Charlotte Alexander was kind enough to publish this little piece in SLO Review today. It means a lot to me. We grew up with Patrick Moore’s descendants, farmer George Gray Shannon, his wife Barbara and their sons. You can tell from the photo what Mom thought of the Shannon boys. The Irish knit tablecloth is out, and it was normally reserved for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.
Michael, the eldest, is now a writer, and he is marvelously gifted. Here are two photos of his Dad, one of them with George holding Jerry in the two-room Branch School hallway, the other, on the family farm, shows George towing the boys and, if you look closely, a dog keeping Cayce company at the rear.
George married Barbara Hall, an elegant woman. She worked at Baxter’s Men and Boys and took care of us every year at Back-to-School time. I did not know for many years that Kaz Ikeda had been nearly arrested, soon after Pearl Harbor, because he was giving a high-school girl, a friend of his family’s, a lift. It was Barbara.
Here are Barbara, on the right, and the Irish-by-marriage Georgie O’Connor, dressed up for the Harvest Festival, Arroyo Grande’s annual salute (more or less, recently) to its agricultural history. Elizabeth and I had the luck to take Georgie’s granddaughter, Kelli, one of my history students, to Ireland with us. She turned out to be the most delightful traveling companion we could ever want.
But the muse for this piece was Patrick Moore’s niece and Michael’s grandmother, Annie Gray Shannon. I’m pretty sure my jaw hit my chest the first time I saw her photo. I tend to show it, shamelessly, with another Irish girl, my Mom, on the left, with Roberta, when Mom—Patricia Margaret Keefe, with roots in County Wicklow— was twenty-two.
If Annie looks a bit too serious in this photo, with her expanse of lace collar and the immense bow holding her hair tight for the photographer, I am sure she had her unserious moments, too. Michael has shared these photos of Annie with her friends at Berkeley. She’s on the left.
When my mother died, I was seventeen. “Tell your father I said goodbye,” she said. Those were the last words she said. She said them to me.
She had taught me to love words. She was Irish, so that made sense.
For years after she left us, I read. Incessantly. Hemingway, Graham Greene, John LeCarre, Katharine Anne Porter, Barbara Tuchman, Richard Brautigan, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Michener and Rutherford, in their vastness, electric Kerouac, the murderous men and women captured in ways that kept me up at night (Vincent Bugliosi, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote); the science fiction of Vonnegut and Heinlein, the strangeness of Hesse, and all the New Journalism that I could inhale.
But the books I kept turning back to included the Civil War historian Bruce Catton and his three-part study of the Army of the Potomac (“Mr. Lincoln’s Army.”) Many years later, I had read Catton’s books so often—I read them every time I missed my Mom—and so deeply that when we visited Gettysburg with my little boys, we didn’t need a tour guide. At every stop, I knew where we were and what had happened there.
That led, fifty years later, to a book I wrote about the Civil War. Hare are a few passages about Gettysburg.
As disgusted as I am with Steinbeck—recently revealed to have stolen much of his research for The Grapes of Wrath from Sanora Babb, a gifted writer, a woman,—the other book that sustained me when I missed my mother was the ever-so-slight Cannery Row. Mom loved Doc, in real life biologist Ed Ricketts, his politeness toward dogs and the time he ordered, out of whimsy, a beer milkshake.
We took Mission kids on a field trip to Cannery Row when I was a young teacher, to the Aquarium, which I still love despite the fact that they won’t let me bring a penguin home with me, and there was an exhibit that replicated the lab and office of Doc’s Pacific Biological. It would be several years before I’d be as enchanted and as humbled as I was that day. That was when we took AGHS kids to Assisi, and I prayed below St. Francis’s little tomb.
And I am due to take flowers to my Mom.
She would’ve been pleased to know that high-school kids loved to be read aloud to (sorry for the gracelessness of that construction) just as much as little kids do. There’s not much more that I loved than reading aloud to them. Years later, I decided to try it again (below) with the slightest of books, Cannery Row, the book my mother, an incredible woman, loved, and the book that made me love her all over again.
This is a first draft–most of it borrowed from other writing of mine–of remarks I’m to give for the History Center of San Luis Obispo on October 19 at the beautiful octagonal barn just south of town.
