Feb 10, 1962: No wonder Bridge of Spies was on this morning. This is the date when Soviet spy Rudolf Abel was exchanged in Berlin, for CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers.
Bridge is an excellent movie on so many levels. The Spielberg-Hanks tandem is such a good fit. The script was written by the Coen Brothers (Fargo, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou?) and the muted, faded colors, blues and grays, of Cold War East Berlin. Brooklyn is warmer, rich browns and ambers, deep red mahogany staircases,-autumnal colors and the colors subtl conveys the difference between dictatorships and democracies.
Spielberg used a Polish cinematographer, Janus Kaminski, who knew the difference.
Mark Rylance, as Abel, is a personal favorite of mine (Dunkirk, and the PBS series about Henry VIII and Cromwell, his chancellor, Wolf Hall.)
You could get the electric chair, Hanks warns Rylance at one point. Aren’t you worried?
Would it do any good? Rylance replies.
I am a sucker for movies about personal integrity (A Man For All Seasons, Julia, Dead Poets’ Society, Spotlight, Shane, To Kill a Mockingbird, Casablanca) which I guess explains why I’m so fond of this film and of Tom Hanks’s acting in it. I think he just might be my generation’s James Stewart or Gregory Peck.
And if you think my taste in films reveals me as one of those Damned Liberal history teachers, you’re right. The scene below reveals precisely the kind of Damned Liberal stuff I taught your children for thirty years. I still believe very word of Hanks’s reply to his CIA handler, and that’s because, quite simply, I have always loved my country and I always will.
Its imperfections are glaring and obvious. As Churchill noted, democracy is by far the worst of all government systems. Except for all the others. But the system that’s sliding toward plutocracy and a gerontocracy needs men and women of integrity, not destruction. The arts, including this film, reveal that truth to us.
The final scenes are moving: A woman recognizes Hanks, previously vilified as Rudolf Abel’s counsel, on the subway, and she gives him an ever-so-subtle smile for bringing Powers safely home.
Hanks’ smile, as mine would be, too, is wider. He is proud of himself.
But when he looks out the subway window and sees neighborhood kids jumping a chain-link fence–he’s just seen young men gunned down by border guards at The Wall—the smile rapidly fades. The character recedes into the ambivalence that is the lot of most of us, as human beings, every day of our lives.
It’s now hard for me to believe that so much of my life was lived during the Cold War. One day, chaff—aluminum strips designed to obscure enemy radar—came raining down on the Branch School softball field. Somewhere high above us, U.S. Air Force warplanes were practicing for World War III.
A gifted photographer recorded this image of her five-year-old daughter.
Happy Birthday today to Margaret Logan Gregory (Feb. 7, 1766), my 2nd great-grandmother, and to her son George Washington Gregory (Feb. 7, 1808), my great-grand uncle.
Margaret’s husband and GW’s father, Godfrey Gregory, claimed to own the human beings in the 1850 Kentucky census below. They have no names, of course.
By extension, and in Black History Month, Happy Birthday to these unnamed people. If there’s even the slightest chance that the slightest amount of their blood flows in my veins, I’d be proud beyond imagination.
They Gregorys are all buried in a family cemetery in Washington County, Kentucky.
When Elizabeth and I visited Stratford-on-Avon, we noticed that the churchyard is bounded by a fence made up of black granite tombstones from which time has erased the names.
There’s a good chance that the Gregory family cemetery and its tombstones’ names have vanished, too. History has a way of getting even.
I think that we leave behind is intangible. Godfrey’s grandson was my grandfather, the Kentucky-born John Smith Gregory, the man in the chair in front of his farmhouse.
What Mr. Gregory left behind was a legacy of kindness, service to others and the indelible reputation as the most graceful waltzer in Texas County, Missouri. Maybe the most graceful waltzer on the Ozark Plateau. He made the teenaged girls who shyly lined up for his dance card believe that a sawdust-strewn barn floor was made of polished glass.
So there is, indeed, is slightest chance that my grandfather and I share a common ancestor—one I might meet someday meet–who had his or her origins in Africa, not in Lowland Scotland or the English Midlands.
