say the least. He said in a statement the day after the Bakersfield Californian published their report: “Yes, I belong to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and I am proud to be associated with many of the best citizens of Taft and vicinity in the good work they are doing….I make no apology for the Klan. It needs none.”

Many in Kern county were not impressed. They started recall campaigns for Abel and others in city and county governments. Local newspaper the Bakersfield Morning Echo was staunch support of the supervisor, stating: “Those liberal Democrats promoting the recall of Stanley Abel are the enemies of good society and of the best interests of Kern County. A vote for the recall of Stanley Abel is a vote for the return of the vicious element and the vicious conditions which existed in years gone by.” Sound familiar? History allows the name to change but the song remains the same no matter the age.

The writer is the grandson of Bruce and Eileen, He and his cousins grew up with stories from the Oil Patch.

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Dear Dona 12

Page 12

Closing the Ring

Landing Ship Tank was the official designation for the ship your dad traveled on to Luzon. The Navy thought that the name was adequate, they didn’t believe they deserved an official name such as those given to “Real” fighting ships. Sailors of course, being very young and with a patented sense of irreverence simply called them Large Slow Targets. Nearly forty were lost during the war so the swabs were right on the mark.

Disembarking from a large slow target, Lingayen Gulf Phillipines. US Navy Photo.

MacArthurs army charged down highway 55 towards the City of Manila. General Sasaki had chosen to leave only a few units along the 224 miles of the fertile Cagayan valley that runs down the center of Luzon. They convoys of American troops sped past Tarlac City, Angeles, San Fernando to Valenzuela on the outskirts of Manila proper. Though the allies had declared Manila an open city and had planned to bypass it. The Japanese were determined to defend it.

In the run down the valley, Some of the major guerrilla groups materialized out of the Corderillas and joined the regular tropps of the Eleventh and sixth corps. Groups led by Ramon Mafsaysay, future president of the Phillipine Republic, Russell Volckmann who was a West Point Graduate and had escaped into the mountains in December 1941 and led a guerrilla force of over 22,000 men*. Robert Lapham was a reserve Lieutenant in the 45th Regiment, Philippine Scouts and escaped into the jungle just before the fall of Bataan in 1942. Considered the most disciplined and successful of the guerrilla groups he moved into the Zimbales mountains where his 13,000 fighters fought with General Walter Kruegers sixth army.**

MacArthur ordered your dad’s team to Zimbales province where they were to be stationed in Olongapo City on Subic Bay. Subic was to be one of the prime the anchorages for the Navy as the Allies prepared for the invasion of Japan. By early 1945 the Navy operated over 6.700 ships of all types and Harbors like Subic and Manila Bay were essential to provisioning and maintenance.

Arriving at a large permanent base the team would have had the opportunity for the first time since landing on Luzon to strip off their filthy uniforms, shave and be relatively safe. For the first time in a long while the chances of being killed or wounded by artillery, Japanese bombers or snipers was behind them. For perhaps the first time your dad could stand up straight without fear of being killed. One MIS soldier said that when he moved into the Quonset hut he was to live in he was reminded that the slamming of the screen doors caused him to stand there and repeatedly open and close it because it reminded him of home so. He said it made him literally weak in the knees.

Hilo must have looked out at the country they were traveling and been reminded of his home in California. The land was gentle and planted in crops tended by families who lived on it. The feral and disturbingly inhospitable jungle, the Green Hell he and his friends had lived in for two years was replaced by a land more familiar to the farm boy from Arroyo Grande.

The island was such that a war of maneuver, where overwhelming numbers of troops and war machinery such as tanks an aircraft gave the allies a great advantage. American industry helped to turn the tide. I read of a German soldier captured in France asking his captors. “Where are your horses?” The Germans moved by horse drawn vehicles and had never dreamed of the American ability to produce. The Japanese Imperial army was equally amazed.

Highway South to Manila. War Department 1945.

The job of the MIS was to put together as much information as they could for the planners of the coming invasion of Japan proper. Captured documents, radio intercepts, military orders, maps and personal letters were to be collated in order to locate as precisely as possible every installation, road, railroad, landing strip In the islands. They even knew the home addresses of individual officers and enlisted men. It was a monumental task.

No longer suspect, Military Intelligence had long proved its worth. The battle of Midway, Guadalcanal, the island hoping campaign, MacArthurs drive up the southwest Pacific, The ambush of Admiral Yamamoto, Merrills Marauders, The mission in China supporting the armies of American General Stillwell and Chiang Kai-Chek, The battleship encounter in the Surigao Straits of the Phillipines along with the organization of the vast amounts of information obtained through all sources gave the allies an impressive view of the Japanes forces everywhere.

