Cholla Sizemore’s booklet on the Argus Cemetery is back from the printers and ready for sale! This is an order form you can save to your computer and print out. These will be available for sale at the Museum. For more information about this book please go to: http://www.news-ridgecrest.com/news/story.pl?id=0000002223 and http://www.ridgecrestca.com/article/20140227/NEWS/140229596
AM radio was an important part of my life in Trona in the 40s and 50s. Television made to Trona by way of cable in the last half of the 50s. That was about 10 years after the rest of the country had TV. Radio and movies at the Trona theater were the two choices we had for modern entertainment until we finally had TV. Once Trona had TV there wasn’t enough people going to the theater to keep it open. Sadly it had to close.
KFI was a 50,000 watt NBC affiliate station that still broadcasts out of LA. It was the only station that could be reliably heard during the day in Trona. My mother would listen to the soap operas it broadcast while she did her housework. My favorite soap was “Just Plain Bill“. As I remember it every time the lead actor’s contract came up for renewal Bill would die. Then as the ratings would drop they had figure out an inventive way to bring Bill back from the dead. KFI was the station of the Bob Hope show, Dragnet, Amos and Andy, The Lone Ranger, Bob and Ray, and Fiber McGee. KNX was the CBS station in Los Angeles. It carried Burns and Allen, and Jack Benny and others that I no longer remember. The problem was that KNX would only come in at night or very weakly at sunrise and sunset. At night, KSL the 50,000 watt station in Salt Lake City was actually, a better source for CBS programs than KNX. As TV became more popular in the rest of the country radio drama started to slowly disappear.
During the last half of 50’s when we were all teenagers interested in rock and roll XEAK, “the mighty 690“, a rock and roll station came barreling out of Mexico and could be heard in Trona during the day most of the time and at night there wasn’t any radio signal that was louder. With 70,000 watts of power it covered all of southern California and beyond. The station was in Mexico but the studios were in the LA area. Every night. It would stop broadcasting rock for a half hour and do a hundred “Hail Mary’s” as if it had to do penance for playing rock. XEAK signed off in 1961. Mighty 690 was a big hit with Trona teens of the era.
That was the days of tube radios and early transistor radios. Many people are predicting that AM radio is going to go completely away and be replaced completely with internet radio and podcasts. That may very well happen but if it does it will be a sad future that has been brought about by poor stewardship and perhaps political corruption in the FCC that has allowed radio station ownership to be trusted to a few corporations that are only interested squeezing all the profit they can out the stations they bought. They have no concern for the future or the public interest. Radio could stay innovative but that would require investment and commitment. The industry has been so run into the ground it almost has to fail before anyone can hope to put it together again. If there is any hope at all for it.
When I started this post I was just trying to share memories but somehow the path I took ended taking a swing into the political realm. Hey, sometimes these things happen. I grew up with radio. I am still a big fan of radio even though 80% of what I now listen to are podcasts downloaded from the internet.
Update: Jess passed away March 29, 2023. The following was put together in 2014:
No, Jess didn’t die. Unfortunately that is how most of my fellow alumni make it to these pages. Maybe this will be a new trend for me, creating posts about living people.
I’ve been wanting to write something about Jess for a long time, ever since he sent me the short book he put together about living on Mojave Street. I put it off and then almost forgot but then yesterday Linda Monroe reminded me about what a great story Jess would make. I guess that is the problem. I’m not sure I can do his story justice. I’m going to do my best and come back and revise it when the mood strikes me.
Jess graduated from Trona High School in 1959. His accomplishments make me feel very humble about my own life.
The information attached to the video above and the video say it better than I ever could:
An instructor of life modeling and 3-D design at SDSU for more than 25 years, Jess Dominguez’s work can be seen all over campus.
The War Memorial at Aztec Green, the statue of President Black near the Old Quad and a relief at the Lipinsky Tower are all his creations. He is volunteering his time and talent for the Coryell bust project.
“I want to keep doing things for the university as long as I can contribute,” he said, “and this one is very special.”
Last year, Dominguez sculpted a bust of football coach Don Coryell. (http://universe.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscen…)
Dominguez said sculpture is intended to be more representational than literal. It should capture a subject’s essence more than a literal likeness that, for example, a figure in a wax museum might represent.
