A man in an Army Jeep picked up my Daddy, he saluted him and then helped Daddy put his bags on the back seat. Mommy was crying and Daddy hugged her and me before he stepped in the jeep and they drove off.
In later years, I learned that the California National Guard was the only military force large enough to be sent to Hawaii quickly, immediately following the disastrous attack on that island.
Mommy got letters for a while, and then they became few and far between.
My Great Uncle, Henry lived down the road from us and he came by regularly to make sure we were alright, beginning in the spring he plowed our orchard and vineyard when he did his own.
We had a hired man, Mr. Ellis, he lived in a small set of rooms at the back of the equipment barn, I was never allowed to go in there but many years later, I saw just how small those rooms were.
By that time, Mr. Ellis had been long dead.
There were several small cottages in back of the orchard, A Mexican Family, the Gonzales', had been coming in May and staying until after the grapes were harvested in October, since the time of my grandfather. At the time of my early memories, they were called Braceros and they had a green permit from the government.
I grew up with those children, some of whom I correspond with even today. They live in Chihuahua and are farmers now.
There were six of us boys, all about the same age and just starting school. Jimmie Tanita, Richard O'Donnell, Danny Phelps, Milan Ward, Georgie Cochran and myself. Other boys drifted in and out of the group, sometimes there were as many as a dozen and sometimes, the number fell to three or four boys.
Richard was my "bestest friend", they lived just across the county road from us. His father was always "Uncle Dick" to me and he called my Dad, "Uncle Bill".
Uncle Dick couldn't pass the physical for the Army, he had some kind of heart murmur. It didn't bother him, but he was sure angry that they wouldn't take him!
The neighbors to the north of us were Japanese Americans, their name was Tanita and they had been in the valley since the days of the Gold Rush. They had a son, Jimmie, who was my age, his grandmother was Irish, her name had been Gilda McGowen. She made the best soda biscuits, it was a treat to be invited for breakfast, Granny Gilda would put on a feed like no other!
Shortly after the War started, soldiers came to the Tanita's house and loaded them all in a truck for transportation to a prison camp. That awful day they were rounded up, I was terrified; I could hear Jimmie screaming all the way over to our house.
Without a thought I raced over the field in time to see, soldiers pushing them into the back of a truck with guns! When I went to my friend, the soldiers pointed their guns at me!
I was in time to see a soldier gun-butt Jimmie and throw him in the back of the covered truck.
My Mom grabbed me and stood in front of me, daring the soldier to shoot her!
Granny Tanita was very old, at least she seemed that way to me. She refused special treatment because she was Irish and she went with her family to a prison camp in Doris, California, along with her family.
120,000 Californians of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and imprisoned because the man who became the Adjutant General of the California National Guard despised those of Japanese ancestry and he had the "ear" of President Franklin Roosevelt!
Restitution for their seized properties and belongings has never been made, yet they were voting California and American Citizens!
Years later, Jimmie's Father used to say that not only did he not speak or read Japanese; he didn't even know anybody who did!
Many years later, I visited that terrible place, the prevention of cruelty to animals folk would have you arrested had you kept your dog in such a place, Old Mrs. Tanita did not survive her stay there.
Sometime later, my mother and grandmother were very upset as the County Land Commissioner was going to take the Tanita land for the back taxes; they dragged me along as they threatened the Commissioner.
When the Tanitas finally came home in 1946, the deed to their property was on the kitchen table and the refrigerator had been filled with food.
Years later, the Tanita family took care of my father after my mother died and saw to it that he was safe.
The neighbors on the other side were the O'Donnells. Their oldest son, Richard was my best friend, a friendship that lasted until his death seventy years later.
We were not related in any way, but Richard's Father was always "Uncle Dick" and his Mom was "Aunt Emma". Uncle Dick had a heart condition and was unable to serve in the military during the war, an indignity he complained about regularly!
