The Tripolitan Monument, United States Naval Academy, dedicated to Stephen Decatur
Stephen Decatur was an early 20th-century U.S. Navy hero.
Tripolitan pirates were kidnaping American merchant sailors in the Mediterranean. In 1803, they seized the USS Philadelphia, a 36-gun American frigate. Decatur led a sixty-man boarding party aboard. At the cost of one man slightly wounded, Decatur’s sailors killed twenty pirates and set Philadelphia ablaze. The British admiral, Horatio Nelson, called it the most daring action “of our age.”
(Above) Decatur kills a Tripolitan Pirate; the USS Philadelphia ablaze.
In the War of 1812, Decatur commanded the USS United States. His ship pummeled the British frigate Macedonian so severely that the ship surrendered and was captured. The battle lasted seventeen minutes.
United States (r) defeats HMS Macedonian
In 1815, commanding the frigate President, he became a British prisoner after his ship was defeated and captured. Decatur and his executive officer were hit by flying splinters; Decatur was hit in the chest and forehead; his lieutenant, standing next to him, lost his leg. The battle lasted eighteen hours.
After that war, he was put in command of the Navy’s Mediterranean squadron and, in 1820,, finally forced the “Barbary Pirates,” based in Tripoli, to surrender.
USS Harvey Milk; Secretary Hegseth
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth today ordered the oiler USS Harvey Milk renamed. Milk was a U.S. Navy diver during and after the Korean War. He was the San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978. In both his naval and political life, Harvey Milk was fearless. His assassination and Hegseth’s order both stem from the fact that Harvey Milk was a gay man.
Decatur, bottom right-center, in the hand-to-hand fight with the pirates.
Harvey Milk was gay.
So was Stephen Decatur.
The shame lies in neither Milk nor Decatur. Pete Hegseth owns it today.
Naval Academy cadets on parade. My beloved brother-in-law, Steve, a husband and father, would have seen the Tripolitan Monument many times. Steve was an Annapolis grad. This is his memorial in the Academy Columbarium.
Captain Stephan Bruce in the ceremony that marked his retirement from the Navy. He flew Sea Stallion helicopters.
I’ve been talking a lot, on Facebook, about my hospitalization, but there are some things I need to write down before I forget them. Eventually, I WILL be quiet, but I’ve been thinking about the nurses at Cottage—where I detoxed for five days– and about my friends who are nurses.
In short, my nurses were incredible. They were cheerful, accommodating if I asked for something, and vigilant about vital signs, blood draws, meds and so on.
Most of all, they were kind.
Yet they had to deal, as a group, with patients who were experiencing psychotic breaks, the kind where they had to clear us out of the halls for our safety.
There were two of these at the same time one morning and all the nurses closed ranks around those patients, talking them through their crises, but that morning they needed the help of four large security staffers, their backup. The security men later escorted the patients, one of them my short-term roommate, to a ward where they could get more intensive care and more potent medications.
So this is what I found out: Being a nurse can be scary. I didn’t realize this, and this was the guy who, during one stay in the ER, wanted to rip aside the room’s dividing curtain and pummel the doctor I overheard referring to the nurse assisting him as “sweetie.”
The nurses don’t know this, but they became my friends. I also made friends with the women who cleaned our rooms, Maria and Joanna. They were, like the nurses, unbelievably sunny. My ego demanded that I share a few words in Spanish with them, and they were admirably tolerant.
My new friends included a boy who couldn’t get through two sentences without suddenly putting his hand over his heart and starting to cry.
There was an older man who couldn’t get discharged and so was palpably, painfully sad. He owned everything he’d done while using, so maybe part of what looked like sadness was a actually a kind stoic strength. I guess wisdom, once it’s earned, hurts like hell. Thankfully, he finally got out early on the Friday I did. We shook hands and looked squarely at each other, the way that men do when they communicate the euphemism “regard” for each other when the proper and more accurate word is “love.”
There was a young woman, small and fine-boned, who spoke so softly that she affirmed my need for new hearing aids. She had the profile of a Nubian princess. She was very black and incredibly lovely. In fact, she was, I thought, one of the most beautiful young women I’d ever known, and thirty-plus years of teaching guarantees that I’ve known thousands of beautiful young women.
