A Look Back: San Bernardino Depot once served 26 trains a day

The Santa Fe Depot in San Bernardino was once the largest train depot west of the Mississippi, employing 5000 people. (Special to The Press-Enterprise)

By NITA HILTNER
Special to The Press-Enterprise

Once, the Santa Fe Depot in San Bernardino was the largest train depot west of the Mississippi, employing 5,000 people and serving 26 trains per day. It was the first place train travelers to California saw before planes and cars replaced the train's popularity.

Today, the depot houses a train museum and the office of SANBAG (San Bernardino Associated Governments, the county's transportation agency). Only two trains, one at 5:30 a.m. and one at 8:30 p.m., stop to take on and let off passengers Monday through Friday. The depot stands as a monument to the building of San Bernardino, where so many of the passengers left the train and decided to make the city their new California home.

A boxcar served as the train depot until it was replaced in 1886 with a two-story wood Victorian-style building that was destroyed by fire in 1916. A new Spanish/Moorish style building with domes and towers and a tile roof was completed in 1918 at a cost of $800,000. The depot earned a reputation for its cleanliness, unlike the train stations in the east.

"The depot is such a big part of San Bernardino and the reason for the city's rapid growth," said Steve Shaw, president of the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society and a director of the San Bernardino History and Railroad Museum.

"At one point in 1886, the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe had a price war and the ticket price for both from the east coast to San Bernardino was a dollar," he said.

Shaw said by the 1920s and 1930s, San Bernardino was recognized as a major city in the U.S. mostly due to the railroad.

"Everyone knew where San Bernardino was," he said.

Shaw said that for a while, the train yards housed the largest maintenance yards for the trains west of Kansas City until the maintenance yards were moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s or 1970s. He said the depot and its yards, including a roundhouse to turn around trains, took up about five square miles and encompassed the area from 3rd to 5th Streets and from I St. west to Rancho Avenue.

Shaw said that in 1922, a large earthquake destroyed many buildings in San Bernardino, but the depot remained untouched, probably due to its hollow clay block construction.

"When you stand inside the depot and a train goes by, the building doesn't shake at all," he said.

The new 57,400-square-foot depot housed baggage rooms, offices, a mailroom and a Western Union office. The domes remained empty except for pigeons. When a $17 million restoration was done on the depot in the early 2000s, a huge amount of pigeon droppings and 300 pounds of honey were removed from the dome and walls of the station.

Most memorable to travelers was the Harvey House restaurant that served travelers 1,200 meals per day in the coffee shop and formal dining room. The Harvey House restaurants were built along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railways between the 1880s and 1930s. The Harvey Girls (waitresses) dressed in starched black uniforms with white cuffs and bibbed aprons and starched white caps to serve hot meals, sandwiches, coffee and baked goods. A movie was made about the Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland.

"The Harvey Girls lived at the train station upstairs in seven to 12 rooms, two to a room. They had to sign a contract not to date or get married while they worked for the restaurant," said Shaw.

The Harvey House at the depot opened in 1921 and closed in the 1950s.

Trains traveling through the station bore such names as Super Chief, the Navajo, El Capitan, Scout, Grand Canyon Limited and the Chief. Today, only the Southwest Chief passes through the station heading east and west.

During World War II, troop trains passed through the station, and in the depot, it was often standing room only. Train travelers, be it movie star or president of the United States, passed through the station to come to California. Business grew up around the station including bars, boarding houses and restaurants such as The Pirate's Den and Cave Cafe and hotels such as the St. Augustine, the Maryland and the Planet.

In the 1960s, the rail industry began downsizing and Santa Fe turned its passengers over to Amtrak in 1972. Most of its workers were transferred to Topeka and its switching operations to Barstow in the San Bernardino County high desert. Today, the depot hosts the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway's intermodal freight transport yard, where freight from trains and trucks are loaded from one to the other. A few hundred yards from the depot is an outdoor station for Metrolink.

Shaw said the 10,000-square-foot San Bernardino Historical and Railroad Museum, housed in the depot and open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., is not open during the week because of Metrolink passenger need for the parking. He said a model train club may move into the depot, and he thinks that one day the Harvey House area could serve as a restaurant once again. There is a coffee bar currently in the depot, and across from it, a new supermarket and strip mall. Nearby, a parking structure for Metrolink will be built.

Though the train station's glory days are behind it, in 2007, Angelina Jolie filmed scenes at the depot for her movie The Changeling, thus bringing some new notoriety to the depot.

The London Bridge: 38 Years as One of Arizona's Biggest Attractions

As the London Bridge approaches its 40th year in Lake Havasu City, it remains one of the busiest attractions in all of Arizona. Accounting for millions of visitors, this famous structure is responsible for making Lake Havasu City what it is today.

Lake Havasu City, Ariz. -- A stately icon known the world over through reputation and song, the London Bridge is one of the most famous bridges in the world. While many know of its current location, the story of how this famous structure came to reside in Lake Havasu City, Arizona is an interesting one.

The London Bridge moved to this desert community in 1968, after being purchased by town founder Robert P. McCulloch. He was looking for something to put his fledgling community on the map, and when his partner C.V. Wood, known for designing Disneyland, heard about the bridge going up for sale, they knew this was the hook they were looking for.

“They really wanted something that was going to make Lake Havasu City famous,” said Ruth Brydon, curator of the Lake Havasu Museum of History. “They knew having the London Bridge in their new city would attract a lot of attention, and new residents.”

The bridge, originally designed by John Rennie and opened in London in 1831, was one of many to inhabit that spot. Historians believe the first London Bridge may have been constructed as early as 50 A.D. by Roman soldiers. Since then numerous structures have spanned the river Thames, including the one now living in Arizona.

Due to its sheer weight as well as heavy traffic flow, the solid granite bridge was sinking slowly but surely into the soft sediments on the bottom of the river Thames. The leaders of the city of London knew a replacement needed to be built, but there was debate on what they would do with their beloved bridge. The decision was made to find someone interested in purchasing it.

They knew a lot of people would be interested in the old bridge, but they wanted it to be for the right reasons. “The fear was someone would take the bridge’s stones and use them for other projects. They wanted the new owner to reassemble it, make it an attraction somewhere so it may live on,” Brydon said.

McCulloch and Wood drafted a bid in the hopes of being able to bring the bridge to Lake Havasu City. They estimated the cost of dismantling the structure at $1.2 million, then doubled that figure to give the city of London a 100 percent return on their investment. Figuring someone else could come up with that same formula, McCulloch then added $1,000 for each year of his age, to come up with the final bid of $2.64 million.

McCulloch’s bid was declared the winner and the bridge was dismantled. Each brick was given a number corresponding with its arch and location within that arch. The stones were then loaded on to barges, where they were shipped across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and on to Long Beach, where they completed the rest of their journey by truck.

The bridge’s delivers to the US also created an interesting historical note. When being checked through customs, the bridge was listed as an “antique”. This lead to the bridge’s official title as World’s Largest Antique.

Assembly took a few years, as not only did the bridge have to be rebuilt to meet Department of Transportation standards, but the channel had to be dug because at that time, the bridge had no water to stand over. “Back then, the island was a peninsula. While crews were busy dredging the channel, the dirt from the dig was used to support the arches while they were reconstructed,” Brydon said. Historical photos offer documentation of this support process.

After three years of work, the London Bridge was dedicated with a tremendous ceremony October 10, 1971. The Lord Major of London was in attendance, as well as numerous international dignitaries, celebrities and local residents who now called Lake Havasu City home. Decades later, the celebration is still commemorated in a weeklong festival known as London Bridge Days.

Even 38 years later, the London Bridge remains an integral part of the community. “We have so many people who come to us who want to see the bridge,” said Jan Kassies who runs the Visitor Information Center beneath the bridge. “People from England come to see it, as they remember when it was back in their country. They like saying they walked across one bridge on two continents,” he laughed.

While many remember the bridge from England, they often remark at how different it looks. “The stones used to be black when it spanned the Thames,” said Gary Asbury, who runs London Bridge Ghost Tours which takes a look at haunted history of the bridge. “The soot from countless chimneys had coated the stones. But the desert sun bleached it out, so the stones now look more like they did when they were originally quarried.”

Some marks left on the bridge while in London, however, are more indelible. Bullet holes riddle one of the arches, the result of an allied airplane shooting down a German aircraft at the base of the bridge. “The London Bridge is the only structure in the continental United States that has damage from the Second World War,” Kassies said. “We even had someone in the visitor center who confirmed the story about the German fighter plane shot down by a Spitfire in front of the bridge. He was there.”

