Courtesy of Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth I, the Tilbury Speech, with the Armada approaching in August 1588, when her nation was threatened by enemies both foreign and domestic:
It’s hard to beat Elizabeth’s contemporary, Shakespeare, for leadership lessons. It’s no wonder that Olivier’s Henry V became an instrument of war in 1944. Agincourt was fought in 1415; the history play was written in 1599. Both events retained their immediacy as Britain and her allies fought just as bitterly—but with far more lethality— as Henry had on the Continent.
Here is the context: An exhausted, disease-ridden and seemingly doomed English army, vastly outnumbered, prepares to meet the cream of French chivalry in Normandy. These are the words Shakespeare puts in Henry’s mouth, and from what I’ve read about the young king—charismatic, implacable and immensely courageous—this is thin fiction indeed:
Abraham Lincoln’s devotion to Shakespeare was legendary. For a man whose formal education totaled about seven weeks, it was Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that formed the fundament of the president’s self-education and the templates for his rhetoric, which no president has matched.
What Henry V might’ve taught Lincoln was the importance of the bond between a leader and his people—Elizabeth clearly understood that bond— a lesson mythologized in this scene from Spielberg’s Lincoln.
The scene is mythic because it never happened. But it’s mythic, too, because myths tell the truth in a way we can understand.
It’s that bond that’s been broken and it’s truth that we’ve lost today: it’s been so besmirched, just as it was in Southern newspapers in December 1860, that recovering it—and with it, constitutional democracy—may require great sacrifice. It may inflict on us wounds beyond imagining. We are met again on a great battlefield where the enemy includes malignant men, so alien to us and to our traditions, and our countrymen, among them those whom we love the most.
This photograph was taken on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on the day Executive Order 9066 was executed and these friends were separated.
There’s a good chance they never saw each other again.
When the buses came to take our Arroyo Grande, California, neighbors away on April 30, 1942, many of them—less than half—came back. I grew up here, and I don’t recognize many of the surnames in the old high school yearbooks.
One woman told me this: On the day the buses came to the high school parking lot, her mother saw a line of high-school girls, some Japanese, some not, walking up Crown Hill, walking up toward their high school, holding hands and sobbing.
Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans went first to the Tulare County Fairgrounds, where they slept in livestock stalls, and then to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature was at or above 109 degrees for twenty of their first thirty days there.
I interviewed a remarkable woman named Jean a few weeks ago. She is 94, is briskly intelligent, articulate and gracious. Her father owned the meat market on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 census, and when his Japanese-American customers, farmers, came in to settle up before the buses came, he refused to take their money. “You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”
When they came home three years later, he extended them easy credit until they could begin to bring in crops again. Jean showed me her father’s business ledgers, so I have no reason to doubt it when she told me that every one of those farmers paid her father back. In full.
This is Jean as a high-school freshman. The doll, with her handmade kimono, came to Jean from Gila River in gratitude for her family’s friendship. For their loyalty.
At ninety-four, that loyalty runs in Jean as deeply as it ever has. One of her best high-school friends was named Yoshi. I can find a photo of the two together in second grade. I found a photo, too, of two second-grade boys in the Arroyo Grande Grammar School in 1926. They would die, about twelve minutes apart, on USS Arizona.
Yoshi’s brother became a war hero. He won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant when he went behind Japanese lines in China to rescue a downed American flier.
Yoshi’s brother brought that flier in and made him safe. Jean never saw Yoshi again and, because of April 30, 1942, there is a part of her that can never feel safe.
The war, at its outset for America, killed two of our sailors. It would claim many more local young men, killing them in Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal and on the beach at Tarawa. It would kill a young paratrooper in Holland during Operation Market Garden. It would kill, with a sniper’s bullet, a tank-destoyer crewman on the German frontier three days before his first child, a son, was born.
The war killed neither Jean nor Yoshi. They remain its casualties, nonetheless.
We had to stop the interview for a moment. In remembering her friend, Jean was fighting hard to stop the tears. One escaped. That moment taught me so much history, and with such intensity, that I almost couldn’t bear it.
