A friend asked me about a token found–I presume by a man with a metal detector–that read “Club Poko, San Luis Obispo.” (You can find sometimes on eBay, similar tokens to one of Pete Olohan’s saloons on Branch Street.)

A search revealed no stories or ads on a Club Poko in San Luis Obispo.

However, there was Pismo Poko, an arcade/amusement parlor at 520 Cypress, Pismo Beach, which seems to have operated between 1938 and 1942. More on these places:

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1930s Arcades

Arcade patrons flocked to coin-operated peep show machines, shooting galleries, grip and strength testers, stationary bicycles, slot machines (in some areas), machines that dispensed fortunes or candy, and other mechanical amusements they could play for as little as a penny.

During the 1930s, David Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball

(1931) and Raymond  Moloney’s Ballyhoo

(1932) introduced pinball to arcades. As pinball designers added bumpers, flippers, and thematic artwork, pinball surged in popularity, even as some local legislators banned the game because they associated it with gambling, organized crime, and delinquency. Nevertheless, over the next three decades arcade owners replaced many older mechanical novelty games with pinball machines and electromechanical baseball, target shooting, horse racing, shuffleboard, [foosball] and bowling games. Pinball machines ruled arcades until the late 1960s when new more sophisticated electromechanical games such as Chicago Coin’s Speedway.

–Rochester NY Democrat and Chronicle

Why “Poko?” From an article on arcade games:

Poko-Lite was produced by Glickman Co. in 1937. Glickman Co. released 19 different machines in our database under this trade name, starting in 1937.

Other machines made by Glickman Co. during the time period Poko-Lite was produced include Treasure, Sailorettes \’42, Scandals 1942, Anti-Aircraft, and Archery.

This game appears on a list of games manufactured between 1931-1939 which was published in the January 1940 issue of the Coin Machine Journal.

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Pinball machines had an unsavory reputation in the 1930s-1940s; they were perceived as akin to slot machines, a form of gambling. A dozen were seized by the SLOPD in August 1941 for operating without a city license; in January, there’d been a spirited City Council debate on whether to allow them at all. They voted to license pinball but ban taxi dances. So it goes.

Here’s a display ad for the Pismo place from May 1940:

Another 1940 ad from the Telegram-Tribune:

520 Cypress is today the site of a modern motel, which straddles the corner of Main and Cypress.

Why did Pismo Poko go out of business, evidently in 1942 (there are no newspaper references thereafter, but plenty of both display and classified ads between 1938 and 1942)? The influx of local soldiers would’ve made Henry T. Betsuin, Prop. a fortune.

So I looked him up. “Betsuin” sounded Filipino to me, which made sense, since Pismo had a vibrant Filipino community (almost all men; Filipinas were not allowed to immigrate.)

There wasn’t much on him except for this curious note on a ship arrival in San Francisco from Kobe:

“Tokunosuke” is definitely a Japanese name; but he seems to have gone by “Henry T.” instead. If he was Japanese, that explains why Pismo Poko disappears after 1942. Henry T. would’ve been in an internment camp. 

So, if that didn’t exactly answer the question, it raised several new ones–and it led me down a sad path, to the impact of Executive Order 9066, whose 80th anniversary we’re observing this year.

I’m speaking in Santa Maria next week about our county’s World War II commemoration—the eightieth anniversary of the war, and of Japanese internment—when I wondered if any Santa Maria Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) had been among the town’s 55 wartime casualties.

Because of his surname, Makoto Yoshihara was at the bottom of the list.

He was actually born in Morro Bay; his parents moved to Guadalupe where they ran a boarding housel and pool hall. Makoto played football for the Santa Maria Saints, joined or was drafted into the Army in October 1941. His parents, like our Arroyo Grande neighbors, went to the Rivers Camp in the Arizona desert. The photo below shows evacuation day in Guadalupe, and I knew that Guadalupe had a prominent Japanese-American presence, but the numbers surprised me: Two hundred people were taken from Arroyo Grande, 400 from Santa Maria, but 800 from little, beautiful Guadalupe.

About two and a half years later, the insult heaped on our neighbors would be intensified by the headline that first reported Makoto’s fate. From the January 25, 1945, Santa Maria Times:

It is, of course, jarring to read. A month later, once Makoto’s death is confirmed, the newspaper softens its tone:

And you’re relieved at the slight change in tone until you read where his parents received that terrible telegram from the War Department. Everyone—everyone—behind barbed wire in the desert would’ve known almost instantly what had happened to Mr. and Mrs. Yoshihara’s son. The tarpaper barracks walls would’ve done nothing to soften the sound of a mother’s weeping for her only child.

