24 Thursday Jul 2014
Posted in American History, California history, Uncategorized, World War II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLFCYQjziw8&feature=youtu.be
In which Mr. Gregory, with the help of the Andrews Sisters–especially Maxine, my favorite, who’s so funny–proves this really was a “World War .”
22 Tuesday Jul 2014
The L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold wrote an excellent summer piece this year on great Los Angeles hamburgers, and it made me think about my strange affection for a city I largely dislike unless it’s about 1946 outside and the Red Cars are running. I’m a San Francisco kind of guy, with the exception of the Dodgers, and that has more to do with Vin Scully than with any loyalty to the Southland. But there is no noir like Los Angeles Noir–-I watched Double Indemnity one more time recently on late-night television-–and the list of good films of the genre is kind of amazing. Here are just a few favorites:
What makes these films even more compelling is, of course, real tragedy. Human wreckage has always surrounded the film industry and examples include Elizabeth Short’s grisly 1947 murder (she worked for awhile at what would become Vandenberg Air Force Base), when she became immortalized as “The Black Dahlia;” the implosion of film comedian Fatty Arbuckle’s career when he was charged with the 1921 murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe; the mysterious 1924 death of producer Thomas Ince, “father of the Western,” after a visit to William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, Oneida, where Hearst mistress Marion Davies, as she did at San Simeon, served as the Chief’s hostess. What ended Ince’s life? Was it a heart attack or a bullet intended for Charlie Chaplin, Davies’ putative lover?
It’s film, finally and ironically, that best illuminates dark places like these. All of these films entangle us in L.A.’s tawdry Day of the Locust glamour, in its ambition and deception, because this is a place where nobody is who you think they are, a place where, as Chandler wrote, the Red Wind-–the Santa Anas-–can lead even the most dutiful Valley housewife to contemplate her husband’s back while absently squeezing the butcher knife’s handle in her free hand, the one without the potholder.
22 Tuesday Jul 2014
I wish I had more old photos of my days at Branch Elementary School in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, which I attended between 1958 and 1966.
I started at the 1880s schoolhouse, but in 1962, we moved into one of those Sputnik School of Architecture schools that was twice as big as the old school. It had four rooms.
I remember seeing one photo of me, Dennis Gularte, and it might’ve been Melvin Cecchetti, all decked out like cowboys, down to chaps and Mattel Fanner ’50s (“If it’s Mattel, it’s swell!”) on our hips.
For the uninitiated, a “Fanner ’50″ is a replica double-action Old West six-shooter that allows your shorter Old West gunfighter to get off approximately 1,200 shots without reloading. It was a marvel.
That was back in the days when gunfights on the playground were still culturally permissible, although they were limited to Fridays, which remains my favorite day of the week.
There was even a glorious, if very brief, time–our teachers would decide to draw the line at high-capacity ammunition drums–when the television show The Untouchables was popular and so we re-enacted the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with Mattel-It’s-Swell Tommy Guns. We died spectacular deaths after we had lined up, hands up, against one wall of the school. We took turns pretending to be the Moran Gang victims and Capone’s button men. We were a democratic bunch.
The girls on the swings just thought we were gross. But they were girls, mind you, and they liked to pretend they were horses, which we found damned peculiar.
We liked to pretend we were ’62 Corvettes.
So us Branch School kids–all 70-odd of us, first through eighth grades– were both rootin’ and tootin’. But we also could be very good.
The entire third and fourth grades went on a field trip to Morro Bay, in a little yellow bus driven by Elsie Cecchetti, whom I will always love, and we all walked through the crew quarters of the Coast Guard cutter Alert without awakening the young man busy contradicting the cutter’s name, snoring softly in his bunk. We were impressed with how white his underwear was. The Coast Guard is a well-laundered service branch.
During that tour, we requested, but were denied, authorization to fire off a few rounds from the 40-mm Bofors gun on the forward deck, which put quite a damper on an otherwise fine outing. It would’ve lifted or spirits and sustained us when, later in the day, we had to visit the abalone processing plant.
Abalone, we discovered, have little Stage Presence, so we watched, stifling yawns, as they lay lifeless and inert, pounded with wooden hammers, by sad, unfulfilled men, until they achieved abalonability.
Years later, with a shock of recognition, I saw the same abalone factory ennui when I took some of my AGHS European history students to Munich and ate schnitzel in a massive auditorium while an oompah band performed and two girls, in traditional costume, more or less danced. It must’ve been about their eighth performance of the day, in front of masses of greasy-cheeked, ungrateful American teenagers–except for our kids, of course– and dancing with gleeful abandon was just not in their repertoire.
By the time the disconsolate abalone pounders had finished with their victims, they looked disgusting, like Neptune’s cow patties. By the time we were old enough to realize that they were tasty, they had all been eaten. Sea otters were the alleged culprits, but my money was always on the Morro Bay Elks Club.