Housed in Quonset huts, hundreds of MIS translators worked around the clock preparing the information that would be need for what was planned as the largest invasion in history. The planning assumed multiple invasion beaches scattered around the Japanese homeland. In the coming invasion of Japan, the US navy planners favored the blockade and bombardment of Japan to instigate its collapse. General Douglas MacArthur and the army urged an early assault on Kyushu followed by an invasion of the main island of Honshu. Admiral Chester Nimitz agreed with MacArthur. The ensuing Operation Downfall envisaged two main assaults – Operation Olympic on Kyushu, planned for early November 1945 and Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu in March 1946. The casualty rate on Okinawa was to be 35% of all troops and with 767,000 men scheduled to participate in taking Kyushu, it was estimated that there would be 268,000 casualties. The Japanese High Command instigated a massive defensive plan, Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive) beginning with Kyushu that would eventually amount to almost 3 million men with the aim of breaking American morale with ferocious resistance. All men of any age, women and children were to be drilled for the effort. Thousands were issued sharpened stakes for use. The plan was for a resistance that would cause the ultimate collapse of the empire and the end of the Japanese nation. Resistance would be suicidal. Some estimates of American casualties ran as high as a million killed and wounded.

It’s impossible today to imagine what the military leaders and planners struggled with. Ordinary soldiers who were involved in the planning must have simply been sick at the thought. No one knew about the bomb. He wasn’t told about it until after President Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945. From President Truman on down the inevitability of the holocaust in Japan for all countries must have been horrific. America was already exhausted. Too many dead boys to bear. Casualties in other allied countries were much higher than ours. In Great Britian there were literally nl boys left. Generals waited impatiently for 17 and 18 year old boys to graduate and be eligible for conscription. As in WWI these children were referred to as “The class of 1917” or “The class of 1944.” Back home in Arroyo Grande, class of 44′ boys included Gordon Bennett, John Loomis, Tommy Baxter and Don Gullickson who would all be in the Pacific by wars end. It must have seemed a universe of war with no ending. Most soldiers and sailors never made it home for a visit. From 1941 you father had spent over fourteen hundred days without seeing his family. There must have many nights lying on his cot in the steaming tropics unable to sleep thinking about his family, not knowing precisely where they were, how they were being treated; would he ever see them again. There was no answer to be had.

Exhaustion would have been written on the face of your father by the beginning of 1945. He had been overseas for over three long years. He hadn’t seen his family, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with machine guns pointed inward for going on five years. Corralled in the Southwest Arizona desert, winter and summer it must have been agony for Hirokini and Ito. Until 1943 theirs could not visit them. The fact that the boys had volunteered to serve the only country they knew meant little to military administrators.

The agony of mothers is compounded by the fact that though grandparents knew he was somewhere in the Pacific they never knew exactly where or what he was doing. Headlines in the Newspaper blared massive headlines praising the military for the carnage they caused and were exposed to. Casualty figures, though not typically released to the press didn’t stop the reporters on the wartime beat from happily publishing the butchers bill.

There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan where, in the distance a small farmhouse and barn somewhere in the wheat-fields of mid-America you see an automobile being driven along a dirt road. It’s a drab green color with a white star on its door. It’s rolling through a cloud of dust of its own making. A middle aged woman in the kitchen goes about her business, rinsing the lunch dishes, her hair styled in the rolls worn by mothers and grandmothers of the time. As she moves about dressed in a red print housedress and an apron exactly like your grandmother wore, she begins rinsing the dishes in the sink. A little movement in the distance catches her eye and she looks up to see the car as it turns up the road to the house. The woman, who you know immediately is the mother of the four Ryan boys because there is a small banner hung, almost without notice by the camera, on the kitchen wall. Framed in red with four blue stars on a white background indicating four children, boys, just boys in the service. Mrs Ryan looks up, sees the car, goes back to the dishes, with her head still down it registers. Why the car is here. She looks up again and grows absolutely still, She knows. The heart goes still, scarcely breathing, she sleepwalks to the screen door and stands, her slippered feet spread, very still as the car pulls up. She does not move. Everything in the scene is in suspended animation and when the doors open, first an officer in uniform from the front then her pastor from the back door, she loses control of her legs, staggers and then slowly, agonizingly collapses on the floor boards. It goes to the heart of every mother who sent a son off to war. It’s the finest scene Spielberg has ever made.

