This drawing appears in Jean Hubbard and Gary Hoving’s outstanding book, from Arcadia Publishing, about Arroyo Grande’s history.

It moves me every time I see it. This is why.

The artist was my best friend in first grade at the two-room Branch School. George’s original hangs on a wall of the South County Historical Society’s research library, so every time I go inside I feel an instant of intense pain. George Pasion died two years ago.

George introduced me to empathy. He wore heavy leg braces—the film Forrest Gump replicated them— and running, for him, was awkward and painful. I remember distinctly one day when he could not keep up with the rest of us boys, and his eyes filled with tears. He was frustrated and enraged.

That moment broke my six-year-old heart, which is as good a way as any to begin a friendship.

George’s heart carried immense weight that belied the weakness of his legs. He was strong in ways we couldn’t understand. He was intensely focused but sometimes far, far away; his art, at which we always marveled, took him to places we couldn’t begin to imagine. This piece indicates he found the ability to time-travel while the rest of us were stuck in the Cold War and Mouseketeers.

There was immense wisdom in George, even then, when he was just a second-grade boy.

It was, of course, a wisdom he must’ve inherited from his parents. His father was Filipino, a member of the manong—Elder Brother—generation, bachelor men who came to Arroyo Grande to help support their parents back home. They fought, like tigers, in World War II and, at war’s end, they brought war brides home from the Islands, thanks to newfound liberality on the part of the federal government. Before the war, almost no Filipinas were allowed to immigrate; in California, male immigrants outnumbered them a hundred to one.

This was thanks to some of the most virulent racism, including in Arroyo Grande, that I’ve ever encountered in my research.

So it was World War II, and the families that soldiers started, that made my friend from sixty-two years ago possible. I last saw him fifty years ago. In learning of his passing, and in seeing this drawing, I’m reminded of the Whitman line.

Time avails not, the old fellow wrote in one of my favorite poems, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Time, according to the poet, doesn’t matter. There are some moments, when we keep them, that can never escape us. And there are some people, like the audacious poet, the old silky-bearded rascal, who inserts himself into his poem, who are looking at us fondly just beyond the reach of our vision.

And so George remains as vivid a presence in my life today as he was in that moment, in 1958, when I saw his eyes fill with tears. That was the moment that made him my first best friend.

I have been stunned, but not at all surprised, by the sadness so many of us feel at the closing of The Grad, the burger/bar/nightclub in an immense building that seemed to hold the south side of San Luis Obispo down for the last forty-five years.

The grief is authentic and I would like to argue that it’s justified, too. Even my wife had tears in her eyes last night: when we were young parents, lunch at The Grad was a supreme treat for our two little boys, who ran about like wildebeest on the dance floor and played video games and then, when they were very little, after their Junior Gradburgers, they’d fall asleep in the back of our VW Westphalia on the way home to Los Osos.

I had my share of burgers there–and beers, too, as a bachelor–with friends like David Cherry and Ricky Monroe and Cleo Cooper and with the fine young man, Rob Rosales, once a Grad bouncer, who would become my best man in 1986. My friend Randy Fiser, a fine teacher and a master of the pizza oven, was once a Grad bouncer, too. I didn’t need much bouncing back then, being a raging introvert. The dancing at night always disoriented me a little–I don’t do well with noise–but it was still fun and the girls were pretty and, as Hemingway would say, the bathrooms were (mostly) clean and well-lighted. And the bartenders were friendly.

But I mostly remember The Grad because of Elizabeth and our little boys.

And, being a lifelong devotee of bread products, I remember the fresh-baked Gradburger buns, which were exquisite, baked by a tiny lady whose eyes were intent behind thick glasses and who was the figurative grandmother to every young person who worked there. A kid took your order, and they were almost always cheerful, but seeing Herself in her bakery, in her stolidity, was assurance of permanence, like the Washington Monument or St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She was a monument, too. But a tiny one.

But nothing, of course, is permanent.

There are plenty of people, as cold-blooded as snakes but far less attractive, who are dismissive of us when something fundamental changes in our lives and we are saddened, even if it’s just a burger joint. Or even if it’s a place like Alex’s BBQ in Shell Beach, far older and just as homely as The Grad. But Alex’s had aromatic ribs whose smokiness you can still smell and it had industrial-strength Martinis that recalled its happily scandalous connections to Prohibition bootlegging. Alex’s was the last restaurant where my Dad and I shared a meal before his death. It was destroyed capriciously, with no more warning than the Japanese carrier task force gave Pearl Harbor.

Even though the snaky people are probably correct, I’d argue that
we have a right, if only for a moment, to mourn Progress. We have no power to stop it.

