Author Archives: ag1970

The Lynching

25 Friday Jul 2014

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The Pacific Coast Railway Bridge

The civilizing and the Americanizing of the once-wild Arroyo Grande Valley begun in 1837 by pioneer ranchero Francis Ziba Branch and his wife, Manuela, should have accelerated with the 1881 arrival of the railroad, the narrow-gauge Pacific Coast Railway. It did achieve this, to a large, extent, tying the Valley to the Pacific Ocean, where there was a commercial wharf at Port Harford, to the Lompoc Valley to the south and to markets in the county seat, San Luis Obispo, to the north.

The railroad’s efficacy as a tool of civilization was dampened when the citizens of Arroyo Grande, in 1886, hanged a fifteen-year-old boy from the PCRR Bridge that forded the Arroyo Grande Creek in the heart of town. The lynch mob strung up the boy’s father, too, and the bodies were found by little boys on their way to school. They gawked at the corpses for a long time, from the soles of their feet to their stricken, clay-colored faces, and once they got to school, tardy, they were punished for telling the story of what they’d seen.

It was the morning of April Fool’s Day, after all.

Although a local pastor would praise the ad hoc Committee of Vigilance for its work that day, it didn’t sit well with all the participants. One of them, in great, great old age, talked to my brother’s class at our two-room school, Branch Elementary, in the late 1950s. The victims of the vigilantes were a father named Peter Hemmi and  his son, Julius. or P.J. The elderly man who told the story must have been about P.J.’s age when this happened.

Mrs. Hemmi was sitting in the anteroom of what passed for a jail, and when the crowd –some of them may have had their faces covered–burst he said, the look on her face revealed that she knew exactly what was about to happen. The old man had never forgotten that face at that moment; it haunted him like Marley’s Ghost, but Mrs. Hemmi was with him always, not just at Christmas.

They wanted to lynch a third man, Peter’s nephew, but the elder Hemmi defended him.  The mob let the nephew go, and he ran for his life with a noose still around his neck.  Peter could not save his son.  P.J. was, one longtime local historian, Madge Ditmas, once wrote, a boy of “cruel disposition,” and he had ended a long-running boundary dispute over property near the source of Arroyo Grande Creek with a rifle.  In a confrontation between the Hemmis and their neighbor, Eugene Walker, P.J. began shooting: Walker died in his garden amid his vegetables. P.J. then shot Walker’s dog and, finally, shot Mrs. Walker twice.  She would live— until November—but now, only hours after he’d started firing, no amount of pleading could save the terrified boy. This was justice.

It was justice carried out by mob violence that was not at all coincidental. Five weeks before the lynchings, a similar mob had appeared in Arroyo Grande’s nascent Chinatown and ordered the residents to leave within two weeks or there would be “justice.”  Three days after the Hemmis died, a similar group, mounted, their faces covered, descended on a Chinese road gang working on an extension of the railroad to Nipomo and they were similarly ordered to leave. Or die.  (Meanwhile, in San Luis Obispo, the county seat, someone attempted to dynamite a Chinese laundry owned by Sam Yee; at about the same time, a rival business opened called, without equivocation, “The Caucasian Steam Laundry.”)

Hemmi was not Chinese, but he was an immigrant; possibly his English was heavily accented, and that wouldn’t have helped him.

Even fifty years later, Madge Ditmas  (to Madge, Evil Incarnate resided in Filipino immigrants and in the New Deal) refused to call Peter Hemmi by name in her history columns in the local weekly, the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder, referring to the Swiss-born Hemmi as “The Frenchman.”

There was not the slightest chance that the two would be allowed burial on sanctified ground, amid their neighbors. The 71-year-old Manuela Branch had their bodies brought to her family’s graveyard, and the two were buried a few feet away from her husband, whose reputation was indestructible.

The little burial ground, by the early 1960s, had reverted to pastureland, and generations of cattle with itches to scratch had knocked down, one by one, the elegant Victorian obelisks and tablets that had marked the graves of the pioneer family. But at some point, someone had built a heavy-gauge steel pipe fence around the graves of Julius and P.J., so their tombstones stood upright and unrepentant.

Francis Branch's tombstone is the largest, at center; since the 1960s, the Hemmis' tombstones were damaged and an Eagle Scout replaced them with a single wooden marker, at far right.

Francis Branch’s tombstone is the largest, at left-center; the Hemmis’ tombstones were damaged at some time during the mid- to late 1960s, and an Eagle Scout replaced them with a single wooden marker, at far right.

JFK

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

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75362bcf56ecbcf18f8d12643a1ce139November 2013.  I’ve been thinking about the assassination of President Kennedy a lot the last two weeks. I will be the first to admit that I am an emotional person; paradoxically, I cry about twice a decade. I’ve cried twice the last week.

But I’m also an academic and I know every detail down to the commas of the seamy stuff, the predatory and amoral father who lobotomized one of his daughters and, when one of the others would have a 16-year-old classmate spend the night, he would lift the covers and climb into bed with her; the mother, so distant, whose response to the one fidelity of her husband—his devotion to his self-indulgence–was to use her faith to draw curtains around herself and live in a world made safe by priests and lit by stained glass. I know their anointed son, the first Irish Catholic American President, who blew himself up to steal the glory back from his younger brother, was an arrogant bully.  I know what a mean-spirited little bastard Bobby was, which is exactly why he became my favorite, because when Jack’s death burned his own arrogance away he discovered his bedrock, his greatest strength, was compassion. I have not allowed the decades to erase the name of the young woman—it was Mary Jo–who drowned in Teddy’s car.

I know all that. I know how doom stalked this family, and it did so largely because they deserved it. I know all of that.

But I know one more thing: I still miss President Kennedy.

I miss him because his short time with us was so transformative. One example: among young people, there was a Renaissance of our folk music that coincided with his presidency. It was as if we had rediscovered in music our national identity, and one that we’d somehow forgotten was so joyful yet also so impatient—patience has never suited Americans—with injustice. Our history was living again.

It wasn’t a coincidence that so may Americans not much older (and some, like President Carter’s mother, were much, much older) than I was had joined the Peace Corps or were volunteering–and giving their lives, like three young men buried in shallow graves in an earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi–to register African-American voters.

