Tag Archives: travel

Traveling by Train

Michael Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judy Garland, The Harvey Girls MGM 1946.

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

The Real Harvey Girls. National Archives photo.

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

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

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

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

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Aretha

EclipsePhototakenin1973whileinMobil

By Michael Shannon. For my friend Joe Hubbell whose only vice is music.

After my hitch in the Navy where I assiduously avoided sea duty with every ounce of cunning I had, I joined the U S Merchant Marine. I’m not sure why, but I needed a job.

You can’t really compare the two services. The Navy crams hundreds of sailors into tiny spaces, spends months at sea with, many times, no apparent destination and nobody tells you anything. The pay is peanuts and you don’t do anything without some kind of permission.

The Merchant service is the opposite. The ships are just as big but with very small crews. There is no uniform, not even for the officers. You always know where you are going and when you will get there. What you do ashore is your own business and is only limited by how long it take to turn the ship around, by which I mean unload and reload cargo. Duty is fairly easy most of the time. It’s a little cold in the gulf of Alaska in the winter and the decks get warmish in the tropics but most of the time it’s pretty pleasant.

I shipped with a typically motley crew. The deck division, the Able Bodied and Ordinary Seamen were responsible for the upkeep of the ship, cargo handling and standing both underway and port watches. The ship owners are only concerned about the movement of cargo so maintenance is a pretty low consideration. Chip a little rust, slap on some paint and find something better to do. If the deck plates are so badly corroded that someone might step through the deck and fall into the hold, just weld a few stanchions around it, attach some chain and tell every one to walk around it.

The Bos’n was named “Pinky,” he had very fair skin and as a young sailor he sunburned easily, hence the name. Big Ray had earned the distinction of being torpedoed twice by the Japanese in WWII. Maybe that why he and his wife had 10 kids. Spread the risk around so to speak. Don was just about my age and was also a Navy Veteran. He grew up on the hard streets around Hill Top Park, Long Beach. He was raised by an Aunt, a nurse, served his four in the Nav’ and joined the MMS, same as me. We cruised together quite a lot when we were ashore.

Shore leave in the merchant service is plentiful but its seldom in places where there is any cultural opportunity unless its of the low kind. Consider where tank ships tie up; National City, El Segundo, Terminal Island, Port of Oakland, Longview on the Colombia River, Anacortes or Bellingham Washington. We put into in places like Rosarito Beach in  Baja Norte, Barber’s Point, Hawaii, Ventura and Estero Bay where the ship pumped from an undersea line and no one got off. Where do you go in Avila Beach, Barbara’s by the Sea? Most places we docked featured dirty old bars that smelled of spilled beer, cigarette smoke, worn out people on the stools, girls on the stroll, dead ends. You can have a beer, play some pool and try and not get in a fist fight with a local. How about Drift River Alaska where we tied up to an offshore platform and the ship was surrounded by ice flows in the winter and a gazillion bird sized mosquitos in the summer. Two days there and you might wish for that smelly old bar.

Opportunities to do something different were few and far between, but they did happen. In March of 1971 we slid under the Golden Gate bridge, passed Alcatraz on our starboard side and tied up at the Rodeo oil terminal at Davis Point up in San Pablo bay. We were off loading and would run in ballast for Drift River, Alaska. Donnie and I both had the night off and so we went down the gangplank, walked up the pier where we called a cab from a pay phone and got a ride into Oakland. We were dropped off in whats now Jack London Square.  Even then no one went into south Oakland unless they had a death wish so we just tooled around a little looking in the windows. As we waited for the light at 2nd and Broadway we noticed, tacked to a pole, a poster advertising a show at the Fillmore West in San Francisco that night. We decided to go. Easy enough, we just took a bus across the bay bridge to the downtown San Francisco bus terminal at Mission and Howard streets. Then still known as “South of the Slot,” San Francisco was divided midway by the Slot. The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the center of Market street, and from the Slot from which once arose the hiss of the ceaseless, endless steel cable that was hitched at will to the cable cars it dragged up and down Market. The cars were no more, replaced by electrified buses but the name remained.  North of the Slot were the theaters, hotels, and shopping district; the banks and the staid, respectable business houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the homes of the working class. The Slot was completely burnt out in 1906 but in true San Francisco style, sprung up like an overnight mushroom. No time to worry about permits and building codes, commerce will out every time. It’s very seediness was it’s charm I guess, though the Navy liberty buses passing through the Mission District from Hunters Point Naval Shipyard had heavy wire screens over the windows to protect the sailors from bricks thrown by the local residents.

We walked from transit center up to the corner of Market and 2nd, then turned up uphill and dawdled along for the 11 or so blocks to Van Ness. We passed streets whose names date back to the earliest days of the old wood and canvas town, Turk, Powell, Ellis and O’Farrell. “The City,” Queen of California, the most beautiful city in the West. The old City of Paris, Gump’s department store, the Palace Hotel, The old Call newspaper building, and the great Fairmont hotel, built by the “Silver King’s” James Fair’s daughters in his memory and reinforced by Julia Morgan after the ’06 quake. Our destination, on that triangular corner where Van Ness crosses Market, the nexus of rock and roll, jazz, bluegrass and gospel, was the old Carousel Ballroom. We were there for a show.

