Pen in Hand: Tehachapi News

Davidson’s Buckwheat and the flowers of Autumn

Jon
Wildflowers in Tehachapi must deal with two fundamental truths about our weather: most of our moisture arrives in winter, when the days are coldest and there is the least amount of sunlight; and during summer when the weather’s warmest and the days are long and sunny, there is generally no rain.

The response from most flowering plants is logical — they bloom in spring, as winter rains are tapering off but not gone completely and the temperature is warming and the days are lengthening. As a result there are literally several hundred different wildflower species abloom in spring and early summer.

There are far fewer plants that are able to muster flowers in late summer and autumn, when the last rain was 120 days ago or more and temperatures have reached the 80s and 90s for months on end. Fortunately for nectar-loving insects, hummingbirds and human residents alike, there are some hardy wildflowers that are still able to bloom this time of year and two of them are colorful right now: Rabbitbrush and Davidson’s Buckwheat.

I’ve written about Rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus nauseous) on several occasions and hopefully many local residents can now recognize these hardy shrubs that are now adding beautiful warm yellow and pale golden color to hillsides, fallow fields, roadsides, and vacant lots throughout the Tehachapi area.

Davidson’s Buckwheat (Eriogonum davidsonii), also known as Pine Buckwheat, is not as common or noticeable but it is still widespread and 2008 has been an exceptional year for this drought-tolerant annual. Oldtimers often refer to this plant as “wireweed” for obvious reasons, since its leafless slender stalks rise up from the ground like pale green wires.

These wiry stalks are ornamented by tiny pink flowers every inch or so. The little pea-sized flower clusters start out bright pink and then gradually fade to pale pink after weeks in the sun.

There are more than 37 species of buckwheat in Kern County, making Eriogonum (commonly pronounced er-ee-OG-onum) the best-represented genus in Kern County’s 8,172 square miles. Their extreme drought-tolerance and hardiness make the buckwheats ideally suited to California’s “lands of little rain,” as author Mary Austin referred to the inland ranges.

At least a dozen or more of these buckwheat species grow within 15 miles of Tehachapi City Hall.

The Nüwa (Kawaiisu) Indian people of Tehachapi ate the seeds of several different buckwheat species, including Davidson’s Buckwheat. The seeds were harvested in the fall and pounded into meal.

We are now moving from the calendar summer to Indian Summer — savor it while it lasts. . . .

Have a good week.

Handbook of the Kawaiisu: ground-breaking book nears publication

Tehachapi residents recently got their first look at a landmark new book about the local Indian people entitled Handbook of the Kawaiisu, which is being co-authored by Native American elder Harold Williams and archeologist Allan Garfinkel.

The two men presented a well-attended program about their ongoing efforts at Mama Hillybeans coffee house on Tehachapi Boulevard on Thursday, September 18.

The Kawaiisu people, who refer to themselves as the Nüwa, have been studied by various ethnographers, anthropologists and archeologists during the past 100 years, but published information about them has been sporadic, piecemeal and often inaccurate. That is about to change with the forthcoming publication of Handbook of the Kawaiisu, which will be by far the most complete and well-researched volume ever assembled about these fascinating and resilient people.

Harold Williams, who is the chairman of the Kern Valley Indian Council, began Thursday’s presentation with an introduction to his people. Recent dating of ancient village sites have confirmed that the Kawaiisu have lived in the Tehachapi area for at least 3,000 years. Harold has been involved in a number of cultural site monitoring and survey projects and is the most knowledgeable Nüwa about tribal prehistory.

While not a fluent speaker, both of Harold’s parents spoke Nüwa and he understands many native words. He introduced his sister Janice Williams, who has been instrumental in efforts to revive both the Nüwa language and the art of Kawaiisu basketry, which lapsed before World War II.

The Williams are descended from a long line of accomplished basketmakers and their great-grandmother, Emma Williams, and her daughter, Sophie Williams, were among the last of the old-time basket weavers. Janice is currently working on a basket that when completed will be the first Nüwa basket made in over 75 years. A number of antique Williams family baskets were on display Thursday night.

Following Harold’s portion of the program, Allan Garfinkel narrated a Power Point presentation covering some of the material that will appear in the book. The wealth of information included Kawaiisu mythology, geography, historical accounts and personal anecdotes. Dr. Garfinkel noted that even preparing the extensive bibliography of published accounts of the Kawaiisu covered 40 pages.

The program ended with a brief discussion by former state senator Phil Wyman, who obtained two grants to help with the research and eventual publication of Handbook of the Kawaiisu. Both during his many years in the legislature and since he left Sacramento, Wyman has done more than any other individual to help preserve Kawaiisu culture.

Wyman continues to work on funding for the book as well as a Tomo Kahnhi Visitors Center, and it was he who made arrangements for Chemehuevi basketmaker Mary Louise “Weegie” Claw to come to Tehachapi to help revive Kawaiisu basketry. The Wyman family’s Antelope Canyon Ranch has also been site of most material gathering for the native basketry program.

Handbook of the Kawaiisu is slated for publication next year, and despite all that has been done so far, there is still extensive work to be done before it can be published. Funds and donations are still being sought to complete the project.

When finished, this book will be the definitive volume about the Kawaiisu people and will shine a light on an ancient culture that thrived in the Tehachapi area for thousands of years.

Have a good week.

Hooks Anderson, Master Woodworker

One of the most unique and talented men that the Tehachapi Valley will ever know left us at 10 a.m. on Friday morning when Hooks Anderson, 91, died peacefully in his chair at home with loved ones close beside him. Hooks had recently had heart surgery and succumbed due to complications.

Services will be held at Woods Family Funeral Home on Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 11 a.m. with viewing from 5-7 p.m. the preceeding day.

Both Hooks and Tootie, his wife of 71 years, grew up in Tehachapi and raised their ever-expanding family here. Their given names are Lester and Leatta, but most people know them as Hooks and Tootie and to many of us they are Nana and Papa.

Hooks grew up dirt poor and like many impoverished Americans from the early part of the 20th century he learned to work hard and be self-sufficient. But he didn’t stop there — with his innate talents and observant mind Hooks was able to excel in so many different areas of life. He was a successful gardener, a fantastic cook, a master mechanic, a skilled welder, a keen fisherman and hunter, was good at carpentry, plumbing, painting, electrical wiring. . . . the list goes on and on.

But the finest work he did with his hands was evident when he worked with his favorite material: wood. Hooks was a master woodworker with a deep and abiding love for many kinds of trees and the wood that they produced. Ponderosa Pine, Valley Oak, Incense Cedar, Black Walnut, White Fir and others were transformed into beautiful and useful objects with Hooks’ patient skill.

Everything from clocks and furniture to totem poles and Native American flutes were born in Hooks’ humble woodshop that he built in the old garage at he and Tootie’s home on Cherry Lane.

The smell of fresh sawdust and the sight of newly-created wooden objects greeted me and other friends and family members who stopped by. My visits with Hooks almost always started in the woodshop because I was anxious to see what he had finished most recently.

When he was a boy, Hooks used to ride a yellow mare to school sometimes — in those days Tehachapi Elementary School actually had a small corral where kids who rode to school could leave their horses while they attended class.

At an early age, Hooks met Tootie, the love of his life. He took an old pair of English riding boots with fine quality dark leather and he cut the boots into leather thongs, which he then square-braided into beautiful supple reins as a present for Tootie. At the time, he was seventeen and she was fifteen.

Such was his affection for her that he walked — that’s right, walked — all the way from Tehachapi to Johannesburg on the desert to see her. He would also help Tootie’s mother, Ola Mae, cook dinner until one of the kids spotted her father, who didn’t approve of Hooks, as he returned home from working in the mines. Then Hooks would have to run out the back door.

Hooks and Tootie eloped with the help of Hooks’ uncle and aunt, Brick and Laura Jones. Grandpa Ford eventually came to realize what a great decision Tootie had made when she married Hooks.

