Dr. Charles Clark was Arroyo Grande’s “baby doctor” for many years until his death in 1916.

During the Civil War, he was a seventeen-year-old member of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry under George Custer–and he fought at Sailor’s Creek in 1865, the battle depicted in the painting.

I’m seeing how much I can find about his practice–his office was on Branch Street, I think near today’s Branch Street Deli–and it’s kind of shocking. Doc Paulding seems to have been the town’s primary doctor–he was a superb orthopedist–but even pediatrician Clark had to sew up the occasional adult who had an extra smile added to his cheek, the result of a knife fight. (This one was the result of an argument between farm laborers in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley.)

Being a child in the early 1900s wasn’t all that safe, either. I’m finding injuries caused to children by a mower (a bean-cutter killed one of our Civil War veterans in the Huasna Valley. He fell into it and his horses dutifully kept pulling), accidental shootings, runaway horses, burns caused by “manufacture of a steam engine out of a carbide can” by some future scientist (maybe not); he tended to his own son, Ed, a printer at the Arroyo Grande “Herald” whose fingers were caught in a press.

The most tragic incident, because it could’ve happened to any of us, came when a young mother, tending to her kitchen, left her toddler alone in the parlor for a moment. The little girl fell into the fireplace. Clark was unable to save her life.

[Fire was a terrible hazard for Victorian and Edwardian widows. A year of mourning called for widow’s reeds of black taffeta, easily set alight by the open flame of a gas jet used to illuminate homes. All that was expected of widowers was a thick black silk armband around the sleeve of a suitcoat.]

Cars are dangerous, (Dr. Paulding never mastered his–it was dangerous when he was out and about on house calls) but so was travel by wagon. Clark tended to the victims of two wagon accidents. In one, a woman and daughter in a funeral cortege were thrown to the pavement and knocked unconscious when the wagon started suddenly and the rear seat tipped.

And in 1912, a PCRR electric utility car T-boned the carriage containing schoolteacher Clara Paulding and her daughter, future schoolteacher Ruth Paulding, for whom the middle school is named. The carriage was reduced to splinters–the horse, an admirable one, stayed in its traces–and Clark helped attend to the Pauldings. The family got a nice settlement from the railroad.

His death was an untimely one; he died at 70 on September 27, 1916. Two tears later, the Spanish Flu would arrive in Arroyo. The Paulding home became a temporary hospital, housing up to sixteen patients at a time, so my guess is that Dr. Clark was sorely missed.

You wouldn’t think a structure as homely as this one—the Paulding Gym, taken from the Google Earth image—would be all that important. There was thought given to demolishing it at one time. That would be a mistake.

For one thing, Arroyo Grande sports fans had been wanting a high school gym—this would’ve been for the 1916 high school, atop Crown Hill—for many years. For another, it’s a legacy of American history, a small part (for a town of about 1,000 people in 1937, a big part) of American history. Along with the retaining wall below Paulding, the WPA stamps on Mason Street sidewalks and the stone fence around the town cemetery, it’s one of the last legacies of the New Deal.

And in many ways, it hasn’t changed all that much. My son Thomas, then a Paulding student, acted in Mr. Liebo’s plays on the same stage these students are using in 1939.

And even the buildings nearby, at the base of Crown Hill, have some historical significance. Here’s another Google Earth image of the IDES Hall, built in 1948;

I don’t know that most people realize that this is the second IDES Hall, still a testament to the importance that Azorean immigration has had in Arroyo Grande’s past. Here’s another photo of the gym, from the 1930s, and at the right, you can see the first IDES Hall.

And that structure dates from the 1880s, built by the Phillips brothers, who owned a furniture store—one of their places is today’s Bill’s Place on Branch Street. But what you see in this photo is a sad remnant of a much grander, complete with steeple, Columbian Hall. Here it is, when it was still on Branch Street, in a photo taken about 1908.

And the Columbia Hall was important—kind of an early 20th Century version of today’s Clark Center—that was the scene for everything from political meetings to Temperance lectures to recitals and plays. And dances: These young women, for all intents and purposes, are dancing in tribute to the local cash crop, the sweet pea, in the Columbian Hall.

By the 1930s, overcultivation of crops like sweet peas had just about done in the topsoil on the hillside around the Arroyo Grande Valley. 230 Civilian Conservation Crops youths from New York City, New Jersey and Delaware—their headquarters stood where today’s Woman’s Club stands–would begin to reverse the damage.

And by the 1930s, the new gym had a new coach. USC Trojan football star also coached basketball in that gym, and he brought a formidable reputation with him. Somehow, Belko, from a tough immigrant family, steelworkers, in Gary Indiana, had somehow escaped the attention of Notre Dame. USC was fine with that. His coach there, Howard Jones, called him “the finest example of a man I’ve ever coached,” and Belko, among other things, kicked a field goal against Montana in 1935. Inexplicably, USC wouldn’t kick another field goal for fifteen years. Frank Gifford kicked that one.

