This was how Mr. Neergaard—his name misspelled— of Arroyo Grande learned of his son’s death in France. It’s hard to imagine getting news in so cruel a manner.
But this, of course, had been a cruel war on an epic scale. What ended it was crueler still.
One of the climactic battles of the First World War came at the end of September, 1918, two weeks before the flu took thirty-year-old Harold, on the St. Quentin Canal.
Part of the battle involved Americans, who came into the war so badly equipped (it was the mirror reversal of World War II, when we were the “Arsenal of Democracy”) that our fliers flew obsolete French Nieuports, the Marines at Belleau Wood were casually smoking cigarettes, bewildered German soldiers noted, as they advanced while firing French Chaucat light machine guns from the hip. The heavy machine gun we used was the British Maxim Gun and doughboys were driven into the Meuse-Argonne aboard Renault trucks driven by young men from what would someday be called Vietnam.
At the canal, the American 30th Division, shown in the photo with German POWs (the tanks are British), went into the Bellocourt Tunnel, shown below, and met the Germans in hand-to-hand combat.
The 30th Division prevailed in ways beyond the ferocity with which they fought. At least one historian has suggested that in the confines of the tunnel and in the closeness of the combat, the Americans brought the flu with them, too, and this was a new, far more virulent strain than the one that had struck the combatants earlier that year, in the spring.
The war ended six weeks later in part from sheer mutual exhaustion. The two sides were too sick to fight anymore.
The flu even played a role in the unsatisfactory peace that followed–the one that led to another, more terrible war–in part because the American delegate, Woodrow Wilson, became ill, with a temperature of 103 degrees, with what was quite possibly the flu
(This was 1919, but the flu came back to Arroyo Grande, too, in 1919 and again in February 1920.)
When Wilson recovered, some said, he wasn’t the same man he’d been. (His presidency would be shattered soon after by the stroke that incapacitated him.)
So it would be the vengeful French leader, Georges Clemenceau, who would dominate the peace settlement at Versailles. Which, of course, was not a peace at all. Even the attacks on 9/11 can be traced back to the terrible Versailles Treaty.
I imagine this pandemic might have powerful effects, many now unseen, that will play out decades away from us.
This was all provoked by Marlo Thomas and a St. Jude’s Hospital commercial. They always leave me little weepy. I immediately turn the channel, too, whenever they show the ASPCA abandoned dogs commercials. I’m just a wimp.
Anyway…
Jeri.
My woeful performance on the “Ten Famous People You Have Met and One You Haven’t” Facebook survey– my famous people were pretty anemic, including G.D. Spradlin, the actor who sent Martin Sheen Up the River in Apocalypse Now and the guy whom singer Trini Lopez portrayed in The Dirty Dozen. (“Lemon tree, verrry pret-ty…” Trini Lopez sang. The G.I. he portrayed blew stuff up.)
I remembered that Jeri was my date for the 1969 Arroyo Grande High School Winter Formal. She was very bright and had a refreshingly sardonic sense of humor that was about 23 years older than the rest of us. Jeri and I were just friends, with no romantic inclinations, except for the ones I felt for her car.
She drove a 1966 Mustang 2 +2 Fastback, with a classic short-block 289 V-8 under the hood. Sigh!
Alas, we went to the Madonna Inn for dinner in my father’s 1965 Chrysler, which, for those of you not up on your Chryslers, was roughly the size of the carrier USS Eisenhower.
Jeri and I on our way to the Madonna Inn.
No, Jeri was not a Famous People. We’ll get to that right after we order.
Yes, baked potatoes with sour cream, please.
As we were beginning dinner (TWO prime rib dinners, $13.74. I kept the receipt), Jeri punched me in the arm. It wasn’t something wrong with the prime rib. It was DANNY THOMAS, sitting in a booth thirty feet away with Mrs. Madonna, and Jeri wanted his autograph. If Danny Thomas wasn’t exactly a celebrity on the scale of all four Cartwrights AND Marshal Dillon in the Madonna Inn Liberace Room on horseback, he was close enough for two kids from Arroyo Grande, California, USA.