[Clams are no more stimulating than abalone, by the way. The second-best show-and-tell ever, other than Tookie Cechetti’s fingertip in a vial of alcohol, lost in a saber-saw accident, was the Pismo clam Dennis Gularte and Melvin Cecchetti attempted to keep alive in the classroom sink in the new school. Clams have all the entitlement and ingratitude of the Kardashian sisters and are only marginally smarter. Our clam said little during the school day, showed little interest when we tried to push a length of kelp, which we know had to be yummy, through its shell’s opening, and then did nothing at all for about another day. Dennis ate it.]
By the way, we didn’t always have the luxury of Elsie’s school bus. We first had a pickup painted school bus yellow, with two benches bolted to the truck bed and a tarp over the top, and when we crossed the creek, we all bounced like a bagful of marbles and squealed with delight.
Not everybody enjoyed the pickup. One morning, one of us got sick, and we decided he’d had scrambled eggs for breakfast.
We also used to go to Poly Royal, the local college’s open house, and loved that jet engine fired off in Aeronautical Engineering, before the event deteriorated into the kind of Roman Bacchanalia that would make Caligula blush.
We most of all loved the biology department, because its centerpiece was the genuine stuffed two-headed calf.
We spent some time pondering another of their exhibits, an aquarium tank full of bullfrog tadpoles that was labeled, soberly, “Elephant Sperm.”
In our day, Branch no longer had the steeple and bell that originally was standard equipment for rural schoolhouses, but it did have the first multi-purpose room in San Luis Obispo County.
The hallway in between the two classrooms was used for both hanging up your coat and for beating students with yardsticks. This encouraged us to learn harder and accounts for why, to this day, I still know all my state capitals, down to the fact that Pierre, South Dakota, is pronounced, “Peer,” of which our teachers had none.
Yes, in that hallway, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Fahey had perfected a technique called “Bad Cop, Other Bad Cop.”
They wore Eleanor Roosevelt cotton print dresses, our teachers did, which made them look, even then, like exhibits from a fashion museum, but either one could’ve humiliated Roger Maris in pre-game batting practice at Yankee Stadium.
They also would’ve made Billy Martin sit perpetually in the corner of the Yankee dugout, his nose pressed against the water cooler, which, given Martin’s notorious partying, might’ve considerably lengthened Mickey Mantle’s career.
The powdered soap dispensers out back were incorporated into language lessons, which is why there are only two documented instances of That Word being uttered with impunity at Branch Elementary between 1888 and 1962, and I believe one of those involved a carpenter and the other a school board member.
It’s a home today, and painted yellow, but in our day it was pink, sheathed in what I think what former classmate Michael Shannon has said were asbestos shingles, which serve as wonderful insulation, but, by the time you’re in your fifties, your school days suddenly begin to produce clouds of what look like chalk dust every time you sneeze.
For the health-conscious reader, not to worry. On summer mornings, when school wasn’t in session, my favorite thing to do was to wave at the biplane that crop-dusted the fields next to our house and then go frolic and gambol in the clouds of herbicide.
Of course, in those days, everybody smoked (Camel shorts), soon after they’d taken their first steps (“JIMMY’S WALKING! Here, son, light one up on Pop!”), and the only seat belts in use were those fastened around Ham, the Space Chimp, the precursor to the Mercury astronauts.
We were a hardy breed, us Baby Boomers. Hack. Wheeze.
There were good things, too, mind you, like actual Pismo clams–all from the extended family of our classroom clam–at Pismo Beach. You didn’t even need a clam fork. They’d just walk up to you and surrender, as if it were North Africa, not Pismo, and they were the Italian Army. But I digress.
The point is that I just don’t have to seem a single picture from those days except of my eighth grade graduation when, of course, I looked not just like a dork, but like a PARODY of a dork. So if there are any in your collection at home, Arroyo Grandeans, I’d love to see them.
But none, please, of Mrs. Brown. She still makes my palms sweaty.
22 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in California history, Family history, Personal memoirs, Uncategorized
This year AVID students–kids whose family backgrounds do not include a college experience– invited me to go on the northern college tour, and I was honored. I had never visited Cal until a few years ago, with another AVID group. I did go to Stanford. For a week. I won a teaching fellowship in 2004 and got to study the Great Depression and New Deal with David Kennedy, whose book on the subject won the Pulitzer Prize for History. I tried not to look too adoringly at him while he taught us. It was difficult, because not only was he brilliant, but he was a real human being– engaging, witty, and you could tell he loved the history of the time and the Americans who had lived it.
I instantly loved Stanford’s rival, Cal, when we visited, even though I had to fight the impulse, so common to my generation, to run off and occupy the administration building, Sproul Hall, and demand that we leave Vietnam. It is so beautiful and I am convinced just walking around campus with the kids boosted my I.Q. a full 20 points, up to 100.
