My Great Aunt Jane, or Jennie, or Mildred Jane Wilson, a name that has persisted, unfortunately ever since a collateral Gregory married the great man’s aunt, Mildred Washington. Even my Aunt Mildred Gregory preferred “Aunt Bill.” That’s Aunt Bill circa 1935.
But, you must admit, Great Aunt Jane, or Jennie, was an enchanting little girl. She was born in Licking, Missouri, in 1884 and died in Yellowstone, Montana, in 1978.
So that’s Jennie, then Jennie with my grandmother Dora (a year older), then Jennie with her husband, Mr. Kofahl, and daughter, Sally Ruth, (who died in Taft, where there are entire regiments of Kofahls.)
So that’s Jennie, then Jennie with my grandmother Dora (a year older), then Jennie with her husband, Mr. Kofahl, and daughter, Sally Ruth, (who died in Taft, where there are entire regiments of Kofahls.)
What disturbs me a little is that Jennie, such a lovely little girl, looks more and more like Rasputin.
She did not get that from her mother—my great-grandmother, Sallie McBride Wilson. That’s Sallie, on the right, her sister on the left and my great-grandfather, Taylor Wilson, in the center. Sallie has such a sweet face; she died young and left Taylor the heartbreak he never got over. This photo, a tintype, was in a Texas County, Missouri root cellar for thirty-five years before it was restored to my father.
Then, good grief, I realized where Jennie’s expression came from. It wasn’t Rasputin. It was my Confederate ancestor, Gen. James McBride, for whom I am named. He was Jennie’s grandfather.
That’s the General’s look, which I always ascribed to chronic constipation.
However, Jennie evidently was a wonderful mother to Sally Ruth, and her brother, Jim Ed Wilson, was the police chief of Shafter.
Missourians like two names.
Three more Wilson brothers worked in the Taft oilfields–the top three in the photo. One of them, I think Cal, grew so frustrated with the camp cook that he threw him into a boiler. We have never ascertained whether it was lit. He must’ve been crabby, like the General.
Cal’s nephew, Robert Wilson Gregory, was stationed at Gardner Field in Taft—Chuck Yeager trained there—discovered that not only was the food terrible, but that the head cook was embezzling mess funds and serving substandard farm, when Army food was already awful, while pocketing the Army’s money. Busting the cook got Dad into Officers’ Candidate School.
Gordon Bennett, Arroyo Grande Union High School ’44, was one of my students’ favorite guest speakers when I taught U.S. History at AGHS. He was a gifted storyteller with a sense of humor as dry as vermouth. My students and I loved hearing his stories about growing up in Arroyo Grande during the Depression and World War II.
World War II was waiting for them when both Gordon and his cousin, John Loomis, joined the service. The two found themselves not that far apart during the Battle of Okinawa, which had begun April 1, 1945. John was onshore with the 1st Marine Division, Gordon offshore serving as a sailor on the fleet oiler Escambia (named after a river in Florida).
Gordon and his shipmates serviced escort carriers (small carriers that carried around thirty planes, like Emerald Bay (above), during the height of the kamikaze attacks off Okinawa. Thirty-four Navy vessels were sunk and over 280 damaged during the last, desperate battle of the war. The little carriers that were Escambia’s responsibility escaped and launched a series of airstrikes on the island. Both Escambia and Emerald Bay were based at Ulithi, where Gordon, according to legend, experimented in the distillation of medicinal beverages.
Above: The Ulithi anchorage; Gordon in high school; USS Escambia’s logo, designed by a Disney artist.
Which, given the ferocity of the kamikaze attacks, I might’ve sipped. The carrier Bunker Hill after once such attack, below.
The sailors on the fleet oilers were tough men. Fueling at sea was smelly, dirty, and very dangerous. The two photos show a fueling operation between Escambia and the fleet carrier Ticonderoga in July 1945. The way Escambia sailors return to their ship, in that breeches buoy, does not seem safe to me, but my guess is that Gordon would have had his turn in the same kind of conditions.
Sadly, Escambia (below, about 1950) would be used by, of all institutions, the United States Army during the Vietnam War as an auxiliary power plant. Transferred to the Vietnamese government in 1971, Gordon’t ship was scrapped.
