Tehachapi News

The Grande Dame of Old Town Road

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Some longtime Tehachapi residents pride themselves on living here before there were any stoplights. But Dottie Fritz Marble, 89, remembers Tehachapi before there were any paved roads and can still recall being excited that part of Hwy. 466 (the portion now known as Woodford-Tehachapi Road) was getting paved so that she could rollerskate on the new asphalt surface.

Yes, her memories of growing up in Tehachapi on a farm on Old Town Road go way back - nearly 80 years.

Newer residents may know her as Dottie Newton, the mother of Tehachapi Museum director Jerri Cowan, and recognize her from the museum, where she has spent thousands of hours over the decades as a docent. I've known her all my life as Perrin, Loran and Manney Cowan's “fun grandma,” the kind who not only approved of kids playing with lizards, she'd even catch them with you.

Dottie was born Dorothy Fritz on Feb. 8, 1920 in Torrington, Conn., the daughter of Julius and Jeanne Fritz. She was nearly born in a giant snowdrift.

“It was during of one of the biggest snowstorms they'd ever had back there, and the doctor came and picked Mom up in his car (like that would ever happen today!) and was taking her to the hospital,” Dottie told me. “They got stuck in a 14-foot snowdrift at the bottom of the hill below the hospital and had to get pulled out, but they managed to make it to the hospital before I came out.”

Dottie was only three years old when Julius and Jeanne decided to move west.

There was family tension between her mother's people, who were French, and her Dad's, who were German. World War I and the chaos in Europe had only further inflamed cultural tensions and Julius and Jeanne figured (correctly) that there would be less prejudice and bigotry in California. So in 1923, they headed west.

A Model T migration

Traveling across the U. S. in those days was no easy task. There were few paved roads. There were no up-to-date maps available. The Fritz family (Dottie, her parents, and her sister Evelyn and brother Eddie) formed a caravan with four other cars, all of them Model Ts, headed from Connecticut to Californ-I-A.

The trip took weeks. The latter-day wagon train of Model Ts would set off each morning after camping together for the night. Without maps, they sometimes just drove along barbed wire fencelines or railroad tracks, sometimes on rutted dirt roads, other times on mere tire tracks through fields and prairies, as long as they headed west. They were literally following the sun. They had to stock up on food and fuel for the cars when they could, for stores and filling stations in those days epitomized the phrase “few and far between.”

Eventually the little caravan of five Model Ts made it to Los Angeles after having collectively experienced only one flat tire the entire trip, which is just short of miraculous. From there the travelers dispersed, and the Fritz family ended up in a new Southern California community called Willowbrook.

Dottie’s father Julius did carpentry and odd jobs until he was hired at the Silvertone Tire factory in Compton.

Illness strikes

A few years later, Dottie’s aunt Rose Fritz, who had been a World War I field nurse in Europe, moved to Keene. She had caught the dreaded tuberculosis while overseas and had been sent to Flagstaff for treatment. Upon recovery, she was told to find somewhere “high and dry” to live so she wouldn’t relapse. She heard about Kern County’s Stoneybrook Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Keene and was able to get a job there.

Then Dottie’s father Julius came down with the often-fatal disease. The family’s response seems amazing today.

“Dad slept in a tent outside the house, and Mother would pass him food through the window,” Dottie recalls. “She had a big pan where she’d boil all of his dishes and us kids weren’t allowed to hug or kiss him.”

Her parents’ vigilance seemed to pay off, for no one else in the family caught TB. However, the kids all came down with smallpox that sister Evelyn brought home from school. The house was quarantined and Jeanne Fritz’s care kept her weakened husband from contracting smallpox.

In 1928, Aunt Rose made arrangements for the Fritz family to spend two weeks in Tehachapi during the summer. They stayed in the largest of the cabins that Jack Leiva used rent to motorists and early visitors, located along Tehachapi Boulevard about where P & N Garage is today.

Julius and Jeanne decided that Tehachapi would be a healthy climate and atmosphere for everyone, so in 1930 they swapped their home in Willowbrook for 47 acres of land and a farmhouse on Old Town Road, which had been there about ten years at that time and was known as “the Burton place.”

In the turkey biz

The property was dominated by an enormous Gray Pine (Pinus sabiniana) and Julius wanted to name the place “Lone Tree Ranch” but someone else was already using that name so he settled on the “White Feather Ranch,” because he immediately started raising some of the first white turkeys to reach the market in California.