Mrs Margaret Ryan at the window, sees the car, in that instant she knows. Note the white picket fence reflected on the glass in a way that suggests white crosses. Superb imagery. Spielberg is a master artist. Screen capture. Amblin Entertainment, Mutual Film Company. 1998

The battle for Manila was to be the most destructive operation in the war outside of Stalingrad and the final apocalypse of Berlin. In the movie, “The Pianist”* the final scene is Adrian Brodie standing in the ruins of Warsaw, Poland. Though it’s a movie set, the scale of destruction is enormous, it borders on insanity, hopelessness and utter destruction. Such was Manila.

Your father had a ringside seat working at Subic Bay. MacArthur himself had a personal attachment to the city, he had lived there for many years. His son had been born in a Manila hospital and when he was serving in the Filipino Constabulary he was often quoted that it was his favorite city. An ancient city with wide avenues and scores of beautiful old buildings shaded by tens of thousands of trees, the dignified Narra with its gorgeous yellow flowers underlayed by the fallen blossoms carpeting the walks below, the unfurling Dapdap known as the Coral Tree with it’s diamond shaped, fiery red blossom, and the huge and ominous Balete, trees renowned for their expansive, sprawling roots and branches which are said to be home for sorcerers.

Gracing the ancient streets deep in the city, “Old Manila” refers to the historic walled city of Intramuros. Manila was known for its Spanish colonial architecture and historical landmarks like Fort Santiago and the San Agustin Church. Fort Santiago (Saint James, the patron Saint of Spain) was built between 1590 and 1593 by the first governor of the Spanish Phillipines and anchored the city center.

Your dad never saw it. By the time he left the Phillipines it was a graveyard of buildings, people and culture.

When the Japanese attacked the islands in 1941 MacArthur declared Manila an open city and withdrew his troops to save it from destruction. This was not to be the case in 1945 when your father was there. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, he commander of the army withdrew his forces from the city into the mountains of the northeast portion of the island leaving Yamashita decided not to declare Manila an open city as MacArthur had done but that Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, destroy all bridges and other vital installations in the area and then evacuate his men from the city as soon as American troops arrived in force.

In spite of these orders, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 31st Naval Special Base Force, was determined to fight a last-ditch battle in Manila. Iwabuchi repeatedly ignored orders to withdraw from the city. From the beginning of February 1945 until march, some of the most vicious street fighting of the war took place. Artillery and air strikes reduced the beautiful old city to a vast landscape of roofless shells. The Japanese forces resorted to a suicidal defense, refusing to surrender and murdering tens of thousands of Filipinos, men, women and children. Accounts from US soldiers tell of rape and systematic execution of the civilian populace. For the remainder of March 1945, American forces and Filipino guerrillas mopped up Japanese resistance throughout the city. With Intramuros secured on 4 March, Manila was officially liberated, although the city was almost completely destroyed and large areas had been demolished by American artillery fire. American forces suffered 1,010 dead and 5,565 wounded during the battle. At least 100,000 Filipino civilians had been killed, both deliberately by the Japanese in the various massacres, and from artillery and aerial bombardment by U.S. and Japanese forces. 16,665 Japanese military dead were counted within the Intramuros alone.

Afterwards, City of Manila, April 1945. War Department photo.

From Subic Bay where your father was, the sound of fighting would have heard. Flashes on the horizon coming from fires and exploding bombs would have illuminated the night sky. He heard the rolling thunder of the defenders being crushed. No one really knows the number of Japanese troops and civilian Filipinos died there. At the end the Imperial Army simply executed any Filipino they could find. They burned them with flame throwers, lined them up against walls and move them down like wheat stalks, they locked them in churches and burned them alive. Women were brutally raped and then shot. It was Hell on earth. It simply cannot be imagined except by those who lived through it and those, especially the soldiers, sailors and nurses to save their sanity simply locked it away. PTSD as it is known today is not a recent phenomenon but has been known by all veterans since Thermopylae and the Phalanx’s of Alexander and the Emperor Xerxes.

Dear Dona

Chapter 13

Coming Next

The Final Blow.

Cover Photo: The Fort Santiago Gate after the battle for Manila. War Dept. Photo.