Happily, Gordon came home safe. So did his cousin, John. They had many years of storytelling ahead of them. Gordon, in my classroom, fueled the imaginations of the young people who were high-school juniors in 2003, just as Gordon had been in 1943.
A father and daughter, “illegals,” drowned in the Rio Grande, 2019.
If you know history—worse, if you teach it, which steers you into confrontations you don’t want—your tolerance for ignorance dissipates. This quote is a favorite of ignorant people.
Of course your ancestors came here the “right way,” especially if they came between 1880 and 1914. We had another ten years before we would subdue the first immigrants—the Lakota people—at Wounded Knee, and we still had a vast continent to fill once we’d accomplished the extermination, or near-exterminations, that we’d always glorified, from Puritan sermons to the the pronouncements of the first governor of California to breathless newspaper dispatches from the Black Hills, and its gold deposits, in the 1870s.
So your ancestors—Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, Bohemians. Irish and the largest immirant group, Germans–were needed to fill the empty space in this map. Their influence remains: In Texas, there are many little towns where “Texas German,” is the second language. Missouri River towns have names like Versailles, Vichy, Hermann. In my hometown, Arroyo Grande, Califronia, what is now Cherry Avenue was dense with Bohemian families.
We were starved for people. Unless, of course, to use a few examples, you were Chinese (denied with the Exclusion Act), Japanese (The “Gentleman’s Agreement”) or Filipino (citizens and then, on a Congressional whim, not citizens. Filipinas were not allowed to come to America.)
“Illegal Aliens” are driven by the same desires that motivated Italians, Russian Jews or the Irish: poverty, persecution, starvation. But not even the “coffin ships” that claimed so many Irish immigrants can compare to the agonizing deaths in our Desert Southwest today.
The great irony is that we are as starved for people now as we were in 1880. The vastness now is not calculated in land, but in the passing of Americans from my generation—the so-called” Boomers”—who, liked the migrants, leave nothing behind when they die: the American birth rate in 2023 was half that of 1957, in the midst of the Baby Boom. And the Boomers are retiring—or dying—so it’s we account who for the gap today, generational rather than geographical, that so closely resembles the emptiness between the Mississippi and the Pacific in 1880.
But these people are not welcomed, ostensibly because they came here the “wrong way.” They came here because death squads killed friends or family members, because climate change has reduced fields of corn to crisp rows resembling papyrus, because there are no jobs for young people in bifurcated economies marked by the vast divide between landowning elites and landless farmworkers.
What would you do in the same circumstances? Illuminate me.
This is a first draft–most of it borrowed from other writing of mine–of remarks I’m to give for the History Center of San Luis Obispo on October 19 at the beautiful octagonal barn just south of town.
I began my formal education in a two-room schoolhouse in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley that had been built in 1888. Some of our desks still had inkwells. A two-cubicle outhouse was our restroom. One day a mountain lion came down from the hill above the schoolhouse and sniffed around our baseball field.
Just over the hill was a little family cemetery that contained the graves of the Branch family, rancheros and founders of Arroyo Grande. Mr. Branch, who died in 1874, is buried beside three daughters, all taken by smallpox in the summer of 1862. And nearby are the graves of a father and son, suspected killers, lynched from a railroad trestle over the creek in 1886.
I had no choice but to become a history teacher. Later, I had the chance to write books about the history—local history—that I love so much.
Me, teaching, I guess, at Mission Prep. It’s probably Civil War-era, either Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or Little Round Top on July 2 at Gettysburg.
The lynch mob’s victims, a father and his fifteen-year-old son, led to a book about San Luis Obispo County outlaws.
Finding a Marine’s tombstone—he grew up in Corbett Canyon and died on Iwo Jima three days short of his twenty-first birthday—led to a book about World War II.
My father was Madonna Construction’s comptroller. He took my brother Bruce and me on an airplane with him once—I was six—while he bid a job in Marysville. The plane was Madonna’s twin-engined Aerocommander; the pilot was Earl Thomson, co- founder of the county airport. I was enthralled by that trip. Sixty years later, it led to a book about Central Coast aviators in World War II.
Alex Madonna, Gov. “Pat” Brown, and the Aerocommander.
My father liked to tell family stories. Dad and Dan Krieger were the best storytellers I have ever known, and that is how I taught history for thirty years.
