The Little House on XXXX Street

13 Wednesday Apr 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Uncategorized

Every once in awhile we historians get research requests from real estate agenst. Which helps to prove, I guess, that we have some practical value. Here’s one:

Dear XXXX,

I am honored to be recommended by XXXX Since, as a historian, I am nosy by nature, I glanced at XXXX’s listings and found the home you cited. If that’s not the property, I will now blush.

I can’t ascertain whether 1930 is the right construction date, but the home once belonged to one of Arroyo Grande’s most prominent families, the Briscos.

Charles Brisco and his wife, Etta, moved to Arroyo Grande in 1902; they had three children. One of them, Leo (1892-1987), was a whirlwind. He owned one of the early garages in town, which would’ve stood about where the IOOF Hall parking lot is today.

Leo married the granddaughter of Huasna rancher and Union Civil War veteran Adam Bair–nearly sixty veterans like him are buried in our cemetery, where I give Civil War tours–

who fought in the deadliest year of the war, Grant vs. Lee, in 1864-65. If I start to feel sorry for myself, all I need to do is glance at the regimental flag of Bair’s 60th Ohio as it looked at the end of the war.

When the Norwegian lumber freighter Elg ran aground off Oceano in 1938, the captain had to jettison the cargo to get his ship afloat again. Pretty much the whole South County ran to the beach to get free lumber–one young man drowned and another, future World War II fighter pilot Elwyn Righetti, nearly did. And that’s how Leo Brisco got into the lumber and construction business. It’s said that many of the homes and businesses along Brisco Road are constructed from Elg lumber. Leo also bought the building, in the 1940s, that now houses Cafe Andreini; it’s sometimes referred to as the Brisco Hotel.

Leo was blind in one eye and wore a shaded eyeglass lens, so that’s him at Brisco Lumber today.

He was also one of the founders, along with my Dad, Albert Maguire, Walter Filer and others, of Mid-State Bank, today’s Mechanics’ Bank.
On Etta Brisco’s death in 1939, the home was inherited by her daughter-in-law, Marietta (1908-2001), who married a business partner of Leo’s, Frank Bosch (1902-1987). Here’s an advertisement from 1941 (I included the cow because I kind of liked the ad:

Sadly–if irrelevantly–Mary Agueda’s daughter was murdered in 1926, which has provided the Arroyo Grande area with its most poignant ghost story:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2021/10/01/little-alice/

Frank Bosch stayed in the service station/auto repair business and kept it in his brother-in-law’s name:

Mrs. Bosch was the head of the local Red Cross and spent countless hours in volunteer work and in teaching first aid classes, most notably during World War II.

Sometime in the 1950s, the home was acquired by Mrs. J.H. (Gertrude) Thurlwell. She moved away from Arroyo Grande in the mid 1950s but returned to the home to live out the final three months of her life in 1959.

Tragically, she lost a son, Vernon (upper left in this photo from the 1917-18 Arroyo Grande Union High School yearbook) who had been accepted to Stanford but was trying to enlist in the Army. The 1918 flu claimed him instead. (And, parenthetically, that hit Arroyo Grande hard, too, as the story in the link below describes):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1libbJd0azm2ZpdUJoBti7G_DUjHFJlv5/view?usp=sharing

Incidentally, a tool that just might bring up several conversation pieces between agents and their clients is this, an interactive history map of Branch Street. Enjoy, and feel free to share, courtesy of the South County Historical Society.

www.historicbranchstreetarroyogrande.com

I hope that some of this is helpful, and the Society and I wish you great success! We, in turn–as we battle our way back from over two years of Covid–welcome the support of the real estate community!

My best,
Jim Gregory, President

Bucha, Ukraine, 2022; Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1890

06 Wednesday Apr 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Uncategorized

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Like most of you, I’ve been veering between rage and despair over Ukraine.

I’m even resorting to movie fantasies to comfort myself–like when Diana rescues the village from the Germans in Wonder Woman–another writer saw that scene evocative of what was then happening in Syria, with the assistance of the Russians– or, far more violent, envisioning the First Air Cav of Apocalypse Now’s Robert Duvall delivering a spectacular napalm strike on the Russian columns as they head east toward the Donbas.