It wasn’t a coincidence that the White House introduced every American then alive to cellist Pablo Casals. While pundits justifiably mocked the President’s enthusiasm for James Bond novels, Kennedy’s passion for Byron was far more enduring and it was Robert Frost who became the co-star at the Inaugural.

Had Kennedy not been reading Barbara Tuchman’s superb account of the summer Europe collapsed into the First World War—The Guns of August—there is a good chance none of us would be alive today. Kennedy had picked up the book in the fall of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And it was fact that most Latin Americans and, even larger numbers of Europeans, liked us, that the President of France had a crush on Mrs. Kennedy, who spoke near-effortless French, as transparent as eighth-grade boy’s, and that the President’s triumphant visit to what was then still one of the poorest nations in Europe—Ireland—finally secured the bond made by the Irish Brigade, scythed in neat rows in the Wheatfield  at Gettysburg.

My job in Kennedy’s presidency was more prosaic: It was my obligation, I decided, to shuffle out to the living room at 4 a.m. in my pajamas, wrapped in a blanket, no matter how cold the night before had been, every time a Mercury astronaut was to begin his mission. (Half the time the launches would be scrubbed and so I would fall asleep in class that day.) When it appeared the heat shield on Friendship 7 had become dislodged and there was a real chance that John Glenn’s re-entry would incinerate him, I prayed as hard as a little boy can pray and I was deeply touched by God’s reply: The parachutes above the little capsule, swinging gently like a bell in its descent, on the flickery television screen.

Let me be clear about this: I am not coming anywhere close to claiming the Kennedy was popular with all Americans. Many hated him. Some of that came from the memory of his father’s bizarre stint as our ambassador to England, when Joe Sr. had unwisely pronounced England finished and urged détente with Nazi Germany.

But a more visceral and widespread hatred was directed toward Kennedy’s Catholicism, the same bigotry, so deeply rooted in the Old Confederacy and the Mountain West, that had poisoned Al Smith’s run for the presidency only a year after jubilant French Catholics had mobbed Lindbergh at Le Bourget to make him one of their own. That kind of hatred is not only poisonous, it’s indestructible, and so it survived Dallas and lives today.

I am not forgetting how palpable the fear of the time was, either, when, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, my father came home empty-handed from Williams Brothers’ Market on Grand Avenue because the shelves had been stripped bare by our terrified neighbors.

But there is another side of Kennedy’s time that scholars are wary of because there’s nothing that historians hate quite so much as sentimentality. Sentimentality kills the reputation of any historian as dead as an easy rifle shot.

The shot that killed Kennedy before his time, of course, was immortalized in a few grainy frames of the Zapruder film that have become the pornography of the assassination. I will try my best to never watch that film again.

But I saw some film images last week that reminded me of the wellsprings of strength in John Kennedy. He was, for most of his life, a semi-invalid, a resemblance that connects his life to Franklin Roosevelt’s. In both men, physical frailty was their greatest gift, because it spared them their assigned destinies as spoiled rich boys who would lead lives of little consequence.

FDR mastered his polio by imprisoning his withered legs in steel braces and building a massive upper body that he learned to throw forward in order to force his legs to follow. The moment when the president approached the podium to ask for a declaration of war was terrifying, for his balance was never secure, but he refused to fall, and that refusal might also have been the hallmark of both his presidency and the nation itself in the years of Depression and war

Kennedy fought illnesses in waves—Addison’s’ Disease,  or the back that radiated the kind of pain Inquisitors dream of. An accumulation of infirmities dogged him all his life. He was sometimes so sick that one brother mused that if a mosquito ever bit Jack, the mosquito would die.

Kennedy masked his vulnerability with lies and with a skillfully managed diet of images that projected vitality—touch football, golf (sparingly, because he didn’t want to Americans to connect him with Ike’s golf addiction), and the beauty of his wife and of his children.

Far more important, he also developed what FDR didn’t have:  a first-rate intellect and with it, a sense of intellectual detachment and the ability to compartmentalize his emotions. The last trait would poison his marriage, but, in 1962, together these became the very strengths that would save civilization from nuclear destruction.

Just a little over a year later, Texans came out in enormous numbers to see the President and Mrs. Kennedy on Thursday and Friday, and, until last week, when I saw the footage of his last 48 hours, assembled by National Geographic producers, I had never realized how enthusiastic those crowds were. There was a warmth and a kind of celebratory communion in them that stunned the Kennedy advance people and the Secret Service detail.

Friday had begun with rain in Forth Worth. By the time Air Force One touched down at Love Field in Dallas, it was Kennedy Weather: bright, crisp, autumnal sunshine. The beauty of that day was quickly obscured by blurred images, snatches of rumor, the eloquent pause that registered the grief not even newscaster Walter Cronkite could master. It seems, sometimes, like Dallas was the last bright day we have ever had, and our time and our nation have ever since been stalked by shadows.

I don’t remember those shadows before Dallas, but I was so very young. What I’m beginning to believe now is that most important and salient point of November 22, 1963, wasn’t that we loved the Kennedys, though, in my house, we truly did.

What was far more important was that we loved being Americans, and it was that self-regard and self-confidence that seemed to die, too, with such explosive violence, in Dealey Plaza.

I think it’s been that healthy self-regard that has made us such a positive force in the world. And I am not talking about a pernicious doctrine, American Exceptionalism, which emerged again in the last election as a kind of litmus test for holding office.

I don’t think John Kennedy’s generation, which included my Dad, born a year after the President, went to war to prove that our nation was better than everyone else’s.  National Socialism already held that copyright.

So what we lost, in Dallas wasn’t the kind of jingoism that comes so easily to 21st Century politicians; it wasn’t arrogance. It was our faith in ourselves—the faith that Lincoln had articulated so well with his “few brief remarks” at Gettysburg, almost exactly 100 years before Kennedy’s death. I think we lost it, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone. It’s ironic, but I’ve seen flickers of that faith most in my travels abroad.

I will never forget the sunburst over Derrynane Bay in a stop for lunch on the Ring of Kerry and inside the little restaurant was a little sign, carefully lettered, that read “Happy Fourth of July to our American friends.”

We were visiting Reims Cathedral with our students when a Frenchwoman insisted on giving us a personal tour because precisely because we were Americans, and it was American money, from the Rockefeller Foundation, that was painstakingly restoring shell damage to the Cathedral from 1916.