Between Uncle Henry and Uncle Dick, our crops got harvested during those years. Times were different then, but, then, maybe they weren't. We had two cows and both were fresh. It was just me and my mother, there was no way the two of us could drink all that milk or use all that butter. There was an old lady down the road, her name escapes me now, but she was very ill. Mom took her a pound of butter and the ration board found out about it, they threatened my mother with jail!
It was better to dig a hole in the ground and bury the butter than it was to give some to a sick old lady! It just shows bureaucratic stupidity is not a recent development!
They must have not liked what my mother called them, because they were always out checking to make sure there was no tractor gasoline in our old Chevrolet automobile.
As I remember, the tractor gasoline was dyed green and they would stick a rod down into the fuel tank of the car to see if it came back green.
It never did.
Wartime rationing became a way of life, gasoline, sugar, meat, shoes and clothing were all rationed. One needed Ration Stamps in order to purchase these items. Anything that was needed for the war effort came under the authority of the Ration Board.
As we got a little older, Richard and I cobbled together two bicycles out of old parts we found in the junk piles on both our places. We rode those bikes everywhere, they were both rusty, rattled like an old freight train and the tires were more electrician's tape than tire!
We went everywhere on those old wrecks, the seats had no covers and the frames were bent and twisted, but they were WHEELS!
There weren't many cars on the roads, gasoline was rationed and many of the men were off to war. It was not common then for a woman to drive, my Mother did, but she was an unusual woman.
With so few cars, the roads were reasonably safe for two young boys to be riding their bicycles, not that there was any place for us to go.
When Richard and I started school, it was an old three room school house for all six grades. How those teachers taught two grades in the same room remains a mystery to me, even now.
It was about that time when Richard began to grow tall, by the time we were in the third grade, he stood head and shoulders above the rest of us. Someone stuck him with the nickname, "HatRack" and he became Rack to all us boys and, probably the girls too.
We had gathered a fair crowd of boys in our group by then, we weren't really wild, but most of our dads were gone and we had learned to not tell our mothers about our "adventures"!
In those days, "Spare the rod and Spoil the child" was still the law of most families. That didn't mean beatings, but a good swat on the "sit upon" sure got our attention!
On Sunday afternoons, we all had to sit and listen to the war news on the radio. The commentator was Gabriel Heater and he would end his broadcast with, "And that is the way it was."
We sometimes heard my Dad's outfit mentioned, The 23rd Signal Battalion, CNG. By then I was a bit older and knew what was happening, whenever Dad's Battalion was mentioned, we would all stand there both in hope and in fear. They were in the war in the Pacific in places that had names we could not pronounce and had no clue as to where they were.
It my adult years, I visited some of those strangely named places while in the Merchant Marine, not many of them would qualify as a tropical paradise and they all had critters on them that, either could swallow you half whole, or were so poisonous, a single bite was nearly instant death.
There was a small creek running through our property, someone had dammed it up long before I came along. It wasn't deep enough to swim, but it was great on a hot summer day.
That precise spot was used many years later as the place where the minister was practicing his sermon in the Disney movie "Polyanna"!
The little dam made a suction pond for the irrigation pump. It also made a small wading pond that Rack and I, and any other boy who happened along, would spend hours in the summer cooling off in.
We must have been about six or seven years old when we got caught by a bunch of girls while we were skinny dipping. We learned that lesson with red faces and much laughter at school!
Our school was a very old, three room schoolhouse. It had two grades in each room and it had all six elementary grades.
I don't know how the teachers coped, but we did learn.
There was a year or two that there was no fuel for school buses, Rack and I rode our old creaky bicycles to school each day, rain or shine. We would have to pump up the tires in the morning to get to school and again to get home.
We never had to lock up those bicycles; they were hardly more than scrap metal and, besides, in those days, it would have been unthinkable to steal someone's bicycle, or anything else for that matter!
We didn't even have locks on the doors to our houses.
Teachers had full authority to discipline us, it was not unusual for us boys to get a smack across our knuckles from the teacher, we prayed that it didn't get home to our Mothers, if it did, we got more than a smack again! I don't remember any of the girls getting a crack with Teacher's yardstick; maybe we boys were just more naughty than the girls?
