Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Sorted by date Results 301 - 325 of 356
Ever since I was a little kid, I've been interested in old objects and artifacts from earlier eras, especially if they were used in the Tehachapi Mountains. These are tangible remnants of our history, and though the people who once used them are gone and the places have changed, these humble items have traveled through time and are physical reminders of the past. I joined the Tehachapi Heritage League when I was 11 years old, when the museum was housed in the little old Chamber of Commerce...
"Admiration: our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves." – Ambrose Bierce Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist and humorist who was a contemporary of Mark Twain. Both brilliant and cynical, he wrote a newspaper column for years in which he offered his own definitions to familiar words....
A young lady who sat by President Calvin Coolidge at a dinner tried all evening to get him into a conversation and all she could get was yes, no or a grunt. She finally told him that she had made a bet with her friends that she could get him to say more than three words during the dinner. He merely turned to her and said, "You lose." – President Calvin Coolidge...
"If you're wanting to see trains in Tehachapi or watch a train go around the Loop, don't try it on a Monday, or at least if you do wait until late in the afternoon – Monday is UP's designated minor maintenance day, and the tracks are often closed to rail traffic until the end of the workday." – Ed Gordon Ed is an extremely knowledgeable rail enthusiast and was for many years the helpful and informative owner of Trains Etc. on Tehachapi Boulevard....
"There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir, We must rise and follow her; When from every hill of flame, She calls and calls each vagabond by name." – William Bliss Carman...
"The Kawaiisu set up temporary camps for gathering acorns and pinyons, and these were surrounded by circular brush structures approximately thirty feet in diameter. These bulwarks were very simply constructed of white fir tree branches – puu-gu-SIV-ah – reinforced with heaps of sagebrush about four feet high. They served as windbreaks." – Dr. Stephen Cappanari, 1947 White Fir is one of the main conifer species found in the Tehachapi Mountains. A bed of White-Fir boughs was John Muir's favor...
"In 1978, we had a 100-year flood in Sand Canyon. Then in 1983, we had another 100-year flood. I thought, 'Boy, time really flies. It hardly seemed like a hundred years had passed!" – Liz Kachmar Liz has probably lived in Sand Canyon longer than anyone else – she and her late husband first moved there in 1974....
"I knocked out the last 9 miles of the trail to get to Tehachapi-Willow Springs Rd. at Mile 558 on the Pacific Crest Trail. A mile or two before I got there, while hiking steadily down through the world's largest wind farm, I spied a white truck at a road. My heartbeat accelerated - could it be Coppertone? This roaming trail angel in an RV gives out root beer floats, and is generally amazing. I forced myself to not sprint the last part of the trail, in case it wasn't him. It was him. I inhaled...
"Tehachapi! is not a sneeze, but the name of a mob of mountain peaks and crags that disputed the right of way with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The heights were impractical, the rocks were immovable, and so the train climbed as high as it could, and crept into a burrow like a fox." – Benjamin F. Taylor, 1878...
Hundreds of Turkey Vultures suddenly appear: What in the world is going on? You're driving in Tehachapi on a late afternoon in September or October, and you suddenly notice a few very large dark birds coasting through the sky, gliding down toward the treetops. As you look at them, you're aware of dozens more. "What the. . .?" you think to yourself as you watch these kite-like apparitions cluster around and then land in the tallest trees. You're not alone. Countless people have had the same...
One day in 1994, I got a call from Marty Smith, who was the California Department of Fish and Game Warden in Tehachapi at the time. He had received a call from the landlord of an apartment in Golden Hills. A tenant had moved out and left a couple of animals behind. I arrived at the apartment with Marty and found an odd pair: a guinea hen and a snapping turtle. Finding a home for the guinea hen was no problem, but the turtle was another matter. "I guess it's the end of the line for this big...
There was an old guy called Swede who used to show up every fall in Arvin, ragged and dirty. My aunt had a little three-room boarding house in Arvin. She was glad to rent him a room because he'd pay for four months in advance. The first thing he'd do is go buy a new pair of bib overalls and a new shirt, shoes and underwear and go take a bath. I had a service station in Arvin and he wandered in one day. He was getting old and I mentioned that I had to go to Tehachapi and he asked if he could bum...
I was born in Croatia in the first months of World War II and I can remember being a little boy later in the war and watching war planes flying overhead to bomb a nearby village. I lived with my parents and three brothers on a farm in the Croatian mountains. It was not an easy life under Communist rule. We worked hard and there was still no money. If we wanted to have a pig, we had to have three – one for us and two for the Communists. One cold November day when I was 13 years old, I was in a ba...
