Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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Rufus Thomas is a Tehachapi man who had an interesting career, spending 40 years working for Southern Pacific Railroad (later Union Pacific) and retiring after many years as a conductor. He has filled his retirement years as an artist working on various projects, drawing, painting and building scale models of the old wooden oil derricks that he grew up around in the Taft area. The story of Rufus Thomas begins on June 10, 1939, when he was born to John and Grace Thomas, joining a family that...
Most Tehachapi residents noticed that an empty, sagebrush-choked field at the intersection of Highway 202, Highline and Banducci Roads turned into a farm in 2018. The dry field became a green, irrigated pasture, and a vintage Airstream trailer was pulled in to serve as a farm stand selling fresh produce. Welcome to Brite Creek Farm! This thriving Tehachapi agrotourism destination is the result of hard work and farming expertise by the Shipman family: Jay and his wife Hannah, and their children...
I first came to Tehachapi in 1967 when I was offered a job as the assistant signal supervisor in Tehachapi. My boss in Arizona told me about the opening, and my first question was "Where the hell is Tehachapi?" He told me to find it on a map and then let him know my decision the next day. I did find out where it was, and the area looked appealing to me, so I said yes. I had been raised in Arizona, but I was actually born in California – in North Hollywood on December 23, 1929. My Dad was origina...
One September, we left Tehachapi to go visit Dick's sister Helen Traina in Liggett, California. We brought our two dogs, Bingo and Penny. Bingo was a black lab cross with a grizzled face and she was 17 years old, pretty deaf and with stiff joints. We brought our travel trailer along with us to sleep in. We had been visiting outdoors one night, and Dick got ready to go to bed in the trailer and called Bingo to come with him. She nuzzled his leg and disappeared into the night. When Elaine came...
Autumn has returned to the Tehachapi Mountains. Nights have grown cold and days are shorter, though often still warm. After a long Southern California summer, a different season now cloaks the land. The colors change, some birds leave while others arrive, reptiles disappear and most broadleaf trees let their leaves drift downward. Even the air feels different. All living things recognize this changing of seasons, as summer fades and winter appears on the horizon. So how do they respond? Let's...
East of the Tehachapi Mountains lies the Mojave Desert, a 48,000 square-mile expanse that is one of the great deserts of the world. It is one of the wetter deserts on Earth and is home to nearly 2,000 species of vascular plants. The region near to Tehachapi is commonly referred to as High Desert, since the average elevation is above 2,000 feet – people are often surprised to learn that the town of Mojave, at 2,762 feet, is about 150 feet higher in elevation than Keene at 2,602 feet. The High D...
My husband and I joined the Southern Pacific construction forces at Caliente [in the early 1870s] to keep a boarding house for the men who were on the big work. Mr. Hood was in charge of the work and he was very kind to us, and gave us a big tent to live in until a house could be built. He used to drop in for visit quite often, and I wonder if he remembers teaching me how to make eggnog in that old tent? The work was rather monotonous, nothing but hard work day after day. The laborers were...
One time I decided to brew some beer at home, so I got some malt extract and made a big batch. When the fermentation is finished and you get ready to bottle it, the beer is totally flat so you have to add a little sugar back in and then cap it, so it ferments just enough to get carbonated again. Well, I made a mistake and used cane sugar instead of corn sugar or malt sugar. When I figured it was done, I took two six-packs and headed down to Mojave to share some with the guys I worked with at Sou...
While the cultivated crops ripen in the valleys below, there are some wild fruits growing in the mountains that also ripen in August and September. Among the best of these are the tiny but useful blue berries produced by elderberry shrubs, which have long been prized by wildlife, Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Paiute) Indians and settlers. Though elderberries are very tart, they can be eaten raw, but the best use for them may be to make beautiful and delicious elderberry jelly. Even with the requisite...
"I would propose that a naturalist is someone whose curiosity is boundless. He or she is interested in kinkajous and sticklebacks, in astronomy, French wine, magpies, baseball, prairie rattlesnakes, quantum mechanics, corn on the cob, great sperm whales, and even Bolsheviks and hummingbirds. A naturalist tries to delight in everything, is in love with the whole of life, and hopes to walk in harmony across this Earth." – John Treadwell Nichols I consider the above quote to be one of the best I h...
My grandfather, who was also named Lance Estes, owned freight wagons and teams of horses, and he used them to haul merchandise to general stores and trading posts in California. He sometimes had to travel across muddy plains, and oddly enough, it was easier to cross when the ground was thoroughly soaked rather than when it was only moderately wet, for when merely wet the adobe soil stuck to the wheels until they could no longer turn, and the mud could not be knocked off, but had to be cut off...
In June 1884, Katherine Layne Curran (later Brandegee) travelled from Bakersfield to Mojave; the trip must have been one of the most successful brief trips in California botanical history. On this trip, in addition to much other material, Mrs. Curran collected the types for no fewer than 14 currently accepted taxa (species or subspecies)! This feat was even more remarkable when one considers that the month was June, not a particularly favorable one for collecting in the region, and that much col...
A small knoll overlooking Meadowbrook Park in Golden Hills has long been home to about 30 Tehachapi pioneers. They don't live there, but rather their earthly remains were laid to rest there in hand-dug graves in the Tehachapi soil more than 100 years ago. After each death, a wagon pulled by a team of horses would slowly carry the casket up the rutted dirt track to the little cemetery on the hill, followed by grieving survivors in buggies, on horseback or on foot. Once at the cemetery, a...
