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The Twelve Hour tour

Chapter 18

The Big Shake

Michael Shannon

“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Out in California shakin’ is a fact of life. If you live here long enough your going to be in one. People can date their lives, just like reading a clock. Which one did you ride out. Was it the Great Fort Tejon in 1857, the Hayward in 1868, or Santa Barbara in 1927. California recorded 9 severe to catastrophic quakes between 1900 and 1933. My grandfather Shannon and his wife to be Annie Gray rode out the San Francisco in 1906 which they never forgot and over time they generated dozens of stories. It went, in the telling, from a catastrophe to legendary status in our family.

Family histories are bookmarked with these. Time, day and place vividly recalled.

Call Newspaper tower on Market Street in flames, April 18, 1906. Hearst photo.

In 1933 Eileen was nearing her term. In a mark of the times she would deliver in a hospital. This child would be the first in the family not born at home. No midwife, no husband or sister-in-law, no mother-in-law. What could be safer or more modern?

Eileen was checked in Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. Built in the Spanish Colonial style it was to be a new and unique experience for Bruce and Eileen and baby to be.

Santa Barbaras Cottage Hospital, 1930. News Press photo.

Delivering a baby at 38 was a dicey proposition in 1933. There had been many improvements in in pre-natal care in Eileens lifetime, infant death rates had dropped significantly since 1900. The diminished numbers of home births was a major contributor along with the acceptance of theories on anti-sepsis and the rise of hospital culture.

In 1888, a group of 50 prominent Santa Barbara women recognized it was time for the growing community to have a hospital — a not-for-profit facility dedicated to the well-being and good health of all residents, regardless of one’s ability to pay or ethnic background. It was a major milestone in the communities history as the population was just five thousand people when the little 25 bed facility opened its doors in 1891.

In ’33 Bruce had a steady job but his pay could barely cover expenses. The depression had reached its lowest point for American people. March 1933 saw the highest number of unemployed, estimated at around 15.5 million. Those numbers represented just under 25% of the workforce. New Mexico jobless numbers were pushing 40%, the highest in the nation. For those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs, wage income had fallen 42.5% between 1929 and 1933. The country had no social security system, no unemployment insurance the unemployed had to rely on themselves and the overwhelmed relief agencies. People resorted to desperate measures to find work or earn money, such as waiting for a day’s wage or selling goods on the street. Children were turned out of their homes to fend for themselves. There was a great deal of unrest across the country.

In San Francisco, the hiring of day laborers called a “Shape up” in which those chosen from a crowd of the hopeful were employed for just a day rather than long term led to the violence of the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, particularly the events of “Bloody Thursday” on July 5, 1934. During Bloody Thursday, San Francisco police open fire on striking longshoremen, resulting in the deaths of two strikers and hundreds of injuries. This escalated the strike into a citywide general strike, where over 100,000 workers in solidarity with the longshoremen walked out and shut the city down.

The majority of the population in the country were bordering on frantic, not knowing where the next meal would come from or how and where they might live.

The Halls had three teenaged children who needed to be clothed and fed. They lived in a small rented house and were by some slight miracle were just getting by. Timing for the new baby couldn’t have been worse.

Not just bad timing either. Eileen had nearly bled to death when Bob was born in 1920. Only aunt Grace’s sprint into Orcutt for the doctor had saved her life. She was very weak for months afterword. Bruce and Eileen told each other that there could not be anymore babies. It was much much too dangerous. The thing is, nature will find a way and it did.

Though the first human to human transfusion was successfully done in 1818 the classification of blood types was only codified in 1900. WWI led to the first mass use of the life saving procedure. Like most things the ability to do a transfusion became routine but the underlying structure which provided the actual blood was not. Blood could not be stored for long periods of time, just days in the best of circumstances. It wasn’t until that the first blood bank was established in a Leningrad, Russia hospital. National organizations did not exist. The first was by Bernard Fantus, director of therapeutics at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States in 1937. In creating a hospital laboratory that can preserve and store donor blood, Fantus originates the term “blood bank.” Within a few years, hospital and community blood banks begin to be established across the United States. It was much too late for Eileen as Santa Barbara had only a very small supply of whole blood on hand in March of ’33 .

Not only is childbirth for most women life threatening but in 1920 when Bob was born the chances of finding blood for a transfusion were unlikely. The doctor ran his small practice in an office above a little shoemakers shop in Orcutt and had no way to store blood of any type. The fact that he was able to get to the lease and find and tie off the bleeder in time was a miracle. The lack of transfusion was the main reason for her long recovery.

If Eileen were to hemorrhage she could well die and her doctor in Santa Barbara insisted she deliver at Cottage. They had no money to pay so Eileen went down to the welfare, they called it relief then and applied for help to pay the hospital. They gave her such a hard time that she felt ashamed that they though she was just another chiseler. She went home in tears and told Bruce that in order to qualify they would have to sell the car which he needed to go to work.*

She told the doctor that they had decided that the baby would be born at home just as the others were. The doctor was adamant and said, he and some other doctors had gotten together and agreed to get together and take care of people who were in need and that the hospital had established a fund for the same reason.

“Eileen, you will be treated the same as if you lived in Montecito with the rich folks.” He said, “No one will ever know.”

Perhaps the sun was about to break out.

