A meditation on Pearl Harbor Day
07 Monday Dec 2015
Posted in American History, California history, History, World War II
Category Archives: American History
Pretty Eleanor, Bank Robber
25 Wednesday Nov 2015
Posted in American History, Arroyo Grande, California history, History
Eleanor Walling was an enchanting little girl—one can easily visualize her in a blouse with a sailor’s collar, with a big bow in her hair, like L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy. She was also a talent and a ticket-office draw for her father, a small-town impresario who owned the Lompoc Opera House, the setting for a 1912 rally for Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt. On that day, Eleanor enchanted the Lompoc Journal, too. The paper notes that
The program was introduced in a most pleasant manner by little Eleanor Walling, daintily clad and draped in a flag, stepping to the front of the stage and with her little violin leading the orchestra in the Star Spangled Banner in a way that carried the audience away.
Eleanor was eight years old. Her mother had died young, but either she or J.O., Eleanor’s father, had bequeathed the little girl with extraordinary musical gifts. She was an actress as well as a violinist, appearing in her father’s plays, including The Moonshiner’s Daughter or in the title role in Editha’s Burglar, which “proved a hummer,” according to the Journal. Sometimes she shared the bill with silent films like Tobacco Mania.
Eleanor, born in Oregon, San Luis Obispo, or England, depending on the source, had, by World War I, joined her father and siblings in a new enterprise: the Walling Orchestra entertained at concerts and dances in a roadhouse owned by J.O. near Avila Beach. They were the band of choice when Arroyo Grande got its brand-new electric streetlights. But by 1920 or so, Eleanor had struck out on her own, for the vaudeville circuit, the story went.
Pretty Eleanor was 20 years old and just as enchanting when she played the violin for her guards at the Kern County Jail in the spring of 1924. She’d been accused, with a male accomplice, of robbing a Taft bank of $5700. A revolver discharged during the robbery. Eleanor, much later, allowed that it might have been hers, but she wasn’t clear on who was holding it at the time. Then, after that, she suggested that she hadn’t been in the bank at all. Her story changed as often as her birthplace.
But in the robbery’s immediate aftermath, she wasn’t suggesting anything. Detectives from both the sheriff’s office and the LAPD grilled her for two days. They got nothing. EFFORTS OF POLICE OFFICERS AMUSE GIRL HELD IN ROBBERY, a headline read. Her hair was cut short, like a Flapper’s, so she became the “Bobbed-Hair Bandit.” PRETTY ELEANOR SMILES AT OFFICERS AS THEY QUESTION HER, another headline announced. She decided to let her hair grow, now that she had the time. She pled “not guilty” in April.
She changed her plea in May. She might have been threatened by a defense witness called to testify on behalf of Bill Crockett, her accomplice, suspected of planning the bank robbery.
According to the prospective witness, a Folsom inmate, Eleanor had been with him when he had shot a “Dutchman” during an armed robbery in Los Angeles. He complained later that they’d paid doughboys $32 a month to kill Dutchmen, but they gave him 29 years, and he’d just wounded his. And his conviction came because Eleanor had turned state’s evidence. Now, he suggested, she’d been much more than an innocent bystander.
Meanwhile, the papers were reporting that she had been one of the robbers who’d burst into the Taft State Bank on March 13, 1924, at 9 a.m., helping to round up customers and tellers. She’d been dressed as a man. She continued to dress that way—“her crossed legs garbed in khaki and long hiking boots”—after her arrest.
Newspaper stories hinted that she wasn’t innocent in other ways. Both the defense witness and Bill Crockett were infatuated with her. So were the deputies at the Kern County Jail.
But by the time of the trial for the robbery, a reporter wrote, “gleaming hatred” appeared in Crockett’s eyes at the mere mention of her name. Crockett was unlucky in love and inept in crime: his mask had slipped as he herded the bank’s occupants into the vault, so a teller on the witness stand identified him without hesitation. And while they’d made away with $5700–nearly $80,000 today–they’d overlooked another $30,000 nearby.
And not only had Eleanor confessed, but she’d led the detectives to the cash. They found a thousand buried under two railroad ties on General Petroleum property outside of Taft; another $1800 was buried at the base of a telephone pole.
Pretty Eleanor distanced herself from the robbery on the witness stand, when “every pair of eyes in the courtroom was directed at her,” as a Bakersfield newspaper reporter wrote. It’s a good bet that Bill Crockett’s eyes gleamed, him wishing he could burn holes in her, through that
…ponged blouse with a man’s collar, about which was knotted a shoestring “sheik tie.” Over her blouse she wore a brown and fawn-colored barred sports vest. A brown full silk skirt completed her ensemble.
She wasn’t there at all, she said. That was another man, Ray. All she’d done was to burn their clothes after and change the license plates on their car. Oh, and she’d buried the revolvers somewhere between Taft and Fellows.
Eleanor was giving one of her last performances for an audience of any size. They were rapt. She went to prison anyway.
Ironically, Bill Crockett was acquitted, only to be convicted later of a second robbery. He’d do time and so would two of his brothers, one a thief and the other a forger who, according to a family history, would do the hardest time of all, on Alcatraz.
