Me in the middle, Bob Seymour on the right, Randi Olsen on the left,
Candy Deltorchio and Alice Seymour (1958?)
I made
the rounds of the Gualala Post Office mailboxes. From the Lions’ box, a bill
for rent of the Community Center; from the Banana Belt Properties’ box, an
advertising flyer; and our box was crammed full with mail-order catalogues for
Alice. As I walked towards the exit, I noticed the small paper poster with a photo
on the window next to the door. I hadn’t noticed it on my way in, but even
though I was looking at the reverse of the poster, I recognized the picture and
knew what it was even before I got outside to read it.
Bobby Lee
Harper was dead. Born January 31, 1931, died July 31, 2007.
The photo
was one that Bobby was very proud of; Bobby in his Air Force blues, with Sophie
holding their first baby. Bobby had three stripes on his uniform, the rank that
was then called Airman First Class, so the picture was probably taken around
1955.
Bobby had
enlisted in the Air Force in the late Forties, and he met and married Sophie, a
Greek girl, while he was stationed in Europe.
Bobby was
very short, a stretch to reach five feet. Sophie was shorter.
In 1963
the Air Force assignment system brought Bobby to Point Arena Air Station, the
home of the 776th Radar Squadron, located at the end of Eureka Hill Road about
ten miles east of Point Arena.
When
Bobby arrived at Point Arena in 1963, the radar station was only twelve years
old. It had been built to narrow the radar detection gap and help prevent a
surprise Soviet Union bomber attack.
Before
the radar station opened, younger brother Ron and I went with Mom one night a
week to a small observation post on the hillside next to and behind the Point
Arena City Hall and Fire Station. There we would wait and watch, and watch and
wait, until relieved by another Ground Observer Corps volunteer. Fortunately
for the volunteers, we never saw anything, and unless the Soviets had flown in
low and with all their lights on, the volunteers couldn’t have seen anything
anyway. On our many foggy Point Arena nights, the Soviets could have mounted
searchlights on their bombers and put them on full power, and they wouldn’t
have been noticed.
Unless
their engines were so noisy that we would hear them inside our cozy observation
post.
Happily,
before the Soviets figured all that out, the radar station was activated December
1951.
Bobby was
an NCO when he arrived, so he didn’t have to work as a “scope dope,” the guys
who read the radar screens and worked long hours until automation replaced
human effort and led to the radar base closure about 1980. By then Bobby had
completed his twenty years and had been retired over a decade in Point Arena.
Sophie was cooking in the Point Arena Wharf restaurant, and her fried lingcod
with French fries was my favorite restaurant meal for many years.
When I
came home from college, or on leave from the Air Force, which was often the
same thing, I’d ask Pop, “Is Sophie cooking tonight?” If the answer was yes, we
knew we would be at the Wharf for dinner.
Bobby and
the airmen and their families who came before him had a deep and lasting effect
on our little community.
During
World War II our sleepy and insular coast received an infusion of strangers,
primarily young Army men, from all over the United States. At the war’s end
they all suddenly left, and things were sleepy and quiet again.
All that
changed again in 1950, when the Air Force chose Point Arena as the site for a
radar base. The lives of our local girls became much more exciting. Their pool
of potential romantic involvements increased greatly, and was steadily renewed
as the Air Force moved personnel in and out.
Sometimes
heartache accompanied news of reassignment. Sometimes happiness and sorrow were
mixed as some of our young ladies married airmen and moved away. Sometimes the
Air Force lost, as several of their young airmen embraced local girls and
returned to civilian life by getting jobs in our sawmills.
I think
that only one of the airmen who left the Air Force to live in the area is still
here.
We young
men attending school and living in the Point Arena, Gualala, and Manchester
areas felt the competition for female attention acutely. The airmen were older,
already high school graduates, spun thrilling tales of travel and work in
exotic lands, and of special interest to the young ladies, had steady incomes
and ready cash.
Their
interest in the young ladies of our area went deeply into our school system,
down to and including some of my seventh- and eighth-grade classmates.