I began my formal education in a two-room schoolhouse in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley that had been built in 1888. Some of our desks still had inkwells. A two-cubicle outhouse was our restroom. One day a mountain lion came down from the hill above the schoolhouse and sniffed around our baseball field.
Just over the hill was a little family cemetery that contained the graves of the Branch family, rancheros and founders of Arroyo Grande. Mr. Branch, who died in 1874, is buried beside three daughters, all taken by smallpox in the summer of 1862. And nearby are the graves of a father and son, suspected killers, lynched from a railroad trestle over the creek in 1886.
I had no choice but to become a history teacher. Later, I had the chance to write books about the history—local history—that I love so much.
Me, teaching, I guess, at Mission Prep. It’s probably Civil War-era, either Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or Little Round Top on July 2 at Gettysburg.
The lynch mob’s victims, a father and his fifteen-year-old son, led to a book about San Luis Obispo County outlaws.
Finding a Marine’s tombstone—he grew up in Corbett Canyon and died on Iwo Jima three days short of his twenty-first birthday—led to a book about World War II.
My father was Madonna Construction’s comptroller. He took my brother Bruce and me on an airplane with him once—I was six—while he bid a job in Marysville. The plane was Madonna’s twin-engined Aerocommander; the pilot was Earl Thomson, co- founder of the county airport. I was enthralled by that trip. Sixty years later, it led to a book about Central Coast aviators in World War II.
Alex Madonna, Gov. “Pat” Brown, and the Aerocommander.
My father liked to tell family stories. Dad and Dan Krieger were the best storytellers I have ever known, and that is how I taught history for thirty years.
My name, James Douglass, is from Dad’s family. James comes from my great-great grandfather, an undistinguished Confederate brigadier general. Douglass comes from his son, a young staff officer who had an unfortunate encounter with a Union artillery shell in Arkansas in 1862. Dad’s stories about his family, influding these two, would lead to my writing a book about the Civil War and the sixty veterans buried in Arroyo Grande’s cemetery. To my distinct pleasure, they are all Yankees.
I do not want to cause a political ruckus here, but I am a Lincoln man.
Gen. James H. McBride, for whom I am named.
History can touch us in what seem to be the most casual of ways.
Last week I spent a large sum of cash at the Arroyo Grande Meat Co. on Branch Street, and it was money well spent: Five grass-fed Spencer steaks for my son John’s birthday.
While I waited for the steaks to be wrapped, I remembered that
–This has been a meat market since 1897.
–It, and the storefronts alongside it, were built with brick quarried from Tally Ho Creek clay.
–The brick was fired in a lot owned by Pete Olohan, Saloonist Extraordinaire, and the building named for him includes today’s Klondike Pizza.
–Two of the early meat market partners were E.C. Loomis, he of the feed store, now empty, at the base of Crown Hill, and Mathias Swall, who also built the bank that is now Lightning Joe’s.
–Mr. and Mrs. Swall lived in the home that is now the Murphy Law Firm on Branch Street. They both loved music and played instruments and resolved to teach their children to play instruments, as well. There were twelve little Swalls. Noisiest house in town.
–E.C. Loomis’s sons, including Vard, a onetime Stanford pitcher who coached a local Nisei team, safeguarded the farms and farm equipment of their Japanese American customers during internment, among many local families who did so out of simple admiration for their neighbors, their values and for their devotion to the little town they shared.
–That is how Vard Ikeda got his name, and those families’ friendship is in part why two generations of Ikedas have been so incredibly important to local youth sports.
–Shortly before they were “evacuated” to internment camps in 1942, Japanese farmers came into the meat market to settle their bills. Paul Wilkinson, then the owner, refused to take their money. These were his friends.
“You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”
After the war, they paid Mr. Wilkinson back. In full.
I grew up with schoolmates whose grandparents came from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese home island. Some of my friends’ families came from the Azores and some from Luzon, in the Philippines.
When I was a little boy, the whistling of braceros—baroque and beautiful—woke me up summer mornings as they went down to the fields next to us for work.
I learned my first Spanish from them. Years later, one of my university Spanish professors took me aside to offer me one of the greatest compliments of my life::
“Mr. Gregory, you have a distinct Mexican accent.”