Phone Man was ALWAYS on the phone, making arrangements, keeping tabs, deciding decisions, I think all of it for his business. He was never really in the hospital, not at all. I did not like him.
Another young man—there were a LOT of young men—beamed proudly when, after four times, he remembered my name. He was very tall, sweet and unassuming, but I’m not sure if his mother had ever really loved him.
An older woman (my age) had been a world traveler, another was homeless. That woman’s life was scored by the deaths of those she loved the most, and the loss showed. She was a little stooped, had lost a few teeth, had lost one of the arms on her eyeglasses, had lost everything she owned except for the clothes she wore into the ward. She now wore the tan scrubs and static socks that Cottage provides.
Only twenty-four hours after coming in, and abstaining from drinking, I overheard a conversation she had with a nurse. The woman I’d pitied was intelligent, articulate, focused on her future after discharge. I was chastened. She was a remarkable person who needed, if just for a few days, a place where she could find herself again. “Remarkable” is almost the right word. “Miraculous” might be a better one for her.
Tomorrow is my big brother Bruce’s birthday. He has many distinctions and we have more than a few similarities.
Distinctions:
1. He was the only one of the four Gregory kids to inherit Mom’s brown hair and eyes. His middle name is “Keefe,” Mom’s maiden name, and traceable back to her ancestors in County Wicklow, on the Irish Sea. The first photo shows him with our beautiful Mom.
2. Family legend has it that he was so reluctant to start school at Margaret Harloe Elementary that he climbed the school flagpole and hung there awhile. They were sensible. He got hungry.
Bruce, front row to the left of the chalkboard.
3. We both later attended Branch, but because he was four years older, he got to hear aged, aged Fred Jones speak about the 1886 double lynching from the PCRR trestle at the base of Crown Hill. Fred saw it happen.
4. His AG(U)HS teachers adored him. Room 301 (I taught in 306) had glass soundproof booths for Sara Steigerwalt’s speech class (we both loved Sara, who was scary). Six years after he’d explained the Battle of Gettysburg to his classmates, his battlefield map of July 2 was still in one of those booths.
Our other scary/much adored teacher was English and Journalism teacher Carol Hirons. I was teaching at AGHS the year of Carol’s retirement, and on her last day, she walked up to me with an 11th Grade American Lit anthology that I recognized immediately.
She had tears in her eyes. “Jim, I wanted you to have this.” I got tears in my eyes as Carol walked away toward the parking lot, and then I opened the book.
It was Bruce’s.
5. Learning to drive a stick eluded me, until Bruce taught me on his little MG sedan. I hope we didn’t run over too many of Mr. Shannon’s Brussels Sprouts.
The MG
6. He is gifted mechanically. I have a hard time clearing out the vacuum cleaner of debris. His airplane and car and ship models were meticulous. Mine looked like the mashed potatoes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Bruce was a finish carpenter.
Bruce made this Revell model of the Confederate commerce raider, Alabama, but his was under full sail. It was marvelous.I got a little bit even many years later when, at Mission Prep, I taught Travis Semmes, a direct descendant of Alabama’s captain, Raphel Semmes.
7, He is meticulous. We had a drawer full of “Mad” magazines, his, and they were arranged in some fashion I did not understand–either by date, theme or the redness of Alfred E. Neuman’s hair.
It never failed. “Been in my ‘Mads’ again, haven’t you?”
He was a pain in the ass until he turned nineteen. He took great joy in picking on me.
More on this at the end.
Similarities:
1. It is almost impossible to tell us apart on the telephone.
2. We are both TV Boomer Generation types. Here are Roberta, Bruce and I watching the TV when we lived on Sunset Drive. Yes, that is a TV.
3. We are both Branch School products, including several grades spent in the 1888 schoolhouse that still stands in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. (Photo above, although we lacked the belltower. Termites.)
4. Bruce was the emcee for the 1966 Senior Class play at AGUHS. I was the emcee for the 1970 AGHS Senior Class play.
5. We both enjoyed setting up toy soldiers and them utterly destroying them with industrial-strength rubber bands that our Dad brought home from the Madonna Construction Co. offices, where he was comptroller.
