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.
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 54th Coast Artillery—-a unit designation remindful of a proud part of our nation’s past, the Civil War’s 54th 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.
Black GI’s and their dates at their San Luis Obispo USO. Photo courtesy Lt. Col. Erik Brun
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
* * *
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.
Battlefield artist Afred Waud depicts Confederates surrendering to advancing Union cavalry, April 1865
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.
Company H, 35th U.S. Volunteer Infantry. Charles Branch was a private in this regiment’s C Company.
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.
Branch on his motorcycle, from The Old Days, by John Loomis and Gordon Bennett
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.
Aguinaldo, who ultimately became the president of The Philippines
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.)
Contrasting views of American policy in The Philippines
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.
American troops apply what was called “the water cure” to a Filipino insurgent
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.)
For many Filipino immigrants, the Navy represented a path to citizenship. These are mess stewards and their dog aboard the light cruiser USS Seattle in 1923. An Arroyo Grande mess steward, Felix Estibal, would die when his destroyer, USS Walke, was torpedoed near Guadalcanal in November 1942.
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.
Filipino G.I.’s and their sidearm, the bolo knife, practice a martial art called escrima. Farmer Gabe de Leon (below) became the mayor of Arroyo Grande—the first Filipino American mayor in United States history.
“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.
Branch Street in Charles Branch’s time. From the online history of the United Methodist Church.
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.
Sawtelle in the early 1900s.
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.
A Work in Progress 