My friend Tony Hertz just posted gentle advice from a vet. When a dog has to be put down, they want us with them. I was with Mollie–Molliebears–when Dr. Murphy helped her make that transition.
It was such a painful experience, but it moved me deeply. I at least felt confident, in talking softly to her in those last moments, that she knew how very much we loved her.
When her head fell into my hands, I was disconsolate for the rest of the day. What brought me back is my belief, no matter how irrational it might seem, that we will see each other again. That will be a joy beyond imagining.
Here’s to you, Mollie, our darlin’ Irish girl. We will love you until the end of time, and beyond it, too.
The tears now running down my cheeks are proof of that.
I am admittedly a little nutty about this airplane. I fell in love hard many years ago when we took the boys to a P-51 Mustang Fly-In at the Santa Maria Airport. The planes, even though they weren’t piloted by small, wiry 23-year-olds but by middle-aged men with enormous amounts of disposable income, have a mystique that is their own.
This piston head, which I treasure (along with my Civil War bullet, my fragment of the Berlin Wall and my piece of oak from HMS Victory), was a Christmas gift.
And here are the obligatory stats:
Wingspan: 37 feet Length: 32 feet Maximum Speed: 437 miles per hour Cruising Speed: 275 miles per hour Maximum Range: 1,000 miles Engine: Packard Rolls Royce Merlin V-1650-7 (1,695 hp)
The engine was miraculous and the sound it produced—nicknamed “whistling death”—was unforgettable, I guess especially if you were a German soldier. Near the sad end of Saving Private Ryan, P-51’s make a brief star turn as the Panther tank closes in on the doomed Capt. Miller:
The sum total of my mechanical abilities consists of reaching into my wallet for my AAA Card, but there are certain engine sounds that are unforgettable. Yesterday I watched, mouth flopped open, as a late-model Mustang, I think a Shelby GT350, pulled up next to me and then made a stately left turn; the driver punched it once he’d passed the intersection and the result was a kind of deep bubbling sound that you could almost feel in your breastbone. It was beautiful.
We can’t afford to fix it up yet, but we have my late mother-in-law’s 1968 Camaro Rallysport in the garage. (Hers has wire wheels. Very cool.) It has a 327 V-8 and when it was running, entering freeways driving this car was one of the great joys of my life. From inside the passenger compartment, it was more of a guttural rumble with the bubbles hovering in two-part harmony just above it. For those of you of a Certain Age, it was the Righteous Brothers of automobile engines. Since you hit 65 mph so quickly, it was a little sad—like that last bite of an In-And-Out burger—when you let off the accelerator. Sigh.
One more: Like the Mustang, the Harley-Davidson has an inimitable sound. My dear friend David Cherry once owned a Harley 45 Flathead with a suicide shift (a gearshift on the left side near the footrest) and when he bought it, I followed him as he drove it back to our apartment in San Luis. That might’ve been the one day the bike actually ran; it became a collection of discordant parts in many boxes and I’m not sure David ever had the chance to rebuild it. But following him home was a happy day. He was happy. The Harley was (momentarily) happy. Hearing that sound, even inside my car’s compartment, made me happy.
Here’s a photo of a restored 1948 45, I think the same year as David’s bike:
This British guy (no helmet law?) demonstrates the sound of his Harley; this late-model bike sounds mellower than Dave’s old-school Harley, but you get a sense of the sound anyway.
lt looks as if the County is finally going to replace the 100-year-old Harris Bridge, a focal point for my childhood. It’s about time, I guess.. But it’s also bittersweet. It was named for this man, who farmed nearby. From 1936:
The bridge was completed in November 1923 with some fanfare:
Here it is in 1934. The CWA, a precursor to the WPA, was oiling what was then called Musick Road to Lopez Canyon, a project administered by Supervisor Asa Porter.
Twenty-three years later, we moved into the house just past the bridge, on the left.
So it’s figured a lot in my writing. From World War II Arroyo Grande:
That month, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley of coastal California, this is what you would see, if not clearly, because the cold morning fog can be dense: labor contractors drop off pickup loads of field workers at the Harris Bridge, which spans the creek that gives the valley its name and that nourishes it.
The workers cross the bridge whistling, an incredibly beautiful, almost baroque whistling, Mexican folk tunes from the time of the Revolution, or love songs, as they walk down to the fields to their work with their lunches–wine-jugs filled with drinking water and perhaps chorizo-and-egg burritos, wrapped in wax paper, the fuel a man needs to do the kind of physical work that would make most men sit in the freshly turned field, gasping and woefully regarding their quickly-blistered hands, within fifteen minutes.