The Madonna Inn–as always, casual and understated.
Now, I worked with Jeri on the school newspaper, and she’d punched me in the arm before. She could leave a bruise if you’d deserved it.
So, after about the third punch, I went over to the booth, introduced myself, blushing profusely and speaking in what must have sounded like Urdu (I knew Mrs. Madonna slightly; my Dad worked for Madonna Construction) and Mr. Danny Thomas provided the autograph.
Danny Thomas and his lovely daughter, Marlo, at St. Jude’s, the incredible hospital Mr. Thomas founded. (Below) Mr. Thomas’s sitcom was at one point on opposite The Andy Griffith Show, which was awkward, because Thomas was Griffith’s executive producer.
That is not really the point of the story, but I have misplaced the point somewhere.
My current television addiction is a German miniseries called Babylon Berlin, thanks in part to a tip from much-beloved former student and fellow history enthusiast Alycia Jones.
The New Yorker summary of the series is far better, but here’s my cruder version.
* * *
Weimar Berlin, 1929: A principled but very troubled police inspector and a very brave (and lovely) young woman meet. He’s a war veteran addicted to morphine; she lives in a nightmare tenement and moonlights as a prostitute. Thanks to her ingenuity and persistence, they begin to work together to crack a case that becomes increasingly complex and dangerous.
Inspector Rath, the professional, and Charlotte Ritter, the gifted amateur.
*Deep breath*
It’s got Stalinists, Trotskyites, Transvestites, Organized Crime, Corrupt Cops, including cynical vice squaddage, the Black Reichswehr, the Red Fortress, frenetic and brilliant Charleston dancing, decaying apartment buildings, workers’ riots, a stunning computer-generated Alexanderplatz, drug-addicted veterans, maimed veterans, a sinister doctor with a hypodermic needle the size of a Krupps field howitzer, a priest-assassin (the protagonist, detective Rath, from Cologne, is Catholic), a furious gunfight perilously close to an immense restaurant fish tank, a St. Valentine’s Day-style massacre, a mysterious vision of a Western Front horse, alone on a bleak battlefield, wearing a gas mask, stolen Russian gold, a character who is frequently killed, tank cars filled with lethal war-surplus gas and an elusive female character, a nightclub singer whose stage persona and assassin’s disguise includes a mustache—and who seems to change the side she’s on every other episode.
Also much sturming und dranging.
The New Yorker review includes a link to an extended nightclub scene from Episode 2—the song “Zu Asche, Zu Staube” (“To Ash, To Dust”) knocked me out, although, since I’m from Arroyo Grande, I’ve rarely seen ladies wearing only banana skirts.
The best part, to me, is that it was all put together by a group of young Germans in their twenties to forties. Brilliant work.
I thought this YouTube video was stunning, and not just for Margot Robbie, who is exactly that.
What struck me even more was how much I loved the song, how much I loved The Mamas and The Papas. My first records weren’t LPs, but 45s, and I played “Monday Monday” and “California Dreamin'” on the same little record player on which I’d once played “Little Toot” and “Tubby the Tuba” as a very little boy.
I was enchanted with harmony—and, of course, I had a huge crush on Michelle Phillips—but beyond that, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Byrds and Crosby Stills and Nash always drew me because of the sublime harmonies. They carried me away to places I’d never known but had always wanted to visit, which explains why I played those old 45s until you could practically see through them.
What saddens me is the subtext of this song–the Laurel Canyon of Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Judy Collins, Neil Young, and, a little later, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne–was so debased by the Tate-LaBianca murders.
I remember reading the first thirty pages of Vincent Bugliosis’s Helter-Skelter and not sleeping for two nights after.
It’s not that my generation deserved Charles Manson–he’s an aberration, not a logical product of historical forces—but I thoroughly get Quentin Tarantino’s thesis: If we had it to do over again, wouldn’t we have relished the chance to destroy Manson, to be heroes?
