Traveling by Train

Michael Shannon

When I was a boy I used to ride with my dad whenever he went somewhere. It was part of my education. My favorite place to go was the box company in Oceano. Oceano is a little town built along the Southern Pacific tracks at the west end of the little valley I grew up in. In the fifties it was the center of the farming industry. The vegetable packing sheds were there, the big ice plant, very important in the days when freight cars were stilled cooled by ice and best of all the box company. It was in a large warehouse located right next the main railroad line and the sidetracks where the little yard goat steam engine shuttled boxcars around as they were filled.

My dad would head into the office of the box company to talk about ordering any of the different types of boxes produce was packed and shipped in. In the early fifties most vegetables were packed right in the fields or in sheds we had on our farm. He needed different kinds of containers for different crops. Crates for Lettuce or Celery, Lug boxes for Tomatoes or Flats for Chinese Peas. Inside the warehouse there were two main areas, one where finished boxes were stored, nested together and stacked clear to the rafters, leaving only narrow passage ways between the different kinds just wide enough for a man to walk through. Down the center there was a wide alleyway for the forklifts that did the moving. Parked here and there were big clamping handcart dollies with jaws to grip the boxes loaded on them. A man would load the dolly and then step on a pedal at the back and the jaws would clamp the bottom box so the load could be moved without sliding the whole load off. We would go over and jump on the foot pedal but even with the two of us we couldn’t make them work. A great disappointment.

At the opposite end of the warehouse was the place where the boxes were assembled. Great stacks of pine. all precut were placed on tables and nailed together. When the man finished his box he placed it on the roller conveyor, gave it a big shove and it spun away on the rollers until someone working at the other end end picked it up, placed it with other boxes in it’s nest where it was then moved into the stacks.

Best of all was the smell of the place. Nearly every box was made of fresh cut pine and the smell of the place was sweet almost beyond imagining. You could, and we did, stand there and inhale the air and it seemed almost good enough to eat. The old heavy plank floors, worn smooth by decades of use were buttered with pitch and polished by the wheels of the forklifts which motored about moving tall stacks of boxes from the warehouse to waiting trucks ready to haul them out to farmers fields.

When dad came out of the office, order in hand he would holler for us and then have to chase us down in the labyrinth of crates. We always gave up in short order because we knew he had things to do and we wanted to be with him anyway.

Outside the box company there were steel rails to put pennies on, stray railroad spikes lying abandoned in the cinders along the rails and divers and unidentified things that stimulated the imagination of kids.

Sometimes the little yard goat steam engine would be scuttling about like a crab, moving loaded freight cars from one place to another, busy making up consists which would be shuffled into place on the big freights that stopped every day. Dad gave us pennies to place on the tracks to be squashed by the little engine as it passed by. You were sure to get a wave from the engineer because he had been a kid too. His dreams of becoming a railroad man had come true so he knew what it was like for little boys.

When the Southern Pacific first came it was the main transportation hub along the central coast of California where we lived. Typical in type, it had a line of warehouses on one side of the tracks and the sheds where produce was delivered from the fields to be washed, sorted and packed for shipment.The big packing sheds were all the same with an office at one end where the salesmen and secretaries worked and the boss sat at his desk with his feet up and thought great thoughts, or so it seemed to us. The processing floor had conveyors and bins everywhere. The men and women who worked there wore rubber boots and aprons, some carried knives for trimming vegetables, that seemed faintly dangerous but, of course we all wanted to carry them too. A goal for nearly all little boys is to go heavily armed.

The boxes all carried labels, colorful advertisements for the growers and shippers. Ed Taylor and Gus Phelan’s “Taylor Made” and “Phelan Fine,” Oceano Packing Companies “Oceano” label, Sal Reyes and Gabe DeLeon with its crossed Bolos reflective of their shared Philippine heritage and the Japanese growers POVE brand, Pismo Oceano Vegetable Exchange. The labels were stuck on the ends of the crates as they were loaded onto boxcars or semi-trucks headed for the Los Angeles or San Francisco markets. Some crops were shipped in used boxes with multiple labels plastered one over the other forming a virtual road map of the boxes travels.

Anchored at one end was the old depot building painted in the ubiquitous SP yellow and brown. In my grandparents day it was also a passenger depot. My grandmother and her family traveled to the bay area where her sister Sadie lived in Oakland and when she was matriculating at the University of California, the train was how she traveled back and forth to school. Someone the family knew always traveled with her, no lady traveled alone in those days.

My grandmother Annie Gray Shannon, center, leaving for Cal Berkeley in 1904. Her parents Samuel and Jenny Gray on the left and her uncle Patrick Moore and his wife Molly “O” Moore on the right. Family Photo.

Once in a while we would be down there when a fast freight rattler would pass through. We always tried to count cars but rarely ever did we make it before the cabooses passed us by with a wave from the brakeman perched up in the window of his cupola. One of the best things to do was to read the names on the boxcars. Each one represented a far off place in the imagination. “The Pine Tree Route” all the way from Maine, The Saint Louis-San Francisco, “The Frisco,” outlined in big white letters on a red shield. Not a popular name with hoity-toity San Franciscans but OK with us. The big Railroad states were all there, the Pennsy, Texas Southern, New York Central, Baltimore and Ohio, the Milwaukee Road, The Dixie Flyer, the Cotton Belt and The Katy. You might get glimpse of less well known roads, their boxcars still in use long after they folded like the Delta-Yazoo RR, nicknamed the old “Yellow Dog” and memorialized in songs from the Delta Blues to Bob Dylan. The proud white mountain goat emblazoned on cars from the Great Northern, the SP and the UP, and AT & SF, immortalized by songwriter Johnny Mercer in 1946 and first sung by Judy Garland in the movie “Harvey Girls.”* We once saw a blue freight car emblazoned with Susquehanna Railroad on one end and a female figure holding a railroad lantern who said, “Ship with Susie Q,” get it?

Very so often you could spot someone standing in the doorway of a “Side Door Pullman,” going from somewhere to someplace, a Bo, a Knight of the Road, seeing the country, didn’t cost a dime neither. Perhaps one of the last of the throngs of men, women and children who drifted around the country looking for work during the depression.

It was altogether a marvelous place for little boys to hang around. The depot has closed permanently , passenger trains dodn’t stop anymore but you could climb on the old freight wagon and peek inside through the dirty dirty windows and imagine the days when it was busy with people preparing to go somewhere much more exciting than the place we lived. You could almost see the conductor wave his red lantern to signal the engineer to open the throttle and hear the full throated cry “All Aboard for Salinas, San Jose and San Francisco, and all points East.” The sound of the locomotive beginning to move, the deep, throaty cough from the stack, the hiss of high pressure steam, the metallic grinding of the drive wheels slipping slightly as she gathered way and the crash and clank of the couplers as the slack was taken out. By standers would invariably stand and watch until the caboose faded completely into the distance and sigh, they were staying home. People my age are the last generation who witnessed train travel when it still carried the mail, nearly all the freight and most passengers. The rise of the trucks and the airplane would nearly doom railroads by the 1970’s. Today the depot is a museum, the sheds are closed and the freight trains pass us by without even slowing down.

*In case you feel like singing, just imagine Judy Garland singing this song as she waited tables in a Harvey House somewhere.

Judy Garland, The Harvey Girls MGM 1946.

“Do ya hear that whistle down the line?
I figure that it’s engine number forty nine
She’s the only one that’ll sound that way
On the Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe
See the old smoke risin’ ’round the bend
I reckon that she knows she’s gonna meet a friend
Folks around these parts get the time of day
From The Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe, Here she comes
Whoo hoo hoo hoo hoo
Hey, Jim you’d better get the rig
Whoo hoo hoo hoo hoo
She’s got a list o’ passengers that’s pretty big And they’ll all want lifts to Brown’s Hotel
‘Cause lots o’ them been travelin’ for quite a spell
All the way from Philadelph-i-ay
On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa FeAll aboard, all aboardHere she comes
Whoo hoo hoo hoo hoo
Hey, Jim you’d better get the rig
Whoo hoo hoo hoo hoo
She’s got a list o’ passengers that’s pretty big And they’ll all want lifts to Brown’s Hotel
‘Cause lots o’ them been travelin’ for quite a spell
All the way from Philadelph-i-ay.”

The Real Harvey Girls. National Archives photo.

If you didn’t live it, well, you should be sorry now. It’s all gone. The packing sheds, the Box Company, the Harvey House restaurants and their girls. Produce goes by truck now and somehow that doesn’t carry the same cachet.

You can still buy those old box labels, collectors items now, but without the scent of a fresh pine box, it’s just a piece of paper.

PS: You can still visit the old depot, now a museum. Ask for Linda Guiton and tell her I sent you.

Michael Shannon is a writer and world traveler. He lives in Coastal California.

The Handshake.