My first sushi was on a special Japanese holiday—I think it was Labor Day—at Ben Dohi’s house. Ben was married to a Yamaguchi sister, and Dr. Jim Yamaguchi came down with his wife and baby girl from the Bay area to visit. I got to hold Jim Yamaguchi’s daughter. Her name was Kristi. She would grow up to be an Olympic gold medalist. I did not drop her.
Kristi Yamaguchi, 1992 Winter Olympics
Mary Gularte took pity on me one cold morning when the schoolbus was late. She took me inside her kitchen and kept an eye out for the bus while setting a dish of sopa—Portuguese stew—on the kitchen table in front of me. I inhaled it. I did not have to eat the rest of the day.
My friends included families with surnames like Pasion and Domingo and sometimes they’d bring back sugarcane from the Philippines and gift me with a stalk to gnaw on. It was wonderful, but I later discovered lumpias, the divine Filipino egg roll, at the Arroyo Grande Harvest Festival. It gave me the greatest pleasure to watch Filipino mothers, most of them, once upon a time, war brides, watch me as I took my first bite of lumpia. My reaction must have been transparent. They beamed.
These were the helping hands that built our county. They helped me in my growing up. These people filled me with their history, by which I mean our history, and they remind me that history is always around us, sometimes just beyond the reach of our understanding. I write about history because I owe the past so much. My writing is the least, and it’s the very least, that I can do for my friends, including those I never had the chance to meet.
My grandfather, Ozark Plateau farmer John Smith Gregory (1862-1933) died eighteen years before I was born. He was the sweetest waltzer in Texas County, Missouri; I wish he’d lived long enough to teach me how to dance.
But I post so much, espeically on Facebook, about history stuff that I hate the idea of me sounding like I am bragging. My Irish-American mother had, as one of her central teachings, that there was no sin quite so terrible as the sin of Pride.
Here’s the deal, Mom. I am now seventy-two, and I have enough stories inside me for two lifetimes. Each story I write takes days of research. Each of the little books I’ve written represent a year of work.
If I don’t get the stories I have left out, they will be lost.
Mom died when I was seventeen, but, as I once told my high school students, she was alive in me every day I taught them. She was right there beside me. Her passion was social justice.
It was Dad’s voice alive in me in the stories I told the teens I loved to teach, at both at Mission Prep and then at my Alma Mater, AGHS, and there’s no better way to teach history than to tell stories. My father was a mesmerizing storyteller. He was right there beside me, too.
Me, being emphatic, as usual, Mission Prep.
So the little stories I post on Facebook—and the marvelous, evocative stories told by my friend Michael Shannon, who grew up near us in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley–are begging to come out. Michael’s stories a lyrical and vivid and, given his four generations in Arroyo Grande, they have roots that make them even more authentic and timeless.
As soon as Michael and I think of one story, another one surfaces. I was asked recently to give five or six examples of acts of kindness, selflessness or sacrifice from Arroyo Grandeans from our past.
I wrote twelve.
Seven more are waiting to be written.
Michael could double those.
Both of us are in our seventies. Neither of us, I think, writes to show ourselves off. We write, instead, to show off people from our hometown’s past whose lives were marked by grace, or generosity, by sacrifice or by courage.
Most of all, Michael and I are drawn to stories about people whose lives were marked by kindness.
These people are our heroes.
I’ve written, too, about our town’s failures–the mob that descended on Chinatown in 1886 and forced the residents to flee, the double lynching a few weeks later, the ugly bigotry directed at Filipino immigrants, the few locals, motivated by envy directed toward the Japanese immigrants who’d become so successful, who applauded Executive Order 9066.
The fact remains that the heroes far, far outnumber the cowards from our past.
They have to be written about. They have to be remembered. In however many years I have left to me, I want to be part of remembering them.
Sgt. George Nakamura
Here is one of my favorite stories; I’ve told it many times before, but for some of you, this might be the first time.
AGUHS grad and Army Intelligence Officer George Nakamura, posing on the car (note the bald wartime tires) when he was studying his family’s Japanese in, of all places, Minnesota. Some of his instructors would’ve been intelligence officers, too. Many of them were women.
