The wire press story recalls a painful part of our past, eighty years ago next week. There were Black Quartermaster units at Camp San Luis Obispo, support troops at the Santa Maria Army Air Force Base, and the 54^th Coast Artillery—-a unit designation remindful of a proud part of our nation’s past, the Civil War’s 54^th Massachusetts—manned gun positions overlooking Port San Luis and Estero Bay. The fighting the story describes took place on the night of Thursday, June 24, 1943.

San Luis Obispo, as the nation did, followed the color line. There were, according to extensive research done by military historian Erik Burn, separate USOs. White GI’s frequented what is today’s Ludwick Community Center; the extant USO for Black GI’s is today’s City Utilities Department at 873 Morro, near the Palm Street parking structure.

The most famous 1943 incident, of course, belongs to L.A., where Army and Navy enlisted men, many Midwestern or Southern, armed with axe handles, beat and then stripped young Latino “Zoot-Suiters” in fighting that had begun near the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine and then rolled south to Chinatown and east to Boyle Heights, finally ending at a boundary that is today’s Santa Monica Freeway.

The Latino kids’ sense of style was made manifest in their Zoot Suits. The fashion—considered seditious, I guess, in a time when cloth was rationed, was popular with young Black kids, too. Cab Calloway is blatantly Zootish in the excerpt from 1943’s Stormy Weather, a film, I need to point out, that made the sixteen million men who served in World War II fall in love with Lena Horne. (The song spilled over into literature, too: a passage from Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday has trumpeter Cacahuete, Joseph and Mary’s nephew, playing “Stormy Weather” into a Cannery Row storm drain for the reverb while the sea-lions accompany him from their rocks on China Point.)

The LAPD had no fondness for minority youth culture in 1943. As was its wont in those days, the Department arrested the Chicano kids, the Zoots, but only after they’d been stripped and beaten. They were easier collars then, when they were bleeding on the sidewalk. And, since they were overwhelmingly the victims of violence, the three days of mayhem were immortalized as the “Zoot Suit Riots.”

The Zoot Suit riots were a vivid but not exclusive reminder of American racism in 1943. Some of the other incidents:

May 25, 1943: On the same date that George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the promotion of twelve Black workers at a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard that built and maintained U.S. Navy warships led to attacks, by 4,000 Whites, on Black defense workers. Some of those workers jumped into the Mobile River to escape the mob. After at least fifty were injured, National Guard troops put the rioting down.

June 3-8: The Zoot Suit Riots.

June 15-17: Beaumont, Texas, where an influx of both Black and White shipyard workers and crowded housing were factors in three days of rioting that left three dead, two of them Black, one White. A White woman had accused a Black man of rape; when a White crowd gathered around the jail where suspects were held and were denied access, they invaded Beaumont’s Black neighborhoods, torching over 100 homes.

June 20: The Belle Isle Riots in Detroit. 6,000 troops were called out by the president to end violence that resulted in 34 deaths—twenty-five of the victims were Black– fueled by rumors that a White woman had been raped and that a White mob had thrown a Black mother and her child off a Belle Isle bridge. Background tensions included densely packed ghettos and, as was the case in Beaumont, the promotion of Black defense workers. Police stood by as a Black man was beaten to death; a White doctor was murdered as he was making a house call.

June 24: Fighting between White and Black GI’s in downtown San Luis Obispo. As the article notes, MP’s took the Black GI’s into custody and drove them to Camp San Luis Obispo.

August 1 and 2: As a Black soldier attempted to intervene in the arrest of a young Black woman, an NYPD officer shot him. Rumors that the soldier had been killed led to two days of violence that killed six and caused millions in property damage. Ralph Ellison, in The Invisible Man, and James Baldwin, in Notes of a Native Son, incorporated the riot into American literature.