Michael Shannon

Those men. They always shook hands. I learned early in life that those handshakes were a form of communication. All kinds of subtleties, rituals observed by grown men that took a lot of growing up for me to understand.

manuel silva 1

Big Manuel had hands that were thick and muscular, criss-crossed with the scars that illustrated his life and when he held your hand in his it felt as if they were covered by the bark of the oak trees that grew on the hills we grew up on. No man would have ever said “I love you” out loud, they did it by touch.

When we were little he just tousled your hair when he came in, perhaps put his hand on your shoulder. As you grew, he offered his hand. By the time you were a teen and as tall as he was, it was the whole shebang, the gravelly voice with a mild insult and a handshake that engulfed yours. The love he showed you, running like current from his heart to yours. God, how I loved that.

It’s how men of a certain time showed affection. The men and women in my family were subtle in that way and each had his own manner. It was a very small play, acted out between two people, seldom varying in its simplicity, which was its charm.

Garrison Keillor had his Minnesota bachelor farmers and we had our farmer uncles, some of our blood and some adopted in friendship.

My Grandmothers brothers, Uncles John, Bob, Tom and her brother in law Olin. There was my dad’s brother uncle Jack or Jackie as he was universally known. We had another uncle Bob on my mothers side and my uncle Ray who was an uncle by marriage.

So, bunches of them. Some we saw often, others, not so much. For many years when I was growing up, the entire Shannon and Gray families got together during the holidays. Uncle John Gray, he of the pin-stripe suits and deep, deep growl of a voice, stood up very straight when he shook your hand. Aunt Eva, always perfectly coiffed, invariably dressed in a grey suit and smelling richly of powder would offer her soft hand, light as a butterfly. My grown cousin Iva Jean offered her little hand palm down, the fragile bones light as as a birds wing. She was a giggly girl, though she was in her forties. She was a simple woman, kind and loving. My uncle Bob Gray was short and wiry with a shiny bald head and he shook with the vigor of a life long farmer. My dad’s brother uncle Jackie shook with his arm akimbo, his right elbow swung out and his hand diving down on yours like a hawk on a mouse, a firm economical grip. My grandmother Annie, she of the Lace Curtain Irish, used her left hand which you softly gripped from the side with your left, your fingers slipped across the index finger and next to her thumb, and always delivered with a soft kiss on her cheek. When she was dressed up she floated in a cloud of White Shoulders, even today the scent evokes memories of her. My grandfather, “Big Jack” Shannon shook hands with a hearty “My blessed boy.” He left no doubt he cared for you.

They had all been born in another century and formality was like wearing a suit of clothes. They all walked in the histories of their time. The view in our kitchen was more inward than outward. Not in the sense that they were unsophisticated, but rather in a way that valued honesty, formality and steady friendship as the anchors of their lives. Manuel, Johnny, Oliver and those other men who sat and drank coffee at our kitchen table, did not talk out of school. Personal opinions were never voiced in front of children, or, I think, in front of wives. Dad’s friends seem homogenous to me, not in the way they dressed or walked to our door, but in their opinions about what mattered the most to them.

They played by the rules they had established for themselves. The big boy rules. They were hard to define and were slightly different for each. No one wrote them down and they weren’t easy to know but you were expected to do what you said you you would do, no questions asked, no excuses given. It was agreed that you paid for your own mistakes. Your problem was yours to accept and deal with. They took the best from each other and ignored the rest. Favors agreed to were freely given. It seemed to me as a child that these were the rules under which the universe was governed. It was a brotherhood of sorts and lasted for life.

Of course, it was all kind of a con job. They knew secrets; they differed on things, but they found no reason to share the petty with us. They had all experienced horror, sadness and despair but nothing of those experiences was ever shared. We learned about casual cruelty in school. When you were undone by events, these steady, anchored men let you know that all could be well in the world. They felt no need to apologize for being who they were. They were the men of the Depression, the World War, born in a time of want, a need that could only be satisfied by hard work. They were used goods, polished until they gleamed like the handle of a good shovel.

You might say they were simple people from another era and different mindset. They worked hard, they rarely read. They talked of land, food and weather. But is was more than that. My dad and his friends were steady people, they’d be quiet rather than lie, they were as good as their word and they were generous to a fault. You could count on them. They told you all you needed to know about them with just a touch of the hand.

When Big Manuel died, he wasn’t rich in possessions, he didn’t drive a fancy pickup and no one would have ever said he was a big shot. No, instead of that, he possessed the greatest thing a man can have, friends. Not just ordinary friends either, but men who, each believed with all their heart, that they were his best friend.

Status meant little to them. They valued the little things that made a life. When my father died and was buried, Manuel’s grandson came to the funeral and introduced himself to the family and said “My father was out of town and couldn’t attend, but he called me and said that I had to come and represent the family because he and my grandfather would have wanted to honor your family in that way.”

They are all gone now, but they left us a legacy, their children and their children’s children. Grown up now, they don’t hug, they still stick out their paw and shake your hand.

Michael Shannon is a farmers son and better for it. He writes so his children will who they are from. He lives in Arroyo Grande California.

OLD SCHOOL.

Letters to my Sons.

Michael Shannon

In the 1950’s when I was in elementary school, a child’s self-esteem was not a matter of concern. Shame was considered a spur to good behavior and accomplishment. If you flunked a test, you might be singled out, and the offending sheet of paper, splattered with red marks, was waved before the whole class as a warning to others, much the way in which ranchers hung the carcass of an offending coyote across a barbed wire fence as a warning to other coyotes.

Fear was also considered a useful tool. In those post WWII days, we were all raised by parents and a society in which was engrained the sort of discipline, not applied with a stick, but rather, the strictures one learned by the seemingly endless depression and the world wide war that followed it. Both events required strict rules that applied to almost all parts of our parent’s lives.

They had been tempered by the depression and had the scars to prove it. Many of them had grown up without enough to eat, with holes in their shoes, ragged shirts and trousers; radios, decent cars and a complete education cut short by the depression or the war. When it came, they were not soured by their experience, but rather still looked on their country as something to love, something special. They came out of this experience self reliant, not afraid of hard work and used to taking orders. They had a sense of worth and self confidence.

We were fortunate enough to be their children.

Teachers were inviolate. Their word was law, and never in my eight years at Branch, did I ever see a parent be other than polite and solicitous to a teacher. In those days, a teacher was not suspect at all, she took care of a child’s education, both academics and social. My parents considered themselves honored guests at school and under no circumstances would they take my word in a dispute. I wouldn’t have dared. You see, there was no principle or administrator, just the teacher and she was the be all and end all for all things school.

At my school, a two-room wooden building, far older than a half century when I went there, hard working parents provided the foundation for teachers in every sense of the word. The teachers taught and the parents supported them. Repair and maintenance of the old building was done by volunteer labor and she was kept in pretty good shape for an old girl. Better, in some cases than the homes kids came from.

Two teachers taught about 50 kids in all grades. Divided smack in the middle by a hallway, the two class rooms were entered by doors tucked in between coat hooks, trash cans and tall cabinets in which were tucked the essential tools of the teaching trade. Grade level books, spare erasers, boxes of chalk; for we still used slate black boards in those days, Rags, cleaning supplies and the detritus accumulated over eighty years of use. Mrs Edith Brown taught first through fourth and Miss Elizabeth Holland, a spinster lady, taught fifth through eighth. Mrs Brown had just arrived a year or two before me; 1949, to be exact, after a long career teaching at the Arroyo Grande grade school on Orchard St. The home of kids we referred to as “Town Kids,” somehow sensed as inferior to us. They on the other hand referred to us as “Farmers,” Most certainly a perjorative term, usually accompanied by a sneer.

Miss Holland taught her entire career at Branch. Until almost her 35th year she taught alone. Only at the twilight of her career, was a second teacher assigned as enrollment increased school population; the beginning of the “Baby Boom,” and the closing of nearby Santa Manuela school made the classes too large for a single person.

Branch school had been moved from it’s previous location by the expedient of jacking it up, sliding peeled logs beneath it and hitching the entire contraption to a team of horses, then dragging it wherever you wanted it’s new home to be. In our case, a hollowed out side-hill near the old Branch Family cemetery on the original Santa Manuela Rancho in the upper Arroyo Grande. Behind and to the right was open, oak studded pastureland, complete with the occasional Hereford. To the left, a scattering of homes, mostly small and fairly recent. Across Branch Mill road was the Ikeda brothers reservoir, a small fenced pond in which the gate was never locked. Tthe creek, was about a half mile down the hill. Across the creek lived the Cecchetti family. Gentle Elsie, big George and the legendary George “Tookie” junior. To the left, an expansive view of the lower valley, all the way to the dunes, fourteen miles away. The view explained, at least in part, why Don Francisco Branch located his home on a little hillock, less than a mile from the school. That building was long gone, having been built of adobe sometime around 1838, it had gently melted back into the earth from which it came. The site guarded by a pair of ancient pepper trees, whose seeds traveled across an ocean in a small bag carried by the Franciscan Fathers who found their way 2690 miles on foot to the site of the Mission, San Luis Obispo de Tolosa.