6, Both of us took our first airplane ride, to Marysville, where Dad was bidding a job, in Madonna Construction’s Aerocommander, piloted by Earl Thomson, one of the founders, in 1939, of today’s airport. In the photo, that’s Madonna and the first Gov. Brown in front of that airplane. (That trip led to me writing a book about local World War II combat fliers sixty-two years later.)
Bruce was later a busboy at the Madonna Inn, where I took Jeri Tomson, my 1969 AGHS Christmas Formal date, for two prime rib dinners which set me back $13.84.
7. Bruce was the editor of the Cuesta College newspaper, “The Cuestonian.” Four years later, so was I.
When he turned nineteen, (I was ADHD and so a much BIGGER pain in the ass than he ever was), I’d become slightly less annoying, at fifteen. That’s when he turned into the best big brother anyone could hope for.
Tomorrow he turns 77. I am 73.
He’s still the best big brother anyone could hope for.
It’s a simple matter of justice, you see. This article is from Heritage Press, the South County Historical Society’s newsletter. If I can find a restaurant that makes chapulines tacos, I am willing to try one. I am willing to be photographed. My eyes, of course, will be closed.
(I made a similar vow about Humboldt squid, so voracious that they are devastating West Coast fisheries. I guess they will eat anything, including the occasional Coast Guard cutter. (I recommend the Calamari Fries at Rooster Creek Tavern in Arroyo Grande.)
Anyway, here’s the grasshopper story.
The Great Grasshopper Invasion of 1934
By Jim Gregory, South County Historical Society President
It must’ve seemed Biblical. In the summer of 1931, swarms of grasshoppers descended on Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota and began eating crops down to the roots.
Another infestation in 1937 Colorado led to the intervention of the National Guard. Guardsmen used flamethrowers to attack the insects.
In 1934, it was Arroyo Grande’s turn. Grasshoppers were the last thing County farmers needed.
The Depression had hit county agriculture hard. The total value of crops in 1929 San Luis Obispo was $12 million; by 1933, with the collapse of farm prices, the figure was $6 million. Poignant anecdotal evidence of the impact on farms can be found in the frequency of legal notices—foreclosure sales—in newspapers from the time.
1933—possibly the depth of the Depression—was accompanied by a singularly dry year in Arroyo Grande. By the end of 1934, over seven inches of rain had fallen. At the same time in 1933, the total was only a little over two inches.
The head of the New Deal’s Soil Conservation Service was struck by what overcultivation and dry weather had done to the canyons north and east of town. Arroyo Grande’s soil erosion was, he wrote, the worst he’d seen in the United States. (The Dust Bowl was yet to come.)
The Dust Bowl was yet to come.
Dry conditions are ideal for grasshopper eggs. So in the spring of 1934, swarms began appearing in Suey Canyon, east of Santa Maria. That was ominous.
In 1873, a grasshopper infestation literally seemed to explode from Suey Canyon. L.J. Morris, a Santa Maria justice of the peace in 1873, wrote that “they came in great clouds, miles in extent so thick that they obscured the sun and the day grew as dark as deep twilight.”
“They settled down on the first bit of greenery they saw,” Morris continued. “They stripped young orchards in a twinkling…nothing was left but the little stubs of the trees, every shred of bark gone.”
Now, in 1934, history was repeating itself. This time, the grasshoppers descended on cars traveling between Santa Maria and Nipomo, fouling radiators and so obscuring windshields that drivers had to pull off the road.
“The Tar Spring Road,” an April Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder reported, “was a moving mass of hoppers from Newsom Canyon…to the Andre Dowell alfalfa field.”
Cars traveling between Nipomo and Arroyo Grande had to pull over to the side of what was then the two-lane 101. Grasshoppers had so fouled their windshield wipers that they no longer worked, and the air along the road was so thick with uncrushed grasshoppers that it resembled the Valley’s famous tule fog.
And they had the same appetite their forebears had demonstrated 1873.
Town blacksmith Jack Schnyder was proud of his new lawn, which he wet down to discourage ethe grasshoppers, but they “dug it out by the roots.” The bean crop in Tar Springs Canyon was completely destroyed.
