Chapter one: My Mother’s laugh.
When I was little, my father would often refer to me as a "prune picker". This puzzled me greatly for a while. I was born and lived in the farm country of central California, the youngest child of a farm family of seven children recently arrived from Oklahoma. I say children, but two of my siblings were over 18 and had moved out of our home when I was born and 2 others were in high school. Both of my parents were in their early 40’s at the time of my birth, so my guess is that I was an accident although my father always denied it. I was the only one in my family who was not born in Oklahoma and, eventually, I figured out that "prune picker" was a playful term, somewhat derogatory in nature, used by Okies for a "native Californian" . So, from that perspective I cannot deny that I was, indeed, a Prune Picker. Later I learned that prunes are a type of plum and that they are not "picked" exactly… the trees are simply shaken until the ripe fruit falls off on it's own. From that I figured out that the Okies were suggesting that the native Californians were so lazy they couldn’t even pick fruit properly.
I was born in the small town of Selma in the San Joaquin Valley of California on April, 22, 1948. At the time the family had recently arrived from Oklahoma after a short stay in Colorado. We lived near the little town of Laton and that is where 3 of my older siblings attended high school. I was not only the first sibling to be born in California, I was the first to be born in a hospital. Specifically, I was born in the Selma Sanitarium. At the time, it was a sanitarium on one floor and a hospital on the other. I believe the building still exists there as of this writing (2021). “Some people'' have suggested that, since I started in a Sanitarium, I likely will end up in one as well. Actually, the word “Sanitarium” has gotten kind of a bad rap. Sanatoria (that’s the plural) did not exist ONLY for the treatment of mental health issues, some were medical facilities that specialized in treatment for long-term illnesses. Many sanatoria in the United States specialized in treatment of tuberculosis in the twentieth century prior to the discovery of antibiotics.
The Selma Sanitarium where I was born.
For the first 18 months of my life, the family lived just southeast of the intersection of Fowler avenue and Clarkson avenue in rural Fresno county. Over the years a tiny neighborhood had grown up on the southwest corner of that intersection and was known locally as “wildflower corner”. Wildflower corner was to play a very important part in a particular event in my later life...more about that later. I don’t have any memories of living in that first house but I came to know the tiny community well because my oldest brother, David, bought a house and raised his family at Wildflower corner.
The family moved when I was about 18 months old (in the Fall of 1949) to a house in the “census designated place” of Conejo, CA. The word “Conejo” means “Rabbit” in Spanish and my guess is that the community was named for the jackrabbits that, no doubt, outnumbered the human residents. Conejo, in 1949, consisted of a potato warehouse, a small country grocery store and perhaps a dozen houses. These days the potato shed is long gone, the store has been closed and demolished, most of the houses are still standing (more or less). I'm told that they are currently building a high speed rail line on the old AT&SF railway right of way that passes very close to where our old house stood.. Somehow it’s hard to imagine travelling through the “town” of Conejo at 200 miles per hour. The phrase “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it” may actually be true in that case. Conejo consists of three streets and a railroad right of way that form a, roughly, half mile long triangle that encloses the entire community. Conejo Avenue runs East and West, Peach avenue runs North and South and Railroad avenue runs NW to SE along a portion of the railroad track. The house and the small plot of land we lived on consisted of only a couple of acres and made up the southern point of the triangle. The railroad right of way and tracks were part of the AT&SF line. I used the acronym for the railway but I love the actual full name of the railroad, the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe. I must have been born to be a wanderer, someone told me that Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe were cities and I longed to travel to those three cities from a very early age. I have long since visited all three. I think I fell in love with the rhythm of the name (I believe there is a song that celebrates the railway if you care to look it up). Regarding the three “cities”, they didn’t meet my expectations but that was more because of my overinflated imagination than anything else.
Most of the events that make up my earliest memories occurred in and around Conejo. My earliest memory is of an incident involving my older brother, Jim. We were in a car, a Model A Ford I think, and we were approaching the railroad crossing near our house. A train was coming and Jim decided, at the last second, that he couldn’t beat the train to the crossing so he slammed on the brakes. I was standing in the front seat (in the days before seat belts or special seats for toddlers) and I fell down onto the floorboards. I don’t think there was any bruising, bleeding or bone breakage involved but the fact that I remember it, vividly, is probably an indication of just how scary it was. The thing is that I don’t believe anyone ever told me this story. I’m wondering if Jim even told my Mother that he nearly killed his baby brother. Jim might have been the single most honest person I’ve ever known...so I am guessing that he told her. I never asked Jim about it and no one else ever mentioned it so I claim it as my first real memory. A lot of my early memories are suspect, did it really happen? Did someone tell me a story and I stored it away like a memory? No, it was real.
