This was taken in 1956, when the as-yet-incomplete Gregory family (Sally would debut later, when we lived on Huasna Road) lived at 1063 Sunset Drive.
In the first photo in the gallery below, it appears that I have just been informed that the Soviets have the hydrogen bomb.
Either that or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was on TV. He appeared fully vested and berobed, complete with skullcap. I think I confused him with Count Dracula.
I didn’t realize for years that Sheen was a kindly man whose spiritual bent tended toward the optimistic.
Or it might’ve been another favorite show of theirs, Liberace. He scared me, too.
Note Mom’s Singer showing machine, behind me at left.
She also had a loom. Since the Industrial Revolution began in textiles, that made teaching that topic so easy for me fifty years later. I could explain power looms and flying shuttles and spinning jennies. The loom was a Christmas gift, seen in the photo above.
And Mom was kind of an artist: knitting, sewing, weaving, crocheting, a little needlepoint here and there.
That is a washing machine we are watching in the photo at the top of the blog enrtry. We were simple folk. Just kidding. Sgt Preston of the Yukon must be on. With his dog, King.
That’s me, Roberta as a hobo and Bruce as a pirate at Halloween. Roberta’s wearing Dad’s beautiful felt hat, which were just out fashion. That makes me sad. Men’s hats are one reason I love old movies so much. The other clown, holding my hand, was all grown-up. At least twelve. She was very kind to me.
Once Mom and Dad went out on a date and dropped me off at another very kind person’s house, an older lady (meaning ten-fifteen years younger than I am now.) She made me hamburger. She put a tomato slice in it. I shrugged and took a bite. When my parents came back to pick me up a couple of hours later, I was still raving about how good tomatoes on hamburgers were. Elizabeth pointed out that it probably was a home-grown tomato, because they taste so much better than the store-bought once, and I bet she’s right.
Once it snowed. Once I ran out the front door and realized I hadn’t put on my pants yet. That was embarrassing.
Once Mom dressed us all up, including the Cocker spaniel, as desert Bedouins. She used eyeliner, I think, to give Bruce and me curly mustachioes. Both Roberta and the Cocker, a little girl, had gauzy headdresses and the boys wore burnooses made out of dishtowels. We all wore our bathrobes. Yup. Mom was pretty cool.
And the Fair Oaks was pretty close. That’s where we saw Lady and the Tramp (the Cocker’s name was Lady, of course.) and also The Ten Commandments (hated it when Pharaoh’s horsies drownded in the Red Sea) and The Searchers (the Comanche attack scene, where you don’t see the Comanches, scared the hell out of me.)
We also saw a movie with Jeff Chandler, The Toy Tiger, and I still have mine, eyeless but more or less intact. We were gullible, what with Cocker spaniels and stuffed animals. I think I also watched a couple of Tammy movies with my big sister, and Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Scared the hell out of me.
Toy Tiger (1956). Mine looks (looked) just like this one. The stripes have faded some. Mine, too.
Note Dad’s love of large turkeys. Shipped overseas (Grandma Kelly STILL said “Clean your plate. Children in Europe are starving!”), one of ‘em would need its own container ship. That’s what nearly twenty years of Great Depression and wartime rationing did to Dad. We always ate well.
Speaking of food, I was a ham even then.
Sgt. Preston and his dog King. When he announced “King, this case is closed,” it was time for bed.
lt looks as if the County is finally going to replace the 100-year-old Harris Bridge, a focal point for my childhood. It’s about time, I guess.. But it’s also bittersweet. It was named for this man, who farmed nearby. From 1936:
The bridge was completed in November 1923 with some fanfare:
Here it is in 1934. The CWA, a precursor to the WPA, was oiling what was then called Musick Road to Lopez Canyon, a project administered by Supervisor Asa Porter.
Twenty-three years later, we moved into the house just past the bridge, on the left.
So it’s figured a lot in my writing. From World War II Arroyo Grande:
That month, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley of coastal California, this is what you would see, if not clearly, because the cold morning fog can be dense: labor contractors drop off pickup loads of field workers at the Harris Bridge, which spans the creek that gives the valley its name and that nourishes it.
