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

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

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

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

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

But nothing, of course, is permanent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress hasn’t the time for details like these.

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

Adapted from the book World War II Arroyo Grande

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

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

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

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

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

One lesson appeared to my mother in the form of a Mexican fieldworker, a bracero, who one day walked into our front yard and up to her. She kept her garden shears at port arms and shoved me behind her skirts. The man signaled that he wanted to fill an empty wine gallon jug with water for himself and his friends, who were working the pepper field adjacent to our pasture. His face, with a tiny Cantínflas mustache, radiated good humor. My mother relaxed and filled the jug from her garden hose. The water was cold. I knew that because of what she said next.

“Now, help him carry it back.”

So I did. And I stayed awhile. These men worked for George Shannon, a man of immense warmth, and on later visits to their barracks at Shannon’s farm—it smelled of earth and Aqua Velva and laundry soap—I learned a little Spanish from the braceros. They spread snapshots across their bunks of wives and girlfriends and children, and they laughed when I tried out  my new words in their language. That encounter would lead to my college studies’ focus, the history of Mexico and Latin America.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

There are times in any amateur historian’s research when you’re led in a direction you didn’t expect. If you’re lucky, that new direction will reward you with a lesson in our shared humanity–which, to me, is what history is all about, anyway.

The facts seem basic. Isidor Aron (1853-1909) and Siegfried Alexander (1856-1923), were cousins, from Posen, a province of Prussia until Bismarck completed Germany’s unification in The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871. This was the final act of a victory over Napoleon III’s France that would poison Europe. This moment made Verdun possible—the place where, beneath plexiglas panels in the floor of the battlefield ossuary, the unidentified bones of tens of thousands of French and German boys are stacked, orderly and ghastly.

The two cousins had emigrated to America two years before the Bismarck’s moment in the Hall of Mirrors—that’s good news— but not long after their adoptive nation’s near-annihilation in the Civil War. That’s bad news. German immigrants were not viewed kindly—my grandmother’s people came here from Baden-Wurttemberg—and the war had made them tragicomic. The Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps, after all, made up mostly of German immigrants (“We Fight Mits Sigel,” a popular song was titled, in honor of their commander, Franz Sigel), had collapsed under the weight of Stonewall Jackson’s stunning surprise attack at Chancellorsville in May 1863, in Lee’s greatest victory.

The Confederates had come bursting out of dense woods thought impassable, trilling their Rebel Yell and preceded by panic-stricken jackrabbits, foxes and deer who galloped through the Union soldiers at their suppers. The Germans trailed the animals in their flight, but not by much.

For a time, the only resistance on Hooker’s right seemed to be coming from a single cannon, also in retreat, but manned by a crew that would pause periodically to load and fire a canister charge, essentially, the artillery version of a shotgun shell, loaded with deadly steel balls, into their pursuers. The defiant artillery crew was directed by a German immigrant, Captain Hubert Dilger. A Southern artillerist described Dilger’s actions that day as “superhuman,” and the young Union officer would win the Medal of Honor.

It appears that Dilger was overshadowed by bad generalship and the resultant flight of XI Corps. It would take generations for their descendants—Eisenhower, Eichelberger, Spaatz, Nimitz—to redeem Chancellorsville.

For the rest of the war, XI Corps would be derisively referred to as “The Flying Dutchmen.” Ironically, it was a Confederate state—Texas, of all places—that would welcome German immigrants with open arms. Texas German is still spoken there.

German immigrant Isidor Aron came to California. Here’s a 1905 passport application, preparatory to the great adventure of his life, which includes the record of his immigration and citizenship.

Luckily, Isidor and his cousin Siegfried were far too young for Chancellorsville. They took up clerking in San Francisco, possibly attracted by the reputation of another successful German—another German Jew—the Bavarian-born Levi Strauss.

The cousins came to Arroyo Grande as merchants in the 1880s, setting up a haberdashery and dry-goods store on the corner of Branch and Bridge Streets, on the site of today’s “Something Different” store, which was once the Bank of America.

In August 1897, the cousins took out a rare display ad—they were given to more modest two-line blurbs that typified the advertising columns of small-town Victorian weeklies— in the Arroyo Grande Valley Herald-Recorder.

What is clear from the historical record is the popularity of Aron and Alexander—as men and fellow citizens, and not just as merchants. The venerable local historian Madge Ditmas wrote in one of her 1941 Herald-Recorder columns, just before veering off into one of her typical anti-FDR screeds, that these Germans weren’t seen as foreigners at all.

So the seemingly effortless generosity of the two—which had to have come, in reality, with tremendous effort—endeared them to Arroyo Grande.