Their summer work might be in a new bean field and the whistling would stop because it is such a tax on men who work beans, whose breathing soon becomes laborious and therefore precious. To begin a newly planted field of beans, the field workers have to drive wooden stakes into precise parade-ground lines along the furrows, so that the bean vines can use the stakes to climb and twist—they will eventually yield bell-shaped flowers–toward the sun.
The sun invariably appears in late mornings when it burns the sea fog away and the colors of the valley, wheaten hills and verdant bottom land where the crop is in, are reborn, vivid and sharply focused.
To drive the wooden stakes, the field workers use a heavy metal tube, hollowed, with a handle attached that resembles that of an old-timed pump primer pioneer men and women once used to draw water out of the ground. So the whistling stops and is replaced by the rhythmic ring of the stake drivers as the workers pound hundreds of them into the field.
It is a musical sound, but, of course, what you cannot hear are the grunts of the men at each stroke of the stake driver and what you cannot feel is the enormous weight that exhausted arms and shoulders soon take on and what you cannot avoid, if you think about it sensibly, is admiration for the men who feed you. In turn, they are determined to feed families who live in camps or tarpaper shacks in the Valley, or, for some, part of the work force that will dominate agriculture here for the next twenty years, for families who are living in the tier of states of northern Mexico.
This is what the creek looked like this spring in this view from the bridge:
From a blog post inspired by that scene this spring:
–The Harris Bridge. Before the bridge, this was near the spot where fourteen-year-old Sam Cundiff drowned in the flood of 1911.
Our house was (and is, much improved) just over the bridge, which was built, I think in 1927, [it was 1923] when Lopez Drive was called Musick Road. I was very happy to see that our walnut trees, just beyond that bank of Queen Anne Lace, are dead. I hated harvesting walnuts, stoop labor, and your hands and nails were black for weeks. Walnut trees used to cover the fields between the high school and Halcyon Road before an insidious pest, the husk fly larvae, began to kill them. I did not much mind. The only way I found walnuts tolerable was in my Mom’s chocolate-chip cookies. In the winter of 1968-69—you can get a sense of it from the video above—the creek rose above that chasm and spilled into our walnut orchard. There were ponds and lakelets in the Upper Valley for months afterward.
I used to catch rainbow trout in the chasm below and, of course, I did NOT catch the big female steelhead who hit my line one afternoon. She was so fierce that I nearly had a twelve-year-old heart attack. It was glorious the way she broke the surface, with a terrific splash, and it was only seconds before she snapped my leader and went upstream for the business of motherhood...
This beauty was caught in my great-grandfather’s birthplace, County Wicklow, Ireland.
Once my friends and I found the heads and innards of two spike bucks—yearlings, illegal to hunt in California—tossed over the side of the bridge by the hunters who’d butchered them and who wanted to get rid of the evidence. We pondered their remains, appalled, for a long time as the creek rushed past.
But once, on a ledge just below the bridge railing, I saw two barn owls asleep, one’s head sweetly on the other’s shoulder. I will never forget them.
Ghost and Willow, photographed by writer Robert Fuller. Barn owls mate for life.
I wrote about what happened to the Cundiff family at just about the site where the bridge would be built twelve years later. You can click on each image to enlarge it:
And since our house fronted Huasna Road, I got to know every car (a lot of celery trucks, too) as it approaced the bridge, including Michael Shannon’s hearse:
I grew up near the Harris Bridge, at the intersection of Huasna Road and what is now called Lopez Drive. So a favorite pastime was waving at neighbors as they approached the intersection.
–Mrs. Coehlo, a stunning woman (Wait, that’s not the right word. One of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known.), and so nice, drove a navy-over- powder-blue 1954 Cadillac.
–The Esteban family, including my friends Frieda and Paula, had a kinda funky light gray 1952 Plymouth.
–Glenn Cherry had a 1968 green Pontiac GTO. Forgive me, but in the argot of the times: Bitchen car. 400 cubic inches under the hood. (Glenn’s was green. Stone Saruwatari’s was a kind of midnight blue. Stone’s daughter, Gayle, was, I think, one of the prettiest girls at AGHS, so seeing Gayle behind the wheel caused teenaged males to tumble like felled redwoods when she drove past.)
