https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2023/07/09/h-s-laird-san-luis-obispo-architect/

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2023/04/29/uss-nevadas-slo-county-connection/

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2023/05/24/bad-war-good-cop-arroyo-grandes-charlie-branch/

A collection of essays on history, including Arroyo Grande history, teaching, family and ancestors, the impact of war and the contributions of immigrant to local history. 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sI9STic6AgNXjLgB1ge6OOpvz9tC-LPP

 This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars

…This precious stone set in the silver sea

…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare, King Richard II.

   If there was a military historian with a gift to rival Shakespeare’s, it was another Englishman named John Keegan. Keegan was a little boy in the English countryside when the Americans began to arrive in their numbers in late 1943 and into the spring of 1944. Little English boys had lived for years with the deepest of privations—thanks, in large part, to the U-boat campaign that had nearly starved Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” to death—and then the Americans came. Keegan was many years later narrating a history of the Great War, about the impact of the arrival of an earlier generation in the pivotal spring of 1918, when he was suddenly at a loss for words. “Well,” he said finally. “they were Americans!” By which he meant they were boisterous, cocky, well-fed, well-clothed, and, thank God, they were friendly, with an innocence and immediacy that was distinctly American. They taught English boys baseball and flirted with their big sisters, who had suffered years of a different kind of privation, and married some of them, but most of them not, which meant that little boys Keegan’s age would inherit littler half-Yank nieces and nephews. Most of all, they were generous. There seemed to be no end to their Hershey bars (there wouldn’t be after the war, either, when, during the Berlin Airlift, one of bomber pilot Jess Milo McChesney’s comrades, Gail Halverson, air-dropped Hershey bars, floating on little parachutes, to the hungry children of blockaded Berlin) and no end to the rough affection for children that came with these big, loud men from across the sea.

   And then they were gone. Keegan has vividly described the early-morning dark when that happened, when the Edwardian chinaware and modest crystal on every shelf in the Keegan home began protesting, rattling an alarm so loud that it woke the family up, if the motion beneath their beds hadn’t already made them sit bolt upright. The anxiety of Keegan’s family, and their neighbors, and of other families all across East Anglia, was relieved only when they went outside. Then anxiety gave way to wonder. They could feel in their breastbones the vibrations of the engines of thousands of airplanes, but could see only dim red and amber lights in the sky, bearing east, toward France. Some of the Americans Keegan had grown to love so quickly, his heroes, were on those airplanes, and tens of thousands of more, his heroes, were riding deathly pale on landing craft corkscrewing in foul Channel waters, and they were all headed for Normandy.

It was D-Day.

Her full name was Maria Ramona de Luz Carrillo Pacheco de Wilson. I think. I accidentally found this photograph of her, age 37, while I was looking for something else entirely, which is how I usually find the material I need the most for writing history.

It’s a puzzler, that.

She, more importantly, was born a Carrillo, in San Diego, which immediately assigns her a special place in our history. There was no family more prominent in Mexican California. Her father was the commandante of the Santa Barbara Presidio, her son would become the twelfth governor of California, and her (second) husband, Yankee sea captain John Wilson, owned the lengthily-named Rancho Canada de Los Osos y Pecho y Islay, which translates in modern terms, to pretty much everything between Montana de Oro and Cambria.

Owning that much land boggles my mind. I grew up on three acres, and thought that much land immense.

Here is the point: She is, at 37, a handsome woman. It is difficult to imagine the self-assurance a man must have felt with a woman like this on his arm.

And she must have been, at sixteen, a delight.

To watch her dance must have been mesmerizing, and Californio women didn’t expend that much energy at fandangos. Dancing was prized, but it was a male pursuit. Young men, and even older men, like Juan Bandini, reputedly the best dancer in Mexican California, did the dancing, like Mick Jagger roosters on Dexedrine, and sixteen-year-olds like Maria moved chastely and modestly, their lacquered Chinese fans held aloft and their long lashes cast downward, while the young men, as is the the perfect right of young men, made fools of themselves in public.

Even Maria Ramona’s downcast eyelashes, I believe, must have been devastating. I would consider giving one or more arms to get the chance to go backward in time to see her at sixteen.