Sadly, the cousins would die far from their American home. A stroke killed Aron in 1909 Los Angeles; a heart attack ended Alexander’s life in 1922 San Francisco. But, as Ditmas notes, they loved to travel, and luckily, they managed to take what was called the Grand Tour together in 1905, four years before Aron’s death. Here’s a note from the Herald-Recorder that clearly indicates the presence of an Aron and Alexander Fan Club:

The cousins were eventually buried together. Aron is buried in Plot C8 in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery; Alexander lies alongside, in C10. Atop their tombstones are the Hebrew letters that tell you

Here lies a son of God.

Of that, I am sure. To have made your way as a foreigner in a place as foreign as Arroyo Grande, on the continent’s edge, to have generated so much good will, speaks unwritten volumes beyond the simple profundity of their tombstones. They were certainly devoted to their business and to each other, but they were devoted—perhaps even more— to my home town. Their lives shaped ours in ways we may never fully understand or appreciate.

This was all provoked by Marlo Thomas and a St. Jude’s Hospital commercial. They always leave me little weepy. I immediately turn the channel, too, whenever they show the ASPCA abandoned dogs commercials. I’m just a wimp.

Anyway…

My woeful performance on the “Ten Famous People You Have Met and One You Haven’t” Facebook survey– my famous people were pretty anemic, including G.D. Spradlin, the actor who sent Martin Sheen Up the River in Apocalypse Now and the guy whom singer Trini Lopez portrayed in The Dirty Dozen. (“Lemon tree, verrry pret-ty…” Trini Lopez sang. The G.I. he portrayed blew stuff up.)

I remembered that Jeri was my date for the 1969 Arroyo Grande High School Winter Formal. She was very bright and had a refreshingly sardonic sense of humor that was about 23 years older than the rest of us. Jeri and I were just friends, with no romantic inclinations, except for the ones I felt for her car.

She drove a 1966 Mustang 2 +2 Fastback, with a classic short-block 289 V-8 under the hood. Sigh!

Alas, we went to the Madonna Inn for dinner in my father’s 1965 Chrysler, which, for those of you not up on your Chryslers, was roughly the size of the carrier USS Eisenhower.

No, Jeri was not a Famous People. We’ll get to that right after we order.

Yes, baked potatoes with sour cream, please.

As we were beginning dinner (TWO prime rib dinners, $13.74. I kept the receipt), Jeri punched me in the arm. It wasn’t something wrong with the prime rib. It was DANNY THOMAS, sitting in a booth thirty feet away with Mrs. Madonna, and Jeri wanted his autograph. If Danny Thomas wasn’t exactly a celebrity on the scale of all four Cartwrights AND Marshal Dillon in the Madonna Inn Liberace Room on horseback, he was close enough for two kids from Arroyo Grande, California, USA.

Now, I worked with Jeri on the school newspaper, and she’d punched me in the arm before. She could leave a bruise if you’d deserved it.

So, after about the third punch, I went over to the booth, introduced myself, blushing profusely and speaking in what must have sounded like Urdu (I knew Mrs. Madonna slightly; my Dad worked for Madonna Construction) and Mr. Danny Thomas provided the autograph.

That is not really the point of the story, but I have misplaced the point somewhere.

Oh, here it is: TWO prime rib dinners for $13.74!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I grew up in Arroyo Grande, California, but we didn’t get here–we relocated from a tough oil town, Taft–until 1955, and not 1953, as I’d earlier thought. I always felt a little ashamed since I grew up with friends whose families had been here since the 1840s or the 1880s. Some of my best friends have been, and are, and always will be, Japanese-Americans, and their families came here fifty years before mine did.

So when I write about the history of this town, going on five books now, I sometimes feel like an impostor, a poser. But, as I’ve written in one of those books, when we moved out to Huasna Road, east of town, in 1957, I recognized instantly, as a five-year-old, that this was Home.

And since most of my childhood was spent in delightful anarchy, in creekbeds and foothills and sometimes in and around abandoned houses, some of them adobe and some of them haunted, I discovered that I was an incurable explorer. So if not quite a native and nowhere near a Founding Family, I was, at least, a learner, and in learning the Arroyo Grande Valley I became entranced. It’s a love affair that began when I was five, and and here we are sixty-two years later.

This place gets under your skin. After many, many years away—twenty-six—I was so happy to come home again in 1996 and, best of all, to come home to teach young people. My parents are buried here, my schools still stand here and so do my memories. My friends, both living and dead, are never quite so much alive as they are in my imagination.

I am a lucky man to love a place so much.

I am thinking through a presentation to local students about the town’s history, and I tend to think vividly and visually in storyboards, so PowerPoint, as my high-school students would confirm, is the way I think history through.

So this is a very selective and in-the-rough history of Branch Street, Arroyo Grande, California, in my home town.

Branch Street