–Sometimes a woodcutter would drive past in a ’58 Chevy pickup. We lost a Beagle named Snoopy once. Then we saw him, months later, his tongue wagging happily, atop a load of the woodcutter’s red oak.
–Cayce Shannon drove an orange VW bug.
–The Berguia family had a 1958 Chevy wagon–the only year they came out with the taillight design seen on Ron Howard’s Chevy in “American Graffiti.” There were a LOT of Berguias, which is a good thing, because they’re such a marvelous family, so the wagon was usually packed. I interviewed Jean Wilkinson Frederick, whose father owned the meat market on Branch Street, and she still has the ledgers. The first page I opened, there was Mr. Berguia’s tab. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I was thrilled. He paid on time, by the way.
–Occasionally a Sheriff’s deputy would drive by. The cars then were silver, and deputies wore straw cowboy hats. When I was five, my Mom asked one of them if he’d give me a ride. No problem. He punched the gas and let me hit the siren button. That was a great moment in my life.
–It’s kind of cheating, because he drove past the bridge, not over it, but Arroyo Grande High School principal Earl Denton drove a 1960 Ford Falcon, the brainchild of Robert McNamara, who also brought you the Vietnam War. Denton was so incredibly tall that you could almost see his kneecaps just under the Ford’s steering wheel.
–My speech team partner Jon Bolton drove a 1954-ish, tan-ish–there was a lot of “ish” about Jon’s car–Chevy station wagon. Once he stopped in front of our house with a leaky radiator. We chewed a lot of bubblegum together to plug the leaks.
–Mitzi Ikeda drove a 1964-ish Ford station wagon. Mitzi liked to drive fast, so you had to wave real quick.
–My speech team partner Joe Loomis drove an eminently practical 1964 blue Chevy Nova. When my Mom died, he showed up in our driveway in a blue Jeep. “Hop in!” he said. The Loomises took care of me for awhile.
–Manuel and Johnny Silva drove also eminently practical Ford F150s. When they weren’t driving by our house, they were stopped cab-to-cab in the middle of Huasna Road talking about garbanzo beans, I guess, even though they’d just had breakfast together at Sambo’s. A car would pull up behind them, and they’d pull to the side to let the car pass. That wasn’t enough. They’d wave cheerily at the driver. The Silvas kind of invented “Have a Nice Day!’ about forty years before some other guy took credit for it.
But by far my favorite car–the whole family’s, in fact– was Michael Shannon’s Pontiac hearse, I think a 1938 model. It was for his surfboards, of course.
The hard-packed dirt between the bridge-rail that fronted Huasna Road (now Lopez Drive, before that Musick Road) was our bus stop for Elsie Cecchetti’s little Branch school bus. Later, for high school and Bus #34, driven by Betty, it was the Four Corners, where we waited with a bunch of Polettis and Evensons, nice company indeeed. So I associate the bridge, the Branch School stop, with Elsie and with Mary Gularte, and with Richard Ayres’ corn, which we covered in wet gunny sacks and sold from a pickup bed on the same spot. We were sunburnt strawberry red by sundown.
Elsie Cecchetti was our bus driver. In the same way that Louis Tedone was SLO’s baby doctor. Elsie was everybody’s bus driver.
Yes, I go back to the days of Branch School’s yellow pickup with bench seats and the tarp overhead, when we bounced happily over creek crossings.
We waited for her at the Harris Bridge.
I think she had mechanical problems one morning–and it was a cold one–when Mary Gularte took me inside from the bus stop for some sopa. That was a good morning.
Both Mary and Elsie called me “Jimmy.”
We tormented Elsie with “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and then, in 1964, with “She Loves You,” ” I Want to Hold Your Hand” and she always headed us off in “The Name Game” song, before we got to “Chuck.”
And I always looked over the edge of the bus window as she drove confidently up Corralitos Canyon. There were some good drops there, but Elsie knew what she was doing. At the Canyon’s end, past the Dentons, she made a three-point turn that the California Department of Motor Vehicles should have filmed for posterity
Elsie. Photo by Vivian Krug
I remembered that ther’s a plaque on the bridge with the names of the Board of Supervisors that commemorates its completion one hundred years ago. I had sense enough to ask that it be donated to the South County Historical Society, so at least that small piece of a bridge that’s felt the weight of so much history—and so much weight!—will remain with us.