The workers cross the bridge whistling, an incredibly beautiful, almost baroque whistling, 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, the fuel a man needs to do the kind of physical work that would make most men sit in the freshly turned field, gasping and woefully regarding their quickly-blistered hands, within fifteen minutes.
Their summer work might be in a new bean field and the whistling would stop because it is such a tax on men who work beans, whose breathing soon becomes laborious and therefore precious. To begin a newly planted field of beans, the field workers 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 yield bell-shaped flowers–toward the sun.
The sun invariably appears in late mornings when it burns the sea fog away and the colors of the valley, wheaten hills and verdant bottom land where the crop is in, are reborn, vivid and sharply focused.
To drive the wooden stakes, the field workers use a heavy metal tube, hollowed, with a handle attached that resembles that of an old-timed pump primer pioneer men and women once used to draw water out of the ground. So the whistling stops and is replaced by the rhythmic ring of the stake drivers as the workers pound hundreds of them 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 and 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. In turn, they are determined to feed families who live in camps or tarpaper shacks in the Valley, or, for some, part of the work force that will dominate agriculture here for the next twenty years, for families who are living in the tier of states of northern Mexico.
This is what the creek looked like this spring in this view from the bridge:
From a blog post inspired by that scene this spring:
–The Harris Bridge. Before the bridge, this was near the spot where fourteen-year-old Sam Cundiff drowned in the flood of 1911.
Our house was (and is, much improved) just over the bridge, which was built, I think in 1927, [it was 1923] when Lopez Drive was called Musick Road. I was very happy to see that our walnut trees, just beyond that bank of Queen Anne Lace, are dead. I hated harvesting walnuts, stoop labor, and your hands and nails were black for weeks. Walnut trees used to cover the fields between the high school and Halcyon Road before an insidious pest, the husk fly larvae, began to kill them. I did not much mind. The only way I found walnuts tolerable was in my Mom’s chocolate-chip cookies. In the winter of 1968-69—you can get a sense of it from the video above—the creek rose above that chasm and spilled into our walnut orchard. There were ponds and lakelets in the Upper Valley for months afterward.
I used to catch rainbow trout in the chasm below and, of course, I did NOT catch the big female steelhead who hit my line one afternoon. She was so fierce that I nearly had a twelve-year-old heart attack. It was glorious the way she broke the surface, with a terrific splash, and it was only seconds before she snapped my leader and went upstream for the business of motherhood...
This beauty was caught in my great-grandfather’s birthplace, County Wicklow, Ireland.
Once my friends and I found the heads and innards of two spike bucks—yearlings, illegal to hunt in California—tossed over the side of the bridge by the hunters who’d butchered them and who wanted to get rid of the evidence. We pondered their remains, appalled, for a long time as the creek rushed past.
But once, on a ledge just below the bridge railing, I saw two barn owls asleep, one’s head sweetly on the other’s shoulder. I will never forget them.
Ghost and Willow, photographed by writer Robert Fuller. Barn owls mate for life.
I wrote about what happened to the Cundiff family at just about the site where the bridge would be built twelve years later. You can click on each image to enlarge it:
And since our house fronted Huasna Road, I got to know every car (a lot of celery trucks, too) as it approaced the bridge, including Michael Shannon’s hearse:
I grew up near the Harris Bridge, at the intersection of Huasna Road and what is now called Lopez Drive. So a favorite pastime was waving at neighbors as they approached the intersection.
–Mrs. Coehlo, a stunning woman (Wait, that’s not the right word. One of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known.), and so nice, drove a navy-over- powder-blue 1954 Cadillac.
–The Esteban family, including my friends Frieda and Paula, had a kinda funky light gray 1952 Plymouth.
–Glenn Cherry had a 1968 green Pontiac GTO. Forgive me, but in the argot of the times: Bitchen car. 400 cubic inches under the hood. (Glenn’s was green. Stone Saruwatari’s was a kind of midnight blue. Stone’s daughter, Gayle, was, I think, one of the prettiest girls at AGHS, so seeing Gayle behind the wheel caused teenaged males to tumble like felled redwoods when she drove past.)
