Former and much-beloved Arroyo Grande High School student Victoria, whom I teased for being distantly related, from my college studies, to a moderately reformist Mexican president, listened so intently in my classes and was so unafraid to ask hard questions that she became one of those students you never forget.
When you wanted to see whether your thirty-two kids had “got it,” your eyes always traveled back to Victoria’s because she was so transparently honest. She was your reality check.
She knew as well and all along that teaching history was just my cover story.
When I was teaching material as arcane and fun as social history (using parish registers to discover that many, many Tudor brides were heavily pregnant) or the more conventional stuff, like the stages of the French Revolution— or when we went on our little classroom trips to Paris in the Second Empire or to interwar Berlin–what I was really teaching, I hoped, transcended mere information. I wanted the thirty-three to learn humanity and empathy and hope. In teaching art, I had the chance to inspire them. In teaching war, I had the chance to make them angry.
History’s inert unless it inspires feelings we didn’t know we had that we discover in people we’ll never know.
Victoria got all that. And then she used it.
So now she is a mother and is a mover and shaker for environmental and cultural causes. I am so immensely proud of her.
She’s part of Atascadero Printery Foundation–you can find it online, along with some photos of this beautiful building–and so is working toward the restoration of the old Printery to make it a community center for the arts.
This is how Victoria makes history live again.
And the photo above shows her daughter on a tour of the Printery. I haven’t seen an image like this one—not in a long, long time, and not until now, when I need it most—that made me so hopeful for the future.
My mother at twenty-three, with my big sister, Roberta.
This is my Irish-American Mom. Her grandfather, Thomas, was born there and now I have a son named Thomas. Both her great-grandfathers were Patricks, both from County Wicklow, south of Dublin, and her grandmother was a Margaret, so she was Patricia Margaret Keefe.
The family went from Famine Ireland to Ontario; a brace of them, brothers and cousins from the same Irish village, worked in the Pennsylvania oilfields in the 1870s and then my great-grandfather headed west. He farmed a Minnesota homestead in the 1880s in the same county that had been marked, twenty years earlier, by the Sioux Uprising of 1862.
My great-grandfather’s declaration of American citizenship.
I would write about that tragic event 120 years after my great-grandfather’s time in Meeker County. It kind of followed me. My home town is Arroyo Grande, and one of our pioneers was a Minnesota soldier—he would’ve been among those on horseback in the contemporary illustration below—who witnessed the execution of 38 Sioux from a massive gallows in Mankato on the day after Christmas. A farmer whose family had been murdered was given the honor of springing the trap.
One of the thirty-eight hanged that day was because of mistaken identity; one of the Sioux had saved a white woman and her family–she spoke forcefully for him at his perfunctory trial–but he had a name nearly identical to that of a condemned man. And so he was hanged shortly after his exoneration.
The whole affair started because the Sioux were starving. Their reservation land had been halved and so had the beef and flour distributed by their reservation agent. His response to the reports that the people in his charge were hungry? He channeled Marie Antoinette. “Let them eat grass,” he said.
So the war began when some young men were caught stealing warm eggs from beneath a Meeker County homesteader’s irate hen. Soon after, the reservation agent was found dead with his mouth full of grass.
The uprising ran its course and ended with the mass exeuction. It must have been cold on the day after Christmas in 1862.
My wife and I once met a charming couple in Iowa, Minnesotans (they’d heard of Solvang, where Elizabeth and I were married) come down to Iowa City on vacation to escape the cold.
And so, tired of Minnesota cold, Mom’s people, the Keefes, moved from Meeker County to Orange County (for the oranges) and their son, my grandfather, to Kern County (for the oil).
But I think I wrote about the Minnesota Sioux because of Mom. The woman had no patience for injustice or for cruelty of any kind.
With my big brother, Bruce, 1948.
The British shot thirty-seven Irish rebels from the Wolfe Tone Rising dead — in front of their families–in 1798 on the village green in Dunlavin. Only twelve years later, my mother’s great-great-great grandfather was baptized in St. Nicholas, the church that faced the green. Maybe my mother’s impatience was in her DNA.
St. Nicholas’ Church, Dunlavin, County Wicklow
The obverse side of her “impatience”—a gentle word—was a trait that not all the Irish come to America, I’m afraid to say, necessarily shared, and that was a respect for others who are strangers here. Here’s a story, set in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, that I’ve told many times, but here it is again. Since it really happened, it serves to make my point.
* * *
One lesson [I learned from her] appeared to my mother in the form of a Mexican fieldworker, a bracero, who one day walked into our front yard and up to her. She kept her garden shears at port arms and shoved me behind her skirts. The man signaled that he wanted to fill an empty wine gallon jug with water for himself and his friends, who were working the pepper field adjacent to our pasture. His face, with a tiny Cantínflas mustache, radiated good humor. My mother relaxed and filled the jug from her garden hose. The water was cold.
I knew that because of what she said next.