The allure of the bridge certainly attracts a lot of attention, as an estimated 3.5 million people visit it each year. Traffic counts have put the number of cars crossing the bridge on any given day at 10,000, and still countless more boating beneath it.

“The London Bridge is a central part of Lake Havasu City and who we are as a town. It’s the reason the city is such a popular destination. People come for the lake, for the beautiful scenery and the activities, but the London Bridge is what got their attention,” said Kassies.

ECV dedicates Desert Training Center monument

Clamper officials pose with pride, after their latest historical monument installation.

D. Westermeyer, BLM
NewsBytes Issue 374

On May 1-3, 2009, the Ancient and Honorable Order of E. Clampus Vitus, Billy Holcomb Chapter 109, descended upon the small town of Desert Center, California for their annual Spring Clampout event. Four hundred and twelve members in black hats and red shirts adorned with tin badges, buttons and pins gathered to initiate fifty three “Poor Blind Candidates” (PBC’s) into the organization under the reign of Noble Grand Humbug, Rick Gavigan.

For the unknowing, E. Clampus Vitus (members are commonly referred to as Clampers) is a fraternal organization dedicated to the preservation of western heritage that is active in state, local, and county Historical Societies. The Holcomb Chapter has worked with the Bureau of Land Management and the California Department of Transportation to place roadside plaques at--as E. Clampus Vitus describes them--“greater and lesser historical sites within San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.

Since October 1969, they have erected and dedicated 109 plaques, including those along parts of the Mojave Road, The Patton Desert Training Center (C.A.M.A.), Route 66, Speed of Light Experiments, various historical buildings and other edifices, local native sites and ruins, and other varied and sundry persons, places and events of historical significance.”

Besides initiating new members during the Clampout, the Clampers erected a concrete monument and brass plaque commemorating the site of the 36th Evacuation Hospital for the Desert Training Center (DTC). Later renamed the California-Arizona Maneuver Area, the training center encompassed an 18,000 square mile area in the Mojave Desert and served as the country’s foremost armor training facility and maneuver area where American soldiers were trained in ground and air combat as well as desert warfare from 1942 to 1944.

The size of the training center made it the largest military installation and maneuver area in the world. It was eventually to become the training ground for more than a million troops in seven armored and thirteen infantry divisions. Major General George S. Patton Jr. was the first Commanding General of the DTC tasked with organizing large scale maneuvers necessary to prepare American soldiers for combat against the German Afrika Korps in the North African desert.

As part of the DTC, the 36th Evacuation Hospital was a 400-bed unit that provided care to sick and wounded soldiers under combat conditions. The unit was instrumental in developing procedures for training doctors and nurses and later served in the Pacific theater of operations where it took part in the New Guinea, Luzon, and Leyte campaigns, the occupation of Japan, and was stationed in Vietnam from 1966 to 1969.

The BLM now manages the majority of the land where the training camps existed. While little remains of the original encampment of the 36th Evacuation Hospital, the layout of streets, tent sites, and patterns of hand-laid rocks for unit insignias can still be seen on the ground.

The site is located along Interstate 10 near the town of Desert Center and can be reached by traveling east of Indio or west of Blythe. The monument is located at the northeast corner at the intersection of Ragsdale and Eagle Mountain Roads at the Eagle Mountain offramp

While visiting the area, please remember that the camp sites are considered Historical Period Archaeological sites eligible for the National Register. The use of metal detectors and the collection of artifacts by individuals are strictly prohibited. Visitors are welcome to walk through the area after parking near the monument or along Eagle Mountain Road but please refrain from driving off the paved roads.

While the BLM completed the required paperwork, environmental review and provide archeological assistance, the Billy Holcomb Chapter was responsible for organizing and funding the monument construction and dedication.

For addition information on the Billy Holcomb Chapter of ECV, visit their website.

Moon Over Mojave

DESERT RATTLER



by Ken Layne
LA City Beat



White Trash Stonehenge.
Ken Layne.


Go north up the old Route 66 out of Victorville, past the biker saloon (FOR LEASE) and abandoned Old West antiques shops and the monstrous limestone-cement factory on the dry Mojave River, the chalky beige bluffs to your left, lush green cottonwood and alien tamarisk trees on the river bed, and you’re finally out of the Southland sprawl.

The river is underground, at this point, flowing under the alluvial sands, feeding the trees and reeds and just barely supporting the handful of houses and farms along its banks. Next to the junkyards and crumbling mobile homes, some unlucky speculators have built Custom Homes on highway-frontage lots. Brand new houses with the standard granite counters and stainless steel appliances and Pergo flooring, never lived in, just sitting here 50 feet off a forgotten highway that used to define America.

Seven months ago, when snow still covered the San Gabriels and Barstow still froze at night, I looked up and down this secret river for a decent place to call home. Nobody seemed to know the housing market had collapsed after a few wild years. Nothing was for rent, everything was priced for a boom that had long passed and was never real anyway. I chased weird leads: a century-old adobe on an alfalfa farm, mystery houses inside Mojave National Preserve that only existed on computer maps.

Kids and dog in the car, I finally investigate “Silver Lakes.” Here, alongside a thirsty little river that rarely appears above the desert sands, some jackass genius carved a pair of evaporation ponds, built a collection of comical boat slips around the fake shore, and lined it all with “lake view” residential lots. About a third of the houses are vacant, For Sale signs everywhere. The cracked-stucco strip mall restaurant lunch is inedible. A dreary windowless liquor store is doing good midday business. At the otherwise empty real-estate office, a woman with a bleach-blonde Mojave beehive hands over a single-spaced full-page list of houses for rent.

It’s an asphalt maze of terrible architecture – everything from faded 1970s ranch boxes to orange 1990s two-story “Moroccan” monstrosities hanging over the lot edges. I get lost in dead-end loops of vacant lots and desolate playgrounds of sun-blasted plastic. It’s a gloomy Philip K. Dick colony on Mars, a shoddily constructed replica of an American suburb back on Earth.

I drive out of Silver Lakes and shudder. That night, two local kids are murdered, “execution style,” at an abandoned World War II bunker up a dirt road from the weird suburb. The story will play out in the Victor Valley newspaper over many, many months:

Bodhisattva “Bodhi” Sherzer-Potter, a 16-year-old honor student who lived in Silver Lakes, and her 18-year-old boyfriend Cody Thompson, of nearby Apple Valley, were hanging out with other kids at the trash-strewn bunker, celebrating somebody’s birthday. Bodhi and Cody were the last kids left when two psychopaths from “down the hill” showed up, dragged the doomed lovers into the bunker, and shot them dead.

As usual, the killers had MySpace pages with the requisite self-portraits brandishing their guns, and within a few weeks they were both behind bars. A third kid was arrested as an “accessory.” A San Bernardino sheriff’s deputy had stopped by the party spot before the murders, and left the teenagers drinking in a desolate Air Force bunker because “none appeared intoxicated and no trespassing complaints had been filed against them.”

The bunker was built for Hawes Auxiliary Field, a World War II air station and an environmental catastrophe thanks to its deteriorated fuel tanks poisoning the groundwater. A mile south of Highway 58 on a gently rising sage bush slope, the bunker loomed like a white-trash Stonehenge.

After the murders, the parents in Silver Lakes protested until the Pentagon agreed to tear down the bunker. But it’s endangered desert tortoise habitat, so fencing would have to go up, to prevent any tortoises from wandering into the demolition zone – a demolition that would be performed without explosives so as not to bother the tortoises. A wildlife biologist would be on the scene until the job was complete.

Late July on a 105-degree afternoon, I drive up the dirt road from Silver Lakes, discovering a Lockheed stealth test site along the way, its distant runway and giant hangars and weird pylons protected by chain-link and dozens of menacing NO TRESPASSING signs. Just before the 58, a pile of old tires points the way to the party bunker. I follow the jeep trail to another pile of tires marking the entrance. But the bunker is gone, wiped off the desert floor. There’s a wide circle of bulldozed and smoothed-over sand, patches of beer bottle shards glimmering in the white sun, pink shotgun shells pressed into the dirt here and there. No fence, no memorial, nothing to mark the scene beyond the pitted concrete rectangles set in the desert at 60-degree angles, in a loose circle around the half-mile site. I walk across the scraped desert site, wondering where, exactly, the two kids were murdered, for no reason at all, in a cold concrete pit somewhere beneath this ground.

The Air Force wants to renovate this old Army Air Field, for the new generation of robot war planes, those high-altitude drones often mistaken for alien spacecraft over the Mojave and, these days, over Iran.

