Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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A day spent riding the range is a day you hate to see end. Time stops when you get on a horse, and starts again when you get off. – Rex Ellsworth Rex Ellsworth was a famous Thoroughbred breeder who once owned a large ranch in Cummings Valley. He owned Swaps, the 1955 Kentucky Derby winner....
I started practicing medicine in Tehachapi in 1964, and for much of that time, I was the only general practitioner in the area. In the seven years after I started, I only took a single vacation, for a month – while I was recovering from having surgery myself. Other than that I was basically always on call and worked seven days a week. – Dr. Vincent Troy Dr. Troy had a private practice and also worked for many years at Tehachapi Hospital. Most longtime Tehachapi residents who were born at Teh...
There was once a sizeable French presence in Kern County, and among the identifiable French miners who were active in the Tehachapi Valley (in the 1870s) but gave up mining and became settlers were Jean Pierre Bizac, Charles Henri Doriot, Pierre Lestelle and Victor Ponsard. Leon and Lydie Abonel were a French couple in Kern County, and ordinarily Mrs. Abonel cooked her husband a breakfast of coffee, bread and eggs, but if he was in a hurry she gave him two raw eggs in a glass of wine. – Dr. M...
Many people throughout the Tehachapi area, Southern California and points much farther afield were saddened to learn of George Novinger, 89, who passed away peacefully at his home on February 4 with his family by his side following a lengthy illness. George was well-known for many different accomplishments: as principal of Tehachapi High from 1982-1992; as one of the owners and creators of The Apple Shed; as a pilot and one of the founders of the Tehachapi Society of Pilots; as a...
I started dating Helen Owens in May of 1982. She is the youngest daughter of Kelcy and Margie Owens, who had Kelcy's Restaurant on Tehachapi Boulevard. Helen and her sister Kathy told me about a new company called Zond Systems that had recently moved into the Talmarc Building on Curry Street (now home to the Family Life Pregnancy Center). Since the company was located just down the alley from Kelcy's, Zond employees came in to eat almost every day and had mentioned that they were hiring. I went...
It's been reassuring this winter for longtime Tehachapi residents to see snow still lingering on the mountaintops and higher elevations from snowstorms in December and January. Snow remaining for weeks in the Tehachapi Mountains used to be a more frequent occurrence when our winters were colder. In fact, I can remember some years when there was still snow visible in May, in the mountains south of Highline Road near Tehachapi Peak and on Summit Lime Company land. Of course by that time there was...
Alice Rankin Beard was born at home in 1915 in the long-vanished town of Isabella in the Kern River Valley. The hamlet of Isabella lent its name to Isabella Lake (which most people refer to as Lake Isabella) and despite this courtesy, when the dam was completed in 1952 the waters of the lake covered up any trace that the town had ever existed. Alice and her sister Raechel were the two children of Walker and Mary Rankin. Though she grew up on a family ranch in Walker Basin, Alice's father believe...
In 2001, I took a job at the California Correctional Institution in Cummings Valley as a maintenance mechanic. Correctional officers got a lot of training at the academy, but I was what they call "free staff" so I hadn't really gotten any orientation. On my first day on the job, I was introduced to Harold Williams, who was in charge of landscaping, and he was assigned to show me the ropes. Harold was a Tehachapi Indian man and he was greatly respected by the people at CCI – the free staff, t...
Those who love open space and wildlife were delighted recently to learn that The Nature Conservancy has just completed their largest nature reserve in the state of California, and it's located entirely in the Tehachapi Mountains and Sierra Nevada. The 72,000-acre sanctuary is known as the Frank and Joan Randall Preserve in the Tehachapi Mountains, though locals are already shortening the name to the Randall Preserve or the Tehachapi Preserve. It was made possible through the incredible...
One summer morning I was in Antelope Canyon, south of Highline Road, gathering willow shoots with Chemehuevi basketweaver Weegi Claw and her mother, Lila McCord. As we walked along a dirt road, an insect rose up from the ground just ahead of us in a flash of cream-colored wings, making a subtle cricking sound and landing 20 feet away. "Atakapizhi!" exclaimed Lila in her soft, musical voice. She said the Chemehuevi word for grasshopper, which is identical to the Nuwä (Kawaiisu) name. Both...
When I was born in Bakersfield at Kern General Hospital in 1941, my mother was only 17 and my dad was only 15 years old. My folks were married at the time but they split up when I was a baby and we were living on Old Town Road, so my mother and I moved to Arvin to live with my grandparents, Martin and Tina Perry Bonds. My grandmother Tina was an Indian woman who spoke fluent Chickasaw and not much English. She spent most of the time raising me in my earliest years. I still remember clinging to...