We had an outhouse when we lived in Conejo. That leads me to another memory. My mother worked from time to time cleaning houses. Since my siblings were all of school age she would often take me to work with her. At one house I had to go to the bathroom and was, apparently, confused by the large, white porcelain bowl full of water. “Mama, are you sure it’s okay for me to use this?”
Another memory that I’m pretty sure is real is the first Halloween that I was old enough to be allowed to go out with my older siblings. They dressed me up in a homemade costume….I don’t remember what the costume was...but I didn’t care because I was allowed to go “trick or treating” with my older brother and sister, John and Carol. I have a clear memory of going to the first house and being given candy cigarettes. For those too young to remember candy cigarettes they were a chalky white semi-hard candy shaped and colored exactly like an actual cigarette. I was handed the candy cigarettes without a wrapper, without a box and I held them in my sweaty little hand instead of dropping them into my bag. I guess I didn’t understand the reason for the bag (part of the costume?). As we proceeded on our tour of the community I figured out that I was supposed to put the candy in my bag and I did so as each piece of candy was handed to me at each house we visited. But, I never did put the candy cigarettes in the bag, they remained in my sweaty little palm and got stickier and stickier as we made our way around the town and back home. My mother had a pretty good laugh as she was washing my hands. One of my best memories, my mother’s laugh.
Another memory involves an incident that happened while we were out in a field, I don’t think it was in Conejo. I believe my Dad was driving a tractor for a farmer on a nearby farm. I remember the Tractor was an older model John Deere and it ran on just two cylinders. I don’t mean some of the cylinders didn’t work….that was the way it was designed. Consequently it made a continuous series of Popping sounds when it was running…. It’s hard to run smoothly when you only have two cylinders. The kid’s all referred to it as a Johnny Popper. I don’t know why we were out in the field while Dad was plowing, maybe we were hoeing weeds or maybe just bringing him his lunch. Actually we may have been helping with the irrigation because, at one point, we had to cross a small irrigation ditch. Not a permanent canal but just a temporary ditch for moving water from one place to another. It must have been maybe 2 or 3 feet wide. The men who worked in the fields would use a shovel as sort of a “pole vault” tool to get across the ditch. The idea is to jam the shovel blade down into the mud at the bottom of the ditch and use the long wooden shovel handle and your momentum to vault to the other side. My Mother tried this, but didn’t succeed. She ended up sitting in the middle of the ditch with water up past her waist, laughing. Lesson learned by her little boy; don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. Again, one of my best memories, my mother’s laugh.
While we were in the field one of my older brothers showed me a magic trick. He taught me how to use a siphon pipe. A siphon pipe is a curved length of pipe that enables a farmer to cause water to flow uphill out of a ditch and flow continuously into a furrow without cutting a hole in the ditch. The technique involves putting your hand over the exit end of the pipe and moving the other end of the pipe back and forth rapidly in the water filled ditch until a difference in pressure is created sufficient for the water to flow up through the pipe and out the exit. You have to be quick and you have to be precise with the timing but the result is like magic. The water flows up and through the pipe from the canal and down to the furrow and will continue to flow until the siphon pressure seal is broken or the water level in the ditch becomes too low to support the suction. You can look it up. Obviously not magic….but to a 3 or 4 year old boy, it was close enough. Later, much later, I learned that this basic technique could be used to siphon gasoline from a car fuel tank into a gas can. This method is slightly different in that you use a length of flexible tube and you start the siphon by mouth...the trick is to know when to stop the mouth suction and, quickly, drop the exit end of the tube into the gas can. Too soon and the gasoline doesn’t flow from tank to can. Too late and you get a mouthful of gasoline (don’t try this at home”). Or...if you must try it at home, use a kitchen sink full of water and a jug. Just make sure the jug remains lower than the water level in the sink and I would recommend using a clear tube so you can see the liquid flowing and better judge when to stop the mouth suction and transfer the exit end of the tube into the jug. Go ahead kids...your Mom won’t mind. Oh, one other thing, make sure the jug is large enough to hold all the water in the sink...or, simply remember to break the suction before the jug overflows.
