Yes, I’m up at going on 3 a.m. after coming home from the doctor’s with good news. But whatever it is that’s still following me saps a lot of the energy out of me because it gets me out of bed at odd hours.

I almost didn’t want today’s news to be good news.

This is why. I was thinking all day of people like Janine Plassard and old friends like my teacher Jim Hayes or Jim Watson, a student Elizabeth and I just lost, and the news they got wasn’t good. Believe me, people prayed for them, too.

These are just three lives of so many that ended too early or are in such peril while my life is neither over nor in any imminent danger. It’s not fair.

So I’m angry with God now. Please allow me to be. We fight all the time; our arguments are fundamental to my faith. That’s the way He intended me to be when He gave me life.

Janine led the kind of life that gave life to others. So did my journalism professor at Poly, Jim Hayes, who made me a better writer and a better human being. It was Jim who first steered me toward teaching. When I was twenty, he made me a writing coach for other Poly journalism students. I found that I loved it, loved teaching. Jim knew that about me before I did.

Janine loved teaching, too. This was her profession, her passion, her vocation and, even though she’d hotly deny it, her ministry. Like Jim, she made better writers–there’s no better example than Kaytlyn Leslie, a superb Tribune reporter who has so much promise. Janine was her first journalism teacher at Nipomo High. She was Kaytlyn’s compass just as Jim was mine.

And just like Jim–we heard this over and over again at her celebration of life last weekend–Janine made better human beings, too.

Elizabeth and I were lucky enough to have dinner with Janine and our friends JIm and Cheryl and Mark and Evie at Rosa’s a few weeks before she died. She looked frail and was just a little subdued but every once in awhile she’d say something with a little barb to it so that it made you gasp momentarily and then laugh.

I looked down at her at the end of the table and it was obvious that she was enjoying her meal–we love Rosa’s–and her wine. She was savoring it. I think she was discerning the earth and the oak and maybe even the sunlight that had ripened the grapes.

She was eating like an Italian, who are masters of the unhurried meal. Italian food is intended to be savored like Janine’s wine. An Italian dinner is about watching your table-mate take that first bite of butternut squash ravioli, watching his eyes close momentarily with pleasure at the taste; it’s about being happy for him.

Then it’s your turn to eat.

But even the eating is secondary to Italians. Janine understood that. Good food is the pretext for bringing friends and family together, for enjoying each other, for telling stories and remembering those odd relatives that we all have; it’s about arguing over baseball. This is how you find life, at the table in other lives.

I don’t know why Janine had to give up her life and I’ve still got mine. I don’t know why I nearly died as a baby but didn’t. I was born in Taft premature and blue and strangling when the doctor, who’d been out of town, suddenly burst through the door and ordered my Dad out. He’d had a hunch. These are mysteries that both bewilder and anger me. It’s not fair.

At the end of the meal at Rosa’s, Janine and I hugged and it felt so good that I said to her: “Oh! I want to do that again!”

“You better.” she said, and she said it quickly. It was a retort, even an admonishment. She meant it. She meant, too, that she knew she didn’t have much time.

So I’m not thinking much today about my luck. I’m wishing I could watch that luck happen in other lives, filling them with life just the way that good ravioli does.

I wish I could say that then it’s my turn to eat. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not all that hungry.

I would rather rest my chin on my cupped hand, elbow on the table, and watch Janine down at the other end, watch the way she drinks wine and watch, too, her eyes close with pleasure at all the flavors she discovers in her first forkful of pasta.

I found this beautiful watercolor online of the Branch Adobe, decaying after the damage done to it by the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. It was near the junction of Branch Mill and School Roads in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, on a little rise that still commands the valley below. A little lower are palm trees and a clearing that was the foundation of the redwood house Branch’s sons built for their mother, Manuela, after the adobe had finally melted into the ground. Manuela’s home burned to the ground when I was a little boy; we woke and could see the incredible white light of the fire as CDF trucks sped by, too late to save it. A neighbor took me there the next day and all that was left was a burned-out foundation, smoke and ashes.