*Brigadier Russell W. Volckmann was one of the founders of the Army’s Special Forces units after the war. His experience as a partisan commander was highly valuable in the formation of that elite force

**In 1947, Lapham returned to the Philippines for five months as a consultant to the U.S. on the subject of compensation to Filipinos who had served as guerrillas during the war. He recognized 79 squadrons of guerrillas under his command with a total of 809 officers and 13,382 men. His command suffered 813 recognized casualties. However, sorting out the deserving from the fraudulent was difficult. Of more than a million claims for compensation in all the Philippines, only 260,000 were approved. Lapham believed that most of his men were treated fairly, but was critical of U.S. policy toward the Philippines after the war. “If ever there was an ally of American whom we ought to have treated with generosity after the war, it was the Philippines.” He said the U.S. Congress was “niggardly” with the Philippines, providing less money for rebuilding than that spent in many other countries, putting conditions on Philippine independence that favored U.S. business and military interests, and backing corrupt Filipino politicians who protected American, rather than Filipino, interests.

***The nurse, LT. Sandy Davys from the film “They Were Expendable” by John Ford surrendered with the other 86 nurses on Bataan and spent the war years in the Los Banos and Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila. They all survived.

“The Angels of Bataan” War Department Photo. 1945

****”The Pianist,” the Oscar-winning film, is based on the real-life story of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist who survived the Holocaust. Szpilman’s memoir, also titled “The Pianist,” details his extraordinary survival in Warsaw during World WarII.

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Dear Dona 11

Moving Up

Michael Shannon

Your fathers original group of four hundred translators that worked in Brisbane in 1943 had been broken up into small units and was now spread all over the Southwest Pacific. Many of them now shared the privations and dangers of combat and had taken to carrying rifles. They operated just behind and into the lines and were subject to enemy gunfire, artillery and bombs. War zones are dangerous places and even those that see no actual combat are subject to the whims of the monster.

After Morotai headquarters moved up to the island of Leyte and promptly discovered something entirely new. The translators as with all staff, headquarters and support troops rarely knew what was going on in the wider war. As they advanced in the Phillipines the war began to widen out. The days of jungle fighting were nearly over. Leyte with a population of just 900,00 most supporters of the Americans was divided by a mountain range with the southern portion of the island very lightly populated The flanking coastal plains allowed the use of tanks and other mobile units for the first time. Fighting was heavy but the Japanese were pushed up the island in a series of very sharp battles. The campaigns success allowed the planning for the invasion of the main island of Luzon to go forward in a hurry.

Since MacArthur had been ordered out, Corregidor had been surrendered, the Bataan death march had taken place and most combatant Americans had been locked up in concentration camps. MacArthurs Filipino Scouts had also surrendered but not all. Army Navy personnel and the Filipinos had disappeared into the hills of the Phillipines and for three years had been roving the country formed into Guerrilla groups. (1) Filipino ex-soldiers, American service members, Naval officers and Australian and Dutch soldiers had formed lethal bands of Guerrillas who preyed on Japanese troop movements and supply convoys. The Dutch and Australian stole or cobbled together radio sets with which they sent messages to Army headquarters in Australia. They reported on Japanese ship movements and disposition of army units.

MacArthurs command arranged to deliver better radios, generators to provide electricity to the Coast Watchers were constantly on the move. A message sent in the clear or in code could be tracked by Japanese rangefinders so they picked up and got out of Dodge immediately after sending. It was highly dangerous work but invaluable to the allies. Radio message were synced with MIS translations and throughout the three years before the return the command had a clear picture of almost everything the Japanese were up to.

The base radio station dugout of the Coastwatchers Ken network in the Solomon Islands. Photo: Australian War Memorial.

During August and September 1942, 17 military coast watchers (Seven Post and Telegraph Department radio operators and 10 soldiers) and five civilians were captured as Japanese forces overran the Gilbert Islands. Imprisoned on Tarawa atoll, they were all beheaded following an American air raid on that island. The coast watchers and their teams, mainly native islanders were constantly on the move. They faced starvation, boredom and feared for their lives but none attempted to escape. Though mostly resident civilians who had worked for the rubber plantations and the petroleum companies they received nothing for their work. It wasn’t until late 1944 that that the Anzacs bestowed military officer rank on them so if killed their families would receive a pension.

Coastwatchers were also involved in organizing supplies for the Guerrilla bands. They received supplies and arms from American subs, Dumbos (2) and the famous Black Cat Catalina flying boats. They also rescued downed flyers and other military personnel who were downed or sunk along the island chains. These included the future US President, US Navy Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, whose PT 109 Patrol Torpedo boat was carved in two and destroyed by a Japanese warship in the Solomon Islands. After the sinking, Kennedy and his crew reached Kolombangara Island where they were found by Coastwatcher Sub-Lieutenant Reg Evans who organized their rescue.

In the Philippines they were to witness the roots of the local Resistance which represented the cultural and socio-economic diversity of the Philippine Islands. From socialist peasant farmers the Huks, middle school teachers, ROTC youths, to Moro (Philippine Muslim), the range of the men and women who participated in the struggle against the Japanese Imperial Army was seemingly inexhaustible.