Some of
the airmen brought young wives with them, and Point Arena was a bee hive as
every available living space, or facsimile thereof, reasonable or not, was
rented by a young family living here because of the radar station or the
booming lumber mills.
I
delivered the newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, to many of them.
I fell
deeply in love with one of them the summer of 1954. Unfortunately, I was
twelve, and Peggy was seventeen or eighteen, married, and was either totally
unaware of or was amused by my infatuation. I first saw her when I was fishing
with a hand-line from the Point Arena wharf, and had already caught half-a-dozen
perch. She was wearing short white shorts, a white shirt tied at the bottom
exposing her waist, and sandals, and had long light brown hair in a pony tail,
and blue eyes.
She wore
the same outfit, or a very similar one, every time I saw her.
She lived
with her husband Jerry, who I never met, a "scope dope" who worked at
the radar station. They lived in a rented trailer house in the trailer park
that was recently built on the flat cow pasture next to Point Arena Creek, only
a couple of hundred yards from the wharf. It was a nice little trailer park,
except for infrequent times when storms caused Point Arena Creek to flood
through it, or the one big storm that once pushed waves all the way up the road
into it.
Even
though I was only twelve years old, I was already a hefty 5’ 10”, about three
inches taller, although her shorts, slim body, long legs, and thick sandals
made her look almost as tall.
My hormones
had just started to stir, and seeing and talking to her considerably
accelerated the stirring process.
She asked
me questions about fish, and fishing, and I’m sure I gave her the most
exhaustive answers she ever endured about fish, about fishing, about the wharf,
the ocean, the rocks, Point Arena, my school, and in fact, about anything and
everything I thought might catch and hold her interest.
One of
the first stories I told her cast me in a sort of daring, heroic role. The
previous summer I bummed along with Sandy Sedler on his salmon-trolling boat, Rip Tide, and we went to the fishing
grounds just off the Point Arena Lighthouse near Wash Rock. Sandy brought in
salmon steadily through the day, but fog came in rapidly as we turned to head
back to the wharf. Sandy used his radio-direction finder to triangulate our
position from the nearby Loran station and his friend Roy Fox’s radio signal
from Roy’s boat tied up at the wharf. We slowly worked our way down the coast
we couldn’t see, finally turning landward at a point on our map chart that we
hoped was directly west of the wharf. After what seemed like hours of slowly
motoring towards Roy’s radio signal, Sandy said: “We should be able to see the
light on the wharf by now.” I stepped out of the cabin to get a better look,
then went back and told Sandy: “I can’t see the light, but I can hear Roy
talking, and he sounds really close.”
In a few
more agonizing moments we finally saw Roy’s boat, and tied up alongside.
When I
finished my story, I was sure I had impressed Peggy.
However,
remembering that time, with the maturity I can now bring to reflection, I doubt
there was much I said that was all that interesting to her, but at any rate she
said she would like me to teach her to fish, and I did.
Since
hand-line fishing was all I knew, because I couldn’t afford a fishing pole, we
rigged her a hand-line too. Peggy’s hand-line was just like mine, about a
hundred feet of braided cotton line wrapped around a short stick. For sinkers
we used old spark plugs the mechanic at the Union 76 station in town saved for
us in a box in the engine tune-up area. The hooks were the inexpensive, black
leaderless ones, and for bait we caught sand fleas under the rocks near the
wharf, or cut up small fish we caught for bait that schooled among the pilings
under the wharf. She soon did very well catching perch, sea trout, and an occasional
cabazone, our best tasting rockfish. Peggy was from Alabama, like Bobby Harper,
and already knew how to clean fish.
I hope
she and her husband liked fish, because she always caught enough for them to
have fish every day.
What can
a twelve-year old country boy talk about that would interest a young lady?
Fortunately, remembering how Pop talked to people showed me a way. Pop asked
people a lot of questions about themselves, and then found things in common to
talk about. I asked Peggy about her home town, and she told me her family moved
from a farm when she was little to a big city with 10,000 or more people– a lot
bigger than Point Arena and its 555 population – and her parents told her about
growing up on a farm. It sounded to me like it had been a poor farm, with a
mule instead of tractor, no electricity, and eating chickens the day they were
killed because of no refrigeration.