Battle Ready: How the desert helped win WWII

ABOUT THE TRAINING AREA
At its peak of operation in 1943, the Desert Training Center had 190,000 troops in training. That compares to about 11,000 men and women at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms today.

Keith Matheny
The Desert Sun
Veterans Day

CHIRIACO SUMMIT - A vast expanse of unforgiving desert just east of the Coachella Valley helped save the world two generations ago.

It was here in 1942, during some of the darkest days of World War II, that the Desert Training Center was created.

Developed by one of America's most demanding generals, George S. Patton Jr., the center is considered the largest military training facility in the history of mankind, stretching over 18,000 square miles of rugged terrain from Southern California into Arizona and Nevada.

From 1942 to 1944, some 1.8 million young American men were forged into soldiers here under hellish-by-design training conditions.

From this desert, these hardened and tested men left California to confront legendary German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the deserts of North Africa, to help free Europe from the Nazis' tightening grip and to fight Imperial Japan to a standstill in grim battles on Pacific islands.

"The men that were trained there helped bring the peace we've enjoyed for so many years," said Margit Rusche, board member and co-founder of the Gen. Patton Memorial Museum at the small desert outpost of Chiriaco Summit. It sits off Interstate 10, about 30 miles east of Indio.

Patton's history at the Desert Training Center is the Coachella Valley's history as well, said former Indian Wells Mayor Walter McIntyre, a Patton museum supporter. Many men and women who trained or worked at the desert camps lived in valley towns, he said.

But it's a part of history that's largely forgotten, generally preserved in black-and-white images and fleeting passages in American history books.

And the training center area today reflects that.

Patchy shrubs and plants dot endless stretches of desert sand under the shadow of distant mountains. The only sounds are of insects, a scampering lizard, an occasional bird. Not a single person can be seen for miles.

The scene contrasts greatly from 65 years ago when thousands of tanks, trucks and self-propelled artillery units thundered across the desert. Roaring units crisscrossed the rugged terrain in a training ground the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.

Almost all facilities at the camp were nonpermanent, tent cities designed to move. Much of what was left behind was looted, vandalized or lost to the desert sands over the decades since.

Modest monuments to training center camps can be found along rural highways such as state routes 177 and 62. And the careful observer can still find vestiges of the days when tanks rumbled here, artillery was fired, warplanes flew and soldiers marched and camped.

Rusche and other museum supporters, as well as the federal Bureau of Land Management, are fighting to protect the last physical remnants of the desert's role in World War II.

"There's actually a tremendous amount of stuff that's still left out there," BLM archaeologist Rolla Queen said.

"The archaeological remnants of the camp are pretty spectacular. "If you really want to experience what World War II was like, the battlefield experience, the Desert Training Center is probably the closest you can come to it without leaving the United States."

Less than a month after the Japanese, in a shocking attack on Pearl Harbor, had thrust the U.S. into World War II, the War Department saw a need for a specialized training center to organize, train and equip troops to operate in difficult terrain.

The Germans were moving through the deserts of North Africa, threatening to meet up with the Japanese fighting in India. If they joined forces and supply lines, the Axis powers would be in position to attack the Soviet Union from the east, west and south - a possible point of no return for the Allied forces.

The crisis forced top allied leaders to take action. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed Nazi advances could be blunted by Americans trained in desert warfare and then shipped to fight in North Africa.

On Feb. 5, 1942, Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, chief of staff of the Army's General Headquarters, approved the concept of the Desert Training Center. One of his first moves: Giving command of the facility to Maj. Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

'A pint of sweat'

The ex-cavalryman was the nation's first expert in armor warfare. He chose the location for the center in the Southern California desert within a few days.

"This was an area that was just massive," said retired Army Brig. Gen. David C. Henley, a part-time Rancho Mirage resident and author of "The Land that God Forgot - The Saga of Gen. George Patton's Desert Training Camps."

"It was sandy with valleys, rocks, gorges. The summer temperature goes up to 120. In the winter, it gets down to freezing. It paralleled the type of geography and weather we found in North Africa."

Patton's mantra was "a pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood." That creed defined the training center he created.

Soldiers lived in some 100,000 tents, not barracks. They slept on canvas cots or the ground.

They dealt with rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions - and the hard-driving demands of Patton.

Within a month, they were expected to run a mile through the desert in less than 10 minutes with full packs.

Soldiers were allowed one canteen of water a day in soaring summer temperatures.

"The whole idea was you're not going to get a PX (U.S. military base store), you're not going to get all of these amenities when you get to North Africa," said retired Army Lt. Col. Carlo D'Este. The noted World War II historian's books include the biography, "Patton: A Genius for War."

"It all goes back to the way Patton approached war - with proper training, his troops could prevail in any situation they could find themselves in. And to do that, you had to toughen them up."

Patton put it in his own colorful way: "If you can work successfully here, in this country, it will be no difficulty at all to kill the assorted sons of bitches you meet in any other country," he told officers.

This wasn't Hollywood

Charles Markovitz remembered feeling excited that his 6th Armored Division was leaving Fort Chaffee, Ark., for training in California in late fall 1942.

"Everybody was so happy - 'We're going to go to Hollywood,'" said Markovitz, now 87 and living in Hemet.

Their enthusiasm evaporated, however, when their train arrived at the one-building outpost of Rice. There, the men boarded trucks and were driven to Camp Coxcomb north of the small community of Desert Center.

"We dismounted and the officer in charge said, 'There's your new camp,'" Markovitz said.

"All you saw was desert. It was just a wasteland."

Freezing nights, blowing sand

Markovitz recalled nights of marching through the desert.

"We left at about 6 p.m. and marched all night," he said. "You'd march and get a five-minute break every hour. A 25-mile hike.

"When we got back to camp in the morning, we figured we'd have the whole day off. Hell, no. Without any sleep, we'd have to do our regular duties."

Though many soldiers went through the training center in oppressive summer heat, those there in the winter remember bitterly cold nights.

Palm Desert veteran Lyle Sparks remembered sleeping on the ground for three days in December 1942 at Camp Young, the training center's headquarters near Chiriaco Summit, while awaiting transfer to San Bernardino.

"We only got two blankets," he said. "I put paper down, my raincoat, got between my two blankets and short-sheeted myself so my feet wouldn't stick out. Fully dressed and still froze.

"Even though there were empty barracks near San Bernardino, they made us put tents up. They were preparing us to go overseas."

Christmas Day 1943, the troops at the center were looking forward to a special dinner - turkey and all the trimmings - when a huge windstorm hit, Markovitz said.

"The cooks had to set up a big canvas to block the wind while they were serving the food," he said. "We got the food in our mess kits, covered it up in our jackets and ran back to our tents. There were tents blowing over, sand in our food."

The camps were virtual cities in desert nothingness - more than 100,000 aligned tents creating road grids; 190,000 troops and 27,000 tanks and half-tracks at the training center's peak.

"I remember seeing the tanks take off below me in the desert, just a big cloud of dust," said Indio resident and World War II veteran Ben Beal, who served as company clerk for the Army's 487th Engineers.

Training Patton's best

Just months after forming the center, Patton was ordered to relinquish his command of the Desert Training Center and lead "Operation Torch." It was the English-American invasion of Nazi-held French North Africa.

Patton never returned to Indio. But he shared this message with his troops: "Having shared your labors, I know the extreme difficulties under which we worked and I know also how splendidly and self-sacrificingly you did your full duty.

"It was an unparalleled honor to have commanded such men."

By March 1943, the North African campaign for which the Desert Training Center was created neared an end.

But the center continued providing tough training to troops headed for Europe, Asia and other theaters around the world.

Preparations for the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, finally forced the center's closure due to a lack of available personnel.

The center ceased operating at midnight April 30, 1944.

Some of Patton's best desert-hardened troops accompanied him on his exploits throughout the war, said retired Army Col. Jerry Morelock, editor-in-chief of Armchair General Magazine.

The 4th Armored Division, dubbed "Patton's Best," trained for two years at the Desert Training Center and was the lead unit in Patton's Third Army's race across France in July and August 1944, Morelock said.

"Essentially the 4th Armored made Patton's reputation as a blitzkrieg-type armored commander," he said.

An officer under Patton's command, Col. Bruce C. Clarke, helped lead the way in the French campaign, Morelock said. Clarke was later promoted to Brigadier General and placed in charge of Combat Command B, 7th Armored Division, where he became known as the "hero of St. Vith" Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge.

"I think much of Clarke's success as an armored commander can be tracked back directly to his time at the Desert Training Center," Morelock said.

As much as Patton put his imprint on the Desert Training Center, it impacted him as well, Henley said.