I’ve mentioned that several of my siblings were much older than me. When I was about 4 years old my brother Keith, who was on Active duty in the Navy, came home on leave and brought his new wife Josephine. Jo was a great person, a lot of fun. One of the things she did to introduce herself was to make tacos for the family. I’d never seen or heard of a taco at the time but I was familiar with PBJ sandwiches made with one piece of bread smeared with peanut butter and jelly or jam and folded over so little hands could handle it easily by taking the first bite on the folded side and proceeding from there. I quickly learned that it wasn’t wise to approach tacos from the folded side. A fresh shirt and washed face and belly later, I was taught the proper approach to a taco.
My brother Jim was a couple years younger than Keith and had also joined the Navy upon his graduation from high school. I was born when Jim was 16 and, for most of my life, he was the brother who watched over me. David was so much older than me he seemed like an uncle, in fact he was older than several of my Dad’s younger brothers. Keith had joined the Navy 3 months before I was born, He actually quit high school in the middle of his senior year to enlist. It all worked out well, he later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. But, I hardly knew him. Honestly, he recently passed away at the age of 91 and I’m 72 and I never did REALLY know him. John is 7 years older and my relationship with John is typical big brother little brother stuff. I mean that in the nicest way, John taught me many things. Jim was always my protector and was always there for me. He bought me my first Tricycle and (I think) my first little red wagon. He worked in one of the very first “recycling” companies and gave me my first bicycle. He found it in the recycle (okay he found it in the dump), restored it with new tires etc and gave it to me. Much later, he went with me to offer advice when I bought my first car. I even met my first girlfriend at his house (she was the babysitter for his kids).
I got sidetracked and went off on a tangent there, but I had to explain my special relationship with Jim. As I mentioned above, when I was about 2, Jim graduated high school and went away to the Navy. My mother and I rode the train/bus to San Diego for his boot camp graduation. As far as I know, this was my first long trip. I have one dim memory of sleeping in the back seat of the greyhound bus. I don’t remember the boot camp graduation ceremony. It’s actually more of a parade. I know this because I graduated from Navy boot camp on the same field at Naval Training Center, San Diego 16 years later. But I don’t have any memory of being in San Diego or seeing Jim in his uniform. Over the years the 2 Navy brothers would come home on leave from time to time. I remember stories about Keith serving aboard a Battleship (I think the USS Wisconsin) off the coast of Korea during the war. There was another story of Jim and Keith meeting accidentally one day while walking down the street in Sasebo, Japan. Apparently Jim was aware that Keith’s ship was in port Sasebo but he had just arrived and had not yet been able to visit the USS Wisconsin. Keith had no idea that Jim had been deployed overseas as an Electrician’s Mate (EM) aboard USS Jason. It’s a small world. Keith was trained as a Radioman (an RM) and later transferred to a new rating of Cryptologic Technician (CTI). The (I) indicates that he was a linguist. More precisely, he was a Russian Linguist or “Ru-ling” as they were called by the other CT’s. I know these things because I too was trained as a Radioman (RM) and later transferred to the Cryptologic Technician Rate (CTR). The “R” indicates that I was, essentially, a Radioman with a higher security clearance. But, I digress again...sorry, I tend to do that a lot.
I loved hearing the Seafaring stories told by my big brothers. My other two brothers were both truck drivers. Exciting and, certainly, an honorable profession but picking up a load of cottonseed in Bakersfield is not quite the same as strolling the streets of Sasebo, Japan or Rota, Spain (and, yes, I have actually done all of those things). I think there was a certain amount of hero worship involved in my decision to join the Navy straight out of High school.
I have lots of other memories from our time in Conejo. Playing in the yard under a big weeping willow tree that, somehow my memory insists, had a large, living grape vine wrapped around it. Chasing the chickens, feeding the chickens and watering the chickens is another memory. There was a small, cement lined well… actually more of a “standpipe” where water collected from a pump… in the middle of the yard. One day while I was dipping water out of the well for the chickens, I fell in. I was about 3 or 4 years old and I was lucky in that my brother, John, saw me or heard me screaming and ran over to lift me out. He grabbed me but couldn’t lift me… my mother heard the commotion and came to my rescue. My actual memory is of being IN the water, IN the well...the rest of this story is what I remember about what I’ve been told.
My brother, John, and sister, Carol attended Conejo Elementary school perhaps a mile or so down Conejo avenue. I remember the grocery store and the nice lady who ran it, her name was Maggie Downs and I believe she also owned or managed the store at Wildflower corner. The tiny communities of Wildflower corner and Conejo constituted the entirety of my world at this point. We did occasionally visit the big cities (in my eyes) of Selma, Hanford, Laton and Caruthers and, rarely, the huge metropolis of Fresno.