But what had been there began in 1837, the same year Victoria came to the throne five thousand miles away. That’s when Branch came to the Valley. He was in his mid-thirties, a gentleman now after a career as a Great Lakes boat captain, a mountain man, a trapper, a Santa Barbara businessman. With him was with his twenty-two-year-old wife, Manuela, and their little boy, who would someday build a home that is today the Talley Farms Winery tasting room. The Valley, even for a young woman as strong and loyal as Manuela, was too wild to bear her second child. Eight months pregnant, she rode home on horseback over the San Marcos Pass to Santa Barbara to deliver her baby where her parents would be close by.

What her husband first encountered were monstrous grizzly bears that carried off the seed of his hoped-to-be-fortune, bawling calves, so he began to kill the bears. His neighbor in the Huasna, another mountain man, George Nidever, gave up cattle ranching after he’d killed his one hundredth grizzly. (His successor there, Isaac Sparks, lost an eye to a grizzly.) You have to concede something to both Branch and Nidever: They’d gotten out of the fur trade at just about the same time British machine-made velvet replaced beaver pelts for gentlemen’s hats. But only Branch survived the bears.

The Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, San Luis Luis Obispo County, today. Branch’s adobe would’ve stood on the hillock at the right-center of this photograph.

Grizzlies weren’t the only obstacle in 1837. The Upper Valley then was dense with willow scrub—the californio word is “monte”—so dense and so punishing that leather chaps were invented to protect vaqueros like Branch’s from having their legs slashed to ribbons when they plunged into it to rescue strays. Branch cleared the monte and planted the crops he knew from his native New York: Wheat and corn, apple and peach trees. An Eastern corn-sheller was his proudest possession, and the base of the grindstone he used to mill the Valley’s flour still sits in Arroyo Grande’s Heritage Square. Both of them were landed at Cave Landing– what is today Pirate’s Cove, near Avila Beach.

His ranch hands—many of them Chumash, others mestizo—worked hardest at roundup in June, when the cattle were slaughtered, not for beef, but for their hides. The hides were stretched on racks and soaked with seawater until they were cured and as stiff as plywood. Then they were hauled, by cart, or careta, to Cave Landing, where they’d be tossed into the surf to be fetched by fearless men, often Hawaiians, who would haul them into longboats to hoisted up into the holds of Yankee brigs bound for Cape Horn and then to Boston Harbor and Boston’s shoe factories.

It was the Gold Rush that transmuted cattle from hides into beef, meat for hungry miners from New York and Sonora and France and Chile. All it took to get the meat to market was your life: Branch and John Price found the bodies of ten people murdered at Mission San Miguel because the innkeeper there had unwisely let drop how much gold dust he’d earned for the mutton he’d sold to the gold fields. Jack Powers and Pio Linares and “Zorro’s” inspiration, Salomon Pico, waylaid cattle brokers in the Cuesta Pass and Gaviota and in Drum Canyon near Los Alamos for the gold dust they carried from beef sold to the gold fields. Pico collected their ears. To fight men like these, Branch became a member of the San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee, which was different in two respects from San Francisco’s: Our was a little later. We hanged more men.

Francis Branch’s tombstone is at left-center; his three daughters’ tombstones are just to its right. The eldest was sixteen.

Branch was in San Francisco in 1862 when he got the message from Manuela. She’d given shelter to a traveler, common to ranch families then, and what he’d given the family in return was smallpox. Branch rode hard to get home again and by the time he did, exhausted and despondent, two of his little girls were dead and a third died soon after.

Kazuo Ikeda would come to farm  the land behind him in this photograph, once owned by Branch. After Kaz and his family came home from the internment camp at Gila River, they coached Little League and Babe Ruth, inaugurated youth basketball, organized the Rotary Club fish fry, which provides scholarships to local high school students, and restored the Branch family cemetery.