Until Taft, Eleanor’s record was a clean one, with one exception: in 1920, she’d started an 18-month term in a Ventura reformatory. She hadn’t played the vaudeville circuit. She’d run away from home.
Her San Quentin term was five years to life. The “Bobbed-Hair Bandit” shared a cell with Clara, “The Girl with a Hammer,” after her murder weapon of choice. Eleanor had been an actress, but Clara was a drama queen: she tried to escape twice and failed both times, once breaking out of a town jail, once slashing her wrists with a razor blade she’d borrowed from a San Quentin matron. Eleanor did her time quietly.
After her parole, she lived in San Francisco, in the Noble Hotel, on a narrow block of Geary Street. The 1930 census lists her occupation as “musician.”
Two years after that, the Oakland Tribune reported that she’d been questioned and released for a bank robbery in the city. Some San Francisco police detective must’ve been disappointed, because he’d certainly done his homework and it must have looked like a good collar. The armed robbers had been two women, dressed as men.
Intimidation
08 Sunday Nov 2015
Posted in American History, California history, History, Writing
Filipino field workers thinning lettuce with el cortito, the short hoe, Salinas Valley. The tool would be outlawed in 1974. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
I thought it would be a good idea to write about the Depression and New Deal, and I still think it is. What I wasn’t prepared for was the topic’s massiveness, the inchoate nature of local scholarship on the period, and the kind of conflict that, in some ways, is more hurtful than writing about the war.
I’m using Kenneth Starr’s series—if California has a Historian Laureate, it’s Starr, and he’s pretty even-handed—as a guide. But once you get into Starr’s depiction of the period 1934-37, the wheels start to come off your Comfort Train.
California was unique in so many ways in the Great Depression. The downturn didn’t have the wallop here that it did in the industrial Midwest, where at one point unemployment in Toledo was 80%, because California, in these prewar years, was still largely agricultural. It also, in large part thanks to a reactionary governor, Frank Merriam, resisted the New Deal–failing to stop FDR’s programs, but retarding their introduction into the state until long after they’d taken hold elsewhere. Around here, for example, the New Deal didn’t seem to have had real impact, except for the CCC, and, of course, except for AAA farm subsidies, until 1938 or 1939.
What California did have–and in spades–was a political right wing that veered, intermittently and locally, into a tight and militarized alliance between business and government: that’s a serviceable definition of corporativism–or Fascism.
This alliance had its beginning in the postwar years, with the Palmer Raids, Sacco-Vanzetti and, more locally, with the IWW and with San Francisco dockworkers’ agitation. By the mid-1930s, the right’s fear intensified, because there were communists among farm labor organizers–made manifestly clear by Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle. In reality, the struggles of California workers at the time had little or nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with organizing for a living wage, for sanitary living conditions, and for a safer workplace.
That, according to the powerful elements in the state–the umbrella organization for big growers, Associated Farmers, Inc., the Union Pacific Railroad, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the City of Los Angeles, with the most aggressive “Red Squad” in the nation being the LAPD’s–that kind of agitation was communism, pure and simple.
The right had its roots in LA, although most of the earlier labor strife had come farther north. By the 1930s, the Imperial, San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys, and the Arroyo Grande and Nipomo Valleys, to a smaller extent, had become the front lines for fighting incipient Communism.
When Socialist Upton Sinclair ran for governor in 1934, it was the LA District Attorney who notified thousands of potential working-class voters, potential Sinclair voters, that they would have to appear and present legal proof of their residence. It was the LAPD who, in 1936, sent nearly 200 officers to entry points around the state’s borders with the extraconstitutional mandate to turn away travelers with “no visible means of support”–they waved through, for example, a gentleman in a brand-new Packard but detained, rousted, and turned away a poor family crammed into a 1921 modified Ford pickup. At night, they gathered hundreds of unemployed men–mostly very young men–handed them peanut-butter and baloney sandwiches, and put them on freight trains bound for the Arizona border.
In Salinas–there are rumbles about the 1936 strike in the old Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorders–lettuce workers were locked off the job while hundreds of scabs were brought in. The strikers threw rocks at the trucks bringing in the strikebreakers, which brought the Monterey County Sheriff, the California Highway Patrol, and hundreds of deputized citizens, armed with axe handles, onto the side of the growers. They beat strikers, men and women, senseless, used tear gas and nausea gas, set up machine gun nests, and when deputies mistakenly unloaded their shotguns on three carloads of strikebreakers, it took them all night and most of the next day to coax them out of the fields where they were hiding, terrified.
In an Imperial Valley strike, growers beat the attorney, on the courthouse steps, who was representing labor organizers indicted for criminal syndicalism. The sheriff and his deputies watched, waited, and then intervened, arresting the semiconscious attorney’s wife when she went to their car and retrieved a revolver. Another labor attorney–a Jesuit-educated Irishman, God love him–took over the case, and tore the prosecution to shreds: they had to drop four of the six charges against the organizers. The D.A. prosecuting the case had his term lapse, but was allowed to continue when the state attorney general named him a special prosecutor. The defense attorneys presented six hours of tightly-reasoned legal arguments (How can you send a man to prison, for example, for being a member of the Communist Party when the Communist Party was recognized by the state of California and regularly ran candidates?) while in his summation, the prosecutor–literally–clutched the courtroom flag to his breast and preached Americanism.
