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The perils of sheet lightning, among other topics

06 Tuesday Jun 2023

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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.

The Bert Bacharach PBS Special, including why Aretha Franklin can still make me cry.

06 Tuesday Jun 2023

Posted by in Film and Popular Culture, Uncategorized

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Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, the supreme interpreter of his songs and of Hal David’s lyrics.


PBS was gunning for Baby Boomer cash last night, because their Sunday night pledge drive featured a Bert Bacharach concert, taped when the great man was in his last years, and it was pretty marvelous. We have no cash for them, with pensions and all being what they are and inflation being what it is. But the special made Elizabeth and me pretty happy.

If you are not a Baby Boomer, then may blessings flow over you and your life. I am a Boomer, too, and even though we are not dying nearly quick enough for a couple of younger generations whose time has come, we had a few things going for us. Before the Internet it was AM Radio that gave life to our lives and, like the internet, made our lives shared lives, albeit far less perniciously.

When I was your age. young people—pardon me, my dentures slipped— when I listened to KSLY in the 1960s, you would have a Beatles song, a Supremes song, a Stones Song, a Beach Boys song, a one-hit wonder (“Friday on My Mind,” by the Easybeats, remains one of my favorites; Mason Williams’s guitar-driven “Classical Gas” another. So sue me).

Then there would be a Bacharach/David song, almost always sung by Dionne Warwick, who should be on Mt. Rushmore, scowling at Thomas Jefferson, I think, for the way he treated Sally Hemings.

My parents were part of the Greatest Generation, the inheritors of the Great Depression and the Second World War, but they dropped the ball after all they’d gone through in the 30s and 40s. This is because my parents’ favorite 1960s-1970s musical program was The Lawrence Welk Show, which was dreck. Myron Floren was a featured musician, and he played polkas, grinning happily, on his accordion, which have their place, in Zydeco and Tex-Mex music, for example.

Not in my living room in the 1960s, however.

The Lennon Sisters—no relation to John—were another favorite, and their performances were enough to send the vulnerable into diabetic shock. Here’s what I mean:



Lawrence Welk was dreadful, a kind of musical War Criminal. We Boomers ran screaming from the room when his show came on, and, years later, when I discovered how wonderful my parents’ music really was (Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald), their love for Lawrence Welk bewildered me even more.

So the PBS Bert Bacharach special was a comfort. Whatever else you say about my generation, and we deserve it, our music was wonderful. (I started teaching at Mission Prep in the 1980s, and I thought that generation’s music was, too. I can’t figure out how to insert it here, but I refer you to MTV Unplugged and Aha’s “Take on Me.” Incredible.)

But the program led me to another thought. Bert Bacharach is light-years better than Lawrence Welk. The concert tape was a little unnerving, because he was so very old and obviously so close to leaving us, but he still played a piano, a synthesizer, and sang, which might’ve been a mistake. In general, the younger singers were not a mistake. They were wonderful, except for the Opera Guy, who destroyed his song, and for a lovely British girl in a miniskirt, whose voice was simply too light and delicate for a Bacharach/David song.

I will borrow a phrase from a woman teaching colleague of mine: Even if you’re a female-type Human Being, you have to have Balls the Size of Church Bells to sing a Bacharach/David song. They are complex, the tempo shifts without warning and you have to learn the difference, often in the same song, when the narrative is softer, like the descriptive passage in a novel, and then it’s interrupted by a direct quote, often urgent or triumphant and sometimes even angry.

That is why Dionne Warwick was perfect for these songs. But thinking that led me down another rabbit-hole: Which singers, other than Dionne Warwick, are my favorite interpreters of the great man’s songs?

I still want Dionne on Mt. Rushmore, mind you.

Here is what I mean about Ball the Size of Church Bells. Nobody knows who Cilla Black is today. Not that many Americans knew who she was in 1964, when she was videotaped performing one of my favorite Bacharach songs, “Anybody Who Had a Heart.” She owns this song, which is also one of the most difficult of his songs to sing. (A quick cultural reference: I suspect that the woman lighting up a cigarette in the background near the song’s end is lighting up a Virginia Slim, a 100-mm cigarette aimed specifically at women. Big Tobacco was egalitarian in its intent to kill both genders and anybody in between.)

So it goes.

Anyway, here’s Cilla. That haircut, by the way, was a big deal in 1965. Two of my AGHS classmates, MaryJane Allen and Prisila Dalessi, both stunning young women, had similar haircuts.