Officers at headquarter were initially astounded when groups began showing up. slipping out of the jungles like wraiths, armed and dangerous.

At least 260,000 strong, the guerrilla forces were ill-equipped and poorly armed. They depended on local civilians for food, shelter, and intelligence. Several units recruited women guerrillas. Some took up arms and served side by side with men, including journalist Yay Panlilio and Huk commander Remedios Gomez-Paraiso also know as “Kumander Liwayway.”

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso, Kumander Liwayway. Photographer unknown. 1945

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso was an officer in the Hukbalahap, a communist guerrilla army known for their daring attacks on Japanese forces. Born in Pampanga, Gomez-Paraiso joined the guerrillas after her father was killed by Japanese forces. Known for going into battle wearing her signature red lipstick, Gomez-Paraiso quickly rose in the ranks to become a commander of a squadron. At one point, she had two hundred men under her command. Perhaps best known for the “Battle of Kamansi” in which, despite being outnumbered, Gomez-Paraiso’s squadron forced Japanese forces to retreat. After the war, her Hukbalahap Guerrillas continued their revolution against the democratic Philippine government until 1948, when her husband was killed, and she was captured. She was released and went on to become a vocal advocate for the recognition of Filipina Guerrillas.

In a marriage of convenience the guerrillas, some who had been fighting the Americans invaders since 1898 when President McKinley annexed the islands against their wishes. In the southern Phillipines, the Muslin Moro had resisted the Spanish conquest since the since the end of the 15th century. This religious war only ended with the annexation by the US in 1898. The Muslim Moros then fought the United States and finally the Japanese. Resistance was baked into their DNA. Because they hated the Japanese more they saw the alliance as temporary but expedient. Filipino Guerrilla groups fought right up until the end of the war. (3)

A guerrila group on Leyte, Phillipines, 1944. National Archives photo.

On January 25th 1945 your dad and his MIS team walked aboard LST 922. They were bound from Leyte to the island of Luzon. Just nine days before 175,00 American troops supported by over 800 ships had gone ashore at Lingayen Gulf, ironically the same beaches employed by General Homma’s Japanese forces in December, 1941.

General MacArthur himself went ashore on S-Day. There were no histrionics this time. Luzon which he had abandoned in 1941 was not only his personal goal, but erasing the embarrassment which was compounded by secretly fleeing during the Phillipines during the dark of the night in a little PT boat, PT-32 commanded by LTJG John Bulkeley (4)

LST 922 at Morotai Island, Dutch East Indies, December 1944. USN Photo

Your dad’s MIS team hefted their barracks bags and walked up the ramp for yet another trip by an LST. Commanded by Lieutenant, Junior Grade Ronnie A Stallings who was a regular Navy officer. A special but not uncommon type in the WWII Navy, he was a Mustang. Mustangs as opposed the thoroughbred Naval Academy officers were generally outstanding enlisted men promoted up from the ranks. Born in Brooklyn New York in 1924, Stallings enlisted in April 1941 and went to sea as a 17 year old later that year. He was an ordinary seaman. Assigned to a Landing Craft Infantry 487 or LCI. LCI 487 was typical of this type of LCI. It was newly built and the crew was young and inexperienced. The skipper, Lt. Stewart F. Lovell was the “Old Man” on board. Born in Manchester, N. H. on May 26, 1907, he was 36 years old when he set sail on the 487. However, most of his crew was seventeen, eighteen and nineteen year olds. His young crew gave their Skipper the nick name “Baggy Pants” because he did not acquire a proper fitting uniform after losing a lot of weight while onboard. LCI’S were 158 feet long, just over half a football field and only 23 feet in the beam. With the bridge being high and the hold being empty she rolled like a “Drunken Sailor” to use a Navy term. There are other terms for unseaworthy ships but most are unprintable. A very strong stomach would be required and perhaps the skipper didn’t have one. The Executive Officer – Ensign James T. Clinton was nicknamed “Boy Scout” because he was pale, clean cut and did not drink or smoke. Ronnie Stallings was present during the landing in North Africa in 1942 and at D-Day, June 1944 where his little ship, derisively known as “Waterbugs” by disdainful Admirals disgorged over two hundred GI’s of K Company, 18th Regimental Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Divion onto Utah Beach. Unable to back off the beach, 487 was pounded by German artillery and temporarily abandoned. Stallings was taken back to a survivors camp in England located at Greenway House the estate of Agatha Christie. With only the clothes on his back he was given an overcoat and a bag with a broken tooth brush and a razor with no blades.

