Created by a 14-year-old boy trapped in a 64-year-old man’s body

On this day last year, I was in Promontory, Utah, for the 150th anniversary celebration of the completion of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad.

In May 1969, I was a lad of 14 living in Kingsville TX with my paternal grandparents. My dad (then deceased), granddad, and three uncles all were working for Missouri Pacific Railroad in Kingsville, Corpus Christi, Victoria, Taylor, and Palestine.

Sadly, no one was willing to take me to Promontory for the 100th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

I was a sad and depressed boy of 14.

I put the 150th anniversary celebration on my calendar, swearing that I would make it if I were alive in 2019.

I made it, spending May 9-12 all over northern Utah and western Wyoming, getting hundreds of pictures and dozens of videos.

My favorite video from that week in Utah shows the two largest operating steam locomotives and their passenger cars leaving the historic 25th Street Station in Ogden on May 12 heading back home to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I followed them to Evanston, Wyoming, and then headed home to San Diego myself.

Here is my video, created by a 14-year-old boy trapped in a 64-year-old man’s body.

Out & About—Dana Point, California

       

On Friday I drove 77 miles to Dana Point, California, to take a 3-hour ride on the tall ship Spirit of Dana Point. The occasion was the opening of the 35th Annual Tall Ships & Ocean Festival hosted by Ocean Institute.

Since these events are quite popular in Southern California, I left at 4:00 a.m. to get there earlier than everyone else so that I could get good parking. I parked and walked around the harbor watching the sun rise.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the natural harbor was a popular port for ships bringing supplies to the Mission San Juan Capistrano located nearby.  The earliest known visit to the harbor was in 1818. Argentine sailor Hippolyte de Bouchard anchored in the harbor while conducting a raid on the mission.

Dana Point was incorporated as a city on January 1, 1989, and had a population of 33,351 in the 2010 census. The city was named after the headland of Dana Point, which was named after Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, who had docked his ship, Pilgrim, in the harbor in 1835.

Two Years Before the Mast is an account of the Pilgrim’s 1834-35 voyage between Boston and California. In it, Dana described the area as the only romantic spot on the coast.

Pilgrim was a sailing brig 86½ feet long and weighing 180 tons. It had been built in Boston in 1825 and went down in a fire at sea in 1856. There is a full-size replica at the Ocean Institute in the harbor at Dana Point.

Pilgrim used to sail but it is in need of major repairs. Right now the money isn’t available to make those repairs, so it appears to be permanently docked at this time.

The harbor is quite beautiful and a joy to walk around watching people, boats, wildlife, sunrises, and sunsets.

Coming up next: More about the Ocean Institute.

Spirit of Dana Point

Many hundreds of years ago I wanted to be a history teacher. Then I found out how much money history teachers made in Texas. That was the end of that dream.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sail on the tall ship Spirit of Dana Point. Since I was on the ship, I could not take a picture of it under sail. So I resort to a picture of it here in San Diego at the Maritime Museum’s Festival of Sail on August 29, 2013:

The event yesterday was the occasion of the 2019 Tall Ships & Ocean Festival of the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California.

The Spirit of Dana Point has an interesting history. It is a traditionally built replica of a 1770s privateer schooner used during the American Revolution. They were known for speed, and their speed made them useful for smuggling.

Formerly named Pilgrim of Newport, it was built piece by piece by Dennis Holland (1945-2014), who dreamed of building an accurate replica from the period when America fought for independence. He had talent and determination, as well as plans he purchased from the Smithsonian Institution. He laid the keel on May 2, 1970, in the yard of his Orange County home. It was finished and launched in 1983. The Ocean Institute acquired the ship in 2001, and it continues to sail the ocean under the name Spirit of Dana Point.

While under sail yesterday, we got more behind-the-scenes tales of how the ship was built. When Dennis Holland started running short of money, he and his family moved into the half-completed ship and rented out their home. When tasked with a school project to draw a picture of your home, one of his daughters drew a picture of the boat. Teacher was not too pleased.

Dana Point is a great little beach town. If you ever get the opportunity to drive Pacific Coast Highway (also known as Coast Highway, U.S. 101, California 1), be sure to stop in Dana Point and check out the harbor and the magnificent cliff side homes.

I will have more about the Ocean Institute and my adventures yesterday on the high seas in upcoming posts.

Out & About—All auto clinics are not created equal

Ocean Beach is a quaint little neighborhood of San Diego. They believe in themselves, so much so that they want to remain stuck in the twentieth century, and the earlier the better.

The homes along Sunset Cliffs are beautiful ocean-view homes, and many of the businesses at ground level on one side are at the top of the sandstone beach bluffs on the other side. Occasionally, when Mother & Father Nature are fighting, the waves will crash against the bluffs and cause large sections to fall to the beach. Such was the case a few months ago, so I went out to see if I could get some pictures. Nope. The only way the bluffs there were accessible is by boat, and I didn’t have a boat. So I wandered around taking pictures of businesses.

