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Ojai at war
Guest commentary by Harlan Wygant
Since I was only 10 years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor
in 1941, I'm always amazed that my memory of those times is still
so vivid. I can still remember what we were doing on that Sunday,
when the radio blared out the news. The congregation of our church
could talk of nothing else when we gathered for evening services
at the First Baptist Church and the minister did his best to
calm our nerves.
My family lived in Ojai at the time and it was an ideal town
for young people - small in size but with a big heart. The ensuing
war effort pulled the town's citizens together in a common cause
that may never be repeated in our lifetimes.
At Nordhoff Elementary School, teachers got the kids involved
in the effort by planting their own victory gardens. We responded
to air raid warnings by leaving our classrooms and assembling
on the soccer fields, which, in hindsight, may not have been
the safest place to be standing in an air raid. Every Friday,
kids brought their dimes to school to buy war bonds. We even
had a scrap metal drive. The kids scoured neighborhoods, looking
for anything metal that we could haul to school. We organized
teams to create some competition. I remember how envious we were
when Ray Price's father hauled in an entire truckload of pipe.
Needless to say, Ray won that contest. I think the reward was
a war bond.
Our entire town contributed to the war effort. At Nordhoff High
School almost every boy who was eligible to enlist left school
as soon as he was old enough. The principal even allowed some
boys to graduate early so they could join the service. We had
no sports teams, no proms, and graduation ceremonies involved
mostly girls. We lost several of our boys in combat and at least
one boy, "Skeets" Hayes, died in the Bataan Death March.
The whole town mourned when any of our citizens became a casualty.
Households displayed "Gold Star" flags in their window
to signify that someone from that family was in the service.
Who can forget the rationing? Gas, tires, shoes, sugar, coffee,
chocolate, nylons, butter, meat and many other items were only
available if you had a ration stamp for it. I even remember we
couldn't get bubble gum for a long time. We all rushed to Boardman's
Drugstore one day, when we heard that the store received a shipment.
A long line formed at the store and slowly we worked our way
in to get our allotted two pieces. It was Fleers Gum with a little
comic strip inside the wrapper. I put one piece in my mouth while
I read the comics, and became so engrossed that I swallowed my
gum. What a tragedy - it still had flavor in it! I hoarded the
second piece for many weeks to savor the memory.
We saved tin foil, string and even fat; things needed in production
of our war machinery. They used rendered fat in making gunpowder.
Our local butcher shop collected the donations and once a week
sent a load to the collection point in Ventura.
Ojai even sacrificed its country club to the Army. For over a
year, the National Guard unit from Omaha, Neb., took over our
world-famous golf course and turned it into a training camp.
They pitched tents all along the fairways and dug trenches and
latrines into the lush greens. There was a shooting range created
in the creek bed near Lyons. Several friends and I used to sell
Liberty Magazine to the GIs stationed there and local teenage
girls were thrilled to have young men around town again. The
GIs taught us some of their close order drills and we would practice
with our Red Ryder BB guns. In 1943, those troops went to Alaska
to defend the Aleutian Islands from a Japanese invasion. They
also helped build the Al-Can highway.
Most of our citizens were able to assist in the war effort in
their own way. Many of the men volunteered as air raid wardens
or airplane spotters. Each night we put heavy, black curtains
over our windows. When the air raid sirens wailed, the wardens
walked the neighborhoods to make sure no light leaked out to
guide an enemy to our home. Spotter stations were built in the
foothills to watch for incoming planes.
The war came much closer to home when a Japanese submarine fired
shells at the oil fields above Goleta. There was another scary
moment when two American fighter planes collided over Ojai during
manuevers and one of them crashed into an orange orchard on the
east side. Most of the town rushed out to observe the crash sight
and watch the pilot float to the ground on his parachute.
It may sound wild and crazy if you were not there, but it was
a great time to grow up. Everyone was dedicated to winning the
war. People really cared. We sacrificed our loved ones, our talents,
our courage to one common goal: Keeping America strong. We are
still proud of our efforts. I wonder if today's citizens can
recreate that spirit and support the nation's efforts.
Harlan Wygant is a former resident of
Ojai, a graduate of Nordhoff Class of 1950, and presently resides
in Bakersfield.
Fair play
Bret Bradigan, OVN publisher
With opening day behind us, another season's worth of memories
are now being constructed with every pitch, every inning, every
game. Baseball, however, to paraphrase the Saturday Night Live's
Chico Escuela, has not been very good to me lately. It is a harsh
mistress - demanding and fickle.
