The Ganns MoveTo California By William Elmore Gann Disneyland opens for the first time in 1955, and Bill and Olga Schools, my grandparents are there to meet Walt and see his magic Kingdom. They are impressed and decide, along with most of the other out-of-state visitors to Never-Never land that day, to move to California. For Bill and Olga, home is a Mississippi River farm in Minnesota. I was born across the river from that farm in La Crosse, Wisconsin. But two years earlier my folks had moved to a rural slum outside Dallas because, I assume, they wanted my sisters and I to grow up in Tobacco Road style poverty. As it is, in two short years I've lost my "Gees so, golly, gosh" Minnesota accent and replaced it with a "Boy Hoddy, way out yonder" Texas drawl. With Magic Kingdom stardust still in their eyes, Bill and Olga come to Texas to rescue us from God know what we would have become. I'm only 9 years old and wear boots, hat and a Long Horn belt buckle, for example. My parents are working 16 hours a day to grub out a living from a little country store called "Y'all Come." They sell fish bait, groceries, and beer in an area ironically called "California Crossing where country people are too poor to pay their bills. Somehow Bill and Olga talk Jack and Shirley, my parents, into leaving our rural Texas existence for a better life in California. The little store called Y'all Come is last seen in the rear-view mirror of our Ford pickup as we leave towing an enormous trailer my father made from plywood and scrap iron. My mother kept making references to a book called "The Grapes of Wrath." Bill and Olga follow in a 51 Ford. The First destination, however, is not California, but to Minnesota. There, our family's 160 acres of priceless river-front farm land is sold for next to nothing, and farm buildings, stuffed with generations of valuable heirlooms, are abandoned. The enormous trailer and truck are packed to the brim with useless items that would later fetch $15 at a California garage sale. My sisters and I ride with our grandparents and hear wondrous tales of a land of sunshine, movie stars, and Mickey Mouse. Mary, who at 11 is two years older, seems to side with my twin sister Bonnie on the whole notion of moving to California. I don't believe any of it, and feel we must be making a terrible mistake. I keep saying, "I'm a country hick, I don't wanna live way out yonder in no California." Sill no one listens and we follow Burma-Shave signs into a setting sun along Route 66 and read, "IT GAVE, MC DONALD, THAT NEEDED CHARM, HELLO HOLLYWOOD, GOOD-BYE FARM, BURMA-SHAVE." There are other signs and omens along the way. At a roadside stop called Jerry's Dinner, for example, my mother and grandmother are going to make a driver switch. Except Shirley forgets to give Olga the car keys. Jack and Shirley drive on in the truck for an hour or so before they realize that the car following them isn't Bill, Olga and the kids in the old Ford. Thinking we must have had a terrible accident, they ditch the trailer beside the road, and roar back to save us. They find us stuffed on Jerry's free cherry pie. The café owner feeling sorry for the abandoned children and old folks, gave us all we could eat. There will be times in the years that follow where we children, especially me, give my father reason to regret going back to get us that night. Dad discovers next that moving a family across the country can be quite a handful. It seems in his haste to unhook the trailer, he allowed it to roll back and become bogged down in the sand. My mother, meanwhile, had to have a bowel movement and found the trailer provided necessary shelter. The tongue of the trailer, after all, makes an excellent support. This, however, leaves a rather large pile of his wife's droppings for James Delton Gann (known among his friends as Jack) to find while feeling around in the dark to hook a tow chain to the trailer. "You know me," Jack often says in reference to the colorful language he learned as a steelworker. "I normally wouldn't say 'crap' if I had a mouthful." While that may be so, this night no one thought of carrying extra water for Jack to wash his hand with. Shirley and Olga are in total agreement that, as the driver, the whole fiasco is his fault anyway. Jack cleans his hand in the desert sand, and considers the trailer full of his family's worldly possessions. It's bogged to the axle, and he breaks a chain on the first attempt to free it. He finds the limit to his normal good humor. We children have cherry-pie stomachaches, and grandfather's weak heart starts to cause chest pains. When an enormous sandstorm begins to blow, Jack speaks as if he has a mouthful of something foul. All the while Jack struggles to free the trailer, the sandstorm builds to dustbowl proportions. By the time Gann family is finally back on Route 66, the contents of the enormous trailer have become saturated with dirt. "Now Jack," my mother says to all my father's fuming, "Things will get better when we get to California. Right now it's just that I feel like we are in a scene from 'The Grapes of Wrath.'" He drives on keeping his right hand off the wheel. Grandpa Bill drives and hunches over the wheel to see the white line in the sandstorm. "Golly, we used to call this highway 'The Mother Road,'" he says as the terrible wind blows us through Kingman and Oatman. At Topock the Red Rock Bridge carries us across the Colorado River. The border guard confiscates our bag of fruit and vegetables at the border. "Welcome to California," He says as he smiles sarcastically at more Okies and takes our precious fruit. "Now problem," Jack says smiling sweetly, and shakes his hand with a sand-cleaned hand. I notice the magical land of milk and honey looks the same as West Texas. At first light, the wind lets up a bit, and sisters Mary and Bonnie look for movie stars as we cruse through Needles. We pass little houses with brown dirt yards and a milkman waves as we go by. I think of a green Minnesota farm, along the Mississippi River, and wonder about my parent's sanity. Texas country life seems like paradise to me compared to our first impression of California. I look out the window as strange, flat-gray towns called Essex, Amboy, Ludlow, and Newberry Springs pass in dull precession. Barstow and Victorville are little more than roadside diners and motels with