Don Gullickson of Arroyo Grande has passed away at 91. He’s at the top right in this photo of the South County Historical Society.

There are many reasons this is a big deal.

I knew Don, but only slightly. I talked to him three or four times, found him intelligent, articulate and very funny. I wished I had talked to him more and listened to him even more than that.

He told me a little about bootlegging days, when he was just a little fellow. His Dad, Ole, was among a group of hunters, including the local pharmacist and other luminaries, who liked to secure a supply of Powerful Beverages before they went up north to hunt deer.

I am not, mind you, advocating the combination of Powerful Beverages and 30.06 rifles. That was their deal.

They bought their bootleg booze from a supplier in Shell Beach. Don, when I talked to him, couldn’t grab his name, but he was Greek.

So was Alex Spanos, the owner of Alex’s BBQ and known to be a modest bootlegger.

Ole and his friends would always take Don along with them when they made their booze purchases, sometimes right on the beach. Their reasoning was that no deputy sheriff would be suspicious of a bunch of guys with a five-year-old tagging along.

They were right.

Ten years later, Don was one part of a kind of Four Musketeers: Himself, John Loomis, Gordon Bennett and Haruo Hayashi.

Haruo, an AGUHS sophomore, was at home recovering from appendicitis surgery when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. He was anxious about getting better and returning to high school.

He was relieved when one of the toughest kids in school, Milt Guggia, beckoned to him. “Haruo,” Milt told him earnestly, “If anybody calls you a ‘Jap,’ I will beat the shit out of him.”

What a wonderful thing.

So, too, were the Four Musketeers. They stood by all their Nisei friends, but they stayed especially constant to Haruo, a painfully near-sighted boy, an Equipment Manager in high-school athletics, a boy who had to learn English from a kind little girl who was his classmate at the old grammar school on Traffic Way, where the Ford agency is today.

In April, the buses came and took Haruo Hayashi and his family away, along with the Kobaras, the Fukuharas, the Fuchiwakis, the Ikedas (except for Kaz, who stayed after to care for his father, his back broken after a team of farmhorses ran away with him), and so many more.

Haruo went first to the Tulare Fairgrounds, where the animal stalls where they kept our neighbors still stank of livestock.

Then he and our neighbors went to Gila River, where the temperature hovered at or above 100 degrees for the first month they were there. Then the desert winds came up, carrying the spores for Valley Fever, and that is what began killing off the grandparents who had first come to our Valley from Japan, most of them from Kyushu, a few from Hiroshima-ken.

Haruo finished high school there, taught by Quakers who insisted on living their faith. He continued to receive letters from the Four Musketeers, including Don.

Maybe “Boococks” would be a better term than “Musketeers.” That’s what their little circle called themselves. They were all members of the AGUHS Stamp Club.

Three of them fought in the Pacific. John, the Marine, fought on Peleliu and in the last terrible campaign on Okinawa. He didn’t know it, but his cousin Gordon Bennet was just offshore, on a fleet oiler like the ones the green kamikaze pilots—they were essentially children—excitedly mistook for heavy cruisers or battleships before they went in for their dives. Don was a swabbie, too.

Haruo joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, but the war in Europe ended before he had his chance. The razor-thin little near-sighted teenager was a heavy machine-gun instructor when word came that he could go home.

When he did, he found that the Phelans and Taylors had taken care of his father’s land and his farm equipment. He lived with the Bennetts during the period of transition—not always peaceful—until he could take up farming again.

John, Gordon and Don all came home, too. The Boococks were together again, and they remained that way for seventy-five years.

I think there can be no finer compliment to a man like Don Gullickson that to call him a true friend to his friends.

He was an Arroyo Grande boy, you see.