Author Archives: ag1970

Random Thoughts from the Sports Desk, January 2025

06 Monday Jan 2025

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Ichiro Suzuki

1. Jimmy Garoppolo is starting for the Rams. This is madness.* When he was a Niner, Elizabeth and I spent a weekend in North Beach—wonderfully Italian—and passed a restaurant, on our way the City Lights Bookstore, that read JIMMY GAROPPOLO EATS HERE FREE!

*The Rammies just lost. Damn.

2. The Dodgers have signed a gifted South Korean middle infielder. Don’t tell me that actress Jeon Jong-seo (okay, and her yoga pants) who threw out the first pitch in an exhibition game in March, didn’t have something to do with that.


3. Yes, Ken Burns’s Baseball, repeating on the MLB channel, is just as good as it was when it first aired. When I taught U.S. History, I showed excerpts about the Negro Leagues every year when we studied the Harlem Renaissance, My kids were enthralled by Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson (and by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, from Burns’s series on Jazz). And they loved my surrogate grandfather, Negro Leagues player/manager Buck O’Neil.



4. Although we, a 49ers family, love 49ers legend Jerry Rice, Tampa Bay wide receiver MIke Evans today equaled Rice’s record for 11 seasons in a row with 1,000 receiving yards. Evans is a good man, and a tough one. (We also have a soft spot for Tampa QB Baker Mayfield, once a Cleveland Brown, and the series of Progressive Life commercials he did with his wife when they both pretended to live in the stadium. They were charming.



5. In thinking about Asian baseball players, I leaned to move my eyes independently when Ichiro and Ken Griffey Jr. appeared together at Dodger Stadium. I am left-handed, so that eye never left Suzuki. He hit like Carew, loving the opposite field, but Ichiro hit with more power and, he played with the game, I think, with the same grace, if a bit edgier, that DiMaggio had.


But we saw a game at Camden Yards in Baltimore—such a beautiful ballpark– there are little bronze baseballs set into the wall to commemorate epic home runs. Griffey’s was about twenty feet above all the others.

6. Best of all, best of all, there’s this magazine cover. WOOT!

I love Australians

05 Sunday Jan 2025

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Lt. Gregory–or maybe he was still a corporal–with my sister, Roberta, 1943.

My father almost became a World War II casualty, but on a London bus. Two drunken GI’s where harassing a young British woman, who was visibly terrified. When Dad intervened, the two got out of their seats and got nose-to-nose with him.

My father, who weighed maybe 140 lbs after two Thanksgiving dinners, closed his eyes and prepared to die for his country. When a moment passed with no discernible personal destruction, he opened them again and the drunks were seated and staring intently out the window, as if bombed-out London was the most beautiful and arresting scene they’d ever encountered.

Dad turned around and there were four sunburned Aussie veterans standing behind him.

“Should you need anything else, Leftenant,” their sergeant smiled, “we’ll be right here.”

The popular orchestra leader Andre Rieu, from Holland, might be a little schmaltzy, but I love him anyway because where he goes, he pays tribute to the nation hosting his orchestra. In this case, Rieu’s emotions are heartfelt. Look at the tears in his eyes, and at the beautiful mother and daughter singing together. Chills.

Since Australia was once a penal colony, there are a lot of people whose ancestors came from Ireland. This song, by the late Dolores O’Riordan and The Cranberries, is a terrible evocation of The Troubles.

And here are Australians—some of them maybe Irish, others definitely Maori, paying tribute to O’Riordan’s song. Aussies may have saved my Dad’s life. Dolores Mary Eileen O’Riordan died in a London hotel in 2018. She still lives in Brisbane, in the voices of these Aussies.

My true identity

04 Saturday Jan 2025

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Guy Williams, as Disney’s Zorro (1957-1959) on his trusty horse, Tornado

Trying to renew my Driver’s License/California Permanent ID.

To do so, I need a copy of my birth certificate. Sure, that’s around here somewhere. Should be easy to find, since it’s heavy, carved in Cuneiform on a big rock.


Nope. Can’t find it.

I can get a copy from Kern County, though. $45.

It will get here a week after my license expires.

But it won’t get here at all unless I pay an extra $25 to get my true identity verified. (Secretly, my true identity is Don Diego de la Vega, aka “Zorro”). That okay. You can do that online, through a convenient online notary.