"Patton many times in his career said what he learned out in the desert with extreme temperatures, maintenance of vehicles in those conditions, helped him all the way through Europe," Henley said.

All told, 20 of the 87 divisions the Army used in World War II passed through the Desert Training Center. The young men who visited Southern California's desert went on to distinguish themselves in battles that now resonate in history.

Markovitz earned a Bronze Star for meritorious service. His 6th Armored Division joined the 4th on Patton's race through France. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Beal landed on Utah beach shortly after D-Day and endured the bloody Battle of the Hedgerows.

Markovitz called his training in the desert "very useful" in his later wartime experience.

"It toughened us up," he said.

Patton had accomplished his desert mission.

General Patton’s Desert Shrine

By Valerie Porter
American Heritage

A visitor examines a World War II tank at the General Patton Memorial Museum, in California. (Nik Wheeler/Corbis)

CHIRIACO SUMMIT -- The middle of the Mojave Desert might seem an unlikely place for a museum dedicated to Gen. George Patton, “Old Blood and Guts.” But Patton himself became linked to the desolate area in southeastern California, now known as Chiriaco Summit, when he chose it as the headquarters for the Desert Training Center during World War II. It played a major role in preparing soldiers before they marched into the North African desert to stop Germany’s onslaught. During the two years it was operational, nearly a million soldiers took a six-week course there.

Wandering through the General Patton Memorial Museum and the remains of the Desert Training Center makes for a fascinating if somewhat eerie history lesson. Much of the outdoor section remains untouched since Patton’s time.

In January 1942 the Germans had recaptured the Libyan port of Benghazi. Troops under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel were pushing toward Egypt and threatening the safety and future of the Suez Canal. British troops couldn’t stop their progress, and the U.S. War Department determined that American soldiers needed to be quickly trained in desert fighting and deployed to the area.

In February 1942 Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, soon to become commander of the Army Ground Forces, appointed General Patton to establish and act as first commander of the Desert Training Center. Approximately 18,000 square miles of land in California, Nevada, and Arizona were chosen as home to the base, the largest in the world.

Having been born in California, Patton knew where he wanted the headquarters to be—Shavers Summit, as Chiriaco was then called. It’s about 50 miles from Palm Springs, and 30 miles east of Indio. He named the headquarters Camp Young, in honor of Lt. Gen. Samuel B. M. Young, who in 1903 became the Army’s first chief of staff.

The soldiers called the Desert Training Center “the place that God forgot,” because of its harsh living conditions. The temperature ranged from 120 degrees in the shade (where there was any) during the summer to below freezing in the winter. Dust storms frequently swept through, and diesel fuel had to be poured on the ground to ward off rattlesnakes, scorpions, and tarantulas. Living alongside the soldiers, Patton found the area ideal. He said it prevented “soft living.”

That couldn’t have been truer. Men often napped under their equipment after going 36 hours without sleep. Food and water were rationed in order to duplicate desert fighting conditions. Soldiers shaved while sitting in the dirt, their shaving water often at 100 degrees without being heated.

The training center closed in April 1944 and was left abandoned for many years. But in 1988 private donors joined up and reopened it as a museum, with the cooperation of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Joseph Chiriaco, a major landowner in the area who had been one of the first locals to meet Patton when he arrived to set up the training center, was instrumental in establishing the museum.

The former camp entrance is now the museum entrance. Outside are stone boundaries that once marked tent sites. A particularly poignant sight is the partial remains of a stone chapel, where soldiers often prayed before being called to fight overseas.

Tanks are scattered on the grounds as though soldiers might return at any moment to use them. They’re mostly World War II–era, but there are also several from the Vietnam and Korean wars. They give you an excellent chance to see a Patton, Pershing, Sherman, and Stuart up close.

Inside, you can view a 26-minute film on the center’s history and Patton’s life, and watch Patton tell the soldiers at the center, “I’m not training you to die for your country. I’m training you to make other people die for their country.”

Throughout the museum, remnants of soldiers’ lives past and present, including uniforms, a chaplain’s case, typewriters, a night-vision periscope, saddles, communications equipment, cots, surgical instruments, and ammunition can be viewed. There’s even a jukebox around which men would gather for entertainment on rare occasions when that was possible.

Patton memorabilia abounds, including photos, letters, and one of his jeeps whose license plate reads “4 WILLY 3,” honoring his pet bull terrier. There’s a guest book at the museum’s entrance that’s reserved for vets who served with Patton. The touching and patriotic comments, many from men who trained at Camp Young, are well worth reading.

Soldiers may have thought God forgot the place, but it’s not likely you will forget it.

The General Patton Memorial Museum is at Exit 173 on Interstate 10, 47 miles east of Palm Springs, California. It’s open 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission is $4 for adults, $3.50 for seniors. For more information visit www.generalpattonmuseum.com or call 760-227-3483.

Under Kelso's dusty top layer is vivid history

A boarded-up post office and restored depot dot the landscape in Kelso. The town attracts as many as 400 people a day to explore the Kelso Dunes and the visitor center. Photo by Greg Vojtko / The Press-Enterprise

By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI
The Press-Enterprise

KELSO - Tim Duncan was not quick to jump nine years ago when the National Park Service asked him to leave his job as a ranger at the Manassas Battlefield in Virginia and move to the dusty and nearly deserted outpost of Kelso in the Mojave Desert.

He had visited California once on vacation, and drove the desolate stretch between Needles and Barstow.

But he took the assignment, in part because one of the Park Service's attractions has been the opportunity to work all over the country, from Alaska to Virginia, he said.

Duncan, 50, has come to love his home in Kelso, hidden against the Granite Mountains. The nearest civilization is in rural Baker, along Interstate 15, some 30 miles to the northwest.

"I enjoy the quietness, I enjoy the remoteness, I enjoy the terrain," he said. "I enjoy the railroad community and the visitor center, which has just been restored."

He was referring to Kelso's 15 other inhabitants: Union Pacific Railroad employees who maintain the track between Barstow and Las Vegas. And to the two-story rail depot officially reopened in March as a visitor center for the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve.

The visitor center, renovated at a cost of $5.5 million, has fostered something of a renaissance for a town that was founded in 1905 as a water stop for steam-driven trains, boomed as a mining town during World War II, and has been little more than a ghost town ever since.

As many as 400 people a day venture off Interstates 40 and 15 on weekends to sift through the artifacts on display here. They also explore the nearby Kelso Dunes, where weather-polished grains of sand emit an eerie, growling boom sound as they cascade during avalanches.

The only other visitors Duncan sees are the motorists who are detoured through town when traffic accidents prompt the California Highway Patrol to shut down one of the interstates.

"The traffic backs up for 50 miles," Duncan said. "It's a slow crawl, and I have to go out and make sure it keeps moving."

How Kelso Came to Be

James Woolsey, chief of resource interpretation and outreach for the preserve, likes to amuse visitors with the not-so-compelling story of how Kelso got its name.

Three railroad surveyors took turns naming the stops, he said. Only two of them were on hand at the Kelso founding and they decided to throw their names, and the name of the third guy, into a hat and choose one for the town.

The name they drew? "The guy who wasn't there," Woolsey said.

He is not certain how often John Kelso visited his namesake, or whether he ever visited it.

When the first trains started running, Kelso had a small store and a few-dozen residents, including a smattering of gold and silver miners.

Soon after, the railroad built a roundhouse to service them and parked half a dozen extra locomotives to help the engines make it up the grueling 19-mile, 2,000-foot grade to Cima.

"That's what made Kelso," said Theo Packard, 95, who moved to the town with his parents in 1920 and stayed for a quarter century.

"Sometimes, the trains were so long, they had to hitch on two or three helpers to make it," Packard said.

Kelso had about 200 residents then.

"It was just a regular, work-a-day town," he said. "Mostly, we worked."

A Busy Little Place

Packard's father opened a general store that doubled as the post office. There were no saloons.

Packard attended Kelso's one-room school, which closed in the 1970s. The building, which still stands, was home to the town's one big social event: a monthly dance where the railroad workers, ranchers and miners converged to foxtrot and waltz.

"They had a kind of a makeshift orchestra," he said. "My mother played the piano."

The school had one teacher who instructed students through the eighth grade, after which they commuted by train to Barstow or Las Vegas to attend high school.

The massive two-story depot, which would eventually house railroad workers, restaurant employees, and telegraph and baggage workers, was constructed in 1924.

Four passenger trains a day, two each in the early morning and evening, stopped in Kelso to load up with water and feed the passengers.

The telegraph operator was something of a gossip, Packard remembers, and would pass the word when celebrities were on the way. Packard ran down to the station one day to meet silent-movie cowboy Tom Mix and look at his horse in the baggage car.