Racial violence didn’t end at our shores. On April 3’s “Battle of Manners Street” in Wellington, New Zealand, the fighting resulted from American Marines blocking the entrance of Maori soldiers to an all-services social club. In June, one American soldier was killed during interracial violence in Northern England in what became known as the “Battle of Bamber Bridge,” after the town where fighting, including exchanges of gunfire, broke out between Black troops and White MPs. Five American servicemen were shot. In the aftermath, thirty-two, all of them Black, were court-martialed.

The people of Bamber Bridge were sympathetic to the Black soldiers they had begun to befriend. Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, taught in the little town then, and remembered that when one local innkeeper was ordered to institute a color bar, he put out the following sign:

OUT OF BOUNDS TO WHITE SOLDIERS

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When I taught U.S. History at Arroyo Grande High School, we learned about the L.A. riots every year, using animated maps to follow their progress, reading contemporary news reports and hearing, thanks to PBS, from people who’d lived through the time and scholars who’d studied it. I assume teachers aren’t supposed to teach anything anymore that puts America in a negative light or that might make European-American kids feel guilty.

It’s funny, but my kinds, mostly Anglo, never seemed to feel guilty. They loved the way these teenagers from East L.A. dressed and danced. What they hated was the cruelty visited on them. They would learn about other soldiers and sailors, heroes, as we studied the war itself. But, to use an analogy I’m fond of: I’ve been married for thirty-seven years, and my wife doesn’t love me because I’m perfect. What she feels for me is mature love.

I love my country in the same way, in spite of and in part because of its imperfections.

There was blood on the sidewalks sidewalks along Higuera in 1943. To look away does America and Americans a disservice. In confronting demons from our past, we give our young people the tools they’ll need to form a more perfect union.

Sheet lightning and thunder outside, and it’s June, for cryin’ out loud.

Of course, I have a story for that.

This was our house, the place where I grew up, on Huasna Road.

Just behind our house was a woodshed–we used it to store hay, oats, chicken mash and junk. There was also an E.C. Loomis and Son chicken incubator in there with a nice warm lamp where my baby chicks, incurable gossips, complained about the Eisenhower and then the Kennedy administrations. They were soft and fuzzy and charmingly nonpartisan.

Sam the carpenter was repairing the woodshed steps when I was six and fell off the top one and went ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump down the steps. Sam looked up and saw me coming. I think the nails he was holding in his mouth fell out when it flopped open and he caught me in his arms.

I loved Sam, who, I believed, was the first bald man I’d ever known. His head fascinated me. We went into town together once and he bought me some of those chocolates, at the Commercial Company–now Mason Bar– wrapped in gold foil that looked like old Federal gold pieces.

The woodshed far predated the house, which was built about 1956. There was a huge pile of finished graying lumber, some of it frosted by mint-colored moss, alongside the woodshed and now I half-wonder now if it had belonged to the Cundiff home. The Cundiffs lost a thirteen-year-old son, another Sam, in the 1911 flood.

When they came home, Sam was gone; he’d been hanging onto a telephone pole that had tumbled into the Arroyo Grande creekbed when it splintered His family, reaching for him, could reach him no longer.

When the floodwaters receded the sad family—they would lose three sons in three years, from different causes— returned home, where they found a steelhead trout in their waterlogged living room, or, rather, its remains, next to a very happy family cat.

Just behind the woodshed was my chicken pen. It contained thirty or forty hens and one Plymouth Rock rooster, roughly the size of velocirpator, and very full of himself.

The chicken pen also contained a replica Civil War cannon, built by the Shannon lads and my big brother Bruce (all of us were the descendants of Confederates; it gave me great pleasure to write a book about Arroyo Grande’s Yankees). The cannon was convincing from a distance, built from irrigation pipe and the axis and wheels from a turn-of-the-century cultivator.

The chickens didn’t mind. What they minded was weasels. That’s another story.

Beyond the chicken pen was the pasture and corral, which contained one quarter horse, one Welsh Pony and, for my brother Bruce’s 4-H project, one very bleaty but otherwise lovely Oxford lamb.

Bruce was gone for some reason. It fell on me to feed the lamb. Feeding the lamb involved taking a corrugated steel milk pail with a big white nipple out to Bruce’s lamb.