I taught AP European History for nineteen years, and I quickly discovered a passion for social history, including women’s history. We learned about skimmingtons, Tudor marriage patterns, women’s work on farms and in factories. Then we got to La Belle Epoque–-Victorian Europe—which should have been my favorite chapter. It was Marion Cotillard’s favorite era, too, in Midnight in Paris, and I would’ve been hard-pressed to choose between Cotillard’s Paris and Owen Wilson’s Lost Generation version of the great city.
I have my romantic reveries about the film interrupted by the reality of its director, whose victim—much later, his wife— was his stepchild, and that unpleasant juxtaposition reminds me of the way I taught this chapter.
Cotillard and Wilson, Midnight in Paris
I didn’t lead with Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins or Nicole Kidman’s Satine from Moulin Rouge–although I did touch on Montmartre and on Hausmann’s re-imagining of Paris.
No. I started the chapter with Jack the Ripper. The Ripper murders, in 1888, were so revelatory of the larger society’s misogyny. The students were reminded of Nancy in Oliver Twist and they learned about Victorian widow’s reeds—for which Her Majesty, in her pining for Albert, deserves so much blame–when it was discovered that black taffeta, required for a year, when combined with gaslights, led to British and American middle-class sati, the tradition where, once upon a time, Hindu women threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres.
Victoria’s daughters mourn dutifully for their father.
The Rippers’ victims funerals were attended only by detectives. These women, some but not all of them prostitutes, were desperately poor, frequently drunk and utterly alone. (This was when the Industrial Revolution had advanced to the point where women, thanks to cooperation between male workers and male capitalists, had been forced out of factory work, where they’d always been integral. World War I would call them back, when munitions work would kill women workers in bushel-loads; shell-filling turned their skin bright yellow. So most of them died slow deaths, from chemical poisoning, rather than the instant deliverance conferred on other women by accidental explosions.)
The Ripper’s escapes were made possible by the rabbit-warren of alleyways and the density of London fog–T.S. Elliot described its greenish cast—that were so evocative of the density and the filth of the East End. Sunlight rarely penetrated the lives of these women; their deaths were captured in photographers’ flashes—theirs were among the first autopsy photos ever taken for police work. I could not show some of them to sixteen-year-olds.
So we began a chapter that was ostensibly my favorite (they learned how to speak Cockney, learned rhyming slang, learned about department stores and the demarcation lines between social classes within Parisian apartment buildings and in the process of lifeboat-filling on Titanic, learned, most of all, about Paris) with some of the most brutal material I’ve ever taught.
I wanted it that way. I taught, whenever I could, to my students’ emotions, because that’s the way I experience history—these people are very much alive and so very human to me—and I wanted them, as we began this chapter, to be outraged.
Most of all, I wanted my male students to understand the Ripper’s brutality, so reflective of the society’s brutality, to understand what it might have been like to be a woman then—and now, because we would visit this topic again before the year had ended–and if outrage wouldn’t take with them, with my young men, then discomfort would do.
I hope their discomfort hasn’t ended. The misogyny, revealed in so many presidential tweets, certainly hasn’t.
This was the Document-Based Essay that ended the chapter–a truncated version of the much more lengthy essays they’d encounter on the AP exam. I was a little proud of this one.
I always reasoned that I needed to retire once my own anger over World War I had passed. I think that sentiment extends logically to the status of Victorian/Edwardian women, as well.
On the morning of Friday, April 12, 1895, the proprietor of the Fashion Stables in San Luis Obispo discovered a body. It lay in a pool of blood—the back of the victim’s skull had been crushed—in a vacant lot behind The Palace, a “house of ill fame,” near the intersection of Monterey and Morro Streets.
An Arroyo Grande man, Frank Feliz, was nearby, inside Sinsheimer’s store—today’s Giuseppe’s—and after he’d followed the gathering crowd to the vacant lot he identified the victim as Ygnacio Villa, a neighbor of his. Villa’s family was prominent but had fallen on hard times. Ygnacio’s father had been the master of the 30,000-acre Corral de Piedra rancho between Pismo Beach and the Edna Valley. Ygnacio, by contrast, homesteaded 160 acres in Lopez Canyon.
