I first heard this song when I was eighteen, and my friend Paul Hibbard’s house in Arroyo Grande, not far from Sambo’s (later Francisco’s, now a derelict) where we drank endless cups of coffee and talked about Life and Stuff. I thought Paul immensely wise, older than his years, and a kind of hero. Him introducing me to this John Mayall album, and to this song, only confirmed my feelings about him. That’s Paul, in the photo from the 1969 AGHS yearbook.
So did this man confirm my feelings about Mayall. This is one of those “First Time Hearing” YouTube videos, and they’re so often young Black People, but this man has a few miles on him and he may not have heard Mayall before, but he knows music.
The best part, I think, is watching this man’s face. Then it gets better, when he admits how jealous he is. Of Mayall’s audience fifty-five years ago.
So what? Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite British newspapers, The Guardian:
Eric Clapton* fled the Yardbirds in the spring of 1965, dismayed by the prospect of their latest single, For Your Love, bringing commercial success and thereby compromising his musical integrity. The 20-year-old guitarist found comfort in the arms of John Mayall, who welcomed him into his band, the Bluesbreakers. Within weeks their relatively purist approach to the blues, while not producing hit singles, had put them among the hottest attractions on the UK’s club circuit.
In Mayall, the young blues-hungry audiences knew they were in the presence of a slightly older figure whose knowledge and understanding of the idiom gave him an immense authority. In Clapton they had an idol who was one of their own.
In those days, it was instructive to see Mayall and his musicians on two occasions either side of Clapton’s arrival: the first time on a club tour accompanying the veteran American guitarist T-Bone Walker, playing the role of devoted and self-effacing disciples; the second time, suddenly bathed in the glow of cult worship.
He had come from Manchester to London in 1963 with a record collection that included Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and many other more obscure bluesmen and women. He and Alexis Korner, a man of similar vintage and tastes, encouraged their acolytes to share and absorb the music they loved, eventually adopting it – in an audacious but ultimately fruitful act of cultural appropriation – as their own language.
Out of Korner’s Blues Incorporated and Mayall’s Bluesbreakers flowed a stream of prodigies who were soon ready to head off in their own directions. When Clapton left Mayall after a year – and one hugely influential album, Blues Breakers – to form Cream, he was replaced by the 19-year-old Peter Green. When Green left a year later, taking the group’s drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and bassist, John McVie, with him to form the first version of Fleetwood Mac, his place was taken by the 17-year-old Mick Taylor. Two years later Taylor would accept an offer from the Rolling Stones.
While they were with Mayall, they became the young gods of the club scene: a new generation of note-bending guitar heroes, beautiful long-haired boys whose skills had been attained through long hours of bedroom practice and were now delivered to audiences mesmerised by their virtuosity…
So thank you, John Mayall, and thank you YouTuber Barri, who doesn’t yet know that he’s made a new friend. I never heard nothing like this, either.
P.S.: Two of the Mayall proteges cited in the Guardian article:
(Above) A fallen G.I.’s dog tag; comrades visit a friend’s grave in World War II Europe
The South County Historical Society and the Oceano Depot Museum had a potluck together yesterday (Sunday, September 22). The food was wonderful, and so was my chance to see Depot Curator Linda Austin again. It was Linda who discovered her inner pit bull and the power of her bite when, in 2017, she was instrumental in bringing the long-missing remains of Oceano Marine George Murray home to lie with his mother. Linda is one of my heroes.
Pvt. Murray had been missing since November 1943, when he was killed in the few seconds after his landing craft’s ramp collapsed onto the beach at Betio during the Battle of Tarawa.
Pvt. Murray’s funeral, Arroyo Grande District Cemetery
So maybe what happened today at the potluck was because of Linda. While I struggled with a glutton’s plateful of potluck goodies, I struck up a conversation with a woman, about my age, sitting next to me. You know how you can tell almost immediately that you’re going to like someone? That happened. We began to talk about our families.
Hers was from Minnesota. So was part of mine, the Irish half, homesteaders in Meeker County.
She did not know Meeker County. Her family lived so far north in Minnesota that they might’ve been honorary Canadians. Her Dad bought a little piece of property there with a pond, and I got the sense that he would sit by it, silent, for hours.
The silence was a manifestation of PTSD. He was a World War II vet and had seen some terrible things. Because he refused to talk about the war, his children knew nothing about his Army career except that he’d served in the Pacific. My friend John Porter’s dad, Asa—we have his uniform on display in the Heritage House Museum—had served in New Guinea, where even the birds are poisonous, the spiders are the size of catcher’s mitts and the diseases that killed soldiers there begin with jungle rot and continue in a list that would fill Roget’s Thesaurus.