When I
heard about the mule, I told her how my younger brother Ron and I used a horse
Pop borrowed from a neighbor to dig a full-sized basement earlier in the summer
for the house we were building. I told her how we harnessed Prince, hooked on a
Fresno scraper, and lifted the scraper arms to let it bite into the earth as
Prince strained in the harness. Then Prince would skid the scraper full of dirt
up a ramp out of the basement to a dump area where we would lift the handles
and spill out the dirt. Ron and I completed the basement project by the end of
the first month of summer vacation, and later in the summer after the wooden
forms were built, we would be working many hours each day “feeding” a cement
mixer to pour the basement floor and walls.
I asked
Peggy how she liked living in a trailer house, and she said it was nice; their
rental trailer was new and comfortable. Talking about trailer house life
inspired me to tell Peggy about my family’s trailer house. We had lived in a
house in Bakersfield until 1947, then bought a trailer house and lived in
several Southern California towns for the next two years.
Then in
September 1949, we towed our trailer house to Point Arena and parked it by the
old abandoned high school building, and after a few months more of living in
the trailer we moved into one room of the old building. Peggy enjoyed my tales
of living in one big room of the old abandoned high school building for our
first three years in Point Arena. Ron and I had a bunk bed behind a partition
at the back of the room. Mom and Pop had their bed in one corner, the kitchen
and dining area was in another, and a couch and chairs was in the “living room”
in the corner nearest the partition. The toilets were through a door at the
back of the room and down the hallway. Mom cooked on a woodstove that also
heated the room and provided enough hot water to halfway fill a galvanized
washtub. All four of us quickly took turns taking our baths in the tub in the
middle of the kitchen; Mom first, then Pop, then Ron and I took turns. It
didn’t take long for the bath water to cool and get a bit dirty. Peggy laughed
at the thought of four people taking turns bathing in a washtub on the floor. I
laughed too, and dreamed of the day we would have our new house built, complete
with bathtub and hot running water.
Pop had
been the thirteenth of fourteen children, and was working as an oilfield
“roughneck” near Bakersfield when Walter, one of his six older brothers who had
a general store in Gualala, wrote us that “the sawmills are hiring.” Mom read
Walter’s letter, looked at Pop, and said: “Honey, you just became a
lumberjack.”
Point
Arena was full of exciting news the week we arrived in 1949; the Pacific Enterprise had just struck Wash
Rock near the lighthouse and was sinking. But the real big news then was how
fast area sawmills were expanding to meet the post-war building boom. Soon Pop was
working for Empire Lumber “setting chokers” in the Wheatfield Forks area on the
south fork of the Gualala River. He liked the hard work, and learned quickly
how machinery was rigged to bring logs out of the woods onto a landing, and
then loaded on logging trucks to be hauled to the sawmills. In our living room
he helped Ron and I rig a highline with our cherished, shared Erector Set so we
could bring out logs too.
Peggy had
been to the radar base on Eureka Hill and had seen the tall redwood trees
alongside the road, and fully loaded logging trucks passing through town, so
that gave me a chance to tell her anything and everything I knew about logging.
Last summer Ron and I went to watch Pop work on the log pond at his new job at the
Diamantine sawmill on Brush Creek, and Peggy was interested in how Pop worked
the “sinker boat,” a small wooden raft with a hand-cranked winch that was used
to bring the heavy, butt-end logs up from the bottom of the pond. Those were
the redwood logs that immediately sank when they were unloaded from the logging
trucks into the pond. Pop would locate the sinkers, hook them with tongs
attached to the winch, and crank them up to the surface. Then he would use a
long pole to put two “floaters” on either side of the sinker, screw a steel
eye-bolt into the sinker, and use a piece of lumber and a rope to secure it
between the floaters. Pop then pushed the three-log rafts to a chain conveyer
that pulled the logs into the mill for sawing.