Rack and I learned a lot about ourselves in that summer between the third grade and the fourth, we learned that we should not go skinny dipping, at least when there were any girls around and we learned that it was not wise to let Mr. Henry Leuhman catch us stealing his apples! I still bear the scar of a charge of rock salt from a shotgun where I sit down! My scar is on the left side and Rack's on the right, just as we were ducking under a strand of wire fence.
It wasn't like we hadn't been warned and we got no sympathy at home. It was two weeks before I could sit at the table to eat my meals!
It was spring of 1944 when my Dad came home for a visit and I had turned seven years old the previous February. It was great to have him all to myself, Mom didn't count, I guess. We went on hikes, fished for trout in the river and he introduced me to baseball. I was inconsolable when he had to go back.
It was fortunate; Dad was a Major by then and was to be stationed in Hawaii. I was only 7 years old and a little fuzzy about the relationship of Dad's visit home and my sister being born in September, but that all came clear a few years later.
I believe that Rack may have been a little more "advanced" in matters of that nature, he became very exasperated with me when he tried to explain it to me.
All during those war years, the Gonzales' came and worked the fruit and there were a lot of kids in that family. They had six children and, by the time you added in cousins, uncles, aunties, grandmas and grandpas, they were a whole tribe in themselves.
They were good folk and I could jabber our own brand of Englipanish with all those kids. They were smart kids, too. Several of them went on to the National University and became famous in their country. Jaunetta became the first woman Director of Public Health in her state and Carlito (Tito) remains today the head of the Maya Language Translation Department at the National University.
Several of the others went into business and Toca operates the Family Farm, about 15,000 hectares!
My mother became active in a group that was probably the USO or some organization similar. Dad was, by that time, stationed at Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, California.
Camp Stoneman was a major departure point for soldiers being discharged after the war. So many of them were recovering from horrendous injuries, they could not be discharged until healed. Mom opened up the barn and offered it to the Army to place their recovering wounded until they could be discharged.
They sent a sergeant and twenty walking wounded soldiers. For me, it was like a bonanza of older brothers, Rack would come over and we would talk with them, play ball and just be with them.
Mom and the neighbor ladies fed them, the Army would have done it, but don't EVER tell a Farm Woman how to feed folks in her own barn! She went ballistic when she saw they were going to feed those soldiers Army Rations!
Not in HER YARD, they weren't!
I wasn't allowed to ride Old Jake, our swaybacked horse, but it was ok if there was a soldier walking beside Jake and me. Those were wonderful and, at the same time, they were terrible days. Those soldiers, even in my young eyes, were so terribly damaged, physically and mentally.
Their wounds inside were the worst, during the summer, we would have all the doors and windows open, we could hear those soldiers crying and sobbing out in the barn.
Rack would many times spend the night with me, we would sneak out of the house and go out to the barn and sit with those soldiers, now, in my old age, I realize they were boys hardly older than ourselves at the time.
Rack and I would sit with them and hold their hands while they cried. Their sergeant, Ben Manning would sometimes tell us to go back to bed, but he didn't really mean it. We were just boys, and the hurt that those soldiers were suffering was a universal language.
I would like to think that Rack and I provided some comfort in their anguish.
We had 300 acres of prunes, a 10 acre family orchard that had peaches, apples, pears and a few cherry trees and 50 acres of cabernet grapes. There was the usual assortment of barns, pens and a dry yard where we sun dried our prunes. There was an older man, Mr. Ellis, who was a hired man who did the chores and tended the cows and did odd jobs around the place. He lived in a small apartment in the back of the equipment barn.
My Great Uncle Henry took over the care of the orchard and the plowing while Dad was in the war and the Mexican Family, the Gonzales', had been coming to work the fruit for at least two generations. There were aunties and uncles, grandparents, parents and six kids. They had a green card permit to come and they would arrive in May and return to Mexico in October.
