My older brother Bruce brought this home in 1969 and played it. A lot. So did I. Who was this girl? Then he brought home a poster—a portion of it is below— and I think it alternated with a poster of Janis Joplin on his bedroom door at our house on Huasna Road.
Sadly, there’s no good live version of Rondstadt singing “Different Drum,” but at a tribute, Carrie Underwood did well. Here’s an excerpt:
I did not know until just now that Mike Nesmith of the Monkees wrote this song.
Okay, big brother, I grok you.
So this is thanks to my big bro’s outstanding musical taste (I would find out many years later, as we discussed Blind Faith, that my younger sister, Sally, has inherited the same gift), I began to follow this young woman. She never, ever, let me down.
Since I have so many chores to do to prepare for Mothers’ Day, I naturally chose to do the video. Ronstadt’s pipes are phenomenal—what continues to amaze, years later, is her versatility.
I am so glad that Bruce brought that record home from Brown’s Music in San Luis Obispo.
I know I’m going on a lot about this Royals thing because today Charles III was crowned in what I saw as a rather dreadful ceremony, but the day gives me a chance for an important confession: I am only about half Irish.
The other half is English.
If you’re keeping score at home, the pub in Mom’s ancestral home is the Lit le Moon (they’re missing one “t,” which fell off the sign) in Coolboy, County Wicklow, Ireland. If you’re in Asfordby, Leiceistershire, England, the local’s called The Horse Shoes.
That’s where the Gregorys came from, from the boring Midlands. Asfordby is famous for the demolition of the coal mine’s hoist towers (below) which was spectacular, and for a local mass murderer who, absent-minded, kept leaving body parts behind.
There were once Lord Gregorys in Asfordby. I’m not sure what happened to the family because the title lapsed. Maybe it was unpaid credit card bills.
The Tudors, those Welsh upstarts, killed poor Richard III nearby. A deep puncture wound, inflicted post-mortem at Bosworth Field, was discovered in the royal pelvis–sorry to use the term, but it was his arse– when his long-lost and sad little skeleton was exhumed in 2013. So the present King could do with better luck than Richard’s, shown below in a royal portrait and as reconstructed by a forensic pathologist/sculptor.
Charles III kept his birth name as his reign name. The first king named Charles, a Stuart, from Mary Queen of Scots’ line, was beheaded. Judging from the contemporary image below, his hat was spared.
His son Charles II, after a Cromwellian interruption–the Interregnum– was King when the Plague swept London in 1666. He ran into good luck when the Plague was followed by the Great Fire, which, in the process of consuming London, killed all the rats.
Charles II’s death yielded his little brother, James II, so odious that the English overthrew him and imported a new king. From Holland. (That was William; his wife, Mary, was at least a Stuart.)
And I hope that England has better luck with this Charles.
It’s petty, I know, but I note that the King has fingers like Vienna Sausages.
I miss his Mum. I miss her Corgis. I miss the way that Cpl. Cruschan IV, the black Shetland pony who’s the mascot for a Scots regiment, used to eat the floral arrangement she was carrying. She scolded him and then petted him. Then, later, he bit Harry. He’s Scots, all right.
This incredible video, from CBS’s Sunday Morning, profiles both the Queen and the actresses who’ve portrayed her. Jane Alexander is one of our finest actresses; look at her reaction when interviewer Ben Mankiewicz, one our finest film historians, interrupts to announce the Queen’s death.
And a plug: A Royal Night Out, about the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret partying on V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, 1945, is charming. I’m especially fond of it because my father spent much of his Army enlistment in London in World War II. That’s my Pop, below, and then the film trailer.
I think, in fact, that we’ve about run out the line of Royals. The Queen’s piper, playing as her coffin was lowered into the crypt at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, provided at least a satisfactory valedictory.
And that, I guess, concludes today’s English history lesson.
Inky is the black dog in the photo with my aunt and father. They had to give him up for “bothering sheep” and found him a new home in Rolla, Missouri.
Inky ran away.
