Author Archives: ag1970

Our Mountain

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This photo was taken near the intersection of Huasna Road and Lopez Drive, where I grew up. Here is the story of the mountain in the photo.

This view is what would we could see very morning from one of our living room picture windows, but, for the sake of accuracy, in this order:

  • Mom’s roses. Sutter Golds were among her favorites.
  • Pasture, with Morgans, whose discharge made the roses grow. Cars would stop to watch the foal, a little stallion made up of 78% legs.
  • Row crops, with the occasional crop duster dipping saucily beyond the power lines. Sometimes they were peppers, sometimes pole beans. A little up the Valley, Mr, Ikeda favored cabbages, which are blue. Just a tad to the left of the cabbages was the beaver dam into which I fell while fishing. Ineptly.
  • The Coehlo place (Kathy). Her Dad carved a model of the old St. Patrick’s Church that was astonishing.
  • The McNeil place.
  • The Shannon place.
  • Various pumphouses and barns.
  • The man who had an airplane in his yard. Just in case.
  • By the early 1960s, just a tad to the left and atop another hill, the Ikeda place.
  • In the late 1950s, Dona Manuela Branch’s redwood home–she’d come to the Arroyo Grande Valley, pregnant, in 1837–had been just a tad more to the left. When I was very little, the home burned in the night. It gave off a spark as bright as Venus. Only the palm trees that had shaded the home, its gardens and had once shaded the family at barbecue remain today. The Ikedas take respectful care of Manuela and her family, maintaining the graveyard up a little canyon five hundred yards away from the home her devoted children had built for her.

So I grew up with this mountain, sort of. It always looked to me like the top of a head with a receding oak tree hairline.

Once there was a brushfire that came up behind it and framed the top, like the sun’s aureola at full eclipse, and that became a passage, fifty years later, in a chapter about the Battle of Petersburg. It went like this:

The Third Battle of Petersburg began in the pitch-black pre-dawn of April 2, 1865. A Union army surgeon, watching the assault from a federal fort, could see nothing until the combined muzzle flashes of thousands of Confederate rifles lit the horizon the way a brush fire will when it crowns a hilltop. When a line of flashes went black again, the doctor knew that the Union assault had carried the Confederate entrenchments.

One day, when I was in my early teens, I decided to climb it. You could access it from behind the Cherry Apple Farm. I was by myself, which was stupid, and forgot about the poison oak, which was stupider.

It took me two hours.

When I reached the top of the mountain I considered to be very close to my own personal property–emotionally, if not legally–I found out I hadn’t reached the top at all.

What neither the photo nor my many morning views as a little boy revealed was that this was actually two mountains: There’s a razorback ridge in front and, behind it and beyond it, the bald man with his receding hairline of oak trees.

I was kind of angry. It took me until almost dark to get back down, by which time my family assumed I’d been eaten by cannibals, which meant that the Eskimo Pies brought us by Frank the Foremost Dairy delivery driver–a consistently cheerful man– would last a little longer.

So it turned out that I climbed mountains just as ineptly as I fished. I would live to climb a few more. I’d help the Mission Prep kids whitewash the “M” on San Luis Mountain and fell off it twice more, spraining an ankle both times. I am not going back.

Now people live on that mountain. This kind of audacity would never have occurred to me when I was thirteen. It may seem pretentious to call it a “mountain.” Visit the Midwest. It’d be a veritable Matterhorn to folks north of the Ozark Plateau.

You can still see the backside of this mountain, but from the Nipomo Valley, to the right off the 101, as you drive north from Santa Maria. The hairline is flipped as if it were a reversed photograph.

I hold it no hard feelings. Seen from Nipomo, it’s a little bare and humbled without the oak-studded proscenium seen from its Arroyo Grande side. This gave the mountain a little romance to a little boy looking sleepily out the window on a cold morning.

Climbing it–and then finding out that I hadn’t climbed it at all–taught me a lesson in humility that I need to re-learn every day of my life.

“1917:” Why confronting World War I is still important

15 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Film and Popular Culture, History, Teaching

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Sam Mendes, a director whose credits include spectacular Bond films, is about to release TolkienUniformsomething different: 1917. 

It was a JRR Tolkein’s (right) experiences in the trenchland of northern France that would lead to The Lord of the Rings in the attempt, I think, to confront the demonic forces that surrounded him when he was twenty-four years old.