The jury deliberated sixty-six hours, brought back a handful of guilty verdicts, and recommended that the convicted be placed on probation. The judge ignored the jury and sentenced the defendants: one to eight years in prison. The women got the lesser sentences; the men went to San Quentin.
There were bitter strikes here, as well, in 1934 and again in 1937, when the CHP were imported to Nipomo, as they had been in Salinas, to protect strikebreakers and to intimidate strikers. The San Luis Obispo District Attorney, with a near-Dickensian name, van Wormer, and Sheriff Haskins felt confident enough to issue the strikers an ultimatum: Go back to work or go to jail, charged as vagrants.
99% of the workers, the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder proclaimed, with equal confidence, were eager and willing to go back to the pea fields, but they were intimidated by outside agitators.
The implacable 1%–doubtless, they were Communists–wanted forty-five cents a hamper to bring in the pea crop. The Herald-Recorder soberly reported that one worker maintained that twenty-five cents a hamper was more than enough to allow a family to support itself.
The final offer was presented, not by the growers, but by Sheriff Haskins: Thirty cents. Take it or leave it.
This research is going to lead me into dark places–and shining daylight there, even eighty years later, is going to make me enemies.
Pea pickers’ children, Nipomo, 1935. The little girl’s knocked knees are indicative of rickets, caused by a Vitamin D deficiency. Dorothea Lange photo.
Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans and World War II
09 Friday Oct 2015
Posted in American History, California history, History, World War II
“It takes life to love life.”
02 Friday Oct 2015
Posted in American History, California history
The more I learn about Mr. Branch, the more respect I have for him. The 1862-63 drought wiped out his cattle–cost him $8 million in today’s money—but he’d already started to make the shift to dairy farming, and that millstone brought in some nice income, too. At the same time–1862– he lost three daughters to smallpox. Despite these setbacks and a lawsuit that dogged him in his later years, he was fighting his way back to the very day of his death in May 1874.
“Setbacks” is an inadequate word. He was in San Francisco when his daughters became ill, traveled hard, at sixty, to get home, but when he arrived, two were already gone. The third died soon after. He saw to it that when he was buried, his three little girls would be close alongside. He missed them–one of the girls was named for his wife–and you wonder if he didn’t blame himself for not being there to protect them, even, as fathers want so badly to do, to protect them from events beyond a father’s control.
He doesn’t look it here, but he was said to be a good-humored man–his actions speak to a someone with a positive outlook–and he was small, spare, wiry. Tough as nails. The energy, too, that he had to have must have been electric. It had to be, to drive an ambition that was much like Lincoln’s: “a little engine that knew no rest,” one of Lincoln’s law partners said.
(Lincoln had lost his mother when he was nine, and, although his stepmother was immensely sympathetic, he was estranged from his father–he would refuse to attend Thomas Lincoln’s funeral–and so he struck out early. Branch, as a toddler, lost his father; his impoverished mother had to divide her children among relatives, so he, too, got out and on his own as soon as he could.)
Now I’m reading a biography of the Lakota chief Red Cloud, and even that bears on Francis Branch. He was a mountain man, but gave up fur-trapping to become a Santa Barbara grocer, marrying Manuela, about 1835. He’d start running his first cattle on the Santa Manuela Rancho two years later.
The book suggests that this is about the time the bottom fell out of the market for beaver pelts: cheap English silk now became the main component for gentlemen’s hats. No demand for beaver pelts meant, simply, that by 1837, mountain men were obsolete.
But Branch, by then, was a rancher. He’d had the foresight to re-invent himself, at 35, for about the fourth career change of his young life.
His outlook on life reminds me a little of a favorite character of mine, Lucinda Matlock, from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems about the residents of a little Illinois town who tell the stories of their own lives with their tombstones’ epitaphs:
Heroes
28 Monday Sep 2015
Posted in American History
Tags
9/11, Hal Moore, Ia Drang, Joseph Galloway, Rick Rescorla, Vietnam
When I taught U.S. History, we spent a day every year studying the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang. There is a brand-new biography out of Hal Moore, the commander of the young Americans there. Moore was, and is, to put it mildly, a “quality human being.” His men came close to being overwhelmed by North Vietnamese regulars. One company was virtually annihilated, like their predecessors, the 7th Cavalry. But Moore and his men–he was, to his boots, both commander and father— hung on, calling air and artillery strikes virtually on their own positions, and they defeated superb North Vietnamese troops.
Sadly, we drew the wrong conclusion from that victory. We were assured, I think, that air mobility and firepower would defeat the NVA in a standup fight, which was absolutely right. But the lesson the North Vietnamese learned was to never fight Americans that way again. (To say we missed the lesson of our own Revolution is another story for another time.)
The fact remains that Moore and his men were unbelievably brave and tenacious. One of them, a British immigrant, Rick Rescorla, would go on, in civilian life, to become a civilian security consultant. After the Lockerbie Pan Am bombing, Rescorla urged his bosses, Morgan Stanley, to move out of the World Trade Center, which he sensed would be an inviting terrorist target. Morgan Stanley agreed with him, but their lease ran until 2006.
