Since Halloween is approaching, here’s a story I don’t mind repeating. At all.
Alice Agueda–buried in the Arroyo Grande Cemetery–was brutally murdered in December 1926 by a farmworker on the Agueda place along Huasna Road. She was twelve years old.
The accused allegedly died after attempting suicide. He shot himself. Five times. Ahem.
The San Francisco Examiner, January 1, 1927
The Agueda home is still with us–it’s the old Conrad Adobe, partly hidden behind a stand of cactus just before a sharp left bend in Huasna Road, about a half-mile beyond the new Branch School. (The term “new” Branch School indicates my advanced age, of course. Guilty as charged.)
The home, the subject of many newspaper articles over the years, is notoriously haunted. My friend David Cherry lived in it when we were AGHS students, and the adobe bricks are visible, down to their straws, in the basement, where Dave and I shot pool. The Cherry family several times heard soft footsteps on the basement staircase and then the door to the kitchen atop the staircase would slowly open.
Many years after, there were new owners who heard the same sounds the Cherrys had heard. There’s a driveway big enough for an RV and these folks had friends visit from San Diego and, of course, since they were friends, the new owners told them ghost stories about Alice.
After their visit, the friends drove the RV home to San Diego. After they got home, they went to bed. That’s when they heard the RV’s doors open and then the sound of soft footsteps. They risked a look in the dark and found nothing. But when they investigated again the next morning, everything inside the RV had been moved around.
The friends, husband and wife, looked at each other with the same thought. It was Alice. She liked them. She liked them so much that she’d followed them home.
So they drove all the way back, from San Diego to Arroyo Grande, pulled up into the big driveway that fronts the Conrad Adobe, and had a talk with Alice. We like you, too, they explained, but this is Arroyo Grande. This is your home. You need to be home, Alice.
When they drove back to San Diego, they turned off the engine and except for the clicks a cooling engine emits when it’s turned off, they never heard another sound from the empty RV again.
The story’s stuck with me.
And there’s an added element: After I’d posted this on Facebook a few years ago, a woman named Ciaran Knight shared the childhood experience of a friend of hers who’d lived in the old house. He had an imaginary playmate he called “Alice.”
A World War I-vintage 155-mm artillery piece could hurl a 95-pound shell 20,000 yards.
If you’d been driving north to San Luis Obispo on the old two-lane 101, there was a a battery of these beasts on the hillside to your right as the road begins to curve inland, headed for true north.
They were there to guard San Luis Bay and they were manned by G.I.’s from the 54th Coast Artillery, an African-American unit that had trained at Fort Fisher, North Carolina–taken from the Confederacy by the Union Army in January 1865–before some of them wound up serving in our county between 1942 and 1944.
I learned this today over lunch, a treat from military historian Erik Brun, who is researching the 54th during the unit’s stay here.
Erik told me that White North Carolinians were not at all fond of having Black G.I.’s close by–even though these soldiers were learning to handle guns that theoretically could inflict considerable discouragement on the U-boats hunting their quarry just offshore.
Those people had forgotten World War I, when 10 merchant ships were torpedoed off the Outer Banks.
In World War II, the U-boats claimed 80 ships. North Carolinians could easily see the glow of burning tankers in the shipping lanes off their coast.
They couldn’t see the crews thrown into the burning water.
So they didn’t want the 54th Coast Artillery anywhere near.
Detachments from the 54th would come to us instead, charged with defending Estero Bay as well as San Luis Bay. And so, for a brief time, Black G.I.’s were part of daily life here.
Some of the 54th’s soldiers played baseball against Arroyo Grande Union High School. A 54th officer–officers were White– married Lorna Folkerts of Arroyo Grande in a candlelit ceremony in a Camp San Luis Obispo chapel. And in 1943, an octet from the 54th sang for South Countians in a holiday concert at the Pismo Beach Army Recreation Camp. The barracks at the Rec Camp had once stood on the site of today’s Arroyo Grande Woman’s Club, where they were built in 1934 to house 230 Civilian Conservation Corps workers from Delaware, New Jersey and New York City.
But the history of Black GIs in San Luis Obispo remains fraught. In June 1943, rioting broke out in San Luis Obispo and it made newspapers throughout America. This is from the June 25, 1943 Salt Lake City Tribune:
I have been trying to wrap my head around this. In an email to my friend Erik, I tried to explain it to myself.
* * *
It just occurred to me to look up the summer of 1943—what happened in SLO seems part of a national trend. There were race riots in —Mobile, Alabama (May 25) —Los Angeles (The Zoot Suit Riots, June 5-8) —Beaumont, Texas (June 15-17) —Detroit (June 20-22; 34 killed) —San Luis Obispo (June 24) —Harlem, NY (August 1-2)
It strikes me that racial tensions would’ve been intense hereand across the nation.
