sonora2sonoma

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Sixteen

The political climate in the Sierra foothills when I was growing up was decidedly conservative. It remains predominantly so today despite the influx of many newcomers seeking respite from the pressures of urban life. My father always voted Republican despite being a registered Democrat, something I never fully understood. He and I would engage in heated arguments around the dinner table during the Vietnam era and continuing into the Reagan administration. Nothing was ever resolved and we doubtless both would have been better off had we avoided discussing politics altogether, but cocktails before dinner insured there would be lively discussion over the newscasts. With a certitude often expressed by the uninformed, I comforted myself in those days with the knowledge that I could cancel my father’s vote for Reagan with my own vote for his competitor.

The Vietnam Era was a difficult period for the United States and its effects were felt in Tuolumne County just as they were all over the nation. The spectacle of the nation’s being lied to en mass about the bombing in Cambodia and Laos, while not on a scale seen today with the current administration, was shocking for its time. Unlike WWII, where the country was under obvious threat from abroad, there were serious questions about why we were in the war at all. The government’s deception concerning how it was going only served to further erode trust. The draft had not yet been abolished, so the casualties were felt by people from all strata of society.

***

When I was a senior in high school, my senior English teacher was a colorful character. Young and gifted, he was vaguely reminiscent in appearance to a young Jack London. Dale Koby loved Shakespeare, and could lecture with passion and conviction about Henry the 4^th, Part One. He also, for whatever reason, had a chip on his shoulder that manifested in an ongoing disagreement between him and the school administration concerning his teaching style, which was exacerbated by the disrespectful statements he shared with our class concerning certain administration officials. The principal, Mr Stoker, he called “the great white father,” while the “Dean of Girls, Claire Sargent, was referred to as “Aunt Claire.” He made little effort to disguise the scorn with which he regarded these personages. They had the power, however, and, in the end, he was dismissed half-way through our senior year.

After his departure, Koby began publishing novels under the imprint of a publishing company known for producing “dime novels” of an erotic and titillating nature. Not what one might term literary by any means, these works capitalized on his experience teaching in Sonora, with titles such as “Campus Sexpot” and “Yankee Hill Lover.” In these novels, Kobe made little effort to disguise the true identities of some of the participants. Campus Sexpot told the tale of a high school teacher having a sexual affair with his babysitter, who also happened to be one of his students. In the spirit of “art imitating life,” the tale bore more than a little resemblance to a biographical work. Mr Stoker became “Mr. Stoper.” Other characters’ names were also similarly thinly disguised. The name of the babysitter, Linda Franklin, was close enough to the name of the girl in my English class, whose initials were similar and who, we all knew, was babysitting his children at the time. I had an opportunity to catch a glimpse of his grade book at the midterms and noted that this co-ed received an A+ for her efforts for the semester.

Yankee Hill Lover was another novel Koby wrote based on his experiences in Sonora and also featured some characters whose identities weren’t difficult to figure out due to the similarity of their names to those of actual people.  Lust on Wheels, written after he had left Sonora, was advertised as a “dramatic story torn from today’s headlines,” a tale of “two average ‘nice’ girls”, who “operated their ‘business’ behind the respectability of a trailer camp.”

Campus Sexpot became the inspiration for a later work of fiction, written by David Carkeet, a coming-of-age piece that sought to use the earlier work as a vehicle to explore the author’s adolescence.

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Fifteen

Staying at my house in Sonora, where I grew up, can be more than a little disorienting. The many memories that come flooding out—not all good—play their part well, their layered nature providing an invitation for deep and extended diving. The emotions evoked by those memories give them power. The feelings that arise when making decisions about what to throw away, what to give away, what to keep? . . . That’s perhaps the hardest of all.

What’s important to one generation does not always transfer to the next. Witness how each generation thinks there’s room for improvement over the current one. It’s true not only of ideas, but also of things, like in what am I going to do with my Dad’s old analog clock radio?

When I was younger, I wanted to hold onto everything because you never know when you might need something down the road. Time didn’t seem much of an issue; there was plenty of it. The road seemed long enough back then to support such notions. The clock ticks louder these days, and, as the road ahead has shortened,  the justifications for holding on to things have lost their former vigor, grown less compelling. There is a subtle sense of freeing that comes with the letting go of a thing, of releasing it to the world.

Possessions have their price and that price is allegiance. People take better care of things they value than those they don’t. Possessions demand attention—for maintenance, protection: Letting go of them may be likened to relieving blocked energy in the body; the sense of freeing, of lightness, that results is how life feels when one is not burdened with too many possessions.