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was the same kind of response. Writers like these two—and like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen—showed us how quickly and completely centuries of civilization could unravel.

The advance word is positive and I hope the critics are right. Gettysburg, based on a far worthier novel, The Killer Angels, lasted longer than the battle itself and I was rooting against both sides by the end; Midway made me care not a damn about human beings. Private Ryan, on the other hand, did.

So I am hopeful for this film.

1917 (2019)

1917: Benedict Cumberbatch as Colonel Mackenzie

I wrote a a book about World War II which would have been impossible to write unless I’d had twenty years’ experience teaching World War I to European history students. It truly was a world war: The film still below shows actors portraying both Tommies and Sikhs fighting as comrades. Those are African-American troops from the 369th Infantry Regiment, but they’re wearing French helmets because the French begged for fighting men–we used African-Americans as manual laborers– and they responded by fighting like tigers. 170 members of this regiment received the Croix de Guerre.

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New York WWI Troops Fight to get into the Fight

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And these are American doughboys riding atop French Renault tanks; our Marines advanced on the machine gun nests in Belleau Wood carrying French Chaucat light machine guns. They fired from the hip, the Germans remembered, while smoking cigarettes. Our troops went into action in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive convoyed in French trucks driven by French colonials from a country that would someday be called Vietnam.

At the end of the year, my students and I decided that there had been no turning points in Western history quite like these three: Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses; the storming of the Bastille in 1789; the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in 1914. The last event, which tumbled us into World War I within a month, hasn’t played itself out yet.

The Americans serving in Syria and Iraq are a product of this war and the ineptitude of the peace treaty never really ended it.

Afghanistan_children11_1024x68

I tried to explain, in this passage from the World War II book, why we need to confront World War I. I have the feeling that this film will take us there.

*  *  *

I taught history for thirty years, and I never, never ceased to get angry every spring when I taught the First World War. It was this war and its peace treaty that did so much to make World War II possible. In 2010, I took some of my students to Western Europe’s World War II battlefields but also to Verdun, site of a horrific 1916 battle that lasted over ten months. The stacked bones in the ossuary there once belonged to boys like my two sons, whose parents had applauded at their first steps or cheered when they scored their first football goal.

I made it my business to help all of my students understand that idea— that war cheats us all so cruelly—and so I led them, every year in my classroom, into dark places, like Fort Douaumont at Verdun, so dark that it swallowed the light of five hundred years of Western culture. To go inside Douaumont, where 100,000 young men were killed or wounded, to study war doesn’t mean we glorify it. A few years ago, a student told me the First World War was her favorite unit. (Not mine—I much prefer La Belle Èpoque) I asked her why, and she replied, “Now I understand how precious human life is.”

 She understood precisely why I became a history teacher.

 She would have understood, as well, how in the process of writing this book, something extraordinary has happened within my heart: the more I research these young men of my father’s generation, the inheritors of the legacy of places like Douaumont, the more they become my sons.

 Through no one’s fault, they’ve been mostly forgotten. This book seeks to name them and so reclaim them for a new generation. When we come to know these young men, we come to love them, and maybe that is the force that will carry us a small step farther along a path that will lead us to a world of peace. The great Jesuit theologian and anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed that we have a divine gift. We evolve physically and intellectually, but, he argued, we can evolve spiritually, as well. I believe Teilhard is exactly right. But I believe also that we cannot advance if we leave behind the boys and men I’ve met, the casualties of war. Their lives were, and are, precious, and if they could somehow save other young lives, I think they’d do it in an instant.

 A North Vietnamese soldier-poet wrote many years ago that “the bullet that kills a soldier passes first through his mother’s heart.” If the young men I now know could somehow spare other mothers the pain theirs went through, then I think they would do that in an instant, too.

 It is our responsibility to confront and understand the horrific violence that took their lives. The young men I now know who died in a Norman village like Le Bot or in the sky over the English Channel or deep in the waters of Ironbotttom Sound off Guadalcanal lit a path, in dying, for the living to follow. If we ignore them, we will lose the path, and the dark will have won after all.

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Arroyo Grande High School students at Fort Douaumont, 2010.

 

How patriots lead; how leaders communicate

24 Sunday Nov 2019

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Kenneth Branagh delivers the St. Crispin’s Day speech in his 1989 film version of Henry V.

