The “Bulge,” in the dotted line, indicates the depth of the German assault, intended to drive a wedge between the American and British armies and drive to the Channel.
Manuel Gularte, Arroyo Grande, 965th Artillery Battalion
The 965th provided fire support at the town of St. Vith for the 7th Armored Division and the 106th Infantry Division. Their fire and the resistance of the two divisions stalled the German attack at its onset, which later took its toll as German tanks and trucks began to run out of fuel—by now, Berlin taxis were running on firewood. Oil had never been a German resource, which led to HItler’s Russian debacle. This was his Western Front disaster.
A 155mm “Long Tom” fires a round in the Battle of the Bulge.A G.I. in St. Vith.
Art Youman, Arroyo Grande, 101st Airborne
The “brothers” were Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne, and Youman, before the war a firefighter at Camp San Luis Obispo, was among them. He’d been promoted to Sergeant by Easy Company commander Dick Winters in Holland in September, and now the 101st was being asked to hold Bastogne, a Belgian town awash in the German advance. Their stand, during the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years, was, like St. Vith, a critical fight, diverting German forces determined to wipe the Americans out. They failed.
German infantry during their offensive.
Youman, second from left, during Easy Company training.
(Above): A 101st machine gunner in his foxhole; 101st soldiers in the 1944 foxholes their comrades had dug. This photo was taken 75 years after the Bulge.
James Pearson, Paso Robles, 455th Bomb Squadron, 323rd Bomb Group
(Above: Houffalize, Belgium; a German Panther tank in the town center suggest this town’s importance in the Battle of the Bulge.
Another key turning point in the Battle of the Bulge was the lifting of a stubborn overcast, which allowed American airpower to assert itself. One medium bomber that participated in this effort, a Martin B-26 Marauder, had a crew that included 1st Lt. James Pearson, the navigator. On December 26, 1944, that aircraft, “Mission Belle,” was shot down over this beautiful town. There were no survivors.
Pearson’s draft cardHe is buried in Hanford
“Mission Belle,” with an earlier aircrew, February 1944. The aircraft flew 149 combat missions.“Belle” at the right edge of this photo, taking off from Laon, France, in December 1944, the month Pearson was killed.
(Below): B-26 Marauders from Pearson’s bomb group–the “White Tails”–over Germany. The video’s music is touching, as is the sight, far below the Marauders, of P-38 fighters, which have connections to the Central Coast. You hope they are safely headed home.
At the end of this post, you’ll see the opening credits to “Ben Casey,” a popular 1960s medical show about handsome Dr. Ben, a neurosurgeon, played by Vincent Edwards.
Dr. Ben deftly picked up the brain he’d dropped earlier in this little boy’s surgery.
His competition was handsome Richard Chamberlain, on another network, as Dr. Kildare, whose love interests included the actress Yvette Mimieux. She was beautiful, and that didn’t prevent her from getting excellent reviews for her performance. (Okay, maybe the bikini helped a little.)
(Her character died, like every last ONE of the young women who set foot on the Ponderosa in “Bonanza.” Those Cartwrights were hell on women.)
Ben Casey’s boss, writing on the blackboard in the video below, was Sam Jaffe, featured in 1939’s “Gunga Din.”
Jaffe as Gunga Din, with Cary Grant, about to swash and buckle.Jaffe, as Dr. Zorba, with Edwards, as Dr. Casey.
Jaffe, born in New York City of Ukrainian Jewish parents–his childhood tenement is today a museum*– was of course a natural choice to play Gunga, essentially an Indian collaborator with the Raj, but, hey, his buddies were Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Faibanks, Jr., so it’s all good.
*(The Tenement House Museum, on the Lower East Side. Pardon Mr. History Guy for finding Jaffe’s connection amazing.)
Anyway, I was thinking of Ben today because I’ve decided I will contact Stanford and go up there for a wee bit of brain surgery. First, the caveats:
1. I have a tumor, but it’s benign. Nonetheless, it can cause you to fall down, develop blurred vision, and it messes with your memory, like forgetting the name of the actor in the movie you just saw on TV (Robert Ryan) or the name of General Grant’s horse (Cincinnati).
2. It is not actually a “brain tumor.” It’s arises instead in the meninges, which lines the brain. Since “Meninges” sounded to me like an island group, like “Azores,” I have named my tumor Manny.
Immigrants from the Meninges.
3. It’s a relatively simple procedure, requiring only a corkscrew and a 1960 Electrolux vacuum cleaner with an upholstery cleaner attachment.
4. Very high success rate, but recovery can be tough. It may involve people bringing me chiles rellenos or cheese enchiladas, sushi, Thai noodles with peanut sauce or ravioli for 60 days after the procedure. And maybe red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.
5. Since it’s at Stanford, unless the surgeon loses the corkscrew inside, I’m sure there’s a chance that my IQ will go up, all the way to 100. I attended a week of classes at Stanford in 2004, on the Great Depression and World War II, and got to hold this X-ray of Hitler’s skull, from the Hoover Institution, so all of this is very symmetrical.