My name, James Douglass, is from Dad’s family. James comes from my great-great grandfather, an undistinguished Confederate brigadier general. Douglass comes from his son, a young staff officer who had an unfortunate encounter with a Union artillery shell in Arkansas in 1862. Dad’s stories about his family, influding these two, would lead to my writing a book about the Civil War and the sixty veterans buried in Arroyo Grande’s cemetery. To my distinct pleasure, they are all Yankees.
I do not want to cause a political ruckus here, but I am a Lincoln man.
Gen. James H. McBride, for whom I am named.
History can touch us in what seem to be the most casual of ways.
Last week I spent a large sum of cash at the Arroyo Grande Meat Co. on Branch Street, and it was money well spent: Five grass-fed Spencer steaks for my son John’s birthday.
While I waited for the steaks to be wrapped, I remembered that
–This has been a meat market since 1897.
–It, and the storefronts alongside it, were built with brick quarried from Tally Ho Creek clay.
–The brick was fired in a lot owned by Pete Olohan, Saloonist Extraordinaire, and the building named for him includes today’s Klondike Pizza.
–Two of the early meat market partners were E.C. Loomis, he of the feed store, now empty, at the base of Crown Hill, and Mathias Swall, who also built the bank that is now Lightning Joe’s.
–Mr. and Mrs. Swall lived in the home that is now the Murphy Law Firm on Branch Street. They both loved music and played instruments and resolved to teach their children to play instruments, as well. There were twelve little Swalls. Noisiest house in town.
–E.C. Loomis’s sons, including Vard, a onetime Stanford pitcher who coached a local Nisei team, safeguarded the farms and farm equipment of their Japanese American customers during internment, among many local families who did so out of simple admiration for their neighbors, their values and for their devotion to the little town they shared.
–That is how Vard Ikeda got his name, and those families’ friendship is in part why two generations of Ikedas have been so incredibly important to local youth sports.
–Shortly before they were “evacuated” to internment camps in 1942, Japanese farmers came into the meat market to settle their bills. Paul Wilkinson, then the owner, refused to take their money. These were his friends.
“You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”
After the war, they paid Mr. Wilkinson back. In full.
I grew up with schoolmates whose grandparents came from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese home island. Some of my friends’ families came from the Azores and some from Luzon, in the Philippines.
When I was a little boy, the whistling of braceros—baroque and beautiful—woke me up summer mornings as they went down to the fields next to us for work.
I learned my first Spanish from them. Years later, one of my university Spanish professors took me aside to offer me one of the greatest compliments of my life::
“Mr. Gregory, you have a distinct Mexican accent.”
My first sushi was on a special Japanese holiday—I think it was Labor Day—at Ben Dohi’s house. Ben was married to a Yamaguchi sister, and Dr. Jim Yamaguchi came down with his wife and baby girl from the Bay area to visit. I got to hold Jim Yamaguchi’s daughter. Her name was Kristi. She would grow up to be an Olympic gold medalist. I did not drop her.
Kristi Yamaguchi, 1992 Winter Olympics
Mary Gularte took pity on me one cold morning when the schoolbus was late. She took me inside her kitchen and kept an eye out for the bus while setting a dish of sopa—Portuguese stew—on the kitchen table in front of me. I inhaled it. I did not have to eat the rest of the day.
My friends included families with surnames like Pasion and Domingo and sometimes they’d bring back sugarcane from the Philippines and gift me with a stalk to gnaw on. It was wonderful, but I later discovered lumpias, the divine Filipino egg roll, at the Arroyo Grande Harvest Festival. It gave me the greatest pleasure to watch Filipino mothers, most of them, once upon a time, war brides, watch me as I took my first bite of lumpia. My reaction must have been transparent. They beamed.
These were the helping hands that built our county. They helped me in my growing up. These people filled me with their history, by which I mean our history, and they remind me that history is always around us, sometimes just beyond the reach of our understanding. I write about history because I owe the past so much. My writing is the least, and it’s the very least, that I can do for my friends, including those I never had the chance to meet.
My grandfather, Ozark Plateau farmer John Smith Gregory (1862-1933) died eighteen years before I was born. He was the sweetest waltzer in Texas County, Missouri; I wish he’d lived long enough to teach me how to dance.
Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee review at Spithead, 26 June 1897. BHC0645
The best of times, the worst of times. Nineteen years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain’s vaunted Navy was mauled by the German High Seas Fleet at the 1916 Battle of Jutland. At right is the British battle cruiser Invincible. She wasn’t.
And so, as of last night, neither are we. Neither am I. In my self-doubt—was everything I taught about America for over thirty years a lie?—I needed to turn to a constitutional monarchy to tamp down, if only in shallow ground, my fear for the loss of our republic. I turned, specifically, the this Shelley poem.
Shelley’s poem reminds me a bit of Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Both men beat the hell out of you, only to let you off the hook with the faintest of hope at the ends of their respective literary landmarks. Edwards—after some of his Puritan parishioners had fainted in the pews out of abject terror—held up the reputation of a loving God. Shelley’s more nebulous, with his “glorious Phantom.” It’s a thinner sliver of hope than God is.
Shelley was a Romantic, but he was in this case an accurate political analyst. George III, having lost America, was dotty, slipping in and out of bouts with insanity that were made worse by treatments that neither a king nor a commoner deserved. His pinch-hitter was the Prince Regent, George IV on Papa’s death, who lacked morals and wisdom and common decency. With the locomotive being invented in his time, George IV was definitely a train wreck. He was, a shipwreck, too.
Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, 1819. Inspired by a real-life shipwreck.
And finally, way down here in the essay, is my thesis: England was saved, after 1819, by a stunning series of reforms that transformed a plutocracy into something approaching democracy and likewise transformed the kind of soulless capitalism, evoked so passionately by Dickens, into an economy that—finally and reluctantly—recognized the working class as human beings.
It was not a straight path. The president-elect has theatened to turn the military loose on protestors. The British government did just that. In Manchester’s St. Peter’s Square in 1819, British cavalry charged into a crowd of working-class protesters who had the audacity to demandy parity in Parliament for urban boroughs vs. rural boroughs, dominated by the immense power of the landed aristocracy. About a dozen were killed; 400 were injured.
Peterloo.
England would continue with the kind of xenophobia that marks successful modern American politics.
Theirs was deadly, too: A million Irish died in their Famine while grain harvested in Ireland was sent to England; the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 India would be crowned by lashing suspected ringleaders to the muzzles of cannons, which were then fired. And, of course, Britain would join in the plunder of Africa, the European competition there tempered—so fierce that it threatened war among White people on the Continent— finally, by the Congress of Berlin in 1885. In the interlude, Britain used Indian poppies to win over the Chinese, who became addicted to opium, and then fought two wars to force their trade conditions on the devastated nation. It was the Art of the Deal.
A British East India Company warship, right background, destroying Chinese junks in the First Opium War.
So Britain struggled and inflicted great cruelty. But along the way, as the power of the monarchy began to ebb and pass to Parliament (It’s notable that Article One in our Constitution is devoted to Congress). For Victorian England, this meant a kind of golden age of power and prosperity—named for a queen who thought it unwise Royal Navy sailors to grow beards–in which there was painful, incremental, but important progress.
I’m not suggesting that we are entering a similar age of reform. We are in for hard times.
Trump, born at the onset of the Boomer Generation, is the final prank we—pampered and indulged as children— have to play on the generations after us, who deserve so much better from us.
The next four years will be especially hard on women, as they were on British women in Victoria’s time, in the age of the Ripper murders, of women being banished from the industrial workforce to become the Ripper’s prey, of suffragists being force-fed in prison, a harrowing version of rape, of Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself in front of a horse at The Derby to show how ready women were to sacrifice themselves for the right to vote, of middle-class widows, required to wear, in mourning, black crepe—they went up in flames in an age when gas jets lit up middle-class homes—and of young women shell-fillers in World War I factories, called “canaries” because of the TNT poisoning that turned their skin bright yellow. TNT would sterilize some and kill others.
Women will suffer, now as they did in Victorian (and Edwardian) England. I do not know where American women are headed. I only know that I want to be there with them. I want to be there, too, with Dreamers, with union workers, with journalists, with teachers, with clergy.
Mary Travers, gone 15 years now, sings here, more cogently and more brilliantly, with Woody Guthrie’s lyrics, everything that I mean to say here.
