She was born in 1883. As a nearly seventy-year-old who loves his sons but who’s bereft of daughters, I would have adopted her, given the chance. And had I a time machine able to go back to her time at about her age–perhaps twelve–I would’ve had a monstrous crush on her. The combination of overalls and pigtails would’ve been enough to reduce me to silly putty.

She grew up in a little farm town, Arroyo Grande, nourished by a beautiful creek which housed, in season, steelhead fighting upstream to spawn and, in another season, floods that once, in 1911, carried away a fourteen-year-old boy named Sam to his death.

She had the comfort of intelligence–a dubious comfort, admittedly. Both her father and her uncle were medical doctors (another uncle was a pharmacist) the sons of missionaries, born in Syria, whose homes, if her uncle Dr. Ed’s is any indication, were filled with artifacts from the Neolithic Holy Land and Chumash California; homes dense with books, homes full of creative energy inside. Her uncle’s, outside, was bounded by an enormous garden—in dirt her Uncle Dr. Ed found joy— to the point where her Aunt Clara added a bathroom that made it impossible for her husband to re-enter the house without a bathtub stop first. It was only the second bathtub in Arroyo Grande. Sometimes Aunt Clara would hear a soft knock at the door. The folks on the porch asked politely if they could come in and see Ed and Clara’s bathtub.

Ormie’s Aunt Clara, as the saying goes, was a piece of work. She was Arroyo Grande’s foremost schoolteacher; she arrived here in the 1880s and began a career that lasted forty years. She was the descendant of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, but she was an agnostic who just loved going to church. Ormie’s father was the medical director of Santa Barbara County who, in 1918, had the audacity to shut down the bars to stop the spread of the killer flu. He was not beloved.

Ormie’s cousin, Ruth was very much beloved. She became such a transformative teacher, of languages, at the Arroyo Grande Union High School (where her commute, atop Crown Hill, consisted of walking across the street) that they would decide to name a middle school after her. That’s baby Ruth, the little blonde. Possibly that’s her cousin Ormie, on the right. The group is posed in the yard of the Paulding home, one that still stands today.

The scene is idyllic, but life, in the 1890s, wasn’t always. Ormie had another cousin, a little boy, the one who was to be first-born, but he was stillborn instead. Her uncle, Dr. Ed, buried him in the garden where he would be close to his parents. Ed planted flowers that gave life to the son who was robbed of the chance to live his.

Ormie would move away from Arroyo Grande—but not very far, only twenty minutes or so today, by car—south to Santa Maria, where she would become a Santa Maria High School Saint, and then, years later, the high school’s librarian and then, after that, she worked for the Post Office.

She died in 1955. Here is Ormie’s tombstone:

Death be not proud. The Arrogant Male in me regrets that she lived her life as a “Miss,” but this is what she did with her life: She served young people, who, if you haven’t noticed, are sometimes insufferable, and maybe introduced one, thanks to the school library, to The Arabian Knights or Willa Cather’s My Antonia or—on the chance that the Santa Maria High School Library even had it on their shelves–The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. The power of school librarians is immense and compassionate, which is why the Far Right hates them so much.

And then she worked at the Post Office. Her obituary hints that even this seemingly mundane career gave her the chance to light up other lives. Post office patrons, it suggests, looked forward to buying a book of stamps from Miss Paulding. I think she had the power to reflect a person’s life back at him, in the instant of her look. You saw yourself welcomed in Miss Paulding’s eyes and so you were validated. I’ve known people like that. A friend who met the South African bishop, Desmond Tutu, a small man shaped, in his vestments, like a church bell, told me that he had that power.

In fact, her cousin, fragile and wheelchair-bound when I knew her, had the same kind of power, too. When I received communion at St. Barnabas, the Arroyo Grande Episcopal church, as a teenager, I would glance at the aged and fragile Miss Ruth Paulding as I returned to my pew. A smile from MIss Ruth carried the same freight as a priest’s blessing.

When World War II came, Ormie added a task not on her Post Office job description: She wrote hundreds of letters to servicemen overseas.