I didn’t hear this performance until about six months ago. It made me happy.

So did the second non-Dionne singer I chose for interpreting Bacharach, and that’s Jackie DeShannon (born and raised in Kentucky and Illinois, as was Lincoln) and her interpretation of “What the World Needs Now.” I guess it’s even more relevant today, as obvious as it is for me to say it, than it was in 1965. Bacharach loved horns, too, especially trumpets, and they are lovely in this song. DeShannon always delivered the song this way, with the the Julie Andrew-esque Sound of Music gestures and turns because, I think, she was on a mission.

I think it’s important to remember this song’s context: It was released two years before the Summer of Love in San Francisco—there were no Hippies in 1965—and three years before the Tet Offensive. There were no Peaceniks in 1965, either, except for at Cal, perhaps, and their focus was on nuclear annihilation, which seemed pretty imminent. DeShannon’s gentle interpretation of Hal David’s lyrics is more powerful than it might seem. She’s pulling us back, in her way, from the brink. (Another popular song with a different message that year was “Eve of Destruction,” sung by Barry McGuire, which assured us that we were all going to die, and real darn soon.)

Last one.

Everyone knew the context of “Say A Little Prayer.” It was a Vietnam song, and everyone knew someone over there—In Country—who needed a little prayer to bring them home. Thirty-four young San Luis Obispo County men came home in flag-draped steel caskets, so there’s a deep emotional undercurrent that goes with this song; it’s the freight my generation carries, heavier than a C-130 cargo plane with thirty steel caskets as ballast.

I’ve played this version of Aretha’s song, surrendered to her by Bacharach and David, I am sure, over and over, but just for me.

I played it again with the earplugs in after the PBS special and my eyes welled up with tears. This incredible woman owns this incredible song, just as Cilla owned hers. If Aretha isn’t in Heaven, I ain’t a-goin.’ I’m joking, of course: God made her with His own hands just to remind us, I think, of how much He loves us. That’s what brought the tears.



Why William Holden is my favorite actor

05 Monday Jun 2023

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Elizabeth was supposed to leave earlier than she did to write her finals for St. Joe, but Born Yesterday (1950) was on Turner Classic Movies this morning and I turned to it and that messed up her schedule.

The reason it messed up her schedule was the lead actress, Judy Holliday.

You have to give Holliday a chance. I couldn’t stand her when I was younger; her voice–she plays a retired chorus girl–is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

She is also spectacularly dumb. Until the screenwriter, the legendary Garson Kanin, who wrote the original play, starts to drop little breadcrumbs. She is Broderick Crawford’s “kept woman,” and when the two play gin rummy, she cleans him out three times in a row with the first hand she’s dealt.

“GIN!”

Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden

Crawford hires William Holden to give Holliday’s character a smattering of education so that she can more or less hold her own in Washington D.C. while Crawford tries to bribe his way into a government contract.

Well, wouldn’t you know? Holliday, it turns out, with Holden as her teacher, loves to learn. Her eagerness to better herself reminded me of one the most powerful experiences I had in over thirty years of teaching, when I taught an adult woman to read. She was miraculous. The experience made me realize that learning to read is miraculous, too. (I realized, in my first day of school at the two-room 1888 Branch Elementary in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, that Mom had already taught me how to read, because I could decode the names of my classmates as Mrs. Brown wrote them on the blackboard. My Mom was kind of miraculous, too.)

And Holliday’s character, Billie, is as excited as I was that day in 1958 when Holden teaches her about American history and government in their tours of D.C. monuments.

The film takes a moment to admit that Washington has crooked legislators and that our democracy isn’t perfect. Our democracy, you might have noticed, has been under attack lately, and Holden’s character—this is 1950, mind you—delivers a brief but stunning monologue about fascism, which, you might have noticed, has been fashionable lately. It’s a startling moment in a film that’s older than I am. The Washington D.C. scenes are, in their way, as affirming of our democratic traditions as those in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

There’s not enough time in the screenplay to smooth out all her rough edges, but, of course, by the end, Holden has fallen in love with her and she’s gained enough self-respect to love him right back.

Holden is one of my favorite actors–he’s my Linked In avatar (my brother chose Clark Gable)–and he’s generous enough in this film to play his character quietly. He’s letting Holliday steal the show.