U.S. Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen was murdered at what was then Fort Hood, Texas, in April 2020. She was twenty years old. The details are horrific. She was beaten to death with a hammer and her body was dismembered and buried along the Leon River. The prime suspect, Aaron Robinson—who may have been sexually harassing Guillen—was arrested for the murder, He escaped but shot himself dead with a handgun before he could be re-arrested.
The crime was so horrific that it became integrated into the “Me Too” movement, which is no less important now than it was, a short but forgotten memory ago, for men like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.
Coincidentally, then-President Trump met with Guillen’s mother at the White House. Here is the photo op.
Trump promised to pay for Vanessa’s funeral expenses.
Today, multiple sources, including The Atlantic, whose credibility includes the fact that it’s been a journal of literature, culture and politics since 1857, are reporting that Trump reneged on that promise.
It gets worse.
What the former president balked at was the bill for the soldier’s funeral.
“$60,000? For a fucking Mexican?”
It’s a quote in keeping with his previous comments on American soldiers: He called the Marines at Belleau Wood “losers.” In 1918, they assaulted German machine-gun nests at Belleau Wood–the Germans remembered that the Yanks were firing from the hip and smoking cigarettes as they advanced–and overran them.
These are modern-day Camp Lejeune Marines re-enacting that assault. This is hard to watch, but the Marine Spirit is evinced in the weapons of some of the assault troops: They are armed with short-barreled pump-action shotguns, which means that they intended to fire their weapons into the faces of the German machine-gunners.
At Arlington, he confessed that he didn’t understnd the place. “What as in it for them?”
He objected to the presence of a disabled veteran at a public ceremony: “Nobody wants to see that!”
In a fundamental—eighth grade—misunderstanding of the Constitution, he referred to military commanders as “my generals.”
And Mexicans? “Murderers and rapists,” from the day he rode down that escalator.
History teaches us that there is nothing new, not even the most venal. This was a stunning moment at the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, when Sen. McCarthy accused the United States Army of being riddled with communists and “fellow travelers,” including a young soldier. The chief counsel for the Army, Joseph Welch, finally confronted the powerful McCarthy:
Thankfully, McCarthy soon died. His influence hasn’t. His counsel, Roy Cohn, later became one of Donald J. Trump’s most important mentors.
What passes for Trump’s faith comes from the otherwise benign Norman Vincent Peale, whose book The Power of Positive Thinking, has been fused with the thinking of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: If you believe in anything strongly enough, it becomes the truth.
Trump borrowed another concept from Joe McCarthy: The senator began his anti-communist crusade in 1950 with a West Virginia speech entitled “The Enemy Within.”
I keep thinking, because I am a history teacher who loves his country, that I have outgrown my capacity at outrage for those who don’t. Every time i see a pickup truck with an American flag and a Trump flag, I see a contradiction. It’s a conclusion based in fact: On January 6, 2020, the Capitol rioters tore down an American flag and replaced it with a “Trump 2020” flag.
The two flags don’t belong together. They are mutually contradictory.
I have one more thing to say, because it’s important to me.
“A fuckingMexican?” So was this soldier, Jose Mendoza Lopez, born in Mexico.
Here is this man’s Medal of Honor citation:
Sergeant Jose M. Lopez (then Private First Class), 23rd Infantry, near Krinkelt, Belgium, on December 17, 1944, on his own initiative, he carried his heavy machine gun from Company K’s right flank to its left, in order to protect that flank, which was in danger of being overrun by advancing enemy infantry supported by tanks.
Occupying a shallow hole offering no protection above the waist, he cut down a group of 10 Germans. Ignoring enemy fire from an advancing tank, he held his position and cut down 25 more enemy infantry attempting to turn his flank. Glancing to his right, he saw a large number of infantry swarming in from the front. Although dazed and shaken from enemy artillery fire which had crashed into the ground only a few yards away, he realized that his position soon would be outflanked.
Again, alone, he carried his machine gun to a position to the right rear of the sector; enemy tanks and infantry were forcing a withdrawal. Blown over backwards by the concussion of enemy fire, he immediately reset his gun and continued his fire. Singlehanded he held off the German horde until he was satisfied his company had effected its retirement. Again he loaded his gun on his back and in a hail of small-arms fire he ran to a point where a few of his comrades were attempting to set up another defense against the onrushing enemy.