They were in Santa Barbara after the layoff and then bankruptcy of Barnsdhal oil. There were no oil field jobs in the Los Angeles basin, absolutely none. They had bought a small house in Wilmington near Bruce’s brother Bill and his wife Anna. When Bruce lost his job and couldn’t find a new one they called Eileen’s brother Henry Cayce who lived with his wife Martha and their three kids in Goleta. Henry had a good job as a mechanic and in the way of family they said come on up, we’ll find room for you all.

So the house in Wilmington was lost, the first they ever owned but they couldn’t make the payments so they turned in the keys and just walked away as so many others did during the depression. By late 1932 it was being called the great depression because there was no doubt that it was the one.

They closed and locked the door for the last time, loaded their suitcases and whatever they could carry, drove to the filling station, gassed her up and they still had .50 cents left. Always responsible and money conscious but with nothing to lose, they said “To hell with it and went to the movies.” They saw “Tarzan the Ape Man” with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Hara. When it was over they took their popcorn and dead broke, hopped in the car and headed to Santa Barbara. They had this way about them where they looked on life as if it was a big adventure. They would do their best, come what may.

At Henry and Martha’s Bruce got up the next day and went looking for work. There wasn’t any possible way that he would find work in the oil fields so anything would do. At thirty eight half of his working life had been in oil and though it was rough it was all highly technical and built almost entirely on experience. He could not read a book on how to do the work. It was learn by doing. All of that seemed out the window now.

Steinbeck’s story about the Joad family would not be published until 1939 but the reality of it was being played out across America every day. The novel explores themes of social injustice, economic hardship, the loss of the American Dream. The power of community and collective action in the face of suffering was for the Hall’s, the way out.

Henry Cayce was Eileen’s uncle and by coincidence an oil worker. He had worked for Barnsdal in Elwood as a mechanic but had also lost his job. He now worked as a garage mechanic in Santa Barbara. They rented a big house in Hope Ranch and had three kids of their own which made six at home. Eileen ran the house and took care of the kids and Martha worked in her mother’s little grocery store. The house was in a walnut grove so Eileen and the six kids shucked walnuts and sold them downtown for extra money. They did whatever they could find.

Bruce took any kind of job he could find mostly doing day labor. A few hours here and a few there most not lasting very long and bringing in a little money to keep them going. He finally got on a a garbage man, humping trash all day. His bad back was murder, but it was life or death, up at four and home at four. He continued looking for oil field work. Call after call hoping that something would turn up. My mother said, she was going on fourteen, at the time that she really didn’t know much about that part of her life just that it was fun to be with her family and cousins and that it was a happy home. Such is how parents shield their kids from harm.

Finally in late February 1933 Bruce got the call from Signal and both he and uncle Henry went back up to Elwood. They would both stay with Signal for the rest of their working lives.

Eileen had been in the hospital for a couple of days. She had intermittent contractions but nothing too serious until later in the day Tuesday the tenth of March. Bruce arrived at the maternity ward just after four o’clock. It was a fine day, one of those familiar California winters near the end of the rainy season. No fog in Santa Barbara, a riffling breeze drifting out of the desert to the east bringing a promise of warmer temperatures and springtime. A fortunate time to bring a new life into the world.

There was no sound. Six miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, rock stirred. Billions of tons of the earths crusts, caught along a crack, Jerked, lurched as they slid by one another at around a sixteenth of an inch a year. The immensity of caught forces gave way at 5:54 pm.

While her parents were at the hospital Barbara, Bob and Mariel and the Cayce cousins had just sat down to dinner, forks clinking against plates, the girls dicing up some boy at school, Bob rolling his eyes, trapped in a world of girls, when suddenly the table was gone, plates forks, knives and the stew Eileen had made just for the occasion splattered across the floor peppered with flakes of china. Too stunned to act they froze as the old wooden house began to shake and sway to a rhythm of its own. They were fortunate. Old wooden structures might skip and jump about in a quake but most survived with little damage.

At the hospital, as Eileen went into labor. Bruce paced the waiting room. In 1933 no man was allowed anywhere near the birthing room. He chained smoked Chesterfields and he waited. He’d heard nothing from upstairs and at 5:50 he decided enough was enough and he would go see what was going on. He was a few steps up the stairs when the Long Beach Quake of 1933 slammed into Santa Barbara. Bruce was staggered in mid-step, fell to his knees and tumbled back down the steps.

Eileen was in bed and had just delivered a baby girl. She was lying on her mothers belly as the doctor reached to cut the umbilical cord when the quake roared in. The bed skidded one way and the other with the nurses and the doctor desperately holding on, trying to keep the new mother and her child in it. The Long Beach quake** which was a terrible event shook Santa Barbara in a gentile way but that little girl who grew up to be my aunt Patsy was always ever after referred to by her father as an earth shaking event.

And that she was.

Coming: Chapter 19. The Depression

Cover Photo: Living outside, post earthquake, Santa Barbara California 1933.

*This is one of the events in our family history which has caused us to be pretty qualified government haters.

**In the early evening hours on March 10, 1933, the treacherous Newport-Inglewood fault ruptured, jolting the local citizenry just as the evening meals were being prepared. The Magnitude 6.4 earthquake caused extensive damage (approximately $50 million in 1933 dollars) throughout the City of Long Beach and surrounding communities. Damage was most significant to poorly designed and unreinforced brick structures. Sadly, the earthquake caused 120 fatalities.