Pacific duty lay several rings inside Dante’s Hell.
I learned, over rhubarb pie, that her father was a farm expert and after the war became, with a doctorate, a United Nations farm expert. He devoted the rest of his life to helping the poorest learn to prosper.
He was, to use one of my favorite terms, a mensch.
But he never talked about the war. It never left him alone, either, which makes the rest of his life, and what he did with it, almost Homeric.
So I began to learn about his veteran during the meal at the Depot Museum, and my interest was piqued. Then I got cocky.
May I have your Dad’s name? I asked my new friend. They’re having a family reunion in Minnesota this year, and, given the fact that they’re all Boomers, like me, this might be their last. If I could find her Dad’s name, I could perhaps find his service number, maybe his regimental and divisional assignments, which meant that I’d have the chance to finally tell this man’s children what he’d done in World War II.
I should never get cocky. I came home and started the research. What I found revealed no unit, no regiment, no infantry division, no combat.
In November 1944, late in the war, he’d received his commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, the supply arm of the World War II United States Army. My Dad’s Quartermaster commission had come earlier that year—both men had joined the Army in 1943— and he went to England in July 1944, armed with a typewriter and an adding machine. He was a pencil-pusher, charged with keeping the army, still trapped in desperate fighting in the Normandy hedgerows, the bocage, with enough gasoline to keep their tanks running.
Lt. Dad, 1944
I’ve told lot of stories about my Dad, but before he went to England, on a troopship crammed with Black Quartermasters, who turned out to be devoted and inventive and courageous soldiers—the truckers of the “Red Ball Express”—he’d done his training at Camp Lee, Virginia, near Petersburg, where the United States had invented trench warfare in 1864-65.
A dead Confederate in the Petersburg trenches, 1865. At right is an abatis, interlocked spikes that would presage World War I barbed wire.
Dad wouldn’t have known it then, but his Midland English ancestors settled in Petersburg in the 17th Century, became vestrymen in the Episcopal Church, married into the Washington family, and claimed to own human beings, a detail which compelled them to go to war against the United States in 1861. I am named for two Confederate officers.
To my delight, I discovered that my lunchmate’s father had trained at Camp Lee, too. So now I am contemplating buying this Camp Lee yearbook on eBay:
My own father’s Quartermaster career was spent filling out forms, fielding furious and profane phone calls from regimental commanders on Omaha Beach, trying to locate tankers that may or may not have been sunk by U-boats and organizing Quartermaster companies and the shipping that would take them to Normandy.
He worked with an office of enlisted men who presented him, in teasing admiration, with a beautiful, diploma-like certificate for “Meritorious Drinking Under Fire” for refusing to abandon his pint of bitters in a London pub during a V-1 raid.
A V-1 “buzzbomb”–the British also called them “Doodlebugs.” Their sound was ugly, but when the engine cut out, the silence was worse. The bomb was going to fall where it wanted to.It was a perfect weapon for killing innocents.
It wasn’t V-1 raids that caused his nervous breakdown; it was, instead, the grind of endless eighteen-hour workdays. By the fall of 1944, he was used up. My Dad, a brilliant man, had made the dreadful mistake of making himself indispensable.
His C.O. was a good one. He put Lt. Robert W. Gregory on a train north, headed for Edinburgh, for a week of R & R. A week there, with my father dense in Scots, who are warm and friendly people, effected the cure.
Dad went back to his war.
The war’s end changed him. For one, he began to meet Germans, whom he liked, and to see the vastness of the damage the war had inflicted on them, which he hated.
Then came his last Quartermaster assignment: training nineteen-year-old infantrymen, full of imagined ferocity, eager to kill truckloads of Nazis. But the war in Europe had ended.
He had the thankless task of a teacher trying to teach unwilling students, shifting those teenagers’ focus from imagined combat glories to graves registration, to the disinterment and reburial, in military cemeteries, of men their age or not much older. Many military cemeteries had already been established by V-E-Day, but many G.I.’s had been buried quickly and were scattered, alone and in bunches, in barnyards and wheatfields, in dense hardwood forests and in marshes, even in little family cemeteries, from Normandy to the Elbe.
This is a terrible thing to say, because it’s true. In historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, in the Civil War, there were often no remains at all, thanks to high explosives or to Southern farmers’ hogs, who left no traces of the nineteen-year-old Yankees, save perhaps the soles of their shoes, who’d been lost in Virginia or Georgia or Mississippi.
Faust’s book revealed how hard it was to deal with death on an industrial scale, and how hard it was for families to deal with a loved one who had truly vanished.