They descended on other parts of the county, as well. In Cambria, known for dairy farming, milk cows refused to go out to pasture—the grasshoppers terrified them. Cal Poly students lit backfires to deprive them of vegetation as they closed in on San Luis Obispo.
Local ranchers met in Edna to come up with a plan which they presented to the Board of Supervisors, where Supervisor Asa Porter of the Huasna Valley acted as their spokesman, successfully securing county funding for fighting the pests.
Poison mash was one antidote. A helpful article in the Pismo Times included a recipe for poison mash, which included citrus fruits, two quarts of molasses, bran and a pound of white arsenic. The mixture was spread over farm fields in the hope that the grasshoppers would take the bait.
Sadly, what seemed to end the 1934 infestation were the grasshoppers themselves; having devoured so many crops in their fields and so much pastureland, they moved on.
But they threatened to return. “Grasshoppers Hatching in Nipomo Area,” a Herald-Recorder front-page headline announced in July 1935. The Farm Bureau and area farmers crossed their fingers and hoped for fog: cool, damp weather destroyed grasshopper eggs effectively.
Just in case, the county had twenty tons of poison mash in reserve.
I few days ago, I wrote a little about one of my favorite film directors, Terrence Malick, whose visual sense is astounding. In this sequence from his Days of Heaven, you can see what grasshoppers can do. Actually, these are locusts, but I looked it up, and the difference, scientifically explained, confused me.
Are Grasshoppers and Locusts the Same?
Locusts belong to three specific Acrididae subfamilies: the spur-throated, band-winged, and slant-faced grasshoppers. With this in mind, they are, technically, grasshoppers.
What sets locusts apart from other grasshoppers is their behavior. Only the grasshoppers in these specific subfamilies have the ability to become locusts because no other species are able to exhibit the necessary behaviors.
Locusts, I guessed, are marked by hanging out on street corners, wearing black leather jackets, smoking Camel shorts and rubbing their legs insolently at passers-by.
Locust or grasshopper, this film clip shows you why, South County 1934 farmers, I will be your Retribution.
And, a year later, on Dutch television, with Melanie:
Pope Francis died today. I needed these voices—one song a spiritual, the other, about Woodstock, secular– to remind me that in a world so beset by venality and cruelty, we are called to higher purpose. We are called to beauty.
The Jesuits are a proud bunch: intellectually rigorous, disciplined, some say arrogant.
They are superb teachers. While they take a vow of poverty, some younger Jesuits, college professors, are marked by their fondness for sports cars.
Twelve years ago, a Jesuit chose the Papal name “Francis.”
I was amazed by that.
St. Francis, that tiny, gentle but driven man from the thirteenth century, identified with the poor. He lived a humble life–he rejected the wealth his father had intended for him–and, of course, is known best for his love of animals and for the natural world.
So Jose Mario Bergoglio, Jesuit, changed his name to “Francis.” And then he lived up to it.
This remarkable documentary was on IndiePlex–that’s, I think, Channel 76 on Charter Spectrum. It’ll repeat on Friday, but early in the a.m., so set that recording thingy.
I am so technologically adept.
It’s about the love between old, old men–my age–and their dogs, truffle-hunters (I have never had a truffle in my life!)
Big business has intruded into truffle hunting, and these old men, who’ve been doing this all their lives, as have their ancestors, as have the ancestors of their dogs, are facing competitors not above setting out bait laced with strychnine to kill the old-timers’ dogs.
But the love between these men and their dogs–not to mention the delight that spreads across the faces of those who taste the truffles, with beautiful fried eggs–is such a joy to watch.
I realized that the trailer is scored by Offenbach’s Beautiful Night, Oh Night of Love,” from an 1881 opera, his last. I had to look that up; I know nothing about Boccherini, except that I used to show my AP Euro students the 1997 film Life is Beautiful, the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Picture. The film is devoted to the Holocaust, but even that is transcended, once again, by love. Here’s the trailer.
And here’s the film’s ending which, in a different way, is about love, too. In this case, it’s my love for my country, now in such great danger.
What had kept the little boy alive in the concentration camp was his father’s promise that the two of them were involved in a secret contest. If they won, the little boy would get his very own tank.