When I was about 4 years old (1952), the family moved from the house in Conejo to a big, rambling house on Chestnut Avenue near the town of Monmouth, California. Monmouth was less than 5 miles from Conejo and was in the Caruthers high school district which adjoined the Laton District that includes Conejo. I had not yet started school but John and Carol transferred from Conejo Elementary to Monroe Elementary in Monmouth. My older sister, Jean, (14 years older) was in the middle of her senior year and she stayed enrolled at Laton high school. Dad would drive her to the nearest Laton school bus stop so she could finish her senior year there.
There were 80 acres on the Chestnut avenue place, all in Cotton at the time as I recall. Dad didn’t own the land, he worked for a man named A.G. Yankee. Mr. Yankee owned the land and Dad farmed it. I’m guessing it was some kind of “sharecrop” agreement? I’m not sure. Dad worked for Mr. Yankee a couple of other times over the next 10 years in a similar situation. One of the “perks” of the job was that we got to live in the farmhouse that was on the land. The house on Chestnut avenue was the best house we ever lived in. We lived there two times over the next 14 years or so. We were there in 1952, 1953 and again in 1965/66. I was pre school in 52/53 and 65/66 was my senior year at Caruthers High School. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Jim, John and Dean Neighbors. about 1953. Jim was, obviously home on leave from the Navy. I was 5, John was 12 and Jim 19 or 20.
I loved the house and the farm because it was a paradise for little boys. There were 80 acres to roam in and, on one corner of the property, there was a grove of Eucalyptus trees that we would play in. There were, and probably still are, small groves of Eucalyptus trees all over the central San Joaquin valley of California. Someone once told me that the groves were planted by the railroad companies to provide the wooden ties for the rail bed, but it didn’t work out because the wood was too soft. I have no idea if that is true or not. We had a dog, poochie, and a cat, Lucy, and all those acres to play in. The house had an enclosed porch that wrapped around the back and continued down the south side of the house. It was huge and was a great place to play if it was raining outside. It was where we had our freezer and where we stored a lot of our food.
I was actually old enough to attend Kindergarten when we lived in this house but, the local school, Monroe Elementary school, did not have a kindergarten so I didn’t start school until the following year by which time we had moved yet again.
I have a few memories from this house. My oldest sister, Jean, graduated from high school and then got married while we lived there. I honestly don’t remember when Walt Westfall, Jean’s husband, was not a part of our family. Walt attended school in the Laton district with Jim and Jean and seems, to my mind, to have always been there.
I have another “Halloween” memory from our time on Chestnut avenue, my brother and sister dressed me up and took me with them to a Halloween party at Monroe Elementary. They put a Petunia pig mask on me and , I think, Carol’s coat and I actually won the prize for best costume. I was very shy and honestly didn’t enjoy the experience much...but it’s a memory.
A lot of our time, Carol and John and me, at the Chestnut house was spent playing in the Eucalyptus grove. We built “forts”, holes in the ground with boards or gates or something over the top and played Cowboys and Indians.
I remember that, aside from the grove of trees, the entire 80 acres was in cotton and Dad spent most of his time tending that crop. He had an old tractor that seems enormous in my memory and, somehow, it was used as a pump to provide water pressure for the sprinkler irrigation system that we used to irrigate the cotton. I just remember that it was loud and big and I didn’t understand why it had wheels but we didn’t drive it. I think there was another tractor, a John Deere, unless I am mistaken; another of the Johnny Poppers I mentioned earlier.
As I mentioned, the second time we lived there I was in my senior year of high school. I still loved the house and the farm. At this point, in the mid 1960’s the place was completely in vineyard and the Eucalyptus grove had been cut down. There were 80 acres of grapes, 110 mile long rows. 55 miles of Thompson seedless and 55 miles of Muscat grapes. I know this because I drove it (in a tractor) and walked it (pruning, harvesting, irrigating, weeding, fertilizing). The farm was still owned by Mr Yankee and one of the perks this time was that I too was employed by Mr. Yankee. I worked part time, since I was still in High school, but it was my first real paying job. Once of the things I liked about living in the house my senior year was that my “bedroom” was round. It was situated at the front corner of the house and I think it was originally a “sitting room”. And the cool thing about it was that it had its own exterior door. I could come and go as I pleased, as long as I was quiet about it. That was a major perk for a restless 17 year old. My Dad was sort of old fashioned (he was born in 1907, why wouldn’t he be old fashioned ) and we didn’t have a telephone, even though it was the middle of the 1960’s. I would sneak out and walk down to the Monmouth grocery store and use the pay phone there to call my friends and/or my girlfriend. It was a great place to live. But, once again, I get ahead of my story.
