Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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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...
My Mother was of French descent and was a tremendous cook who kept her family and many friends fed during the Depression. She canned over 500 jars of fruits and vegetables every year to put in our root cellar, and she also had big 15-gallon crocks that she used to make sauerkraut and corn beef. She also used to dry lots of apples from our 10-acre orchard. She'd peel them and slice them and put the slices up on the roof to dry in the sun. Mother loved Tehachapi and the White Feather Ranch on Old...
Tehachapi has one of the prettiest downtown areas in Kern County, and it keeps getting more attractive, thanks to ongoing efforts by the City of Tehachapi and local business owners. There are pocket parks, landscaping, benches, vintage-style street lights, brickwork, top quality signage, tastefully painted buildings and more. There is an overall forward momentum, and a feeling that higher standards have been established. Both residents and visitors alike appreciate the welcoming and picturesque...
I arrived in Tehachapi on the last day of December, 1940 and moved into a home purchased from my brother Rolf at 412 East F St. on New Year's Day. On the day that I moved here, the whole area was covered with snow. This soon melted, though, and the valley and surrounding mountains were covered with beautiful green grass, very spectacular. Tehachapi Valley had about 30,000 acres of good farm land together with many thousands of acres of grazing land. It is part of a pass through the Tehachapi...
There are four main valleys in the Tehachapi Mountains: Tehachapi, Brite, Cummings and Bear Valleys. Each of them are similar, basin-like valleys entirely ringed by mountains, but each of them have their own characteristics. Brite Valley is the smallest of the four, and is approximately four miles long by two miles wide. It is a diverse and charming little valley with a long history. The first permanent residents of Brite Valley are believed to be Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Paiute) people whose...
The Fourth of July, the annual holiday celebrating independence from England and the creation of the United States of America, is a festive occasion in the Tehachapi Mountains. It has been since it was first observed here in 1856. We don't have many details about that first Fourth of July celebration, but it was mostly members of the John and Amanda Brite family and some of their friends. They were basically the only English-speaking residents of the Tehachapi Mountains in those days. The...
I went to work at Monolith when I was still in high school – the company (Monolith Portland Cement Company, four miles east of town) would hire you at 16 years old. You couldn’t work at the plant, but you could work at the Monolith town site, which the company owned completely. They had a town painter, a town plumber named John Frahm and also a general handyman. When you were younger, you could get hired in the summer to work as helpers to those guys. When I graduated at Tehachapi High in 195...
Although the Tehachapi Mountains are more than a thousand miles away from the principal battlefields of the Civil War, in fact the War Between the States did have some effect on local residents. During the 1860s, Southern California was home to many Confederate sympathizers, and the majority of Southern California's population was actually in favor of secession. Many of the miners and farmers in California were originally from the South, and they wanted California to join the Confederacy. In...
The warmer months have arrived in the Tehachapi Mountains, and with the rise in temperatures comes the return of the reptile kingdom. Snakes and lizards are here year-round, of course, but they hibernate when it's cold, typically disappearing around September and October and re-emerging on warm days in March and April. California is one of the most snake-diverse states in the U.S., with a current total of 72 species and subspecies, exceeded only by Texas with 115 species and subspecies. Snakes...
"The first time I came to Tehachapi was in the 1930s when we came up to buy apples. There was an underground apple storage place on C Street, just down from Curry Street and Farmers Supply (now Mountain Gardens Nursery), in the area of the old garment factory (the new Tehachapi Police station) and Carroll Development's storage yard on C Street and Pauley. You would drive through with a wagon and dump the apples in bins and then drive out the other side. There was an old winter variety of apple...
"During Prohibition, my dad leased a ranch on Old Town Road, on the south part closer to Highway 202, which was known as 'the Lovejoy Place.' It had a barn and he and my Uncle Bob put a still in a hidden underground room in there, and he proceeded to become one of the biggest bootleggers in Tehachapi. They also called that place 'the Turkey Ranch' because there were about 150 turkeys of the bronze breed there all the time. They kept them in a low shed that's still there. My dad was a Yugoslav...