If we had the chance to do that part of history over again, I think we would embrace it.
But, since history is impassive and indiscriminate in the way it inflicts cruelty, the road my generation took led to a different kind of monster. We voted for him in droves.
And so we’ve empowered leaders, like this one and many more, who laugh at us even as they systematically destroy all the stubborn and self-assured idealism that so maddened our parents.
And then, to make matters worse, we—my generation— refuse to get out of the way. I’m cynical enough to think, if only in halves, that the Coronavirus is Darwinian and so salutary in its selection of victims.
It doesn’t end there. I find myself wishing aloud—embracing the kind of sinfulness that my Irish Catholic background would require consignment to hell, postage paid—that the virus would embrace a president who is much more promiscuous–even moreso than the Manson Family was—in the destruction of his victims.
He kills stupidly and without regret. If he lacks Manson’s premeditation—and only because he lacks the imagination to think beyond the moment he inhabits— he stays behind the way Charlie did to let others, or other forces, do the killing for him.
This is because is a coward.
So he kills indirectly, but, unlike Charlie, he kills the powerless. They will never have movies made about them.
I am not sure how we go to the point where we are today and, of course, the Manson murders weren’t some profound historic tipping point.
Maybe what’s more historically authentic– and so much more painful to confront–is the possibility that all those gifts under Boomer Christmas trees spoiled us and there’s nothing we fear quite so much as having our presents taken away from us. And so we seek the terrible protection of someone who seems a caricature of every Disney villain we hated when we still had the wisdom of children.
When we met the Disney villains we emerged, blinking in the sunlight coming out of the movie theater, sure in the comfort that we would never be like them—or, even more, that we would never be so foolish and weak as to taste the sweet apples that they offered us. They were poisoned, after all.
No. We would be instead like Cinderella—our strength and our beauty and our nobility would defeat any number of wicked stepsisters. Or we would be like Zorro, manly and generous, righting injustices and humiliating the unjust, all the time hidden in the anonymity and the humility of our disguise.
We were, in fact, graced by our intolerance for injustice. We took that to the streets, and we should, I think, be proud of that. But the humiliation didn’t fall on the unjust, did it?
It’s fallen on us instead. So it might be time for us to get out of the way—imagine the absurdity of two septuagenarians running for president when our president was the youngest elected in American history—when, a little later, we said we would never trust anyone over thirty.
But we said that in the comfort of youth, when the young girls coming into the Canyon were strong and beautiful and noble, and when I, if I remember it right, was not quite old enough to have left my belief in heroism behind.
What’s damnable is that I’m still not old enough, not even at sixty-eight.
I taught young people, and I learned, to my delight, that the heroism I once cherished still lives in them. I learned to recognize it in my classrooms over thirty years of teaching, and in those moments when I saw it, their heroism was incandescent and unforgettable.
Maybe it’s the meaning of my generation’s music that’s now forgettable. It’s now so distant and long-ago, even if the harmonies, no matter how faint, are still unmistakeable to me.
But
The music reminds me there’s still a chance to take the road that will make all the difference. If we can find it, we might walk, with our young people–I am just beginning to enter the fragility of age, so that I would need them to hold my hand over the rough spots and mind for me the loose shale on the steeper downslopes—until we would find together a narrow hardpan road that leads into a sunlit California canyon.
This is the road, we would understand, all of us, instantly and without words, when would turn to each other and let smiles suffice, that belongs to us.
The road ends where a window opens, and then, for the first time, we will see a little yard flush with wildflowers–lupine and blood-orange poppies and shooting stars–and smelling of sage and just-turned soil. Through the window we will see the warm light of a welcome house and smell the sweetness of fresh-baked bread and, most of all, we will hear again the music we loved so much.
And then we will be home, in a place where’s there is room for everything except for fear.