Nakamura was part of a team attached to–and meant to spy on–Mao Zedong’s guerrillas as they fought the Japanese in the mountains of Ya’Nan Province.
Nakamura disguised himself as a Chinese peasant to go behind Japanese lines to rescue a downed American flier. He was twenty years old.
When he turned twenty-one, the former sports editor of the AGUHS “Hi-Chatter” had so charmed his hosts that they threw him a birthday party. Somebody had a record player.
So the female fighters took turns dancing with the former editor of the AGUHS “Hi-Chatter.”
One of them was a famous prewar film actress, Jiang Qing.
She was the boss’s wife. The woman who danced with Nakamura would be far more famous by her married name: She was Madame Mao.
That’s a hell of a story. There are thousands more from this little town. There are so many stories; there is not nearly enough time.
Please forgive this reflection, but this is how I think, and this is how I taught history.
* * *
Pvt. Brown’s flags were threadbare–the American flag was gone–so I needed to take care of business.
On the way to his grave, in he IDES section of our cemetery, a big Dodge pickup was parked in the drive-path, the driver’s side door open. . Next to it was an older woman, a term, at seventy-two, that I use heedlessly, kneeling in front of a grave that was almost knee deep in flowers, surmounted by a happy pinwheel.
I don’t know why I say things like this, but I do.
“That is beautiful!” I told the lady.
She smiled and then her shoulders sagged. “My daughter. She’s been gone twenty-seven years.”
“I am so sorry.” The obligatory and stupid response. “I’m going to visit a Marine killed on Iwo Jima.” I had to repeat it. We’re both a little hard of hearing.
She put her hand over her mouth for a moment. “He died for his country.”
“Yes, he did, and he helped me to write a book about Arroyo Grande and World War II. He was the inspiration. I owe him so much.”
She liked that, I think, but we were still standing by her daughter’s grave, in the sun, and it was a little warm.
I don’t know why I do this, but I do. I had Private Brown’s flags in my left hand, so I reached out to her with my right. We held hands for a moment. I didn’t squeeze hers too tightly; she was wearing rings, one of them I am sure a wedding band.
“God bless you,” I said. I do know why I said this. Yes, I do. That’s the way my mother raised me.
After I’d tended to “my Marine”–he got fresh flags (needs new flowers), I ran my fingers over the smooth glass that covers the oval portrait on his tombstone, used the tombstone to get my my 72-year-old feet again, and gave its rough top a few pats with the palm of my hand. Then I began to walk back to my car.
The woman was still there, but this time, in the shade, thank goodness. She was kneeling at another grave, like her daughter’s, rich with flowers.
I didn’t bother her this time. I left her alone there, in the shade. She was by now standing but looking intently at the tombstone.
The past, Faulkner famously wrote, isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. I hope that the devotion the woman showed has been inherited by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I suspect that it has.
This extraordinary photo shows Lee’s army in Frederick, Maryland in September 1862, on its way to the Battle of Antietam.
Ten months after this photo was taken, it was the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the streets of Frederick. The just-appointed commander, George Meade, was in hot pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, now to his north, across the border in Pennsylvania. The two armies would meet July 1 at Gettysburg.
These future Arroyo Grande settlers would have been in that town on this day. Here they are, with their respective corps (up to 26,000 men) commanders.
Bela Clinton Ide, for whom Ide Street was named, 24th Michigan, Iron Brigade, I Corps, commanded by Gen. John Reynolds. Reynolds would be shot from his horse on July 1, the first day of the battle, as he ordered the Iron Brigade into action to stop the surging Confederates. 363 of the 496 men in Ide’s regiment were killed, wounded or captured that day. Ide would become a blacksmith and Arroyo Grande postmaster.
Joseph Brewer, with his daughter Stella, became a farmer in Oak Park. On June 28, 1863, he was a private in the 11th New Jersey and his III corps commander was Dan Sickles, a politician who, before the war, shot his wife’s lover—the son of Francis Scott Key, the “Star-Spangled Banner” composer– dead in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Sickles was acquitted in the first known case to use “temporary insanity” as legal defense. Brewer would lose seven regimental commanders in a row, all shot dead, on July 2 at Gettysburg. Sickles would lose his leg to a Confederate cannonball.