The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival has given SLO Review the opportunity to preview some of the narrative and documentary films on the festival’s April 24-29, 2025 program schedule. Follow the links to purchase tickets to see these notable films for yourself.
A 250-Year-Old Musical Mystery
I once found, in my family tree, my ninth great-grandmother, now vanished beneath pavement in what was once a London churchyard. She died three years before the Armada. I imagined her as a girl:
At puberty, Lady Elizabeth [Gelsthorpe Gregory] would’ve been enshrouded in clothing almost as barbaric as the not-yet-invented whalebone corset: linen petticoat surmounted by a stiffened bodice, or kirtle, that mashed the breasts and stifled breathing and then, over that, the gown for noblewomen, made of dense and elaborate fabric (velvet, or even cloth of gold for prospective noble marriages); the gown would’ve been nearly as heavy as the chains sported by Marley’s ghost. English or French hoods—the latter, Anne Boleyn’s innovation—covered most of a woman’s head. Lady Elizabeth, like most Tudor women, grew up in a cocoon.
Two hundred years later, in the Enlightenment, despite the brilliance of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges and Abigail Adams, the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet and the astronomer Caroline Herschel, women remained cocooned.
In the one-woman play The Other Mozart, playwright/actress Sylvia Milo appears as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s older sister, Maria Anna (1751-1829). Surrounded by a sea of fabric—petticoats and a vast court dress—she appears in the center, inside a wooden corset and pannier, the latter intended to support the fabric that extended the width of a woman’s hips.
She, too, is cocooned. Because of that, Maria Anna Mozart is hard for historians to find.
The documentary film Mozart’s Sister makes that attempt but fails to find a “smoking gun,” a composition that reveals, definitively, that it was written by Mozart’s sister.
What director and screenwriter Madeleine Hetherton-Miau does reveal is that Maria Anna hasn’t completely vanished.
Maria Anna is believed to have been a composer as well as a masterful keyboardist.”
She grew up loving and admiring Wolfgang, younger by four years, and the feeling was reciprocated. Their father, Leopold, gifted her with a musical notebook from which she practiced at the harpsichord, and both her recollections of their childhood plus the later four-hand piano pieces composed by her brother suggest that they played together. They suggest, from the margin notes, that she, as well as their father, might’ve taught the little boy.
Mozart Family Portrait, Johann Nepomuk della Croce, 1780-81. Maria Anna and Wolfgang, with their father Leopold, in front of a portrait of their mother, Anna Maria.
Leopold took the two, aged 10 and six, on a tour of Central Europe that culminated with a performance at the Hapsburg Court in Vienna. Two years later, Wolfgang wrote Symphony No. 1 in E Flat Major.
The symphony is made up of three movements, the first and third exuberant and playful, the middle part slower and elegant. Conductor Paul Dyer is convinced that this part of Mozart’s first symphony belongs to his sister: “The wisdom of an older child really comes through” in the middle passage, Dyer insists.
Wolfgang, of course, would come through, renowned as the composer of more than 600 pieces of music in his 36 years. Maria Anna wouldn’t.
The change came when she turned 15. By then, their father, always impecunious, had turned more and more toward teaching his son, hoping someday that he would find a steady living as kapellmeister for an archbishop or prince. There was no future in Maria Anna.
This was, of course, the product of the misogyny that thrived even in the Enlightenment. Rousseau, for example, argued that “women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.”
In conservatively Catholic Austria, girls were not taught to be musicians (the cello being a particularly horrifying instrument), and women artists performing professionally were equated with prostitutes. Composition, too, was out of the question.
But Maria Anna is believed to have been a composer as well as a masterful keyboardist. In its attempt to establish this, the film uses four conductors, musicologists and even a forensics handwriting expert. One tantalizing piece of solid evidence comes in a letter from her brother, who praises a minuet, now lost, that she’d sent him.
An estrangement from Wolfgang emerged about the time of the letter; he’d urged her to come to Vienna but then married unexpectedly. His sporadic employment as a performer and conductor meant that supporting a sister was impossible.
Too much of Maria Anna remains to be learned. What ‘Mozart’s Sister’ does is to validate the search for her.”