By the way, here’s an older Don Diego, about my age, played wonderfully by Anthony Hopkins.



Online Notaries ask a lot of questions—maybe it adds a little excitement to their dreary Bob Cratchity lives? Once they’re done being nosy, you submit a photo of your Driver’s License—mine’s the one that’s about to expire—front and back.

Okay.

To the photo submission page:

Take photo. Submit.

Failure.

Take photo. Submit.

Failure.

Take new photo. Submit.

Failure.

(I do this all the time when I make an online bank deposit, by the way, so I’m no newbie.)

Take new new photo. Submit.

Failure.

I submit heated a note to Mr./Ms. online notary. No cuss words, but it does include the adjective “absurd.”

Now I know why folks hate The Guvmint. Come to think of it, Zorro had a beef with the colonial Mexican guvmint of California, too.

Singing to self: Out of the night/When the full Moon is bright/Comes the horseman known as ‘Zorro’…

Happy Birthday, Mom: January 1, 1921

29 Sunday Dec 2024

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This was an introductory slide on local women’s history, a presentation I made to the Woman’s Club.

Since I never miss a chance to brag about my mother, and her birthday’s almost here, let me tell you why I love her still:

She taught me how to read.

When I realized, terrified, that I was going to die someday, she used seemingly dead tulip bulbs to teach me about new life.

She was gifted with flowers, including tulips, but most of all roses.

The same went with fabrics–weaving, knitting, needlepoint, crochet, and sewing (which she disliked, but we had an big black Singer in the living room on Huasna Road.) And a hand loom, far bigger.

When it didn’t sound quite so insulting as it does today, the first superintendent of Lucia Mar, Earl Denton, said that my mother “was the most brilliant woman he’d ever known.” (Her education ended at Taft Union High School in 1939.)

She loved music. We had everything from Disney records–“Tubby the Tuba” and “Little Toot the Tugboat” to Classical LPs and, her favorites and mine, the two Harry Belafonte Carnegie Hall concerts.

She was a marvelous cook. I will never, ever be able to replicate her chicken in white wine sauce, served either atop rice or toast points. I loved Fridays at Branch School because her tuna sandwiches were epic.

We all watched The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS on Sunday nights. Mom’s favorites were Ringo, Petula Clark and, most of all, Diana Ross and the Supremes. (For context, that means that Mom was Beyond Cool for 1965).


Earlier, when we lived on Sunset Drive, we all decided we wanted to be Bedouins. Mom provided burnooses, robes, makeup (Bruce and I had curly mustachioes) for the three kids. And for our Cocker Spaniel, Lady. She had a veil, too.

Her favorite mission was Santa Ines. Coincidentally, it became my Fourth Grade Branch School Mission Project. Many years later, Elizabeth and I would be married there.

She loved anyone who wasn’t quite like us. My college major was in Mexican history. That’s Mom’s doing.

She belived in integrity, in the brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings, and in Jesus, to whom she held no exclusive rights. She was a devout Catholic who didn’t live long enought to convert.

She grew up in the Great Depression, so our can cupboard on Huasna Road was filled with food she’d never eat. Here she is in fourth grade in Taft. They’re cropped out in this version of the elementary-school photo, but her shoes are badly scuffed.

So what poverty taught her—including the Famine poverty of her Irish great- grandfathers, both name Patrick—had nothing to do with brilliance and everything to do with compassion. Her grandson, Thomas, shows the same quality with the little friend he made in Killarney on a student trip to Ireland.

And Jimmy Carter, a Baptist, who left us just today, showed the same kind of compassion that my mother taught and that her grandson inherited. Here he is, with Rosalyn, working on a Habitat for Humanity project in Memphis.

In 2010, I took AGHS students on another trip to Europe, on a battlefield tour, and one of our stops was at Verdun, the site of one of the most horrific battles, in 1916, of World War I. Here are some of my students atop Fort Douaumont, where 100,0000 French and German soldiers died.

Later, we toured the ossuary, where we could see the anonymous bones of unknown young men in stacks just below Plexicglas apretures.

“Are these your students?” a museum docent asked me. I gulped.

Yes, they are, I admitted.

“They are so respectful!” she said.

Maybe I had taught them that. But my mother had taught me. She was their teacher, too.

Mom and me, 1952.

Never underestimate the power of a kindness.