I opened the pasture gate and closed it quick, because the Quarter Horse and Welsh pony were like World War II airmen confined to Stalag Luft 7. They were always on the lookout for an escape.

On another topic entirely: Is it just me, or do horses have the most beautiful eyelashes ever?

Anyway, the lamb got bleaty as I closed the pasture gate, edged out from the corral, and approached with the big corrugated steel milk pail.

That’s when the sheet lightning began and raindrops the size of steelie marbles began to fall.

I let the bucket fall, too, and ran on my short legs back to the house and my Mom.

The lamb went hungry that night. That was sixty years ago. I still feel bad about her.

Union veteran Bela Clinton Ide of Arroyo Grande, San Luis Obispo County, California, had a bad day in September 1896, according to this clipping.

He’d had worse.

On July 1, 1863, Ide’s 24th Michigan, part of the Iron Brigade, lost two-thirds of its complement in a horrific firefight with the 26th North Carolina, which lost 81% of its soldiers.

After an experience like that, I would’ve been a grump the rest of my life. Note the caption under Ide’s photograph

Dr. Clark, meanwhile, served in the 1st New Jersey Cavalry during the Appomattox Campaign. He was all of seventeen and a native of Randolph.

Lee’s men had just arrived at Farmville on Aprl 7, 1865 and were beginning to fry up bacon and gobble cornbread when Custer’s cavalry, including Clark’s regiment, showed up.

There would be rations, after all, at Appomattox Court House.

Custer got there first.

Clark became Arroyo Grande’s “baby doctor,” and the newspapers are vivid with the details of his treatments: fingers getting caught in a printing press–the patient was his son, Ed, new to his job at the local newspaper– a horse fracturing a little boy’s leg with an instinctive kick, another little boy building a home-made steam engine that exploded and injured his hand; most tragic, when her mother’s attention was momentarily diverted, a little girl, wearing her flannel nightgown, who fell into the fireplace.

Childhood was dangerous. Arroyo Grande needed a Dr. Charles S. Clark.

His home and offices, near what is today a deli on Branch Street—Arroyo Grande’s main street— are no longer with us.

The house that Bela Clinton Ide built, most likely in 1878, still is. In the superheated real estate market that marks California, it recently sold for $1.25 million.

Charles Branch served Arroyo Grande as a constable, town marshal, traffic policeman and finally chief of police in the 1930s. While he was not related to the Branches who founded the town, he seems to have been almost as prominent.

When the City laid him off in the depths of the Depression, carloads of teenaged boys drove around town to honk their horns in protest. That’s high praise. The PTA honored him, too, for his vigilance for ticketing speeders who exceeded what was then a 15-mph speed limit in school zones. Since the State Highway—101, today’s Traffic Way—ran directly through town and past the grammar school, Charlie lighting up careless drivers (an old clipping notes that one such driver was Rose Bowl-bound) from his motorcycle may have saved many young lives.

In 1931, he was the first AGPD officer to be issued a tear-gas gun. The Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder notes that Branch needed it to quell disturbances at local dance halls. That may well be a coded reference. The dance halls, including the IDES (“Portuguese”) Hall, were frequented by Filipino farmworkers. They patronized taxi dancers—“henna-haired girls,” one article called them—who were Caucasian and this seemed to be a state of affairs that agricultural towns in California could not tolerate. The dances were frequently raided by local police.

But the tear-gas gun also represented a kind of deja vu in Charles Branch’s life. He was a staunch member of and officer in the local Spanish-American War veterans’ organization, but that’s a slight fib. It’s more likely that most of these veterans fought instead in the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902), one of America’s most controversial wars. His sister’s application for a military tombstone—Branch died in 1961 and is buried in Santa Ana, in Orange County—gives the game away.

The 35th Volunteers, indeed, fought in the Philippine Insurrection. This was a merciless colonial war brought on by the Filipinos themselves, led by a man, dynamic and charismatic, named Emilio Aguinaldo.