I read a rant on Facebook on Critical Race Theory, which is not taught in any California high school, despite the ranter’s insistence that it is. Willful ignorance seems to be seductive nowadays. It was in 1861, too. My namesake from another branch of the family, Confederate officer James McBride, led his Confederate into battle under this flag. They knew what they were about: States’ Rights, the defense and extension of slavery, and Jesus Christ.
I am fond of the Bogart line from Casablanca, when Rick informs Major Strasser that he came to Casablanca for the waters. “I was misinformed,” Rick says.
I do know this: I took a year of the History of the American South in college and, I, the namesake of two Confederates, was entranced. That led to me teaching Black History to my high-schoolers for thirty years.
So they learned about Harriet Tubman and Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (they instinctively loved Armtrong), osh Gibson and Satchel Paige, Brown v. Board and Loving v. Virginia.
They were entranced. Learning this history made my kids proud to be Americans.
Immensely proud, you might say.
Black history’s part of their history, after all:
–The ferocity of the assault of Black soldiers on the Confederate center as Nashville in 1864 guaranteed the success of an the Ohio regiment’s assault on the Confederate left a few hours later. That’s where Arroyo Grande farmer Otis Smith earned his Medal of Honor.
–Huasna Valley rancher Adam Bair, a Mankins ancestor, watched the Black troops descend into the Crater outside Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864, where they were slaughtered like sheep. That’s because they knew what they were doing and should have gone in first, instead of the White troops who preceded them, chosen because they were White.
–The all-Black 54th Coast Artillery had barracks in Shell Beach. The audience demanded three encores when a 54th octet sang spirituals at a 1943 Christmas concert at the Army Rec Camp in Monarch Grove in Pismo Beach. Sometimes those GI’s played baseball against the AGUHS Varsity.
My students, nearly all White or Latino, loved learning about these Americans.
During World War II, “these Americans” were not allowed within the Arroyo Grande city limits after sundown. Black History month means learning the painful parts, too. Learning them only makes us stronger.
Leave it to me to wake up thinking about 18th-Century women’s wigs. A couple of weeks ago, Elizabeth and I watched again the film The Duchess, about Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, the ancestral great-aunt of Princess Diana. Georgiana was played by Keira Knightley, she of the oddly beautiful underbite and delicate bone structure, and Knightley did her job well.
The real Georgiana—she’s portrayed by Gainsborough in the painting— had some impressive branches on her family tree, given that she was a Spencer:
He life was not so stellar. She married William Cavendish, the Duke, at 16 to bring wealth to her own family, and the marriage was not happy. Ralph Fiennes portrays Cavendish and I almost bought a bag of frozen cod the other day because it reminded me of Fiennes in the film. Not all of him was frozen: there was enough warmth in the hearth for him to invite his mistress, Elizabeth Foster, to live with him and Georgiana. (Eventually, the two women become friends and fellow-sufferers.)
Knightley with Hayley Atwell as Lady Elizabeth Foster
Georgiana consoles herself in drinking, partying, running up immense gambling debts (although she gained entry into British politics by shrewdly choosing her gambling partners at cards) and cavorting with the handsome MP Charles Grey. In one film scene, daughter she bears by Grey is taken from her to be raised with “his people,” and the exchange of the baby is done between two carriages on a remote country road. It is gut-wrenching.
Despite all of this, Georgiana would be remembered as a loving friend and mother, good-humored and devoted to the poor, especially children. Good for her. She was also beautiful: here she is, in 1786, with one of her daughters, and, again, portrayed by the many-wigged Knightley.
The Favourite, produced ten years after The Duchess but set in the century before Georgiana’s time, won the Academy Award for costume design, as did the earlier film. Well-deserved. But when it comes to wigs, it was the men who outdid the women in The Favourite. In that film, it’s Lord Harley’s wigs, not to mention his beauty mark, that steal the show (the young Nicholas Hoult is wonderful as the acidic and opportunistic Parliamentarian).