Chapter one: My Mother’s laugh.
When I was little, my father would often refer to me as a "prune picker". This puzzled me greatly for a while. I was born and lived in the farm country of central California, the youngest child of a farm family of seven children recently arrived from Oklahoma. I say children, but two of my siblings were over 18 and had moved out of our home when I was born and 2 others were in high school. Both of my parents were in their early 40’s at the time of my birth, so my guess is that I was an accident although my father always denied it. I was the only one in my family who was not born in Oklahoma and, eventually, I figured out that "prune picker" was a playful term, somewhat derogatory in nature, used by Okies for a "native Californian" . So, from that perspective I cannot deny that I was, indeed, a Prune Picker. Later I learned that prunes are a type of plum and that they are not "picked" exactly… the trees are simply shaken until the ripe fruit falls off on it's own. From that I figured out that the Okies were suggesting that the native Californians were so lazy they couldn’t even pick fruit properly.
I was born in the small town of Selma in the San Joaquin Valley of California on April, 22, 1948. At the time the family had recently arrived from Oklahoma after a short stay in Colorado. We lived near the little town of Laton and that is where 3 of my older siblings attended high school. I was not only the first sibling to be born in California, I was the first to be born in a hospital. Specifically, I was born in the Selma Sanitarium. At the time, it was a sanitarium on one floor and a hospital on the other. I believe the building still exists there as of this writing (2021). “Some people'' have suggested that, since I started in a Sanitarium, I likely will end up in one as well. Actually, the word “Sanitarium” has gotten kind of a bad rap. Sanatoria (that’s the plural) did not exist ONLY for the treatment of mental health issues, some were medical facilities that specialized in treatment for long-term illnesses. Many sanatoria in the United States specialized in treatment of tuberculosis in the twentieth century prior to the discovery of antibiotics.
For the first 18 months of my life, the family lived just southeast of the intersection of Fowler avenue and Clarkson avenue in rural Fresno county. Over the years a tiny neighborhood had grown up on the southwest corner of that intersection and was known locally as “wildflower corner”. Wildflower corner was to play a very important part in a particular event in my later life...more about that later. I don’t have any memories of living in that first house but I came to know the tiny community well because my oldest brother, David, bought a house and raised his family at Wildflower corner.
The family moved when I was about 18 months old (in the Fall of 1949) to a house in the “census designated place” of Conejo, CA. The word “Conejo” means “Rabbit” in Spanish and my guess is that the community was named for the jackrabbits that, no doubt, outnumbered the human residents. Conejo, in 1949, consisted of a potato warehouse, a small country grocery store and perhaps a dozen houses. These days the potato shed is long gone, the store has been closed and demolished, most of the houses are still standing (more or less). I'm told that they are currently building a high speed rail line on the old AT&SF railway right of way that passes very close to where our old house stood.. Somehow it’s hard to imagine travelling through the “town” of Conejo at 200 miles per hour. The phrase “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it” may actually be true in that case. Conejo consists of three streets and a railroad right of way that form a, roughly, half mile long triangle that encloses the entire community. Conejo Avenue runs East and West, Peach avenue runs North and South and Railroad avenue runs NW to SE along a portion of the railroad track. The house and the small plot of land we lived on consisted of only a couple of acres and made up the southern point of the triangle. The railroad right of way and tracks were part of the AT&SF line. I used the acronym for the railway but I love the actual full name of the railroad, the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe. I must have been born to be a wanderer, someone told me that Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe were cities and I longed to travel to those three cities from a very early age. I have long since visited all three. I think I fell in love with the rhythm of the name (I believe there is a song that celebrates the railway if you care to look it up). Regarding the three “cities”, they didn’t meet my expectations but that was more because of my overinflated imagination than anything else.
Most of the events that make up my earliest memories occurred in and around Conejo. My earliest memory is of an incident involving my older brother, Jim. We were in a car, a Model A Ford I think, and we were approaching the railroad crossing near our house. A train was coming and Jim decided, at the last second, that he couldn’t beat the train to the crossing so he slammed on the brakes. I was standing in the front seat (in the days before seat belts or special seats for toddlers) and I fell down onto the floorboards. I don’t think there was any bruising, bleeding or bone breakage involved but the fact that I remember it, vividly, is probably an indication of just how scary it was. The thing is that I don’t believe anyone ever told me this story. I’m wondering if Jim even told my Mother that he nearly killed his baby brother. Jim might have been the single most honest person I’ve ever known...so I am guessing that he told her. I never asked Jim about it and no one else ever mentioned it so I claim it as my first real memory. A lot of my early memories are suspect, did it really happen? Did someone tell me a story and I stored it away like a memory? No, it was real.