I have been undertaking a Serious Historical Study of the Andy Hardy movies that appear frequently on TCM. There were sixteen made between 1937 and 1958, during which Mickey Rooney’s Andy grew not an inch. Andy would go off to World War II but that part of his life is forgotten in favor of “I know what let’s do! Let’s put on a show!“
The films I’ve seen leave me with even more questions.
1. Did Andy ALWAYS wear a tie?
2. Did Americans once put that much sugar on their corn flakes?
3. Was that car as beautiful as I thought it was? Yes, it was. Andy’s high school graduation gift was a 1940 Plymouth convertible. Possibly it was a bribe offered Judge Stone, like the silver candlestick offered Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.
4. Mrs. Hardy deserves far more credit. I think she irons Andy’s undershorts.
5. Judge Hardy is rarely in court. He mostly just hangs around and dispenses advice, like Ozzie Nelson did in Ozzie and Harriet. And, given Lewis Stone’s appearance, I would guess he was about 78 when his son Andy was born.
6. It seemed to take Andy about seven years to get through high school. Maybe that’s because in Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, he falls in love with his drama teacher, Helen Gilbert.
7. In one scene, Andy ties a BOW TIE while talking to Mrs. Hardy without the use of a mirror. That’s an Academy Award right there, as far as I’m concerned.
8. We need soda fountains to make a comeback. My father first met my mother in a soda fountain in 1939.
9. In Love Finds Andy Hardy, Andy offers to court a friend’s girlfriend while he’s away on a weeks-long family vacation so no other guys will Make the Moves on her. They haggle over the fee. They agree on eight bits (a dollar) or $18.36 in today’s money. Good Lord, money went a lot farther then.
10. In Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary, Andy and Polly go parking in what looks like Amazon rainforest in the 1940 Plymouth convertible. Judge Hardy and a good portion of the supporting cast suddenly pull up and hilarity ensues. If any OTHER Andy Hardy type had been caught by his Dad parking with Anne Rutherford (Polly), he would’ve been horsewhipped.
11. Judy Garland appears in only three of the films. Andy is dismissive of her, because she’s just a kid. I find that really difficult to believe. Donna Reed (below) appears one film, too, and that’s good, because that might’ve laid the groundwork for her casting opposite James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.
12. The girl Andy dates for his friend (for $18.36 in 2020 money) in LoveFinds Andy Hardy is Lana Turner. He finds her spoiled and selfish and, in my mind, no competition for Judy Garland. He breaks off the pseudo-relationship, which is good news because Lana Turner grows up to get her husband murdered and John Garfield sent to The Chair in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
13. There are Black people in Andy’s hometown, Carvel, USA (like The Simpsons’ Springfield, it’s everywhere but nowhere in particular). They are all—all of them— Pullman porters, it seems. That part of the Andy Hardy myth is less appealing to me than Andy and Judy and their fountain soda.
This photo was taken near the intersection of Huasna Road and Lopez Drive, where I grew up. Here is the story of the mountain in the photo.
This view is what would we could see very morning from one of our living room picture windows, but, for the sake of accuracy, in this order:
Mom’s roses. Sutter Golds were among her favorites.
Pasture, with Morgans, whose discharge made the roses grow. Cars would stop to watch the foal, a little stallion made up of 78% legs.
Row crops, with the occasional crop duster dipping saucily beyond the power lines. Sometimes they were peppers, sometimes pole beans. A little up the Valley, Mr, Ikeda favored cabbages, which are blue. Just a tad to the left of the cabbages was the beaver dam into which I fell while fishing. Ineptly.
The Coehlo place (Kathy). Her Dad carved a model of the old St. Patrick’s Church that was astonishing.
The McNeil place.
The Shannon place.
Various pumphouses and barns.
The man who had an airplane in his yard. Just in case.
By the early 1960s, just a tad to the left and atop another hill, the Ikeda place.