Courtesy of Trevor Noah, here is the president on Fox and Friends two days ago, frantically pushing the Worldview According to Putin:

https://youtu.be/lY1fv-QP1Pw

Courtesy of Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth I, the Tilbury Speech, with the Armada approaching in August 1588, when her nation was threatened by enemies both foreign and domestic:

https://youtu.be/fbjj9Nmn6ZU

It’s hard to beat Elizabeth’s contemporary, Shakespeare, for leadership lessons. It’s no wonder that Olivier’s Henry V became an instrument of war in 1944. Agincourt was fought in 1415; the history play was written in 1599. Both events retained their immediacy as Britain and her allies fought just as bitterly—but with far more lethality— as Henry had on the Continent.

Here is the context: An exhausted, disease-ridden and seemingly doomed English army, vastly outnumbered, prepares to meet the cream of French chivalry in Normandy. These are the words Shakespeare puts in Henry’s mouth, and from what I’ve read about the young king—charismatic, implacable and immensely courageous—this is thin fiction indeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM

Abraham Lincoln’s devotion to Shakespeare was legendary. For a man whose formal education totaled about seven weeks, it was Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that formed the fundament of the president’s self-education and the templates for his rhetoric, which no president has matched.

What Henry V might’ve taught Lincoln was the importance of the bond between a leader and his people—Elizabeth clearly understood that bond— a lesson mythologized in this scene from Spielberg’s Lincoln.

The scene is mythic because it never happened. But it’s mythic, too, because myths tell the truth in a way we can understand.

https://youtu.be/xsmgkZ8l2TQ

It’s that bond that’s been broken and it’s truth that we’ve lost today: it’s been so besmirched, just as it was in Southern newspapers in December 1860, that recovering it—and with it, constitutional democracy—may require great sacrifice. It may inflict on us wounds beyond imagining. We are met again on a great battlefield where the enemy includes malignant men, so alien to us and to our traditions, and our countrymen, among them those whom we love the most.

For Yoshi, who never came back

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Posted by in American History, Arroyo Grande, California history, History, Uncategorized, World War II

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This photograph was taken on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on the day Executive Order 9066 was executed and these friends were separated.

There’s a good chance they never saw each other again.

When the buses came to take our Arroyo Grande, California, neighbors away on April 30, 1942, many of them—less than half—came back. I grew up here, and I don’t recognize many of the surnames in the old high school yearbooks.


One woman told me this: On the day the buses came to the high school parking lot, her mother saw a line of high-school girls, some Japanese, some not, walking up Crown Hill, walking up toward their high school, holding hands and sobbing.

Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans went first to the Tulare County Fairgrounds, where they slept in livestock stalls, and then to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature was at or above 109 degrees for twenty of their first thirty days there.

I interviewed a remarkable woman named Jean a few weeks ago. She is 94, is briskly intelligent, articulate and gracious. Her father owned the meat market on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 census, and when his Japanese-American customers, farmers, came in to settle up before the buses came, he refused to take their money. “You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”

When they came home three years later, he extended them easy credit until they could begin to bring in crops again. Jean showed me her father’s business ledgers, so I have no reason to doubt it when she told me that every one of those farmers paid her father back. In full.

This is Jean as a high-school freshman. The doll, with her handmade kimono, came to Jean from Gila River in gratitude for her family’s friendship. For their loyalty.

At ninety-four, that loyalty runs in Jean as deeply as it ever has. One of her best high-school friends was named Yoshi. I can find a photo of the two together in second grade. I found a photo, too, of two second-grade boys in the Arroyo Grande Grammar School in 1926. They would die, about twelve minutes apart, on USS Arizona.

Yoshi’s brother became a war hero. He won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant when he went behind Japanese lines in China to rescue a downed American flier.

Yoshi’s brother brought that flier in and made him safe. Jean never saw Yoshi again and, because of April 30, 1942, there is a part of her that can never feel safe.

The war, at its outset for America, killed two of our sailors. It would claim many more local young men, killing them in Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal and on the beach at Tarawa. It would kill a young paratrooper in Holland during Operation Market Garden. It would kill, with a sniper’s bullet, a tank-destoyer crewman on the German frontier three days before his first child, a son, was born.

The war killed neither Jean nor Yoshi. They remain its casualties, nonetheless.

We had to stop the interview for a moment. In remembering her friend, Jean was fighting hard to stop the tears. One escaped. That moment taught me so much history, and with such intensity, that I almost couldn’t bear it.