Kelso's "boom" came at the start of World War II, Woolsey said, when iron ore-mines in the area supplied raw material for the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana. The plant, in turn, turned out steel for the Liberty ships that ferried beans and bullets to Europe during the war. At one point, the town had 2,000 residents.

By war's end, Kelso was on a track to oblivion. Packard left to seek work for a rail delivery service.

'Tin Cans and String'

Today, Kelso has no general store, no restaurant, no movie theater and still no saloon.

Duncan has two freezers and drives to Las Vegas once a month for supplies. He says it's quicker than going south to Barstow and there is a wider variety of stores, which saves trips.

Only a few of the railroad workers are in town at any given time, he said. Their only entertainment, he said, is what it has always been: They get together every now and then to have dinner.

That isn't all that's stayed the same. The telephone at his ranger station has a scratchy signal and frequently cuts out, like poor cell-phone service.

"The lines, the equipment, everything, is 50 years old," Duncan said. "I guess they don't see the need for improvement. We're on tin cans and string out here."

Not exactly the way he likes it.

Video: A history of Kelso, the once flourishing railroad town in the Mojave Desert

Remodeled Kelso Depot has rich desert history

Backward Glance

by Steve Smith
Desert Dispatch [Barstow, CA]

Editor's note: This is the first of two parts.

In desert history and in fiction much centers around oases. Recently I got a chance to visit an oasis that had undergone a rejuvenation and on March 25 will have its grand opening, Kelso Depot.

The town of Kelso got its start when the Union Pacific Railroad came through in 1904. How the town got its name is one of my favorite stories. Three railroad workers decided to draw one of their names out of a hat to decide the name of the town. One of the gentlemen had recently left the area but the other two threw his name in for him. Wouldn't you know it the guy that left, John H. Kelso, won.

The town was founded because of the water needed for steam engines. The nearby steep grade at Cima Summit (which rises in elevation 2,000 feet in 18 miles) was also a reason for the town's founding. Helper engines would tie onto passing trains and help them over the grade. The helper crews lived at the depot or at other houses in town so when they got a train over the hill they would turn around and head back to Kelso.

The first depot at Kelso was built in 1905 when the Los Angeles to Salt Lake line was established. One of the influence on building the depot was the Santa Fe's Harvey Houses. Harvey Houses were so profitable and popular with passengers that the Union Pacific wanted to copy the success. They built a separate building for a lunch counter. When a new station was built, the old depot was moved and used for a number of purposes.

The present station was built in 1923. It was planned as an "all-in-one facility." The station had rooms for workers, telegraph office, Beanery lunch counter, downstairs hall and billiard room. The station also served the people of the small town as a meeting hall.

The Depot also provided amusement for the children of the town. The dump in back of the depot attracted wild burros. The town's children would lay out a noose and capture the burros by a hoof. Many a time the children would get drug for a bit and suffer rope burns. They sometimes tamed the burros and kept them as pets.

The lunch counter not only served the workers but also served passengers traveling on trains with no dining cars. One item on the menu, stew, lent itself to a humorous story at the beginning of the station. The new lunch counter requested a stew pot from the head office. What arrived was a thunder mug, a pot used as a urinal before flush toilets. Despite the many odd looks visitor's gave it, the thunder mug did serve as a passable stew pot.

On average the town had a population of around two hun- dred. During World War II the town had its biggest boom. Kaiser Steel started the Vulcan Iron Mine nine miles south of Kelso. They shipped its ore to the steel mills in Fontana. From 1942 to 1948 it was estimated that 2,500 tons of ore passed through Kelso daily. At its peak the town housed 2,000 workers.

The population of Kelso took hits from different sources after World War II. Kaiser Steel shut down the mine because of high sulfur content in the ore and the railroad started using more powerful diesel locomotives so the helper engines weren't needed and the water wasn't as important. By the 1950s Kelso was becoming a ghost town.

The depot continued to be open during the seventies when it became a gathering spot for desert visitors and locals. One visitor, James Woolsey, once had an ice cream cone there. He doesn't remember it but his father told him about it. James went on to work on the depot restoration and the displays in it. The nearby water was a particular draw for birds and their watchers.

In 1985 the railroad decided that it was not feasible to run the station any more so they closed the depot entirely. The railroad company had planned to demolish it but through efforts of local people and the Bureau of Land Management it was spared the wrecking ball.

In 1992 the Bureau of Land Management purchased the depot and the property around it for one dollar. The depot came under the care of the National Park Service when the Desert Protection Act was signed into law and created the Mojave National Preserve in 1994. Renovation work was started 1999 and continued until last year when the Depot opened up as the Preserve's visitor center. The depot is open seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Grand Opening for the restored Kelso Depot will be March 25, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. There will be tours and field trips starting at 10 a.m. The dedication ceremony will be at 2 p.m.

The depot is located 35 miles south of Baker. From I-15, exit at Kelbaker Road and drive south 35 miles to Kelso. From I-40, exit at Kelbaker Road and drive north 22 miles to Kelso.

Come back next week when I will talk a bit about the renovation of the Kelso Depot and a tour of the building.

Depot a desert diamond

Mary Manning
Las Vegas Sun

About an hour and 45 minutes southwest of Las Vegas, the two-lane Cima Road leads from Interstate 15 into Southern California's Mojave Desert.

Miles of Joshua trees, yucca plants and creosote bushes dot the landscape until the horizon gives way to what at first seems like a mirage: a two-story salmon-colored building, its Spanish-style arches rising from the desert floor.

The train tracks next to the building help explain its existence.

Union Pacific built the mission-style building as a depot in 1924. It was close to the halfway point between Barstow and Las Vegas. Nearby Cornfield Spring was a reliable source of water, crucial to coal-fired steam engines.

After years of being left to dry up and blow away, the Kelso Depot in the heart of the Mojave National Preserve once again is welcoming desert travelers.

It has been transformed from a train station into the preserve's visitor center with a museum, historically furnished rooms, a theater and a bookstore.

The depot's U-shaped counter is to start serving meals again in March when the grand opening is scheduled. The counter was popular with passengers who had been riding the rails in trains without dining cars in the early 20th century.

Beginning in March the depot will stay open seven days a week. It actually opened late last month, on a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule, Thursdays through Sundays.

The word is starting to get out that the depot is already open. More than 200 people visited the depot on Sunday, for example.

But with the grand opening still four months away, visitors can still catch some quiet days at the depot. On those days, the silence after leaving the car in the crushed gravel parking lot is almost overwhelming. No leaves rustle, no water drips and unseen insects hum instead of buzz.

Kelso has long been known largely for a sound. Eleven miles southwest of the depot are the Kelso Sand Dunes, known for their "singing," a haunting bass tone made by the shifting sand.

"The best way to get them booming is to run down them as fast as you can," said National Park Service Ranger Linda Slater, who has been renovating the depot for four years.

A recording of the dunes "singing" can be heard at the new museum. It's one of the features that make the Kelso Depot Information Center perfect for the curious who do not want to linger in the Mojave.

As it did in its former life, the depot continues to serve as a respite for travelers. Patches of grass relieve the desert landscape at the center. Nearby are blossoms of desert wildflowers that attract birds, bees and butterflies.

Inside the depot, the walls are adorned with quotes about the desert such as: "For all the toll the desert takes of a man, it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of stars," by author Mary Austin.

The exhibits include denizens of the desert mounted under glass: the Mojave Desert tortoise, a scorpion, a sidewinder snake, a kangaroo rat.

There's a 500-year-old clay pot, probably made by a Mojave Indian; woven baskets and drawings of other desert tribes; informational displays of the area's volcanic and anthropologic history.

Statler said more exhibits are possible. The Park Service would like to eventually turn the empty basement into a Children's Discovery Center with interactive exhibits, for example.

At one time the basement held a pool table and piano for entertainment -- not only for the rail passengers and workers, but for the miners and others who lived in Kelso.

When the United States entered World War II, Kelso boomed. Miners extracted iron ore from mines in Southern Nevada and Southern California and sent it by rail to wartime factories.

"At that time, around 1,000 people lived here," Statler said. The town had a one-room school, a post office and a grocery store.

But after the war, Kelso withered and most of the buildings crumbled into dust.

The depot weathered the years, but since it was no longer needed for the ever more efficient diesel trains, it was closed in 1986, and Union Pacific made plans to demolish it.

In 1991, the federal government, responding to public pressure, stepped in to save the building. The renovation took years.

The original color scheme emerged after workers scraped layers of paint away, Statler said. A "putrid green" covered the depot's interior until white paint and shiny dark wood trim resurrected the original look.

