Wes is an AGHS grad, a saxophonist, who played in concert with Booker T. last night (“Green Onions” is below.)

Sandy is an Army officer I hope to see again in the next few days. He taught history at West Point and has forgotten more about the Revolutionary War than I will ever know. He took his underclassmen to battlefields now 250 years old.

Two former students are military doctors. One more is an officer in the 82nd Airborne.

Two more have just become mothers for the second time, and you can tell from their photos how devoted they are to their children.

I’ve a former AGHS student, a young woman, who’s an architect. Another, a lawyer, is a product of UC Berkeley. Yet another, just married, worked with sea mammals at an aquarium.

Another just got her veterinary degree from my Alma Mater, the University of Missouri. When our tortoise, Lucy, got sick, she was a vet tech, and she cared for Lucy, who got better, with great compassion.

Another commanded a Coast Guard cutter based out of Ketchikan. When she served in Florida, she led armed boarding parties interdicting Colombian cocaine.

One is traveling in Turkey, one more in France. Another loves fishing, and she posts photos of immense rockfish she’s caught off our coast.

One–one of the most brilliant students I’ve ever taught–is a voracious reader and she works at City Lights in San Francisco, the bookstore haunt of Ferlinghetti and Kerouac and Ginsberg.

A young man, a former nationally-ranked Irish step dancer, is now a composer with a PhD from Columbia who lives in London. He is a newlywed. She is lovely.

One of his closest friends from AGHS was the Valedictorian at Yale a few years ago. He and his friend, another AGHS grad, and an honors grad from Reed College, write and perform plays.

At least three have written books.

A young woman especially dear to me is fighting, with great dignity, an autoimmune disease that would reduce the rest of us, including me, to tears.

So is a young man we taught at AGHS.

There are others fighting alcoholism, depression, or cancer. I admire them without reservation.

I admire, too, the students are now teachers, including at least one at Branch and another at Harloe and two at Mesa Middle School. And, yes, several teach history. One, a PhD with a specialty in the history of California farm labor, a topic dear to me, teaches at Poly.

This year, one student her M.D. from Harvard. Another got his from Yale.

There are students I remember vividly from Arroyo Grande High School who are therapists, police officers, mechanics, carpenters, electricians, Melodrama actors, businesswomen, farmers.

I recently posted, on another website, how important teaching was to me. I wrote about a young woman, whose parents came from Guerrero, in central Mexico, and how hard she worked to excel in our AP program at AGHS.

One reply was a laughing emoji, from a stunted man who believes in pretty much nothing.

He sees public education–where I tried, always, to teach the truth, no matter how painful it was to me– as “indoctrination.”

If he thinks I “indoctrinated” students like the ones I’ve mentioned here, then I am guilty. So are all the teachers I had the honor to know at Arroyo Grande High School.

Two photos of rivals and friends, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays.

But this photo shows Dodgers pitcher Johnny Padres throwing a “message pitch” to…excuse me, AT… Mays at Candlestick in 1962.

So that whole Dodgers-Giants thing is A Thing.

The two teams finished in a tie at the end of the 1962 season–101 wins, 61 losses–in the pre-division National League. I was ten years old and, other than Koufax and Drysdale, my ultimate hero was Dodger shortstop Maury Wills, who stole 104 bases, then a record, that year.

We were in my Dad’s 1961 Dodge Polara station wagon (that car was a beast) when Vin Scully announced the Giants’ 6-4 victory, ending a three-game playoff, on October 3, 1962.

The Giants played Game one of the World Series, against the Yankees, the NEXT DAY.

Johnny Podres had started the final playoff game for the Dodgers; Juan Marichal for the Giants, but the winning pitcher was Don Larsen, who, as a Yankee, threw the perfect game against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series.

Darn you, Don Larsen.

Much groaning came from our car at the playoff game’s end. Then we went home to Huasna Road and sulked for a couple of days.

Much groaning came from our car at the playoff game’s end. Then we went home to Huasna Road and sulked for a couple of days.

And, as a Dodger fan, nothing was more terrifying to me than the #3 and cleanup spots in that lineup, with the right-handed Mays and the left-handed Willie McCovey. That started in 1961; McCovey was hurt in 1962 but those places in the lineup remained between 1963 and 1968 and came back once more in 1971.

Other great one-two punches came to mind: Ruth and Gehrig, Eddie Matthews and Hank Aaron (Braves), Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell (Pirates).

Statistically, Ruth and Gehrig were the most productive, but in my lifetime, watching West Coast games on both black-and-white and color television, nobody touched Mays and McCovey.

Sometimes, for cryin’ out loud, they’d move Mays into the leadoff spot and put Bobby Bonds in the #3 slot. (WOW!)

The other thing that’s A Thing is how exceptional those 1962 teams were. Lineups/stats attached.

The always-articulate sportscaster Bob Costas identified what made Willie Mays stand out among all of these players from 1962, and it was the sheer joy with which he played baseball. (Admitting my lifelong prejudice—I saw my first Dodgers game at the Coliseum, against Stan Musial’s Cardinals—I can see some of Willie Mays in a modern player—yes, a Dodger—Mookie Betts).

The sheer joy.

Godspeed, Willie Mays. Every one of us who loves baseball will always love you, too.

I am to speak briefly as a small part of a bigger event this morning at 10 a.m., for the performance of a musical piece called “Behind Barbed Wire.” I think this is what I will say.