Introducing history students to brutality against women

06 Wednesday Nov 2019

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I taught AP European History for nineteen years, and I quickly discovered a passion for social history, including women’s history. We learned about skimmingtons, Tudor marriage patterns, women’s work on farms and in factories. Then we got to La Belle Epoque–-Victorian Europe—which should have been my favorite chapter. It was Marion Cotillard’s favorite era, too, in Midnight in Paris, and I would’ve been hard-pressed to choose between Cotillard’s Paris and Owen Wilson’s Lost Generation version of the great city.

I have my romantic reveries about the film interrupted by the reality of its director, whose victim—much later, his wife— was his stepchild, and that unpleasant juxtaposition reminds me of the way I taught this chapter.

Cotillard and Wilson, Midnight in Paris

I didn’t lead with Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins or Nicole Kidman’s Satine from Moulin Rouge–although I did touch on Montmartre and on Hausmann’s re-imagining of Paris.

No. I started the chapter with Jack the Ripper. The Ripper murders, in 1888, were so revelatory of the larger society’s misogyny. The students were reminded of Nancy in Oliver Twist and they learned about Victorian widow’s reeds—for which Her Majesty, in her pining for Albert, deserves so much blame–when it was discovered that black taffeta, required for a year, when combined with gaslights, led to British and American middle-class sati, the tradition where, once upon a time, Hindu women threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres.

Victoria’s daughters mourn dutifully for their father.

The Rippers’ victims funerals were attended only by detectives. These women, some but not all of them prostitutes, were desperately poor, frequently drunk and utterly alone. (This was when the Industrial Revolution had advanced to the point where women, thanks to cooperation between male workers and male capitalists, had been forced out of factory work, where they’d always been integral. World War I would call them back, when munitions work would kill women workers in bushel-loads; shell-filling turned their skin bright yellow. So most of them died slow deaths, from chemical poisoning, rather than the instant deliverance conferred on other women by accidental explosions.)

The Ripper’s escapes were made possible by the rabbit-warren of alleyways and the density of London fog–T.S. Elliot described its greenish cast—that were so evocative of the density and the filth of the East End. Sunlight rarely penetrated the lives of these women; their deaths were captured in photographers’ flashes—theirs were among the first autopsy photos ever taken for police work. I could not show some of them to sixteen-year-olds.

So we began a chapter that was ostensibly my favorite (they learned how to speak Cockney, learned rhyming slang, learned about department stores and the demarcation lines between social classes within Parisian apartment buildings and in the process of lifeboat-filling on Titanic, learned, most of all, about Paris) with some of the most brutal material I’ve ever taught.

I wanted it that way. I taught, whenever I could, to my students’ emotions, because that’s the way I experience history—these people are very much alive and so very human to me—and I wanted them, as we began this chapter, to be outraged.

Most of all, I wanted my male students to understand the Ripper’s brutality, so reflective of the society’s brutality, to understand what it might have been like to be a woman then—and now, because we would visit this topic again before the year had ended–and if outrage wouldn’t take with them, with my young men, then discomfort would do.

I hope their discomfort hasn’t ended. The misogyny, revealed in so many presidential tweets, certainly hasn’t.

This was the Document-Based Essay that ended the chapter–a truncated version of the much more lengthy essays they’d encounter on the AP exam. I was a little proud of this one.

I always reasoned that I needed to retire once my own anger over World War I had passed. I think that sentiment extends logically to the status of Victorian/Edwardian women, as well.

I am retired. The anger isn’t.

The Lopez Canyon Feud, 1894-95

06 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized

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Feliz’s booking photo, Folsom Prison

On the morning of Friday, April 12, 1895, the proprietor of the Fashion Stables in San Luis Obispo discovered a body. It lay in a pool of blood—the back of the victim’s skull had been crushed—in a vacant lot behind The Palace, a “house  of ill fame,” near the intersection of Monterey and Morro Streets.

An Arroyo Grande man, Frank Feliz, was nearby, inside Sinsheimer’s store—today’s Giuseppe’s—and after he’d followed the gathering crowd to the vacant lot he identified the victim as Ygnacio Villa, a neighbor of his. Villa’s family was prominent but had fallen on hard times. Ygnacio’s father had been the master of the 30,000-acre Corral de Piedra rancho between Pismo Beach and the Edna Valley. Ygnacio, by contrast, homesteaded 160 acres in Lopez Canyon.