As I mentioned earlier, Hooks was a worker and he didn’t know how to be lazy. He worked harder as a boy than most guys will as men. He used to hand dig cesspools (also called dry wells) around Tehachapi for $1 a foot. These were square holes that were typically 5-foot by 5-foot or 8-foot by 8-foot. When he reached ten feet deep Hooks would raise his price to $1.50 because he could no longer throw the dirt out with a shovel, he had to use a windlass and a bucket to get the dirt out of the hole.

The deepest one he dug was for a Tehachapi judge, Ferd Snyder, and Hooks dug that one 45 feet deep, with Hooks down in that unreinforced shaft digging with a shovel and bar while a friend on top worked the windlass bucket. Hooks was only 16 years old at the time.

Hooks went to work for the Monolith Portland Cement Company and spent over 40 years there, retiring as a repair foreman. His knowledge of many different mechanical skills served him well at the plant.

Hooks had a very playful side to his nature and he and Tootie often hosted gatherings of family and friends. On the 4th of July, two days after his birthday, Hooks used to don his bathing suit, run off the diving board and jump into the air firing two black powder pistols he had made, and then plunge into the swimming pool he made and concreted using cement sweepings from Monolith.

I was glad when Papa retired from Monolith because then we had him on Cherry Lane all the time. My own grandfathers were both gone before I was six months old, and Hooks was the only I grandpa I knew. As our closest neighbors, Hooks and Tootie were always among my family’s dearest friends and their grandkids are cousins to me.

Hooks has been the single most influential person in my life. He not only taught me many practical life skills and how to use tools, but I also learned to have confidence and strive for high standards in the things I make or do.

With little formal education, Hooks was able to learn and be good at so many different things. He was an astute observer of the natural world who knew weather, where different birds were nesting, when the trees leafed out early or late, how much good the last rain had done, etc. We formed a permanent bond based on a shared love of the outdoors and the joys of being creative.

Many people stopped by Hooks and Tootie’s place to get advice or help on a project from Hooks. He was like the Wizard of Cherry Lane, who could cut the riflings inside the barrel of a black powder gun, tan buckskin, rebuild an engine, make a lamp, put up jars of pickles and a hundred other skills.

Hooks spent the summer of his 75th year building a small sawmill from scratch, using his own design. At a time when most people have long since retired, given up and geared down, Hooks was cutting steel, welding, fabricating and painting a sawmill capable of cutting logs ten feet long and four feet in diameter.

He then logged insect-killed trees from his property in the mountains south of town and milled them into lumber, which he then used for his many woodworking projects. He also carved cedar trees from the Benz family’s Cedar Canyon Ranch into totem poles, two of which he donated to Tehachapi High School.

I’ve left so much out but I hope it’s now plain that Hooks Anderson was an amazing, incredibly knowledgeable and inspirational Tehachapi man. He loved his country, his home, his friends and most of all his family. Even at 91 he never became irrelevant or stuck in the past. He still worked nearly every day and his sharp mind and clear memory were intact.

Papa had a special fondness for babies and children and his ready grin put them at ease. Generations of little kids have looked forward to going to Nana and Papa’s on Cherry Lane and as you were leaving Hooks would always call out his familiar farewell greeting: “Come back.”

So now despite knowing that Hooks lived a full, exceptionally long life and passed away peacefully in his own beloved home, the tears streaming down my face right now tell me that we weren’t prepared to live in a world without him and I want to say “Come back, Papa.”

Thank you to Hooks Anderson for gifts beyond measure and the lessons of your beautiful life.

Captions:

Hooks and his cherished 1935 Chevy truck, which he and Tootie bought new here in Tehachapi and still have to this day.

California Gray Squirrels: Agile and Alert

One of the more interesting mammal species in the Tehachapi Mountains can be seen running, climbing, bounding and scampering up trees year-round. These lively and energetic creatures with large bushy tails are California Gray Squirrels (Sciurus griseus).

“Gray” is both a name and a description of these attractive animals, for they are covered with gray fur and have extravagant tails bearing long gray hairs. Their bellies are snowy white underneath. Their backs can have salt-and-pepper coloration and their specific name griseus is Latin for “grizzled,” meaning “streaked or flecked with gray,” but they appear gray overall.

Gray squirrels are the largest members of the squirrel family, which includes chipmunks, that can be found in the Tehachapi area. Like all squirrels, they are diurnal (active during daylight hours) and stay in their nests at night.

Unlike many squirrels, however, gray squirrels do not hibernate or enter a true state of torpor during inclement weather — they simply stay hunkered down in their cozy stick nests high in a tree and emerge the moment the storm or snowfall stops.

Gray squirrels depend largely on pine nuts and oak acorns for food. When acorns are plentiful you can often see gray squirrels burying the nuts in soil and leaf litter on the ground of forests and woodlands. In time of food shortages, gray squirrels return to find the acorns again using their sense of smell. They inevitably miss some of these cached acorns which may then germinate and sprout, making gray squirrels one of the natural tree planters in the mountains.

Gray squirrels have powerful hind legs which they use to leap from branch to branch as well as to cover open ground quickly in bounding hops. They also have sharp claws which enable them to cling to uneven tree bark. Where tree limbs overlap, gray squirrels will traverse from tree to tree without touching the ground.
Their agility is amazing as they move fluidly through the forest canopy. Tehachapi doesn’t have monkeys or lemurs, but gray squirrels can seem almost like small primates with their dextrous hands and ease of movement through trees.

The Nüwa (Kawaiisu) Indian people of Tehachapi call gray squirrels wogo-tiv-azi and hunted them in former times. The California Department of Fish and Game still allows a regulated hunt for gray squirrels in some areas but squirrel is not a popular menu item in 21st Century California.

The Gray Squirrel population ebbs and flows and biologists are not certain of the causes for this fluctuation. These population changes are found in the Tehachapi area — some places can go for years without resident gray squirrels, then they’ll be back for several years before vanishing again.

Gray squirrels can be found down to four to five hundred feet in elevation in some areas of California, but locally they tend to live at 4000 feet and higher. They extract nuts from pine and fir cones by carefully chewing off one scale at a time, and a good indication of gray squirrels is the presence of “cores” underneath conifers. These cores are cones that have been stripped of all their scales and they are suggestive of studiously-eaten apple cores or corn cobs.

Gray squirrels produce a litter or two each year of two to six babies, born in the furred warmth of their tree nests, which are frequently but not always built in conifers. Gray squirrels make several different vocalizations that sound like a hoarse cough or “chup” noise repeated at intervals, but they don’t make the piercing alarm bark that is so typical of California Ground Squirrels.

In addition to seeds, nuts and green foliage, gray squirrels also eat truffle-type fungi that they locate growing on the forest floor. They are preyed upon by raptors and some mammalian predators like bobcats, but their speed and climbing ability makes them difficult prey and puts them out of reach of many would-be predators.

There is a healthy colony of gray squirrels in and around Tehachapi Mountain Park and they provide visual entertainment for park visitors. Residents in Bear Valley, Alpine Forest, Golden Hills and other outlying areas often have gray squirrels appear at bird feeders to help themselves to seed. Some discourage this but I find gray squirrels as interesting as any avian species and wouldn’t begrudge them a share of the food.

Gray squirrels are tough and likeable and are active all year, just like the best native Tehachapians. Look for them when you’re in the mountains and hills and enjoy our little “mountain monkeys.”

Have a good week.

Pen In Hand

A vibrant and eye-catching mural celebrating the 100th anniversary of the cement plant at Monolith has recently been completed in downtown Tehachapi, causing motorists on F Street to slow down and admire it as they drive by.

Painted by well-known muralist Art Mortimer with the assistance of several local artists, the large installation covers most of the south wall of the St. Vincent de Paul building on the corner of F and Green Streets.

The mural features a dozen different images from Monolith’s past, from its earliest days in 1908 manufacturing cement for use in the Los Angeles Aqueduct to the plant modernization project in 1990. The resulting collage spreads across the building like a tastefully done page from a giant scrapbook.

Newer residents may regard the plant as a distant curiosity, its towering infrastructure illuminated at night like a strange amusement park. But for longtime residents, Monolith looms large in our consciousness. The plant was the major employer here for about 75 years and thousands of families over the decades depended on Monolith paychecks.