They are buried next to him today, three little tombstones, broken in the years since by cattle scratching itches, next to his big tombstone. Branch died twelve years after, so he would have given instructions to have his little girls close by him. It had to have been the biggest heartbreak of his life.

Francis Ziba Branch

Until the drought years of 1862-64. The vast herds of beef cattle he’d tended with such care for twenty-five years died on yellow, stubbled hillsides. Thirst and coyotes and ravenous mountain lions winnowed them down until they were gone. Branch lost the modern equivalent of eight million dollars.

What he hadn’t lost yet was himself, his wife, and his family. He was making the transition to row crops and tree crops and dairy farming and was dividing the Santa Manuela into sub-ranches run by ambitious sons and sons-in-law—men who were founding schools and building roads and raising churches—and then the immense energy this small, wiry, ambitious man had always taken for granted was finally taken from him, by pneumonia, in 1874.

Branch Elementary School, the two-room schoolhouse where my education began in 1958.

So we have a street named for him today.

Yesterday I saw a pickup truck rear-end a sedan at the flashing crosswalk on Branch Street between Rooster Creek Tavern and the Branch Street Deli. Dozens of gawkers gathered to watch the culprit and the policeman and the fire trucks and the ambulance, thankfully, unneeded, as it turned out. Soon the gawkers dissipated and the commotion evaporated.

What was left, once the accident was cleared, was the name of the street. The folks involved, and the gawkers, too, most of them tourists, are to be forgiven, of course, given the situation, for not knowing a thing about the man for whom the street was named. Neither do the customers or the young and attractive waitresses at Rooster Creek Tavern or the sandwich-makers at Branch Street Deli.

But the street where they work is named for the man who once brought grizzly bears down with a Hawken rifle to make his cattle safe enough to the graze the land where he would build the adobe to raise the family, eleven children less three little girls, that would evolve into the beginning of a town—in 1869, one smithy, one general store, one school—that would someday name its main street for him. Yesterday, all that meant was headlight glass shattered in the crosswalk.

Branch Street, Arroyo Grande, about 1904.

This is one of my favorite photos from the Central Coast Aviators in World War II book, and I got a little more insight into it today. These young women were more than likely USO guests of the Army Air Forces cadets at Hancock Field, Santa Maria, the site of today’s Hancock College. I see at least two girls–one of them looks a little like Betty Grable–with whom I would’ve fallen in love more or less instantly.

The poignant part is in the caption. For every American infantryman killed in World War II, three were wounded.

For every American airman wounded in World War II, three were killed.

I was giving a talk today in Grover Beach on Central Coast Aviators to the volunteers at the Five Cities Food Bank, who, by the way, lay out a lunch to rival any of my grandmother’s, and I noticed, during the talk, an older woman looking at me narrowly. I thought I was bombing, so I didn’t look at her for fear of breaking out in the flop sweat so familiar to standup comedians.

I was wrong.

She came up to me after the talk and told me that she’d lived in Los Angeles during the War, and she was part of a USO visit to Camp Cooke, today’s Vandenberg Space Force base. In her time, in World War II, it had been a US Army armored training base, and she was one of the young women, densely chaperoned and caravaned north in Greyhound buses, who would visit the GIs, training to become tank crewmen, courtesy of the USO.

“We had dinner with them, and we went out to a dance, and then we went to church with them. And they were so happy to see us–I had a marvelous time!” Then she bought a book.

Before you think I’ve gone all soft in the head, I’m well aware that wartime was not an Andy Hardy movie. Illegitimacy skyrocketed, and so did juvenile delinquency. And one of the civilian workers at Camp Cooke–voted a “Camp Cooke Cutie” in the camp newspaper in 1944–was Elizabeth Short (below), the “Black Dahlia” murder victim three years later, which proves, sadly, that a tradition of trivializing women, and of brutalizing them, goes deep in American culture.

This woman’s experience was, thank God, vastly different, yet it was the same one I’d heard from a veteran Santa Maria Times reporter, Karen White, who once told me that her big sister went to USO dances at Camp San Luis Obispo. She, too had a marvelous time.