Erastus Fouch, 75th Ohio, was a member of O.O. Howard’s unhappy XI Corps. The corps, largely made up of German immigrants, had lost their previous commander, Franz Sigel and Howard, a dour Protestant, was not popular and the corps had performed poorly at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May. Now, on June 28, 1863, Fouch was two days away from being captured by the Confederates who overwhelmed his regiment at Gettysburg. He would be paroled, fight out his war in Florida and take up farming along what is today Lopez Drive. Another Ohio soldier, Sylvanus Ullom, whose regiment fought near Fouch’s on July 1, was twenty years later a farmer not far away from Fouch, in Corralitos Canyon. Howard University is named for their corps commander.
From the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder. Some of these places are still with us, and some not.
Not the same pier, of course, but it’s still there, in all its creosote glory.
A teredo, or shipworm, with a face—whichever end it is—that only a mother teredo could love.
Happy 100th Birthday, Mason Street Bridge!
The bank in Taft that Eleanor robbed is today The Bank, a sports bar/restaurant. It was still a bank fifteen years after Eleanor fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. My dad was a teller there.
Of course, the Campground is still there, along with the beautiful tabernacle.
The article identifies the six-plane squadron as “VS-2,” which denotes a scout plane squadron. This is likely the kind of plane that visited Pismo. But that’s not all.
The ship that will call, USS Prometheus, was a repair ship. One of her sisters was USS Vestal.
This is USS Vestal on December 7, 1941, just outboard of the battleship Arizona.
Arizona blew up moments later, claiming two sailors who’d grown up in Arroyo Grande.
Finally, and tragically, here is the rest of the story—one no one could have seen coming on June 26, 1924.
My mother taught me, the little joker in the crib, how to read a few years later. On my first day of education, first grade at Branch School in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, I realized that I could read the names of my classmates as Mrs. Edith Brown wrote them on the blackboard.
My mother’s teaching made me want to be a teacher.
She taught me about music and art. Harry Belafonte and Mozart and Glenn Miller were on our Zenith cabinet record player and there were immense and immensely heavy art books in our den, along with several decades of National Geographic magazines. I spent hours in the den, inside the big cabinet built into the wall —it was like a little house—where the books were kept.
She taught me to love God—admittedly, with me, still a work in progress— with the intensity and the intellectual hunger of a Jesuit. Her favorite was Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit, an anthropologist who saw no contradiction between Darwin and Genesis, and her margin notes in his books, declamatory and questioning and meticulously written in Ticonderoga #2 pencil, were nearly as brilliant as Chardin’s text.
She wanted to go to college, but it was the Great Depression. Still, I can almost see her, as I’ve written before, with her notebooks and textbooks spread on a lawn, Memorial Glade outside UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. My mother is wearing a pearl-buttoned blouse with a knotted sweater around her shoulders, a pleated skirt, bobby socks and saddle shoes, and there’s a bright red ribbon restraining her curly auburn hair. She brushes her hair aside, irritated, because it gets in the way of her reading.
I can almost hear her, respectful but premeditated, questioning a history professor on Wednesday about a point he’d made about the French Revolution on Monday.
She didn’t go to college, but she used tulip bulbs to teach me about death.
She instructed me to carry a jug full of cold water down to the braceros who were working a pepper field just beyond our pasture fence.
When we lived on Sunset Drive in Arroyo Grande, she was a Den Mother to my brother’s Wolfpack, which included my brother Bruce, the Fesler twins and the Cub Scout she adored, Greg Folkerts. Greg, AGUHS ’66, became a surfer, impossibly handsome and effortlessly charismatic, and when he was killed on the beach at Pismo in a car accident, at 17, Mom was heartbroken. So was my brother.
Since we lived on Sunset Drive, we were close to the Fair Oaks Theater, so we saw a lot of movies together. One of them, from 1956, was a Jeff Chandler comedy-drama, The Toy Tiger, about a little boy and his stuffed animal. I still have mine, now sixty-eight years old. He’s named “Toy Tiger.” I stuck to the script.
She had a wonderful sense of play. Once, on Sunset Drive, we all decided we wanted to be Bedouins. Mom thought that was a fine idea. She dressed us up in bathrobes, made us all burnooses out of towels, used eyeliner to paint curly mustaches on my brother and me. She even made a gauze burnoose for our Cocker Spaniel, Lady—she was a beautiful little dog, named, of course, for the Cocker in Lady and the Tramp. We stuck to the script.