–Sometimes a woodcutter would drive past in a ’58 Chevy pickup. We lost a Beagle named Snoopy once. Then we saw him, months later, his tongue wagging happily, atop a load of the woodcutter’s red oak.
–Cayce Shannon drove an orange VW bug.
–The Berguia family had a 1958 Chevy wagon–the only year they came out with the taillight design seen on Ron Howard’s Chevy in “American Graffiti.” There were a LOT of Berguias, which is a good thing, because they’re such a marvelous family, so the wagon was usually packed. I interviewed Jean Wilkinson Frederick, whose father owned the meat market on Branch Street, and she still has the ledgers. The first page I opened, there was Mr. Berguia’s tab. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I was thrilled. He paid on time, by the way.
–Occasionally a Sheriff’s deputy would drive by. The cars then were silver, and deputies wore straw cowboy hats. When I was five, my Mom asked one of them if he’d give me a ride. No problem. He punched the gas and let me hit the siren button. That was a great moment in my life.
–It’s kind of cheating, because he drove past the bridge, not over it, but Arroyo Grande High School principal Earl Denton drove a 1960 Ford Falcon, the brainchild of Robert McNamara, who also brought you the Vietnam War. Denton was so incredibly tall that you could almost see his kneecaps just under the Ford’s steering wheel.
–My speech team partner Jon Bolton drove a 1954-ish, tan-ish–there was a lot of “ish” about Jon’s car–Chevy station wagon. Once he stopped in front of our house with a leaky radiator. We chewed a lot of bubblegum together to plug the leaks.
–Mitzi Ikeda drove a 1964-ish Ford station wagon. Mitzi liked to drive fast, so you had to wave real quick.
–My speech team partner Joe Loomis drove an eminently practical 1964 blue Chevy Nova. When my Mom died, he showed up in our driveway in a blue Jeep. “Hop in!” he said. The Loomises took care of me for awhile.
–Manuel and Johnny Silva drove also eminently practical Ford F150s. When they weren’t driving by our house, they were stopped cab-to-cab in the middle of Huasna Road talking about garbanzo beans, I guess, even though they’d just had breakfast together at Sambo’s. A car would pull up behind them, and they’d pull to the side to let the car pass. That wasn’t enough. They’d wave cheerily at the driver. The Silvas kind of invented “Have a Nice Day!’ about forty years before some other guy took credit for it.
But by far my favorite car–the whole family’s, in fact– was Michael Shannon’s Pontiac hearse, I think a 1938 model. It was for his surfboards, of course.
The hard-packed dirt between the bridge-rail that fronted Huasna Road (now Lopez Drive, before that Musick Road) was our bus stop for Elsie Cecchetti’s little Branch school bus. Later, for high school and Bus #34, driven by Betty, it was the Four Corners, where we waited with a bunch of Polettis and Evensons, nice company indeeed. So I associate the bridge, the Branch School stop, with Elsie and with Mary Gularte, and with Richard Ayres’ corn, which we covered in wet gunny sacks and sold from a pickup bed on the same spot. We were sunburnt strawberry red by sundown.
Elsie Cecchetti was our bus driver. In the same way that Louis Tedone was SLO’s baby doctor. Elsie was everybody’s bus driver.
Yes, I go back to the days of Branch School’s yellow pickup with bench seats and the tarp overhead, when we bounced happily over creek crossings.
We waited for her at the Harris Bridge.
I think she had mechanical problems one morning–and it was a cold one–when Mary Gularte took me inside from the bus stop for some sopa. That was a good morning.
Both Mary and Elsie called me “Jimmy.”
We tormented Elsie with “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and then, in 1964, with “She Loves You,” ” I Want to Hold Your Hand” and she always headed us off in “The Name Game” song, before we got to “Chuck.”
And I always looked over the edge of the bus window as she drove confidently up Corralitos Canyon. There were some good drops there, but Elsie knew what she was doing. At the Canyon’s end, past the Dentons, she made a three-point turn that the California Department of Motor Vehicles should have filmed for posterity
Elsie. Photo by Vivian Krug
I remembered that ther’s a plaque on the bridge with the names of the Board of Supervisors that commemorates its completion one hundred years ago. I had sense enough to ask that it be donated to the South County Historical Society, so at least that small piece of a bridge that’s felt the weight of so much history—and so much weight!—will remain with us.
