This is the Arroyo Grande Creek alongside the house where I grew up. The creek makes for rich alluvial soil, so many years before my family moved here, two Civil War veterans farmed within a mile of this spot. Both were Ohioans and both had been neighbors twenty years before they came to California in the 1880s.
But that day was July 1, 1863, when their regiments took up their positions on Barlow’s Knoll.
Fouch became a fierce defender of the high school where I would someday be a student and teach history. It was not at first popular with Arroyo Grande taxpayers, but Fouch, a formidable man, saw to it that the high school would not only survive but get its first schoolhouse in 1906.
Sylvanus Ullom’s son—later high school graduating classes are populated by plenty of Ulloms–became a house painter who, in 1918, won the contract to paint the 1888 two-room schoolhouse, yellow in this photograph, where my education began.
Their descendants still live in Arroyo Grande today.
I was asked how old the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery was, and I still don’t know the definitive answer. Thanks to the San Luis Obispo Genealogical Society, I launched a search that revealed the oldest graves—there are three—date from 1881.
Then I noticed that two of the burials were girls named “Hess.” Then, thanks to the Find a Grave website, I found them. They were sisters and they died within a week of each other. I will never know why, but there was a worldwide cholera outbreak in 1881, and it claimed about 30,000 lives in the Americas, so there’s a chance that this is what took Louisa and Lenna from their parents.
Their parents were immigrants from Hesse, Germany; the entry in the 1880 Census for Arroyo Grande doesn’t include Lenna, who probably was still in her mother’s womb when the enumerator came to visit.
Henry Hess was a successful man but the irony is that the fruits of his hard work as a farmer were recognized in this piece from the San Luis Tribune, published just four days before he lost Louisa.
When we studied childhood in AP European history at Arroyo Grande High School, the callous and even cruel way that children were treated in early modern Europe was shocking to us. It was in part a function of childhood mortality rates; parents could not afford the emotional investment in children who were more likely than not to die, so they became little worker drones in European farm families.
It was farming that changed that attitude. The Agricultural Revolution of the 1600s-1800s (crop rotation and new farm implements like the seed drill were among the contributors) exponentially increased Europe’s food supply. Better diet meant more and more children survived to adulthood. That fact may have deepened the ties between parents and their children.
In fact, macabre as it may seem to us, photography, in its infancy, meant that families with some substance had their dead children memorialized. This meant that they loved them so much—and that death in children was becoming an aberration—that they didn’t want to let their babies go.
But California, even in the 1880s, was still on the frontier and medicine was still relatively primitive. Farmers all across America, like Mr. Hess, would have consulted cure-alls like this: Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup included generous helpings of alcohol and opium.
And this cure-all, from an 1881 San Francisco newspaper ad, included cholera among the afflictions that it claimed to treat.
In the years before Dr. Paulding came to Arroyo Grande in the late 1880s, and before his brother established the town’s first drug store, the Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the pharmacy for American farmers. (The film Tombstone, among others, depicted Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife, and her struggle with addiction to laudanum.)
So children’s health was still precarious in frontier Arroyo Grande. While the evidence is indirect, I suspect that Mr. and Mrs. Hess were devastated. Despite his success in Arroyo Grande, he would be buried in Santa Clara. Maybe he had to get away from 1881 and what it had done to him.
Arroyo Grande’s founder, Francis Branch, was devastated, too, by the loss of three daughters, taken by smallpox, in the summer of 1862. But he missed them so much that, twelve years later, he was buried next to his little girls.
So Prigohzin, the hot-dog vendor turned mercenary chief turned his Wagner Group column around on the M4 highway to Moscow, belying a few unguarded moments of hope this morning that pointed to the end of Putin’s dictatorship.
That means the kids who posed happily this morning on television in Rostov-on-Don with Wagner Group tanks will wind up looking like the Soviet novelist Alexander Sohlzenitsyn, seen here as a zek–a political prisoner–in Stalin’s Gulag.
UNSPECIFIED – AUGUST 04: Alexandre Soljenitsyne, the day of his liberation in 1953 after 8 years in Gulag (Photo by Apic/GettyImages)
If we are lucky, Prigohzin will wind up the way the Romanov family did in Yekaterinburg in 1918, where the Bolsheviks held them captive in an immense home, the Ipatiev House.