She was a delegate, from St. Barnabas, then the Camp SLO World War II chapel where the Arco station stands today, to the Grace Cathedral convention that elected James Pike bishop.
When we lived on Huasna Road, she was vice president of the Branch School PTA.
On Huasna Road, she grew roses—I remember one varietal, a Sutter Gold—and there were two long rows of them alongside the house. We once visited Mission San Antonio de Padua to the north, near the Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation, just to buy some of their famed rose cuttings. The manurage from my big sister’s Roberta’s horses—Quarter horses and Morgans and Welsh Ponies—were perfect for growing roses.
Despite the San Antonio mission, she loved Mission Santa Ines above all others. We visited often when were were little. (The aebeslskivers and frikadeller and the nearby Andersen’s Split Pea Soup added to the attraction for the rest of us.) She bought me a little book, a juvenile novel, about Pasqaule, a little Native American girl, a neophyte at Santa Ines. My fourth-grade obligatory mission model was of Santa Ines. Elizabeth and I were married there, not by Jesuits, but by Irish Capuchin Franciscans. Mom loved that, I am sure.
She was, in anything to do with fabric, an artist: knitting, crochet, needlepoint, weaving, sewing.
She loved the Beatles, Ringo most of all. He reminded her of a Basset Hound.
She asked for Richard Burton one year for her birthday. That was the name of her Basset Hound puppy. It’s no coincidence that I love Basset Hounds.
She was forty-two when she went into labor during a driving rain–Dad drove her to the hospital, seventeen miles away, in his big 1961 Dodge Polara station wagon, roughly the size of a World War II jeep carrier. She gave birth to Sally, the youngest, the family beauty, who turned out to be a wonderful mother, too. I can’t tell you how much she would have loved her granddaughters and our sons, John and Thomas, her grandsons.
This coming March 19 marks fifty-five years since Patricia Margaret Keefe Gregory died.
I was seventeen. I am seventy-two. I still miss her, and that’s probably because she was such a beautiful woman. When I say “beautiful,” I’m referring to her heart and to her mind, not to her looks.
She was named “Patricia,” after two grandfathers, Patrick Keefe and Patrick Fox, Famine refugees from County Wicklow, two men who would’ve been immensely proud of the little girl they never met. The two Patricks came from Coolboy, the village below. Then there’s some photos of my mother, of the kind of woman the Irish would refer to as “Herself.”
I love the Turner Classic Movie hosts because I learn so much from them. Last night’s host—it’s the annual “Month of Oscars” series—Dave Karger, taught me a lot about It Happened One Night, so his introduction made me watch it more closely than I ever have before. Among the items Karger pointed out:
–The studio that produced it, Columbia, was a shoestring operation in danger of going under. This film saved it.
–The resemblances to my favorite film, Casablanca, are amazing. Nobody expected either this film or Casablanca to be very good. Gable had gotten into the doghouse with his contract studio, MGM, so they lent him to a studio made of tin, Columbia, with the thought of disciplining him.
–No matter how much the Gable and Colbert seemed to enjoy each other, Colbert confided after It Happened had wrapped that she’d just finished the most awful film.
She was, as Bogart deadpanned in Casablanca, misinformed.
–It Happened One Night won won five of the most prestigious Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress. That had never happened before, on one night nor on any other in particular.
It must’ve helped hat Gable was the King of Hollywood (yes, I know about the bad teeth and the urban legend about the the fatal hit and run.) I’ve always been interested in Gable—I started out as a reporter, and it was Teacher’s Pet, with Doris Day, and not GWTW, which would’ve been one of my parents’ first “date”movies in 1940—that first attracted me. But I’ve also always been interested in Carole Lombard, too.
When I showed a similar film in spirt to It Happened One Night—My Man Godfrey—with Lombard and William Powell, to my U.S. History classes (Gregory La Cava directed), they loved it and they learned from it. That intersection between the privileged rich and us plebes attracted them immediately and it held them. They learned empathy from a film made before their grandparents were born.