6. I get to have morphine, once a dandy additive to children’s medicine.
I’m still working up the courage, being a devout coward, to start the process that will lead to the surgery. It’s been two days now. I will try again tomorrow. I am posting this in part as an incentive for me to get off my rear end and get going.
These are my parents, Robert Wilson Gregory and Patricia Margaret Keefe Gregory, before and after World War II. I remember that painting of the Monterey Cypress on the wall of our home in Arroyo Grande. In the photos, my folks are newlyweds, innocent of the catastrophe would be me several years later.. The photo on the right shows them after Dad had come home from the war in Europe. They’re at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, as far a remove from an oil town like Taft as you can get.
They met in 1939, when this storefront was a sweet shop/soda fountain owned by Mom’s parents, the Kellys. Dad ordered a banana split, struck up a conversation and the little newspaper clip, from July 1940, shows what followed. It’s true that my young father, only 22, was the manager of the Fellows Bank of America. He was also the teller and the janitor.
It’s what’s in between the banana split and the wedding that fascinates me. My parents were dating in 1939. Here are some of the films that were released that year:
In a very real sense (here’s to you, Turner Classic Movies!), Hollywood made my life possible.
I will now embark on a fool’s errand. If I were forced to pick three 1939 that mean the most to me, which would I choose?
I will toss two of the most obvious films: Gone with the Wind didn’t reach smaller California markets until 1940. And I’m only omitting The Wizard of Oz because, providing we strike oil in our Arroyo Grande backyard, I want desperately to see that surround-you show (DUCK! Flying monkey!) in Las Vegas.
Here, then, are my choices:
Young Mr. Lincoln. John Ford. You can criticize me for omitting Ford’s Stagecoach, a favorite, and you can condemn Ford’s hagiography, as naive as a sixth-grade textbook, but the is the first film in which Ford emphasized Henry Fonda’s legs. They are inordinately long, and young Abe—a nickname he detested—is far more comfortable resting them along a Sangamon County riverbank than he his trying to find a place for them inside a Sangamon County courtroom. Ford used those legs again, in My Darling Clementine, in a brief and funny scene where Fonda’s Wyatt Earp attempts to balance his chair along a Tombstone boardwalk. Just in case you think I’m nuts, a distinct possibility, look at what Sergio Leone did with Fonda’s legs in Once Upon a Time in the West, twenty-nine years after Young Mr. Lincoln.
In a way, I met Lincoln in Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of him in Spielberg’s marvelous film. But I was a little boy when I saw the Ford film on television, and that was the Lincoln I fell in love with, the Lincoln that led me toward teaching history to young people.
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. If you want to know my politics, they’re hopelessly romantic—I’m Irish. It’s allowed—-than the perfect counterpoint to Young Mr. Lincoln is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where idealism collides with venality. The other thread that makes these films powerful is that their leading actors. Fonda and James Stewart were the best of friends, going back to Depression-era summer stock, and sharing a cheap apartment in New York City (Gene Hackman’s roommates, in his New York stage days, included Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman). In either case, you can imagine the young actors splitting a can of pork and beans.
But what made Fonda and Stewart authentic is that both loved America is vastly different ways: Fonda the Hollywood liberal, Stewart, the lifelong conservative from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Mr. Smith’s love for America is illuminated, as well, by its immigrant director, Frank Capra. You first meet that America in an earlier film, It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, when a busload of weary passengers suddenly comes to life by joining in singing “The Daring Young man in the Flying Trapeze.” It is an indelible scene, and Capra even inserts himself singing at the left edge of the movie frame.
It’s Stewart’s dogged idealism that makes Mr. Smith so appealing to me, but even he, one of my favorite actors, is not my favorite part. My favorite part is his co-star, Jean Arthur, today underappreciated. Arthur was smart, appealing, and suffered, all her career, from debilitating stage fright, including on film sets, but she delivered touching and very funny performances. Stewart and Arthur had been paired before in You Can’t Take It with You, another Capra film. In Mr. Smith, she is a cynical reporter who takes Stewart under her wing. After young Smith is humiliated on the Senate floor, there’s a quiet streetside dialogue where she helps him find his courage again. It’s stunning. Arthur’s performance is stunning.
Above: Stewart near collapse in Mr. Smith’sfilibuster sequence;Arthur, as Clarissa Saunders, picks up the phone in Mr. Smith’s office; in a studio still—the scene was shot in deep shadow–Saunders restores Smith’s faith in himself.