This is the wall of the room in that home’s basement where the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, used pistols to murder all of them.
In the decades after 1918, so many devout Russians visited the home to pray that the local communist party chief ordered it torn down in 1977. His name was Boris Yeltsin. All Saints’ Church stands on that site today, memorializing a beautiful but profoundly clueless family.
Prigohzin, a war criminal, deserves pistols but no churches. CNN ran thankfully blurred footage of his mercenaries interrogating a prisoner by smashing his hands and feet with a sledgehammer. The man did not survive Prigozhin’s boys, most of them recruited from Russian prisons.
But I was rooting for him for just a few hours on Saturday, if only in the hope that the hole his Wagner Group had left behind in Ukraine would be filled by Ukrainian soldiers.
I was reminded, too, of Operation Market Garden—in someways similar t0 but in more important ways vastly different from Saturday’s event—in the fall of 1944, where Field Marshal Montgomery came up with what sounded like a brilliant idea: Drop paratroopers into Holland and drive into Holland with British armor along the excellent Dutch roads and then force a Rhine crossing into Germany.
It was a disaster. Market Garden included two South County 101st Airborne soldiers; one, Arroyo Grande’s Art Youman, was promoted to sergeant by Easy Company’s Richard Winters for his conduct and the other, a young lieutenant, Oceano’s William Francis Everding, was killed as the Germans retook the town his regiment had liberated. After Market Garden’s failure, most of Holland, except for the south, was reclaimed by the German Army, the Wehrmacht. But the difference between 1944 and 2023 lies in the character of the would-be liberators. I offer these photos as proof.
(Top): A British soldier feeds two little Dutch boys during Market Garden; at war’s end, American G.I.’s are escorted to a folk dance by Dutch children.
But the Dutch thought all of their progressive, prosperous and historically brilliant nation had been liberated. For a few days, they were jubilant, just like the kids taking selfies Saturday with the Wagner Group tanks. Hitler had been defeated, or so it seemed and, for a few hours, it must’ve looked like Putin was about the be defeated, too.
And so now Vladi Putin, two inches shorter than Hitler but in every other respect his doppelganger–down to kidnaping children to raise them Russians, just as Hitler did Eastern European children to raise them as Aryans–might have just enough breathing space to reconsolidate his power and turn his attention again to the important business of destroying Ukrainian churches.
But there’s one hopeful sign, macabre as it is.
The most famous sniper of World War II was named Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Red Army soldier credited with killing 300 German soldiers who were part of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
She has a modern-day counterpart, a Marine, who goes by the pseudonym “Charcoal.” She has another nickname that once belonged to Pavlichenko:
“Lady Death.” Like her predecessor, Charcoal is Ukrainian.
A rainbow trout from County Wicklow, Ireland–where Mom’s ancestors, Famine people, came from–and the display at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Elizabeth always has to grab me firmly by the arm and lead me away from the trout display. I want to jump in after them.
I just wrote about Ken Kobara remembering that Executive Order 9066 being carried out the day before trout season opened in 1942.
Let me tell you about trout season opening day. If you’re from Arroyo Grande, it came in third place, but only after Christmas and Thanksgiving.
One of my happiest memories is fishing from a plank bridge over the creek–it would’ve been washed away in 1969–halfway between the Cecchetti Road crossing and the Harris Bridge, where we lived. My Dad was next to me; I was little and he was big and we dropped our lines into the creek below and we just sat there, quiet. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that safe.
When I was a little bigger, Dad would give me five bucks–an enormous sum in 1964–and turn me loose in Kirk’s Spirits and Sports on Branch Street (today it’s the Villa Cantina).
Once we were appropriately armed, my best good buddy Richard Ayres and I would sleep in a walnut orchard overnight that was maybe 200 feet away from our favorite fishing spot, a little narrows in Arroyo Grande Creek with a sweet little still spot.
Mind you, our house was RIGHT NEXT TO Arroyo Grande Creek and not far from the spot where I once hooked a steelhead who almost gave me an eleven-year-old heart attack. Man, she was angry. Broke my line.
Richard was a good fisherman. I was spectacularly inept, in part owing to my ADHD difficulty in remotely understanding knots.
