THE HISTORIAN

Written by Michael Shannon

A historian seeks the truth of it. He is neither blinded by the glare of opinion nor does he ever stop seeking a final answer which he knows in his heart is not or ever will be there. He must always dig deeper. His life is to live in worlds which no longer exist. His life is to parade before mankind the true blocks that built the world we live in.

My friend the historian has pawed through the dustbins of scrap, piecing together the puzzle of lives lived. Letter, journals, documents, film are all grist for the mill. A fabulist he is not.

He understands that there is never a final answer. There is always something to be discovered and his hope is the honour will be his. That is his calling.

Not long ago in a comment string on an article he posted, someone commented that what he said was interesting but not written by a “Real” historian. A “real” historian, which implied he was not.

I’ve been thinking about the comment and the not so subtle dig it implies so I though I’d explain what a real historian is.

You are. Did you keep your grandmothers Christmas cards? How about your mothers letters to her sister. Perhaps the journal your great uncle kept when he was stationed in Vladivostok during WWI. Do you still have the box with some black and white unidentified photos, the ones with the deckled edges and a coffee stain? Does it have an old crinkled embroidered handkerchief and at the bottom and a deed to the ranch made out in 1924. Do you still have your high school yearbook? How about a set of Compton’s Encyclopedia from 1930. All of that, my friend is history. Keepers of history long for those things. Mundane objects are the things history is made of.

True history which is known to all “real” historians is made up of the things that did not get thrown away. We know of the war between the kingdoms of Elam and Assyria because a record of the conflict was kept and survived nearly three thousand years buried in the sand of southwestern Iran. In Great Britain the site of the Roman fort at Vindolanda, a part of Hadrian’s Wall built to keep illegal Picts from what is now Scot Land from entering Roman Britain. Just like today its cost was enormous and it didn’t work.These finds record military expenditures; daily bookkeeping which hasn’t changed in nearly 1,900 years which you would recognize if you ever served in the military, have been found. From it we learned that Roman soldiers wore underwear, something completely unknown until today. The documents are personal messages to and from members of the garrison of Vindolanda, their families, and their slaves. Highlights of the tablets include an invitation to a birthday party held in about 100 AD, which is perhaps the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman. It features her signature, the first known example of a woman signing her name, Claudia Severa. The commander’s wife was writing to Sulpicia Lepidina. How different is that than your grandmothers invitations. You can easily see it’s the same thing. That is its historic significance.

“Please come to my party Sulplicia.” AD 100. Collection of British Museum.

Those of us who watch movies or read novels must learn the difference between story telling and historical fact. Screen writers play fast and loose with history all the time. The old saying that “Facts should not get in the way of a good story” are absolutely true Unless you are a historian.

Consider some favorites. Old Braveheart, William Wallace never saw a kilt in his life. Thomas Rawlinson, an English ironmonger, who employed Highlanders to work his furnaces in Glengarry near Inverness invented the one you are familiar with in the early eighteenth century, around 1710. Finding the belted plaid wrap cumbersome, he conceived of the “little kilt” on the grounds of efficiency and practicality, as means of bringing the Highlanders “out of the heather and into the factory.” However, as Dorothy K. Burnham writes in Cut My Cote (1997), it is more likely that the transformation came about as the natural result of a change from the warp-weighted loom to the horizontal loom with its tighter weave. After the battle of Culloden (1745) which Jamie Frasier barely survived, wearing the “Wee Kiltee,” it was outlawed By the British overlords. Luckily moviegoers don’t care that Braveheart died horribly in 1305 over four centuries earlier.

William Wallace didn’t paint his face blue either. Where did the idea that the Picts painted themselves blue originate? Julius Caesar once noted that the Celts got blue pigment from the woad plant and that they used it to decorate their bodies. Pict was a name coined by the Romans to describe the Northern tribes who covered their bodies in blue woad to camouflage and perhaps to intimidate: Picti means painted people in Latin. It is likely that the Picts were descended from the native peoples of Scotland such as the Caledones or Vacomagi who lived in modern-day northern and eastern Scotland about 1,800 years ago. Picts is merely a descriptive term. William Wallace and the Scots wore blue face paint in Braveheart, not because it was historically accurate, but because the filmmakers liked the idea of it. Braveheart certainly did not have sex with the English Queen out in the woods. Did Queen Eleanor have the habit of wondering around in the darkling woods of a night. Certainly she did not. If she wanted a child by Wallace she would have removed her Wimple which women wore to cover their hair lest the sight of it turn men into savage wanton beasts. She died fifteen years before Wallace’s revolt.

Eleanor, Queen of England. Tomb in Westminster Abbey, London

Henry the VIII’s second wife Ann Boleyn was executed, her head severed with the sword of a French executioner because she was an adultness. At least that is what we learned in “The Tudors.” Think about this, Henry the VIII was 6’2″ and weighted 210 pounds when he was in his twenties. The man who played him in the series is 5’9″ and 155 pounds. Quite a difference, yes? The simple truth is, Henry was a Tomcat, adultery was his hobby. Anne’s sister Mary was one of his mistresses, pimped out by her own father Thomas Boleyn the Earl of Wiltshire and the 1st Earl of Ormond. These were nasty ruthless people. What Henry was, was fixated on having a male heir to the throne. The Tudors had overthrown the York family by killing King Richard the third who was the last of the Plantagenet dynasty that had conquered Britain in 1066. Henry felt a little shaky on the throne. English barons were a testy and power hungry lot and they could turn on the king in an instant. With the help of Bishop Cranmer, the head of the church, charges were trumped up and the lovely Anne bared her “Little Neck,” she actually said that to the executioner before the chop. She went to the block, dressed in a white shift, her hair shorn and her feet bare. Henry’s only concession was to allow the sword rather than the axe. Royalty was not to be beheaded by axe or an Englishman, hence the Frenchman. Likely we wouldn’t be at all interested in her story except that her daughter grew up to be the most famous British monarch of all. Elizabeth the first. The virgin Queen, though that too is in serious doubt. The virgin part I mean.