In 1945 Europe, Quartermaster troops, working with the Army’s Medical Branch, were given the duty of finding this war’s dead, and many of them would never be found, either. I was once talking about this to a class of my Arroyo Grande High School history students, and I had to stop. I was starting to cry.
Dogtags had made the process easier, but Identifying the dead, even those just dead, was a terrible assignment. These are the victims of an accidental English air crash, a B-17. in 1943 England. One of them was an Arroyo Grande boy. This is how they were identified.
Another duty that fell on Quartermasters was in meticulously cataloging a dead soldier’s personal effects and then packing them into footlockers for shipment home. That took time. Here are the personal effects of the Arroyo Grande airman killed in the 1943 crash.
It would take six years for his wedding band to be returned to his wife.
My hunch is that I shared lunch with a woman whose father, already a 1940 graduate in ag science from the University of Minnesota (only 4.6% of Americans graduated from college in 1940) and headed for a postwar doctorate, who saw service on three fronts at the end of the war—a singular fact for any officer— was indispensable.
That would explain why World War II followed him without mercy until the end of his life in 2002. I think it’s very likely that he took part in finding, identifying, and re-interring the remains of young men in military cemeteries, in three different combat theaters, where their families might know that they were finally safe.
Since so many World War II Army records were destroyed by a tragic 1973 fire in the St. Louis Repository. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to confirm if this was, indeed, this man’s duty. This single sheet is all the official evidence I have of my father’s service.
But if my hunch is right, it’s no wonder that the rest of another Quartermaster officer’s life included deep currents of sadness, and it’s no wonder that the war was far too painful for him to talk about with the children who loved him.
It was just as impossible for him to talk about this subject with his grandchildren. I taught one of them, and she is going to be a nurse. He would be immensely proud of her. This is not a hunch. It’s a certainty.
The first fallen Americans to come home were honored in 1947 San Francisco.
Her grandfather’s suffering was the product of a soldier’s heroism and a decent man’s compassion. This man, marked by those qualities, devoted his life to using science to save lives.
I can’t tell you how much I love this song. I was doing some local history research when I made a connection with Pan American extending its routes into Rio in the early 1930s, at the same time that Halcyon’s Sigurd Varian was flying seaplanes into Mexico and Central America.
Above: Juan Trippe, a handsome Sigurd Varian at upper right; Alec Baldwin as Trippe in Scocese’s The Aviator; Leo Dicaprio, in the film that changed by mind about Leo Dicaprio (I loved this performance, and his Howard Hughes was several notches higher), as a bogus Pan Am pilot in Catch Me If You Can.
“Mas, Que Nada” (roughly translated: “So WHAT?”) was first performed by Jorge Ben in 1962.
Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, a group I still love, quickened the tempo and made the song a big hit.
It’s such an infectious, happy song. I like this version, very close to that of Brasil ’66:
But the “Playing for Change” people do a marvelous version, as well, a little downtempo and likely closer to the song’s original version (if you’re down in the dumps, may I also recommend, from Playing for Change, “Guantanamera,” Cuban, and “La Bamba,” Mexican.)
There’s even a choral version. I like this one. Dang, they’re cute. (They also do a fine version of Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass.”)
Finally, this is my favorite version. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve posted this on Facebook and then taken it down, lest I be accused of being a dirty old man, a label I cannot abide. Nossa is a French group, and they are gorgeous and sexy (equal time: so’s the young man wo pursues them through Rio alleys). But this video makes me happy, because they are beautiful, but they’re not the most beautiful element of the video.
The street dancing scene, albeit brief, is the beautiful part. There’s a little girl, about twelve, multiracial, learning the dance’s elbow moves, then there’s a a young Black man, a dancer, with tight curls, whose smile is ebullient. Because the Nossas are so glamorous, the camera doesn’t stray from them for too long. It’s those two minor players, however, who generate inside me little waves of volcanic joy.
We’re struggling just now with the idea of being a multiracial society. So has Brazil struggled.
Among the immigrant families that have enriched Arroyo Grande history are the Coehlos, from Brazil. Growing up with them has enriched my life immensely. And, as beautiful as Nossa is, they are no match for Mrs. Coehlo, maybe the most beautiful woman, along with my Mom, that I’ve ever known.
She, born in Rio, like her husband, Al, used to drive by our house on Huasna Road in a navy-over-powder blue 1954 Cadillac (Mr. Coehlo, a farmer, did well because he worked so hard) and the eight-year-old me would run out to the front yard to wave to her. I was a hopeless Romantic even then.
