Well, I’m trying, anyway. I’m going to speak on local history—probably our “Wild West”—at the Wyndham Residence on Elm Street soon. I enjoy talking to seniors. When you’re done, some of them come over and tell their stories. I met a woman from Japan who’d married her Air Force husband during the Korean War.

Another remembered going to (densely-chaperoned) USO dances during World War II. She and a soldier boy kind of hit it off, spent all night talking and went to church the next morning. While that might not have been typical of all wartime encounters, I sure enjoyed hearing her story.

She never saw her G.I. again, of course.

And I’m starting to research and write again. I’d like to do an article on four local dance halls during the 20s and 30s, when dancing was actually learned and apparently a vital part of socialization for kids and, for adults, dances established a sense of community. And, I would guess, kept marriages together.

I’ll probably focus on four: Trinity Hall in Edna and our IDES Hall in Arroyo Grande, both founded by Portuguese-American fraternal societies; the Pismo Pavilion, where in 1925, a benefit dance was held for visiting sailors whose destroyers were anchored off the pier; and Tanner Hall in Arroyo Grande where, in 1966, as I was about to enter ninth grade up on Crown Hill, I saw two high-school girls get into the most epic fight I’d ever seen. It gave me pause.

Above: Trinity Hall, Arroyo Grande’s IDES Hall (1948). It was preceded by the whittled-down Columbian Hall—kind of the Clark Center of its time–the steepled building in the 1880s Branch Street photo. You can see the whittled-down version, the first IDES Hall, behind the football team. The photo was taken after the war, near what is today the Lucia Mar bus barn. The Pismo Pavilion and Tanner Hall are in the next photos.

And as to Gene Autry? It’s officially Christmas at our house when Elizabeth plays her ancient vinyl record of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” And I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jeanne Wilkinson Frederick at 94. Her family owned the meat market that’s still a meat market on Branch Street, and, as a preteen and teen she went to the movies at the Grande Theater, today’s Posies in the Village. She loved Gene Autry Westerns, she told me in the interview, and then demonstrated it by pointing her index fingers and going pew! pew! as if she were Autry shootin’ the pistols out of the bad guys’ hands.

Good Lord, she was a delightful human being.

This is for you, my friend.