Mike and Julian, down by the Subaru…

05 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by ag1970 in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized

Among my favorite human beings are my high-school classmates Julian Brownlee and Mike Knecht. Mike is a writer and a (real) cowboy; Julian—named for his grandfather, Cal Poly President Julian McPhee—a standout athlete (football, baseball) with a marvelously dry sense of humor with whom I smoked my first cigarette, a Marlboro, in the St. Patrick’s Parish Hall in 1965.

That wasn’t very humorous, but it was my owned damn fault. I turned green.

And then—to show you how obstinate I am—the same thing happened shortly after, this time with a cigar called a Rum Crook, in the Fair Oaks Theater, during a film in which the Disney actress Hayley Mills (the original Parent Trap) appeared in a scene that revealed her nude rear end. That, and the Rum Crook, proved too much for me to tolerate. I think somebody—I don’t really remember who—found me sprawled on the sidewalk beneath the Coming Attractions, took pity on me, and drove me home to Huasna Road.

A little later, in high school, I found that there was a little knot of us in the AGHS Class of 1970—Julian, Joe Loomis, John Porter and me—who all shared January birthdays as well as given names that began with “J.”

Anyway, Mike and Julian are currently on that road trip—Mike’s posting from time to time on Facebook—from San Luis Obispo County to North Carolina for a wedding, in Julian’s Subaru. (A fine car; we’ve owned three.)

The photo shows them at the Great Divide. It has just occurred to me that they, heading east instead of west, are doing a Reverse Kerouac. These two may not know it, but not only are they are among my favorite human beings, but On the Road is among my favorite books.

And Kerouac, while working as an SP brakeman, lived in San Luis Obispo for a short time. I get all Kerouacky when I go to my much-beloved San Francisco and visit the City Lights Bookshop, where another one of my favorite human beings, my former AGHS history student Erin Messer, works.

This is my favorite photo of Erin. We both like cats. Elizabeth and I acquired two cats early in our marriage, both calicos, named Hadley (after Hemingway’s first wife) and Bumby (the nickname for Hemingway’s eldest son).

It was a major gathering place for the Beats, including Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and the City Lights founder, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died recently.

I believe that he was more or less 140 years old.

The only bookstore that comes close to City Lights is Shakespeare and Company, founded by Sylvia Beach–from Altadena, California, of all places–and it stands just across the Seine from Notre Dame. I’ve been to Paris twice, but I was too intimidated to actually go inside the bookstore that was once frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. I’m just a little fellow.

It was enough for me to sip a latte the size of a soup bowl at a sidewalk cafe, Les Deux Magots, and gaze fondly at Shakespeare and Company’s facade. (Hemingway would’ve done the same, but with a Pernod, a pad of yellow lined paper and a dozen #2 pencils sharpened with his pocketknife.)

After I’d finished my latte, I got moderately but happily lost in the Latin Quarter, the old university section, with my nose almost against the glass of shop windows and looking around corners up narrow alleyways—an alley, in Europe, is called a “close”— once prowled by belligerent university students, thinking it was Poly Royal, armed with cudgels and fortified by red wine. The alleys, always in shadow, are 14th-century relics that somehow escaped Baron Hausmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the time of Napoleon III.

That was a good Lost. I think Mike and Julian are reasonable navigators, so they won’t get lost. They might run into a little culture-shock, like the time the guy hollered at me from a pickup truck in the Ozarks:

“Hey, boy!”

Actually, it was more like:

*Sylvia Beach and James Joyce inside Shakespeare and Company*

“Hey, BOY!“

I was 25 years old and walking to a hamburger stand in Licking, Missouri, for some French-fried mushrooms, an Ozark delicacy. I looked nervously for the Easy Rider Rifle Rack in the pickup’s cab, but it turned out that the man was just asking for directions.

But that’s another story. As to this current road trip with Mike and Julian, I don’t know which one is Kerouac and which is Neal Cassady. I don’t think that’s very important. It’s more important to have friends like these. We don’t see each other very much anymore, but every time Mike posts, our friendships are renewed.

