Kaylie and I took light rail to Folsom on Sunday. She took pictures from the window. Railroad tracks are rarely in pretty areas.
Sunday in Cameron Park - Happy Jacey
Kaylie playing with Starbuck and Daubie
Sooki
Monday, August 22, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Highway 99
We arrived at Aunt Faye's house in Hilmar on July 17, 1957. We'd left Graford, Texas on July 10th in an old car that dad had just purchased after his return from California. He'd recently preached for the newly formed Hilmar Baptist Church and they'd asked him to be their pastor. Our first stop was in Waco where my two older brothers, Stan and Don were living. We'd brought my brother Don our set of Encyclopedia Britannica which dad had sold to him. Don had just entered Baylor University and could use the encyclopedias, but the money we got for them was the more important thing. The car dad had just bought had already broken down, and we couldn't go on until we got another car. We were in Temple near Waco, on Sunday and nothing could be done until Monday, so we took off the mattresses roped to the top of the car; threw those down and spent the night in a city park. Around midnight the local police came to question why we were there. Dad told them our story. They told him that it was against the law to sleep in the park, but that we could go ahead and stay that night and they would let the next shift know that we had permission to be there. Dad spent most of Monday negotiating for another old car while Mom, Lanora, Dorothy, Lester and I sat under a tree trying to stay cool awaiting the next leg of our journey. We were on our way again, headed for Aunt Beulah’s in El Paso, to drop off our rented U-Haul trailer and purchase another. It took a couple of days to accomplish finding a trailer we could afford, then unload one trailer and load another and be on our way.
My memories of the trip have faded over time, but the lasting impressions are of heat and nothing to mitigate that. We had groceries for making baloney sandwiches (sliced white bread, baloney and mayonnaise) and filled jugs with water from “filling” station's water hoses. We slept in the car or at the side of the road or in roadside parks. Coming through the Mojave Desert our car would over heat and at times dad had to climb down embankments to a nearly dried up river bed to find water to put into the radiator. I envied people with the canvas water bags hooked over the car emblem on the hood. I thought that meant they were rich.
We got onto Highway 99 in Bakersfield and I fell in love. Although I was just 12 years old, I knew that this place was my destiny. I loved Highway 99; the oleanders separating the north and south lanes seemed like a tropical paradise. I was charmed by the Giant Orange stands and longed for the day we could actually stop and eat at one. For most of my life I’ve lived somewhere near Highway 99 and still enjoy traveling it from Sacramento to Bakersfield. So much of it hasn’t changed in all those years since I first saw it in July 1957 and it reminds me how important that roadway has been in my life.
A few years ago I asked my siblings to write something about their feelings/memories of Highway 99. My poem includes my feelings and I added to mine what my older sister had told me about her feelings. My brother Don, the one who was just beginning Baylor University in 1957 has spent a great deal of his adult life living in California and loving it, also wrote a poem.
Highway 99 Memories
BY: Liz Claybrook Birmingham 2006
Texas in the Rear-View Mirror
California not straight ahead
Seven-day Journey in July '57
Too hot to speak about
Couldn't wait to trade
Route 66 for Highway 99
That Oleander-Blessed
Highway to Heaven
Dropped us in Merced County
Ready to rescue the Dust-Bowl Baptist
Their Souls Lost
Crossing Death Valley
So Eager to Reach the
Promised Land
But Highway 99 Memories
Don't charm all...
Desolation
Dirt blowing across
Cotton fields...
Monotony broken only by
Central Valley towns
Sick of heart and body..
Loss and Lost the further we traveled on
99, that highway to a Place Half a Day
Short of Eden
Couldn't wait to put it in reverse..
99 to 66 and back to heart's home
left behind in Texas.
Highway 99
BY: Don Claybrook - 2006
Needles and Barstow,
Hell’s hungry, haunting acres,
Only to be endured
For that ribbon of promise,
Called Highway 99!
Bakersfield, Turlock…
Other sun-blanched Meccas
Beckoning parched travelers
From Texas and sundry,
Barely remembered lands.
Oh, the time forgotten trails
We traced in search of Eden!
We pushed up our sleeves
And lingered awhile,
Our highway had taken us home.