giant plaster cowboys and rearing horses out front. The temperature rises with the sun, and we pass a man with a beet-red face who stands alone in the desert. Dad insists we go back and get him, as he can't believe someone be out in such heat with no hat or water. He's blond , about 20-years old, looks like he's about cry, carries a bedroll, and an alarm clock. Children are shifted so he sits between "The Twins" as everyone collectively refers to Bonnie and I. After gulping quarts of water, the man holds his clock, stairs ahead, and says nothing. In the eyes of a 9-year-old boy, California looks hot and hopeless, like our silent passenger, who I study like a strange desert creature. Candy bars melt in the car's back window. The smell of stale peanuts and sticky pop bottles blend with the wild odor of the quiet man. My dad makes several attempts to establish where the man is going but he says nothing. We try to ignore him but the car fills with his presence and the ticking of his clock. We try to ignore him try to play license plate games, but roadside shaving cream signs speak our hearts, "THE BEARDED DEVIL, IS FORCED, TO DWELL, IN THE ONLY PLACE, WHERE THEY DON'T SELL, BURMA-SHAVE." "Standing out in that heat without a hat or nothing, must have cooked his brains," Dad allows, and stops to buy him pink lemon sodas, which he quietly accepts, and gulps down, in single slugs. This goes on while the gas station attendant, Dad, and Grandfather gather around the red-faced traveler trying to figure him out. "You should take the mountain route," the gas station man advises as his solution. "In just 35 miles, you'll all be cool as a cucumber." As if transported from hell into an alpine heaven, we pull the enormous trailer out of 110-degree desert, and into cool pine-scented air of the San Bernardino Mountains. We stop to enjoy the climate change at a roadside overlook, and watch as the quiet desert spirit walks off clutching his clock, never once looking back. "Well golly, maybe he didn't know how to talk to begin with, Olga allows. "Geese so," Bill agrees. "I think he's just queer. There's a lot of odd folks coming to California now days," Grandpa adds directing our attention to a view of paradise. I see mountains tumble down to golden foothills and green fields. Small towns and orange groves cover the 80 miles to the ocean. Through crystal skies we see low light catching the distant Pacific, and I begin to understand why we have come. We descend the mountains and see the green orange groves and lush irrigated fields of Orange County. We stay for a while with relatives in the little village of Orange, at the very heart of the citrus-growing country. My folks start looking for a house and work, there seems to be plenty of both. Orange County is a scattering of quaint farming towns that have just started to boom near the Southern California coast. One day we visit the Carson family, hometown friends who had moved from Minnesota a few years earlier. I hear them offer to help us acquire land near Capistrano Beach. I burst out the door of their ocean-view home and bounce with joy hearing this wonderful news. The salt air fills my lungs, and my spirit says, "yes, yes this is a marvelous place." I soar over the golden hills and stop on a dramatic cliff overlooking the ocean. This, I think, would be as good if not better than our Mississippi River farm. But I get back to the house and hear the adults talking crazy talk, and find my jubilation had been premature. "Jack, it's too gosh-darn cold and damp down at the beach," Shirley allows. "We don't need a lot of land to look after neither. We should get one of them modern homes they're building round Anaheim." We had set our sights on Disneyland, and Disneyland by gosh, it was going to be. We pass the old mission at San Juan and I keep trying to come up with words to make my folks understand. "Don't you think it's better here," I ask from the back seat. "More sunshine in Anaheim," Dad explains, as we pass through a picturesque art colony called Laguna Beach. An old man all dressed in red with long, wild-flowing hair and beard comes up to our car at a stoplight and shakes my Dad's hand (he'd washed it by then). He looks like a tall skinny Santa Clause. "Hello there Minnesota!" he says with a glance at Grandpa's license plates. He stands in an umpire-like stance, pointing his finger as if he were calling a strike. "Folks round here call me 'The Welcomer' and I like to welcome y' all to Laguna Beach, the best place in California." "Don't you think he's right Dad?" I ask, looking out the back window as we leave Laguna Beach and head inland to settle near the Happiest Place on Earth. "Shouldn't we buy some land down here near the water?" "No son," he explains. "The beach is a good place to visit, and it will always be here. We're going to live inland where we belong, and there aren't so many crazy people." So we buy a pink tract house in a blue-collar neighborhood of Anaheim, where not one single family living there is actually from California. People there speak with accents from all over the United Sates, work in factories, and drive Chevys and Fords. We live at 1457 Chevy Chase Drive, and our back yard faces a dead orange grove. One day the naked trees are ripped out, bulldozed into twisted piles and burnt. A dusty, noisy highway project begins and takes years finish. The road building is done in time for me to grow up with the constant roar of passing cars and trucks a few feet from our back door. My entire youth takes place against a backdrop of Riverside Freeway noise. With traffic rattling the glass of my bedroom window, I'd lay awake on warm California nights, and allow that my parents had done all right by us. It seemed then to have been a good idea to leave Texas. As for the Minnesota farm, well everyone I grew up with had left farms and homes to be in the California sun. Disneyland cost a dollar to visit, and Knotts Berry Farm is free. Wide-open freeways take us to morning in the desert, or snow-covered mountains in the sun. I grow up where I can surf and snow ski in the same weekend. We can be in Mexico, and know another culture in less than two hours. Most of all, just like father promised, the beach is always there and only a few miles away. Sometimes dad takes us down just to see the sun on the water when the day is done. |