Once a Bavarian woman approached Mr. Kamin, our German teacher, and his students near Munich and thanked him, and them, for the kindness World War II GI’s had shown her when she was a little girl. There were tears in her eyes. Of course, many of those young soldiers had died long before Mr. Kamin’s students had been born.

Young Americans, including young men like those soldiers, may be the best evidence we have that the faith we have in ourselves has such enduring power. In my experience, there are few images more evocative of the faith we keep than those that confront you silently in the fields of the dead.

My trips to the American cemeteries in the Ardennes, at Colleville-sur-Mer above Omaha Beach and to the Punch Bowl on Oahu never, ever made me want to wave flags or blow trumpets.

I always think instead of men who were once wavering toddlers, who took their first steps to a little smattering of applause from their parents. They waited expectantly and sleeplessly on Christmas Eves stalked by the Great Depression. When they did sleep, they would sleep with their arms around the best friend they would ever have, and one as mongrelized as Hitler said all of us Americans truly were: a dog. I think of boys whose hands shook when they tried to pin that damned corsage on the dress of their Prom date. And then they aren’t boys anymore: they’re young men fresh out of Basic whose last moments here, maybe a few free moments in San Diego or Philly, were marked by ribald laughter and 3.2 beer or poker—any distraction that would somehow increase the distance between themselves and the troopships waiting to take them to their deaths.

So I never think of patriotism at places like Colleville-sur-Mer. I think of baby shoes, and I think of mothers.

Or I think of somehow pulling off a temporal fraud so preposterous that I hope it really happens to me someday.

My fantasy is that I would get a chance to teach those boys the history of their country in my classroom, a history that some of them would not survive, and somehow I could help them understand what they would never have the time to understand:  In their lives, no matter how short, there was a light so powerful that it would destroy the greatest darkness the world had ever known.

And maybe, somehow, I would get the chance, in my re-working of history, to put my arms around them at graduation, to hold them tight for just a moment until I would have release them to give them the chance they deserved to fulfill their destinies.

The young men I would like hold close to me have been dead a long, long time, and so has the president who emerged from that incredible generation. But I am so grateful that I am old enough to have recognized their light—our light–last week when I watched the news and saw an aircraft carrier group and a Navy hospital ship headed at flank speed for the Philippines, so devastated by a massive typhoon.

Kennedy understood that the most fundamental American value is generosity, and so the ships in that television image reminded me of the president whose life and whose call to service so illuminated my own. It reminded me that I live in a country I love so much that my love is greatest in the anger I feel when it is clearly in the wrong, warmest when my fingers touch cold marble in Normandy, brightest in the flame that marks the grave where my childhood, too, is buried.

Most Inspirational. Ever.

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

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jim-hayes-fb2Jim Hayes taught me journalism at Cal Poly and was on the copy desk when I was a Tribune reporter.  He is now in hospice care with a brain tumor,and his Facebook page has exploded–page after page after page–with tributes from former students.  Here are some of mine.

*   *   *

This is Missie Pires, at the “Mustang Daily” in the early 1970s. I was 21, and Jim made me

her writing coach. She would go into broadcast journalism, anchor at KSBY, and NOT because of me, but because she was bright, hard-working, and so incredibly positive; she actually could light up a room—newsroom or otherwise. I was heartbroken when she died so young, but our time together so many years before was the first hint I’d ever had that I loved teaching and that I might have a gift for it.

Jim knew that before I did.

Years later, my first student teaching assignment was at Morro Bay High, and I met another student I grew to love as I’d loved Missie. It was Josh, Jim’s son.

There are Roman Catholics and then there is the denomination I belong to—Lousy Catholics—but I fundamentally believe that God lights our way with people like Jim and Missie, and, through them, She takes enormously good care of people like me, well-intentioned and good-hearted characters, but with a wee tendency to run off the tracks if we’re not watched carefully.

I’m on a fine road nowadays–after 29 years in the classroom, I still look up at them when they’re taking a test or writing an essay, and they are so beautiful, so full of promise, that my eyes fill with tears. Thanks, Jim.

 

January 2014.  Jim died in June.

* * *

 

 

What makes Hollywood fun: murder, duplicity, and blondes

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in California history, Film and Popular Culture, Uncategorized

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Double-Indemnity-2

The L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold wrote an excellent summer piece this year on great Los Angeles hamburgers, and it made me think about my strange affection for a city I largely dislike unless it’s about 1946 outside and the Red Cars are running. I’m a San Francisco kind of guy, with the exception of the Dodgers, and that has more to do with Vin Scully than with any loyalty to the Southland. But there is no noir like Los Angeles Noir–-I watched Double Indemnity one more time recently on late-night television-–and the list of good films of the genre is kind of amazing. Here are just a few favorites:

  1. Chinatown. Not only a good hard-boiled detective film, in the Raymond Chandler tradition, the novelist who created private eye Philip Marlowe, but it deftly sketches the water wars that made L.A. and its orange groves–the attraction that lured my mother’s family from the Minnesota prairie–possible in the first place. J.J. Geddes, I think, is one of the most memorable characters in American film, and John Huston’s cameo, both jovial and sinister, is stunning.
  2. Double Indemnity. The murder plot flows seamlessly to the point where, after dumping the body of Barbara Stanwyck’s husband on the railroad tracks, she and Fred MacMurray can’t get her car to start so they can leave the murder scene. Then the seams start to unravel, and it’s a lovely thing to watch. Doom can be interesting. In a perverse way, it’s even kind of fun, especially in the implicit comedy of the Stanwyck-MacMurray plot-hatching in the aisles of the local grocery store: the two are interrupted by little ladies asking the lanky MacMurray’s help in reaching the canned goods.
  3. True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay about two brothers–-one, Robert Duvall, an L.A. homicide detective, and the other, Robert DeNiro, a politically ambitious monsignor–is deeply moving. Duvall must solve the mystery of a priest found dead in a prostitute’s bed, and he’s got to tear down the wall DeNiro’s character has constructed to protect his church and his career. This is a wonderful story about redemption, and how redemptive personal destruction can be.
  4. The Big Sleep. Bogart and Bacall in a plot so arcane that even the scriptwriters couldn’t figure it out. Bogie’s Marlowe builds on the fast-talking Sam Spade we’d first seen in San Francisco, in The Maltese Falcon, and his ability to shift character, posing, for example, as a dirty-minded bookworm in one scene, foreshadows James Garner’s television detective, the delightful Jim Rockford. Bacall is smoky, alluring, mysterious, dangerous, and Bacall.
  5. L.A. Confidential. A superb ensemble cast–Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kim Basinger as a kind of Bacall archetype, although her call-girl character has been molded to look like Veronica Lake. You’ve got your fast-talkers, con men, like Spacey, but you’ve also got your straight arrows, like Pearce and the wounded Crowe, and all three, it will turn out, are decent men at their core in a department so corrupt that even they, in own casual infidelities to the law, must finally take a stand. Again, a wonderfully redemptive story crowned by a harrowing shootout scene.
  6. The Big Lebowski. I’m a little dense, but by the third or fourth time I realized that this was a wonderful tribute to and parody of the Chandleresque formula, with Jeff Bridges as a soft-boiled stoner and the incomparable John Goodman as Walter, his manic, explosive and completely inept partner. Includes femmes fatale, slipped Mickeys (in Lebowski’s White Russian), a couple of Falcon-like talismans (a finger, Lebowski’s rug), and a brace of Nihilists.

