Dear Dona

Chapter 13

The End And A New Beginning.

By Michael Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MIS camp, Okinawa, 1945. Signal Corps photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punchbowl

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

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

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

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

Cover Photo: Private Bob Hoichi Kubo United States Army MIS

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

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

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

The Twelve Hour Tour.

Chapter 15

The Desperados

By Michael Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Culvert on Eagle Canyon. Goleta Historical photo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Notice to the Reader.

For those of you who read this Blog on the Facebook platform I’d like to explain some changes that are affecting your ability to read and see them. Many FB sites have gone to AI to do the work of administering who gets seen and who doesn’t. This means that there is no actual human being deciding who gets published and who doesn’t. Programmers have designed algorithms to filter submissions to all kinds of platforms. What this means to me is that about a month ago quite suddenly a dozen or so FB sites that I published on suddenly began refusing my content, all of it.

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

I believe that soon AI will rule FB entirely and the “Social” will no longer be attached to the Media.

I encourage you to go to https://atthetable2015.com/ and click the follow button. When an article is published you will receive a notice in your email which you can click to open and read.

For those who are curious, there is no profit for me in this. It’s free to you and I receive nothing other than your goodwill.

https://atthetable2015.com/

The Calf Shed

Michael Shannon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was all wonderfully “Make Do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Six bits will do it George.”

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

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

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

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

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

Epilogue.

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

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

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

Dad Shannon at the BBQ pit. Family Photo

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

“Make Do.” That was it.

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

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

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

Please Subscribe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

	Erma Kendrick on Play a Waltz from 1910
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	georgekastner on A Walk In The Yard.
	Gregory Pisano on 442nd RCT Erased.

	Erma Kendrick on Play a Waltz from 1910
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	georgekastner on A Walk In The Yard.
	Gregory Pisano on 442nd RCT Erased.

atthetable2015

What we learned in our kitchen.

Tag Archives: family

Dear Dona

The Twelve Hour Tour.

The Calf Shed

The Twelve Hour Tour

Twelve Hour Tour

Twelve Hour Tour

Four Men

Twelve Hour Tour

The Old Cow

Twelve Hour Tour

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: