By ROBERT PRICE
The kids have orders not to touch the 17 cents sitting in the center console of Nigel Oliver’s Chevy Blazer. Not that a kid can do much with 17 cents, but that’s beside the point.
Those two nickels and seven pennies represent a man’s gratitude, a man's pride. That pocket change signifies a stranger's stubborn reluctance to accept insult and defeat as part of some universal, irrevocable reality.
Nigel Oliver wants to hear those coins rattle around near his ashtray for a while longer. It'll remind him of a 101-degree day, a cup of ice and a walking, talking parable with a three-day beard.
It happened last week on a sweltering day in Bakersfield. It must have been around noon when a car pulled off the freeway south of Bakersfield and a 50-ish man with salt-and-pepper hair and a blue baseball cap, short and wiry, scrambled out from the passenger seat onto the dirt shoulder.
He extracted his bags, which were attached to an aluminum luggage cart, and thanked the man who'd driven him up from Los Angeles.
Then he set out for town. It was a long, miserable trudge up Union Avenue, and by the time he reached a bustling roadside mini-market, he must have been about ready to evaporate in his work boots.
He staggered into the convenience store, filled his insulated, 32-ounce coffee cup from the ice machine and stepped to the back of the line. When he reached the front, the clerk looked him over. “Eighty-nine cents,” he said.
The salt-and-pepper man didn’t need to rummage through his pockets. He hadn't expected a cup of ice to cost quite so much, and he knew he didn’t have it. Realizing this, the clerk took the man's cup, walked over to a sink and poured the ice down the drain.
Perhaps accustomed to such humiliations, the salt-and-pepper man walked back out through the double glass doors and calmly sat down on a curb. He took out an old, mottled rag and wiped off his sweaty arms and forehead.
That’s what he was doing when Oliver, who’d stopped there to gas up his ’85 SUV, found him. Oliver had watched the whole thing unfold inside the store, and after he’d paid for his gas and his Gatorade, he walked over to the man.
Did he need anything? A Coke? No thanks. A beer? The man hadn't had a drink in 11 years, and he wasn't about to start again now. In fact, the stranger said, he was just fine. Oliver went back into the store anyway and filled his own 64-ounce plastic mug with ice. After some prodding, the man accepted it.
Oliver asked him his name. Charles, the man answered, but friends called him Charley. You, Charley said, can call me Charley.
Oliver asked him where he was headed. Charley wasn’t sure. Probably into town, he said. He could get a meal and a break from the heat at the Bakersfield Homeless Center, Oliver said. Could he use a little bus fare to get himself there? No thanks, Charley responded. He could walk. You'll fry first, Oliver said. It's a mighty long walk, and today's a mighty hot day.
Charley thought this over for a minute. He had a couple of dollars in food stamps he could pay in exchange for a ride, he said. Hop in, said Oliver, but don't worry about the food stamps. Oliver tossed in Charley's luggage cart, with its small suitcase, backpack and shaving kit, and they drove away.
It was only after he’d delivered his passenger to the Bethany Center and then driven a few blocks toward home that Oliver noticed the coins resting on the little tray of his vehicle's center console — 17 cents that hadn't been there before. Seventeen cents that might have represented all the money Charley had at the time.
When he talks about the incident now, Oliver is alternately sad and irate. He thinks about the cup of ice that went down the drain and how much good it might have done.
“How can you deny a man a cup of ice?” asks Oliver, who works overnight shifts as a pumper for a Kern County oil refinery. “In the city that started the Random Acts of Kindness thing, that's pretty bad.”
There's more than one irony at work here, though: The mini-market chain that turned away the overheated stranger — undoubtedly to discourage loitering and avoid the stray-cat syndrome that plagues many Union Avenue businesses — is a regular contributor to at least one homeless program in Bakersfield.
These are programs designed to take homeless and destitute people — vagrants, hobos, mentally ill, whatever they might be —out of settings like the one at the convenience store and place them in environments where they can get both immediate and long-range sustenance.
At the Bakersfield Rescue Mission, “clients” can work toward their GED, or high-school equivalency diploma. At the Bakersfield Homeless Center, operated by Bethany Services, they can work part-time feeding and housing their Colleagues. The idea is to pass out confidence along with corned-beef hash, self-esteem, blankets and pillows.
If a homeless man walks out into the world each morning with a full belly, good. If he walks out with more pride in himself, with a greater resolve, than when he checked in, even better.
It's that very principle, though, that gives Nigel Oliver pause when he reflects on Charley and his 17 cents. Charley, he believes, already possesses a healthy measure of pride and resolve. He's got some self-esteem, Some integrity, some dignity.
All he wanted was a cup of ice.
Published Aug. 6, 2000
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Winemaker’s life was filled to the rim
By ROBERT PRICE
For a lot of people, there is something daunting and unapproachable about fine wine. There are prerequisites, it seems: good breeding or perhaps some sort of advanced degree. Bonus points for an expensive German car. At the very least, a handle on the proper use of the word “bouquet.”