Which she deserved. She won the Academy Award that year–beating out, among others, Bette Davis and, good Lord, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Holden was Swanson’s co-star in that film, too—her kept man— and I now realize he did the same thing that he did with Holliday: he let the actress do the heavy lifting because Swanson, once a silent star, deserved it. (The final scene on the staircase—as Holden’s character floats face-down in the swimming pool just outside—“I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille,” is, I think, one of the most indelible moments in American film. And it still scares the hell out of me, and I’m seventy-one now.)

Holden was a problematic man; stalked throughout his life by the alcoholism that would finally kill him, in a fall. I also wished he’d married Audrey Hepburn, a Hollywood love story that rivals Fairbanks and Pickford or Bogart and Bacall. He didn’t, alas.

Holden and Hepburn on Wall Street for Sabrina (1954) and ten years later for Paris When It Sizzles.

He loved animals–was a wildlife preservationist–which goes a long way in our house.

His characters are as problematic as Holden was. The one thread that marks them all, in films like Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Bridge Over the River Kwai or Network, is integrity, the kind that often leads to a moment of self-disgust, when Holden’s character realizes that he was meant to be a better man than he is. But there’s a lie in that common thread, because communicating integrity was not a stretch for Bill Holden, not even when his characters were, in the same order as the films I cited, two cynics, a coward and an alcoholic television news executive who kept telling the same stories from his glory days as a reporter on live television in the 1950s.

(The film, now nearly fifty years old, was as prescient as was Holden’s outraged comment on fascism in Born Yesterday; screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky envisioned a time when television news would leave its Walter Cronkites behind for its Tucker Carlsons.)

Faye Dunaway and Holden in Network.

Maybe Holden never had a moment of insight that would’ve taught him that he was a better man than the counterfeit his self-destructiveness and his self-doubt had made him. But what remains, for me, is what I love in his acting: his integrity and generosity. Despite his flaws, and maybe because of them, that’s why I love the man, too.







Dr. Mr. O’Leary, they are not “banzai” trees, you ignorant bastard

01 Thursday Jun 2023

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I don’t know this man, nor do I want to. I guess he’s a regular on a show I don’t know, nor do I want to, called Shark Tank on CNBC. Maybe you’ve seen this television commercial for a venture of his in which promises to get, just for you, Large Amounts of Money in Covid Relief. So I guess he is a shark, after all. He is Canadian, which gets him no slack in my book. This is the letter I just wrote him.

Mr. O’Leary:

Your “bonsai” television commercial is offensive.

They’re not “banzai.” They’re “bonsai.”

They’re not “shrubs.” They are trees.

If you’re trying to be funny, you have failed.

I come from a California town whose entire Japanese American population was interned behind concertina wire in the Arizona desert, where the temperature in summer and fall hovered at 109°.

Twenty-five of the fifty-eight members of our high school’s class of 1942 were Nisei.

Many of them would go on to serve in the United States Army. Two were members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly-decorated unit of its size in United States History.

Three were awarded Bronze Stars for valor.

One, the twenty-year-old leader of an intelligence team inserted into the mountains of China, disguised himself as a peasant to go behind Japanese lines—the enemy’s lines—to rescue another American, a downed pilot. After the war, businessman George Nakamura was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for his efforts to heal the relationship between Japan and the United States.

Another, a medic in the 83rd Infantry Division, was shot by a German sniper in the Hurtgen Forest as he was kneeling over a wounded comrade. Medics, with their distinctive helmets marked by red crosses, were prized targets. Makoto Yoshihara’s Bronze Star was posthumous.

A third, a member of the 442nd,  volunteered to bring up more ammunition under heavy German fire in the Vosges Mountains of France. The 442nd was there to liberate 230 Texas National Guardsmen, mostly justifiably terrified nineteen-year-old draftees, who were surrounded. Nearly 1,000 Japanese American GI’s were killed or wounded in the relief of what became knowns as “The Lost Battalion.” Sadami Fujita didn’t make it.

I understand that your nickname is “Mr. Wonderful.”

Earn it.

Withdraw this disrespectful commercial.


“It’s gonna be all right, mija.” For Father’s Day.

30 Tuesday May 2023

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Two father portrayals in recent films I’ve watched inspired me. Coincidentally, both fathers were Mexican American, both children were daughters. In both cases, they did what fathers are supposed to do best: they replaced fear and doubt with faith.