What makes these films even more compelling is, of course, real tragedy. Human wreckage has always surrounded the film industry and examples include Elizabeth Short’s grisly 1947 murder (she worked for awhile at what would become Vandenberg Air Force Base), when she became immortalized as “The Black Dahlia;” the implosion of film comedian Fatty Arbuckle’s career when he was charged with the 1921 murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe; the mysterious 1924 death of producer Thomas Ince, “father of the Western,” after a visit to William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, Oneida, where Hearst mistress Marion Davies, as she did at San Simeon, served as the Chief’s hostess. What ended Ince’s life? Was it a heart attack or a bullet intended for Charlie Chaplin, Davies’ putative lover?

It’s film, finally and ironically, that best illuminates dark places like these. All of these films entangle us in L.A.’s tawdry Day of the Locust glamour, in its ambition and deception, because this is a place where nobody is who you think they are, a place where, as Chandler wrote, the Red Wind-–the Santa Anas-–can lead even the most dutiful Valley housewife to contemplate her husband’s back while absently squeezing the butcher knife’s handle in her free hand, the one without the potholder.

Glory Days

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in California history, Film and Popular Culture, Personal memoirs

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Screen shot 2014-07-22 at 4.18.51 PMI wish I had more old photos of my days at Branch Elementary School in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, which I attended between 1958 and 1966.

I started at the 1880s schoolhouse, but in 1962, we moved into one of those Sputnik School of Architecture schools that was twice as big as the old school.  It had four rooms.

I remember seeing one photo of me, Dennis Gularte, and it might’ve been Melvin Cecchetti, all decked out like cowboys, down to chaps and Mattel Fanner ’50s (“If it’s Mattel, it’s swell!”) on our hips.

For the uninitiated, a “Fanner ’50″ is a replica double-action Old West six-shooter that allows your shorter Old West gunfighter to get off approximately 1,200 shots without reloading. It was a marvel.

That was back in the days when gunfights on the playground were still culturally permissible, although they were limited to Fridays, which remains my favorite day of the week.

There was even a glorious, if very brief, time–our teachers would decide to draw the line at high-capacity ammunition drums–when the television show The Untouchables was popular and so we re-enacted the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with Mattel-It’s-Swell Tommy Guns.  We died spectacular deaths after we had lined up, hands up, against one wall of the school. We took turns pretending to be the Moran Gang victims and Capone’s button men. We were a democratic bunch.

The girls on the swings just thought we were gross.   But they were girls, mind you, and they liked to pretend they were horses, which we found damned peculiar.

We liked to pretend we were ’62 Corvettes.

So us Branch School kids–all 70-odd of us, first through eighth grades– were both rootin’ and tootin’. But we also could be very good.

The entire third and fourth grades went on a field trip to Morro Bay, in a little yellow bus driven by Elsie Cecchetti, whom I will always love, and we all walked through the crew quarters of the Coast Guard cutter Alert without awakening the young man busy contradicting the cutter’s name, snoring softly in his bunk. We were impressed with how white his underwear was.  The Coast Guard is a well-laundered service branch.

During that tour, we requested, but were denied, authorization to fire off a few rounds from the 40-mm Bofors gun on the forward deck, which put quite a damper on an otherwise fine outing. It would’ve lifted or spirits and sustained us when, later in the day, we had to visit the abalone processing plant.

Abalone, we discovered, have little Stage Presence, so we watched, stifling yawns, as they lay lifeless and inert, pounded with wooden hammers, by sad, unfulfilled men, until they achieved abalonability.

Years later, with a shock of recognition, I saw the same abalone factory ennui when I took some of my AGHS European history students to Munich and ate schnitzel in a massive auditorium while an oompah band performed and two girls, in traditional costume, more or less danced.  It must’ve been about their eighth performance of the day, in front of masses of greasy-cheeked, ungrateful American teenagers–except for our kids, of course– and dancing with gleeful abandon was just not in their repertoire.

By the time the disconsolate abalone pounders had finished with their victims, they looked disgusting, like Neptune’s cow patties. By the time we were old enough to realize that they were tasty, they had all been eaten. Sea otters were the alleged culprits, but my money was always on the Morro Bay Elks Club.

[Clams are no more stimulating than abalone, by the way. The second-best show-and-tell ever, other than Tookie Cechetti’s fingertip in a vial of alcohol, lost in a saber-saw accident, was the Pismo clam Dennis Gularte and Melvin Cecchetti attempted to keep alive in the classroom sink in the new school. Clams have all the entitlement and ingratitude of the Kardashian sisters and are only marginally smarter. Our clam said little during the school day, showed little interest when we tried to push a length of kelp, which we know had to be yummy, through its shell’s opening, and then did nothing at all for about another day. Dennis ate it.]

By the way, we didn’t always have the luxury of Elsie’s school bus. We first had a pickup painted school bus yellow, with two benches bolted to the truck bed and a tarp over the top, and when we crossed the creek, we all bounced like a bagful of marbles and squealed with delight.

Not everybody enjoyed the pickup. One morning, one of us got sick, and we decided he’d had scrambled eggs for breakfast.

We also used to go to Poly Royal, the local college’s open house, and loved that jet engine fired off in Aeronautical Engineering, before the event deteriorated into the kind of Roman Bacchanalia that would make Caligula blush.

