Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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As I drove slowly through the quiet, older residential streets east of Downtown Tehachapi, my headlights shown on a furtive figure in a mask who hurried across the road. It wasn't a person observing social distancing in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, but it was a local resident: a large raccoon, out for some late night foraging. These interesting animals are mostly nocturnal and tend to conceal themselves in hollow logs, trees or other hiding places during the day. Raccoons emerge at...
Gary Davies is a lifelong Tehachapi resident and military veteran who has found solace and satisfaction in hand carving assorted animals out of wood. Gary, who was born in Tehachapi Hospital in 1959, has many talents and has spent his life working with his hands. His father taught him to weld when he was only 11 years old, and he worked as a welder for the Navy and in Texas oilfields. He has also worked in vegetation management, landscaping, carpentry and masonry. The Veterans Administration...
Our family moved to Tehachapi in 1930 when my parents, Julius and Jeanne Fritz, swapped their home in Willowbrook for 47 acres of land and a farmhouse on Old Town Road, which had been there about 10 years at that time and was known as "the Burton place." The property was dominated by an enormous Gray Pine (Pinus sabiniana) and my Dad wanted to name the place "Lone Tree Ranch" but someone else was already using that name so he settled on the "White Feather Ranch," because he immediately started...
When my daughter Teagan was born, her father gave me a pair of 1-carat diamond earrings to commemorate her birth. They are the most meaningful pieces of jewelry I have because they represent Teagan to me, and all the wonderful things she's brought to my life. Her father and I are no longer married but those are my "Teagan earrings" and I wear them all the time. Recently I was cleaning out the rental unit where we had been living after most of our things had already been moved into the new...
There aren't many Tehachapi residents left who remember the days when almost every phone call made in this area required a person working at a switchboard, an operator who manually put a plug into a jack to complete a call. Pat Gracey, 91, not only remembers that time, she actually was one of those hard-working women who made phone calls possible. Patricia Davis Gracey was born in Mojave on September 2, 1928, the youngest of four children born to Chauncey and Maude Davis. She was raised in...
I used to sell a lot of beer when I owned the Monolith Store. It was all Acme brand – about as bad a beer as you could buy, but I bought from the Bohemian Distributing Company and that's what they had. I bought Ambassador Reserve wine from them, and they also had the Acme beer distributorship. The previous owner of the Monolith Store, Bert White, he was a pretty smooth politician, so when he went down to talk to the guy at Bohemian he always took down a dozen nice, big T-bone steaks to the b...
I was out irrigating a five-acre alfalfa field that we had at our place on Cherry Lane, moving 3-inch aluminum sprinkler pipe, when I saw something up at the edge of the field. It looked like a twisted piece of pipe. When I got close, I saw that it was one of the biggest gopher snakes I've ever seen. It was 'bout as big around as that sprinkler pipe. But it was dead. And there was a big ol' boar gopher sticking out of side of that snake. I guess that big snake had caught the gopher and...
While driving home from Bakersfield on the back way (Bena Road) between Edison and the Arvin Cutoff this week, I noticed that the earliest wildflowers to bloom in our mountains were beginning to show their first yellow color. These unique and interesting plants are Bladderpods. The extremely drought-tolerant Bladderpods begin flowering on the San Joaquin Valley floor, and then follow spring as it moves upslope. With egg-shaped green globes dangling from the stems, beautiful yellow flowers and...
It was late August, 1966 on a very hot afternoon when my husband and I pulled into Tehachapi for the first glimpse at our new community. In Colorado earlier that summer we had interviewed with the Tehachapi Unified School District superintendent about teaching jobs in Tehachapi. Yes, he said, they needed a math teacher at the junior high, and yes, he said, Tehachapi has skiing and fishing very close, and yes, it is the top of a mountain pass. We signed our contracts with eagerness and excitement...
A fire at Bear Mountain destroyed much feed and valuable timber. The fire started near Sycamore last Saturday and was not under control until late Tuesday afternoon. Many sections of dry feed on the west side of Bear Mountain were destroyed, the loss falling almost entirely on F. W. Fickert. The fire fighters experienced many hardships during their three strenuous days and nights on the mountain, often without food or water for many hours at a time and sometimes surrounded by the roaring,...
I lived in Cummings Valley with my family. I was born on my Grandfather Ocana's ranch on December 21, 1907. My Dad was Anselmo Campos and he was a cowboy for the Hill Ranch. When we went to visit family in Bakersfield, we went in a wagon over the Sheeptrail. You could make it in a day if you wanted to – a long day. We didn't have a radio – we didn't even know what one looked like. My family had a Victrola with one of those big horns on it. Then they had those little rolly things [wax cyl...
Small footsteps crunch on the surface of the snow. The young face looks up at the house, and a little hand reaches skyward. A larger hand stretches towards the eaves, breaks off a thin tapering spike of ice and gives it to the smiling child, who promptly starts eating it. Our affection for icicles starts at an early age. Icicles, nature's water-flavored popsicles, are actually quite rare in natural world, but are common among human habitation in colder climates. Icicles typically form on steep...