It’s a gift, you see.

Dragonflies

03 Sunday Oct 2021

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

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This is a story I heard today. I won’t get the details exactly right, but even so, this is a true story.

A young woman went to visit her friend, afflicted with cancer. When she entered the sickroom, she knew immediately that the end was pretty close.

–Would you like to go outside for a bit?

–Yes. I’d like that.

So the visitor wheeled her friend out to the garden where there would be sunlight and warmth and a little breeze.

There would be flowers.

There were two dragonflies flitting about the flowers. The visitor pointed them out, but her friend, Dawn, had seen them first.

She knew who they were. Her father and grandmother had come to be with her, she announced with confidence from her wheelchair.

I think that death confers on people who’ve lived good and unselfish and courageous lives—all of these describe the Dawn’s life, the young woman in the wheelchair— a wisdom near the end that we cannot understand. It gives them a clarity of vision that allows them to see what we cannot see.

It wasn’t long until death came. The visitor—a real friend, the friend of this person, now dying—Dawn had always drawn people to her the way flowers draw dragonflies—-came to visit on the last day. It would be presumptuous to call it the “final” day, because I believe that all of us will embrace each other again someday, and it will be a long time before we let go and step back, smiling, to regard each other in perfect wonder.

But when that day was over, when Dawn summoned the courage to give up her struggle, the visitor left the sickroom and walked into the sunlit garden.

Just above her shoulder, there was a dragonfly.

“Hello, sister,” the visitor whispered.

This is Hozier, and he’s singing an old Irish song of farewell, “The Parting Glass.”

Coming Home

02 Saturday Oct 2021

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

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*The first World War II American casualties to be repatriated, San Francisco, October 1947*. US Dept. of Veterans’ Affairs

Of course I didn’t expect to meet him, but T5 Orville Tucker’s death crossed my life today. Here’s his grave, in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery.

And there were a lot of things that struck me about him. The first was his date of death, and dates mean something to historians. We lost this American on the second day of Operation Wacht am Rhein, in what we now call the Battle of the Bulge.

It struck me, too, that he was part of a tank destroyer unit, like Frank Gularte, another Arroyo Grandean I know much better. Tucker was a member of the 691st TD Battalion, Gularte was part of the 607th. And the two soldiers died only days apart. Here’s what I wrote about Gularte on a website that memorializes fallen GI’s, killed in the war my father’s generation fought:

Sgt. Gularte served with the 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion and was killed in action 28 November 1944 near Metz, possibly outside the town of Merten. His son was born five days later in San Luis Obispo County, California. A memorial Mass was said in Sgt. Gularte’s memory at St. Patrick’s Church, Arroyo Grande, San Luis Obispo County, on Wed., 13 December 1944. Sgt. Gularte, before the war, was employed by E.C. Loomis and Son, a farm supply company; Gularte and his family were and are well-known and highly respected in the Arroyo Grande area.

At the time of his death, Tucker’s battalion was still fighting enemy armor with the 57-mm artillery piece, like the one at left being manned by soldiers training at Camp San Luis Obispo in 1944. Frank’s 607th had graduated to the M36 tank destroyer–that’s a 607th TD in the other photo—built on the chassis and hull of the famed Sherman tank, but with a much more robust 90-mm gun.

But it was likely a Mauser rifle that killed Frank, in the hands of a German sniper, during an attack by the 607th that was to have been supported by infantry. They didn’t show, so Frank’s company went into action alone. German fire disabled three tank destroyers edging into Merten—a beautiful mountain town— and the American attack bogged down. Chaos ensued and it claimed Sgt. Gularte.

I don’t know yet how Orville died, but he’s got another tie to the Gularte family.