We most of all loved the biology department, because its centerpiece was the genuine stuffed two-headed calf.

We spent some time pondering another of their exhibits, an aquarium tank full of bullfrog tadpoles that was labeled, soberly, “Elephant Sperm.”

In our day, Branch no longer had the steeple and bell that originally was standard equipment for rural schoolhouses, but it did have the first multi-purpose room in San Luis Obispo County.

The hallway in between the two classrooms was used for both hanging up your coat and for beating students with yardsticks. This encouraged us to learn harder and accounts for why, to this day, I still know all my state capitals, down to the fact that Pierre, South Dakota, is pronounced, “Peer,” of which our teachers had none.

Yes, in that hallway, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Fahey had perfected a technique called “Bad Cop, Other Bad Cop.”

They wore Eleanor Roosevelt cotton print dresses, our teachers did, which made them look, even then, like exhibits from a fashion museum, but either one could’ve humiliated Roger Maris in pre-game batting practice at Yankee Stadium.

They also would’ve made Billy Martin sit perpetually in the corner of the Yankee dugout, his nose pressed against the water cooler, which, given Martin’s notorious partying, might’ve considerably lengthened Mickey Mantle’s career.

The powdered soap dispensers out back were incorporated into language lessons, which is why there are only two documented instances of That Word being uttered with impunity at Branch Elementary between 1888 and 1962, and I believe one of those involved a carpenter and the other a school board member.

It’s a home today, and painted yellow, but in our day it was pink, sheathed in what I think what former classmate Michael Shannon has said were asbestos shingles, which serve as wonderful insulation, but, by the time you’re in your fifties, your school days suddenly begin to produce clouds of what look like chalk dust every time you sneeze.

For the health-conscious reader, not to worry. On summer mornings, when school wasn’t in session, my favorite thing to do was to wave at the biplane that crop-dusted the fields next to our house and then go frolic and gambol in the clouds of herbicide.

Of course, in those days, everybody smoked (Camel shorts), soon after they’d taken their first steps (“JIMMY’S WALKING! Here, son, light one up on Pop!”), and the only seat belts in use were those fastened around Ham, the Space Chimp, the precursor to the Mercury astronauts.

We were a hardy breed, us Baby Boomers. Hack. Wheeze.

There were good things, too, mind you, like actual Pismo clams–all from the extended family of our classroom clam–at Pismo Beach. You didn’t even need a clam fork. They’d just walk up to you and surrender, as if it were North Africa, not Pismo, and they were the Italian Army. But I digress.

The point is that I just don’t have to seem a single picture from those days except of my eighth grade graduation when, of course, I looked not just like a dork, but like a PARODY of a dork. So if there are any in your collection at home, Arroyo Grandeans, I’d love to see them.

But none, please, of Mrs. Brown.  She still makes my palms sweaty.

Redheads Again

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Personal memoirs, Teaching

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-portrait-of-mademoiselle-irene-cahen-danvers-pierre-auguste-renoirThis Renoir, the exquisite 1880 portrait of 8-year-old Irene Caher d’Anvers, was part of today’s lesson.   Irene would live to be 91.  Born in horse-and-buggy Paris, she would die with humans hurtling through space at unimaginable speeds.

Irene reminded me of a something I’d mentioned in class a few days before. In 29 years of teaching, I told them, I have never taught so many red-haired girls, in particular, and hair in so many shades of red–from strawberry blonde to deep copper. Having this many redheads is extraordinary.

This anomaly led to intense meditation and at least one extended monologue in front of 31 slightly befuddled sophomores, on redheads–all of this was me processing information–and it led to one logical, unavoidable conclusion about them:  They are beautiful.

My mother, by the way, had deep auburn hair. That’s her, with my big sister, Roberta, in 1943. She was twenty-two, with ancestors from County Wicklow, on Ireland’s east coast.

One of the dearest friends of my life, Joe Loomis, died last fall. Joe was the kind of guy–you hear stories about this in him over and over again–who would drop anything and everything to help a friend.

Here’s an example. My Mom, the single most informative influence of my life, died when I was 17.  She took her own life, a pattern that runs in my family the way cancer does in others. Nobody knew how to handle my tragedy. Joe did. He simply drove up to our front door in a jeep, invited me to jump in, and drove me—rapidly–up the Huasna to his family’s Tar Springs Ranch.  The Loomises gave me a place, their home, where I could feel safe again.

Years later, Joe and I had lost touch, but it didn’t matter because I knew this great friend would be around nearby and we would have the luxury of time to renew our friendship.

And now he isn’t, and now we don’t.

I made a color copy of a photograph of Joe– it radiates his kindness and good humor–and put it on the corner of my classroom desk.  This is his year. I will be the best teacher I can be, and it’s for him.

After school today, Kaylee and Maggie, two basketball players, were studying in my room–I work late, and I hate working alone, so having kids do their homework with me is a blessing.

We were talking, I think, about Irene again–-Irene with the red hair, because Maggie has red hair, too.  I was talking to Maggie and suddenly I thought of Joe.

“One of my best friends died this year,” I started.

The girls’ faces fell.  They started to stammer their “sorries.” These are good kids.

“No, you don’t understand.  Maggie, go look at the photo of my friend on the corner of my desk.”

She did.  The girls thought he looked nice.  I asked Maggie what color hair Joe had.  Red, she said.

I don’t think they completely got the point because I didn’t completely make it, and coherence is in short supply when you need it most.  They had to go to their game, and I think they believed they’d said or done something wrong, when in fact they’d given me a wonderful gift.  It took me a few hours to unwrap it.

The reason–and when you’re in your sixties, you begin to understand that life isn’t as accidental and random as you think it is–the reason I have more redheads this year than I’ve ever had in 29 years of teaching— is that Joe hasn’t left me at all.

My little brace of red-haired girls light me up inside every day they’re in my classroom, because they are themselves beautiful and, I now understand, because they connect me to the friend of a lifetime.  It’s no wonder I loved Joe—excuse me, love him–so very much.