Hundreds.

The effort and the generosity of spirit implied in that task is a little overwhelming to me, living in a country where we observe a day—January 6—when patriotism and generosity were so debased.

Ormie’s generosity was boundless.

She loved animals. She was a charter member and a driving force in the Santa Maria Humane Society, and the lives she couldn’t save with letters, lives of young men lost in combat, she saved in the lives of the dogs and cats carelessly put aside. I can see her framing an abandoned mongrel’s face in her hands and looking into his eyes: the dog understands and looks back in the way dogs do, in absolute and unconditional adoration.

Hers was the same look that Ormie’s Post Office patrons saw.

And so she died a spinster—a terrible word—and I was born far too late to propose marriage to her, which I would have done, on the spot, when I was twelve. She didn’t need me. Women don’t need men to live lives that are graced by love, and filled by it, too. I think Ormie’s life was like that.

The life represented in that image, the little girl in overalls and pigtails, turned out to be more than a little miraculous. Women don’t need children any more than they need husbands. But without her knowing it—because I believe that kindness has the power to cross generations and so inform even unborn lives—we are, in a way, Ormie’s children.

Preview in new tab

Bonnie was in my ninth-grade art class on Crown Hill at Arroyo Grande High School in 1966. She was so lovely and so kind that I was immediately entranced by her. Not in the way you think. She was another guy’s girl. What I felt for her was more in the line of admiration rather than romance.

Of course, that previous sentence was a baldfaced lie, but there’s more to Bonnie than that.

Some people have the gift of reflecting your own worth back at you. I was never convinced, growing up, of my worth, but Bonnie saw it and communicated it without words. Sketching beside her on big sheets of newsprint bequeathed the most immense sense of belonging, at fourteen, that I’d ever felt.

She came to art class one day fighting tears because she was just a freshman and was therefore barred from going to the Christmas Formal with her boyfriend, an upperclassman.

And then some time in the spring, Bonnie didn’t come to class anymore. She vanished.

I found out later that she vanished because she was pregnant. Other than the whispers, which lasted just a short time, Bonnie was never heard from again.

I missed her so much that twenty years later, as a history teacher, I talked about her, when teaching American cultural history, to my students. They were appalled by the way she’d been treated, which, in their disgust at cruelty and hypocrisy, is yet another one of the dozens of reasons for why I love teenagers.

When I was growing up, a three-times-a-year treat for my family was driving from Arroyo Grande to Morro Bay for fish and chips at Bob’s on the Embarcadero. My goodness, you could still get abalone and chips at Bob’s. It took up a full Sunday, and, for somebody who grew up amid the cabbage fields of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, Morro Bay was exotic and enchanting. Abalone steak dipped in Tartar sauce–we drove out to the Rock to eat our lunches and to watch the fishing boats surge over the breakwater–was sublime.

So was the smell of the sea. Morro Bay was doubly enchanting when local farmers had just added a generous layer of turkey fertilizer to the row crops of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley.

It had to be than twenty years gone before I went back to Bob’s for fish and chips—the abalone, of course, was gone, but the calamari was wonderful—and this time it was with Elizabeth, my wife. I guess we’d gone there a couple of times before but the third time, I recognized the waitress immediately.

It was Bonnie, and it was twenty years later, when I had the audacity to use her as a Primary Source in my classroom, and there she was with her short waitress skirt and order pad and pen. I could’ve easily been appalled, as was a brilliant friend of mine, a classmate, now a lawyer, when she found me working as a liquor-store clerk in the years when I was recovering from the end of a career and the end of a relationship. Most of my recovery was not recovery at all; my life lay instead in the consistent and generous anesthetization that the liquor store’s stock supplied

So my friend, the lawyer, stared blankly for a moment at me, ashamed, behind the counter. “Oh, Jim.” was all she said.

I never saw her again.

But when Elizabeth and I saw Bonnie, she was radiant. She blushed, as I had in the presence of my lawyer friend, for just moment, but the weekend rescued her. It was Poly’s graduation and the child that had been inside her in ninth grade was later that day to graduate with an engineering degree.