That’s when I found Cliffside Auto Clinic. You might think, “Auto repair shop. Meh.”, but look what’s sitting in front of Cliffiside Auto Clinic:

One might think, “Gosh, it takes them six decades to repair a car. The owners are probably dead by now!”

Nope.

Cliffside Auto Clinic specializes in restoring cars. How cool!

The “Horseless Carriage” really got my attention because it was in such bad shape:

I think the owner, whom I talked to that morning, said the Horseless Carriage was a 1909 Ford Model T but I’m not 100% sure.

There were other historic car-related items, too:

I also found two early Fidget Spinner prototypes:

Out & About—The Great Stone Church, the Wrightwood Earthquake & dubious construction methods

During my early years as a teenager 55 years ago, I wanted to be an anesthesiologist, but only because I could spell that word.

When I was in my mid-teens, I wanted to be a history teacher, but then I found out how much money teachers in Texas made. Not enough….

History, though, very much has been a part of me all my life, so when my husband told me a few months ago that he wanted to go to Mission San Juan Capistrano, well, I’m all there….

So yesterday we drove up to the Oceanside Transit Center (51 miles) and took Metrolink to San Juan Capistrano, about a 40-minute train ride. We spent six hours wandering around the city and the mission, both of which are extraordinarily fascinating.

I’ll have more about both the city and the mission in future blog posts, but today I wanted to share some pictures of the ruins of the Great Stone Church:

In the second picture, that long walkway was what one might call the Great Hall inside the church. A model of the church, built in the shape of a cross, provides a better perspective; the Great Hall is the base of the cross:

The Great Stone Church took nine years to build, 1797-1806. It was used as a house of worship for six years, 1806-1812. Mother & Father Nature destroyed it in mere minutes with one of their earthquakes on December 8, 1812. Forty people died, all Native Americans attending mass and in the process of being converted to Christianity. I wonder why the almighty god would want to kill forty of his converts………….

Earthquakes also have fascinated me throughout my life so I went to find out more about this one. Records are poor (which is just one of the many reasons why I don’t take anything literally that is in the Bible; records from 200 years ago are poor but somehow records from 2,000 years ago are complete?). The earthquake involved here is called the Wrightwood Earthquake or, sometimes, the San Juan Capistrano Earthquake in recognition of the death toll.

While the exact location and size of the earthquake are unknown, evidence from sediments along the San Andreas Fault, as well as analysis of tree rings of pines growing near the fault, has led to the earthquake being identified as one along the Mojave segment of the San Andreas Fault, possibly resulting in as much as 106 miles of surface rupture, and a theorized epicenter near Wrightwood. The magnitude has been estimated at M_w 7.5.

The Great Stone Church was built completely of stone; ergo, its name. The earthquake caused the mortar to fail and the church collapsed. No surprise to me. Look at the stone—no rhyme or reason as to size and placement:

Here a stone, there a stone, make it big, make it small…. Each stone will conduct stresses differently, so while one stone might be great at absorbing stresses, another stone might be great at concentrating those stresses. And of the stone and mortar, the mortar will be the weakest part of the construction. Of course, I have the advantage of an extra 225 years of construction knowledge and experience….

The Southern California Earthquake Data Center states:

That even a magnitude 7.5 on the San Andreas fault could have such dire consequences on a structure as far away [about 80 miles] from the fault as the mission church seems unusual, but it was reported that the construction of the church was of dubious quality.

So now I’m wondering why this almighty god would let his people build a church using construction methods of dubious quality…………….

We moved to the boondocks!

So our live-in-the-sky experiment came to an end yesterday. It lasted 2 years and 3 months. For the first few months it was kind of neat to live high up but then the 45 stairs to get to the front door became burdensome. Sunrises from the home office were spectacular.

Sadly, though, there was no wildlife 50 feet up in the sky—no lizards, no snakes, no spiders, no bugs, no birds. Well, alright, one mourning dove did come to visit us in the 27 months we lived there.

Our new home is in the boondocks, which is kind of funny since the city of La Mesa had 60,00o people crammed into 9.1 square miles. Out here in the boondocks, we live in El Cajon (ka-hone), a city of 104,000 crammed into 14.48 square miles. So the population density actually is greater in El Cajon, 7,163 people per square mile, versus La Mesa’s 6,592.

Maybe it’s the outskirts, where we lived and live, that is the difference. A-ha! (not the group). Google Maps indicates that we don’t even live in El Cajon. That’s simply the post office that delivers our mail. Google Maps indicates that we live in Winter Gardens, which is a census-designated place in San Diego County. In other words, an unincorporated area. In other words, THE BOONDOCKS!

