Rituxan In the Morning

Yesterday was another infusion day, so I spent the morning hooked up to an IV drip in a comfy bed at the Infusion Center reading "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck which I had not done before despite my enthusiasm for Steinbeck and his dyspeptic vision of California's Central Coast and its society.

In that regard, I should mention that my (new found) cousin sent me a journal kept by her mother and our aunts that has an extended section  telling tales about their cross country rail expedition from Washington DC (where they were working at the WPA headquarters) to The Coast, where they did and saw everything. They saw all the sights from the Redwoods to San Francisco's Golden Gate and International Exposition at Treasure Island to Hollywood and Beverly Hills where they hob-nobbed with the movie stars and studio honchos. They went out to the beach and sunburned lobster red, they even went to Mexico, briefly, and saw a disgusting bull fight.

This was 1939. They passed through the Salinas Valley on their way to Los Angeles, but I can't imagine they noticed much. Certainly not the wretchedness and waves of travelers up from Mexico and still crossing the country from Oklahoma. What they reported and what they saw was the idealized tourist vision of California. There was always some truth to it, but it never told the whole story. Not by a long shot.

Steinbeck fills in some of the blanks, but he was hated for it in and around Salinas. His stories of his home place and the people there were stories you weren't supposed to tell. I grew up in other parts of California being socialized to that same notion. There are simply things you do not mention. If you're smart, you won't even look into them.

For example, I spent years studying the Gold Rush and the people who made their way to California between 1849 and about 1855. I reviewed all kinds of original documents kept at the California State Library and other places, and scoured the Gold Country for remaining clues to what was going on in those days.

The picture that emerged was nothing like the glorified and romantic image of the Gold Rush we were taught in school -- and I guess is still widely believed. For many who made the trek, it was horrible. Many died along the way or shortly after arrival. It cost a fortune to make the trip, and the chance of finding gold or even surviving more than a few months was slim to none.

And yet they kept coming. By the hundred thousands and ultimately by the millions they kept coming. My mother and her mother and stepfather among them. Most of my father's siblings -- but not himself -- came and settled in California, too.

Ms Ché and I left, though. She was born in California, and I lived there almost all my life, and the two of us could hardly wait to move to New Mexico.

Where I think we've never been happier -- health issues for both of us aside.

And so it goes.

Yes, there are plenty of challenges in front of us, and many memories left behind (along with a storage unit full of... stuff, including some of those memories...)

Perseverance, yes. But ultimately relaxation and freedom, too.

More to come.

1917

1917 was the year that my mother, her mother, and her step-father came out to California from Indiana, changing their lives and future forever.

My mother said she remembered very little about her natural father -- or Indianapolis, for that matter -- but as I've written elsewhere, after doing a lot of research, I don't think she remembered her biological father at all. He was gone from Indianapolis, establishing a new life and family in St. Louis, by the time my mother was two years old. She could have had some vague memory of him, I suppose, but it's not likely. Also, her mother sued my mother's father for divorce in the summer of 1912, when my mother wasn't even a year old. The parents were not living together at the time and it's possible they never lived together as man and wife.

I always thought that Leo, the man who became my mother's stepfather, was Irish-American, but in fact his grandparents were German. I'm pretty sure my mother thought he was Irish, too. Maybe he pretended to be Irish for the hell of it. "Passing" as it were.

Leo was definitely a romantic, and he must have believed that something wonderful was inevitable. He worked as a machinist in Indianapolis, but when he went out to California, he worked as a mechanic at the Dodge Brothers dealership in Santa Maria -- after a brief sojourn in Santa Ana, the end of the line for the railroad that brought him and my mother and her mother to California. Leo and Edna (my mother's mother) were married in Santa Ana in October of 1917. Edna stated on her marriage certificate that she was a widow. Leo claimed it was his first marriage, but I've found records that suggest he was married before in Kansas City where he lived for about ten years, married, if he was married, to a woman who died in an asylum in 1921. I found no record of a divorce, and it is possible he was still married to her when he married Edna in Santa Ana. Which would be ironic as hell, since my mother's biological father had another wife and family in St. Louis when he was killed in that rail yard incident. We won't even get into my mother's grandfather, shot and killed by his mistress when he threatened to leave her...

As far as I can tell, Leo did very well for himself and his family in California. He became the service manager at the dealership, he was able to buy a nice bungalow a few blocks from the shop shortly after he started work, he had a car of his own, and my mother said he always provided very well for her and her mother. All of this would have been almost impossible had they stayed in Indianapolis among the suffering and seething working class.

But sometime in the early '30s Leo quit his job at the dealership and bought a filling station which he ran profitably for a while. He sold that and bought a motor court cum filling station in Willits on the Redwood Highway which he operated until 1939 when he sold it in order to invest in a "mine" in Nevada -- a phony mine as it turned out. He lost everything, and I think he just barely escaped going to jail for fraud, though it didn't appear that he knew that the partners in the mining operation were engaged in swindling their marks, chief among them Leo.

Leo and Edna returned to California in 1941, where he went to work at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard building Liberty Ships for the War. Edna was sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. Leo himself died in 1945, still working at Mare Island.

1916 was the year that started this sequence. My mother's father had been killed in a rail yard incident in St. Louis in December of 1916 -- actually just before Christmas. His funeral was on December 23. My mother said she remembered going to his funeral (she was five) but she never mentioned St. Louis. I think she "remembered" all of this happening in Indianapolis. She never mentioned the trip to California, either, but she had strong memories of living in Santa Maria from a very early age -- she was still only five years old when they arrived.

She considered herself a California girl for the rest of her life  -- even though she was born in Indianapolis. She never really wanted to live anywhere else, and if she'd had her druthers, she'd have stayed on California's Central Coast the rest of her life.

1917 was the year the US entered WWI, and although I only heard about that  from my father -- he was a junior officer on the Home Front in Iowa during WWI -- I think the War was a critical element in the decision of Leo and Edna to move to California. The opportunities were greater on the West Coast, or seemed to be.

It was a risky move as I doubt Leo had a job lined up before the departure from Indianapolis. But what did it matter? There would be plenty of opportunities once they got there. And so it was to be.

Dumb luck? I don't know.

At any rate, he did well, and he would have been wiser to have stayed in his position rather than going out on his own with his filling stations and disastrous mining adventure. But I can imagine his romanticism informed his vision. He couldn't believe he could fail.

Of course I didn't know either Leo or Edna, let alone my mother's father, as they had all passed on by the time I was born.

In fact, all my grandparents were dead by the time I was born. At the time, it was a fairly unusual situation, as nearly everyone had grandparents. I didn't.

Not having the anchor of grandparents -- among other things -- has helped differentiate my point of view from that of many people who did have grandparents. I see and experience things somewhat differently than most people, and I always have.

1917 -- and WWI -- are considered the era when the US "came of age." That is another topic for another day, but I would agree there's something to it. Given the devastation in Europe and the creation of the Soviet Union, the impending collapse of the global economy and the breakup of the European Imperial Projects, the role of the US in world affairs had to change. It did. We thought for the better, but recent events -- say, over the last 60 years or so -- bring that into question.