(As a high school history teacher, one of the best proms I ever chaperoned, when my wife and I taught at Mission Prep in San Luis Obispo, was at the Camp SLO Officers’ Club. The place is alive with the presence of officers and officers’ wives or fiancés from back home—they would’ve endured unbelievably uncomfortable wartime train trips—come all the way to California, from a long, long time ago. You can sense them there, sense the vitality of young lives interrupted. I remember feeling somehow comforted by the closeness of them. I’ve heard others talk about the same feelings I had.)

The graduation dances for Navy fliers who’d completed preflight training at Cal Poly—3,000 did during the war, while the civilian student population fell to eighty–had a special touch because the chaperone who brought the young women to Poly was none other than Mrs. Edward G. Robinson. It made sense, Edward G. had been a Navy man in the First World War, long before he became Scarface, long before Fred McMurray poured out his lifeblood and his murder confession to Edward G. in Double Indemnity.

So I was gifted today with story of a woman who went to a dance with young soldiers seventy-five years ago. For just the briefest of moments, she was, in my imagination and in her memory, a teenager again.

What a blessing.

Jess Milo McChesney, B-24 pilot, top right.

The reason I write books is to disabuse us of the notion that, because we’re from a rural California county, we’re not all that important to American history.  This is not so.

The McChesney family of Corbett Canyon–I was taught by a relative, Eva Fahey, at Branch School, went to Arroyo Grande High with another, Leroy McChesney III, and finally, taught a third, Kathryn, who is quietly but incandescently brilliant–is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

They ran a dairy out there (the McChesney children would lay out milk cans on a trestle for the Pacific Coast Railway and, magically, have it return to them as ice cream from the Golden State Creamery in San Luis Obispo), but dairy cows were far from their chief interest.

Leroy McChensey Jr., tall and rangy, would take breaks from the milk barn to, in borrowing Whitman’s phrase, “stare in perfect wonder” at the vultures drifting effortlessly overhead. He caught the flying bug early.

Leroy McChesney Jr.

The urge to fly got worse when a wrong-way biplane from Santa Maria landed in a pasture alongside the McChesney farm, which the pilot, in 1922, had mistaken for his landing strip in Santa Maria, most likely another pasture just a tad bit farther south.

The wrong-way airplane, with passengers who don’t seem too upset, Corbett Canyon, 1922.

The proof that Leroy had been bitten badly by flying came long after he’d earned a pilot’s license, once he’d married and started a family. He began building a full-scale glider, for whatever reason, in the living room. It grew. The kids had to dodge the fuselage to make their way to the kitchen for Golden State ice cream in the freezer. I think eventually Leroy’s project migrated outside, but his love for flying remained such a constant in the family that, years later, after he’d suffered a heart attack, his wife, Grace, took up flying. She reasoned that she’d have to land the damned plane. Truth be told, she, a member of the “99’s,” a women’s flying group, may have been the better pilot.

But, unlike Leroy, she didn’t get the country airport, McChesney Field, named for her. It was Leroy’s boundless energy as an advocate for fellow fliers and as a member of several state and national aviation boards that got that well-deserved honor.

His little brother, Jess, caught the bug, too. And he was a war hero, like the more famous son of another dairy family, the Edna Valley Righettis, who gave us P-51 pilot Elwyn, an enormously gifted flier and leader, lost in 1945.

Jess flew his thirty-five B-24 combat missions, in the Fifteenth Air Force, out of Italy, a pilot whose career was book-ended by crash landings on both his first and final bomb missions, which wended their way over the Alps and into Austria, Germany, and Hungary, where civilians lynched downed aircrews. On both those book-end missions, the latter a belly-flop on a British airfield, the big bomber he piloted had been shot to pieces.

One of his gunners tried to contact the family many, many years later, and learned, over the phone, that Jess had died. He was devastated.

“I would fly to the gates of hell with that man,” he said simply over the long-distance connection.