But this photograph–undoubtedly, part of a group portrait, because you can detect, at lower right, the wedding lace or First Communion lace or the quinceañera lace of another woman–is a revelation. It’s one more reason why I love women. I don’t “cherish” them. You don’t “cherish” a human being who can give birth to another human being with the density of a bowling ball and the kinetic energy of a herd of buffalo on the Yellowstone. No. You love them. You acknowledge your own gender's fragility, then you move on, loving them, and trying to keep up with them.

Maria, for example. She was born in 1812 and died in 1888, the same year my two-room school, Branch School, was built. When my parents drove me to that school for the Hallowe’en carnival (Houses were too far apart in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley for trick or treating. You’d wind up in Pozo.), I could see, in the limbs of California oaks, bandidos reaching to snatch me from the car, especially if the moon was full. There was always history, in my little-boy imagination, just beyond the moonlight.

One of my first memories in the Valley was that of the home of another Californio matriarch, Manuela Branch, as it caught fire, about 1958, in the corner opposite the Valley from our home on Huasna Road. I had never seen anything burn so bright, and it would take me a few years to realize how costly that fire had been, how completely it had erased the traces of a woman so important. She was buried over the hill from our two-room school, alongside her husband--from Scipio, New York, of all places–-and alongside him, three little girls taken by smallpox in 1862, and, a few yards beyond their tombstones, the common tombstone of a father and son lynched in 1886.

How did they endure? Maria Josefa Dana gave birth to twenty-one children and lost more than half of them at birth or within five years. Nine of Manuela Branch’s survived, but she lived thirty-five years beyond her husband, who died in 1874. Maria Ramona de Luz Carrillo Pacheco de Wilson’s progeny was modest by Californio standards: seven children, but three of them would die before they’d reached twenty-five.

So here she is, in 1849, looking squarely at the photographer without flinching, and this was an age when the camera lens remained open so long because the “film” in those days, on glass-plate negatives, was so slow, that chancing a smile, even a faint one like hers, likely meant that her face would be lost to posterity. It would be a blur. Matthew Brady, in his Washington City studio, kept on hand a variety of neck and head braces, reminiscent of the Inquisition, to keep his subjects, including Lincoln, perfectly still.

And here she is, smiling, albeit faintly, like some kind of San Luis Obispo County Mona Lisa.

What is she smiling about?

It is, more than likely, an event in which she is a peripheral character. If it is a First Communion, a quinceñeria, or a wedding, it is certainly not hers. She is merely a guest. But the fact that she is included, even at the edge of what seems to be a group photo, one in which the celebrants wanted her presence, is indicative of her prominence and indicative of so much more: her personal strength, her unshakable calm, her dignity, and, most of all, her integrity.

You cannot “cherish” a quality like integrity.

You either understand it, or you don’t. This woman was bred into it, born into it, grown into it, and she would impart it in the generations who lived far beyond her death in 1888.

Her husbands were lucky enough to live with it, and with her.

She lived a life as strong as Christ’s rock—Jesus, fond of puns, changed Simon’s name to Peter, or “rock”—and soft as velvet. This is a proud woman.

She has every right to be.

TO THE EDITOR, SAN LUIS OBISPO TRIBUNE:

Mr. Phil Christie of Cambria, in an April 9 Letter to the Editor on the Pismo Beach beaver situation, wanted to know if there were other beavers in San Luis Obispo County. The scientific answer is: Yup.

At least there were when I was a teenager, which was about the same time my close personal friend, Sir Francis Drake, was bumping around the coast on the Golden Hinde.

 Actually, it was only the mid-1960s. But there was a beaver dam on the Arroyo Grande Creek, adjacent to Kaz Ikeda’s cabbage fields in the Upper Valley. I know because I fished in their pond. When I first found them, they were Angry Beaves (a popular cartoon show I used to enjoy with my sons when they were younger), but they soon became, if not mellow, at least tolerant of  my presence. Theydo slap their tails on the water, by the way.