She was just as beautiful as I remembered and I saw in her eyes the validation I’d remembered in ninth grade. She was proud of me and proud of us, of Elizabeth and me, as a couple.

I don’t remember, of course, the rest of the meal at Bob’s.

It would be many years later when I learned that Bonnie had died. The news hurt doubly, because I learned that she’d taken her own life, and we teacher types frequently confuse ourselves with Jesus. Surely, I thought, there could’ve been something I could have said or done. Or something I could have done without saying anything at all: Didn’t she see, in the moment before she took our order that day at Bob’s, how immensely proud I was of her?

When we got to the 1960s in my U.S. History classes in the years after that day, I told my Bonnie story again, but I added Graduation Day as the ending I’d never had before. A good teacher can sense when he or she has touched the students in their care; Bonnie touched mine. She inspired them.

As much as teenagers hate cruelty and hypocrisy, they love righteousness. Teaching history, after all, is really about teaching the future, and Bonnie’s story resonated because it gave them the hope that the future in their care would be righteous.

Bonnie resonates to me, too, because she died the same way my mother did. I spent many years in therapy after I lost my Mom until I quit it when the psychiatrist opined that my mother, in taking her own life, was a selfish person.

That’s the last word I would use to describe either my mother or my friend Bonnie. Nobody can understand the immense power of clinical depression and the seductiveness that self-destruction promises when it’s the only reasonable, rational way left for you to fight back.

A high-school administrator—my boss— once smugly confided to me that she could never imagine taking her own life. She was taken instead by cancer. I doubt that she could ever have imagined that, either. But clinical depression and Stage Five cancer are coequals when it comes to conferring death.

I keep a photo of my mother, holding my big sister when she was a baby, atop our mantle. She is breath-taking. So was Bonnie, in her white embroidered apron and red waitress mini-skirt and scuffed white tennis shoes, on the day that Poly graduated her daughter. I don’t know that there is a Heaven–I guess I’ll have to find that out on my own–but if there is, I want to hold my Mom very close. And then I want to ask directions.

Where is Bonnie?

And then, given God’s grace, I will hold her very close, and tell her, in a private voice just above a whisper, how much her life has meant to me. And then, given God’s grace, we will get the chance to sketch again, holding soft-lead pencils that drift noiselessly across the paper of big newsprint pads, We’re close together, sitting on high stools. Every once in awhile, Bonnie might look at my sketchpad, then look at me, and smile.

Dr. Charles Clark was Arroyo Grande’s “baby doctor” for many years until his death in 1916.

During the Civil War, he was a seventeen-year-old member of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry under George Custer–and he fought at Sailor’s Creek in 1865, the battle depicted in the painting.

I’m seeing how much I can find about his practice–his office was on Branch Street, I think near today’s Branch Street Deli–and it’s kind of shocking. Doc Paulding seems to have been the town’s primary doctor–he was a superb orthopedist–but even pediatrician Clark had to sew up the occasional adult who had an extra smile added to his cheek, the result of a knife fight. (This one was the result of an argument between farm laborers in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley.)

Being a child in the early 1900s wasn’t all that safe, either. I’m finding injuries caused to children by a mower (a bean-cutter killed one of our Civil War veterans in the Huasna Valley. He fell into it and his horses dutifully kept pulling), accidental shootings, runaway horses, burns caused by “manufacture of a steam engine out of a carbide can” by some future scientist (maybe not); he tended to his own son, Ed, a printer at the Arroyo Grande “Herald” whose fingers were caught in a press.

The most tragic incident, because it could’ve happened to any of us, came when a young mother, tending to her kitchen, left her toddler alone in the parlor for a moment. The little girl fell into the fireplace. Clark was unable to save her life.

[Fire was a terrible hazard for Victorian and Edwardian widows. A year of mourning called for widow’s reeds of black taffeta, easily set alight by the open flame of a gas jet used to illuminate homes. All that was expected of widowers was a thick black silk armband around the sleeve of a suitcoat.]