The other thing I thought, with a little sadness, was that my Mom–Patricia Margaret Keefe–should’ve been here. She was desperately poor, a child of the Great Depression. She was a human footnote in the immense body of Kennedy’s scholarship. Her father, my Irish-American grandfather, deserted the family in the mid-1920s, so my grandmother worked long hours as a waitress in a Taft, California, coffee shop, where “extra sugar” meant a healthy dollop of bootleg Canadian whiskey in your coffee. It meant my mother, as a little girl, spent a lot of time alone. Those years left their mark on her. We had a can cupboard longer than the cupboards in the back of my classroom, full of food we’d never eat, because the thought of being hungry must have terrified her. And so going to college, for the daughter of a waitress from an isolated outpost on the oil frontier, had been out of the question.
Earl Denton, the first superintendent of the Lucia Mar Unified School District in southern San Luis Obispo County, and a family friend, said that my mother, whose education ended with her graduation from Taft High School, was the most brilliant woman he had ever met. I remember her devouring the works of the Jesuit theologian and anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that evolution was no contradiction of faith; in fact, it was a divinely-inspired process. She–-as I would years later with Das Kapital–-wrote almost as much in the margins of Teilhard’s books as he had written in the text.
When I was very little, we played school. She even rang a hand bell when “recess” was over. It had been my grandmother’s—Dora Gregory, her mother-in-law, had been a schoolmarm in a one-room school in the Ozark foothills. My first day of formal education was in first grade in a two-room school, Branch Elementary, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. I remember realizing, with a little shock of pleasure, that I could read the names of my classmates as our teacher, Mrs. Brown, wrote them on the blackboard.
My mother and I hadn’t been “playing” school at all. She just made it seem that way. Losing her, when I was 17, remains the central tragedy of my life.
So, many, many years later, on that visit to Cal, while the AVID kids explored, I had the briefest and loveliest mental image of her, about 1938 or 1939-–blouse, pleated skirt, saddle shoes, bobby socks, with her books and notebook spread out on one of those lush, verdant lawns, studying between classes. My mother was a beautiful woman, but the most beautiful thing about her may have been her mind.
And I think that’s why I enjoy these particular trips, with this particular group of kids. It’s my way of repaying Mom. One of them might take her place, studying in the sunlight on the lawn at a place like Memorial Glade. She would love that idea.
And she would love these kids because she would understand them completely. Despite my ne’er-do-well grandfather, I believe completely that my mother’s love for learning and for the the written word had deep genetic and psychological roots in County Wicklow.
So she would love without hesitation the AVIDS who show the incredible desire, the hunger, to improve themselves that she’d had, who refuse to complain when things get tough, who extend themselves to help their classmates, because she believed that all of us, and all of our lives, are intricately and intimately connected, and that this connection requires us to be responsible to and accountable for each other.
The young person who understands these things is close to my mother’s heart.
18 Friday Jul 2014
Posted in American History, California history, World War II
15 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in American History, California history, World War II
Japanese-Americans await transport at the Santa Anita Racetrack. They slept in the stables.
From a letter to a University of Oregon alumni magazine that ran an article on the internment of World War II:
“In 1942, U.S. Marines were battling the Japanese in the Guadalcanal jungles. American aircraft carriers were sunk by Japanese warplanes. So many ships were sunk in the Solomon Islands ‘slot’ that it was nicknamed Iron Bottom Sound. The fighting was a match of equals that could have gone either way. The American public was frightened of a West Coast invasion. We cannot condemn 1942 policy using our 2013 mores and sensibilities. The prospect of a ready made collaborationist population, following a Japanese invasion, impelled the internments of Japanese Americans.”
This, of course, excuses the irrational. Consider the other coast of the United States:
–In 1941, German U-boats were already attacking American warships: the destroyers Greer and Kearny came under fire before a torpedo took the Reuben James and 115 of her 159-man crew in October, five weeks before Pearl Harbor. Even before then, with the fall of France in June 1940, war hysteria in America had been intense. With FDR’s blessing, J. Edgar Hoover would compile voluminous lists, aided by wiretaps, of suspected German Fifth Columnists living in the United States; the agency included more lists of any American who subscribed to periodicals written in German or Italian, and until FDR ordered the registration and monitoring of all aliens, there were isolated but frightening cases of Germans or German-Americans who were attacked–one was murdered–by wrongheaded “Patriots,” deprived of our 2013 mores and sensibilities.
–By 1942, American troops were fighting Rommel’s Afrika Korps—and getting routed, at Kasserine Pass. In general, the war was going against the Allies on both the Western Front—the disastrous Dieppe Raid is a notable example–and Eastern Front, with Gen. von Paulus’s Sixth Army, which would eventually surrender at Stalingrad, defeating Soviet forces in combat around Kharkov.
In the Pacific war, we had lost the Philippines, just as the War Department knew we would, and our Pacific possessions, but we’d taken the war to Japan with the Doolittle Raid in April and achieved a much more substantive victory–the first American turning point–at Midway in June with destruction of four of the six carriers that had begun the war against us at Pearl Harbor, along with the cadre of the Japanese naval air forces.