29 Sunday Dec 2024

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Diana Berguia, 1949-1985, AGHS 1967

I ran away from home when I was about thirteen. It didn’t last long. We lived by the Harris Bridge–that’s our house, the way it looks today.

So I went up into the hills, where I found cowpies, some fresh–damn!–and cow bones and skulls, which later made their way into a book I wrote, about the drought of 1862-64 that decimated Francis Branch’s cattle. In modern dollars, it cost the founder of Arroyo Grande $8 million, and the drought arrived the same year he lost three little girls, now buried next to him, to smallpox.


My situation wasn’t quite that dire. I was angry with my Mom and, given to grand gestures, running away from home seemed appropriate.

My runaway covered most of this map.


That lasted about twenty minutes. The idea wore itself out. My stubbornness didn’t. For those of you keeping score at home, I did a big loop. I turned left behind the IDES Hall, went behind Old Arroyo (We did NOT call it “The Village,” a term I consider insulting, unless you’re a Smurf), went up Cherry and then onto Branch Mill Road, grudgingly headed toward home.

It was a long hike, especially for someone, like me, who was vertically challenged. I was always the shortest in the photo, and here’s proof, the year before I ran away from home, when I’d won a writing award for the American Legion’s Women’s Auxiliary. I believe the topic was “Lordy, How I Hate Communism.” I could be wrong, but not by much.


Me, front center, with my hair neatly slicked down by Avon Hair Trainer, courtesy of our Avon Lady, Mary Lou Fink, whom we loved. To my immediate right is Josephine Thwaites, AGHS ’71. Her Mom, many years later, took our wedding photos.


I walked up Branch Mill and was getting close to Tar Springs Creek when a 1958 Chevy station wagon stopped.

Behind the wheel was Diana Berguia. Her passengers were, I think, her sisters—Angie, Connie (my contemporary and my friend back to first grade at Branch School, and later my teaching colleague at AGHS) and Emily.

“Do you need a lift?”

My feet hurt.

I bashfully accepted. Diana was immensely older and more classy than I—she must have just gotten her driver’s license, which only validated this estimated. And she was beautiful, with long straight black hair, and I think I remember a soft and almost musical voice. Her family farmed far up Huasna Road, past the haunted house where little Alice had been murdered, up toward the Coehlos but not quite as far as the big tree where the fog stopped and not quite as far as the Tar Springs Ranch or the Porter Ranch beyond where, in my imagination, bounded as it was by the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, you reached the ends of the Earth and fell off. I later learned about Pozo.

Geography aside, my feet hurt, and I was being picked up by a station wagon full of girls. Accepting Diana’s offer was the first good decision I’d made all day.

I have a damnable habit of getting rescued by friends—Joe Loomis is another example of this, if you’ve heard that story (if you haven’t, look up “Redheads” on this blog)—and I think Diana sensed that I was upset. And she was worried. I was short enough to be run over by a celery truck, with me unseen, so the Berguias got me home safely.

Years and years and years later, I was interviewing Jeanne Wilkinson Frederick, whose father owned the Arroyo Grande Meat Market. I’ve written about her, too, because her dad was so kind to his Japanese customers—his friends—that they sent Jeanne this beautiful doll from the Rivers Internment Camp in the Arizona desert. Jeanne, at 93, still had it.

Jeanne Wilkinson as an AGUHS student, about 1944, and the doll .

She also still had her father’s ledgers. It was customary for grocers and butchers to allow the farm customers to run a tab, to be paid off when the harvest came in. When I opened the ledger, the entries were for Diana’s father, Victorino, born in 1909 in the Philippines.

The memory of the day I ran away from home came back to me just then, along with the realization of the luck I’d had in growing up with Victorino’s children. An AI description of his birthplace:

Barotac Nueva, Iloilo, is known for its friendly people and is a great destination for travelers who want to experience the local culture. Some say that the people of Barotac Nuevo are among the most hospitable in [the Philippines].

Of course that must be true. It is now sixty years since Diana pulled over to ask if I needed a ride. It remains one of the most vivid, and one of the warmest, memories of my life.

The Berguias were, are, and always will be one of our finest families.

Special thanks to Shannon Ratliff Evans, whose faithful Facebook record, “Arroyo Grande High School’s Fallen Angels,” is a constant reminded to me of how lucky I’ve been to have grown up in Arroyo Grande.