But in Georgiana’s time, even Lord Harley’s wigs would be surpassed, in this century by women’s wigs. I’ve always loved this Bow Wow Wow song anyway, and it’s appropriate to this scene from Marie Antoinette (2006).
And there were so many to choose from! I’m pretty fond of the ship model wig.
Finally, “freshening up” in Georgian England would’ve had a different meaning, because for men and women, that meant getting properly powdered before you showed your noble head to the public.
What the films don’t always show is the fashion accessory that went with 18th-century wiggery. Long-handled scratchers like this one, made of whalebone, were vital in this age of big hair, because underneath it all was a warm, dark home for lice.
The Misfits is a heart-breaking film with three doomed leads. Their characters capture mustangs so that they can become ingredients in pet food. You’ve reached the end of your usefulness as a human being in a line of work like that.
But the actors were incredible and indelible.
Montgomery Clift out-Deaned James Dean as Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the bugler who refused to box for the 219th Infantry Regiment at Schofield Barracks in From Here to Eternity. The erotic surf smoochery between Burt Lancaster’s Sgt. Warden and Deborah Kerr got all the attention, but in a later scene, the newfound friendship between 100% Army Lancaster and the prodigal Clift, both gloriously drunk, is touching. Clift was incredible, incredibly oily and deceitful in The Heiress, with poor delusional Olivia de Havilland, and twitchy and craven as a Nazi war criminal in Judgment at Nuremberg. Five years after Misfits, Clift was dead.
Gable was Gable. He survived the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco but sadly failed to strangle Jeanette McDonald as she began her solo near the film’s end. I saw It Happened One Night again a few weeks ago and somehow he and Claudette Colbert are as fresh and charming now as they were in 1934. (I love the Dad in that movie, too.) A film he made about journalists, Teacher’s Pet, with, of all people, Doris Day, made me want to become a journalist long before Woodward and Bernstein.
And then, of course, there’s GWTW. My parents started dating that year, 1939, were married in September 1940, and, if you Google “Famous Films 1939,” you will understand why Hollywood made me possible. Gable, who’d once played softball with giggly San Luis High girls on Pismo Beach during the filming of Strange Cargo with Joan Crawford, died the year of The Misfits’ release.
Mom launches a snowball at Dad near Frazier Park, about 1941 or 1942.
Marilyn. I was too young to understand it in 1962—and I don’t want to talk about the Kennedy dirt today— but her death, I think, touched my parents deeply. She was just a shade younger than they were–born in 1926–and I somehow think they, especially my Mom, sensed the intelligence behind the “sex goddess” image, and she sensed the actress’s fragility, too. Given my mother’s upbringing in the Great Depression, in a household wounded by my feckless, often drunken and sometimes violent Irish grandfather, she understood it.
I do know that my mother enjoyed, for example, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” later stunningly plagiarized by Madonna and by Nicole Kidman, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (Our own AG music teacher Lee Statom played the piano for singer Jane Russell, Marilyn’s partner in that film, at the Radisson alongside the airport runway in Santa Maria.) While I love Blondes, a lesser-known film with Robert Mitchum, River of No Return, is another favorite. She is tough and courageous, despite the tight jeans that never would have passed muster in the Old West. I apologize for thus, because Billy Wilder also brought us a masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, but I did not care for Some Like It Hot, except for the closing dialogue between Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon. On the other hand, I care a great deal about Bus Stop, another modern Western, and I will use this term again only because it fits: Marilyn breaks your heart.
In The Misfits, you realize you can never put it back together again.
His mind was a museum of uncatalogued exhibits. –John Steinbeck on Hazel, Cannery Row.
Yup. Guilty.
I can’t always “access” Wes Anderson films, but there are two I’ve loved: The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom. My oddly working mind (SEE: James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed) moves laterally rather than straight ahead, so sometimes I make odd connections, in this case, between disparate directors, Terence Malick and Wes Anderson.
Maybe three directors, if you count the Andersenesque Jojo Rabbit.