“Now, help him carry it back.”
So I did. And I stayed awhile…I learned a little Spanish from them in a barracks that smelled of damp earth and Aqua Velva. They spread snapshots across their bunks of wives and girlfriends and children, and they laughed when I tried out my new words in their language. That encounter would lead to my college studies’ focus, the history of Mexico and Latin America.
I attended a state college in the Midwest two decades later, where my Spanish teacher informed me one day that I had a pronounced Mexican accent.
It was such a fine compliment.
* * *
Dad and Mom, about 1941.
So I became a history teacher because my father, the most marvelous storyteller I’ve ever heard, taught me how to tell stories. It was my mother who put the edge to them. I guess that I was pretty passionate about teaching history. I never got over, for example, the anger I felt every year in teaching my young people about the First World War.
Exhausted poilus, Verdun.
At the end of the year, I once asked a student what unit she’d liked the most in the AP European History class I was teaching.
She didn’t hesitate. “The First World War,” she said.
I was a little flummoxed. I would’ve picked the Renaissance or La Belle Époque.
Why? How can you “like” the First World War?
“Because,” she replied, “now I understand the value of human life.”
It was such a fine compliment, because this marvelous young woman understood the lessons my mother had taught me. My mother was still teaching them.
And that’s me in the crib. From the look on my face, it’s Mom’s face that I see.
One of my AP European History classes at Arroyo Grande High School. Photo by Joe Johnston, San Luis Obispo County Tribune.
“…You’re one of the big reasons I went into teaching.” Message from a much-beloved former student. To paraphrase Mark Twain and, given my affection and respect for that student, that’s a compliment on which I could dine for a week.
At last count, I was up to about sixteen former students who are now history teachers. Two of them have doctorates; a third is working toward his at Yale.
Somewhere, there’s an Italian-American approaching forty who’s named Gregory James and one more middle-aged person with the middle name Gregory.
Calm down, people, Those who know me best know I’m really kind of clueless. In truth, I’m as brittle as an autumn leaf. Hopeful, yes; intense, yes; passionate, yes, yes, yes.
But, at heart, I’m just like you. I’m just another rudderless ship.
The best I have to offer is that I can imagine and describe what it was like atop Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg on July 3, as the North Carolinians emerged from the tree-line and shook out their lines, perfectly dressed, because even the most misguided and gullible men can die heroically; how hot it was inside an artist’s garret atop a Parisian townhouse in the of summer of 1882–the farther up, the poorer the tenant; how beautiful Simonetta Cattaneo was, claimed by the Plague at twenty-three but immortalized in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; or how silent it must’ve been inside a bus ferrying the parents of my friends to internment camps in April 1942.
Simonetta Cattaneo
The best I have to offer is that I love telling stories.
But what made me a teacher are teachers none of my students ever knew–including my fearsome first-grade teacher at Branch School, Edith Brown, Sara Steigerwalt and Carol Hirons at AGHS, Jim Hayes and Dan Krieger at Poly, Winfield J. Burggraaff, David Thelen and Richard Bienvenu at the University of Missouri.
Jim Hayes, my Cal Poly journalism professor. I know that look well. Photo by Wayne Nicholls.
And there are the best teachers I ever had— my Mom and Dad. Dad taught me how to tell stories; his were about the Great Depression or about what Ireland looked like from the rail of his troopship in 1944. When I realized, at six and weeping dramatically, that I would be dead someday, Mom used tulip bulbs from the garden alongside our home on Huasna Road, ostensibly lifeless but with the promise of Resurrection, as visual aids to talk me down out of my tree. She’s the one who brought home the Harry Belafonte Carnegie Hall albums, where “Hava Nagela,” “Merci Bon Dieu” or “John Henry” would be interspersed with Miriam Makeba singing the Xosha Click song, a wedding song, or the sound of Belafonte’s heels flying as he danced to “La Bamba.”
I later taught World Geography. Harry Belafonte was my first World Geography teacher.
So thank you. But don’t thank me. All that we teachers do is to give new life to old lives, to the lives of those who taught us. We are links in a chain—my family’s chain goes to a Tudor burying ground, now vanished, alongside St. Giles-Without-Cripplegate in London, to timber-and-mortar homes out of the Brothers Grimm reflected precisely, but upside-down, on a the surface of beautiful river in Baden-Wurttemberg, to a village green that fronts St. Nicholas’ Church in County Wicklow, where thirty-seven Irish rebels were executed in front of their families in 1797.
There are thousands of intervening links, pink and howling and indignant—newborns—that bridge the space between.
As a teacher—and especially as a history teacher—I am happy to be just a link. There’s a kind of immortality there.
I have no idea how this is is going to end up, so I might as well begin.