The archives kept in the British museum document Annes trial and her indictment but also contain the personal letters between the principles which show without a doubt that she was completely innocent of anything except, apparently, the capital crime of having a girl baby.

Anne Boleyn by Hans Holbein, from life. The only known likeness from life. She does not look like Jessica Alba nor Natalie Dormer.

Willian Shakespeare did not write his plays. That idea, which has persisted for decades was good enough to make more than one movie. We can start with the fact that his life in London is very well documented. There are the bills of lading for the material that he used to build the Globe theater. There is the building permit for the same. There are copies of the original documents themselves with his name on them The main argument, in the absence of such “proof” of authorship, skeptics have posed the question: How could a man of such humble origins and education come by such wealth of insight, wide-ranging understanding of complex legal and political matters and intimate knowledge of life in the English court? Shakespeare’s supporters emphasize the fact that the body of evidence that does exist points to Shakespeare, and no one else which are written in his own hand. This includes the printed copies of his plays and sonnets with his name on them, theater company records and comments by contemporaries like Ben Jonson, Samuel Boswell and John Webster, men of letters who actually knew him. Doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship and attempts to identify a more educated, worldly and high-born candidate reveal not only misguided snobbery but a striking disregard for one of the most outstanding qualities of the Bard’s extraordinary work—his imagination.

Who can doubt that an intelligent man, even one with limited education, not use historical works as background for whatever his bountiful imagination seeks to follow? Provable historic fact are the foundation of his plays, the same as it would be if he was writing today. Consider Samuel Clemens, one of Americas greatest writers. Fifth grade education in he backwater town of Hannibal, Missouri. Charles Dickens also left school at age twelve and I’ve seen no movement to discredit either.

In the end, the Puritans, yes those Puritans who figure in our American history tore down the Globe theater and banned all productions of any play including Will’s as being devilish and depraved. Puritans condemned the sexualization of the theatre and its associations with depravity and prostitution. Puritan authorities shut down English theaters in the 1640s and 1650s—Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was demolished and copies of his plays were burned. That is an example of history that is not made up.

The Puritans ruled England and early white America for a time. When you read your high school text book, there is no mention of the fact that they banned Christmas. Sometimes historical facts don’t fit the narrative do they? Inconvenient but provable historical fact. No Christmas for you. Maybe they had a point. Americans spent around 178 billion dollars on Christmas this year, nearly a thousand dollars per person.

The sainted “Boy General” George Armstrong Custer was in real life impotent because he spent a lot of time with prostitutes even after marriage. Gonnorea will do that to you. The Mercury used to treat it did his mental faculties little good. He demonstrated during the Civil War a sort of demented courage which the generals encouraged and rewarded him for with stars and high praise. He proved to be no tactician though and his skill was the same as any attack dog, he just went straight at the foe. After the war his career centered around the occasional Indian massacre, more cheating on his wife embezzling from the Army and in the end these skills or failings, call them what you will got him savagely killed which historians today say was his deserved fate. The whole story of the Greasy Grass fight was told ad infinitum by those same white men who ran the country. It apparently never occured for anyone to ask the winners who, when they were asked had quite different storys. He may have made it to the hill like the painting shows and in fact none of the warriors or warriorettes, yes the woman fought too even knew it was him. He was likely knocked off his horse by Buffalo Calf Road Woman and shot twice. Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode her horse into the Little Bighorn battlefield and struck Custer on the back of the head with a club. Custer, who was already injured with a shot to the chest, was knocked off his horse and died there. A bullet to the left temple did him in.

The gruesome details of the story from the elders say that following that encounter, another warrior woman speared him in the side with a saber in order to be a part of the slaying, and other women warriors took sewing utensils and stuck them in his ears. George Custer was an evil man in the eyes of the indigenous tribes.

Sticking him in the ears would prevent him from hearing them coming in the afterlife. Many warriors mutilated the Wasichu after the battle, but because Custer was labeled as an evil spirit, they left his body intact. White men said it was out of respect, Lakota and Cheyenne begged to differ.

There is some conjecture that the body may not have been him. Two days, stripped naked in the blazing sun meant that very few bodies were ever identified with certainty. History is murky that way.

The Crow scout Half Yellow Face told the colonel before they rode down upon the village,”You and I are going home today by a road we do not know.” He was correct.

When I was still teaching high school I heard from my mainly male students about their love of the Kurt Russell version of the Tombstone legend. They were adamant that the Earp legend was hands down true and accurate. They would accept no argument. What they knew was what the Earp and the screenwriters told them. Because Earps history is relatively recent, unfortunately it is also pretty well documented. Over two dozen films have featured Wyatt Earp, actually that would be Wyatt Barry Stapp Earp, a name that doesn’t easily fit on a theater marquee. Writers play fast and loose with “facts” all the time. What documented history knows and can prove is this; He was by turns a lawman, stage robber, horse thief, gambler, pimp, brothel keeper with his brothers, two of his wives were prostitutes and is definitively known to have killed two men, one a town marshal. At the shootout, eye witnesses state that he wore a Mackinaw coat not a long black overcoat ala Kurt Russell. He also didn’t carry a pistol in a gun-belt but in his pocket as was his custom. Perhaps the testimony of men who knew him in Tombstone sheds a light on his personal history. Roy Drachman would later write: “I don’t remember when Wyatt Earp began to be looked upon as some kind of hero. That was not his image around Arizona then, where many people knew and remembered him well. I never heard anything from those folks about any of the good or great deeds that he is supposed to have done. I think he just made them up for his biography which is nearly all lies anyway. He was a simply a survivor at a time when some of his close friends and relatives weren’t so lucky in avoiding a violent death.” Lastly, John Ringo had no education at all and did not speak Latin. Holliday didn’t either.