So this video, and this song, make me happy. Seeing Mrs. Coehlo made me happy. This song, that place, that family, that mother, refresh the waters that are my hope.
Yes, I know. Pet Sounds is the masterpiece—the album that goaded the Beatles into recording Sgt. Pepper—but this 1973 album remains one of my Beach Boys favorites. It cites Morro Bay, borrows from the Carmel naturalist poet Robinson Jeffers, and begins with this elegant song. What makes it unique is that the lead singer isn’t Brian Wilson, nor Carl, nor Al Jardine, nor is it Mike love. The singer on the album and in the video was South African Blondie Chaplin, a temporary Beach Boy who belongs in the Beach Boy Pantheon for All Time and Then Some.
This guy belongs, too.
And then there’s this band, one of my all-time favorites. This is the studio cut rom the album Native Sons–Los Lobos are, of course from L.A.
Oh, and why do I love Los Lobos so much? A brief aside, with a different song. Watsonville High School, 1989. I know this has nothing to do with Holland. I don’t mind that if you don’t.
This version of “Sailor” is sublime. Darius Rucker (Hootie and the Blowfish) has a gravelly, immensely soulful voice that fits the song exactly. Ray Charles and Darius Rucker. Oh, my.
Foxes and Fossils, a cover band that features old farts like me and, as a complement, young women, do the song justice, too. The lead singer is fine, but what gives this live version its Beach Boys lift are the not the Fossils, but the background harmonies from the Foxes.
And I wish we had Jimmy Buffett’s sweet face for this video, but we do have his voice, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t mind the visual images.
And, of course, Brian Wilson was the song’s co-writer, and he’s been on my mind a lot lately. Here are the lyrics, and they fit him exactly in this fearful stage of his life—one I’ll face soon—and these words, and that life, even now, remain beautiful to me.
I sailed an ocean, unsettled ocean Through restful waters and deep commotion Often frightened, unenlightened Sail on, sail on sailor
I wrest the waters, fight Neptune’s waters Sail through the sorrows of life’s marauders Unrepenting, often empty Sail on, sail on sailor
Caught like a sewer rat alone but I sail Bought like a crust of bread, but oh do I wail
Seldom stumble, never crumble Try to tumble, life’s a rumble Feel the stinging I’ve been given Never ending, unrelenting Heartbreak searing, always fearing Never caring, persevering Sail on, sail on, sailor
I work the seaways, the gale-swept seaways Past shipwrecked daughters of wicked waters Uninspired, drenched and tired Wail on, wail on, sailor
Always needing, even bleeding Never feeding all my feelings Damn the thunder, must I blunder There’s no wonder all I’m under Stop the crying and the lying And the sighing and my dying
Sail on, sail on sailor Sail on, sail on sailor Sail on, sail on sailor Sail on, sail on sailor Sail on, sail on sailor Sail on, sail on sailor Sail on, sail on sailor
Twenty-seven-year-old Robert MacIntyre won the Scottish Open today
And it was a bonnie putt that won the tournament. MacIntyre was headed for a playoff–tied at seventeen under–and it was this put that would make that happen, because he hit it too gently. It died at the cup.
And this young man became the first Scot to win the Scottish Open in 25 years.
He’s a small-town boy. Oban, on the west coast, is about 24,000 people. Here it is on a map. I post this for all the lovely names in that part of Scotland, including Oban.
It’s kind of a touristy town, I guess, and this photo suggests why that is so. Oban is lovely, too.
The victory came on the Renaissance Course, also in the west of Scotland, so when that putt went in, the crowed was even more jubilant than the guy who won the tournament. Scots, to counter the impression Elizabeth and I have of them, are not “dour.” They are warm and friendly and given to moments of great jubilation. Like this one:
This was Robert’s first PGA Tour win, earlier this year, in the Canadian Open, and he’s sharing a hug with his caddie. That’d be his Dad, Dougie.
And a Scot winning the Canadian Open is perfect for history, as well. This is Sword Beach on D-Day and you can see a young bagpiper getting ready to offload. He’s with a British regiment, but Bill Millin is actually Canadian. There’s a statue for Bill, there today.
So I think this calls for bagpipes. These pipers are marching across a bridge near Arnhem, Holland–the “Bridge Too Far” in Corneilus Ryan’s wonderful book, key in Operation Market Garden, the attempt to force a crossing over the Rhine and into Germany in September 1944. It was Field Marshal Lord Montgomery’s scheme, and it was a disaster.
My Dad—Lt. Dad, in this photo, when he served in London as Quartermaster, befriended a Canadian bagpiper from a Canadian regiment, the Princess Pats. He was one of the last pipers alive in that regiment, in 1944. The rest were two or three years dead, in temporary graves in North Africa.