Knots had nothing to do with the beaver pond just off Kaz Ikeda’s cabbage fields in the Upper Valley. I was fishing there by myself one day–the beavers were rather indignant, and they really DO slap their tails on the water’s surface–when a shaft of sunlight suddenly made the pond transparent.
There, just below the surface, was a veritable Armada of rainbow trout.
I was so excited that I fell in. My night crawlers died futile deaths.
The trout scattered.
The beavers, I am reasonably sure, were laughing at me.
Yes, I have a playlist called “Disco” on my MP4 player. So sue me. It got me through a pretty good session on the rowing machine this morning, though, and I just wanted to share three songs, whether you want me to or not. So there.
Gloria Gaynor evokes Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard in the way she vamps it up—even the piano rolls help— in this version of her wonderful song, “I Will Survive.” But she makes it the vamping work. And she’s not scary, like Gloria Swanson.
And this song is infectious. Even the orchestra gets happy. Me, too.
And, finally—hence the name of this blog post—we used to watch Soul Train open-mouthed on Saturday mornings (was it on after American Bandstand?) The dancers were amazing. And, as for Diana Ross, my Mom adored her when the Supremes appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s, so she became a part of family tradition. The dancers she invites onstage, in this video from an old Midnight Special, aren’t necessarily Soul Train caliber, but look how happy the young woman is. This moment will live with her forever. That’s a sweetness only music can provide.
I don’t think it’s possible to tell you how much I love this book. It was so inspirational and so instructive—about horses and horse-racing, about which I know little–but being immersed inside stables and jockey’s locker rooms and the Santa Anita grandstands, with smells ranging from liniment to buttered popcorn, was one of the most vivid reading experiences of my life.
What’s just as impressive as the racehorse is the book’s author.
Laura Hillenbrand was essentially paralyzed by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (her New Yorker account of her disease is haunting) and she persisted in researching and writing a book interrupted by days when all she could bring herself to do was crawl out of bed to fix a bowl of corn flakes.
Although I come from a family familiar with horses—my father and my sisters—I am not. (I raised chickens.) But the writing of Hillenbrand and of Elizabeth Letts (The Perfect Horse) was so powerful that it led me to write perhaps the best essay I’ve ever written, “Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse,” about a “blocky little mare,” an Arab, who became the national champion cow horse in 1961.
Central to the Hillenbrand book and to its film adaptation is the great match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in 1938. It figures, oddly, in a recent event in our lives: my much-loved brother-in-law, a Naval Academy grad and retired Navy Captain, died recently. When my wife, her sister Robin, her brother Dana and my son John went to Virginia for the funeral, they encountered something I’ve heard of before. They were Californians and once that was discovered, some of the East Coasties snubbed them. Not all of them, to be sure, but there was a discernible distaste in the air, as if those who had known and loved Captain Steve the longest were pretty much Neanderthals.
The film Seabiscuit was on the television yesterday and, of course, I misted up during the final sequence when the ‘Biscuit, recovered from the injury that had nearly led to him being put down, wins the 1940 Santa Anita Derby. It’s glorious filmmaking.
But it’s not the centerpiece. For me, that would be the 1938 match race between the little California horse and the Kentucky-bred and East Coast darling, War Admiral, a magnificent athlete.
The way that race was run made me feel better about being a Californian; the way the film portrayed it—down to the elegant pre-race narration by historian David McCullough—reminded me of the mare Ronteza, Sheila Varian’s Arabian, Sheila took on twenty male competitors and Ronteza took on twenty Quarter horses in 1961 and they beat them all. There is nothing I love more than a good underdog—in this case, underhorse—story.
Forty million Americans listened to the great match race call that day in 1938. That’s because of the point Hillenbrand’s book makes: Seabiscuit was their horse, the underdog champion of an underdog people—Hitler dismissed Americans as “a mongrel race”— in the transition years between Depression and War, when they would prove that they were champions, too.
Somehow the 1942 photo below is consistent with Seabiscuit’s legacy. The statue dedicated to him was installed at Santa Anita in 1941. The following year, the racetrack became an assembly center for Japanese Americans, headed for desert camps, who slept in the track’s stables. Here, internee Lily Okuru, Japanese American— poses alongside the Biscuit. The horse and the young woman, and her people, shared remarkable similariies: They were unappreciated, sometimes reviled, banished, loyal without reservation to those who loved them, courageous in combat—whether on Caliornia racetracks or Italian battlefields—and Seabiscuit, like 120,000 of Lily Okuru’s people, were Californians.
