sonora2sonoma

A collection of short essays on my recollections of growing up in the Sierra foothills in the 1950s.

By Tim Konrad

There were three cigar stores in Sonora in my youth. One of them, Elsbree’s, featured an array of cured tobacco leaves, displayed in bins, from which cigar aficionados could choose when ordering custom, hand-rolled cigars.

A competing business, Burns & Punter, sported a pool table in the back and had an extensive collection of periodicals, among which was a large selection of girley magazines. Needless to say, the magazine rack was a big hit with me and my friends in our early teenaged years.

Both Elsbree’s and Burns and Punter’s are now long gone, leaving the Sportsman as the sole survivor. This business has the unique distinction of being the only establishment of its kind in California to offer both alcohol and ammunition—a dubious qualifier, but one that reflects the rural mood and tenor of the community.

The resiliency afforded the Sportsman by its eclectic fare—where else can one purchase a hunting or fishing license, plus the equipment needed to use it, while quenching one’s thirst with a frosty glass of beer? These features doubtless helped the Sportsman survive the decades relatively unchanged.

Elsbree’s used to be located at the corner of Washington and Linoberg streets, while Burns & Punter’s sat at the present site of the Diamondback Grill’s wine bar.

I used to accompany my mother on shopping expeditions before I was old enough to attend school. At that time, the local Safeway store was housed in a storefront on Washington Street just down from the Courthouse Square. You couldn’t browse the shelves in those days; you would present your shopping list to the clerk behind the counter in the front and he would go to the back of the store while you waited until he returned with your order all bagged up for you.

It wasn’t until sometime in the late 1950s that Safeway moved up south Washington St. to the site of the present Pak n Save, where it remained for decades before relocating to its present location in East Sonora.

In my earliest recollections, my mother used to purchase various meat products from the Palace Meat Market.

Situated on the east side of Washington Street near its intersection with Stockton Street, the floors of the market were covered with a deep layer of sawdust from one of the local sawmills. The sawdust, replaced frequently, functioned to absorb any moisture from whatever meat scraps and debris managed to escape to the floor during the butchering process. I can still remember the smell exuded by that combination of sawdust and meat juice–faintly musty with a slight sweetness that was not unpleasant.

The most directly-wired of the five senses, odors have the power to transport one across time, spurring what can be immediate and vivid recollections long dismissed from conscious memory. Known as the Proust Effect, this ability to trigger memories is believed to be due to the close proximity of the olfactory system to the brain’s memory hub, the hippocampus.

The most vivid of my fragrance-driven memories concerns a recollection that was preserved for years in a coconut once owned by my grandfather. Given me by my grandfather’s widow, Helen, some years after his passing, the nut was a time-worn empty shell with a patina dulled from years of handling. At some point, someone had drilled a single hole in the coconut near its top.

Over the years, the nut’s opening absorbed traces of the many scents it was exposed to during its residency in my grandfather’s house. At a later point, someone sealed the nut’s hole with a suitably-sized cork.

The cork’s seal was snug enough to capture the rich bouquet of aromas contained within. Comingled, the vapors remained, aging, like fine wine. Once released, the tang issued forth with startling  alacrity, a nasal assault of the first order.

Removing the cork and sniffing the opening brought back a flood of memories of my grandfather’s house. From within that unassuming little orb emanated traces of the particular odors that had characterized his house on the many occasions when my parents and I used to pay him visits.

While it was in my possession, I used to uncork the coconut from time to time just to savor the aroma—a  musty mixture of honeycomb, cigarette smoke and old person smell—and let it carry me back, if only for a moment, to a simpler time. I would welcome the chance to do that today were it not for the fact that the nut was among the many items lost in a house fire in 1977.

The house my grandfather lived in was torn down after his death to make way for a bowling alley. The little cabins across the street that used to house old men living out their twilight years were torn down about the same time. Downtown Sonora underwent a transformation of sorts in the 1950s as merchants and property owners undertook a campaign of “modernization” designed to keep up with the times. This meant replacing historic storefronts with unimaginative and sterile-looking installations featuring plastic tiles and big, aluminum-framed picture windows. By so doing, much of the cultural heritage and historic charm of the old buildings was destroyed.

Discounting matters of taste, however, Sonora in the 1950s was every bit the commercial hub then that it is now. What’s different these days is most of the business establishments and government offices that used to be located downtown have now either moved out the 108 corridor or to the various shopping centers east of town.

Things were arguably more convenient back then. Many jobs existed that would later be eliminated by automation. For example, the operator who was readily available by dialing “0” on the telephone was housed in a building two blocks away from our house. Similarly, it was easy to reach a real human being when calling a business on the phone. The annoying recorded messages encountered these days when trying to reach someone to talk with in business or, even more so, in government settings, hadn’t been employed yet, if they’d even been conceived of at that time.

I suppose each generation bemoans the changes, usually viewed as negative ones, that “progress” engenders. John Muir’s chagrin, for instance, over a San Francisco water project led to the founding of the Sierra Club. I confess a certain nostalgia for the way things used to be and have watched with alarm as the changes wrought by the years have transformed my hometown into something in many ways unrecognizable from how I remember it.

I recall an incident that perfectly symbolizes the deeply personal nature of the alienation such change is capable of producing in a person. In the mid 90’s, I lived for a time in Turlock while attending the university there. Change is usually gradual and can sometimes be seen more clearly from a distance. Watching children as they grow perfectly exemplifies this: It’s harder to notice their growth if you’re with them day in/day out; if you’re away for a while and then return to visit, the difference can be dramatic. Such was the case when I returned to Sonora for a visit one afternoon after having been gone for a period of weeks.

Driving into town by way of the fairgrounds, as I rounded the curve where Save Mart becomes visible on the left, the hillside that rises prominently above the old grammar school “dome” came into view.

The last time I had seen it, the hill was still undeveloped, save for the road connecting Baretta
Street with Greenly Road that coursed across it. Suddenly that view had vanished, replaced by a collection of houses. In that instant, I was struck with the realization that the part of me that had cared what happened to Sonora had suffered a fatal blow. If the town’s inhabitants lacked the ability to preserve the qualities that made Sonora a desirable place to live, what was the point of my continuing to care?

Sadly, that feeling has not gone away.

This was not something I planned to have happen, to be sure. I have always loved Sonora and am still grateful I had the opportunity to grow up there. On some level, I will always care about the place, but I realized in that moment that the place I loved now existed more in my mind, in my memory, than it did in real life. Sonora had changed so much it was no longer recognizable as the place I once knew!

It wasn’t just the sight of those houses on that hill that did it, although I used to play on that hillside with my friends growing up. It wasn’t the population increase, although that didn’t help much either. It wasn’t even the tendency of the local boards of supervisors, sadly repeated for decades, to bend over backward in meeting the needs of real estate developers while ignoring their responsibility to protect the environment. It wasn’t any one thing in particular that tipped the scales as much as it was the accumulation of insults suffered over the years as politicians and developers came and went, most of the time confusing quantity with quality and in every instance leaving as their legacy more subdivisions, shopping centers and environmental mismanagement and mayhem.

Meanwhile, as succeeding waves of newcomers descended on the county, they brought with them their suburban notions, proclivities and expectations, which resulted in the aggregation of restrictions, regulations and requirements, with their associated fees, that we see today.

Taken of a piece, the whole thing amounted to more than my rural sensibilities could accommodate. Seeing those buildings newly placed on that hill was just the last straw!

Songs often articulate feelings that words alone are incapable of addressing. Joni Mitchell perhaps said it best in her song, “Big Yellow Taxi:”

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,

with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot.

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone . . . “

Indeed!

 To be continued: