Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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I played quarterback for the Warriors football team when I was a senior, in 1945. There was no stadium in those days, and football games were played at Imhoff Field, which is the grassy area on the south side of the old Jacobsen Junior High on Snyder Street (now being used for Cerro Coso College) but back then it was Tehachapi High. The "stands" back in the 1940s was a small set of wooden bleachers, maybe six rows of seats tall and 20 yards long. There would only be 50 to 75 people at each of...
I spent two and a half years in the Navy during World War II, and when I got out in 1946, I was still only 20 years old. I went to Oak Glen, near Yucaipa, to help my parents at their apple orchard and guest ranch. I was grading apples one September day and I began to experience increasing pain in my back and shoulders. I stopped grading apples for the day because of the pain, and instead went under the house and ran an electrical line for a heater. When I crawled out from under the house, I...
In late April of 1996, three steers were hit and killed by a train near Tunnel 8 just north of Hart Flat. Unfortunately, the death toll rose when a black bear sow was struck and killed by a Southern Pacific locomotive as she fed on the remains of the cattle. Her death orphaned her two young cubs, a male and a female that were only about three months old. Train engineers kept reporting that they saw the baby bears, but by the time California Department of Fish and Game Warden Marty Smith could...
Since the bright hot days of August have given way to the warm days and cool nights of September in the Tehachapi Mountains, locals can feel it in the air – apple season has arrived. And with that delicious time comes one of the finest products of an orchard: fresh-pressed apple juice. Whether you call it apple juice or use the older term "apple cider" (not hard cider, that's an alcoholic drink of an entirely different nature), the sweet nectar that pours from fresh-pressed apples is simply u...
This crazy incident happened one winter in 1980, when I was in high school. One of my older brothers worked for my family's business, Ricker Motors (on Tehachapi Boulevard where Haddad Automotive is now). He went into B & B Liquors in the morning to get a soda and some kids in two cars asked him to buy them some beer. He thought that they were friends of mine, so he did – he bought them two cases of beer. They were actually from Arvin and I had no idea who they were. Then before lunch, a classma...
I lived in Ecuador during part of my childhood, since my father is Ecuadorian and he wanted my sister and I to experience that country. When I was four or five years old, I was visiting a waterfall near our house. Having a source of clean, fresh drinking water was a big deal, and the stream that fed the waterfall could be trusted, so I was carrying home some water jugs. While there, I caught a little frog that I wanted to bring home with me. My hands were already full, and I thought about...
Tehachapi weather: it's a thing. Local residents talk about it, enjoy it much of the time, dread it at other times and speculate about how it will affect them. Our weather changes frequently. It can be warm, cool, hot, cold, breezy, windy, still, damp, wet or dry. All in the same week. Tehachapi weather conditions aren't always that fickle, of course, and over time patterns have emerged. Humans tend to have short or at least unreliable memories about weather, saying things like, "It's never...
In 1983, I was 17 years old and living with my Dad, Mom, sister Joy and brother Brian in an old house in Caliente Canyon. It had been a very wet winter that year, and on March 1, it had been raining really hard for about 3 days. Caliente Creek had risen up and then come back down a few times. Dad left early that morning because he had to be at work in Bakersfield by 6 a.m. My sister Joy had caught the school bus about 6:15. Mom told me, "That water's getting deep, I need you to stay home and...
One day after I got off work at Lehigh Southwest, I took a drive to think about my Dad, who passed away the year before. I took a dirt road not far from the entrance to Sand Canyon, and I came up on some commercial bee hives. There in broad daylight, at 3:35 in the afternoon, was a black bear lounging against some hives. He had torn two of them open. He was sitting on his rump, leaning against some hives with his arm resting on them, scooping honeycomb into his mouth, swipe after swipe. He...
As you drive down Curry Street past the Tehachapi fire station, on the east side of the road there's a surprisingly large open space. A portion of this big field near Phil Marx Central Park used to be where the Tehachapi Mountain Festival carnival set up every year. This wasn't always open space, however – for 72 years it was home to a large pear orchard. It was one of the defining features of that part of town. Here's some background about pears: pear trees are amazingly long lived. Governor P...
One wintry day in 2005, it was my turn to host our Gourmet Luncheon Group, also known as The Piranhas. We have been getting together for many years. The house was immaculate. I had purposely turned off the furnace because my luncheon theme was Siberia and I wanted the house to feel just right. The invitation was suggested that guests wear long underwear. The house was appropriately freezing! It was 9:30 a.m. and I had allowed about thirty minutes to set the table and prepare drinks. My twelve...