I can be a bloodthirsty little bastard when I’m angry.

Even moreso when I’m helpless.

We seem, among world figures and self-important commentators, to be quibbling over the term “genocide.” The term applies here, to what’s being done to the people of Ukraine. I’ve written about genocide, at some length, in our own history, and some of it involved Arroyo Grande settlers.

–In 1862, when the government, which had already reduced the size of the Woodland Sioux reservation in Minnesota, thus depriving them of game, also withheld the reservation’s meat and grain allotment, a war broke out. It began with some hungry young men stealing a hen’s eggs from a farmer in Meeker County–where my Irish ancestors, no strangers to hunger, later homesteaded–and ended with the largest mass execution in American history, of thirty-eight Sioux fighters, hanged in Mankato. Over three hundred had originally been sentenced to hang until Lincoln intervened. John Rice, who build a home from Los Berros stone on Myrtle Street, was a soldier who witnessed that execution as a member, mounted that day, of F Company, 10th Minnesota Infantry.

The hangings happened the day after Christmas, 1862. The Sioux sang as they climbed the scaffold and stood on the plank that would be collapsed on the signal of a settler whose family had been murdered. Their hands were bound, but the condemned men tried desperately to touch each other in that final moment.

One of the fighters who died that day was named Chaksha. A White woman had intervened on his behalf at one of the perfunctory military tribunals because he had saved the life of the woman and her children as they were about to be killed by Chaksha’s comrades. But a mistake in record-keeping killed Chaksha. The same mistake, thanks to the similarity in names, spared the life of Chaksey-etay, a Sioux condemned of raping and murdering another woman.

When a warder went into the Mankato jail on December 27 calling Chaksha’s name for his release, a voice called out simply, “You hanged him yesterday.”

*The execution at Mankato, 1862. The bodies were disinterred soon after they’d been buried; one became the office skeleton for the father of the physicians who founded the Mayo Clinic.*

–In the Treaty of Laramie in 1858, the Powder River Country was promised to the Lakota and Cheyenne until the end of time. Then gold was discovered there. When miners began getting picked off, the Army sent in a punitive expedition that included two Arroyo Grande settlers, James Dowell and Thomas Keown, under the command of a general, Patrick Connor, who promised “to kill every male Indian over the age of twelve.” It didn’t work out that way, especially when, on the first night of the expedition, Dowell and Keown’s commander pitched camp between two villages whose leaders were Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.

“The Sioux fell on them like angry badgers,” one historian wrote. Dowell and Keown survived the expedition, but just barely, and as infantrymen. They’d had to eat their horses.

–Harrison Marion Bussell, First Colorado Cavalry, is buried in our cemetery. It was only a matter of luck that his company was left behind at Fort Lyon when a detachment of cavalry, under Col. John Chivington, fell on a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864. The horse soldiers from the volunteer regiment that accompanied the First mutilated the genitals of the dead to bring home souvenirs–the troopers of the First, regular army soldiers, had to be forcibly restrained from opening fire on the volunteers, who killed, over the course of eight hours, 230 women and children.

The volunteers killed at close range. The First Colorado–Bussell’s comrades–had brought mountain howitzers along for the expedition and when they opened fire on the camp, witnesses noted that the shells detonated harmlessly in mid-air, high above the Native Americans who were going to die anyway. The soldiers of the First had cut the shells’ fuses short.

The leader at Sand Creek, Black Kettle, would escape. Six years later, on the Washita, he was flying an American flag, a gift from President Lincoln, outside his tipi when Custer’s Seventh–the regimental band was playing the Seventh’s theme, “Garryowen,” the merry old Irish drinking song– rode into the village and began killing everyone in sight. Black Kettle was among them.

And then there’s Wounded Knee. This is from a piece I wrote eight years ago.

So don’t call what’s happening in Ukraine–the extermination, both haphazard and deliberate–of a people considered “inferior”–anything other than genocide. Don’t bullshit me. Don’t equivocate.

I know genocide when I see it.

My Spoon River Poem

30 Wednesday Mar 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized

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Based on the Edgar Lee Masters’ collection, this one’s about a woman a half-continent away from Illinois. Rosario Cooper was the last speaker of her dialect of Central California’s Chumash language. She was interviewed and some of her language taken down by anthropological linguist J.P. Harrington who, I guess—from reliable sources—was a jerk. But her language survives, if only in Cal’s Bancroft Library.

Rosario was a midwife and healer—her people’s knowledge of wild plant foods, herbs and curatives was vast and remains amazing to me, as was their understanding of the wild birds, the rainbow trout, the mule deer, jackrabbits, mountain lions, coyotes and, until the late 1870s, the grizzly bears that were part of their daily lives.

A land dispute near her, in Arroyo Grande’s Lopez Canyon, resulted in a double murder and then a double lynching of the suspects just below Arroyo Grande’s Crown Hill in 1886. A decade later, a second feud, also over land rights, led to the beating death of a man whose body was discovered by a prostitute out for her morning walk along Monterey Street in San Luis Obispo. The prime suspect was acquitted, but some justice was carried out ten years later, when he went to Folsom for horse theft.

All of this would have bewildered Rosario, who was the granddaughter of a “Mission Indian” born in the 1790s in a rancheria, or village, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, near today’s Strother Park. Her grandfather may or may not have been a sailor; the marriage may or may not have been enforced by the Mission Fathers and the grandfather may or may not have been drowned at sea. So much was uncertain at the turn of that century.

The Chumash were acquainted with uncertainty: a terrible drought in what would become San Luis Obispo County forced them to become neophytes; it threatened to exterminate them before White men and their smallpox and cholera very nearly did.

Eighty years after the Mission’s founding, the City Fathers of San Luis Obispo hired a man and his wheelbarrow to cart the cholera victims up the hill that led to the Old Mission burying ground. His hard work is unrecognized, as are the human beings that were his freight. They are buried, in what must be compact stacks, like the soldiers’ bones in the Verdun ossuary, in a steeply-banked garden that faces the annex, the addition that gives the Old Mission a half-cruciform floor plan.

On the opposite side of the nave, in the Mission Gardens proper, the only legal hanging in San Luis Obispo County history was carried out in 1859. All the others, carried out by the 1858 Vigilance Committee, which has the dubious record of hanging two more men than San Francisco’s, happened facing the Mission, where a little bronze Chumash girl shares a fountain with a Grizzly. Given their propensity for carrying off rancheros’ bawling claves, the proximity of the little girl and the Grizzly might seem odd.

The statues might have made more sense to Rosario, who died in 1917 still understanding the fading natural world around her that was quickly being reduced to checkerboard ranches bounded by barbed wire. The events in Lopez Canyon, in her California, where men shot at each other over their barbed-wire fences—those White men events— would have bewildered her.

Justifiably so.

Note: The origin for this was a class I taught teens as part of the Central Coast Writers’ Conference. This was a model. The teens then chose a person from local history and wrote a “tombstone poem” for that person.

*Lopez Canyon, 1916. L-R: Rosario’s husband, Mauro Soto, Anthropologist J.P. Harrington, Frank Olivas, Rosario’s son, and Rosario Cooper.*

What amazed and pleased me to no end was realizing, years afterward, that I had taught two of Rosario’s great-great (great?) granddaughters in my history classes at Arroyo Grande High School.

McKenzie—with her little girl— and Hannah are beautiful, brilliant and generous young women. Beyond that, they are powerful in ways that I am sure are part of their DNA. I can’t help but think that Rosario would be even more proud of them than I am. I don’t doubt at all at the immensity of her love for them.

We are fixed on linear time: Rosario understood that time was cyclical, so she will watch over her babies, including McKenzie’s and including those not yet born. She will always be here for them. As we reckon time, Rosario Cooper died in 1917. I am convinced that the force of her life—one that gave life to newborn babies— endures.