Crash (2004) is still before my inner jury, but this scene, with Michael Peña, was extraordinary. Danny is an upwardly-mobile locksmith and he’s just moved his family out of a bad L.A. neighborhood. When he comes home from work, he finds his daughter, Lara, underneath her bed.

This is the passage from the script. It’s extraordinary writing.

LARA I heard a bang.

DANIEL Like a truck bang?

LARA Like a gun.

DANIEL Huh. That’s funny. ‘Cause we moved outta that bad neighborhood, not too many guns ’round here.

LARA How far can bullets go?

DANIEL Oh, pretty far. But they usually get stuck in something and stop.

LARA  What if they don’t?

DANIEL You thinking about that one that came through your window?

Lara nods.

DANIEL Yeah, we never did find it, did we?

Lara shakes her head.

LARA I think it didn’t see me, ’cause I was under the covers.

DANIEL And you think it was that same bullet you heard tonight?

Lara shrugs, she thinks it is but doesn’t want to say it. Daniel settles in, as if only now realizing the enormity of this situation. He lies there thinking this problem through.

DANIEL Huh. You think maybe we should move again?

LARA I like it here.

DANIEL Yeah. Me, too. But if that bullet found out where we live … (realizes something) Hold on.

LARA What?

DANIEL I am so stupid. How could I forget this?

LARA What?

DANIEL Never mind, you’re not gonna believe me.

LARA Tell me.  

DANIEL Okay. When I was five, this fairy came into my room one night.

LARA (skeptical) Uh-huh.

DANIEL See, me. I told you wouldn’t believe Okay, you go to sleep now.

LARA No, tell me.

DANIEL Okay, so this fairy comes into my room. And I’m like, “yeah, .right, you’re a fairy.” Anyway, we’re talking, you know, and she’s flying around the room, knocking my posters down and stuff.

LARA She was flying?

DANIEL Yeah, she had these little stubby wings. But she coulda glued ’em on or something, right, I’m not gonna believe she’s a fairy. So, she· says, “I’ll prove it. 11 And she reaches into her backpack and pulls out this invisible cloak. And she ties it around my neck, and she tells me it’s impenetrable. You know what impenetrable means?

(Lara shakes her head)

It means nothing bad can get through it. Not bullets, nothing. And she says I should wear this cloak and nothing will ever hurt me. So, I did. And my whole life I never got shot, stabbed, nothing. I mean, how weird is that? Only she tells me I’m supposed to give it to my daughter on her sixth birthday. And I forgot.

LARA Can I touch it?

DANIEL Sure, go ahead. She touches his arm.

LARA I can’t feel it.

DANIEL Pretty cool, huh? If you want, I can take it off and tie it around your shoulders, ’cause she showed me how to do that. Unless you think it’s stupid.

LARA … Don’t you need it?

DANIEL Not anymore. So, what do you think? You want it?

Lara waits, then nods slightly.

Daniel reaches in and pulls her out. Daniel places her on the bed.

DANIEL Okay.

Daniel “unties” the invisible cloak and takes it off. He wraps it around her shoulders.

DANIEL Hold your chin up.

She does. He ties it around her neck.

DANIEL That too tight?

She shakes her head.

DANIEL You feel anything at all?

She shakes her head.

DANIEL Good. Then it’s just right.

He kisses her on the forehead. He pulls out her pillow and places it on the bed. She lies down and he covers her. He turns off her light.

LARA Do I take it off when I have a bath?

DANIEL No, you leave it on all the time. ‘Till you grow up and have a daughter, and she turns six. Then you give it to her. Okay?

LARA Okay.

And he walks toward the door. Lara strokes her shoulder, trying to feel it, then closes her eyes.

In East Side Sushi (2013), Juana, a Mexican American single mother who lives in East Oakland, works in the back kitchen of a sushi restaurant. She is fascinated by Japanese food and is determined to become a sushi chef. She enters a sushi-making contest at a local public-access TV station and her father, along with her daughter, videotapes her as she prepares her “signature sushi.”

https://videopress.com/v/wHJG15A8?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Rodgrio Duarte Clark plays Juana’s father. Here, in a later scene, she’s just learned that she’s won a place in the sushi competition. Juana is terrified. Her Apa decides that this is instead a moment to be celebrated.

I need to be careful with moments like these because these are movies and movie fathers seem to always know what to say. All too often, I never found the words I needed to say as a father. But moments like these make me wish that next time, I will know what to say, too.