Another Thin Man. The Nick and Nora Charles film series, based on a detective invented by San Francisco writer Dashiell Hammett, may seem a trifle compared to other films from 1939. But once again, it’s the chemistry between the two leads, William Powell and Myrna Loy, that make this lighthearted detective film enduring. Their relationship was such that millions of Americans assumed they were married in real life. In this entry, the couple, new parents, are invited to a swanky estate. Their host winds up very dead. Here’s the trailer:
Powell and Loy weren’t married, of course. The woman who wanted to marry the impossibly suave Powell was the actress Jean Harlow. They spent time together at Hearst Castle, where Harlow continued her courtship. Powell wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. When Harlow died of kidney failure in 1937, the impact on Powell, seen here with his mother at Jean’s funeral, was overwhelming. He had lost the love of his life.
Above: Nora (Myrna Loy) can’t sleep, so Nick (William Powell fixes her scrambled eggs; the couple with their dog, Asta; Loy, Jean Harlow– real-life friends–with Clark Gable; an unidentified woman, Powell and Harlow at Hearst Castle, 1934; Powell at Harlow’s funeral three years later.
I am not ashamed of my fondness for Myrna Loy. She was beautiful and her characters were played layers deep-, most notably in The Best Years of Our Lives, in her portrayal of a veteran’s wife who discovers that her husband has become an alcoholic. If her Nora Charles is far less worldly than Nick, she can still get the best of him, as she does in this charming closing scene from After the Thin Man, the 1936 film and predecessor to Another Thin Man.
I’m not alone in my admiration for Myrna Loy. That’s her in the statue in front of her Alma Mater, Venice High. My students and I visited the Frank home in Amsterdam many years ago. In Anne’s room, inside the Secret Annex, she’d cut a photo of Loy from a movie magazine and glued it to the wall. It was still there, carefully preserved beneath plexiglass.
The statue, Venice High School; Loy as a very young actor; the Frank home, Amsterdam.
They were gathering firewood Saturday for their family.
Apologies to composers Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The original version, written for the 1965 Michael Caine film Alfie, is performed by the incomparable Dionne Warwick in the video below.
Two carriers from Kido Butai, the Imperial Navy striking force, en route to Pearl Harbor
I have an infallible wish to change the course of history. I want to tell Custer, not that he’d listen, “Don’t go down there.” I want to tell Captain Smith of Titanic: “Slow down, sir. Pack ice, bergs and growlers ahead.” I want to tell President Lincoln not to go to the theater. I want to tell Amelia Earhart to double-check her radio equipment.
All of it, for sure, for naught.
The biggest challenge would be to give Pearl Harbor some kind of advance notice of what was coming to them five days after today’s date. The Imperial task force–six fleet carriers and a cluster of support ships—had just received the message “Climb Mt. Niitaka,” the code ordering Adm. Nagumo’s fleet to complete its mission. Radio silence followed.
My warning, obviously, never worked but neither did warnings from Naval Intelligence that the Japanese fleet had suddenly disappeared. That morning, the destroyer Ward’s sinking of a midget sub at the Pearl Harbor entrance didn’t cause enough nerves to jangle. The radar report from Point Opana, about heavy incoming air traffic, was dismissed because a flight of B-17 bombers from the States was due in that morning. The telegram from Washington warning that war was imminent arrived long after the attack had.
And, having no means to travel back in time, I wasn’t there, hopping up and down on Waikiki to warn servicemen and tourists alike about what was coming. They would’ve put me in the looney bin, anyway.
Rod Serling’s Twilight Zones loved to play with the time-travel warning from the future idea. In another vintage TV broadcast, the wonderful actor Dana Andrews (Best Years of Our Lives) tries the same trick, in an episode written by Serling. This Wikipedia summation is excellent:
Paul (Andrews) first travels to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, but the captain dismisses him as insane. Paul then travels to a Berlin hotel room to assassinate Adolf Hitler in August 1939 (immediately before the outbreak of World War II the following month), but is interrupted when a housekeeper knocks on his door and later calls two SS guards to his room. On his third stop, Paul tries to change the course of the Lusitania on May 6, 1915, to avoid being torpedoed by a German U-boat, but the ship’s captain questions his credibility.
Paul accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to go to the town of Homeville, Indiana in 1881, resolving not to make any changes, but just to live out his life free of the problems of the modern age. Upon his arrival, he realizes that President James A. Garfield will be shot the next day, but resists the temptation to intervene.
Dana Andrews, as Paul, fails to convince Lusitania’s captain that destruction lies ahead.
Even Kirk Douglas, for crying out loud, failed to change history, and his chance, sure enough, came at Pearl Harbor. In the slightly cheesy but somehow engrossing film The Final Countdown, his aircraft carrier—the VERY appropriately-named Nimitz, after the American commander in the Pacific in World War II-—is transported back in time, to Kido Butai’s time. All hell ensues.
From the lofty heights of 1980, it was comforting to imagine we had the airpower sufficient to prevent the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. We didn’t, of course, lacking the time-travel storm, and we didn’t have the right, either.