To restore an authentic look to the station's hub -- the ticket and telegraph office near the baggage room --Statler perused eBay and found period pieces: an accounting book, baggage tickets, pencils, an early 20th century stapler and candlesticks.

An average of 60 trains a day still chug through Kelso, compared with 100 in Barstow, Park Service volunteer Vince Marino said as freight cars rumbled past and shook the depot's red-tile floor.

For most people the Mojave Desert is a place to only pass through. But it also has always been a land of dreams attracting tourists, miners, ranchers, train crews and artists.

One such person is Ken Hall, a National Park Service worker who has spent most of the last 40 years in the Mojave's dry air. Hall lives in Baker, a 70-mile round trip from his work at the depot.

Before people swarmed into the Southwest and settled up and down Interstate 15, Hall frequently brought his children to the depot to loll on the grass and watch the passing trains.

He said he stays on the job to "to take care of my desert for my grandchildren."

Hall has driven trucks for Gilbert Trucking of Las Vegas, managed the Denny's Restaurant in Baker and served in the Air Force in Yuma, Ariz., before he settled for life on a road that seems to go nowhere.

After describing the spectacular sunrises with a sigh, Hall takes a cup of coffee and walks out the backdoor, ignoring the satellite hookup feeding a fully stocked entertainment center.

"I prefer the silence," he said.

Kelso Depot

Where: Take Interstate 15 from Las Vegas to the Cima Road exit. Kelso is 35 miles south of Baker, Calif., on Kelbaker Road.

When: The center is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Starting in March, it will be open seven days a week.

Cost: There is currently no entrance fee for Mojave National Preserve.

For more information: (760) 733-4040.

National Park Service Web site: http://www.nps.gov/moja/home.htm

Source: National Park Service

Tug of Wear Over Desert Homestead Shanties

Russell Scofield of the federal Bureau of Land Management visits an abandoned cabin in Wonder Valley. (Irfan Khan / LAT)










By Hugo Martín
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The days of homesteading are long gone. But in the Mojave Desert, on the eastern edge of the ever-expanding Southern California metropolis, the sun-bleached remnants of that pioneering era dot the landscape.

Off Cactus Jack Road in Wonder Valley is a bare frame structure with a collapsing roof and blown-out walls. Outside, a line of red ants and an occasional darting lizard are the only signs of life. Inside, a vintage record player, broken and faded by the sun, lies near a dog-eared Bible on a bare concrete floor.

The shack is one of hundreds of abandoned structures in the desert, left from a time when the federal government offered small parcels of scrubland for a nominal fee to anyone willing to put down stakes.

As more and more suburban neighborhoods sprout up in the desert, however, the weatherworn shanties have lost their decades of isolation, and they're now at the center of a local dust-up. Some longtime desert dwellers see the dilapidated structures as eyesores and want them torn down, while a growing number of newcomers want to preserve the shacks as historic landmarks.
"A little empty shell that is sitting out there is a beautiful thing," said Perry Hoffman, an artist and photographer who moved from San Francisco five years ago to live in a renovated homestead cabin in Wonder Valley.

Beautiful is not how Bob Dockendorff describes them. The Yucca Valley resident helped organize a federally funded program several years ago to demolish the most blighted structures. He said some of the buildings that were razed were havens for drug makers, squatters and vermin.

"When you drove through the area, you got a bad impression," he said.

Dotting the Landscape

Such disparate views are common in the Morongo Basin, a 5,200-square-mile expanse of desert just north of Joshua Tree National Park. The basin is home to more than 66,000 residents and an estimated 2,500 abandoned homestead shacks in various states of deterioration.

Most of the tiny cabins are on 5-acre parcels that were deeded by the federal government under the Small Tract Act of 1938, one of the last of the government's homestead acts. The government's goal was to distribute 457,000 acres of desert that the Bureau of Land Management deemed disposable, most of it in the California desert. By the time the act was repealed in 1976, about 36% of the land was privately owned. The rest is federally protected desert.

Under amendments to the act, homesteaders were granted a deed only if they built a structure with dimensions no less than 12 by 16 feet. No water or power was required. The government was required to charge fair-market prices, but the land was cheap. A couple in Joshua Tree paid $125 in 1954 for a 5-acre lot about a mile from the nearest paved road.

The offer of cheap land drew thousands of applications from World War II veterans and suburban dwellers looking for inexpensive vacation homes. Several construction companies sprang up in the desert, offering to build cheap structures that met the government's minimum requirement.

A few homesteaders stayed and raised families, but many more abandoned the cabins, yielding to the desert's searing temperatures, pounding wind and fierce dust storms. Other homesteaders died, leaving the deteriorating shacks to their children, who had no love for the harsh landscape.

As development has spread into the desert, business leaders and government officials have begun to look disdainfully on the ramshackle structures. The basin's population has grown by about 24,000, or 60%, from 1980 to 2000, according to the U.S. Census.

Five years ago, Dockendorff and other desert residents teamed up with San Bernardino County officials to demolish the most dilapidated and visible examples, particularly those along heavily traveled roads. The program, dubbed Shack Attack, was funded by a $500,000 federal grant and disposed of 116 shacks. At the behest of program organizers, the owners of 335 other cabins demolished their structures.

"The worst of the worst were taken care of," said Bruce Davis, an aide to county Supervisor Dennis Hansberger, whose district includes many of the homestead shacks.

But the cleanup program eliminated only a fraction of the shacks built throughout the basin. Sun and wind have reduced many to sun-dried wood frames. Some shacks still have remnants of the pink or lime-green roofing tiles that were used on the exterior walls as a cheap alternative to stucco or wood panels.

"I think they are eyesores," said Pat Flanagan, the marketing coordinator for the Twentynine Palms Chamber of Commerce, who converted a homestead shack into a guest house at her home in Desert Heights. "They do give a bad image to the area."

Law officers who patrol the Morongo Basin say the cabins occasionally attract squatters and teenagers on motorcycles who throw rocks through the windows. But the cabins do not represent a major law enforcement problem, said sheriff's Sgt. Richard Boswell.

"We don't have an inordinate amount of calls," he said.

Still, the Bureau of Land Management has received at least 50 complaints about illegal dumping at the abandoned shanties in the last eight years.

Russell Scofield, the habitat restoration coordinator for the BLM's office in Yucca Valley, said the dumping sometimes included hazardous materials such as car batteries, which can contaminate underground water supplies.

"The main problem is that they are attractive nuisances" — meaning they attract trouble — "the same as an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles," he said.

Consensus Is Elusive

Even family members living in the desert sometimes can't agree on what to do about the buildings.

Ronald Phenning, a carpenter who bought, expanded and moved into a homestead cabin in 1982, overlooking several abandoned shacks in Wonder Valley, considers the buildings historic reminders of a bygone era.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's part of our heritage," he said.

Phenning installed electricity soon after he bought the cabin. Over the years, he has added several rooms and a workshop, where he builds tables and other furniture. He must still haul in water from the local water district in a huge tank. An outhouse is a bathroom.

The cabins are also part of Phenning's past. His parents were homesteaders who built a 16-by-12-foot cabin near Joshua Tree in 1950. The family used the cabin as a weekend getaway where Phenning and his brothers chased lizards and organized tortoise races in the sand.

Phenning's mother, Marjorie, has fond memories of the cabin, which the family sold once the boys were grown. But she disagrees with her son, seeing blight in the abandoned shacks.

"They just look unattractive," she said. "Why don't they tear them down?"

In the last few decades, the Morongo Basin has become a refuge for artists attracted to the serenity and beauty of the desert. Over the last year and a half, Hoffman, the artist and photographer who moved from San Francisco five years ago, has renovated a homestead cabin in Wonder Valley with colorful tile, pastel paint and desert-themed artwork. He rents the cabin to other artists, so they too can be inspired by the solitude.

The shacks are not eyesores but picturesque elements of the landscape, Hoffman argues.

"I love them," he said. "They are part of the desert out here."

Christine Carraher is an artist and medical transcriber who bought a home in Wonder Valley 10 years ago and converted an adjacent homestead cabin into a studio. She said she favored the removal of individual shacks that draw neighborhood complaints. But she fears that a wholesale demolition of the abandoned cabins would ruin the character of the region and open the door to widespread commercial development.

"The day that this place looks like San Bernardino and everyplace else, I'm gone," she said.

History Captured Alive

Dennis Casebier is an expert at oral histories




Story by STUART KELLOGG
Photo by LARA HARTLEY
Victor Valley Daily Press



Dennis Casebier, executive director of the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association (MDHCA), has interviewed 200 people who once lived in Lanfair Valley.