But we leave pieces of our lives in vacant buildings or in the powdered brick that rises from buildings broken up by wreckers as merciless at the Caterpillars that flattened Okie farmhouses in The Grapes of Wrath.

I long ago gave up trying to understand San Luis Obispo, where Progress, when measured in storefronts, is so constant and so fickle that it’s the historic equivalent of a strobe light, freezing us in one moment that’s gone in the next.

But here is where I left pieces of my life: The Sno-White Creamery on Monterey, where Mom took me for consolation after getting a doctor’s shot; Corcoran’s lunches with my mother and grandmother, where you raised a little Bear Flag to let the waitress know you were ready to order; Riley’s Department Store, where Santa, with soft whiskers and a crushed velvet suit, sat in a big chair expecting you; Gabby’s Bookstore, where my parents found a collection of Robert Frost poems, a Christmas gift now sixty years old;  Green Brothers clothing, where I rented my Prom tuxes and endured the sardonic but delightful humor of my favorite Green brother, Joe, as he measured me.

I even miss Aethelred’s, a bar where I left parts of myself that I never noticed were missing, including much of my hearing, and the Taco Bell on Santa Rosa, where 29-cent (or were they 19 cents?) tacos and burritos around the big round fire out front kept me sustained in my early college years.

I might miss, most of all, Muzio’s Market on Monterey Street, with its wooden floors and cramped colorful shelves and just-pink, just-sliced roast beef under the glass counter.

Joe Gularte of Corbett Canyon once delivered fresh strawberries to Muzio’s in a Model A pickup whose bench seat was lined with excited Gularte girls going to town.

Joe’s son, Frank, died a decade later, in November 1944, during a firefight in the streets of a beautiful mountain French town, Merten, in the Moselle Valley along the German border. Frank’s last moments were chaotic. The first tank destroyer in his battalion to creep into Merten was fired on and returned fire, but then, in moving around a tank barrier,  it  got mired in the mud was destroyed by a German anti-tank crew. The next destroyer turned back, the third tumbled into a ditch and was set ablaze by enemy fire and the fourth’s gun jammed.

Frank’s son, and Joe’s grandson, Frank Jr., was born in the Mountain View Hospital on Upper Marsh Street three days after the sniper robbed him of his father.

It took another week for the War Department telegram to come home to Corbett Canyon.

Progress hasn’t the time for details like these.

So this business about mourning the latest victim of Progress, The Grad, strikes me as perfectly sensible. What we’re mourning is a place where we’ve shared our lives. In a time when we are so bitterly divided against each other, with the kind of venom we haven’t seen since the Civil War, we will miss The Grad because it reminded us that we, all of us, belong most of all to each other.

Adapted from the book World War II Arroyo Grande

…Just east of Old Arroyo, farm fields also bordered the house where I grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. With my big brother, I walked through them on my way to school, past men cultivating crops with el cortito, the “short hoe”—backbreaking work with a tool that would be outlawed in 1974. The soil of these fields is rich and loamy, alluvial deposits that are the gift of the Arroyo Grande Creek, which flows into the Pacific Ocean seven miles from its origins in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

During my childhood, the creek was my playground. My friends and I fished for rainbow trout in little eddies and in a beaver pond adjacent to farmer Kazuo Ikeda’s cabbages. In fact, steelhead trout still swam upstream to spawn; they are now gone this far south in California. I hooked one once when I was eleven, and the shock of the big fish hitting and then fighting made me nearly drop my pole. I had never seen anything quite so beautiful and so violent—so determined to escape and to live. She did both.

It was earning a living that absorbed my father; a brilliant man with a gift for numbers, he became an accountant who was determined that his children would not suffer anything like the poverty he’d seen among his neighbors in the Ozark foothills during the Great Depression. Beyond that, he was determined that they would all get a college education. His mother, our grandmother Gregory, had been a rural schoolmarm. My education began with two severe but gifted women at the two-room Branch Elementary School, another rural school, with some seventy-odd students in grades one through eight.

Though our teachers dressed like the women in Grant Woods’s Daughters of the American Revolution, they had none of the insipid smugness of Wood’s subjects. These women were teachers because they had the calling; their lives had purpose. Each had to choreograph teaching six subjects to four grades—first through fourth in one room, fifth through eighth in the other— and so they ran a tight ship. We would learn their way, a requirement for which, many years later, I would be deeply grateful.