My first day of school, Branch Elementary, 1958. First through fourth grades met in the right-hand classroom, fifth through eighth in the left.
The school was pink then, absent the bell tower, deemed a hazard by the state. Our schoolbus was a yellow pickup with a canvas top over two benches bolted to the floor, driven by Elsie Cecchetti, also deemed a hazard by the state.
I could read my classmates’ names as our teacher, Mrs. Edith Brown, wrote them on the board. Fifty years later, I realized that my Mom, a remarkable woman, had already taught me how to read.
Each teacher taught six subjects to four different grade levels simultaneously. First grade might be in a reading circle, second at penmanship (those big green pencils and the coarse paper with those big green lines), third reading “My Weekly Reader,” fourth doing a multiplication worksheet.
My teachers were remarkable, too. I got a superb education.
Mom, at twenty-two in 1943, with my big sister, Roberta. In the days when it wasn’t insulting, the first Lucia Mar superintendent, Earl Denton, said that she was the most brilliant woman he’d ever met. Denton’s wife, Nita, was no slouch in the brilliance department, and she was a sweet and lovely woman, too.
My life’s been punctuated by awards. Three of my books, on local history, have won national recognition. For thirty years, I taught literature and history at Mission Prep in San Luis Obispo and at my Alma Mater, Arroyo Grande High School. I was a Lucia Mar Teacher of the Year. I’ve had three babies named for me. They are far more meaningful awards.
I have the devotion of thousands of students, some now in their fifties, who somehow still love me—I just don’t understand this— every bit as much as I have always loved them. At least nine of them teach history. Two of them are specialists, university professors, in areas dear to me, military history and the history of farm labor.
And I am an alcoholic. I am, as a writer, very open about that.
That’s why I’m devastated right now. My primary care doctor, Scott Davis, died unexpectedly yesterday. He was caring, funny, extremely bright and he actually listened to you.
He was also relentless in badgering me—somehow he did this gently—about my drinking. I mean no disrespect, and I have no proof, but I somehow had a hunch that he’d had demons, too—like all of us—at points in his life. That made him both my hero as well as my doctor. He was, to borrow the wonderful Yiddish word, a mensch.
I made two appointments with him earlier in the year and broke both of them because I hadn’t stopped drinking, was ashamed, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. That’s how much he meant to me.
I had an appointment with him in October, and I didn’t want to let him down again. That’s why I’m getting help now and that’s why I’ve been sober for ten days. This was for Scott.
I wanted so much to come into his office and hear him say, as he had a few years back when I managed a brief burst of sobriety, how healthy and alive I looked. I wanted to hear him say that in October.
I won’t get the chance to hear him again. I do have the chance to honor him by staying sober.
A doctor named Dykes Johnson delivered me. He was a private pilot at an air meet in Shafter and got the call, from Taft, that my Mom had gone into labor a month before I was due. Dykes had a hunch and flew back to Taft. I was both premature, at four pounds, and the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around my deck. I was being strangled. Dykes arrived, intense and worried, burst through the delivery room doors, roughly shoving my Dad aside, and saved my life.
Dykes Johnson
How blessed I am, at seventy-one, to have known the best doctor of my adult life in Scott. He saved my life, too.
I will not let this good doctor down again. I will never forget him, either.
Britt did Vargas Girl poses–her way of mocking cancer— during her stays at Children’s Hospital in Duarte. This one was taken just before her seventh round of chemotherapy.
There is so much to say about Britt, whose life was so vast.
But there’s one thing that I need to say:
Britt and I are total nerds, and it is Star Trek that has makes this so.
Before we knew that, she was my student in AP European History at Arroyo Grande High School. That’s when I realized, in reading her essays, that she was gifted beyond measure.
I was adamant about writing clear essays. It brought out my Napoleonic Complex, and maybe Mussolini, too.
When you have seventy history essays to grade, you play a trick on yourself. You grade in a nice coffeehouse with a latte nearby. And you bunch essays in groups of five so you can take a moment for a break at the end of each group.