Within a few seconds, 120 schools in and around the Long Beach area were damaged, of which 70 were destroyed. Experts concluded that if children and their teachers were in school at the time of the earthquake, casualties would have been in the thousands.

Michael Shannon is a writer, former teacher and a surfer. He write so his children will know where they came from.

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How To Live Forever

Michael Shannon.

For a good start, be sure to be born on Easter Sunday. You might want to be the only child, a boy child at that, born that day. You should be born at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Hospital, better known as Sisters Hospital.

Staffed with The Poor Clares an austere Roman Catholic religious order of nuns, co-founded in 1212 by Saint Clare of Assisi and Saint Francis of Assisi. The order is dedicated to a contemplative life of prayer, and poverty. They were all good Irish girls. Many of them spent their entire working lives in Santa Maria and when they retired they returned to Ireland from whence they came.

They delivered the newborn to my mother with a blue bow tied in my blond locks. They told my mother it was an omen from God. It must have been because Dr. Case had given my parents some very bad news the year before, he said, “Barbara you will never be able to conceive.”

Born on Easter Sunday? Perhaps a subtle message to Harold Case. Who knows.

So thats a good start.

Now be sure your parents are from Farm and Ranch families. There are scads of reasons for this. The first is general health. To build a child’s immune system it’s important for them to drink from the irrigation ditch and the hose. In my case we drank from the kitchen faucet too, even when the water tank had dead Screech Owl chicks floating in it. The hard water in the valley had coated the inside of irrigation and all the other water pipe with a whitish hard scale that eventually caused the kitchen faucets to close up to the point where you could not stick a pencil in them. A soupcon of fertilizer in the irrigation pipe was good for kids too.

We learned that planting Roly-poly bugs does not grow snapdragons but that Nasturtiums are pretty tasty. We had oodles because they grew insanely lush over the septic pit behind the house. Leaves of three. let them be, we learned that the hard way and that Horse Nettles could be touched in the center of the leaf but not on the edge. We learned to remove our socks in the presence of foxtails and cockle burrs, that is if we happened to be wearing them and that there was only one kind of bad snake. If we saw one in the yard we just told mom, the woman whoo was terrified of spiders and she would come out and dispatch it with a shovel something she learned growing up in the oil fields. Mice in the house were pretty OK; Dad said they didn’t eat much anyway.

Kitties were tolerated for their mouser abilities but seldom coddled, dogs were loved beyond any reasonable amount. Dogs went everywhere we did, showing us the way.

I learned to swim in the creek and the watering ponds on the cattle ranches. I could throw tomatoes, bell peppers and dirt clods with deadly accuracy. It was a mile walk through the fields and a dirt clod fight could and did last the whole way. My friend Kenny and I stalked Old Man Parrish’s apple orchards with our Red Ryders. Everything we did was a made up game of the imagination.

Every old building, corn crib, horse barn, tractor shed harbored an army of spiders. The dark places were home to Black Widows. There were Tarantulas living in holes in the ground, The Daddy Long Legs, so delicate and harmless, the Orb Weaver who weaves those delicate circular webs that can be so striking in the morning when dripping with the morning dew that are so striking that we used to duck under them so as not to harm them. Besides they were natural born fly killers. The nasty brown recluse which, if it bit you it was a sure trip to Doctor Cookson’s office.

When Warners came to dust the crops with clouds of sulphur and DDT filled the air. Not unpleasant odors went you sniffed it floating on the breeze. Sulphur was sprayed on Tomatoes and peas to fight mildew and DDT. It just killed everything but kids. We could imgine WWI watching those old Stearman biplanes zooming ten feet off the ground and then pulling nearly straight up after flying under Lester Sullivan’s power lines. He flew a Chandell and came right back the way he came and did it again. Dad said he was WWII fighter pilot and wishes he still was. He would call the kitchen phone to say when he was leaving Santa Maria so we knew when to rush out and get as close as possible to the crop he was dusting.

When we were big enough we stood on the cultivator bars of my dads tractors to hitch a ride into the fields. This wasn’t thought of as any great danger. Two of us would jump up and down on the bars to make the tractor buck a little which dad never seemed to mind much. Falling, losing your grip or footing and being dragged to death seemed a small price for some adventure.

We dug in the dirt, wallowed in the good rich mud of our adobe fields. Mom said the clogged pores in our skin prevented germs from entering. Being hosed of on the front lawn wasn’t such a bad thing in the summer.

The families ranches introduced us to livestock, “Bob” wire fences, the wonderful cow flop, cows must have the biggest bladders on earth. Have you ever seen a steer pee? My goodness! We knew what a salt block tasted like. The smell of new mown hay, used all the time in poetry but I think seldom experienced by most, the feel of the curly hair on a Hereford calf’s head and the rough feel of a cows tongue when she gives you a kiss.

My mother made sure we had a good clean shirt every day but Levi’s were worn until they were dirty and greasy enough to stand on their own. I mean, she had an old Westinghouse tub style washer with a wringer on the top which we were warned about but that hardly mattered and the occasional fingertip was squshed, carefully, so just to see how it felt. No one minded hanging out the wash because the clothsline was a great place to run through when the clothes were till wet. Had to be careful though, that was a switching offense. If you ran though and made good your escape mom soon pardoned you with a hug and a promise not to do it again.