We (collectively) seemingly aren't better at all. In fact, many of our collective worst aspects are on display. There's little or nothing "good" about it. And our model is being adopted widely.

I don't know that Leo learned his lesson with the collapse of his mining venture, My mother had nothing good to say about him afterwards, but I didn't know him, so I have nothing to base an opinion on. The indications prior to the collapse all seem positive, so whatever happened afterwards I think would have to grow out of that.

Much the same can be said for the US -- many, many positive indications that go haywire toward the end.

We'll see.

[Note: this post has been difficult for me to write,  not so much for the topic as for the continuing problems I'm having with my condition. For the last week or more, I've been experiencing an RA "flare" that has been very painful and debilitating, and has been devilishly difficult to control. All part of the disease they say....]

Houses: My Mother Grew Up Here

Herself lived here...

This is the house where my mother grew up in Santa Maria, California. Until recently, I didn't know where she had lived in Santa Maria when she was young. I don't think she ever told me, and I'm not sure I ever asked, despite the fact that I lived in Santa Maria from 1949 to 1953, and I spent most summers there from 1973 to 1983.

The picture was taken by the omnipresent Google Street View in 2012, before the house was fairly extensively rehabbed. Though the front porch is enclosed in this image, and the paint color is not likely to have been original (ha), the picture gives a pretty good idea of what the house was like when my mother lived there.

It seems to me to be quite a pleasant place, all things considered.

It's a classic California bungalow built c. 1918. My mother, her mother, and her step-father moved to California from Indiana in 1917, and I'm pretty sure that my mother's step-father had this house built shortly thereafter. In 1920, it was apparently the only house on that side of the street. It was two blocks from my mother's stepfather -- Leo's -- work at the Eugene Rubel Dodge dealership on Broadway.

"A Classic California Bungalow" gives me pause. Our last home in California was in a neighborhood full of "Classic California Bungalows" and I can't say that I was particularly fond of them. They tended to be dark as caves, and if they were in original condition -- few of them were -- they were poorly constructed, rickety, rotting, with unsafe and inadequate wiring, failing plumbing, tiny kitchens, and otherwise barely functional interiors.

They were considered the height of modernity back in the day, however, so much better and simpler they were than the gaudy Victorians they replaced. In California at the time this house was built, the Bungalow was the nearly universal modest home style, and I can well imagine that the family that moved from industrial Indianapolis to idyllic California in 1917 were entranced with the idea of building and living in one.

Leo worked for the streetcar company in Indianapolis. The streetcar company was notorious for its ill treatment and very low pay of employees and for appalling working conditions.  In California, Leo went to work in the repair shop for a prominent auto dealer and worked his way up to service manager. I always thought Leo's heritage was Irish or Welsh, but it turns out he was of German descent, as was Rubel, and he was a member of the Knights of Pythias by which connection he was able to move to California and find work quickly.

The house he built in Santa Maria wasn't large by today's standards, but it was more than adequate for the needs of his small family at the time. It appears to have been lighter and brighter than most bungalows. The front faces south, and the large picture window in the living room must have let in lots of light. There is a large south facing window in the dining room as well, but as it is sheltered by the porch roof, it wouldn't have let in quite as much light. On the other hand, there is a high window on the east side of the dining room that would have flooded the room with morning sun. So much that there is a wood frame for a shade above the dining room window. The kitchen and the breakfast room also face east, so the morning light would have been generous and cheery -- at least when it wasn't foggy.

There are high windows on either side of the fireplace in the living room, and they could have let in abundant afternoon light as they face west. Each bedroom and the bathroom also have windows facing west. In most of the country, west-facing windows are a bane, especially in summer, but on California's central coast, that's often not the case. Ordinarily, the fog rolls in from the Pacific each afternoon, softening or eliminating the heat and glare of the western sun. Even when the sun shines in the west on the Central Coast, it is hardly ever hot.

I had thought that the main entry to the house was on the east wall of the living room, but now I think not. There is an indication that the front door is actually directly across the porch from the door visible in the picture above. It probably did not open into the dining room,  however. In the similar floorplan I found in Keith's Magazine (c. 1916), there is a small vestibule and hallway separating the living and dining rooms, and something like that is what I suspect this house featured.

The dining room would have been smaller than is indicated from the exterior. It may have been smaller, but it had typical bungalow built ins -- a buffet under the horizontal window, and two glass doored china cabinets on either side. The living room probably boasted glass doored book cases on either side of the fireplace.

I don't know whether the ceilings in the living and dining room had box beams, but it wouldn't have been surprising if they did. Pan ceiling lights would also be expected, but and there may have been side lights as well.

The floors would have been oak -- except in the kitchen, bath, breakfast room and screen porch. I expect that all except the bath had linoleum floor coverings; the bathroom probably had tile flooring -- the small hexagon tiles so common in those days.

What kind of bathroom fixtures there were, and whether there was a claw-foot tub or a built in tub, is a mystery. I suspect the fixtures were the most modern, however. The idea of having a house like this was to be as up to date as possible.

A bungalow kitchen sink

The kitchen probably had a row of cabinets with tile countertops. A sink was in the center under the east window. On the opposite wall was no doubt a gas stove. The ice box was probably located on the screen porch the way they were in those days. I imagine there was a "California cooler" at the end of the counter in the kitchen, so the ice box was probably small compared to some. There were no doubt laundry tubs on the screen porch, but I have a feeling that Edna (Mrs. Leo) had a washing machine from very early on as well. She probably acquired a radio and an electric refrigerator as soon as they were reasonably priced and available in Santa Maria. As a side note, Santa Maria at that time was a small rural community dominated by a few pioneer ranching/farming families. They ran cattle and grew fruits and vegetables for market. It wasn't unlike the Salinas of Steinbeck's East of Eden -- with the exception that I think the people of Santa Maria were a good deal nicer, but that's another story.

The rooms in this house not large by today's standards, and I expect the house probably had less than 1,200  square feet in total.

The house would have been considered "neat and tidy" when it was new. My sense is that it always had a stucco exterior, probably without the lower brick veneer seen in the photo. I imagine it was furnished simply. More likely simplicity was the style favored by my mother's parents from their own experience in Indiana. I think they brought a lot of that Midwest simple-living ethic with them to California and never entirely lost it. My mother inherited some of that, too.

I don't know for certain, but I suspect the house was painted barn-red with white trim when my mother was growing up there. I have this notion because that color scheme was one she talked about frequently. She tried to get my father to paint his own house in Iowa that color, but he wouldn't do it. He did, however, have a three-part front window put in to please my mother; she complained that his house was "so dark."

From real estate and other listings I've been able to find, it appears that the house was used as an office building in recent years, primarily for medical and chiropractic offices. But it has retained most of its residential character. After it was last sold in 2014, it was extensively rehabbed -- I wouldn't say it was necessarily remodeled or restored -- and it appears to have been returned to residential use.

My mother got married the first time in 1932, and she moved into a small duplex with her husband -- who was an employee at Eugene Rubel's, an auto mechanic working under Leo. Not long afterwards, Leo sold this house and he and Edna bought an auto court in Willits on the Redwood Highway.

 In 1939, Leo sold that and "invested" all his money in a mining venture in Nevada. Turns out it was a fraud, and he lost everything. I suspect he barely escaped going to jail.