***

This spring, it will have been 29 years since my father’s passing. After all the intervening years of returning to the house I grew up in, I no longer think constantly of my father when I’m there. At the same time he’s never far from my mind.

My father was humble, soft-spoken and droll; he also possessed good comic timing, and could find opportunities for humorous quips in mundane situations. He loved to take advantage of my gullibility and continued to do so even after becoming severely disabled by a cerebral hemorrhage.

A good part of my fascination with the place has to do with my father’ artistry, which he expressed in this place with the stonemasonry that adorns it so elegantly. A housepainter by trade, in addition to his stonework, he was also a skilled wall paperer and carpenter. As I go through the place and pretty up the signs of wear resulting from years of tenants, I can’t help but think of him and wonder if any part of him is still hanging around, and, if so, what he would think of how the place has changed.

He maintained it well over the years, which was in keeping with his dependable and responsible nature. nowhere better expressed than in the devotion he showed to my mother throughout her extended and challenging illness.

When I think of selling the place, part of my resistance is because I almost feel I would be betraying my father for leaving this place he sunk his fortune into as the place to raise his family and enjoy his old age. And while he did these things, and hopefully found satisfaction in how things turned out (although I know it would have been better if his grandkids had not been removed to another state), that’s past tense now, and I need to separate myself from this enmeshment and figure out what I need to do to achieve my goals. In other words, think like a businessman, which is about as foreign to me as Kate Perry.

***

Some say you can move from a place and never look back; I say, can you ever totally leave a place behind where you spent significant time in? Roots can run deep! Connections abound. Everywhere you look is somewhere you’ve been at some time or another.

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Fourteen

In an old field that is now the parking lot for a small cluster of rental units, we used to play baseball after school. While not regulation-sized, our field was entirely adequate for our needs and was the site of many happy memories. There were personnel changes along the way as friends moved into or out of the neighborhood, but the core group, Bill Rasor, his brothers and me, remained throughout. The Rasor’s had an arsenal in their home–a proliferation of hunting rifles, WWII arms from different countries, among them a fine Italian carbine, pistols both automatic and revolvers, shotguns of various gauges and a 9mm German luger from WWI whose handle fit like a glove even though ergonomic design didn’t catch on until much later. When we would go out hunting, Bill would supply half the guns for the outing. While fond of guns, I didn’t like killing things, so my career as a hunter was short lived.

***

In high school, I studied Journalism. The class, enrollment of which was by invitation, was divided into two sections–one produced the school yearbook, while the other published the school newspaper. I was on the newspaper staff. When someone completed an assignment, they would place it in the copy bin on the teacher’s desk. I started writing poetry in my senior year of high school. After doing it for a while, I began to wonder what others might think of it. Since I wasn’t the most popular kid in the school, I was fearful I wouldn’t get honest feedback if I were to share my work. I struck upon a workaround that solved this problem. I began slipping poems into the copy box when no one was looking and then hung around to hear what kinds of reactions they elicited when they were discovered. I sometimes even participated in speculation about the identity of the author. To my delight, my poems were well received. I continued submitting poems anonymously and they continued to receive good reviews.

Finally, the teacher offered a reward–a set of volumes of Wallace Stevens’ poetry –for whoever would identify himself as the author of the poems. Anticipating there might be a time in which I would need proof I was the author, I had made carbon copies of everything I’d submitted right down to a signature I devised for my nom de plume–Frederick P. Gargoyle—which I had re-traced on each copy as I’d made them. I gathered my copies, my “proof,” and went, the next day, to class to reveal my identity. Imagine my surprise when I was told I was too late–that the author had already revealed herself and claimed the prize.

A fellow classmate in Journalism class had submitted one poem under my pen name and cheekily claimed ownership of the body of work. My claim was met with disbelief until I produced my evidence, at which point the teacher agreed the work was mine, but he didn’t want to make the other student give back the books, which had come from his library. He instead gave me a single volume–Pencils in the Air, by Samuel Hohenstein. The student, for whatever reason, never expressed remorse for her act.

Thereafter, I wrote poetic editorials on timely topics for the newspaper, to considerable acclaim within that insular little world. I was even invited to write the dedication for the inaugural issue of the school’s literary magazine, a great honor. But I suffered from writers’ block and was unable to come up with anything. My poetry writing otherwise continued through that year and into the next until one day when a friend was visiting. While showing him some of my poetry, I was taken aback by something he said. He asked me why it was all so negative. Up until then, negativity had been my muse, my inspiration, the driving force behind my writing. Hearing his reaction I resolved not to write any more until I could find motivation from positive sources to do so. Such motivation, it turns out, took decades, and my writing all but dried up in the interim.