Some of my favorite World War II photos include children. The first is of a little Berlin girl, soon after the war’s end. She is meeting her first American, a G.I. in the 77th Infantry Division.
The second gets me misty. The little boy lost his immediate family in the horrific battle for Okinawa. The two young Marines cared for him until relatives were found.
A Nisei G.I. with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team teaches a rapt audience how to make a paper airplane. His arm’s around a little girl who’s nestled close to him. I suspect that in this moment she feels safe, probably for the first time in a long time.
In England, shortly before D-Day, a G.I. gives a British lady help with the jump rope.
Manuel Gularte of Arroyo Grande and his comrades entertain guests for lunch in Normandy. Manuel’s brother, Frank, was killed on the German border just five days before his son, Frank Jr., was born at the Mountain View Hospital in San Luis Obispo.
And in Luxembourg, Christmas 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge is raging nearby–there’s an amazing Battle of the Bulge museum in Diekirch, Luxembourg–a G.I. playing St. Nicholas, flanked by two angels, heads out to distribute gifts. Note the expression on the jeep driver’s face.
Finally, a soldier, I suspect a member of the famed Red Ball Express, makes friends with a little refugee while another little girl–her sister?–makes sure that she doesn’t leave her doll behind.
I am not naive enough to suggest that all Americans were angels. They weren’t. There were rapes, murders, thefts. Racism was a given and violence, especially attacks on Black G.I.’s, was commonplace, at its height in 1943. In New Zealand, American Marines attacked Maori soldiers for entering the bar where the Yanks were drinking beers.
Filipino-Americans were subject to some of the most virulent and racist invective–you can find examples in the old Arroyo Grande “Herald-Recorders”–and they responded by becoming some of the finest infantrymen of the war.
While their parents and grandparents were behind barbed wire, Japanese-American G.I.’s were marked by the frequency of their Purple Hearts, by Bronze Stars that should’ve been Silver Stars, by Silver Stars that should’ve been Medals of Honor. Nearly 1,000 of them were killed or wounded in October 1944 to break through and rescue a Texas National Guard Unit–240 justifiably terrified 19-year-olds- surrounded by the Germans in France’s Vosges Mountains.
These weren’t hyphenated Americans. They were Americans.
My parents’ generation was condemned before the war by sociologists who saw them as self-indulgent and frivolous. They proved the eggheads wrong. Spectacularly. That’s why I write about World War II so much.
In my book Central Coast Aviators in World War II, I wrote about a brilliant man named John Keegan:
If there was a military historian with a gift close to Shakespeare’s, it was another Englishman named John Keegan. Keegan was a little boy in the English countryside, in Somerset, when the Americans began to arrive in late 1943 and into the spring of 1944. Little English boys had lived for years with the deepest of privations—thanks, in large part, to the U-boat campaign that had nearly starved Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” to death—and then the Americans came. They were, as Keegan later said—for once at a loss of words while narrating a documentary on the 1918 turning point of World War I—“Well, they were Americans!” By which he meant they were boisterous, cocky, well fed, well clothed and, thank God, friendly, with an innocence and immediacy that was distinctly American. Their World War II counterparts taught English boys baseball, and they flirted with their big sisters and married some of them—but most of them not—which meant that little boys Keegan’s age would inherit littler half-Yank nieces and nephews. Most of all, they were generous. There seemed to be no end to their Hershey bars (there wouldn’t be after the war, either, when, during the Berlin Airlift,one of Arroyo Grande bomber pilot Jess Milo McChesney’s comrades, Gail Halverson, air- dropped Hershey bars, floating on little parachutes, to the hungry children of blockaded Berlin) and no end to the rough affection for children that came with these big, loud men from across the sea.
And then they were gone. Keegan has vividly described the early morning dark when that happened, when the chinaware and modest family crystal on every shelf in the Keegan home began protesting, rattling an alarm soloud that it woke the family up, if the motion beneath their beds hadn’t already made them sit bolt upright. The anxiety of Keegan’s family, their neighbors and other families all across East Anglia was relieved only when they went outside. Then anxiety gave way to wonder. They could feel in their breastbones the vibrations—“the grinding forced you to the ground,” Keegan remembered—of the engines of thousands of airplanes, but they could see only dim red and amber lights in the sky, heading east, toward France. Some of the Americans Keegan had learned to love so quickly, his heroes, were on those airplanes, and tens of thousands of more, his heroes, were riding deathly pale on landing craft corkscrewing in foul Channel waters, and they were all headed for Normandy.