Several of their kids were us boy's age and we could jabber all together in Englipanish. It probably would have made no sense to anyone but ourselves, however, we all understood each other. There were some cottages in the back of the orchard that were just for them. They were furnished and had indoor plumbing.
Toca was a boy about our age and he would always cry when it was time for them to go back to Mexico. He was tall and wiry and at the early age of 9 or 10 years old, he sported a few hairs on his upper lip. The rest of us were jealous!
I grew up with that family, their boys were almost like brothers to me. Even today, I remain in contact with them by mail and sometimes, even a visit.
The family orchard and vineyard was irrigated, we had an old, horizontal one cylinder Fairbanks Morse gasoline engine that drove the pump through a wide leather belt. It was not until I was a teen, that I was big enough to crank that old engine to start it, but, as a small child during the irrigation season, it was my job to check the water line that fed cooling water to the "teapot" on top of the engine. It had a little valve on it, coming from the irrigation line, the valve had to be adjusted daily so that there was just a little overflow out of the "teapot", otherwise, the engine would overheat and seize up.
We kids had all tried running through the irrigation ditches in the summer to cool off and promptly got a peach sucker switch applied to our behinds. We would be told to go cut our own switch. That was a terrible thing for a young boy to have to do. If he chose one too small, Mother would go get a bigger one. If he chose a big one, OUCH!
Thinking back, it would have made a wonderful post card picture, off in the distance a half dozen summer-tanned little boy behinds running down the length of the irrigation ditch!
Families would car-pool and trade off driving to go to church on Sunday. As often as not, Rack and I would spend Saturday night together, either at his house or mine.
Neither of our houses had heat in the bedrooms, our house had a big coal and wood heater in the main room and when you were going to take a bath, we all had round Perfection kerosene heaters. Everyone had a sandbox in the bathroom, you started the Perfection heater outside and let the wick heat up so it didn't stink of kerosene, then you brought the heater inside and set it in the sandbox.
Hopefully, the sandbox would stop any dripping kerosene from burning the house down!
The hot water heater had a "sidecar", it was a small water heater with a burner that ran on propane and circulated the heated water into the larger hot water tank, or, like at Rack's house, the sidecar burned kerosene.
You lit the burner and waited until the side of the big hot water tank felt hot. If the tank started "rumbling" you knew that you had left the burner on too long and it was in danger of blowing up!
At either place, we had to take a bath before Sunday church, no matter what. We would then run to the bedroom and jump under the quilts. In the summer it wasn't so bad, but in the winter, those bedrooms were near freezing, so you ran fast! We would lay there shivering and shaking until our bodies had heated up the cold sheets and quilts. Of course, we thought we were big boys and didn't need to wear pajamas or a nightshirt.
The next morning, it took a lot of prodding and threats of dire punishments to get us out of that warm bed. It was amazing how fast we could get dressed on a cold morning!
After church, we had to listen to the war news, there was only two or three radio stations and they all carried the same commentator, Gabriel Heater.
He would drone on about places we had only a vague notion where they were, occasionally, he would mention my Father's unit, the 23rd Signal Battalion, California National Guard. When we heard that, everyone stopped and was silent; not wanting to miss a single word. He would end his broadcast with "and that is the way it was".
Then we could breath again.
Dad didn't come home permanently until 1947, right after my 10th birthday. One of the first things he did was to tear the old farmhouse down. It had originally been built as a one-room house in the early 1840s and as children were added, so also were rooms. Dad complained that no matter which room you were going to, you had to step up or step down to get there!
He moved us into a trailer, it must have been about 20 feet long, and the four of us lived in that durned thing for a year, while the house was being built. I don't remember it as being that bad, but Mom had a whole different outlook on that trailer!
Finally, by Easter of the next year, she put her foot down with an "OR ELSE". They tacked bed sheets up on the studs to make walls and we moved in.
Dad figured I was getting old enough to help on the farm, that next spring he taught me how to drive the John Deere Wheel Tractor.