A couple of decades later I found myself among a group of poets who would gather regularly for poetry readings. I never once during that time felt any sense of identification with them as poets, nor did I feel any desire to participate, since I hadn’t written anything in many years and seemed to have lost the impetus to produce new work. Writing is, after all, a discipline, and one that requires practice in order to improve. Letting one’s skills languish is akin to letting one’s fields go fallow.

My writing inspiration has surfaced from time to time over the years, usually only short-lived, but more so lately, fueled partly by the ongoing spectacle in Washington as a third of the nation continues to embrace a figurehead who fancies himself a leader, not realizing he is a leader of fools who, like him, are so enamored of their misguided notions they are incapable of realizing how far their views have drifted from reality. If there are words that accurately depict the utter absurdity of the trump regime, I’ve yet to find them.  I doubt the person who first coined the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction” had any idea just how true that statement is.

Writing about trump alone would be more like a punishment than an outlet for creativity, but keeping silent in the face of his constant assault on decency, propriety and yes, even sanity–I mean, how could anyone with a pulse find the introduction of “fake news” into the lexicon acceptable?–is too much to ask.

That the nonsense that issues forth from trump’s oral orifice finds resonance with so many people in this country is perhaps more disturbing than his antics alone. The implications are difficult to ignore: misogyny, racial discrimination and homophobia are alive and well in America and, along with nationalism and isolationism, they threaten to upend decades of social gains and diplomatic progress. Never underestimate the power of fear to motivate people into making unwise decisions about who they want to represent their interests in government, to make them forget, as Mother Theresa said, that the reason we have no peace “is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

In reality, we are all connected with each other, forever bound by common interests.

I doubt Mother Theresa ever read Ayn Rand; she was probably too busy exemplifying the antithesis of Rand’s teachings to take notice. People who fancy themselves Christians yet follow Rand’s brand of self-centeredness are a curiosity to me. I wonder how, in their quiet moments, they account to themselves for the cognitive dissonance inherent in their conflicting beliefs?

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Fourteen

In an old field that is now the parking lot for a small cluster of rental units, we used to play baseball after school. While not regulation-sized, our field was entirely adequate for our needs and was the site of many happy memories. There were personnel changes along the way as friends moved into or out of the neighborhood, but the core group, Bill Rasor, his brothers and me, remained throughout. The Rasor’s had an arsenal in their home–a proliferation of hunting rifles, WWII arms from different countries, among them a fine Italian carbine, pistols both automatic and revolvers, shotguns of various gauges and a 9mm German luger from WWI whose handle fit like a glove even though ergonomic design didn’t catch on until much later. When we would go out hunting, Bill would supply half the guns for the outing. While fond of guns, I didn’t like killing things, so my career as a hunter was short lived.

***

In high school, I studied Journalism. The class, enrollment of which was by invitation, was divided into two sections–one produced the school yearbook, while the other published the school newspaper. I was on the newspaper staff. When someone completed an assignment, they would place it in the copy bin on the teacher’s desk. I started writing poetry in my senior year of high school. After doing it for a while, I began to wonder what others might think of it. Since I wasn’t the most popular kid in the school, I was fearful I wouldn’t get honest feedback if I were to share my work. I struck upon a workaround that solved this problem. I began slipping poems into the copy box when no one was looking and then hung around to hear what kinds of reactions they elicited when they were discovered. I sometimes even participated in speculation about the identity of the author. To my delight, my poems were well received. I continued submitting poems anonymously and they continued to receive good reviews.

Finally, the teacher offered a reward–a set of volumes of Wallace Stevens’ poetry –for whoever would identify himself as the author of the poems. Anticipating there might be a time in which I would need proof I was the author, I had made carbon copies of everything I’d submitted right down to a signature I devised for my nom de plume–Frederick P. Gargoyle—which I had re-traced on each copy as I’d made them. I gathered my copies, my “proof,” and went, the next day, to class to reveal my identity. Imagine my surprise when I was told I was too late–that the author had already revealed herself and claimed the prize.

A fellow classmate in Journalism class had submitted one poem under my pen name and cheekily claimed ownership of the body of work. My claim was met with disbelief until I produced my evidence, at which point the teacher agreed the work was mine, but he didn’t want to make the other student give back the books, which had come from his library. He instead gave me a single volume–Pencils in the Air, by Samuel Hohenstein. The student, for whatever reason, never expressed remorse for her act.