“It’s not supposed to look like a death mask, it’s supposed to look like a sculpture with tool marks and imperfections,” he said.
Before Dominguez casts a final version of a sculpture he tries to have family members or someone close to the subject approve the work.
Jess has come a long way from that house that was on the other side of the tracks on Mojave Street where his family once lived. When I talked to Jess he reminded me of the salted jelly candy that my dad would bring home from work. I didn’t know it but Jess told me that AP&CC would give the candy to the workers. He said that some of the men in the plant would throw their candy over the fence to the kids that were playing on Mojave Street. If I had known that I might have gotten to know Jess much sooner. I loved that salty candy.
Actually I was forbidden by my mother to visit Mojave Street. At that time racism still had a strong hold on the minds of many Americans, including my mother. It wasn’t so much racism as a lack of understanding.
Jess’s book about Trona tells about how his father would find remnants of grain in boxcars that they would sweep up and use as feed for their chickens and how his mother would pass food through a hole in the plant fence so her husband could have a warm lunch at work. Or maybe that was from when we talked?
He also gives credit to his art teacher Lois Pratt for encouraging him to continue with his art. Jess is making a bronze plaque now for the Centennial which will incorporate high points in Trona, like Austin Hall and Valley Wells.
I didn’t know Jess very well. The Dominguez that I knew and that I looked up to at the time was Jess’s older brother, Ernesto. Ernesto was one of my brother’s best friends and since I always looked up to my older brother he and and all his friends were heros in my eyes.
I reserve the right to come back and revise this as I feel the need and I can truly say I’m sorry for postponing writing this for so long.
For more about Jess read:
Lee Shimmin,Leroy Reece, Gilmore, and Richard (Larsen) Orr were involved in building a cave. It started on a sand dune on the lake side of the highway going from Trona to Valley Wells east of Pioneer Point. We had an iron pipe some 2×4’s stretched between the sides of sand and holly bushes holding up the pipe, then we placed cardboard on top with sand thrown on top to hold the cardboard down tight so it would not be blown away. Gilmore, Reece and Orr went in and I followed into the room we built inside. Richard Orr went out the tunnel entrance and I followed him. He got out but I did not and the pipe hit my head and I was covered with sand as the cave collapsed. Lucky for me my head was out enough to breathe. But, the steel pipe and sands weight pinned me so I could not move.
Richard went out to get help and contacted a graveyard [shift] foreman at the Point and my mother Mary Shimmin. She came ASAP with a shovel and tried to leverage the pipe off the shovel to no avail. The pipe was raised above my head and slipped, only to land on my shoulder and severed a nerve that paralyzed my arm. There were no bones broken, however my arm was limp. I could only move my fingers and could not write. I was in the hospital near Austin Square and my roommates included Walter Austin who taught me my multiplication tables and coached me to move my arm to no avail. My concerned parents took me to Los Angles near MacArthur Park where a neurologist examined me and put me into an “Airplane Splint”. The splint lasted into the summer of sixth grade when after swimming and doing physical therapy I recovered. They had to pump sand from my lungs and try all kinds of modern techniques during the recovery time. The splint was used in polio patients for their recoveries.
Well, needless to say I survived due to Richard Orr.
The story above is told by Lee Shimmins, class of 1957, in an email to my brother, Joel, who I had written to find out what he could tell me about this story. Lee says he was in the 6th grade at the time and was the school superintendent’s son. Counting backwards this incident must have happened about 1951.
A few days ago Ernie Kraut wrote a note asking about this incident that how this post came about . After being reminded that it was Lee, Ernie wrote: “We were in the 5th grade I think and in the temporary buildings at school. Lee had his arm on a support that held his forearm and bicep up in the air even with his shoulder and the elbow at a right angles.” LeRoy Reece told Joel that he also ran to the Point and brought back help. I’m not sure who Gilmore is but there was a Sue Gilmore who is now Sue Halstead. She was in Lee’s 1957 class.
Digging caves was a common thing for Trona kids to do at that time. It probably started with the the first kids in the valley and probably still goes on today.