By 1941, he and Edna were back in California where Leo took work as a machinist at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. Edna was ill with the cancer that would kill her by the end of the year. My mother and sister were in Sacramento. My mother would divorce her first husband in 1941 or 42 (I've never known the exact date -- all my mother told me was that she and my sister's father were married "for about ten years.")

My mother and father were married in 1947, divorced in 1949. My mother vowed never to get married again, and never to depend on a man again, and she didn't. It was tough at first, but she made her own way the rest of her life, and I've admired her courage throughout.

I think this Santa Maria bungalow had a very strong influence on the way she came to see herself and the way she wanted to live. Never again would she live in a bungalow per se, but she insisted on living in a house as opposed to an apartment, and when she could, she owned her own houses rather than renting. A surprising number of the houses she lived in resembled this bungalow, as have a surprising number of houses Ms Ché and I have lived in on our own. Indeed, the house we live in now has some fairly strong resemblances.

It's more because the style became standardized than anything else.

As I think about this house and imagine how it might have been when my mother was growing up, I can more and more easily picture it and the effect it had on her. She never indicated to me that she was an unhappy child -- except for one thing: she wasn't adopted by Leo, and she always knew that he wasn't her natural father. She used his last name and she said he always treated her as his daughter, and he was a kind and generous man, but he wasn't her father. And that made for... difficulties that she couldn't control. She didn't know her biological father. He was killed when she was five years old, but he had left Indianapolis years before when she was only one or two years old. The absent father became a theme later in her life.

Leo's failure to strike it rich in Nevada and Edna's subsequent death from untreated cancer (they were Christian Scientists), followed by my mother's divorce from my sister's father led to a period of intense chaos in my mother's life, chaos that only started to settle in the early 50s, and even then, nothing ever quite settled down for her.

She lived an interesting life... ;-)

-----------------------------------------------
As a point of reference, this is apparently the Santa Maria bungalow where my mother and her family lived until Leo built or bought the house at the top of the post.

She also lived here...

I say "apparently" because the address of this house isn't exactly the same as the one listed for the family until 1918. It's two numbers off, and houses on this street are numbered by tens.

Our Banana Republic -- Memories and The TINA Principle

[OT: Oxygen! I got the small tanks yesterday. What relief. Couldn't deal with the big ones and the huge "portable"concentrator. Well, it's got wheels, so yah, it can be rolled from room to room, so there's that. Portability! The small tanks, about the size of a large wine bottle, can be carried about with a shoulder strap and the oxygen is dispensed in little bursts as you breathe. They last much longer than the big tanks that way, 4 hours or more as opposed to an hour and a half or less. I like it. And let me tell you, it is the simple things these days that make me smile... Oh my yes...]

Gold plated toilets. Damn, Dude has gold-plated everything. WTF? Why would anybody even want that?

But let's look back in our history. Do they teach history any more? They say that Civics isn't taught any more, so maybe they're not teaching history either.

Ms. Ché and I were yakking the other day about Our Day ("Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?")  We've long been convinced that our years (1965-66)  were the last high school graduating classes in California to get a comprehensive education. It was downhill from there, and we cite as evidence our nieces who went to the same high school I did. Things had changed radically from Our Day. And they, our nieces, did not get anything like the education we did. I wouldn't say they got an education at all.

We had to take six periods in class every day throughout three years in high school and one year (9th grade) in junior high -- it wasn't called middle school in those days. We took foreign language  -- Ms Ché Latin and Spanish, me French all four years; science, history, math, social studies, civics, English, Ms Ché was also taking performing arts classes and performing in plays; I wrote a couple of plays in college prep English classes which were then performed by the drama students. Electives were few, and for me, there was almost no time for much besides regular college prep classes (it wasn't called Advance Placement until several years after we graduated and went on to higher education... another story entirely.) We had to successfully complete 250 units as I recall to graduate. In order to receive scholarships and other benefits to go to college or university, our grade points had to be above 3.2, which wasn't an easy challenge in those days. Our teacher worked us hard and expected excellence.

My senior English teacher was a Stanford graduate married to State University drama professor, and her standard for us was modeled on Stanford's English class requirements. It was her intent that whether or not we went to Stanford (I think only one of those in my senior English class did) we would be prepared for any college or university English class, and because we would be prepared for that, we would be prepared for any other college course as well.

My French teacher was a Columbia graduate who had been a student at the Sorbonne when Paris fell to the Nazis. She spent almost a year in Nazi controlled Paris before she was "miraculously" able to return to the United States. Her last name was Cohen, and when she told us about this, we thought "Oh my god, she's just lucky she wasn't sent to the camps for liquidation." She said she had friends who were rounded up, but that there was little chance she would be. Not only was she American -- and at the time, the US was not at war with Germany -- but she wasn't a Jew, she was a WASP from Long Island. She would marry a Jew later, but at the time, she didn't feel she was under any particular threat because of her religion or nationality, though she knew people who were, and it tore her apart. She  was just glad to get out of there, and when she returned to Paris after the War, she said she was devastated. The city had survived more or less intact, but the people were so traumatized she wondered if they would ever recover from what they'd been through.

My chemistry teacher's last name was Tsuda. He was Nisei, and he was sent to the camps during the War. He was a teenager at Manzanar, and his experience there shaped his attitude toward the "America" as an adult. He graduated from UC Berkeley with high honors, but he had to wait until after the War, and until after some of the Anti-Jap agitation in California had died down before he could attend and complete his degree. All of the high school students he taught were white... go figure. He had no open animosity toward us, but I wouldn't say he liked us or gave a shit about us, either. I never did learn chemistry to speak of, and I doubt that more than one or two students in my class did.

When I was in high school, I lived next to the site of one of the transit camps for Japanese-Americans on their way to relocation. I knew there had been a military facility there called Camp Kohler. It had burned down-- I didn't know when at the time, but I found out later the fire was in 1947 when the camp facilities were being used to house returning US veterans and their families. All that was left of the camp were the concrete barracks pads, charred wood, fused glass, bits and pieces of metal, overgrown asphalt roads, and a spirit. A dark spirit.

I don't recall if Mr. Tsuda ever spent time at Camp Kohler before being sent to Manzanar (probably not, but who knows... ) What I do recall was his barely contained rage about what had happened to him and his family under the Stars and Stripes. I recall he mentioned being in Japan before the war and how beautiful it was, and he had returned after the war, I think he said in 1952 or 53 (Korean War? Was he a vet? I don't remember....) and it broke his heart. So much of Japan was still in ruins, of course. But it was the  broken people that hurt his heart more. I don't recall him specifically mentioning Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it was very much on our minds given the nuclear tension we were all living under during the Cold War.

I could go on describing my memories of high school and my teachers, but these examples give an idea of the kinds of people they were and the kinds of experiences they shared with us. Wartime memories were of course very important because they had so strongly shaped our parents and our teachers, and WWII had completely transformed the world we came into as post-War Boomers.

There was a level of prosperity and well-being that Americans had never experienced before. There were also severe strains and the early stages of general social unrest that seemed to begin in California and spread outward from there. Of course it had not started in California, but it became focused there as the youth rebellion took hold and Hippies became a Thing.