We’re at the end of a street, not a true cul-de-sac, but we only have one neighbor. The other three sides are hills. At night it is quiet quiet quiet. We kind of like it since the street we lived on in La Mesa was noisy noisy noisy, even with dual-pane windows. We also have a nice oversized 2-car garage. We haven’t had a nice garage since March 2007.

I don’t know who loves it best out here, me or Zoey the Cool Cat (ZCC). The old place was 684 square feet (we downsized too much) and the new place is 1,440 square feet. Our largest home was 3,984 square feet on 1.83 acres of land, too big for just two people. This new place feels just right for the queen and her staff of two.

ZCC has 14 low-sill windows where she can watch all the wildlife, and after 11 days here (hmmm, same number of days that Scaramucci was employed by Twitler………), she knows where the sunny spots are, the sunny windows, and, of course, the wildlife. There’s a difference between dawn, day, and dusk wildlife, so she has to go to different windows. There are a few billion rabbits, another billion ground squirrels, only a million fence lizards, and then birds of all types, with ravens and raptors prevailing. Sometimes the ground squirrels come to see ZCC.

Following are some pictures of the wildlife and, of course, the queen adjusting to her new palace. It’s all about the queen….

Common garden wolf spider found its way inside.
It was returned to the outside where it could become food for….

….California quail, the state bird.

I built a cat box for ZCC whereby she can go through a cat door
in the window and sit outside while still being protected.
This ground squirrel came up to see ZCC in her cat box,
which is the blurred white in the lower right.
They are just a couple of feet from each other.
ZCC helping me put together our new desks,
although she’s more interested in the tennis match
on our new 49″ 4K TV than she is actually helping me.

ZCC exploring the new digs.

ZCC helping me populate the bookshelves.

Like any cat, ZCC likes to help unpack things.

Once all the work is done, of course, one has to sleep,
and ZCC has lots of options for that vital task.

A post-modern triumph or a regrettable hodgepodge?

My husband earns money each day by working at Warwick’s at the San Diego International Airport. Warwick’s is a bookstore. Occasionally he brings home free books for me to read. Recently he brought home a pre-published proof of the new Dean Koontz book, “The Silent Corner.”

Koontz and his wife live in “Southern California.” In other words, he doesn’t want us to know exactly where, but I suspect it might be closer to San Diego than Los Angeles since the book takes place in San Diego County—Alpine, San Diego, and La Jolla, so far (I’m on page 74).

On page 33, Koontz calls our new San Diego Central Library (opened in September 2013) “a post-modern triumph or a regrettable hodgepodge.” That’s the first time I have ever heard of the new library being called anything except “beautiful” and synonyms for “beautiful.” Thus, I have to presume that Koontz considers it a regrettable hodgepodge.

Here are some pictures of the regrettable hodgepodge:

The Central Library building is 9 floors, but the sixth and seventh floors are accessible only to students, teachers, and others affiliated with E3 Civic High School, which according to sources is the only high school in the nation (probably the world) housed within a library. Imagine going to high school in a magnificent library. I want to live my life again….

The library cost $184.9 million, comprises 366,673 square feet, houses 2.6 million items, has a circulation of 7.2 million, and 6.6 million visitors each year. There is free WiFi at the Central Library and all 35 branch libraries; in fact, the San Diego Public Library was one of the first in the nation to provide free WiFi at all locations. It also houses the second largest collection of baseball memorabilia in the United States. The dome on top is claimed to be the fourth largest in America and the sixth largest in the world.

Here’s a picture of the old library which served from 1954 to 2013:

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Out & About—Cruise historic Highway 80

More sights from my driving tour of Old Highway 80 through East San Diego County.

The Alpine Town Hall (two pictures below) was built in 1899 and served through 1999. Alpine began in the 1870s as a local center for ranching. The building currently is owned by the Alpine Woman’s Club which pretty much has to missions: to preserve the town hall and to provide scholarships to Alpine graduating seniors heading to college.

The Descanso Junction Restaurant is quite popular. I was there around 8:00 a.m., and it was packed. Descanso Junction’s original name was Bohemia Grove, and the original name of the restaurant was El Nido. That’s my car at the left parked next to the truck.

The Descanso Town Hall was built in 1898. It still is a popular venue for local events and is one of the few community halls still operating in the mountains.

The Perkins Store has been in operation since 1875. The store in the picture below was built in 1939 after the original store burned.

The old Guatay Service Station dates from the 1920s but is now just a shell of its former self. The round metal shed was the service bay.

Behind the service station ruins sits a cool stone house, also built in the 1920s and still being used as a private residence.

The immensely popular Frosty Burger in Pine Valley occupies another 1920s-era service station. I can highly recommend Frosty Burger. It can get cold in the high desert mountains, and Frosty Burger has only outdoor seating, so take a jacket or plan on eating in your warm car.