Autumn has officially started and will now be redecorating the Tehachapi Mountains, changing the broadleaf trees and shrubs from assorted shades of green to a variety of yellows, browns, golds and reds. The longer, colder fall nights bring out the color in both our native and introduced trees. Virginia Creeper, a popular ornamental vine, will soon be a riot of color in Tehachapi, with the more exposed leaves having turned a deep old barn red while the more protected leaves are a dozen different...
I played quarterback for the Warriors football team when I was a senior, in 1945. There was no stadium in those days, and football games were played at Imhoff Field, which is the grassy area on the south side of the old Jacobsen Junior High on Snyder Street (now being used for Cerro Coso College) but back then it was Tehachapi High. The "stands" back in the 1940s was a small set of wooden bleachers, maybe six rows of seats tall and 20 yards long. There would only be 50 to 75 people at each of...
I spent two and a half years in the Navy during World War II, and when I got out in 1946, I was still only 20 years old. I went to Oak Glen, near Yucaipa, to help my parents at their apple orchard and guest ranch. I was grading apples one September day and I began to experience increasing pain in my back and shoulders. I stopped grading apples for the day because of the pain, and instead went under the house and ran an electrical line for a heater. When I crawled out from under the house, I...
In late April of 1996, three steers were hit and killed by a train near Tunnel 8 just north of Hart Flat. Unfortunately, the death toll rose when a black bear sow was struck and killed by a Southern Pacific locomotive as she fed on the remains of the cattle. Her death orphaned her two young cubs, a male and a female that were only about three months old. Train engineers kept reporting that they saw the baby bears, but by the time California Department of Fish and Game Warden Marty Smith could...
Since the bright hot days of August have given way to the warm days and cool nights of September in the Tehachapi Mountains, locals can feel it in the air – apple season has arrived. And with that delicious time comes one of the finest products of an orchard: fresh-pressed apple juice. Whether you call it apple juice or use the older term "apple cider" (not hard cider, that's an alcoholic drink of an entirely different nature), the sweet nectar that pours from fresh-pressed apples is simply u...
This crazy incident happened one winter in 1980, when I was in high school. One of my older brothers worked for my family's business, Ricker Motors (on Tehachapi Boulevard where Haddad Automotive is now). He went into B & B Liquors in the morning to get a soda and some kids in two cars asked him to buy them some beer. He thought that they were friends of mine, so he did – he bought them two cases of beer. They were actually from Arvin and I had no idea who they were. Then before lunch, a classma...
I lived in Ecuador during part of my childhood, since my father is Ecuadorian and he wanted my sister and I to experience that country. When I was four or five years old, I was visiting a waterfall near our house. Having a source of clean, fresh drinking water was a big deal, and the stream that fed the waterfall could be trusted, so I was carrying home some water jugs. While there, I caught a little frog that I wanted to bring home with me. My hands were already full, and I thought about...
Tehachapi weather: it's a thing. Local residents talk about it, enjoy it much of the time, dread it at other times and speculate about how it will affect them. Our weather changes frequently. It can be warm, cool, hot, cold, breezy, windy, still, damp, wet or dry. All in the same week. Tehachapi weather conditions aren't always that fickle, of course, and over time patterns have emerged. Humans tend to have short or at least unreliable memories about weather, saying things like, "It's never...
In 1983, I was 17 years old and living with my Dad, Mom, sister Joy and brother Brian in an old house in Caliente Canyon. It had been a very wet winter that year, and on March 1, it had been raining really hard for about 3 days. Caliente Creek had risen up and then come back down a few times. Dad left early that morning because he had to be at work in Bakersfield by 6 a.m. My sister Joy had caught the school bus about 6:15. Mom told me, "That water's getting deep, I need you to stay home and...
One day after I got off work at Lehigh Southwest, I took a drive to think about my Dad, who passed away the year before. I took a dirt road not far from the entrance to Sand Canyon, and I came up on some commercial bee hives. There in broad daylight, at 3:35 in the afternoon, was a black bear lounging against some hives. He had torn two of them open. He was sitting on his rump, leaning against some hives with his arm resting on them, scooping honeycomb into his mouth, swipe after swipe. He...
As you drive down Curry Street past the Tehachapi fire station, on the east side of the road there's a surprisingly large open space. A portion of this big field near Phil Marx Central Park used to be where the Tehachapi Mountain Festival carnival set up every year. This wasn't always open space, however – for 72 years it was home to a large pear orchard. It was one of the defining features of that part of town. Here's some background about pears: pear trees are amazingly long lived. Governor P...
One wintry day in 2005, it was my turn to host our Gourmet Luncheon Group, also known as The Piranhas. We have been getting together for many years. The house was immaculate. I had purposely turned off the furnace because my luncheon theme was Siberia and I wanted the house to feel just right. The invitation was suggested that guests wear long underwear. The house was appropriately freezing! It was 9:30 a.m. and I had allowed about thirty minutes to set the table and prepare drinks. My twelve...