He fired from this position until his ammunition was exhausted. Still carrying his gun, he fell back with his small group to Krinkelt. Sgt. Lopez’s gallantry and intrepidity, on seemingly suicidal missions in which he killed at least 100 of the enemy, were almost solely responsible for allowing Company K to avoid being enveloped, to withdraw successfully, and to give other forces coming up in support time to build a line which repelled the enemy drive.
Lopez became a Texan. Vanessa Guillen was Houston-raised. We may not have all that much power over our lives, but we do have the power to choose those whom we admire, those whom we aspire to be.
This is a first draft–most of it borrowed from other writing of mine–of remarks I’m to give for the History Center of San Luis Obispo on October 19 at the beautiful octagonal barn just south of town.
I began my formal education in a two-room schoolhouse in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley that had been built in 1888. Some of our desks still had inkwells. A two-cubicle outhouse was our restroom. One day a mountain lion came down from the hill above the schoolhouse and sniffed around our baseball field.
Just over the hill was a little family cemetery that contained the graves of the Branch family, rancheros and founders of Arroyo Grande. Mr. Branch, who died in 1874, is buried beside three daughters, all taken by smallpox in the summer of 1862. And nearby are the graves of a father and son, suspected killers, lynched from a railroad trestle over the creek in 1886.
I had no choice but to become a history teacher. Later, I had the chance to write books about the history—local history—that I love so much.
Me, teaching, I guess, at Mission Prep. It’s probably Civil War-era, either Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or Little Round Top on July 2 at Gettysburg.
The lynch mob’s victims, a father and his fifteen-year-old son, led to a book about San Luis Obispo County outlaws.
Finding a Marine’s tombstone—he grew up in Corbett Canyon and died on Iwo Jima three days short of his twenty-first birthday—led to a book about World War II.
My father was Madonna Construction’s comptroller. He took my brother Bruce and me on an airplane with him once—I was six—while he bid a job in Marysville. The plane was Madonna’s twin-engined Aerocommander; the pilot was Earl Thomson, co- founder of the county airport. I was enthralled by that trip. Sixty years later, it led to a book about Central Coast aviators in World War II.
Alex Madonna, Gov. “Pat” Brown, and the Aerocommander.
My father liked to tell family stories. Dad and Dan Krieger were the best storytellers I have ever known, and that is how I taught history for thirty years.
My name, James Douglass, is from Dad’s family. James comes from my great-great grandfather, an undistinguished Confederate brigadier general. Douglass comes from his son, a young staff officer who had an unfortunate encounter with a Union artillery shell in Arkansas in 1862. Dad’s stories about his family, influding these two, would lead to my writing a book about the Civil War and the sixty veterans buried in Arroyo Grande’s cemetery. To my distinct pleasure, they are all Yankees.
I do not want to cause a political ruckus here, but I am a Lincoln man.
Gen. James H. McBride, for whom I am named.
History can touch us in what seem to be the most casual of ways.
Last week I spent a large sum of cash at the Arroyo Grande Meat Co. on Branch Street, and it was money well spent: Five grass-fed Spencer steaks for my son John’s birthday.
While I waited for the steaks to be wrapped, I remembered that
–This has been a meat market since 1897.
–It, and the storefronts alongside it, were built with brick quarried from Tally Ho Creek clay.
–The brick was fired in a lot owned by Pete Olohan, Saloonist Extraordinaire, and the building named for him includes today’s Klondike Pizza.
–Two of the early meat market partners were E.C. Loomis, he of the feed store, now empty, at the base of Crown Hill, and Mathias Swall, who also built the bank that is now Lightning Joe’s.
–Mr. and Mrs. Swall lived in the home that is now the Murphy Law Firm on Branch Street. They both loved music and played instruments and resolved to teach their children to play instruments, as well. There were twelve little Swalls. Noisiest house in town.
–E.C. Loomis’s sons, including Vard, a onetime Stanford pitcher who coached a local Nisei team, safeguarded the farms and farm equipment of their Japanese American customers during internment, among many local families who did so out of simple admiration for their neighbors, their values and for their devotion to the little town they shared.
–That is how Vard Ikeda got his name, and those families’ friendship is in part why two generations of Ikedas have been so incredibly important to local youth sports.
–Shortly before they were “evacuated” to internment camps in 1942, Japanese farmers came into the meat market to settle their bills. Paul Wilkinson, then the owner, refused to take their money. These were his friends.