Thereafter, I wrote poetic editorials on timely topics for the newspaper, to considerable acclaim within that insular little world. I was even invited to write the dedication for the inaugural issue of the school’s literary magazine, a great honor. But I suffered from writers’ block and was unable to come up with anything. My poetry writing otherwise continued through that year and into the next until one day when a friend was visiting. While showing him some of my poetry, I was taken aback by something he said. He asked me why it was all so negative. Up until then, negativity had been my muse, my inspiration, the driving force behind my writing. Hearing his reaction I resolved not to write any more until I could find motivation from positive sources to do so. Such motivation, it turns out, took decades, and my writing all but dried up in the interim.

A couple of decades later I found myself among a group of poets who would gather regularly for poetry readings. I never once during that time felt any sense of identification with them as poets, nor did I feel any desire to participate, since I hadn’t written anything in many years and seemed to have lost the impetus to produce new work. Writing is, after all, a discipline, and one that requires practice in order to improve. Letting one’s skills languish is akin to letting one’s fields go fallow.

My writing inspiration has surfaced from time to time over the years, usually only short-lived, but more so lately, fueled partly by the ongoing spectacle in Washington as a third of the nation continues to embrace a figurehead who fancies himself a leader, not realizing he is a leader of fools who, like him, are so enamored of their misguided notions they are incapable of realizing how far their views have drifted from reality. If there are words that accurately depict the utter absurdity of the trump regime, I’ve yet to find them.  I doubt the person who first coined the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction” had any idea just how true that statement is.

Writing about trump alone would be more like a punishment than an outlet for creativity, but keeping silent in the face of his constant assault on decency, propriety and yes, even sanity–I mean, how could anyone with a pulse find the introduction of “fake news” into the lexicon acceptable?–is too much to ask.

That the nonsense that issues forth from trump’s oral orifice finds resonance with so many people in this country is perhaps more disturbing than his antics alone. The implications are difficult to ignore: misogyny, racial discrimination and homophobia are alive and well in America and, along with nationalism and isolationism, they threaten to upend decades of social gains and diplomatic progress. Never underestimate the power of fear to motivate people into making unwise decisions about who they want to represent their interests in government, to make them forget, as Mother Theresa said, that the reason we have no peace “is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

In reality, we are all connected with each other, forever bound by common interests.

I doubt Mother Theresa ever read Ayn Rand; she was probably too busy exemplifying the antithesis of Rand’s teachings to take notice. People who fancy themselves Christians yet follow Rand’s brand of self-centeredness are a curiosity to me. I wonder how, in their quiet moments, they account to themselves for the cognitive dissonance inherent in their conflicting beliefs?

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Thirteen

When I was a teenager I became fascinated with bottle hunting and collecting. Some of my friends were making discoveries by digging into old dumpsites and outhouses, and some were finding bottles worth money. In following suit, I soon came across a variety of beer bottles from different breweries, such as Buffalo Brewery in Sacramento, that I had never heard of. Some of these breweries were local, which only added to my curiosity. Asking my father what happened to these breweries, he told me they all went out of business when Prohibition came along. I remember lamenting the lack of diversity in the brands of beer available at the time–mostly Hamms, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Burgermeister. Back then, Coors hadn’t made it to the west coast, although I had seen it in New Mexico on visits there. (The first Smokey & the Bandit film centered on a wager over how long it would take a trucker to deliver a truck load of Coors beer cross country to Georgia).  How different it must have been, I thought, and how exciting to be able to taste such variety as apparently existed prior to Prohibition. Thankfully, changes in the law made a couple of decades ago made it possible for the blossoming of new craft breweries we are seeing today. Variety, it is said for good reason, is the spice of life.

***

My father was living in San Mateo when Prohibition began. My grandfather had a still in the attic of their house and it was my father’s job to tend to it when he was home from school. One day, it caught fire while he was tending it. My Dad, fearful, and rightfully so, knew he couldn’t call the fire department, so he managed to extinguish the fire by himself. Years later, when he and I were walking on some property I used to own out past Phoenix Lake, he spotted my marijuana garden. Like any good father, this worried him, since it was before medical marijuana became legalized. I drew a parallel between my garden and his father’s still back in San Mateo, making the case that if having the still was an acceptable risk, so was the garden. He seemed to buy it and we never discussed the garden again.

***

Prohibition was ultimately overturned in 1933 and the nation resumed legal drinking. Conceived as an effort to force behavioral changes upon people who hadn’t indicated any interest in changing, weren’t interested in changing, and weren’t going to do so simply because some idiots in Washington said they had to, Prohibition was fatally flawed from the beginning. Such efforts to stifle the human spirit have been attempted throughout the ages by well-meaning busybodies who ought first to put their own houses in order before trying to tell others how to manage theirs. We see this today in our politics. Despite the required separation of church and state in government affairs, the growth of the influence of evangelical Christianity over government matters these days is alarming. The reason the founding fathers wanted religion out of governmental decision making is because a man cannot serve more than one master at a time, no matter how you try to spin it.

