by Bill Graves
I found no monument, no plaque, not even a paragraph in the Lemoore Chamber of Commerce’s town history that recognized the anguish this proud town must have endured. Then again, who erects a monument to suffering and pain? Certainly not those who have lived it.
Perhaps it is best forgotten. It was a long time ago.
32
Its Name Preceded It
Coalinga, California
The town of Coalinga was so named because of its association with the coal mines. Like so many others in the West, this town began when the railroad arrived. In the mid-1870s, the Southern Pacific Railroad was frantically laying track westward across the San Joaquin Valley. After Hanford, it was a straight shot to Huron, then northwest over the coastal Diablo Range to Hollister. But by 1877, the railroad had crossed the valley and decided Huron would be the end of the line.
At about the same time, oil seeping from the foothills near here was being collected in gall on cans and sold around the valley by peddlers. The cans of crude, like nuggets of gold, begged the question among prospectors and businessmen alike: Was there more where that came from?
The first well produced ten barrels of oil a day, and that was with the help of a windmill pump. But things picked up. By the late 1880s, oil fever was rising like the wooden derricks that were popping up west of Huron.
As oil production grew, so did the problems of getting it to market. The mule trains they were using could not handle it all. The oilmen begged for a rail line to their wellheads. At best, oil was merely axle grease for the railroad or maybe a substitute for coal oil. The railroad had no interest in either. But that attitude quickly changed when coal was discovered in the oil fields. The railroad understood coal. They used it.
In 1887, the railroad ran an eighteen-mile spur west from Huron to loading points it called Coaling Stations A, B, and C. The coal mines played out quickly. Stations B and C were lost even to history. So the coal train then had only one stop: Coaling Station A, which quickly became Coaling A. And that’s how Coalinga got its name—and its railroad.
A few years later, the mines closed. But no one cared. An oil well called the Blue Goose was gushing 1,000 barrels a day. The black-gold rush was on, and with it came Coalinga’s identity.
From two-dozen frame buildings and some tents and shanties in 1900, Coalinga erupted into a wild frontier boomtown. The thirteen Saloons of Whiskey Row stretched for a block. With a reputation for raising nothing but “hell and jackrabbits,” Coalinga drew its share of ruffians.
Helen Cowman was ten years old the night that Whiskey Row burned. “Oh, do I remember that night! My father was really upset. The Saloons were where everything happened in town. Whiskey Row was like the Yell ow Pages. It was where you got your business done.”
The oil towns of California were never as wild and lawless as the earlier gold-mining camps. One reason was that the oil companies provided homes for their workers’ families.
As recently as 1972, every kitchen sink in Coalinga had three faucets: hot, cold, and drinking water. In the early years, trucks hauled the drinking water from Armona, forty miles away, and delivered it to tanks at each house. In 1959, the front-yard tanks disappeared when the city built one big one and laced the town with new plumbing for drinking water.
“Coalinga water was so high in salts, we were told not to drink it,” Audry Acebebo told me. “Some claimed it worked on you like a laxative. Molly Hughes drank a glass every day before breakfast. Said it helped her. Guess it didn’t hurt. She lived into her high eighties. We couldn’t wash our hair in it because the soap got gummy. It took a rinse of vinegar or lemon juice to get it out.”
Audry, curator of the R.C. Baker Memorial Museum, sat at her desk. She poked through shoe boxes of colored stones as we talked. “If you go back to the Indian days, oil bubbled out of the ground as tar. They lined baskets with it, traded it, used it as glue for arrowheads, and even chewed it. There are some caves near here that have an inch of soot baked on the ceilings, so I guess they burned it, too.”
She ran her fingers through the stones in a second box. “Going way back, this country was all under water. So we have great fossil beds around. We have a conglomerate here in the museum—a rock, really—that is solid seashells. Takes two men to lift it.”
Pointing at the shoe boxes, I asked Audry if she was into rocks.
She laughed. “If you’re a curator, you’re into everything. These were a gift. You know the expression about someone’s else’s treasure?”