It was D-day.
B-17’s from the 398th Bomb Group assemble for takeoff. At most any American airfield, British children were there for moments like this. Pressed agains the airfield’s perimeter fence, they’d come to wave goodbye to “their” Yanks.
A (wonderful) AGHS German teacher, Mark Kamin, was leading a group of students on a tour of Bavaria. I think they were waiting for their bus when an older German woman approached them.
“You’re Americans, aren’t you?” she asked Mark.
Yes, we are, Mark replied
Her eyes began to fill with tears. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said, “for how kind your soldiers were to me when I was a little girl.”
Candy, Berlin, May 1 1945
We are so divided now, but these photos of men long dead fill me with hope. Their generation lit a path for us to follow. It’s up to us to find it.
St. Andrew’s Church, England. Two Arroyo Grande B-17 fliers served at the nearby 8th Air Force Base at Snetterton Heath. One of them, Clarence “Hank” Ballagh, the AGUHS 1937 Valedictorian, was killed eighty years ago next month. Here, an American airman looks up to the Risen Christ. The English have not forgotten Yanks like Hank Ballagh.
Jürgen Prochnow (the white cap) as the U-boat captain. It is Christmas and he and his crew are listening intently for the telltale sound of reindeer hooves on the deck above them.
Das Boot
Top of the line–the 1981 version, that is. You got your sturm. You got your drang. You got beards like the Hatfields and McCoys by the film’s end. The grief comes, alas, becaue of the Americans and their air atttacks on the sub pens. You get the thrill of a high-speed run in heavy seas through the Straits of Gibraltar and an impish junior officer with a red beard. AND you have the Nazi “political officer” everyone despises. He doesn’t care for the crew’s taste in music, either. Maybe the best sub film of all time.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Yeah, it’s a Disney movie from 1954, but where ELSE are you going to get to see Kirk Douglas sing to a sea lion? And where else can you see James Mason, a vengeful 19th century version of Elon Musk or Richard Branson, bust up warships AND—the scene that initiated my fondness for calamari–you get Douglas in a fight to the death again a giant squid!
U-571
Any boarding party led by Pulp Fiction’s Harvey Keitel is the boarding party for me, yo-ho! Lots of good male grunting and bonding and killing and stuff, and Matthew McConaghey is the most clean-shaven sub sailor in history. Keitel’s knit cap with the little dingleball on top is a definitive fashion statement, and this depth-charge scene, from the 2000 film, nearly equals Das Boot’s. Nearly.
The Enemy Below (1957)
This is as much a psychological thriller as it is a war movie and, as many critics like to note on Mr. Google, the Germans, led by (too old) captain Kurt Jurgens, are NOT cartoonish. His counterpart is Robert Mitchum as the American destroyer captain and the two ships look for an opening—any opening—so that they can kill the other guy. It’s like a Frazier-Ali 15-rounder, but in the middle of the South Atlantic. And Mitchum? I could watch that man butter his toast and get a kick out of it. I can do without the trailer intro/narration by Dick Powell, he of 1935’s Lullaby of Broadway. Lullabye-bye, Powell.
K-19: The Widowmaker
In this 2002 thriller, Harrison Ford is the Russian commander whose accent periodically disappears; Liam Neeson’s is far more reliable. Since Vikings invaded both Russia and Ireland, good on Neeson, whose accent might come from some Viking who invaded both places, too. Maybe Ford can be forgiven, since he was born in Chicago and very few longships were seen on 9th-Century Lake Michigan. But, there you go. When a reactor begins to melt down, the last 2/3 of the film is tragic, of course . Doom doom doom. Collective society may suck, but the film at least shows Soviet sailors willing to give everything to save their crewmates and their submarine. No one can save Ford’s Russian accent; it evidently fell overboard.
Runners Up
The Hunt for Red October:While I am fond of Sean Connery’s spiky hairpiece, the movie goes downhill after he murders Red October‘s political officer, a moment of sudden violence that’s kind of fun. After that. It’s as if the defecting Soviet sub is plowing through maple syrup. And I detest Tom Clancy’s writing. I remain sad that Sean Connery is dead but content because Clancy is. He won’t inflict anymore of his technobabble on us. Red October has a magnetohydrodynamic “caterpillar drive” ANNNNND she’s
Just a little deuce coupe with a flathead mill But she’ll walk a Thunderbird like she’s standing still She’s ported and relieved, and she’s stroked and bored She’ll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored
The only other compelling character is the American sub commander Scott Glenn, who has Balls the Size of Church Bells, a mystery after the tight Wranglers and mechanical bull rides he endured in Urban Cowboy.