Kids did get sick though. We got infected from the other kids at Branch school. In the winter. Mrs Brown’s lower grade classroom could at times be fogged with microscopic beads of snotty goo and desk tops were glazed with phlegm from sticky fingers.

Mom and dad took disease very seriously. We had all the modern doctor mom tools, the humidifier that chuffed a fog of Vicks Vapo-Rub mist, A bottle of Iodine, Aspirin and band-Aids. She kept a handy rubber hot water bottle and if it was serious you might repose in their bed during the day and simply be cured by that treat and the smell of them as you slipped in and out of your fever dreams.

Our parents grew up in an age where the death of children was an omnipresent occurrence. When my father was born, one in five children died before their fifth birthday. Smallpox still wasn’t eradicated though the vaccine had been around for more than a century. My dad nearly died from Scarlett fever when he was seven. There was no cure. Children died from Whooping Cough, Measles, Influenza, Pneumonia, and infections from ordinary cuts and scrapes. A broken bone could become septic and a child would be lost. If you lived in the country there was little access to medical care, schools did not have nurses in attendance. The life of a child was precious but there were few ways to protect them. My own aunt was infected with polio when she was just nineteen. She survived but had a game leg for the rest of her life. Did I mention he was married with two small children and pregnant with a third when it happened.

Today we seem to have lost the institutional mamory of what pre-antibiotic medicine was like. My parents never did and neither have I.

No one asked me if I wanted to be stabbed by the nurse from the County Schools Office as we lined up at the schools gate and waited in line to go up the steps of the little school van and be stuck. Nope, any squawking would have been completely ignored. Parents knew the cost, nobody complained.

We learned from our parents that most things were not crying offenses. Dad never complained about anything, neither did my mother who if she sniped about her friends she didn’t do it around us. We lived in the kids world, all of us. Adventure was something homemade. You polished your imagination with no help from television because in the very beginning it wasn’t made for you. Reading was the drug of choice. We had all the Hardy Boys adventures, The Three Musketeers, Mark Twain, Jack London, Franklin W. Dixons Frank Merriwell’s adventures which in and of itself made us want to go to college. We knew little or nothing of war or politics. Those were of the adult world.

Looking back you can see that we were free to make our own adventures. We had little supervision. We knew the rules laid out for us but they were few. We were expected to have a good time, explore, learn to swim in the creek, fish for our dinner and follow the dogs wherever they went.

It was in many ways a simpler time for kids. You had time to learn and form yourself. To put on some the armor of self before you had to inevitably step over the threshold of young adulthood. It took me a long time to catch up with the town kids when I went to high school. I wasn’t prepared for smoking, fighting, sex or any of the other thing that can bring kids to grief.

A friend once told me that he found it admirable that I went my own way. Growing up on the farm had vaccinated me so to speak. Thoughtfulness was simply ground in you by experience. We were vaccinated by the tenet that you should “Look before you leap.”

Growing up on the land and understanding that the most wonderful thing was that my parents were alway there. My dad in our fields and mom in the kitchen. We were safe and secure in the knowledge that we were loved and cared for.

Cover Photo: My aunt Patsy at 17, she of the polio. My two brothers and myself. We were one, four and six. Shannon family photo

Michael Shannon is at heart, still a farm boy. He writes so his children will know where they come from.

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The Lid

Michael Shannon

It’s inauguration day January 20th 1961. There is eight inches of new snow on the ground. It is freezing yet over a million people had gathered on the mall as witnesses. Two vastly important things happened on the marble steps of the Capitol building in Washington DC. Neither one was the swearing in of a new president. In a photograph of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren reading the oath of office to the new chief executive who is not wearing a hat, his wife Jaqueline stands behind Warren absolutely rocking her Halston designed pillbox hat. The hew President John F. Kennedy was set to become the first US leader born in the 20th century, the first Catholic commander-in-chief and the first president whose inaugural speech was beamed across crackly television screens in color.

Everything that happened on January 20, 1961, was stage-managed to tell America that a new age was dawning. “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,” he implored a nation in need of reassurance and leadership at the height of the Cold War.

Perhaps the saddest thing about this day of hope was that it was the death knell of hats. Kennedy didn’t like hats and wouldn’t wear one unless he had to. He had great hair which is essential in the political game. Why cover it up?

In one fell swoop two centuries of hats were swept away. After 1961 there were still great hats to be seen but only on rare and special occasions. In the movies, at fashion shows and at the Kentucky Derby where they aped the far more famous and, dare I say more stylish British.

Audrey Hepburn, “My Fair Lady.”

We all know the iconic mega-feathered hats of the Edwardian era. The Edwardians were particularly enamored with plumage, but unlike their be-feathered predecessors, the Victorians and the Georgians, many a fine species of bird was taken to the brink of extinction by the incredible demand for ladies be-feathered hats.

Throughout history, hats have played a big role in indicating one’s status. For the Edwardians, they took this to a new level, and often added entire birds to their heads, and sometimes these birds were fantastical creations cobbled together from several varying bird parts!