Although the emphasis is on old tools of the oil industry, just being old earns an artifact a spot in this museum. There is a license-plate collection from 1928 and that requisite of every museum: the town’s telephone switchboard. Next to some well-used saddles is a rack of barbed wire samples, 200 varieties in all. Amazing, when you think about it. If one thing tamed the West, it was barbed wire. But I had no idea it took so many different kinds.
Perko’s was one of the few restaurants to survive a 6.7-magnitude earthquake that hit Coalinga in the late afternoon of May 2, 1983. In forty-five seconds, most of downtown was wiped out. Fifty-four buildings. Three hundred homes were also destroyed. Luckily, there were no deaths. Some people remember Perko’s as the only normal spot in their lives afterward.
“We could come in here, have a nice meal, and the girls would smile like everything was OK, even though they were working fifteen-hour days. If you couldn’t pay for your meal, that was OK, too,” Bill Delco remembered, as we sat together at Perko’s lunch counter. “Within minutes after the quake, the sky was full of airplanes. I haven’t seen so many since Iwo Jima. We were pulling folks out of the rubble, and those news people were buzzing around making so much racket we could hardly hear each other,” Bill recalls, with obvious bitterness.
Downt own Coalinga is rebuilt. Perko’s, at the corner of Elm (tree) and (President) Polk, now faces a McDonalds across the street and a traffic signal in front, the only one in town. Attached to the back of Perko’s is Del’s Odessa Bar-B-Que. “Del” is Delbert Geer, near age seventy, who shows up at 6:00 every morning “because I don’t want to miss any thing.”
Outside Del’s, under spreading shade trees, rests a 100-year-old hay rake and a barbecue grill the size of a grand piano. From mid-morning on, meaty ribs and beef tri-tips cover the grill. Meat drippings, hissing and sizzling when they hit the white-hot mesquite, create an odoriferous billboard that makes even a full stomach growl.
Inside Del’s—acfually a covered patio—grows a tree. Its trunk is a foot and a half in diameter. Del figures the tree has seniority, since it’s older. So there it is, sticking through the roof. Picnic benches with red-checked tablecloths surround it. Del is in bib overalls, long sleeves, and an apron, apparently oblivious to the ninety-degree heat. He talks to everyone.
The world discovered Coalinga in 1968, when Interstate 5 opened, Del said. “The San Francisco-Los Angeles crowd and truckers from all over were suddenly as close as eighteen miles. Volkswagens used to come in off the highway in meltdown condition. Nobody here had parts for German cars then.”
My last night in Coalinga, I camped in town by Olsen Park. There, some remarkably good ballplayers were fighting out a doubleheader. They played nearly to midnight. I guess most of the crowd stayed to the end, but not me. I went off to bed. I had promised Del that I would meet him before seven for some Odessa-brewed coffee. With the coming of a new day, I did not want to miss anything.
33
Searching for Main Street
Taft, California
Taft, about a hundred miles south of Coalinga on Highway 33, has one main street, two that really could be, and another that really is. Kern Street has the town’s only stoplight, the bowling alley, McDonalds, two banks, and city hall.
Center Street has the Fox Theater, two more banks, the office of the Taft Daily Midway Driller, and Ong’s Chinese Cafe & Vacuum Cleaner Repair & Gift Shop.
Main Street, on the other hand, has fewer stop signs, the United Pentecostal
Church {with only one window}, and the empty Pioneer Mercantile Company Building. Obviously, Main Street is not the “main” one.
Tenth is definitely the busiest street at this time of the morning. Its two delis are doing a brisk business in coffee-to-go and Lotto tickets.
The day is an hour old and the sidewalks are empty, except for a lone gentleman on Center Street. He wears a white shirt and tie and carries a pouch of Watchtower magazines.
“This probably should be Main Street,” he said, “That is, if you are naming the street because it is the main one.” He pointed out that Center Street has angled parking and trees that come up through grated holes in the fancy, red-brick sidewalks, plus the J.C. Penney Store.
“Do you know we have an East and a West North Street?” he asked.
“Well, that make’s sense, I guess.”