This place became, much later, Francisco’s Country Kitchen, which I came to love both for its biscuits and gravy and for the density of the newspaper racks out front. They will demolish it soon, and that makes me fearful. No so much for losing the building, which is a minor example of a style that considered Moderne sometime between Sputnik and Apollo 13, but because even the most transitory spark lit by the wreckers might ignite fifty years of kitchen grease with the explosive force of a typical B-52 payload.
I’m just glad we live on the far side of Grand Avenue.
But before it was Francisco’s, it was Sambo’s, a story that had always charmed me—imagine tigers spinning themselves into butter, I thought, at four, and imagine how delicious they would be!—but became politically inconvenient many years later after the summit of my time there. That was about 1969.
Ten years after, it was still one of my favorite places. When I was a newspaper reporter for the Telegram-Tribune, I interviewed Leroy Saruwatari there for a feature on the demise of Arroyo Grande’s once-vast walnut orchards. Leroy told me about the perpetrator—husk fly larvae, which are so voracious and pitiless that you wonder why the orchards didn’t collapse, on their own, into sawdust–but he also told me a little about his family, perhaps the first Japanese immigrants to the Arroyo Grande Valley. They came here about 1903. Leroy didn’t know this, but that interview in a booth at Sambo’s so moved me that it would pay off thirty-seven years later when I wrote a little about his family in the book World War II Arroyo Grande.
Sometimes, years after the interview, I would stop in for a coffee or even a breakfast, take a booth to myself if it was during the slack in the morning shift, and furtively stare at the men sitting at the stools along the counter. They were farmers, come in for breakfast and coffee and gossip during a slack time for them, at a midpoint between sunrise and lunch.
Some of them wore green John Deere hats, many more wore the same felt hats typified by Bogart and made unfashionable by JFK, who hated hats. My father’s, with a broad brim and a silk ribbon and bow, lived out its life hidden— neglected except by me, who took it down and tried it on as a child—in the upper reaches of a narrow closet in our home on Huasna Road. Dad’s hat was pristine. The farmers’ hats were dented and stained by the traces of loam that is a compound of Upper Valley soil and irrigation water. Perhaps they’d blown off their heads while they towed a harrow into a field to break it up for a new crop of peppers or cabbage or pole beans.
I was far too shy to sit among them. So I just sat in my booth, waited for my order, and watched them quietly. Had I been a teenaged girl and had it been twenty years earlier, they would have been my Beatles and I would have been screeching. Thank the Good Lord for timing.
I am, after all, the grandson of a farmer from the Ozark Plateau who wore overalls all his adult life, who raised corn and milo and soybeans and—he was considered odd for this—ginseng, who slaughtered hogs in December and who, even into his sixties, was the most graceful waltzer in Texas County, Missouri. The line of teenaged girls waiting their turn to dance with Mr. Gregory did not amuse my grandmother.
And years before I sat quietly watching the farmers at the Sambo’s counter, this was me.
See? I’m being pedantic already. I’m a senior at Arroyo Grande High School, in the Quad, and quite full of myself. Probably I’m at the midpoint of a book–you can see one just beneath my legs—and probably it’s Herman Hesse or Kurt Vonnegut. My victim—you can just see her kneecaps—is my girlfriend, Susan. Susan was—is— extraordinary. She was bright and lovely and, by God, she had tamed a raccoon. She was a horsewoman and she loved my little sister, Sally, so sometimes she’d appear in our driveway and ask to take my seven-year-old sister for a ride. She’d keep one arm around Sally, the other controlled the reins, and they’d ride through Kaz Ikeda’s cabbage fields and talk. My little sister is bright and lovely, too, and I think that a small part of her was formed on those quiet horseback rides.
The rear end belongs to Jack. Just beyond him, with a sandwich, is Clayton, a Canadian transplant whose family settled near the mouth of Lopez Canyon where they raised horses, too. Next to Clayton, the young woman is Lois. Lois was stunning. She had beautiful wide eyes with impossibly long eyelashes and a breathy voice—a little Marilyn Monroe-ish—that devastated every seventeen-year-old male within fifty yards of that tree in the Quad of Arroyo Grande High School.
They chopped the tree down, many years later.
But Lois brings me back to Sambo’s, because her boyfriend was Paul. Paul was my classmate and intellectual soulmate. He may have turned me on to Hesse—“turned me on” was a stock phrase in 1969— and, for a brief time, to psychedelics. Paul was kind of shambly and self-effacing; he sometimes threatened to disappear inside the clothes that seemed just a little too big for him. But he was also brilliant—not just in English but also in mathematics and science and all the other subjects in which I was not at all brilliant.
Lois adored him. So did I.
Paul’s family lived in the blocks of houses bounded by Grand Avenue and the 101. (Another family I loved, the Hirases, lived there, too.) So it was natural, when I visited him, that the meeting adjourned to the nearby counter at Sambo’s, just a short walk away.
We were quiet during our visits there. In 1969, after an AGHS football game, Sambo’s was besieged and had to surrender to hordes of teenagers who ordered enough cheeseburgers and fries to ensure the eventual but inevitable cardiac occlusions, who shouted at each other from three booths away and experimented with how far they could shoot—at each other— a crinkled soda-straw wrapper from the end of its plastic muzzle.