The Filipinos started the war by helping the United States defeat Spain in the Spanish-American War and then assuming that America, given our War of Independence and our democratic traditions, would grant the Islands independence so that they could begin democratic traditions of their own.

Nope. The Islands became America’s “Jewel in the Crown”—a reference to British India— the centerpiece of our own colonial empire and the beginning of a slippery slope that would lead to another terrible war with another colonial power, one that would claim two Arroyo Grande sailors killed on battleship Arizona on December 1941.

“It is our duty,” President McKinley intoned in 1899, to explain why we weren’t leaving, to “uplift and Christianize” the Filipinos (80% of them were Roman Catholic, but that’s another story. That didn’t count as ‘Christianity’ in McKinley’s thoroughly Protestant America. When Al Smith ran against Herbert Hoover in 1928, some Hoover campaign buttons read simply A Christian in the White House.)

The war that followed claimed tens of thousands of Filipino insurgents. Collateral damage (starvation and disease) accounted for somewhat between a quarter-million and a million civilians.

This was the war in which one general, later court-martialed, ordered his men to kill every male Filipino over the age of ten, in which “waterboarding” was invented, in which the Americans adopted a practice that had been invented by the Spanish in Cuba and the British in South Africa: the concentration camp.

One of the most decorated regiments—multiple Medals of Honor—was the Twentieth Kansas Volunteer Infantry, a unit that included a private who wrote his friends back home that “this shooting niggers beats shooting rabbits all to hell.”

The war divided America as deeply as the Dreyfus Affair was dividing France—or as deeply as the United States is divided today. The two sides were exemplified by two powerful men: the imperialist Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge and the writer Mark Twain, whose essay “To the Brother Sitting in Darkness” was a searing indictment of American policy.

Aguinaldo surrendered. We won.

Thirty years later, you can find some shockingly racist language in the editorial columns of the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder, most of it directed against “Mexicans” (many of whom were American citizens) or “Filipinos” (who occupied a nebulous status somewhere between being citizens and resident aliens.)

Filipinas were not allowed to immigrate. That factor created huge economic opportunities for the henna-haired girls, the taxi dancers.

Meanwhile, Filipino immigrants responded to the abuse heaped on them throughout the 1920s and 1930s by joining the fight against Japan in the months after Pearl Harbor. They formed two infantry regiments, the first at Camp San Luis Obispo. Their regular army trainers, from the 77th Infantry Division, were stunned by how quickly these men took to soldiering and how self-disciplined and motivated they were. These gifts became evident in combat in the Southwest Pacific and in the liberation of the Philippines. They fought with immense bravery.

“Immense Bravery” is not a term I’d apply to Charles Branch’s 35th Volunteer Infantry Regiment. They were a hard-luck unit. “Volunteer” regiments occupied a separate status from the regular Army; enlistment terms were limited, discipline was easier, and the food, allegedly, was better. Despite those inducements, the 35th, made up of large numbers of Californians, had trouble finding recruits in 1899, when the Insurrection began. They would have to borrow some Easterners, including (horrors!) New Yorkers, to fill out their ranks.

But they had a Californian, Charles Branch, as one of those rankers. He avoided dying on the troopship that left San Francisco for Manila. Ptomaine poisoning swept the 35th—turn-of-the-century soldiers were issued tinned meat that was Civil War surplus—and at least one soldier, from San Francisco, died en route to the Philippines.

That’s where malaria began claiming them, including a popular captain from Los Angeles.

They fought for two years, pursuing and not finding insurgent leaders and engaging in at least one pitched battle, on Mindanao, in June 1900. They were routed, losing twenty men killed or wounded; the Filipino attackers lost four.

Coming home to California must have been an immense relief. Over 4,000 American soldiers and Marines did not come home alive.

Arroyo Grande was still ten years away from incorporation in 1901, when newly-discharged veteran Charles Branch was twenty-three. He would eventually become a constable but he also had a mechanical bent, working for the Barcellos-Morgan Ford agency on Branch Street—today an ice cream shop— and eventually opening his own radiator shop. He also formed an all-girls drill team, sponsored by a fraternal organization, the Knights of Pythias, that performed regularly in town celebrations and parades in the 1930s.