In the late 1950s, Dona Manuela Branch’s redwood home–she’d come to the Arroyo Grande Valley, pregnant, in 1837–had been just a tad more to the left. When I was very little, the home burned in the night. It gave off a spark as bright as Venus. Only the palm trees that had shaded the home, its gardens and had once shaded the family at barbecue remain today. The Ikedas take respectful care of Manuela and her family, maintaining the graveyard up a little canyon five hundred yards away from the home her devoted children had built for her.
So I grew up with this mountain, sort of. It always looked to me like the top of a head with a receding oak tree hairline.
Once there was a brushfire that came up behind it and framed the top, like the sun’s aureola at full eclipse, and that became a passage, fifty years later, in a chapter about the Battle of Petersburg. It went like this:
The Third Battle of Petersburg began in the pitch-black pre-dawn of April 2, 1865. A Union army surgeon, watching the assault from a federal fort, could see nothing until the combined muzzle flashes of thousands of Confederate rifles lit the horizon the way a brush fire will when it crowns a hilltop. When a line of flashes went black again, the doctor knew that the Union assault had carried the Confederate entrenchments.
One day, when I was in my early teens, I decided to climb it. You could access it from behind the Cherry Apple Farm. I was by myself, which was stupid, and forgot about the poison oak, which was stupider.
It took me two hours.
When I reached the top of the mountain I considered to be very close to my own personal property–emotionally, if not legally–I found out I hadn’t reached the top at all.
What neither the photo nor my many morning views as a little boy revealed was that this was actually two mountains: There’s a razorback ridge in front and, behind it and beyond it, the bald man with his receding hairline of oak trees.
I was kind of angry. It took me until almost dark to get back down, by which time my family assumed I’d been eaten by cannibals, which meant that the Eskimo Pies brought us by Frank the Foremost Dairy delivery driver–a consistently cheerful man– would last a little longer.
So it turned out that I climbed mountains just as ineptly as I fished. I would live to climb a few more. I’d help the Mission Prep kids whitewash the “M” on San Luis Mountain and fell off it twice more, spraining an ankle both times. I am not going back.
Now people live on that mountain. This kind of audacity would never have occurred to me when I was thirteen. It may seem pretentious to call it a “mountain.” Visit the Midwest. It’d be a veritable Matterhorn to folks north of the Ozark Plateau.
You can still see the backside of this mountain, but from the Nipomo Valley, to the right off the 101, as you drive north from Santa Maria. The hairline is flipped as if it were a reversed photograph.
I hold it no hard feelings. Seen from Nipomo, it’s a little bare and humbled without the oak-studded proscenium seen from its Arroyo Grande side. This gave the mountain a little romance to a little boy looking sleepily out the window on a cold morning.
Climbing it–and then finding out that I hadn’t climbed it at all–taught me a lesson in humility that I need to re-learn every day of my life.
Courtesy of Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth I, the Tilbury Speech, with the Armada approaching in August 1588, when her nation was threatened by enemies both foreign and domestic:
It’s hard to beat Elizabeth’s contemporary, Shakespeare, for leadership lessons. It’s no wonder that Olivier’s Henry V became an instrument of war in 1944. Agincourt was fought in 1415; the history play was written in 1599. Both events retained their immediacy as Britain and her allies fought just as bitterly—but with far more lethality— as Henry had on the Continent.
Here is the context: An exhausted, disease-ridden and seemingly doomed English army, vastly outnumbered, prepares to meet the cream of French chivalry in Normandy. These are the words Shakespeare puts in Henry’s mouth, and from what I’ve read about the young king—charismatic, implacable and immensely courageous—this is thin fiction indeed:
Abraham Lincoln’s devotion to Shakespeare was legendary. For a man whose formal education totaled about seven weeks, it was Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that formed the fundament of the president’s self-education and the templates for his rhetoric, which no president has matched.
What Henry V might’ve taught Lincoln was the importance of the bond between a leader and his people—Elizabeth clearly understood that bond— a lesson mythologized in this scene from Spielberg’s Lincoln.