Likely not many men have noticed that few women are featured in the teacher’s history book. That’s something you might wonder about.

Consider, before you comment on my friends historic credentials, most people have only a single high school credit in US History, taught from a text compiled by a college professor and likely written by teaching assistants, cobbled together from many pieces and passed of as definitive “Truth.” 50% of U.S. adults are unable to read above an eighth grade level book with complete comprehension. 33% of U.S. high school graduates never read a book after high school. 80% of U.S. families have not purchased a book this year. (2025) The current chief executive does not. According to his family ever been a reader a fact which he demonstrates daily. Knowing this, it seems to me that folks should be very careful about who, what and why the so called facts they offer up in any criticism of “Real” historians.

Perhaps the best example there is, is that until recently everything you know about ancient Egypt came from Victorian Era amateur archeologists. All of them educated white men who had no background in the very long arc of Egyptian history. Not one asked an Egyptian. Until recently nearly all you knew about King Tut, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, and the other Pharaohs was written by these English gentlemen. What you know of the city stae of Troy was written by a German.Notwithstanding the beauty and the glory of that which was found in their tombs the real treasure were things like your grandmothers post card. Found in digs all over Egypt are payroll records for the pyramid builders, personal letters, diaries and business accounts. Those mundane objects are the real historical record.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Around 1335 BCE

Our friend the local historian knows where knowledge lies. He has written, studied and taught nearly his entire lifetime. He deserves credit for what he says. Do not take him lightly.

The phrase, “I only want to hear what I already know” was never uttered by any Historian.

History is a growing thing, it changes constantly as new things are discovered. As my sainted father was wont to say, “Don’t believe most of what you read and only half of what you see.” Look for it yourself, it’s the only way to know. History is thick, dense and very tasty. It explains a lot for those that seek it.

This particular historian, with his inquisitiveness and his joy in pure thought shine through, and they have captivated me. In a time when parts of our society, particularly political leaders are trying to freeze false historical narrative in amber, glorifying a time that never was, it’s more important than ever to get down on your knees and dig in the pig pen for that lost diamond.

Michael Shannon is a World Citizen, Surfer, Sailor, Teacher, Builder and Story Teller. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California, USA. He writes for his children.

E-Mail: Michaelshannonstable@Gmail.com

RECESS

Michael Shannon

Eight years of Grammar school and any memory of what I studied there is vague at best. What I do remember is Recess. Tiny rural schools in the 1950’s had the best Recess, bar none. Kids played. They played at things you might not believe but it’s all true, I swear by my tattoo.

Kids need to play and make use of their imaginations. Something we have perhaps lost with children carrying I-Phones everywhere. This is how we did it.

First of all, we played in the dirt. Once my dad and the other trustees planted a lawn in front of the school but it was a futile gesture. Hard adobe soil, no sprinkler systems because there was no hose bib in the front of the school and hundreds of acres of wild oats surrounding it guaranteed that by late spring it was just a memory. In the spring, mud, early summer dust, we sprinted out to recess, not wanting to waste a moment. Kids games revolved partly around soil conditions which was something we knew about, being mostly farm kids. When I was seven I could whip up a mud pie like nobodies business. That old adobe mud could be made in Frisbees, weaponized so to speak. Mom made sure our shirts were clean but those old black Levi’s we wore stayed on for days. Laundry was a lot of work for her. The old tub washing machine with its ringer was pretty slow and the dryer was 3/8 inch cotton rope strung between poles. When you were big enough you’d help her hang the wet laundry, sheets on the outside to hid the private stuff such as panties, slips and bras. Those bras of hers were wired for sound or at least highly engineered. They were so well made you could have used them to haul water from the well or use them as hampers to pick beans in. Our farm had a road that ran upwind of the clothesline and she had to take that into account too. We were clean but not too clean. My mother always said that a little dirt was good for you. Science has born that out.

A list of the games we played was long but in a funny way each had a life of its own. Each in it’s own season.

Marbles were played in the spring when the dirt was still slightly damp so a good ring could be scratched out. Not too soft but stiff enough so the marbles would roll. One boy would show up with a pocket full of glassies, cats eyes and steellies in early April and the next day it would be on. Boys and girls showed up ready to go to war. No playing for keeps was the teachers rule but out of sight they changed hands. Just as mysteriously as marble season appeared it was gone. There was no date on the calendar. It was as mysterious as the first flight of swallows showing up under the eaves of the old barn in our back yard.

Since the school never seemed to have more than one baseball, likely used for decades and an old basketball with all the pebbles worn off some ingenouity was required. There was no lack of old timey games, some from centuries lost in the mist that could be played. No one knew where the rules for Red Rover, Kick The Can, Mother May I, or Simon Says but everyone seemed to know how. The only game deemed too dangerous was Crack The Whip which was still played if the teachers were otherwise occupied. Second graders on the end could be spun like 45’s off the end on a good crack. The occasional skinned knee the result. Nobody cried. Parents would say thing like, “Well, don’t play then,” or “Just spit on it and rub it with mud, you’ll be fine.”