This photo was taken outside my grandparents’ farmhouse on his return to Raymondville, Missouri. Raymondville is forty miles south of Rolla, but Inky found the people he loved.
My friend Wendy Taylor read the Inky story on Facebook. We went to AGHS together. She told me that her father’s family was living in Raymondville in the 1930s. The odds are staggering because I think the YOU ARE NOW ENTERING and YOU ARE NOW LEAVING signs are on the same signpost in tiny Raymondville.
Wendy the Arroyo Grande High School Homecoming Princess, from my senior yearbook. Her career—her calling—was that of a nurse, so she’s one of my heroes, too.
And, sure enough, my Aunt Aggie married Mr. Charles A. Taylor in Raymondville in 1912. They were both 19.
I don’t know that this Taylor is related to my friend Wendy, but I found something else out about my family.
This is Aunt Aggie, on the right, later in life. That’s her mother, the scary lady, my step-grandmother, Dorriska Rose Trail. (She died and my grandfather John, widower, married my grandmother, Dora, widow.) The noses give their connection away—DNA does not lie much—but Aggie’s a softer person and she loves her pearls. Me, too.
Charles and Aggie were living in Illinois when, sadly, he passed away at 49. Aggie would live another 38 years. I found his obituary in a Houston, Missouri, Herald from July 1942, and it contained this poignant detail:
And then I found their son in the World War II casualty books:
And then I found their son.
He’s a nice-looking boy, isn’t he? He’s remembered on this particular marble wall, along with two sailors, just two years older, who grew up in Arroyo Grande:
I didn’t remember the whole story, but Dad used to talk about a cousin who was killed on Arizona. It was Wendy Taylor’s comment that set me to thinking. I had no idea that a morning spent researching my aunt, Aggie Caroline Gregory Taylor, would take me back, once again, to Pearl Harbor and December 7, back to a war that took my Dad, an Army lieutenant, from Raymondville and Taft, California, to London and Paris.
I think it was Inky who led me to this young sailor, so his sense of direction remains unerring. What a good dog.
Last Mooring, by artist Tom Freeman. Arizonaties up at her quay on Battleship Row on the morning of December 5, 1941.
If I had to guess, I’d place this photo in about 1936, in Raymondville, Texas County, Missouri, on the northern edge of the Ozark Plateau.
That’s my Aunt Bill, my Dad, and the appropriately-named Inky the Dog.
Aunt Bill’s real name was “Mildred,” which I think she detested.
The name persisted in our family because a collateral ancestor married Mildred Washington, the great man’s aunt. They sold Mt. Vernon to GW’s father.
That’s not the story. The story’s about Inky.
Aunt Bill and Dad had to give Inky up for allegedly “bothering sheep,” which, given my experience with my big brother’s 4H lamb, is a stretch,. She was imperturbable.
But maybe Ozark Plateau sheep are more sensitive.
Inky would’ve meant a to Aunt Bill and my Dad, Their Dad–my Grandfather John–had just died in a Springfield hospital after a long struggle to overcome the injuries, including two broken legs, inflicted by a Texan driving a Ford roadster at high speed as Grandfather John crossed the road to visit his neighboring farmer and friend, Mr. Dixon.
That’s not the story. The story’s about Inky.
The Gregorys, being neighborly, found a home for Inky with a nice family in Rolla, famed for Fort Leonard Wood and for what was then called the Missouri School of Mines.
This photo was taken after all that. Inky ran away from his new home in Rolla and came back to Aunt Bill and Dad in Raymondville.
Brian Wilson died today, June 11, 2025. This was written two years ago.
I knew a little about Brian Wilson’s struggles, but I had never heard of his illness, called schizoaffective disorder, before the documentary Long Promised Road.
The Wilson brothers’ father contributed to his son’s emotional disorder, I am sure. He was abusive and a hearing loss in one of Brian’s ears has several explanations, but the most reasonable one, to me, is that his father hit him hard upside the head with the flat surface of an electric iron.