The movement of Black Americans into defense jobs during the war was a factor in Mobile and Beaumont, where Black and White shipyard workers worked. The population influx, resulting housing shortages and competition between Black and White defense workers generated increasing tensions as the shipyards reached full production.
The same was true in Detroit, which created thousands of defense jobs—the city was a focal point for the Great Migration, where you could once find entire city blocks settled by families from the same county in Mississippi —but where housing shortages were (and are) notorious in the Black community and casual but cruel racism was, in 1943, a constant.
A similar influx, but of soldiers, happened here, in a little town not fully equipped to deal with thousands of GIs, including a shortage of places to entertain them. Blacks and Whites coming together (and the latter in such large numbers) and in seeming competition might’ve led to the kind of hostility seen in the shipyards.
It strikes me, too, that racism,including the stereotyping of Black Americans, might’ve typified a town like San Luis Obispo, which had little experience in interacting with them, including the soldiers of the 54th.
There’s a faint similarity, then, to the background of the Zoot Suit riots. Los Angeles was growing in the late 1930s and the war (e.g. the aircraft industry) accelerated it; the city did not plan well and the kind of housing problems that marked Detroit—as well as racism and job discrimination—were common to the Mexican-American community, which included Chavez Ravine.
But it was the decision to place a Naval installation there that resulted in fraught relations between sailors—outsiders, many from the Midwest or the South, who had little understanding of the Mexican-American community— and local residents. The two groups were strangers to each other, as was White San Luis Obispo to the 54th. So the Ravine in L.A. and Danny’s Bar on Higuera became flash-points for two of the 1943 riots.
* * *
I guess because I took a year of the History of the American South in college, at the University of Missouri, I’ve always been fascinated by this part of our history, by which I mean Black History, by which I mean American History.
My Dad, a quartermaster officer who grew up in Texas County, Missouri, was a small part of that history.
Lt. Robert W. Gregory, 1944
On the troopship to England, Dad was issued a .45 sidearm. It wasn’t for Germans. It was for Black soldiers, truckers, suffering belowdecks in the North Atlantic crossing. I wrote about this:
These were the men who would drive the deuce-and-a-half trucks on the Red Ball Express. It was my father’s job the organize and send some of these truckers, in gasoline supply companies, to the 1944 beachhead in Normandy, where details from George Patton’s Third Army would arrive regularly to kidnap them so that the great general would be the first to the Rhine, the natural border between France and Germany.
In this, Patton would succeed, but it was the Red Ball express that made his moment, captured by wire service photographers, possible.
Along the way, the black truckers died under artillery fire, died from worn out brakes and frayed tires and died from the irresistible urge to fall asleep on darkened roads that led irrevocably east, from the Seine Valley to the Ardennes.
To stay alive, they learned to drive at night without headlights. If a driver felt that sleep was too powerful to resist, he learned to switch seats with his passenger and comrade while the truck was moving. When the trucks didn’t move fast enough for the Red Ball drivers, they modified the governors on their trucks’ carburetors. When the trucks broke down, they resurrected them.
On a typical day, 900 trucks were on the road, spaced at sixty-yard intervals, to keep Third Army fed and its trucks and tanks fueled.
One of the Red Ball veterans was named Medgar Evers. After the war, he became a civil rights activist. A sniper took his life near Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, with a Lee-Enfield rifle, the infantry weapon issued the British soldiers who became my father’s wartime friends.
Medgar Evers was thirty-seven years old. His wife, Myrlie, who would become a formidable activist in her own right, and his three children were at his graveside when he was buried at Arlington.
Medgar’s killer was convicted. It took thirty-one years.
The 1916 Battle of Verdun was one of the ghastliest in twentieth-century history, claiming over 300,000 French and German lives and vaporizing seven French villages. But the French have honored their military truck drivers who were part of that terrible battle: The road to Verdun is called La Voie Sacree—The Sacred Way— and, as you approach the battlefield, which my students and I visited in 2010, markers commemorate French soldiers, the poilus, who drove the trucks.
So the French remember. What Arroyo Grande farmer Haruo Hayashi remembers during his time training with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Mississippi was the rigidity of Jim Crow. He couldn’t understand why Black soldiers weren’t allowed to watch USO shows inside the Camp Shelby (named after a Confederate cavalry officer) gymnasium. It bewildered him.
Haruo’s family was behind barbed wire at the Gila River internment camp.