The sheriff’s deputy on the scene, Joseph Eubanks, would have had bad memories of Lopez Canyon. Eubanks had assisted Constable Thomas Whitely in the arrest of Peter and P.J. Hemmi for the 1886 murder of Eugene Walker. The Hemmis and Walker had been involved in a land dispute in the canyon; Hemmi had reportedly broken down fences and poisoned livestock to force Walker off land he believed to be his. On March 31, fifteen-year-old P.J. shot Walker and his young wife, Nancy, who died several months later.

On the night of the Hemmis’ arrest, Eubanks had to share Whitely’s humiliation when a mob, their faces covered by handkerchiefs, locked the two inside a Branch Street restaurant’s storeroom. The mob then stormed the little town jail and lynched the Hemmis from the PCRR trestle over Arroyo Grande Creek. It was schoolchildren who first discovered the hanging bodies the next day—April Fool’s Day.

After 1886, Arroyo Grandeans remembered Lopez Canyon for its bounty, rather than its violence.

A 1909 San Luis Obispo Morning Tribune portrait of the canyon was titled “Where Nature Has Been Lavish With Her Charms.” Local papers were frequently filled with little stories about Arroyo Grandeans taking extended hiking and camping trips or those who came back to town to brag about a big catch of trout, to show off trophy mule deer bucks or, in one case, four bird hunters who returned with “a wagon load” of pigeons.

But Deputy Sheriff Eubanks wasn’t done with Lopez Canyon. Within days of Ygnacio Villa’s murder, he would place Frank Feliz and two others under arrest. The killing was the apparent culmination of a year-long feud between two factions in the canyon—one led by Feliz and the other by a neighbor named Gerard Jasper.

There are repeated stories about the feud throughout local newspapers in 1894-95.  It began, as the Hemmi-Walker dispute had, because of conflicting claims over land. Neither side comes off looking innocent.

Gerard Jasper was a contrary man. In 1869, when he’d lived in Cambria, a deputation of local citizens was organized  to warn him not do bring his cattle into town during an outbreak of what was called “Texas Fever.” He appears frequently in county civil suits in subsequent years, but his contrariness took a new direction in Lopez Canyon: Jasper was accused, in the fall of 1894, of setting a string of arson fires. Pasturage, a neighbor’s wagon and twenty-five cords of wood went up in flames, and one of those fires burned land claimed by Frank Feliz.

At his San Luis Obispo trial, Jasper, according to one account, “offered a very vigorous defense, and at times branched out into philosophical utterances, which His Honor [Judge V.A. Gregg] was finally compelled to check.” Jasper’s character witnesses, which included prominent local men like Fred Branch and David Newsom, were more effective in his eventual acquittal.

After the trial, the Jasper-Feliz feud escalated in late 1894 and early 1895. Feliz was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. A comrade of Jasper’s, identified only as P. Morales, broke down a neighbor’s fence and smashed the windows and door of his little Lopez Canyon cabin. Morales had to be subdued by two deputies when he resisted arrest. Another friend of Jasper’s was a victim: he returned from town to find seven bullet holes in his front door and seven .44-caliber slugs embedded in the opposite wall.

It seemed that Frank Feliz was itching to make Ygnacio Villa a victim, too. Villa had testified against Feliz in the Jasper arson trial and, according to news accounts, Feliz accused Villa of stealing one of his cows. “I will kill him the first time I see him,” Feliz reportedly told Villa’s niece, Rafaela.

There was evidence that Feliz had done just that, according to trial accounts that dominated the news in August 1895.

Two prostitutes from the Morro Street houses saw Feliz and some companions verbally confront Villa the night he died (one of them was the first to find the body the next morning, but she didn’t report it). Evidently all of the men, Villa included, had spent much of Thursday night, April 11, drinking heavily in a nexus of saloons—one of them, ironically, was called the Olive Branch–along Monterey Street. There was physical evidence, as well: blood on Feliz’s overalls. On the witness stand, Feliz maintained the blood had come from slaughtering a steer several days before Villa’s murder.

The evidence wasn’t enough to convince the jury. On August 11, 1895, they acquitted Feliz. A few years later, Gerard Jasper died a natural death and the feud seemed to end with him.