Ms. Ché and I were on the cusp of all that.

No doubt we were rebels, but generally were not part of the Hippie scene -- which we saw for its self-evident commercial aspects more than its social importance. We would go to San Francisco from time to time during the hey-day of Hippiedom, but it was not necessarily an attractive thing. It was just another Thing, not the only thing. We had friends who moved to the City and became part of the Scene there, and we saw it as them being who they were, not as something we were compelled to emulate or necessarily wanted to.

We did attend the Monterey Pop Festival the summer after the Summer of Love, and we almost went to Altamont, but thankfully did not.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan was -- "impossibly" -- elected governor of California promising to bring an end to the student unrest, suppress the rebellions in the black ghettos, and ensure that nothing like that ever happened again.

Ever.

His methods were cruel and violent on the one hand, more subtly destructive on the other. He deliberately set out to wreck California's Progressive operating system, and he largely succeeded. After California's Progressive Era was brought to a screeching halt under Reagan, he and his cronies would  apply the lessons learned nationwide.

And so here we are, Banana Republic.

Progressivism was itself the Enemy. Ripping it out root and branch was neither wise nor possible, but what the Reaganites did was set in motion its self-implosion and collapse, first by discrediting it, then by pushing on carefully selected pressure points -- including public education, mental health care, and "law and order" -- to produce desired results in time if not immediately. They knew what they wanted  but they didn't always know how to get there.

What they wanted -- and largely got -- was a reversion to pre-Progressive California and ultimately a pre-Progressive America.

In other words, a Banana Republic ruled by caudillos, whose favor had to be curried or else. Corporate control of government would replace Progressive "experts" and public servants. Elections would be manipulated for desired results. Tax burdens would be lightened for the well-off (why should they be forced to pay taxes anyway?) and fees in lieu of taxes would be increased for everyone else. Government would be operated by and for the rich, and barely function at all for anyone else. Public education would be administered to death. There would be no more "free" higher education in California. Students would pay increasing fees and tuition until going to college at all would be too expensive to even think about. The quality of public education at every level would decline, to the point where high school students would graduate pig-ignorant, and college graduates would barely begin to comprehend what an average high school student understood in previous generations.

"All against all," "greed is good," and "There Is No Alternative" would become the new reality.

And so it was. So it is.

I have long been a critic of Progressivism for cause, but not necessarily the same cause as its Reaganite critics. It's racist and authoritarian at its core, even in decline, and those factors were in large part responsible for the uprisings that presaged the Reaganite reaction. Progressivism led to some good things to be sure, but the costs were very high, especially for marginalized populations. Progressivism could not mask its racism and authoritarianism, though in a late fight for survival, it tried to.

The argument was that compared to Reaganism, Progressivism was less racist and less authoritarian. The lesser of two evils, eh?

Besides, what are you going to do? You have a choice between the radical return to the Bad Old Days or continuing on a failing course of what was seen as public sector stupidity.

Nobody I know of in the political realm bethought themselves to come up with something better than either choice.

There was no alternative. "None of the Above" was not an option.

Nixon was elected president in 1968, and compared to Reagan, he was practically a Communist. He was a genuine California Progressive but on the dark side of the movement, and eventually he was driven from office, not so much because he was a criminal, but I believe because he was going bonkers and had become unstable and unreliable. His judgment was so severely impaired and his actions so arbitrary that he was seen as a clear and present danger to the survival of the  Republic. That's something Our Rulers do not and cannot talk about. We the Rabble are not to know just how incompetent Our Rulers are. Please.

Incompetence is part of the package of public sector destruction that Reaganites set in motion in California and spread all over the country once they achieved the White House.

They didn't want competent public servants, and they saw to it that at the Rabble level, competence was often unavailable from government. This was actually a genius move because it destroyed confidence in government ("of the people and by the people") to get necessary things done. The only success allowed to government in the future would be police, prisons and jails, and in time, even that would be largely taken away with the substitution of private prisons, much like private schools would replace government schools.

They used some of the social strengths of the liberal-Progressives against them, and it worked.

I would say that initially the Reaganites were very weak, and they didn't really know how to do what they wanted to do. Progressives then offered them  a helping hand to get things done. They set the stage and the standard model for their own destruction. They cooperated and collaborated. Oh my, we've seen so many examples of this throughout history, haven't we?

We see echoes of it in the actions of the few Democrats still in office nationally. I wouldn't call them Progressives, good doG no, but they act as the rump remainder of what used to be Progressives.

They are notorious collaborationists.

It is one reason among many they aren't elected any more. They offer no policy alternatives, only procedural and personality ones. Bless their hearts.

The Mini-Mes of Destruction. USA! USA!

You gotta elect me cause I'm not him! YAY Me!

Jeebus what a goon show.

Thanks to Jill Stein -- bless her heart-- we're finding out just what a fucked up scam this latest election was. Honestly, at this point there is no way to tell who the voters chose in the battleground states, as there is no way to accurately count or recount their votes in too many jurisdictions. There's no way to know.

We've been experiencing fucked up scam "elections" for so long that a lot of people seem to take it for granted and accept the announced results on faith -- because you can't do anything else. There is no way to show that faith results are right or wrong. They just are what they are.

Electoral fraud appears to be pervasive but unprovable -- by design.

Voter fraud is something else altogether and appears to be rare, but maybe not. Again, there's no way to tell.

And in the common perception manipulated by the media, there's no difference. The two are conflated all the time, deliberately and with malice aforethought.

It's becoming very clear that we do not know and we cannot know who the voters in the battleground/recount states actually chose to become president. And if we can't know the actual vote in those states, it puts into question the actual vote in every other state.

And that's not even considering the active voter suppression efforts that have been under way throughout the country for years.

Reports indicate that millions of otherwise eligible voters were prevented from voting or had their votes tossed out due to a wide variety of suppression efforts, and in at least some cases due to the whim of election officials. The suppression efforts during the primaries were highlighted -- and they were extraordinarily varied and frequent. By the general election, it was all but taken for granted that the same sort of suppression would occur on an even wider scale, and nothing would or could be done about it.

After all, There Is No Alternative.

How much longer this corrupt and corrupting system can endure is anybody's guess.

With the advent of Golden Boy to the White House (will he choose to live in his hotel, will he sell or rent rooms in the White House, say tuned campers!) the inherent instabilities may become so severe that it all collapses.

I'd say we're close to that point now.

I've thought for some time that Trump will not be inaugurated Jan 20, but if he is, he won't serve more than a year in office. This is based on instinct rather than any evidence, so I won't say it's a prediction, but because he is personally so unstable -- and is known to be -- it seems to me unlikely that the Deep-State/Permanent Government will allow him to rule as president or anything else.

On the other hand, I'm not seeing any effort at all to contain him.

So.... we don't know. We can't say. And for the moment, there is no alternative to his ascension.

As they say, We Are So Fucked. No matter what.

What a whirled, what a whirled.
------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile on the Standing Rock/Archambault front. Wow. As I expected, the announcement that everybody should go home, they weren't needed any more, was met with shock, outrage, and resistance. Chad Iron Eyes, a prominent Standing Rock Sioux, all but called Archambault out for this bullshit. But some people did try to leave in the blizzard and some ran off the road and otherwise wound up in dire straits. What was he thinking? This is crazy.