His next ship was the fleet oiler USS Salomonie. He caught up with her in Panama in July as she passed through the canal on the way to Milne Bay, New Guinea. By this time a Quartermaster or QM, he would stand watch as assistant to officers of the deck and the navigator; serve as helmsman and perform ship control, navigation and bridge watch duties. QMs procure, correct, use and stow navigational and oceanographic publications and oceanographic charts. Thats the official description. Navy slang is “Wheels” because the begin by steering ships which is no mean feat. (5)

USS Salamonie Ao 26 and an LCI unloading at Utah red Beach Normandy, France June 5th, 1944.

Salamonie sailed for the Pacific Ocean via the Panama Canal on 8 July 1944 and reported for duty to Commander Service Force, US 7th Fleet, at Milne Bay, New Guinea, on 23 August. Salamonie joined the Leyte invasion force in Hollandia on 8 October 1944 and later supported both the Morotai and Mindoro strike forces. She spent the final months of the war supporting Allied operations in the Philippines after Ronnie Stallings transfer to the LST.

By the time Stallings arrived at Milne Bay he was a Chief, a rank achieved in just three years, a feat that could only be achieved in wartime. In peacetime it could take 20 years of duty, and he was just 22 years old. A 22 year old former enlisted swab made it to Chief Quartermaster. At Milne Bay he received a commission as a Lieutenant Junior Grade, and his own ship. No stateside classes, no practice, only his three years at sea as his training ground. As a newly commissioned officer he walked up the gangplank as the senior officer and Captain of his own ship Landing Ship Tank-922. He could never have imagined as a seventeen enlisted recruit that he would end up here.

Trailing their gear the team came aboard 922. Led by your father, the leader with the rank of TEC 4. Trudging into the ship were his crew, Jim Tanaka, Michael Miyatake, Henry Morisako, and Tabshi Uchigaki. Masai Uyeda, and Tsukasa Uyeda followed. Seven men, all headed for Eleventh Corps headquarters at Lingayen. General Eichelberger commanding. By this time they undoubtedly knew that the end was coming for the empire of Japan.

Eleventh Corps Badge, WWII

Dear Dona,

12th page next week Feb. 15th.

Closing the Ring*

1) Guerrilla from the Spanish Guerra. Guerrilla literally translates to “little war”. It’s a diminutive of the Spanish word guerra, which means “war”

(2) Dumbo refers to large aircraft such as the B-17 or B-24 heavy bombers which were modified to carry a large lifeboat that could be dropped to survivors at sea. They were largely replaced by the more versatile PBY Catalina which had a longer range and could land on water. The Catalina has been Largely ignored by most historians but was a major factor in air-sea rescue, insertion and extraction of personnel from Japanese held islands. The Catalinas also delivered supplies to Coastwatchers and guerrilla groups. The term Black Cats or Nightmare is the name given to the Naval and Army squadrons who flew these missions by night.

(3) The Moro people in the southern Phillipines have fought invaders from the fifteen hundreds right up to the present conflict with independent Philippine government. Nearly five hundred years of almost constant conflict has made them a formidable force.

(4) LTJG John Bulkeley is portrayed by Robert Montgomery in the 1945 film “They Were Expendable.” Directed by John Ford and co-starring John Wayne and the inestimable Donna Reed. In my opinion one of Ford’s best films. It impresses with its portrayal of the utter hopelessness of those last days before the surrender of the Phillipines to the Japanese. The dinner scene with the officers and the nurse, Donna Reed is utterly in tune with the times. By todays standards it is mawkish but it wasn’t made for now but during the war when people felt differently than they do today.

(5) The author served in the Merchant Marine. Steering a ship as long as two football fields and weighing nearly 30,000 tons is not for the faint of heart.

(6) Technician fourth grade (abbreviated T/4 or Tec 4) was a rank of the United States Army from 1942 to 1948. The rank was created to recognize enlisted soldiers with special technical skills, but who were not trained as combat leaders. Technician fourth grade. The T/4 insignia of a letter “T” below three chevrons.

*Apologies to Sir Winston Churchill.

Michael Shannon is a writer from California. He knew Mister Fuchiwaki personally.

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Dear Dona,

Page 7

A Long Way From Arroyo Grande

Written By: Michael Shannon

When your dad was transferred up to Port Moresby with his team he was introduced to a place he never imagined while he grew up in Arroyo Grande.