"When I was growing up, a lot of people didn't pen up their chickens during the day – they'd just let them scratch around for seeds and bugs, and then shut them in at night to protect them from raccoons and other animals. A farmer who raised a lot of them and sold the eggs usually kept them in chicken coops, but if you just had a handful of hens for your own use, you'd just turn them out during the day. One day when I was just a kid there were some girls visiting, and I wanted to show them how t...
What kind of weather can you expect in Tehachapi during each month? Here's a first look In the last issue of The Loop, I mentioned that I would give a little month-by-month look at weather in the Tehachapi Mountains. So this is the first installment of that monthly summary. Our weather is varied and over the years has often defied accurate prediction, but here's what you can reasonably expect from the first four months of the year. Bear in mind that Tehachapi weather is not always reasonable....
The following is Frank Nejedly's marvelous account of what may have been the greatest single assembly of steam locomotives in railroading history, and it occurred quite unintentionally in Tehachapi in November of 1942. Nejedly was a Southern Pacific telegrapher and amateur photographer who explored throughout this area – his 1911 Studebaker was one of the earliest cars in the Tehachapi Mountains. He was a handsome, robust man of keen intellect and memory, with an encyclopedic knowledge of trains...
Wind is a fact of life when you live in the Tehachapi Mountains – there's a good reason there are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wind turbines on local hillsides. Mountain passes tend to channel winds, and three mountain passes – Altamont Pass, Tehachapi Pass and San Gorgonio Pass – were the areas where the wind energy industry was born in California in the 1980s. While our winds are variable, there are some basic patterns that tend to hold true. Our prevailing wind is from the west/...
When I was growing up, I lived on a ranch between Onyx and Weldon, in the Kern River Valley. There were no high schools in Tehachapi or Kern Valley, so the kids who lived there had to go down to Bakersfield and attend Bakersfield Union High School, now just known as BHS. There were dormitories on the school grounds and the kids would come down on Monday morning, and then stay in the dorms all week and go home on Friday after school. That was quite a transition, for little 12 and 13-year-olds to...
During World War II, the Marine Corps put an anti-aircraft gun in a field right by where the Tehachapi News office is today, near the corner of North Mill Street and Highway 58, though neither of those roads were there at that time. They figured that if the Japanese were going to attack the Marine Corps Base that was in Mojave then, they'd have to come through Tehachapi Pass. There was a crew stationed there with that gun all the time – they called it an "ack-ack gun" [for the phonetic a...
When my wife Lucille and I lived down in El Centro, her mother, Gladys Girado, lived with us. She was a wonderful Nuwä (Kawaiisu) Indian lady who had been raised around Twin Oaks and Lorraine Canyon. She spoke fluent Nuwä and only broken English – a lot of times she'd forget that I didn't speak the language and she'd say something to me in Nuwä, but usually I could figure out what she was saying. She was a shy person and very humble. We had a swimming pool, but Gladys had never learned to swim...
Of the four seasons in the Tehachapi Mountains, spring is the one with the greatest diversity of weather, temperatures, natural changes and other conditions. Officially beginning about March 20 and lasting until June 21, spring in Tehachapi can bring snow, wind and freezing cold, but it can also be a time of gentle rain, cool breezes and mild temperatures. And spring can also bring hot weather, dry winds and decidedly summer-like conditions. The three months of spring offer the biggest range of...
Mountain Tales are accounts and recollections of life in the Tehachapi Mountains, collected over decades by Jon Hammond. "My parents, Evard and Hazel Dickerson began farming and dairying in Tehachapi in 1911. Their dairy was located below the Tehachapi Pioneer Cemetery in what is now Golden Hills. The place was called Meadow Brook Dairy, and it was right where Meadowbrook Park is today – our dairy was the source of that name. My dad, "Dick" Dickerson, raised registered Milking Shorthorn c...
Mountain Tales are accounts and recollections of life in the Tehachapi Mountains, collected over decades by Jon Hammond. "Harry Beauford Jr. was a film projectionist and he had two projectors and one amplifier. We'd load them up into Harry's old Model A Ford, which had an enclosed delivery truck bed on it, and then we'd haul 'em up to Kernville so he could show movies there once a week. After the show we'd load them up again and bring them back. Once we tipped over near Walker Pass, but people...