There have been many attempts to rationalized Archambault's statements as primarily a matter of "safety" -- but when so many people who tried to leave were caught in the blizzard and were stuck, the "safety" argument fell apart. Safety for whom, eh? Not the Water Protectors.

Most of those who stayed were obviously better off than some of those who tried to leave.

Apparently there have been some modifications since the "leave now" statements were issued. Realizing -- gee, ya think? -- that leaving under blizzard conditions is probably unwise, the tribe and (interestingly) Morton County and AoCE officials have extended their hands to "help" by opening shelters for those who don't have winterized camping facilities, and for those who would rather not travel in such weather. Morton County officials (the source of so much pain) have said they will respond to any emergency and provide assistance to anyone who needs it due to the weather. This after saying they wouldn't.

I've been around Indian politics enough to recognize or at least suspect what's going on, but I'd rather not get into it right now -- because I can't do anything about it, and it will have to be resolved one way or another by those on scene. I don't doubt it will be, and it might get pretty ugly.

Indeed, what a whirled.

Leo the Incurable Romantic

Leo was my mother's step-father. He died before I was born, and I've never seen a picture of him, so I didn't know him and I have no personal knowledge of what he looked like. But since I've been on this journey of genealogical discovery, I feel like I've learned a great deal about him, enough, perhaps, to have a fairly good idea of what he was like.

I have little doubt that he was an incurable romantic.

He was second-generation American. He and his parents were born in the United States; his grandparents were born in Germany. That surprised me, for I thought he was Welsh or even Irish, but according to the records, he was German. He was born and reared in Indianapolis, and as far as I know he was a friend of my mother's biological father. That's what I was told by my mother, and the records I've found indicate they both worked for Indianapolis's streetcar company, and at least for a time they were neighbors.

Leo was a machinist for the streetcar company, whereas Larry (aka "Riley"), my mother's biological father, worked mostly as a conductor. When he worked. Leo was a member of the Sons of Pythias, and seems to have parlayed that and his own rather sunny personality into a much better life than Larry the Rebel was able to do for himself and his many offspring.

Larry would be killed in a railyard incident in St. Louis just before Christmas of 1916. He left behind a widow and young daughter in St. Louis and another widow and young daughter in Indianapolis. There were a number of other women and children, but those two households were primary at the time of Larry's death. The yard boss in St Louis married Larry's St. Louis widow Marie and adopted her daughter Helen, and they lived in St. Louis for the rest of their lives.

Larry's Indianapolis widow Edna would be married by Leo, and Leo, Edna and her daughter Virginia -- my mother -- would move to California in 1917 to start a new life. Leo never legally adopted my mother, but he treated her as his daughter and she used his last name as her own until she married.

Leo and Edna had no children together of their own.

In California, Leo started out as an auto mechanic for the Ed Reubel Dodge dealership in Santa Maria. He worked his way up to service manager, and he and his little family had a nice little California bungalow a few blocks away from the dealership. The house is still there and it still looks cozy and cheerful though it's now part of a multi-unit compound.

Sometime after 1930, Leo pulled up stakes and bought an auto court and filling station on the Redwood Highway in Willits called "U-Auto-Stop" where he and Edna moved. By this time my mother Virginia was married to her first husband, and shortly she would give birth to a daughter, Patricia, my (half) sister. They continued to live in Santa Maria where my mother's husband, Polk, worked as a mechanic and at other jobs for Ed Reubel.

In 1939, Leo sold the "U-Auto-Stop" and at first, I didn't know what had happened to them. Turns out he and Edna moved to Reno where he became the Secretary-Treasurer of a mining company. After some further search, I found out it was called the Jungo Mine, and it was located outside of Jungo, NV, the site of a very famous gold mine that had been extensively featured in Life Magazine. That mine was called the Jumbo Mine.

I found some ads for the Jungo Mine offering penny shares to all and sundry with extravagant promises of riches to come. Sacks of ore were being taken out of the Jungo Mine, some of them assaying at $12 and $15, so the ad copy said, and this translated to a remarkable return on a penny investment. "Get in now!"

Whether or not this mine actually ever operated, I don't know. There were lots of diggings around Jungo following the Jumbo strike in 1936, but whether any of them proved worthwhile is unknown to me. The ads I found for the Jungo Mine seem to have been placed only in 1940 -- I found none before or after -- and by 1941, Leo and Edna were living in Vallejo, CA.

Leo took a job as a machinist at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard -- where all those Liberty Ships were built to win the War -- and Edna took sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. She died in October, 1941. Leo continued to work at Mare Island until his own death in 1945.

My mother spoke rather highly of Leo, when she spoke of him at all -- which wasn't often. Except that, when it came to her mother's death, she became hard and unforgiving. Suddenly her attitude toward Leo changed, and she blamed Leo for her mother's death at age 52. According to her, Leo and Edna had adopted Christian Science, and that meant Edna got no medical attention during her illness and according to my mother, she died in agony. There were hints in the story she told me that they had turned to Christian Science because they couldn't afford traditional medical treatment, and the fact that they couldn't afford it was due to Leo's profligacy.

That could be, but my mother didn't say anything to me about Reno or the mine or Vallejo. Her stories of her mother and stepfather stopped in Willits, which is where I thought Edna had died. But it wasn't so.

She lived at least briefly in Vallejo and died at the Solano County Hospital where she was taken when it was too late.

At the time, my mother was living with her husband and daughter on an orchard-ranch in Yolo County owned a Japanese-American family. Her husband, Polk, she said, was working as an oil-jobber, but according to records I found, he was a service station attendant. It's possible he was both. She divorced Polk in 1941 or 42 -- due to his infidelity, she said. She and my sister stayed on the ranch until some time after the Japanese family was sent away to the camps. Then they moved into town, Sacramento, just across the river from the ranch. Polk was also in Sacramento at the time, and he stayed there through the War and afterwards. In fact, he's buried in Sacramento, which surprised the heck out of me as he died in Walnut Creek where he lived with his second wife for thirty years or more working for Chevron, eventually becoming a vice president for sales.

But his new wife Jean was from Sacramento, and after Polk died she moved back to Sacramento where she lived the rest of her life.

This is getting far afield of Leo, however.

Leo's romanticism comes through in the path he follows from Indiana to California, from California to Nevada, and from Nevada back to California -- when it seems that his hopes in the mine were dashed.

In the end, I see his story as a romantic tragedy.

Leaving Indiana in 1917 and making a new life in California with my mother and her mother was in itself a romantic gesture, a supremely romantic gesture, it seems to me.

My mother's mother Edna had come from a rather well-off matriarchy headed by her mother Ida. Ida was a widow-woman who had apparently inherited quite a lot of property from her parents and her husband, land and buildings in the path of Indianapolis's growth during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She lived off the income and proceeds of sales of this property and provided a home for her sisters and son and daughter, and soon would be providing a home for her granddaughter when Edna gave birth to my mother Virginia in 1911. The house where they lived on N. Sherman Drive is still standing, and it seems like a rather modest place, though it's deceptively large. It's next door to a fire station which was built in 1915 on the site of Ida's former home, the place she'd shared with her husband and children. Though I've never seen a picture of that house, my impression is that it was an old two story farm house that was built when that section of Indianapolis was rural. It apparently burned in 1912 or 1913, and Ida sold the lot to the city -- for a fire station. The household moved next door to a house Ida also owned at the time.