So my time with Erik today gave me a lot to think about
This video shows a crew working the same kind of gun the 54th knew so well.
There used to be an A & W Root Beer restaurant on Grand Avenue. It isn’t there anymore. It was right across Grand from Young’s Giant Food, which isn’t there anymore, either.
A Pontiac Ventura. My sister’s was red over white.
But when I was little, this was high living: My sister, Roberta, would take Mom and me and later little sister Sally to the A & W in her 1961 Pontiac Ventura.
I believe that it was dangerous to drive a 1961 Pontiac Ventura in the San Diego area. Fighter jets from the Naval Air Station might mistake it for an aircraft carrier and try to land.
But a car that size was made for drive-in meals.
They had car hops, teenaged girls, at this A & W, and I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that they were on roller skates. They’d glide out to take your order and then glide back to place it. They’d hook a tray to the driver’s side door and, with great dignity, roll out again to lay the feast thereupon. It was Roberta, since she was driving, who distributed the goodies.
The smell, of burger and bacon and fries was unendurable. Roberta was never fast enough for me. Many years later, I saw the film Reefer Madness. At one point, one of the hopelessly addicted 1940s teenagers blurts “I NEED SOME REEFERS!” I was like that, but it was with hamburgers.
A nostalgic view. They’re all so white.
My invariable order: A root beer freeze, a Teen Burger (bacon and cheese, then a novel innovation) and fries. It was a substantial meal and required a nap afterward.
Alas, my cardiologist would whip me with a stethoscope if I ate a meal like that today.
Mom always got the Mama Burger and Sally the Baby Burger. Of course.
But it was a different America then. We had big cars like Pontiacs–eleven miles per gallon, thank you very much–so immense that they were mobile dining rooms, and we had vast and limitless cattle ranches devoted solely to Teen Burger production. There would always be plenty of gasoline, we believed, and you could always eat plenty of hamburgers.
Then they shot the president and the whole shebang started to unravel.
New/not so new favorite shows on KQED-San Francisco. “Finding Your Roots” with Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. The last episode that Elizabeth and I watched featured:
–Christopher Walken, whose father owned a bakery in Astoria, NY. Researchers found his grandfather’s bakery in Germany, captured in a 1912 photo. Walken’s father was an extraordinary man, I think. He immigrated from Germany in 1928, married a beautiful woman and started the bakery when the stock market crashed. “He just figured the Depression leveled the playing field for everybody,” Walken said. The bakery was in business for sixty years.
–Fred Armisen [“Portlandia”], who thought himself 1/4 Japanese and therefore loves Japanese food.. Nope.* Armisens’s grandfather, a dancer who had a brief fling with a German woman that eventually led to Fred, was Korean. And he was a part-time German spy on the side. The grandfather, Kuni, only studied in Japan, but he was such a gifted and influential dancer that a museum is dedicated to him there.
*[My Dad thought his family was Scots. Nope. They were from the coal-dusty English Midlands, not far from Bosworth, where Richard III got himself massacred. When they found the little fellow’s skeleton beneath a parking lot a few years ago, there was a deep postmortem puncture wound in his arse. Despite that indignity, Richard, remains, I think, Shakespeare’s greatest villain.]
The thoroughly dead Richard III
–Carly Simon, who loved her grandmother but knew almost nothing about her. DNA testing showed that her grandmother was the descendant of Cuban slaves, and that Carly’s ancestry is 10% African. “You’re the blackest white person we’ve ever tested,” Gates deadpanned. There’s some kind of justice there, I think. The Simon family was very close to an African-American couple who moved into their neighborhood: Jackie and Rachel Robinson.
Rachel Robinson embraces the late Chadwick Boseman, who played her husband in 42.
Armisen, Simon, Walken
“Check, Please, Bay Area.” Incredible visuals that make your mouth water. My favorite recent show featured reviews from these three adorable kids who reviewed Japanese, Italian and Burmese restaurants. They were incredibly articulate and they gave the desserts at all three places the attention that they deserved. Yum.
I don’t know. All that “melting pot” stuff kind of rocks. Here’s the “Check Please” episode with the kids. They are delightful. More Melting Pot: The Italian-American girl is an Irish step dancer.
Early in World War II, my Dad was stationed at Gardner Field in Taft. He was a marksman with both the 1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand, which is just above middling, but he was lethal when handling a shotgun. His last shotgun was a lovely Spanish over-and-under, and when Dad led a cock pheasant, the bird was doomed. No matter. The Army sent him to London with a typewriter and adding machine. He was a Quartermaster officer.
Dad, on the right, with a Winchester Model 12, about to go hunting with a neighbor in rural Missouri.