*A family barbecue at the Gularte Ranch, behind the site of the IDES Hall just below Crown Hill. Manuel Gularte is standing; Frank is kneeling: Both are about to go to war in Europe.*

As near as I can tell, in the opening hours of the Battle of the Bulge, Orville Tucker’s battalion was attached to the 28th Infantry Division. They were defending St. Vith, a Belgian town directly in the enemy’s line of advance and at the seam of two powerful German armies. Twenty-two thousand Americans were in the way of 100,000 Germans and their armor, including 500 tanks. The units that attacked St. Vith on December 17 included the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, an SS unit that had it origins as the dictator’s bodyguard.

Their assignment was to take St. Vith by midnight December 17. It didn’t work out that way, partly in thanks to Orville Tucker and partly because of Frank’s brother, Manuel, also fighting to defend St. Vith. (Two Arroyo Grande settlers, Civil War veterans, had fought in separate regiments within 300 yards of each other at Gettysburg.) Manuel’s field artillery unit–they tended big 155-mm guns, updated versions of the artillery that stood guard over San Luis Bay here at home–and it was the accuracy and ferocity of their fire that delayed the German advance.

*A 155-mm gun in action during the Battle of the Bulge; a GI on the outskirts of St. Vith in January 1945.* *The Battle of the Bulge was fought during the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years.*

“Delay” was exactly what was needed. The panzers were fuel-poor (because Germany was: Berlin taxis were running on firewood in 1944) and the success of the Battle of the Ardennes depended on speed, on objectives seized promptly, even on the hopeful seizure of vast American stockpiles of gasoline.

Those might’ve been dispatched to the battlefield by my father, a lowly Quartermaster second lieutenant whose responsibilities included providing the African-American gasoline supply companies that kept the American army on the move.

By the time the American army had stopped moving—backward—and flattened the Bulge salient, 20,000 GI’s were dead, among them Orville Tucker. And though he died 5,000 miles away, Tucker was evidently one of the first local GI’s to come home. This is from the December 31, 1948, edition of the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder:

*A sniper killed Yoshihara on the German frontier as the young man, a medic, was trying to save a brother soldier.*

And the ship that brought Orville’s body home, the Barney Kirschbaum, named for an American merchant mariner killed in a 1943 U-boat attack, was a Liberty Ship, one of the miracles of the war, one of 2,710 such freighters launched from American shipyards during the war. Kirschbaum would’ve looked exactly like San Francisco’s Jeremiah O’Brien, tied up at Pier 45. (In 1994, O’Brien had the distinction of returning to the European Theater—to Normandy, no less—where she’d been part of D-Day fifty years before.)

The war dead intersect with my father’s life, as well. Once the war had ended, his duty shifted to training GI’s, nineteen-year-olds, some of them grads from Class of ’44. They’d come to Europe prepared the fight Germans, but the war was over, so Dad’s work, and theirs, was in Graves Registration. He trained these soldiers in the ghastly work of identifying the young Americans the war had claimed. Those young men—forever young— were then to be buried in one of a network of American military cemeteries. Many of those casualties, like Orville Tucker, would eventually come home.

*A Quartermaster, part of a Graves Registration unit, records the identities, soon after battle, of fallen soldiers.*

One of the soldiers who came home after the war—in my family’s case to rural Missouri— was my father’s cousin, Roy.

Roy was discharged from a field hospital, where he’d been treated for shrapnel wounds, in November 1944. He went back into action in Alsace, where, in January 1945, another elite SS unit essentially wiped out the headquarters company to which he was attached.

Roy—who’d fought with his buddy, Sgt. Chew, in Sicily, Italy, and finally France–looks remarkably like my Dad.

*Sgt. Gregory’s hospital record; the family’s application for a military headstone. He is buried near my grandfather, John Smith Gregory.*

*My father as a lieutenant; Sgts. Chew and Gregory in a studio photograph taken in Italy.*

Graves registration work was ghastly, of course, because of the way these young men had died. Sometimes, in the Army Air Forces, when the flight surgeon of a bomb group had the duty of identifying the dead, the clues were circumstantial and almost always, as in the case of this Marine killed on Iwo Jima, the deaths were violent beyond imagination.