Starting in 1910, the well-watered valley north of Goffs enjoyed a homesteading boom.

But as will happen, bust followed.

“Of 400 homesteads,” Casebier says, “fewer than 200 ‘proved up.’ The people I interview now have all left Lanfair Valley.

“I do oral history in an empty land.”

On April 26, he met with members of the Mohahve Historical Society and students of Leo Lyman, professor of history at Victor Valley College, to discuss what Casebier has learned about collecting oral histories (“an art form, not a science”).

Much of what Casebier shared has as much to do with courtesy as with research technique.

Equipment

“Oral histories take a lot of time,” Casebier said, “so don’t scrimp on equipment. I use a Bell & Howell recorder and standard-size 90-minute cassettes. A 60-minute tape is too short, a 120-minute tape too thin.”

Remarking that Nikon makes a lens especially for photographing photographs, Casebier urged the amateur historians to have their pictures of documents developed at a top-of-the-line photo lab.

Be prepared

Because every interview subject leads to somebody else, Casebier maintains a computerized list of old-timers’ names, addresses and phone numbers. Every now and then, he prints it out and puts the most recent version in his car.

“And I always carry a tape-recorder,” he said. “Who knows, I may have to go to jail tonight, and there I’ll meet an old-timer on my list.”

Advance notice

To assure a potential interview subject that he and the MDHCA are professional, Casebier may put an old-timer on the organization’s newsletter mailing-list.

“Hopefully,” he said, “when I do call, they’ll have been waiting to hear from me.

“But I never send a potential subject a copy of one of my books (e.g., Casebier’s “Guide to the Mojave Road”). If I did, they’d tell me what’s already in the book.

“But after our interview, I may give them a book.”

Knowledge of the topic

Although each subject contributes something of value, Casebier said, “You need to know more about the topic than any one person you interview.”

Citing a subject who remarked, “My grandfather lived in Blake, not Goffs,” Casebier said, “In fact, Blake and Goffs are the same place. Briefly changed to Blake, the name was later changed back to Goffs.”

Potential for intimidation

No matter how much you know, Casebier said, never correct the subject, for that will surely turn them off: “And don’t flaunt your own knowledge of a topic.”

“Shut up and listen”

In line with the above, Casebier said, if an older person gets a blank look, don’t prompt them: “They are thinking, so let them think. It takes time to remember events of 60 years ago.”

Follow-on notes

Rather than disturb the flow of recollection, write down questions as these occur to you, and ask them later.

“Make sure to tell the person why you are writing notes,” Casebier said. “As it is, most of your questions will have been answered by the time a person stops talking.”

He also warned interviewers to watch for signs of fatigue, “for if the subject is tired, they won’t give their top performance. Suggest a break for a few hours or, if possible, come back the next day.”

Maintain control

If a subject goes off about an old hurt (ranting, for example, against the government or a family member), he permits it — for a while. Then he steers them back to the topic at hand.

Military service

In an exception to his “Maintain control” rule, Casebier lets veterans tell their war stories even if these have nothing to do with Lanfair Valley. “I try to get what I need first,” he said, “but they deserve it.

“For veterans of World War II, I always ask, ‘Where were you when the war ended?’ and ‘What do you think of the atom bomb?’

“A guy who’d fought at the Battle of the Bulge was on a troop ship, heading from Le Havre to the Pacific, when he got word of Hiroshima. ‘I’d been good as dead,’ he said. ‘Now I wasn’t.’ ”

Casebier added: “Always ask a vet what unit he served in. This will help historians who come after you.”

One person at a time

Dismissing family reunions as “having no value except as a chance to add to your old-timer list,” Casebier stressed the importance of not allowing other people to interrupt a subject: “Be willing to say to an adult child, ‘I’d like your mother to answer this.’ ”

But having interviewed two people separately, it can pay to talk with them together.

This is what Casebier did with a man and a woman who’d gone to school together in 1914 and hadn’t met since:

“By interviewing them separately, and then together, I got so much more than I could have gotten from either one alone.”

Raise the comfort index

“Most of my people are elderly, simple folk,” Casebier said, “and so I start with easy questions: What is your full name? Any middle name? Your date of birth and where? Who were your parents (you may get a story out of that)?

“Maybe I’m chicken, but if there is a touchy issue, I put it off. For example, if I already know that the subject’s grandfather made moonshine.

“Once I was scheduled to interview the only man to spend time in San Quentin for cattle rustling. When I rang the bell, an elderly man with an oxygen tank opened the door.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no!’ But he brought up San Quentin right away.”

Transcription

Back home from an interview, Casebier promptly duplicates the tapes.

“Never transcribe from original tapes,” he cautioned. “Instead, transcribe from duplicates. You can also mail dupes to a volunteer transcriber who may not be the best interviewer but is a much better typist than you.”

According to Casebier’s wife, Jo Ann, “All transcription is verbatim. No language or factual errors are corrected.”

Remarking that he prides himself on capturing candor, Dennis Casebier said, “There was once a lot of prostitution in Searchlight (Nev.).

“When I mentioned this to one woman, she said, ‘Go down the street and talk with so-and-so. She was a whore.’ ”

Which may be why it’s Casebier’s policy not to enter a history in the MDHCA data base as long as the subject is alive — without their express permission.

Photographs and documents

To preserve homestead papers, postcards and other ephemera, Casebier brings a photocopier to each interview.

He also solicits photos: best of all as gifts to the MDHCA, next best as loans. Barring that, he photographs pictures on site.

In any event, Casebier said, “I organize the photos in the order that they’ll be copied — and ask the person to talk about each one. I also photograph what’s written on the back.

“The best interview subjects are teachers. They’ve spent their whole lives talking, appreciate what we are doing, and understood the need for caption material.

“I believe the caption is 50 percent of a photograph’s value.”

Just as he duplicates tapes, Casebier copies every image twice and in the same sequence. “That way,” he said, “I’ve got a backup set in case one batch of negatives is lost at the photo lab.” He added that “a scanned digital-image is no substitute for a continuous-time print from a negative.”

Leads for other interviews

An important part of any oral history is developing leads to other subjects. To make it easy for people to contact him, Casebier leaves cards with everyone he speaks to.

“Another way to get leads,” he said, “is to print an old photo and caption in the newspaper. This is sure to provoke calls from people eager to tell you the truth of the matter!”

Established in 1883 as a siding for the Southern Pacific Railway, Goffs grew in importance when, in 1907, a short-line railroad connected it to the rich mines at Searchlight.

By 1911 there were enough children living in Goffs (the sons and daughters of railway employees) to require a school: at first a rented, frame structure; later a handsome Mission-style building.

The school served a total of 412 students before closing down in 1937, obviated by a new school in Essex.

The old Goffs schoolhouse is now the centerpiece of the 113-acre Goffs Historic Cultural Center (founded by Casebier and his wife, Jo Ann, in 1989) and headquarters for the nonprofit Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association.

“The other day,” Casebier said, “we were having a board meeting, and an elderly lady appeared in the door of the schoolhouse. When I asked, ‘May I help you?’ she said, ‘I’m part of the puzzle.’ “She was one of the 412 students.”

Of their shared passion for oral history, Casebier told his audience: “My only regret is that I didn’t start earlier. It’s taught me how to listen and how to appreciate the elderly.”

KMUD’s Pirate Radio Adventures at the Mojave Phone Booth

janggolan weblog

The Mojave Phone Booth was a phone booth in a remote region of the Mojave National Preserve that rang almost 24 hours a day 7 days a week. People from all over the planet called the most remote phone booth known on earth with the hope that someone would answer. Installed shortly after World War 2 at the request of local miners, the phone booth was miles from civilization, 15 miles from the nearest highway, near Death Valley.

For more than fifty years it was the most curious landmark in a wild and desolate area until it was removed by park officials in May 2000.

On March 20, 2000 an adventurous and enthusiastic crew from shortwave pirate station KMUD descended on the Mojave Phone Booth for a historic broadcast from the site. The phone booth had been recently publicized in the media including the nationally syndicated Art Bell show. One of the KMUD operators that night called the Art Bell show from the booth and spoke with guest host Peter Weissbach. KMUD was allowed to give the time and frequency of their broadcast but not the phone number (which was 760-733-9969). However, the phone number was easily available on the internet, setting the stage for a live call-in show transmitted by KMUD on 6851 and 3450 kHz.

KMUD crew members spent three days and two nights in the Mojave National Preserve and recall the weekend as being perfect for their activities. Careful planning had gone into the technical arrangements. Antennas were set up and transmitters finely tuned. Batteries were charged and ready to go. An audio pickup and mixer were connected to the phone. Wires and cables were strung everywhere, turning the booth into a scene from an electrician’s repair shop.