The combat photographers

13 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Uncategorized, World War II

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Photographer Robert Capa captured a GI amid beach obstacles struggling to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. Even the shots that survived the Time-Life London processor, like this one, were compromised–this somehow made them even more powerful.

Some are condemning the work of New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who captured the indelible image of the Ukrainian family struck down by a mortar round in the city of Irpin.

I disagree vehemently. If you Google “Alexander Gardner Antietam,” you’ll find the most horrific photographs of the casualties of war ever published, the record of what remains the single deadliest day of combat in American history, in September 1862

Unlike Gardner’s images, Addario’s was relatively restrained–the family likely died from the concussion of the mortar round’s impact or the needle-like shrapnel that the detonation can generate. They almost appeared asleep, which, to me, made the image even more powerful and even more moving.

They were, in death, so oddly beautiful and so completely innocent. I couldn’t look away from the image until I finally had to. Maybe, in losing their lives, in the anger their innocence provokes in us, they will save the lives of many others.

There’s another side to this terrible event. A video captured this man, a volunteer, at the moment the mortar round detonated. He disappears, and then, in a dense layer of concrete dust, someone seems to drag his inert body away.

You can hear Addario and other journalists shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” when they see the family across the street.

Robert Capa captured the moment of a Spanish Loyalist soldier’s death in Spain in 1936, during a war that seems to parallel Ukraine’s war today. Eight years later, after surviving the carnage in the assault on Omaha Beach, eight of the nine rolls of film that Capa had shot that morning were ruined in a London photo lab.

That’s not the whole story, and the whole story is about the value of human life. Addario found out that the man in the video, the Ukrainian volunteer who disappeared in the dust of the explosion, had in fact survived.

That was important to her. Another photojournalist captured Addario’s image moments before the fatal mortar round, when other rounds were landing all along the street where she was shooting.

The man in the video, in this image, had pushed Addario to the ground and he was covering her body with his.

He was willing to offer the American stranger his own life.

I’ve been agonizing, as all of us have, over Ukraine. When I found out that Addario’s protector had survived, I let out, involuntarily, something that approached a sob.

Ukraine is so instructive. In my memory I haven’t seen anything like this since Rwanda, when the depths of depravity–in today’s case, Putin’s–are offset, if only incrementally, by human beings with far less power but far more courage, far more generosity of spirit.

In the middle of reporting the genocide in Rwanda, with a parade of refugees walking painfully—toward safety, they hoped—behind him, the superb CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen, during what might well have been a live shot, suddenly realized the enormity of what he was covering. He began to cry.

It was one of the most powerful moments of reportage I’ve ever seen. Petersen reminded us that these faraway people—Black people—were our brothers and sisters, a concept that many Americans still have difficulty understanding. Petersen’s tears affirmed our shared humanity.

And so I found another brother in the man whose name I don’t know who more than likely saved Lynsey Addario’s life, This was so that she could take the photograph that has reminded us, too of our humanity, of the family that my heart will remember until the moment of its last beat.

*Marines carry a dead comrade to a helicopter, Vietnam, 1966. Photographer Larry Burrows would be killed in this war five years later.*

The Medic

11 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized, World War II

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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.

Jeremiah O’Brien, *one of three thousand Liberty Ships built during the war.*

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 man tries to teach Women’s History

17 Thursday Feb 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Teaching, Uncategorized

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La Soldadera: A remarkable photograph from the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920)

In researching the Arroyo Grande history class I’m to teach for Cuesta, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Californio (i.e., Mexican) women enjoyed rights their Anglo-American counterparts didn’t.

Especially property rights. At least one of the women hanged in 1692 Salem was an unmarried property owner. She was a threat.

It reminded me, too, of how passionate I could get about teaching women’s history in my AP Euro classes. It was a topic I taught with sharp edges. Sometimes, anger can motivate a teacher. It did me.

Victorian and Edwardian English and American women enjoyed the same rights as “children, the feeble-minded and the legally insane.”