Rural baseball. US Archives

Most of our fathers and uncles; in fact almost every man we knew, some women too had served in WWII and the Old Colonel, who you could see driving around town, racing down Branch street in his old Plymouth at the breakneck speed of 10 mph had served in WWI. Naturally the boys, whose male relatives never, ever talked about the war, were a rabid and blood thirsty group. We were the Blue and Gray, Yanks and Huns, Nazi and Dogfaces, Rebels and Hessians, We rode with TR up Kettle Hill. We didn’t know that he actually walked up, but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Being farm boys we brought our own shovels to school and dug foxholes in the cut-bank uphill from the school where we staved off multiple attacks from the days chosen enemy, slaughtering them with the sticks found under the schools oak trees or pelting them with acorns. In a last ditch defense, Manny Silva leapt on Charlie Silvas back while he was coming up the hill and bit him. Victory was achieved for the Hillsiders.

When Mrs Fahey wasn’t looking we slid under the barbed wire fence around school and hightailed it up the hill and then down the other side to check out the old Branch Family grave site. Francus Ziba, his wife Manuela were buried there and just to the side, the graves of the Hemmi’s, father and son who were lynched by vigilantes, hung from the Pacific Coast Railroad bridge in 1886. Mrs Branch, in her kindness allowed them to be interred near the Branch Family when no other cemetery would . We knew a little about it because Fred Branch came to school on a history tour to talk about goings on in the old days and said he clearly remembered men coming to the Branch home, asking his father to come outside where they spoke in hushed voices before his father came back into the house to get his rifle before leaving with them. He was sure his father had had something to do with the hanging. An inquest was held afterward and ruled that persons unknown had done the deed though some members of the panel were likely present at the bridge. Secrets are hard to keep in small towns.

The Old Branch Family Cemetery today. Author photo.

The little place was not a spooky place, most kids knew about the original Ranchero and his family. Some of his descendants were my school mates.

When I was in the sixth grade Miss Holland retired. She had taught for decades at Branch and had taught kid who were now the grandparents of my classmates. The next year we had a new teacher, Miss Parker who I remember as young, blond and who smoked cigarettes behind the girls restroom during recess. That seemed daring, we had never seen a teacher smoke though you can be sure than in the fifties almost every adult we knew did. Somehow it was unexpected. It made her a person of some respect, we assumed this was never done. An adult who scoffed at rules had our respect.

Hours were spent carefully crafting snares from wild oat stalks. We stripped the leaves and carefully tied a loop on the thin end, securing it with a slip-knot. Ever so carefully we stalked the wily and elusive western fence lizard as he lay sunning himself on the rocks and old railroad tie fence posts around school. Captured “Blue Bellies” were never killed which might surprise some, kids being a rather bloodthirsty lot, but were left in girls coat pockets or carefully stashed in a teachers desk. Rural school teachers like Miss Parker were, of course, not the least bit frightened and simply took the lizards outside and freed them with a knowing smile, having been down that road many times. Courage was tested by letting the small reptile bite your little finger in a show of outstanding bravery which sent the little boys into to paroxysms of squeaks and admiring glances which we took as our due, being older, wiser and oh, so courageous.

Miss Parker did something else I’ve never forgotten. She read out loud to us. A chapter a day just before school let out. She read from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. It was the greatest thing. I’m sure most kids hadn’t read the book either. She was an accomplished speaker and she took on the character voices too. I remember it was perhaps the greatest treat I had in grammar school. We couldn’t wait to get out on the Mississippi with Huckleberry and Jim to ride down the river on his raft to New Orleans.

Lucky for us the brothers Ikeda farmed the land across Branch Mill Road from the school and, wonder of wonders, they had a reservoir directly opposite. It was full of water and it didn’t take long to figure out that if we brought some loose boards from our dad’s scrap piles we could build a raft and go floating along the Old Mississip’ just like Huck and Jim. Since the gate to the pond was never locked we quickly used our recess time to start building and in just a few sessions we were floating about, spying out the downriver under our hand visors like true river rats. Mrs Brown and Mrs Fahey took no notice, they were used to feral boys on the loose.

Finally after a few days while driving by the school Kaz Ikeda noticed what was going on and our trip was ended. We had to clean up the pond and remove the raft but it was all done in the spirit of good fun. When one adventure ends another begins.

Walt Disney introduced us to Davy* Crockett when I was nine. Crockett, being such a fabulous creature, we naturally took his legend in hand and soon all the boys were sporting Coonskin hats and strutting around school shooting the eyes out of turkeys at a hundred yards. It was such an epidemic of gunplay that kids with their Mattel Fanner 50’s slung low around their hips that Mrs. Brown, the principle, as if you needed one in a school with less than sixty kids, decreed that we could only bring our guns to school one day a week. This would be known as “Gun Day.” On that day, a Wednesday if memory serves, the air was heavy with the smell of spent roll caps and the popping of pistols from behind every tree. The two acres of the school ground was the scene of vast carnage as the bodies lay where they fell, briefly of course. It was perfectly legal to pop up and shoot your adversary in the back. The hooks placed along the sides of the hallway between the two school rooms looked like an armory during class time, with the gun-belts hooked up and waiting for their owners to return.