The dead recorded from this B-17 accident in northern England include Clarence “Hank” Ballagh, a young man whose ancestors came to Arroyo Grande in a covered wagon. He was the AGUHS valedictorian in 1938 and graduated from Cal with an engineering degree.

*This young Marine, Louis Brown, was a farmer’s son from Corbett Canyon.*

The Quartermasters also took charge of cataloguing a fallen man’s personal effects, and these reveal—with the possible exception of the Army Air Forces, where the sharp lines of rank blurred among bomber crews—that there remained a vast social gap between officers and enlisted men. These are the personal effects of Lt. Ballagh, the Berkeley grad, and Private Brown, who, like 64% of Americans in 1940, hadn’t finished high school:

Brown’s Rosary is listed in a separate Navy Department letter to his mother.

Ballagh was killed when his plane flew into the side of an English mountain; fragments of the B-17 remain there today. Brown was killed, most likely by a Japanese land mine, no more than 48 hours after he went into action on Iwo Jima. Both came home to Arroyo Grande, in a bureaucratic ballet in quadruplicate steps, that was unmistakably human. There’s no mistake that the Army wants Lt. Ballagh, even in death, to come home safely.

The records of the dead, I think, are important: they force us to confront a war now safely confined to history books and television screens. Beyond that, they reveal the terrible price that the living had to pay, as well.

Little Alice

01 Friday Oct 2021

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Since Halloween is approaching, here’s a story I don’t mind repeating. At all.

Alice Agueda–buried in the Arroyo Grande Cemetery–was brutally murdered in December 1926 by a farmworker on the Agueda place along Huasna Road. She was twelve years old.

The accused allegedly died after attempting suicide. He shot himself. Five times. Ahem.

The San Francisco Examiner, January 1, 1927

The Agueda home is still with us–it’s the old Conrad Adobe, partly hidden behind a stand of cactus just before a sharp left bend in Huasna Road, about a half-mile beyond the new Branch School. (The term “new” Branch School indicates my advanced age, of course. Guilty as charged.)

The home, the subject of many newspaper articles over the years, is notoriously haunted. My friend David Cherry lived in it when we were AGHS students, and the adobe bricks are visible, down to their straws, in the basement, where Dave and I shot pool. The Cherry family several times heard soft footsteps on the basement staircase and then the door to the kitchen atop the staircase would slowly open.

Many years after, there were new owners who heard the same sounds the Cherrys had heard. There’s a driveway big enough for an RV and these folks had friends visit from San Diego and, of course, since they were friends, the new owners told them ghost stories about Alice.

After their visit, the friends drove the RV home to San Diego. After they got home, they went to bed. That’s when they heard the RV’s doors open and then the sound of soft footsteps. They risked a look in the dark and found nothing. But when they investigated again the next morning, everything inside the RV had been moved around.

The friends, husband and wife, looked at each other with the same thought. It was Alice. She liked them. She liked them so much that she’d followed them home.

So they drove all the way back, from San Diego to Arroyo Grande, pulled up into the big driveway that fronts the Conrad Adobe, and had a talk with Alice. We like you, too, they explained, but this is Arroyo Grande. This is your home. You need to be home, Alice.

When they drove back to San Diego, they turned off the engine and except for the clicks a cooling engine emits when it’s turned off, they never heard another sound from the empty RV again.

The story’s stuck with me.

And there’s an added element: After I’d posted this on Facebook a few years ago, a woman named Ciaran Knight shared the childhood experience of a friend of hers who’d lived in the old house. He had an imaginary playmate he called “Alice.”

The big guns above Shell Beach, 1942-1944

13 Monday Sep 2021

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

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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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

Baby Boomage at the A & W

06 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by ag1970 in American History, Arroyo Grande, Personal memoirs, Uncategorized

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There used to be an A & W Root Beer restaurant on Grand Avenue. It isn’t there anymore. It was right across Grand from Young’s Giant Food, which isn’t there anymore, either.