An excerpt from Robert Lowell’s 1960 poem about his artwork, “For the Union Dead:”
…Parking lots luxuriate like civic sand piles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin-colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shakingBottom of Form
over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
The monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat. Its colonel is as lean as a compass needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound’s gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds. He rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back.
The 54th leaves Boston in this scene from the film Glory, which remains, in my mind, the finest Civil War film yet made. Frederick Douglass watches from the reviewing stand and, as fine as the soldiers are, it’s the reaction of the Black Americans in the crowd, and Col. Shaw’s reaction at seeing his family, that move me most:
Black troops played roles in the combat careers of two Arroyo Grande settlers. At the December 1864 Battle of Nashville, this old man, Otis Smith, a Huasna Valley farmer, earned the Medal of Honor for seizing the battle flag of the 6th Florida Volunteer Infantry in the Union assault on the Confederate flank atop Shy’s Hill, the high point that guarded the city.
Otis Smith, about 1920, at the Sawtelle Veterans’s Home near the UCLA campus.
Once Smith had carried the Florida regiment’s position, the rest of the Confederate line crumbled. Their commander, John Bell Hood, ruefully said that he’d never seen an army flee in such disorder. This is a replica of the flag that Smith captured—which would have meant fighting or killing five or six men to get to it. The original, with some corners missing—souvenirs for the men of Smith’s 95th Ohio Volunteer Infantry—is on display in the Florida Museum of History today.
This is in no way intended to denigrate Smith’s bravery. He deserves his Medal of Honor. But the story isn’t complete until you know the whole of it, and that involves Black soldiers. Smith’s regiment was able to stampeded the Floridan’s, on John Bell Hood’s extreme left, in part because of what happened earlier in the day. Three regiments of what were then called U.S. colored troops attacked Hood’s center. They were repulsed with heavy casualties; afterward, the Confederate officer in charge of the position praised them for their bravery.
Hood noted that. As a result, he shifted troops away from his flank to his center. That left the depleted 6th Florida, already miserable from soaking overnight rain, unprepared for the ferocity of Otis Smith and his comrades. Black men had made his moment of glory; they may in fact have saved the life that still marks lives in Arroyo Grande today. The Mankins brothers, managers of Brisco Lumber and members of a family long noted for cattle ranching and community service, are descendants of Otis Smith.
The second incident, involving another Huasna Valley farmer, Adam Bair, remains one of the saddest moments of the Civil War. It bears reminding that recent scholarship has revised the casualty count from the traditional statistic of 620,000 dead to 750,000 or more. That is the modern equivalent of eight million Americans lost.
Among them were the soldiers who fought in the Crater in 1864, the victims of racism on the part of their own leader, a hero of Gettysburg, George Gordon Meade.
From an earlier blog post about the Battle of the Crater, witnessed by Adam Bair:
Arroyo Grande’s Ben Dohi died last month, and his obituary was so beautifully written that I wanted to include it below:
Benjamin Hideo Dohi November 8, 1927 – May 26, 2023
Arroyo Grande, California – A little piece of our community’s history was lost last week with the passing of Benjamin Hideo Dohi at age 95. Ben passed peacefully at home on May 26 after a long life filled with hard work and the love of family.
Benjamin Hideo Dohi was born on November 8, 1927 into a farming family to parents Hugh Setsugo Dohi and Hide Kobayashi Dohi in Santa Maria, California. Ben contracted pneumonia as an infant and after the doctors had given up hope on his recovery, it was the love of his mother that nurtured him through his illness and his early months of life.
That same tenacity and determination would be what saw him through his early adult years as an internee in the Japanese internment camp at Poston, Arizona from 1942-1945. Benjamin was 14 when he, along with his parents and two brothers and two sisters, were evacuated from Arroyo Grande to a waiting facility in Clovis, California before being transported to Poston, where he resided until the end of World War II. Although Ben would end up starting high school at Arroyo Grande High School as a freshman, he moved to Clovis High School then on to Poston High School where he earned his high school diploma. “The only thing I lost was my youth,” said Ben when interviewed by Mathew Donovan for Cal Poly in 2006. He credits his teachers at the internment camp, who were mostly Quaker volunteers, for the valuable lessons learned while there. When the Japanese were released from the camp in 1945, Ben successfully transferred to college in Kansas City, Missouri where he said he knew as much as the other students but was mostly treated like a “novelty.”