And, as always—maybe it’s my Dad— no matter where I start, I come back again to my hometown. Operation Market Garden included two South County soldiers. Art Youman was promoted to sergeant for his leadership in Holland. His commanding officer was Dick Winters, Easy Company–the “Band of Brothers.”
Lt. William Francis Everding, from Oceano, another 101st Airborne paratrooper, was killed in a fierce German counterattack on the Dutch village into which he’d parachuted at the beginning of Market Garden.
Holland was eventually liberated. This photo gives you a feel, I think, for how Yanks felt about the Dutch.
Scotland is 5,000 miles away; Holland a bit farther than that. But the fact is that bagpipers crossing the John Frost Bridge—and, of all things, a Scots golfer who loves his Da–can have an emotional wallop on this extremely amateur historian—that means something.
I think it means that we, all of us, no matter how distant we might be in time and space, are somehow bound together in deep and passionate ways that we’re not meant to understand or to see, except in brief moments when our peripheral vision allows us to see them. What follows is a flash, very warm and very brief, of recognition. We are ennobled then. Robert MacIntyre’s victory today ennobled me. It made me so happy that I married a woman with deep ancestral roots in Scotland.
This extraordinary photo shows Lee’s army in Frederick, Maryland in September 1862, on its way to the Battle of Antietam.
Ten months after this photo was taken, it was the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the streets of Frederick. The just-appointed commander, George Meade, was in hot pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, now to his north, across the border in Pennsylvania. The two armies would meet July 1 at Gettysburg.
These future Arroyo Grande settlers would have been in that town on this day. Here they are, with their respective corps (up to 26,000 men) commanders.
Bela Clinton Ide, for whom Ide Street was named, 24th Michigan, Iron Brigade, I Corps, commanded by Gen. John Reynolds. Reynolds would be shot from his horse on July 1, the first day of the battle, as he ordered the Iron Brigade into action to stop the surging Confederates. 363 of the 496 men in Ide’s regiment were killed, wounded or captured that day. Ide would become a blacksmith and Arroyo Grande postmaster.
Joseph Brewer, with his daughter Stella, became a farmer in Oak Park. On June 28, 1863, he was a private in the 11th New Jersey and his III corps commander was Dan Sickles, a politician who, before the war, shot his wife’s lover—the son of Francis Scott Key, the “Star-Spangled Banner” composer– dead in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Sickles was acquitted in the first known case to use “temporary insanity” as legal defense. Brewer would lose seven regimental commanders in a row, all shot dead, on July 2 at Gettysburg. Sickles would lose his leg to a Confederate cannonball.
Erastus Fouch, 75th Ohio, was a member of O.O. Howard’s unhappy XI Corps. The corps, largely made up of German immigrants, had lost their previous commander, Franz Sigel and Howard, a dour Protestant, was not popular and the corps had performed poorly at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May. Now, on June 28, 1863, Fouch was two days away from being captured by the Confederates who overwhelmed his regiment at Gettysburg. He would be paroled, fight out his war in Florida and take up farming along what is today Lopez Drive. Another Ohio soldier, Sylvanus Ullom, whose regiment fought near Fouch’s on July 1, was twenty years later a farmer not far away from Fouch, in Corralitos Canyon. Howard University is named for their corps commander.
From the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder. Some of these places are still with us, and some not.
Not the same pier, of course, but it’s still there, in all its creosote glory.
A teredo, or shipworm, with a face—whichever end it is—that only a mother teredo could love.
Happy 100th Birthday, Mason Street Bridge!
The bank in Taft that Eleanor robbed is today The Bank, a sports bar/restaurant. It was still a bank fifteen years after Eleanor fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. My dad was a teller there.
Of course, the Campground is still there, along with the beautiful tabernacle.
The article identifies the six-plane squadron as “VS-2,” which denotes a scout plane squadron. This is likely the kind of plane that visited Pismo. But that’s not all.
The ship that will call, USS Prometheus, was a repair ship. One of her sisters was USS Vestal.
This is USS Vestal on December 7, 1941, just outboard of the battleship Arizona.
Arizona blew up moments later, claiming two sailors who’d grown up in Arroyo Grande.
Finally, and tragically, here is the rest of the story—one no one could have seen coming on June 26, 1924.
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.
The Beast. In addition to its space-age fins, it had a push-button automatic transmission and an electric rear window.
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.
Mays and McCovey
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.
Mays against the Dodgers. John Roseboro is the catcher.
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.
A 1962 Zenith color television, like ours.
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.
A Work in Progress 