A Pontiac Ventura. My sister’s was red over white.

But when I was little, this was high living: My sister, Roberta, would take Mom and me and later little sister Sally to the A & W in her 1961 Pontiac Ventura.

I believe that it was dangerous to drive a 1961 Pontiac Ventura in the San Diego area. Fighter jets from the Naval Air Station might mistake it for an aircraft carrier and try to land.

But a car that size was made for drive-in meals.

They had car hops, teenaged girls, at this A & W, and I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that they were on roller skates. They’d glide out to take your order and then glide back to place it. They’d hook a tray to the driver’s side door and, with great dignity, roll out again to lay the feast thereupon. It was Roberta, since she was driving, who distributed the goodies.

The smell, of burger and bacon and fries was unendurable. Roberta was never fast enough for me. Many years later, I saw the film Reefer Madness. At one point, one of the hopelessly addicted 1940s teenagers blurts “I NEED SOME REEFERS!” I was like that, but it was with hamburgers.

A nostalgic view. They’re all so *white.*

My invariable order: A root beer freeze, a Teen Burger (bacon and cheese, then a novel innovation) and fries. It was a substantial meal and required a nap afterward.

Alas, my cardiologist would whip me with a stethoscope if I ate a meal like that today.

Mom always got the Mama Burger and Sally the Baby Burger. Of course.

But it was a different America then. We had big cars like Pontiacs–eleven miles per gallon, thank you very much–so immense that they were mobile dining rooms, and we had vast and limitless cattle ranches devoted solely to Teen Burger production. There would always be plenty of gasoline, we believed, and you could always eat plenty of hamburgers.

Then they shot the president and the whole shebang started to unravel.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: So it goes.

Melting Pots

04 Saturday Sep 2021

Posted by ag1970 in American History, Uncategorized

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New/not so new favorite shows on KQED-San Francisco. “Finding Your Roots” with Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. The last episode that Elizabeth and I watched featured:

–Christopher Walken, whose father owned a bakery in Astoria, NY. Researchers found his grandfather’s bakery in Germany, captured in a 1912 photo. Walken’s father was an extraordinary man, I think. He immigrated from Germany in 1928, married a beautiful woman and started the bakery when the stock market crashed. “He just figured the Depression leveled the playing field for everybody,” Walken said. The bakery was in business for sixty years.

–Fred Armisen [“Portlandia”], who thought himself 1/4 Japanese and therefore loves Japanese food.. Nope.* Armisens’s grandfather, a dancer who had a brief fling with a German woman that eventually led to Fred, was Korean. And he was a part-time German spy on the side. The grandfather, Kuni, only studied in Japan, but he was such a gifted and influential dancer that a museum is dedicated to him there.

*[My Dad thought his family was Scots. Nope. They were from the coal-dusty English Midlands, not far from Bosworth, where Richard III got himself massacred. When they found the little fellow’s skeleton beneath a parking lot a few years ago, there was a deep postmortem puncture wound in his arse. Despite that indignity, Richard, remains, I think, Shakespeare’s greatest villain.]

–Carly Simon, who loved her grandmother but knew almost nothing about her. DNA testing showed that her grandmother was the descendant of Cuban slaves, and that Carly’s ancestry is 10% African. “You’re the blackest white person we’ve ever tested,” Gates deadpanned. There’s some kind of justice there, I think. The Simon family was very close to an African-American couple who moved into their neighborhood: Jackie and Rachel Robinson.

*Rachel Robinson embraces the late Chadwick Boseman, who played her husband in* 42.

“Check, Please, Bay Area.” Incredible visuals that make your mouth water. My favorite recent show featured reviews from these three adorable kids who reviewed Japanese, Italian and Burmese restaurants. They were incredibly articulate and they gave the desserts at all three places the attention that they deserved. Yum.