And, of course, Lombard was madly in love with Gable, learned to hunt and fish because he loved to hunt and fish. She didn’t have to learn anything about dogs—I’ve written before about her love for them—because Gable loved them, too. Including Irish Setters. (We’ve had two, among many pound puppies in our thirty-seven wedded years, named Mollie and Brigid.)
Those two, Gable and Lombard, like Elizabeth and me, finally found each other, married. Tragically, Lombard died in an air crash soon after Pearl Harbor, during a War Bond Drive. It’s an incredible and incredibly sad love story.
The two were part of our history, San Luis Obispo County’s history, too. They’d been guests at the Hearst Estate in San Simeon and, six years after It Happened. Gable and Joan Crawford filmed Strange Cargo in Pismo Beach, stayed at the Landmark Hotel, which is still there, on Price Street, and one day, The King of Hollywood thrilled a group of San Luis High kids by joining them in a pickup game of softball n the beach.
But here are some of the things that caught my eye in last night’s viewing, thanks to Dave Karger’s inspired introduction:
A quick summary: Claudette Colbert (Ellen) is running away from her father–she gracefully dives from his Florida yacht and swims to shore—so that she can marry a man, King Westley, an aviator who looks like Howard Hughes, as played by Bela Lugosi. He’s a creep. So she’s incognito and riding an interstate bus north when she runs into Gable’s reporter, Peter. Peter needs money and Ellen, the runaway heiress, is his scoop. Ellen needs Peter’s street smarts. So they become uneasy seatmates on a northbound bus.
The bus alone is amazing: It’s big and square with fog lamps and headlights and an air horn that blasts when it pulls out of the terminal. It’s a damned impressive Atlantic Greyhound. So’s the driver: the first one is Ward Bond, who will have a bigger role in Capra’s postwar It’s A Wonderful Life, where he’s the Bedford Fall cop. But he’s uniformed impressively as a Greyhound driver, too, from his Sam Browne Belt to his soft high-topped boots.
It’s all over for Gable, even though his hard-boiled reporter type won’t admit it, in the first night on the bus, when Ellen falls asleep against Peter. She is, let’s face it, adorable.
But the two, as is required, fuss and fight. She doesn’t carry cash. He doesn’t have it to begin with. So, when the bus runs up against a bridge washout, they have to share a room at an overnight camp. That, of course, leads to the film’s most famous scene, where Gable undresses and reveals to the world that Peter does not wear undershirts. I guess Jockey took a hit after that scene. He loans Ellen his best pajamas and erects a divider—“the Wall of Jericho”—between their beds for decency’s sake. The next morning, when Ellen clumps to auto court showers in Peter’s overcoat and oversized shoes, Colbert somehow makes even a clumsy walk seem charming.
Still, you’re glad when spoiled Ellen has to learn to stand in line in a place that closely resembles the Weedpatch Camp in The Grapes of Wrath. Another part of this film’s allure is its uncanny ability to transport you back to 1933, when it was shot, and to the Great Depression.
Ellen’s lucky to have that shower, and those pajamas and that overcoat and those shoes—-and the toothbrush and toothpaste that are Peter’s little gifts.
And therein lies Peter’s charm. He’s cocky, a big drinker, insubordinate and not quite as smart as he thinks he is. He passes himself off as an expert at hitchhiking, piggy-back riding and the art of dunking a doughnut. But he is also, with the exception of stealing Alan Hale’s Model T and tying the man to a tree (Hale deserved it, if only for his awful singing), he is decent. He is, to use an old-fashioned word that needs desperately to be revived, honorable. He is also generous; he is, to borrow Joseph Campbell’s remarkable observation about Han Solo, “a hero who doesn’t know that he’s a hero.”
And Peter makes breakfast, too. The doughnut-dunking scene meant a lot to me. The film was made in 1933, when the Depression was at its depths, and the care with which Peter and Ellen share a breakfast— two eggs, two doughnuts, two cups of coffee—made me a little hungry and made me, in some silly way, want to march in and add hash browns, ham, biscuits and gravy and another pot of coffee. That kind of extravagance—the big breakfasts I love so much— just wasn’t there in 1933.