The blow to Brian’s ear was about the time the hallucinations began. Brian didn’t see things. He heard them. They were voices telling him terrible things about himself and suggesting that he do terrible things. I’ve heard those voices, all my life, but they were inside my head. Brian’s voices were out there in The World, and they were very real.
I did enough research to establish that the link between mental illness and creativity is nonsense. I still believe, though, that Wilson’s music is so beautiful because that was how he fought the voices. The only place, I think, where he could silence them was in the studio, recording music with his brothers and cousins and friends and with his wife and her sister.
I could not watch the rest of the PBS special because Brian is now so wooden. I lost my nerve. That was a bad decision on my part, but it was because The Brian Wilson that impacted my life made me all rubbery and jiggly and happy. You can’t NOT dance to, for example, “Help Me Rhonda” or “I Get Around.” I still remember, at Branch School, three lovely eighth-grade girls—Patsy Silva, Marilyn Machado, Carolyn Coehlo— (all of them from Azorean stock, by the way) dancing to Beach Boys 45’s in Mr. Lane’s room at lunchtime. I had crushes on all three, but I was just a punk kid.
That was a long time ago. As the documentary revealed, even if he’s seemingly diminished, Brian Wilson is very much alive.
And the fact that he’s even around—upright, breathing, performing, even though he’s tentative, afraid, monosyllabic—is a kind of miracle. I think the first three adjectives I just used are far more important than the last three. “God Only Knows” is the kind of music that vaporizes demons, both Brian’s and mine.
The “genius” stuff can take a back shelf. Wilson was not compared, in the documentary, to Mozart. The conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic chose Mahler and Schubert instead.
That’s labeling the man with not-very-faint praise. But what counts isn’t Brian Wilson’s genius. It’s his courage.
And those harmonies…
Brian could still Bring It many years later. With Al Jardine.
This song was just plain fun. From the TV show American Bandstand.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: The Beatles answered “California Girls” with this song, a little more arch but just as fun. Paul McCartney in Red Square more than a few years ago.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Part II. A lovely song from Foxes (young women) and Fossils (guys my age).
Imitation is the sincerest…Part III. This live Fleetwood Mac cover of Wilson’s “Farmer’s Daughter” is haunting.
Thank you, Brian. Say hello to Sly Stone from me, will you?
My friend Wendelin van Draanen just won a well-deserved award for her Young Adult novel The Peach Rebellion, and her writing made me reflect on the illustrators who influenced me as a child and ‘tweener. The one who doesn’t belong is Sendak, but I included him because there has never been a book that gave me greater joy to read aloud.
And “Classics Illustrated,” true, was an industry, not an artist, but their “War of the Worlds” scared the bejabbers out of me when I was ten. I don’t think I could’ve handled the Spielberg version unless they needed another screamer to give poor Dakota Fanning’s vocal chords a break.
My brother Bruce had an entire drawer in our bedroom full of neatly-stacked “Mad” magazines, probably in chronological order, which I, the messy one, raided.
We also had two enormous pull-out drawers beneath our bedroom closet stocked from keel to gunwales with Disney comics, “Classics Illustrateds,” and a long-forgotten anti-Commie series, “Blackhawk,” about an international cadre of fighter pilots who did cool tricks like standing up in the cockpit to lasso Russki jets in midair.
We even had some Dick Tracy comics. When one of Dick’s fugitives refused to come out of his motel room at the end of a wing, Dick simply used his tommygun to inscribe a capital “Z” in the exterior wall. End of fugitive. I don’t think he was Mirandized.
I’d forgotten how bluntly charming Garth Williams’s Miss Bianca illustrations were. Sadly, Disney made a cartoon version with Disney art at its low point–The Rescuers were two-dimensional cutouts and Bianca’s voice was provided by Eva Gabor, who was charming in “Green Acres,” a low point for American comedic television but several notches above “Gilligan’s Island.”
I have a brief Gabor story somewhere. Remind me.
Most of these artists have one thing in common: When you’re a little boy, you can get lost inside their work. They take you to another place.
