On the Back Roads (14 page)

Then it happened. It came on so slowly, few were prepared for it. It began to build in the late 1960s, along with the growing number of newspaper stories with the words “based at Lemoore Naval Air Station.” This little farming community, sheltered from even big-city problems, was being ravaged by a war in a foreign country—Vietnam. Every aircraft carrier deployed from the West Coast to the waters off Vietnam carried two squadrons of jets with 500 officers and men from the naval air station at Lemoore. Many of their families stayed here, living either in town or in quarters at the air station. More than a hundred young Navy pilots and crewmen with families in Lemoore never came back. Some of those families have stayed here. Others have gone elsewhere to remake their lives.

Another unfortunate group of Navy families grew here in numbers as the war dragged into the 1970s: the wives and children of prisoners of war and those missing in action. These families lived in a never-never-land for years, not knowing when their husbands and dads would come home, if at all. Lemoore was probably home to more Navy POW/MIA families than any other community in the nation, at least any community its size. These families could have moved anywhere they wanted, but they have stayed in Lemoore. What they have needed to survive—support, understanding, and acceptance—they have found here.

This small town of fewer than 5,000 people carried an awesome burden for the whole nation. A nation that did not care. Although the lost and missing were not native sons, it didn't matter. They were neighbors. Living with unending suffering week after week, year after year took its toll. It had to.

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.

T
he 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.

T
aft, 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.