Jimmy’s 2024

25 Wednesday Dec 2024

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It was not an easy year: We lost Mollie and Mittens, the beautiful Tuxedo cat. But here’s some stuff I’ve created this year because I have, yup, a big mouth.

And so, 2024, here we go:

December 31:

January:

February.



February.

March.

May:

June:

July: From a presentation for the South County Historical Society.

September: Remarks before the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors for “Good Neighbors” week.

October: For the 99s, the women’s pilots organization, from a presentation at the Estrellla Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles.

October: From a presentation to the Cayucos Historical Society:


And maybe I should add just a few blog posts, too? Okay.

I can’t believe I did this. December:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/12/10/how-to-take-teenagers-to-europe/

When my mother died, I read. November:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/11/15/when-my-mother-died-i-read/

Remarks to the History Center of San Luis Obispo County, October:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/10/10/how-has-history-influenced-my-life/

Good Neighbors, Arroyo Grande, September:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/09/23/good-neighbors/

Devotion. August:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/08/31/devotion-2/

My New Hero, July:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/07/31/my-new-hero-the-muffin-man/

Oba! July:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/07/20/oba-oba-oba-i-love-this-song-from-brazil/

The song “Wayfaring Stranger, May:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/05/25/wayfaring-stranger/

The Rising, Ireland, 1916. April:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/04/23/april-24-1916/

This Beautiful Song, March:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/03/21/this-beautiful-song/

Just a girl, February:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/02/26/just-a-girl/

Our “Masters of the Air,” January

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/masters-of-the-air-2024/



How has history influenced my life?

25 Wednesday Dec 2024

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This is a first draft–most of it borrowed from other writing of mine–of remarks I’m to give for the History Center of San Luis Obispo on October 19 at the beautiful octagonal barn just south of town.

I began my formal education in a two-room schoolhouse in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley that had been built in 1888. Some of our desks still had inkwells. A two-cubicle outhouse was our restroom. One day a mountain lion came down from the hill above the schoolhouse and sniffed around our baseball field.

Just over the hill was a little family cemetery that contained the graves of the Branch family, rancheros and founders of Arroyo Grande. Mr. Branch, who died in 1874, is buried beside three daughters, all taken by smallpox in the summer of 1862. And nearby are the graves of a father and son, suspected killers, lynched from a railroad trestle over the creek in 1886.

I had no choice but to become a history teacher. Later, I had the chance to write books about the history—local history—that I love so much.

Me, teaching, I guess, at Mission Prep. It’s probably Civil War-era, either Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or Little Round Top on July 2 at Gettysburg.

The lynch mob’s victims, a father and his fifteen-year-old son, led to a book about San Luis Obispo County outlaws.

Finding a Marine’s tombstone—he grew up in Corbett Canyon and died on Iwo Jima three days short of his twenty-first birthday—led to a book about World War II.



My father was Madonna Construction’s comptroller. He took my brother Bruce and me on  an airplane with him once—I was six—while he bid a job in Marysville. The plane was Madonna’s twin-engined Aerocommander; the pilot was Earl Thomson, co- founder of the county airport. I was enthralled by that trip. Sixty years later, it led to a book about Central Coast aviators in World War II.

Alex Madonna, Gov. “Pat” Brown, and the Aerocommander.


My father liked to tell family stories. Dad and Dan Krieger were the best storytellers I have ever known, and that is how I taught history for thirty years.

My name, James Douglass, is from Dad’s family. James comes from my great-great grandfather, an undistinguished Confederate brigadier general. Douglass comes from his son, a young staff officer who had an unfortunate encounter with a Union artillery shell in Arkansas in 1862.  Dad’s stories about his family, influding these two, would lead to my writing a book about the Civil War and the sixty veterans buried in Arroyo Grande’s cemetery. To my distinct pleasure, they are all Yankees.

I do not want to cause a political ruckus here, but I am a Lincoln man.


Gen. James H. McBride, for whom I am named.


History can touch us in what seem to be the most casual of ways.

Last week I  spent a large sum of cash at the Arroyo Grande Meat Co. on Branch Street, and it was money well spent: Five grass-fed Spencer steaks for my son John’s birthday.

While I waited for the steaks to be wrapped, I remembered that

–This has been a meat market since 1897.

–It, and the storefronts alongside it, were built with brick quarried from Tally Ho Creek clay.

