Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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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...
I was running on a dirt road in the mountains near Tehachapi Mountain Park early one morning, about 6:30 a.m. I ran down a sloping stretch of road and around a corner and didn't see any deer or other animals. I reached the halfway point of my run and had turned around and was headed back up when I saw an animal in the road ahead of me, about 20 feet away. It was small and at first I thought it was a bobcat, but then I saw a long tail and realized it was a mountain lion, but it was just a baby,...
There is a remarkable native plant that can be found growing mostly unnoticed in the Tehachapi Mountains. It has several unusual qualities, and once you are aware of these, you are unlikely to forget it. It is known most commonly in our area as Coyote Gourd (Cucurbita foetidissima), though it has acquired numerous aliases. Among these are buffalo gourd, calabazilla, wild gourd, fetid gourd, chilicote, prairie gourd, wild pumpkin and more. The Mountain Lion is the animal credited with more differ...
For more than 30 years when the Johnson family owned the Tehachapi News, the newspaper was typeset each week on a monumental piece of equipment called a Linotype Machine, which was invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884. This complex, 6,000-piece device revolutionized the printing industry by enabling type to be cast and stamped quickly, rather than laboriously set by hand, letter by letter. Setting type by hand took so long that prior to the invention of the Linotype, no newspaper in the...
For some people, their career and life trajectory seem almost predetermined, as they follow in their parents' footsteps or otherwise make predictable choices about their occupation. That wasn't the case with beloved Tehachapi physician Dr. Sam Conklin, 84, the next to the youngest of 12 children whose father was a carpenter and small farmer in the mountainous region of Eastern Pennsylvania. Sam worked in construction in Connecticut after he got out of high school, and as he admits, "I never...
I started playing piano when I was three years old, and played constantly after that. I was going to attend Pomona College Music Conservatory, but then my father was killed in a car accident when I was a senior in high school. After his death my brother started running away from home, and he was found dead in an orange orchard, apparently from pesticide poisoning. Then it was just my mother and I left, so I decided to continue living with her and enrolled at UCLA on my 16th birthday. I graduated...
One of Kern County's most strategically important fire stations is the little-known Keene Fire Station, located just off Highway 58 in the sleepy community of Keene, nestled in the Tehachapi Mountains. Kern has 48 different fire stations given numbers between 11 through 79, starting with Station 11 at Keene. So why would Station 11 be so significant, given that Keene itself is home to only a couple of hundred people at most? Because Keene is one of the main wildland firefighting stations, with t...
They say money talks, and they're right: it mostly just says, "Goodbye." – American Folk Wisdom...
"Ma'am, I have a powerful hankerin' to take you out to dinner if you ain't taken." – Hod Welden This is what Hod Welden of the Tehachapi Hay Company said when he first asked Jane Gibbons out on a date. She said yes, and she has happily been Jane Welden for more than 25 years....
"I'd always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright and would be automatically bestowed upon me as time passed. I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live – that there were specific disciplines and ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life." – Dan Millman...
"We're gonna have a hard time ever being happy if we aren't thankful for what we already have." – Jacob Sokol...
"That ceiling isn't glass; it's a very dense layer of men." – Anne Jardim Dr. Anne Jardim was one of the founding deans of the Simmons College School of Management, the first MBA program in the world focused on creating women business leaders, and she was referring to the "glass ceiling" that is said to limit upward employment opportunities for women....
"When you appreciate what you have, what you have appreciates in value." – Robert A. Emmons Robert Emmons is a researcher in the Department of Psychology at UC Davis who partnered with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami to conduct research into gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life....
Among the most interesting insects to be found in the Tehachapi Mountains, or anywhere for that matter, are the translucent-winged dragonflies. Since dragonflies always lay their eggs in or near water, aquatic habitats are necessary for dragonflies. The dry Inland Ranges of California are not known for their abundance of aquatic habitats, of course, but dragonflies can often utilize small ponds, pools, seeps, etc. You can also find some adults quite a distance from any surface water. The...
My family, the Freemans, arrived in the Tehachapi Valley 140 years ago when my grandparents, Farmer and Susan Freeman, moved from Havilah to Tehachapi in the 1870s. The Freemans ran a small dairy located on Green Street, about where the former St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store (and before that, Town and Country Market) was located. My grandmother would turn her cows loose after the morning milking, and they would wander down the canyon by the railroad tracks and eat the meadow grass. It used to b...
Among the most charismatic – and largest – wildlife in the Tehachapi Mountains are the American Elk (Cervus canadensis nelsoni) that can be seen in outlying areas. These huge deer are impressive creatures, about the size of horses, and the bulls grow spreading antlers each year. You may wonder where these picturesque animals came from, and if they’ve always been here. They now wander the areas of Bear Valley Springs, Stallion Springs, Golden Hills, and the mountains south of Highline Road in a r...
A Southern Pacific Railroad Fireman named James Rolls risked his life in an attempt to save a little child right in front of the Tehachapi Depot. It was April 1, 1952, and Fireman Rolls was onboard a freight train that had pulled off on the No. 1 siding track in Tehachapi to let a fast passenger train, the Santa Fe "Grand Canyon Limited" go by. As that eastbound passenger train bore down on Tehachapi, Santa Fe Engineer Sammy Uren was sickened when he saw a little blond-haired two-year-old girl s...
When my brother Lawrence and I were teenagers in the 1930s, we used to work for old Bill Browning catching jackrabbits outside Delano. He was an oldtimer, the first white baby born in Kern County and he once owned half of Delano. He was a bootlegger during Prohibition, and he was a great guy. He used to sell big jackrabbits to the greyhound dog tracks in LA for $1 apiece. When he had an order for 40 or 50 jackrabbits, then we would go set up nets out west of Delano in the alkali scrub, in the...
Now that summer is beginning to look towards the coming autumn, oak trees in the Tehachapi Mountains are starting to produce the crop that sustained life here for thousands of years: acorns. These distinctive, conical seeds are highly nutritious, containing significant amounts of carbohydrates, fats, protein and fiber, as well as minerals including potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron and vitamin B-6. Animals of many kinds rely on the annual bounty of acorns to feed and nourish them, both now and...
"Anything north of the 210 freeway is Northern California." – Cal Fire Captain While in town to fight a massive wildfire in Blackburn Canyon, a Cal Fire crew went into a restaurant on Tehachapi Boulevard to eat and said to their server, Megan, that, "This is our first time here – we're from Southern California." When she replied that Tehachapi IS in Southern California, this was his response....