One of his jobs was to organize and dispatch gasoline supply companies to Omaha Beach, where George Patton would promptly steal them.
Another young man stationed at Gardner Field flew P-51 Mustangs into combat and, oh yes, broke the sound barrier two years after the war had ended.
Gardner Field, Taft, during World War II
Here’s one way that fellow entered my life. Elizabeth and I were on a JetBlue flight from somewhere to somewhere else when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom:
“Ladies and gennulmen. If y’all look out the starboard side of the cabin you’ll see a cloud that looks jes’ like a little ol’ puppy dog.”
Because I’d read and so enjoyed the writing of the late Tom Wolfe, I realized suddenly where that voice came from. This passage is from The Right Stuff. It’s kind of fun.
Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring)…the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): “Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not… uh… lockin’ into position when we lower ’em… Now… I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right”… faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you…
…Well!—who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it!—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.
That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, “they had to pipe in daylight.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down…into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous offal the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.
Young Yeager at Gardner Field in front of the BT-13, a trainer that shook so violently that student pilots called it the “Vultee Vibrator.” (Right) Actor Sam Shepherd and Yeager with a replica of the Bell X-1, the jet in which he broke the sound barrier. With a broken arm.
Wolfe became one of my role models as a writer, along with Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Graham Greene, Bruce Catton, Dave Barry and Barbara Tuchman. The film version of The Right Stuff included a masterful performance by playwright/actor Sam Shepard, who comes face-to-face with the real Chuck Yeager, a bit player, in a couple of scenes. This, the crash of an F-104 Starfighter–the West Germans called the Starfighters we foisted on them “Widow Makers”–is a stunning bit of filmmaking.
I watched a good part of Saving Private Ryan again last night. It is so compelling, Tom Hanks’s Capt. Miller especially so, that, amid its graphic violence, it reminds us—Miller reminds us—of who we are.
It also reminded me of a local G.I. killed in Normandy. I wrote about Pvt. Domingo Martinez in World War II Arroyo Grande. He was on my mind as I watched this film again.
This is what I wrote about him.
Domingo Martinez’s grave, Colleville-sur-Mer
It was…drought that may have brought a fieldworker, whose family had lived for generations in New Mexico, to these coastal valleys in 1940. Much of his native [New Mexico] in the years before had been swept away by the Dust Bowl. Winds had carried the copper-red soil as far east as the Mid-Atlantic to drop it, like gritty rain from a place that had none, onto ships still sailing freely between continen
Those ships would lose their freedom in the years immediately after, and the coyotes that hunted them without fear were U-boats come out of their lairs in Kiel and later in Lorient. U-boat captains called this the “Happy Time.”
The U-boats would someday kill that young fieldworker, if indirectly, as part of an inexorable chain of events that would lead him to Normandy, so far away from the fields that border Arroyo Grande Creek, and to pastures bound by hedges and grazed by fat dairy cows, cows that lowed piteously to be milked in what had become killing zones. One of them, dead in the crossfire, may have provided scant cover from the German machine guns that harvested crops of young men for fieldworker, now rifleman, Private Domingo Martinez
Taking the radio site, from Saving Private Ryan.
It is difficult to imagine Normandy in 1944; it is beautiful today, as are its people. A bonjour from an American tourist has more traction here than it does in Paris, and the little villages, separated by pastures and farm fields, are lovely, each with its distinctive little parish church. During the Middle Ages, as the skilled writer and Francophile Graham Robb notes, few villagers ever went beyond the sound of their parish church’s bells. The world beyond was like the ends of the eart
It is not the ends of the earth, but the Arroyo Grande Valley is 5,500 miles away from the D-Day beaches. Three local men, killed in the campaign to capture and then and break free from Normandy, are buried at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, an almost impossibly serene place above Omaha Beach.
The American Cemetery
Below the cemetery, just offshore, a visitor today can see young men as they should be—exuberant and free—racing tiny sailboats, their sails bright oranges and reds, just beyond the surf line, where on June 6, 1944, young men floated like dead leaves on the water’s surface. The invasion of Hitler’s Europe nearly failed here. It didn’t but only because of an American generation that includes those who still hold the high ground at Colleville-sur-Mer
Omaha Beach, 2010
…The [Norman]hedgerows enclosed fields that had been plowed or grazed since Agincourt and were a hopscotch of natural fortresses—roots and compacted earth had formed defensible walls. The GIs had to assault them, one by one, to try to root out the defenders. When they broke through a hedge and entered a field, the superb German machine gun, the MG42, hidden in the next hedge beyond or positioned on the Americans’ flanks, annihilated entire rifle squads. It fired so rapidly that a burst sounded like canvas ripping. Army films had incorporated the sound to try to desensitize trainees. So the Americans could hear but never see in the tangle of the hedges who was killing them so efficiently. With supreme indifference, the bocage quickly transformed GIs into either hardened veterans or into statistics. This is what Private Martinez and the 313th Regiment faced in the attempt to seize the approaches to a key crossroads town, Le Haye du Puits.