There was once a thriving townsite across the road from the plant (it is depicted on the mural) and some older residents living in Tehachapi today attended school at Monolith Elementary before going to high school in town.

Also included on the mural is an image of the Monolith Store, which was a popular stopping place for gas and groceries and was the only business east of town between here and Mojave. It was owned and operated for many years by the colorful Ed Tompkins, who was basically the Mayor of Monolith. The store persisted until 1971 and its closing rang the final knell for the now-vanished community of Monolith.
The company itself has undergone a few name changes, from Monolith Portland Cement Company in 1921 to Calaveras Cement Co. in 1989 to the present Lehigh Southwest Cement Company beginning in 1995. Lehigh donated $10,000 towards the cost of the mural.

“We were glad that we could contribute,” said Lehigh accounting manager Duana Frerichs Pera, a Tehachapi girl whose grandfather helped build the silos at Monolith in the 1930s. “It’s not about the company, it was done to honor the workers,” she emphasized, “Main Street has done a fantastic job and everyone here at Lehigh is excited.”

Monolith is known for the dedication and hard work of its employees — many don’t retire until they have labored over 40 years in the east end of our valley, making cement used in concrete projects large and small, from the Los Angeles Coliseum to Tehachapi sidewalks, from bridges and roads to the foundations of tens of thousands of homes.

With a plant that operates to some extent around the clock, every day of the year and has always paid good wages, Monolith has historically offered stable employment and a better life for those without much education and even to those with limited English skills.

Many neatly-kept older homes in Tehachapi belong to working class people of Hispanic descent whose families were supported by a wage earner at Monolith. To honor that heritage, an image on the mural depicts members of the Ursua family at one of the Safety Picnics the company once provided for workers and their families. A number of Tehachapi Indian men have also been on the payroll at Monolith over the years.

It is not a job without risk: over the years men have died in quarry accidents and electrocutions and truck crashes and been killed or maimed in machinery. Even with the plant automation in 1990 that reduced the workforce from 450 employees down to 125, working at Monolith (the site continues to be known as Monolith, even though the parent company name changes) can still be a demanding job that is not for the weak or idle.

A large celebration is being planned to dedicate this new mural, which is the eighth in a series of historical murals in downtown Tehachapi presented by the Tehachapi Historical Murals Committee and Main Street Tehachapi. A portion of F Street will be closed for the dedication which will be held on Saturday, September 13 and will feature guest speakers, music from the Tehachapi Pops Orchestra and refreshments and food. All interested people are encouraged to attend, with a special invitation extended to past and present Monolith, Calaveras and Lehigh employees.

Muralist Art Mortimer was assisted by additional artists Terry Asher, Lyn Bennett, Allyson Gray, Caitlin Johnson and Alicia Shabra. Dylan Welch and other scouts from Troop 136 performed the prep work to get the building ready for the mural project, using sandblasting equipment generously loaned by Sunbelt Rentals of Palmdale.

Have a good week.

The Spirit of Tehachapi: Pat Gracey’s sweet book of local stories

People who love Tehachapi, rejoice: my friend Pat Gracey has just written and compiled a delightful book entitled Spirit of Tehachapi, which is filled with personal accounts and recollections of earlier times in our mountain home.

“This is not a literary gem, it’s a little collection of remembrances,” Pat told me modestly. “I just wanted to preserve the stories of life growing up in our little town of Tehachapi.”

Her self-published book is easy and wonderful reading for longtime Tehachapi residents and newcomers alike. If you want to understand this area and its people better, read these informal but informative stories from residents who didn’t just read about local history, they lived it.

Pat, who was raised in Tehachapi and was known as Patty Davis before she married Doyle Gracey, was one of four children of Chauncey and Maude Davis. From age 11 onward she lived in the historic Davis home, the stately yellow 1880 house located on the southwest corner of Curry and F Street, which is now owned and beautifully maintained by Pat’s niece Gerry and her husband Al Stark.

Pat’s experience in writing about Tehachapi goes way back — she was the editor of the 1946 Tomahawk, the Tehachapi High School annual (now commonly called “yearbook”).

Her graduating class at THS consisted of 20 seniors, only 16 of whom were present on graduation day. Classmates Dick Johnson and Frank Barrera had already gone into military service and Hugh Vasquez went later.

“The Marine Corp base in Mojave was operating at that time and it was taking its toll on local girls,” Pat remembers with a laugh, as Tehachapi girls became military wives. Pat herself married Doyle, a Marine who has been stationed in Mojave, when he came back to Tehachapi to live because he’d become acquainted with locals during his assignment to Mojave.

“With such a small class, we really were like a family at Tehachapi High,” Pat remembers. “Each year when school started the girls would be asking ‘Are there any new boys!!??’ because there weren’t many choices for dating. We were sad when we graduated because we knew we weren’t going to be seeing each other any more. And our entire class never was together again, though of course some of us still live here in Tehachapi.”

Pat will be discussing her recollections and her book when she is the featured guest at Honoring Our Elders: History in the First-Person on September 18 at Mama Hillybeans coffee house on Tehachapi Boulevard.

In this series, sponsored by Mama Hillybeans and Tehachapi 101, I interview interesting local seniors who share their memories and insights into Tehachapi.

The event starts at 7 p.m. and Pat will have copies of her book for sale and will be autographing them. They are also available at The Apple Shed and at the Tehachapi Museum.

If you’re at all interested in Tehachapi and its earlier days, before the circus came to town, you will want to own a copy of Spirit of Tehachapi, and I know several of my out-of-town family members who will be getting copies for Christmas. Thanks for collecting and recounting these great stories, Pat.

Have a good week.

Pen In Hand

Last week's column told the story of Tehachapi-area resident Sam Young, a Czechoslovakian Jew who survived the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II in Europe. When the narrative left off, the 18-year-old Sam and his family were among a group of Czechoslovakian Jews who were kidnapped from their village of Sevlus by Hungarian police and soldiers and taken to Poland and abandoned, told never to return to their homes.

After spending the night in a racehorse barn, the group dispersed but Sam's father, who was a doctor, and the rest of the family were brought to a big house built into a hillside. A houseboy told them to go downstairs, and there they found a meal of boiled eggs, bread and milk.

“It was a tremendous meal for the four of us,” Sam remembers. “We really hadn't eaten since we were taken from our home two days earlier.”

After each family member had gotten to bathe, they met the owner of the home: a Polish physician named Dr. Lachowics, who housed the four members of Sam's family for the next year.

“He was the kindest, most wonderful person I've ever had anything to do with,” Sam says. “He opened his house to us, total strangers, and saw to it that we had a chance to eat and clean up before meeting us.”

Dr. Lachowics (pronounced Lock-o-vits) was the only doctor in Jagelnika, so Sam's father, Dr. Josipovics, helped the Polish doctor tend to the needy residents, who referred to Sam's father as “the Hungarian Doctor.”

“The conditions in this Polish village were miserable,” Sam recalls. “Most of the able-bodied people were gone to the war — there was mostly just women, children and old people left. There was no store, no pharmacy, no money. About the only medicine available was what the people found in the forest left behind by retreating Russian forces.”

The Germans made life nearly unbearable for the Poles. “The Germans wouldn't allow the flour mills to operate, so people would sneak in at night and grind what grain they could to make a little flour,” Sam said. “People also weren't allowed to cut wood, so they would cut wood secretly at night in the snow with little sharp saws. The Germans even took any furs of any kind that the people had owned.”

The winter was brutal, with temperatures that dropped to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

“There was no wood for heat or cooking, so we burned the fruit trees in Dr. Lachowics's orchard, tree by tree,” Sam explains. “There was a walnut tree that we burned and then even dug up the roots and burned them because we had nothing else. Snow drifted as high as the telephone lines. To even survive a day was hard.”

Having to sneak back to their own home

The family did make it through the winter and after a year spent in Poland, the Yosipovics family decided to try to sneak back to their former village of Sevlus. A group of about 12 people, traveling mostly by foot at night, started back across the Carpathian Mountains to home.