[I didn’t order a cheeseburger. My favorite was a short stack of pancakes with scrambled eggs and blackberry syrup. This might still be one of my favorite meals.]
But we must have been exasperating. I am not sure this is so, but I expect it is: The waitresses’ hair was tied into tight ponytails behind or lacquered beehives above to keep their hairdos out of the food. You could almost see the ponytails come undone or stray strands of beehive, like little blond flags, wander away under the stress of serving teenagers with no more discipline than your typical Capitol Hill mob.
But that was after games.
Paul and I were quiet at our counter seats—the bank opposite from the one where I watched the farmers so many years later—and all we wanted was coffee. I could be wrong, but I believe Sambo’s had a policy then was can be briefly summarized: We are the Marianas Trench of Coffee. For ten cents.
So Paul and I, no matter how different we were—he was far brighter and more worldly; he smoked Winstons and I smoked Camel Filters–would sit there, exploring the depths of Sambo’s Coffee Policy, and we would talk about Hesse and Vonnegut and Steinbeck, about Squares, which included Richard Nixon, about film, about the White Album and about the one passion that we shared above all others: Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, from the supergroup Cream.
“Ya need more cream for your coffee, Hon?” That was the waitress. I can’t remember her name. Since I was seventeen and she was in her mid-forties, she seemed to me a relic from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. She moved noiselessly on white nurses’ shoes from one bank of the counter seats to the other; she pinned her orders to the cook’s wheel and spun it with great authority, she knew how much to talk and when to shut up.
And she called me “Hon.” [Yes, I know. ALL waitresses call you “Hon.”]
My mother had just died, in 1969, and this waitress was about Mom’s age. Gravity— and doubtless some heartbreak, which is none of my damned business –was beginning to pull the features of her face to the south but their counterpoint was the discipline of her beehive, Peroxide Harlow, which towered defiantly north.
And not only did she put up with us, the pretentious punks that we were, but she never failed to glide back to us for refills, which I always looked forward to. There I was, sitting next to a friend whom I loved and having my cup filled by a woman whom I loved, too. She didn’t know that.
But when she asked quietly “More coffee, Hon?”—I know now this was simply because she had no idea what my name was—for just a moment, Sambo’s restored my mother to me. I wasn’t the only one, either, looking for his Mum that year.
I had the great gift of getting a chance to record a sixty-second public service announcement for the Diversity Coalition of San Luis Obispo County.
It was agony.
This morning, it took me twenty takes, six edits of the manuscript and three hours to finish.
The whole time, I’m sure, my Arroyo Grande High School speech teacher, Miss Sara Steigerwalt, was looking at me narrowly.
Sara was a tiny woman confined to a wheelchair, yet she had the kind of command I never pretended to have once I became a teacher. She terrified me. But I adored her. (She wasn’t feeling well one day and made the mistake of calling me “Jim” instead of her normally imperious “Mr. Gregory.” For that slip, I adore her still.)
Despite the vast differences in our teaching styles, she made me want to be a teacher, too.
But this morning’s experience reminded that she was right. Public speaking is truly difficult, and it demands a mental and emotional toughness that I can find only in fits and starts.
My immense pain in trying to sound coherent in a modest sixty-second burst reminded me, too, of my favorite public speaker: the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, now lost to two generations of Americans, who, through no fault of their own, have no idea who she was.
She first caught America’s attention as a member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, charged with preparing Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon. Her summation, on national television, was electric: My faith in the Constitution, she said, is whole. It is complete. It is total.
She was channeling Moses, so fundamental to Black Christianity. If you listen to her for just a few moments of in the link below, you can hear Moses, too.
Jordan’s politics are irrelevant here. What’s noticeable is the precision of her enunciation, the measured cadence that was characteristic of her speaking, the specificity of her word choice and—most of all—the power of her intellect.
Even my teacher Sara—a Robert Taft Republican—would have admired Barbara Jordan. Her eyes narrowed in Room 403 at Arroyo Grande High School in 1968 when I spoke, but I was, after all, a wastrel, the product of a family of New Deal Democrats and Eisenhower Republicans.
But six years later, had she the chance to hear this, I can almost see Sara’s eyes widening and her carefully landscaped eyebrows, modeled on Joan Crawford’s, rising at the sound of Barbara Jordan’s voice.
Sara would have listened, too, with pleasure, to the silence in the audience.
They’d waited in line for hours in Washington’s suffocating summer heat for the chance at a ticket that would win them a seat in the hearing room. They didn’t know that they would hear Jordan speak, and many of them might not have known who she was. What they heard would stay with them the rest of their lives.
Ricketts, Steinbeck, Campbell and his wife Jean Erdman, a Martha Graham dancer.