The sheriff’s deputy on the scene, Joseph Eubanks, would have had bad memories of Lopez Canyon. Eubanks had assisted Constable Thomas Whitely in the arrest of Peter and P.J. Hemmi for the 1886 murder of Eugene Walker. The Hemmis and Walker had been involved in a land dispute in the canyon; Hemmi had reportedly broken down fences and poisoned livestock to force Walker off land he believed to be his. On March 31, fifteen-year-old P.J. shot Walker and his young wife, Nancy, who died several months later.
On the night of
the Hemmis’ arrest, Eubanks had to share Whitely’s humiliation when a mob, their
faces covered by handkerchiefs, locked the two inside a Branch Street restaurant’s
storeroom. The mob then stormed the little town jail and lynched the Hemmis
from the PCRR trestle over Arroyo Grande Creek. It was schoolchildren who first
discovered the hanging bodies the next day—April Fool’s Day.
After 1886,
Arroyo Grandeans remembered Lopez Canyon for its bounty, rather than its
violence.
A 1909 San Luis
Obispo Morning Tribune portrait of
the canyon was titled “Where Nature Has Been Lavish With Her Charms.” Local
papers were frequently filled with little stories about Arroyo Grandeans taking
extended hiking and camping trips or those who came back to town to brag about a
big catch of trout, to show off trophy mule deer bucks or, in one case, four
bird hunters who returned with “a wagon load” of pigeons.
But Deputy
Sheriff Eubanks wasn’t done with Lopez Canyon. Within days of Ygnacio Villa’s
murder, he would place Frank Feliz and two others under arrest. The killing was
the apparent culmination of a year-long feud between two factions in the canyon—one
led by Feliz and the other by a neighbor named Gerard Jasper.
There are
repeated stories about the feud throughout local newspapers in 1894-95. It began, as the Hemmi-Walker dispute had,
because of conflicting claims over land. Neither side comes off looking
innocent.
Gerard Jasper
was a contrary man. In 1869, when he’d lived in Cambria, a deputation of local
citizens was organized to warn him not
do bring his cattle into town during an outbreak of what was called “Texas
Fever.” He appears frequently in county civil suits in subsequent years, but
his contrariness took a new direction in Lopez Canyon: Jasper was accused, in
the fall of 1894, of setting a string of arson fires. Pasturage, a neighbor’s
wagon and twenty-five cords of wood went up in flames, and one of those fires
burned land claimed by Frank Feliz.
At his San Luis
Obispo trial, Jasper, according to one account, “offered a very vigorous
defense, and at times branched out into philosophical utterances, which His
Honor [Judge V.A. Gregg] was finally compelled to check.” Jasper’s character
witnesses, which included prominent local men like Fred Branch and David
Newsom, were more effective in his eventual acquittal.
After the trial, the Jasper-Feliz feud escalated in late 1894 and early 1895. Feliz was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. A comrade of Jasper’s, identified only as P. Morales, broke down a neighbor’s fence and smashed the windows and door of his little Lopez Canyon cabin. Morales had to be subdued by two deputies when he resisted arrest. Another friend of Jasper’s was a victim: he returned from town to find seven bullet holes in his front door and seven .44-caliber slugs embedded in the opposite wall.
It seemed that
Frank Feliz was itching to make Ygnacio Villa a victim, too. Villa had
testified against Feliz in the Jasper arson trial and, according to news
accounts, Feliz accused Villa of stealing one of his cows. “I will kill him the
first time I see him,” Feliz reportedly told Villa’s niece, Rafaela.
There was
evidence that Feliz had done just that, according to trial accounts that
dominated the news in August 1895.