***

With the passage of time has come a rise in the population. The impact on the environment resulting from our increase in numbers can be seen in many ways, some more obvious than others. It used to be possible, for instance, to hike in the Emigrant Wilderness without a permit. Back then, you could camp in the forest in places other than designated campsites, and there were no fees involved. Turnouts near river crossings were places to pull off and park to hike down to the river. Nowadays, the highway department places boulders in those wide spots and constructs berms to prevent people from pulling off. As access has been restricted, controls have proliferated, all, or mostly designed with good intentions in mind, but the net effect has become a world with fewer opportunities and less convenience than before. And the funny thing about it is, if you hadn’t been around long enough to remember the way things used to be, you wouldn’t be aware of how much they’ve changed  What might seem inconvenient or limiting to an older person might appear normal and routine to younger folks. One’s attitude and perspective can make all the difference.

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Twelve

Buzzy Bamber was the talk of the town my freshman year of high school. A few years my senior, Bamber, who hailed from the town of Tuolumne, led law enforcement officials on an extended chase not once, but two separate times after escaping jail. Skilled in living off the land and bold and daring, Bamber once swam a river and sneaked within 50 feet of the sheriff, where he pilfered his lunch practically from under the man’s nose before disappearing back into the bush. Each manhunt lasted over a week and Bamber was never apprehended locally, instead only being captured in traffic stops far from Tuolumne County.

The local newspaper followed Bamber’s ecapades closely, weaving a tale full of adventure and daring and shading his actions with an air of mystery reminiscent of the press coverage that followed the likes of Bonnie & Clyde in an earlier time. The attention  garnered in the press by accounts of Bamber’s antics presaged the hullabaloo that would accompany the Ellie Nesler affair decades later.

The human tendency to root for the underdog as manifested in the public’s fascination with colorful ne’er-do-wells has been around since the days of Robin Hood. The fascination surrounding the celebration of criminals and their activities is at least in part a product of the human tendency to display more interest in following news about disaster than news that is uplifting and positive.  Whatever needs of the human psyche are being addressed  by this activity, the identification with individuals at odds with the prevailing power structure has been a potent theme transcending time and culture and one of the universal characteristics that unites us  in our shared humanity.

I remember hearing when I was quite young–maybe 6 or so–about a woman who lived out Tuolumne Road somewhere around Steve’s Place who had poisoned her husband, dismembered him and buried his body parts in her flowerbeds. According to the story, she was released from prison after serving around seven years. Because of that story, and also on account of the unusually high number of reported suicides in the county,  Tuolumne County was once described on the Tonight Show as the place to go if you want to murder somebody and get away with it.

But what is likely the most sensational case to come out of Tuolumne County since the Bartlemei kidnap-murder in the early 60s was the one in which Ellie Nesler shot and killed the man accused of molesting her son as he sat in a courtroom awaiting arraignment.

The circumstances surrounding the Ellie Nesler affair serve well to illustrate the dynamics commonly present in narratives that have achieved sensational status.  For those of you not familiar with the story, the drama began in 1993 when Nesler, reportedly fearing that the alleged molester, Daniel Driver, would be set free, took matters into her own hands by shooting Driver in the head with a pistol as he sat at his arraignment awaiting the arrival of the judge.

As reported by CBS News, after Nesler saw Driver ‘smirk’ at her son in the courtroom, before going to her car and returning with the handgun. “I may not be God,” she was quoted as saying at the time, ” but I tell you what, I’m the closest damn thing to it.”

It isn’t uncommon in rural areas for a person to have a wide circle of acquaintances. What may be less common is to have been acquainted with so many of the players in this drama.  I knew the judge in whose courtroom the crime occurred, I knew the mother of the victim, who left town abruptly after her son’s killing and I knew one of the prosecutors.

Regarded by some as an “avenging angel,” Nesler achieved a kind of local notoriety almost cult-like in expression, with throngs of followers gathering daily at the small park below the courthouse in demonstration of their support, cheered on in news bites by defense attorney Tony Serra, a man practiced in the manipulation  of the news media for purposes of persuasion. Containing all the elements that make for a good story–the harried heroin, the heroic defender, the act of passion that brought them together, the character twists and turns–the trial dominated the headlines, locally and beyond, throughout its duration.