If I had a time machine, I’d take it to Cannery Row, Monterey, about 1935.
Ed Ricketts, “Doc,” of Pacific Biological already has steaks and oysters and a loaf of sourdough, the last neatly bisected and all of them bathed in garlic and butter, ready to grill.
He crosses the street to Wing Chong’s for a gallon of red wine. He crosses back to start preparing dinner.
Wing Chong’s Market, Cannery Row, Monterey.
The guests, who drove in together from Pacific Grove, knock perfunctorily and walk in unencumbered—one of them, with luck, might’ve remembered to bring loaves of hard salami and Jack cheese. Regardless, Ricketts offers them their wine, poured generously into laboratory beakers. Then they barbecue, and one guest, the writer, offers unsolicited opinions—the very worst kind—on the proper way to grill Spencer steaks. They sip.
The steak expert is the the the novelist John Steinbeck. His friend and co-pilot on the perilous journey tomorrow morning back to Pacific Grove is the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who bears a remarkable resemblance to my Grandfather Kelly.
When their time comes, the steak and oysters and sourdough are dispatched promptly, along with a perfunctory iceberg salad with Thousand Islands dressing.
Two-thirds of the wine is left.
I don’t want the wine or the salad or the steak or the oysters–or even the sourdough, dipped in steak juices. I want to be, for just a short time, a fly on the wall, a grass snake under a warm lamp in one of Pacific Biological’s glass terrariums or even a skate breathing noiselessly at the bottom of a tank, just to listen, in my animal disguise, when the talk that won’t end until sunrise begins.
And could they talk. There would have been a lot of laughter, but there would’ve been confrontational moments, too. Ricketts, especially, with the scalpel that is a scientist’s mind, would have sliced his friends’ theories— about sexuality, life after death, about God the Father-Creator vs. God the Prime Mover, about the Great Depression and Italian Fascism— into slices as transparent as sashimi.
I can almost see Steinbeck, from my skate’s tank, slumped disconsolate into his chair once he’s been bested by his friend. In the silence, the only sound might’ve been the waves crashing into the pilings beneath the floor. But writers never shut up. Steinbeck would’ve found his voice again.
When sunrise came, I am sure that they departed wobbly friends.
Ten years away from 1935, the Allies will liberate Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau and they will vaporize Hamburg and Hiroshima. Three years later, Doc Ricketts, will be gone, killed on the train tracks above the Row—a little later, The Log from the Sea of Cortez will be his eulogy [Sweet Thursday would have embarrassed Ricketts]— so talks quite like this won’t happen anymore.
That’s a sadness because they told each other such grand stories, made even grander because they were told inside such a homely building.
What they told each other, thought through and distilled and re-worded, was what they’d learned from each other.
They were a biologist whose mind was so profound but whose stock-in-trade was Pacific Coast specimens for high school biology classrooms in Minnesota; a frustrated novelist, who’d written a dismal treatment of the pirate Captain Morgan and an immature and condescending novel about a paisano named Danny from Tortilla Flat and a mythologist who occupied an academic stratosphere to which no living wage could ascend.
What they discovered in each other was an electric attraction—or what Whitman called a “necessary film”— that ties all of us together. Granted, the red wine helped. They talked about our antecedence as clarified by Charles Darwin and William Jennings Bryan, they talked about Celtic and Hindi myth, about human nature’s potential, found in The Buddha, and its tawdriness, found in Huckleberry Finn. They argued about every conceivable topic, from Jungian theory to St. Francis’s wolf.
If they agreed on anything by the time the sun came up over the Gavilan Mountains, it was that this place—this planet—was a living organism, that we were its subordinates and, at the same time, its most murderous and indispensable components. They agreed that we belonged to it, and so to each other.
All of this disparate business, of course, had been hashed out a century before and a continent away from Pacific Biological by the Transcendentalists at Brook Farm. And before that, an ocean away, the same kind of talk happened, but it was in German: the Romantics there called the “necessary film” that ties all of us together weltgeist: World-Spirit.
But they didn’t have barbecue.
The talk on Cannery Row would have disappeared with the Del Monte Express that killed Ed Ricketts, except for Bill Moyers’s marvelous PBS series, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. This was when we learned, thanks to Campbell, just how miraculous Luke Skywalker’s arrival truly was. Luke became even more miraculous when the mythologist helped us to understand, to our delight, that there was nothing new about Star Wars at all.
And then Campbell, thanks in great part to what he’d learned at Pacific Biological, told Moyers and all of us miraculous stories of his own that, of course, didn’t belong to him at all. He had learned them, too.
Bill Moyers (foreground) and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. PBS.
But that series was a long time ago. But now, against the hard edges of current events, it’s in our soft remembrance of myth where we find the deepest truths, and there we have the chance to find our way back from the desolate place where we find ourselves now.