We grew in numbers
And memories too…
..(mostly all golden
And full of hope)…
On this road called
Ninety and Nine.
We waited…and…we remembered.
But Time did neither.
In Sacramento
We wrote a history book,
Miners without a stake,
We pitched our tent
To stay awhile
And live for another day.
To sing and cry
And recall again…
Of boys and girls
And highways,
The days on 99.
Now that highway
Is little more than a vestige.
Out of place, out of time,
And way out of the way.
But it showed us the way
And not only took us where we are
But made us who we are.
We grow old but it will stay
Forever…99.
California provided many opportunities for my family. Both my younger sister, Dorothy and I were privileged to graduate from Sacramento State University, when a college education was affordable to students of very limited resources. I’m grateful for that opportunity and for that road that lead us here…Highway 99.
Updates: Lanora returned to Texas after after completing her senior year of high school at Hilmar High in 1958. She married Richard in 1960 and they have 3 children and all live in Texas.
Dorothy lives in L. A. and many years ago became, D.J., as she says, “Dorothy is ok for Kansas, but I now live in Oz, so DJ it is.”
She's married to Mike, an early transplant to California from Indiana and they have two sons and a daughter.
Lester, who was named for a Texas evangelist, Lester Roloff, disliked his name and and so was Les from high school until his death in 2000. His widow Vicki and their two children reside in the metroplex in or near Dallas.
Dad died in 1989 in Witchita Falls, Tx., after retiring from the ministry.
Mother lived independently until this summer of 2010 and then at age 91 moved into a nursing home and lives in Canton, Texas near my brother, Stan and his wife Margaret.
Stan and Margaret tried California with their 4 daughters for 6 years, but they also put it in reverse; 99 to 66 and returned home to Texas some 40 years ago, where they all still reside.
Don lives in Ft. Bragg and two of his 4 children live in and love their native state; California.
I live in Sacramento and continue my love affair with California, along with my two children, Jennifer and her family in Cameron Park and James and his family in San Rafael.
From Via magazine: Jennifer Reese http://www.viamagazine.com/destinations/californias-quirky- As the region's farm economy burgeoned, the little road grew to link big cities with small, isolated agricultural towns like Hughson, Le Grand, Tulare, Selma, and Hilmar. In John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, it is on 99 that the fictional Joads travel, as did so many real-life Dust Bowl migrants looking for work in the fields. Today, hardly a nectarine, cotton boll, or walnut exits the Central Valley without being ferried up or down 99.
But the road has never ranked high on sightseers' agendas. Most people who drive 99 these days do it because they have to—truck drivers delivering goods, people visiting relatives. As Joan Didion wrote in "Notes from a Native Daughter", "99 would never get a tourist to Big Sur or San Simeon, never get him to the California he came to see."
This may be the key to its charm. Driving along 99 today, you'll find a vibrant, unfussy, authentic California, a fitfully lovely landscape of almond orchards, mangy farmyards, rusty train works, peach trees, Depression-era hamburger stands, and Dairy Queens from more recent days.
Seems that many people have similar warm feelings and memories about traveling on Highway 99.
Dennis Ziemienski fell in love with Highway 99 from the backseat of a Plymouth station wagon in the 1950s and ’60s. He sipped fresh-squeezed orange juice handed to him by someone inside of a giant orange-shaped stand.
During these family trips, his eyes would follow the neon piping lighting words like “Milt’s,” “California Motel” and “Mearle’s Drive-In.” He watched men in caps and button-up shirts pump gas and young girls on skates deliver onion rings and thick malts. He watched palm trees, mid-century eucalyptus and row crops pass by, one by one.
See article and paintings Dennis has done of his memories of his childhood trips on Highway 99
During these family trips, his eyes would follow the neon piping lighting words like “Milt’s,” “California Motel” and “Mearle’s Drive-In.” He watched men in caps and button-up shirts pump gas and young girls on skates deliver onion rings and thick malts. He watched palm trees, mid-century eucalyptus and row crops pass by, one by one.
See article and paintings Dennis has done of his memories of his childhood trips on Highway 99
Watch video of more Highway 99 history with Dennis Ziemienski
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