We had an outhouse when we lived in Conejo, no indoor plumbing. That leads me to another memory. My mother worked from time to time cleaning houses. Since my siblings were all of school age she would often take me to work with her. At one house I had to go to the bathroom and was, apparently, confused by the large, white porcelain bowl full of water. “Mama, are you sure it’s okay for me to use this?”
Another memory that I’m pretty sure is real is the first Halloween that I was old enough to be allowed to go out with my older siblings. They dressed me up in a homemade costume….I don’t remember what the costume was...but I didn’t care because I was allowed to go “trick or treating” with my older brother and sister, John and Carol. I have a clear memory of going to the first house and being given candy cigarettes. For those too young to remember candy cigarettes they were a chalky white semi-hard candy shaped and colored exactly like an actual cigarette. I was handed the candy cigarettes without a wrapper, without a box and I held them in my sweaty little hand instead of dropping them into my bag. I guess I didn’t understand the reason for the bag (part of the costume?). As we proceeded on our tour of the community I figured out that I was supposed to put the candy in my bag and I did so as each piece of candy was handed to me at each house we visited. But, I never did put the candy cigarettes in the bag, they remained in my sweaty little palm and got stickier and stickier as we made our way around the town and back home. My mother had a pretty good laugh as she was washing my hands. One of my best memories, my mother’s laugh.
Another memory involves an incident that happened while we were out in a field, I don’t think it was in Conejo. I believe my Dad was driving a tractor for a farmer on a nearby farm. I remember the Tractor was an older model John Deere and it ran on just two cylinders. I don’t mean some of the cylinders didn’t work….that was the way it was designed. Consequently it made a continuous series of Popping sounds when it was running…. It’s hard to run smoothly when you only have two cylinders. The kid’s all referred to it as a Johnny Popper. I don’t know why we were out in the field while Dad was plowing, maybe we were hoeing weeds or maybe just bringing him his lunch. Actually we may have been helping with the irrigation because, at one point, we had to cross a small irrigation ditch. Not a permanent canal but just a temporary ditch for moving water from one place to another. It must have been maybe 2 or 3 feet wide. The men who worked in the fields would use a shovel as sort of a “pole vault” tool to get across the ditch. The idea is to jam the shovel blade down into the mud at the bottom of the ditch and use the long wooden shovel handle and your momentum to vault to the other side. My Mother tried this, but didn’t succeed. She ended up sitting in the middle of the ditch with water up past her waist, laughing. Lesson learned by her little boy; don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. Again, one of my best memories, my mother’s laugh.
While we were in the field one of my older brothers showed me a magic trick. He taught me how to use a siphon pipe. A siphon pipe is a curved length of pipe that enables a farmer to cause water to flow uphill out of a ditch and flow continuously into a furrow without cutting a hole in the ditch. The technique involves putting your hand over the exit end of the pipe and moving the other end of the pipe back and forth rapidly in the water filled ditch until a difference in pressure is created sufficient for the water to flow up through the pipe and out the exit. You have to be quick and you have to be precise with the timing but the result is like magic. The water flows up and through the pipe from the canal and down to the furrow and will continue to flow until the siphon pressure seal is broken or the water level in the ditch becomes too low to support the suction. You can look it up. Obviously not magic….but to a 3 or 4 year old boy, it was close enough. Later, much later, I learned that this basic technique could be used to siphon gasoline from a car fuel tank into a gas can. This method is slightly different in that you use a length of flexible tube and you start the siphon by mouth...the trick is to know when to stop the suction and, quickly, drop the exit end of the tube into the gas can. Too soon and the gasoline doesn’t flow from tank to can. Too late and you get a mouthful of gasoline (don’t try this at home”). Or...if you must try it at home, use a kitchen sink full of water and a jug. Just make sure the jug remains lower than the water level in the sink and I would recommend using a clear tube so you can see the liquid flowing and better judge when to stop the mouth suction and transfer the exit end of the tube into the jug. Go ahead kids...your Mom won’t mind. Oh, one other thing, make sure the jug is large enough to hold all the water in the sink...or, simply remember to break the suction before the jug overflows.