Makoto had wanted to be a mechanic. This must be his high school senior photo. He looks like a serious young man.

Which is why the Army—my father, a World War II veteran, would claim to be surprised by this—did something right. They made this serious young man a medic.

Another surprise came, at least for me, in the article with the insulting headline. Makoto was not a member of the famed 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team, nor—since served in the European Theater—was he a Nisei intelligence officer, like so many local men were, the ones who underwent, at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, the same tough training that the 4-4-2 endured.

Makoto instead served in the 83rd Infantry Division, a unit that had a thoroughly White pedigree—the 83rd was traditionally an Ohio outfit, from the state that produced a batch of mediocre presidents, and here, probably the only Nisei among 10,000 White boys, was Makoto Yoshihara, the medic from Guadalupe, California. The Ohio boys probably had never seen the ocean. Makoto probably never got the chance to see fireflies, one of the natural wonders that make Midwestern summers, despite their oppressiveness, delightful.

He must’ve been lonely. And, if only at first, he must’ve endured racist attempts at humor.

The only other local Nisei G.I. I know of that served in a non-Nisei unit was Arroyo Grande’s Mits Fukuhara, who served in a tank battalion; Mits and his battalion missed the fighting because the war ended before they could join it.

Makoto didn’t miss the fighting; in fact, he saw some of the worst combat of the Americans’ war. The 83rd and his regiment, the 330th Infantry, got into a slugging match with the Wehrmacht in the Huertgen Forest in September 1944—the photos below give an idea of the terrain there— in a horrific battle that would last for two months. The nearest approximate I can think of in the American experience would’ve been the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, where dense forest broke Grant’s infantry companies down into little knots of men, separated by trees and dense foliage that made it impossible to see each other—or the enemy. Lee’s men appeared as shadows, mirages, and disappeared in the smoke, because the muzzle flashes from Enfields or Springfields set the Wilderness afire. The fires burned the wounded alive.

(In 1945, after Germany’s surrender, fires swept the Huertgen and detonated unexploded artillery shells. The war hadn’t ended at all for the scores of German civilians killed by buried ordnance that had been intended for soldiers.)

The battle for the Huertgen was a debacle. The Americans suffered nearly twice the casualties the German defenders did and they had to pull back and reorganize in December.

Somehow Makoto Yoshihara survived those two months in the forest.

And then, in December, the 83rd Division would face the Germans again in the massive offensive that we remember as the Battle of the Bulge, fought during one of the coldest winters in Europe in thirty years.

Makoto didn’t have to face that second, epic battle. Somewhere in the not-quite-lull in between, he died. The divisional after-action reports for the day he died, December 22, are bland; they suggested units relieving other units and the straightening of lines; battlefront housekeeping. But when you get down to the battalion level, the reports cite heavy German resistance, nighttime attacks, and cold. Always the cold.

The way he died once again confirms the Army’s wisdom in assigning him to the 330th’s Medical Detachment. The Santa Maria Times kind of redeems itself, thanks to the Bronze Star citation’s wording, in this article from September 1945:

Makoto died saving a brother G.I.’s life because medics were favored targets for snipers; if you can kill a medic, the five or six wounded soldiers he might’ve saved will die, too.

(Above): Tragic bookends: Makotto’s draft card, its spelling uncertain, and his family’s application for a military tombstone.

Makoto died 5,000 miles away from Guadalupe’s row crops, its Mexican restaurants, honky-tonks and the sand dunes and the vivid ribbon of ocean beyond.

His body was returned to America in December 1948 aboard the prosaically-named Liberty Ship Barney Kirschbaum, one of the war’s industrial wonders; Kirschbaum’s duplicate, Jeremiah O’Brien, made the trip in reverse in 1994, sailing from her berth in San Francisco to England and then to the Normandy coast where she’d done duty in the invasion of the Continent in 1944; O’Brien is the last of the 6,000 ships that supported the D-Day landings.

Accompanying Makoto’s coffin on Kirschbaum were the coffins of Orville Tucker of Arroyo Grande, killed on the second day of the Battle of the Bulge—five days before Makoto knelt over the wounded soldier— and Stanley Weber of Oceano, who died the next month in the counteroffensive that erased the Bulge and drove the Germans back.