The intimate scenes between the two principals are barbed and funny and eventually they are…well, intimate…but one of my favorite scenes comes on the crowded bus, when the passengers joint in three rousing choruses of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” which includes a sailor whose verse is pretty racy for 1934 (“His eyes would undress every girl in the house…”) and who looks remarkably like Popeye, who would also sing this song.
I noticed for the first time that the third and final verse is led by the director. That is Frank Capra, painfully young but already wise enough to know that we Americans are at our best when we are together, even if singing this song, than we are when we battle each other. The one painful part of the film comes when the bus stops and a Black man, ringing a bell, bellows out what’s on the menu in Stepin Fetchit English. He’s a moment of comic relief, a kind of cinematic comma, and while Capra has so much to offer modern, divided, Americans, this scene, mercifully brief, hurts.
The battle between Ellen and Frank begins to end in their stay at another auto court, considerably more rustic than the first, when the blanket goes up again. This is Ellen, on her side, as she realizes that she’s in love with the arrogant man on the other side and not with the man she’s running away to for her New York wedding. This might be the film’s most poignant scene.
When her intended arrives at the wedding in his ludicrous gyrocopter—wearing a top hat, which you wish the rotors would lop off, along with his head—Peter is in the den of Ellen’s father, demanding he be paid for his efforts in returning the prodigal daughter home.
That amounts to $39.60.
That seals the deal for Ellen’s father. His sideways whispers as he takes her to the altar lead to her to dump King, Mr. Hughes-Lugosi, right then and there. Gasps ensue.
I don’t know how many runaway bride films have been made, but this one has set the standard, as far as I’m concerned. Ellen’s breath-taking wedding gown, satin, is stunning, from the cloche headdress (like Colbert’s bob, it’s on the edge of going out of style) to the train which trails behind her, by about the length of three freight cars.
A little earlier, stuck at a crossing in his Model T, Peter waves jauntily at a freight car loaded with what were called “hoboes” in 1933. My grandfather John let men like these stay the night at his farmhouse on the Ozark Plateau while my grandmother made them bacon and eggs. They were poets, engineers, one a classical violinist who played by the warmth of my grandmother’s stove.
Decency.
So Ellen, quite sensibly, runs away to her destiny.That would be with Peter.
The Walls of Jericho come down later, in a third auto court somewhere in Michigan, maybe in the Upper Peninsula, where Gable would’ve found fine fly-fishing. That would mean trout frying for breakfast, just like Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” That’s another meal altogether, of course, but. there’s a common link between Hemingway’s prose, and Capra’s films. They are miraculous to me. They are miraculously American.
A little meal was the centerpiece of this little film. It Happened One Night, I think, is the equivalent of a breakfast of one egg, one doughnut, and one cup of coffee. By the time it’s over, you realize, in making every bite count, that it was perfect.
Claudette Colbert, in that dress, studies her lines in between takes.
Today is February 23. On this day in 1945, a detail from the 28th Marine Regiment was immortalized in this Joe Rosenthal photograph as, still under fire, they raised a second, larger, flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima. The young Marine on the right had six days to live. He was a farmer’s son from Corbett Canyon, near Arroyo Grande. His parents were Azorean immigrants. And I knew, from the date on his tombstone, that he died on Iwo Jima.
I owe Pvt. Louis Brown so much for many reasons. In my history classes, I wanted my students to learn the basics of research, including forensic study of a battlefield (The Little Bighorn) and using deductive reasoning to analyze a murder scene (the Lizzie Borden home) so that they could begin to appreciate how historians think. So the sad business of finding this young man’s tombstone inspired a lesson plan. I walked students through the steps of researching a World War II combatant—may they might research an ancestor someday—by modeling what I’d done, in a series of PowerPoint slides:
And, yes, this would be on the test, so they had a notes handout to help them follow along:
Louis Brown had by now become important to me. I wanted other people to know him, too, hence this article in the June 2009 SLO Journal Plus.
Even that wasn’t enough, so, when I began to give talks on local World War II history, Louis Brown was part of them.
By now, of course, I was hooked on doing research like this, so Brown inspired this 2016 book, my first.
And this is why, every few months, I make sure that he has new American and Marine Corps flags. Sometimes, as this photo shows, someone else has left him flowers. That is a great kindness: Brown is their Marine, too.
A Work in Progress 