I’ve mentioned that several of my siblings were much older than me. When I was about 4 years old my brother Keith, who was on Active duty in the Navy, came home on leave and brought his new wife Josephine. Jo was a great person, a lot of fun. One of the things she did to introduce herself was to make tacos for the family. I’d never seen or heard of a taco at the time but I was familiar with PBJ sandwiches made with one piece of bread smeared with peanut butter and jelly or jam and folded over so little hands could handle it easily by taking the first bite on the folded side and proceeding from there. I quickly learned that it wasn’t wise to approach tacos from the folded side. A fresh shirt and washed face and belly later, I was taught the proper approach to a taco.
My brother Jim was a couple years younger than Keith and had also joined the Navy upon his graduation from high school. I was born when Jim was 16 and, for most of my life, he was the brother who watched over me. David was so much older than me he seemed like an uncle, in fact he was older than several of my Dad’s younger brothers. Keith had joined the Navy 3 months before I was born, He actually quit high school in the middle of his senior year to enlist. It all worked out well, he later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. But, I hardly knew him. Honestly, he recently passed away at the age of 91 and I’m 72 and I never did REALLY know him. John is 7 years older and my relationship with John is typical big brother little brother stuff. I mean that in the nicest way, John taught me many things. Jim was always my protector and was always there for me. He bought me my first Tricycle and (I think) my first little red wagon. He worked in one of the very first “recycling” companies and gave me my first bicycle. He found it in the recycle (okay he found it in the dump), restored it with new tires etc and gave it to me. Much later, he went with me to offer advice when I bought my first car. I even met my first girlfriend at his house (she was the babysitter for his kids).
I got sidetracked and went off on a tangent there, but I had to explain my special relationship with Jim. As I mentioned above, when I was about 2, Jim graduated high school and went away to the Navy. My mother and I rode the train/bus to San Diego for his boot camp graduation. As far as I know, this was my first long trip. I have one dim memory of sleeping in the back seat of the greyhound bus. I don’t remember the boot camp graduation ceremony. It’s actually more of a parade. I know this because I graduated from Navy boot camp on the same field at Naval Training Center, San Diego 16 years later. But I don’t have any memory of being in San Diego or seeing Jim in his uniform. Over the years the 2 Navy brothers would come home on leave from time to time. I remember stories about Keith serving aboard a Battleship (I think the USS Wisconsin) off the coast of Korea during the war. There was another story of Jim and Keith meeting accidentally one day while walking down the street in Sasebo, Japan. Apparently Jim was aware that Keith’s ship was in port Sasebo but he had just arrived and had not yet been able to visit the USS Wisconsin. Keith had no idea that Jim had been deployed overseas as an Electrician’s Mate (EM) aboard USS Jason. It’s a small world. Keith was trained as a Radioman (an RM) and later transferred to a new rating of Cryptologic Technician (CTI). The (I) indicates that he was a linguist. More precisely, he was a Russian Linguist or “Ru-ling” as they were called by the other CT’s. I know these things because I too was trained as a Radioman (RM) and later transferred to the Cryptologic Technician Rate (CTR). The “R” indicates that I was, essentially, a Radioman with a higher security clearance. But, I digress again...sorry, I tend to do that a lot.
I loved hearing the Seafaring stories told by my big brothers. My other two brothers were both truck drivers. Exciting and, certainly, an honorable profession but picking up a load of cottonseed in Bakersfield is not quite the same as strolling the streets of Sasebo, Japan or Rota, Spain (and, yes, I have actually done all of those things). I think there was a certain amount of hero worship involved in my decision to join the Navy straight out of High school.
I have lots of other memories from our time in Conejo. Playing in the yard under a big weeping willow tree that, somehow my memory insists, had a large, living grape vine wrapped around it. Chasing the chickens, feeding the chickens and watering the chickens is another memory. There was a small, cement lined well… actually more of a “standpipe” where water collected from a pump… in the middle of the yard. One day while I was dipping water out of the well for the chickens, I fell in. I was about 3 or 4 years old and I was lucky in that my brother, John, saw me or heard me screaming and ran over to lift me out. He grabbed me but couldn’t lift me… my mother heard the commotion and came to my rescue. My actual memory is of being IN the water, IN the well...the rest of this story is what I remember about what I’ve been told.
My brother, John, and sister, Carol attended Conejo Elementary school perhaps a mile or so down Conejo avenue. I remember the grocery store and the nice lady who ran it, her name was Maggie Downs and I believe she also owned or managed the store at Wildflower corner. The tiny communities of Wildflower corner and Conejo constituted the entirety of my world at this point. We did occasionally visit the big cities (in my eyes) of Selma, Hanford, Laton and Caruthers and, rarely, the huge metropolis of Fresno.