Everything seemed to work like a charm. No park rangers visited the phone booth that weekend and thankfully no one from the Federal Communications Commission. After half an hour of testing, KMUD signed on with Art Bell’s “The Chase” theme. The signal went out in AM mode with about 20 watts of carrier power. A CD of wolf calls played atmospherically in the background as the KMUD crew interviewed callers on the air. The effect worked beautifully – no one seemed to notice that coyotes, not wolves, are indigenous to the desert.

KMUD’s broadcast featured conversations with callers, some music and station IDs, and the announcers encouraging listeners to call the phone booth. An interesting woman caller suggested that the Mojave Phone Booth was drawing its power from a UFO held at “Area 51” in Nevada. Two callers reported on reception conditions. Two reporters from Canadian Television arrived at the phone booth just prior to the KMUD transmission. They interviewed the KMUD crew before the show and videotaped them fielding phone calls. This must have been a first – shortwave radio pirates broadcasting live being interviewed by television journalists.

One woman who called during the weekend was an official with a Zurich based financial institution. She called from St. Moritz where she was facilitating a seminar for corporate CEOs. Several weeks earlier the woman had been touring the desert and happened upon the phone booth. She answered some calls and learned all about the booth’s story. After returning to Switzerland she decided to call the booth herself.

The KMUD broadcast from the Mojave Phone Booth was well documented in audio and video. It is unclear how many people actually heard the broadcast but those who did were witnesses to pirate radio history. The beautiful, stark Mojave environment was a natural setting for people connecting with other people, their voices shimmering through the phone lines and the ether, the power of radio bringing them all together.

Don't fence him in

Dennis Casebier preserves the human resources of the East Mojave

Stuart Kellogg, Staff Writer
Victor Valley Daily Press

Yes, it was rude, but I had to ask: What’s it like to live 30 miles from nowhere?

“We are here,” replied Dennis Casebier, founder of the Goffs Historic Cultural Center six miles north of Interstate 40 and half an hour west of Needles.

“You are the one who lives far away.”

So it came as no surprise when, two seconds later, he admitted a fondness for “desert rats,” heirs to the original mountain men.

“Desert rats aren’t exactly rebellious,” said Casebier, 65. “It’s just that they won’t be told what to do.

“People who live in the back country unconsciously erect barriers to confound city folk. That barrier — whether 30 dogs or junk in the yard — serves as a filter.

“The average flatlander is intimidated. But once you pass the desert rat’s test, you can’t get away.”

Lamenting that the classic desert rats have all gone, Casebier blamed the Bureau of Land Management (“Once the BLM got interested in resource management, the desert rats were doomed”) but also the fact that “today it’s an unlucky combination to be both self-reliant and intolerant of regulations.”

This from a 30-year Navy man.

Goffs was established in 1883 as a siding for the Southern Pacific Railway. It increased in importance when, in 1907, a short-line railroad connected it to the rich mines at Searchlight, Nevada.

By 1911 there were enough children living in Goffs (sons and daughters of railway employees) to require a school. Classes began in a rented, frame structure.

Three years later, a handsome mission-style schoolhouse was built. It served a total of 412 students before closing down in 1937, supplanted by a new school in Essex.

Searchlight had fizzled by 1923. Route 66, which once brought traffic through town, was redirected six miles south in 1931.

By 1937, Goffs had gone bust.

But 20 years later, a kid from Topeka, Kan., was assigned to the Marine Training Center in Twentynine Palms.

“Kansas isn’t the desert,” Casebier conceded, “but it, too, is big and empty. And it, too, had been homesteaded — Twentynine Palms was settled by World War I veterans gassed by the Germans.

“Back then, you could still drive all over Joshua Tree National Monument, so a friend and I explored the old mines. We’d sleep out at night and, in the morning, dump scorpions out of our boots.”

No wonder Casebier fell in love with the desert.

In 1960 he returned to California to work as a physicist on the Navy’s guided missile systems. By then, however, Joshua Tree was choked with tourists and government regulations. So Casebier looked around and discovered the East Mojave.

“It reminded me of the desert I used to know,” he said. “But more desert, and more Joshua trees.”

His work for the Navy meant Casebier spent a third of his time in Washington, D.C. While there, he researched the East Mojave in the National Archives, combing through pension files and muster rolls:

“The Army’s muster rolls detail everyone who ever served here — what he looked like and what he’d been doing just before he enlisted.”

Casebier’s research focused on the 1850s through the 1880s, and especially the Old Mojave Road, an ancestor of Route 66 that runs 15 miles north of Goffs.

“Until 1883,” he said, “the Old Mojave Road was the major route through this latitude for people traveling between Prescott, Arizona, and the Port of Los Angeles.”

Over the course of 25 years, Casebier filled 50 reels of microfilm with records from the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

In 1981, while still living in Corona, he founded the Friends of the Mojave Road with fellow devotees of that road and other back-country trails.

Today the Friends boast 850 members, chiefly in California, Nevada and Arizona. “But the other day,” Casebier said, “someone wrote from Switzerland requesting a (newsletter) subscription.”

Why do people join the Friends?

“Because they think it matters to create something bigger than yourself.”

This “thing that matters” is the cultural center, built around the old Goffs schoolhouse on 113 acres bought by Casebier and his wife, Jo Ann, in 1989.

In 1993 the Friends gained nonprofit status as the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association.

Working from old photos and interviews with more than 40 former students — and funded by $133, 850, all from private donors — MDHCA volunteers restored the schoolhouse to its original, 1914 splendor.

That schoolhouse may be the centerpiece, but the cultural center boasts other gems as well: for example, the tiny Danby courthouse, which once stood next to Judge Johnny Neilson’s service station; a building from the Golden Queen Mine near Mojave; an Atlantic & Pacific boxcar, 100 years old, now used as a cookhouse; and a complete 10-stamp ore mill from Rosamond.

Casebier explained that gold miners used stamp mills to pulverize rock: “Stamp mills won the West, but they contained so much metal, most got scrapped out. Today hardly any are left.”

Another building at the site, now used as a library, has had a most adventurous life.

Built in the ’20s as a maintenance station for the California Division of Highways, it was moved 18 miles to Essex after the realignment of Route 66.

In 1992 the Friends moved it back to Goffs.

“In fact, there are two of these houses,” Casebier said. “The other, built under the same contract, is still in Newberry Springs.”

The library is home to MDHCA’s 6,000 volumes of desert lore, 35,000 historical photographs and 600 oral histories.

Of those oral histories, half were done by Casebier, and half by Harold and Lucile Weight of the late, great “Desert Magazine.”

“The Weights were doing oral histories a generation before I started,” Casebier said. He also acknowledged the work of volunteers who transcribe recorded interviews.

The center’s purview stretches from Barstow to Las Vegas, Arizona and Twentynine Palms. “Vegas is just at the edge of our turf,” Casebier said, “though if I heard of a 97-year-old with a clear mind who lived in Vegas in the ’30s, I’d certainly interview them.”

He’s even interviewed people younger than himself, “if they were significantly involved in a core business or in the highway itself.”

Any tips on collecting an oral history?

“During the interview itself,” Casebier said, “I talk as little as possible.

“We start with vital statistics, such as the person’s full name. If that name is unusual, I’ll ask about it. Then we go on to where and when the person was born, their parents’ names, etc.”

When he interviews an elderly woman, her grown daughter — worried about having a strange man in the house — may sit in the same room. “Then,” Casebier said, “the daughter may finish her mother’s sentences instead of giving her time to collect her memories. That’s hard.”

At other times, two may be better than one:

“I interviewed a man and a woman who’d gone to school together in 1914 — in Lanfair Valley, an elevated, better-watered valley north of here that enjoyed a homestead boom starting in 1910.

“By interviewing them separately, and then together, I got much more than I could’ve out of either one alone.”

Should scholars approach him, asking to read a transcript, Casebier first tries to discover their intentions. “Especially until someone passes on,” he said, “I feel responsible for what they have told me.”

Sometimes friends or family suggest a really good interviewee. Then Casebier sends the prospect an MDHCA newsletter, “to let them see what we’re up to.”

At other times subjects show up on his doorstep:

“During World War II, 16,000 troops were stationed at Goffs. Every once in a while, a guy will come by looking for his roots.

“We’ll sit on the porch and I’ll ask him, ‘Could you see the water tanks? How far were you from the railroad? How would you get into Needles?’

“From this I can figure where his particular camp was.

“You can still see rock streets those boys built during the war.”