So Maria Anna did what women had to do: At 34 she married an older man and moved to a lakeside town whose sole culture consisted of her devotion, three hours a day, to playing at a clavichord whose tuning became impossible in the damp air.
There was a kind of comeback. As a widow, independently wealthy, she returned to Salzburg and re-established herself as the piano virtuoso that she’d been since her childhood. She moved into an apartment from whose windows she could see the distinctive yellow apartment building where she and her brother had grown up.
In another part of the square, facing the Mozart home today, there is a bakery whose window is graced with impossible pastries, many filled with cream or jam. They are airy and crispy, and crumbs fall down your chin as you reach the soft center.
This film is like that: beautifully photographed, beautifully scored, intelligently written. But it disappears as quickly as a Salzburg pastry. Too much of Maria Anna remains to be learned. What Mozart’s Sister does is to validate the search for her.
Editor’s Note: Screenings ofMozart’s Sister (Australia, run time 97 minutes, rated G, in English, US premiere) at the SLO International Film Festival is sponsored by Festival Mozaic.
Jim Gregory taught history at Mission Prep and at his alma mater, Arroyo Grande High School, for 30 years and was Lucia Mar’s Teacher of the Year in 2010. Growing up in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley and attending the two-room 1880s Branch School was integral to his becoming a history teacher and figured, as well, in the authorship of five books on local history. Three have won national book awards.
From yet another letter that won’t make it into the Los Angeles Times.
To the Editor:
I grew up in Arroyo Grande, in San Luis Obispo County, and I remember going to the Coliseum in 1958, aged six, to see the Dodgers play the Cardinals, once upon a time the Gashouse Gang, my father’s childhood team during the Great Depression.
My father and I were not close, but we were that day, and we were every time Vin Scully called a game.
We’d huddle close together as Dad barbecued a weekend dinner. For Koufax’s perfect game, we were inside the kitchen with a big shortwave radio atop the stove, and we weren’t breathing much.
I became a high school history teacher in part because Scully taught me how to tell stories. His only equal was my father. My mother, Irish American, loved Sandy Koufax because he wouldn’t pitch in the Series during High Holy Days.She admired integrity.
I admired everything about Koufax.
But that was a long time ago. The Dodgers, after making meek discordant noises, visited with the crude and brutal man who claims to be Abraham Lincoln’s successor. Lincoln and Koufax and Jane Goodall were my childhood heroes, and so they remain. Those are not bad choices.
But the team I adore–a team of immigrants, Italian and Irish and Polish and, finally, African American, Dominican and Cuban and Mexican– the team I have adored since I was six, has let me down.
This is not a matter of “Republican” vs. “Democrat.” It is, more properly, a matter of truth vs. falsity, integrity vs. venality, patriotism vs. betrayal, of good vs. evil.
“Evil” can be registered in the decision to delete a Department of Defense web page about Jackie Robinson, a decision reversed only because of public outrage.
Robinson played with courage, both in his introduction to MLB, when he was forced to absorb the abuse, and in the ferocity with which he played after Branch Rickey removed the handcuffs. Scully spoke vividly, even worshipfully, about the player Robinson became when he was allowed to play with anger.
In their visit to the White House, the team I love so passionately abandoned Koufax’s integrity and Robinson’s courage. The man whom they surrounded, all of them grinning, is certainly no Lincoln.
Since my heart is seventy-three and therefore brittle, it can be broken as easily as it was when Sandy Koufax retired, when I was thirteen. I forgave Sandy because he did the right thing.
I will be brief and let the music tell the story instead.
Bruce Springsteen, in Dublin.
Harry Belafonte in Sweden, 1966.
The Supremes, a little adventurous, in Paris.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Take Five,” Germany, 1966.
Chuck Berry in London, 1972.
Dionne Warwick, Belgium, 1964. This is incredible.
The Duke Ellington Orchestra in Amsterdam, 1958.
Taylor Swift in Paris, 2024. They know the words. In English.
Melanie, 23, in the Netherlands, 1970, with the sublime Edwin Hawkins singers.
A generation or two before, this is what Americans meant to those who aren’t American: A Marine on Saipan feeds a little boy; a Frenchwoman greets an American soldier; an English family with a Yank at table for Christmas dinner.
A Work in Progress 