In the myth that is American film, I look to Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, and, when I can stand him, to John Ford. In writing, I look to Steinbeck and Willa Cather and to Hemingway’s short fiction; from my generation, I look to New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. I look to the historians Bruce Catton and Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin, to young historians like Laura Hillenbrand and Lynne Olson and Isabel Wilkerson, to baseball writers Roger Angell and Roger Kahn. I look to documentarian Ken Burns. I rely on the stories they tell me because they are true.
There are some—a harpy in Congress— who hold that our destiny lies in hating each other. That is a monstrous lie.
One way we can counteract this lie is to tell each other the truth: We belong to each other.
Here is just one example of what connects us: Campbell told Moyers that his research had taught him that there is a version of “Cinderella,” in one form or another, that’s found in nearly every culture in the world. I once watched Wes Studi—so terrifying as Magua in the film Last of the Mohicans—read a Native American version of the story to little children on Reading Rainbow, and he was so open-hearted and read the story so beautifully that the children at his feet, wide-eyed, knew immediately that it was a true story.
So here’s a story that I invented. The fact that it never happened doesn’t make it any less true.
It’s day’s end in Monterey in the summer of 1935. I am shivering a little in the fog despite layers of sweater and jacket. I am sitting on the bottom step of Pacific Biological. It’s cold, but I can smell the promise of warmth: red oak burning on a grill nearby. Then, in my story, I see Ed Ricketts, dressed in indifferent shades of khaki complemented by a surplus olive Army tie. He is closing a worn leather jacket across his chest and against the chill as he crosses the street with a gallon of red wine, which he carries with care, because the bottle’s green glass is thin. Its bottom is lined with sediment.
When he sees me waiting for him, an immense smile transforms his face, always serious, except for now.
I finally got my appointment for my first Covid shot, which, of course, given the size of the needles I’ve seen on television, reminded me of Ahab and Melville’s Moby-Dick.
This was a novel I read in its entirety when I was a sophomore at Arroyo Grande High School. Two factors drove me to do this: 1) I had mono, was out of school for ten days, and the status of daytime television in 1968 was odious. You only had Herman Melville to fall back on, and he was one of our Assigned Novels. 2) While I read, our West Highland White Terrier, Winnie, napped under the comforter at my feet. Having a Westie as your best reading buddy was a marvelous experience.
And, as it turned out, so was the novel. I learned everything about cetaceans except their bowel movements, which I prefer to ignore, and Ahab was one of the most delicious fictional characters, in terms of self-destructive leadership and excepting our 45th President, whom I’ve ever encountered. (An aside: Patrick Stewart’s Ahab is fine, but Gregory Peck’s remains the standard.)
Here is what happened because I had Mono and Winnie: I discovered a latent New England fetish. Never mind Robert Frost, whom I’d loved since I was a little boy. Years and years later, when I taught American Lit at Mission Prep, I discovered, after two years of struggling with the material, how much fun teaching Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was. Hawthorne’s gift was never in writing, which quickly became apparent to my students; it was instead in human psychology. So I became, the third time around, a member of the Hester Prynne Marching and Chowder Society, a devotee of the short story “The Minister’s Black Veil”—Puritan guilt isn’t that far removed from my ancestral Irish guilt—and even began to like, from a distance, the frequently-infuriating Melville short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
All of this, of course, came a whole unit before I got to teach New Englander Emily Dickinson, whom I never much wanted to leave behind, and her Brooklyn contemporary Walt Whitman, for the more dubious pleasures of Hamlin Garland or even Huckleberry Finn. There’s not much more fun to be found in teaching American Lit than to teach these two side-by-side and to marvel at the contrast—Whitman’s obnoxious but endearingly jubilant expansiveness, Dickinson’s eccentrically-hyphenated economy—and to try to teach your students the one quality they shared, which was their audacity.
But Emily never held a harpoon in her hand. Melville did, and, given my impending vaccination, I was reminded, too, of nonfiction, which I read much more nowadays. Nathaniel Philbrick is one of our finest nautical writers, and his book In the Heart of the Sea is a marvelous re-telling of the actual event on which Melville based Moby-Dick.
In 1820, the Nantucket whaler Essex had her hull crushed by an enraged bull whale in the South Pacific. Essex was engaged in the work of whalers, harvesting calves and cows and young bulls in the important business of lighting American homes and around-the-clock New England textile mills, where thirteen-year-old girls at their power looms were frequently beaten.
Whale oil smelled sweet, but the whaling ships were brutal, too, with their crews at the mercy of a ship’s master who might prove as merciless, as prone to a “starter”—a short knotted rope— as a Mississippi Delta overseer was to his whip. A whaler’s voyage frequently took three years or more, and from them we derived a feature of late Georgian and early Victorian American architecture, the “Widow’s Walk.” From their heights, women whose hearts would break as surely as Emily Dickinson’s did could watch for ships that would never return. Even for husbands who did return, Philbrick writes of polished whalebone dildos–they were called “he’s at homes”—that served as transitory relief for young wives condemned to the celibacy that whaling imposed on their lives.
