I’m sorry I’m posting so much, but I am laid up and besides that, but this is how my mind has worked all my life. It always has lots to think about.

This morning it was about two wonderful interviews I got to do when I was a reporter.

One was with Tom Carolan of the Carolan House in Grover. He was 100 when a gifted photographer, Thom Howells, and I met him. Carolan’s home was, to borrow Steinbeck, like a museum of uncatalogued exhibits, like an incredible antiques shop.  I was particularly  taken, and so was Thom, by a pair of beautifully-crafted binoculars from 1906. Carolan was Irish-born–not fond of Oueen Victoria–funny, eccentric, and delightful. He still missed the love of his life. He outlived Mrs. Carolan by twenty years.  She was a New York girl, I think, with whom he, a young immigrant had fallen in love, during the McKinleyvAdministration. . I loved the interview and I loved his little house, one of the first in Grover City.

I get a little emotional in old homes because some part of me intuits the lives that have left their traces in them, and the Anne Frank home in Amsterdam very nearly overwhelmed home me. Even as a supposedly objective historian, I have a consistent habit of making friends I have never met. The young men of World War II  I am now researching are from my father’s generation, but their lives ended so young that they become, in a way, like adopted sons. They are my boys, and I miss them.

The second wonderful interview was with Gene Saruwatari over coffee at what is Pancho’s today. It was still Sambo’s, and a place where in high school I had spent hours talking about books and music and poetry and ideas over botomless cups coffee–ten cents, no limit on refills–with my friend Paul. A peroxide blonde with a beehive who snapped her gum and looked tough–she more than held her own with truckers, farmhands,  and drunks– served us. But she liked Paul and me, called us “Hon,” and so I liked it when Gene suggested that place for the interview.

(By the way, we all had crushes on Gene’s lovely sister, Gayle, back in high school and also with the car Gayle drove–their Dad’s 1969 400-horsepower Pontiac GTO, black top over midnight blue.)

It had suddenly suddenly occurred to me that all the walnut trees of my youth, including the groves that had once surrounded the high school, were gone. I remember that Joe Loomis, in his woodcutting days, had cut enough firewood from them to keep all the fireplaces at Hearst Castle roaring for fifty years.

Gene told me a pest–the husk fly larvae–had infested the trees and so killed walnut cultivation in the Valley. But Gene made it interesting, and then even more interesting when he talked about how his grandfather, who harvested walnuts as well as vegetables (My Kelly grandparents had 40 acres of almond trees in Williams, California) had come from Japan and settled here.

I remember Tom and Gene because in both interviews, I had to struggle to take notes. Sometimes you just want to put down your pen and Reporter’s Notebook and listen to good people tell good stories. It is a great honor.