–German U-boats sank 82 American ships in all waters in December 1941 alone; In 1942, they sank 121 American ships off the East Coast and 42 along the Gulf Coast out of a total of 500 American merchant marine ships sunk by German submarines that year. Americans on holiday, from Coney Island to Miami, could see our ships glowing at night as they burned,, with their crews. A U-boat also delivered a team of Abwehr saboteurs onshore near Jacksonville, Florida. We were bleeding ships and English children were beginning to go hungry: they were allowed one small egg every four weeks.
During the same period, Japanese submarines sank a total of four ships off the West Coast.
–120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned under Executive Order 9066. Fewer than 3,000 Italian-Americans or Italian aliens and 11,000 German-Americans or German aliens were interned.
14 Monday Jul 2014
Posted in American History, California history, World War II
I recently found a local man who fought, like this soldier, with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Pfc Sadami Fujita was killed in action and awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart during the relief of the “Lost Battalion” in the Vosges Mountains in October 1944.
Sadami was born and raised in Hawaii. Here he is, as an eight-year-old, in the 1920 census. You can click on the images to make them larger.
But in 1939, he left Hawaii for California on the President Pierce, evidently with a younger brother, Jimmy. Here’s the “alien” passenger list and; below, Pierce passes one of the Bay Bridge’s towers, probably in 1935, the year before the bridge opened.
This ship was intimately tied to the career of Amelia Earhart. She was one of the dozens of ships, both military and civil, which searched fruitlessly for the lost flier in 1937. But in 1934, Pierce had saved Earhart’s life on her Hawaii-to-California flight, in her beloved Lockheed Vega. From a website on that flight:
In the final hours of the journey Earhart found herself surrounded by a thick blanket of fog. Glancing down through a hole in the fog, she suddenly caught sight of a ship. She dove down through the hole, she wrote later, “faster than I ever flew before from 8,000 feet to 200!” The ship was the President Pierce, outward bound from San Francisco. Earhart lined her plane up with the wake of the ship and headed for California—now only 300 miles away!
In the 1940 Census, Sadami, too, has found a home in California: he is living with two brothers, Jimmy, who will go to the Poston internment camp, and Dick, in Arroyo Grande. The page from that year’s census is like a Who’s Who–it includes the Ikedas, the Hayashis, the Fukuharas, and Javier Pantaleon, the foreman at the Waller Seed Co. to whom doomed sailor Felix Estibal wrote one of his last letters before being killed in action off Guadalcanal in November 1942. 
Five months after FDR re-instated the draft, the United States Army tapped Sadami on the shoulder–and, not unusual in the Army–they spelled his name wrong, though not as egregiously as the case of Marine Private Louis Brown, from Corbett Canyon. Killed on Iwo Jima, the twenty-year-old’s name was spelled “Louise” in the Navy casualty records.
He would be assigned to the 100th Infantry Battalion, a tough outfit made up of Hawaiian Japanese-Americans. The 100th would later be merged with the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team as that unit’s First Battalion. The 442nd included Nisei soldiers from all 48 states. The unit would do most of its fighting in Italy, but was transferred to France in the fall of 1944.
Sadami, a PFC in “B” Company of the 100th Battalion, was killed on October 28 in the relief of the “Lost Battalion,” a unit made up largely of Texans that had been surrounded by German troops in the Vosges Mountains.
This is what it was like that day, from a website on the 442nd: (http://www.the442.org/battlehistory/vosges.html)
The following day [October 28th], both battalions continued the drive forward in the teeth of stubborn resistance and heavy artillery and mortar fire. Casualties went up and up, caused largely by tree bursts, from which there was no escape. Our own artillery was active, and the Cannon Company and 4.2 mortars performed yeoman service, but the Germans were below ground, while our troops were up and moving forwards. At the end of the day, the regiment was 1,500 yards nearer to the “lost battalion,” but only at [a] terrible cost in men and material. During the night, biting cold and rain kept the men from resting.
So it’s probable that it was artillery fire that killed Fujita–the Germans fired .88 shells into the treetops and, as was the case in the Hurtgen Forest, a ferocious battle being fought at the same time in in Germany, just over the Belgian border, many GI’s were killed by flying shrapnel and splinters. This is what the combat zone looked like then, and today: 
The 442nd broke through two days later. 800 Nisei soldiers were killed or wounded to rescue the 230 Texans.
Several Nisei soldiers, like Masami Hamakado, in Fujita’s “B” Company, kept extensive photographic records of their service years and of their comrades. Two of Hamakado’s photographs show paired soldiers, but each is labeled only with last names. In both photos one of the names is “Fujita.”
This is what drives historians nuts. No first names. Here’s the first photograph, labeled “Ono and Fujita at Parade Rest.” 
Here’s the second, “Fujita and Umihara.” 
One of these men has to be the Arroyo Grande Fujita. A hint: Sadami was only 5′ 1″, so he’s likely to be the shorter man in either photograph. I looked up the enlistment record of the other “B” Company Fujita., whose first name was Hasami.
He was 5′ 2″. Great.