Popular plumage for hats extended beyond ostrich, to include heron, peacock, egret, osprey, bird of paradise, pheasant…even vulture. The more “common” feathers for adornment were garden fowl, pigeon, turkey, goose, and rooster. These feathers were made into plumes, pompoms, aigrettes, wings, pads, bands, breasts, and quills, and not by marchandes, milliners, and craftsmen in quaint little shops, oh no, by massive factories employing thousands of women and children, and dealing in hundreds of thousands of feathers per day. In 1900, in North America, the millinery industry employed 83,000 people!

Camille Clifford American actress

Evelyn Nesbit, the Girl in the Velvet Swing. Lillian Russell the Jersey Lily. Lily Elsie in the Merry Widow

In a world of sweat stained baseball caps and shapeless, floppy hiking hats sold at every seaside gift shop and those faux cowboy hats made for the bar and ATV wrangling, only Jazz musicians have kept the banner of the chapeau flying. No one could rock a Pork Pie like Lester Young, the greatest tenor sax player who ever lived if I do say so myself.

L to R Thelonius Monk and Lester Williams “The Prez,” nicknamed by Billie Holiday herself.

Rockers too have had their iconic hats. Some such as Leon Russels “Mad Hatter” lid was so famous that just the sight of it identified the person. Tom Petty’s John Bull Topper and Stevie Ray Vaughns Texas style Plateau hat could be spotted a mile away. All three somehow lent a special air to the legendary musicians.

Cowboys are well known for their hats. Every area of the country seems to have a dedicated style today but in the beginning it was just something to cover the head. Bowlers, broken down military hats the cheap felt hats that came out of the civil war especially from the Confederates. Since big time ranching essentially started in Texas-New Mexico those boys set the style. They were dirt poor, likely almost no education but they could fork a horse and they showed off a certain style that somehow puts modern cowboys riding their ATV’s and wearing custom shirts with patches that make them look like they came out of nascar to shame.

Nat Love, African American cowboy who claimed to have won the name of Deadwood Dick in South Dakota, 1876, by virtue of his roping talent. Full length photo with lariat and saddle. From his privately published autobiography (1907).

Cowboys from the old original days. Black, Brown and white as it used to be. 1870 to 1900. PD

The women too wore hats, just like the men though with perhaps a little more style.

Clockwise from upper left: The Sweetheart of the rodeo, my great-grandmother Marianna Cayce, a Mexican Charraria from Jalisco, Mexico and one of the girls from the old Huasna rancho, California. Look up the Charrarias, they ride horse handling events and do it all sidesaddle. My grandmother was the first woman to ride astride in the Santa Barbara Fiest parade in 1925. She loved the scandal.

I have to say that some of the movie cowpokes sported great hats too though theirs were chosen by set dressers to match their features, like an artist might paint them but the good ones are worth remembering.

From upper left clockwise: Henry Fonda, Tom Selleck, Jeff Bridges with Hailey Stanfield and from the greatest western ever made, “Monte Walsh.” Lee Marvin.

Every good gangster must wear an iconic hat. Fedoras, snap brims, skimmers, newsboys, they wore ’em all doncha see? Before gangsters dressed in tracksuits and gold chains by the dozen, revealing their status as potential killers there was a day when the point was to look like an honest businessman. In suits and fedoras they strolled the Big Apple in neighborhoods such as “Hell’s Kitchen, “Alphabet City” and the Bowery. Gangsters of every stripe roamed the lower east side, Little Italy and The Five Points, The Tenderloin and Harlem. The Dead Rabbits, The Forty Thieves, The Whyos, The Purple Gang and Murder Inc. roamed their districts with evil intent. With a Snap Brim or Straw Boater, Chewing on a ‘seegar’ they dressed to the Nines to send a message.

“Lucky” Luciano and “Bugs Moran” Cold dead eyes.

Moviemakers have a fascination with gangsters. Their portrayal is designed to send shivers up and down the spines of viewers who will watch them and ogle their antics on the big screen in a state of vicarious joy.

The Godfather, Little Caesar, Public Enemy and Scarface.

The workingman typically sported a cap unlike the “Swells” and their Homburgs and hardboiled Derbys winding down through the financial district and sporting a rolled umbrella as a mark of their status. Known by various names in the western world, Flat Caps, Newsboys, Scally Cap and Baker Boy Cap they were once worn by tradesmen of every kind. Recently they have seen a modest rebirth with the hipster Scally Cap and the Baker Boy Paddy Cap from Ireland.

The Morning Telegraph was a New York City broadsheet newspaper owned by Moe Annenberg’s Cecelia Corporation. Bat Masterson frontier marshall was its sportswriter. It ceased publication in 1972. Newsboys photo circa 1897.

This a comparison of the Baker Boy Cap, the real on the left and the movie on the right. Henry Fowler real, Cillian Murphy not real.

Gang members frequently wore tailored clothing, which was not uncommon for gangs of the time. Bosses wore silk scarves and starched collars with metal tie buttons. Their distinctive dress was easily recognizable by city inhabitants, police, and rival gang members. The wives, girlfriends, and mistresses of the gang members were known for wearing lavish clothing. Pearls, silks, and colorful scarves were commonplace on their women. The gang in England, operated from the 1880s until the 1920s. The group consisted largely of young criminals from lower- to working-class backgrounds. They engaged in murder, robbery, violence, racketeering, illegal bookmaking, and control of gambling. Members wore signature outfits that typically included tailored jackets, lapelled overcoats, buttoned waistcoats, silk scarves, bell-bottom trousers, leather boots, and flat caps. The so-called Peaky Blinders, which contrary to what you might see on television did not have razor blades sewn into their caps because Gillette didn’t begin making the old single edge razor blade until 1908. They instead gained their name from the way they wore them with the cap tilted so that the peak covered one eye.