Two prostitutes
from the Morro Street houses saw Feliz and some companions verbally confront
Villa the night he died (one of them was the first to find the body the next
morning, but she didn’t report it). Evidently all of the men, Villa included,
had spent much of Thursday night, April 11, drinking heavily in a nexus of saloons—one
of them, ironically, was called the Olive Branch–along Monterey Street. There
was physical evidence, as well: blood on Feliz’s overalls. On the witness
stand, Feliz maintained the blood had come from slaughtering a steer several
days before Villa’s murder.
The evidence
wasn’t enough to convince the jury. On August 11, 1895, they acquitted Feliz. A
few years later, Gerard Jasper died a natural death and the feud seemed to end
with him.
Ironically, the
crime that would finally doom Frank Feliz, in 1901, was the one he’d accused
Ygnacio Villa of committing: cattle theft. On April 7, 1901, the Morning Tribune exulted in Feliz’s
conviction and subsequent ten-year sentence to Folsom prison: time enough, the
article opined, for Feliz to reflect on a brutal murder “in an alley back of a
darkened street where evil flourished.”
I was browsing an early 1980s version of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the South County Historical Society journal, and I found this photograph of the Arroyo Grande Grammar School second grade in 1926-27.
The two boys who are circled are Wayne Morgan (top) and, in the front row, Jack Scruggs. Wayne’s father, Elmer, was a partner-owner of the Ford agency, today’s Doc Burnstein’s Ice Cream Parlor. Jack’s father had lost his farm earlier in the 1920s; at the time the class photo was taken, he worked with an oil prospecting company exploring the Huasna Valley.
That’s Wayne in the front, in a photo taken during this Ford Model A’s nationwide tour in 1931 (the car, fully restored, is owned by a Michigan car collector).
Nine years later, Wayne would join the Navy.
By the time Wayne Morgan graduated from eighth grade, Jack Scruggs’s family had moved to Long Beach. Both boys were musicians–Wayne played violin in Mr. Chapek’s orchestra (he was also an avid Boy Scout), but Jack would make music his career.
In 1940, Jack joined the Navy.
Jack is circled in this photo taken on November 22, 1941, during a Battle of the Bands competition among the ships of the Pacific Fleet. Jack was a trombonist in Navy Band 22–the band of USS Arizona.
So there’s a very good chance that the one-time classmates had a reunion on the great ship.
The tragic part of the story, of course, is that both were killed on Arizona. The concussion from a near-miss killed Jack just before 8 a.m. as the band was preparing to play the National Anthem during the colors ceremony. Wayne died about ten minutes later, when the ship blew up. So were all of Jack’s bandmates, killed at their action stations in the Number Two gun turret, just inboard from where the fatal bomb struck.
A few weeks before the attack, Jack had played “Happy Birthday” on the accordion for Rear Adm. Isaac Kidd’s wife–Kidd flew his flag on Arizona. All that was found of him after the attack was his Annapolis class ring, fused to a bulkhead.
Jack’s body was recovered; he came home to Long Beach. Wayne rests with his shipmates.
I knew both were from Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in 1940. I thought it extraordinary that two young men from such a small town wound up serving on the same ship. I had no idea that they were in the same grammar school class.
Sometimes even the smallest footnotes in history tell compelling stories.
The SLO Railroad Museum just emailed me to let me know of the upcoming funeral of a local man, 93, who was one of the last steam engine engineers. (Elizabeth and I took a ride on one to the Isle of Skye, and it was just like a Harry Potter movie.)
That set me a-pondering. Wasn’t there an ancestor who was a train engineer?
Yup. Our Great Uncle William “Willie” Keefe, born in the Pennsylvania oilfields to Thomas and Margaret Keefe. He was #1 in the batch of ten that would include our grandfather, at #9.
I found his photo, not a good one:
And I discovered that he was an engineer on the Great Northern Railway, whose route(s) ran thusly (it went out of business about 1970):
So there’s a chance some of Elizabeth’s Washington ancestors might’ve been passengers on Great Uncle Willie’s train.
There was no date of death for him on ancestry.com, so I did some hunting. After about 25 minutes, from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:*
So, sadly, he died on the job. He died on Monday, May 10, 1948–only three days before Bruce Keefe Gregory was born.
Then I looked up his train. It wasn’t diesel, not steam, but it was gorgeous.