That’s a shame, for the impact of Pearl Harbor was devastating on my hometown, Arroyo Grande, California. Two sailors who grew up here were killed on battleship Arizona, as was a second cousin of mine. One of the Arizona sailors, Jack Scruggs, was about to play his trombone as the ship’s band assembled for the morning Colors Ceremony when concussions from falling bombs killed him, blowing his body into the harbor. His second-grade Arroyo Grande Grammar School classmate, Wayne Morgan, died moments later when the great ship blew up. I used many sources to put together the ship’s story.
Since retribution seems to be a big theme in today’s America, Americans got theirs six months after Pearl Harbor. Four of Kido Butai’s carriers, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Shoyu and Hiryu, were sunk at Midway. 2200 sailors died with the four ships.
Japanese carriers under attack at the Battle of Midway, June 1942.
By then, my hometown’s Japanese American residents—-farmers, merchants, athletes, honor roll students— were at the assembly enter at the Tulare County Fairgrounds. In August, they would be moved to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature hovered at 108 degrees for most of that month.
At war’s end, only about half came home. By then, two of them, soldiers, had died in combat. One was a 442nd Regimental Combat Team rifleman who died in the relief of the “Lost Battalion.” These were 240 terrified 19-year-old Texans surrounded by the Germans in France in October 1944. The 240 Texans were rescued, at the cost of at least 800 killed or wounded Nisei soldiers, including ours, who was trying to bring up more ammunition under withering German fire. The other G.I., an 83rd Infantry Division medic, was felled by a German sniper’s shot as he knelt over a wounded brother-soldier.
That’s too much history to change, and, in truth, given those two local sailors and those two local soldiers, we are honored—and, hopefully, humbled— by the gifts that were their lives.
A Dorothea Lange photograph, censored during the war, taken in 1942 California.
I guess it bothers me a little that most of the young people I taught don’t know about Laura Nyro. She didn’t have the staying power of, say, her contemporary, Joni Mitchell, but this was because ovarian cancer took her away, at 49, in 1997.
That’s long-ago enough, but the funky character of this videotape, from a 1969 NBC special, shows that this performance is even longer ago. It’s Nyro and her song, which means as much today as it did then.
Nyro was an amazing performer, but what made her special is how amazing her songs became in the performances by other artists. I will now be quiet and let you be the judge of Laura Nyro.
Sara Bareilles, “Stoney End,” for the induction of Nyro into the Rock Hall of Fame.
“Eli’s Coming,” a Nyro song performed by Three Dog Night. This video, made in 2025, is one of those “First Time Hearing” videos I’m fond of, where younger folks are introduced to songs from the time of us older folks. The bonus in the video is this man’s marvelous face.
In my youth, American Bandstand was the dance show based in Philadelphia, South Train, which amazed this wee Irishman, featured amazinger dancers. Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic,” showed she could go mellow, to use a terrible word. Popularized by the Fifth Dimension, the song proved that an Italian/Russian Jewish songwriter from the Bronx touched L.A. Black kids, graceful and elegant.
Nyro’s songwriting crossed genres in other ways. Blood Sweat and Tears covered her “And When I Die” that is folk-jazz-Gospel, a genre I just now made up.
We need to hear Laura’s voice again, so this is her mesmerizing performance of “Poverty Train” at Monterey Pop in 1967. She was nineteen years old.
Last call for the poverty train Last call for the poverty train It looks good and dirty on shiny light strip And if you don’t get beat you got yourself a trip You can see the walls roar, see your brains on the floor Become God, become cripple, become funky and split Why was I born No-no-no-no whoa-oh no-no-no-no no no no, no
Oh baby, I just saw the Devil and he’s smilin’ at me I heard my bones cry, Devil why’s it got to be Devil played with my brother, Devil drove my mother Now the tears in the gutter are floodin’ the sea Why was I born No-no-no-no whoa-oh no-no-no-no no no no, no
Oh baby, it looks good and dirty, them shiny lights glow A million night tramps, tricks and tracks will come and go You’re starvin’ today But who cares anyway Baby, it feels like I’m dyin’ now
I swear there’s something better than Getting off on sweet cocaine It feels so good It feels so good Gettin’ off the poverty train Mornin’…
Twelve years after that performance, I heard another beautiful train song, this time by Rickie Lee Jones. I had the great good luck to teach American Literature to high school students, and my favorite unit featured the terse diamondlike verse of Emily Dickinson and the endless self-regard—and the verbosity—of Walt Whitman. I loved them both. Whitman believed, as I do in teaching history, that we are all connected. He is writing this poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” to a reader not yet born.
Laura was East Coast, Rickie Lee L.A., but time and distance avail not. Jones acknowledged and paid explicit tribute to Nyro in her album Pirates. She performs Laura Nyro songs in concert. So here is her train song, from her 1979 debut album.