My first teacher, however, was my mother, and she was remarkable. Her childhood had been a hard one. She grew up poor. Her ne’er-do-well Irish father deserted the family when she was a toddler in an oil boomtown, Taft, just over the county line. When I was very little, we played school. She even rang a hand bell—it had been Grandmother Gregory’s—when “recess” was over. On my first day of formal education, I remember realizing, with a little shock of pleasure, that I could read the names of my classmates as our teacher, Mrs. Brown, wrote them on the blackboard.

One lesson 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. These men worked for George Shannon, a man of immense warmth, and on later visits to their barracks at Shannon’s farm—it smelled of earth and Aqua Velva and laundry soap—I learned a little Spanish from the braceros. 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.

Year later, a Spanish professor—I am ashamed at how much of the language I’ve forgotten– at my Midwestern college took me aside after class and told me this:

“Mr. Gregory, you have a pronounced Mexican accent.”

It was one of the finest compliments I’ve ever received.

In the early summer of 1944—when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower receives his weather officer’s report for June 6 and says simply, “OK, we’ll go,” when Rome falls to Mark Clark’s armies and when horrified marines watch Japanese civilians leap to their deaths from the cliffs of Saipan—the war, for Americans at home, was both distant and, for grieving families, painfully intimate, but even the war could not touch the work to be done.

That month, in the upper Arroyo Grande Valley of coastal California, this is what you would see, possibly through the dense, cold morning fog: labor contractors drop off pickup loads of fieldworkers at the Harris Bridge, which spans the creek that nourishes and gives the valley its name.

The workers cross the bridge whistling, an incredibly beautiful, almost baroque whistling of Mexican folk tunes from the time of the revolution or love songs, as they walk down to the fields to their work with their lunches— wine jugs filled with drinking water and perhaps chorizo-and-egg burritos wrapped in wax paper, fuel for the kind of physical work that would make most men sit in the freshly turned field gasping within fifteen minutes and woefully regarding their quickly blistered hands.

Their summer work might be in a new bean field, where the whistling would eventually stop because it is such a tax on men who work hard, whose breathing soon becomes laborious and therefore precious. To begin a newly planted field of beans, the fieldworkers have to drive wooden stakes into precise parade-ground lines along the furrows, so that the bean vines can use the stakes to climb and twist—they will eventually bear delicate, bell-shaped flowers that stretch toward the sun. The sun invariably appears in late morning, when it burns the sea fog away, and the colors of the valley— wheaten hills and verdant bottomland where the crop is in—are reborn, vivid and sharply focused.

To drive the wooden stakes, the fieldworkers use a heavy metal tube, a driver, with a handle attached that resembles that of an old-time pump primer that nineteenth-century settlers used to draw water from the ground. So the whistling stops and is replaced by the rhythmic ring of the stake drivers as the workers pound hundreds of stakes into the field.

It is a musical sound. But of course, what you cannot hear are the grunts of the men at each stroke of the stake driver; what you cannot feel is the enormous weight that exhausted arms and shoulders soon take on; and what you cannot avoid, if you think about it sensibly, is admiration for the men who feed you.

Since World War II, agriculture here has changed—pole beans and the seemingly limitless groves of walnut trees that once competed with row crops are gone, the latter victims of a malevolent infestation of insect larvae. Today, farmers grow more exotic crops, like bok choy and kale, and along the hillsides given over to beef cattle as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century, there are new farmers and new rows of wine grapes, profitable, lovely and greedy for water—a commodity that isn’t plentiful in California—multiplying every year. The beef cattle haven’t dominated the coastal hills since the 1860s, when the drought that periodically afflicts the state hit as hard as it ever has. The cattle, either killed outright by ravenous coyotes or mountain lions come down from distant folds in the hills or dead of thirst and hunger, would have covered the hills with their bones.

It was that kind of drought that may have brought a fieldworker, whose family had lived for generations in New Mexico, to these coastal valleys in 1940. Much of his native state in the years before had been swept away by the Dust Bowl. Winds had carried the copper-red soil as far east as the Mid- Atlantic to drop it, like gritty rain from a place that had none, onto ships still sailing freely between continents.

Those ships would lose their freedom in the years immediately after, and the coyotes that hunted them without fear were U-boats come out    of their lairs in Kiel and later in Lorient. U-boat captains called this the “Happy Time.” The U-boats would someday kill that young fieldworker, if indirectly, as part of an inexorable chain of events that would lead him to Normandy, so far away from the fields that border Arroyo Grande Creek, and to pastures bound by hedges and grazed by fat dairy cows, cows that lowed piteously to be milked in what had become killing zones. One of them, dead in the crossfire, may have provided scant cover from the German machine guns that harvested crops of young men for fieldworker, now rifleman, Private Domingo Martinez.