In the warm haze of my memory, it is my 15th birthday. That day
dawned with a summer storm that brought in lightning and canceled
tournament play for the Babe Ruth regional championships.
Within hours, though, the sun split open the dark clouds and
sent plumes of steam rising from the pools on the macadam roads.
Several teammates and I had gone to the St. Rose of Lima church's
lawn fete and were relieved, actually, to not be playing ball.
It was a long season, and the pressures of playing so far into
the playoffs had taken their toll. So we fought off the disappointment
and reluctantly put on our game faces when our coach, an enormously
obese man with a brushcut and a candy-apple red '67 Chevy Malibu
convertible, hunted us down at the lawn fete as we were trying
to flirt, in our excruciatingly inept way, with a couple of girls
our chronological age but much our seniors in maturity. These
were the very same girls who a few years earlier we had chased
away from the bus stop with a dead frog stuck on a stick.
The fatigue of the long season and my desire to show up well
against an implacable foe created the conditions for the best
game I have ever pitched. My fastball had snap, and my knuckleball,
well, I was one of the few 15-year-olds around who could throw
a knuckleball, let alone with any consistency. That day, I struck
out 17 batters, many of them on called strikes, dazzled into
immobility by the knuckler's unfamiliar flutter. The game ran
into extra innings, as we twice had bases loaded with no outs,
and failed to score. All told, I ended up pitching an 11-inning
two-hitter against the team that earlier beat us 10-0. And, charmed
as their season was, they ended up winning 1-0 on one infield
hit, a stolen base and an error. This game was the only bump
on their way to their second consecutive state championship.
Few of my victories on the mound were as sweet and satisfying
as that loss.
Contrast that with my previous outing on the mound, this past
Sunday, when I couldn't even make it through the fourth inning,
giving up three hits and four walks before giving myself the
hook. I walked off the mound, shaking my head at my obstinate
refusal to believe the accumulation of evidence that my best
days were behind me, and that, absent the shimmering glaze of
selective memory, even those best days weren't all that good.
And still, for every such moment, others surface, unbidden, to
balance it out. I remember playing in the 100-degree plus dust
of a barren field in a colonia of Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico
when a hard-hit line drive busted the stitching on my glove.
Not only did I have the presence of mind to make the play, but
one of our fans was a leathersmith, who in 15 minutes had my
treasured glove better, even, than new, with new stitching and
a tailor-shaped webbing. Or perhaps the most gratifying recent
moment in baseball history, was two years ago watching from third
base as my brother, 53 years old, pitched a complete game victory
in our annual family reunion showdown against our archrivals,
who had their own 50-something-year-old pitcher, a local legend
who had once been a major league bonus baby back in the 1960s.
Not only had my brother had a heart attack and quadruple-bypass
surgery, had he batted his weight, he'd be a Hall of Fame shoe-in.
It was our first win in seven years against these guys.
My first baseball memories are the best, though, as time has
a way of distilling away the dross of confusion and conflict
and leaving only the essential truth of the moment. My grandfather,
not long then for this world, would give us kids nickels for
every foul ball we chased down, as he and my father and multitude
of uncles would suit up every Sunday for town-team games. And
after the games, the other grandkids and I would parcel out those
hard-won nickels for crisp cones of ice cream. To this day, the
taste of soft-serve ice cream does for me what madeleines did
for Proust; it summons forth a world of time regained.
This year, this team, I had hoped my role would be to play third
base or first, perhaps pitch an inning or two now and again,
and work with the younger players on their pickoff moves or base-stealing
techniques. Instead, I have found myself - not even a has-been,
but a never-was-much - in the role of no. 2 pitcher. And for
someone who spends most of their time among the monochromatic
and older-skewed people of Ojai, it is refreshing and instructive
to be, as as a middle-aged white man, in the decided minority
in race, as well as in age. It reminds me of my years as a GI
in more ways than one.
Despite breaking a finger, being hit by a pitch and spraining
muscles I never knew I had even before that first game, it was
too late to quit. The season has started and by showing up in
the first place, I had made a commitment to the other 14 guys
on the squad. And it is a good team, of good men from all backgrounds.
And that is why we do it, we aging warriors of the weekend. We
get their backs, because they get ours. Baseball, like life,
is not just about showing up, but about showing up for each other.
© 2003 The Ojai Valley News
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