In the fifties we considered ourselves modern because we had a school bus. When I started school, it was a 1949 Chevrolet half-ton pickup, fitted with a brown canvas top, two wooden benches down the sides and a chain across the back where the tailgate used to be. You simply climbed up and over the bumper and perched where ever there was a seat. It had a roll down flap in the rear to protect kids from the rain. Why I don’t know, most kids had to walk from home to the bus stop no matter what the weather. Our house was about a quarter mile from the back door to the mail box where we were picked up. In the winter that driveway, if I can dignify it as such, was slimy with mud and puddles that reached little boys ankles. I still recall the ritual of using a kitchen knife to scrape as much mud as you could from your shoes and then putting them in the oven to dry. The next morning, shoes were dry, but as stiff as an old hide and had to worked about in order to make them soft enough to wear. In case you missed the part about the kitchen knife, yes, they were the same ones we ate with. No one seemed the least concerned about that. Just a job that had to be done.

Our bus driver was Mrs Evelyn Fernamburg. She did duty as the bus driver, janitor, school board member and 4-H leader. You see, Branch was its own, independent school district. It was almost entirely a volunteer operation. The county school office provided the budget and thats all you got. The budget came almost completely from property taxes and after the county skimmed off the lions share, schools received their allotments. School board members used funds for improvements, teachers salaries, the bus and driver, and then did the rest of the jobs for free. They built the monkey bars, teeter totter and carousel on weekends. There was no lawn and the playing fields were simply scraped out of the hill sides. No child of the fifties will ever forget that, in order to save money on the continual painting of the old redwood siding, which was a big job, the board decided to cover it all with a brand new innovation, asbestos shingles. An off-pink color, they solved the problem of repainting but, of course, they were asbestos. Didn’t seem to hurt anyone though and the school was well known for its “wonderful” color.

1961Branch grads. L-R Christine Baker, Sheryl Jurniak, Mrs. Brown, Jeanette Coehlo, Jerry Shannon and Dickie Gularte.

Behind the school were the restrooms. The term restrooms is applied loosely. Both boys and girls were in a small green shed, divided in the middle with the girls on the school side and the boys on the up hill end. Neither had a door, only a little privacy wall to prevent any immodest peeking. They both had a toilet with a wooden seat. In the fifties they had dispensed with old phone books and stacks of small squares cut from newspapers and used what my dad called window pane toilet paper, you can guess what that meant. Each room had something unique. The boys had a urinal or rather a trough for them to use. It was a galvanized thirty gallon water pressure tank cut in half lengthwise and bolted to the wall. A piece of half inch diameter pipe, drilled with a series of small holes and a gate valve at one end, completed this modern marvel. The girls had something even better; Bats. Boys, of course, knew all about bats and how the would lay their bat eggs in little girl’s hair. Mass screaming during recess would bring whichever teacher was closest, running to the bathroom with a handy broom to chase the bats away temporarily, at least. We boys took an unusual amount of pleasure in this.

One of the things that we didn’t realize until we were much older was, with only a few kids of any age, every activity from classroom study to recess and organized games required all ages, six to fourteen. All grades were together for every thing we did, be it a school play, softball or jump rope. Each game had its season, none marked on a calendar, but mysteriously appearing when the time was right. Suddenly, in the spring, marbles. The jump ropes, dormant in the old closet that served the athletic gear, brought out for the two weeks that jump rope was in vogue. In our school this was not just a sport for girls. There was no PE. Groups of kids just decided what to do on their own. There was almost no adult supervision, kids were expected to use their imaginations. Older girls might stay in during lunch and listen to records they brought from home on the little portable record player that was kept in the closet. Oh, the wailing and crying in 1959 when the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were killed. Lulu, and the Judy’s were fit to be tied. A terrible tragedy when you are just 13.

Sleepin Beauty. 1954. Family Photo

I never heard a teacher or parent discuss curriculum. We were taught the basics of math, social studies, California history and we read, a lot. With perhaps 30 kids, Miss Holland supervised four grade levels all at the same time. When giving lessons to one grade level she left the others on their own. We helped each other. Books were kept for a long time not traded in for new ones every couple of years. I used a social studies book in 1956 that was used by William “Bill” Quaresma in the 1930’s. I used a reader with the name Al Coehlo on the flyleaf. His son Al Jr was just a year behind me and used the same book as his father. History doesn’t change much, the teacher could fill in the blanks. Lest you think our teachers weren’t very good, The county schools superintendent told my father that Miss Holland was the finest teacher in the county in reply to a parent complaint. She had polio as a young woman and walked with a pronounced limp and used a crutch when she was tired. She was so very kind to all of us kids and I’ve thought through the years that those hundreds of kids she taught must have been her true family. My mom took me with her when she went to visit her on Pine St in Santa Maria a couple years after she retired and she seemed somehow diminished, as if the school was a part of her that was lost. She died in 1965, just 58 years old. In the picture at the head of this story, she is 47. She lived her whole life in that house on Pine St, she never married. We were her children.

All in all I was treated with kindness, which was often more than I deserved. My public school education has stood the test of time, which includes both the lessons my teachers instilled and the ones they never intended.

On the front steps of Branch School, 1932.

I went to school with the children of many of the students pictured above. Most of these children are second generation immigrants whose families were working, renting or buying the rich farmlands of the Arroyo Grande. Mostly Portuguese from the Azores or South America whose families came to this country in the surge of immigration from the islands after the 1880’s. The Japanese families arrived about the same time, post 1880.

My own classes in the 1950’s weren’t unlike this one. We had some of the same surnames. We were Italian, Portuguese, Mexican, Irish, English, Filipino and Japanese. Quite a hodgepodge. My eighth grade class had four, the two Judys, Hubble and Gularte and the two Mikes, Murphy and Shannon. Our teacher, the same Miss Holland.

Branch Class of 1960, L-R Alcides “Al” Coehlo,Mrs Brown, Johnny Silva, Nancy Wilcox, Steve Luster. Manuel “Manny” Silva, and Mrs. Fahey.

credits: Cover photo, 1956, Back Row, l-R Dickie Gularte, Jerry Shannon, Irv “Tubby” Terra, George “Tookie” Cecchetti. Front, Patsy Cavanillas, Doreen Massio and Irene Samaniago. The entire fourth grade class.

Michael Shannon is a former teacher himself and damn proud of it. I hope Miss Holland and Mrs Brown know I turned out OK.

THE GREAT PEA WAR

By Michael Shannon

You would think the war over peas was about the Chinese peas my dad grew out on our farm. Not so. My mother heard Clarence Birdseye proclaim, “You must eat peas to be healthy” and she believed it with all her heart.

As in all wars, the beginnings are shrouded in mystery. what we kids always referred to as the “Olden Days” and which meant anything that had to do with our parents lives or maybe even what happened just an hour ago.

Medieval Manuscript Illustration with Peas

She fed her boys strained peas when we were babies, that vile looking and tasteless, slimy concoction spooned directly from a jar into our mouths like a mother bird feeding its chicks. Tiny babies are weak and helpless as we all know and we could have offered little resistance. Eat ’em or starve, it must have seemed easy to mom, her little boys growing healthy and strong before her eyes. Growing stronger yes; but smarter too, and in that fact lay the seeds of her ultimate defeat.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first began to realize what was happening. I do recall the aftertaste being something like green latex paint with chalk dust added for flavor. Vile and disgusting doesn’t begin to describe it.

The origin of the pea is a mystery. The pea is a food plant so ancient that no one is sure, botanically or geographically, just where it came from. People have been eating peas for at least 10,000 years. Archaeologists have turned up the carbonized remains of pea feasts from Swiss lake dwellings and Neolithic farming villages in western Europe. According to Chinese legend, the pea was a find of the Emperor Shen Nung (the “Divine Farmer”), a helpful agricultural deity who also introduced the people to the hoe, the plow, the calendar, acupuncture, and tea. According to Norse legend, peas arrived as a punishment from the god Thor, who sent dragons toting peas to fill up the wells of recalcitrant worshippers. Later, once peas had caught on, Thor, when displeased, dispatched dwarves to plunder the pea fields. I think I’d have liked him.

In the medieval times, one of the staples of diet was dried pea soup, sometimes with resin added for flavor. Isn’t that a wonderful thought. Why just add some tree sap to make it sweeter. Perhaps that explains the fact the average Anglo Saxon of the time stood a scant five feet and weighed about 135 pounds. Forty was old, very old. Poor people could be so hungry they would waylay and murder travelers in order to have fresh meat. Imagine eating your neighbor because you couldn’t stand peas. When I was six, they might have had an ally. Fill a sock with dried peas and bonk ’em on the noggin.