By the turn of the decade, the end of the fifties, the new “Modern” school was about to open and the last class to graduate from the old school, which had been in use since the 1880’s was looking forward to high school. The days of free recess where the kids were left to their own devices were coming to an end. The county schools office was growing in power and most of the old one and two room schoolhouses were closed. We had seen the end of Huasna, Santa Manuela, Newsom, Oak Park, Berros, Santa Fe, Freedom and Cienega schools and the rise of a much more rigorous education system. The Arroyo Grande Elementary school, though opened in 1932 was fifty years more modern than old Branch. The brand spanking new Margaret Harloe school with its modern buildings and structured activities didn’t allow for rafts, gun days or digging foxholes. Recess was now organized. Imaginations were stifled under the weight of adult theory about what is good for children. A sad day. Just for once why can’t we just open the gates and let them run free to discover on their own what is out there? No Toys-R-Us, no phones, no proper PE equipment no adults pointing fingers and giving orders. Just give them a shovel. As Pink Floyd so aptly said, “Teachers, leave those kids Alone.”

L-R: Christine Baker, Cheryl Jurniak, Mrs Edith Brown, Jeanette Coehlo, Jerry Shannon, Unidentified, Dickie Gularte, Mrs Fahey. Not pictured, George Cecchetti Junior. The last eighth grade class from the old school, 1961 Family photo

L-R: Michael Shannon, Judy Hubble, Judy Gularte and Michael Murphy, 1959, graduates Family photo

Cover Photo: 1960 Eighth Grade, Alcides Coehlo, Mrs Edith Brown, Johnny Silva, Nancy Wilcox, Steve Luster, Manny Silva and Mrs Fahey. The pond is to the right. Family Photo

*There is no record of Mister Crockett ever being referred to as Davy by either himself or any of his peers. That’s a Disney thing.

Michael Shannon is a proud graduate of the last two room school in our valley.

Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter Eight.

Off to Oildale, California.

Time was passing in Casmalia, the kids were growing and Bruce and Eileen had finally moved from the Associated camp to a little house between Orcutt and Santa Maria. Mariel, the oldest had started school at tiny Casmalia school, one of a few students from the oil fields. Like many rural schoolhouses it was a first to eighth affair. Kids ranged from six years old to, well, no limits on age. Public education in the 1920’s was open to all. It wasn’t uncommon to have sixteen year olds in the third grade. One teacher taught all subjects to all grades. Curriculum was primarily reading, writing and arithmetic. Books were well used and almost always second hand hand me downs from larger urban schools. Parents did the janitoring, painting, general upkeep and provided most, if any, improvements.

Education, particularly for boys had exploded after the war. The advent of progressive education and state and federal funding began to be felt in public schools. With close to 25% of the United States population considered illiterate, business and government could see the value of providing at least a basic education for its citizens.

Neither of my grandfathers graduated high school. Bruce attended only to the ninth grade. My other grandfather never finished the eighth grade. There was no high school in Arroyo Grande when he was of age, closed because the large landowners refused to pay taxes to support the school. They believed that elementary school was good enough. “Those boys need to go to work,” they said and the high school was closed down for a number of years. Donovan and Miossi led the fight to close the wasteful school.

Attitudes had changed by 1920, both public and private money became available. Teacher requirements were raised, more education for them became the norm. Graduation from high school for boys had risen from six and one half percent in 1900 to nearly seventeen by 1920.

Little Orcutt school had less than two dozen students when Mariel went there but it had much in common with all rural schools. These characteristics were still evident when I went to grammer school in the fifties. Flip top desks with inkwells, hard wooden seats all facing a black slate board with pieces of chalk lying with dusty felt erasers in the tray. Above the blackboard, paper poster board printed with the alphabet in both upper and lower case letters depicted in cursive. Above that the big black framed clock, wound by hand each morning by the teacher, above that the bracket holding the California state flag and the national flag which we pledged allegiance to first thing each and every morning. The floors were wooden planks, there was a heater in the corner, a teachers desk and some bookshelves holding reading material and textbooks. By todays standards those little schools were pretty spare but if you had good teachers as I did you could get a first class elementary school education.

All students, no matter the age learned together. Older kids helped younger kids. In effect there was not just one teacher but many. Subjects were integrated and holistic with each subject taught in the context of others.

With more liesure time than before the war the grindingly hard work of the woman began to be reduced with the introduction of all kinds of labor saving devices. Eileen, because she now had electricity didn’t have to clean kerosene lanterns or burn coal and wood to cook and heat. She could have an electric mixer, just introduced ten years before. She could buy a pop-up toaster first marketed in 1919 and a Hoover Electric Floor Cleaner could be had for just $39.00.

And, in 1920, for the first time, she could vote in the national election. Women had campaigned for over fifty years for the right to vote in California and had finally narrowly won that right in 1911 though it was not until 1918 that three women were elected to the state assembly.

The business, industrial, politicians and saloons were bitterly opposed to suffrage but perhaps not surprisingly, though the measure was soundly defeated in San Francisco and barely won in Los Angeles, it turned out the deciding factor was the men’s rural vote. Farm wives, oil patch women, school teachers and those who put up with the daily drudgery of life for which there was little future put it over the top. Men listened to their wives and daughters and did what they asked. It’s important to remember that women didn’t vote in California in 1911 but the men did and especially men outside the cities thought it was time things were a bit more equal.

The birth of my Uncle Bob was bookmarked by the opening of the floodgates of social reform. People looked up and said, “I’m not going to take it anymore.” Big changes were in store for the oilfield worker.

In 1924, Bruce and Eileen loaded their three kids in car, a pretty new Model T Ford and hit the road, headed for a new job in the San Joaquin . “The Valley” as Californians refer to it is the area of the Central Valley that lies south of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and is drained by the San Joaquin River. It comprises seven counties of Northern and one of Southern California, including, in the north, all of San Joaquin and Kings counties, most of Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno counties, and parts of Madera and Tulare counties, along with a majority of Kern County, in Southern California.