February 2014

 

Joe Loomis. 1952-2013

Joe Loomis. 1952-2013

To the girl on the lawn at Cal

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in California history, Family history, Personal memoirs, Uncategorized

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Patricia Keefe, Taft (CA) High School, about 1938
Patricia Keefe, Taft (CA) High School, about 1938

This year AVID students–kids whose family backgrounds do not include a college experience– invited me to go on the northern college tour, and I was honored. I had never visited Cal until a few years ago, with another AVID group.  I did go to Stanford. For a week. I won a teaching fellowship in 2004 and got to study the Great Depression and New Deal with David Kennedy, whose book on the subject won the Pulitzer Prize for History.  I tried not to look too adoringly at him while he taught us.  It was difficult, because not only was he brilliant, but he was a real human being– engaging, witty, and you could tell he loved the history of the time and the Americans who had lived it.

I instantly loved Stanford’s rival, Cal, when we visited, even though I had to fight the impulse, so common to my generation, to run off and occupy the administration building, Sproul Hall, and demand that we leave Vietnam.  It is so beautiful and I am convinced just walking around campus with the kids boosted my I.Q. a full 20 points, up to 100.

The other thing I thought, with a little sadness, was that my Mom–Patricia Margaret Keefe–should’ve been here.   She was desperately poor, a child of the Great Depression.  She was a human footnote in the immense body of Kennedy’s scholarship.  Her father, my Irish-American grandfather, deserted the family in the mid-1920s, so my grandmother worked long hours as a waitress in a Taft, California, coffee shop, where “extra sugar” meant a healthy dollop of bootleg Canadian whiskey in your coffee.  It meant my mother, as a little girl, spent a lot of time alone. Those years left their mark on her. We had a can cupboard longer than the cupboards in the back of my classroom, full of food we’d never eat, because the thought of being hungry must have terrified her. And so going to college, for the daughter of a waitress from an isolated outpost on the oil frontier, had been out of the question.

Earl Denton, the first superintendent of the Lucia Mar Unified School District in southern San Luis Obispo County, and a family friend, said that my mother, whose education ended with her graduation from Taft High School, was the most brilliant woman he had ever met.  I remember her devouring the works of the Jesuit theologian and anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that evolution was no contradiction of faith; in fact, it was a divinely-inspired process.  She–-as I would years later with Das Kapital–-wrote almost as much in the margins of Teilhard’s books as he had written in the text.

When I was very little, we played school.  She even rang a hand bell when “recess” was over. It had been my grandmother’s—Dora Gregory, her mother-in-law, had been a schoolmarm in a one-room school in the Ozark foothills.  My first day of formal education was in first grade in a two-room school, Branch Elementary, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley.  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.

Me and my kids. My Mom was part of every lesson I ever taught.

My mother and I hadn’t been “playing” school at all.  She just made it seem that way. Losing her, when I was 17, remains the central tragedy of my life.

So, many, many  years later, on that visit to Cal, while the AVID kids explored, I had the briefest and loveliest mental image of her, about 1938 or 1939-–blouse, pleated skirt, saddle shoes, bobby socks, with her books and notebook spread out on one of those lush, verdant lawns, studying between classes. My mother was a beautiful woman, but the most beautiful thing about her may have been her mind.

memorialglade

And I think that’s why I enjoy these particular trips, with this particular group of kids. It’s my way of repaying Mom. One of them might take her place, studying in the sunlight on the lawn at a place like Memorial Glade.  She would love that idea.

And she would love these kids because she would understand them completely.  Despite my ne’er-do-well grandfather, I believe completely that my mother’s love for learning and for the the written word had deep genetic and psychological roots in County Wicklow.

So she would love without hesitation the AVIDS who show the incredible desire, the hunger, to improve themselves that she’d had, who refuse to complain when things get tough, who extend themselves to help their classmates, because she believed that all of us, and all of our lives, are intricately and intimately connected, and that this connection requires us to be responsible to and accountable for each other.

The young person who understands these things is close to my mother’s heart.

My mother and my big sister, Roberta, 1943. Mom was twenty-two.

Going to be a teacher? *Sigh!* Well, here’s some trade secrets.

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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10492258_10204106681091042_2162799464749117961_nI always wanted to be among those teachers who seem to command the fondest memories and the greatest respect, and in my high school experience—-the school where I teach today-—those would be Sara Steigerwalt, my speech teacher, and Carol Hirons, my journalism teacher. They generate fond and respectful memories, and I was terrified of both of them.

I also loved them.

I knew another teacher, with a fabulous reputation and whom I observed for an education class, who terrified his students; in fact, tyranny was the bedrock of his classroom technique. He did not hesitate to use humiliation and he used it frequently, and he did it to push his kids into thinking and speaking and writing in ways that made them better students, and it worked. He was gifted, charismatic, and passionate, and I hated the way he taught.

In his defense, he really did care for his students. The English loved the Parthenon, too, which is why they mutilated it, breaking off huge chunks of Antiquity so they could sail them across the seas and up the Thames to the British Museum.

I tried to be a Tough Guy, like him, early on in my teaching career, but something unexpected happened: My stomach began to hurt so badly that I would actually have to stop and catch my breath. I couldn’t sustain it.

So I went back to being myself. And, as much as I’d like to, mostly to salve my male ego, I can’t be a tough guy. It saved my pride a little when I came to realize that I deal with children, not calves at branding time.

Don’t be mistaken: That doesn’t mean I’m not demanding. I expect a lot from my kids, and I hold them to those expectations. And my most demanding demands are for civility and effort.

But I fail, every year, the basic Jesuit rule about teaching: Don’t smile until Christmas. This is because if I couldn’t be funny when I teach-—I was my high school’s Class Comedian, 1970—-I would almost certainly die, and it also means that sometimes, especially when I’m watching students write an essay or take a test, when they’re not watching me, they make me so happy that I can’t help but smile. Children are so beautiful, and what’s just as beautiful is thinking about the kinds of people they will grow up to be. They will, I think, do a better job than my generation did.

[Sure, Gregory. You teach really smart kids. I get that a lot from one or two teachers, who think teaching AP European History is easy. Here’s a little secret for them: It isn’t, and, by the way, I have taught all kinds of students, and I love teaching knuckleheads, having been one myself. One of my all-time favorite teaching experiences came in a support class for Alternative kids—the kids we try desperately to keep in school, and they taught me something valuable. They weren’t knuckleheads at all. They were some of the funniest and most honest and most decent kids I’ve ever taught, and some of them came from homes that would’ve made mine, sometimes a Reign of Terror with Dad as Robespierre, look like a Thanksgiving episode of The Waltons. ]

I once took one of those education classes—and you know how I feel about education classes—when we observed a not-very-competent teacher on videotape and the prof asked for feedback after. Mine was that the teacher didn’t seem to like kids much. The professor looked as if I were the Village Idiot with two of his prize hens under my arms. “Who said,” he asked, both rhetorically and icily, “that it’s necessary to like kids?”