The scene is mythic because it never happened. But it’s mythic, too, because myths tell the truth in a way we can understand.
It’s that bond that’s been broken and it’s truth that we’ve lost today: it’s been so besmirched, just as it was in Southern newspapers in December 1860, that recovering it—and with it, constitutional democracy—may require great sacrifice. It may inflict on us wounds beyond imagining. We are met again on a great battlefield where the enemy includes malignant men, so alien to us and to our traditions, and our countrymen, among them those whom we love the most.
This photograph was taken on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on the day Executive Order 9066 was executed and these friends were separated.
There’s a good chance they never saw each other again.
When the buses came to take our Arroyo Grande, California, neighbors away on April 30, 1942, many of them—less than half—came back. I grew up here, and I don’t recognize many of the surnames in the old high school yearbooks.
One woman told me this: On the day the buses came to the high school parking lot, her mother saw a line of high-school girls, some Japanese, some not, walking up Crown Hill, walking up toward their high school, holding hands and sobbing.
Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans went first to the Tulare County Fairgrounds, where they slept in livestock stalls, and then to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature was at or above 109 degrees for twenty of their first thirty days there.
I interviewed a remarkable woman named Jean a few weeks ago. She is 94, is briskly intelligent, articulate and gracious. Her father owned the meat market on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 census, and when his Japanese-American customers, farmers, came in to settle up before the buses came, he refused to take their money. “You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”
When they came home three years later, he extended them easy credit until they could begin to bring in crops again. Jean showed me her father’s business ledgers, so I have no reason to doubt it when she told me that every one of those farmers paid her father back. In full.
This is Jean as a high-school freshman. The doll, with her handmade kimono, came to Jean from Gila River in gratitude for her family’s friendship. For their loyalty.
At ninety-four, that loyalty runs in Jean as deeply as it ever has. One of her best high-school friends was named Yoshi. I can find a photo of the two together in second grade. I found a photo, too, of two second-grade boys in the Arroyo Grande Grammar School in 1926. They would die, about twelve minutes apart, on USS Arizona.
Yoshi’s brother became a war hero. He won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant when he went behind Japanese lines in China to rescue a downed American flier.
Yoshi’s brother brought that flier in and made him safe. Jean never saw Yoshi again and, because of April 30, 1942, there is a part of her that can never feel safe.
The war, at its outset for America, killed two of our sailors. It would claim many more local young men, killing them in Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal and on the beach at Tarawa. It would kill a young paratrooper in Holland during Operation Market Garden. It would kill, with a sniper’s bullet, a tank-destoyer crewman on the German frontier three days before his first child, a son, was born.
The war killed neither Jean nor Yoshi. They remain its casualties, nonetheless.
We had to stop the interview for a moment. In remembering her friend, Jean was fighting hard to stop the tears. One escaped. That moment taught me so much history, and with such intensity, that I almost couldn’t bear it.
I taught AP European History for nineteen years, and I quickly discovered a passion for social history, including women’s history. We learned about skimmingtons, Tudor marriage patterns, women’s work on farms and in factories. Then we got to La Belle Epoque–-Victorian Europe—which should have been my favorite chapter. It was Marion Cotillard’s favorite era, too, in Midnight in Paris, and I would’ve been hard-pressed to choose between Cotillard’s Paris and Owen Wilson’s Lost Generation version of the great city.
I have my romantic reveries about the film interrupted by the reality of its director, whose victim—much later, his wife— was his stepchild, and that unpleasant juxtaposition reminds me of the way I taught this chapter.
Cotillard and Wilson, Midnight in Paris
I didn’t lead with Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins or Nicole Kidman’s Satine from Moulin Rouge–although I did touch on Montmartre and on Hausmann’s re-imagining of Paris.