So Rick Rescorla died in the South Tower on 9/11.
That’s his photograph on the cover of Joe Galloway’s gripping account of the battle. The paradox–of discovering such admirable people in the midst of such unspeakable violence–is something I find heartbreaking. They may be heroes, but they are also very human, and so make me feel very human, as well. That kind of connection is a gift, and it is a generous and deeply moving gift to get from men you will never get the chance to meet.
The Gularte Boys, 1944
22 Tuesday Sep 2015
Posted in American History, California history, World War II
When you meet someone like Johnny Silva, you say to yourself, “this has to be the best and kindest man I have ever met. Nobody can be like that.” But then you meet Johnny’s wife, Annie Gularte Silva, and you find that somebody can. And when you remember what their kids were like when you were growing up with them, you realize that these things are not coincidences: your life has been blessed.
The last time the Gularte children were together, 1944. Frank, in uniform, in front of his mother, would be killed in action in November 1944. Just above him is Manuel, who would serve as an artilleryman and survive the war. Joe and Tony, at left, would run the family farm during the war; Mrs. Clara Gularte is flanked by her six daughters: Mary, Edwina, Clara, Rose, Annie, and Barbara. Photo courtesy Annie Gularte Silva.
…The Americans’ breakout from Normandy, after claustrophobic weeks in the death traps of the hedgerows, must have been a jubilant one, but the 607th would encounter another death trap whose brutality sobered them. The Americans, under Omar Bradley, and the British and Canadians, under Bernard Law Montgomery, had the chance to encircle the entire German Army in Normandy. They would fail, and thousands of Germans would escape, battle-weary, some of them now barefoot, running for their lives along narrow roads and cattle trails through what became known as the Falaise Gap. American artillery units found them there–artillery spotters were nearly incoherent because there were so many targets to call in on their field radios–and the slaughter they inflicted was horrific. Seventy years later, one of the 607th’s soldiers, Frank Kunz, remembered the results in an interview with his hometown newspaper: “ Christ help me. There were 6 to 8 inches of bodies and horses ground up on the road. There was nothing you could do. You had to drive through it.” People, Kunz added, don’t understand what war is.
Patton’s chase would end in September on the Moselle River at the old Roman garrison town of Metz. It would take him two months to break down German resistance and Gularte’s 607th, now attached to the 95th Infantry Division, fought in several actions around the city. In one of them, a company of the unit was credited with firing the first Third Army shells into Germany, aimed at a church steeple in the town of Perl.
By November 23, the battalion was fighting along the river, six miles south of Metz. The Moselle, beautiful, calm, and, in summer, a soft blue, might have made Gularte homesick if he’d had the opportunity to see it then, and in peace. The river’s surface is punctuated by ringlets as trout nose up to feed, and on summer nights, with their long twilight hours, little French boys do what little boys in the Arroyo Grande Valley do—they go fishing.
But with winter descending in 1944, it’s along the Moselle where the unit saw one of its finest hours: Company C, unsupported by infantry, was charged with holding a little town, Falck. By now, the 607th had made the important transition from a towed to a self-propelled unit. Their main anti tank weapon was a robust 90mm gun—with its armor-piercing shell, it was a match for the German 88—mounted on a tank chassis. This was the M36. C Company, commanded by 1st Lt. George King, came under mortar and artillery fire, then repeated infantry assaults from the woods, still dense around the town today. The enemy wanted Falck back, but they would not get it. Smith’s tank destroyers and their crews alone would turn them back in their repeated assaults, and the young officer would earn a Silver Star for his leadership that day: November 27, 1944.
“Old Faithful,” a tank destroyer, with members of Frank Gularte’s 607th TD Battalion.
That was Frank Gularte’s last full day of life. On the 28th, the 607th was ordered to take another town, Merten. Everything that could go wrong did. The infantry that was to support the big M36s never materialized. The 3rd Platoon of Company C took on Merten by itself: the first M36 to advance down the road was fired on, returned fire but then, in moving around a tank barrier, got mired in the mud and so was easily destroyed by a German anti-tank crew. The next destroyer turned back, the third tumbled into a ditch and enemy fire set it ablaze, and the fourth had its gun jam. When it turned to return to Falck, this last destroyer, too, became bogged down in the mud. Somewhere in the melee, a German sniper took the life of the young man who would never see his son. Frank Jr. was born five days after the sniper fired the shot that killed his father. Frank’s wife, Sally, would have gotten the terrible War Department telegram a few days after that.
The squad leader/writer, Sgt. Gantter, wrote in his memoirs of a young man in his company who carried, from his arrival in France to the German frontier, a box of cigars to share once he had word of the birth of his first child. Gantter liked the young man: he was earnest, friendly, and desperate for word from home. But mail was slow—Gantter would be sharing Christmas cookies with his fellow dogfaces in March—so the young soldier eventually gave up the waiting and gave out his cigars when the due date had safely come and gone. Gularte must have been waiting anxiously for word from home, as well—receiving it would be a joyful distraction from the filth, the cold, the constant, dull exhaustion—and it would be a sign, too, that there was a new reason to survive the war, a new reason to get himself home.
