I feel abandoned! I was born and raised in Trona. But we left when my father died. I was 11 yrs old and had finished the fifth grade. My family lived there for 25 years. Two older brothers and a sister graduated from Trona High School. I lived and breathed Trona High where both of my brothers played varsity football.
Now I am an orphan! I didn’t graduate from Trona High, so I have no class to belong to. It is where I walked barefoot in the sand, where the asphalt curled under our toes and the windstorms blinded us but never sent us back indoors. Where I walked to school every day with my dog Lassie who stayed outside the school yard and waited for me to return. Where I passed the homes of my teachers who invited us in for Kool-Aid and cookies.
We had big yards, alleys between the houses and we knew everyone on our street and down the alley.
There was scary Bobby Jones who always beat up the younger boys on the street, there was “Big Mary” that we all fantasized about and “Little Bill” and his brother Skipper who lived across the street (I was “Big Bill”).
We lived on Lupine street where, in the company owned town, the big shots lived. You were assigned your house, you didn’t pick it. We went to the open air movie theater at the town center, got banana splits at the counter in the drug store and paid for things at the grocery store with company script (not dollars).
If you didn’t have a car, you left town on the Trona Stages, our bus company. If you weren’t married, you lived in the bungalows across from the town center.
I roamed the desert fearlessly, escaping rattlesnakes, capturing desert turtles that became pets, discovering old mine shafts hidden in the tumbleweeds. I’m not sure if I owned any long pants or even shoes! The priest at our church, then located near the center of town, just rolled his eyes when we altar boys showed up barefoot and in short pants to serve at Mass.
My favorite time was the summer when we would go to the huge pool at Valley Wells. Most of the town was there almost every day. It was where we escaped the crippling heat and became human beings again (there was NO such thing as air conditioning then. Just useless water coolers that were only effective if you stood directly in front of it).
My Dad had a massive heart attack earlier in the year of 1952.. He retired as the President of Trona Railroad in June of 1952. He died the night we moved from Trona. I was 11 yrs old.
My two brothers, Michael (1950), Bruce (1952) and sister Elizabeth (1945) who graduated from Trona High are deceased now, but my sister Eileen, 88 yrs old is still around. Probably the last living member of her class of 1951. I don’t think she will be attending any reunions!
So that leaves me. A Tronan without a home! A lost soul whose identity is like a ghost living in a world that exists only in another universe.
Oh, except we moved to Santa Monica, the jewel of all beach communities in California, if not the world. I spent my teen years in a place that I could not afford to live in today! But it also has its memories.
I live today in San Clemente, CA and have done so for the past 46 years. My recollections of Trona have faded somewhat over the years (I’m 80 yrs old) and I suspect it does not match my childhood memories that are so idyllic.
But I am still a Tronan in my bones. It is the wellspring from which I come and defines me by a childhood that could not have been more perfect.
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