Starting 2 million years ago, a series of glaciers periodically caused much of the valley to become a fresh water lake. Lake Corcoran was the last widespread lake to fill the valley about 700,000 years ago. About 12,000 years ago there were three major lakes remaining in the southern part of the Valley, Tulare Lake, Buena Vista Lake and Kern Lake. In the late 19th and early 20th century, agricultural diversion of the Kern River eventually dried out these lakes allowing farmers and ranchers access to the vast southern Joaquin. Oil followed

The San Joaquin Valley has long since eclipsed the Los Angeles Basin as the state’s primary oil production region. Scattered oil wells on small oil fields are found throughout the region, and several enormous fields near the Kern river bluffs, the Lost Hills and Taft, including the enormous Midway-Sunset Oil Field, the third-largest oil field in the United States were operating by the time Bruce and Eileen made their way north.

Headed for Oildale, 1924. L-R, Mariel, uncle Marion Hall , Bob, Barbara, Eileen and Bruce Hall. Family Photo

In 1924 the was valley is predominantly rural, dotted with small farm towns with curious names like Wasco, Fruitvale, Reward, Fellows and Temblor which naturally sits smack dab on the San Andreas Fault Line.

Oildale, now there’s a name to remember. Surrounded by Bakersfield it’s not much remembered today but once it was one of the great discovery fields. In 1920 it was the third largest oil producing area in California. The only town in California other than La Brea to be named for the oil it sat on.

The Halls were moving from Santa Maria where Bruce started his career. He’d worked for Associated Oil as he’d learned his trade. Associated was at the time one of the most integrated companies in California. They had their beginnings in the Kern fields in 1900 when more than thirty smaller companies signed up to form it. Within a few years Standard Oil of California and the Southern Pacific Railroad acquired an interest in Associated Oil for the purposes of transporting their own oil to the San Francisco Bay Area where it would be refined and marketed jointly. The Southern Pacific needed fuel for its railroad steam engines. The Matson’s Pacific Oil and Transportation Company, the Matson Line, was acquired in 1905, which included the Coalinga-Monterey pipeline and a refinery at Gaviota, California. In 1907, the Associated Pipe Line Company was formed as a subsidiary of the Associated Oil Company with the Southern Pacific Company providing property along its railroad tracks which ran from the Bakersfield Kern River oil fields to Port Costa, California, later being shipped to China and other parts of the world. The Southern Pacific Company attained a controlling interest of the Associated Oil Company’s stock. Like most of the larger companies it became an almost impenetrable labyrinth of subsidiaries and holding companies. The Southern Pacific Railroad had rightly earned the name, “The Octopus,” and the brag in its boardrooms was that it owned California which wasn’t very far from the truth.

Kern River fields, 1910. Calisphere photo.

Bruce was moved up to the Kern fields because by this time he was an expert in cable tool drilling. There is a thing that some men have that is a natural feel for things mechanical. Call it a sixth sense though its probably just a combination of the other five. It is an absolute mystery to those that don’t have it. Bruce had it. He could smell, hear and feel a well. The wells talked to him and he listened. The sense of things is what separates the laborer from the boss. By the time they got to their house on Bakersfield’s Chester Avenue he was a Farm Boss, in charge of drilling for more than one well. Things were looking up.

Cable tool rigs work by using a long iron bit attached to a heavy, cable laid manila rope. The cable is attached to a walking beam that lifts and drops the bit, crushing the rock, slowly pounding its way downward. By 1924 it was considered obsolete compared to the faster rotary rigs. Looking down their noses at the rotary rig roughnecks, the cable tool men derisively called them “Swivelnecks.” Typical behavior from those workers who could clearly see the writing on the wall that spelt the end of their particular trade.

Cable tool rigs were widely used from about 1870 and are still being used today, although almost all of today’s oil wells are drilled using a rotary rig. The basic machinery consists of the engine and boiler, the derrick and crown block, the bullwheel and drilling cable, the sandwheel and sanding line for the bailer, the vertical bandwheel with a center crank, and the walking beam supported by the Samson post. Bandwheels were essentially large pulleys (usually 8-10 ft in diameter) driven by a leather belt from the engine, which reduced the engine rpms and increased power. A crank on the bandwheel’s axle imparted up-and-down motion (via a pitman arm) to the walking beam, much like the motion of a teeter-totter. The other end of which was connected to the drilling cable by the temper screw. The walking beam alternately raised and lowered the drilling tools. Walking beams were typically 26ft x 12in x2in in size. Bullwheels and sandwheels were spools for the drilling cable and sanding (or bailing) line, respectively. Additionally, fishing tools, various hand tools, wrenches, and forge tools were required for the drilling process.

The early rigs were powered with steam. Steam was delivered from the boiler to the engine by way of pipe. The engine powered the band wheel by a turning belt. A well-braced upright post, called the sampson post, was mounted further down the platform. On top of it, and mounted with a hinge, laid the horizontal walking beam. The band wheel was connected to one end of the walking beam by a pitman and crank. As the band wheel turned the crank, the pitman was raised and lowered which rocked the walking beam up and down on the sampson post. A temper screw was attached to the other end of the walking beam. At one end of the temper screw there was a clamping device that gripped the drilling line to which the cable tool bits were attached. The drilling line came from the bull wheel and ran over a pulley at the top of the derrick. The bits, which were basically just pointed steel weights, pounded the well into the ground. The action at the bottom of the well was one of crushing, not chipping or cutting of the rock. The walking beam raised and lowered the bits about two feet. If the complete drilling tool string weighed 1200 lbs (and some weighed up to 3000 lbs.) and the velocity was 6 feet per second, the the force of the blow would be over 16 tons. After a while, the bit had to be replaced. In soft formations, progress could average 30 feet per day, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the conditions. The equipment was run 24 hours a day. Two tours.