On your break, you take a sip of your latte and glare poisonously at the other people in the coffeehouse because they are having fun.
And at the bottom of each group of five essays you insert one that you know will be good. They are the correctives to the bloopers you can find in student essays, like the classic Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands.
Britt’s essays were always at the bottom.
She sat in the first desk in the third row from the bank of windows in Room 306 at AGHS. She was quiet. When she asked a question, it would be a zinger, albeit one marked by guileless curiosity. The question revealed, too, that her mind traveled at warp speed in galaxies far beyond ours.
But a Britt question could take me in a different direction, far beyond my lecture notes. Suddenly, she reminded me, it was story time. This was why I became a history teacher.
So we might leave London in 1666 to visit London in the summer of 1944. There, on a barstool in his favorite pub, was Lt. Dad, enjoying a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel.
There was an air raid going on.
In between the wails of the sirens, you might hear the ugly growling cough of a V-1 flying bomb high above Regent’s Park. But my father refused to take shelter. It was a matter of principle. He refused to abandon his pint to Nazi Terror.
And so he won an honorary commendation for Meritorious Drinking Under Fire.
I think Britt liked that story.
Here are Lt. Dad, 1944 and Mom with my big sister, Roberta, 1943.
Her fifth-grade teacher, Mary Hayes, told my wife Elizabeth that she’d had the identical experience. Britt was quiet in class and then she’d ask a question that left Mrs. Hayes, just like me, gobsmacked. Both of us adored her.
Years after high school, Britt and I found each other on Facebook, my preferred method for procrastinating. That’s when I began to follow her writing career. I found out, too, that we were brother and sister Trekkies.
The breadth of Britt’s writing, from political commentary to gender issues to the arts, was vast. She was insightful, funny, and, when it was deserved, she could use ink to draw blood.
She had discovered her voice. Rather, she had revealed the voice that had been there all along.
And she was wicked funny.
–She described the barren planet where Luke Skywalker grew up as “the Modesto of the Star Wars Universe.”
–Excited by the prospect of a film that would reunite the original cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, she wrote “That’s right, everyone. Set your phasers to ‘cry’.”
–She wrote about Kyrsten Sinema, “our manic-pixie senator from Arizona,” and archly compared her to Veruca Salt, the brat who disappears down a garbage chute in Willy Wonka.
She interviewed actors and writers and producers in the Star Trek franchise we both loved. So we remember together Tribbles, Romulan Ale, Jefferies Tubes, McCoy snapping “I’m a doctor, dammit, not a coal miner!” and Picard snapping “Shut up, Wesley!”
We were both big fans of Captain Janeway from the series Voyager.
Janeway adored Irish Setters. Elizabeth and I have had three Setters grace our lives.
We admired her love of coffee. When Voyager’s food replicator broke down, Janeway, in her withdrawals, wanted to strangle the ship’s cook, who’d offered a kind of interstellar Sanka. The cook was irritating, so we empathized with Janeway.
Britt did a piece on the Star Trek Series and ranked them from worst to best. “Best” Honors, according to Britt, went to Deep Space Nine, about a space station that was kind of a 24th Century Dodge City,with Avery Brooks’s Benjamin Sisko and Terry Farrell’s Jadzia Dax.
Dax and Sisco.
What stunned me is that this was my favorite, too, but I never had the courage to come out and say it. Britt did.
But it was Gates McFadden, Dr. Beverly Crusher in The Next Generation, who sent Britt a video message of comfort that comforted me, too.
Gates McFadden, as Dr. Beverly Crusher, in the Captain’s Chair, where she had every right to be.
I’ve taken comfort, too, in two Star Trek films. In The Wrath of Khan, memorable for Ricardo Montalban’s impressive pectoral muscles, Spock saves the Enterprise.
He does so by jump-starting the warp drive, which involves inserting himself into the matter-anti-matter chamber. And so he dies.
They shoot Spock out into space in what looks like a jumbo Prozac capsule.
And, of course, in the next film, The Search for Spock, he comes back, all of him, including the arched eyebrow.
Elizabeth and I were watching 2013’s Star Trek: Descent into Darkness, in which Khan is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who looks and sounds nothing like Ricardo Montalban.
