Monthly Archives: January 2020

Questions remain, Andy Hardy…

22 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Arroyo Grande, Film and Popular Culture, Uncategorized

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I have been undertaking a Serious Historical Study of the Andy Hardy movies that appear frequently on TCM. There were sixteen made between 1937 and 1958, during which Mickey Rooney’s Andy grew not an inch. Andy would go off to World War II but that part of his life is forgotten in favor of “I know what let’s do! Let’s put on a show!“

The films I’ve seen leave me with even more questions.

1. Did Andy ALWAYS wear a tie?

2. Did Americans once put that much sugar on their corn flakes?

3. Was that car as beautiful as I thought it was? Yes, it was. Andy’s high school graduation gift was a 1940 Plymouth convertible. Possibly it was a bribe offered Judge Stone, like the silver candlestick offered Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.


4. Mrs. Hardy deserves far more credit. I think she irons Andy’s undershorts.

5. Judge Hardy is rarely in court. He mostly just hangs around and dispenses advice, like Ozzie Nelson did in Ozzie and Harriet. And, given Lewis Stone’s appearance, I would guess he was about 78 when his son Andy was born.


6. It seemed to take Andy about seven years to get through high school. Maybe that’s because in Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, he falls in love with his drama teacher, Helen Gilbert.


7. In one scene, Andy ties a BOW TIE while talking to Mrs. Hardy without the use of a mirror. That’s an Academy Award right there, as far as I’m concerned.


8. We need soda fountains to make a comeback. My father first met my mother in a soda fountain in 1939.


9. In Love Finds Andy Hardy, Andy offers to court a friend’s girlfriend while he’s away on a weeks-long family vacation so no other guys will Make the Moves on her. They haggle over the fee. They agree on eight bits (a dollar) or $18.36 in today’s money. Good Lord, money went a lot farther then.


10. In Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary, Andy and Polly go parking in what looks like Amazon rainforest in the 1940 Plymouth convertible. Judge Hardy and a good portion of the supporting cast suddenly pull up and hilarity ensues. If any OTHER Andy Hardy type had been caught by his Dad parking with Anne Rutherford (Polly), he would’ve been horsewhipped.

11. Judy Garland appears in only three of the films. Andy is dismissive of her, because she’s just a kid. I find that really difficult to believe. Donna Reed (below) appears one film, too, and that’s good, because that might’ve laid the groundwork for her casting opposite James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.


12. The girl Andy dates for his friend (for $18.36 in 2020 money) in Love Finds Andy Hardy is Lana Turner. He finds her spoiled and selfish and, in my mind, no competition for Judy Garland. He breaks off the pseudo-relationship, which is good news because Lana Turner grows up to get her husband murdered and John Garfield sent to The Chair in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

13. There are Black people in Andy’s hometown, Carvel, USA (like The Simpsons’ Springfield, it’s everywhere but nowhere in particular). They are all—all of them— Pullman porters, it seems. That part of the Andy Hardy myth is less appealing to me than Andy and Judy and their fountain soda.

Our Mountain

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Posted by in American History, Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized

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This photo was taken near the intersection of Huasna Road and Lopez Drive, where I grew up. Here is the story of the mountain in the photo.

This view is what would we could see very morning from one of our living room picture windows, but, for the sake of accuracy, in this order:

  • Mom’s roses. Sutter Golds were among her favorites.
  • Pasture, with Morgans, whose discharge made the roses grow. Cars would stop to watch the foal, a little stallion made up of 78% legs.
  • Row crops, with the occasional crop duster dipping saucily beyond the power lines. Sometimes they were peppers, sometimes pole beans. A little up the Valley, Mr, Ikeda favored cabbages, which are blue. Just a tad to the left of the cabbages was the beaver dam into which I fell while fishing. Ineptly.
  • The Coehlo place (Kathy). Her Dad carved a model of the old St. Patrick’s Church that was astonishing.
  • The McNeil place.
  • The Shannon place.
  • Various pumphouses and barns.
  • The man who had an airplane in his yard. Just in case.
  • By the early 1960s, just a tad to the left and atop another hill, the Ikeda place.
  • In the late 1950s, Dona Manuela Branch’s redwood home–she’d come to the Arroyo Grande Valley, pregnant, in 1837–had been just a tad more to the left. When I was very little, the home burned in the night. It gave off a spark as bright as Venus. Only the palm trees that had shaded the home, its gardens and had once shaded the family at barbecue remain today. The Ikedas take respectful care of Manuela and her family, maintaining the graveyard up a little canyon five hundred yards away from the home her devoted children had built for her.

So I grew up with this mountain, sort of. It always looked to me like the top of a head with a receding oak tree hairline.

Once there was a brushfire that came up behind it and framed the top, like the sun’s aureola at full eclipse, and that became a passage, fifty years later, in a chapter about the Battle of Petersburg. It went like this:

The Third Battle of Petersburg began in the pitch-black pre-dawn of April 2, 1865. A Union army surgeon, watching the assault from a federal fort, could see nothing until the combined muzzle flashes of thousands of Confederate rifles lit the horizon the way a brush fire will when it crowns a hilltop. When a line of flashes went black again, the doctor knew that the Union assault had carried the Confederate entrenchments.

One day, when I was in my early teens, I decided to climb it. You could access it from behind the Cherry Apple Farm. I was by myself, which was stupid, and forgot about the poison oak, which was stupider.

It took me two hours.

When I reached the top of the mountain I considered to be very close to my own personal property–emotionally, if not legally–I found out I hadn’t reached the top at all.

What neither the photo nor my many morning views as a little boy revealed was that this was actually two mountains: There’s a razorback ridge in front and, behind it and beyond it, the bald man with his receding hairline of oak trees.

I was kind of angry. It took me until almost dark to get back down, by which time my family assumed I’d been eaten by cannibals, which meant that the Eskimo Pies brought us by Frank the Foremost Dairy delivery driver–a consistently cheerful man– would last a little longer.

So it turned out that I climbed mountains just as ineptly as I fished. I would live to climb a few more. I’d help the Mission Prep kids whitewash the “M” on San Luis Mountain and fell off it twice more, spraining an ankle both times. I am not going back.

Now people live on that mountain. This kind of audacity would never have occurred to me when I was thirteen. It may seem pretentious to call it a “mountain.” Visit the Midwest. It’d be a veritable Matterhorn to folks north of the Ozark Plateau.

You can still see the backside of this mountain, but from the Nipomo Valley, to the right off the 101, as you drive north from Santa Maria. The hairline is flipped as if it were a reversed photograph.

I hold it no hard feelings. Seen from Nipomo, it’s a little bare and humbled without the oak-studded proscenium seen from its Arroyo Grande side. This gave the mountain a little romance to a little boy looking sleepily out the window on a cold morning.

Climbing it–and then finding out that I hadn’t climbed it at all–taught me a lesson in humility that I need to re-learn every day of my life.