“You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”
After the war, they paid Mr. Wilkinson back. In full.
I grew up with schoolmates whose grandparents came from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese home island. Some of my friends’ families came from the Azores and some from Luzon, in the Philippines.
When I was a little boy, the whistling of braceros—baroque and beautiful—woke me up summer mornings as they went down to the fields next to us for work.
I learned my first Spanish from them. Years later, one of my university Spanish professors took me aside to offer me one of the greatest compliments of my life::
“Mr. Gregory, you have a distinct Mexican accent.”
My first sushi was on a special Japanese holiday—I think it was Labor Day—at Ben Dohi’s house. Ben was married to a Yamaguchi sister, and Dr. Jim Yamaguchi came down with his wife and baby girl from the Bay area to visit. I got to hold Jim Yamaguchi’s daughter. Her name was Kristi. She would grow up to be an Olympic gold medalist. I did not drop her.
Kristi Yamaguchi, 1992 Winter Olympics
Mary Gularte took pity on me one cold morning when the schoolbus was late. She took me inside her kitchen and kept an eye out for the bus while setting a dish of sopa—Portuguese stew—on the kitchen table in front of me. I inhaled it. I did not have to eat the rest of the day.
My friends included families with surnames like Pasion and Domingo and sometimes they’d bring back sugarcane from the Philippines and gift me with a stalk to gnaw on. It was wonderful, but I later discovered lumpias, the divine Filipino egg roll, at the Arroyo Grande Harvest Festival. It gave me the greatest pleasure to watch Filipino mothers, most of them, once upon a time, war brides, watch me as I took my first bite of lumpia. My reaction must have been transparent. They beamed.
These were the helping hands that built our county. They helped me in my growing up. These people filled me with their history, by which I mean our history, and they remind me that history is always around us, sometimes just beyond the reach of our understanding. I write about history because I owe the past so much. My writing is the least, and it’s the very least, that I can do for my friends, including those I never had the chance to meet.
My grandfather, Ozark Plateau farmer John Smith Gregory (1862-1933) died eighteen years before I was born. He was the sweetest waltzer in Texas County, Missouri; I wish he’d lived long enough to teach me how to dance.
This extraordinary photo shows Lee’s army in Frederick, Maryland in September 1862, on its way to the Battle of Antietam.
Ten months after this photo was taken, it was the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the streets of Frederick. The just-appointed commander, George Meade, was in hot pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, now to his north, across the border in Pennsylvania. The two armies would meet July 1 at Gettysburg.
These future Arroyo Grande settlers would have been in that town on this day. Here they are, with their respective corps (up to 26,000 men) commanders.
Bela Clinton Ide, for whom Ide Street was named, 24th Michigan, Iron Brigade, I Corps, commanded by Gen. John Reynolds. Reynolds would be shot from his horse on July 1, the first day of the battle, as he ordered the Iron Brigade into action to stop the surging Confederates. 363 of the 496 men in Ide’s regiment were killed, wounded or captured that day. Ide would become a blacksmith and Arroyo Grande postmaster.
Joseph Brewer, with his daughter Stella, became a farmer in Oak Park. On June 28, 1863, he was a private in the 11th New Jersey and his III corps commander was Dan Sickles, a politician who, before the war, shot his wife’s lover—the son of Francis Scott Key, the “Star-Spangled Banner” composer– dead in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Sickles was acquitted in the first known case to use “temporary insanity” as legal defense. Brewer would lose seven regimental commanders in a row, all shot dead, on July 2 at Gettysburg. Sickles would lose his leg to a Confederate cannonball.
Erastus Fouch, 75th Ohio, was a member of O.O. Howard’s unhappy XI Corps. The corps, largely made up of German immigrants, had lost their previous commander, Franz Sigel and Howard, a dour Protestant, was not popular and the corps had performed poorly at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May. Now, on June 28, 1863, Fouch was two days away from being captured by the Confederates who overwhelmed his regiment at Gettysburg. He would be paroled, fight out his war in Florida and take up farming along what is today Lopez Drive. Another Ohio soldier, Sylvanus Ullom, whose regiment fought near Fouch’s on July 1, was twenty years later a farmer not far away from Fouch, in Corralitos Canyon. Howard University is named for their corps commander.
A Work in Progress 