The hedgerows. (Below) Wounded GI’s from Martinez’s 79th Division exit a farm field; Miller’s squad on patrol in a Norman field.
There, the Americans fought first-class combat troops, not garrison soldiers, many of them veterans of the Russian front. As the 313th fought to envelop the town, the regiment’s combat chronicle is almost monotonous with passages that have the Americans falling back to their jump-off points after repeated failed attacks through fields, then across a creek, where every time they would be driven back by concentrated German artillery fire. The Germans had not only the finest machine gun of the war but also the finest artillery piece, the versatile 88-mm gun.
The record of Martinez’s death.
Other elements of the 79th Division would take La Haye du Puits while the 313th Regiment continued its sledgehammer attacks to the south. Martinez died during three furious assaults near a little town called Le Bot on July 12. It was likely an 88-mm shell that killed Martinez. Shrapnel to the head and chest ended his life quickly, but his death wasn’t recorded for three days, an indicator of the intensity of the stress the 313th had to endure. The division was victorious, but both the regiment and the division were depleted and their dogfaces, real veterans now, were used up. Signal corps photographers show some Seventy-ninth soldiers playacting outside a wine shop along a street in La Haye du Puits—they sit at a small table amid the rubble, enjoying a fine red wine as if they had dinner reservations and were awaiting the first course. But other photos of other soldiers show men who resemble sleepwalkers: their faces blank and few of them celebratory.
79th Division soldiers leave a secured Le Haye du Puits. The G.I. in the lead carries a mortar tube; one just behind carries the mortar’s baseplate.
With rest and replacements, the veterans of three weeks’ combat soon joined the breakout from Normandy. Two weeks after Martinez’s death, the Allies launched Operation Cobra, a coordinated drive to the east. They uncovered Paris and liberated the city in August, standing aside to let Free French units and their prickly commander, General Leclerc, enter first. Leclerc would have been furious to learn that Ernest Hemingway and some of his camp followers had preceded him and were, with great offensive spirit but also with deteriorating unit cohesion, busy liberating the bar at the Ritz Hotel.
It’s not hard to wish that Private Martinez had been granted more time—maybe, for this migrant farmworker and Dust Bowl refugee, time enough for a few days’ leave to explore Paris. Perhaps he would decide to visit Notre Dame, where it’s not hard to see him in your mind’s eye. He would enter the great church, remove his garrison cap, and cross himself at a holy water font. Then he would walk up the nave, the silence pressing on his ears, to stand for a moment at the transept crossing, where he would stop to smile with delight as he was bathed in brilliant, colored sunlight. This is the gift of the Rose Window to men and women of good faith.
It’s sad–but no recriminations on my part–that the Harvest Festival was canceled this year. (There were cancellations during World War II, as well; the first Harvest Festival was in 1937). The Harvest Festival was an especially big deal when I was little, when my parents dropped me off and turned me loose for the day. The parade was the best part. My sisters, in matching mint-green outfits, appeared in at least one, in the pony cart with Obispo Telstar, one of Anne Westerman’s Welsh ponies, doing the work.
That’s my big sister in the center of the Jeanne Thwaites photograph, taken at Sid Spencer’s cattle ranch, now underneath Lopez Lake. Sid, on her Morgan–Roberta’s riding a Spencer Morgan mare–is on the left and her sister, Anne, on her pony, is on the right.
It was Sid Spencer who taught Sheila Varian how to work cattle. She was a good teacher. Sheila won the National Cow Horse Championship at the Cow Palace in 1961. She was the only woman competitor and her mare, Ronteza, was the only Arabian in a field of Quarter horses.Ronteza’s sire, Witez II, was a champion Polish Arab who plays a central role in a superb book, “The Perfect Horse,” about the American rescue of the Spanish Riding School’s Lipizzaner near the end of World War II.
My favorite Harvest Festival equestrian unit was the one that veered off the parade route and entered Ralph and Duane’s. The horses were thirsty.My most vivid memory was the Harvest Festival of 1966, I think. I was a ninth-grader at the big old Paulding campus, having just graduated from Branch in a class of ten boys and three girls. I went to a dance in Tanner Hall, where City Hall now stands.Tanner Hall had been a dance hall since it was built by Beder Wood in 1894.