Many at home, and in the front lines in Europe, as well, according to Gantter, hoped the war would be over by Christmas. The chase across France had given both false hopes. It would instead be a hard Christmas, hard in the Ardennes, with the onslaught of Nordwind, the great German offensive; hard, too for the Gularte family: on Wednesday, December 13, Father Thomas Morahan celebrated a Mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Frank’s memory.
Even then, the war would not leave the family alone: four days later, Frank’s brother, Manuel, and his 965th Field Artillery Battalion began a desperate fight around St. Vith, Belgium, in support of the Seventh Armored Division, charged with holding the town in the face of the massive German offensive that would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. The Americans would lose the town to the Germans, but the 965th’s heavy guns—155 mm cannons—would be one of the factors that would make them pay dearly for it, wrecking, in the process, the enemy’s timetable. The Seventh Armored abandoned St. Vith, but only after holding on for a full four days past the German target date, December 17, for its seizure.
That was the day that the 101st Airborne Division arrived to take up defensive positions in and around Bastogne. Their stubborn resistance in holding this town, in the rear of the German advance, was another decisive factor that prevented the Bulge from becoming the breakthrough that Hitler so desperately wanted: the German drive to the west lost momentum as thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers were thrown into the attack on Bastogne. There, among the tough and battle-wise Americans—some of their foxholes are faintly visible today– was a young sergeant from Arroyo Grande, Arthur C. Youman. December 17 was his twenty-third birthday.
The American Girl
20 Sunday Sep 2015
Posted in American History, History, News, Teaching
Tags
When I retired from teaching last year, it was time. I hadn’t lost my love for young people, or for teaching, but I couldn’t think of a better graduating class for my goodbyes than the Arroyo Grande High Class of 2015.
One of my very favorites—she’s just starting her freshman year at Poly—is named Leila. The smile you see on her face is a constant: she radiates the kind of warmth and openness that captures others, but there is nothing calculated in the capturing. Leila’s smile comes from Leila’s heart. At the end-of-the-year Senior Assembly, she gifted me with a farewell bouquet. She was fighting tears, and seeing her struggle to master her feelings was an even greater gift. It’s good to know the love you’ve spent means something to someone so important.
I have rarely read a college letter that brought me to tears, but Leila’s did. One part told of her family’s trip to Egypt, to visit her grandmother. I saw photos of the woman and she has a kind of Leila-ness about herself, as well. You wonder if there are applications you can send for to become her adoptive grandson. Her health has not been good. She had to have surgery, and the passage I remember is when Leila volunteered to change the dressing on her wound. Her grandmother apologized for its appearance, but Leila did not hesitate and did not flinch, and I don’t think anything so clinical has been done with such gentleness and compassion.
The experience only reinforced Leila’s dream to become a doctor. We have common heroes–Doctors without Borders—and I could easily see Leila doing their work. I immediately thought of her while listening to an NPR story about a doctor who lost 19 of the first 20 patients he’d treated for Ebola in West Africa. It was heart-breaking, but this doctor was a man of spiritual depth. “Curing disease isn’t the most important thing a doctor does,” he said. “The most important thing a doctor can do is to enter into another’s pain.” Leila has that kind of empathy and she has the spiritual strength to sustain it.
I will come to the obvious part. Leila is an observant Muslim, and as captivating and welcoming as her smile is, there are those–some have been in the news lately–who are blind to kindness because it’s so threatening to the comfort they find in hating. Leila can take care of herself–she gets those reservoirs of strength from the deep wells her family has made for her–but she also is the kind of student who can provoke every paternal instinct a male teacher has. You want to protect her from the blind and the bigoted who also have the unpleasant tendency to be loud.
The comfort is knowing that those people do not matter and have no enduring impact, unless you count, of course, the agonizing depth of the pain God feels when they broadcast their hatred.
I gained a lot of wisdom by talking to Haruo Hayashi in researching a book I’m writing about Arroyo Grande during World War II. In 1942, his family was among those interned Japanese-Americans who slept in stinking animal stalls at the Tulare County Fairgrounds; they were then sent to the remote Rivers Camp in the Arizona desert, where the hot winds, carrying the spores for Valley Fever, began to kill their grandparents.
When I visited the Hayashis, I saw three generations of a family whose bedrock is hard work relaxing on a Sunday, watching television, reading, raiding the refrigerator, and all of them were present, were living in the moment, and the devotion you sensed among them was unforced and unpretentious, which only made it more powerful. Haruo’s extraordinary wife, Rose, was dying. Her son, Alan, remained at her side, attentive but respectful and unobtrusive, his love for her a mirror-image of the love she’d always given so selflessly.
Haruo went through, after Pearl Harbor, the kind of bigotry that I fear so much. But, while the bigots were loud and threatening, they do not matter to him 75 years later. They were small people whose names he’s lost. He hasn’t lost the names of Don Gullickson or Gordon Bennett or John Loomis, constant friends whose constancy has lasted four lifetimes. He smiled when he remembered another name, of a tough classmate, Milton Guggia, who told Haruo he would personally beat the living crap out of any kid who called Haruo a “Jap.”