I wore out my welcome one day when a late-afternoon shaft of sunlight hit the pond at just the right angle, making the water translucent. There, meticulously aligned like a trout armada—I must be thinking of Drake again—were dozens of rainbows, noses upstream, waiting for me to catch them. I was ecstatic!

So, as a crack fisherman, my first move was to fall into the water with rod, tackle and some happily liberated night crawlers.

I think I hear the beavers trying to suppress hysterical laughter. My dignity was crushed, so I never went back to the pond. I’m sure, however—if there are still beavers in the county—that this anecdote  has been passed down from generation to generations around whatever is the beaver equivalent of a campfire. Stupid humans.

Jim Gregory

2018 National Indie Excellence Award

Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). Three Central Coast women flew military aircraft during World War II. One of them, Betty Pauline Stine of Santa Barbara, was killed in the line of duty.

Just before eight o’clock on December 7, 1941, a bomb’s concussion on  Arizona’s stern blew the lifeless body of Navy bandsman Jack Scruggs into Pearl Harbor. A little more than five minutes later, the second, fatal, bomb penetrated the teak deck, killing a second sailor, Wayne Morgan, and nearly 1200 of his shipmates when it detonated the forward powder magazines. Scruggs and Morgan had grown up in Arroyo Grande, a farm town in San Luis Obispo County.

Park Service divers can still see, just behind portholes, December 7 air trapped inside Arizona’s submerged compartments. A clock recovered from the chaplain’s cabin was frozen at just past 8:05 a.m., the moment the ship blew up.

Few moments can be frozen in time. History is remorseless and it demands change. The war changed Arroyo Grande forever. In a way, the little town of just under 1100 people was torn apart just as Arizona had been.

Residents here heard the first bulletin at about 11:30 a.m., as they were preparing for Sunday lunch, the big meal of the day for churchgoers like Juzo Ikeda’s family. Like many of the town’s Japanese-American residents, the Ikedas were Methodists. They were also baseball fans. Juzo’s sons had played for local businessman Vard Loomis’s club team, the Arroyo Grande Growers, and for Cal Poly.

Juzo was technically not “Japanese-American.” He was not permitted citizenship. The Supreme Court maintained that this honor was never intended for nonwhite immigrants.

The court couldn’t deny citizenship to Juzo’s sons, born Americans, or to the sons and daughters of families like the Kobaras, the Hayashis, the Fuchiwakis, the Nakamuras.

These young people played varsity sports at the high school on Crown Hill, or served in student government or on The Hi-Chatter, the school newspaper, or joined the Latin Club or the Stamp Collecting Club, the brainchild of young cousins John Loomis and Gordon Bennett, known for committing occasional acts of anarchy as little boys (John’s mother grew so frustrated that she once tied him to a tree. Gordon freed him.) and known even more for being good and loyal friends.

Two of those friends were Don Gullickson and Haruo Hayashi. Loomis, a Marine, and Bennett and Gullickson, sailors, would fight the Japanese in the Pacific in the last year of the war. They would also continue to write to Haruo at his internment camp at Gila River, Arizona.

Haruo joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, but he was very young—only a sophomore when Pearl Harbor was attacked—and the war ended before he could ship out for Europe.

Haruo never understood an incident at the 442nd’s training camp at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. A wonderful USO show arrived and while both the white and Nisei GI’s watched it in the camp auditorium, black GI’s had to content themselves with hearing what they could of the show while standing outside.

It wasn’t right, Haruo thought.

In April 1942, buses had appeared in the high school parking lot atop Crown Hill to take Haruo and his family to the assembly center in Tulare. A line of teenaged girls—twenty-five of the fifty-eight members of the Class of 1942 were Nisei—walked up the hill together to where some would board the buses. They were holding hands. They were sobbing.

Many young men would join the army after they and their families were moved to the desolate Gila River camp. Sgt. George Nakamura won a Bronze Star and a battlefield commission to lieutenant for rescuing a downed flier in China. Pfc. Sadami Fujita won his Bronze Star posthumously. German small-arms fire killed him as he brought up ammunition during the relief of the “Lost Battalion” in France in 1944. Nearly a thousand Nisei GI’s were killed or wounded in freeing the 230 young Texans pinned down in dense woodland splintered by German shellfire.