These places on N. Sherman Dr were half a block from the Michigan Avenue streetcar line where Larry, my mother's biological father, worked -- when he worked -- as a conductor.

Larry was quite a ladies' man.

He'd been married in 1896 and had three children with his wife Maud, but they were divorced around 1907 and his children were farmed out. His daughter Florence went to live with his brother Frank and Frank's wife Edna, and for all anyone knew, Florence was Frank and Edna's daughter for ever more. Larry's sons, George and David, went to live with Larry's parents where they stayed until they reached majority.

Larry fathered other children, three of whom I found records of. One, Virgil, was born the same year as my mother (1911) to a woman (girl, really; she was 17) who never claimed to be married to Larry. My mother's mother Edna did claim to be married to Larry, though I could find no proof of it. According to what I did find, she claimed to be married to him in January or February of 1910. But she did not live with him as man and wife -- ever, so far as I could find out -- and she did not use his last name until after my mother Virginia's birth.

Larry's other child, Helen, was born to Marie, his wife in St. Louis. I did find records of their marriage, though he married her under what appears to have been an assumed name. My mother always claimed that he was a bigamist, and the scandalous discovery was made at his funeral when his "other family" was revealed. My mother remembered attending his funeral, and she recalled feeling sorry for his daughter Helen who was then two years old (my mother was five.)

She recalled the funeral taking place in Indianapolis, but it didn't. It was in St. Louis on the 23rd of December, 1916, and Larry was buried in Friedens Cemetery in Bellfontaine Neighbors just north of St. Louis.

I suspect my mother simply didn't remember the train trip of several hours from Indianapolis to St. Louis to attend his funeral.

My mother said she had few memories of her father, but I suspect she had none. Not only was he a ladies man, he was a somewhat notorious petty criminal, accused of numerous robberies and burglaries from the time he was a young teenager. In March of 1912, he was chased through the streets of downtown Indianapolis by a "merchant policeman" who was firing his gun at the fleeing Larry -- who he accused of burglarizing a drugstore.

Larry was apprehended by regular police -- who knew him -- and taken to the stationhouse where he denied everything. The proprietor of the drugstore averred that nothing had been taken from the premises. Larry was arraigned and the case was bound over to the grand jury but I found no disposition. He may have gone to trial, but maybe not.

Larry's father David was a prominent Civil War veteran who held a number of patronage positions in Indiana state government. He was the legislative parliamentarian, later the state land clerk, and he served in a number of other capacities. He had six sons, three of whom became prominent in Indiana in their own right. Larry, the second youngest, on the other hand, became notorious.

It seems that Larry's father got him out of one scrape with the law after another, but the 1912 incident may have been the last straw. By sometime in 1913, Larry had moved to St. Louis where his older brother Harold had long lived and worked as a printer and Linotype operator for the St. Louis Globe Dispatch. (As a side-note, David, the pater familias, had published a newspaper in Lebanon, Indiana, before moving to Indianapolis and taking up positions with the state government.)

After Larry died in St. Louis, Leo -- his friend in Indianapolis -- took it upon himself to "make an honest woman" out of Edna and to take care of and protect Edna's daughter Virgina. They moved to California to start a new life -- a project which appears to have gone very well.

The family's life was very different and better in California than it could possibly have been in Indiana. Indianapolis was rough and gritty and dirty, and whether she wanted to be or not, Edna was caught up in scandal brought on by Larry's misbehavior.

Given the "moral" standards of the era, Edna was sullied, and there was nothing she could do about it -- though she tried. Leaving was her best option, and the fact that Leo was there and ready, willing, and able to take the risk of building a new life in California with Edna and Virginia was a godsend.

It's too bad that Leo's romantic vision culminated with his mining adventure in Nevada -- which apparently came to nothing and left him broke, his wife ill, and his stepdaughter hating him.

It's a very common story in some ways, but on another plane, it may be unique to this particular group of people at this particular time in American history. I knew little about it because it all took place before I was born, and my mother was not necessarily forthcoming. She harbored great resentment -- indeed hatred -- towards Leo, blaming him and his incurable romantic vision for her mother's death. She could not and did not forgive him. I have little doubt he carried his own sense of guilt and failure to his own death a few years later (I believe he died of a heart attack -- or perhaps of a broken heart).

I didn't know Leo or Edna -- let alone Larry. I've never even seen a picture of any of them. But they had an influence on my life through my mother. Finding out about them -- who they were, where they came from, what they did -- is an adventure for me, something I could not have done to this extent prior to the advent of the internet.

Now that I've found living cousins I'm learning a whole lot about my father's family I never knew before, too. It's all quite a wonder.

The Altar Boy is Radicalized at Berkeley -- Mario Savio and More About "Subversives"

Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley, 1965

Now that I've gotten to the chapters about the student rebellion at UC Berkeley and more particularly about Mario Savio, I'm learning plenty of stuff I didn't know or didn't think about if I did know.

Images of the early Free Speech Movement protests at Berkeley and of those involved (particularly Mario, but not just of him) are burned into my brain. They form a huge part of what I considered positive in my adolescence. "Who" these people were and the underlying motivations for "why" they were doing what they were doing hardly mattered. What mattered was that they were doing it, fearlessly, determinedly, and at considerable risk to themselves and and their futures. Bravery was only the most obvious of their attributes.

While I was riveted by Mario Savio's eloquence and charisma -- and oh, yes, I had a sheepskin lined suede jacket like his, and I think in other ways I strongly identified with him -- I knew nothing, really, about him, except that he was considered "working class" among the students and administrators who came from money (I knew too many of those people), and thus he was subject to relentless denunciation and ridicule by those opposed to the FSM protests.

After the glare of the media spotlight faded from him and the student movement went on to other issues and other campuses, I didn't try to follow Mario's further adventures. I knew that he was a reluctant hero, if you will, and was deviled by doubt during the Free Speech Movement years, but beyond that, not much. It wasn't until much later that I learned he'd gone on to become part of the initial faculty at Sonoma State University in the 1980s, and died of heart failure in 1996. Resquiat in Pacem.

Until I got into the biographical chapters about him in "Subversives," I didn't know that he had been an altar boy in Queens, or that he was considered a "troubled genius" in school and had a terrible stammer when speaking -- unless he was on stage or in front of a crowd, at which time he could become extraordinarily eloquent and persuasive. I didn't know that his mother wanted him to become a priest -- and he seriously considered it -- but he chose physics and the sciences in his initial college days in New York, only to switch to philosophy studies when he transferred to UC Berkeley in 1963.

I didn't know that he was initially enthusiastic about the Kennedy presidency, but he became disillusioned as Kennedy seemed incapable of following through on his campaign rhetoric and promises. Where have we heard that before?

I didn't even know that he had gone South for the Freedom Summer, and that his experiences with the Freedom Riders and with CORE and SNCC at Berkeley had profoundly shaped his perspective about the absurd and arbitrary restrictions placed on student political advocacy and activity on the University campus.

While Mario's iconic speech about "the gears of the machine" he gave on the steps of Sproul Hall on December 2, 1964, will likely resonate forever, the issues he was speaking about are not really well known at all, and they're not particularly easy to explain or examine from the distance of almost 50 years.

I remember what I was feeling about it back then, but the issue of the prohibition of on-campus political activity -- which is what the Free Speech Movement was opposing -- seems somewhat arcane and even petty from a distance.

It was actually a pretty much universal rule to prohibit on-campus political activity throughout California's public education system at the time, especially so at the University. The premise was that California's students would receive a mandatory and "free" public education through high school, and qualified students would be eligible for tuition free higher education at any public institution of higher learning in the state -- any that they could get into, as access was highly competitive and restricted. But part of the bargain that made this possible was that the public education system, particularly the University, had to stay out of politics... thus the prohibition on political advocacy on the Berkeley campus that became the fuse that lit the fire of the Free Speech Movement.

Up to a point, this prohibition was tolerated because the University didn't interfere with tabling and political speechifying "outside the gate," Sather Gate. Well, that is they didn't until they discovered that the sidewalk outside the gate actually belonged to the University, not the City of Berkeley as they had assumed. The campus administration and police started enforcing the rule on the sidewalk as well on the campus proper, and this seemingly arbitrary act triggered the protest. Students moved their tables onto the campus in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building, and defied the administration and police orders to desist.

And when Jack Weinberg, a graduate student, refused to desist or identify himself to police, he was taken into custody and hustled into a waiting police car on Sproul Plaza. This arrest by campus police precipitated a sit-down action by hundreds and then thousands of students, and the Free Speech Movement was launched. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Mario quickly emerged as the spokesman for the Movement, though it was obvious even then that he was uncomfortable in the role that had been thrust upon him. Nevertheless, he was a passionate and very articulate spokesman.

His passion derived from his experience, an experience I knew very little about until I started reading "Subversives." I have a much greater regard for him now than I did nearly 50 years ago, and I hardly thought that was possible. But learning about his past, and what he believed in, and what he had done prior to the Free Speech Movement only makes me admire him the more.

I'm no hero-worshiper, as anyone who knows me knows. There are many individuals, however, for whom I maintain great admiration and respect. Mario Savio has always been one of them, but now my admiration and respect for him has increased substantially.

The more I learn... I'm grateful I can still learn...

California Dreamin'

My mother was four or five years old when she came out to California on the train from Indiana with her mother and her new step-father. This was in 1916. California's population stood at about 3,000,000 at the time, mostly concentrated in two urban areas: Los Angeles with about 350,000 people and San Francisco with about 450,000.

The rest of California's population was scattered in rural areas and in small towns up and down the Coast and Valley. There were remnant Gold Rush towns in the foothills and mountains of the Sierras in the east and the Cascades in the far north, but most had become ghost towns when the easy gold was got.



My mother's parents settled in Santa Maria, which was at the time quite a fresh little town on the northern edge of Santa Barbara County. It was bordered on the west by newly plowed farm fields that led to the Guadalupe Dunes and the Pacific Ocean some ten or twelve miles away. On the north intermittently flowed (and sometimes flooded until it was dammed) the Santa Maria River. On the east were the Coast Mountains which blocked the Santa Maria Valley from the far more extensive Central Valley. And to the south were more rolling dune fields that seemed to stretch for dozens of miles until they blended into the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara. Oil had recently been discovered under the dunes.

Santa Maria had been founded sometime in the 1870's as Grangeville/Central City by a handful of farmers who saw potential in this windswept and rather chilly little valley that had once been part of the Rancho La Purisima that was headquartered at La Purisima Mission in Lompoc. When the California Missions were secularized in the 1820's, the land was pretty much abandoned except for the Chumash Indians who lived in the hills round about. It wasn't until the 1860's that settlement in the Valley was attempted by (Anglo) families whose names are still very prominent in the Santa Maria area.

The name of the town was changed to Santa Maria in 1885 because they say mail meant for Central City, California was being delivered to Central City, Colorado. Such were the vicissitudes of pioneering.

When my mother's parents settled there in 1916, Santa Maria had a population of between 2,000 and 3,000. It was a small town, but not a tiny town by the standards of the day, and Santa Maria considered itself highly progressive -- which in many ways it still does. Public education, water, sewage, electricity and so on were hallmarks of progressive infrastructure, along with active public health campaigns, scientific farming methods, irrigation systems, public parks and recreation and so on. Tidy little bungalows housed most of the people along wide tidy streets -- the width of Santa Maria's main streets is still impressive -- and the Southern Pacific Railroad ran a line along the Coast that stopped at Guadalupe on the eastern western margin of the farm fields to pick up the abundant produce that was grown then and still is. A spur line, the Santa Maria Valley Railroad, was run from the SP tracks in Guadalupe through the fields and to the produce packing plants in the Valley.

El Camino Real, the Spanish road in the province of Alta California, ran through the middle of town along Broadway. It's path is now followed or paralleled by Highway 101.

Perhaps most astonishing to these immigrants from Indiana were the flowers. The Valley was filled with wildflowers in the spring, and all through the growing season -- which was practically year round -- vast acreage was devoted to growing flowers for seeds and cutting in some of the most remarkable agricultural displays ever devised.


Well, of course, that and the fog and the ocean nearby. The Pacific wasn't visible from town but you could get to it reasonably easily either by going north to Pismo, which was even then a working class beach resort, or east through the dunes to what was essentially a wide deserted beach west of Guadalupe. The only thing about it -- apart from the wind and the cold and the fog -- was the tarballs. Oil leaked from fissures off-shore, and so the Guadalupe beach was often fouled with the smell of oil or the balls of tar that were washed up by the surf.



Oil would become my mother's step-father's key to living the relatively good life in California, for shortly after arriving in Santa Maria he was able to either open or become manager of an Associated Oil filling station. Car travel at the time was still in its infancy, but in California, the motor trip was already a way of life. My mother's step-father also worked as a mechanic at the Dodge Brothers dealership (I have the feeling that the dealership and the filling station were on the same site, though I have no real proof of it). Eventually, he wound up selling the Dodge Brothers cars as well.


Associated Oil became Flying A sometime in the 1920's or '30's, and I remember my mother telling me how proud her step-father was to have the Flying A logo on his station when the change came.

He retired in 1940 or 41 and bought a motor court up in Willits in the Redwood Country. Unfortunately for both him and his wife (my mother's mother) died within eighteen months or so and never had much enjoyment out of their retirement.


I'm surprised I remember as much of this story as I do. My mother was rarely inclined to talk about her childhood, and she harbored an intense resentment against her step-father (and her natural father, for that matter, whom she barely remembered.) From everything she said about him, her resentment was difficult for me to understand because she described her step-father as a very kind and generous man, strict but fair, and always willing to help a friend or a colleague in need.

She said he was never cruel to her, but she was always aware that she was not his natural daughter, and that seemed to make all the difference to her. She saw her mother as a saintly figure, but so far as I can recall, she never really had much to say about her.