Nesler’s story is not a happy one. She served 3 1/2 years in custody while her case worked its way through the courts, eventually pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter. The remainder of her life was spent, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “struggling with the complicated power of fame and infamy, battling cancer and drugs, earning money from her tale, losing it all, and seeing her son fall into his own spiral of violence, ending with his imprisonment for murder.” https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Nesler-dies-killed-man-accused-of-molestation-3178158.php

Nesler’s son, Willie, didn’t fare much better. An hour after his release from jail upon completion of time served for attacking a man during a dispute over tools, he returned to the scene of the original crime and beat the man to death. Charged with first-degree murder, Nesler was sentenced to serve 28 years to life in prison.

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Eleven

I attended grammar school at the old dome in Sonora. The primary grade kids attended classes in the basement of the old 3-story building, while the middle-school-aged students met on the second floor. The 7^th and 8^th graders had classes in the uppermost level, where the views out the windows were the best and the temptation to spend time daydreaming was the greatest. I found this feature to be of enormous benefit when the rigors of sentence diagramming would become overwhelming and the only available recourse was to check out for a while. I suppose it’s reasonable to admit I was a failure at sentence diagramming but that shortcoming doesn’t seem to have affected my ability to construct passable sentences, and I still have fond memories of that view.

One day during civics class, my 8^th grade teacher, Mr. Ostlund, spoke to us about a phenomena he termed gerrymandering. A then archaic term, it referred, we were told, to a practice, long since abandoned, in which representation in congressional districts had been manipulated not to accurately reflect census data, but for political reasons. The teacher explained that the practice had eventually fallen out of favor because it had unfairly disadvantaged some groups of people over others. As this illustrates, it’s folly to underestimate the power of a bad idea to resurface further down the road to once again perpetrate mischief upon the unsuspecting or uninformed. It’s also a good argument for the necessity of eternal vigilance as a countermeasure against such goings on.

Another (hopefully) well-meaning lie told us under that hallowed dome came from the lips of Smokey the Bear himself when he came to visit our primary grade class one afternoon. The iconic figure spoke to us about how destructive logging practices like clear cutting had once done great damage to watersheds but that enlightened foresters had since prevailed in getting the practice discontinued. A most reassuring message, I believed it for decades until the first time I flew over the Cascade Range in Washington state in the early 80s and saw mile upon mile of mountainous territory that had been stripped bare of growth. I later discovered the damage wasn’t confined to the northwest alone when I peered beyond a couple of rows of trees lining the side of Highway 108 in the forests above Pinecrest and saw a clear cut area just beyond. As shocking as it is to contemplate children being lied to by Smokey the Bear, I can think of no more powerful illustration of the change wrought by time than to compare the bear’s mendacity to that of the current occupant of the White House, a person whose dishonesty has reached epic proportions.

***

As previously noted, my father’s business partner had the gift of gab. He came fully equipped with a repertoire of stories and anecdotes, materials from which he could draw for hours at a time without running out of sources. If you were around him long enough, however, you would start to hear repeats. The story of how he used to fall towards moving vehicles and wasn’t cured of it until his friends tied him up to a telephone pole by the roadside to prevent him from falling was interesting, funny even, the first time I heard it. When people would offer him a beer, Ralph would politely decline, explaining that beer made his eyes cross. After the third or fourth time I heard these things, I became more interested in studying the reactions, clearly visible on the faces of the people listening as they labored to place what he was saying into some conceptual framework that didn’t leave them with a vague sense of unease.

Some of Ralph’s stories centered on people he knew in the community. One tale involved an Italian man he generically called “Tony.” There were many people of Italian heritage in Tuolumne County in those days, particularly from the Genoa region. As the story went, Tony one day decided to make an unannounced visit to see some friends, also Italian. Unbeknownst to Tony, these folks had been discussing him just before his arrival, one of them having just said, “That Tony, he’s a no good son-of-a-bitch.” The next instant Tony arrived and it was all “Hey Tony, Good to see you!”

My dad was not one to speak ill of people and would only say of Ralph that he was “eccentric.” A well-respected member of several fraternal organizations and an avid card player, Ralph was well-liked in the community. He also, I suspect,  had a guardian angel. I had occasion to ride with him up Highway 49 to Jackson on several occasions. Back then, before the construction of New Melones reservoir, the road wound down to the river at Melones and then climbed back up into the hills toward Carson Hill on its way north to Angels Camp and beyond. There were around twenty blind hairpin curves on that stretch of road and Ralph cut the corner on every one of them every single time but never encountered an oncoming car.

Fidgety and nervous, he was not a meticulous craftsman like my father. Possessed of a short attention span, Ralph once forgot he was counterbalancing me on a plank suspended 25 feet in the air and started to step off to go have a smoke. Many customers overlooked his shortcomings because of his personality; what complaints my father received about Ralph’s work he never shared with him.