The drilling was controlled by a skilled worker who, by feeling the line from time to time, could tell what was going on in the well. When necessary, he could let out more line or stop the walking beam. When the bottom of the hole became clogged with rock chips, the bit was raised and a bailer (attached to the the sand line on the sandwheel) was lowered into the well to scoop out the debris. This involved a complicated process of raising the drilling cable with bit out of the well and lowering a bailer bit from the sand line. The bailer then had to be lowered and raised multiple times until it collected enough material. Then it had be raised out of the well and emptied. This had to be done until the well was cleared of loose material. After that, the drilling cable was lowered into the well and the whole process started again. This pound and bail process was repeated about every three feet.

Bruce Hall, “Feeling the Well” Associated Oil Company Well, Kerndon no. 5, Kern River Field. 1925, Famiy Photo

The Calf wheel contained the casing line. When casing was necessary for the well, the casing line was used to lower it into the well. The headache post was a safety feature that kept the walking beam from dropping if anything came loose at the other end of the beam.

As greater depths were reached, control became increasingly difficult. The cable became longer, heavier, and had more elasticity. Water often become an issue. Subsurface pressures could not be controlled causing frequent blowouts. An experienced driller was a big asset in the process.

Cable Tool Drill Bits. Kern County Museum photo

In 1914 the usual cost of drilling a 1000-2000 foot hole with cable tools was about $10,000 – $30,000. Prior to 1910, practically all wells in California were drilled with cable tools.

The Kern River and Kern Bluff fields were very shallow. Some of the early wells were less than 100 feet deep. Those wells were drilled in mere days. Lots of work and the successful companies were raking in the dough.

Things looked good in the business at Bruce’s level. There were lots of wells going down all over the fields in the southern San Joaquin. Refined oil usage had grown with the auto industry and conversion of railroad steam locomotives to oil from coal. The merchant fleet was rapidly changing its engines too. The U S Navy’s entire battle fleet had by now had adapted to using bunker fuel rather than coal. In fact the Federal Government and the War Department had set aside three underground fields, two in California and one in Wyoming as a backup for the Navy in case of war. The three fields were the Elk Hills on the valley’s west side, the Buena Vista field near Taft and the soon to be famous, infamous in fact, the Teapot Dome field near Casper, Wyoming.

Things in the oil field were beginning to simmer and that would change Bruce and Eileens life in a hurry. Dark clouds were rising and it was oil. The long odyssey through the oil patch had begun. It would continue for another thirty four years.

The writer is the grandson of Bruce and Eileen Hall. His mother, Barbara went along for the ride. Born in Madera in 1918 she moved to the oil patch in Casmalia when she was just a year old.

MARSALEK FIRE

If you think you don’t know your parents life before they had you, you’re right.

My dad was a good boy. He was a good man too. He followed the rules even if he didn’t like them. He did what his mommy asked him to do. He got rid of the goat when she said, “Only shanty Irish keep goats,” even though he loved that goat and told stories about it all his life. He really wanted to do good. Sometimes, though, it was just impossible.

He noticed the plume of smoke through the open schoolhouse window and quietly elbowed his friend Kenny Jones. They watched from the corner of their eyes until suddenly a burst of crimson flame framed in black, oily smoke shot up from behind the trees that surrounded the old Arroyo Grande schoolhouse yard. It was too much to bear. Miss McNeil had her back to the class so they made a break for it, jumping out the window and hightailing it for the fire. Behind them they could hear Muriel Metzler hollering at them to come back. “Miss McNeil, Miss McNeil, George and Kenny jumped out the window, George and Kenny jumped out the window.” Miss McNeil flew to the window but she was too late, the boys were gone.

Arroyo Grande Grammar School Staff 1925-25

Sitting, l-R Miss Phoenix, Mr Faxon Principal, and Miss Righetti, Standing l-R Miss Doty, Miss Wimmer, school nurse, Miss McNeil, Miss Walker, Miss Lambeth and Miss Cotter

It was Fred Marsalek’s home. They had just moved there from the Oak Park area the year before. They farmed Walnuts on nine acres of land they bought from John Huebner. The farm was about a half mile from school as the crow flies and fly those boys did.

With just a population of around 850 people Arroyo Grande was a pretty typical small farming town in the mid 1920’s. The main street had recently been paved and concrete sidewalks replaced the old wooden ones. There were some new, but dim, street lights on Branch St, but everywhere else, particularly on those moonless nights you had to know where to put your feet. Some things had changed, boys, mostly wore shoes to school now. They were more likely to go on to high school than their fathers. Dad’s father, Jack Shannon dropped out of school in the 8th grade in 1896. Boys were expected to work then. At 14 you would have been expected to do a mans work. For a number of years there was no high school in Arroyo because the principal taxpayers, mostly farmers didn’t see the need for schooling boys and refused to pay the school tax. My grandmother Annie, went to Santa Maria HS though she lived in Arroyo Grande.

Electricity was common and indoor plumbing had been installed in most homes, though not in my grandparents house. That wouldn’t come for another year and even then my grandparents had to pay for the lines to be strung out from town. The juice went to the dairy they owned in order to operate the sterilizer, pasteurizer and the milking machines. It would be 1925 before they had electricity in the house at the foot of Shannon Hill on the Nipomo road. No one had radios yet, the first radio broadcast in the country was radio KDKA in Detroit in 1920, and that was a long way from Arroyo Grande. Radios were considered so important that they were an item on the 1930 census forms. If you wanted news you read the papers. There were two in Arroyo Grande and the Los Angeles and San Francisco papers were delivered each day by train.