As they neared the heavily guarded border, a sympathetic Jewish man paid a Ukrainian smuggler to get the little group back into Czechoslovakia, a portion that was claimed by Nazi ally Hungary.

“He moved us at night and we snuck across between patrols by border sentries,” Sam said. “He knew every step in the dark. When we crossed the border the mountains were so steep that we had to slide down but we made it.”

Back in Sevlus again, Sam's father began to quietly practice medicine again while Sam worked on the family farm outside town. The main house was occupied by someone else so the Josipovicses lived in a smaller house on the property that had been stolen from them.

When the Russians came back into Poland as the tide turned against the Germans, some Russian soldiers came to Dr. Lachowics' house and told him his services were needed. He went, and this kindest of men was never seen or heard from again.

“My father did everything he could to find Dr. Lachowics or discover what had happened to him, but to no avail,” Sam says sadly. Sam's family helped support the doctor's widow and daughter and to this day, Sam sends money to Dr. Lachowics' daughter and granddaughters.

That's right — after 60 years, Sam still sends money to Poland to help that family that helped his family. Loyalty and gratitude are well-tended lamps that can burn bright through many decades…

Sent to slow death in a labor camp

In 1943, Sam turned 21 and had to report to the Hungarian Army for labor. Most of those Jewish men who went to the work camps died or got killed.

“The camp I was sent to was in a swamp, and we slept in an unfinished concrete building without doors, windows or a roof,” Sam said. “It was so cold and the only food was rye bread and black 'coffee' made from chicory.”

Luckily for Sam, the camp had eight horses — four coach horses and four plow horses, and these abused animals bit and kicked and were difficult to handle. An old sergeant noticed that Sam, with years of farm experience, could work with the horses so Sam was made a groomsman and got to sleep in the much-warmer barn.
As terrible as conditions were, they could have been much worse except the camp commander, Col. Imre Reviczky of the 10th Labor Division, did what he could to help the unfortunate slave laborers at the camp.

After the war, Col. Reviczky was demoted and stripped of his pension for failing to send Jewish laborers to the front or to death camps. The Jewish community interceded on his behalf, however, and got his rank restored and even supported his widow financially after he died. Many of the good deeds and heroism of WWII were not forgotten.

By this time Sam had gotten a Hungarian Jewish girlfriend named Irene who bravely worked with the Hungarian Resistance, secretly helping Jews and others and undermining the Axis government.

Sam learned from Irene that there was a “technical camp” in Budapest where conditions were better for the laborers. Sam claimed to be a tool-and-die maker, and though he was no machinist, he learned quickly and found conditions were indeed better, at least until the British began daily bombings that targeted munitions factories.

Though intended to destroy the factories, it was the hapless workers, forced to be there, who suffered the most in the bombings.

“The British bombing destroyed every single building in the camp, including the barracks where we slept,” Sam remembers. “With the camp destroyed, we were moved 50 miles away to a knitting factory that was taken over and converted to military purposes.”

In 1944, Sam's father, mother, younger sister Handa and all four grandparents were sent to camps. One grandmother was the only grandparent to survive the ordeal.
Sam's girlfriend Irene had friends in the Hungarian Underground prepare forged documents for him and helped Sam escape from the plant in the old knitting factory. He was later caught by the dreaded Hungarian Red Arrow (similar to the German Gestapo) and badly beaten, imprisoned in a house for three days until some Germans came by needing workers and he was released to work again.

At last the shadow lifts

In January of 1945, the Germans retreated before the advancing Russian Army and Sam was finally free to return home. He found that both his parents and his sister had survived imprisonment at a camp, and the Yosipovicses — alone among 1,200 Jewish families that had lived in Sevlus — had made it through the war with the immediate family intact. They were the only ones.

The horrors, the obscene deprivation and grotesque suffering that Sam witnessed are difficult for him to contemplate even now.

“I saw a tall man who was so emaciated that his lips couldn't cover his teeth any more, and I watched him die, starved to death clutching a raw potato in his bony hand that he couldn't even eat,” Sam relates quietly. “There were so many unthinkable scenes like that. When I was working all the time, my mind was kept busy with other thoughts. Now that I'm retired, this damn thing is coming back to me — after 60 years! I wake up sweating.”

After returning to his hometown, Sam was pressed into service by the Russians, ordered to be in charge of food distribution and economic development (“As though there was any economy left,” Sam says wryly) and forced to run a bakery. When flour was difficult to obtain, Sam was threatened with deportation to Siberia, a virtual death sentence.

He and Irene, who became his wife, escape to Prague and Sam became a university student. When Czechoslovakia beca

me communist, the government wanted to draft Sam for three years.
“I told my wife that I'd had a bellyful of armies and wanted nothing to do with it,” Sam says.

To a new land and a new life

With the help of the U.S. Embassy in Prague, Sam and Irene obtained visas and immigrated to America, arriving in New York on Aug. 13, 1946. Sam was advised to Anglocize the difficult-to-pronounce name “Yosipovics” so it became “Young.” After living briefly in Detroit, the young couple moved to Los Angeles.

Sam's first job was in a lumber yard making $30 a week, but eventually started a construction business with his brother-in-law. “We were very successful, and we built thousands of good-quality houses,” Sam says.

Sam's parents and sister also emigrated to America and his father, the brave Dr. Ignatz Yosipovics, practiced medicine in New York until he retired at 70 and moved to Los Angeles.

Sam bought the Keene Ranch in 1960 and his life was mostly good. His beloved wife Irene, who had helped him survive the war, died in 1971 as a result of improper medication from the same physician who was treating Marilyn Monroe at the time of her death.

Sam married Betty Nash in 1973 and they moved to the Keene Ranch fulltime in 1978, where they still live today, surrounded by beautiful mountains and ranchland. Sam's sister Handa, now 83, lives in Hollywood.

“It was strictly luck that we survived,” explains Sam matter-of-factly. “I tried for years to forget everything that happened. I wouldn't look at photos in Holocaust museums. It's very difficult. This was a tremendous atrocity — 51 million people of many different nationalities died. What they suffered and went through was unbelievable.”

Sam insists that his own compelling story is not significant.

“What happened to me is not important,” he states. “What is important is ensuring that it doesn't happen again to other people in other places. History has no value if you don't learn from it.”

Sam Young's incredible life experience is worth remembering, and I am grateful to him for his willingness to share it with you and me, difficult and painful though it is for him to relive.

And thank you for your patience and persistence in following this epic story.

Pen In Hand

Imagine being 11 years old and leading a happy existence in a peaceful mountain town, in a place where both your parents are well-known and respected. Then imagine that while listening to the radio one day you hear a strange speech by an angry man in another country, and after that your pleasant life begins to unravel until nearly everything and everyone you love is stolen, abused, murdered or swept away and your own survival looks brutally unlikely.

Sam Young doesn't need an imagination to conjure up this grim scenario — he lived it personally and nearly died many times before he finally escaped this waking nightmare that lasted for years. Until it actually happened, Young and millions of other Europeans like him could not have believed the scale of death and suffering that would be wrought by World War II.

Young, 85, is a survivor of the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the genocidial Holocaust waged by the German Nazis and their allies. Sam and his wife Betty have lived on the Keene Ranch near Tehachapi for 30 years now and Sam is well-known and respected in the Tehachapi area, but you cannot fully take the measure of this admirable man unless you know the circumstances of his earlier life.

Most of us think we already know all about the Holocaust and may summarize this rolling atrocity as “the Polish Jews being sent to German concentration camps where most of them died,” but the actual scale was much larger, more complicated and involved many other countries as well.

Sam's own narrative illustrates how large and dark a shadow the Nazis and other Axis forces cast upon Europe, and also how complex life can be through no fault of your own. This is his story.

Sam was born in the eastern Czechoslovakian town of Sevlus on Dec. 22, 1922. His father was Dr. Ignatz Josipovics (pronounced Yosi-po-vits), a popular physician in town and his mother was from a farming family and owned two nearby farms. His mother was also born in Sevlus, known for its grape vineyards, and his father was born in a neighboring town.

Sevlus had approximately 12,000 people and about 1,200 Jewish families, including the Josipovics. A variety of ethnicities could be found in Sevlus and yet people got along together with little sign of friction.