All of them, by the way, make liberal use of one of my favorite actors, Sam Rockwell, whom I’ve loved ever since Galaxy Quest. Someone wisely put together all the Rockwell scenes in Jojo. I won’t show the last one, but here are a few. The film’s director, New Zealander Taika Wititi, did a brilliant turn as Hitler, who appears periodically in little Jojo’s dream dialogues.
But today’s date in history came thirteen years after the Reich collapsed. In January 1958, two teens, Charlie Starkweather and Carl Fugate went on what was called a “murder” spree” from Nebraska to Wyoming. There were eleven killings in all. Charlie got The Chair. Springsteen wrote “Nebraska” about the pair. Here, from what might be my favorite Springsteen album, the artist sings the film:
The teenaged criminals had confirmed what we all knew about teenagers anyway: They were damned dangerous. James Dean and Natalie Wood, Elvis and “Jailhouse Rock,” (Pat Boone was the Elvis antidote) Ed Byrnes (“Kookie”) and his comb, pointy sweaters (Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe), Rockand/or Roll, including Little Richard and Chuck Berry, in a time when Black people were to be invisible except for pancake mix Jemimas and Central Pacific porters. When they became visible, they often died. It was that way in the the abject horror paranoia generated when a Black youth (Emmett Till) from up north wolf-whistling at a pretty White woman down in Mississippi, a story that was probably fabricated.
So Charlie and Caril had an enormous impact, far, far beyond the Badlands. (So, thankfully, did Emmett Till, or rather, Mamie, his mother.)
So it suddenly occurred to me, because of today’s date in history, that Moonrise was an homage to Terence Malick’s Badlands, about the two teen killers, and I am fond of Malick. I once wrote a big essay about his Days of Heaven, with Richard Gere, of whom I am not fond.
Just one similarity involves goofy dances.
When I realized the connections, I had to share it with my wife.
Elizabeth looked at me oddly. Heck, I looked at me oddly. Then I did a Google and found six or seven other people, some of them film critics, who’d already made that connection.
Two mixed-up and misunderstood kids, kind of vaguely in love but clearly devoted to each other, some random violence (a stabbing with scissors in Moonrise) police pursuit (Bruce Willis is endearing as the cop in the Anderson film) and final standoff, on the prairie in the older film and on a rooftop in a driving rainstorm on the newer. Even writing this pains me, but a dog is killed, to no purpose and for no purpose, in each film.
Badlands, thanks to its succession of cars, is a picaresque film, moving in not very much time but through an immense amount of space, in a genre invented by Cervantes, but, thanks to our vastness, perfected in America–Huck Finn, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, True Grit and The Good Lord Bird are just a few examples
So maybe I’m not exactly Hazel after all (he was among many children and his Mom was tired the day she named him).
Maybe almost best of all, Badlands was the film whose introductory music, “Gassenhauer” (“Street Song”) enchanted me. So here it is, in the YouTube link below. There are a couple shootings in the video montage, so be advised. But this film remains indelible in my memory. So are Malick’s images of the American countryside. And, just one more point? Without all that blood dripping down her (Carrie), Sissy Spacek is luminous.
Thomas and I were among many guests at the Palm Theater for a screening last night, courtesy of the theater owners and also David and Naomi Blakely, because David’s father, Everett,is among the fliers featured in this Apple TV Spielberg/Hanks miniseries.
David was a warm and generous host and, best of all, his Mom, now 101, joined us along with other heroes of mine, including Dan and Liz Krieger, writer Tom Fulks, fellow historian and fellow TR fan John Ashbaugh, military historians Erik Brun and Preston King, the Central Coast Veterans Museum’s Bart Topham and world traveler/radio correspondent extraordinaireTom Wilmer.
Thank you, David and Naomi.
That’s my boy!
As to the miniseries—we saw the first two episodes—it was excellent, beautifully photographed, by turns harrowing, inspirational and funny, and it was all about men who in their late teens or early- to mid-twenties who fought a war that was unbelievably dangerous. We saw airmen wounded—including from frostbite— in last night’s screening. I was reminded that for every American infantryman killed in World War II, three were wounded. For every American airman wounded, three were killed.