My Mother was of French descent and was a tremendous cook who kept her family and many friends fed during the Depression. She canned over 500 jars of fruits and vegetables every year to put in our root cellar, and she also had big 15-gallon crocks that she used to make sauerkraut and corn beef. She also used to dry lots of apples from our 10-acre orchard. She'd peel them and slice them and put the slices up on the roof to dry in the sun. Mother loved Tehachapi and the White Feather Ranch on Old...
Tehachapi has one of the prettiest downtown areas in Kern County, and it keeps getting more attractive, thanks to ongoing efforts by the City of Tehachapi and local business owners. There are pocket parks, landscaping, benches, vintage-style street lights, brickwork, top quality signage, tastefully painted buildings and more. There is an overall forward momentum, and a feeling that higher standards have been established. Both residents and visitors alike appreciate the welcoming and picturesque...
I arrived in Tehachapi on the last day of December, 1940 and moved into a home purchased from my brother Rolf at 412 East F St. on New Year's Day. On the day that I moved here, the whole area was covered with snow. This soon melted, though, and the valley and surrounding mountains were covered with beautiful green grass, very spectacular. Tehachapi Valley had about 30,000 acres of good farm land together with many thousands of acres of grazing land. It is part of a pass through the Tehachapi...
There are four main valleys in the Tehachapi Mountains: Tehachapi, Brite, Cummings and Bear Valleys. Each of them are similar, basin-like valleys entirely ringed by mountains, but each of them have their own characteristics. Brite Valley is the smallest of the four, and is approximately four miles long by two miles wide. It is a diverse and charming little valley with a long history. The first permanent residents of Brite Valley are believed to be Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Paiute) people whose...
The Fourth of July, the annual holiday celebrating independence from England and the creation of the United States of America, is a festive occasion in the Tehachapi Mountains. It has been since it was first observed here in 1856. We don't have many details about that first Fourth of July celebration, but it was mostly members of the John and Amanda Brite family and some of their friends. They were basically the only English-speaking residents of the Tehachapi Mountains in those days. The...
I went to work at Monolith when I was still in high school – the company (Monolith Portland Cement Company, four miles east of town) would hire you at 16 years old. You couldn’t work at the plant, but you could work at the Monolith town site, which the company owned completely. They had a town painter, a town plumber named John Frahm and also a general handyman. When you were younger, you could get hired in the summer to work as helpers to those guys. When I graduated at Tehachapi High in 195...
Although the Tehachapi Mountains are more than a thousand miles away from the principal battlefields of the Civil War, in fact the War Between the States did have some effect on local residents. During the 1860s, Southern California was home to many Confederate sympathizers, and the majority of Southern California's population was actually in favor of secession. Many of the miners and farmers in California were originally from the South, and they wanted California to join the Confederacy. In...
The warmer months have arrived in the Tehachapi Mountains, and with the rise in temperatures comes the return of the reptile kingdom. Snakes and lizards are here year-round, of course, but they hibernate when it's cold, typically disappearing around September and October and re-emerging on warm days in March and April. California is one of the most snake-diverse states in the U.S., with a current total of 72 species and subspecies, exceeded only by Texas with 115 species and subspecies. Snakes...
"The first time I came to Tehachapi was in the 1930s when we came up to buy apples. There was an underground apple storage place on C Street, just down from Curry Street and Farmers Supply (now Mountain Gardens Nursery), in the area of the old garment factory (the new Tehachapi Police station) and Carroll Development's storage yard on C Street and Pauley. You would drive through with a wagon and dump the apples in bins and then drive out the other side. There was an old winter variety of apple...
"During Prohibition, my dad leased a ranch on Old Town Road, on the south part closer to Highway 202, which was known as 'the Lovejoy Place.' It had a barn and he and my Uncle Bob put a still in a hidden underground room in there, and he proceeded to become one of the biggest bootleggers in Tehachapi. They also called that place 'the Turkey Ranch' because there were about 150 turkeys of the bronze breed there all the time. They kept them in a low shed that's still there. My dad was a Yugoslav...
"When I was growing up, a lot of people didn't pen up their chickens during the day – they'd just let them scratch around for seeds and bugs, and then shut them in at night to protect them from raccoons and other animals. A farmer who raised a lot of them and sold the eggs usually kept them in chicken coops, but if you just had a handful of hens for your own use, you'd just turn them out during the day. One day when I was just a kid there were some girls visiting, and I wanted to show them how t...