It’s one of the great stories of American naval history. At Pearl Harbor, here is the aging USS Nevada at the end of Battleship Row, at bottom left, just astern of Arizona, which is anchored inboard of the repair ship Vestal. You can see the concussions from torpedo hits on the outboard battleships ahead of Arizona. That ship has about twelve minutes to live.
The attack came during the morning Colors Ceremony, when bands played the National Anthem as each battleship hoisted its colors. The trombonist on Arizona’s band, Jack Scruggs, killed just after this photograph was taken, grew up in Arroyo Grande.
The Officer of the Watch on Nevada was Ens. Joseph Taussig, about Scruggs’s age, twenty-one or twenty-two. He was standing his very first watch while most of the ship’s senior officers were ashore. He was so green that he had to send a sailor over to Arizona to ask what size flag was appropriate to hoist for the morning formalities. Then the bombs began to fall.
Nevada’s band had begun to play the Anthem. They continued to play the Anthem. When machine-gun bullets began to splinter the teak deck, they paused for a moment, somehow resumed the song in unison, finished it, and then ran like hell for their action stations. (Arizona’s band ran for their stations in the No. 2 gun turret, near the bow and near where the fatal bomb hit. None survived.)
Lieutenant Lawrence Ruff was attending Mass on the hospital ship Solace at this moment. He immediately caught a launch back to Nevada, assumed command topside with Taussig as his anti-aircraft officer. The ensign had done something right, he would find out later: he’d left two of the battleship’s four boilers lit. It normally took a ship the size of Nevada two hours to come to full power, but two boilers were sufficient to get her underway. Ruff gave the command to make a run for the channel exit. The oldest ship on Battleship Row was the only one to steam away from the flames and smoke that blanketed the anchorage off Ford Island.
Sailors cheered as she passed.
Nevada during her run for the channel.
Nevada aground on Waipo Point.
Nevada didn’t make it to the open sea. Crippled by at least one torpedo and six bomb hits, she lost headway. Her run ended when Lieutenant Ruff ordered her beached on Waipo Point, leaving the narrow channel open.
And that brings us to the Shell Cafe in Pismo Beach, at the north end of Price Street in those years. The Christmas ad is from a 1939 Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder. (The Shell’s still around today, but in Grover Beach.)
The image of the Shell Cafe is from the Boeker Street Trading Company. Today it’s the Oasis Cafe.
It’s natural to focus on the horrific losses at Pearl Harbor, but the attackers took losses, too. Twenty-nine planes were shot down and five midget submarines sunk. Only one ship in the Pearl Harbor Striking Force, the destroyer Ushio, survived the war.
The first of the attacking planes shot down was claimed by USS Nevada. It’s better for me to let the newspaper article tell the story. From the May 8, 1942, Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder:
“…he hoped to become a baker, but found himself a machine gunner instead.” That is a fine piece of writing.
Both Melvin and his ship survived that terrible day. Here is Nevada approaching drydock after being refloated:
And these are her main batteries opening fire at German positions along Utah Beach on D-Day. Nevada was repaired at Pearl Harbor, overhauled and modernized at Puget Sound, and continued her war over 7,300 miles away and two and a half years removed from the place where the ship had revealed her heart in her run for the sea.
On June 6, 1944, Nevada was granted the honor of being the first ship to open fire on the invasion beaches.
Melvin the hopeful baker survived his war, too, but his wounds sound severe. Maybe they were a factor in his premature death in 1959. He re-enlisted three times and, after the war, retired as an enlisted man in the United States Air Force. He’s buried at Forest Lawn, next to his mother.
This is his tombstone. Sadly, there’s not enough room on it to record the way he revealed his heart, too, on December 7, 1941.
In 1939, San Francisco’s Treasure Island was the site for the Golden Gate Exposition, a showcase dedicated to a world beginning to emerge from the Great Depression. The Exposition was a masterpiece of Art Deco design and, with California comfortably distant from Europe, tinges of optimism must’ve remained awhile; I imagine the fall of France ended all that.