The real deal. Peaky Blinders criminal records about 1904. Birmingham, England.

The armed forces in America have little choice in what they wear. Officers and enlisted men have gone to great lengths to build in some individual style when they can. In WWII Army Air Corps officer pilots wore their field grade visor hats in the cockpit. Because they wore head phones to communicate the strap on the phones bent down the crown stiffener so that the normally flat top was “crushed” on the sides. The hat became so cool that all officers not just fliers sported them. Flyers looked down on these posers with a degree of disdain as they should.

The real deal. B-17 pilot Colonel Jimmy Stewart and Major Clark Gable, air gunner. Both flew multiple missions over Germany.

Enlisted sailors and soldiers, though they didn’t wear gold braid, nevertheless found ways to twist, fold and crimp their headgear too. If you have complained about those darn kids wearing their ball caps all crazy, have at look at your great-grandfathers style.

L2/Sqdn/99th Ftr/pho 171

Tuskegee 332nd fighter group ground crew in Italy WWII. Bobby Hall stylin’ his Dixie, US Navy

In Great Britain they run the Epsom Derby, pronounced Darby, is run in June of each year. The Stakes, more commonly known as the Derby and sometimes referred to as the Epsom Derby, is a Group 1 flat horse race in England open to three-year-old colts and fillies. It’s a major event in on British sporting calendar. The queens and kings have been running their horses in this race since 1661 and annually since 1740. Like other elite horse races, the Epsom Derby has grown into a multiday festival, featuring musical acts and events in addition to the race itself. The Oaks is also run during the Derby festival, held on the Friday before the Saturday running of the Derby. Derby Day is more formal than most contemporary sporting events: Epsom Downs maintains a dress code for male spectators in certain sections of the stands, and women often attend the event wearing extravagant hats. Hats are literally the most important reason for showing up for some. Troops of photographers flit to and fro capturing images of important people and their hats.

EPSOM, UNITED KINGDOM – JUNE 01: (EMBARGOED FOR PUBLICATION IN UK NEWSPAPERS UNTIL 48 HOURS AFTER CREATE DATE AND TIME) Queen Elizabeth II attends Derby Day of the Investec Derby Festival at Epsom Racecourse on June 1, 2013 in Epsom, England. (Photo by Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images)

Queen to be, The real Queen, a Duchess and an the American Queen.

We’ve all seen the distintive Cloche hat which was popular in the 20’s and 30’s I always thought the were strange looking things. aort of beanie-like, blah and bland. When I was looking for examples I ran across a colorized video of a Parisian woman sitting outside a bistro wearing one and it completely changed my perception. The color and movement explained it all.

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Janet Gaynor, American actress traveling to New York on the Queen Mary in 1929 and a sophisticated Parisienne taking tea on the banks of the Seine in 1927. Some people can make anything look good.

I’m sad to see the end of the Pork Pie, the Topper, the Skimmer, the derby, the merry widow and the little straw bonnet worn by Natty Bumpo’s sweetheart Cora Munro in the Last of the Mohicans,

Misstress Cora Munro.

My brothers and I though, are making an attempt to jump start the fine old art of hat wearing. Maybe it will work.

Good luck to us I say.

Cover Photo: My grandmother Annie Gray Shannon and Hattie Tyler, 1900

Michael Shannon is a writer and sure to take some abuse from his brothers for this.

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THE NECESSARY

My Goodness, What to Do?

By Michael Shannon

My grandmother was born in 1885. Things were different then. The little Red house she was born in down in the Oso Flaco is long gone now like most old houses built in the days before electricity and indoor plumbing. She didn’t live there too long for her father was a fortunate man and found oil on his little ranch in Graciosa, todays Orcutt. he became an instant rich man and soon built himself a large modern home on west Guadalupe road. Though rich, he was still a farmer and he worked his land which stretched all the way back to the Santa Maria River. For an landless Irishman, which most were, the land held more importance than the oil.

When my grandma Annie was eight years old she came to Arroyo Grande to live with her aunt and uncle, Sarah and Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore had come to Guadalupe from Ireland and prospered in the sheep business. Though he had little education he was a cunning man and made himself a fortune with which he built a big house on the edge of little Arroyo Grande. He bought a big book of the collected works of William Shakespeare which he kept in the foyer of his house where all could see it as they entered. That was all the education he needed.

So, my grandmother grew in a life of privilege. Servants, beautiful clothes and the best of Arroyo Grande pioneer society. Her girlhood friends were, Phoenix, Harloe, Rice, Lierly, Porters, and the descendants of Don Francisco Branch. Families that sent their children to private schools in San Francisco and San Luis Obispo.

She was a child of the late Victorian Age and all it represented. A hundred years after the first American civil war or The Revolution as it’s now styled, fashionable society still looked to the European continent for guidance in societal affairs. We will dress this way, walk this way, speak this way and adopt the mores and shibboleths that decree customs, principles, or a belief that distinguish a particular class or group of people. The majority, under the influence of vague nineteenth-century shibboleths, understood that by associating oneself with these doctrines implied sophistication to the nth degree.