When I was about 4 years old (1952), the family moved from the house in Conejo to a big, rambling house on Chestnut Avenue near the town of Monmouth, California. Monmouth was less than 5 miles from Conejo and was in the Caruthers high school district which adjoined the Laton District that includes Conejo. I had not yet started school but John and Carol transferred from Conejo Elementary to Monroe Elementary in Monmouth. My older sister, Jean, (14 years older) was in the middle of her senior year and she stayed enrolled at Laton high school. Dad would drive her to the nearest Laton school bus stop so she could finish her senior year there.
There were 80 acres on the Chestnut avenue place, all in Cotton at the time as I recall. Dad didn’t own the land, he worked for a man named A.G. Yankee. Mr. Yankee owned the land and Dad farmed it. I’m guessing it was some kind of “sharecrop” agreement? I’m not sure. Dad worked for Mr. Yankee a couple of other times over the next 10 years in a similar situation. One of the “perks” of the job was that we got to live in the farmhouse that was on the land. The house sson Chestnut avenue was the best house we ever lived in. We lived there two times over the next 14 years or so. We were there in 1952, 1953 and again in 1965/66. I was pre school in 52/53 and 65/66 was my senior year at Caruthers High School. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
I loved the house and the farm because it was a paradise for little boys. There were 80 acres to roam in and, on one corner of the property, there was a grove of Eucalyptus trees that we would play in. There were, and probably still are, small groves of Eucalyptus trees all over the central San Joaquin valley of California. Someone once told me that the groves were planted by the railroad companies to provide the wooden ties for the rail bed, but it didn’t work out because the wood was too soft. I have no idea if that is true or not. We had a dog, poochie, and a cat, Lucy, and all those acres to play in. The house had an enclosed porch that wrapped around the back and continued down the south side of the house. It was huge and was a great place to play if it was raining outside. It was where we had our freezer and where we stored a lot of our food.
I was actually old enough to attend Kindergarten when we lived in this house but, the local school, Monroe Elementary school, did not have a kindergarten so I didn’t start school until the following year by which time we had moved yet again.
I have a few memories from this house. My oldest sister, Jean, graduated from high school and then got married while we lived there. I honestly don’t remember when Walt Westfall, Jean’s husband, was not a part of our family. Walt attended school in the Laton district with Jim and Jean and seems, to my mind, to have always been there.
I have another “Halloween” memory from our time on Chestnut avenue, my brother and sister dressed me up and took me with them to a Halloween party at Monroe Elementary. They put a Petunia pig mask on me and Carol’s red coat and I actually won the prize for best costume. I was very shy and honestly didn’t enjoy the experience much...but it’s a memory.
A lot of our time, Carol and John and me, at the Chestnut house was spent playing in the Eucalyptus grove. We built “forts”(holes in the ground with boards or gates or something over the top and played Cowboys and Indians.
I remember that the entire 80 acres was in cotton and Dad spent most of his time tending that crop. He had an old tractor that seems enormous in my memory and, somehow, it was used as a pump to provide water pressure for the sprinkler irrigation system that we used to irrigate the cotton. I just remember that it was loud and big and I didn’t understand why it had wheels but we didn’t drive it. I think there was another tractor, a John Deere, unless I am mistaken; another of the Johnny Poppers I mentioned earlier.
As I mentioned, the second time we lived there I was in my senior year of high school. I still loved the house and the farm. At this point, in the mid 1960’s the place was completely in vineyard and the Eucalyptus grove had been cut down. There were 80 acres of grapes, 110 mile long rows. 55 miles of Thompson seedless and 55 miles of Muscat grapes. I know this because I drove it (in a tractor) and walked it (pruning, harvesting, irrigating, weeding, fertilizing). The farm was still owned by Mr Yankee and one of the perks this time was that I too was employed by Mr. Yankee. I worked part time, since I was still in High school, but it was my first real paying job. Once of the things I liked about living in the house my senior year was that my “bedroom” was round. It was situated at the front corner of the house and I think it was originally a “sitting room”. And the cool thing about it was that it had its own exterior door. I could come and go as I pleased, as long as I was quiet about it. That was a major perk for a restless 17 year old. My Dad was sort of old fashioned (he was born in 1907, why wouldn’t he be old fashioned ) and we didn’t have a telephone, even though it was the middle of the 1960’s. I would sneak out and walk down to the Monmouth grocery store and use the pay phone there to call my friends and/or my girlfriend. It was a great place to live. But, once again, I get ahead of my story.