However, since Cumberbatch was once spotted country-western line-dancing at the Madonna Inn, near where both Britt and I grew up, I will let this go.
Two Khans
This time, to save Enterprise, it’s Chris Pine’s Kirk who likewise enters the matter-anti-matter chamber, which in my mind resembles an immense and lethal lava lamp. And so he dies.
It’s Bones, of course, who saves him. It’s complicated, but essentially he revives Kirk with the help of—wait for it— a tribble.
Shatner’s Captain Kirk awash in tribbles, who are both charming–they purr–and reproductively alarming.
Coming back to life after death isn’t confined to altar boxes or the toolboxes of science fiction writers.
Five years ago, I lost another student, Dawn, to cancer. In my heart, she is Britt’s twin. They share the same audacity.
Both grew up in small towns, but both made careers in L.A., Dawn in film casting and Britt in writing about film.
Dawn Marie Deibert, 1969-2020
I heard this at Dawn’s memorial. This is a true story.
Just before she died, a visitor wheeled Dawn into the garden. It was a sunny day and there were two dragonflies flitting among the flowers. Her friend pointed them out, but Dawn had seen them first.
They were her father and grandmother, she explained, come to be with her.
A few days later, when it was over, the visitor left Dawn’s darkened sickroom and walked into the sunlit garden.
Just above her shoulder, there was a dragonfly.
“Hello, Dawn,” the visitor whispered.
Hello, Britt. Your life was vast. So is our love for you.
Britt and her beloved husband Devin, as imagined by artist Jessie Ledina
This is the Arroyo Grande Creek alongside the house where I grew up. The creek makes for rich alluvial soil, so many years before my family moved here, two Civil War veterans farmed within a mile of this spot. Both were Ohioans and both had been neighbors twenty years before they came to California in the 1880s.
But that day was July 1, 1863, when their regiments took up their positions on Barlow’s Knoll.
Fouch became a fierce defender of the high school where I would someday be a student and teach history. It was not at first popular with Arroyo Grande taxpayers, but Fouch, a formidable man, saw to it that the high school would not only survive but get its first schoolhouse in 1906.
Sylvanus Ullom’s son—later high school graduating classes are populated by plenty of Ulloms–became a house painter who, in 1918, won the contract to paint the 1888 two-room schoolhouse, yellow in this photograph, where my education began.
Their descendants still live in Arroyo Grande today.
I was asked how old the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery was, and I still don’t know the definitive answer. Thanks to the San Luis Obispo Genealogical Society, I launched a search that revealed the oldest graves—there are three—date from 1881.
Then I noticed that two of the burials were girls named “Hess.” Then, thanks to the Find a Grave website, I found them. They were sisters and they died within a week of each other. I will never know why, but there was a worldwide cholera outbreak in 1881, and it claimed about 30,000 lives in the Americas, so there’s a chance that this is what took Louisa and Lenna from their parents.
Their parents were immigrants from Hesse, Germany; the entry in the 1880 Census for Arroyo Grande doesn’t include Lenna, who probably was still in her mother’s womb when the enumerator came to visit.
Henry Hess was a successful man but the irony is that the fruits of his hard work as a farmer were recognized in this piece from the San Luis Tribune, published just four days before he lost Louisa.
When we studied childhood in AP European history at Arroyo Grande High School, the callous and even cruel way that children were treated in early modern Europe was shocking to us. It was in part a function of childhood mortality rates; parents could not afford the emotional investment in children who were more likely than not to die, so they became little worker drones in European farm families.
It was farming that changed that attitude. The Agricultural Revolution of the 1600s-1800s (crop rotation and new farm implements like the seed drill were among the contributors) exponentially increased Europe’s food supply. Better diet meant more and more children survived to adulthood. That fact may have deepened the ties between parents and their children.
In fact, macabre as it may seem to us, photography, in its infancy, meant that families with some substance had their dead children memorialized. This meant that they loved them so much—and that death in children was becoming an aberration—that they didn’t want to let their babies go.
But California, even in the 1880s, was still on the frontier and medicine was still relatively primitive. Farmers all across America, like Mr. Hess, would have consulted cure-alls like this: Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup included generous helpings of alcohol and opium.