When I was a little boy, one of my favorite things to look at on my family's old Tehachapi farm was a faded scrapbook with an embossed eagle on the cover. I would open it up, and slowly turn page after page, studying the images. It was like a time machine into the earlier days of the 20th century, for it contained more than 100 of the magazine covers that Norman Rockwell painted for the Saturday Evening Post. Like most of her contemporaries, my grandmother loved the work of Rockwell, and while...
I had gone to see an early movie in Lancaster with my friend Manney Cowan one summer Saturday, and we were driving back home to Tehachapi on the back road -- 90th Street West. We passed a large ranch with a lot of cars parked around it, and some white balloons and paper bells out by the road that were the unmistakable signs of a wedding at a private estate. "It's still early," (it was about 8:30 p.m.) Manney said, "I think we should pay our respects to the bride and groom." This despite the...
On a warm, sun-drenched autumn morning in the Tehachapi Mountains, a tawny predator jumps up from the ground and lands silently on a tree stump, surveying the muted landscape of dried grasses and oak leaves faded to the color of manila rope. With keen hearing and eyes that are better able to detect movement than humans can, the Bobcat is superbly adapted to hunting, and this one was alert for any sign of prey. As she scans her surroundings for movement, the Bobcat hears a rustling in the leaves...
I was running on a dirt road in the mountains near Tehachapi Mountain Park early one morning, about 6:30 a.m. I ran down a sloping stretch of road and around a corner and didn't see any deer or other animals. I reached the halfway point of my run and had turned around and was headed back up when I saw an animal in the road ahead of me, about 20 feet away. It was small and at first I thought it was a bobcat, but then I saw a long tail and realized it was a mountain lion, but it was just a baby,...
There is a remarkable native plant that can be found growing mostly unnoticed in the Tehachapi Mountains. It has several unusual qualities, and once you are aware of these, you are unlikely to forget it. It is known most commonly in our area as Coyote Gourd (Cucurbita foetidissima), though it has acquired numerous aliases. Among these are buffalo gourd, calabazilla, wild gourd, fetid gourd, chilicote, prairie gourd, wild pumpkin and more. The Mountain Lion is the animal credited with more differ...
For more than 30 years when the Johnson family owned the Tehachapi News, the newspaper was typeset each week on a monumental piece of equipment called a Linotype Machine, which was invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884. This complex, 6,000-piece device revolutionized the printing industry by enabling type to be cast and stamped quickly, rather than laboriously set by hand, letter by letter. Setting type by hand took so long that prior to the invention of the Linotype, no newspaper in the...
For some people, their career and life trajectory seem almost predetermined, as they follow in their parents' footsteps or otherwise make predictable choices about their occupation. That wasn't the case with beloved Tehachapi physician Dr. Sam Conklin, 84, the next to the youngest of 12 children whose father was a carpenter and small farmer in the mountainous region of Eastern Pennsylvania. Sam worked in construction in Connecticut after he got out of high school, and as he admits, "I never...
I started playing piano when I was three years old, and played constantly after that. I was going to attend Pomona College Music Conservatory, but then my father was killed in a car accident when I was a senior in high school. After his death my brother started running away from home, and he was found dead in an orange orchard, apparently from pesticide poisoning. Then it was just my mother and I left, so I decided to continue living with her and enrolled at UCLA on my 16th birthday. I graduated...
One of Kern County's most strategically important fire stations is the little-known Keene Fire Station, located just off Highway 58 in the sleepy community of Keene, nestled in the Tehachapi Mountains. Kern has 48 different fire stations given numbers between 11 through 79, starting with Station 11 at Keene. So why would Station 11 be so significant, given that Keene itself is home to only a couple of hundred people at most? Because Keene is one of the main wildland firefighting stations, with t...
They say money talks, and they're right: it mostly just says, "Goodbye." – American Folk Wisdom...
"Ma'am, I have a powerful hankerin' to take you out to dinner if you ain't taken." – Hod Welden This is what Hod Welden of the Tehachapi Hay Company said when he first asked Jane Gibbons out on a date. She said yes, and she has happily been Jane Welden for more than 25 years....
"I'd always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright and would be automatically bestowed upon me as time passed. I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live – that there were specific disciplines and ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life." – Dan Millman...
"We're gonna have a hard time ever being happy if we aren't thankful for what we already have." – Jacob Sokol...
"That ceiling isn't glass; it's a very dense layer of men." – Anne Jardim Dr. Anne Jardim was one of the founding deans of the Simmons College School of Management, the first MBA program in the world focused on creating women business leaders, and she was referring to the "glass ceiling" that is said to limit upward employment opportunities for women....
