And it was a bonnie putt that won the tournament. MacIntyre was headed for a playoff–tied at seventeen under–and it was this put that would make that happen, because he hit it too gently. It died at the cup.

No, it didn’t. I had one more roll. Plop.

And this young man became the first Scot to win the Scottish Open in 25 years.

He’s a small-town boy. Oban, on the west coast, is about 24,000 people. Here it is on a map. I post this for all the lovely names in that part of Scotland, including Oban.

It’s kind of a touristy town, I guess, and this photo suggests why that is so. Oban is lovely, too.

The victory came on the Renaissance Course, also in the west of Scotland, so when that putt went in, the crowed was even more jubilant than the guy who won the tournament. Scots, to counter the impression Elizabeth and I have of them, are not “dour.” They are warm and friendly and given to moments of great jubilation. Like this one:

This was Robert’s first PGA Tour win, earlier this year, in the Canadian Open, and he’s sharing a hug with his caddie. That’d be his Dad, Dougie.

And a Scot winning the Canadian Open is perfect for history, as well. This is Sword Beach on D-Day and you can see a young bagpiper getting ready to offload. He’s with a British regiment, but Bill Millin is actually Canadian. There’s a statue for Bill, there today.

So I think this calls for bagpipes. These pipers are marching across a bridge near Arnhem, Holland–the “Bridge Too Far” in Corneilus Ryan’s wonderful book, key in Operation Market Garden, the attempt to force a crossing over the Rhine and into Germany in September 1944. It was Field Marshal Lord Montgomery’s scheme, and it was a disaster.

My Dad—Lt. Dad, in this photo, when he served in London as Quartermaster, befriended a Canadian bagpiper from a Canadian regiment, the Princess Pats. He was one of the last pipers alive in that regiment, in 1944. The rest were two or three years dead, in temporary graves in North Africa.

And, as always—maybe it’s my Dad— no matter where I start, I come back again to my hometown. Operation Market Garden included two South County soldiers. Art Youman was promoted to sergeant for his leadership in Holland. His commanding officer was Dick Winters, Easy Company–the “Band of Brothers.”

Lt. William Francis Everding, from Oceano, another 101st Airborne paratrooper, was killed in a fierce German counterattack on the Dutch village into which he’d parachuted at the beginning of Market Garden.

Holland was eventually liberated. This photo gives you a feel, I think, for how Yanks felt about the Dutch.

Scotland is 5,000 miles away; Holland a bit farther than that. But the fact is that bagpipers crossing the John Frost Bridge—and, of all things, a Scots golfer who loves his Da–can have an emotional wallop on this extremely amateur historian—that means something.

I think it means that we, all of us, no matter how distant we might be in time and space, are somehow bound together in deep and passionate ways that we’re not meant to understand or to see, except in brief moments when our peripheral vision allows us to see them. What follows is a flash, very warm and very brief, of recognition. We are ennobled then. Robert MacIntyre’s victory today ennobled me. It made me so happy that I married a woman with deep ancestral roots in Scotland.

Wes is an AGHS grad, a saxophonist, who played in concert with Booker T. last night (“Green Onions” is below.)

Sandy is an Army officer I hope to see again in the next few days. He taught history at West Point and has forgotten more about the Revolutionary War than I will ever know. He took his underclassmen to battlefields now 250 years old.

Two former students are military doctors. One more is an officer in the 82nd Airborne.

Two more have just become mothers for the second time, and you can tell from their photos how devoted they are to their children.

I’ve a former AGHS student, a young woman, who’s an architect. Another, a lawyer, is a product of UC Berkeley. Yet another, just married, worked with sea mammals at an aquarium.

Another just got her veterinary degree from my Alma Mater, the University of Missouri. When our tortoise, Lucy, got sick, she was a vet tech, and she cared for Lucy, who got better, with great compassion.

Another commanded a Coast Guard cutter based out of Ketchikan. When she served in Florida, she led armed boarding parties interdicting Colombian cocaine.

One is traveling in Turkey, one more in France. Another loves fishing, and she posts photos of immense rockfish she’s caught off our coast.

One–one of the most brilliant students I’ve ever taught–is a voracious reader and she works at City Lights in San Francisco, the bookstore haunt of Ferlinghetti and Kerouac and Ginsberg.

A young man, a former nationally-ranked Irish step dancer, is now a composer with a PhD from Columbia who lives in London. He is a newlywed. She is lovely.

One of his closest friends from AGHS was the Valedictorian at Yale a few years ago. He and his friend, another AGHS grad, and an honors grad from Reed College, write and perform plays.

At least three have written books.

A young woman especially dear to me is fighting, with great dignity, an autoimmune disease that would reduce the rest of us, including me, to tears.

So is a young man we taught at AGHS.

There are others fighting alcoholism, depression, or cancer. I admire them without reservation.

I admire, too, the students are now teachers, including at least one at Branch and another at Harloe and two at Mesa Middle School. And, yes, several teach history. One, a PhD with a specialty in the history of California farm labor, a topic dear to me, teaches at Poly.

This year, one student her M.D. from Harvard. Another got his from Yale.

There are students I remember vividly from Arroyo Grande High School who are therapists, police officers, mechanics, carpenters, electricians, Melodrama actors, businesswomen, farmers.

I recently posted, on another website, how important teaching was to me. I wrote about a young woman, whose parents came from Guerrero, in central Mexico, and how hard she worked to excel in our AP program at AGHS.

One reply was a laughing emoji, from a stunted man who believes in pretty much nothing.