The Pine Valley Inn was the main business in Pine Valley for many years. The main dining hall (right in the picture below) is still used as a restaurant, and the rental cabins, although remodeled and updated, still are in use. One of the rental cabins can be seen at the left.

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Out & About—I guess they are planning for a population boom

The first time I went to the Mojave Desert was during the Summer of 1973 when I went with two friends (Jaime and Larry) on a tour of the United States west of the Mississippi River. Since we lived in South Texas, a desert in its own right, the Mojave didn’t really interest me, at least not near as much as San Francisco, Oakland (home of the Raiders and A’s), Los Angeles, and San Diego. The only reason we were going there was to visit Death Valley, which has the lowest point in the lower states and the highest recorded temperature of 134°F (July 10, 1913).

Now that I am a couple of years older, I have a greater appreciation for the deserts, finding them quite interesting. For some reason, though, they still are quite hot, so i don’t visit them often.

In early February, I was in the western reaches of the Mojave Desert tracking trains that have to get through the desert to points east. Here are a few pictures of what I found in the Mojave Desert:

California Aqueduct & Lake Palmdale

Seems kind of odd to build an open-air aqueduct in one of the hottest places on Earth.

The desert seemed to be one huge dumping ground. Trash was everywhere, and I’m not talking about litter. I’m talking about huge items abandoned as trash. The beauty of the Mojave Desert was ruined in so many places.

Winfield’s Custom Shop had the most interesting advertising sign.

When Winfield says “custom,” I think he means it. Check out this custom police car:

Wind farms were everywhere. Many people find them ugly but I find them strangely fascinating and beautiful.

Notice the snow-capped mountains in the picture above. This is the high desert, and although it gets extraordinarily hot and has little precipitation, the mountain peaks are high enough that they can get snow on them in the winter.

I saw Edwards Air Force Base where the Space Shuttle would land when bad weather prevented a Florida landing at Cape Canaveral. More snow-capped mountains in the distance.

My little hometown of Kingsville TX had numbered streets all the way up to 17th Street, paved with concrete and asphalt, and houses lining both sides of the street. Out in the Mojave Desert, it’s a little different.

You might be inclined to think, “Well, obviously it’s a new street.” Doesn’t matter. Every street from 1st Street East to 233rd Street East looked exactly like that. I guess they are planning for a population boom. I don’t think it’s coming. I did not bother trying to find 233rd Street West.

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Halls of History—The Coogan Ranch

When I was touring Old Highway 80 through the boondocks in East San Diego County, I came across the Coogan Ranch, or what remains of it. Here’s the gate to the ranch:

I stopped to read the paragraph and found that it was the ranch of movie star Jackie Coogan back in the early 1930s. Although I recognized the name, I couldn’t place him so I figured he was just slightly before my time. Nonetheless, I took two more pictures showing the old utility poles to the house and a lone foundation wall of the house:

My research for this blog post found that Jackie Coogan’s movie career started well before my time, in 1921 with Charlie Chaplain in the movie “The Kid.”

Picture from Wikipedia

According to resources, the Coogan Ranch was mapped as early as 1931, which would make Jackie a mere 17 years old, so I’m not sure that he owned the ranch himself. The same source, however, as well as others, say that Jackie Coogan did, in fact, own it. Sources say that he earned an estimated $3-$4 million as a child star, so it is possible that he bought it when he was 17, which I believe is the earliest that one can buy real estate legally.

In May 1935, at the age of 20, Jackie was the only survivor of a car crash in eastern San Diego County that killed his father; his best friend, 19-year-old actor Junior Durkin; their ranch foreman Charles Jones; and actor and writer Robert J. Horner. They were returning from a day of dove hunting in Mexico. Jackie’s father was driving when their car was forced off the mountain highway near Pine Valley by an oncoming vehicle, rolling down an embankment.

In October 1935, when Jackie turned 21, he found that almost his entire earnings had been spent by his mother and stepfather, Arthur Bernstein, on fur coats, diamonds and other jewelry, and expensive cars. Coogan’s mother and stepfather claimed that Jackie had enjoyed himself and simply thought he was playing before the camera. His mother insisted, “No promises were ever made to give Jackie anything”, and claimed he “was a bad boy.” Coogan sued them in 1938, but after his legal expenses, he received just $126,000 of the $250,000 which remained of his earnings.

The legal battle focused attention on child actors and resulted in the 1939 enactment of the California Child Actor’s Bill, often referred to as the “Coogan Law” or the “Coogan Act.” It required that a child actor’s employer set aside 15% of the earnings in a trust (called a Coogan Account), and specified the actor’s schooling, work hours, and time-off.

Remember earlier I said that his movie career started well before my time? Well, it also went well into my time. Some might remember Jackie Coogan as Uncle Fester in 1964-66 television series, “The Addams Family.”

Picture from Wikipedia

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