Cooking the Pease porridge, 1156 Not happy

My mother was an oil field brat. She grew up during what was a constant state of financial depression. In 1915, my grandfather Bruce Hall went to work in the oilfields down in Casmalia. The pay was good for the time, about five dollars a day for an eight hour day. In the oil patch hours could be much longer and at about .67 cents an hour the pay was among the highest in the country but the work was itinerant, you might have to move at any time and oil companies in the heyday of discovery were going out of business almost as fast as they were created. Mom was born in 1918 and her life until 1943 when she married my dad, was spent on or near oil leases. The names of the places they lived are a litany of California’s oil history. Casmalia, Bakersfield, Taft, Coalinga, Maricopa, Summerland, Elwood, Signal Hill, Huntington Shores, Santa Barbara and Arroyo Grande. The family staggered through the depression when mom was growing up and I’ll just bet you thats where she got her taste for peas. You could buy them by the 50 lb. bag. In the depression a sure indicator that the cost of living was increasing was the sudden demand for peas by the economically pinched who typically took refuge in that kind of food. In 1933, a hundredweight of dried peas cost $2.50 and baby, thats a lot of peas.

In 1928, the Gerber company held a contest to find a face to represent a baby food advertising campaign. Artist Dorothy Hope Smith entered her simple charcoal sketch of a tousle-haired, bright-eyed cherub of a baby. In her entry, Smith noted that she would finish the sketch if she won. Her drawing competed with elaborate oil paintings, but the judges fell in love with the baby face Smith drew, and when they chose it as the winner, they insisted that the simple illustration remain a sketch. The image of this happy, healthy baby was soon to become the face that launched a brand. My mother always said that I was a dead-ringer for that Gerber kid. She loved that.

Add to this the fact that San Luis Obispo county during and after WWI grew peas, and I mean everywhere. A dry land crop that needed no more than winter rain for irrigation became the go to crop for the war in Europe where half-starved doughboys crouched in muddy dugouts choking down peas in lieu of real food.

County farmers grew wealthy. Semi-desert land that once was home to vast herds of Californio rancheros cattle now had pea vines criss crossing every available piece of ground. My family had been growing peas for two generations by the end of the war. The canceling of government contracts in 1918 slowed production but for some reason, non-discerning Americans continued to eat them by the ton.

Me and mom out standing in the pea fields. 1947. Shannon Family Photo.

The photographs taken by Dorothea Lange of itinerant pickers in Nipomo during the depression show the depression at its worst. Did I mention they were there to pick the Dana’s family’s peas? They picked my grandfathers too. The crop was valuable enough that part of the foreman’s job was to make sure that the pickers didn’t steal them. I know thats true but I just cannot imagine even a starving, homeless Okie family wanting to eat them.

So my mom had a real affection for that drawing on the Gerbers jar but love might not been the word I would choose. When I was old enough to refuse food, peas had the honor of being the first and the worst. Mom was very clever though and so really determined, she marshaled her forces . She had cans of peas in the cupboard, dried peas in the cabinets and frozen peas in the refrigerator freezer. First she tried just boiling them and putting them on your plate, even adding a pat of butter to perhaps entice you to eat them. She and dad used the old strategy of telling you “You can’t leave the table until you’ve eaten everything on your plate.” The counter play’s for this are numerous. Self starvation means going to bed hungry, the old squish trick, mushing the food around in a vain attempt to make it look like you had eaten most of them which always works if your parents are blind, the drop, which is dropping a few peas at a time into your lap until dinner is over and the ever popular, hiding them in your napkin and asking to be excused to go to the bathroom and then dumping them down the toilet. My brother Jerry sat next to my little brother Cayce who would eat anything. He would slide his onto Cayce’s plate when no one was looking. No such luck for me, I sat next to my dad who loved my mother so much that he would have eaten anything my mother made. Anything, and I mean it too. She treasured him above diamonds for that. He deserved it.

Mom’s head on assault met with fierce resistance, her forces thrown back time and time again. So, as with any good general she tried a flanking attack. Understand, we were a farm family in which the menu was essentially an endless round of simple and comforting dishes. My mother was a good cook as most were in those times but she didn’t try gourmet foods or fancy dishes. I mean, come on, the French ate snails. My dad liked what he liked and that was it and we kids grew up thinking it was just fine with us.

One of our favorite dishes was creamed hamburger on home made biscuits of which my mother was the doyenne; par excellence as they say. My brother Jerry still eats, sixty years on, a homemade biscuit for breakfast almost every day. After months and years of frontal assaults she thought she would fool us by infiltrating a few peas into the the creamed hamburger in the hope we wouldn’t be able to detect this so subtle attack. The peas would be completely covered with her creamy milk and flour gravy which, she thought, even the most discerning boy would be unable to detect. No dice, there they were, winking her defiance beneath the sea of white camouflage. After that first less than successful subterfuge she became a dog with a bone in its teeth. Casserole with peas, creamed peas, carrots and peas, mushy peas, peas and cauliflower, green beans vegetable casserole with peas, creamed peas with bacon and; and wait for it, wait, horror of horrors scrambled eggs with peas, surely the poison gas attack of meals. But like the stubborn Irish boys we were, descendants of a people who have been fighting the hated english almost continuously since May, 1159, we still wouldn’t eat ’em.

How did she ever expect to win? Eight centuries of mostly futile resistance breeds a certain stubbornness, or as my British friend Claire Mason said,”Whats wrong with you Irish anyway, why won’t you quit?” A well known Irishman, George Bush, famously banned broccoli from Air Force One, explaining, “I do not like broccoli… And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!” We felt the same way about peas.

Peace was never achieved, nor I suppose was it possible. A boys delight in putting one over on his parents is sublime. Actually, we were taught to think for ourselves at that table. It was a constant refrain, my dad would always tell us not to believe half of what we saw and believe little we read in the newspaper and certainly nothing we saw on television. It’s turned out to be good advice.

Still don’t like peas and you can’t make me eat them; ever.

PS: Drawn by Dorothy Hope Smith, the Gerber baby was introduced in 1928 and has become the internationally recognized face of the company. The model for the original sketch, is Ann Turner Cook, a mystery novelist and english teacher. The symbol has one of the highest levels of loyalty in branding history. Mrs. Cook lives in Florida.

Michael Shannon is a writer from Arroyo Grande,California.

Rainy Day

By Michael Shannon

Farmers are outdoor people. They live by the rhythms of season. So we learned from our father the importance of weather. My dad lived more outdoors than in. No matter the weather, he was up and out of the house at dawn. Be it the promise of a hot August day, an April morning dripping fog or a dark winter day of pouring rain.

On the wall of our kitchen dad always had a barometer. The thermometer was outside the back door. We had no meter for the dew point but the humidity you could feel on your skin. In the early morning, observing the moisture on a plants leaves and even the smell of the air could be interpreted to predict the weather. The wind from the south meant rain, from the northwest meant it was clearing. The daily crop report on the radio could help a farmer see a little bit into the future. Calling the brokers at the San Francisco wholesale vegetable market and asking about the bay area conditions was a help. At Mow Fung produce on Grant Avenue in Chinatown, they could just look out the window and give you a forecast. I know a farm family who called their cousins in Salinas for the same reason.

Farmers are all gamblers. They are the greatest of optimists. My dad bet the farm on the weather and the markets every day of his working life. An entire summers investment and work could be wiped in an early morning hour by frost or rising waters from the same creek that fed his crops.

When you are a kid every day holds the promise of some adventure. Rainy winter days were the most exciting, fraught with the possibility of perhaps, some disaster.

As little children we were eager listeners when family told stories of creeks flooding. The Arroyo Grande going over its banks, drowning crops under layers of mud carried down the creek from the High Mountain area above the Ranchita, Huff’s Hole and upper Lopez canyon. Joined by Tar Springs creek just below Gulartes, the careening water would swirl, twisting in upon itself while parts of broken trees submerged and resurfaced like wooden submarines. Through the narrows at the Harris bridge, close by the Machado’s and the Gregory’s, the sound carried to our home almost a mile away. A rumbling, low bass, with a curious rhythmic pace, things being torn apart and slammed together with terrific violence.

Ed Taylor, George Shannon and just behind, John Loomis and George Oliver

My father sitting in the semi-darkness, smoking and drinking coffee, worried over the rise of the waters, a scene mirrored in other kitchens as farmers throughout our valley waited for dawn to see the how high the creeks were. Bundled up in our coats and riding the front seat of the pickup, warm and snug against my dad, we rode the dawn patrol as he made the rounds of all the turnouts where the water could be seen. Cecchetti’s bridge crossing, The Harris bridge, under the spans at Mason and Bridge Streets and the crossing at the site of the Cienega school, hard by the old Oliver Taylor house. The photo above, taken in 1954, clearly shows the concern on my fathers face as he watches the flood waters just above the old highway 1 bridge. The water is just below the top of the dike and Ed Taylor’s ground is just on the opposite side of the creek. Ed is listening to John Loomis who is pointing just upstream where the flood is about go over the bank.