When I was around 11 years old a lady moved in next door to us. I became friends with her oldest daughter, who was my age. When Christmas got close we found out they weren't going to get a tree. A single mother with three kids, times were hard. Daddy went out and bought presents for all of them. He even bought a record player for them so the mom would get something that she could enjoy. On Christmas Eve Thrifty would sell all their display artificial trees, fully decorated, for around $5.00. Lat...
There's a group of regulars who come into Kelcy's twice a day at about 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. I call them the "Board of Directors." It started with Boyd Lehman and Harold Rouse in 1961 or 1962, when it was still Trusty's Cafe. Then they started bringing in Chet Gilbertson, who owned The Rock Shop on Tehachapi Boulevard. Over cups of coffee, they'd discuss Tehachapi history, politics, their families and news of the day. And the group grew over the years. It's good to see them all. They're good friends...
At about 10 a.m. on April 13, 1992, a backhoe operator working on the City of Tehachapi's new sewer line on Dennison Road accidently tore through a telephone trunk line, cutting phone service for every single resident of the Ashe Village (formerly known as Ashe Tract) neighborhood north of the railroad tracks. Pacific Bell construction splicers Lonnie Latham, Mike Mattucci, Charlie Lunn and Jimmy Womack were dispatched to fix the massive problem, and arrived at the site at about noon to...
Short, cold days and long frosty nights. When the sun went down, the land grew dark. There were no lights anywhere, except the occasional flickering glow of a small campfire. The stars overhead glittered in the black sky. The nights were quiet, but not silent. Coyotes could often be heard as they yipped and barked, and sometimes wolves would raise their muzzles towards the sky and their mournful, descending wails would echo from the hills. This is the time of year in the Tehachapi Mountains...
“Louie Boden was a lawman in Tehachapi for 36 years, from 1915 until his death in 1951. He relied on his physical strength and popularity alone. He was our constable and he was a big, barrel-chested man. He was really strong, but he was kind-hearted and everyone loved him – he was probably one of the most popular men in town. He often chewed on a cigar as he made his rounds. “He was once called to break up a fight between two Marines at a bar on Tehachapi Boulevard, near where Kelcy’s is now....
The Kawaiisu had achieved preeminence as rain shamans. The rainmaker, or more accurately, weather-manipulator, is called uupu-ha-gud. In the land of the Kawaiisu, precipitation was of prime concern. The productivity of the wild plants is dependent upon rain in an area which often suffers from drought. On the other hand, water is capable of descending in an overwhelming quantity. Flash floods were known and feared and a dry creek bed could suddenly turn into a rampaging, destructive torrent....
We liked to have our chickens be able to roam around our property. One of our roosters disappeared and we didn't see it for a few days. I figured something must have happened to it since he had disappeared. Then I went to move a plastic five-gallon bucket that was sitting upside down. I lifted the bucket and that chicken was underneath it. It had gotten in there, probably pecking at grain or some food left while the bucket was lying on its side, and somehow straightened upright and wound up...
Newer Tehachapi residents who have wondered what it was like back in the old days, when there used to be more snow, don't have to wonder any more: our snowstorm on December 26 was like the winter storms that used to be a yearly occurrence. In fact, the speed of this snowfall would be exceptional during any year, past or present – we went from having no snow at all to having a foot and a half in less than 24 hours. Even in previous decades when we routinely got more snow, it would typically t...
I was involved in the early days of the California Condor Recovery program, prior to the capture of all the remaining birds in 1987 in a last-ditch (and ultimately very successful) effort to prevent their extinction. We suspected that lead poisoning was one of the leading causes of condor mortality, caused by ingesting bullet fragments from carcasses and hunter's gut piles. We wanted to take blood samples and check their lead levels, but there were only 22 birds in existence and the U.S. Fish...
My Dad was in the British Army during World War I. When he was only 19, he got captured by the Germans and taken to a military prison camp in Germany. It was newly built and had wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire – like the camp in the old Hogan's Heroes television show, though that took place in World War II. My Dad hated being a prisoner and was constantly trying to figure out how to escape. One night when it was misty and kind of foggy he got his chance. He managed to wriggle his w...
While Tehachapi is rightfully known as the Land of Four Seasons, it could also be known as the Land of Lenticulars, since the formation of these distinctive, sometimes amazing looking clouds is a common occurrence in the Tehachapi Mountains. While headed out to Cummings Valley with friends late on Tuesday afternoon, Dec. 17, in the fading light we saw a huge lenticular cloud with a large completely circular hole in the middle of it. It looked like a giant round spacecraft had either gone up...
Actually, a first remembered Christmas for me, a member of the Davis Family, was in the desert town of Mojave with the famous strong winds hitting the house. That one action of the harsh, howling wind always made me, as a small child, feel quite secure in my warm bed with my parents nearby. There was a problem though because we had no fireplace for the jolly old elf, Santa, to make an entrance into our living room. The brick chimney atop our house connected to a wood stove, and that worried me....
I was up on a hilltop overlooking Hart Flat, cleaning up some branches and deadwood for firewood. It got dark and I could hear some coyotes calling, so I turned my headlights out and started making predator calls, making kind of a squeaking, whistling sound with my lips to see if I could call in any coyotes to investigate the sound. I had my flashlight out, and I held it close to my chest. I saw a barn owl take off and head towards a bald mountain ridge. I stood there and kept making that sound...