“Czechoslovakia was a very democratic country and the population consisted of Czechs, Slovaks, Jews, Germans, Hungarians and Rutanians (a Russian-speaking minority),” Sam recalls. “Basically, they all lived peacefully and worked together.”

Sam even went Christmas caroling with young Christian friends, who were jealous when Hannukah came around and lasted for eight days because Sam kept getting presents each day. “We were friends and neighbors and people mostly got along together,” Sam explains. “We had a very good life until 1933.”

It was in that year that an 11-year-old Sam first heard a speech by the radical German chancellor Adolph Hitler.

“I remember like it was yesterday, listening to Hitler's talk accusing Jews of being behind all the problems of the world,” Sam says. “There weren't many radios in town and they had one set up near a movie theater so people could hear it. Hitler spoke German but I spoke German as well so I understood what he was saying.”

Sam thought that Hitler's speech was odd and repellent, but he was not really worried by what he heard.

“His speech was so far-fetched that he wasn't taken very seriously in Sevlus,” Sam notes. “No one thought that what did happen could happen — it would have been unbelievable.”

Poisoning the well

After Hitler’s rant was broadcast, nothing was done officially but anti-Semitism began to be expressed more openly, Sam remembered, and tension grew between the different ethnic groups. The ties that held society together beginning to fray…
With hostility to Jews growing, Sam’s parents took him out of the town public school and enrolled him in a Hebrew school. It was a good school and it was attended by most of the town’s Jewish youth.

While the Czechs had a good military, they were forced to make concessions to Hitler and the Germans as a result of the Munich Pact, in which British Prime Minister Chamberlain and other world leaders decided to deal with the growing menace through a policy known as appeasement — basically, “let’s give them what they want and hopefully they’ll leave us alone.”

What the Germans wanted most was part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudentenland, which was home to many ethnic Germans. Great Britain and the other allies ceded Sudentenland to Germany and the Czechs had no choice but to give it to them.

The beast that was Nazi Germany had begun to devour Europe. Austria was next. “Things went from bad to worse day by day once they gave in to Hitler,” Sam remembers.

Eastern Europe was full of contested borders with a bewildering assortment of groups making claims. Sam’s town of Sevlus was close to Hungary, Romania, Poland and Ukraine. Once Hitler began taking territory, other nations eyed their neighbors greedily. Hungary claimed the portion of Czechoslovakia where Sam lived.

“The Hungarians started a group to terrorize the people,” Sam says. “Then a Ukrainian man organized a bunch of the young men from our area to fight the Hungarians. Many of them had never held a rifle before. The Hungarian soldiers killed hundreds of them and tossed them in the river. Their bodies floated down the Tisza River for months.”

The Ukrainian who had “led” the resistance had appeared in Sam’s father’s office before the fighting and insisted that Dr. Josipovics bandage and cast up his arm so he wouldn’t have to fight — even though he wasn’t even injured.

In 1938, as the situation continued to deteriorate, a cousin of Sam’s who lived in America was sent to warn the family to leave. They declined.

“My father had an established medical practice and my mother had her farms, so they didn’t want to leave,” Sam explained. “Medicine was my father’s life and he treated everyone — gypsies, barons, the whole community. Our house and the attached doctor’s office was in the center of the city and everyone knew us. No one believed things would get as bad as they did.”

Something wicked this way comes

The problems really started for the Josipovics and other Jewish families in July of 1941. It was the summer vacation from school, and Sam always spent his summers working on his mother’s family farm, which was a short distance outside town.There was no electricity or phone, and one day his parents sent word by a neighbor that Sam needed to come home right away.

The 18-year-old rode his bike over the 2-1/2 miles back home, wondering what was going on. When he got home, there were Hungarian policemen at the house.
“They were very polite and they told my mother to just pack for one night, they were going to the train station but that we would be back home in a day or two,” Sam says. Sam, his father, mother and younger sister went together.

When they go the train station, the family was surprised to find not passenger cars but boxcars. About 200 people, almost all of them from the town’s Jewish community, were loaded into the boxcars. They were told they were being taken to the nearby town of Khust, inside the Polish border, but the train kept moving and near nightfall, they found themselves in the Carpathian mountains. The people were unloaded and locked in a mountain sawmill for the night.

“In the morning, they started calling out the families by name,” Sam remembered. “We had to surrender all money, jewelry and documents — they took everything. The soldiers didn’t explain why or what was going on. After they had taken everything, they loaded us into the back of military trucks.”

“Shoot him at the next stop”

The trucks made slow progress, since territorial fighting had destroyed the bridges and damaged the roads. The passengers had to get off the trucks frequently while the trucks forded creeks or skirted obstacles.

At one of these stops, an older woman was injured while getting out of a vehicle. The call went out for a doctor and Sam’s father was quick to respond. He tended to the injured woman and then returned to the truck where he had been riding. He was the last one in and a Hungarian soldier raised his rifle in a motion to hit him.
Sam saw the menacing gesture and raised his arm defiantly to block the assault. “Don’t you dare hit my father,” the teenager snarled at the soldier.

The soldier lowered his gun and glared at Sam. With everyone in, the trucks began to move once more. Sam sat up near the cab while his little sister was near the back.

She overheard two of the soldiers talking. One of them eyed Sam and instructed “Shoot him at the next stop.” The frightened girl whispered the remark to her mother, and Sam’s parents quietly passed the warning forward to him.

The trucks rumbled along until finally they stopped near an old cemetery and the passengers were again ordered out. The minute the trucks stopped, Sam leapt out and jumped over a 4-foot stone wall surrounding the cemetery and hid down against the stones. The soldiers looked for him but didn’t find him.

Then the officer in charge addressed the group and said that they should never dare to go back to Hungary. Without explanation, the soldiers then drove away, leaving the confused Sevlus residents behind.

“We didn’t know where to go, we didn’t know what to do, we didn’t even know where we were,” Sam explains. “We had been told nothing. Only to never return to our homes.”

A group of civilians with guns and armbands soon surrounded the weary, hungry group and told them that they should leave. The refugees didn’t know where to go, so the townspeople led them to a big barn outside the small village of Jagelnica.
“They had once raised racehorses in that barn, but it was empty except for some dead colts,” Sam says. “There was water but no food. Some local Jews and Poles heard we were there and brought some food, but they had little to share.”

The coldest winter ever

One of the men who had escorted the refugees to the barn was the mayor of Jagelnica, and it happened that his wife was ill. He asked Sam’s father to examine his wife to see if he could help her, and Sam’s father immediately agreed. A quick friendship of sorts sprang up between the two men.

Dr. Josipovics asked if there were any other physicians in the village. He was told that there was a Polish doctor named Wojciech Lachowicz (pronounced Lack-o-vits). Sam’s father asked to meet him.It would prove to be a fateful meeting that would tie the two families together for decades.

The story of Holocaust survivor Sam Young will continue in next week’s Pen In Hand column. Your patience in following this remarkable tale will be rewarded.
Have a good week.

What is that large dark bird?

I often get asked to identify local birds, especially raptors, in absentia: “I saw a big dark bird last week in a tree near my house, and it wasn’t a raven, so what was it?” is the typical sort of question. Most of the time, the unknown bird was an example of our most common and widespread bird of prey — the Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis).

There is a simple reason why Redtails are so frequently the source of confusion: they show more variation in plumage than any other raptor, and possibly any other bird of any kind in North America. They range from very pale individuals (even white, in the case of rare albinos) to very dark chocolate brown birds, with many gradients in between.

The typical Redtail seen perched atop a power pole or oak tree, waiting for a small mammal to appear, is a large bird (20 inches tall with a 4-foot wingspan) with a dark hood, light chest, streaked belly and dark wings with mottled light markings and highlights.

In the West, however, darker birds referred to as either dark or intermediate morphs may make up 10 to 20 percent of the population at any given time. You only have a 1-in-10 chance of seeing fully dark red-tailed hawks, however.