I’m reasonably sure–but will never be certain– that the lower photo is of “our” soldier, because Sadami Fujita outweighed Hasami Fujita by 22 lbs., so the smaller soldier in the lower photograph is a more likely choice.
He’s a nice-looking young man.
My next step is to hope to get a return email from the Fujita family still living in Hawaii–maybe the will know more about Sadami and maybe they’ll have photographs.
Sadami Fujita would go home to his family. His grave is in the Punch Bowl, an incredibly beautiful place; I visited in 1996. I owe it to him to find out more. 
I owe to these young men, too. These are the 442nd Regimental Combat Team soldiers who gave their lives for the country:
MEMBERS OF THE 100th INFANTRY BATTALION AND 442nd REGIMENTAL COMBAT TEAM KILLED IN ACTION IN WORLD WAR II
Chester K. Abe / Matsuei Ajitomi / Tokio Ajitomi / Frank Chujiro Akabane / John Akimoto / Victor Akimoto / Hideo Akiyama / Zentaro G. Akiyama / Eugene T. Amabe / Nobuo Amakawa / James H. Anzai / Yoshiharu N. Aoyama / Harold J. Arakawa / James Y Arakawa / Masashi Araki / Frank N. Arikawa / Hiroaki Arita / Shiro Asahina / Ralph Y. Asai / Shotaro H. Asato / Kenneth L. Asaumi / Shigeo Ashikawa / Daniel D. Betsui / James Boodry / Howard Vernon Burt / Joseph Lawrence Byrne / Henry Chibana / Guchi Chinen / Onso Chinen / Jenhatsu Chinen / Danny K. Chorike / Cloudy Gary Connor Jr. / Walter Maurice Crone / Haruo Doi / Kenneth E. Eaton / Tetsu Ebata / George Eki / Hachi Endo / Hiroo H. Endo / Masaharu Endo / Robert T. Endo Kaname Enomoto / Kiyozo Enomoto / Ralph Burnell Ensminger / Harold C. Ethridge / Charles Oliver Farnum Jr. / Fred H. Fritzmeier / Abe M. Fuji / Paul Fuji / Masao Fuji / Richard T. Fujii / Samuel A. Fujii / Yutaka Fuji / Jitsuro Fujikawa / Masaki Fujikawa / Hideo Fujiki / Toshiaki Fujimoto / Noboru Fujinaka / Russell Takeo Fujino / Yasuo R. Fujino / Yoshimi Fujino / Teruo Fujioka / Wendell S. Fujioka / Sadami Fujita / Ross K. Fujitani / Peter Fujiwara / Takeo Fujiyama / Akira W. Fukeda / Shigeo F. Fukuba /Masami Fukugawa / Barbara Fukuhara /Herbert M. Fukuhara / Kakutaro Fukuhara / Edward Fukui / Roy S. Fukumoto / Ichiji Fukumura / Chester T. Fukunaga / Arthur M. Fukuoka / Katsumi Fukushima / Kaoru Fukuyama / Stanley K. Funai / Satoshi Furukawa /Tatsumi Furukawa / Tsuyoshi Furukawa / Kenneth K. Furukido / Henry T. Furushiro / Mitsuo Furuuchi /George M. Futamata / Shigeto Fuyumuro / Roland Joseph Gagnon / Seikichi Ganeko / Hiroshi Goda /Kazuo Goya /Yeiko Goya / George Gushiken / Frank T. Hachiya / Victor Hada / Hatsuji Hadano / Eichi F. Haita / Tom S. Haji / Tetsuo Hamada / Kenichi Hamaguchi / Katsuyoshi Hamamoto / Seuchi Hamamoto / Fred Y. Hamanaka / Clifford H. Hana / Richard S. Hanaumi / Tamotsu Hanida /Ben Hara / Charles K Harada /John Y Harano / Kiyoshi Hasegawa / Mikio Hasemoto / Denis M. Hashimoto / Hisao Hashizume /Masao Hatanaka / Kunio Hattori / Harry M. Hayakawa / Makoto Hayama / Stanley Hayami / Donald S. Hayashi / Eugene Hayashi / Joe Hayashi / Robert N. Hayashi /Tadao Hayashi / Torao Hayashi / Henry Hayashida / Henry Y. Hayashida / Hideyuki Hayashida / Robert Hempstead / Eiji Hidaka / Charles Higa / Eddie K. Higa / Katsumori Higa / Masao Higa / Takei Higa / Toshio Higa / Wilson E. Higa / Yeiko Higa / Bert K. Higashi / Harold T. Higashi / James T. Higashi / Harry N. Hikichi / Aranari Hiraga / Tomosu Hirahara / Mitsuo Hiraki / Kazuo L. Hiramatsu / Hiroyuki Hiramoto / Frederick M. Hirano / John Hirano / Robert R. Hirano / Genichi Hiraoka / Satoru Hiraoka / Gerome M. Hirata / Louis M. Hirata / Himeo Hiratani / Yasuo Hirayama / Yutaka Hirayama / Masao Hisano / Gary T. Hisaoka / Yeichi Hiyama / Richard M. Honda / Tomio Honda / Kay I. Horiba / James J. Horinouchi / Paul F. Horiuchi / Robert S. Hoshino / Earl Hosoda / Max M. Hosoda Jr. / Kihachi Hotta / Teruo Hozaki / Toshio Hozaki / Kenichi Ichimura / Edward Y. Ide / Shigeo Igarashi / Kiyoshi Iguchi / Masao Iha / Kazuo Ihara / Martin M. Iida / George Ikeda / Isamu Ikeda / Masao Ikeda / Roy Y. Ikeda / William Y Ikeda / Yoshio Ikeda / Lloyd Ikefuji / Henry S. Ikehara / Kikuichiro D. Ikehara / Haruyuki Ikemoto / James S. Ikeno / Tomio lmai / William I. Imamoto / Larry M. Imamura / Shunichi Imoto / Thomas T. Inada / Ben M. Inakazu / Masami Inatsu / Minoru Inoue / Henry Inouye / Masato Inouye / Takeshi Inouye / Masaji Irie / Tadayoshi Iriguchi /Mitsuo M. Iseri / Haruo Ishida Hidemaro Ishida / Minoru Ishida / George F Ishii / Richard H. Ishii / Stanley T. Ishiki / Walter S. Ishiki / Kiyoshi lshimizu / Kusaku Isobe / Hachiro Ito / Roy Ito / Takashi Ito / Tetsuo Ito / Robert K. Iwahiro / Hisashi lwai / Yoshio Iwamasa / Lawrence T. Iwamoto / Henry S. Izumizaki Thomas M. Jichaku / Katsui Jinnohara / John A. Johnson / Chitoshi Kadooka / Joe Y. Kadoyama / Yasuo Kagawa James J. Kagihara / Tsugito Kajikawa / Nobuo Kajiwara / Fred Y. Kameda / Bob T. Kameoka / Shinobu Kametani / Mitsuo Kami / Shizuto Kamikawa / James J. Kanada / Walter E. Kanaya / John S. Kanazawa / Frank Kanda / Takezo Kanda / Takeo Kaneichi / Katsuhiro Kanemitsu / Seichi Kaneshiro / Yasuo Kaneshiro / Isamu Kanetani / Jero Kanetomi / Akira Kanzaki / James S. Karatsu / Haruo Karimoto /Kenneth G. Kashiwaeda /Yoshitaka Kataoka /Noritada Katayama /John S. Kato /John J. Kato /Joseph Kato /Kenji Kato /Yoshio Kato /Masaichi Katsuda /John R. Kawaguchi /Richard H. Kawahara /Tetsuro Kawakami Kazuo Kawakita /Haruo Kawamoto /Sadao Kawamoto /Toshio Kawamoto /Yutaka Kawamoto /Kikumatsu F Kawanishi /Cike C. Kawano /George Kawano /Tetsuo Kawano /Yasuo Kawano /Albert G. Kawata /Satoshi Kaya /Stephen M. Kaya /Yasuo Kenmotsu /Lewis A. Key /Tadashi Kijima /Leo T. Kikuchi /John S. Kimura /Matsuichi Kimura /Paul Kimura Jr. /Tsuguo Kimura /Shomatsu E. Kina /Francis T. Kinoshita /Mamoru Kinoshita /Richard K. Kinoshita /Toshio Kirito /Robert T. Kishi /Roy J. Kitagawa /Paul T. Kitsuse /Ronald S. Kiyabu /Edward Y. Kiyota / Kiichi Koda /Sadaichi Kohara /Sadamu Koito /Hayato Koizumi /Yutaka Koizumi /Shaw Kojaku /Tadashi Kojima /Nobuo Kokame /Jimmie T. Kokubu /James K. Komatsu /Katsuto Komatsu /Fred H. Komeda /Nobuo Komoto /Harry M. Kondo /Harushi Kondo /Herbert Y. Kondo /Howard N. Kondow /Seichi Kotsubo /Shigeo Kuba /George M. Kubo /Tadashi Kubo /James Kubokawa /Mitsuharu Kuboyama /Thomas T. Kuge /Isamu Kunimatsu /Tetsuo Kunitomi /Katsuji K. Kuranishi /Jerry S. Kuraoka /Minoru Kurata /James S. Kuratsu /Ichiji H. Kuroda /Robert T. Kuroda /Satoshi Ben Kurokawa /Shigetoshi Kusuda / Shosei Kutaka /Masaji Kutara /Shozo Kuwahara /Sunao Kuwahara /John Kyono /Clarence E. Lang /Leonard H. Luna /Harry F. Madokoro /Saburo Maehara /Richard K. 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07 Monday Jul 2014
Posted in American History, California history, Family history, Personal memoirs
My mother and grandmother, about 1925.
