Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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Among the most beautiful and eye-catching native wildflowers in the Tehachapi Mountains are members of the Castilleja genus, many of them known by a more familiar common name: Indian Paintbrush. These tend to be upright, feathery flowers in various shades of red, though some are yellow and others appear purple. Castilleja, pronounced "cass-till-LAY-hah," is a confusing genus of plants, partly because botanists are not in agreement about which members are full species, which are subspecies, etc....
High quality, great tasting fruit grows on trees today in the Tehachapi area, and has since some of the first homesteaders put trees in their own gardens beginning in the 1860s. The earliest commercial orchards were planted a decade or two later. A man named Moses Hale planted an apple orchard here in 1880, and another named Joseph Kiser planted an apple orchard in upper Brite Valley in the 1870s, and sold some of the apples they produced to Southern Pacific Railroad, which apparently supplied t...
Since this is The Loop's Mother's Day issue, I decided that I would honor an amazing lady who was a devoted mother and raised her own two children here in Tehachapi, but she also provided motherly support and was a role model to countless other local kids. Her name was Joan Johnson. Joan (pronounced jo-anne) was married for 67 years to Tehachapi boy Dick Johnson, whose father Walter published the Tehachapi News for many years. Joan helped at the family business for decades, since Walter later...
When Ed Grimes first came to live in Tehachapi in 1950, the odds in life were heavily stacked against him: he was a seven year-old, half Latino boy whose father had abandoned him and his brother Jerry, and he had been bounced around in eight different foster homes after his mother, Helen Arvizu, contracted tuberculosis and was confined to the Stoneybrook Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Keene for two years until her death. It would have been difficult to imagine that this hard luck lad would one day...
Now that spring has arrived in the Tehachapi Mountains, we will start seeing babies of all different kinds of animals: rabbits, squirrels, songbirds, raptors, reptiles and amphibians, as well as livestock like cattle, sheep and goats. Spring is known as the season for renewal and rebirth, and it's also the season for birth. It makes sense for animals to synchronize the arrival of their young with the onset of spring: lots of fresh green plant growth means food is more available and easier to...
Would you like to make your garden or yard more interesting and colorful? Then I highly recommend planting flowers that will attract an assortment of pollinators. Not only are the blossoms themselves beautiful to look at and often fragrant, but the activity of insects can be enthralling as you watch an assortment of butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bees and other creatures forage among your flowers. Pollinator plants often grow well in planters or raised gardens, so they are well-suited to...
Terry Edwards was the definition of a superfan. He was the undisputed "Warrior of the Century." This devoted Tehachapi High School athletics fan attended 413 Warrior football games in a row – he didn't missed a single game in more than 30 years, ever since he went to a contest against the Bishop Broncos on Halloween, 1980. That included every single away game as well as home games. On two separate occasions when he was visiting his daughter Rocki, in Seattle, he drove home to Tehachapi, w...
This is the time of year when it looks like tiny lily pads have suddenly appeared in shady spots near the base of trees, or below moss-dappled boulders half submerged in the surrounding soil, and along gentle slopes and beside meandering shaded footpaths. These welcome clusters of round leaves with miniature white flowers in the center are the unmistakable sign of Miner's Lettuce. This pleasant annual is a California native that does best in wet years, but still manages to make at least a cameo...
My family first came to the Tehachapi area in the early in 1930s, when my maternal grandparents Fred and Daisy Fisher left behind the Dustbowl in Oklahoma and came to California to better their lives. Fred went to work in Tehachapi for the Sasia ranching family, and also dry-farmed barley at the Fickert Ranch in Bear Valley. The Fishers lived just off Giraudo Road in Cummings Valley in an old house that was built in the late 1800s. If you dropped a marble on the floor of my grandparents' house,...
Spring wildflowers in the Tehachapi Mountains are abundant during wet years, and scarce during dry years. Since California and the West in general have been in such a period of prolonged drought, it seems that we've had more misses than hits lately when it comes spring flowers. But there is at least a modest bloom along the western Tehachapi foothills. If you've driven to Bakersfield lately, you may have noticed some California Poppies blooming on hillsides and sandy washes in the vicinity of...
Did you ever grow anything in the Garden of Your Mind? You can grow ideas, in the Garden of Your Mind. All you have to do is think, and they’ll grow. – Fred Rogers For a wonderful remix song featuring a compilation of the wisdom of Fred Rogers, go to YouTube and search for Mr. Rogers Remix....
One Fourth of July we were sitting there watching the parade go by our old house on Tehachapi Boulevard, and there was actually snow in the air. Bobbi McCullough was the parade queen, and they were throwing bags of potato chips off the float because of all the potatoes that were grown in the area at that time. It was so cold! – Lydia Muro Wheat The Muro family lived in the house near the corner of Tehachapi Boulevard and Robinson Street, across the boulevard from Taco Samich. It is believed t...
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....
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...