The staircase shootout, The Untouchables

28 Sunday May 2023

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I tried real hard not to watch Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables the other night, and I failed once again. It is 95% hooey—Sean Connery is no more convincing as an Irish cop than The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie, and the two most action-packed scenes, the shootout along the Canadian border and the second, far more graphic gun battle in Chicago’s Union Station—never happened.

Thank goodness. Those poor sailors.

The real Union Station shootout was in Kansas City’s Union Station between police and allies of Pretty Boy Floyd in June 1933. You can still see the marks left by bullets just as you can in the Louisiana State Capitol, where Huey Long was shot, or in Dublin’s neoclassic General Post Office, the site for the failed 1916 Easter Rising.

But The Untouchables’ cast is still compelling, despite Kevin Costner and the not-very-Irish Connery, whom I miss. Costner’s accent—is it San Fernando Valley? Maybe Topanga? Glendale?—is no more convincing and it grates even more in Dances with Wolves. I forgive Costner only because of Bull Durham.

Meanwhile, Charles Martin Smith’s nerdy IRS accountant is charming. His killing is horrific and heart- breaking. But to my mind, it’s Andy Garcia’s police recruit who almost steals the show.

The reason I keep going back to this film, though, is that Union Station scene. It is brilliant (it was parodied in one of the Naked Guns, which is high praise) and it’s homage, of course, to Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps scene, from The Battleship Potemkin (1925), set during the 1905 Russian Revolution, when Tsarist troops open fire on protestors. Here’s an excerpt:

I guess it’s pretty safe to say that Eisenstein was a pioneer. But dePalma’s staircase, with the blood now in color, is incredible, too:

And, if the scriptwriters and dePalma played fast and loose with history, they used history to get into our heads in a way I wasn’t aware of until the last time I watched the film. Below are two images: the baby in the carriage and the Lindbergh baby, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., murdered in 1932. I don’t think this was an accident. The Ness in Costner’s Wheatie-box portrayal was a cop, after all, but he helped the inept woman with her baby carriage, the trigger for the staircase scene, because being a father was just as important to him.

Dr. Clark

25 Thursday May 2023

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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.

A snapshot of Arroyo Grande, California, October 3, 1896

25 Thursday May 2023

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A kind of glossary to a page from the October 3, 1896 Arroyo Grande Herald, the town’s weekly.

Birthday Party: Ruth Paulding was the daughter of Dr. Ed Paulding and Mrs. Clara Paulding, who taught in local schools for forty years. Clara was a Force of Nature. Like her mother, Ruth became a teacher. She taught languages at Arroyo Grande Union High School, just across the street from where Ruth lived nearly her entire life (1892-1985). Ruth was much-loved by her students; the middle school is named for her.

“An Entertainment:” The Col. Harper Corps was the local chapter of Union Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic. Nearly sixty veterans are buried in the local cemetery (four fought at Gettysburg; one, Otis Smith, was awarded a Medal of Honor after the 1864 Battle of Nashville). The “Columbian Hall” was a steepled assembly/lecture/concert hall on Branch Street, later disassembled and moved to become the IDES (“Portuguese”) Hall. A new hall was built in 1948 but the floor remains from the 19th-century Columbian Hall.

Civil War veterans from the Col. Harper Corps assemble with schoolchildren on Memorial Day, 1905, for a march to the Arroyo Grande Cemetery. The IOOF Hall is at the right edge of this photo, taken on Bridge Street. From Jean Hubbard and Gary Hoving, Images of America: Arroyo Grande, California, Arcadia Press.



Arroyo Grande Milling: Newton Short, who built the Swinging Bridge, operated this mill behind Branch Street along the creek. Barley was a big crop in the interior of San Luis Obispo County so this must’ve been a nice source of income for Mr. Short, also a farmer. The mill was later sold to the Loomis family—like the Shorts, an important part of Arroyo Grande history. Barley, of course, was an important component in animal feed and in beer, the fluid that floated the six saloons at or near the corner of Branch and Bridge Streets in 1903. (One more in 1906. See below.)