Looking for a larger hall for his shows, Bill Graham had moved from the old Fillmore on Geary to the Carousel at 10 Van Ness, calling it the Fillmore West. Locals affectionately still referred to it as the Carousel though. Graham filled San Francisco with sound. Any touring band worth their salt were booked into one of his halls there. Home town groups like the Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the group that became a symbol for the city, The Grateful Dead played  the Fillmore. Otis Redding,  The Staples Sisters, and blues groups out of Chicago and Detroit City, like Paul Butterfield and John Lee Hooker. And Miles Davis. I had been to a concert the year before when his group opened for Laura Nyro. That band featured drummer Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira, Keith Jarrett and Chick Correira and did they cook. One of the best jazz groups ever put together and each famous in his own right. You had to follow that with Laura Nyro’s sweet voice the same way you had to take an Alka Seltzer after a night of serious drinking.

griffin poster

Liberated from a telephone pole in San Francisco. Authors collection.

Our night. We bought our tickets and strolled inside. In those days, the floor had few seats, you could move around during concerts as the mood seized you. The earlier you got in the closer you got to the stage. It was a happy crowd. All the Hippies had their freak on, the girls dressed in prized clothing from thrift stores, The boys in Top hats and tails. Everyone was expecting a good show. The last night of a tour is always the best. The bands are really tight from long practice and they know the next day is for home. They are happy too.

The opening act was from Oakland, just across the bay, what we called a horn band in those days, not well known, but they moved the crowd. They were one of Bill Graham’s contract groups and still a couple years away from famous. Tower of Power.

After Tower of Power the main acts began to appear on stage, the roadies moving equipment, pushing the big Hammond B-3 Organ to the back corner of the stage, The Fender Rhodes keyboard upstage. They quickly assembled Bernard Purdie’s drum kit, the instrument stands and the mikes in a choreographed ballet polished with long familiarity.

Band members began to drift on stage and take their places, a few drum rattles, keys turned, guitars tuning as sounds were matched and finally when everything was in place the Kingpins marched on stage, accompanied by the Memphis Horns, took their places and without a pause, in response to some subtle signal, launched into “Memphis Soul Stew,” followed by Procol Harems’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Baby, the crowd was getting’ really wound up, this was some kind of music they weren’t used to.

And finally she’s there. She struts onstage wearing a white pants suit with a wide gold belt and a rasta man beanie, grabs the mike on the stand, swings it left then right, and shouts, “Allright?” flips her hand a little to cue the band and its,

What you want, baby, I got it
What you need, do you know I got it?
All I’m askin’ is for a little respect when you get home…

…and everyone is on their feet. The “Sweethearts of Soul”, grooving, Billy Preston’s hands flying over the organ keys, King Curtis’ Saxophone, it’s distinctive honk a counterpoint to Aretha belting it out.

The delivery of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” hymn was a gem. Her covers instantly make the originals obsolete, “Make it With You,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Love the One You’re With.” One way of looking at those song choices is that Aretha was reminding everyone that there was no song she couldn’t improve. She takes you inside the church where Eleanor Rigby is sweeping up after someone else’s wedding, she makes you feel her aching back, her despair.  She shows Stephen Stills what sexual agency really means. She even makes Bread’s “Make It With You,” that forgettable soft-rock schlock sound deep.

Being in the audience was exhausting. No one ever stopped moving. Finally, near the end, Aretha came down into the audience and pulled an “impeccably dressed” man from the audience and up onto the stage. He was dressed in black from head to toe. His eyes were hidden by wrap-around dark glasses. She led him to the stage, sat him down at the Fender Rhodes and within seconds we recognized Ray Charles. The huge crowd went crazy. Ray joined with Aretha in the closing and, to become legendary, 10-minute rendition of “Spirit in the Dark.”

Never, ever have I experienced anything like Aretha at the Fillmore. It wasn’t that the hippies just liked her. They were out of their minds. They were completely lost in her.

It was March 7th, 1971, a Sunday night in San Francisco. The new American Dream is falling apart; Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, the Vietnam war is spreading to Cambodia and Laos, the boys are coming home in boxes, the utopian ideal of the sixties is breathing its last. The Haight is drowning in drugs. The venue whose rafters Aretha is currently rattling, Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, will close its doors forever a few months after this show. Disco lurks. These are some terribly troubled waters, and it takes a singer with Aretha’s forceful kind of grace to calm them, at least for one night.

Goodbye sweet and God Bless. We will miss you.

Michael Shannon is a writer, former teacher and a tattered survivor of the sixties.

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The Library

By Michael Shannon.

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

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

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

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

Santa Maria Carnegie Free Library, 1909

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

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

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

Mrs Edith Brown and Miss Elizabeth Holland at Branch Grade School

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

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

school books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Letters

By: Michael Shannon

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

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

mom and dad wed

Barbara and George Shannon on their wedding day

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

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

             gas_milage_ration_windshield_B_stamp_front_type_1_and_20_chevy_001

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

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

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

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

uni at war

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

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

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Ships at anchor San Francisco Bay in early 1943

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                                        

March 21, 1943

Hello Everybody,                                                                                                     

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

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The Emporium Department Store. Now Bloomingdales.

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

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

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

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The dining room in the Palace Hotel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of love,

Barbara and George

                       (Mr and Mrs George Shannon)

                                             Looks nice, huh? 

PS  (This is in dad’s hand)  

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

Love, George  

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

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

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