Essex didn’t return, of course. These marvelous stills from the film version, directed by Ron Howard, of In the Heart of the Sea suggests why. The things that men make don’t stand a chance against the whales that God makes:
One of the ironies of Essex’s wreck is that the crew, in three tiny whaleboats, made for the shore of Chile, 3,000 miles away. The Hawaiian, or Sandwich, Islands were much closer, but the Americans heard that the natives there were cannibals. On the day Essex left Nantucket, a Boston newspaper might’ve hit the docks, bundled in twine, and one of its articles remarked on the kindness of the people who lived in the Sandwich Islands.
Of course, during the ninety days that it took Essex’s crew—what was left of it—to get themselves rescued, they had to eat each other to survive.
Hence the value of local journalism, something rapidly disappearing in 21st century America.
I was a journalist. I was frequently complimented for my accuracy, which made me immensely uncomfortable. That meant I was telling a story that someone wanted to hear. That’s not the same as reporting objective reality, or its closest approximation, which is the best that any reporter an hope to do. The reporters I knew and worked with were young men and women of immense integrity. They agonized, as I did, over misstated facts or misquoted quotes. A misspelled name would keep me awake for two nights running.
Years and years after, Murdochian journalism appeared—with its antecedents in the 1860 Charleston Mercury, in Hearst’s Journal, in Father Coughlin’s broadcasts from the National Shrine of the Little Flower–but this was seven nights running, loud and shrill and strikingly blond, skilled in telling stories that Americans wanted to hear, skilled in the kind of seduction that Ahab used to lure Pequod’s crew to its doom.
The Americans who tuned in, in their Nielsen millions, lacked my father’s editorial snort.
Now it’s come to this: We are in the same sea that Essex sailed in 1820. Our hull has been stove in and we are taking on water. We call out to each other across the sea that separates us in our isolated whaleboats, but the loudest voices, the ones that carry above the wavetops and against the current, belong to men and women fully as mad as Pequod’s Ahab was. In the aftershock of January 6, we watch our ship in her agony, but we remain shocked and silent, listening to boat-captains urging us to steer east, toward a landing we will never make.
As meek as they might seem—and all of these truly are–wearing a mask, displaying the flag on Inauguration Day, questioning the wisdom, given Exodus, of the golden statue of Donald Trump at CPAC and even getting a vaccination are all now politically fraught. I hate shots, so I will get my shot. It’s my only oar in the water, but even a gentle pull might help us come home again.
I was asked to write a Lenten reflection. It came from a marvelous story about a young World War II pilot who lived in Orcutt after he’d retired from the Air Force. The verse from John reminded, me, too, of Arroyo Grande’s war.
Three years before the buses took them away in 1942, Arroyo Grande’s Japanese, in a moment of immense generosity and tragic irony, gifted the church to which many of them belonged–the Methodist Church– with a painting of Jesus in Gethsemane, in a solitary moment without the friends He loved so much, praying for deliverance from a death He knew was inevitable. We begin to see that in John:20-33.
I found the reflection, on Verse 24, in an odd place, in my studies of World War II and in a book I wrote, Central Coast Aviators in World War II. If you click on the link just below the photograph, the video will explain my choice.
The theme, which seems so lost to us today, is Selflessness.
I found this quality in a man, nicknamed “Ike,” so self-effacing and so seemingly colorless–the parakeet in the background of this interview is far louder than he–that at first glance I wouldn’t have looked for Jesus in him at all.
But John XXIII reminded us that Jesus loved food and, even more, He loved the company that being at table brought Him.
From “Ike” Eckermann’s 2012 obituary:
He enjoyed traveling, gifts of service to others, genealogy study, the [Lutheran] church, sharing stories of his military adventures, birdwatching, gardening, and music. Cooking was one of Ike’s greatest talents, and his recipes are treasured by those who were blessed to share meals at his home.
And there you find Christ, busy in Ike, who is busy in Ike’s kitchen, hovering over an omelet that will emerge lighter than the clouds that protected him such a long time ago and served, with such happiness, at the table of the man whose machine-guns refused to fire.
Since it’s pouring proverbial buckets, I remembered a song about rain from my teen years. Turns out it was “The Rains Came,” 1965, an earlier song covered by the Sir Douglas Quintet. I loved the Sir Douglas Quintet, but I couldn’t find a live version on the YouTube that I liked.
Then I found this one, lovely, performed by the late Freddy Fender.
Hm, I wondered. Why would a Tejano Country-Western star cover a Brtish group’s song? I let it go and found another Sir Douglas Quintet song, “She’s About a Mover,” with Go-Go dancers and a vaguely scary lead singer, Doug Rahm, and a just-as-scary organist, an instrument that was a Sir Douglas trademark.
They’re not English at all. They’re Texans!From San Antonio!