–The brick was fired in a lot owned by Pete Olohan, Saloonist Extraordinaire, and the building named for him includes today’s Klondike Pizza.

–Two of the early meat market partners were E.C. Loomis, he of the feed store, now empty, at the base of Crown Hill, and Mathias Swall, who also built the bank that is now Lightning Joe’s.

–Mr. and Mrs. Swall lived in the home that is now the Murphy Law Firm on Branch Street. They both loved music and played instruments and resolved to teach their children to play instruments, as well. There were twelve little Swalls. Noisiest house in town.

–E.C. Loomis’s sons, including Vard, a onetime Stanford pitcher who coached a local Nisei team, safeguarded the farms and farm equipment of their Japanese American customers during internment, among many local families who did so out of simple admiration for their neighbors, their values and for their devotion to the little town they shared.

–That is how Vard Ikeda got his name, and those families’ friendship is in part why two generations of Ikedas have been so incredibly important to local youth sports.

–Shortly before they were “evacuated” to internment camps in 1942, Japanese farmers came into the meat market to settle their bills. Paul Wilkinson, then the owner, refused to take their money. These were his friends.

“You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”

After the war, they paid Mr. Wilkinson back. In full.


I grew up with schoolmates whose grandparents came from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese home island. Some of my friends’ families came from the Azores and some from Luzon, in the Philippines.

When I was a little boy, the whistling of braceros—baroque and beautiful—woke me up summer mornings as they went down to the fields next to us for work.

I learned my first Spanish from them. Years later, one of my university Spanish professors took me aside to offer me one of the greatest compliments of my life::

“Mr. Gregory, you have a distinct Mexican accent.”

My first sushi was on a special Japanese holiday—I think it was Labor Day—at Ben Dohi’s house. Ben was married to a Yamaguchi sister, and Dr. Jim Yamaguchi came down with his wife and baby girl from the Bay area to visit. I got to hold Jim Yamaguchi’s daughter. Her name was Kristi. She would grow up to be an Olympic gold medalist. I did not drop her.

Kristi Yamaguchi, 1992 Winter Olympics




Mary Gularte took pity on me one cold morning when the schoolbus was late. She took me inside her kitchen and kept an eye out for the bus while setting a dish of sopa—Portuguese stew—on the kitchen table in front of me. I inhaled it. I did not have to eat the rest of the day.

My friends included families with surnames like Pasion and Domingo and sometimes they’d bring back sugarcane from the Philippines and gift me with a stalk to gnaw on. It was wonderful, but I later discovered lumpias, the divine Filipino egg roll, at the Arroyo Grande Harvest Festival. It gave me the greatest pleasure to watch Filipino mothers, most of them, once upon a time, war brides, watch me as I took my first bite of lumpia. My reaction must have been transparent. They beamed.

These were the helping hands that built our county. They helped me in my growing up. These people filled me with their history, by which I mean our history, and they remind me that history is always around us, sometimes just beyond the reach of our understanding. I write about history because I owe the past so much. My writing is the least, and it’s the very least, that I can do for my friends, including those I never had the chance to meet.

My grandfather, Ozark Plateau farmer John Smith Gregory (1862-1933) died eighteen years before I was born. He was the sweetest waltzer in Texas County, Missouri; I wish he’d lived long enough to teach me how to dance.

Superman: Our immigrant hero.

19 Thursday Dec 2024

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David Corenswet as Superman in James Gunn’s feature, to be released in July.

I was watching CNN’s morning news and they handed the feature on the upcoming Superman film to Richard Berman. I love Richard Berman because he is ebullient about popular culture, especially rock music and movies. He is, like me, a geek. His geekiness was overwhelming—and utterly charming—in presenting this story today. I’ve loved Kate Bolduan, the mother of two, since 2016, when she began to cry while presenting a story on Omran, a little boy, here in the back of an ambulance after surviving an airstrike in Syria. Sara Sidner, on the right, has shown immense dignity during her struggle with breast cancer; there are days when she’s not on and your suspicion is that she just isn’t feeling well.

“Take me home, Krypto.” Part of the enthusiasm Berman showed was because the upcoming film features Superman’s dog, Krypto, and the hero plummets to earth in bad shape. Krypto saves him. This drove folks on the internets nuts—remember, the trailer was released just this morning—and Berman is a dog lover, like so many of us.