When Sgt. Hilo Fuchiwaki first came home at war’s end, he went to the movies in Pismo Beach in his uniform. A patron spat on him. When the Kobara family came home from the Gila River camp, they could hear gunshots in the night as they slept, for protection, in an interior hallway of their farmhouse.

As others began to come home, they found that families like the Loomises, the Silveiras and the Taylors had watched over their farmland and farm equipment. Insurance agent and football booster Pete Bachino, killed in the 1960 Cal Poly plane crash, had taken care of their cars.

But more than half of Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans never came home again.

Arizona, twisted grotesquely at her mooring, burned for two days after the Pearl Harbor attack. The scar that this terrible fire left behind, even here, seems invisible only because it is so deep.

This photo reminded me immediately of Rod Steiger's superbly-acted redneck sheriff in the film In the Heat of the Night. But these are Californians, not Mississippians, and these men, according to the scholarship I've been trying to digest so far, were representative of an alliance of reactionary forces that dominated California between 1933 and 1938.

Whether they were representative of San Luis Obispo County remains to be seen.

What made up that coalition? To borrow Renault's quote from Casablanca, they were the usual suspects: Harry Chandler's L.A. Times, the Hearst newspapers, the L.A. District Attorney and the LAPD, the Chamber of Commerce, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and Associated Farmers, a powerful anti-labor lobby (they blocked literally hundreds of bills in the state legislature that would have provided laborers with a minimum wage, with decent housing, even a bill that would have required employers to provide drinking cups) that also organized resistance to and suppression of strikes. 

They wore revolvers on their hips, however, like Henry Sanborn, a national guard officer who organized hundreds of paramilitary "deputies" in the 1936 Salinas lettuce strike, a strike provoked by the growers themselves when they locked workers out of the packing sheds. The growers, in fact, had already built a big stockade, complete with concertina wire, in anticipation of a strike. "Don't worry," they told alarmed packing-shed workers before the lockout. "That's for the Filipinos."

By the way, the one dissident in the state's economic power structure, an ardent New Dealer, was A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy, by now the Bank of America.

Another disturbing trend was the extent to which this coalition depended on the newly-founded California Highway Patrol. In Salinas and other places, including in a brief mention in an article about Nipomo, the CHP constituted a kind of rapid-repsonse strike suppression force and one, unlike the "deputies" and their baseball bats in Salinas, that was heavily armed.

In the history of American labor disputes, like the 1894 Pullman Strike, this traditionally had been the role of government: to uphold capital and to suppress labor. TR's intervention in the 1902 Pennsylvania Coal Strike represented a rare departure, because he demanded that both sides come to the bargaining table or he'd use the army to take over the mines. Neither management nor labor were pleased with the president, but the strike was settled.

When TR's cousin became president, capitalists, including California growers, were outraged that the government seemed to side so clearly with workers, what with the Wagner Act (which did not extend to agricultural workers; FDR didn't want to alienate Southern Democrats and their planter-supporters), with health inspections of labor camps, and with occasional attempts by the federal government to settle strikes (one such attempt had a Labor Department official beaten, stripped, and left in the desert of the Imperial Valley).  

The Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder at this time regularly railed against the excesses of this activist government on its editorial page while its news page primly reported another schedule of AAA subsidy payments.

Frustrated as they were with FDR, growers and their allies obviously took on the strikers, not the federal government.

The easiest way to sanction strikers, and to make labor organizers "disappear" (Temporarily. Usually.) was to arrest them for vagrancy, since they clearly weren't working. That was the pretext used by SLO County Sheriff Haskins, backed by 200 instant deputy sheriffs, in the 1937 pea strike, in April. It worked; that strike, centered in Nipomo, ended pretty quickly. So had another one farther north, in January, in and around Pismo Beach, organized by Filipino laborers against Japanese growers. It was over in three weeks, with some violence--fights between strikers and scabs--and it ended with a negotiated settlement. The growers didn't negotiate with the strikers, by the way. They negotiated with the Chamber of Commerce, which dictated the settlement. Curious.

Santa Maria Times photo by Ian Wood.