Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Sorted by date Results 76 - 91 of 91
When I go through my mother Marion Deaver’s files, I never know what I am going to come up with. For instance, last week I was looking for some more information other than what I had so I could write a column on Tehachapi’s Mountain Festival. Instead I found an employment brochure for the Muroc Schools. There is no date on the brochure, but it says the district is unified, which happened in 1953, according to the current district webpage. As I have mentioned before my brother Mike rode the bus e...
When I finished my last column on Peter Lebec I thought I had put him to rest. That is, until I received a phone call from local historian Del Troy. She told me she had some more information concerning the mystery surrounding his death. I met her at the Tehachapi Museum and she showed me a book, one of several volumes written by Bonnie Ketterl Kane entitled, “A View from the Ridge Route, Volume One: The First People. “ For those of you who are too young to remember, the Ridge Route was the ear...
Claudia White, Loop Publisher, asked me to update my column from last year about the Mountain Festival. I wrote a column taken from the 1968 Lilac Festival brochure that I had found in my mother Marion Deaver’s files last year – it was the only one she had saved. So, having discovered the library at Tehachapi Museum, thanks to Del Troy, I once again imposed upon her to let me see some of the other old brochures. I chose several, including the 1958 brochure proclaiming that year as the first ann...
I recently traveled to Fort Tejon to attend a dinner put on by the Kern Economic Development group. When we exited the freeway we drove past Fort Tejon. I told the group I was riding with that I had not been there since I was about 10 years old, and remembered the tree with the epitaph carved in it about the death of Peter Lebec. No one knew what I was talking about. Coincidentally as I was once again working on boxes brought home from my storage unit I found a book entitled “The Life and D...
Normally I find things to write about in my mother Marion Deaver’s files, but this time I found something in my stuff. I have been slowly cleaning out my storage unit in the last two months. I say slowly because we had the unit for 13 years and it is 9’ x 12’, tons of “stuff.” Yesterday my son and his wife Clay and Sarah came down and we brought home another truckload of “stuff.” I found a copy of the 1958 Gold Rush Days brochure, which was the ninth annual one, held in Mojave. It was held Oct....
I found an article my mother Marion Deaver wrote about the Shoshones of Kern County, what they ate, and how they gathered it. I thought you all might like to see a photo of my mother in action, so I have included a photo of her with Co-founder of the Tropico Gold Mine and Museum Glen Settle. She is going through old newspapers doing research of an article. The old newspapers were located at the mine museum. As women did in that era, she identified herself as Mrs. Paul Deaver. Back to the...
[Due to an editorial error in the May 24 issue part of the article “The Mojavian” was not printed. The Loop staff would like to apologize to Susan Wiggins and to our readers. Here is the article in full:] I never know what I am going to find in my mother Marion Deaver’s files. Dig deep enough and there is no telling what I will find! This time I found “The Mojavian” the eighth grade Mojave Grammar School “yearbook” from 1952-53. It was mimeographed (remember those?), and the cover was blue cons...
While looking through files of my mother – Marion Deaver –, I found some old bulletins from the Kern Antelope Historical Society, this one from 1972. This story was a follow up from an article written by John Covington that was included in the 1965 publication of “Bears, Borax, and Gold.” That article was about John Searles and his fight with a bear. This one is also about the same bear. John Covington was the great uncle of Dorene Settle, one of the founders of the historical society. In the ea...
As many of you know, I suffered a great loss April 1, when my husband Ed died suddenly. I was at a loss on how to cope when I remembered that my mother Marion Deaver lived seven years after my father Paul died. She would have lived even longer but died of cancer right before her 92nd birthday. She got “needier” as she got older, in the sense that she did not drive, and we had to take her to the doctor and buy her groceries for her. She had a standard list of what she ate, and when she for...
Normally I write about articles my mother Marion Deaver wrote about, area history, and things that other people did. Today I am writing about my mother and some of the things she did. I found an article that the Bakersfield Californian wrote about her. The paper was writing articles about various correspondents in honor of National Newspaper Week. My mother had the bad habit of tearing things out of the newspaper and not leaving the top of the page with the date on it, so I am not sure when...
As usual I was digging through my mother Marion Deaver’s files and found some notes about the early days of California City, CA. It was not enough for an entire column, so I went to the East Kern Historical Society for some more information. I think I have mentioned this before here, but my Mother was the first person to find proof of the community of California City actually coming into existence. Everyone denied that Nat Mendelsohn and his group were buying up land from the Mendeburu Ranch i...
I found an article that my mother Marion Deaver wrote in August of 1974 about the price of gold going up and regulations relaxing, and I thought about the Golden Queen Mine, just south of Mojave. In the article my mother interviewed Glenn Settle, owner of Tropico Gold Mine, west of Rosamond. President Gerald Ford had just approved legislation that would allow U.S. citizens to buy and sell gold. In 1974 the hills that rise above the valley in East Kern were mostly quiet, but some like Settle,...
When I read recently about a movie that was made of the pictographs (or petroglyphs, I always get them confused) near China Lake it brought back a lot of memories of the many field trips that I went on with my parents Paul and Marion Deaver, organized by the Kern-Antelope Historical Society. I have been to the China Lake site on such an outing. I could probably write about field trips with that group for the next six months, but I try to “sprinkle” them in every now and then. One such trip was...
Last week I wrote a column about the mines of Soledad Mountain from the perspective of Viola White Jennings, who with her family lived around that area. The article was from the collection of my mother, Marion Deaver. This week I will wrap up the remembrances of this lady. I concluded last week with Jennings and her sister avoiding snakes on that mountain. In all the years I have roamed around the deserts of East Kern, I have only happened upon a rattlesnake twice. Once however, was in January,...
I found an extensive article in my mother, Marion Deaver's files, about two sisters who traveled in 1970 to visit their old home, by then located at Tropico Mine and Gold Camp. The two sisters were Viola White Jennings, from San Bernardino, and Marjorie, from Buena Park. When they first looked for their home at Soledad Mountain they thought it had been torn down, but later learned that it was located in Rosamond at the gold camp. Visiting the old home and other old buildings at the camp brought...
In light of the fact that California is facing yet another drought season, I decided to write about an article my mother Marion Deaver wrote on the history of water in Mojave and the formation of the Mojave Public Utilities District. Mojave was called the “Land of Little Rain” by Author Mary Austin. Water was, and is, the topic of concern in Mojave and other East Kern communities who strive to provide enough water for present and future development in the region. As you [may] have read in thi...