Milton Guggia. That’s a real American name.
As is Leila’s. She’s the girl who went to Proms, who served on the ASB, who played Powderpuff Football, who participated every year in Mock Trial, who played in the school band. Haruo played in the school band, too. And you can see him in a yearbook photo with the 1941 AGUHS Lettermen’s Club–his bad eyesight ruled out sports, but he managed for every team and earned his spot, with all the jocks, right next to Coach Max Belko, the kind of big, boisterous and indestructible coach whom every kid idolizes.
He was destructible, it turned out. Belko, a Marine lieutenant, died on Guam in 1944.
But there, and forever, in the old yearbook, are Max Belko and Haruo Hayashi, shoulder to shoulder: two real Americans. Leila—and Leila’s marvelous family, so much like Haruo’s—are no different. Their fidelity to each other, their quiet insistence on hard work and service to others, and the openness of their daughter’s heart–all of these have been blessings in my life. They are, I think, the kind of Americans we would all wish to be.
For Tom and Barb
22 Saturday Aug 2015
Posted in American History, California history, World War II
It is difficult to imagine Normandy in 1944; it is a beautiful place today, as are its people: a bonjour from an American tourist has more traction here than it does in Paris, and the little villages are lovely, separated by pastures and farm fields, each village with its distinctive little parish church. During the Middle Ages, as the skilled writer and Francophile Graham Robb notes, few villagers ever went beyond the sound of their parish church’s bells. The world beyond was like the ends of the earth.
It is not the ends of the earth, but the D-Day beaches are 5,500 miles away from the Arroyo Grande Valley. Three local men, killed in the campaign to capture and then and break free from Normandy, are buried at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, an almost impossibly beautiful place above Omaha Beach.
Below the cemetery, just offshore, a visitor today can see young men as they should be—exuberant and free– as they race tiny sailboats, their sails bright oranges and reds, just beyond the surf line, where on June 6, 1944, young men floated like dead leaves on the water’s surface. The invasion of Hitler’s Europe nearly failed here. It didn’t, but only because of an American generation that includes those who still hold the high ground at Colleville-sur-Mer.
Up there, on the immaculate cemetery grounds, and not far from a famous American—the ebullient and popular Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., felled by a massive heart attack soon after the invasion– lies a soldier as far removed from the Roosevelts’ patrician (if rambunctious) Oyster Bay home as a human being can be.
He was a farmworker, then an Army private, named Domingo Martinez. He is buried in Plot C, Row 13, Grave 38. Martinez is a soldier who more than likely knew the bean-stakes and the smell of sweet peas of prewar Arroyo Grande. The best that can be said is “more than likely:” the Arroyo Grande Valley is where a farm worker, as he’s listed in his 1943 Army enlistment records, would have found a job, or a series of jobs, following different harvests, and migrant farmworkers are elusive for both historians and for census-takers. My students, though, found his grave on a trip to Normandy in 2010, and spent some time with Domingo, who’d become “their” GI.
Two more soldiers, city boys compared to Martinez, are memorialized at the American Cemetery, both from the county seat, San Luis Obispo, just to the north. An artillery officer, 2nd Lt. Claude Newlin, is buried here. Ironically, Newlin’s battalion, attached to the 35th Infantry Division, had spent part of its training at Camp San Luis Obispo, just north of his home. Newlin survived some of the costliest fighting of the campaign, near St. Lo, only to die hours before the 35th broke out of Normandy to join George Patton’s breath-taking race across France to Metz and the German frontier.
For another San Luis Obispo soldier, an airman, there is a memorial, but no grave. On June 22, 2nd Lt. Jack Langston was flying his P-38 in a low-level bombing and strafing attack on Cherbourg with his 367th Fighter Squadron when that city’s flak guns demonstrated the folly of ordering low-level attacks. Langston died that day with four other 367th pilots. His body was never recovered.
The farmworker, Pvt. Martinez, 26 years old, was in the southern suburbs of Cherbourg with the 313th Regiment of the 79th division and would have been grateful for the contributions of Langston and his fellow pilots: a furious eight-minute bombardment to soften the city Martinez and his comrades were ordered to take.
The 79th was sent into action soon after landing on Utah Beach. The division moved west and then turned north to push up the Cherbourg peninsula. The city, at the peninsula’s tip, needed to be taken because the Allies faced an enormous supply problem. They needed a port to help feed, arm, and fuel the growing numbers of Allied soldiers in France—the artificial “Mulberry” harbor that allowed the offloading of ships off Omaha Beach would be destroyed in a capricious Channel storm. For the Allied command, SHAEF, Cherbourg was critical.
It was also difficult to take. Its bristling anti-aircraft defenses would claim Jack Langston. Massive coastal batteries could keep naval support for the Americans at bay, and the city’s Wehrmacht defenders, though not elite troops (20% of them were non-German conscripts) were securely dug in and they had nowhere to go, for they were backed into a corner of France, and so isolated that the only alternative to fighting was to leap into the sea.