“You think so? It’s con fusing as the dickens. If you’re re -naming streets in Taft, start with those two.”
We laughed and parted company. I headed up East North, squinting into the sun that would bring the temperature here to ninety degrees by noon.
Having arrived at dusk last night and camped by the park next to the city hall, curiosity had me dressed and out of my motor home before dawn.
This California oil town, population 6,000, has seen times more prosperous times. But it is still the heart of the largest oil-producing region in the Lower Forty-eight.
A line of five newspaper racks in front of Jo’s Family Restaurant on Kern Street might just as well be a billboard. Everyone eats breakfast here. Most of the booths in Jo’s are in pairs, with nothing more than salt shakers and pepper shakers and maybe a bottle of ketchup to interfere with the flow of conversation. My booth neighbors were Pat and Harold Hunt.
“Nobody had air-conditioning then,” Pat said. “We took a box, open at both ends, draped wet gunnysacks over it, and blew air through with a fan.”
Harold added, “We cool our house today with a swamp cooler. Same principle.”
Pat was born here in 1928, when the whole town worked for the oil companies. Then over 2,300 wooden derricks peppered the hills around Taft, and gushers of 10,000 barrels a day were still coming in.
“As a kid, I would go to sleep at night by the noise of the oil pumps that were almost in our backyard. They would go bang and then chug-chug about five times, then bang again.” The bang was the power stroke of a one-cylinder, gas engine. The chug was its two flywheels going around and around, using up the energy from the bang. “Each pump had its own rhythm. The night they stopped, I couldn’t sleep,” Pat remembered.
Eventually electric motors replaced the noisy, “hit-and-miss” engines. The wooden derricks are gone, too.
It took five men five days to build a 108-foot-tall derrick. Just the demand for timbers to build them made Taft the second-largest freight-receiving station in California in the early 1900s. The Sunset Railroad that ran thirty miles between Taft and Bakersfield was then the most profitable line in the world.
“When my daddy came here from Ireland, this town was like a rowdy mining camp,” Pat continued. “I remember the Brass Rail Bar on Main Street had its windows broken out so many times they bricked them all in, except for one small one they left for ventilation.”
“And it’s now a Pentecostal Church?”
She looked surprised. “Looks like a bank vault, doesn’t it? Whiskey was cheap. Beer and soft drinks were almost unheard of, probably because it took ice to cool them. There was little of that. Drinking water was shipped in. It sold for more than crude oil. They drilled water wells but just got more oil.”
It all started with the Lakeview Gusher that erupted nearby on March 14, 1910. For a year and a half, this geyser of black gold poured out 50,000 barrels a day before anyone figured out how to cap it. There were many more, but none rivaled the Lakeview.
Pat looked at Harold’s watch and announced that they must leave. It was time for Jeopardy.
Cali forma oilmen of the nineties wear ball caps that exhibit their individual loyalties, be it a ball team, a beer, where they hail from, or maybe a truck or tire maker. A Red Adair cap, which bears the embroidered likeness of the famous fighter of oil-well fires, is the most sought After in the oil patch, I was told.
The only Western-style hat I saw in Taft was at the post office. It was of black felt with a garl and of sterling silver as a hatband. It was worn by a tall, straight man whose boots had silver tips matching those on his shirt collar. His shirt, too, was black with cowboy artifacts embroidered in red. His face and hands were those of a seventy-year-old, but he was probably younger. Several lost teeth and an Arkansas accent gave his speech a lilting lisp, maybe a guitar strum away from a country song.
“Gotta get to Pismo Beach by nightfall,” he said, walking to his camper parked outside. His daughter and her daughter crowded into the front seat, which was already occupied by a dog.
As they backed from the curb, I asked a cityboy’s question: “You got a card or something?”
“They call me Cowboy Dean. It’s on the back,” he said, pointing with a thumb to the rear of his camper.
Sure enough, reflective silver letters spelled out Love Me Tonight—Cowboy Dean—Country Classics Band. There were bumper stickers, too, but they were a blur before I could read them.