But in 1966, at that particular Harvest Festival Dance, I saw the second-most epic girl fight of my life. It was terrifying when you come from a graduating class of ten boys and three girls.
These city girls are lethal, I thought.
The most-epic Young Woman fight–note the change in word choice, reflective of the times– I ever saw was one I broke up as a student teacher at Righetti. I barely survived. Boy fights end when they get tired. If I hadn’t intervened at Righetti, those two Young Women would STILL be fighting.I was lucky to survive.
Tanner, or Tanner’s, Hall was also where locals went to watch silent movies, enormously popular by 1912, when the ad appeared in the Herald-Recorder. And Young Women in 1918–we know this from contemporary teenager letters– couldn’t wait for the flu pandemic to end because they missed the movies. High school, not so much.
The Hall was also used for high-school graduations. The Hall, according to the Arroyo Grande Herald, “was filled to the point of suffocation” for the graduating class of 1898.All five of them. That’s the Class of ’98 in the photo.
Young Women wore white dresses to their graduations in those days. Fifty years after her graduation from Arroyo Grande Union High School, Ruth Paulding STILL fit into hers.
At the 1898 commencement, graduate Albert Ore delivered what the newspaper characterized as a stirring speech, “Spain and America!” about the then-current war still being played out in Cuba and the Philippines.
Ore gave that speech on June 30, 1898.The next day, Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, one of them from San Luis Obispo, followed the Buffalo Soldiers in to take the Spanish trenches atop Kettleman Hill in Cuba–misnamed “San Juan Hill.”
Albert Ore must have been thrilled. Look at what his speech did.
I didn’t learn until last night that my friend and AGHS classmate Keith Sanbonmatsu, AGHS ’70, has died after a motorcycle accident in Simi Valley.
I knew it couldn’t have been ‘natural causes.’ Keith was, throughout his life, an incredible athlete—a swimmer in high school, a relentless walker even as he approached seventy.
He was bright, unfailingly positive, with a sense of humor that flew like an arrow toward anything that was absurd or nonsensical.
He also had an integrity that was bedrock to his personality. I think it was Keith and Vard Ikeda we once saw as referees at a third-grade Biddy Basketball game, when one of the kids’ coaches was doing a terrible-tempered Coach Bobby Knight routine, stopping just short of throwing the folding chairs.
The refs called a time-out and had a very, very quiet talk–we couldn’t hear a word–with the offending coach. He was very, very quiet for the rest of the game.
I love this photo. Keith’s parents, Nami Kobara Sanbonmatsu and Mitsuo Sanbonmatsu– and kitty. Mitsuo was a farmer and an artist, a painter.Keith Sanbonmatsu Collection, Cal Poly Re/Collecting Project
I know that one source of Keith’s integrity and strength of character came from his maternal grandparents, Shig and Kimi Kobara. Like our other Japanese-American neighbors, they were interned, at the Gila River Camp, during World War II. But Shig was such a successful farmer, and such a natural leader, that the FBI picked him up and took him away only days after Pearl Harbor.
The Kobara family at Gila River…
…and in a remarkable contrast–an image that celebrates a marvelous moral victory– The Kobara family a decade later.
Top row (left to right): Ken Kobara, Mitsuo Sanbonmatsu, Towru Kobara, Hilo Fuchiwaki. Middle (left to right): Mari Kobara, Nami Kobara Sanbonmatsu, Shigechika Kobara, Kimi Kobara, Iso Kobara Fuchiwaki, Lori Fuchiwaki, Fumi Kobara, Joan Kobara. Bottom row (left to right): Gary Kobara, Keith Sanbonmatsu, Dona Fuchiwaki, Susan Fuchiwaki, Steve Kobara. Lori Fuchiwaki Collection, Cal Poly Re/Collecting Project
That’s also why the War Relocation Authority, at the end of the war, made sure the Kobaras were the first to come home from Gila River. They had to sleep for several weeks in the interior hall of their home in the Lower Valley. They could hear gunshots in the night. As the other families began to come home, it was Shig and Kimi who gave them shelter until they could re-establish their own homes and farms. This proved to be a necessity because local hotels refused the Japanese-Americans shelter.
But in a story that was repeated over and over again in Arroyo Grande, farmer Joe Silveira looked after the Kobara family’s land and equipment during the war; I think it was Cyril Phelan who stayed from time to time in their home and let it be generally known that he was accompanied by a 30.06 rifle. That discouraged potential vandals.