Berman is talented, funny and he is Jewish. I knew that, knew that my ancestors were not terribly kind toward Jews (my Mom, when I was four, scolded me for wearing my underwear under my pajamas. “Only Sheenies do that!” “Sheenie” is an Irish pejorative for “Jew.”) I hope my Mom didn’t know that.

Once, when Roberta brought home a German boy from Poly, a date, Mom refused to come out of her room to meet him. The Irish hold grudges, and they hold them hard—it’s the flip side of their sense of humor. In the marvelous book Paddy’s Lament, about the Great Famine, the sure sign that an Irish victim (simple malnutrition or, more likely, typhus) was about to die was when he or she lost their sense of humor.

My mother’s grudge? It was called Auschwitz-Birkenau.


But was at least a small part of Berman’s reaction to the movie trailer rooted in his Jewish heritage? Superman’s own Jewishness is a point that will never, ever be resolved, but of course, I had to look it up. I found this article, in the link below, fascinating—and ambiguous, which is just as it should be. History is ambiguous. Individuals aren’t. If Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, thought of him a a fellow Jew, then surely he must be. His nationality, of course, is American, and he is an immigrant, along with the 3.5 million Jews from our past who preceded him. They are Americans, too.

https://bigthink.com/the-present/supermans-jewish-history

I need to make one more point about the trailer. The director, James Gunn, St. Louis-raised, did not slight the love story. The film is said to contain scenes that are tributes to Christopher Reeve, our late 20th-Century Superman, the actor known for his decency, kindness and immense reservoirs of courage. So it’s appropriate that in both versions of the story, Superman and Lois fall in love in the air.



I am the proud father of two fine sons, but my nieces, Emily and Rebecca, are my surrogate daughters, and they are from the same miracle that produced that immigrant who calls himself Clark Kent. On their mother’s side—my younger sister—they are County Wicklow Irish. On their Dad’s side, they are descended from Russian Jews who escaped the Romanov pogroms. The first of them who was an American was a junk dealer, not a Superman. That role fell in equal parts on his grandsons, three of them university professors.

As to their descendants, my nieces? Emmy (NYU) is the actor, in New York City. Becky (Honors, University of Missouri, my Alma Mater) is the poet who combines words, seemingly discordant, and makes them shimmer. Maybe that’s why I love Superman now even more than I did when I was twelve, inhaling the comic books while waiting my turn for a haircut in my hometown, a little farm town, Arroyo Grande, California.

Arroyo Grande Irish.

17 Tuesday Dec 2024

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Charlotte Alexander was kind enough to publish this little piece in SLO Review today. It means a lot to me. We grew up with Patrick Moore’s descendants, farmer George Gray Shannon, his wife Barbara and their sons. You can tell from the photo what Mom thought of the Shannon boys. The Irish knit tablecloth is out, and it was normally reserved for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

Michael, the eldest, is now a writer, and he is marvelously gifted. Here are two photos of his Dad, one of them with George holding Jerry in the two-room Branch School hallway, the other, on the family farm, shows George towing the boys and, if you look closely, a dog keeping Cayce company at the rear.

George married Barbara Hall, an elegant woman. She worked at Baxter’s Men and Boys and took care of us every year at Back-to-School time. I did not know for many years that Kaz Ikeda had been nearly arrested, soon after Pearl Harbor, because he was giving a high-school girl, a friend of his family’s, a lift. It was Barbara.

Here are Barbara, on the right, and the Irish-by-marriage Georgie O’Connor, dressed up for the Harvest Festival, Arroyo Grande’s annual salute (more or less, recently) to its agricultural history. Elizabeth and I had the luck to take Georgie’s granddaughter, Kelli, one of my history students, to Ireland with us. She turned out to be the most delightful traveling companion we could ever want.

But the muse for this piece was Patrick Moore’s niece and Michael’s grandmother, Annie Gray Shannon. I’m pretty sure my jaw hit my chest the first time I saw her photo. I tend to show it, shamelessly, with another Irish girl, my Mom, on the left, with Roberta, when Mom—Patricia Margaret Keefe, with roots in County Wicklow— was twenty-two.

If Annie looks a bit too serious in this photo, with her expanse of lace collar and the immense bow holding her hair tight for the photographer, I am sure she had her unserious moments, too. Michael has shared these photos of Annie with her friends at Berkeley. She’s on the left, and these images of her enchant me even more.