And this cure-all, from an 1881 San Francisco newspaper ad, included cholera among the afflictions that it claimed to treat.
In the years before Dr. Paulding came to Arroyo Grande in the late 1880s, and before his brother established the town’s first drug store, the Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the pharmacy for American farmers. (The film Tombstone, among others, depicted Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife, and her struggle with addiction to laudanum.)
So children’s health was still precarious in frontier Arroyo Grande. While the evidence is indirect, I suspect that Mr. and Mrs. Hess were devastated. Despite his success in Arroyo Grande, he would be buried in Santa Clara. Maybe he had to get away from 1881 and what it had done to him.
Arroyo Grande’s founder, Francis Branch, was devastated, too, by the loss of three daughters, taken by smallpox, in the summer of 1862. But he missed them so much that, twelve years later, he was buried next to his little girls.
A rainbow trout from County Wicklow, Ireland–where Mom’s ancestors, Famine people, came from–and the display at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Elizabeth always has to grab me firmly by the arm and lead me away from the trout display. I want to jump in after them.
I just wrote about Ken Kobara remembering that Executive Order 9066 being carried out the day before trout season opened in 1942.
Let me tell you about trout season opening day. If you’re from Arroyo Grande, it came in third place, but only after Christmas and Thanksgiving.
One of my happiest memories is fishing from a plank bridge over the creek–it would’ve been washed away in 1969–halfway between the Cecchetti Road crossing and the Harris Bridge, where we lived. My Dad was next to me; I was little and he was big and we dropped our lines into the creek below and we just sat there, quiet. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that safe.
When I was a little bigger, Dad would give me five bucks–an enormous sum in 1964–and turn me loose in Kirk’s Spirits and Sports on Branch Street (today it’s the Villa Cantina).
Once we were appropriately armed, my best good buddy Richard Ayres and I would sleep in a walnut orchard overnight that was maybe 200 feet away from our favorite fishing spot, a little narrows in Arroyo Grande Creek with a sweet little still spot.
Mind you, our house was RIGHT NEXT TO Arroyo Grande Creek and not far from the spot where I once hooked a steelhead who almost gave me an eleven-year-old heart attack. Man, she was angry. Broke my line.
Richard was a good fisherman. I was spectacularly inept, in part owing to my ADHD difficulty in remotely understanding knots.
Knots had nothing to do with the beaver pond just off Kaz Ikeda’s cabbage fields in the Upper Valley. I was fishing there by myself one day–the beavers were rather indignant, and they really DO slap their tails on the water’s surface–when a shaft of sunlight suddenly made the pond transparent.
There, just below the surface, was a veritable Armada of rainbow trout.
I was so excited that I fell in. My night crawlers died futile deaths.
The trout scattered.
The beavers, I am reasonably sure, were laughing at me.
Arroyo Grande’s Ben Dohi died last month, and his obituary was so beautifully written that I wanted to include it below:
Benjamin Hideo Dohi November 8, 1927 – May 26, 2023
Arroyo Grande, California – A little piece of our community’s history was lost last week with the passing of Benjamin Hideo Dohi at age 95. Ben passed peacefully at home on May 26 after a long life filled with hard work and the love of family.
Benjamin Hideo Dohi was born on November 8, 1927 into a farming family to parents Hugh Setsugo Dohi and Hide Kobayashi Dohi in Santa Maria, California. Ben contracted pneumonia as an infant and after the doctors had given up hope on his recovery, it was the love of his mother that nurtured him through his illness and his early months of life.
That same tenacity and determination would be what saw him through his early adult years as an internee in the Japanese internment camp at Poston, Arizona from 1942-1945. Benjamin was 14 when he, along with his parents and two brothers and two sisters, were evacuated from Arroyo Grande to a waiting facility in Clovis, California before being transported to Poston, where he resided until the end of World War II. Although Ben would end up starting high school at Arroyo Grande High School as a freshman, he moved to Clovis High School then on to Poston High School where he earned his high school diploma. “The only thing I lost was my youth,” said Ben when interviewed by Mathew Donovan for Cal Poly in 2006. He credits his teachers at the internment camp, who were mostly Quaker volunteers, for the valuable lessons learned while there. When the Japanese were released from the camp in 1945, Ben successfully transferred to college in Kansas City, Missouri where he said he knew as much as the other students but was mostly treated like a “novelty.”