There were still saloons even though it was an “officially” dry town and had been since 1911 when the city was incorporated by a vote of 88 yeas to 86 nays. There were a few dozen residential lots, clustered mostly on the east side of Bridge Street. The rest of the area was dotted with small farms, it was a pretty quiet place to grow up.

Fred Marsalek grew artichokes, peas and had walnut trees, which were a big crop in those days before the development of efficient railroad refrigerator cars which changed farming from dry crops to the fresh vegetables that we know now. Entire families lived on small acreages which wouldn’t be profitable to farm today. People still kept chickens and many had milk cows. There were barns behind most houses because the day of the horse wasn’t over yet. Many farmers still used them for cultivation and pulling wagons and buggies. Fred didn’t buy his first auto until 1929. Valley road was just a dirt track and would have been nearly impassable when it rained.

On that day, dad probably rode to school with Newell Buss and his brothers, They came down from their ranch behind Mount Picacho, picking up my dad and uncle at the dairy. A buckboard full of young schoolboys pulled by a tired old horse who spent the school day hitched to a post in front of the school, a nosebag of grain hooked behind his ears, swishing his tail at the occasional fly.

Kenny Jones would have walked from his house on Myrtle street. Drifting toward school on the footpath that would become Poole St. but at that time just wide enough for a couple of kids to walk side by side. The crowd grew larger as they passed the McCoy’s, and the Bardin’s before crossing Bridge St. to the grammar school. Kids coming down Pig Tail Alley and from the Phoenix, Harloe and Costa places or the Runels and Conrow ranches down the valley, funneling in the door before the final bell rang.

Kenny,s father Fred was a farmer and horse breeder, the grandson of Francis Ziba and Manuela Branch. You can’t get more local than that. He and my dad were best friends all through school. They went to grammar, high school and the University of California Berkeley together, even joining the same fraternity.

That was the future though. This day was about Fred’s house. They ran as fast as they could down the rows of pea vines, careful to stay in the furrows because, as every farm boy knows, you never step on a plant, that’s your living right there. Ruining crops was a bigger crime than ditching school.

The hollering from the school died down as they distanced themselves from the school and drew closer to the Marsalek’s burning house. It was already old in the 20’s and dry as a bone. Built of redwood from Cambria, those old houses, once the wood dried out were like tissue paper when they burned, fast and hot. The volunteer firemen arrived just in time to sprinkle the ashes. Surrounded by a few pieces of furniture and keepsakes they had managed to drag out of the burning building, Albina quietly cried.

After the fun was nearly over, the chief of police, Ben Stewart scolded the boys and ordered them back to school. Now, Ben was more than just the chief, he was the town tax collector and the city clerk. A little officialdom went a long ways in those days, but his word was law and dad and Kenny had to obey. Besides, Ben played poker with my grandfather and dad knew there was no escape.

So they slunk back to school. They were going to have to face the “music” as the old saying goes. Miss McNeil sent them to the principals office while Muriel and Bessie snickered behind their hands. The boys were secretly envious of course and wished they had gone to such a big event. Kathryn turned to her friend Mary Taylor and said in the superior way that girls have always had, “Those two are going to get what for alright.” They went down the hall past Miss Phoenix and Miss Walker’s rooms, Miss Doty and Miss Righetti had their doors open also and the sibilant hiss of giggles followed them right into the Mr Faxon’s office.

Mr Faxon taught eighth grade, as well as being principal, so he told they boys to sit down and wait and he would be right back. Dad and Kenny sat, fidgeting in their chairs imagining the fruits of their little adventure; the dire circumstances they found themselves in. Soon, Kenny started tapping his feet in an insistent rhythm and he turned to dad and said, “George, George, I gotta poop but I’m scared to leave the office.” Dad said he should use the principals toilet which was right there in the room. Kenny looked around, didn’t hear any footsteps so he quickly darted in and closed the door. Dad could hear the sigh of relief behind the door and a few minutes later the door opened again and Kenny came out, surrounded by a horrible miasma, a stench of the worst kind. Now dad grew up on a dairy and he knew smells, and this one was epic in its proportions, nearly making his eyes water. Kenny sat down and a moment later Mr Faxon came sailing in the door ready to do business. He suddenly skidded to a halt, looked at the two boys, then ran to open the windows. He stood with his head out the open window, then looking back over his shoulder he eyed both boys, he paused a moment ad then he said, “You boys get out of here, get back to class.”H e followed them out into the hall, carefully closing the door behind him. George and Kenny scurried back to class and nothing more was ever said about it. For several days the principal spent very little time in his office. The boys considered it a miracle. They were heroes.

The Arroyo Grande School, Bridge Street Arroyo Grande California circa 1920.

OLD SCHOOL.

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 a 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.

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.

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.

credits: Cover photo, 1956, Back Row, l-R Dickie Gularte, Jerry Shannon, Irv “Tubby” Terra, Georgei “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.

… 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.

	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: history

THE HISTORIAN

RECESS

Twelve Hour Tour

MARSALEK FIRE

Sitting, l-R Miss Phoenix, Mr Faxon Principal, and Miss Righetti, Standing l-R Miss Doty, Miss Wimmer, school nurse, Miss McNeil, Miss Walker, Miss Lambeth and Miss Cotter

OLD SCHOOL.

THE GREAT PEA WAR

Rainy Day

… And a River Runs Through It.

Aunt Mickeys

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Sitting, l-R Miss Phoenix, Mr Faxon Principal, and Miss Righetti, Standing l-R Miss Doty, Miss Wimmer, school nurse, Miss McNeil, Miss Walker, Miss Lambeth and Miss Cotter

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: