Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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Sometimes one finds themselves doing things that make people say, “Why would you want to do that?” For instance, I, not long ago decided to memorize, in chronological order, our forty-four presidents. . . and I did it. I sort of had a headstart for I was born when Calvin Coolidge was President. Old “silent Cal” was famous for metering out his spoken words as if he had to pay for each of them personally. Of course, I was never aware of his term of office as Herbert Hoover was sworn in as Preside...
I have been an Old Timer for a good many years having passed the forty year requirement figure while I was still in my forties. It seems that the newly qualified folk sort of shy away from the Senior affair and they shouldn't. It's really a fun gathering and laughter abounds. It gives one a chance to see people who once lived here and were a part of our lives. I don't know how many towns or cities sponsor such an event but it certainly goes over big in Tehachapi. Recreation and Parks and the...
My grandson, Dakota Gracey, has been racing bikes for several years. Not just the kind of bike you hop on and ride around town. These are racing bikes designed for that purpose. When not racing he rides daily to keep in shape. Fifty to sixty miles, or often more, is his daily morning “wake up” ride. I had him write up a story about his First Place win in one of Baker City, Oregon’s Cycling Classics. These are his words for I am not familiar with biker vocabulary. THE CHASE by Dakota Grace...
Before this goes to press the Heritage League will have already sponsored what they called "a Summer Stroll", which in actuality, will have consisted of a group of people "strolling" from one location to another with a Heritage League member stopping and giving a bit of history of a few local sites. The Stroll will have started at the Depot where a short orientation took place before the leisurely walk began. I would not be on the walk itself but stationed at a prescribed location, however, I...
With the Old Timer's Reunion coming up soon and this, being the 69th anniversary of my graduation from good old Tehachapi High, I will be meeting people who will say, "Pat! You haven't changed a bit!" I always reply, " You mean I looked this bad in high school?" Come on, now! Nice try. What they mean is, that they are glad to be able to even read the name tag on my chest and discover who I really am. Sometimes, when volunteering in the local Museum, I meet young students from Tehachapi High...
Sometimes, when I think of the many “Tales of the Old Corps” that my husband told to regale his Marine Corps buddies, I get a chuckle by remembering them. The following was an event that took place when he spent a tour of duty in Okinawa in 1959. Here is an account of a simple volleyball game with the troops! Jungle Rules by Doyle D. Gracey, CWO-4, U.S.M.C. It was summer of 1959 and I hadn’t been on Okinawa very long. My last time there was in 1945 in World War II during the Battle of Okina...
My parents moved to Tehachapi in 1923. Then, in 1926 they moved to Mojave as my father secured employment as a switchman for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Consequently, I was born in the Mojave Desert where rain doesn’t visit often. In fact, when it rained while we were at school they let us go home! It was called a Rainy Day Session. I only remember that happening twice but it was a happy time for the children. It’s strange though that sometimes a desert rain can turn into a flash flood and...
I left you in the early days of the Twentieth Century in “nineteen ‘aught’ nine.” That’s the way the old timers said those early years. They called zeroes “aughts” in those days. Sometimes “naughts” too. 1909 - The City of Los Angeles Cement Company was established four miles east of Tehachapi. An aqueduct was needed to provide Los Angeles with water from the Owens Valley. They closed the plant down after the project was finished. For a time it produced Potash; not to make cement again unti...
In 1987 I wrote a one hundred year history for St. Malachy Church Centennial commemoration. I found much material that I didn't need but did not wish to completely discard. I ended up making a time line for safe keeping. Each notation has volumes of history behind it but it's nice to get a glimpse of the "goings on" of the people who came before us. It extends from 1776 to 1987. Here is just a portion. 1776 – Padre Francisco Garces traverses Tehachapi Pass with four Mojave Indian guides. 1776 ...
A friend of mine is a hiker. She is not the type one meets at the Post Office where you see young people, mostly men, with staffs and back packs. She lives locally and is a hiker. My friend, the hiker, is very familiar with the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Many of the peaks on that range have altitudes of thirteen to fourteen thousand feet. My friend has seen the Owens Valley from the top of Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the continental United States. She’s been there – imagine! In a m...
I was thumbing through a little book I put together a few years back which contains a collection of stories and found one my granddaughter wrote about growing up in our town. I am sure she won't mind if I share a few of her memories. She attended the same grammar school (Wells) and High School (good old T.H.S.) that I did and played in the same park. Just in a different time frame. The House On D Street by Jacque Gracey Whinery Growing up in Tehachapi was a wonderful experience. Some of my...
A few years back I came upon a book called Leonie, which told of a woman who had studied and received her degree in Dentistry in 1902; she was twenty years old. She first was to practice in San Francisco, then to Arizona with the Hopi Indians, and also to the Klondike where she spent fifteen years. Later, back in California, for four years, she tended the dental needs of the young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps from 1932 until 1936. When the Federal Government appointed the...