Cars are dangerous, (Dr. Paulding never mastered his–it was dangerous when he was out and about on house calls) but so was travel by wagon. Clark tended to the victims of two wagon accidents. In one, a woman and daughter in a funeral cortege were thrown to the pavement and knocked unconscious when the wagon started suddenly and the rear seat tipped.

And in 1912, a PCRR electric utility car T-boned the carriage containing schoolteacher Clara Paulding and her daughter, future schoolteacher Ruth Paulding, for whom the middle school is named. The carriage was reduced to splinters–the horse, an admirable one, stayed in its traces–and Clark helped attend to the Pauldings. The family got a nice settlement from the railroad.

His death was an untimely one; he died at 70 on September 27, 1916. Two tears later, the Spanish Flu would arrive in Arroyo. The Paulding home became a temporary hospital, housing up to sixteen patients at a time, so my guess is that Dr. Clark was sorely missed.

You wouldn’t think a structure as homely as this one—the Paulding Gym, taken from the Google Earth image—would be all that important. There was thought given to demolishing it at one time. That would be a mistake.

For one thing, Arroyo Grande sports fans had been wanting a high school gym—this would’ve been for the 1916 high school, atop Crown Hill—for many years. For another, it’s a legacy of American history, a small part (for a town of about 1,000 people in 1937, a big part) of American history. Along with the retaining wall below Paulding, the WPA stamps on Mason Street sidewalks and the stone fence around the town cemetery, it’s one of the last legacies of the New Deal.

And in many ways, it hasn’t changed all that much. My son Thomas, then a Paulding student, acted in Mr. Liebo’s plays on the same stage these students are using in 1939.

And even the buildings nearby, at the base of Crown Hill, have some historical significance. Here’s another Google Earth image of the IDES Hall, built in 1948;

I don’t know that most people realize that this is the second IDES Hall, still a testament to the importance that Azorean immigration has had in Arroyo Grande’s past. Here’s another photo of the gym, from the 1930s, and at the right, you can see the first IDES Hall.

And that structure dates from the 1880s, built by the Phillips brothers, who owned a furniture store—one of their places is today’s Bill’s Place on Branch Street. But what you see in this photo is a sad remnant of a much grander, complete with steeple, Columbian Hall. Here it is, when it was still on Branch Street, in a photo taken about 1908.

And the Columbia Hall was important—kind of an early 20th Century version of today’s Clark Center—that was the scene for everything from political meetings to Temperance lectures to recitals and plays. And dances: These young women, for all intents and purposes, are dancing in tribute to the local cash crop, the sweet pea, in the Columbian Hall.

By the 1930s, overcultivation of crops like sweet peas had just about done in the topsoil on the hillside around the Arroyo Grande Valley. 230 Civilian Conservation Crops youths from New York City, New Jersey and Delaware—their headquarters stood where today’s Woman’s Club stands–would begin to reverse the damage.

And by the 1930s, the new gym had a new coach. USC Trojan football star also coached basketball in that gym, and he brought a formidable reputation with him. Somehow, Belko, from a tough immigrant family, steelworkers, in Gary Indiana, had somehow escaped the attention of Notre Dame. USC was fine with that. His coach there, Howard Jones, called him “the finest example of a man I’ve ever coached,” and Belko, among other things, kicked a field goal against Montana in 1935. Inexplicably, USC wouldn’t kick another field goal for fifteen years. Frank Gifford kicked that one.

Here’s Belko and his basketball team, from Gordon Bennett and John Loomis’s book, The Old Days.

It’s not your imagination. There were a lot of Japanese-Americans who went out for basketball. That’s the next, tragic connection that the Paulding Gym has with history. On April 30, 1942, buses would assemble in the high school parking lot just outside to take local Japanese-Americans into internment. Among them were the Nisei seniors of the Arroyo Grande Union High School Class of 1942. There were fifty-eight seniors that year. Twenty-five were Japanese-Americans.

By then, Belko had left Arroyo Grande for a teaching position in Hanford. But the war would sweep him up, as well. The clipping below is from the August 14, 1944 edition of the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder.