*More Minnesota trivia: The 1862 Sioux uprising began in Meeker County, where Thomas and Margaret would later homestead and where most of the bunch o’ Keefes were born. I bring that up because John Rice, an Arroyo Grande settler whose house still stands in an old, old part of AG [photo below], was part of a regiment charged with ensuring order and witnessing the execution of 38 Sioux warriors in Mankato, Minnesota in December 1862.
So it goes. That is today’s report from The History Desk.
Great Uncle Willie’s home in Minneapolis–the little fellow with the yellow door.
There was a tragic accident in Connecticut this morning when a vintage B-17G, “Nine O Nine,” crashed. The plane was a frequent visitor to our area, to San Luis Obispo County. My son and I saw this beautiful airplane, restored to resemble the 1943 original, which flew 140 combat missions with the 91st Bomb Group without a fatality. The chief of the B-17’s ground crew won a Bronze Star because his airplane flew 126 consecutive missions without aborting for a mechanical failure.
That streak ran out this morning, when this ship, built in 1944, lost an engine and went down just short of the runway.
My son John with Nine O Nine, San Luis Obispo, 2012.
I wrote a book about aviators from my area— San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara Counties.
I learned that a bomber squadron was usually made up of twenty B-17s like “Nine O Nine.” On maximum effort days—in the spring of 1944—there would be eight hundred to a thousand of these airplanes, both B-17s and B-24s, going into the air in shifts all over East Anglia. They would rattle dishes and wedding crystal in the modest homes below as they assembled and headed east.
Typically, B-17 pilots were twenty-two years old. Gunners were teenagers. There were liars among them as young as fifteen. San Luis Obispo County lost eighteen of these young fliers during World War II, both in combat and in horrific training accidents from Texas to Montana to South Carolina.
Among the young men who made it overseas, one, from Arroyo Grande, died when his B-17 flew into the side of Mount Skiddaw in England’s Lake District. Another, from Morro Bay, was shattered in his co-pilot’s seat by a cannon round from a Focke-Wulf 190. A San Luis Obispo navigator died when a Messerschmitt 109 collided with his B-17. A Templeton B-24 gunner took off on a mission that was scrubbed because of weather; when his bomber crashed returning to base, his aircrew were the only Eighth Air Force casualties that day.
At least two local men served in “Nine O Nine’s” 91st Bomb Group.
Robert Abbey Dickson’s B-17, “Wheel and Deal,” was brought down by antiaircraft fire over the Ruhr Valley in 1943. Dickson bailed out and when he hit the ground, the first German he met was an angry farmer armed with a vintage World War I Mauser. The young American was rescued by two Luftwaffe soldiers who rode up on a motorcycle and sidecar and fetched him back to their 88-mm gun emplacement. It suddenly occurred to Dickson that this might be the gun that had brought his bomber down.
But it was lunchtime. The first thing Dickson’s captors did was to offer him a bowl of potato soup.
91st Bomb Group co-pilot Robert Abbey Dickson retired to Morro Bay.
Henry Hall of Cayucos was a twenty-year-old gunner on “Black Monday,” in March 1944, when Eighth Air Force undertook a “maximum” effort mission, with nearly a thousand heavies sent into the air. At this point in the war, the B-17s and B-24s weren’t just strategic weapons. They were bait, intended to bring up German fighters so state-of-the-art American fighters, like the P-51, could begin to winnow the young Germans down. But the winnowing that Hall saw involved Americans. Hall watched, horrified, as an Me-109’s attack on a nearby B-17 took effect. The plane’s right-wing landing gear dropped lazily. Then it began to go in, and on its way down, it clipped two more B-17s and sent them in, as well. That mission turned out to be fruitless: the target was obscured and Hall’s ship dropped its bombload on a “target of opportunity,” a German village—one, Hall thought, that had done little harm to any Americans— on its way home. It was a terrible day for Hall’s aircrew.