One can almost predict what people are going to say when they mention the quake of ’52. They usually just say, “Oh, really, you were there? My, my,” and that’s it. It’ll never be “old hat” to those of us who weathered the shake and the suffering and death it brought to some. But going through some old news items at the local museum, I found many eye-catching columns. There were interesting articles and a few of them completely exaggerated in parts due to the imagination of visiting news...
On Sunday mornings when our church choir is practicing and warming up before Mass we are in a classroom that contains a vintage piano. It is an old upright grand with lots of fine brass “innards” and there is no manufacturer’s date showing but I know it’s in there somewhere. It does say it’s guaranteed for ten years! Since I can trace its beginning back to the early days of the twentieth century the guarantee, obviously, expired over ninety-five years ago. I cannot help but think of the old Irvi...
Years ago when one traveled to Bakersfield over U.S. Highway 466, it involved going down what is now known as the “old road” which, at that time, was the only way one could get to Bakersfield. To navigate this historic road today, one must proceed west on Highway202 and turn right on Woodford-Tehachapi Road. This will put you on the old road that we all once traveled moving northwest down past Keene and into the San Joaquin Valley. On this old road was an infamous turn called Dead Man’s Curve! J...
A few years ago I ordered a strip of some sort of material with ready inserted flower seeds so all I had to do is lay it on the ground and water it. The fewer times I handle any growing plant is to the plant's advantage. My "kiss of death" touch is not conducive to lush plant growth. Those little flowers started sprouting and I was carefully watering them. Each little dainty flower was identifiable except for a strange green sprouting "thing" that soon gained height but no blossom. It was kind...
When people tell me, “Gee, you know lots about Tehachapi!” I just tell them that what I know, I know, and what I don’t know, I really don’t know! About the time I think I have it all together, is when I find out I need a few more lessons. This town has its secrets and some are left unsaid simply because they weren’t newsworthy enough to make the newspaper but were part of community life and would bring a smile or a tear to those remembering. Then, of course, there are some secrets that are...
It 1950, when I began living in the Southland, it was, and still is, 200 miles from Oceanside, California to Tehachapi and if I had a dollar for every time I have made the trip I would have a comfortable amount. At first, our trips consisted of getting into my husband’s 1947 Buick Roadmaster and taking off. It was a lovely car; one that he acquired during his bachelor days while still an Enlisted man in the Corps. Highway 101, between the two points, at that time, was a three lane affair. The mi...
When I was just a little preschooler, in the early 1930s, we lived in Mojave. In those days of the Great Depression, men who were out of work sometimes “rode the rails” looking for work or maybe just enjoying being “knights of the road.” At any rate, I have read the code that the hobos made up and passed along to one another signifying which house was good for a handout and which ones to avoid. I have seen these printed out occasionally in magazines and, of course, online. I never knew if our...
Sometimes when reliving memories of years past I think of something that is just too good to keep to myself. My husband and his friend, Sergeant Major, Frederick W. Filkins, were what you would call "brothers in the Corps." Both served in World War II, both were with the China Marines, veterans of Korea and Vietnam. They often found themselves in the same duty stations during the thirty years they spent in the Corps. One day, many years back, when Fred was telling one of his experiences, I...
When one of my grandsons was in the Fourth Grade at Golden Hills Elementary - about 1998 - he was studying the history of California as all fourth graders do. It was then that I, a Native Californian, found out that our state song was "I Love You California." In all of my years in the Golden State I thought it was "California Here I Come!" Well, I went online, found it and listened to it for the first time. If you have enough time, it has a pleasant lilt but it does run on and on. One day as I...
I’d never have written this piece except for a lady who wrote a news article printed in the Bakersfield Californian. She decided to tell the reading public that the book, The Grapes of Wrath, was completely exaggerated. Her main objection was that it was being used as required reading in high school classes and was inaccurately portraying a period in American history. I don’t know if it was an exaggeration; I never read the book, written in 1939. I know it was fiction with a historical bas...
I feel that, in my last column, I had done the French Hotel an injustice by somewhat skirting over its past. I had placed it, rather abruptly, on the corner of Green and F streets, without enough ceremony. A whole page of history was glossed over, and I'd like to go back and give you "the rest of the story." As aforementioned, The Summit School was a beautifully structured building where the ancestors of early settlers studied as well as the children of an influx of Spanish and French Basque,...
The Opera House, an early Tehachapi building, was located on F Street in the place where the present College Community Service building now stands (113 E. F St.), next to the little yogurt shop. It was a focal point for dances, local entertainment, meetings and silent movie films. A 1915 newspaper announced a Charlie Chaplain movie, The Little Tramp, being shown at the local Opera House. Margaret Erbel, a young Tehachapi resident still in her teens, was known to play the piano for the silent fil...
When I was in school, and perhaps today also, the students figure out clever, witty and often a stupid simile to fit our initials or to create a rhyme. I was Pat Davis, so I was named Police Department or Patty Watty. My daughter was Ellen Gracey, so she was "Ellen, Ellen, watermelon." How about "Tony, Tony, macaroni!" How about "Silly Lilly?" It could probably be termed as abuse today, but in my day it was just what we did. Students were also identified by their accomplishments; sometimes loose...