Ironically, the crime that would finally doom Frank Feliz, in 1901, was the one he’d accused Ygnacio Villa of committing: cattle theft. On April 7, 1901, the Morning Tribune exulted in Feliz’s conviction and subsequent ten-year sentence to Folsom prison: time enough, the article opined, for Feliz to reflect on a brutal murder “in an alley back of a darkened street where evil flourished.”

Classmates, Shipmates

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I was browsing an early 1980s version of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the South County Historical Society journal, and I found this photograph of the Arroyo Grande Grammar School second grade in 1926-27.

The two boys who are circled are Wayne Morgan (top) and, in the front row, Jack Scruggs. Wayne’s father, Elmer, was a partner-owner of the Ford agency, today’s Doc Burnstein’s Ice Cream Parlor. Jack’s father had lost his farm earlier in the 1920s; at the time the class photo was taken, he worked with an oil prospecting company exploring the Huasna Valley.

That’s Wayne in the front, in a photo taken during this Ford Model A’s nationwide tour in 1931 (the car, fully restored, is owned by a Michigan car collector).

Nine years later, Wayne would join the Navy.

By the time Wayne Morgan graduated from eighth grade, Jack Scruggs’s family had moved to Long Beach. Both boys were musicians–Wayne played violin in Mr. Chapek’s orchestra (he was also an avid Boy Scout), but Jack would make music his career.

In 1940, Jack joined the Navy.

 

Jack is circled in this photo taken on November 22, 1941, during a Battle of the Bands competition among the ships of the Pacific Fleet. Jack was a trombonist in Navy Band 22–the band of USS Arizona.

So there’s a very good chance that the one-time classmates had a reunion on the great ship.

The tragic part of the story, of course, is that both were killed on Arizona. The concussion from a near-miss killed Jack just before 8 a.m. as the band was preparing to play the National Anthem during the colors ceremony. Wayne died about ten minutes later, when the ship blew up. So were all of Jack’s bandmates, killed at their action stations in the Number Two gun turret, just inboard from where the fatal bomb struck.

A few weeks before the attack, Jack had played “Happy Birthday” on the accordion for Rear Adm. Isaac Kidd’s wife–Kidd flew his flag on Arizona. All that was found of him after the attack was his Annapolis class ring, fused to a bulkhead.

 


Jack’s body was recovered; he came home to Long Beach. Wayne rests with his shipmates.

185086433_1510535707

 

I knew both were from Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in 1940. I thought it extraordinary that two young men from such a small town wound up serving on the same ship. I had no idea that they were in the same grammar school class. 

Sometimes even the smallest footnotes in history tell compelling stories.

 

The Great Northern Railway and Great Uncle Willie

28 Monday Oct 2019

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From a kind of round-robin email to family:

Hello, all!

The SLO Railroad Museum just emailed me to let me know of the upcoming funeral of a local man, 93, who was one of the last steam engine engineers. (Elizabeth and I took a ride on one to the Isle of Skye, and it was just like a Harry Potter movie.)

That set me a-pondering. Wasn’t there an ancestor who was a train engineer?

Yup. Our Great Uncle William “Willie” Keefe, born in the Pennsylvania oilfields to Thomas and Margaret Keefe. He was #1 in the batch of ten that would include our grandfather, at #9.

I found his photo, not a good one:

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And I discovered that he was an engineer on the Great Northern Railway, whose route(s) ran thusly (it went out of business about 1970):

GNMap1.jpg

So there’s a chance some of Elizabeth’s Washington ancestors might’ve been passengers on Great Uncle Willie’s train.

There was no date of death for him on ancestry.com, so I did some hunting. After about 25 minutes, from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:*

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So, sadly, he died on the job. He died on Monday, May 10, 1948–only three days before Bruce Keefe Gregory was born.

Then I looked up his train. It wasn’t diesel, not steam, but it was gorgeous.

Great_Northern_Empire_Builder_WP_1024x1024.jpg

*More Minnesota trivia: The 1862 Sioux uprising began in Meeker County, where Thomas and Margaret would later homestead and where most of the bunch o’ Keefes were born. I bring that up because John Rice, an Arroyo Grande settler whose house still stands in an old, old part of AG [photo below], was part of a regiment charged with ensuring order and witnessing the execution of 38 Sioux warriors in Mankato, Minnesota in December 1862.

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So it goes.  That is today’s report from The History Desk.

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Great Uncle Willie’s home in Minneapolis–the little fellow with the  yellow door.