The dark morph birds are strikingly handsome, with an overall rich brown coloration. Juveniles have light and dark banded tails and yellow irises, while birds 2 years or older have dark eyes and the distinctive red tail for which the species is named. Even the darkest individuals still have white markings on the outer half of their underwings.

Although the name “morph” suggests that these color patterns can change, they are not phases and a dark morph bird will remain a dark morph bird its entire life, even though birds replace their feathers every year. Whether they are light, intermediate or dark morph birds, they will retain the same coloration even after they molt.

The coloring of Redtails is analogous to that of gray wolves — while most wolves are the typical overall gray with light bellies and some dark markings, individuals may range from entirely white to completely black, and even littermates may be different colors.

Though color variations seem to have no impact on either mate selection or the prey that Redtails hunt, there is some evidence that lighter birds tend to choose more open areas to nest and darker birds tend to select darker, more shaded nest sites with more cover.

Pay attention as you travel in the Tehachapi area and sooner or later you will see dark morph red-tailed hawks. Along Highline Road, Banducci Road, Cummings Valley Road, throughout the rural areas, even in town the observant resident can spot these ubiquitous raptors patiently waiting on tall perches for something edible to make an appearance.

Once in awhile, the bird you see will be a beautiful dark chocolate brown and you’ll know you’ve seen the equivalent of a black wolf on the prowl.

Have a good week.

Pen In Hand

Our rains haven’t continued long enough into the spring to make this an exceptional year for wildflowers, but some species have gotten all the moisture they needed to thrive. Among these 2008 success stories are the handsome blue flowers of Valley Phacelia.

These medium-height annuals are currently blooming in profusion in several local areas, including slopes along Woodford-Tehachapi Road, on Pinon Canyon Drive and other roads in the Oak Knolls area and there is also a nice little colony alongside the westbound lanes of Highway 58, just before the Tucker Road exit when approaching from the east.

This has been a good year for members of the Waterleaf Family (Hydrophyllaceae), which include many kinds of phacelia as well as Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila menziesii).

There are many species of phacelia, which is generally pronounced pha-see-li-uh, in Kern County and it is the sixth best-represented genus with a total of 24 species and one subspecies found within Kern’s 8,172 square miles.

Right now in the Tehachapi area there are two different blue-flowered species flowering simultaneously: Valley Phacelia and Lacy Phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia), a species that I profiled this time last year.

Like most plant species, both of these phacelias have multiple common names, which is why scientific names are essential in helping to avoid confusion. Lacy Phacelia is also known as caterpillar phacelia, fiddleneck phacelia and tansy-leaved phacelia.

Today’s featured guest, Valley Phacelia, is also known by the names Blue-flower, Great Valley Phacelia and Great Valley Scorpionweed. The somewhat sinister name “scorpionweed” has been applied to several phacelias and refers to the way their flowering stalks curl back on themselves near the top like a shepherd’s crook or a scorpion’s tail. These pleasant flowers are not venomous of course and have no other connection to scorpions.

Valley Phacelia usually has five overlapping lilac-blue petals that form a shallow flared trumpet shape, reminiscent of their cousins the Baby Blue Eyes. The inner center of each blossom is white, and even slightly trumpet-shaped flower species with this characteristic are often described as “white-throated.”

Protruding well above each blossom are five stamens, the male portion of the flower which consists of a long thin filament tipped by a pollen-producing anther.
In Valley Phacelias these look like tiny chopsticks with a miniature piece of popcorn stuck on the tip of each one.

Collection records made by botanists who have visited the Tehachapi area over the years are often quite revealing, indicating how the distribution of plants and their blooming period may remain stable or change dramatically over time.

In the case of Valley Phacelia, the records are quite consistent. The earliest collecting reference I could find was on April 20, 1935, when W. G. Webb collected flowering Valley Phacelia in the Tehachapi Mountains. Then on April 30, 1967, botanist N. Meng reported collecting Valley Phacelia in the “Golden Hills subdivision.”

On April 28, 1973, botanist June Latting collected some Valley Phacelia that was flowering in the vicinity of the Tehachapi Loop. And on April 26, 2001, G. K.. and E. A. Helmkamp gathered Valley Phacelia growing near Sand Canyon Road.

So over the course of 70 years, on four different collecting trips by different botanists, all of them gathered blooming Valley Phacelia in the Tehachapi area between April 20 and April 30.

These pleasant wildflowers are blooming a little earlier this year, which is typical of the way our spring seems to have moved forward a few weeks in recent years.

Hotter temperatures are coming and they hasten the end of annuals like Valley Phacelia, so I will suggest as I often do that you get out and enjoy our spring wildflowers while you can.

Have a good week.

Painted Ladies pass through Tehachapi:

A huge wave of travelers passed through Tehachapi last Monday and Tuesday on their way north. There were tens of thousands of them but they had no effect on local traffic because they weren't using the roads, they were flying — it was an exodus of Painted Lady butterflies on their annual migration to recolonize North America.

These orange and black butterflies with white highlights generally pass through this area every year in late March and early April. Observant Tehachapi residents might have noticed that all the butterflies were moving from south to north. Occasionally they alter their course to avoid buildings or natural obstacles, but the Painted Ladies are all headed north.

Though the Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) can be found in every state and well into Canada in late spring and summer, hard frosts in the fall and winter kill off any remaining butterflies, with the possible exception of a few that may survive in coastal California and extreme southern Arizona.

Enough adults survive in Mexico to lay abundant eggs, which hatch into caterpillars in January and February in the far Southwest. These caterpillars, which are mostly brown or black with some yellow highlights and short white spines, feed on thistles and other host plants, grow quickly and then form a chrysalis and emerge about 10 days later.

Upon completing their metamorphosis from caterpillars into attractive butterflies, Painted Ladies begin to stream north into the United States. The timing of their flight and the number of butterflies varies from year to year and is influenced by winter temperatures and rainfall. In favorable years, the population of Painted Ladies is hard to fathom as many millions of these nectar-loving flyers stream north to repopulate the United States and Canada.

Unlike the yearly migrations of Monarch (Danaus plexipus) butterflies, the Painted Lady migrations are a one-way trip without a corresponding return in the fall.
Painted Ladies don't fly high above the ground in the region of relative safety used by migrating birds — instead they usually flutter and sail a few feet above the ground, exposing them to many hazards including cars, whose windshields, radiators and grills often bear the remains of Painted Ladies that didn't survive an encounter with speeding auto or truck.

Sheer numbers enable the species to withstand such carnage and other creatures make use of the bounty of butterflies. Last week I watched two different ravens make repeated forays onto Highway 202 and Cherry Lane to retrieve and eat butterflies that had perished in collisions with cars. Painted Ladies don't feed on milkweed plants and so lack the bitter taste imparted to Monarchs, which are unpalatable and thus largely protected from predation.

Like most butterflies, Painted Ladies are bright and noticeable when viewed from above with their wings opened flat, but they are well camouflaged by their cryptically-colored underwings. The upperside and underside of their wings appear so different they don't even look as though they belong to the same butterfly.

Not all the Painted Ladies pass through Tehachapi and keep going — a few can be found in gardens and meadows in this area throughout the spring and summer. As widespread as they are (Painted Ladies are frequently called “the most cosmopolitan butterfly in the world”) they don't congregate and aren't found in large numbers except during their spring migration. Apparently they disperse and spread out as they reestablish themselves in the United States.

Keep your eyes open for the sight of Painted Lady and other butterflies now that the weather has warmed up. Butterflies are one of the pleasures of spring in Tehachapi, a reward for making it through another cold and windy winter.
Have a good week.

Fruit trees light the valley with scents and color

Spring has slipped into the Tehachapi area, arriving on soft westerly breezes and warm rays of morning sunshine. The Earth has responded with greening hillsides, wildflowers, nesting birds and blooming fruit trees.

While Tehachapi is best known for apples, many varieties of temperate fruit trees do well here: pears, cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots and more. Nut trees like almonds also grow fine in Tehachapi, but they tend to bloom earlier and their crop is often eliminated or reduced by late frost.