What’s hard about doing your family tree is finding some branches you’d rather break off. The one that comes to mind is the ancestor with 19 slaves in the 1850 census, identified only by gender and age, as if they were machine parts rather than human beings. That’s not the case with my Grandma Kelly. When she died in Cambria in 1974, I think she’d finally found some happiness in that beautiful place. She deserved it. Her life, I now realize, represents a significant slice of California’s economic history, and the wealth the Golden State has generated came because of people like her, proud independents whose only wealth was their determination to keep going.
When I was little she took us out to lunch at a restaurant, now torn down, where the Carl’s Jr. is today on the northern edge of San Luis Obispo, off Santa Rosa. When the waitress handed out the menus, her eyes widened and locked on Grandma’s bracelet: It was made of gold nuggets.
I found out a lot I didn’t know researching my Mom’s family tree over the summer. Emma Martha Kircher—my Grandma Kelly—was born in a mining town now underneath Lake Shasta–Kennett, California–and the nuggets on her bracelet were her father’s. Charlie Kircher, the son of German immigrants from Baden-Wurttemberg, refugees from the humiliating collapse of the German revolution of 1848, was a restless Kansas farmer who came west in a lesser-known California Gold Rush near the turn of the century.
Kennett was at its epicenter: From the photographs it’s a town that looks like a Universal Studio version of Dodge City; later photos, by the 1910s, show a huge and menacing copper smelter—the industry that sustained Kennett after the gold ran out—dominating the little town.
Charlie Kircher, my great-grandfather, was not the romantic figure I thought him to be, not a hardy 49er with shovel, pan, and cradle. He was a company man. The mine where he worked—the Uncle Sam mine—eventually would yield over a million dollars in ore, and one of his jobs, as a chlorider, was to separate the gold ore from the rock in which it was embedded. It wasn’t romantic at all—it was tedious, smelly, but important to an industry that could be immensely destructive: the photographs of what hydraulic mining, for example, did to the land of Shasta County are as shocking in their way as the photographs of bombed-out German cities at the end of World War II.
But it’s here where Charlie seems to have found his vocation, and it’s in Kennett’s goldfields where he set down his roots. He married a 14-year-old native Californian, Nellie Wilson, in 1894, and the couple promptly produced three children: my grandmother, Emma Martha, born in 1895, Violet, in 1898, and Charlie Jr., in 1900.
My grandmother’s earliest memory was of “a house on stilts.” I had visions of her living over the Sacramento River—I seem to 
remember an urban legend that Country-Western star Merle Haggard owned a house like that over the Kern River with a trap door to facilitate fishing. That wasn’t Emma’s situation at all: her house was terrifying. It was a Company house for a Company man, built flush into the steep sides of Iron Mountain, and below the stilts is a sheer drop, seen in an old photograph, that makes it a miracle she survived her childhood.
She attended a school, a little steepled building, in Kennett, which was also graced with a Methodist Church and the two-story Diamond Saloon and Hotel (V.C. Warrens, Prop.): an interior shot from a UC Davis collection shows a long bar with a militia-line of brass spittoons along the rail and an ornate ceiling with plump, gauzily and vaguely-dressed females and an attendant cherub or two for class.
Kennett was a tough town. Charlie Kircher was a tough man. The records note a “crippled right hand,” but he may have used the good one liberally. Nellie would divorce him and had remarried by 1906; although the three children would follow Charlie to Burbank in 1910, later, the youngest, Charlie Jr., would lie about his age to join the World War I Navy, quite probably to put some ocean between himself and his father.
My great-grandmother, Nellie Wilson Kircher.
That’s when Charlie Kircher’s trail disappears. I can find no record of his death and my Grandmother never discussed him and very rarely discussed her early life. I never met her sister and brother.
I can pick up the thread of her life again in Taft, California, a town just over the San Luis Obispo county line that resembled Kennett in every way except for one: the source of wealth was oil, not gold.
Emma Martha Kircher met my Grandfather—they’d marry in July 1920 in Bakersfield—whose job descriptions over the years more or less connect with the oil industry and also with the fact that he couldn’t seem to hold a job for very long.
There’s only one photograph of him, now missing—a handsome Irishman, Edmund Keefe, in a grand three-piece suit and a Homburg hat, his hands wrapped proudly around my toddler mother, Patricia Margaret Keefe. His eyes are fixed on her and the part of the face you can see below his hat brim is creased by a wide smile. Edmund’s father had come to North America as a Famine baby, but in a miraculous way: The Keefes’ English landlord, Lord Fitzwilliam, had paid the passage to Quebec for his starving County Wicklow tenants, an act of seeming generosity that would make my own life possible.
Fitzwilliam estate, Coolattin, County Wicklow
It also made it possible for Fitzwilliam to replace Irishmen with sheep–far more pliable and almost as cheap to feed.
The Keefes had farmed in Ontario and worked as migrant laborers in the Pennsylvania oilfields before the family settled and homesteaded for many years in Minnesota. Thomas Keefe married into another Wicklow family, the Foxes, so profoundly Catholic that they produced a somewhat frightening nun, Sister Loretto, who made it her life’s mission to minister to unwed mothers.