The Arroyo Grande, The morning after, 1914. Crown Hill in the background

Groups of worried farmers gathered at each turnout to assess the damage and speculate whether the water was rising or falling. This was no academic exercise. If the creek rose enough to top the banks, farm fields would flood. Crops could not recover, either drowned or covered with a slurry of mud, choking them to death. Any part of the valley which had heavy soil, such as the Dune Lakes area, could take months to dry making it impossible to farm at all. To the farmers on the ground which made up the old La Cienega Rancho, flooding was a disaster of the first order. The ranch that was Spencer Record’s, the Taylor acreage, could be destroyed in a few minutes for once she was over her banks there was no stopping her. Witness the washout at Branch Street in 1914 created by the little creek out of Corbit Canyon. Imagine the effort it took to replace the ground in the days before powered machines. Every bit of the dirt was brought in by horse and wagon, one shovel full at a time.

1914, looking down Branch Street, the old Herald building first on the right.

In those days, the flooding creek literally plowed it’s way downstream, rooting out the willows and sometimes entire Sycamore trees which scoured the undergrowth along the banks, cleaning the channel for its entire length. In the days before the dam was built this was an annual cycle that allowed a free flowing stream in the summer and fall where swimming and fishing in the farmers dams was an annual sport for boys and girls who ran free like semi-tamed animals, migrating up and down stream as they would. At our place it was the dam behind our farm, or George Cecchetti Senior’s just above the bridge where we would go after school. It is still today, a short downhill coast from the old Branch school to the creek. Town kids swam at the gauge below the old high school, just above the old railroad bridge. Most of us learned to swim this way. And of course we weren’t by any means the first. Generations of Arroyo Grande kids once swam there. My grandfather Jack Shannon told stories of swimming in the slough at the foot of Printz Road. Arch Beckett’s lake it was called. My dad and uncle had a small hole on Shannon Creek near where they lived.

Jack and George Shannon 1920, taking a dip in Shannon Creek.

My uncle Jackie on the left and my dad on the right, taken in the front yard of my great-grandfather’s house on the old Nipomo road now known as El Campo, about to set out for a dip in 1920. You can just see the gravel drive at the left and the bushes along the little creek. Today this flows behind Arroyo Grande High School where it was re-routed when the Poole tract was built in the 1930’s. It could be just as well be my brother and I, 35 years later.

I can still remember Hazel Talley, in our kitchen talking to my mom about how frantic she was when her oldest son Donald, went down the creek with Bob Rowe, leaving from the Rowe’s house, putting in at the creek on the Waller’s farm and racing downstream to the ocean in an inner tube during a big flood year in 1959. The flooding creek was a meat grinder of logs, whole trees, old car bodies and whatever kind of junk had been thrown in it. Poor Hazel could just imagine what could have happened to her son, who of course, being a boy, thought only of the adventure.

High water above the highway 1 bridge 1954

We have lost this annual cycle to the dam. Water no longer flows in the summer or winter. The creek is choked with willows and wild blackberry woven together in an impenetrable mat by poison oak vines. Children no longer play in their fathers little ponds and todays farmers needn’t agonize through the night wondering if their fields will be there in the morning. Safer, yes, but what has been lost to us is irreplaceable. Fish no longer swim upstream for little boys to catch and our fathers disasters can no longer be, there is a certain sadness here.

Few kids today can know the pleasure of cuddling with their mothers on the couch of a rainy day, before television and reading the Hardy Boys while she leafed through the pages of the Ladies Home Journal. Dad in the kitchen staring out the big picture window at the weather, something he did nearly every day of his life.

Michael Shannon lives in Arroyo Grande, California. He writes so his children will know who they came from.

The Library

By Michael Shannon.

There is a misconception about reading and education in early California. It is easy to think that our Rancheros were illiterate in Spanish andor English. The men and women who pioneered the Cow Counties were fixed on the idea that their children should be educated. Francis Branch, William Dana, Mariano Vallejo and Isaac Sparks set up schools in their homes for the children who lived on their vast Ranchos. Each of the many Mexican land grants had libraries of books imported from Mexico, Spain, The United States, England and other countries around the world. The impression that California was a backwards, howling wilderness could not be farther from the truth. Trade with China, the Phillipines and Russia was common. Francis Branch and his family ate off plates imported from China and drank from goblets that came from Mexico and Spain. Their boots and shoes came around the horn from New England. Contrary to Richard Henry Dana’s characterization of the Californios as a backward and a foolish people they were in fact wealthy, well read and sophisticated in the ways of the country they lived in. A cousin of Captain William Dana, Richard, a wealthy Harvard student taking a gap year for his health was, he felt, a superior being and felt no compunction about mocking and denigrating the people of California. His book, Two Years Before the Mast is an instructive look into California culture in the early 19th century but it must be viewed through the lens of the writer and his prejudices.

Other than the priests who managed the Missions and had libraries of religious tomes which no one other than the fathers would have been allowed to read, the first books introduced to San Luis and Santa Barbara counties would have come from the first pioneering families. For three quarters of a century all the libraries in the counties were either private or small collections of books maintained by the little towns themselves.

Until Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie, was, one of Americas most ruthless, loathed and hated tycoons of the late 19th century. Connecting him to the libraries that bear his name, my father explained that he built them because he was trying to beat the Devil. Spending part of his massive fortune on free public libraries, a novel and very liberal idea at the time might buy his way into heaven. Regardless, those libraries set the tone for a major change in public education.

Carnegie libraries were built along the coast of California in Lompoc, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles and Santa Barbara from 1905 until 1917. Our town, Arroyo Grande had a very small library tucked into a small and old wooden building on Branch Street. It was the towns first and was located right next to the space that would later house Dr. Pence’s office. It later moved, sometime in the Twenties to another small space on Mason Street roughly where Andy David’s law office was. It migrated to a utility building behind the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall before WWII which is where it was when I was a kid.

Santa Maria Carnegie Free Library, 1909

I cannot remember the time when I didn’t have a library card. My mother started taking us to the little library behind the American Legion hall on Orchard street when I was just a little guy. It was the domain of Mrs Bernice Kitchell. She was the first librarian ever I knew. She was not too tall, slight in stature, almost too thin, wore spectacles and always had her hair up. She was very nice to little boys and guided us around the tiny rooms, for the library was, at that time, just a temporary building. Being a temporary building, it is, of course still there sixty five years later. At the time it was just a simple city library, not the kind you see today, but financed by the town. Mrs Kitchell was of course paid a pittance and in return she did every job required or not. She scrounged books from everywhere she could and it wasn’t unusual to find in a checked out book someones name written on the flyleaf. Most likely someone you or your parents knew. There was a muted mysteriousness to the place brought on by the smell of books, both the sharp fresh smell of a new book and the musty timeless smell of the old. The air was redolent of the mixture and combined with the pale, dusty air, a perfect setting for the child exploring for just the book to take him to a new place and the adventure there.

Thanks to Mrs Kitchell I’ve been everywhere, both on this world and all the others. I ran through the jungle with the Lost Boys, I’ve drifted down the mighty Mississippi with Huck and Nigger Jim, Followed Tarzan through the great, lost elephant graveyard on his quest for the jewels of Opar. I waited until I saw the whites of their eyes on Breed’s Hill, Studied with Frank Merriwell at Yale and crossed swords with Pedro De Vargas, the Captain from Castile.

Before I was out of grammar school I had read hundreds of books. I used to take books to school and read after my lessons in the little two room schoolhouse that my brothers and I went to. Both of my teachers, Mrs Brown and the sainted Miss Elizabeth Holland knew I was reading when I should have been doing something else because I would open my desk top and read a few lines while I pretended to be looking for something.

Mrs Edith Brown and Miss Elizabeth Holland at Branch Grade School

One of the things that worked to my advantage was that each of the teachers taught four complete grades mixed in each of the two classrooms. They taught each grade level for part of the day while the other students did assigned work or read from the school library. A student had time to explore their education without having each classroom minute orchestrated. This worked to my advantage because I could complete my school work and then go adventuring in a book. What has turned out to be the greatest reading lesson of all has been the ability to read in context. I was simply too lazy to go to the big Webster’s which weighed a full fifteen pounds and look up words I didn’t know, so I figured them out by the way they worked in sentences. I can say that this is the best thing I learned in school.

Not many of these little schools exist anymore. They were places where the teachers set the curriculum with a little help from the school board. Many of the school board members at Branch had gone to the school themselves. Other than a small stipend from the county schools office they were on their own as to school improvements, curriculum, books, playground equipment and anything else that was required. We had no band, and no organized sports program. Everything we did was dependent on the parents and teachers. Believe it or not, some of our text books were the same books used by students more than a generations before us. It seems strange today but those books covered social studies or history up to the 1930’s and the rest everybody knew because they had lived it. It was first hand knowledge.

The photo above shows some texts from Branch. None is newer than 1936. The Growth of the American People has two names written on the flyleaf, Joe P. Roza and William Quaresma. Al Coehlo’s name is in the California Progress textbook. I knew these men as friends of my father and went to grammar school and high schol with Al’s children. These books were still in use in the fifties when I studied there.

I figured not long ago that I’ve read somewhere north of ten thousand books in my lifetime. Incubated in the Library and School, I have Mrs Kitchell, Katie Sullivan McNeil, Edith Brown and Elizabeth Holland to thank for starting me On the Long Road.