Losing the B-17 Nine O Nine

04 Friday Oct 2019

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920x920

Nine O Nine

There was a tragic accident in Connecticut this morning when a vintage B-17G, “Nine O Nine,” crashed. The plane was a frequent visitor to our area, to San Luis Obispo County. My son and I saw this beautiful airplane, restored to resemble the 1943 original, which flew 140 combat missions with the 91st Bomb Group without a fatality. The chief of the B-17’s ground crew won a Bronze Star because his airplane flew 126 consecutive missions without aborting for a mechanical failure.

That streak ran out this morning, when this ship, built in 1944, lost an engine and went down just short of the runway.

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My son John with Nine O Nine, San Luis Obispo, 2012.

I wrote a book about aviators from my area— San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara Counties.

I learned that a bomber squadron was usually made up of twenty B-17s like “Nine O Nine.” On maximum effort days—in the spring of 1944—there would be eight hundred to a thousand of these airplanes, both B-17s and B-24s, going into the air in shifts all over East Anglia. They would rattle dishes and wedding crystal in the modest homes below as they assembled and headed east.

Typically, B-17 pilots were twenty-two years old. Gunners were teenagers. There were liars among them as young as fifteen. San Luis Obispo County lost eighteen of these young fliers during World War II, both in combat and in horrific training accidents from Texas to Montana to South Carolina.

Among the young men who made it overseas, one, from Arroyo Grande, died when his B-17 flew into the side of Mount Skiddaw in England’s Lake District. Another, from Morro Bay, was shattered in his co-pilot’s seat by a cannon round from a Focke-Wulf 190. A San Luis Obispo navigator died when a Messerschmitt 109 collided with his B-17. A Templeton B-24 gunner took off on a mission that was scrubbed because of weather; when his bomber crashed returning to base, his aircrew were the only Eighth Air Force casualties that day.

At least two local men served in “Nine O Nine’s” 91st Bomb Group.

Robert Abbey Dickson’s B-17, “Wheel and Deal,” was brought down by antiaircraft fire over the Ruhr Valley in 1943. Dickson bailed out and when he hit the ground, the first German he met was an angry farmer armed with a vintage World War I Mauser. The young American was rescued by two Luftwaffe soldiers who rode up on a motorcycle and sidecar and fetched him back to their 88-mm gun emplacement. It suddenly occurred to Dickson that this might be the gun that had brought his bomber down.

But it was lunchtime. The first thing Dickson’s captors did was to offer him a bowl of potato soup.

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91st Bomb Group co-pilot Robert Abbey Dickson retired to Morro Bay.

Henry Hall of Cayucos was a twenty-year-old gunner on “Black Monday,” in March 1944, when Eighth Air Force undertook a “maximum” effort mission, with nearly a thousand heavies sent into the air. At this point in the war, the B-17s and B-24s weren’t just strategic weapons. They were bait, intended to bring up German fighters so state-of-the-art American fighters, like the P-51, could begin to winnow the young Germans down. But the winnowing that Hall saw involved Americans. Hall watched, horrified, as an Me-109’s attack on a nearby B-17 took effect. The plane’s right-wing landing gear dropped lazily. Then it began to go in, and on its way down, it clipped two more B-17s and sent them in, as well. That mission turned out to be fruitless: the target was obscured and Hall’s ship dropped its bombload on a “target of opportunity,” a German village—one, Hall thought, that had done little harm to any Americans— on its way home. It was a terrible day for Hall’s aircrew.

What kept them together, I learned, and kept them flying in unpressurized cabins where hypoxia and frostbite were common, when they endured sudden, terrifying attacks from German fighters so fast that no gunner could track them—those fighters, too, were flown by twenty-two year-olds—and when flak sliced through wings, fuselage, air hoses and human beings, was their devotion to each other.

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Waist gunners, friends.

You could not let your friends down.

I learned, too, that among their best friends were the British schoolchildren who lined airfield fences along the tarmac at the start of every mission.

They were there to wave goodbye to their Americans, who were loud and boisterous, friendly and incredibly generous, with endless supplies of Hershey bars, because these young men had grown up in the Depression, and they knew what the British children, after their six years of war, knew. They knew what deprivation was like.

So those children were there for their Yanks.

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The 96th Bomb Group’s Sgt. George Crist of San Diego colors Easter Eggs with British children, 1945.