Here’s Belko and his basketball team, from Gordon Bennett and John Loomis’s book, The Old Days.

It’s not your imagination. There were a lot of Japanese-Americans who went out for basketball. That’s the next, tragic connection that the Paulding Gym has with history. On April 30, 1942, buses would assemble in the high school parking lot just outside to take local Japanese-Americans into internment. Among them were the Nisei seniors of the Arroyo Grande Union High School Class of 1942. There were fifty-eight seniors that year. Twenty-five were Japanese-Americans.

By then, Belko had left Arroyo Grande for a teaching position in Hanford. But the war would sweep him up, as well. The clipping below is from the August 14, 1944 edition of the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder.

There have been, of course, thousands of games played—volleyball and basketball—and hundreds of school dances and scores of plays in that old gym since Coach Belko’s time. And that’s been a long time ago. You wonder if the hopes and disappointments of the young people who once lived brief parts of their lives within its walls aren’t somehow still there, imprinted but invisible, invisible but powerful.

Among my favorite human beings are my high-school classmates Julian Brownlee and Mike Knecht. Mike is a writer and a (real) cowboy; Julian—named for his grandfather, Cal Poly President Julian McPhee—a standout athlete (football, baseball) with a marvelously dry sense of humor with whom I smoked my first cigarette, a Marlboro, in the St. Patrick’s Parish Hall in 1965.

That wasn’t very humorous, but it was my owned damn fault. I turned green.

And then—to show you how obstinate I am—the same thing happened shortly after, this time with a cigar called a Rum Crook, in the Fair Oaks Theater, during a film in which the Disney actress Hayley Mills (the original Parent Trap) appeared in a scene that revealed her nude rear end. That, and the Rum Crook, proved too much for me to tolerate. I think somebody—I don’t really remember who—found me sprawled on the sidewalk beneath the Coming Attractions, took pity on me, and drove me home to Huasna Road.

A little later, in high school, I found that there was a little knot of us in the AGHS Class of 1970—Julian, Joe Loomis, John Porter and me—who all shared January birthdays as well as given names that began with “J.”

Anyway, Mike and Julian are currently on that road trip—Mike’s posting from time to time on Facebook—from San Luis Obispo County to North Carolina for a wedding, in Julian’s Subaru. (A fine car; we’ve owned three.)

The photo shows them at the Great Divide. It has just occurred to me that they, heading east instead of west, are doing a Reverse Kerouac. These two may not know it, but not only are they are among my favorite human beings, but On the Road is among my favorite books.

And Kerouac, while working as an SP brakeman, lived in San Luis Obispo for a short time. I get all Kerouacky when I go to my much-beloved San Francisco and visit the City Lights Bookshop, where another one of my favorite human beings, my former AGHS history student Erin Messer, works.

It was a major gathering place for the Beats, including Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and the City Lights founder, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died recently.

I believe that he was more or less 140 years old.

The only bookstore that comes close to City Lights is Shakespeare and Company, founded by Sylvia Beach–from Altadena, California, of all places–and it stands just across the Seine from Notre Dame. I’ve been to Paris twice, but I was too intimidated to actually go inside the bookstore that was once frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. I’m just a little fellow.

It was enough for me to sip a latte the size of a soup bowl at a sidewalk cafe, Les Deux Magots, and gaze fondly at Shakespeare and Company’s facade. (Hemingway would’ve done the same, but with a Pernod, a pad of yellow lined paper and a dozen #2 pencils sharpened with his pocketknife.)

After I’d finished my latte, I got moderately but happily lost in the Latin Quarter, the old university section, with my nose almost against the glass of shop windows and looking around corners up narrow alleyways—an alley, in Europe, is called a “close”— once prowled by belligerent university students, thinking it was Poly Royal, armed with cudgels and fortified by red wine. The alleys, always in shadow, are 14th-century relics that somehow escaped Baron Hausmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the time of Napoleon III.

That was a good Lost. I think Mike and Julian are reasonable navigators, so they won’t get lost. They might run into a little culture-shock, like the time the guy hollered at me from a pickup truck in the Ozarks:

“Hey, boy!”

Actually, it was more like:

“Hey, BOY!“

I was 25 years old and walking to a hamburger stand in Licking, Missouri, for some French-fried mushrooms, an Ozark delicacy. I looked nervously for the Easy Rider Rifle Rack in the pickup’s cab, but it turned out that the man was just asking for directions.

But that’s another story. As to this current road trip with Mike and Julian, I don’t know which one is Kerouac and which is Neal Cassady. I don’t think that’s very important. It’s more important to have friends like these. We don’t see each other very much anymore, but every time Mike posts, our friendships are renewed.

It’s a gift, you see.