Peggy
seemed really interested when I told her how Ron and I ate lunch with Pop and
all the loggers in the cook shack. We sat on long wooden benches, and the
equally long rough wooden tables were covered with lots of good food that never
ran out. I would have been happy to make my whole meal of just the tasty
biscuits with butter and jam, but Pop made sure we had some of everything.
Peggy
told me that she didn’t remember much about life on the farm, although she
helped feed the chickens and watched her father milk a cow. As she got older,
her family told tales of how hard life on the farm had been, and how little
money they had. That all changed when her family moved to the city and got jobs
with steady incomes. I told her that even though we lived in town, we had a cow
that Ron and I milked, and chickens, rabbits, and a calf we raised for beef.
I told
Peggy that three years ago we bought our first “bummer” calf (a twin rejected
by its mother) for $5 from Stogie Stornetta’s ranch. The calf was very cute,
with big soft brown eyes, and Ron and I named him “Bosco.” Our chore was to
feed Bosco after school, and he would run to the fence to greet us, and we
rubbed his head as he ate. We fed Bosco powdered milk mixed with water in a
bucket with a rubber teat, and we held the bucket firmly, braced against the
fence, to keep Bosco from spilling it as he energetically sucked on the rubber
teat. When Bosco got bigger, we stopped the milk and fed him hay and grain. I
told how one time in a driving rainstorm part of the fence fell and Bosco
escaped, and we chased him through the rain and wrestled him in the mud to get
him back into his pen. Peggy laughed when she said she could just imagine how
we looked, soaking wet covered in mud.
Bosco,
like all calves, was very playful, and liked to bound across the field and do
awkward, funny leaps. When I finished telling Peggy about Bosco, I think she
noticed a sad look on my face, and asked: “Where’s Bosco now?”
“Bosco’s
dead." One day after school we went to feed him, and he was gone. Pop said the
butcher came and took him away.” We begged Pop to tell us when Bosco would come
back, and then Pop told us: “He can’t come back. He’s dead.” I told Peggy how
Ron and I couldn’t believe Bosco was dead and how we cried so hard we could
hardly breathe. Then Pop told us gently but firmly to stop crying, and pointed
around us. “These animals aren’t pets, they’re dinner. Don’t give them names.”
Peggy
looked sad, too. Maybe she was remembering animals she named on their farm, and
knew that most of them probably ended up like Bosco. I guess a part of
childhood ends when you realize that death is a part of life, that something as
lively as you can become suddenly cold and still, existing only in our
memories.
I forced
a weak laugh, and said I call all the calves “Hamburger” now, and Peggy smiled
gently.
“He may
sound tough, but Pop’s really nice,” I said. “When people tell him that Ron and
I are good, big boys, he says ‘Yep, they’re strong as an ox and nearly as
smart.’ That’s the way he tells us he’s proud of us.”
One day
after we finished fishing, and Peggy went back to her trailer, a high school
guy told me: “I bet you’d like to screw her. I sure would.” I turned away,
angry and blushing, and he laughed at me. I guess he was right, but I wanted to
keep it a secret. I realized that I hated the thought of her “doing it” with
someone. Anyone. Even her husband. Even me.
But now,
more than ever I looked forward to going fishing at the wharf and talking with
Peggy. We had fished together almost daily for over a month, then one day I
fished for hours watching for her, and she didn’t come.
I never
saw her again, or heard anything more about her.
Another
Air Force family soon moved into her trailer.
Thinking
about Bobby and Sophie, and their lives and some of the times we shared here, spurs
memories.
Bobby’s
gone, and his poster on the Post Office window announcing his death has already
been removed.
The Post
Office has strict rules about what and where and when things can be displayed.
Peggy was
only here a month over fifty years ago, and then she was gone.
I hope
she hasn’t had her poster taped on a Post Office window somewhere.
Not
Peggy, not the girl in shorts with the long legs and the sweet, sometimes sad,
smile.
Peggy and
Bobby, and many others, live on in my memories.
At
least until the day my poster takes its place in a Post Office window.