Then something happened. Around 1939, Branch disappears from the old Herald-Recorder’s news columns except for occasional visits. His residence is listed as “Sawtelle,” which is ominous. That was the veterans home, near the UCLA campus, that was notorious for mistreating its Civil War veterans during the 1920s (“patients” were referred to as “inmates.”) It looks like a pleasant place. I don’t think it was, certainly not for Civil War veterans and perhaps not for the cohort to which Branch belonged, a generation after the Civil War.

The veterans who lived at Sawtelle—maybe Branch was assigned to the Malibu facility, which had to be a little more pleasant—were chronic sufferers. Many of the Civil War veterans were incapacitated by the crippling depression that is one manifestation of PTSD. Others were alcoholics. Still others died, years later, from diseases contracted during the war: Arroyo Grande Grammar School janitor Richard Merrill, for example, a veteran of the Antietam and Chancellorsville campaigns, was finally killed in 1909 by the dysentery that had first assaulted him in 1863.

The malaria that killed the 35th Volunteers’ captain can stalk a survivor over the course of his entire life. We have no way of knowing, but perhaps Pvt. Branch’s war finally caught up to him.

A man who was admired by both the PTA and rascally teenaged boys had to be exceptional. I can’t help but hope, though, that Charlie Branch never had to use that tear-gas gun.

For a proposed Memorial Day Speech at the Arroyo Grande Cemetery, May 29, 2023.

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In 1963, my older brother went out for the wrestling team at what was then Arroyo Grande Union High School. That’s when he met arguably the toughest kid on the team—maybe the toughest athlete in the high school’s Class of 1966.

His name was Pete.

My brother was the son of an accountant; our Dad was the comptroller for Madonna Construction. Pete was a farmer’s son.

Dad’s ancestors migrated from England to Virginia in the 17th century; Pete’s father was an immigrant from the Philippines.

My brother was a hard worker, maybe happiest behind the wheel of our Ford garden tractor. Pete was a hard worker because he had to be.

Pete was a natural athlete. Neither my brother nor I are natural athletes. But here’s what my brother said about his wrestling teammate:

“He was nice to me, and he didn’t have to be.”

Please keep those words in mind for a few minutes.

“He was nice to me, and he didn’t have to be.”

Bear with me. I have to recite a few statistics.

The Vietnam War claimed eleven young South County men. Nine of them are near us today. One is buried in Santa Maria. One remains missing in action.

Thirty-four San Luis Obispo County men died in the Vietnam War.

Most of them were soldiers. Eight were Marines.

The ratio of Californians killed in Vietnam was twenty-eight deaths for every 100,000 residents. For San Luis Obispo County, it was thirty-two deaths for every 100,000 residents.

The average age of a Vietnam serviceman was twenty-two. At the times of their deaths, most County servicemen were twenty-one.

The most common cause of combat deaths was from grenades, which claimed eight of our young men. Whether hand-thrown or fired as RPG’s, this meant that fighting was at close quarters.

Mortar or artillery fire took six more.

The greatest number of county casualties—eleven—came in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive. Nine more died the following year.

One of those killed in 1969 was Marine Sgt. Pete Segundo. His grave in this cemetery is directly above my parents’ graves. When I come to visit my Mom and Dad, I visit the young Marine I never met.

I’ve seen one yearbook photo that was typical of him: amid all the football guys trying to look tough, there’s their all-county guard with a big smile on his face.

In fact, there’s a big smile on his face in every one of his yearbook photos.

To know Pete, his classmates have told me, was to love him.

He was a standout athlete, especially in wrestling and football.

Otis Smith, a Civil War Medal of Honor winner, is buried here, too. His grandson, Johnnie, was awarded a Silver Star as a member of a World War II tank destroyer battalion.

In 1934, Johnnie was a Leiter Award winner, presented to the high school’s outstanding football player.