I don’t know. All that “melting pot” stuff kind of rocks. Here’s the “Check Please” episode with the kids. They are delightful. More Melting Pot: The Italian-American girl is an Irish step dancer.

If y’all look out the starboard side of the cabin…

01 Wednesday Sep 2021

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Early in World War II, my Dad was stationed at Gardner Field in Taft. He was a marksman with both the 1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand, which is just above middling, but he was lethal when handling a shotgun. His last shotgun was a lovely Spanish over-and-under, and when Dad led a cock pheasant, the bird was doomed. No matter. The Army sent him to London with a typewriter and adding machine. He was a Quartermaster officer.

*Dad, on the right, with a Winchester Model 12, about to go hunting with a neighbor in rural Missouri.*

One of his jobs was to organize and dispatch gasoline supply companies to Omaha Beach, where George Patton would promptly steal them.

Another young man stationed at Gardner Field flew P-51 Mustangs into combat and, oh yes, broke the sound barrier two years after the war had ended.

*Gardner Field, Taft, during World War II*

Here’s one way that fellow entered my life. Elizabeth and I were on a JetBlue flight from somewhere to somewhere else when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom:

“Ladies and gennulmen. If y’all look out the starboard side of the cabin you’ll see a cloud that looks jes’ like a little ol’ puppy dog.”

Because I’d read and so enjoyed the writing of the late Tom Wolfe, I realized suddenly where that voice came from. This passage is from The Right Stuff. It’s kind of fun.

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring)…the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): “Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not… uh… lockin’ into position when we lower ’em… Now… I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right”… faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you…

…Well!—who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it!—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, “they had to pipe in daylight.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down…into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous offal the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

Young Yeager at Gardner Field in front of the BT-13, a trainer that shook so violently that student pilots called it the “Vultee Vibrator.” (Right) Actor Sam Shepherd and Yeager with a replica of the Bell X-1, the jet in which he broke the sound barrier. With a broken arm.

Wolfe became one of my role models as a writer, along with Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Graham Greene, Bruce Catton, Dave Barry and Barbara Tuchman. The film version of The Right Stuff included a masterful performance by playwright/actor Sam Shepard, who comes face-to-face with the real Chuck Yeager, a bit player, in a couple of scenes. This, the crash of an F-104 Starfighter–the West Germans called the Starfighters we foisted on them “Widow Makers”–is a stunning bit of filmmaking.

Normandy, 1944

27 Friday Aug 2021

Posted by ag1970 in Uncategorized

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I watched a good part of Saving Private Ryan again last night. It is so compelling, Tom Hanks’s Capt. Miller especially so, that, amid its graphic violence, it reminds us—Miller reminds us—of who we are.

It also reminded me of a local G.I. killed in Normandy. I wrote about Pvt. Domingo Martinez in World War II Arroyo Grande. He was on my mind as I watched this film again.

This is what I wrote about him.

*Domingo Martinez’s grave, Colleville-sur-Mer*

It was…drought that may have brought a fieldworker, whose family had lived for generations in New Mexico, to these coastal valleys in 1940. Much of his native [New Mexico] in the years before had been swept away by the Dust Bowl. Winds had carried the copper-red soil as far east as the Mid-Atlantic to drop it, like gritty rain from a place that had none, onto ships still sailing freely between continen

Those ships would lose their freedom in the years immediately after, and the coyotes that hunted them without fear were U-boats come out of their lairs in Kiel and later in Lorient. U-boat captains called this the “Happy Time.”

The U-boats would someday kill that young fieldworker, if indirectly, as part of an inexorable chain of events that would lead him to Normandy, so far away from the fields that border Arroyo Grande Creek, and to pastures bound by hedges and grazed by fat dairy cows, cows that lowed piteously to be milked in what had become killing zones. One of them, dead in the crossfire, may have provided scant cover from the German machine guns that harvested crops of young men for fieldworker, now rifleman, Private Domingo Martinez

*Taking the radio site, from* Saving Private Ryan.