What kept them together, I learned, and kept them flying in unpressurized cabins where hypoxia and frostbite were common, when they endured sudden, terrifying attacks from German fighters so fast that no gunner could track them—those fighters, too, were flown by twenty-two year-olds—and when flak sliced through wings, fuselage, air hoses and human beings, was their devotion to each other.
Waist gunners, friends.
You could not let your friends down.
I learned, too, that among their best friends were the British schoolchildren who lined airfield fences along the tarmac at the start of every mission.
They were there to wave goodbye to their Americans, who were loud and boisterous, friendly and incredibly generous, with endless supplies of Hershey bars, because these young men had grown up in the Depression, and they knew what the British children, after their six years of war, knew. They knew what deprivation was like.
So those children were there for their Yanks.
The 96th Bomb Group’s Sgt. George Crist of San Diego colors Easter Eggs with British children, 1945.
Usually when I’m under the Brisco Road underpass, I reflect nervously on the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, when part of the Nimitz Freeway pancaked. Or, as you wish, tortilla’d.
[We felt that quake in Los Osos. I was feeding John in his high chair and noticed, suddenly, that I had to move the spoon to track his mouth, because he was swaying. I snatched him up and dragged him, mostly but not completely out of the high chair, into the safety of the hallway. John was unfazed. The boy likes to eat.]
Thank goodness, I did not think about the earthquake today. What I thought about instead was the vision just beyond my windshield.
It was a silver 2019 Corvette that looked just like the one above. It was beautiful and it sounded glorious, too. The engine purred and then, when the driver accelerated, it growled.
There was a time in my very young life when I wanted to grow up to be a 1963 Corvette Stingray.
The Corvette I saw today looked so futuristic I would not have been at all surprised to see George or Jane Jetson behind the wheel.
Amber Derbidge and I once took kids to Europe and one of our stops was in Monaco, where the biggest yacht in the basin was owned by a man in Ladies’ Underwear. That was his business, to clarify. Then we passed one of the biggest Ferrari dealerships in Europe, but there were so many Ferraris on display that they were kind of dull, like Ford Escorts in the Mullahey lot.
But if you see one good thing, say, Princess Grace’s grave, which was strewn with rose petals, or a shooting star Elizabeth and I once saw in an empty sky over Utah—or a silver Corvette you weren’t at all prepared to see—that’s a singular beauty. Oh, and as much as I love sports cars, there’s no beauty like Grace Kelly’s. None.
I grew up in Arroyo Grande, California, but we didn’t get here–we relocated from a tough oil town, Taft–until 1955, and not 1953, as I’d earlier thought. I always felt a little ashamed since I grew up with friends whose families had been here since the 1840s or the 1880s. Some of my best friends have been, and are, and always will be, Japanese-Americans, and their families came here fifty years before mine did.
So when I write about the history of this town, going on five books now, I sometimes feel like an impostor, a poser. But, as I’ve written in one of those books, when we moved out to Huasna Road, east of town, in 1957, I recognized instantly, as a five-year-old, that this was Home.
And since most of my childhood was spent in delightful anarchy, in creekbeds and foothills and sometimes in and around abandoned houses, some of them adobe and some of them haunted, I discovered that I was an incurable explorer. So if not quite a native and nowhere near a Founding Family, I was, at least, a learner, and in learning the Arroyo Grande Valley I became entranced. It’s a love affair that began when I was five, and and here we are sixty-two years later.
This place gets under your skin. After many, many years away—twenty-six—I was so happy to come home again in 1996 and, best of all, to come home to teach young people. My parents are buried here, my schools still stand here and so do my memories. My friends, both living and dead, are never quite so much alive as they are in my imagination.
I am a lucky man to love a place so much.
I am thinking through a presentation to local students about the town’s history, and I tend to think vividly and visually in storyboards, so PowerPoint, as my high-school students would confirm, is the way I think history through.
So this is a very selective and in-the-rough history of Branch Street, Arroyo Grande, California, in my home town.
Usually when I’m under the Brisco Road underpass, I reflect nervously on the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, when part of the Nimitz Freeway pancaked. Or, as you wish, tortilla’d.
A Work in Progress 