That would have been a blessing for Martinez and the 313th Infantry Regiment, because their march north, to the suburbs of Cherbourg, on the right flank of the 79th Division, taught them a bitter lesson in German military engineering. A network of concrete pillboxes guarded the southern approaches to the city. They contained machine guns pre-sited for interlocking fields of fire, for maximum effect on the American dogfaces.
These pillboxes were impervious to frontal attack—57 mm artillery shells bounced of the steel-and-concrete walls—so two battalions of the 313th engaged the enemy while a third looped to the left and came in on the rear of the fortifications, where they were more vulnerable. The 313th leap-frogged closer to the city, only to discover that the Germans they thought they’d subdued had been hiding deep in underground galleries and had reoccupied some of their fortifications—for a short time, they would cut all of the regiment’s contact with divisional headquarters. So the 313th would have to do what field officers hated—fight over the same ground twice. It must have been a hard lesson for these soldiers, new to combat, to learn.
Once they’d gotten inside Cherbourg, 79th Division GIs learned to hate street fighting almost instantly. Death came instantly from illusory shadows that a fallen soldier’s comrades never saw, and from gunfire they sometimes never heard. In peacetime, a French city block can be cacophonous with the sounds of cafe music, or cheers inside during the World Cup, with the comic honking of little cars or the squeals of children at play. In combat, the same block, seemingly empty, can muffle the report of a sniper’s rifle or generate echoes that make soldiers look anxiously in all directions at once.
79th GIs, Cherbourg.
What do you say to a bunch of Rotarians? Mr. Gregory Speechifies.
20 Thursday Aug 2015
Posted in American History, California history, Teaching, World War II
Santa Anita internees, bound for Gila River.
I would like to thank you because I have retired and I need you badly. Today is the first day of school, so this is the first day in thirty-one years that I have not been there.
I have not quite made it to the happy retiree place yet. I am suffering withdrawals: I get weepy when I go into Office Max because I am now irrelevant to back-to-school sales.
After thirty-one years, I can honestly say that I still loved teenagers and loved teaching them. Some people would suggest that I am mentally ill. That is a possibility.
Since that is a possibility, I am going to pretend that you are my designated sophomores. Welcome to Mr. Gregory’s history class!
As a student, my first class came just before Alaska became a state, and, although I cannot say the same about Alaska, I have never regretted that class. I went to the two-room Branch School. Actually, three rooms. One room held grades one through four. The second held grades five through eight. There was a hall in the middle where you hung your coat and where our two teachers motivated us with yardsticks.
I loved growing up here, despite the contusions, and so I had the idea to write a book about my hometown’s experience in World War II, and it found a publisher. It should go to press in November.
I had no idea how many stories a town of 1,090 in the 1940 census would yield. I don’t have time to tell them all, even though I am a history teacher and would certainly like to take that time.
I would like, with your permission, to briefly address three aspects of the war.
–First, I need to talk about what happened immediately after Pearl Harbor because those events impacted the lives of some of my best friends and some of your best Rotarians.
–Second, I’d like to give you a sense of what Camp San Luis Obispo was like during the war. At least eight different divisions—about 15,000 men each– trained here during the war, and they fought in the Aleutians, the Philippines, New Guinea, Normandy, Holland and Germany.
–Finally, I want to introduce you to a young Marine from Corbett Canyon who fought on a desolate place called Iwo Jima.
Before I tell my stories, one more point.
You are not required to like my presentation. The world is populated in part by sad people.
If by chance, you do, then the teaching I’m going to attempt today like is the teaching your children and grandchildren get every day in Lucia Mar schools.
There are Doctors of Education—a degree open to anyone who can write obscure English and collect sufficient Froot Loops boxtops—who are trying every day to confine teaching to a narrow belt on a silent assembly line. This is what we call standardized monotony.
Despite that, most Lucia Mar teachers are much like me. We are passionate about what we do. It’s not a job. It’s our calling. And our thirty-five seats are not filled by abstract manipulatives. Those are our kids. Even if we teach them for only a year, they are, and always will be, our kids, too.
* * *
On December 8, the students of Arroyo Grande Union High School gathered in their new gymnasium—a New Deal WPA work project that is today’s Paulding Middle School gym—to listen to Franklin Roosevelt’s brief but dramatic address asking Congress for a declaration of war.
Haruo Hayashi, a sopohomore, was recovering from an appendectomy when that message was broadcast. He dreaded his return to school a week later. He had no idea how he’d be received.
But nothing had changed his best friends: John Loomis, Gordon Bennett and Don Gullickson. Two of them would later fight the Japanese, but they also would write Haruo letters posted to his desert internment camp. The classmates who called Haruo a “Jap” are so unimportant now that he has forgotten their names.
But two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the war arrived offshore. Verna Nagy, a young Shell Beach resident, was looking out her picture window for a picture-postcard view of the Pacific, when the shaft of a submarine’s periscope appeared. She might have preferred the spout of a migrating gray whale instead.
A local cattlewoman, on volunteer shore patrol between Port San Luis and Estero Bay, said she saw the sub surface. She let fly with her 30-30 carbine. The range was too great, she said later, but she had the satisfaction of seeing the crew scamper below and the captain dive the boat.
