The Reedley area was first plotted by U.S. Army teams and contract surveyors around the 1850s. The area was like a giant magnet, drawing all kinds of settlers from all kinds of backgrounds. Some were farmers and some were tradesmen, but they all wanted a good place to raise families.
Halloween is the night before All Hallow’s Day or Hallowmas which occurs on November 1. Today, those of us in the modern church call this All Saints Day. This is a time we remember and celebrate the lives of the faithful men and women who have recently passed away. The feast day was established by Pope Gregory III around the 8th century. Halloween, or to be more correct, Hallowe’en is short for Hallows Eve.
My forefathers arrived in Jamestown in 1608 when King James granted them land for financing passage to tradesmen that were badly needed in the New World. This land was on the outer banks of Virginia and that is where my family started burying their dead. Part of Diana’s family arrived on the Mayflower. All 12 of them survived the ocean journey, but only four survived that first winter.
Celia Davies runs a free medical clinic for the poor women of San Francisco. It puts her in contact with people most would like to avoid—the servants, prostitutes and foreigners. Celia lives with her cousin Barbara, a half-Chinese girl who faces prejudice whenever she’s out in public, and Addie their housekeeper.
St. John the Baptist De La Salle was born into a wealthy and noble family in Rheims, France. By age 16 he was named a canon of Rheims Cathedral and was ordained into priesthood by age 26. La Salle gave up a promising, and possibly brilliant, ecclesiastical career to take up a life filled with poverty, persecution, and contempt. He also became the educational genius of the seventeenth century and the founder of modern methods of teaching.
Today cinnamon is considered a common spice. But in antiquity it was a valued commodity deemed to be as precious as gold. Cinnamon was so important that the demand for it drove world exploration and countries went to war over this aromatic seasoning.
When I was a child, my experience with dogs was somewhat limited. We did have a dog on the farm in Texas, but he wasn’t considered a pet. Shep was a shepherd-mix, just a farm dog. He had work to do. He was the protector, announcing the arrival of people coming down the driveway and clearing out the occasional rattlesnake so it would be safe to go outside to play in the yard. When we left the farm to move to Pantex, Shep stayed behind to continue his dog duties.
My first pets were little piglets out on the farm. Mom would rescue the runts rejected by the old sow and raise them in the kitchen. In those days, even the runt piglets were money in the bank when taken to the livestock auction.
Summer is truly upon us. Three digit days are to be expected in the Central Valley and many of us are relying on time-tested measures to get us through the heat of the day. Some people are lucky enough to have air conditioning or a backyard pool. I live in an old house--air conditioning was unheard of in 1910. We also gave up the pool when we moved into town. So I have to rely on my ceiling fans and iced tea.
This saga starts in the old Lincoln School back in 1949. Mr. Hank Rasmussen, the bank manager at Bank of America, had set up a teller’s booth in the hallway of Lincoln and Washington schools, offering savings accounts to the students in order to teach them responsibility and good banking habits. Remember this was an era when credit cards were in their infancy and an ATM was unheard of.