When I was in High School, it was Margaret Sullivan and Florence McNeil, members of some of the oldest Arroyo Grande families. Mrs. Don Rowe too, they were always there when you needed them. Decades later when I was a teaching High School the fabulous Kathy Womble prowled behind her desk at Nipomo High School always on the lookout for kids she could nurture. We also had the fabulous Feryl Furlin who was so helpful and organized she was scary.

Librarians care for books and they want you to care also. Nearly a million books are published in the United States each year. They are all written for you to read so you’d better hurry up.

Internet Memes are useless in building knowledge on any subject. Their only redeeming factor is that they may spark some little curiosity to know more. Go see your librarian and do it now.

Cover Photo: Margaret Sheldon and Florence McNeil, Arroyo Grande High School Library 1962.

Michael Shannon lives in Arroyo Grande California. Reading has taken him around the world and into space both literally and figuratively. The number of library cards he has held from different places looks like a deck of cards.

Cards: Arroyo Grande Community Library, NTC San Diego, Balboa Naval Hospital San Diego, Naval Base Pearl Harbor, NSA RVN, Long Beach, San Diego, La Mesa, Hilo Hawaii, Honolulu, Haleiwa, Waikiki branch, San Luis Obispo Black Gold and San Luis County library system libraries and Shell Beach Community Library. Member of the Friends of the Library San Luis County.

Letters

By: Michael Shannon

My grandmother Hall insisted that her children write her once a week and I remember my mom sitting at the kitchen table with a freshly opened letter before her and penning a reply for the return post. There was nothing out of the ordinary in these letters, the cast of characters nearly always the same, the day to day things that people communicate to one another. The said nothing profound, just passed along the news of the family and friends they had in common.

My mom and dad were married in 1943. During the war people didn’t make much of a fuss about a wedding. For a young farmer and his bride there would’nt be a fancy trip to an exotic location, ration cards and jam-packed troop trains would see to that. Being modest people that kind of difficulty didn’t bother them, they just took a little trip to visit relatives and friends.

Barbara and George Shannon on their wedding day

The following letter is from mom to her new mother-in-law Annie Shannon in Arroyo Grande. Writing from the Olympic Hotel on Eddy St, she described some of the sights and sounds of wartime San Francisco. San Francisco would have been familiar to my dad and his parents. My grandparents had both lived in the bay area from 1904 to 1918 and my dad had studied at Cal Berkeley in the early 30’s.

The subtext of the letter revolves around the events unfolding in the city and in the family in 1943. Mom mentions leaving the car in the garage. Rationing of gasoline had taken effect in December of 1940 and though my grandparents dairy and my dad’s military deferment as a farmer gave them access to more rationed items than usual, gasoline and rubber for the cars and milk trucks were in short supply. You could only own 5 tires per car or truck, having extras was not allowed. Dad said they would drive the tires until there was no rubber left, just the fabric cord or the inner liner was left. You had to take in the old tire in order to buy a new one. The first nonfood item rationed was rubber. The Japanese had seized plantations in the Dutch East Indies that produced 90% of America’s raw rubber. President Roosevelt called on citizens to help by contributing scrap rubber to be recycled, old tires, old rubber raincoats, garden hose, rubber shoes and bathing caps. A person or business was issued a ration card and sticker for the car which allowed a specific amount of a given item to be purchased. The green ‘B’ sticker was for driving deemed essential to the war effort; farmers, for example, could purchase eight gallons a week.

In movies taken at their wedding, the car, a 1936 Chevy coupe has the sticker plainly visible on the windshield. They drove from Arroyo Grande to San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley and my great aunt Sadies home, then up to Watt’s Valley to see Mariel and Ray, and finally, home, a distance of over 600 miles today and longer then, before our modern roads. They must have used about four weeks of gasoline, a great indulgence, but of course, such is the course of true love.

The newlyweds at Mariel and Rays’ in Watts Valley, March 1943

This was the first time that dad met both of them. Dad immediately recognized a kindred spirit in Ray and began a friendship that lasted all their lives. Mariel, though, was enormously pregnant with their first child, Bruce, and had what we might say was the proclivity to pass enormous amounts of gas at any time. What an introduction to new family that must have been. I wish she was around so I could ask her about it. I can just hear her laugh, haw haw haw.

Both my folks mention the crowding. Photos of the city at the time show the sidewalks jammed with sailors and Marines. There is a March photo of the Palace hotel dance floor so crowded that it is a wonder anyone can move. Mom and dad went there to dance and he said it was so expensive they could only afford two cups of coffee.

Saturday afternoon, San Francisco, 1943. SF Muni photo.

In March 1943, the battle for Guadalcanal had just been declared won, and the buildup for the Marine invasion of Tarawa was underway and San Francisco, indeed, the entire bay area was fantastically crowded with men and ships. Add to the population the workers at the wartime shipyards of the East Bay, the naval bases packed around various cities in San Francisco bay and it is easy to understand why the sidewalks were so crowded. It’s a wonder they could get a hotel room at all.

Ships at anchor San Francisco Bay in early 1943

Though unstated, worry about family members and friends serving overseas was certainly a concern. Two of my dad’s cousins were serving in the Pacific as well as his closest friend, Sgt. Harry Chapek who die in France. My mom’s uncle Marion, cousin Donald and her brother Robert were also in the military. Her cousin Donald Polhemus was to be lost at sea in December of 1944. Arroyo Grande was a very small town in 1943 and most young men of draft age were already in the service or soon would be. My grandmother Shannon saved an old Arroyo Grande Herald Recorder newspaper from 1943 and in it there is a list of local service men and women that runs four full pages. It would have been impossible not to know someone in the service. In fact, a local boy, Jack Scruggs died on the Arizona. I went to school with a boy whose father was trapped on the capsized Utah.

The image that opens this story is V-Mail from my dad’s friend Jim Moore who he grew up with. It’s just the kind of folksy newsy letter the family received from the many young men they knew serving overseas. Jim was a Navy Lieutenant serving on LST-398 in the western Pacific and though the ship had and would continue to serve in extremely hostile waters, the mail itself was just as casual as it would be if he was writing home from college. The truth of his life at war was something best kept secret, not only because it was but because Jim’s thoughts were at home, a place he could not be. Every V-Mail we have is like that. Home life, a place they couldn’t be.

Jim Moore’s ship. LST-398, Nov. 1944. US Navy photo. Guadalcanal, New Britain, New Guinea, Leyte and Guam campaigns.

The passing of the art of letter writing, I think is a kind of tragedy. Instant communication is just that, instant, but its gone just as quickly. Much is lost. Here then is the text of mom’s honeymoon letter.

March 21, 1943

Hello Everybody,

George says “You write,” so here goes. We’re having a wonderful time. We’ve left the car in the hotel garage so haven’t used any gasoline.

The Emporium Department Store. Now Bloomingdales.

Yesterday we walked one end of Market Street to the other. We went through The Emporium, looked at everything and didn’t spend a cent. Then we were so tired we went back to the hotel and took a nap. It wasn’t a Sunday afternoon but we took one anyway.

The Olympic Hotel still stands today. Its near the the city center, three blocks from Union Square.

Last night we made reservations at The Palace for dinner and dined with the best of the, maybe I should say, the rest of the upper crust. We had a lovely dinner. Steak. We watched the floor show and danced and everything. The show was on ice. You know, skaters. They were pretty good too.

The dining room in the Palace Hotel.

What I liked best, tho, besides the food, was just watching the people.

There are more people here on the streets at night than I’ve ever seen before, even in Los Angeles.

George called Sadie yesterday, and we’re going there for dinner at one. It’s 11:30 now, so we’d better get going.

We’re leaving the big city tomorrow, and going to Fresno. Home on Wednesday. It’s nice here, but Arroyo Grande is so much better.

We haven’t had time to write to anyone else, so say hello.

We’ll see you Wednesday or Thursday. Thank you for being so nice to me.

Lots of love,

Barbara and George

(Mr and Mrs George Shannon)

Looks nice, huh?

PS (This is in dad’s hand)

Tell little Jug (Dad’s Brother Jackie) to run our farm the way I told him or I will demote him when we return. This is the busiest place I have ever seen. You can hardly walk down Market St either day or night. We are getting ready to leave for Sadie’s for dinner so must go.

Love, George

The phrase “Thank you for being so nice to me,” resonates. Mom grew up as an oilfield brat, never settled for long in one place and to be folded into a family and community that had deep roots must have seemed a miracle to her. She now had, as small towns do, friends by the score and a family that would cherish her all of her life. My grandparents adored her for who she was and she would be the only daughter-in-law they would ever have.

Michael Shannon is a writer, sailor, surfer, world traveler and grew up in the little town he writes about.

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… And a River Runs Through It.

Michael Shannon.

On Norman MacLean’s beautiful written canvas, life is viewed through a lens focused on contemplation and life related to fly fishing on the rivers that flow down from the eastern Rocky mountains. MacLean’s father was a minister. He spoke of all Christ’s disciples being fisherman on the Sea of Galilee and left his boy’s to assume that the disciples were all fly fisherman and the favorite, John, a dry-fly fisherman.