Stages of mourning for Victorian women

In nineteenth-century England, a widow was expected to remain in mourning for over two years. The rules were slightly less rigid for American women. These stages of mourning were observed by women.

Full mourning, a period of a year and one day, was represented with dull black clothing without ornament. The most recognizable portion of this stage was the weeping veil of black crepe.* If a women had no means of income and small children to support, marriage was allowed after this period. There are cases of women returning to black clothing on the day after marrying again.

Second mourning, a period of nine months, allowed for minor ornamentation by implementing fabric trim and mourning jewelry. The main dress was still made from a lusterless cloth. The veil was lifted and worn back over the head. Elderly widows frequently remained in mourning for the rest of their lives.

*Tragically, crepe is highly flammable. Middle-class Victorian homes were lit by gas jets.

Half mourning lasted from three to six months and was represented by more elaborate fabrics used as trim. Gradually easing back into color was expected coming out of half mourning,

And, if they were widows, they had a distressing tendency to catch on fire.

Meanwhile, women in Mexican California lit up cigars.

That did not last. The Americans came.

Thank goodness, a few generations later, the safety bicycle–equipped with drive chains and coaster brakes– came, too. Women began to wheel toward equity.

But women’s bicycle clubs, on their Saturday jaunts in the country, normally were accompanied by male outriders. Their job was to take the hits from the rocks being thrown at the women. Ministers thundered against the Satanic influence of bicycles from the pulpit. No wonder. Bicycles made the whalebone corset obsolete. Bicycles meant freedom–whalebone corsets and misogynistic ministers meant something else altogether.

A little while later, a powerful suffragist movement, one, in America, that had earlier coexisted with (but was subordinated to) abolitionism began to emerge.

So did the temperance movement. We’ve reduced temperance to cartoon Carrie Nations busting barroom mirrors, but the movement was a second forum for feminism. This was because alcohol was a major factor in domestic homicides, like that of Nancy Sykes in Oliver Twist. The dockets of London’s Old Bailey are dense with the murders of hundreds of women like Nancy.

Those records almost reduce the 1888 Ripper murders to a footnote.

*Street vendors, Victorian London. By now women had been pushed out of the factory work that typified their place in the early Industrial Revolution.*

It was suffragism that gave fin de siècle feminism its focus. Women fought with mass demonstrations and speeches and petitions and parades.

They also bombed buildings, threw bricks through windows and set fires.

When they were jailed, they went on hunger strikes. Matrons held their mouths open with metal hinges while doctors threaded a hose filled with something like cream of wheat down their throats.

This was, of course, rape.

*The death of Emily Davison (at left), 1913. Emmeline Pankhurst arrested (below).*

English suffragist Emily Davison threw herself under King George V’s horse at the 1913 Derby to demonstrate how serious women were about the right to vote. The herky-jerky film that survives is still horrific.

A few more deaths nudged women’s rights a few more steps. Women–las soldaderas–fought alongside men in the Mexican Revolution. Ninety women fought in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916.

But the great turning point came with the Great War, when young women were called on to supply labor for the vast armaments industry that trench warfare required.

Some were blown to shreds in munitions factories. Others died far more slowly, from TNT poisoning, which turned their hair bright red and their skin yellow.

They were called “canaries.”

And then they got the right to vote.

Older historians, forty years ago, in a discipline still dominated by men, dismissed the very notion of women’s history.

Thankfully, nearly all of them are dead, too.

In 1944, Women’s Airforce Service (WASP) pilot Gertrude “Tommy” Tompkins (right) gave her life for her country. The P-51 Mustang fighter she was ferrying to its base disappeared into ocean fog over Santa Monica. Neither plane nor pilot was ever found.

“…I felt confident in your class.”

11 Friday Feb 2022

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I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately–too many irons in the fire–but I posted a photo of my old AGHS classroom a few days ago and a former student shared this about that room:

“I miss that room. I was going through such a difficult time but I felt confident in your class. It was a much needed safe haven. Thank you.”

Teaching is hard, and I’m so fearful because fewer and fewer young people are going into the profession–“calling” or “vocation” might be even better words.