For Justin Meyer, wine was always something people drank because it tasted good — nothing more.
When Meyer, a self-described “Bakersfield Okie” and co-founder of Napa Valley’s Silver Oak Cellars, died this past week, the wine industry lost a great innovator. Wine lovers lost a friend and wine novices lost an advocate.
“I sometimes think the wine cognoscenti, gurus, and snobs, have harmed the cause of vino as much as they have helped it,” Meyer wrote in “Plain Talk About Fine Wine,” his 1989 book.
“They speak a language that intimidates and confuses people, giving the impression that only a select minority can genuinely appreciate good wine.”
Meyer had a regular guy’s appreciation for food and beverage, racquetball and life.
Meyer died from a heart attack Tuesday afternoon at age 63 while he and Bonny, his wife of nearly 30 years, were visiting friends in Markleeville, near Lake Tahoe.
Meyer, who gave the The Californian an interview at his home June 18, was semi-retired. In January 2001, he’d sold his half of Silver Oak to his partner, Ray Duncan, with whom he’d co-founded the business in 1972. Meyer was looking forward to spending the last years of his life helping one son make his way in the wine business and enjoying stress-free time with the rest of his family.
Meyer took a circuitous path to wine-making fame. His path led from the playing fields of Garces Memorial High School to the religious order of the Christian Brothers to the leadership of a cabernet sauvignon-only winery of international renown.
Meyer was born Raymond Meyer Jr. in Bakersfield on Nov. 11, 1938. His father and maternal grandfather worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, his mother for a dry cleaners a block from the house.
He attended St. Joseph’s, a now-defunct Catholic grammar school on Bakersfield’s Oregon Street. Then he enrolled at Garces, which at the time was run by the Christian Brothers, an order of Catholic monks. The Garces girls were sequestered into separate classes taught by Dominican nuns.
After his grandfather died, the Meyers moved out of their house and took up residency with Justin’s widowed grandmother. From the time Meyer was in eighth grade, it was Grandma who did a lot of the raising. But Meyer also made himself comfortable at friends’ houses throughout the neighborhood — a predominantly Hispanic part of town. He developed a taste for Mexican cuisine and became fluent in Spanish.
“Raymie,” as he was known at Garces, played football (as a running back) and baseball (he pitched and played right field). As class president for much of that time, he helped plan school dances and charity drives for the local poor. He paid attention to his classroom work only as much as was necessary; if his grades kept him eligible for sports, that was good enough.
He delivered The Los Angeles Tiimes, washed dishes at a local eatery and, during his last two summers in Bakersfield, installed attic duct work for his Uncle Leo’s business. That sweaty work, as much as anything, convinced him his future was beyond Bakersfield.
His father, Raymond Meyer, a 6-foot-2, 280-pound laborer for the railroad, was a tough, blunt-spoken man, and he was determined to impress upon his children the importance of education. He underscored his point in a memorable way: Do it, or “he’d kick my butt until my nose bled,” Meyer said.
Meyer graduated in 1956 and spent a semester or so at Bakersfield College.
Then he entered the Christian Brothers order, intending to teach at a high school like Garces somewhere on the West Coast.
The Brothers, as is their tradition, gave him a new name: Brother Justin.
Meyer studied for 18 months at the Mont La Salle novitiate near Napa, where he took vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience, studied religion and worked several jobs at the monastery.
Then he packed his bags for St. Mary’s College in Moraga, where he studied economics — and prayed a lot.
In between there was school and little else — though Meyer, banned along with the other seminary students from participating in intercollegiate sports, befriended the college’s baseball coach and volunteered his time as the team’s groundskeeper.
In early 1962, he graduated and joined the staff at Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento. He remembers that time fondly.
“It was a boarding school then, an all-boys school of about 200 to 300 students, and we had some problem cases,” Meyer said. “You could shape them up, and then they’d go home for the summer and when they’d come back they’d have all their old habits back. But I loved it.”
The long black robe he wore to school every day was hot, but it wasn’t a hindrance in the school yard.
“At recess, you’d have a kid come up and announce, ‘I can beat you in handball, brother,’” Meyer said, laughing at the memory. “I’d say, ‘No, you can’t.’”
And then he’d prove it.
Meyer coached basketball and baseball, served as an assistant foot- ball coach and doubled as bus driver.
“The only thing about the job was, you had a room full of kids and when (the school year) was over, they were gone,” said Meyer, who in later years established a scholarship fund for students in the Napa area.
Wine beckons
In 1964, Brother Timothy Diener, a lifelong mentor, gave Meyer a new assignment: wine-maker. Profits from the Christian Brothers’ Napa Valley winery funded the order’s various schools all along the West Coast, so it was a significant assignment. In more ways than one.