Renetzky and Co.: This family was related to the Dana family, whose patriarch, William G. Dana, founded Rancho Nipomo. Dana, Francis Branch, John Michael Price and Isaac Sparks were the “Big Four” rancheros in the South County. Joanna Renetzky, schoolteacher, would later marry Clair Abbott Tyler of Morro Bay at the Old Mission; Alex Madonna was Clair’s best man. In 1943, Lt. Clair Abbott Tyler was killed in his co-pilot’s seat by cannon fire from the German fighter that brought his B-17 down after a raid on the sub pen complex at Lorient.

American Laundry: This is ominous. The name implies that this is not a Chinese laundry at a time when anti-Chinese bigotry was common. Masked men had driven Chinese residents out of Arroyo Grande in February 1886, only about six weeks before masked men lynched the Hemmis, father and son, suspected killers, from the railway trestle at the foot of Crown Hill. Meanwhile, there was an attempt to dynamite Sam Yee’s laundry in San Luis Obispo and an even less-subtle rival laundry was formed there: The Caucasian Steam Laundry. The notorious ad below, from about 1886, suggests that buying this detergent will help drive Chinese immigrants out of business and so out of America.


Library of Congress

“Hard Times:” The Phillips Brothers operated the store, from about 1895, now occupied by Bill’s Place on Branch Street. The reference is to the Panic of 1893, a severe depression that persisted into 1897 and was a centerpiece in this year’s presidential campaign between William McKinley and the Democratic/Populist candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

Pacific Coast Steamship Company: The railway had a spur that ended at the end of the Port Harford (Avila) pier; before the completion of the Southern Pacific, the best way to travel to San Francisco or Los Angeles was by steamship, at least one operated by Capt. Marcus Harloe, the father-in-law of longtime schoolteacher Margaret Harloe, herself from another prominent family, the Phoenix family. Margaret married Capt. Harloe’s son, Archie. (Archie’s mom was Manuela Sparks, from the Huasna Rancho family, a working ranch today still run by Isaac Sparks’s descendants, the Porters.)

Ryan’s Hotel: Built in 1873, roughly on the site occupied today by Village Grill and the adjacent parking lot. A pretty classy place for its time, with a restaurant, barber, full-service bar, pool room and, in the back, a stable where stagecoaches changed teams. The Ryan is on the left in the photo of Branch Street from about 1906; the steepled building just up the street is the Columbian Hall; Crown Hill, where Ruth Paulding grew up and the high school was built, is in the distance, at the end of Branch Street. On the right side of the photo is the just-completed Bank of Arroyo Grande; the Bank Saloon would have made it seven saloons at or near this street corner. One of them, The Eagle, is just beyond the bank building. The Capitol Saloon stood across the street, just out of the picture frame, at left. Town policeman Henry Lewellyn was shot in the Capitol doorway in 1904; he died the next day in a room at the Ryan.

Calisphere photo.

Dermatologists of the Lost Ark and Other Adventures

25 Thursday May 2023

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Being half English and half Irish has its advantages. After all, the first half of me once owned 25% of the Earth’s surface, which included the second half of me. The sun’s the problem—the Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the Noonday Sun thing—because if I so much as miss a nickel-sized spot on my face with sunscreen, it turns as bright as the currently-erupting Popocatépetl (a word I like to say aloud over and over) within about seven minutes.

So I went to the dermatologist today for what I call the Blue Light Special, a light treatment that should vaporize the numerous pre-cancers on my face. “You may feel some discomfort,” they said (the young woman who attended to me was wonderful), but this is a phrase I remember hearing as a child when I was about to get a shot. Here’s my childhood doctor and his crack medical staff getting the hypodermic needle ready:

If you think this is the only movie that occurred to me, you’d be wrong. You have to be in a dark room for an hour for the Magic Ointment to take effect, so for an hour I was Papillon.

https://videopress.com/v/FsIIyVn1?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

And here I am, with my hour up, emerging from the darkened room:



Now it was time for the Blue Light Treatment, which works something like this:

Just kidding! But you put your face into a Blue Light Helmet shaped something like Dave’s helmet from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And we all know how that worked out for Dave:

And darn if that blue light didn’t remind you of another scifi movie!

https://videopress.com/v/NZpQa5FH?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

No little space critters, though. After an hour in the dark, you have sixteen minutes inside Dave’s Space Helmet. They remind you:

You have fourteen minutes left.

You’re doing fine. Twelve and a half minutes left.

How are you doing? Only eleven minutes and forty-five seconds left.

Which of course reminded me of:

But I guess I’m glad I had this done. And for the next two or three days, I will look just like one of my absolute favorite film characters!