I never knew my grandmother as a girl though she certainly was one. She was 60 years old when I was born. She wore sensible low heeled shoes, cats eye glasses, plain print house dresses covered by an apron with the ubiquitous hankies in the pocket. If she wore any jewelry other than her slim wedding ring I don’t recall. She wasn’t overly solicitous of my attention but she was a calm presence rocking in her chair darning socks or knitting. It was the chair my grandfather bought her when she was first pregnant with my uncle Jackie in 1908, the year she graduated from California Berkeley. She would offer her hand with its delicate skin which had hardly ever seen the sun because in the forties women still wore gloves everywhere. A little cheek was offered for a boy’s kiss which was as soft as a down feather. She always smelled of White shoulders, powder not perfume for perfume was considered vulgar and only worn by “Soiled Doves or low class strumpets.

She played the piano in church, always wore a hat to go to town no matter how mundane or routine the purpose was and was unfailingly polite, no gossip that I ever heard. If there was it was confined to her bridge club, women who had sat at those old folding tables together for nearly fifty years and likely chewed, although the word chewed which she viewed as vulgar would never have passed any of their lips, they chewed on the same old conversations until they were polished to a soft sheen. Safe, familiar and soothing.

She was raised in a quite remarkable era which is almost unbelievable today. Things we take for granted were forbidden or lived under a series of shadow words that said one thing but implied another. Society had developed euphemisms to mask words and phrase which the well-educated and socially prominent practiced.

women were as energetic as they are today but har far fewer things to occupy their minds. A contemporary woman would hardly recognize my grandmothers life in 1900. She couldn’t own property under her own name, she couldn’t vote, there were few places she could go unaccompanied. She couldn’t initiate divorce nor was she protected from domestic abuse. She couldn’t wear trousers, smoke a cigarette, she couldn’t handle money even if she had some, that was her husbands job.

She a had an Irish servant girl, her name was Clara. Clara washed ironed, served dinner and kept house for the Moore’s. She is in one photo kept in the families collection. She was apparently a scandalous girl who’s secret my grandmother kept to herself for nearly her entire life. She let it slip in her mid-nineties when her memory of the present faded and the memories of the past sharpened.

When a girl reached puberty she was likely to be 16 or 17. Poor nutrition, increased physical stress from industrial work, and other poor living conditions during the Victorian era contributed to this delayed onset. Social standing at the turn of the century figured in the timing. Children went straight to adulthood as there was no concept of adolescent until roughly 1905 when the concept was published in a book. The word teenage was completely unknown. My grandmother graduated high school in 1904 and would have been constrained to act and dress as an adult. You can see in old photographs children dressed exactly like their parents.

As a young single woman which she was until graduation from college she wore her hair up. Nearly every woman did. She put her hair up as a young teen and it stayed up until she bobbed it in 1920. Wearing the hair down as an adult woman was a scandalous thing and indicated that you were of a lower class or a, horrors to even think about it, “Lady of the night.” A fallen woman in fact and if my grandmother and her friends saw you on the street in San Luis Obispo which by the way had a rich and teeming Red-Light district, they would turn away and point there noses skyward at the scandal of it. Hmph.

The girl in the rear, Margaret “Maggie” Phoenix. Our Margaret Harloe for which the school is named. Note the ubiquitous hankies.

This developmental stage was deeply shaped by Victorian social and moral codes, which emphasized female purity and restricted young people’s autonomy. Victorian culture strongly discouraged public discussion of sexuality and puberty. This lack of frankness contributed to a cultural “prudery” surrounding these topics. Some late-Victorian medical and social commentators viewed puberty with apprehension, seeing it as a time when girls were susceptible to disease or irrationality, swooning and the “vapors” more than likely brought on by too-tight corsets. There was a push for female health and physical activity for some, but this was often met with resistance from those who preferred to preserve traditional ideals of fragile femininity. Social mores were set by the extreme upper classes in order to distance themselves from the lower or even worse, the depraved gutter Irish.

Grandma of course was just like the girls of today. They aped the manners and dress of their elders but they still found occasion for hi-jinks. Dressing up as their fathers was apparently a regular pastime. We have many photos of she and her friends posing for pictures taken with her new Kodak Brownie camera in front of her home. No lawn though as a front lawn wasn’t even a concept in 1903.

Annie Gray and Tootsie Lierley in 1903. Patrick Moore residence Arroyo Grande

You might notice that they both are both hatted. No self-respecting woman would ever be caught outside without a hat. Notice too that the skirts hem is touching the ground. It was thought that the sight of a shoe or God forbid, an ankle would drive men crazy. One of her classmates at Cal in 1907 was expelled for wearing her skirts short enough to expose he ankles. A length of fabric called a flounce was whip stitched to the hem of dresses with a small loop that could be grasped and delicately lifted just a little if she stepped over a curb or ascended the stairs. I could be removed for cleaning as often as needed since hems touched the ground and could get very dirty in a town which had no paved streets.

My grandmother is the girl in the checked dress on the left. 1907. University of California Berkeley campus.