Collum Turner and Austin Butler
Two friends are at the heart of the first two episodes. Major Bucky Egan (Collum Turner) is mercurial, a grand and extravagant drinker, whose anger comes explosively. His friend, Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler, Academy Award winner for Elvis) is stoic, reserved, unbelievably cool under fire. It’s the same kind of dynamic that made Kirk and Spock and many years later (the film based on O’Brian’s novels, Master and Commander) Aubrey and Maturin work so well.
And, even though he was hidden behind his oxygen mask, there was Ev Blakely, the kind of man who, in later years, worked in the shop in the garage of his San Luis Obispo home to help Boy Scouts finish their Eagle projects or boys and girls build Christmas gifts for their parents. He was a warrior with a heart called to service, including to children.
David Shields as Maj. Everett Blakely
There were many things that struck me about the showing, and I was profoundly touched by them. In no particular order:
Grommet: The wire that gave an officer’s hat its stiffness was removed in the Army Air Forces. You couldn’t get your headphones around a grommetted hat, but the unintended side effect was a kind of rakish look that, I guess, charmed young women, and U.S. Army officers in World War II already wore uniforms that were so handsome that the Army has recently brought them back.
The “pinks and green” officer’s uniform. One—Army Air Forces Gen. James Doolittle–has liberated his service hat from its grommet.
The B-17F’s weakness: Masters is set early on in the American air war, in 1943, and Ev Blakely and his fellow pilots flew the B-17F, a superb airplane with a fatal weakness: Only one machine gun in the plexiglas nose. So German fighter pilots learned quickly to attack B-17s head-on, and one of our county’s first air casualties, Clair Abbott Tyler, was a co-pilot killed in precisely this kind of attack, from a Focke-Wulf 190 that came out of the sun.
Tyler’s crew on his last mission. Alex Madonna had been the best man at Tyler’s wedding.Tyler’s B-17 in its position that day.B-17Fs from Tyler’s bomb group.A cannon shell from an FW-190 like this one killed Tyler in his seat.The “chin turret” that gave the B-17G more firepower forward.
Dogs: Meatball, a gorgeous Siberian Husky, makes an appearance in the first episode. Airmen were devoted to their dogs—one of the most famous, the Scottie named Stuka, was Capt. James Verinis’ dog and the mascot of the B-17 Memphis Belle. She was in a London pet shop window and for Verinis, it was love at first sight. Stuka became a Yank after the war.
The historian for one bomb group told me that dogs not only heard the B-17s coming home first, but ground crews knew an aircrew was safe when a dog became noticeably excited. She’d recognized the individual pitch of her human’s engines. No greater love.
Losing the B-17: Maj. Blakely’s 100th Bomb Group suffered appalling losses—they were the “Bloody 100th”—and as many airmen were killed in World War II as Marines were killed in their deadly march across the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. It’s hard to watch a ship carrying ten young men, all between sixteen (some gunners were also liars in their enlistments) and twenty-two, burst into flames or come apart in midair, even in computer-generated images. On one mission, Henry Hall of Cayucos, saw the following: a shot-up B-17 lazily dropped one of its wheels before beginning its fatal plunge. On the way down, it clipped two more B-17’s and they went in, too. Another bomb wing, off-course and late, came in behind Hall’s and they were pummeled. Ev Blakely’s 100th Bomb Group sent in sixteen B-17s on that mission. Only one came home.
This B-17 was “The Wee Willie”
The Target: Two of the 100th’s missions in the first episodes are attacks on German U-boat pens, one near Bremen and another in Norway. The impact of the U-boat on transatlantic shipping was such that in a story that stayed with my father, he gifted a British family with a bag of oranges in 1944. The mother of the family burst into tears. They hadn’t seen oranges, thanks to the U-boats, since 1939.
Clair Tyler was killed after an attack on the sub pens at Lorient, France. Below is a strike photo from his last mission and next to it are the sub pens. Today. They were indestructible—in fact, the Lorient pens were the base for French submarines four decades after World War II had ended.