I later taught two of his children. They were brilliant students and gentle, selfless human beings. I liked them. I really liked them. I came to realize that my professor must have been going through a hard time; he would father these two a little later in his life, in another, better, marriage, and when I met him again, at Parent Conference Night—-I didn’t bring up our previous acquaintance-—he was a changed man. He was much happier and he was, most deservedly, a proud father. He had done a beautiful job with them, and the gift he gave me in those children trivialized that bitter moment years before in his classroom.

I need to point out that I am not a saint, plaster or otherwise, either. I’ve screwed up in the classroom in ways that still make me flinch, years later. I’ve gotten angry—-absolutely and flamboyantly lost my temper, and reamed a class with more fury, minus the profanity, than a Parris Island D.I. could summon, and left them shaken.

Two years ago, I completely mishandled a situation involving a young man throwing the F-bomb at a young woman sixty feet away. I was furious, he was suspended, and, it wasn’t until much later that I realized she probably was fluttering her eyelashes, the whole time, in shocked innocence. What he said was completely inappropriate, and the chances were that she completely deserved it.

But that was kind of an exception. This is the part I love about getting older. I seldom get angry anymore. At my students, anyway.

I make an exception for most educational theorists, and that stems from their theories but it also has a lot to do with they way they savage the language I love so much. They B.F. Skinner English to death, and there’s nothing more infuriating and less enlightening than a sentence written by a typical Doctor of Education.

When I do get angry in the classroom, it’s more likely that I’m pretending to be angry. I’ve learned to pick my spots: those talks, at the right moment, can be marvelous motivators, and it’s fine with me if I’m the only person in the room who knows I’m delivering a monologue in the Globe Theater of my mind, usually as either Henry V or Richard III.

But when I do get genuinely angry, and, in the process, I belittle a student, here is what I’ve learned to do:

Apologize.

If possible, within earshot of that student’s friends.

Here’s why: Teaching is about human relationships, and a kid you’ve humiliated isn’t going to be in relationship with you. He’s going to shut down, he’s not going to learn, and you’ve failed him. And I do fail, with such blithe regularity, and in so many areas of my life, and while it’s all right for kids to see an adult fail, it’s essential for them to see that adult accept responsibility for his mistake.

The basketball player Charles Barkley was absolutely right when he said it wasn’t his job to be a role model. But it is for teachers.

Finally, all of us deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and I don’t have the right to take any student’s dignity away, and that is the difference between me and the brilliant, but abrasive, teacher I observed so many years ago.

That goes for my behavior outside the classroom, as well. If I want to buy something from the lunch ladies, I’ve made this a cardinal rule: Never cut in front of the kids. Wait your turn with them instead. Inside the classroom, I will never ask a student to do an assignment I haven’t done myself.

I believe these things so strongly and try to live them, too, because of the biggest single influence on my life: My Mom. She was no saint, either—-she had an Irish temper, on occasion, so I come by mine honestly—tragically, she died when she was only forty-eight, when I was seventeen—but in our short time together she was, to me, one of the strongest, one of the most brilliant, and one of the most generous persons I’ve ever known. Every moment I’m in the classroom is meant to honor her.

My values and my spirituality—-because, to me, teaching has always been a vocation, a ministry, and while my faith is mine, and personal, it includes Humanity—-are my way of letting my Mom touch, and inspire, through all the years of my career, the four thousand children who are hers, too, because her life still burns inside me.

My relationship with my Dad was fraught, but he was the most engaging storyteller I’ve ever heard in my life. You forgot to breathe when he was telling a story about our ancestors and you never, ever saw the punchline coming when he delivered it at joke’s end. I inherited that from Dad. I will always be grateful to him.

I’ve also discovered, years later, that “classroom management” isn’t about disciplining kids: It’s about disciplining yourself. It means thinking out your lesson—my role model in lesson design is Filippo Brunelleschi, the jeweler who designed the Florence duomo and engineered the incredible machinery that made its construction possible. It’s means you make your objectives clear, you know how to change the subject or the learning style at least three times in a class period, and you know your students–the last is as much intuition as it is science–and, most of all, it means what comes easiest for me: being excited about what you’re teaching and, for that matter, about the honor of being a teacher.

It is amazing how something so unmeasurable—educational theorists adore the term “data driven,” and they’re easy to visualize with tape measures, calipers, and slide rules, always measuring, and meanwhile an eighth-grade girl has tied their shoelaces together–is also so marvelously effective.

But it also takes a tremendous amount of hard work. My easy workdays are ten hours. We don’t, despite the popular belief, go home at three. School is why we’re scribbling in our weekly plan books at our kids’ soccer games, or why I’m grading essays at the local coffeehouse while my peers are stopping by for a cup before they go on a bike into one of our beautiful coastal valleys, or sipping a cappuccino with the New York Times Book Review. That’s not how teachers spend their weekends.

And while I love kids, they can take a toll: I’m also a raging introvert, and all those surging emotions and all the needs and all the questions that young people have can wear me out. Sometimes, on my prep period, I have to turn out the classroom lights and put my forehead down on my desk and just let the exhaustion take over for a little while. That moment comes to every teacher. It’s a price, we’ve decided, that’s worth paying.

Fortunately, I am not so absorbed in my own noble suffering that I’m not willing to share some outrageously cheap stunts. in the name of classroom management, that might illuminate the gifted young teachers that will replace me:

Not getting an answer to a question you’ve asked? Threaten to hold your breath until you die, in which case it will all be their fault, and will have to live with that for the rest of their lives! Somebody will raise her hand!

Also, I will sometimes lie down on the floor and pretend to take a nap, and ask them to wake me up when they want to re-engage in the class discussion.

It’s useful to have a few stage tricks, too. Sometimes I will have to chew out a kid, but we’ll go outside to do it, get our signals straight again, and then I will hit a locker (darn it, they are gone now) with my fist and we’ll re-enter the classroom with the kid rubbing his arm and wincing. When they laugh, it’s because the joke is ours––mine and the kid who got into trouble––and we’ve turned the tables on something that could have been hurtful.