Uncle Jackie Shannon, 1924. Family Photo.

And so it was in our house. My father George and his older brother Jack were raised in a time when boys had the free run of the country and fishing the creeks of the Arroyo Grande, Stoney Creek, The Lopez and such elegantly named spots as Huff’s hole was their delight. We grew up on tales of the Rainbow, Golden, Cutthroat and Brown trout, coaxed from their cold lair beneath the riffles of the San Joaquin, Kaweah, and Kern rivers. We heard stories about how it was camping and fishing around the meadows of Dinkey Creek, named for a dog who bit and held on to the hind leg of a charging Grizzly, giving time for the ranchers to grab their rifles and kill the rampaging beast. The creek and the area around what is now McKinley Grove were named in honor of the bravery of this little dog, “No bigger than a rabbit.

The Holy Grail, though, was the mighty Kings River and particularly the deep, dark gorge of the middle fork. The middle fork rushes down a 37 mile long, very deep and narrow canyon to its confluence with the South fork to form the main stem of the Kings.

Confluence of the South Fork and the Middle Fork, Kings River. Family Photo

My dad and uncle started going there in the early 30’s and were still doing so when I was a boy. The tales they told of fording the river, bone chilling cold even in the early fall when the water was sometimes low enough to ford seemed to me to be akin to the adventures of the bravos who roamed the west before it was tamed. My dad told of tying a rope around his waist and swimming across, being swept downstream for a hundred yards before making the far bank. Up the canyon, beneath the 1800 foot cliff known as Valhalla, which my dad always called the Waldorf after the hotel in New York, they would make camp under the willows on a nice sandbank shaded by huge granite boulders. In the darkness before dawn, coffee brewed in a can on a small fire woke you enough to get on the river before the sun was on the water. As the fly hatch began in the warming sun, providing breakfast for the trout, they fished up the river toward the Gorge of Despair below Tehipite Dome.

The Canyon of the Middle Fork.

This was before the time of fancy camping rigs. They each took a simple rucksack stuffed with some loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly, one frying pan, a jar of butter for frying fish and salt and pepper. Tie on a sleeping bag, battered old tin canteen from WWI and what else did you need? Rubberized waders, nope, too heavy. Hiking boots, not likely, Old high top tennis shoes gripped the wet rocks better. Creels, maybe, but it was cloth, not wicker. You just needed a small round tin to put your flies in, some extra leader and a pocket knife. The only expensive and cherished item was the pole. Incredibly slim and tapered to a fine point, the silk wound bamboo fly pole was and is one of mans most beautiful creations and in the hands of a master fisherman, a thing to behold. My father was such. Even after a lifetime of farming, working with hands scarred and thickened by heavy work in all kinds of conditions he could make his fly rod sing in a ballet seldom equalled.

I made my first trip at thirteen. The Model T was long gone of course, but not much else had changed. The gear and the provisions remained the same and I have to say that peanut butter and jelly are hard to beat after a long day in the sun hiking, first down to the river from the road at Cherry Gap, crossing the South fork of the King’s to get to the trail head where you begin the long trek up the middle fork, walking old miners trails along cliffs 500 feet above the river below. In the late fifties none of the trails were maintained by the forest service and could be really rough and treacherous after a long winter covered in snow and ice.

On the King’s

I made my bones on this river, learning to roll cast under the willows that lined the river, never letting my shadow show on the water, always working upstream so as to leave no scent for the fish waiting patiently in the deep water under the massive boulders where the river eddied, sweeping a fishes dinner right to his doorstep. You had to make the dry fly dance, skip and hop along the surface to fool these fish, they were the ultimate quarry, native, raised on the river, never having been fished before. Some years there was absolutely no evidence of any other human being having been up this canyon. In all the years I fished with my dad and uncle Jack, we never saw another human being.

Mike and George Shannon, September, 1967. Barbara Shannon Photo.

We made our last trip together in 1967. My father and my uncle grew too old and I, I went off to new adventures in other places. Looking back on those times I can’t help but think of what I have lost. It seems to me that all of the best memories of family deal with some kind of loss, don’t they?

We lay half under the willows a night sheltered and warmed by the gigantic granite boulders radiating the heat of the day, looking up at a sky with no hint of light other than the billions of stars visible between the soaring granite peaks above. There, there in the center, the Milky Way, the great crossing over bridge to journeys end where my father has gone.

Sometimes it’s as if life has been made and not happened.

Michael Shannon is a dry fly fisherman of course.

Aunt Mickeys

The lives of descendants of Californias Cow Counties.

By Michael Shannon.

My aunt Mickey, God what a woman. She was my grandparents oldest, born in a little yellow house in Arroyo Grande’s Bee Canyon. In 1917 babies were still born at home and for many years that bed was passed around by family members who produced even more babies. But, that’s another story. This story is about my aunt Mariel, bless her heart. She was absolutely one of a kind.

Mariel Hall, Santa Barbara HS class of 1934.

On mom’s side of the family there were several places we would go to visit. She had many uncles and aunts and cousins but our favorite by far was my Uncle Ray and Aunt Mickey’s. They lived in the Fresno county foothills in a little valley called Watt’s.They were mountain people, not necessarily by birth but certainly by inclination. According to my dad my uncle Ray knew the name of every stream in the Sierra and how to get there. He owned a small cattle ranch in the valley on which he and aunt Mickey and their two boys lived. To get there from our house we had to cross the San Joaquin valley on which we as kids measured our progress by the sight of the endless cotton fields of Westlake farms, waiting to see the Pacific Southwest Building in Fresno, the tallest building we had ever seen. We passed by the tomato processing plant where my mom said everything that came out of the fields was mixed to make catsup, even mice. She told that story every time we passed that factory for years. I haven’t cared for catsup since.

Once out of Fresno we continued up into the foothills on winding roads, each more crooked than the last, finally turning off onto a dirt road where we had to open and close three different cattle gates, drive through The creek, splashing water all the way and finally arriving at the gate below the old house. The house was pretty old , built at the turn of the century, but it was big, surrounded by a covered porch as was the custom in the days before air conditioning. If you wanted that, Uncle Ray had to drive to Sanger and buy a 50 lb block of ice, haul it home put in a washtub covered by a burlap sack on put the fan behind it to cool the air. The heat didn’t bother us kids much, we spent much of the time in the creek anyway.

My uncle Ray was a short man, skinny when he was young and had curly black hair. He was 13 years older than my aunt, about 4 inches shorter and 60 pounds lighter. He went to riding horseback when he was four, rode until the day he died, and was so thin and bowlegged that he looked for all the world like a wishbone. He was a horseman, something all us kids knew by instinct, much different than the TV type we regularly saw. He was known amongst his peers as “Powerhouse” for a feat of riding without parallel in the history of the mountain folk. In the morning, after he made breakfast he would walk down the little draw in front of the house to the barn on the other side, saddle his horse, ride back to the house and tie it to the gatepost, ready if he needed it.

Aunt Mickey, Aunt Meta and cousin Jimmy, Watts Valley 1947

Uncle Ray was a cowboy when young, and a rancher till he died. He knew no other life, wanted no other life and as far as I know he was perfectly content. He loved to tease. He had a nickname for everyone. He called my mom “Sis” even though she wasn’t. He called me “Shebang,” my brother Jerry “Jeb,” and my little brother Cayce, “Festus.” His own boys “jughead and “knot head.” You can figure out which was which.

My aunt Mickey was the funniest woman I ever knew. When I was a boy she was my dream of the perfect aunt. How she loved us. She always wore Ruby red lipstick and when we arrived for a visit she would say, “Come and give your aunt mickey a kiss” and scoop us up for a hug and a kiss. She was a full figured woman so it was a little like being smothered in a big feather pillow. She gave us a big old smack which left red lipstick on your mouth and she would threaten you if you tried to wipe it of. We weren’t allowed to wipe off HER kisses.

L-R Jeb, Sis, Festus, Shebang, Jughead and Knothead. 1953

My folks, my dad’s family were quiet people. Sober, hard-working, Presbyterian. Handshaking was the preferred greeting, you could give my grandmother Annie a kiss on the cheek, but that was it. The were all farmers and were a sober lot, and of course they talked about farming; a lot. And I mean, A LOT. You have no idea how much there is to know about raising potatoes.

The Long’s though, were yellers. They yelled when they were laughing, they yelled at each other, the dogs, the cows, the pickup, the car, and they yelled about the neighbors, anything really that needed yelling at.

Their life was a continuous series of catastrophes. The damned pickup had a flat tire, the neighbors bull had jumped the fence, the roof still leaked, the electricity shut off just before company was expected. The pump lost prime, no water, oh God, the heifer was in the garden again; there was always something.

One year we arrived just in time to see my aunt racing across yard chased by the soon to be Christmas turkey. She barely made it to the back porch screen door. She made very good time for a hefty woman.

