I didn’t learn until last night that my friend and AGHS classmate Keith Sanbonmatsu, AGHS ’70, has died after a motorcycle accident in  Simi Valley.

I knew it couldn’t have been ‘natural causes.’ Keith was, throughout his life, an incredible athlete—a swimmer in high school, a relentless walker even as he approached seventy.

He was bright, unfailingly positive, with a sense of humor that flew like an arrow toward anything that was absurd or nonsensical.

He also had an integrity that was bedrock to his personality. I think it was Keith and Vard Ikeda we once saw as referees at a third-grade Biddy Basketball game, when one of the kids’ coaches was doing a terrible-tempered Coach Bobby Knight routine, stopping just short of throwing the folding chairs.

The refs called a time-out and had a very, very quiet talk–we couldn’t hear a word–with the offending coach.  He was very, very quiet for the rest of the game.

I know that one source of Keith’s integrity and strength of character came from his maternal grandparents, Shig and Kimi Kobara. Like our other Japanese-American neighbors, they were interned, at the Gila River Camp, during World War II. But Shig was such a successful  farmer, and such a natural leader, that the FBI picked him up and took him away only days after Pearl Harbor.

That’s also why the War Relocation Authority, at the end of the war, made sure the Kobaras were the first to come home from Gila River. They had to sleep for several weeks in the interior hall of their home in the Lower Valley. They could hear gunshots in the night. As the other families began to come home, it was Shig and Kimi who gave them shelter until they could re-establish their own homes and farms. This proved to be a necessity because local hotels refused the Japanese-Americans shelter.

But in a story that was repeated over and over again in Arroyo Grande, farmer Joe Silveira looked after the Kobara family’s land and equipment during the war; I think it was Cyril Phelan who stayed from time to time in their home and let it be generally known that he was accompanied by a 30.06 rifle. That discouraged potential vandals.

Keith and his cousin, Dona Fuchiwaki, both related to Shig and Kimi, were an immense help to me in writing the World War II book. And it was Kimi, through an oral history interview, who provided me with this charming story, included in World War II Arroyo Grande, about what was truly a frontier couple:

…Arroyo Grande’s Ella Honeycutt, a longtime conservationist and a gifted agricultural historian, notes that by 1913, when Congress passed the first Alien Land Law, it was too late. Many local immigrant families had already acquired farms.  They tended to concentrate in the Lower Arroyo Grande Valley, where they grew vegetables, especially bush peas and pole peas, and when the latter were hit by disease in the mid 1920s, they began to grow newer crops like celery, lettuce and Chinese cabbage.The newcomers had hunted for legal loopholes and found them: they formed corporations and bought land through them, or through friendly white intermediaries, or they bought land in the names of their American-born children, whose citizenship would be inviolable until Executive Order 9066 proved otherwise. The birth of that new generation of Japanese-Americans—the Nisei—was proof incarnate that the people from Kyushu intended to stay in the Valley and make it their home. This trend was made possible by a single premeditated and humane opening in the anti-Japanese laws. They allowed those men already in American to settle here with their wives, to send home for them, or to send, as if they came from the Sears Catalogue, for “picture brides.”

     This is how Shigechika Kobara, one of the early immigrants to the Valley, and his wife Kimi began their lives together. Their fathers were neighbors in Kagoshima, and after a short negotiation and a longer courtship-by-letter, the match was made. Shigechika took a train north and was waiting on a Seattle dock, looking for his bride among the passengers on her ship as it began to berth. She was looking back.  “I remembered his brother, a naval officer,” Kimi recalled, “and I found a man who resembled him. I thought that this was the man I was about to marry. From the deck I fixed my eyes on him, even though I had never met him. That is why it is called a ‘picture bride.’”

Learning the story of this family has been a grace to my life. I’ve been graced, too, in knowing their grandchildren, my friends and classmates, and in teaching their great-grandchildren in my history classroom. There’s some comfort to be found there when you’ve lost a friend who can’t be replaced.

This is like a Rosetta Stone for local historians. To put this in context, 1938 was the year of the first Harvest Festival, indicative that the area was beginning to recover from the hit it had taken during the Great Depression, when San Luis Obispo County crop prices were halved between 1929 and 1933. And it’s in a kind of place of innocence, three years away from World War II, which will sweep up the little town, population 1,090 in the 1940 census.

A few examples among the advertisers in the newspaper ad, and this is just scratching the surface:

“J.J. Schnyder” was the kindly blacksmith who’d interrupt almost any paying job to fix a kid’s soapbox racer; he was responsible for funding the first swimming pool at Arroyo Grande High School because he wanted kids to have a place to play. When the Kobara family’s irrigation pump broke down in 1945, after their return from internment, Schyder insisted on fixing it immediately. It was Christmas Day.

“E.C. Loomis and Son:” The family would safeguard the land and equipment of their Japanese-American neighbors during the war; one son, Vard, had coached the Nisei Arroyo Grande Growers, a powerhouse baseball team, before the war. His catcher was Kaz Ikeda, whose image is included in the mural on the Mason Bar wall, and Kaz named one son “Vard.” E.C.’s grandson, John, was a Marine who fought at Pelileu and Okinawa who maintained a lifelong friendship with the other three of a kind of “Four Musketeers:” Don Gullickson, Gordon Bennett, and Haruo Hayashi.

“Horner’s Second Hand Store:” Ed Horner, an Eighth Air Force officer, had his B-17 shot down in 1944 and would be a POW until war’s end.

“Commercial Company:” This general-goods store stood on the site of today’s Mason Bar; it was later a grocery in the same building Mason Bar occupies. One of the owner’s sons, Elliott Whitlock, AGUHS ’40, won a Distinguished Flying Cross for bringing his B-17 safely home after it’d been set afire by flak over Berlin in March 1944.