The Leiter Award went to Pete Segundo, too. Twice.

And while his classmates enjoyed a root-beer float and a burger at the Chu Chu Drive-In on Grand Avenue, Pete was in the fields chopping celery to help support his family.

A lifetime of hard work did nothing to diminish Pete’s smile. What ended it was an incident of friendly fire; Pete, a Marine dog handler, was shot while on patrol.

Sgt. Segundo, like most county Vietnam casualties, was twenty-one when he was killed.

He’s a powerful example of how that war—how any war—cheats all of us. This war stole that young man from us. That young man gave his life for us.

But that was typical of his generosity of spirit.

“He was nice to me, but he didn’t have to be.”

My brother found this out the day he met his wrestling teammate, Pete Segundo.

Today was my big brother’s 75th birthday. He lives in Templeton with his wife, Evie. They’ve been married for 55 years.

Our Dad–brilliant, volcanic, alcoholic– was not easy to get along with, and he was hard on Bruce.

Once he slammed the car door on Bruce’s hand and yelled at him for bleeding. When, on Huasna Road, we had a bent pasture gate, Dad attempted to reshape it using a sledgehammer, with Bruce holding the bottom end, like John Henry’s shaker, and Dad taking big and not-always-accurate swings.

Bruce and I didn’t get along. I was a pain in the ass–I have just realized in the last few years that I am profoundly ADHD, and was given to manic episodes, repeatedly rolling a hassock across the living room floor and tackling it, as if I were an NFL defensive back, and spontaneous bouts of dancing for no particular reason.

So I sucked a lot of the air out of the family dynamic, and Bruce had to live with that. So he rode me pretty hard.

And then, suddenly, when he was about eighteen and I needed to learn how to drive a stick shift, everything changed. He was the best and most patient teacher I could ever hope for.

When he went to UCSB, I’d play hooky from AGHS just to visit him and Evie and maybe sit in on a real college class. I was entranced.

He met Evie when he was the editor and she a reporter on the Cuestonian, the Cuesta College newspaper. I inherited Bruce’s job four years later.

We are so much alike in one other way: our voices are indistinguishable over the telephone.

I have never known anyone who works as hard as my brother does. This was the way he dealt with Dad. He worked harder than any of us because, I guess, he wanted to prove himself.

I have only met one or two people who are as well-read as he is. He is a wonderful storyteller and comic–quirky and delightful– but he is serious about things like personal integrity.

This has gotten him, like me, into trouble with authority figures.

His college education was interrupted but he went back to UCSB, years later, to finish his English degree.

The man is determined.

He loves motorcycles and sometimes that worries me. But on a ride a few years ago he rode up to our grandparents’ farmhouse in Williams, Colusa County, and sent me back a photo.

My earliest memory is falling down the farmhouse steps and cutting my knee and having my Grandpa Kelly sweep me up in his arms to comfort me. I still have the scar on my knee. But I had long forgotten what the farmhouse looked like and Bruce’s photo brought Gramps back to me again.

We are not close–our lives as children were chaotic and sometimes dangerous, and so we are emotionally reserved.

But he is close to our wondrous son Thomas, the one given to spontaneously buying ice-cream cones for homeless people, for adopting and raising, including bottle-feeding, at 2 a.m., homeless kittens, for occasionally, to our surprise, putting up temporarily homeless friends on the sofa in our garage and sneaking out microwaved pizza to feed them, and like me, given to being a pain in the ass.

So on his seventy-fifth birthday, there is no adequate way to tell you how much I love my big brother.

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Brian Wilson died today, June 11, 2025. This was written two years ago.

I knew a little about Brian Wilson’s struggles, but I had never heard of his illness, called schizoaffective disorder, before the documentary Long Promised Road.

The Wilson brothers’ father contributed to his son’s emotional disorder, I am sure. He was abusive and a hearing loss in one of Brian’s ears has several explanations, but the most reasonable one, to me, is that his father hit him hard upside the head with the flat surface of an electric iron.