And that’s the way things were. Life at aunt Mickey’s and uncle Rays was simply chaotic. If dinner was to be at one, we ate at four. If the turkey, the late, great speedster, was ready the potatoes weren’t. Someone had forgotten to buy cranberries and Ray and my dad would head for Hunphrey’s Station, a 15 mile round trip on narrow winding roads, probably as much to escape the chaos as anything. They might even take the whiskey bottle in order to calm down.

After dinner, the dishes washed and put away, the dishes had cattle, lariats and brands on them of course, the kids were put to bed in various places around the house, stacked on beds, laid in the hall, the lucky ones though, wrapped in blankets and laid on the living room floor. Now came the exciting part, because we knew the adults would soon be through in the kitchen and would be coming to the front room to visit. This side of the family never wasted time on talk of farming, oh no, they talked about things we never learned in school and were certainly never discussed at our kitchen table. The whiskey bottle went around and though we struggled to stay awake we finally drifted off with tales of whose son had gotten drunk and put the car in a ditch, who was having an operation and why, the brutal details, heard from Frances McMurtrey, who heard it from Ruby Glass about so and so’s daughter.

Uncle Ray on Charm, the horse who bit, at the front gate.

What fun for boys, and we never wanted those visits to end. But they did end and those happy days are but a memory now. Most of the folks have long since gone to their reward and I miss them more than you can know.

When we were little, when we said a naughty word, my mother gave us “heart medicine.” One time when we were leaving “Watts Valley,” on the long road home my brother Jerry said, “Mom, I bet Uncle Ray sure has to take a lot of heart medicine,” she didn’t say anything for a long while, then she simply said, “Honey, your uncle Ray is the salt of the earth.”

I didn’t know what she meant then, but I do now. The Salt of the Earth, and they all were. They might have been a little rough, but they were honest, faithful, hard workers, honorable to a fault. They were the backbone of America. Their yes was yes, there no was no, they settled a deal with a handshake, they were loyal to their families beyond measure. They had a lot to teach us growing up and we had a lot to learn, some time I wish I had paid more attention.

Ray Clarence Long, 1902-1976. Authors photo

Michael Shannon, “Shebang” along with the rest of his family loved Aunt Mickey and Uncle Ray beyond measure. He’s not likely to ever see their kind again. That is a sad thing.

At The Table

Michael Shannon

In 1918 my grandparents, Jack and Annie Shannon came home. Home for both of them was southern San Luis County. This family event is the linchpin of our story.

When I was a boy we lived in the kitchen. Our little house, built at the turn of the century was the heart of the home. As were most homes built at the time it featured none of the devices we take for granted today. No insulation, no central heat, and no weatherstripping. Small houses were the norm before the war and ours, originally just three rooms had slowly been added to over time. To get to the back bedroom you had to pass through each of the other rooms. Porch, kitchen, living room, my parents bedroom, bathroom and finally, my room, a sunny room with large windows in which I imagined my future life as boys will do.

What my brothers and I learned at the kitchen table has shaped our lives. The Japanese philosopher Masonabu Fukuoka has said,”The simple hearth of the small farm is the true center of our universe.” This quote describes the experience of family all over the world, something we all have in common. I don’t know of any kids that I grew up with don’t share this experience and to this day I can see them as they were.

The photo above, taken in 1920 at my great-grandparents house on west Main St in Santa Maria shows my father and my uncle Jack with two friends. My father, George steers the trike on the right and my uncle Jack, his older brother by two years stands behind him. My grandparents lived with Annie’s parents for a time until they could move onto Annie’s ranch just south of Arroyo Grande.

The Samuel Gray home on Guadalupe Road in Santa Maria. Built by oil wells and many sheep. photo 1938.

We didn’t have a televison until I was eight. The most exciting thing was watching the test pattern because we somehow knew that hidden behind it were many earthly delights. We were partly right about that. There was only one available channel anyway and my parents didn’t see any need for one, the TV was for us mostly. They had the radio. They had been radio people all of their lives and it was the familiar thing. It had all the basic elements of TV anyway as television was really nothing more than radio with pictures. They read. We had Life, Look and the Readers Digest magazines scattered about. Part of my education were those old Reader’s Digests with their puzzles, riddles and a vast variety of stories. I found Bennett Cerf there and many of the great writets of the day. My grandmother belonged to the book of the month club as did many of my mothers friends so there was always a book around. We still have old Book of the Month editions with the names of friends on the flyleaf. Gladys Loomis’s heirs are probably still looking for them.

Most of my abiity to read comes from comic books. For a time we had a neighbor who rented Joaquin Machado’s house which was back by the creek near the old Evans place. The renter was a comic book distributor and each month one of his jobs was to collect all the back issues of comics not sold. Once a month my dad would come into the kitchen with a big bundle of comic books tied up with cotton string. It was a tiny Christmas. We devoured them and couldn’t wait for the next 30 days to pass. It seemed a tragedy when the man moved away.

Farm and ranch life in the forties and fifties was pretty isolated. Farm kids, for the most part spent their time either in small one or two room schoolhouses learning from books, in some case decades old taught by teachers who balanced the needs of up to four grades at one time. Kids were not separated by grade as they are today. All eight grades studied and played together. If you imagine schools today there are self-contained boxes for each grade level. We had all the kids in one box. Teachers ran curriculum and the parents were the school board members, janitors and school bus drivers. It was a family affair. A six year old had to handle a ground ball from a thirteen year old. It made little kids deal with older ages and those older ages learn to accept the little guys. Not a bad system.

4-H was the only club activity which was OK as nearly every kid’s father was a farmer or worked for a farmer and it was assumed by kids that they would do what dad did. It was not an unusual thing to see see Mrs Fernamburg working in their walnut orchard or Elsie Cecchetti out feeding her calves. I can still see Helen Kawaguchi sitting up on the seat of the old red Farmall wheel tractor slowly trekking back and forth across their fields. She always wore a big straw hat favored by the Japanese ladies when they were in the fields.

Fields were a descriptive word much like a compass and used to indicate direction. There was “Down the fields” and “Up the field.” Mom might say daddy is down the field which told you he was far away from the house. He would tell you that the irrigation pipe to be moved was up the field meaning it was away from the house too. Everyone understood this. Other directions told you he was with the celery crew or the broccoli cutters. Markers were all around. There were the Walnut trees, Lester Sullivans barn or “Old Man Parrish’s” orchard. I crossed Branch Mill Road at the old Branch bear pit behind Ramon Branches adobe house when I went to visit Kenny Talley, my closest friend. The four corners was where we caught the school bus, which wasn’t a real bus but served the purpose of getting kids to school. It had retired “Shanks Mare” in 1949. Kids didn’t have to walk anymore. The school bell which had once rung to tell moms it was time to send the kids still rang but really just for tradition I suppose.

The old Kawaguchi home. in the 1890’s

Schools were the center of social life. They were the meeting halls, the place where Halloween was celebrated, Christmas plays performed and potlucks held for no particular reason other than to get together. Mom’s made the costumes, painted the decorations and formed the audience cheering us on as we walked in our circle in Mrs. Edith Browns lower grade classroom. We might get a prize, or should I saw mom might get a prize. My own mother was a master at costumes. I was a robot, my brother Jerry and I were a horse once. as the older brother I started of as the head but was reduced in rank when I passed a smidge of gas during a rehearsal in our living room. It was worth it though, winning a round in war between brothers always was. Still is.

The world was small. A schoolroom, the little town of Arroyo Grande, which, for kids meant The Western Auto and The Variety Store, thats were the toys were. Bennett’s Grocery where Muriel and Rusty were free with the candy jar, the clothing stores where my mother worked. Louise Ralphs where all the ladies wore perfume, still the best and most fragrant place I can remember, Zeyen’s clothing store where the Levis were stacked to the ceiling and permeated the building with their peculiar new clothes odor. Mom worked there and served two generations of kids.

During the Gay Nineties festival celebration my grandfather sang in a barbershop quartet with Gordon Bennet, and Bill O’Conner from the stage of the old Mission theater. The Rotarians entertained with jokes and skits. Thats them below in all their sartorial finery doing the Lord knows what.

Vaudeville Blackouts in the Mission Theater. Harvest Festival/Gay Nineties, 1950’s. Family photo

The moms entertained too. Being shy was not too bad when you knew everyone in the audience.

1965, Women were still know by their husbands name.

The world was small and lined with soft things that didn’t sting or hurt too much. A kiss, some spit or a daub of mud cured most things. Kids felt safe there. It would be gone soon enough, mores the pity.

The kitchens in our homes weave through the narrative of our lives and form the foundation of the stories of our lives.

Michael Shannon writes and would still prefer to live in the kitchen if he could.

	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

Traveling by Train

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The Handshake.

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OLD SCHOOL.

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THE GREAT PEA WAR

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Rainy Day

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The Library

Mrs Edith Brown and Miss Elizabeth Holland at Branch Grade School

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Letters

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… And a River Runs Through It.

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Aunt Mickeys

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At The Table

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Mrs Edith Brown and Miss Elizabeth Holland at Branch Grade School

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