But Ben’s education was once again interrupted in 1946 when he enlisted into the US Army and began training in Military Intelligence. He served two years in Japan as an interpreter after completing a language program at the Language School in Monterey, California. After being discharged from the army, Ben completed one year of law school at the University of California, Berkeley, but the draw of farming and the love of the Arroyo Grande community brought him home.
In 1955 Ben became a grower for POVE, Pismo Oceano Vegetable Exchange, the largest Japanese cooperative of farmers in California. He joined the Hayashi, Ikeda, Kobara, Saruwatari, Fuchiwaki, Kawaoka, and Fukuhara families. It was in the office of POVE that Benjamin Dohi met the woman who would change his life. Ty Yamaguchi, who had also been a young woman in the same internment camp, won Ben’s heart and they married soon after Ben joined the family of growers who would go on to become one of the most successful farming operations in the state.
The young Dohi family experienced heartbreak when their first child, Leslie Naomi Dohi, died at childbirth in 1958; Ben and Ty were later blessed with the birth of their sons, Hugh Jonathan in 1959 and Peter Benjamin 1961. Ben, along with his wife, Ty, dedicated their lives to growing their business, Dohi Farms, and although there were struggles in the beginning, once he began growing bell peppers they found their stride. Ben took great pride in growing bell peppers which was his most important crop in the early years of farming. As Ben’s sons got older he was able to build a home for his young family on the same property where he was raised as a child.
Ben split his time between farming and watching his boys play sports, as well as coaching some of their baseball teams, a skill he learned in the internment camp. Ben loved to take his family on vacations and loved to teach his boys how to fish in Arroyo Grande and Lopez Creek. He instilled in his boys a love of farming, family, and community. He showed his sons how to be honest, generous, and humble in life, and these values became theirs in their own lives.
Ben never wanted to dwell on the past; instead, he focused on his work, his family, and his business. Nothing made him happier than driving in his pickup truck alongside sons Hugh and Peter overseeing each farm which he referred to as “making my rounds.” He always gave credit to “the Man upstairs” for any success he had.
His was a life well-lived.
Ben is preceded in death by his wife, Ty, and his baby daughter, Leslie, brother, Abe, and sister, Ruth. He is survived by his son, Hugh Dohi (Shawnah Dohi), son, Peter Dohi, brother, Paul Dohi, sister, Grace Dohi, nephews Gregory Dohi and Anthony Dohi, and niece Sylvia Roldan-Dohi.
The family expresses its deep appreciation and gratitude to the community of Arroyo Grande, the farm families of POVE, and the doctors and nurses of Arroyo Grande Hospital and San Luis Post Acute. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Arroyo Grande Community Hospital Foundation 345 S. Halcyon Road Arroyo Grande, CA 93420 or to Kristie Yamaguchi Always Dream at 125 Railroad Ave, Suite 203 Danville, CA 94526. No services are planned.
Ben
So Ben’s sons still farm land, near the high school, that his family has been farming for nearly a hundred years. I knew Ben and his wife, Ty Yamaguchi Dohi, in high school, where I was a sometimes visitor to the Dohi home. This is where I first discovered sushi, a treat reserved for special Japanese holidays like the Fourth of July and Labor Day. The three Yamaguchi sisters prepared it in the kitchen, frequently giggling—they must have been a handful as teenagers—and I’d break away frequently from the men and the TV sports we were watching to hang with the sisters, who sometimes fed me samples.
On one such occasion, I got to hold the beautiful baby girl who would grow up to be Kristi Yamaguchi.
Ben’s death led to updating a video—I’m a historian—that I’ve shared with schools and community groups about the experience of people like Ben during World War II. Executive Order 9066, as you’ll see, was perhaps the single most tragic event in my hometown’s history. But the way that both Japanese Americans and their friends responded brings to mind the word that so marks Ben Dohi’s life: Honor.
A Work in Progress 