In fact, Sir Douglas—er, Doug Rahm—would go on to found the Texas Tornados. Here’s “Mover,” by the Tornados, from a 1990 “Austin City Limits.”
And that’s Freddy Fender next to Rahm.
And, about 3:47, just past the accordionist Flaco Jimenez, theres a solo by a guitarist in a striped shirt. That’s San Luis Obispo’s Louie Ortega.
By 1957, over 35 million prescriptions for the sedative Miltown had been written, overwhelmingly for American women.
Being a History Guy, and knowing that, it startled me in the midst of watching a 1956 Hitchcock film I otherwise enjoy. This one:
The film scene that brought me up short happens in a Marrakech hotel room, when James Stewart’s Dr. Ben Makenna must disclose to his wife, Doris Day’s Jo, that their young son has been kidnaped. This is how Dr. Ben breaks the news, with the help of Modern Pharmaceuticals:
To her credit, it’s Jo who finally realizes that the man Ben is looking for in London—the lead to their missing son— is not a man named Ambrose Chapell, but a church called Ambrose Chapel. While she runs to the phone to summon the authorities, Ben gets into a manly fight inside the chapel and is cold-cocked by blackjack. Later, in the Albert Hall, Jo gets to scream, throwing off an assassin’s aim, while Ben gets into a manly fight with said assassin, who falls, kerplop! to his death, making a new hole in the Albert Hall. [Sorry. Arcane Beatles reference.]
This scene reminded another 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which Dr. Miles J. Bennett, played by Kevin McCarthy (Not the funny one. He’s still the House Minority leader.) repeatedly urges his beloved, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), amid all the poddage, “TAKE TWO OF THESE!” Sometimes they seem to be Miltown or Librium; in one scene I think they’re dexedrine—so Becky can run faster, I suppose. They don’t do her any good—nor Dr. Miles J. Bennett. Becky becomes a 112-pound snow pea. Bennett winds up loony alongside the 101.
A kind of Female Learned Helplessness theme can be seen throughout Fifties films. Creature from the Black Lagoon’s Julie Adams (1956) gets to swim fetchingly and faint a lot, but only the boys have access to the cool stuff, like the lever-action Winchester and what appears to be a Jumbo Economy Size Spear Gun.
The same holds true for the 1954 classic and I think one of the best scifi/horror films ever made, Them! It’s established pretty early on that Joan Weldon’s Dr. Patricia Medford is by far James Arness’s (FBI agent James Graham) intellectual superior, but who goes wandering absent-mindedly through a desert dense with drooling Atomic Ants the size of RVs? Yup, The girl.
Tum-te-tum-te-tum. I wonder what’s under that sagebrush over there?
Arness somehow manages to discourage the ravenous ant with a snub-nosed Detective .38 Special, which I find not convincing at all.
For God’s sake, Agent Graham! He wants the Juicy Fruit in your pocket!
But does Dr. Patricia Medford get to use any weapons? Especially the flamethrowers? Nosirreebob. Those are left to Arness and the unfortunate James Whitmore, who gets squished by Ant Mandibles. Medford gets a half-hug from James Arness.
[Are you beginning to see why I liked Alien’s Ripley so much?]
Aneta Corsault and Steve McQueen; the Blob emerges from the movie theater sliding effortlessly across Main Street thanks to all the popcorn butter he’s consumed. Or, “she.” Let’s be fair.
The one film where the female lead gets something close to Equality in Pluckiness would be in another favorite, 1958’s The Blob, where Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsault get to rush around what seems to be an incredibly obtuse San Joaquin Valley town. Even for the San Joaquin Valley. They’re trying to convince their elders that a huge ball of Olallieberry Jam from Space has eaten an old man, but not his dog, the town doctor and, alas, his nurse and the most of the Class of 1960 at the movie theater. They get a lot of “Crazy kids!” and “They’re just teenagers!” but Aneta doesn’t panic, does her own fair share of rescuing, and just as the Blob is about to eat the diner she and McQueen are sheltering in (Warning to future Blobs: The sheer volume of cheese, hamburger meat and onions stockpiled in a typical 1958 diner is enough to kill most alien life forms), she doesn’t get gypped out of any cool weaponry. McQueen figures out that Blobs don’t like cold and he spritzes it with a fire extinguisher.
Sensibly, Corsault moved from the San Joaquin Valley to Mayberry, North Carolina, where she changed her name to Helen Crump, took a teaching job, and began dating Sheriff Andy Taylor. They will go steady in a noncommittal way for what seems like twenty years until, one season, Miss Crump just up and disappears. I bet she left behind a drawerful of ungraded social studies reports about Our Latin American Neighbors. Except for Paraguay. Nobody ever wants to do a report on Paraguay.
One of Corsault’s contemporary actresses, Nancy Kwan, starred in 1961’s Flower Drum Song,a Rodgers and Hammerstein film so condescending that it reminds me of Quint from Jaws dragging his fingernails down the chalkboard, but for two hours.
A Work in Progress 