It is difficult to imagine Normandy in 1944; it is beautiful today, as are its people. A bonjour from an American tourist has more traction here than it does in Paris, and the little villages, separated by pastures and farm fields, are lovely, each with its distinctive little parish church. During the Middle Ages, as the skilled writer and Francophile Graham Robb notes, few villagers ever went beyond the sound of their parish church’s bells. The world beyond was like the ends of the eart

It is not the ends of the earth, but the Arroyo Grande Valley is 5,500 miles away from the D-Day beaches. Three local men, killed in the campaign to capture and then and break free from Normandy, are buried at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, an almost impossibly serene place above Omaha Beach.

Below the cemetery, just offshore, a visitor today can see young men as they should be—exuberant and free—racing tiny sailboats, their sails bright oranges and reds, just beyond the surf line, where on June 6, 1944, young men floated like dead leaves on the water’s surface. The invasion of Hitler’s Europe nearly failed here. It didn’t but only because of an American generation that includes those who still hold the high ground at Colleville-sur-Mer

…The [Norman]hedgerows enclosed fields that had been plowed or grazed since Agincourt and were a hopscotch of natural fortresses—roots and compacted earth had formed defensible walls. The GIs had to assault them, one by one, to try to root out the defenders. When they broke through a hedge and entered a field, the superb German machine gun, the MG42, hidden in the next hedge beyond or positioned on the Americans’ flanks, annihilated entire rifle squads. It fired so rapidly that a burst sounded like canvas ripping. Army films had incorporated the sound to try to desensitize trainees. So the Americans could hear but never see in the tangle of the hedges who was killing them so efficiently. With supreme indifference, the bocage quickly transformed GIs into either hardened veterans or into statistics. This is what Private Martinez and the 313^th Regiment faced in the attempt to seize the approaches to a key crossroads town, Le Haye du Puits.

*The hedgerows. (Below) Wounded GI’s from Martinez’s 79th Division exit a farm field*; *Miller’s squad on patrol in a Norman field.*

There, the Americans fought first-class combat troops, not garrison soldiers, many of them veterans of the Russian front. As the 313^th fought to envelop the town, the regiment’s combat chronicle is almost monotonous with passages that have the Americans falling back to their jump-off points after repeated failed attacks through fields, then across a creek, where every time they would be driven back by concentrated German artillery fire. The Germans had not only the finest machine gun of the war but also the finest artillery piece, the versatile 88-mm gun.

Other elements of the 79^th Division would take La Haye du Puits while the 313^th Regiment continued its sledgehammer attacks to the south. Martinez died during three furious assaults near a little town called Le Bot on July 12. It was likely an 88-mm shell that killed Martinez. Shrapnel to the head and chest ended his life quickly, but his death wasn’t recorded for three days, an indicator of the intensity of the stress the 313^th had to endure. The division was victorious, but both the regiment and the division were depleted and their dogfaces, real veterans now, were used up. Signal corps photographers show some Seventy-ninth soldiers playacting outside a wine shop along a street in La Haye du Puits—they sit at a small table amid the rubble, enjoying a fine red wine as if they had dinner reservations and were awaiting the first course. But other photos of other soldiers show men who resemble sleepwalkers: their faces blank and few of them celebratory.

*79th Division soldiers leave a secure*d *Le Haye du Puits. The G.I. in the lead carries a mortar tube; one just behind carries the mortar’s baseplate.*

With rest and replacements, the veterans of three weeks’ combat soon joined the breakout from Normandy. Two weeks after Martinez’s death, the Allies launched Operation Cobra, a coordinated drive to the east. They uncovered Paris and liberated the city in August, standing aside to let Free French units and their prickly commander, General Leclerc, enter first. Leclerc would have been furious to learn that Ernest Hemingway and some of his camp followers had preceded him and were, with great offensive spirit but also with deteriorating unit cohesion, busy liberating the bar at the Ritz Hotel.