It was dark when I returned to my motor home. I opened it to let in the cool night air. The park was quiet except for a couple of lovers who drove in to giggle and chase each other around the swings. I fell asleep without knowing if anyone got caught.
Just before dawn, water began pelting my motor home. I jumped from my bed to close the roof vents to keep out the rain. False alarm. The automatic sprinklers in the park just had a long reach.
Leaving town, I stopped for coffee at McDonalds, the new early-morning hangout for Taft’s old-timers since the Safeway closed. McDonalds gives free coffee to those over age sixty-five when they spend a dollar. So they buy three cookies, drink their free coffee for an hour or so, see their friends, and take the cookies home to their grandchildren. Great system. Everybody wins.
I sat with a group of five men who had qualified years ago for free coffee. Two were sipping through triangle-shaped holes in the plastic tops. They all talked.
“When haircuts went up to fifteen cents, I just didn’t have one so often.”
“You probably came out ahead over time. So the barber ended up the loser.”
“But they say now they can’t make it at five bucks. That’s too much for seniors. We’ve got less hair for one thing.”
“You know that new guy on Kern has a deal for seniors? He gives you the first and last haircuts free.”
Silence. Some thoughtful swallows, too.
The same man continued, “I guess you just have to tell him it’s your first time in there to get a free one.”
Just then, a senior lady-customer walked by with a coffeepot, but my attention was on the silent drama unfolding around me. One man mumbled something about decaf. Another struggled with a shaking hand to get the plastic top back on his cup.
It finally came.
“Yeah, but how do ya…or when do ya tell him? I mean, how do you know it’s your last haircut?
“I guess ya don’t. That’s the way he makes his money.”
They all laughed, but it seemed forced. After that, conversation slowed.
Back in my motor home, I headed south on Highway 33 through oil fields where pumps stick up like cactus in the Arizona desert. I stopped in Maricopa to think for a while about which way to turn. I looked at the map. Either the heat of the valley or the cool of the coast. I headed west toward the Pacific.
34
Where Butterflies Spend the Winter
Pismo Beach, California
It’s all one big, homogenized beach with sand hard enough to drive on. Its south end rolls into sand dunes. People used to run horses through the dunes. Some still do. But off-road vehicles are more popular now. You can rent one at the end of Pier Street withou
t even getting your toes out of the sand.
California’s Pacific Coast High way runs parallel to the beach. Tourist haunts, groves of eucalyptus and Monterey pine, and pricey RV parks line both sides of the road. The towns of Grover Beach and Pismo Beach run together here. Apparently, identity is not a big issue, nor is competition. A Pismo Beach T-shirt can be bought in Grover Beach, and vice versa. Roadrunner beach towels cost the same in either place.
Pismo clams made this place famous for a while. Commercial fisherman once harvested as many as 45,000 a day. A few years of this, coupled with the appetites of sea otters, have about wiped out Pismo’s namesake mollusk.
It’s butterflies now. Although the interest in butterflies will never surpass that of the clams, their numbers may have already. From late November through March, millions of migrating monarch butterflies settle near here and at Pacific Grove, farther up the coast.
I think monarch butterflies are the greatest mystery of nature. They spend their winter here, then fly a couple thousand miles to Canada to spend the summer. There, they breed and die. But their offspring ret urn here in the fall, to the very same trees. When these youngsters make their migratory flight, they know exactly where they are going.
The ageless attraction of Pismo Beach is its summer weather. When most of central California swelters in ninety-degree heat, here it can be in the low seventies or sixties, even foggy.
“I remember as a kid hearing talk about going to the beach with a horse and buggy. Roads were rough and went through walnut groves and around lettuce fields. It took them as long to get there as it takes me to drive to San Francisco,” Gordon Bennett told me. His family goes back several generations in nearby Arroyo Grande, where his grandfather was the town’s first mayor in 1911.
Midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Arroyo Grande is a century-old farming town of about 15,000 people. The trees and lettuce fields that Gordon spoke of are gone, replaced with people and their houses. The city limits of Arroyo Grande and the beach towns along the Pacific Coast Highway now bump against each other.