Because I graduated from and taught at Arroyo Grande High School, I needed my school to bring clarity to what I have to say today.

Twenty-five of the 58 members of the Class of 1942 were Nisei. They’d played basketball–the 1941-42 starters included three Nisei players. So were the quarterback and halfback for that year’s football team.

So were the teens who’d played baseball for Juzo Ikeda and Vard Loomis.

The principal’s secretary was Nisei. So was the assistant editor of the “Aerie,” the yearbook, and the sports editor of the “Hi-Chatter,” the school newspaper. So were three officers in the ASB. So was the student speaker for the FFA’s parent night.

The previous year, so was the winner of a scholarship as the high school’s outstanding student So was the senior recognized as the outstanding science student.

Most of them been seventh and eighth-graders at the new Orchard Avenue School, a WPA project completed in 1937. Their fathers, as volunteers, landscaped the new schoolgrounds. At a PTA function that year, their mothers shared a tea ceremony with their friends.

Five years later, this all changed. 1400 of our neighbors in in San Luis Obispo County and northern Santa Barbara County were sent into exile. This is what that was like in Arroyo Grande.

 On April 30, 1942, South County families met waiting buses at the high school, outside what is today the Paulding Gym, and there was a poignant moment when the Woman’s Club brought box lunches from the French Café, in the Olohan Building, for the long ride to the Tulare fairgrounds. 

The loaded buses then would’ve crept down Crown Hill in low gear, on their way to the two-lane 101 on the western edge of town. Their passengers, crammed inside with their luggage crammed in the bellies of the buses, would have passed, along Branch Street, familiar places, from E.C. Loomis and Son at the base of Crown Hill to the twin churches, Methodist and Catholic, just before the 101.

The Nisei children and teenagers who grew up here, who had never known any other place, did not know whether they would ever see these places again, all the little shops they’d known all their lives.

 Many of them wouldn’t.

Just past the churches, the buses turned north to make the connection for the long, colorless journey into the San Joaquin Valley.

If you grew up in Arroyo Grande, as I did, that day was, in peacetime, almost the equivalent of Christmas Eve. One of the teenagers on one of the buses remembered, years later, that it was the day before trout season opened.

The Manzanar Fishing Club risked getting shot by creeping beyond the wire to fish for trout at night. There are Gila Trout in the Gila River beyond the wire of our neighbors’—our ancestors’— desert camp. I don’t know if there we were similar subversive trout fishermen there.

I hope so.

One of the Manzanar fishermen said, “When you’re fishing, you forget everything that’s wrong.”

Today, of course, we are here to remember instead.
  

I think I mentioned that at the Camp Arroyo Grande Jamboree, I was deeply touched because a young teen, Caleb, bought one of my World War II Aviators books. I inscribed it especially for him.

 (It especially made up for the guy who passed my books and snorted derisively, “Outlaws in San Luis County?” Snort. That book took a year to research and write. So have the others.)

It also made up for the book, on World War II aviators, that I accidentally gave away to an older gent–by that, I mean older than ME–who’d worked at Edwards AFB and remembered the X-15 program. WOWSERS!

I got so excited that he walked away from the South County Historical Society table without paying. It wasn’t felonious, by the way. It’s just that both of us are hard of hearing.

But Boy Howdy, young people lightning struck twice! A nice Mom from Templeton emailed me asking if Cuesta offers a World War II class for credit.

They don’t, but since I’ve found ANOTHER teenager interested in history, I was, as we said back in the day, stoked.

So on the off-chance that anybody else is interested in this part of our history–of local history–here’s my reply to that very kind woman from Templeton.

I tend to be enthusiastic. Sorry.

Anyway, here’s my reply.


Well, this email made my day. I am so happy to hear of your son’s interest!

Cuesta College does not even offer an onsite class on World War II, but you might try this link to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. That might be worth a try for distance learning credit courses:

Distance Learning | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (nationalww2museum.org)

Your son might have already seen these, but in appreciation for his interest, here are a few videos based on my books. I am sorry there are so many, but summer break’s coming up!

Best,

Jim

The American Cemetery above Omaha Beach:
https://youtu.be/i4ILEWNzaXc

A local paratrooper in Easy Company:
https://youtu.be/wq3AQV0ip6g

Louis Brown, USMC, and Iwo Jima:

Lady Moe, the Donkey, and the airmen who adopted her:
https://youtu.be/Lvm1HBByeLQ

Inspired by a Santa Maria airshow. World War II airmen and their planes:
https://youtu.be/6sGdI3AYIJk

Arroyo Grande and USS Arizona:

Al Spierling’s thirteenth mission:
https://youtu.be/wmG2o2dhIVY

Camp San Luis Obispo during World War II:
https://youtu.be/UQ8sxwnuYqA

A B-17 pilot and POW from Morro Bay:
https://youtu.be/h0hRoTCA03U

My Dad was in the Army and I’m kind of nutty about piston-driven airplanes, so sometimes I slight the Navy. Here are some blog posts to make up for that:

American Twilight: The Golden Gate Exposition of 1939 | A Work in Progress (wordpress.com)

The wreck at 20,000 feet | A Work in Progress (wordpress.com)

USS Nevada’s SLO County Connection | A Work in Progress (wordpress.com)

Devotion | A Work in Progress (wordpress.com)

The Lost Boy | A Work in Progress (wordpress.com)