I hate them in the classroom, but parents with cell phones are quite useful. It’s a marvelous thing to call to the door a student who’s frittering away a chance to study for an exam, hand him your cell phone, and whisper:

“It’s your Mom.”

By the way, I once asked a parent, and my anger was not well disguised, who was texting during my Back to School Night presentation to turn the phone off. He did.

Early in my career, in a Catholic high school, I had a rambunctious class that wouldn’t settle down for the lesson. I assigned them an essay instead, due the next day. I collected them at the beginning of class and then, in front of the classroom, ripped them all apart and threw them into the wastebasket.

“Now,” I said, “do you understand why I was upset with you yesterday?”

I believe they did.

Another time, I got so frustrated with a class that I left the room and walked out in seeming cold fury. Then I ran around to the other side of the building, where there’s a bank of windows, and crawled under the lowest ones and brought my face up, glowering, very, very slowly, as if I were a periscope. When they started laughing, I got them back.

I’ve gotten the kind of angry teachers can get with a kid that’s such a bad anger that it keeps you up all night. We lose a lot of sleep worrying about you, American students. Here’s what I finally learned to do: I go to the records office, find the student’s folder, and look at the first-grade school photo. That little, little boy, whose hair has been combed so carefully, is your student, too. And if his hair’s not combed, then you begin to understand how the two of you arrived your sad meeting place, and you can start to look for a better one.

At the same time, my humanitarian tendencies are tempered by a catalogue of snappy lines:

When they’re supposed to be doing quiet seated work:

“I can hear voices, and the last time I checked, I wasn’t Joan of Arc.”

I asked two chatty girls to leave the room, then went outside and asked them: “There are two variants of the Plague. What are they?” They knew: Bubonic and Pneumonic.

“Which variant are you two?”

Bubonic?

“WRONG! You are pneumonic, because you’re more contagious. You’re out here because the two of you were talking, and then there would be two more, and two more after that, and what that means is that one of your friends is going to miss a question on the next exam because they’ve been distracted. They’ve been cheated out of a chance to study. Do you understand?”

They nodded. Enthusiastically. I was kind of flummoxed, but the best part was I got the chance to do a little re-teaching.

Two boys were sending eye signals when they were supposed to be reading. Some teachers would immediately launch an all-out nuclear strike. I waited instead, in the bushes, for twenty-four hours, then took them outside.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “I’ve been teaching for a long time, and can always tell the kind of guys who are going to give me trouble, the kind of guys I’m going to butt heads with.”

Pause. The pause is the most important part.

“And you aren’t those guys.”

Pause. I learned to pause from the sportscaster I so admire, Vin Scully.

“I like you.”

And then you describe the behavior, and why it’s a problem, and they get it.

They get it, too, when they get a good grade on a difficult test, or they try to answer a difficult question, or when they are kind to another student, because when I pass that student’s desk and give him or her just the briefest pat on the shoulder, they know what I’m saying: You matter, your did your best, your behavior is admirable, and I admire you, too.

When it comes to behavior, I am, ironically, the worst note-passer in my own class. A 15-year-old honors student last week told me she was having a panic attack and left the classroom in tears. Later I passed her a note: I’ve had them, too. So have Lincoln, Adele, Johnny Depp, and John Steinbeck, We’re not weirdos. We’re humans, you and me. Love, Mr. G.

Summer, 1944, Arroyo Grande, California

19 Saturday Jul 2014

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100_1460In the early summer of 1944—when Eisenhower pauses at the end of his weather officer’s report for June 6 and says simply, “Okay, 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 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, if not clearly, because the cold morning fog can be dense: labor contractors drop off pickup loads of field workers at the Harris Bridge, which spans the creek that gives the valley its name and that nourishes it.

The workers cross the bridge whistling, an incredibly beautiful, almost baroque whistling, 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, the  fuel a man needs to do the kind of physical work that would make most men sit in the freshly turned field, gasping and woefully regarding their quickly-blistered hands, within fifteen minutes.

Their summer work might be in a new bean field and the whistling would stop because it is such a tax on men who work beans, whose breathing soon becomes laborious and therefore precious. To begin a newly planted field of beans, the field workers 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 yield bell-shaped flowers–toward the sun.

The sun invariably appears in late mornings when it burns the sea fog away and the colors of the valley, wheaten hills and verdant bottom land where the crop is in, are reborn, vivid and sharply focused.

To drive the wooden stakes, the field workers use a heavy metal tube, hollowed, with a handle attached that resembles that of an old-timed pump primer pioneer men and women once used to draw water out of the ground. So the whistling stops and is replaced by the rhythmic ring of the stake drivers as the workers pound hundreds of them 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 and 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. In turn, they are determined to feed families who live in camps or tarpaper shacks in the Valley, or, for some, part of the work force that will dominate agriculture here for the next twenty years, for families who are living in the tier of states of northern Mexico.

In 1944, Mexican nationals are doing this work. Four years before, many of the laborers would have been Japanese, but they are gone now, to bleak, colorless, and hopeless camps–where they would cultivate hope nonetheless– like Poston or Gila River. A few of them, as the war begin inexorably to wind down, will begin to trickle home. The Kobara family will be the first. But many, many families–now unfamiliar surnames in yellowed 1941 high school yearbooks–will never come home. The wound may have been too deep.

Beans are no longer central to the agriculture of the Arroyo Grande Valley, but once gain, Japanese American farmers—like the Kobaras, the Ikedas, the Hayashis—are. Agriculture has changed—the seemingly limitless groves of walnut trees that once competed with row crops are gone, victims of a malevolent infestation of insect larvae.

Today farmers grow more exotic crops, like bok choy or kale, and along the hillsides once given over,  in the 19th centur, to beef cattle, there are new farmers and nearly endless row of wine grapes, multiplying every year, profitable, lovely, and greedy for water, a commodity that isn’t always plentiful in California.

That is why 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 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 field worker–not a Mexican, but an American, a New Mexican–to these coastal valleys in 1940.

Much of his native state, of course, 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, of course, were U-boats come out of their lairs in Kiel, and later in L’Orient. U-boat captains called this “The Happy Time.” Martinez

The U-boats would someday kill that young field worker, if indirectly, as part of an inexorable chain of events that would lead him to Normandy, 5,500 miles 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 for the field worker, now a rifleman, Private Domingo Martinez, from the German machine-guns that harvested crops of young men.