No. I started the chapter with Jack the Ripper. The Ripper murders, in 1888, were so revelatory of the larger society’s misogyny. The students were reminded of Nancy in Oliver Twist and they learned about Victorian widow’s reeds—for which Her Majesty, in her pining for Albert, deserves so much blame–when it was discovered that black taffeta, required for a year, when combined with gaslights, led to British and American middle-class sati, the tradition where, once upon a time, Hindu women threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres.
Victoria’s daughters mourn dutifully for their father.
The Rippers’ victims funerals were attended only by detectives. These women, some but not all of them prostitutes, were desperately poor, frequently drunk and utterly alone. (This was when the Industrial Revolution had advanced to the point where women, thanks to cooperation between male workers and male capitalists, had been forced out of factory work, where they’d always been integral. World War I would call them back, when munitions work would kill women workers in bushel-loads; shell-filling turned their skin bright yellow. So most of them died slow deaths, from chemical poisoning, rather than the instant deliverance conferred on other women by accidental explosions.)
The Ripper’s escapes were made possible by the rabbit-warren of alleyways and the density of London fog–T.S. Elliot described its greenish cast—that were so evocative of the density and the filth of the East End. Sunlight rarely penetrated the lives of these women; their deaths were captured in photographers’ flashes—theirs were among the first autopsy photos ever taken for police work. I could not show some of them to sixteen-year-olds.
So we began a chapter that was ostensibly my favorite (they learned how to speak Cockney, learned rhyming slang, learned about department stores and the demarcation lines between social classes within Parisian apartment buildings and in the process of lifeboat-filling on Titanic, learned, most of all, about Paris) with some of the most brutal material I’ve ever taught.
I wanted it that way. I taught, whenever I could, to my students’ emotions, because that’s the way I experience history—these people are very much alive and so very human to me—and I wanted them, as we began this chapter, to be outraged.
Most of all, I wanted my male students to understand the Ripper’s brutality, so reflective of the society’s brutality, to understand what it might have been like to be a woman then—and now, because we would visit this topic again before the year had ended–and if outrage wouldn’t take with them, with my young men, then discomfort would do.
I hope their discomfort hasn’t ended. The misogyny, revealed in so many presidential tweets, certainly hasn’t.
This was the Document-Based Essay that ended the chapter–a truncated version of the much more lengthy essays they’d encounter on the AP exam. I was a little proud of this one.
I always reasoned that I needed to retire once my own anger over World War I had passed. I think that sentiment extends logically to the status of Victorian/Edwardian women, as well.
On the morning of Friday, April 12, 1895, the proprietor of the Fashion Stables in San Luis Obispo discovered a body. It lay in a pool of blood—the back of the victim’s skull had been crushed—in a vacant lot behind The Palace, a “house of ill fame,” near the intersection of Monterey and Morro Streets.
An Arroyo Grande man, Frank Feliz, was nearby, inside Sinsheimer’s store—today’s Giuseppe’s—and after he’d followed the gathering crowd to the vacant lot he identified the victim as Ygnacio Villa, a neighbor of his. Villa’s family was prominent but had fallen on hard times. Ygnacio’s father had been the master of the 30,000-acre Corral de Piedra rancho between Pismo Beach and the Edna Valley. Ygnacio, by contrast, homesteaded 160 acres in Lopez Canyon.
The sheriff’s deputy on the scene, Joseph Eubanks, would have had bad memories of Lopez Canyon. Eubanks had assisted Constable Thomas Whitely in the arrest of Peter and P.J. Hemmi for the 1886 murder of Eugene Walker. The Hemmis and Walker had been involved in a land dispute in the canyon; Hemmi had reportedly broken down fences and poisoned livestock to force Walker off land he believed to be his. On March 31, fifteen-year-old P.J. shot Walker and his young wife, Nancy, who died several months later.
On the night of
the Hemmis’ arrest, Eubanks had to share Whitely’s humiliation when a mob, their
faces covered by handkerchiefs, locked the two inside a Branch Street restaurant’s
storeroom. The mob then stormed the little town jail and lynched the Hemmis
from the PCRR trestle over Arroyo Grande Creek. It was schoolchildren who first
discovered the hanging bodies the next day—April Fool’s Day.