“Night Train,” by Rickie Lee Jones
Here I’m going Walkin’ with my baby in my arms ‘Cause I am in the wrong end of the eight-ball black And the devil, see, he’s right behind us
And this worker said she’s gonna take my little baby My little angel back
They won’t getcha, no ‘Cause I’m right here with you On a night train
Swing low, Saint Cadillac Tearin’ down the alley And I’m reachin’ so high for you
Don’t let ’em take me back Broken like valiums and chumps in the rain That cry and quiver
When a blue horizon is sleeping in the station With a ticket for a train Surely mine will deliver me there
Here she comes I’m safe here with you On the night train Mama, mama, mama, mama
Concrete is wheeling by Down at the end of a lullaby On the night train
You don’t have to believe me, not one damn bit. I don’t need your sympathy, but, many years ago, I could’ve used a Corona Familiar. I was stranded two miles northwest of Loma Enjuta, California, with the radiator steaming the way Mt. St. Helens would steam a year later. It was a miserable moment in what turned out to be the most satisfying case of my time as an L.A. private detective.
I was giving a lift to the little boy I’d found by the side of the road next to his dead horse. He regarded the Buick’s breakdown and me gravely. So did the buzzard with the head shaped like your grandfather’s Adam’s Apple. The buzzard was not in the Express Line at Taco Bell. He was content, instead, with his dark sepulchral wings spread in the sun, to wait for his dinner—that would be us–to be properly cooked.
I smiled bravely at the little boy. We’d spoken enough, in Spanglish, for me to understand that his horse, old enough to be a mount in Pancho Villa’s dorados in 1916, had decided that in this heat, it was better for him just to lie down. So, he did.
The little boy lived in Loma Enjuta, and he probably would catch hell for coming home alone, so our conversation grew a little stilted. But at least he smiled faintly back.
I’d come to this place, so bare that it makes the nearby Salton Sea look like Lake Tahoe, to look for a missing old man, Patrick O’Connell Jimenez, a sugar beet farmer, who’d gotten off the Union Station Greyhound stop in Los Angeles and then vanished.
The Jimenez family came into my office smelling like sugar beets. I’ve smelled worse smells. I once passed an Amarillo stockyard at noon.
But they were Irish Mexicans, like the actor Anthony Quinn, and so maybe my favorite kind—although, to be truthful, I like Mexicans and Mexican Americans of any variety, and, even better, like them if they have a little sugar beet money.
I came south two weeks after that interview, when the Buick overheated. I hadn’t found much up in L.A. and hadn’t gotten much help from LAPD Detective Sgt. Lopez, who’d looked at me dubiously and asked
You want my help in finding WHAT?
A lost Mexican.
A lost Mexican? In L.A.?
He was old.
That helps immensely.
And he would have smelled.
So does my abuela.
So now I needed information about Patrick O’Connell Jimenez. I needed to interview again his family, maybe, but not likely, the local priest, maybe, but even less likely, the Loma Enjuta Police.
The buzzard ruffled his wings. He was hungrier now and we weren’t dead enough yet.
“Ha!” I cried for the little boy.
The steam coming from the Buick’s radiator had subsided to the point where I could unscrew the cap without getting my arm blown off. I refilled the radiator from the Joad Family Model Waterbag, checked for potential leaks to be plugged from the bucket of Bazooka bubble gum in the back seat, and started the car.
It was a grand car, a 1957 Roadmaster, emerald over cream, with the classic bullet holes alongside the hood. I loved the steering wheel, too, big enough for a World War II fleet carrier.
The Buick
The little boy and I got back in and back on the road. I managed to scrape together enough Spanish, free of conjugated verbs, and I pulled a fifty out of my wallet, asking my passenger if he’d care to translate for me. He agreed. Happily. He began to blow Bazooka bubbles. His name was Carlos.
You know you’re getting close to a town like his from all the white plastic Ralph’s shopping bags entangled in the sagebrush. This is civilization in California.
Carlos got me to pull over the parking lot of a tamale house from the shoebox school of architecture. He opened the screen door and held it for me gingerly. Once I was through, he dashed inside and the door imploded, smacking us both in the ass.
It was his mom’s place. He was relieved because he wasn’t in trouble. The old horse was an old horse. His mother’s eyes liquified a little when, I think, Carlos told her how nice I had been. She made me sit down and prepared a big plate of chiles rellenos surrounded by rice and liquidy refried beans, the way I like them. The meal came with some one-shade-short-of-thermonuclear salsa, the way I like it, and a stack of fresh corn tortillas for the scooping.
Fresh corn tortillas, unlike sugar beets, have the most the most beautiful smell on this here Planet Earth.
I was happy in my scooping and, to the buzzard’s regret, could have died right then and there a happy man.
But Carlos was on the payroll now, and his mom knew the Jimenez family. My Spanish was still alive enough to capture about every fifth word, but the one that stuck was “Doyers.”
“Dodgers?” I asked Carlos.
That was it. The old man had gotten a wild hair and announced it here while scooping his his frijoles.. He’d decided to take the bus taken the bus north for a three-night homestand between the Dodgers and the Gigantes of San Francisco. Don Sutton was one of the L.A. pitchers, and Patrick O’Hara Jimenez loved him. Pedro Borbon, whom the old man liked no better than a scorpion in his work boot, was one of the Giants’ pitchers. His hatred for Borbon was inexplicable and visceral.