Loving the B-17: Its partner among heavy bombers, the B-24, was a little faster, carried a bigger payload and had a longer range, and there were more of them. But the B-24 lacked the B-17’s graceful Art Deco lines and it was a beast to fly—an analogy might be that the B-24 lacked the B-17’s “power steering,” and pilots of the former sometimes lost five to ten pounds on a typical mission. But the B-17’s most admirable trait may have been its ability to absorb punishment. Maj. Cleven is stunned by the damage German explosive shells (flak) have done to his ship on his return to the airfield at Thorpe Abbots. These planes returned home, too.
Green eggs and Spam: One of the funniest lines in the first episode is a speculative comment on the age of the powdered eggs airmen ate. This passage from Central Coast Aviators also comments on the food airmen ate:
...[E]en in the AAF, the green-hued powdered eggs, along with the ubiquitous Spam, were breakfast standards, and creamed chipped beef on toast—referred to as “shit on a shingle”—followed airmen across the Atlantic from the air bases stateside where they’d first encountered what seemed to be, to the military, a perverse culinary masterpiece.
Nine thousand Army Air Forces cadets went through Hancock’s training program, on the site of today’s college, during the war. Here are some Hancock cadets at table with you-know-what on shingle, surmounted by a fried egg, in the other photo.
British children: David made one of the best points of the night in his introduction. The series pays attention to the ground crews who kept the B-17s flying. While the aircrews slept—fitfully—before a mission, the ground crews were up all night arming, fueling, tuning engines, fine-tuning electrical and hydraulic systems. The most prized crew chief in the episode is a nineteen-year-old corporal who’s struck up a friendship with two British kids. In truth, while other Brits may have resented the Yanks, who could sometimes be obnoxious (“Overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here”), children adored them. And their Hershey bars. If takeoff came at a decent morning hour, the perimeter fence around an airfield would’ve been lined with schoolchildren, there to wave goodbye to “their” Yanks.
In 2019, the city of Sheffield commemorated the crew of a crippled B-17G returning from a mission in 1944. As the pilot began to bring his plane down, he pulled up to avoid a park crowded with children. The bomber came down somewhere else. There were no survivors.
American singer Melanie, born Melanie Safka-Schekeryk in Queens of Ukrainian and Italian parents, died Tuesday at 76. If you have no idea who she is, let me introduce you to her at twenty-three, performing with the Edwin Hawkins singers on a Dutch TV show. While the audience, more than half over sixty, looks as if it were lifted from a Monty Python sketch, they eventually come around.
So I will miss her terribly, and so will, among many, Keith Richards and Miley Cyrus, with whom she sang. She might well be singing with Johnny Cash right now; the two performed “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” together.
And if you have no idea who the Edwin Hawkins singers are, let me give you a wee hint from Sister Act 2. The young soloist is Ryan Toby.
But it was the choir backing Melanie, the Edwin Hawkins singers, who first released this song in 1967. Here they are. The lead singer is Dorothy Combs Thompson.
And, of course, there is no way anyone could stop Aretha Franklin from covering this marvelous hymn. When she did, it was with the legendary Mavis Staples. Someone put together this video, intercut with Aretha (call) and the wonderful images of the congregants (response).
Melanie grew up in Queens, Dorothy in Texas, and Aretha is singing in the church where her father was pastor, in Detroit. We are in troubled times now, and perhaps music is one way we can navigate them. American music is so rich and so varied, but, after all, e pluribus unum–“In many, one.” Melanie’s song reminded me of that.
When I was little, we had a reflecting telescope that we’d set up in the back yard of our home on Huasna Road, before the city lights crept east to obscure the sky. You don’t mind the cold when you can see the lips of craters or the jagged mountain-tops on a Moon that wouldn’t be visited for five more years.
I’ve written, too, about getting home from long trips—say, to Dad’s nephew John in Glendale or to his mother Dora, in a Bakersfield rest home– climbing wearily out of Dad’s 1958 Oldsmobile 88, and the Gregory kids staring, open-mouthed, at the vastness of the Milky Way above us.