“French’s Cafe:” On April 30, 1942, French’s prepared over 200 box lunches for local Japanese-Americans on the day buses took them to the Tulare Assembly Center. Only about half of our prewar neighbors would come back after the war.

“Bennett’s Grocery” (today, the Chic Salon): Two of Rusty and Muriel Bennett’s sons would serve–Jerry in the Army Air Forces, Gordon in the Navy.

“E.M. Morgan:” His Ford agency occupied today’s Doc Burnstein’s. Morgan’s son, Wayne, was killed December 7 on USS Arizona, along with his second-grade classmate, Navy bandsman Jack Scruggs.

“Aki’s Market,” next to the meat market, was owned by Akira Saruwatari, a member of perhaps the first Japanese immigrant family to settle in the Arroyo Grande Valley; they farmed land across from the Halcyon Store. He was interned at Gila River and would live his postwar life in Santa Barbara.

“Wilkinson’s Market:” Today’s meat market. When his Japanese customers came in to pay their bills just before internment, Leo Wilkinson would’t take their money. “You keep it; you’re going to need it,” he told them. This act of generosity was repaid, in full, after the war.

“Grande Theater,” in the building that today houses Posies in the Village, would’ve been where many local people, through newsreels, kept up with the war news. (A short distance up Branch was the Security Drug Company, today’s Village Grill, where moviegoers could order a milkshake or ice cream sundae after the movies.)

Earl Wood was the funeral director who would supervise the homecomings of many South County servicemen killed in Europe or the Pacific in the years after the war had ended; Louis Brown, for example, killed on Iwo Jima, came home in 1948.

In the program, the Arroyo Grande coach, Max Belko, was once a USC All-American. He kicked a field goal against Montana in 1935, a feat that wouldn’t be repeated for fifteen years, when Frank Gifford kicked the next Southern Cal field goal. Belko, a Marine lieutenant, was killed on Guam in 1944, but we still have a connection to him: He was Haruo Hayashi’s P.E. teacher. (There are many familiar surnames in the football program, but two, both Navy men during the war, offer a glimpse into postwar Arroyo Grande: Tony Marsalek was our longtime fire chief; Chuck Brooner was the pharmacist/owner of the Fair Oaka Pharmacy.)

The sports editor of the high school newspaper, the “Hi-Chatter,” was George Nakamura. As a twenty-year-old intelligence officer in China, he was awarded a Bronze Star for going behind Japanese lines to rescue a downed American flier and, after the war, a Congressional Gold Medal in recognition for his efforts, as an international businessman, to nurture the relationship between Japan and the United States.

I taught European history for many years at Arroyo Grande High School and so wound up leading summer trips for students so they could see some of the places we’d studied. The 2010 trip focused on Western Europe in World War II and during one of the stops we found ourselves in Bastogne, Belgium.

Bastogne, of course, won fame in the winter of 1944-45 when the town and the woods around it were occupied by the American 101st Airborne. Although surrounded completely by the Wehrmacht, the German army, the airborne troops refused to surrender. They were downright rude about it. “Nuts!” the airborne artillery officer in charge, Anthony McAuliffe, told the German delegation that offered humane surrender terms.

What does that mean? The German delegation asked.

It means “go to hell,” they were told.

That’s the sanitized version. I imagine the reply was closer to something the Wehrmacht could do to itself were it not anatomically and militarily impossible.

The 101st held on until they were relived–one of them, Art Youman, a member of the 506th Parachute Infantry’s famed Easy Company, was from Arroyo Grande. In holding on, during the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years, the paratroopers ruined the German timetable for their offensive, and the timetable was precious to the offensive’s success. The 101st’s stubbornness helped defeat the Germans, rich in steel but oil-poor, in what came to be called the Battle of the Bulge because they simply ran out of the fuel they needed to drive their panzers— their tanks and trucks and their mobile artillery.

None of that history mattered to the Bastogne lady giving our tour group the stinky eye in the creperie the day of our visit. All that Belgian-American amity built up during and since the war had dissipated in her eyes. Not only were we Americans–we laughed too loudly, chewed gum, were innocent of all languages other than a strange Southern California variant of Standard English, and we were (horrors!) a bunch of teenagers.

Despite the daggers the lady cast our way, I spotted one redeeming feature: in her lap was a small dog, secured by a chain leash. On my cell phone, I had a photograph of our Basset, Wilson, who passed away at thirteen earlier this year. “Wilson,” our neighbor said, “was a dog for the Ages.” Our neighbor was right.

This is why: I walked over to the lady and showed her the picture of Wilson. She grew so excited that she dropped her small dog.

“COLUMBO!” she shouted with delight. I could hear her dog’s nails askitter on the tile floor.

Her husband just then came out of the restroom. She gestured toward me—her little dog went with her, like laundry fluttering on a clothesline–and my cell phone. The husband looked.

And shouted “COLUMBO!” with delight.

We were all friends after that.

I have been convinced ever since of the singular ability that Basset hounds have to bring harmony to a disordered world. They should be the Official Dog of the United Nations.

Of course, the syndication of old Universal Studios detective shows played a part, as well. Despite your characteristically rumpled appearance, Lieutenant Columbo, I offer you a snappy 101st Airborne salute, sir.

And I offer for your viewing enjoyment another Basset hound photo. That’s Walter. We adopted him in March and drove so far south to meet him—way, way past San Diego—that his vaccination papers were in Spanish.

Wilson, Walter. What was the name of Columbo’s dog? I had to look it up: It was “Dog.” He was a dog for the ages, too.