But Ben’s education was once again interrupted in 1946 when he enlisted into the US Army and began training in Military Intelligence. He served two years in Japan as an interpreter after completing a language program at the Language School in Monterey, California. After being discharged from the army, Ben completed one year of law school at the University of California, Berkeley, but the draw of farming and the love of the Arroyo Grande community brought him home.
In 1955 Ben became a grower for POVE, Pismo Oceano Vegetable Exchange, the largest Japanese cooperative of farmers in California. He joined the Hayashi, Ikeda, Kobara, Saruwatari, Fuchiwaki, Kawaoka, and Fukuhara families. It was in the office of POVE that Benjamin Dohi met the woman who would change his life. Ty Yamaguchi, who had also been a young woman in the same internment camp, won Ben’s heart and they married soon after Ben joined the family of growers who would go on to become one of the most successful farming operations in the state.
The young Dohi family experienced heartbreak when their first child, Leslie Naomi Dohi, died at childbirth in 1958; Ben and Ty were later blessed with the birth of their sons, Hugh Jonathan in 1959 and Peter Benjamin 1961. Ben, along with his wife, Ty, dedicated their lives to growing their business, Dohi Farms, and although there were struggles in the beginning, once he began growing bell peppers they found their stride. Ben took great pride in growing bell peppers which was his most important crop in the early years of farming. As Ben’s sons got older he was able to build a home for his young family on the same property where he was raised as a child.
Ben split his time between farming and watching his boys play sports, as well as coaching some of their baseball teams, a skill he learned in the internment camp. Ben loved to take his family on vacations and loved to teach his boys how to fish in Arroyo Grande and Lopez Creek. He instilled in his boys a love of farming, family, and community. He showed his sons how to be honest, generous, and humble in life, and these values became theirs in their own lives.
Ben never wanted to dwell on the past; instead, he focused on his work, his family, and his business. Nothing made him happier than driving in his pickup truck alongside sons Hugh and Peter overseeing each farm which he referred to as “making my rounds.” He always gave credit to “the Man upstairs” for any success he had.
His was a life well-lived.
Ben is preceded in death by his wife, Ty, and his baby daughter, Leslie, brother, Abe, and sister, Ruth. He is survived by his son, Hugh Dohi (Shawnah Dohi), son, Peter Dohi, brother, Paul Dohi, sister, Grace Dohi, nephews Gregory Dohi and Anthony Dohi, and niece Sylvia Roldan-Dohi.
The family expresses its deep appreciation and gratitude to the community of Arroyo Grande, the farm families of POVE, and the doctors and nurses of Arroyo Grande Hospital and San Luis Post Acute. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Arroyo Grande Community Hospital Foundation 345 S. Halcyon Road Arroyo Grande, CA 93420 or to Kristie Yamaguchi Always Dream at 125 Railroad Ave, Suite 203 Danville, CA 94526. No services are planned.
Ben
So Ben’s sons still farm land, near the high school, that his family has been farming for nearly a hundred years. I knew Ben and his wife, Ty Yamaguchi Dohi, in high school, where I was a sometimes visitor to the Dohi home. This is where I first discovered sushi, a treat reserved for special Japanese holidays like the Fourth of July and Labor Day. The three Yamaguchi sisters prepared it in the kitchen, frequently giggling—they must have been a handful as teenagers—and I’d break away frequently from the men and the TV sports we were watching to hang with the sisters, who sometimes fed me samples.
On one such occasion, I got to hold the beautiful baby girl who would grow up to be Kristi Yamaguchi.
Ben’s death led to updating a video—I’m a historian—that I’ve shared with schools and community groups about the experience of people like Ben during World War II. Executive Order 9066, as you’ll see, was perhaps the single most tragic event in my hometown’s history. But the way that both Japanese Americans and their friends responded brings to mind the word that so marks Ben Dohi’s life: Honor.
A Work in Progress 