Teachers have to plan meticulously but deal with chaos. Sometimes the lessons kind of sing and other times you’re like a comic–the flop sweat is notable– whose act is imploding on stage.

A sudden drop in barometric pressure—I am not making this up— or the addition of just one obnoxious student added to your class roll can turn thirty-four sweet kids into a pack of Tasmanian Devils.

Just when you’re almost begun to sort of manage your workload, Higher Ups decree a series of inservices with “breakout groups” and forms to fill, all about the latest teaching theory. The theories seem to come from a stylebook written, empty of humanity, by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. The theories come with lots of buzzwords.

One example of the language: We actually had a superintendent once who announced at a beginning-of-the-year assembly: “I’m a data-driven kind of guy.” I almost threw up.

Another Higher Up once announced, with a straight face, was that our five-year-goal was to have every student in the district pass the No Child Left Behind exams. Every student. I had the audacity to raise my hand, in front of 700 people, and question his reasoning.

They have a shelf life of about three to five years, these theories do. Horizontal Alignment was replaced by Outcome Based Education which evolved into “Let’s Teach Them The Answers To The State Standards Tests.”

I got out just in time. The State Standards gave us two classroom days to teach the Vietnam War. I usually took eight.

I was recalling yesterday some of my principals over the years. Two were insane. Three were politicians. Two were fired, and they were among my favorites. Some I can’t remember.

You remember your students far more than you do those Higher Ups. And this marvelous young woman, my former student, just paid back my work in ways she can’t imagine. What a blessing.

Mr. Burns, Branch School

07 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by ag1970 in Arroyo Grande, Personal memoirs, Teaching, Uncategorized

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This photo comes from the year Dad was the clerk of the Branch School Board, and bids were being submitted for the new school. Mr. Burns drove a white-over-gold Dodge Polara with a big V-8. I have never forgotten seeing him speed down Huasna Road toward the four corners–he had to be doing 70 mph–because his passenger, picked up at the County Airport on Edna Road, was a construction company comptroller trying to get his boss’s bid in on time.

I don’t know whether the guy made it.

This article, from June 1961, cites Mr. Burns, my big brother and my Dad—and Mrs. Vard (Gladys) Loomis, who would’ve been a dignitary to us. She was a woman of great dignity, so the term “dignitary” fits exactly. The ceremonies were at the IDES Hall because the old 1880s two-room schoolhouse couldn’t hold any more kids–we were Boomers, after all, and there were immense and inconvenient numbers of us—so the big kids, 7th and 8th graders, had their classes at the Hall until the new school could be built.

I wish this story had a happy ending. It doesn’t. Midway through one school year, Mr. Burns was fired. I’m still not sure of the cause, and I don’t want to know. No one talked about it then, and I don’t want to talk about it now. It may have involved his corporal punishment of a student who refused to do her homework. I don’t think that was the case because, just a few years before, I’d seen two Branch teachers, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Fahey, work over Danny Hunt in the hallway of the old school. They used those hardwood rulers with the sharp copper inserts along the edges and Danny was crouched in the fetal position–and whimpering–while two teachers I loved worked him over like Bad Cop-Bad Cop. To say that I was shaken is an understatement. That was sixty years ago.

Nothing happened to them. Those were less litigious days, and country schools were their teachers’ fiefdoms.

*The Old School. It was pink in our day.*

So maybe Mr. Burns did something even worse than what the article below suggests.

It’s absurd, of course, but I’ve been trying to look for him for years. I think I have an obituary, in Los Angeles, but I’m not sure of it. I think I have a wedding, in Monterey, in 1976, and she is lovely in her high school yearbook photo. It might just be the same William Edward Burns–the age, 36, fits. She is Marcia Katherine Ross, 25, and the two were married the day after Christmas.

And, of course, this couldn’t be Mrs. Burns, not at all. I don’t have any conclusive proof of what happened to him–or even any conclusive proof that he was heterosexual, which is irrelevant– not even after years when I periodically take time to look for him on genealogical and newspaper websites.