The blow to Brian’s ear was about the time the hallucinations began. Brian didn’t see things. He heard them. They were voices telling him terrible things about himself and suggesting that he do terrible things. I’ve heard those voices, all my life, but they were inside my head. Brian’s voices were out there in The World, and they were very real.

I did enough research to establish that the link between mental illness and creativity is nonsense. I still believe, though, that Wilson’s music is so beautiful because that was how he fought the voices. The only place, I think, where he could silence them was in the studio, recording music with his brothers and cousins and friends and with his wife and her sister.

I could not watch the rest of the PBS special because Brian is now so wooden. I lost my nerve. That was a bad decision on my part, but it was because The Brian Wilson that impacted my life made me all rubbery and jiggly and happy. You can’t NOT dance to, for example, “Help Me Rhonda” or “I Get Around.” I still remember, at Branch School, three lovely eighth-grade girls—Patsy Silva, Marilyn Machado, Carolyn Coehlo— (all of them from Azorean stock, by the way) dancing to Beach Boys 45’s in Mr. Lane’s room at lunchtime. I had crushes on all three, but I was just a punk kid.

That was a long time ago. As the documentary revealed, even if he’s seemingly diminished, Brian Wilson is very much alive.

And the fact that he’s even around—upright, breathing, performing, even though he’s tentative, afraid, monosyllabic—is a kind of miracle. I think the first three adjectives I just used are far more important than the last three. “God Only Knows” is the kind of music that vaporizes demons, both Brian’s and mine.

The “genius” stuff can take a back shelf. Wilson was not compared, in the documentary, to Mozart. The conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic chose Mahler and Schubert instead.

That’s labeling the man with not-very-faint praise. But what counts isn’t Brian Wilson’s genius. It’s his courage.

And those harmonies…

Brian could still Bring It many years later. With Al Jardine.

This song was just plain fun. From the TV show American Bandstand.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: The Beatles answered “California Girls” with this song, a little more arch but just as fun. Paul McCartney in Red Square more than a few years ago.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Part II. A lovely song from Foxes (young women) and Fossils (guys my age).

Imitation is the sincerest…Part III. This live Fleetwood Mac cover of Wilson’s “Farmer’s Daughter” is haunting.

Thank you, Brian. Say hello to Sly Stone from me, will you?

My friend Wendelin van Draanen just won a well-deserved award for her Young Adult novel The Peach Rebellion, and her writing made me reflect on the illustrators who influenced me as a child and ‘tweener. The one who doesn’t belong is Sendak, but I included him because there has never been a book that gave me greater joy to read aloud.

And “Classics Illustrated,” true, was an industry, not an artist, but their “War of the Worlds” scared the bejabbers out of me when I was ten. I don’t think I could’ve handled the Spielberg version unless they needed another screamer to give poor Dakota Fanning’s vocal chords a break.

My brother Bruce had an entire drawer in our bedroom full of neatly-stacked “Mad” magazines, probably in chronological order, which I, the messy one, raided.

We also had two enormous pull-out drawers beneath our bedroom closet stocked from keel to gunwales with Disney comics, “Classics Illustrateds,” and a long-forgotten anti-Commie series, “Blackhawk,” about an international cadre of fighter pilots who did cool tricks like standing up in the cockpit to lasso Russki jets in midair.

We even had some Dick Tracy comics. When one of Dick’s fugitives refused to come out of his motel room at the end of a wing, Dick simply used his tommygun to inscribe a capital “Z” in the exterior wall. End of fugitive. I don’t think he was Mirandized.

I’d forgotten how bluntly charming Garth Williams’s Miss Bianca illustrations were. Sadly, Disney made a cartoon version with Disney art at its low point–The Rescuers were two-dimensional cutouts and Bianca’s voice was provided by Eva Gabor, who was charming in “Green Acres,” a low point for American comedic television but several notches above “Gilligan’s Island.”

I have a brief Gabor story somewhere. Remind me.

Most of these artists have one thing in common: When you’re a little boy, you can get lost inside their work. They take you to another place.