There have been, of course, thousands of games played—volleyball and basketball—and hundreds of school dances and scores of plays in that old gym since Coach Belko’s time. And that’s been a long time ago. You wonder if the hopes and disappointments of the young people who once lived brief parts of their lives within its walls aren’t somehow still there, imprinted but invisible, invisible but powerful.

Among my favorite human beings are my high-school classmates Julian Brownlee and Mike Knecht. Mike is a writer and a (real) cowboy; Julian—named for his grandfather, Cal Poly President Julian McPhee—a standout athlete (football, baseball) with a marvelously dry sense of humor with whom I smoked my first cigarette, a Marlboro, in the St. Patrick’s Parish Hall in 1965.

That wasn’t very humorous, but it was my owned damn fault. I turned green.

And then—to show you how obstinate I am—the same thing happened shortly after, this time with a cigar called a Rum Crook, in the Fair Oaks Theater, during a film in which the Disney actress Hayley Mills (the original Parent Trap) appeared in a scene that revealed her nude rear end. That, and the Rum Crook, proved too much for me to tolerate. I think somebody—I don’t really remember who—found me sprawled on the sidewalk beneath the Coming Attractions, took pity on me, and drove me home to Huasna Road.

A little later, in high school, I found that there was a little knot of us in the AGHS Class of 1970—Julian, Joe Loomis, John Porter and me—who all shared January birthdays as well as given names that began with “J.”

Anyway, Mike and Julian are currently on that road trip—Mike’s posting from time to time on Facebook—from San Luis Obispo County to North Carolina for a wedding, in Julian’s Subaru. (A fine car; we’ve owned three.)

The photo shows them at the Great Divide. It has just occurred to me that they, heading east instead of west, are doing a Reverse Kerouac. These two may not know it, but not only are they are among my favorite human beings, but On the Road is among my favorite books.

And Kerouac, while working as an SP brakeman, lived in San Luis Obispo for a short time. I get all Kerouacky when I go to my much-beloved San Francisco and visit the City Lights Bookshop, where another one of my favorite human beings, my former AGHS history student Erin Messer, works.

It was a major gathering place for the Beats, including Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and the City Lights founder, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died recently.

I believe that he was more or less 140 years old.

The only bookstore that comes close to City Lights is Shakespeare and Company, founded by Sylvia Beach–from Altadena, California, of all places–and it stands just across the Seine from Notre Dame. I’ve been to Paris twice, but I was too intimidated to actually go inside the bookstore that was once frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. I’m just a little fellow.

It was enough for me to sip a latte the size of a soup bowl at a sidewalk cafe, Les Deux Magots, and gaze fondly at Shakespeare and Company’s facade. (Hemingway would’ve done the same, but with a Pernod, a pad of yellow lined paper and a dozen #2 pencils sharpened with his pocketknife.)

After I’d finished my latte, I got moderately but happily lost in the Latin Quarter, the old university section, with my nose almost against the glass of shop windows and looking around corners up narrow alleyways—an alley, in Europe, is called a “close”— once prowled by belligerent university students, thinking it was Poly Royal, armed with cudgels and fortified by red wine. The alleys, always in shadow, are 14th-century relics that somehow escaped Baron Hausmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the time of Napoleon III.

That was a good Lost. I think Mike and Julian are reasonable navigators, so they won’t get lost. They might run into a little culture-shock, like the time the guy hollered at me from a pickup truck in the Ozarks:

“Hey, boy!”

Actually, it was more like:

“Hey, BOY!“

I was 25 years old and walking to a hamburger stand in Licking, Missouri, for some French-fried mushrooms, an Ozark delicacy. I looked nervously for the Easy Rider Rifle Rack in the pickup’s cab, but it turned out that the man was just asking for directions.

But that’s another story. As to this current road trip with Mike and Julian, I don’t know which one is Kerouac and which is Neal Cassady. I don’t think that’s very important. It’s more important to have friends like these. We don’t see each other very much anymore, but every time Mike posts, our friendships are renewed.

It’s a gift, you see.