The Exposition even won periodic mention in the little Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder, including this October 1939 display ad. I think the Greyhound station was in the Olohan Building, whose basement is now home to Klondike Pizza. A Klondike pizza is also good for transient moments of optimism, if I may be allowed to editorialize.
What had to be a highlight of the Exposition came in June and July 1939, when most of the Pacific Fleet, just off maneuvers, sailed into San Francisco Bay for a visit. Many years ago, my wife and my sons and I spent a delightful visit to our favorite city during Fleet Week, when we saw the Blue Angels, sailors from twenty nations, and, on a Muni Bus, a bearded lady (who was very nice) and a man who could do 360s with his dentures. I preferred the visits to the submarine Pompanito and the Liberty Ship Jeremiah O’Brien, but I’m built that way, I guess.
Here’s an article from an Oakland newspaper—with little seeming regard for what we’d call “national security” today— about the ships, and their 40,000 men, headed for the Exposition:
And here, also from British Pathe, is a remarkable video as the fleet arrives, led bybattleships, then a light cruiser and finally the preciuus carriers. And then, best of all, happy sailors coming ashore for liberty.
The scale of these ships is hard to imagine, even though they’re relatively small when compared to modern aircraft carriers. A Pennsylvania-class battleship, like the one in the video below, displaced 32,000 tons, was 600 feet long and carried a complement of about 60 officers, 70 Marines and 1,000 enlisted men. These ships were small cities. And small cities need the mail delivered, even in mid-Caribbean. This film is from the early 1930s:
And the battleship in the newsreel—you had to know this was coming—was, of course, USS Arizona, lost with 1100 crew, including two sailors who were raised in Arroyo Grande, on December 7, 1941.
Maybe it’s just me, but I am a devoted fan of American film, and as a cultural barometer, 1939 was a sign of renewed confidence in the same way the Exposition was. My parents began dating that year, when their movie dates might’ve included The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Destry Rides Again and Gone With the Wind.
And that brief moment of renewed self-confidence, of hope, is what makes the images of these ships and their young men so poignant to me. These are the fates of some of the ships cited in the Oakland newspaper article above:
Downes and Cassin in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. The battleship Pennsylvania, also in drydock that day, is just beyond.
As devastating as the photograph above is, both destroyers were salvaged, rebuilt and returned to duty, as were the damaged battleships. One of them, Nevada, which made a heroic run under attack for the Pearl Harbor exit channel, was, on June 6, 1944, hurling 14-inch shells at the Germans defending the Normandy invasion beaches. Nevada, in fact, was granted the honor of firing the opening salvo that day.
One of my favorite lessons in U.S. History was devoted to the construction of the Oakland Bay Bridge, truly, to steal a term, an engineering marvel. It, and its sister bridge, are emblematic of the way we responded to the Great Depression.
We responded to the shattering of our confidence at Pearl Harbor with new ships and old ships pulled to the surface from Pearl Harbor mud and made new again. Vast fleets of warplanes, tanks, trucks, artillery and small arms, Spam and K-ration Lucky Strikes, a labor force that went to war— a third them women and many of them killed in factory accidents—and over 400,000 young men killed in combat, all of these made up our response.
These things happened because of a generation that, before the war, was dismissed by intellectuals as pleasure-seeking, selfish and shallow. This was my parents’ generation. My parents were hard-working, generous and deeply read. I became a history teacher because of the values they instilled in me.
Learning about the Exposition, in what remains—after a fair amount of European travel (Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Munich, Salzburg, Florence, Venice, Rome) with twenty to forty of my closest teenaged friends, my students—the city I love the most. The Exposition reminded me of my mother and father and their generation. If this was a twilight time in our history, followed by four years of wartime dark, we were still here in the morning.
Katy Jurado had already made twenty Mexican films when Hollywood beckoned. She would make many more—both in Mexico and in the States, especially in Western roles—and I remember her best in this scene from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Her other Westerns include High Noon, Arrowhead, Broken Lance and a personal favorite of mine, One-Eyed Jacks, a film made by Marlon Brando, who fell madly in love with her in the middle of torrid affairs with two other actresses. Who can blame him for falling in love with just one more?