The earliest trees to bloom in this area, in fact, tend to be almond trees. Their appearance is striking when the almonds are in full bloom — their creamy white blossoms with red or pinkish centers are a marked contrast to the dark, almost black rough bark of old almond trees. There are several of these oldtimers on the east side of Curry Street near the fire station and others are scattered throughout town.

There used to be one veteran old almond tree located at Herb and Ola Mae Force’s house across from Tehachapi Hospital (now Dr. Susan Hall’s office) that had been planted in the 1880s, and I’ve seen more than one time when it was in full bloom in January following a brief warm spell.

Apricots are another early bloomer, and my Uncle Hank used to say that you could only get a crop on apricot and almond trees in Tehachapi about once every three years. With our warming trend over the past 20 years, the odds may be better now but as the earliest bloomers apricots and almonds are still the most vulnerable. Not all fruit blossoms are particularly fragrant, but almond blossoms have a wonderful sweet scent.

Peaches, cherries, nectarines and plums are usually the next to bloom, followed closely by pears. Peaches and nectarines have beautiful pink blossoms the color of cotton candy, and since the trees haven’t yet leafed out when the blossoms arrive, there is an amazing transformative effect when a drab peach orchard with bare dark limbs suddenly erupts in bright pink flowers.

Each variety of fruit tree is only in full bloom for about two weeks, so like most of nature’s spectacles the flowering of fruit trees is a fleeting phenomena of great beauty.

Pears are slow-growing trees that form stately, upright shapes that bear lovely white blossoms without the reddish centers that almond flowers possess. The parking lot at Albertsons supermarket on Tucker Road is currently decorated with the lovely snowy blossoms of flowering pears.

Incidentally, there is something a little sad about fruit trees that have been specially-bred to produce flowers but not fruit. I understand that it may not be desirable to have fruit dropping on parking lots and sidewalks, but a tree that is incapable of producing fruit isn’t really a fruit tree, it seems to me.

Flowering plums with their riotous masses of deep pink flowers seem so popular and are everywhere, yet they offer no summer reward of sweet fruit to feed a hungry resident or passerby. My farming background and personal philosophy are at odds with the notion of barren fruit trees that bear no fruit and I have yet to plant one anywhere.

The last fruit trees to flower here are generally the apples, which is why they are the most likely to escape harm from late spring frosts. Apples already have leaves when their blossoms arrive, but the effect is still magical when an orchard is in full bloom.

Apples are in the rose family, and the family resemblance is evident in the blossoms: before they open, the outer surface of apple blossom petals are pink and the little rounded flower buds look like tiny pink roses that are about to open.

The apple flowers themselves have five white petals that are often tinged with a delicate pink. If you examine the pale pink flowers produced by our native wild roses, they look very much like apple blossoms.

We are in the middle of our fruit tree blooming period now, so enjoy this while you can and appreciate the differences between the various types of fruit blossoms. As long as we don’t have a killing frost (28 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours or more) this should be a banner year for Tehachapi fruit production. Let’s hope so.

Have a good week.

Where does the snow go?

Tehachapi had more snow this winter than we’ve had in recent years, and yet the roads in town were driveable every morning. Even when local schools were closed because of safety concerns, our city streets remained passable. How was this possible? Because of the diligence and hard work of the City of Tehachapi’s Public Works Department snow removal crew.

The whole approach to snow removal and ice reduction on Tehachapi’s city streets has changed since I was a little kid growing up here. The philosophy used to be more “let the driver beware” when snowstorms blanketed the valley. Locals were expected to respond intelligently following a heavy snow — either walk and don’t drive, or use snow chains, or stick to a 4-wheel drive vehicle with snow tires.

City employees would scatter sand by the stop signs and try to keep Tehachapi Boulevard open, but not too much else. Most people had lived here long enough to simply avoid driving during and immediately after snowstorms unless it was absolutely necessary.

Now there are a lot more people in the area and many have brought with them Southern California expectations of driving: any time of the day or night, 365 days a year. The City, to its credit, has responded by adding more equipment and working longer hours to insure that most of Tehachapi’s 44 miles of city roads and streets are passable, even when it snows heavily.

“People wake up in the morning after a snowstorm and they want to be able to drive regardless,” explained Public Works Superintendent Dennis Wahlstrom. “We do our best to make that possible. The main roads, especially all the areas around our schools are our main priority, but we even try to keep the residential streets passable.”

Using both snow plows and also sanders to spread a mixture of volcanic cinders and sand on local streets, city crews attempt to melt snow and prevent ice formation as well as moving the snow toward the sidewalks and gutters.

The result is streets that are reasonably safe to navigate, but there is a downside, noted Public Works Supervisor Perrin Cowan.

“Seeing a cleared road with sand and cinders can give people a false sense of security and some drive way too fast,” Cowan said. “There can be more serious accidents when people drive too fast for the conditions, and they would be better off if they were just going slowly in the snow. Even with plowing and sanding, there can still be water and ice on the roads and drivers need to slow down. Some don’t, though.”

Since we know the roads aren’t cleared by magic or snow elves, how exactly does the city respond to a predicted snowstorm?

First a crew of six employees are placed on snow removal duty. If a nighttime storm seems certain, some employees may stay home during the day in anticipation of working all night instead. A designated monitor then checks conditions every hour throughout the day and night — if the snow begins to stick, the crew is mobilized and will work until the roads are drivable and the snow stops.

The city puts four pieces of equipment to work: a sander truck, a plow, and two vehicles that have both a sander and a plow. The sanders are rectangular hoppers with a spreader at the back end to broadcast the sand/cinders evenly on the streets to help melt snow and ice.

While the city used to have straight plow blades, newer trucks are equipped with Boss “V” plows that can be angled to form a scoop or a wedge. The newer plows also have replaceable polyurethane blades affixed to the bottom to keep from damaging city streets, especially new features like the compass rose at the Tehachapi Boulevard/Green Street intersection.

When a driver has worked long hours into the night and morning, another crew member is called out to replace them while the exhausted driver goes home to sleep for a few hours. If a storm lasts for several days, snow removal can continue around the clock for 48 hours or more. At the same time, hard-working crews from county and state road departments are also at work in the area clearing the roadways for which they are responsible.

This year the city has already used over 200 tons of the sand/cinder mix on Tehachapi streets, which may set a record.

So remember that while you might be inside enjoying the beauty of a winter storm with snowflakes beginning to fill the air, City of Tehachapi employees are pulling on their boots and heading out to work all day and night if necessary to keep our roads safer.

Thanks, guys. Your efforts are both noticed and appreciated.

Have a good week.

Bill Mead writes final column

It is with a profound sense of loss mingled with love and respect that I announce the passing of former Tehachapi News owner, publisher, editor and current columnist Bill Mead, 80, who died in Ridgecrest on March 7 following a brief illness.

Bill and his wife Betty co-owned the paper for 25 years and for the 40 years they have lived here were devoted supporters and boosters of the Tehachapi area.

Longtime readers of the paper already know Bill through his column, The Overall Picture, which has appeared every week in the Tehachapi News for over two decades. It’s common knowledge that he had a wonderful sense of humor and was a great writer — let me tell you more about this remarkable man.

Bill Mead’s prospects as a child were as bleak and grim as the Depression Era into which he was born. He was orphaned by financial hardship and family disfunction, he and his siblings scattered to different homes. He was facing life as a little kid without family or money.

He was adopted by a couple who published newspapers and he had a largely rural upbringing in Iowa. Bill was proud of his Midwestern origins and he learned lessons there of hard work and humility that stayed with him his entire life, even though he moved West and had a thoroughly Californian outlook on life, embracing travel and change and being much more open-minded than most people realize.

Bill knew and understood humanity well, and his skills with people served him well in his different jobs, which included helping to pass water bonds to make the California State Water Project a reality.

I first heard Bill’s voice in the early morning hours around the kitchen table on my family’s farm as my uncle listened to the farm report, which listed commodity prices of grain and livestock narrated by the rich melodic baritone of William J. Mead.

It was around 1968 when the Meads moved to Tehachapi and became partners with Dick and Warren Johnson in the Tehachapi News. Bill and Betty later bought out the Johnsons’ interest in the paper. Bill always insisted that he and Betty be listed as co-publishers, even though he did virtually all the newspapering and she served as the perpetually cheerful ambassador.