When a woman was menstruating she was “Indisposed.” Women were such a fragile things that too much stimulation of any kind could cause her to swoon. Those darn corsets again. If a man referred to a woman’s leg as anything but a limb he might be cast out of polite society. A woman could not be touched in any fashion other than to take her arm if the road was too rough for walking. Sitting on a buggy seat, the heat from a woman’s limb was known to cause temporary blindness in men.

When she was in her nineties she still wouldn’t cross her ankles since that was considered suggestive. My grandfather didn’t cross his legs either, at least in the presence of women. You had to be careful because you were surrounded by vulgarity, it’s nasty fingers aching to clutch the unwary sophisticate.

Grandma frowned on anyone mentioning the number six, I think for obvious reasons. Animal horns were considered obscene, vulgar to the point of being devilish. Once I found a beautiful copper chaffing dish she had received as a wedding gift in 1908. That dish spent it’s entire life in the barn because the handle was a section of Elk horn which she wouldn’t touch. No goats either. My dad and uncle Jackie had to give their pet goat away, it had those devilish cloven hooves. The milk cows and bulls were also polled or dehorned, either for utility or because she wanted it that way.

She wore a silk chemise and pantaloons for underwear called, always, unmentionables. They were never seen by men. The pantaloons were basically a set of short leggings with no, dare I say, crotch. Probably shouldn’t. They wore so many layers of clothes that they simply could not undress quickly. A woman doing her business would have looked the same as a woman sitting in a chair. You see, this was because there were a couple things about feminine hygiene which were quite unknown at the time. Most homes had no toilet and many no running water. Finding and using the “Necessary” cold be very difficult when out and about. This was a woman’s dilemma. No business had a public toilet, Toilet comes from the French Toilette by the way. Toilet is French in origin and is derived from the word ‘toilette’, which translates as “dressing room”, rather than today’s meaning. This was another dodge around a seemingly vulgar term such as “The Jakes”, the outhouse, the Crapper* or the chamber pot. If I may, there was no toilet paper in a necessary unless the owner was well off . Paper for the toilet was invented by the Chinese in the fourth century BC. It took until 1857 until it first appeared in America and was sold in individual packs of five hundred and, of course quite expensive. Think of this, splinter free toilet paper first appeared in the 1930’s, multiply paper in 1942 and thanks to modern inventiveness, scented in 1964. Speaking of this would have been absolutely taboo in front of my grandmother. No lady could possibly utter the word toilet. She went to the bathroom where she did things that were secret from the world of men.

Remember that ancient Rome, Greece and Persia over three thousand or more years ago had running water, sewers and public baths and “Necessaries.” Arroyo Grande at the turn of the twentieth century did not, certainly did not.

This somewhat limited the distance a woman could go from her home. Timing was of the essence. She certainly could not just drop in to the Capitol Saloon on Branch street. She and her friends would have been forever shunned.

Saloons were places where Demon Rum lived. The men inside were considered vulgar beyond description. A woman who approached too closely would likely be subject to catcalls** and other unwanted comments.

I cannot imagine what she would think of our house when we had two rambunctious boys and one bathroom. On school days the door never closed and no one though anything about it. You all know what I mean. All that would have been incomprehensible to grandma.

As to engage in man woman stuff or Amorous Congress there was simply no word in her vocabulary that sufficed and it was never mentioned in any context, not even animals. She was a dairymen’s wife so she had to make her peace with sort of thing. She was seriously uncomfortable with both words and I’ve heard the act itself was only practiced twice, resulting in two children. Or so my father said, tongue in cheek, I hope.

Girls and boys didn’t have to wonder what the rules of courtship were, you could buy a printed card.

So my grandmother, her name was Annie Shannon was a steady presence in my life growing up. She never raised her voice, she always dressed the same, she never ever went out without hat and gloves even if she was going to buy groceries. She taught her grandchildren not to masticate with their mouths open, keep our elbows off the table, not to speak unless spoken too and keep our opinions to ourselves. I’ve done poorly with the latter but I hope she will forgive me.

I loved her for who she was and I miss her.

Jack and Annie Shannon as I remember them. Arroyo Grande about 1950.

Cover Photo: Annie Gray formal portrait high school graduation 1904. Stoneheart Studios Santa Maria California.

*Thomas Crapper was an English plumber and businessman. He founded Thomas Crapper & Co in London, a plumbing equipment company. In 1861, Crapper patented his first invention – an improved ballcock mechanism. The device was used to regulate the flow of water in cisterns and is still used today in toilets across the world. I cannot not imagine my grandmothers reaction to the word ballcock, it may have killed heron the spot. Crapper’s notability with regard to toilets has often been overstated, mostly due to the publication in 1969 of a tongue-in-cheek biography by New Zealand satirist Wallace Reyburn.

**Catcalling is a form of street harassment, typically sexual in nature, where a man makes unwanted comments, gestures, or sounds toward a woman in public. It is not a compliment but a demeaning act that makes the target feel threatened, degraded, and unsafe. The motivations behind it can include asserting power, misogyny, or a desire to express sexual interest, but it is always a form of harassment that infringes on the target’s dignity and right to feel secure in public.

Michael Shannon, the author of this piece loved his grandmother. Both of them actually because they were characters in their own right.

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At The Table

Michael Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old Kawaguchi home. in the 1890’s

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

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

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

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

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

1965, Women were still know by their husbands name.

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

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

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

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