Sister Loretto, in an old newspaper photograph.
“He was a bad man,” my step-grandfather said of Edmund Keefe, and that’s about all I know of him. I know he liked to drink. I know he liked to borrow cars that didn’t belong to him, and I know that the Taft Police Department and the Kern County Sheriff knew him far better than I ever will. He disappeared in the 1920s—one version has him running off with Shell Beach restaurant owner and businesswoman Mattie Smyer.
Before she moved here, she was a whorehouse Madam in Taft. She became a restaurateur—today, Mattie’s old place is McLintock’s Restaurant. When the War came, Mattie’s contribution to defeating the Axis was a stable of girls behind the restaurant and in little multi-doored houses across Highway 101, near the sea.
The Mattie connection was something we discovered years after, when my parents made the innocent mistake of taking Grandma to dinner to Mattie’s Restaurant for her birthday. Midway through the main course, after an epic personal struggle, her face began to twitch and she burst into tears. Much later, I found out why: Edmund Keefe may have been a bad man, but he was also, according to my uncle, the love of my grandmother’s life.
But none of us—not a private detective my parents hired, nor hours of research on my part—has ever uncovered what happened to him.
He wrote a one-act play about a young married couple, which he titled “Emmeline.” It, too, has disappeared.
So Emma Martha Keefe was a single mother in an oil boomtown and she was heartbroken. She worked as a waitress in a Taft 
coffee shop where “extra sugar” meant a good stiff belt of Prohibiton-era Canadian whiskey—possibly landed at Spooner’s Cove at Montana de Oro–in your coffee. She and my mother lived close to the bone; their poverty is revealed in an old school picture of my Mom, a jaunty little beret on her head, sweater and pleated skirt–and that Irish smile I would grow to love so much–but her shoes are beaten and scuffed.
Emma resisted, but eventually accepted, the courting of another man, another Irishman, a Taft police constable, George Kelly, my step-grandfather, our Gramps. This man was my real grandfather. He was soft-spoken, gentle, tall and slender, a natural carpenter, gifted with children–I am so happy my toddler older son, John, got to meet him twenty-five years ago.
Gramps was a tough, too, and strong as an ox. He and my Uncle George, a big man and bigger than his Dad, used to have little handshaking contests every time they saw each other after an absence. Gramps always won: he was a bone-crusher. There’s a story of him getting jumped by three oilfield roughnecks in an alley during the 1930s, and of an assisting officer arriving at the scene to discover that Gramps was the only combatant both conscious and vertical.
It was Gramps who, at lunch one day, casually mentioned that Mattie was leaving Taft for Shell Beach, and she was putting on a big yard sale. The furniture was elegant. Grandma wouldn’t hear of it. “Not,” she sniffed, “from THAT woman.”
Later, she surreptitiously drove by the yard sale. She made a few more passes. Very slowly.
Fifty years later, when I spent the night at my uncle’s house near Sacramento, I slept on a Mattie Smyer couch in a living room surrounded by Mattie Smyer end tables, lamps, china cabinets and easy chairs. It was beautiful stuff–if one can use the word “voluptuous” to describe an elegantly curved floor lamp, then this was libido-driven furniture.
The Kellys eventually would move to Williams, in Colusa County, raise almonds, where the earliest memory I have is of falling down Gramps’s ranch-house steps. I still have the scar on my knee. I still remember the look of concern on Gramps’ face as he scooped me up in his arms.
When the pair came to visit us in Arroyo Grande, there was inside me the kind of trembling excitement a little kid feels on Christmas Eve. Grandma talked about politics, but also about Hollywood scandals–Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton seemed to share equal time with the Berlin Wall and the Mercury astronauts–and teased Gramps, a quiet man but a remarkably funny one, without mercy. He had learned after years of marriage how to be her straight man, Burns to her Gracie Allen. He adored her, and sometimes, in mid-needle, Grandma would stop suddenly and regard him with a smile. You could see that she had learned, after years of marriage, to adore him, too.
The only part I hated about their visits was when it came time for them to leave, and I would watch their car until it was gone, and still watch awhile after. Maybe, I must have thought, they’ve forgotten something and will have to come back.
When they retired to Cambria in a house built in large part by Gramps, then in his sixties, on a lot she’d been wise enough to buy when it was cheap, they lived quietly and putting on the Ritz consisted of going to an all-you-can-eat family restaurant off Highway 1. It wasn’t fancy. Grandma Kelly had no need for fancy. The wealth she had was in living life, in enduring unimaginable heartbreak and in enduring bleak poverty, and through all of that, she was most truly herself in those moments I caught her smiling at Gramps.
In those moments of delight, it was as if she was were five years old again but, somehow this time, her father, Charlie Kircher, was carrying her down Iron Mountain, carrying her away forever that horrific house on stilts and lifting her gently onto the back of the pony every little girl dreams of.
A Work in Progress 