Keith and his cousin, Dona Fuchiwaki, both related to Shig and Kimi, were an immense help to me in writing the World War II book. And it was Kimi, through an oral history interview, who provided me with this charming story, included in World War II Arroyo Grande, about what was truly a frontier couple:
…Arroyo Grande’s Ella Honeycutt, a longtime conservationist and a gifted agricultural historian, notes that by 1913, when Congress passed the first Alien Land Law, it was too late. Many local immigrant families had already acquired farms. They tended to concentrate in the Lower Arroyo Grande Valley, where they grew vegetables, especially bush peas and pole peas, and when the latter were hit by disease in the mid 1920s, they began to grow newer crops like celery, lettuce and Chinese cabbage.The newcomers had hunted for legal loopholes and found them: they formed corporations and bought land through them, or through friendly white intermediaries, or they bought land in the names of their American-born children, whose citizenship would be inviolable until Executive Order 9066 proved otherwise. The birth of that new generation of Japanese-Americans—the Nisei—was proof incarnate that the people from Kyushu intended to stay in the Valley and make it their home. This trend was made possible by a single premeditated and humane opening in the anti-Japanese laws. They allowed those men already in American to settle here with their wives, to send home for them, or to send, as if they came from the Sears Catalogue, for “picture brides.”
This is how Shigechika Kobara, one of the early immigrants to the Valley, and his wife Kimi began their lives together. Their fathers were neighbors in Kagoshima, and after a short negotiation and a longer courtship-by-letter, the match was made. Shigechika took a train north and was waiting on a Seattle dock, looking for his bride among the passengers on her ship as it began to berth. She was looking back. “I remembered his brother, a naval officer,” Kimi recalled, “and I found a man who resembled him. I thought that this was the man I was about to marry. From the deck I fixed my eyes on him, even though I had never met him. That is why it is called a ‘picture bride.’”
The young Kobara family, about 1930. Keith Sanbonmatsu Collection.
Learning the story of this family has been a grace to my life. I’ve been graced, too, in knowing their grandchildren, my friends and classmates, and in teaching their great-grandchildren in my history classroom. There’s some comfort to be found there when you’ve lost a friend who can’t be replaced.
From 1938: A display ad from the Arroyo Grande Valley Herald-Recorder; below, the program for the game:
This is like a Rosetta Stone for local historians. To put this in context, 1938 was the year of the first Harvest Festival, indicative that the area was beginning to recover from the hit it had taken during the Great Depression, when San Luis Obispo County crop prices were halved between 1929 and 1933. And it’s in a kind of place of innocence, three years away from World War II, which will sweep up the little town, population 1,090 in the 1940 census.
A few examples among the advertisers in the newspaper ad, and this is just scratching the surface:
“J.J. Schnyder” was the kindly blacksmith who’d interrupt almost any paying job to fix a kid’s soapbox racer; he was responsible for funding the first swimming pool at Arroyo Grande High School because he wanted kids to have a place to play. When the Kobara family’s irrigation pump broke down in 1945, after their return from internment, Schyder insisted on fixing it immediately. It was Christmas Day.
“E.C. Loomis and Son:” The family would safeguard the land and equipment of their Japanese-American neighbors during the war; one son, Vard, had coached the Nisei Arroyo Grande Growers, a powerhouse baseball team, before the war. His catcher was Kaz Ikeda, whose image is included in the mural on the Mason Bar wall, and Kaz named one son “Vard.” E.C.’s grandson, John, was a Marine who fought at Pelileu and Okinawa who maintained a lifelong friendship with the other three of a kind of “Four Musketeers:” Don Gullickson, Gordon Bennett, and Haruo Hayashi.
“Horner’s Second Hand Store:” Ed Horner, an Eighth Air Force officer, had his B-17 shot down in 1944 and would be a POW until war’s end.
“Commercial Company:” This general-goods store stood on the site of today’s Mason Bar; it was later a grocery in the same building Mason Bar occupies. One of the owner’s sons, Elliott Whitlock, AGUHS ’40, won a Distinguished Flying Cross for bringing his B-17 safely home after it’d been set afire by flak over Berlin in March 1944.
“French’s Cafe:” On April 30, 1942, French’s prepared over 200 box lunches for local Japanese-Americans on the day buses took them to the Tulare Assembly Center. Only about half of our prewar neighbors would come back after the war.
“Bennett’s Grocery” (today, the Chic Salon): Two of Rusty and Muriel Bennett’s sons would serve–Jerry in the Army Air Forces, Gordon in the Navy.