Jess’s career did not end with the end of World War II. He would win his fifth Air Medal in “Operation Vittles,” which we know better as the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift, when Stalin, determined to starve the western Allies out of Berlin, deep inside East Germany, closed the borders to ground traffic.

Of course, it wasn’t Allies who were going to starve. It was German children. So in one of, I think, the most heroic episodes in our history, veteran World War II pilots who had been shot to pieces by German 88-mm flak or by German fighters, FW-190s, turned instead to airlifting fuel and food and medicine to Berliners, and especially to children. That’s when Jess Milo McChesney was activated from the Reserves and flew the 100 missions that would add a fifth Air Medal to his DFC.

We tend to downplay the Berlin Airlift in favor of the “Memphis Belles” of World War II but, truth be told, what Jess did in 1948-49 was nearly as dangerous. The relief flights were so relentless and so constant–one of the biggest cities in the world had to be supplied completely by air–that exhausted pilots made mistakes that killed them and their aircrews, or exhausted airframes failed and plunged, in pieces, into Berlin suburbs. These were enormously courageous and compassionate young men.

An American GI in Berlin’s occupation force recorded this image of a little girl in 1945.

Of course, the most famous of Jess’s comrades was Gail Halverson, “Der Schockoladen Flieger,” who tied handkerchiefs to Hershey Bars and dropped them, in their little parachutes, to the children of Berlin on his approach to the airfield at Templehof.

Halverson did this because he loved children. I watched a story, on CBS news on, I think, the fiftieth anniversary of Halverson’s chocolate campaign. When he landed in Berlin, he was immediately buried by a mass of adoring and middle-aged German hausfraus, who had never and would never surrender their love for Americans.

And Jess Milo McChesney, far less famous than Halverson but just as brave and just as bound by duty and by compassion, is just as important to American history. There is a powerful connection between Berlin and Corbett Canyon, California.

I was so happy to find this book, Horses of the West, by the superb photographer Jeanne Thwaites, from 1971, because it’s out of print AND because that’s my big sister, Roberta Gregory, on her Morgan mare, in the center of this photo, between two noted local horsewomen, Sid Spencer and Anne Westerman.

Sid and Anne were sisters. Anne raised her Welsh ponies off of Carpenter Canyon Road and the little fellows were unintimidated by Sid’s Herefords, some of them as big as the ponies, at roundup time. [Welsh ponies used to haul carloads of coal out of mines, so they’re tough little beasties.] Anne taught locally for many years, including a stint at the one-room Santa Manuela School, now in Arroyo Grande’s Heritage Square. P.J. Hemmi, lynched at fifteen in 1886 from the Arroyo Grande PCRR trestle, also attended a previous version of that school, which burned. Lumber from that school was salvaged to build “our” 1901 schoolhouse. That was a long, long, long time, of course, before Anne’s tenure there.

In 1936, the woman’s beret and mannish dress—oxford shirt, pleated skirt, sweater tied around her shoulders, high-topped tennis shoes—might have made her look a little like the outlaw Bonnie Parker. The car she drove was a powerful V8,  the engine Bonnie and Clyde favored, but her car was homely and utilitarian, a wood-paneled Model C Ford wagon, not sleek and raked like the Ford DeLuxe in which the outlaws had met their deaths two years before. The driver, nodding a little with each click of the seams in the two-lane concrete Highway 101, needed a wagon’s room, not for bank-bags full of loot, but for equipment, the boxy, awkward but fragile paraphernalia of the documentary photographer, tucked securely inside the passenger cabin and wedged together in cases to make the run north to San Francisco secure and tight.

She had a good six hours to go before San Francisco and so was taking a chance on dubious tires on the narrow coast highway, littered in sad little Darwinian islets with expired possums, skunks, and ground squirrels. For her, the more menacing detritus was that of a nation in motion: fragments of glass, shredded and peeled truck-tire treads, oil slicks, fragments of cargo that included scraps of lumber and tenpenny nails. Her  tires, nearly bald at the edges from months of traveling hard roads in the San Joaquin Valley and the California coast, were vulnerable to the traps the 101 had laid for her, but she wasn’t prepared for the trap the roadside sign presented.