They’re plausible stories. On December 22, A Japanese submarine, I-21 had, fired a torpedo that missed its target, an oil tanker, off Lompoc. The sub headed north, along our county’s coast, in search of targets of opportunity.
I-21 found one in the little tanker Montebello off Cambria, but this time, the result was more satisfying: at 5:45 a.m. on December 23, the sub fired two torpedoes and this time one hit; I-21 surfaced and opened fire with her gun. Its report could be heard inland by residents of Atascadero, 26 miles away. The crew escaped, but Montebello went under 45 minutes after the attack began.
Within weeks, I-21 was patrolling the coast of Australia, would later shell Sydney Harbor, and would be lost with all hands near Tarawa in 1943.
So the surreal shock of Pearl Harbor, followed by the submarine attacks just off the coast, generated fear that outweighed reason. In 1942, Japanese I-boats sank four ships off the West Coast.
At the same time, German U-boats sank 70 ships off North Carolina’s Outer Banks alone. Americans from Coney Island to Miami Beach could watch as doomed American merchantmen and their crews burned offshore.
Nevertheless, it was time, some began to say, to get the Japanese out. The President of the United States, despite the strenuous objections of his own attorney general, agreed.
So, in April 1942, South County Japanese met waiting buses at the high school parking lot on Crown Hill. There was a poignant moment when the Women’s Club brought box lunches for their neighbors to take with them.
The loaded buses then would’ve crept down Crown Hill in low gear, on their way to the two-lane 101 on the western edge of town. Their passengers were crammed inside with their luggage crammed in the bellies of the buses and lashed to the roof racks.
They had to run a gauntlet, along Branch Street, of familiar places: E.C. Loomis and Sons, the Commercial Company market, F.E. Bennett’s grocery, Mr. Wilkinson’s butcher shop, Buzz’s Barber and Beauty, the Grande Theater, the Bank of America and finally, the twin churches, Methodist and Catholic.
The Nisei children and teenagers who grew up here, who had never known any other place, did not know whether they would ever see these places again. Many of them wouldn’t.
As to teenagers, there were 58 seniors in the high school Class of 1942. Twenty-five of them were of Japanese descent, so their carefully-posed senior photos bear no autographs. The yearbook came out in June. Those seniors were gone.
Just past the churches, the drivers, with their silent passengers, turned north to make the connection for the long, colorless journey into the San Joaquin Valley. They would sleep that night at the Tulare County Fairgrounds, in animal stalls that smelled of manure.
Tulare was temporary: an “assembly center.” Gila River, officially known as the Rivers Camp, would house most Arroyo Grande Japanese for the duration in the desert south of Phoenix.
Haruo Hayashi remembered the heat, which hit like a hammer-blow. Families would order swamp coolers from the Sears catalogue, which did little to help.
What Kaz Ikeda remembered was the dust. The desert winds generated terrific dust storms that hid the sun and the dust, sharp and gritty, permeated everything: bedding, nostrils and ears, the floors of the barracks, which required endless cycles of sweeping, and even the internees’ food. The dust would begin to kill older people, as well, who were susceptible to valley fever, whose spores came with the hot desert winds.
When Kaz tried to form a baseball team, it was the wind that destroyed his best efforts. Most of his players were Buddhist, and, as their parents began to die, many from lung disease, the sons observed the traditional 49 days of mourning and prayer. As a result, Kaz lost his first-string pitcher and then a catcher. Kaz’s father, Juzo, paralyzed by a farm accident, told his son that when he died, Kaz could go ahead and play the following week.
When Juzo did die, in 1943, Kaz left to top sugar beets in Utah and began to put aside a little money. Ben Dohi went to college in Missouri. Haruo Hayashi joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and discovered, when he tried to use the colored men’s latrine at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, that he was a white man.
By the time the camp closed in fall of 1945, only old people and children remained.
The young people who had left may have saved themselves in ways they couldn’t have foreseen. Kaz would live to be 94. Haruo, who lost Rose, his remarkable, generous-hearted wife, this summer, still lives on the Hayashi farm. Ben Dohi lives on land now farmed by his two sons.
Getting out may have been key to their long lives, because many internees would lose their health as well as their freedom. A 1997 study revealed that internees had a rate of a cardiovascular disease twice that of the Japanese-Americans who lived in the interior and so escaped internment. Many of them experienced the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, including flashbacks.
The impact of the camps would extend into the third generation, or Sansei: whose parents commonly refused to discuss the camps with their children, and this contributed to a family dynamic fraught with tension and with shame. The Sansei felt intense pressure to assimilate, which in turn generated a sense of emptiness, a loss of cultural identity, and an even more intense pressure to succeed in school and beyond—which most of them did.
Juzo Ikeda’s life had been a successful one, too, marked by hard work. But his workplace had been beautiful—green hillsides, fields of black earth and, in the distance, above the ears of his team of horses, he could see shimmering white sand dunes. He could smell the sea. In coming to America, he had set himself and his sons free.
But when death came for him, Juzo was in a makeshift hospital in a barren desert camp. He died not long after asking his son to remain loyal to the nation that had made them prisoners.
A Work in Progress 