The point remains: He screwed up. He did something I never would’ve done as a teacher.

Mr. Koehn replaced him–he would be my algebra teacher later, in ninth grade, on Crown Hill, which remains the only year in my formal education that I enjoyed math. He decided, in P.E. to introduce us to golf and brought thirty aged short irons, some with wooden shafts, and a hundred whiffle golf balls to school and we fifth and sixth graders had the time of our lives, swinging without mercy. Our beloved bus driver and custodian, Elsie Cecchetti, was less than thrilled with the divots that swinging without mercy leaves behind. Many years later, when I took my students to Normandy and we saw the enormous craters left by the D-Day gunfire of Allied naval ships, I was suddenly reminded of what we kids had done to Branch School’s front lawn.

We missed Mr. Burns, though. He was charming and unforgiving, inspirational and demanding, sometimes generous and sometimes mean.

But my family, including my big sister, who taught with him at Branch, loved him. My big brother and I loved him because of his intelligence, his wit and his passion–and, frankly, because he was the first male teacher we’d ever had.

And what this flawed man wrote in that old Thesaurus remains one of the greatest gifts of my life:

Someday I expect to read great things by you.

Good Morning, Aztlan…

03 Thursday Feb 2022

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It’s pretty much impossible for me to tell you how much I love this band. Between Los Lobos and my Latin American History concentration—especially in Mexican history—next to getting (finally) my college diploma and loving teenagers in thirty years of being their high-school history teacher—scoring 96% on the Facebook “How Mexican Are You?” quiz remains one of the proudest achievements of my life.

They’re coming to Santa Maria April 8, and I think I need to get tickets. Elizabeth and I saw them at the Santa Barbara Bowl many years ago, and we danced our cabooses off for the entire set. So did everybody else.

I’ve never heard such straight-ahead rock and roll that also had so much meaning to me. Here they are at Watsonville High School in 1989, performing “La Bamba.” At one point, I think you can see a teardrop escape from beneath Cesar Rojas’s sunglasses. This performance is so joyful, even though it’s punctuated by dancing gabacho Hippies who have seemed to have misplaced the decade in which they belong, that it makes me tear up, too.

There is no song I love as much as this one, but it’s still not my favorite Los Lobos song. “Will The Wolf Survive?” about crossing the Border, is one of the most meaningful and beautiful songs of my life.

PBS once aired a documentary on the work that welfare agencies and coroners on this side of the Border do in identifying the remains of migrants lost in the desert—the dignity the coroners exhibited in their work, with human remains that look, after months in the desert, like driftwood—and the effort they put forth in trying to return them home, was incredibly moving.

So, too, were the candlelit wakes, the brightly-decorated caskets, and the tears of the families on the rare cases when their brothers or sisters, sons or daughters, husbands or wives, finally came home again.

So this is my favorite Los Lobos song:

And this, from an old blog post, is why:

Cabbage harvest, Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. New Times

It’s a story I’ve told a million times, but it speaks volumes about why I love my Mom and why, 43 years after her death, I still miss her. She was pruning her roses and a farmworker–they called them braceros–came into our yard from the field next door and pantomimed filling a gallon jug with water. She nodded, filled it and handed it to me–I was about five: “Help him carry it back.”

That was the day I first fell in love with Mexicans. Not with Brussels sprouts, which is what they were harvesting that day, talking easily with me, as they snapped the sprouts off their stalks with their thumbs, in a language I didn’t think I understood.

“…fell in love with Mexicans.” It amazes me how that might shock some folks (Oh. Doesn’t he mean “Latinos?” or “Hispanics?” We’ve turned an entire people into a pejorative, the butt of ignorant, heartless jokes.) When our family went with the St. Pat’s youth group to Tijuana to help build a home, the mission director asked why we’d come, and there were many moving religious answers. When my turn came:

“I just like Mexicans.”

Migrant children, Nipomo, 1936, by Dorothea Lange. The little girl’s knock-knees are symptomatic of rickets, a nutritional disease.