I have often wondered what it must have been like for them to move from the gritty and hard-scrabble life of Indianapolis in the 'teens of the last century to the relatively easy life and lifestyle of pre-WWI California, and what they thought about it -- if they thought about it.

Picking up and moving to California was something that Americans did in those days, lured by the railroads and the real estate developers to low-cost land and homes and to pioneer communities where fresh starts were always under way. People were lured by the brochures, by Sunset Magazine, by incessant stories in the weeklies, and by a psychology of westward movement that almost assured that every year more and more people would depart from Back East -- which was anywhere east of the Mississippi -- and head out to California, or perhaps to Washington or Oregon if they could stand the constant rain.


California was a Promised Land like no other, and at least for some of the immigrants from Back East, it proved to be almost exactly as advertised. They came and prospered, living an adventure, and living well at lower financial cost than they knew where they came from, and with a far better sense of security than they had ever known before. It was possible -- back then, anyway -- to live modestly but well in California on a good deal less money than it cost to live poorly in any city Back East. It was possible to grow your own fruits and vegetables in your own yard or, if you wanted, to buy a few acres in the not-so-distant country and set out orange trees or any other crop you chose, and make a go of it as a small farmer or rancher. Many did and decided the rural life was not for them, but many others found they could take up residence in cities and towns in California and surprisingly fit right in almost immediately -- because nearly everybody was from somewhere else for one thing, and for another, because the early settlers tended to be friendly and welcoming.

Of course they were. They needed newcomers in order to prosper themselves.

The whole point of the California Dream was endless growth, after all, and without newcomers constantly arriving, there could be no economic growth, and without economic growth, there could be no Dream.

The Dream was built on the pocket-books of those who kept coming, and come they did for generation after generation.

While Santa Maria doesn't seem to be an obvious destination -- and it certainly wasn't in 1916 -- I can easily understand how my mother's parents would find it an almost ideal place to settle once they found it. I was never sure how they got there to begin with -- there was no direct passenger rail service, for example, and I don't know when they got a car, but driving continued to be something of a challenge for many years due to poor roads and unreliable vehicles. My mother never said what exactly brought them to Santa Maria rather than keeping them in -- say -- Los Angeles.

But I've lived in Santa Maria and I know it as one of the friendliest and most charming towns -- now a city -- in California, with a very "at ease" way of life. It is entirely unpretentious. Well, let me modify that a bit. The pretentious people tend to be known for what they are, and their pretensions tend to be the subject of friendly ridicule. This characteristic is said to go back to the earliest ranching days in the Valley, and I tend to believe it. A style was set back in the Old Days, and it's been carried on from then till now, and it shows no sign whatever of changing any time soon. Despite the fact that Santa Maria has grown substantially in the last 50 years (the span of time I've known the town), it still shows very much the same way of life and personality characteristics among the people as ever.

For me, it's not the place to be. I'm not very well suited to it, but I have no problem understanding why others -- especially newcomers from Back East -- find it delightful.

My mother's parents fit right in, and soon enough, they prospered modestly. They lived in a succession of tidy bungalows on the broad and tidy streets of the town, traveling extensively around California when they had the chance. My mother said she had been "practically everywhere" in the state by the time she was out of high school, going on road trips with her parents as often as possible. She was always happy to return to Santa Maria and said she didn't have any urge to live anywhere else until... well, after she was married the first time.

She married an oil jobber who worked for Associated and then for Standard Oil of California (now Chevron.) He had been coming by her step-father's station for some time, and they first met while she was still in high school. Her step-father did not approve of the young and somewhat flashy Texan who was making eyes at his step-daughter. He much preferred her to see the rancher's son that she had gone on dates with a few times.

As it happened, the rancher's son's family -- one of the First Families of the Valley -- did not approve of my mother, largely as far, as I can tell, as a matter of class. My mother's people were obviously working class, and her step-father was an actual mechanic. The ranchers of the Valley still consider themselves to be a kind of nobility (derived, I think, from the Spanish rancheros). They do not marry mechanic's daughters. They marry in their own class or above -- or they become monks and nuns.

As friendly as the Valley people are, there are certain lines and certain taboos that one does not cross or violate. Class lines being chief among them.

So my mother wound up marrying the Texas oil jobber who set her up quite nicely. I remember asking her how the Depression had affected her -- she married in 1932 -- and she said "it didn't." She showed me some pictures (I wish I had them now) taken of her outside her home in Santa Maria next to her car (she said it was a Dodge roadster purchased from her step-father). She was dressed stylishly for the time, looking very smart indeed. She said they lived very well and she never lacked for anything.

Except... the marriage was a failure. Her husband, it seems, had to travel a lot in his job, often staying overnight or longer at some of his destinations, and he was -- everyone agreed -- a charmer. One thing led to another... and another... and another... and so on. The fact that he was having affairs was well known to those in the business, but he was always devoted to his family -- which included his daughter, my (half)sister, and so it was a shock when my mother sued him for divorce after ten years of marriage.

It was apparently quite rancorous. My mother and sister moved in with her parents in Willits for a time, then my mother decided to strike out on her own, which wasn't a success, at least not initially. The story of her life from 1942 to 1949 was pretty chaotic, at least as I understand it, for even with the expanded opportunities for women in wartime, she still struggled mightily to maintain equilibrium and independence.

She said it was especially hard for her after her mother died in 1943, "so young" -- she was 54 -- as my mother put it. She never really talked about her mother with me, though, so I have only the sketchiest image of her, some coming from my sister -- who was very fond of her grandmother -- and some coming from friends of my mother's who were also friends of her mother. They said she was a strong and very sweet woman, and very fun to be around, and a damn good bridge player. She taught elementary school for a while, but as soon as her husband was making enough money to take care of the family well, she left the classroom and never went back. I've never seen a picture of my mother's parents, so I have no idea what they looked like. I can imagine, but beyond that, nothing.

It would have been so much easier for my mother simply to stay with her first husband (easy for a man to say!) since he had no wish for their marriage to end... I met him when I was a teen ager, and at that time he was a vice president for sales with Chevron; he was indeed a very charming man, married to a delightful woman he met soon after his divorce from my mother; they'd been married 25 years or so when I met them. They lived up on a hillside above Walnut Creek, in a sprawling ranch house with a spectacular view of Mt. Diablo. "California Dream" indeed.

I can't say that my mother ever looked back. Her reasons were complicated and tied in with other things in her life that caused her heartache and trouble till her dying day. Her relationship with my father was no less stormy.

But that's a story for another day.

The California Dream went well for my mother's parents, not quite so well for her. Subsequent generations -- my own, the two or three that have come after -- have a very different view of California. There's much about it I like, much about it that I question, and some -- not much -- that I despise, but I find I'm much happier in New Mexico -- "so far from God, so close to Texas." And I realize that a lot of my happiness in New Mexico is due to the fact that in many ways it is like the California I knew as a child, and indeed, it's not that different from the California my mother knew when she was a child. In some surprising ways, New Mexico is almost like California was 50 or 100 years ago.

Well. But the weather is different! And it's so close to Texas but so far from the sea!

[I may be on this tack for a while, I'm not sure. Biographical material is always interesting to me, though I'm sure it can induce catatonia in others. I beg readers' indulgence...]