Run Silent, Run Deepis based on a pretty good novel I read when I was about thirteen, but since it revolves around a personality clash between one of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, as the exec, and his captain, Clark Gable, I am unimpressed. If I want personality clashes, I’ll watch Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Just stay there. Cool sub, though, but the ones at Disneyland have windows too and you can see mermaids from them. Barbara Eden’s in this film, but she’s in the sub, alas, and not outside combing her mermaid hair with a golden brush while perched on rock, which I would pay good money to see.
Ice Station Zebra: Ice Station Zero.
Operation Petticoat. What a great idea! Let’s trivialize submariners!
BEST RUNNER-UP:Twilight Zone, “The Thirty-Fathom Grave.” Rod Serling was such a talented writer, but I much prefer his ghostie stuff to his Serious Social Stuff. He wrote the script for this episode. An American destroyer’s sonar, in our time (that would be about 1960 in TV time) picks up what sounds like a hammer pounding against metal beneath the surface. Alas, it’s a sunken submarine, and a destroyer sailor and World War II submarine vet, played by an excellent actor, Mike Kellin, suddenly realizes that that was his sub and the pounding comes from his lost crewmates, calling for him to come join them. The ship’s captain, played by Simon Oakland, is quite good, as is John Considine, who explores the wreck (for you Boomer types, Considine brother, Tim, was in My Three Sons. He left the show to college and never returned. I suspect he was crushed to death while telephone-booth* stuffing, popular among college students before they began occupying adminsitration buildings a few years later.
(*Younger people: Use Google Image Search for the term “telephone booth.”)
One of my favorite human beings is KCBX’s Tom Wilmer, the host of “Journeys of Discovery.” I did not know he belonged to the California National Guard like my friends Dan Sebby and Erik Brun. I knew Tom was working on restoring a World War I-era French 75mm cannon, but I did NOT know he’d finished it. It is amazing.
The 75 was also the field piece for the AEF, the American army fighting in France. We had no light artillery of our own. We also had no fighter planes, no tanks, no light machine gun, no heavy machine gun and, until we began mass-producing British knockoffs, no helmets.
We just had us, our Smokey Bear campaign hats and the Model 1903 Springfield. That was about it.
My friend Tom has always been an adventurer, an explorer. I am not. I prefer chairs and sofas and recliners. So that’s one reason he’s my hero. I hope it’s okay that I tell this story:
Tom was hiking along Highway 1 as a teen and became desperately sick with the flu. He trudged up a hill–a 1300-foot hill–to the Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage near Big Sur (great fruitcake, and I don’t even LIKE fruitcake) and they took him in, I think for a week, and took care of him until he was better. Good people taking care of a good person.
Those are French-manned 75’s, like the one Tom rebuilt, in action at the horrific 1916 Battle of Verdun, which claimed over 305,000 German and French lives (I despise jokes about French “cowardice.” Go to Verdun.) and wounded another 400,000.
“100,000 died” struggling for Fort Douaumont; those are our kids. When it was the Germans’ turn to occupy the fort, the Bavarians, because they are civilized, decided to brew coffee inside. There was no fuel to start a fire to brew the coffee. One of the Bavarians, suddenly inspired, emptied out a hand grenade’s charge and make a little mountain of the contents to start the fire.
When the explosion came, the Bavarians were blinded and burned black. Their comrades shot them down, thinking they were French colonials, Senegalese, who terrified the Germans.
There’s a French 75 just outside the main museum. The nearby ossuary contains the bones of thousands of soldiers from both sides who will never be known. You can see them in their stacks just beneath plexiglas panels in the floor.
All of them, of course, had been little boys once whose mothers applauded their first steps, whose fathers rousted them early for morning milking or who went to sleep at night with the dogs they loved tucked tight next to them.
The French cemetery, which of course is vast, features both Christian and Muslim gravestones, many for the Senegalese, the latter facing Mecca. All of them died for France.
I was touring the museum with my teaching partner Amber and our kids when a guide grabbed me gently by the elbow.
“Are these your students?”
My heart sank. We’d been yelled at in Paris by a policewoman who had a shot at becoming an NFL offensive guard.