My brother and I once spent an hour in one of George Shannon’s bunkhouses with some of his field workers (George Shannon deserves his own novel. One of the hardest-working and kindest human beings I’ve ever known, an unpretentious man who married into the Hall family, which, around these parts, is like some guy named Lincoln marrying into the Todds.) and they spread out religious medals and family snapshots and pocketknives, toys and firecrackers and belt buckles and, I think, one stuffed baby armadillo, and we chattered away the whole time, each side understanding about every eleventh word, until George came in, smiling, and told us it was time for us to go home for dinner. It was one of the happiest hours of my life and I think it was for them, too, because somehow my brother and I reminded them of family and home and they missed both.

Border fence, Tijuana. The crosses represent migrants lost in the desert.

They missed both. This Mexican was drunk but he was not incoherent. The mission directors were showing us the border fence, with clusters of white crosses at intervals, memorializing the deaths of those–one, a 17-year-old girl–whose coyotes had abandoned them in the desert, and a 13-year-old had started a trash fire at another point as a diversion so a small group of friends might have time enough to vault the fence to what was NOT the promised land, which was the drunk guy’s point.

You think I want to live in your country? he demanded of us, wide-eyed teenagers (and adults). He was drunk but also very angry, which made him clearer than a sober man. You people think we’re invaders? I don’t want to be in your country! I don’t want to be an American. I LOVE MY COUNTRY. I LOVE BEING A MEXICAN! I love my family and that is why I cross over and get arrested by La Migra and then cross over again. I hate it! But I am a man with a man’s responsibilities and if washing dishes in Chula Vista or working melon field in Indio is what it takes for me to be a man, I will do it. I love my country. Not yours. Not yours.

He wandered off and continued the talk with himself alone in that little park where the border fence meets a fetid stretch of Pacific Beach. We were stunned.

We met deportees at a la migra detention center, too. They were flesh and blood, just as the Woody Guthrie song had always suggested.

“Deportees” (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

My father’s own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees?”

And, finally, a few years after that mission trip, I led some of my students to the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha Beach. We were looking for a G.I. named Domingo Martinez.

We found him. Because of the ocean breeze, the marble crosses and Stars of David in this impossibly beautiful cemetery are cold to the touch—it’s almost shocking—but if you let your hand rest against the marble for a moment, it begins to warm.

This is about Private Martinez.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H38UVxeRzTHAX7iC2Qn6cFmv6Zxh_0SM/view?usp=sharing

The New Jerusalem

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Elizabeth, Thomas and I were watching the CNN series on the movies last night, and the installment we saw focused on the Eighties.

And, of course, Working Girl had to be one of the movies the documentary noted. They could’ve spent a lot more time on it, in my opinion.

If the big New Jersey Hair of Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack is clearly dated, the film and its issues aren’t. This is a film about the obstacles women face, directed and written, I am proud to say, with great sympathy, by men.

I think it’s Mike Nichols’ finest film.

And I might still say that had Nichols ended Working Girl after the first three minutes.

The cinematography is stunning; the opening sequence, shot from a helicopter, is a loving study of the Statue of Liberty that then pulls back to reveal Southern Manhattan–including, tragically, the Twin Towers–the Jersey shore and the the camera swoops in again, gliding alongside the Staten Island Ferry until the dissolve that takes us to the ferry bench where, in an intimate closeup, Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack share a birthday cupcake.

It is glorious, as is Carly Simon’s song “Let the River Run.”

This introduced me to a city that terrified me until I saw the Cooper Union, where Lincoln delivered the 1860 speech that made him president, saw the lobby and the city below the observation deck of the Empire State Building and saw, miraculously, the Chrysler building.

It took me two tries to “get” Paris. I fell in love with New York almost immediately. This stunning piece of film-making made that possible.

And I just found this version of Carly Simon’s song, from one of those European song competition shows, La Voz. The singer is Cuban-Spanish, her name is Lieta Molinet, and she nails it. If you are a female-type person, you might just notice that one of the male judges is both entranced and gorgeous. Be that as it may, I think this is a stunning performance of a stunning song.