Betty Mead is so good-natured and kind that she has always been the diplomat for Bill, who could get a little cranky when things weren’t going well. Betty doesn’t even know how to be rude.

Once at the News when Bill was giving her a hard time, which he often did teasingly, the girls in the production department told her “Don’t let him talk to you that way, Betty! We’d give him the finger!” Betty just laughed and said, “Well, I would too if I knew which one to use!”

Bill often included Betty in his humorous columns, gently poking fun at his lifelong partner and gender differences in general and a few people got the misconception that she was his “long-suffering wife,” but in truth he adored her and seldom told her “no” about anything. “Come on kid, let’s go,” he’d say each day as they left the News office.

Although Bill loved Tehachapi and its people and was quick to trumpet the accomplishments of locals, he was always self-deprecatory and dismissive of his own formidable talents. And I say this without exaggeration: Bill Mead had a huge intellect. You think you know people smarter than Bill? No, you probably don’t.

He was extremely well-read and was an amateur Civil War historian, as well as a student of American history in general. Bill was an authority on America in the 20th century and knew both the accepted version of things and the inside stories. He preferred to let people underestimate him and think he was just a hick in overalls, when he could easily have been a university professor.

I first came to Bill’s attention when I was 15 and had written a couple of “Letters to the Editor” criticizing his stance on growth and development in the Tehachapi area, which he favored and I was against. Bill took no offense — he held strong opinions but wasn’t the least bit sensitive about them — and he offered to let me write for the paper, with pay.

I was a teenager with no writing or photo experience, but Bill suspected that I might work out. I know that he wanted me to succeed — as a maverick and an outsider himself, he rooted for the underdog and the individualist. He was anti-elitist and felt that snobbery and discrimination of any kind were unAmerican.

Bill used to tell people with satisfaction that “Two of my best hires in the editorial department were Tehachapi kids who never went to journalism school — Jon Hammond and Pam Stowell Johnson. You don’t have to go to J-school to write well.”

After he agreed to hire me, Bill peered at me over the rim of his glasses as he often did and asked, “You can type, can’t ya? You can’t work here if you don’t type.”

“Sure, I can type,” I lied. I initially wrote my stories out in pen on a legal pad at home and then typed them after I had made changes and corrections.

He then handed me an old twin-lens reflex camera and a 12-exposure roll of film and said “Go shoot this roll of film and I’ll teach you how to develop it.”

I took some photos around our farm, came back a couple of hours later and he showed me how to develop and print them. I eventually became the News darkroom technician and Bill had me developing and printing his photos. More than 4,000 rolls of film and tens of thousands of images later, I still have the negatives from that original roll and the prints we made that afternoon.

Bill was far more professional than other newspaper people working in Kern County then or now. He was an old-school publisher who insisted our little weekly have high standards as though we were a big daily.

He told me “There are two things I want you to remember: One, always be accurate and two, don’t get the boss sued.” I’ve done my best to follow that advice.

Bill and Betty treated their employees as family, and our lives and work were intertwined with that of the Meads and their daughters Debbie, Maggie and Carol and later their grandchildren. When we would work late putting the paper together at the old news office, located on F Street where Tehachapi Flowers is today, we would all walk over to Kelcy’s Restaurant together and have dinner at the big table, with Betty and Bill picking up the tab.

And they inspired loyalty: the three of us who are working on the paper today (Saturday) — Lori Nardini, Sandi Severin and myself — have a combined total of over 70 years at the Tehachapi News.

While Bill would make fun of himself and his alleged mechanical ineptitude in his column, he was actually quick to embrace new ideas and new technology and he kept the news office supplied with current computers and equipment. He even showed me how to use the auction Web site, eBay.

Bill considered discontinuing his column recently, telling us “The average age of Tehachapi residents is 35, and they wouldn’t be interested in my stuff. I don’t care if Britney Spears doesn’t wear underpants.”

Of course people do continue to read Bill’s writing, both his columns and feature stories, and he was convinced to continue writing.

Bill and Betty have made the most of their time since the paper was sold to The Bakersfield Californian, traveling with their daughters, their spouses and grandkids — Nikki, Grant, Andrew, Susannah, Travis and Emma Rose and centering their lives around their family. “My tribe,” as Bill refers to them.

Bill wasn’t an emotional guy and didn’t like a lot of fuss made about him. Last year he wrote the dry, just-the-facts obituary about himself that appears in this week’s paper so it would be ready when the time came.

But if you thought that you were going to leave us without me paying tribute to you, William J. Mead, you were mistaken.You made an indelible impact on those around you and you lived an exceptional American life.

I’m trying to be positive, acknowledging that a little orphan boy beat the odds and lived to be 80, became a professional and financial success and was surrounded by a close-knit family, with two great-grandchildren on their way. But when I think of that keen wit and encompassing intellect silenced forever, or Tehachapi without its most vocal booster, my heart aches and my eyes brim.

Thanks Bill, for the opportunity you gave me to stay in my own hometown to write about and photograph the place we both love so well.

We just weren’t ready to tell you goodbye yet....

Locals always miss their mountains when they leave

While I’ve never moved out of Tehachapi and have no intention of ever leaving, I have many friends who left and later returned because they found themselves homesick for life in the embrace of the Tehachapi Mountains. “I missed seeing the mountains” is a common sentiment expressed by the returnees. I start feeling that way if I’m gone for two days consecutively.

No matter which of our four main valleys you grow up in — Tehachapi, Brite Cummings or Bear — you are surrounded by mountains on all sides. Unlike long V-shaped valleys that are open at the ends, or huge valleys like the San Joaquin that are so big that their mountainous margins can be hard to see, all of our valleys are nestled into their immediate surroundings.

The mountains that appear largest are those south of the town of Tehachapi, and they are in fact the highest points in the Tehachapis: the tallest is Tehachapi Peak at 7,988 feet, while nearby Double Mountain is 7,974 feet and Cummings Mountain to the west is 7,741 feet. Our view is of the more shaded, north-facing side of these mountains, where snow accumulates deepest and remains the longest.

The photo above was taken from a vantage point overlooking Highway 58, and of course looks directly south. Starting from the left in the background you can see the deep notch that is Antelope Canyon, owned by the Wyman family’s Summit Lime Company. Light patches on the hillside just east of Antelope Canyon mark the location of the old limestone quarry.

Continuing towards the center of the photo, the highest point is Tehachapi Peak, which can be reached by a relatively short but steep hike from Tehachapi Mountain Park. A metal can at the summit holds paper for hikers to write comments, and campers from the Burbank YMCA’s old Camp Earlanna in Paradise Valley would sometimes refer to this as “Woody’s Peak” after a camp counselor by that name, but that peculiar nickname wasn’t recognized or used by anyone else.

Just right of center is the smooth yellow grassy hill almost devoid of trees known as China Hill after a nearby gold mining operation in the late 1880s that employed Chinese laborers. Water Canyon is visible as a deeply-shadowed notch just behind and to the right of China Hill.

Continuing west (right) is the round summit and long sloping incline of Cummings Mountain, which dominates the south side of Cummings Valley and often bears snow for weeks or months after the last snowstorm.

In the left foreground of the photo is the lawn and stately Italian Cypress trees that mark the Tehachapi Eastside Cemetery, formerly known as the Catholic Cemetery. Tucker Road is of course the roadway visible in the center of the picture.

Epic vantage points that overlook the Tehachapi area are mesmerizing to me, because there are so many landmarks to look for and discern — peaks, canyons, hills, roads, creeks, homesteads, ranches, the railroad, water tanks, distinctive trees....all are part of the changing tapestry of our beloved area.

I’ve taken a similar photo following a big snowstorm to capture Tehachapi when it is clothed in winter white, and the landscape is as beautiful as it is in each of our four seasons.

If you’ve ever lived in Tehachapi and loved this place, then I’ll make a prediction for you: if you move away, you’ll miss the mountains.

And hopefully at least some of the people, because some of the finest humans anywhere live in the 93561 zip code.

Have a good week.