I nodded.
“They are so RESPECTFUL!”
Might just be the greatest compliment of my life.
Those are some of our students atop Fort Douaumont at Verdun.
My first day of school, Branch Elementary, 1958. First through fourth grades met in the right-hand classroom, fifth through eighth in the left.
The school was pink then, absent the bell tower, deemed a hazard by the state. Our schoolbus was a yellow pickup with a canvas top over two benches bolted to the floor, driven by Elsie Cecchetti, also deemed a hazard by the state.
I could read my classmates’ names as our teacher, Mrs. Edith Brown, wrote them on the board. Fifty years later, I realized that my Mom, a remarkable woman, had already taught me how to read.
Each teacher taught six subjects to four different grade levels simultaneously. First grade might be in a reading circle, second at penmanship (those big green pencils and the coarse paper with those big green lines), third reading “My Weekly Reader,” fourth doing a multiplication worksheet.
My teachers were remarkable, too. I got a superb education.
Mom, at twenty-two in 1943, with my big sister, Roberta. In the days when it wasn’t insulting, the first Lucia Mar superintendent, Earl Denton, said that she was the most brilliant woman he’d ever met. Denton’s wife, Nita, was no slouch in the brilliance department, and she was a sweet and lovely woman, too.
My life’s been punctuated by awards. Three of my books, on local history, have won national recognition. For thirty years, I taught literature and history at Mission Prep in San Luis Obispo and at my Alma Mater, Arroyo Grande High School. I was a Lucia Mar Teacher of the Year. I’ve had three babies named for me. They are far more meaningful awards.
I have the devotion of thousands of students, some now in their fifties, who somehow still love me—I just don’t understand this— every bit as much as I have always loved them. At least nine of them teach history. Two of them are specialists, university professors, in areas dear to me, military history and the history of farm labor.
And I am an alcoholic. I am, as a writer, very open about that.
That’s why I’m devastated right now. My primary care doctor, Scott Davis, died unexpectedly yesterday. He was caring, funny, extremely bright and he actually listened to you.
He was also relentless in badgering me—somehow he did this gently—about my drinking. I mean no disrespect, and I have no proof, but I somehow had a hunch that he’d had demons, too—like all of us—at points in his life. That made him both my hero as well as my doctor. He was, to borrow the wonderful Yiddish word, a mensch.
I made two appointments with him earlier in the year and broke both of them because I hadn’t stopped drinking, was ashamed, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. That’s how much he meant to me.
I had an appointment with him in October, and I didn’t want to let him down again. That’s why I’m getting help now and that’s why I’ve been sober for ten days. This was for Scott.
I wanted so much to come into his office and hear him say, as he had a few years back when I managed a brief burst of sobriety, how healthy and alive I looked. I wanted to hear him say that in October.
I won’t get the chance to hear him again. I do have the chance to honor him by staying sober.
A doctor named Dykes Johnson delivered me. He was a private pilot at an air meet in Shafter and got the call, from Taft, that my Mom had gone into labor a month before I was due. Dykes had a hunch and flew back to Taft. I was both premature, at four pounds, and the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around my deck. I was being strangled. Dykes arrived, intense and worried, burst through the delivery room doors, roughly shoving my Dad aside, and saved my life.
Dykes Johnson
How blessed I am, at seventy-one, to have known the best doctor of my adult life in Scott. He saved my life, too.
I will not let this good doctor down again. I will never forget him, either.
There was another outbreak of Neo-Nazi leaflets left on Grover Beach doorsteps last night. It’s not the first time, Grover’s not the first place. It is, of course, heart-breaking. The willful ignorance that is bigotry’s handmaiden is probably impossible to overcome. So I had to make a video, not expecting to convert a White Nationalist, but instead to honor my parents, whose generation dealt with people like these when they finally had no other choice.
For a “cow county” as recently as the 1940 Census, San Luis Obispo County suffered heartbreak infinitely more painful than mine. But that’s what it took to defeat industrialized hatred, whose pinnacle, of course, was in the gas chambers of places like Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It wasn’t that long at all–twenty years?–before Hitler’s boorish, comical NDSAP had graduated from silly pamphlets into a mass movement whose embrace included the finest gun of the terrible war, the 88mm flak gun and, even more sinister, endless canisters of Zyklon-B. God help us.
Or, barring Him, may young people save us. When they were young, my parents’ generation did exactly that.
A Work in Progress 