You could say that Ralph was lucky he never had a collision, given his driving habits, and you’d be right! You could also posit that, by his never having had any problems arise on account of his poor driving choices, Ralph was denied the opportunity to learn that such consequences provide. Adversity, as they say, builds character, and, while Ralph was beyond doubt a character in his own right, having come by it naturally, his life experience might have been deeper had he not been insulated from consequences.

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Ten

Two of my former club-mates in the Gentlemen featured prominently in an interesting display of small town jurisprudence a few years after our car club days. Brothers, they became embroiled in a dispute at a local celebration with the father-in-law of the older fellow and some of his friends. This father-in-law happened to be the owner of a local glass company and, if memory serves, a member of the sheriff’s possee. When the disagreement  became physical, the police were summoned & the brothers were arrested. At the jail, when the brothers were in the elevator going between receiving in the basement and the higher detention floor, something happened.

The brothers would later claim they were assaulted by the police lieutenant who had been escorting them and the lieutenant said the brothers started it; the brothers had marks indicative of physical trauma. The brothers filed charges against the policeman and a trial ensued.

I knew the policeman and had always thought him to be an okay person, which was complimentary, since my overall impression of policemen at that point was less favorable. I also knew from firsthand experience that one of my former associates, the older of the two brothers, could throw a punch with little provocation.

Elsie Robinson was a famous newspaper columnist from a bygone era who retired to Sonora in the 1930s. Descended from a prominent local family, her roots went deep in the community. One of her comrades from her youth was Melvin Belli, the famed lawyer. Belli, who grew up near Columbia, practiced law out of San Francisco. An unnamed local benefactor (probably Robinson) hired Melvin Belli to defend the police lieutenant in his upcoming trial. The officer was acquitted of his charges and his career was saved.

I chanced upon Belli while strolling one evening in Columbia. He was sitting on a bench across from the museum with his fabled greyhound by his side. The animal had achieved temporary celebrity status a few years earlier and was the subject of numerous news articles. The reports had failed to mention the dog was a miniature greyhound and not  the bigger variety I had expected. Mr. Belli told me that the bathtub he was bathed in as a wee child was in the museum across the street. Some day, he said, he wanted to see if he could purchase it from them.

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Nine

One of the delights of my childhood was the opportunities the area presented to be witness to the filming of some of the many movies and tv shows that were a regular presence in our community in those days. The iconic western “High Noon” was filmed in Tuolumne County when I was nine. I remember some mention in grammar school about the production company casting about for kids to play extras in the movie, and secretly hoped I might be chosen, but, alas, I was not. I knew one boy, a year my senior and the son of the school principal, who did make the cut. The scene in which he, and the lucky others, appeared (for those of you familiar with the film)  was in the church when Gary Cooper goes inside to implore the townspeople to support him against the imminent arrival of a gang led by a man he had sent to prison who was bent on his destruction.

Beginning when I was around 13, I began hanging out evenings at the lobby of a local inn when a movie company would be in town filming. Our family had inside information on when movie companies were in town because our next door neighbor, Josie, worked as a housekeeper at an exclusive local motel where the leading ladies and gentlemen, such luminaries as Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper,  were routinely housed during their stays. Josie whispered tales about how difficult and demanding Claudette Colbert was, or how agreeable she found Ingrid Bergman.

While strictly admonished never to venture to the motel in search of autographs, I was free to haunt the lobby of the Sonora Inn, where second-tier actors and support staff would pass en route to the restaurant, the bar or to their rooms on the upper floors. I made the acquaintance of a Filipino bellhop, who would signal with an eye gesture when someone with the movie company entered the hotel lobby. That would be my cue to hone in on my subject and ask for their autograph. By this means, I succeeded in meeting and getting autographs from Randolph Scott, Edgar Buchanan, Francis X. Bushman, Barry Sullivan, Dale Robertson, Mala Powers and a host of character actors and others. My bellhop friend was not above a good spoof, as he one time signaled me a target who turned out to be a local rancher.  During the tour of one particular production company, I also made the acquaintance of the son of the man in charge of lighting for the movie—Lindsley Parsons—who went on to follow in his father’s footsteps as Lindsley Parsons Jr.

During the summer of 1958 (verify), The Lone Ranger came to town for a couple weeks of filming. It was surreal (though I wouldn’t have thought to describe it that way at the time) to run into Jay Silverheels, the actor who played Tonto, shopping in the local Sprouse-Ritz dime store. Within 3 miles bicycling distance from home, I was able to pedal to a location on a ranch in Shaw’s Flat where I got to spend an afternoon watching the filming of part of an episode of The Lone Ranger. Having grown up watching the show, this was a big deal to a 15-year-old boy such as myself. And a somewhat disillusioning experience, as it turned out!