He certainly read Tarzan of the apes when he was a kid and must have imagined the African jungle as it was described by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the time honored way of writers, Burroughs himself never ventured any closer to Africa than Chicago. As kids, the places we know outside our own existence are described in a way that rarely has much relation to the real place where the story takes place. No less your fathers generation whose visual images wee formed by Life magazine or the jungle movies he saw at the Mission or Pismo theaters. It’s not much different today. Moviemakers are rarely too concerned with an actual location when they are creating a mythical place.


I’ve been to Papua New Guinea. I can testify as to its holding the title of one of the greatest hell holes on earth. When Hilo arrived in Port Moresby with MacArthurs headquarters the port itself was a tiny backwater of the colonial British empire. Papua New Guinea had a population of approximately 3,000 people, 2,000 natives and about 800 Europeans.

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1943

Port Moresby was a small British administrative center at the time, with only two track dirt roads connecting nearby coastal villages. The city was dry for eight months out of the year, from June to January, and locals had to depend on rainfall or transport water from other areas. For a place considered one of the wettest place on earth and because it was in the rain shadow of the Owen Stanley range it received only fifty inches of rain annually. It seems like a great deal if you grow up in Arroyo Grande where the average is about 19 but your dad would soon find out what real tropical rain is all about.


Imagine the introduction of nearly 18 thousand allied troops into the area. The general and some of his staff took over the British administrative buildings but almost everyone else lived in tents. There is no real way to experience the climate unless you go there. New Guinea is just about four hundred miles south of the equator and in the western regions the annual rainfall exceeds 125 inches a year. Think of that in feet. It’s raining there today and tomorrow and the next day and so on and so on. Plus its more 90 degrees and the humidity is roughly the same. Don’t worry though, it will cool off at night to about 85 or a little more. When the sun is out it can cook your skin in just a few minutes.

Port Moresby tent camp, 1943.

Flora and fauna? New Guinea has one of the most diverse ecologies on earth. It is home to every kind of biting, stinging and poisonous insect, even the wild dogs are dangerous. Think about birds, the Hooded Pitohui is extremely poisonous, and isn’t the only one. Some cockroaches can grow to six and seven inches long. There are nasty scorpions, stinging hornets, bees, caterpillars and moths, moths of all things. You want some relief? Go for a swim where in the ocean which is home to the deadly stonefish, killer sharks, Poisonous stingrays, remember the Crocodile Hunter? And snakes, sea snakes, very deadly and my personal favorite the “Two Step Snake,” if he bites you, you get two steps and you die.


The biggest killer in human history thrives in tropical climates and was responsible for more deaths in the Pacific than even the most horrific combat, especially for the Japanese Imperial army which was notoriously casual about the well being of it’s troops. Statistically somewhere around 95% of Japanese combat soldiers died of disease or starvation during the campaigns in Papua New Guinea.

Sidewall Tent Living, Port Moresby.

If all of that was not enough, living in a sidewall tent, sleeping on folding cots under mosquito netting you could also fall victim to Dengue fever commonly referred to as Breakbone Fever for which there was no vaccine until 1997. Add to this list Yellow Fever which killed tens of thousands during the building of the Panama Canal, Chagas, a parasite you get through the bite of the apply named “Assassin Bug.” Add Cholera which is transmitted through contaminated water and all kinds of parasites such as Hookworm, Roundworm, Whipworm and Tapeworm.


For Americans, disease was responsible for about 10% of deaths in the Pacific war but in the casualty column it was by far the biggest cause of loss. At any given time about 4% of US troops in the Pacific were unavailable for duty.

The MIS boys were ordered up by MacArthur in early 1943. He had around sixty who were loaded with their gear aboard the Australian navy’s transport HMAS Kanimba and sailed to Ferguson Harbor at Port Moresby. When they arrived there was almost no accommodations for them. Troops were billeted in camps scraped out of the brush. It would be months before Navy Seabees arrived and began building an airfield and erecting the ubiquitous Quonset huts so familiar to anyone who has ever lived in the Pacific islands.
Army service soldiers from the 93rd Division (Colored) worked around the clock unloading supply ships and building shelters, kitchens and other necessary support structures including showers and laundries.

His Majesty’s Australian Ship Kanimba unloading at Port Moresby, 1943. Australian War Museum photo.

In one of the funny things regarding race, which was an ongoing issue, the white officers and troops had only cold water showers but the Black troops built themselves hot water showers. Your father said the Nisei showered with the African Americans. Apparently the white troops never figured this little act of defiance out. A small rebellion but a taste of a future army*

At Port Moresby, your father and the others on his ten man team moved into their tents and quickly began digging slit trenches. The Japanese sent bombers on a regular run down from Rabual to pound New Guinea. The sound of bombs rattling down from high above sent soldiers diving head first into their fox holes and trenches. When your dad first arrived the ground troops had not pushed the Japanese army far enough to stop the harassment. It would be their first experience of the shooting war but not the last.