He sees public education–where I tried, always, to teach the truth, no matter how painful it was to me– as “indoctrination.”

If he thinks I “indoctrinated” students like the ones I’ve mentioned here, then I am guilty. So are all the teachers I had the honor to know at Arroyo Grande High School.

Two photos of rivals and friends, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays.

But this photo shows Dodgers pitcher Johnny Padres throwing a “message pitch” to…excuse me, AT… Mays at Candlestick in 1962.

So that whole Dodgers-Giants thing is A Thing.

The two teams finished in a tie at the end of the 1962 season–101 wins, 61 losses–in the pre-division National League. I was ten years old and, other than Koufax and Drysdale, my ultimate hero was Dodger shortstop Maury Wills, who stole 104 bases, then a record, that year.

We were in my Dad’s 1961 Dodge Polara station wagon (that car was a beast) when Vin Scully announced the Giants’ 6-4 victory, ending a three-game playoff, on October 3, 1962.

The Giants played Game one of the World Series, against the Yankees, the NEXT DAY.

Johnny Podres had started the final playoff game for the Dodgers; Juan Marichal for the Giants, but the winning pitcher was Don Larsen, who, as a Yankee, threw the perfect game against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series.

Darn you, Don Larsen.

Much groaning came from our car at the playoff game’s end. Then we went home to Huasna Road and sulked for a couple of days.

Much groaning came from our car at the playoff game’s end. Then we went home to Huasna Road and sulked for a couple of days.

And, as a Dodger fan, nothing was more terrifying to me than the #3 and cleanup spots in that lineup, with the right-handed Mays and the left-handed Willie McCovey. That started in 1961; McCovey was hurt in 1962 but those places in the lineup remained between 1963 and 1968 and came back once more in 1971.

Other great one-two punches came to mind: Ruth and Gehrig, Eddie Matthews and Hank Aaron (Braves), Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell (Pirates).

Statistically, Ruth and Gehrig were the most productive, but in my lifetime, watching West Coast games on both black-and-white and color television, nobody touched Mays and McCovey.

Sometimes, for cryin’ out loud, they’d move Mays into the leadoff spot and put Bobby Bonds in the #3 slot. (WOW!)

The other thing that’s A Thing is how exceptional those 1962 teams were. Lineups/stats attached.

The always-articulate sportscaster Bob Costas identified what made Willie Mays stand out among all of these players from 1962, and it was the sheer joy with which he played baseball. (Admitting my lifelong prejudice—I saw my first Dodgers game at the Coliseum, against Stan Musial’s Cardinals—I can see some of Willie Mays in a modern player—yes, a Dodger—Mookie Betts).

The sheer joy.

Godspeed, Willie Mays. Every one of us who loves baseball will always love you, too.

I am to speak briefly as a small part of a bigger event this morning at 10 a.m., for the performance of a musical piece called “Behind Barbed Wire.” I think this is what I will say.

Because I graduated from and taught at Arroyo Grande High School, I needed my school to bring clarity to what I have to say today.

Twenty-five of the 58 members of the Class of 1942 were Nisei. They’d played basketball–the 1941-42 starters included three Nisei players. So were the quarterback and halfback for that year’s football team.

So were the teens who’d played baseball for Juzo Ikeda and Vard Loomis.

The principal’s secretary was Nisei. So was the assistant editor of the “Aerie,” the yearbook, and the sports editor of the “Hi-Chatter,” the school newspaper. So were three officers in the ASB. So was the student speaker for the FFA’s parent night.

The previous year, so was the winner of a scholarship as the high school’s outstanding student So was the senior recognized as the outstanding science student.

Most of them been seventh and eighth-graders at the new Orchard Avenue School, a WPA project completed in 1937. Their fathers, as volunteers, landscaped the new schoolgrounds. At a PTA function that year, their mothers shared a tea ceremony with their friends.

Five years later, this all changed. 1400 of our neighbors in in San Luis Obispo County and northern Santa Barbara County were sent into exile. This is what that was like in Arroyo Grande.

 On April 30, 1942, South County families met waiting buses at the high school, outside what is today the Paulding Gym, and there was a poignant moment when the Woman’s Club brought box lunches from the French Café, in the Olohan Building, for the long ride to the Tulare fairgrounds. 

The loaded buses then would’ve crept down Crown Hill in low gear, on their way to the two-lane 101 on the western edge of town. Their passengers, crammed inside with their luggage crammed in the bellies of the buses, would have passed, along Branch Street, familiar places, from E.C. Loomis and Son at the base of Crown Hill to the twin churches, Methodist and Catholic, just before the 101.

The Nisei children and teenagers who grew up here, who had never known any other place, did not know whether they would ever see these places again, all the little shops they’d known all their lives.

 Many of them wouldn’t.

Just past the churches, the buses turned north to make the connection for the long, colorless journey into the San Joaquin Valley.

If you grew up in Arroyo Grande, as I did, that day was, in peacetime, almost the equivalent of Christmas Eve. One of the teenagers on one of the buses remembered, years later, that it was the day before trout season opened.

The Manzanar Fishing Club risked getting shot by creeping beyond the wire to fish for trout at night. There are Gila Trout in the Gila River beyond the wire of our neighbors’—our ancestors’— desert camp. I don’t know if there we were similar subversive trout fishermen there.

I hope so.

One of the Manzanar fishermen said, “When you’re fishing, you forget everything that’s wrong.”

Today, of course, we are here to remember instead.