The coffins, of course, would’ve been flag-draped. That’s an important detail, because belowdecks on Kirschbaum’s long voyage home, there were no “Japs;” no Ohioans, no Californians. These were our young men; even in death and even in the eighty years that separate our lives, they remind us that we, all of us, belong to each other.

A lot on my mind with this one.

Harry Chapek was a young Arroyo Grande man killed in action on the Belgian-German border, near the Siegfried Line, in September 1944.

He was a member of the 81st Tank Battalion, 5th Armored Division and is buried at the American Cemetery at Henri-Chapelle, near Liege, Belgium.

Those are 81st Sherman tanks in the photo.

He was almost killed once before, in 1938. He was a driver for the Arroyo Grande Trucking Company, which stood at the site of today’s Bank of America–the photo of the site is courtesy of the Martin family. (That’s the old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the left background, built in the 1880s.) It was a vital part of the economy of our little farm town on California’s central coast, population 1,090 in the 1940 census.

He was driving near Elwood, just south of the Gaviota Pass, and less than an hour north of another beautiful California place, Santa Barbara,  when a horse threw three little girls and galloped out into the highway in front of Chapek’s truck.

The impact killed the horse and the truck veered into a tree, where it caught on fire. Chapek was stuck in the cab, which in turn was buried by vegetable crates.

But that night there was a PTA meeting at the Elwood School, which is still there today, and a parent and a janitor ran out to the truck, dragged Chapek out–he was waving his arm out the cab window–and knocked the fire down with two of the school’s fire extinguishers. Four years later, a Japanese submarine shelled Ellwood.

Six years later, a German artillery battery, covered by dense fog, fired a barrage that landed on the 81st’s “A” Company; it was probably the devastating explosion of .88 shells that killed Chapek, awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Growing up, he was a close friend of our friend George Shannon, who farmed near us in fields along Huasna and Branch Mill Roads, peppers and string beans and I think Brussels sprouts, among other crops. Mr. Shannon was an admirable man.

That’s my Mom serving dinner to us Gregory kids and to the three Shannon boys. You can tell how much she thought of them because dinner’s being served on the Irish lace tablecloth.

Chapek was an admirable man, too. As was his father, Matthias, or Mat. That’s Mat with the Arroyo Grande Boys’ Band about 1909. He probably lured potential juvenile delinquents away from a life of crime with a tuba or two.

He taught two generations of kids how to play musical instruments. Longtime teacher Ruth Paulding was one of them. The middle school’s named for her. Wayne Morgan, also an Eagle Scout, took up the violin thanks to Mr. Chapek. He was killed on December 7 on USS Arizona, along with another Arroyo Grande musician, Jack Scruggs, a trombonist in the battleship’s band.

I know something about the waves of immigration to Arroyo Grande, for example, from the Azores, Japan and the Philippines. Mat Chapek was from Bohemia– today’s Czech Republic.

It turns out that on upper Cherry Avenue–then called Leedham Lane–Arroyo Grande had a “Little Bohemia.” The Chapeks lived there, as did the Huebners, as did the Marsaleks.

That struck because one of my favorite books as a sophomore in Mrs. Flatt’s sophomore English class at AGHS, was Willa Cather’s My Antonia, about a girl from a family of Bohemian immigrants to Nebraska, to the Great Plains. It’s not more than six pages in before an inordinately large rattlesnake makes its appearance. That snake, and what I read later about the toll laundry and ironing took on frontier farm wives, bending their spines and hunching their shoulders—effectively and mercilessly transforming them into human question marks—remained with me always.

Arroyo Grande’s not much like Nebraska. The climate here is mild and the growing seasons overlap. But both places produce incredible wildflowers. This is field mustard near the foothills east of Arroyo Grande.

So Antonia and Chapek, the children of Bohemian immigrants, are linked in my mind now, even though Nebraska and California are so distant. The cemetery at Henri-Chapelle is more distant still—over 5,000 miles away from the foothills and the farm fields and the wild mustard that both Chapek and I grew up with. The distance, as the poet Whitman wrote, avails not. Sgt. Chapek’s life is now connected to mine. Time, Whitman also wrote, avails not. Arroyo Grande is my home town. Nearly eighty years after George Shannon lost his friend, our town survives both of them. It does so because of them.

It’s their gift to us, you see.

I a now a friend of the American Overseas Memorial Day Association Foundation in Belgium, which is a small honor. But that means I can now pay tribute to Sgt. Chapek on their website, and so draw recognition to the man with far greater honors.

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.

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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 here and 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.

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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.

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.