Paul Mock, class of 1958, also dug a cave during this same time period in the lot behind our house. Perhaps he was inspired by Lee’s cave and the self confidence that he could build a safer cave that would not cave in. Mr. Mock took one look at it, and made Paul fill the hole in but promised to help build another one that was properly braced so it couldn’t collapse and he did follow through on his promise and the cave was built. It lasted several years. Someday I’ll write a post about the secret cave that went back deep into the mountain of the Point of Rocks (Ali Baba’s cave).
Trona Bloody Trona is a book that was recently published about the 1970 strike. Linda Monroe emailed me and told me about it. If you are from Trona you should read this book.
I will never think of Trona in the same way again. Kerr McGee changed Trona. The 1970 strike changed Trona. Time changed Trona. My memories of Trona are childhood memories of wonderful teachers, Austin Hall, the club house, the sables and the fish pond at the railway office. I really don’t want the images of Trona this book has put into my head.
In 1970 I was working in San Bernardino and apparently I was so busy living my own life that I was barley aware of the strike in Trona. I can remember visiting my parents in Trona a short while after the strike was over. We sat in my mothers kitchen on Argus Ave. and I listened to them and my brothers talk about the things that happened during the strike. Some of the stories they told were different versions of the stories Paul Abrams tells about in his book. They were different versions of the stories that were on the news during the strike.
One of the stories we talked about while sitting at my mother’s kitchen was the fire at Zimmerman’s Lumber. I had forgotten all about the fire until recently and was doing research for a story I wanted to write about the stables. Someone I asked about the stables mentioned a fire in the barn. I wrote to Mary Bermani to ask her what she knew about the fire. Well, that was the wrong thing for me to do. Her memories were about the fire I had forgotten. The fire that changed her father’s and her families lives.
There were many families that lost all they had before the strike was over in spite of what this book implies. The strikers were sold out by their union and all I can say is that if corporations were people Kerr-McGee would have died and gone to hell.
I know that most of those that were involved have forgiven and forgotten. That is the way Trona people are. I also know that there will be some with long memories that will never forget or forgive. I am a big believer that forgiveness is very important but I also know that it is something that I often find hard to do.
I see Paul Henry Abram as the hero he makes himself out to be in this book. He wrote a good book. I enjoyed reading it. My only regret is that it may tear a scab off a wound that that will never totally heal.
I am going to tell you a story that nobody cares about and makes no difference anyway.
In 1961 and 1962 I worked in #1 and #2 pan rooms. This little story is about the Three Stage Evaporator Units that were in #1 and #2 pan rooms. Originally they were in South America used for making sugar. They were cast iron pieces bolted together to make a ball sitting on a cone like an ice cream cone.
They were disassembled in South America, put on ship and brought to Trona where they were reassembled and made potash, borax and soda ash for the rest of their lives. The only problem was cast iron has to be heated or cooled evenly or it will crack. They had to wash these things out every two weeks and try as they might to avoid it eventually they would have a crack.
There might be a way to weld cast iron now, but in 1920 thru 1960 you would have to find someone to sew cast iron up. In 1960 they were down to one guy in the U.S. and maybe the world who knew how to do it and he was getting old. The cast iron was about 1 ½ “ thick. The old guy would drill a hole on each side of the crack and drive a thing that looked a big staple into holes. He would follow the crack putting a staple every inch or so until the crack ran out.
This man was about 80 years old and they had to send another man in with the old guy to make sure that he didn’t pass out or die. They had already built unit #3 out of steel to solve the cracking problem. They knew that if they didn’t replace the cast iron evaporators soon that they wouldn’t be able to repair them so they started building unit #4 which was big enough to replace both #1 and #2 units. By 1963 unit #4 was operational and the cracking problem was solved.
The picture at the beginning of this post is the triple effect evaporator in Pan Room #1.
Alfred De Ropp Jr., the son for the president of the American Trona Company, was a research Engineer in Trona in 1918. At that time he wrote and article about the evaporators and how they operated. It was published in 1918 in Chemical & Metallurgical Engineering, Volume 19 edited by Eugene Franz Roeber and Howard Coon Parmelee. The Journal is available from Google Book by clicking on the link above.