PEA PICKERS CAMP

At first, she was strong enough to resist the seduction of the crudely-lettered sign; she had so far to go and had, after all, only reached the southern edge of San Luis Obispo County. Here  the terrain was just beginning to reveal that she’d left the gravitational pull of Los Angeles, which ends at about the Gaviota Pass, with its severe rock outcroppings scattered with spiny yucca plants, where the light hits hard at noontime and yields to soft pastels at sunset, purples and pinks, all suggestive of aridity and drought in a country meant for lizards and coyotes and not for farming.

She knew the farmland she was entering pretty well, had interviewed and talked to its Mexican migrants and itinerant cowboys and the gypsy people mistakenly generalized as “Okies,” “mistaken” because she’d photographed the same kind of people from as far away as Vermont. They lived in their canvas tents and lean-tos in labor camps like the one the cardboard sign suggested, and they were as hard and as stark and as dry as the rocks at Gaviota. Poverty and stoop labor and hunger and human hostility had dried these people out by 1936. If  the woman had her way, hope would wash through them like irrigation water the color of creamed coffee did through the furrows of the fields they worked, fields of pole beans and strawberries, cabbages and peas. But this water would revive them, fill them out, galvanize and energize them, restore to them the forward-looking strength that had been so fundamental to their ancestors from Germany, from the Scots Lowlands, from Sonora and Mississippi, from Luzon and Kyushu. These people waited, quiet, stoic, unblinking, for the waters of hope to baptize them. But they thirsted for them.

She kept driving north past the irrigated fields and vast groves of fruit and walnut trees because there was no need for her to stop. On the seat and the floor beside her were thousands of  5 x 7 negatives secure inside their wooden frames, stored in black light-resistant boxes, and on that film she had captured the hard, dry, and thirsty people at work in their fields, in camps preparing dinner or washing laundry, and their children beside them in the fields, whole families struggling with the trailing bags they were struggling to fill with cotton bolls or onions or potatoes or with the tall wooden pails meant to be filled with fruit or pea pods. They harvested the food that fed a nation that was now too incapable, in places like Henry Ford’s Detroit, of feeding itself. Ironically, the harvesters themselves went hungry. They’d been abandoned by fossilized congressmen who forgot the hunger of the hill people that had driven their forebears, fierce Populists like Tom Watson, to the offices of great power that they now held.

So the migrants’ children’s bellies were swollen, their legs were like sticks, knock-kneed from rickets, and now, in the hard rains that had come late this year, the dominant sounds that came from the tents in the migrant camps were the wracking coughs of migrant children in attacks that convulsed them and curled them like sowbugs into the fetal position where they could gather enough strength for another breath. There were thousands of people like these harvest people, sealed in her negatives on the seat beside her, waiting to come to life again in tubs of fixer in the photo lab.

Some of them, some of those children, were going to die.

South of the Ontario Grade, to her left, was a stretch of the Pacific in a shallow crescent from Guadalupe to Port Harford; the sight of it must have hurried her north to where she would finally see the ocean again, and with it San Francisco.

Ten minutes later, impulsively, somewhere near San Luis Obispo, the driver pulled to the shoulder and stopped her car.

The engine idled and her grip tightened atop the steering wheel. She leaned forward until her forehead rested against her knuckles and she closed her eyes. She was tired. She had miles and hours of highway ahead of her before home and relief and release from the hard work she’d been doing. Then she sighed. There was only one thing to be done. She brought the Ford around in a U-turn and headed south on the highway she knew so well that she would intuit a mile ahead of its appearance where the sign would be,  where she would turn off the 101. She could not know it now, a little angry at herself for reversing  course, but when she turned off she would meet a Madonna of the Sorrows, a woman in a tent in a muddy field who would leave even a master like Raphael rapt in her presence and powerless to capture her image. This image was meant for the photographer, and meant for her alone.