The kicker had to do with the most iconic scene of the entire series—the one in which the Lone Ranger and Tonto are seen riding off into the sunset at the end, waving to the camera as they depart. It was late in the day when they got to this scene, probably to take advantage of the angular light of late afternoon. It looked much like the familiar version that appeared at the close of each episode, and would have passed unnoticed had I not known that, while Jay Silverheels was riding his horse in the guise of Tonto, the saddle intended for the Lone Ranger was instead filled by a stuntman of similar height and build while Clayton Moore, the actor portraying the real Lone Ranger, sat in his director’s chair by the wayside sipping a drink.

That revelation by itself might not have tipped the scales for me had it not been for the fact, that very morning, I had witnessed the filming of a scene at the
Columbia airport in which, per the script, the Lone Ranger was bound and gagged and laying in the back of a runaway buckboard while Tonto rode up beside the unattended wagon, leaped from his horse into the empty driver’s seat, grabbed the reins and brought the team to a halt, thereby saving the Lone Ranger from some undoubtedly disagreeable fate. It was thrilling to witness Jay Silverheels’s skill in pulling off that stunt by himself, never mind the fact that the LR’s stunt man was in the wagon in his stead. One could hardly escape the conclusion that the only reason Clayton Moore was needed was for the talking scenes, especially since, without his mask, he was not a handsome man.

One more bit of trivia concerns the Lone Ranger and an anecdotal exchange that took place between me, him and another boy: This other boy caught a grasshopper and, bringing it to the LR, asked him, ”Look, Lone Ranger. I caught this grasshopper. What should I do with it?” The LR replied, in his booming baritone voice, “Let it go,” to which, being the smart-mouthed kid I was back then, I said, “Let it Go? You’re this guy who shoots bad guys all the time and you don’t want to see a grasshopper get hurt?,” and he says, again in this voice that likely earned him that role, “the Lone Ranger never kills an outlaw. He only wounds them and brings them to justice.”

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Eight

Few things in life have the power to evoke long-forgotten memories than the plaintive sound of a lonely train whistle. Thanks to the recent return of rail travel to Sonoma County, this sound is now heard several times each day in my community and, each time I hear it I am brought back to the comforting wail emanating from the Sierra Railroad’s locomotive each afternoon as it wound its way to the train station at the south end of Sonora. I recall accompanying my father as he went to the train station to receive the shipments of paint that enabled him to provide for our family while I was growing up. As a small boy, I remember the guilt-tinged fascination with which I would steal glimpses of the calendar girl pinups that lined the walls of the inside of the freight-receiving part of the train station. Pictures of scantily-clad women, a novelty for an 8 year-old boy unaccustomed to such material, became something to look forward to when going to pick up paint with my father.

The rail line played a big part in meeting the area’s freight needs at that time.  The freight depot, located  where the post office sits today, was a handsome building with a deck on the receiving side whose height was just right for off-loading freight onto awaiting trucks. In the days of my youth, the train had been reduced to a freight- hauling line. In an earlier time, before a larger and more ambitious train station had fallen victim to fire, the rail line had ferried passengers bound for the foothills and beyond. Today, most of the passengers riding the rails in these parts are tourists, visitors to the area who arrive in Jamestown by automobile to board trains for short excursions on summer weekends and special occasions.

In reflecting on the ability of sounds, such as that of a train whistle, to summon memories long forgotten, another sound familiar from childhood comes to mind—the once familiar sound of a rooster crowing to herald the arrival of a new day. A man who lived uphill from us when I was a child had a chicken pen commanded by a rooster who, each morning, would proclaim the coming of the dawn with unfailing regularity. Anyone who doubts that roosters are early risers is someone who has never lived close enough to one to be dispelled of such foolish notions! Many were the times I cursed that bird as a teenager after having stayed up half the night thinking I could sleep through the following morning to catch up, only to be awakened in the early light by that damnable biological alarm clock. In those days, once awake I was not able to go back to sleep, no matter how late I’d stayed up. Had I been bolder, I might have consoled myself at those times with thoughts of the bird’s demise but I was not then yet sufficiently distrustful of my conditioning to indulge in such independent thought.

I eventually learned to accept the sound of the rooster crowing and even, in time, to appreciate it. One of the blessings of the passage of time is its ability to promote acceptance of that which is beyond one’s ability to change—a life lesson whose applicability has extended far beyond the confines of the conditions which, in this case, as in many others, nourished it into being!  I hear no such morning delights these days in Petaluma. Alas, the advantages of urban living do not often include the freedom to raise farm animals.