Elizabeth and I bought a ’78 Westphalia VW bus, with the pop-top roof, and I miss it so much because camping overnight at Lopez with our boys reminded me of how beautiful the stars are.
And tonight, it’s moon-bright with scudding clouds, which I discovered while taking out the recycling. How mundane. But then. since I love history so much, I thought about these things.
The Northern Chumash, the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (ytt) people, take their name from the Moon. They were sophisticated astronomers. The time has just passed, the Solstice, when they prayed fervently and sang songs that urged the sun to return, and it always did, which meant that steelhead trout likewise would return and so would mule deer and jackrabbits, and so, too would the oaks—old even then—as they began again to drop the acorns that became the bread of the ytt people. Maybe their prayers sounded like these ytt people from three hundred years later:
In 1862, Francis Branch rode hard from San Francisco to Arroyo Grande on receiving word that his little girls were sick. He might have seen a moon like tonight’s on that ride. By the time he arrived at Rancho Santa Manuela, in the Upper Valley, exhausted even for a man of his energy, three of his girls were dead. They are buried next to him. If the Moon had been anything like tonight’s on that ride south, he would never see it on nights like tonight without missing his daughters.
The Moon wasn’t like tonight’s at all on Wednesday, March 31, 1886. That would have suited the men with handkerchiefs over their faces fine, because their work was done best in the dark. That was the night they lynched a father and son, suspected killers, from the Pacific Coast Railway Bridge over Arroyo Grande Creek, near the foot of Crown Hill. Schoolchildren found the bodies the next day—April Fool’s Day—as they walked to school.
Buffalo, New York, April 2, 188
But the Moon would’ve been this bright on the night of December 7, 1941—it was 93% illuminated—as it is tonight. Little boys that night might have seen Japanese attack planes in the shapes of the scudding clouds, and they would have seen their imaginary foes easily everything else was was so dark. The blackout had been announced, with the same terrifying urgency as 1938’s radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, and then the Pacific Coast stations, including San Luis Obispo’s KVEC, went off the air. For little boys, what made that night terrifying is that the only inside light came from the big family radio’s hot vacuum tubes with their brightness creeping out from the shutters in the big radio’s cabinet, the only light in a darkened home. At the same time, the only sound, for a family deep in shock from the news, came from radio announcers, who were saying that enemy planes, phalanxes of them now, were headed for San Francisco.
If you, as a little boy, went outside your darkened home, you could wait for them to appear, which they finally did, if only in your imagination, and they were vivid there, in the guttural rumble of a thousand Mitsubishi 14-cylinder engines, as they turned in vast squadrons, one to the north, the other to the south, to devastate the big cities of you’d known, San Francisco and Los Angeles, on family trips in the big Ford your father drove.
Jack Scruggs, who grew up in Arroyo Grande, was the USS Arizona’s trombonist. As the band prepared to play the National Anthem, theconcussions from these explosions off Arizona’s stern killed him. The great ship blew up after a direct hit forward about twelve minutes later.
And so that Moon has come back to me tonight. We are in no less danger tonight than we were on the night of December 7. Evil forces intend to harm us, capitalizing on the very real fear that our government has abandoned us. We are in no less danger tonight than we were on the night after the December 7 attack or in the morning dark when the cannonade of Fort Sumter began in April 1861.
But in my momentary pause to regard the Moon tonight, in perfect silence, as Whitman once wrote, brought me comfort. Its brilliance will never leave us. Now it’s time to understand that we can never leave each other, even if our affection for each others waxes and wanes as surely as does the Moon.
Francis Branch’s America had already come apart by the late summer of 1862, when he learned about the smallpox that threatened his little girls. What he needed to focus was beyond politics, he was instead fixed on the road ahead in the dark ahead. His horse’s breathing was labored and his own breath would have struggled to keep up with his effort. He had to fight the pain in his back and his thighs and in the soles of his feet, trapped in their stirrups. He was riding hard to come home, in the light the Moon offered him, to the people he loved.