It’s not hard to wish that Private Martinez had been granted more time—maybe, for this migrant farmworker and Dust Bowl refugee, time enough for a few days’ leave to explore Paris. Perhaps he would decide to visit Notre Dame, where it’s not hard to see him in your mind’s eye. He would enter the great church, remove his garrison cap, and cross himself at a holy water font. Then he would walk up the nave, the silence pressing on his ears, to stand for a moment at the transept crossing, where he would stop to smile with delight as he was bathed in brilliant, colored sunlight. This is the gift of the Rose Window to men and women of good faith.

Harvest Festivals past. And other things.

26 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by ag1970 in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized

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It’s sad–but no recriminations on my part–that the Harvest Festival was canceled this year. (There were cancellations during World War II, as well; the first Harvest Festival was in 1937). The Harvest Festival was an especially big deal when I was little, when my parents dropped me off and turned me loose for the day. The parade was the best part. My sisters, in matching mint-green outfits, appeared in at least one, in the pony cart with Obispo Telstar, one of Anne Westerman’s Welsh ponies, doing the work.

That’s my big sister in the center of the Jeanne Thwaites photograph, taken at Sid Spencer’s cattle ranch, now underneath Lopez Lake. Sid, on her Morgan–Roberta’s riding a Spencer Morgan mare–is on the left and her sister, Anne, on her pony, is on the right.

It was Sid Spencer who taught Sheila Varian how to work cattle. She was a good teacher. Sheila won the National Cow Horse Championship at the Cow Palace in 1961. She was the only woman competitor and her mare, Ronteza, was the only Arabian in a field of Quarter horses.Ronteza’s sire, Witez II, was a champion Polish Arab who plays a central role in a superb book, “The Perfect Horse,” about the American rescue of the Spanish Riding School’s Lipizzaner near the end of World War II.

My favorite Harvest Festival equestrian unit was the one that veered off the parade route and entered Ralph and Duane’s. The horses were thirsty.My most vivid memory was the Harvest Festival of 1966, I think. I was a ninth-grader at the big old Paulding campus, having just graduated from Branch in a class of ten boys and three girls. I went to a dance in Tanner Hall, where City Hall now stands.Tanner Hall had been a dance hall since it was built by Beder Wood in 1894.

But in 1966, at that particular Harvest Festival Dance, I saw the second-most epic girl fight of my life. It was terrifying when you come from a graduating class of ten boys and three girls.

These city girls are lethal, I thought.

The most-epic Young Woman fight–note the change in word choice, reflective of the times– I ever saw was one I broke up as a student teacher at Righetti. I barely survived. Boy fights end when they get tired. If I hadn’t intervened at Righetti, those two Young Women would STILL be fighting.I was lucky to survive.

Tanner, or Tanner’s, Hall was also where locals went to watch silent movies, enormously popular by 1912, when the ad appeared in the Herald-Recorder. And Young Women in 1918–we know this from contemporary teenager letters– couldn’t wait for the flu pandemic to end because they missed the movies. High school, not so much.

The Hall was also used for high-school graduations. The Hall, according to the Arroyo Grande Herald, “was filled to the point of suffocation” for the graduating class of 1898.All five of them. That’s the Class of ’98 in the photo.

Young Women wore white dresses to their graduations in those days. Fifty years after her graduation from Arroyo Grande Union High School, Ruth Paulding STILL fit into hers.

At the 1898 commencement, graduate Albert Ore delivered what the newspaper characterized as a stirring speech, “Spain and America!” about the then-current war still being played out in Cuba and the Philippines.

Ore gave that speech on June 30, 1898.The next day, Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, one of them from San Luis Obispo, followed the Buffalo Soldiers in to take the Spanish trenches atop Kettleman Hill in Cuba–misnamed “San Juan Hill.”

Albert Ore must have been thrilled. Look at what his speech did.