Don Sutton.
Now, I had discovered purpose for his visit north. Carlos and I then drove to the police, who were Oklahomans and thinly pleasant, with thin blond mustaches in need of Miracle-Gro. They were stumped, too, and not terribly bright. We tried the Santa Ines de Bohemia parish house, where the young priest, Father Herman, was asleep after some vigilant taste-testing of communion wine.
No help there. Carlos took me for one more stop, the Jimenez home. Sugar beets will not get you Mt. Vernon, but the Jimenez home was large and kind of upscale Bakersfield.
Patrick’s daughter, Scarlett Dolores, and his son-in-law, Alvino, sat me down and brought me that Corona and Carlos a lemonade. I’d liked them in my office and that didn’t let up now in their living room. We were parked on the sofa in front of the family’s massive Curtis-Mathes console television, the size of a coffin, big enough to contain a man the size of, say, Don Drysdale.
Scarlett said her dad loved watching the Dodgers on the big color screen and, when Borbon pitched for the Giants, the usually dignified old farmer hurled thick and vile Spanish insults at the Dominican starter.
A well-worn 1970s Curtis-Mathes console. The only feature it lacked was a defibrillator.
“Go home and chop sugar!” Patrick would shout and would add verbiage that the couple could not repeat in front of Carlos. Patrick hated cane sugar, too.
But they had not much more to offer. Fr When the old man decided to vanish, he did a thorough job—-but they thought a sudden and impulsive trip to Chavez Ravine, where he could yell at Borbon in person, was at least plausible.
I got home to L.A. about one in the morning.
At four in the morning, I woke up in my apartment, in many ways a duplicate of Fred MacMuray’s in Double Indemnity. I was in a MacMurrayesque cold sweat.
I’d covered the old man’s origin point. What about his destination?
I needed to go to Chavez Ravine.
The Ravine once upon a time was the lively barrio where, in1943, Midwestern sailors wolf-whistling at lovely chicanas precipitated the Zoot Suit Riots. The LAPD intervened in the customary way: they waited until the sailors, using axe-handles, had beaten the Zoot Suiters senseless.
Then they arrested the Mexican kids.
Two decades later, the City of Los Angeles flattened the Ravine with battalions of bulldozers to make way for Walter O’Malley’s Dodger Stadium. The only thing that remains of the barrio is its name, sometimes used to refer to the stadium that replaced it.
I had a friend at Chavez Ravine, and in the Dodger organization. He sold frozen lemonades, in big conical containers, in the stands during games, so he had enough pull to get me in as they were preparing the field for a night game.
I’d asked about my eleventh employee about any old Mexicans they’d seen in the last three weeks and got the Detective Sgt. Lopez treatment from all of them. The twelfth was chalking baselines and his eyes widened.
“You mean like the old guy who was nailed during batting practice?”
Well, yes, I replied, trying to be even-voiced, that might be the one.
He asked for a moment and walked into the groundskeeper’s.
He never came back out, but two security officers did. They airlifted me, my toes never quite touching the ground, to the Dodger Stadium Corporate Offices, which even the likes of Vin Scully entered maybe two or three times a year. (Jerry Doggett Scully’s co-broadcaster, was made to wait outside.)
Broadcasters Scully and Doggett, from a 1960 program.Scully was a masterful storyteller and game-caller. Doggett, who got a few middle innings, was stolid but occasionally confused.
I was reamed by a junior executive, a young, good-looking man with a German-Jewish surname, who threatened me with arrest for trespassing.
Sure. Arrest me. But what happened to the old man?
Security was summoned.
One floor up, I got the same treatment by another executive, this one Italian American.
This is why I was a Dodger fan, too. They’d carried that whole immigrant ethic from Brooklyn to the West Coast. And after they’d bulldozed Chavez Ravine for the stadium, they’d even pay a little back with the kid pitcher from a town smaller than Loma Enjuta–Etchohuaquila, Sonora—the birthplace of Fernando Valenzuela.
The next-floor-up executive soon grew tired of me. He called Security. They were getting a workout that day.
They glided me up, not unpleasantly, to the sanctum sanctorum of Dodger Baseball, the O’Malley family office. They let me sweat awhile in a big leather sofa and then Himself walked in.
Walter O’Malley and his kingdom.
It was the Old Man, Walter O’Malley, preceded into the office, for several seconds, by his cigar. He sat in an office chair big enough for Pharaoh and looked at me a long time in silence.
What do you want? he snarled. Finally.
I want to find out about an elderly man a Mr. Jimenez, who has disappeared. I was retained by his family. Dodger Stadium was the last place he was seen alive.
And what in Christ’s Pajamas do you think we have to do with him disappearing?
Word has it he was hit here by a line drive during BP. He wasn’t seen after that.