“E.M. Morgan:” His Ford agency occupied today’s Doc Burnstein’s. Morgan’s son, Wayne, was killed December 7 on USS Arizona, along with his second-grade classmate, Navy bandsman Jack Scruggs.
“Aki’s Market,” next to the meat market, was owned by Akira Saruwatari, a member of perhaps the first Japanese immigrant family to settle in the Arroyo Grande Valley; they farmed land across from the Halcyon Store. He was interned at Gila River and would live his postwar life in Santa Barbara.
“Wilkinson’s Market:” Today’s meat market. When his Japanese customers came in to pay their bills just before internment, Leo Wilkinson would’t take their money. “You keep it; you’re going to need it,” he told them. This act of generosity was repaid, in full, after the war.
“Grande Theater,” in the building that today houses Posies in the Village, would’ve been where many local people, through newsreels, kept up with the war news. (A short distance up Branch was the Security Drug Company, today’s Village Grill, where moviegoers could order a milkshake or ice cream sundae after the movies.)
Earl Wood was the funeral director who would supervise the homecomings of many South County servicemen killed in Europe or the Pacific in the years after the war had ended; Louis Brown, for example, killed on Iwo Jima, came home in 1948.
In the program, the Arroyo Grande coach, Max Belko, was once a USC All-American. He kicked a field goal against Montana in 1935, a feat that wouldn’t be repeated for fifteen years, when Frank Gifford kicked the next Southern Cal field goal. Belko, a Marine lieutenant, was killed on Guam in 1944, but we still have a connection to him: He was Haruo Hayashi’s P.E. teacher. (There are many familiar surnames in the football program, but two, both Navy men during the war, offer a glimpse into postwar Arroyo Grande: Tony Marsalek was our longtime fire chief; Chuck Brooner was the pharmacist/owner of the Fair Oaka Pharmacy.)
The sports editor of the high school newspaper, the “Hi-Chatter,” was George Nakamura. As a twenty-year-old intelligence officer in China, he was awarded a Bronze Star for going behind Japanese lines to rescue a downed American flier and, after the war, a Congressional Gold Medal in recognition for his efforts, as an international businessman, to nurture the relationship between Japan and the United States.
In 1966, when green fees were $20 a month, I learned to play golf at Black Lake, when it wasn’t “Blacklake,” which still irritates me. (So does “California Mens Colony.” Just how many mens are incarcerated there?)
The pro was Eddie Nowak, one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. I’ve written about him. Eddie’s World War II army career was spent in teaching golf to flag officers so that they could relax enough to plan invasions of France or the Philippines.
Ben Hogan once said that Nowak was the finest golf teacher in America. I’ve written about Hogan, too.
One summer, when I was about sixteen, I played almost every day with my AGHS friend Kent Pearson. Once we hitched a ride with a friend of Kent’s who had a convertible ’60 Corvette and we went zipping up the Mesa–us, our clubs and the ‘Vette. I think I sat on Kent’s lap, back when seat belts were a novelty, but the Corvette handled beautifully on the road up the Mesa and the clubheads clicked softly at the turns. Oh, my. What a car.
The Corvette looked like this one.
Another time, we put together enough money to rent an electric cart. I left the brake off on a hill, the cart began a ponderous and dignified descent down the hill, and we caught it three feet from the lake that straddled the old eighth hole.
The golf cart would’ve looked like this one except we caught it in time.
That was a glorious summer. I would work all the rest of ’em, which is why I wasn’t at Woodstock in 1969. I was selling shoes with my friend Robert Garza at Kinney’s in the shopping center that now has the Rite-Aid and the Aldi. The Kinney’s is gone, a victim of advanced age.
Here it is. I wonder if they found any of my old shoehorns in the rubble when they demolished it?
Anyway, one day, he assistant pro introduced me to a revolution in irons, the Browning 440s, made by the same folks who brought you the Automatic Rifle. They were manufactured in Belgium and were “revolutionary” because of the tiny clubface.
Today, they’re as antiquated as a Brown Bess musket is when compared to an M4 carbine.
But when the assistant pro urged me to try a couple of Brownings out on the driving range. The golf balls seemed to leap off the clubface, leave little vapor trails in flight, and land crisply, since the driving range was aimed that way, in the southbound lanes of the 101.
I was entranced. And broke.
A vintage ad. Some think they’re hideous. I don’t. I think they’re svelte.
Ladies and gentlemen, fifty-five years later, I finally have a complete set of Browning 440s.
My (somewhat elderly) babies
Even though I’m elderly golfer whose backswing, given the current state of my back, ventures no farther than the minute hand at 12:45, with my Browning 440s, I am Bill Murray in this scene from Lost in Translation.
A Work in Progress 