When Jack Sprague was 7 years old, he and his dog got caught in a downpour in a portion of Sand Canyon at the eastern end of the Tehachapi Valley, and together they sat out the rainstorm inside a rock shelter that bore numerous ancient Kawaiisu (Nuwä) Indian pictographs painted on the ceiling. The boy and his dog spent a couple of hours in the shallow cave. Jack never forgot the experience and the impression it made on him. That was in 1966, and Jack grew up to have an abiding fascination with...
My best friend Martin and I were both in the Army during World War II – he was in the European Theater and I got sent to the South Pacific, stationed in both Papua New Guinea and later in the Philippines. Martin was in Italy, Germany and Southern France. While he was there, he encountered members of the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team, which was known as the "Go For Broke" regiment. The officers were primarily Caucasian, but all of the enlisted men in the 442nd were Nisei, which is the J...
I went to work at the Tehachapi Post Office one morning a few years ago, and pretty soon one of the other workers came in and said there was a bobcat underneath one of the cars in the employee parking lot. Most of the other workers were kinda scared and were peering out from the doorway, which was silly because bobcats don't normally attack people, unless they're trapped. I went outside because I wanted to get a better look. It was obviously a young one, and the bobcat was more alarmed than the...
I was definitely a surprise to my folks when my mother became pregnant with me – she was 38 years old and daddy was 50. They lived in Old Kernville, long before the dam was built and Lake Isabella flooded the site where the town had been. My father's first wife had died in childbirth, as did their newborn son. Five years later, he married my mother and they also lost a son who was 17 days old, and my mother had a series of miscarriages, so they gave up and adopted my brother Henry. Then 10 years...
A small dark green shrub flourishes in the Tehachapi Mountains, growing among California Junipers in drier locations. You may be familiar with this plant in connection with cold medication and diet pills, but Tehachapi Indian people have used it to make tea for many hundreds of years. This is a plant with a hundred different names: Indian tea, Mormon tea, sheepherders tea, Spanish tea, cowboy tea and many others. The local Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Paiute) people call it "Tu-tu-pivi" while botanists...
Although the pandemic has, at least temporarily, caused many changes in daily life, many things remain dependably true. Like the fact that one of the most vibrant, friendly farms in California is located right here where the Tehachapi Mountains slope down to join the rising San Joaquin Valley. This is Murray Family Farms, an agricultural oasis including more than 170 varieties of fruit trees as well as berry vines and row crops that keep the Big Red Barn stocked with fresh produce year-round....
Moments after the last notes of "Taps" fade away from a lone bugler, you can hear the "ka-KER-ker" calling of nearby California quail. Two men in spotless military uniforms remove the American flag from a silver casket, triangle-fold it, and present it to a grieving relative. The honor guard is dismissed. From the lower branches of a big valley oak, the liquid warble of a meadowlark drifts upward. Another funeral service has ended at Bakersfield National Cemetery, tucked serenely into the rollin...
Longer days, warmer temperatures and changing barometric pressure have started bringing about the annual reappearance of snakes in the Tehachapi Mountains. They've been here all along, of course, but have spent the colder months tucked away in an old rodent burrow, rock crevice, fallen log or some other hibernaculum. This period of cold weather dormancy among snakes, lizards and tortoises is called brumation, from the Latin word "bruma," meaning "midwinter" or "winter solstice." While it is...
Although both Louise and Nellie Fickert, who owned the sprawling 25,000-acre Fickert Ranch that later became Bear Valley Springs, were mentally sharp until they died, other infirmities of age caught up with them in their last years. Dr. Vincent Troy was the Fickerts' doctor for many years. He was always there to help Louise and Nellie, especially after they became confined. Mary Farrell felt that the sisters looked upon Dr. Troy as the son they never had. For one reason or another – perhaps b...
In 1925, when I was 16 years old, my cousin and I got jobs with the remount unit at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, on the border with Mexico. The remount unit was responsible for gettin' horses broke and ready for the troopers to ride. We weren't in the cavalry, we were employees who lived in civilian barracks on base. There were 3,000 to 4,000 horses at Ft. Bliss at that time, and we got paid "$19 a month and found (room and board)" as remount wranglers. It wasn't easy, but it involved less wor...
David Schulgen, who made a career in the wind industry starting from its early days in the 1980s, had unambivalent feelings about wind energy when it arrived in the Tehachapi Mountains: "I hated wind turbines. We raised cattle in Oak Creek Canyon, and I liked to explore the hills around Tehachapi, and I didn't like the wind turbines coming in." His feelings toward the wind industry evolved. But it took some time. The wind industry still didn't exist in the area when Dave graduated from...
We usually have a big Easter egg hunt at our old farm on Cherry Lane for the children of family and friends. Of course it didn't happen this year because of the pandemic. But most years, a few uninvited guests leave with eggs: a couple of resident ravens help themselves to eggs that the kids hadn't found yet. Ravens don't just score a few hard-boiled chicken eggs, but even plastic eggs have proven tempting to those large black birds – I have seen ravens fly away with a brightly-colored p...
