I grew up in Arroyo Grande, California, but we didn’t get here–we relocated from a tough oil town, Taft–until 1955, and not 1953, as I’d earlier thought. I always felt a little ashamed since I grew up with friends whose families had been here since the 1840s or the 1880s. Some of my best friends have been, and are, and always will be, Japanese-Americans, and their families came here fifty years before mine did.

So when I write about the history of this town, going on five books now, I sometimes feel like an impostor, a poser. But, as I’ve written in one of those books, when we moved out to Huasna Road, east of town, in 1957, I recognized instantly, as a five-year-old, that this was Home.

And since most of my childhood was spent in delightful anarchy, in creekbeds and foothills and sometimes in and around abandoned houses, some of them adobe and some of them haunted, I discovered that I was an incurable explorer. So if not quite a native and nowhere near a Founding Family, I was, at least, a learner, and in learning the Arroyo Grande Valley I became entranced. It’s a love affair that began when I was five, and and here we are sixty-two years later.

This place gets under your skin. After many, many years away—twenty-six—I was so happy to come home again in 1996 and, best of all, to come home to teach young people. My parents are buried here, my schools still stand here and so do my memories. My friends, both living and dead, are never quite so much alive as they are in my imagination.

I am a lucky man to love a place so much.

I am thinking through a presentation to local students about the town’s history, and I tend to think vividly and visually in storyboards, so PowerPoint, as my high-school students would confirm, is the way I think history through.

So this is a very selective and in-the-rough history of Branch Street, Arroyo Grande, California, in my home town.

Branch Street