As a farm boy Hilo certainly knew about digging. Nikkei Archive photo.

The workload of the translators was very heavy. Because combat in New Guinea was unceasing as the allied troops slowly pushed the Japanese Northwest and out of the island, documents, letters and personal journals stripped from the vast number of dead** Japanese troops which by this time the allies understood to be of significant importance.

A Detail from the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Warship and Officer list. National Archives.

The battle of Midway in 1942 was partially won because of the MIS. Radio intercepts by the translators along with the breaking of the Japanese Naval code by the code breakers at Pearl set the stage for the ambush of the Japanese carrier force headed to Midway island in the northwest Hawaiian island chain and a good bit of sheer luck blunted the Japanese carrier navy which would never fully recover. It was the first nail in the coffin of Imperial Japans plans for the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

American commanders initially resisted using MIS nisei for their intended purpose, the gathering of information about the enemy. Thanks, however, to the persistence of a haole plantation doctor from Maui, Major James Burden, and the work of the nisei themselves, attitudes changed quickly. Major Burden took an MIS team to the South Pacific. They had to work hard for a chance to prove themselves. Nisei with the 23rd “Americal” Division in New Caledonia worked around the clock to translate a captured list of call signs and code names of all Imperial the Japanese Navy ships and air bases.

Major Burden and the nisei pushed to get closer to the action, and some wound up on Guadalcanal, where they made a big discovery: the joint operational plan for Japanese forces in the South Pacific.
Found floating in the Ocean it was brought ashore by New Caledonian natives and turned over to an Australian Coast watcher who arranged to get it to the 23rd’s headquarters. The Mis translators quickly discerned it’s contents and forwarded the documents to Army, Navy and Marine senior officers in Hawaii and Maryland. The hubris of the Japanese high command in not changing codes or plans meant that US forces in the Western Pacific were able to use the information to follow troop movements, fleet assignments for the rest of the war. Just this one thing validated the wisdom and the expense of the Army in forming the MIS teams.

There was more to come.

Above: SIMINI, New Guinea, January 2, 1943: From left, Major Hawkins, Phil Ishio and Arthur Ushiro Castle of the 32nd Infantry Division question a prisoner taken in the Buna campaign. Information from POW interrogations produced vital tactical information countless times. National Archives photo.

Next: Dear Dona, page 8. Moving up towards Japan. Maurutai, Luzon, Leyte, and Okinawa.

*Presiden Truman integrated the armed forces. On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, creating the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces.

**The 23rd Infantry Division, more commonly known as the Americal Division, was formed in May, 1942 on the island of New Caledonia. In the immediate emergency following Pearl Harbor, the United States had hurriedly sent three individual regiments to defend New Caledonia against a feared Japanese attack. They were the 132nd Infantry Regiment, formerly part of the 33rd Infantry Division of the Illinois National Guard, the 164th Infantry Regiment from North Dakota, and the 182nd Infantry Regiment from Massachusetts. This division was formed as one of only two un-numbered divisions to serve in the Army during World War II. After World War II the Americal Division was officially re-designated as the 23rd Infantry Division, however, it is rarely referred to as such. The division’s name comes from a contraction of “American, New Caledonian Division”. The Americal Division was involved in ground combat in both World War II and Vietnam.

***From the Owen Stanley Mountains in New Guinea to Luzon, Philippines, the 32nd Division walked that long, winding and deadly combat road for 654 days of intense combat, more than any other American unit in World War 2. The Red Arrow was credited with many “firsts”. It was the first United States division to deploy as an entire unit overseas, initially to Papua New Guinea. The first of seven U.S. Army and U.S. Marine units to engage in offensive ground combat operations in 1942. The division was still fighting holdouts in New Guinea abd the Phillipines after the official Japanese surrender.

****The 93rd (Colored) was a combat trained division led by white officers. The “Blue Helmets” as they were known were almost never used in combat but reduced to labor battalions. The Division had shown in WWI in France that they were a fearsome outfit but in this war they were rarely given the chance and were reduced to no more than “Hired Hands.”

Cover Photo: General Frank Merrill posing with Japanese-American members of the Marauders. Fourteen Japanese-American service members with the Military Intelligence Service served as translators and codebreakers (Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

Michael Shannon is a lifelong resident of California. He writes so his children will know where they come from.

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