Damned lie,O’Malley replied from behind a cumulus cloud of cigar smoke. Jesus Christ and Sandy Koufax!
Your best pinch-hitter of all time, Manny Mota, killed a kid in the stands with a line drive back in 1970.
I’d done my homework.
Silence. For a long time.
He’s still here, O’Malley finally whispered.
Manny Mota?
No. Your old man.
What?
Look, O’Malley said. I am a businessman, and I am an old man, too. It’s time for me to turn the team over to my son and, when his time comes, the team may pass into another family—maybe even a foreign family, like those Frenchies, the Rothschilds, or those Murdochs from Australia.
So?
So our brand—the Dodgers—has an immaculate reputation, and an old man getting killed during BP could do us irreparable harm. But, being an old man myself, we treated the one you’re looking for with complete dignity.
How?
He’s underneath the pitcher’s mound.
Beg pardon?
The next away series, we excavated the pitcher’s mound, wrapped him in Mexican and American flags, covered him in roses, put the mound back together. After that, we invited mariachis to play at the mound. Told them it was some kind of welcome for a kid pitcher who’d soon be coming up from Mexico.
Fernando.In his first start–Opening Day, 1981–he shut out the Astros 2-0.
You got most of the flags right. This Mexican was half Irish. His full name was Patrick O’Connell Jimenez. The name was starting to roll off my tongue now.
Ỏ, cac, O’Malley said. Oh, shit.
His face had softened a little, transforming into that of Jackie Robinson’s surrogate father. Surrogate uncle. Robinson’s surrogate father was Brooklyn GM Branch Rickey, Protestant Irish, who’d signed Robinson to a minor league contract in 1945.
Robinson and O’Malley; #42 and Branch Rickey.
Well, then. What is it that you want?
The family has a right to know, I said.
O’Malley’s silences were masterful.
Three days later, I drove back to Loma Enjuta. I presented Carlos with a Don Sutton autographed baseball. I presented Scarlett and Alvino with a non-disclosure agreement. They signed it because of the big color Curtis-Mathes television and, as they say in MLB trades, for a cash consideration.
For the rest of his MLB career, they believed that Borbon, who would pitch for many clubs, could never be comfortable atop that Dodger Stadium mound. They would think, while watching Dodger games on his TV, of Patrick O’Connell Jimenez, just below Borbon, and that made their secret a proud one.
Twenty years after his father’s time, Pedro Borbon, Jr., became a Dodger pitcher.In 1996, the team was sold to the Murdoch family’s Newscorp. They, in turn, sold the team in 2004.
Tom Stoppard may be best known to Americans for the Academy-Award winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which I watch maybe not quite as often as Casablanca, The Searchers or The Godfather.
But almost that much.
It’s full of deliciousness, even from the lips of Ben Affleck, thanks to Stoppard’s words.
My big brother Bruce was an English major at UCSB and left around a copy of the absurdist Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, about two doomed and not terribly bright courtiers—messengers—in the court at Elsinore in Prince Hamlet’s time. I read it and didn’t understand most of it, except the coin-tossing scene (I loved it) a commentary on, I guess, free will, or the lack of it—if the two are powerless to turn up “tails,” then they’ll have no more power to save themselves from Hamlet’s merciless plot.
That scene was from a 1990 film adaptation of the Stoppard play. The then-very young actors are Gary Oldman, a favorite, and Tim Roth, marvelous in this scene with an even-more-marvelous Samuel L. Jackson. Tarantino, of course, not Stoppard.
Tom Stoppard, who died today at 88, loved our language in the same way that Jackson does in this scene, free-styling Old Testament Yahweh verses that don’t exist. He makes our language marvelous, including that f-word that would’ve been familiar in the England of Hamlet’s time.
Stoppard’s work, like Shakespeare’s, is so often beyond my poor understanding that I finally had to forgive myself. These are words meant to heard, not just read. Then they come to life. Another great playwright, Robert Bolt, reconstructs the trial of Sir Thomas More in his play A Man for All Seasons. In this scene, a onetime member of More’s household, Richard Rich (the wonderful Sir John Hurt, he of the Alien Belly Eruption) has just committed the perjury that will send More to the scaffold. But More wins anyway, with that delicious little dig at the scene’s end.
English insults don’t sear the way they do in Spanish or Italian, but their aftereffect is such that Hurt’s character must leave the courtroom with the sudden realization that his legs are missing below their knees.
I am fond of snide humor, but when Elizabeth and I saw the Stoppard play, early in our marriage, I was intimidated because we were Yanks in Levi’s inside what I think is this magnificent theater in the West End. (We were later Yanks in Levi’s at Oxford when the chapel sexton insisted we come in to hear the boys’ choir for a sung Mass. He was a lovely man. And we were Yanks in Levi’s still later, at Stratford-on Avon, for Twelflth Night, a little saddened that our seats were standing-room only.
