Pen in Hand: Jim and Teri Frerichs: A Tehachapi partnership of 60 years
Pen in Hand: Jim and Teri Frerichs: A Tehachapi partnership of 60 years
By: Jon Hammond
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Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
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0 responses 0 comments Jim and Teri Frerichs of Tehachapi have a beautiful, interesting garden with many recycled items and antiques integrated with the plants and flowers to create themed growing areas and whimsical displays. Their yard itself is worthy of a newspaper article, but the Frerichs have a much richer and layered story of their connection with Tehachapi, beginning with Jim’s arrival as a seven-year-old boy in 1932. . .
The tale begins when Jim’s father, Henry Frerichs, left Iowa in the 1920s seeking a better life in California. He travelled with four other Iowans and the five of them roamed California together working at different jobs, including plucking turkeys for the poultry industry. They also worked a stint at the cement plant at Monolith, building new silos, which is how they ended up in this area.
Henry got a job at the Stoneybrook Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Keene in 1932 and sent for his wife Theresa and children Carolyn, Helen and Jim to come out from Iowa and join him in California. They arrived by train at Barstow in September and Jim said that when his mother saw the arid desolation of Barstow she was ready to turn right back around return to the lushness of Iowa.
She didn’t, however, and the family settled in Tehachapi. Later that same month, a cloudburst caused a flood down at Keene that washed away the Bear Mountain Cafe and all but one of the 17 occupants. Two freight trains were also swept off the tracks and including the transients who often rode trains during the Depression days, the death toll was estimated as high as 60 people.
Also swept away was the Frerichs family car. Henry had gone to move it but thought it was too risky and the car vanished in the flood waters. For a year afterward Henry was forced to hop freight trains to get to and from work at the TB Sanitarium in Keene.
“Sometimes on the way home the train wouldn’t slow down in Tehachapi and Dad would have to ride it all the way to Mojave and then hitchhike back,” Jim remembers. Kinda makes modern daily commutes to work seem easy, doesn’t it?
The Frerichs family lived in several different Tehachapi locations. A fourth child, Jackie, was born north of the railroad tracks in an old adobe house now owned by Phil Wyman. They also lived up in Antelope Canyon at the lime kiln camp, with the whole family occupying the main cook shack left over from the active days of the Summit Lime Company.
Jim started school locally in second grade at Wells Elementary School (the old alma mater of me and thousands of other Tehachapi kids). Among Jim’s close friends were brothers Earl and Darrell Stevens. When they were older, the three were playing together with BB guns and Darrell got shot in the eye and lost his vision in that eye — so the warnings parents always said about BB guns were true.
Several years later, the boys had been picking apples for the Lutges up at their Water Canyon ranch. The Stevens dropped Jim off at home in Antelope Canyon and started back down towards town with older brother Earl driving. He hit a rock and the wooden spokes of the old car gave out, causing a crash that ejected both Stevens boys. Darrell survived, but Earl hit his head on rock and died. There are plenty of risks to teens even today, but life was more perilous in the last century.
Late in 1941, Jim and his father were up in the mountains in Appletree Canyon (a smaller canyon above Antelope Canyon) cutting firewood and loading it in a trailer. Jim’s father had the old car radio playing, as he always did, and the news came on that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. So the news penetrated even into a remote canyon in the sparsely populated Tehachapi Mountains, and father and son knew that the world was going to change.
Two years later, when he was 17, Jim and two other Tehachapi teenagers, Darrell Stevens and Bobbie Lee Smith, decided that they would all enlist together so they went to Bakersfield. Only Jim got accepted, though: Darrell’s blindness in one eye from the shooting accident kept him out and Bobbie Lee had a variety of past injuries that resulted in both of them receiving the 4-F designation, meaning that they weren’t candidates for enlistment.
So Jim went in by himself, enlisting in the Navy in 1943. He was on a Liberty ship for a year and then served in what was known as the Armed Guard, providing security for merchant marine vessels. He was a radioman on a sea-going tug boat for another year and was then discharged in 1946.
Jim moved to Newhall, California in 1946 and went to work for his old friend Bud Lutge (a name well-known to Tehachapi locals) in the Newhall Dairy that Bud owned. Jim was a milkman who delivered milk all over the area, including the Antelope Valley. He also delivered to a soda fountain in Newhall that employed an exceptionally pretty “soda jerk” (odd term, but that’s what they used to call the counter employees) named Teri Entikin.
She would become his wife and the mother of their children Sharon, James and Duana. They would also move back to Tehachapi and become partners with Bud and Helen Lutge in opening the Mountain Lanes bowling alley, coffee shop and Best Western Motel. But that story will be continued in next week’s column. . .
Have a good week.
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