Brando’s hijinks aside, there was, I think, a consistent feature in all the characters Jurado played, and it was in their dignity
She was born in Mexico City in 1924, when the nation was just emerging from the violence of a ten-year revolution that had claimed one million lives—one of every ten Mexican citizens. Sadly, violence marked her relatively short marriage to Ernest Borgnine. And violence is a hallmark of Sam Peckinpah films, and it’s a staple of his Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
This scene is no exception. Jurado plays the wife of lawman Slim Pickens, James Coburn is Pat Garrett, and they’re on Billy the Kid’s trail when they encounter outlaws holed up in a remote cabin. The gunplay follows. Jurado’s performance with a shotgun is impressive.
But the violence isn’t the memorable part. This scene moves me because of the final glances that Jurado and Pickens exchange as both of them realize that he is dying. This is marvelous, heart-breaking acting.
Bob Dylan had a minor role in this film. His song is all the dialogue this scene needed.
What a scene. What a song. What a woman.
And, of course, it’s such a fine song that I can’t leave the blog post hanging without the rest of. Dylan and Tom Petty perform “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” here. This is for Katy Jurado.
This is hard. My brother-in-law, Stephan Bruce, Elizabeth’s big brother, died yesterday [Saturday, April 22] at his home in Fairfax Station, Virginia. It might’ve been an aneurysm.
The photo shows Steve during his retirement ceremony from the Navy. We were there, in Virginia.
He graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and from the Darden School, University of Virginia, with a Master’s in Business. He became, among other executive jobs—the man was a natural leader– the marketing director for Kraft Foods
During his plebe year at the Academy, he was lucky enough to inherit a bunk bed with an empty bunk. Because upperclassmen dropped half-dollars atop the bunk to see how tightly it’d been made and were merciless in assigning demerits if it didn’t bounce high enough, Steve slept in the top bunk in the sleeping bag he’d brought from home in California. The bottom bunk remained pristine.
It was perhaps the best-made rack in U.S. Naval Academy history.
He was a brilliant guy, a devout Catholic, tough and hard-headed, just like his dad, Gail, the 49er. I loved both men. Steve loved our son John.
My big brother, Bruce, loves our Thomas in much the same way.
I did not realize until I wrote a book on World War II fliers how dangerous military aviation can be. Steve survived two helicopter crashes–equipment failures–flying Navy Sea Stallions.
The Daily Mail Hagerstown, Maryland • Tue, Jul 24, 1973
But my favorite Steve story came when he was piloting a Sea Stallion and it was time for lunch. The Navy, normally known for pretty good chow, had issued Steve and his crew the worst sandwiches in Western history. When they unwrapped the cellophane, the smell began filling the flight cabin. It was ghastly.
A Russian “trawler” was shadowing Steve’s carrier group in the Mediterranean Sea. So he flew low over the trawler, the Russians and the Americans waving merrily at each other. Or, more likely, making internationally recognized hand gestures at each other.
Then he made another pass. This time, the Americans threw their sandwiches at the Russians. Lunch landed with dreadful ptomaine splats on the trawler’s deck.
Yup. He got chewed out by the Admiral Commanding, up one side and down the other. But I do, especially given current events, love that story.
We will miss him so much.
* * *
April 25, 2023
I did love my brother-in-law, Steve, who died Saturday at his home in Fairfax Station, Virginia.
He loved history, so I added a little local Naval lore, too.
When Steve attended the funeral of a Naval Academy classmate at Annapolis, he changed his mind. He had planned on burial at Arlington, but the Academy cemetery moved him so much that he decided this was where he wanted to be laid to rest.
That was a couple of weeks ago.
So, the video is for Steve, because when I started researching that cemetery and discovered the company that he’ll keep–his forever shipmates–I understood his decision.
A Work in Progress 