Until, we realized at intermission that we were closest to the bar.)
My previous awesome theater experience was at the Obispo in San Luis, beautiful but about the size of Cinderella’s glass slipper compared to this place.
Then I noticed the opera glasses. They were for rent–rather, “for hire”–and I thought that was supremely cool. I hired us a pair.
And then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead began, and I began to laugh so hard that I began to feel quite at home. We wanted to take the young actors, made larger by our opera glasses, home with us, but, after all, they were in the right place at the right time, playing the right roles, and they were enjoying themselves, too.
This two hours of happiness was Stoppard’s work, the man who could make our beautiful language flow and, when he wanted, make it hiccup, too. I wrote this to thank him.
P.S. Speaking of Shakespeare—and why not speak of him?—director Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, whose emotional center is Shakespeare’s son, is coming to Arroyo Grande in mid-December. Here’s the trailer. I can’t wait. Maybe I’ll rent some opera glasses.
More and more, as I age (Oops! One arm just fell off!) the more I appreciate Thanksgiving.
We forget sometimes that it’s a uniquely American holiday, first declared by my foremost hero, Abraham Lincoln.
When I wrote a book about local World War II aviators, I found dozens of heroes. Most of them were Eighth Air Force fliers, stationed in England.
These photos show some of those Yanks. One teaches British war orphans about baseball.
Joseph Sleeping Bear, on the left, helps to serve a Thanksgiving meal to British kids.
Two photos show a grander Thanksgiving celebration, with Army Air Forces officers in conversation with their little guests.
SandS
For British children, Thanksgiving was an impossible holiday. Thanks to the U-boat campaign, the British had been going hungry for years.
I’ve told the story before because I’m so touched by it. My father, an Army officer, was kind of “adopted” by a family in London–a common occurrence–and when he brought them a bag of California oranges in the summer of 1944, the family’s mother burst into tears. Her family hadn’s seen fresh oranges since 1939.
What the Yanks brought was their brashness, their loudness, and their determination to romance English girls–the elder sisters of children like these. So they left behind Anglo-American babies.
But they left behind their good will, offered in seemingly endless Hersey bars and spearmint gum. Their rough kindness remains vivid in the memories of children, now in old age, who will never forget the Americans.
An American soldier, among those marshaling for D-Day in southern England, finds time for a little jump rope.Yanks and “Freckles,” the little Dorset girl who befriended them.
There’s proof of that remembering. The stained-glass window is from a church near a wartime airfield, RAF Alconbury, from which at least three Arroyo Grande airmen, B-17 crewmen, flew.
The left panel depicts the Risen Christ. In the right panel, looking up at Jesus, is a Yank airman.
I keep writing about this generation, stupidly condemned by prewar sociologists as self-centered and pleasure-seeking, because I loved my parents so much, and because the war brought out in these Americans the generosity that I think is a fundamental American trait.
It’s a trait that has been nearly destroyed in the last year.
Picture this about the impact we had in England: On nearly every heavy bomber mission taking off from nearly every American airfield in England, little schoolchildren would gather to line the airfield’s perimeter fence.
They were there to wave goodbye to their Yanks.
Addenda: This kind comment appeared in he original Facebook post of this essay.
Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy published the book Freedom from Fear, about America in depression and war. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
I took a weeklong class from Kennedy, along with thirty history teachers from all over America, at Stanford in 2004. It was one of the great experiences of my life: Kennedy was warm and engaging, answered questions with both brilliance and respect, and his admiration for the Americans he’d written about was obvious. My admiration for Kennedy will remain with me always.
Today it was time to eradicate all those little precancers that we of Anglo-Irish descent tend to accumulate, so I went to the dermatologist for the Blue Light Treatment.
I forgot that the Blue Light Treatment lasts an hour and a half. First they put a substance on you that smells like an exploded still on the Ozark Plateau. Then they leave you in a darkened room to fidget for an hour. Then they sit you in a chair and wheel you inside the Blue Light Machine, which looks amazingly like Robocop’s mask.
Then they go away. The machine goes hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, only softer. Most of the light is yellow but there’s definitely blue bars above you and to your sides.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
It starts to get warm. They give you a little fan but, being a he-man type male, I only used it once. The rest of the time I was counting “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…”
For seventeen minutes and forty seconds.
Sometimes the nurse comes in to tell you how much time you have left, kind of like Leslie Nielsen:
ONLY ELEVEN MORE MINUTES!
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Three hundred twelve Mississippi, three hundred thirteen Mississippi…
Panic begins to set in. The machine’s supposed to shut off automatically. What if it doesn’t? What if the nurse’s boyfriend is breaking up with her over the phone and she forgets about me?
Then, thank the Good Lord, the machine goes dark. They give you lots of post burning tips: Don’t go out in the sun, refrigerate Vaseline for pain relief, use sunscreen, don’t stand under a napalm strike. They give you two prescriptions for an ointment and a steroid for pain.
A Work in Progress 