After 1886,
Arroyo Grandeans remembered Lopez Canyon for its bounty, rather than its
violence.
A 1909 San Luis
Obispo Morning Tribune portrait of
the canyon was titled “Where Nature Has Been Lavish With Her Charms.” Local
papers were frequently filled with little stories about Arroyo Grandeans taking
extended hiking and camping trips or those who came back to town to brag about a
big catch of trout, to show off trophy mule deer bucks or, in one case, four
bird hunters who returned with “a wagon load” of pigeons.
But Deputy
Sheriff Eubanks wasn’t done with Lopez Canyon. Within days of Ygnacio Villa’s
murder, he would place Frank Feliz and two others under arrest. The killing was
the apparent culmination of a year-long feud between two factions in the canyon—one
led by Feliz and the other by a neighbor named Gerard Jasper.
There are
repeated stories about the feud throughout local newspapers in 1894-95. It began, as the Hemmi-Walker dispute had,
because of conflicting claims over land. Neither side comes off looking
innocent.
Gerard Jasper
was a contrary man. In 1869, when he’d lived in Cambria, a deputation of local
citizens was organized to warn him not
do bring his cattle into town during an outbreak of what was called “Texas
Fever.” He appears frequently in county civil suits in subsequent years, but
his contrariness took a new direction in Lopez Canyon: Jasper was accused, in
the fall of 1894, of setting a string of arson fires. Pasturage, a neighbor’s
wagon and twenty-five cords of wood went up in flames, and one of those fires
burned land claimed by Frank Feliz.
At his San Luis
Obispo trial, Jasper, according to one account, “offered a very vigorous
defense, and at times branched out into philosophical utterances, which His
Honor [Judge V.A. Gregg] was finally compelled to check.” Jasper’s character
witnesses, which included prominent local men like Fred Branch and David
Newsom, were more effective in his eventual acquittal.
After the trial, the Jasper-Feliz feud escalated in late 1894 and early 1895. Feliz was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. A comrade of Jasper’s, identified only as P. Morales, broke down a neighbor’s fence and smashed the windows and door of his little Lopez Canyon cabin. Morales had to be subdued by two deputies when he resisted arrest. Another friend of Jasper’s was a victim: he returned from town to find seven bullet holes in his front door and seven .44-caliber slugs embedded in the opposite wall.
It seemed that
Frank Feliz was itching to make Ygnacio Villa a victim, too. Villa had
testified against Feliz in the Jasper arson trial and, according to news
accounts, Feliz accused Villa of stealing one of his cows. “I will kill him the
first time I see him,” Feliz reportedly told Villa’s niece, Rafaela.
There was
evidence that Feliz had done just that, according to trial accounts that
dominated the news in August 1895.
Two prostitutes
from the Morro Street houses saw Feliz and some companions verbally confront
Villa the night he died (one of them was the first to find the body the next
morning, but she didn’t report it). Evidently all of the men, Villa included,
had spent much of Thursday night, April 11, drinking heavily in a nexus of saloons—one
of them, ironically, was called the Olive Branch–along Monterey Street. There
was physical evidence, as well: blood on Feliz’s overalls. On the witness
stand, Feliz maintained the blood had come from slaughtering a steer several
days before Villa’s murder.
The evidence
wasn’t enough to convince the jury. On August 11, 1895, they acquitted Feliz. A
few years later, Gerard Jasper died a natural death and the feud seemed to end
with him.
Ironically, the
crime that would finally doom Frank Feliz, in 1901, was the one he’d accused
Ygnacio Villa of committing: cattle theft. On April 7, 1901, the Morning Tribune exulted in Feliz’s
conviction and subsequent ten-year sentence to Folsom prison: time enough, the
article opined, for Feliz to reflect on a brutal murder “in an alley back of a
darkened street where evil flourished.”
