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

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.