“Dad would buy 500 of those day-old turkey chicks at a time from Sears or Montgomery Ward and they’d arrive in Tehachapi by train,” Dottie remembers. “We go down at 2 o’clock in the morning and meet the Night Flyer at the Tehachapi Depot and pick up those crates of chicks. They’d always throw in a few extras in case any died, but we hardly lost any and we’d end up with 500 or more turkeys.”

The White Feather Ranch was the perfect place to weather the storm of hardship that was the Great Depression. The Fritz family had 10 acres of apples, five acres of pears, turkeys, rabbits, hogs, a milk cow or two, and also hunted and raised vegetables. Despite not having much money, the family had plenty to eat and often shared with others as well.

There was no electricity on Old Town Road in those days. Firewood provided the fuel for heating and cooking at the White Feather Ranch.

“We’d go out with our team of two white horses and a sled and cut fallen oak wood with a handsaw all over what is now Golden Hills,” Dottie says, still able to picture those woodcutting expeditions clearly after all those years.

“One night Mom was driving the team in with a load of firewood and a steam train was coming up the canyon from Keene,” Dottie told me. “One of the old Malley engines blew its whistle and the team bolted. We were all running behind them hollering and then they came to a tree and forked it, with one horse on one side and the other horse on the other, which stopped ‘em. We only lost part of the load.”

Dottie became a tough wiry farmgirl who worked hard alongside her parents. She and her brother Eddie would herd 500 turkeys back up in Rattlesnake Canyon behind the White Feather Ranch, where the turkeys would forage, eating grasshoppers, seeds and other treats.

“We’d have them back up in there for a few hours and then at feeding time we’d yell ‘prrrrrrt!’ real loud and all those turkeys would take off flying and gliding back down to the ranch where we could shut them in for the night,” explained Dottie.

Though she was lean and pretty, Dottie was also something of a tomboy, which is why she made such a splendid Grandma in later years. She once broke her ankle trying to parachute off the highest point of the roof with a worn out umbrella.

Retrieving Frisco

When Dottie was about 12 years old, her childhood friend from the city came to visit. She was a big plump girl, who (typical of the time) went by the nickname “Itsy-bitsy.” The visiting girl brought along her little Chihuahua dog named Frisco.

The Fritz family used an outhouse that had one small hole for children and a large one for adults. Itsy went out to use “the necessary” and Frisco got excited, jumped up on the seat and promptly fell down through a hole into the sewage below.

“Itsy was crying and yelling and we figured we’d get in trouble,” Dottie remembers with a twinkle in her dark eyes. “Dad had recently dug new holes and moved the outhouse so the holes were still deep and there was about six inches of slush in there. I told Itsy ‘Grab my ankles’ and I lowered myself down in the big opening head-first and grabbed little Frisco. I raised him up to the other hole where Itsy could get ahold of him and then came back out myself. Didn’t have a mark on me.”

What a great and fearless friend Dottie has always been.

In 1935, Dottie was in the first graduating class from Tehachapi Grammar School (later Wells Elementary) to use the newly-built auditorium for commencement ceremonies. In those days grammar school went from first through eighth grade.

“We stood on that stage and looked out over the auditorium and it looked as big as a city block to us,” she remembered clearly with a mind that is still sharp and strong.

“We were amazed to have such a nice place to graduate.”

As a fellow alumnus of the now-shuttered Wells Elementary School (class of ‘75), I too recall that stage with great fondness, as the scene of our theater plays, award ceremonies, etc. I love to have that in common with Dottie and the other 20th century Tehachapi pioneers.

The delightful story of Dottie Fritz Marble, the Grande Dame of Old Town Road, will conclude in next week’s Tehachapi News.
Have a good week.



Please note: I will be interviewing Dottie at Mama Hillybeans Cafe on Tehachapi Boulevard on Thursday, Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. as part of our continuing series “Honoring Our Elders: History in the First-Person,” which are conversations with interesting Tehachapi oldtimers.

There is no fee and the public is encouraged to attend. You will learn things about Tehachapi and local history you never knew from someone who was actually there.
It is a rare and wonderful opportunity to hear from a strong and funny woman from another era. If you love Tehachapi, don’t miss it!