The tenth edition of the American Fertilizer Handbook published in 1917 mentions the evaporator house (Pan Room) in a short article that was written before the evaporator houses were operational. It says:
“The evaporator house at Trona is a steel structure 109 feet high, and the boilers will have 2,000 horsepower. The spray pond for cooling condenser water is built with reinforced concrete. A reinforced concrete chimney, 150 feet high and 9 feet in diameter in the clear on top, tanks a crystallizing vats, triple effect evaporators and a traveling crane for the evaporating building are features of the equipment.”
Click here to see a Diagram of the Evaporators in Pan House 1 and 2.
Location of Pan Rooms
Pan Room #3 Evaporator
You must be an old timer if you can remember Trona’s Coke machines. I don’t know why but the seemed to attach young boys like like a magnet. There was something magical about a machine that could dispense such a wonderful product. I still remember what it sounds like when it was dropping into the opening. The fact that it was a machine and that we were boy probably had a lot to do with the magic.
I still remember the taste of my first six ounce vending machine Coke in a glass bottle. Today’s Cokes and Pepis don’t even come close. The machines kept the Cokes super cold and on a hot day there wasn’t anything better to cool you down. The fact that my mother forbid us from drinking Coke made it taste even better.
Each bunkhouse had at least one Coke machine and some had two or more. A nickel doesn’t sound like much today but in the fifties coming up with a nickel wasn’t easy for a young boy. The word hacker didn’t exist back then but Coke machine hackers sure did. Some of us tried slugs but the machines had magnets and gaps that deflected iron slugs and coins that were too heavy or light so if anyone did get a slug to work it was exceptional luck.
Probably the best hack I’ve heard was waiting around a machine and then complaining to the first adult that came by that the machine ate your nickel and didn’t dispense a coke. I don’t think I ever did this but someone who did told me that it worked every time.
There was one daring young man that I know that learned he could stick his hand up the opening, tug on the bottle a little and out it would come. One day he did this and about 15 bottles came out at one time. Most of them broke when they hit the floor and most of the kids that were watching immediately scattered.
Since the machines had moving parts there was a risk of losing a finger or maybe a hand but no one ever got hurt by doing this that I know of. I’ll confess that every once in awhile this is the way I got my forbidden cokes.
Eventually they changed the machines to a different style that made it impossible to pull a Coke out without paying but there were hacks that worked with limited success on these too.
When you think about it being able to deliver a bottle of Coke for a nickel in a bottle that was washed and recycled came pretty close to being magic.
Trona’s first swimming pool was not Valley Wells. It was Crawley Pond and was located by the plant near the Number Two Evaporator House. The first photograph of it below is from a scrapbook put together by Elisabeth and Peggy Gauslin while they lived in Trona in about 1915. It was sent to me by Elisabeth’s son, John Whitelaw. The second picture is from the files in the SVHS Library and was sent to me by Lit Brush. The third picture is the new Trona pool and the picture was stolen from the Trona Alumni page on FB. Pools in Trona have come a long way haven’t they?
Trona’s New Pool
Did you you know that Amelia Earhart‘s husband George Palmer Putnam died in the Trona Hospital in 1950?
He had Just completed his popular book, Death Valley and its Country
Joe Whitelaw’s aunt, Mary Margaret “Peggy” Gauslin, lived in Trona when she was ten. She joined the Ninety-Nines, an association for women pilots, soon after she soloed in February 1930. She was a member until 1936, and was active in air shows. Amelia Earhart was a charter member of the Ninety-Nines which was founded in 1929.. Peggy probably never knew Amelia but it is an interesting coincidence. Peggy was born in 1905 and lived in Trona from about 1914 to 1918 while her father was building and then managed the California Trona Company plant. There are several pictures of her and her family in Trona on this web site.
According to a Curtiss-Wright newsletter dated April 6, 1930, Peggy and two others that week became part of the 200 (female) licensed pilots on record at that date. “Of the 200, 17 were transport pilots, 22 were limited commercial pilots and 161 were private pilots.”
Later in Peggy’s life she worked for the Los Angeles Times as a clerk. She died in Orange County in 1990.
This week I spent some time looking at the 1940 census for Trona. It was quite interesting and I think it would be worth my time to study it in more detail. Here are some interesting examples:
In 1920 the population of trona was about 700 and in 1930 it was about 1000.
To look at the 1940 census for free I recommend using the LDS Family Search site. As far as I know it is the only free site that is indexed and searchable by name.