The Brothers tried Meyer in every job they had at their Mont La Salle winery, then they sent him to UC Davis, where he earned degrees in viticulture and enology, followed by a master’s in horticulture. He returned to Napa and did a little bit of everything, from the vineyards to the laboratory to labor negotiations. The Brothers emphasized mass production and a full palette of consumer choices.
Changing direction
Keeping up with the many jobs and many wines became overwhelming, and in 1972 Meyer called a man he’d met a year before — Duncan, a Colorado oil man who’d been looking to break into the wine business. They agreed to start their own winery, and in July Meyer left the Brothers.
He also resigned his vow of chastity and married Bonny Smith, whom he’d met at UC Davis. Bonny was a psychology major who’d needed tutoring in Spanish. Meyer was willing and able to help — if prevented by his vows from pursuing all possible aspects of the friendship at the time.
Duncan had purchased nearly 1,000 acres of wine-country land, some of it promising and some of it not. An old dairy milking barn was on one of their newly acquired properties, situated roughly between the Silverado Trail and Oakville, and they set up shop there in September.
They’d hoped to call their winery Silverado Cellars or something similar, but another winery owned the rights to the name and wouldn’t sell it, so they combined “Silverado” and “Oakville” to create the name Silver Oak.
The old Keig dairy was an ugly stucco building with an open attic and big holes in the wall, where cows used to butt their heads while they were being milked. The men insulated it, added wood shutters to block out the sun and added air conditioning. It was humble, but it would work.
The milking shed was situated in the middle of a retired cow pasture. Meyer took down the barbed-wire fences, installed the stakes and irrigation system and planted the vines. For the next three years, that’s practically all he did: plant vineyards.
All Meyer ever wanted to make was cabernet sauvignon, a full-bodied red. He picked cab for two reasons: At Christian Brothers he’d never had the luxury of devoting himself to perfecting any one thing; and Napa Valley was perfect for cabernet — this, of all the places on earth, was the spot to do it.
Many fellow vintners thought him crazy. Just one wine? A red? In the midst of a white-wine craze?
“It would have been like Ford only making Thunderbirds,” Meyer told The Detroit News in a 1998 interview.
But that’s what he and Duncan set out to do. They took their first haul, from a 20-acre vineyard in the Alexander Valley, to the Christian Brothers for crushing and fermentation. Then they transferred the immature wine to their old barn and put it in barrels.
While they waited for the wine-making process to run its course — they’d decided five years was about right — they looked after other interests.
Meyer and Duncan had planned to build a new winery, but when bankrupt Franciscan Vineyards went up for sale in 1975, they bought it and switched their operations there. They bottled up the winery’s existing inventory, which was aging in tanks and barrels, and sold 30,000 bottles for $1 each. Restaurateurs backed up their trucks against Franciscan’s freight loading dock and bought dozens of cases at a time.
Meyer sold out and bottled more, to the dismay of many of his fellow vintners. (They sold Franciscan in 1979 to a group of German investors, although Meyer stayed on as the winery’s president and winemaker until 1981.)
Meanwhile, Meyer and Duncan still hadn’t tasted their own wine — not in the condition they intended to sell it, anyway.
Things were slow those first few years for the three-person team — just Duncan, Justin Meyer and Bonny Meyer, who was the winery’s sales manager. It was, after all, a sideline for the Meyers, who were raising a young family while Justin and Ray Duncan ran Franciscan. Their ambitions for Silver Oak were still humble.
Hitting the big time
Finally, August 1977 arrived — time to taste the 1972 Alexander Valley cabernet. It wasn’t the best Silver Oak they ever made — but it was the first.
Things changed in a big way when the 1974 vintage, uncorked two years later, won a gold medal at the Los Angeles County Fair. (Meyer and Duncan later decided to stop entering wine competitions: Lose and your reputation is tainted; win and demand soars beyond its already impossible level. Still, their wines were so good they managed to win competitions they didn’t realize they’d been entered in.)
Silver Oak started making its Napa cabernet in 1979 — in part, Meyer said, to please the critics who tended to prefer the more tannic reds. So they had the smooth, “feminine” Alexander Valley version and the bold, austere Napa, and both were successes.
Wine critic Robert Parker, writer- editor of the influential Wine Advocate newsletter, assured the winery of lasting credibility when he wrote favorably about Silver Oak’s Alexander Valley cabernet in 1982. From that point, the wines sold out early every year, and Parker continued to give Silver Oak good scores over the years.
They’d hit the big time. One year, 4,000 people lined up down the street on release day, and Silver Oak sold $1.5 million worth of wine. Few customers blinked at the prices, which surpassed $50 a bottle long ago.
Meyer helped change the way people thought about wine-making. In the early ’70s, the winemaker was the thing — you had to have a genius in the back room. Meyer, who considered himself a viticulturalist first and foremost, changed that attitude. Suddenly the vineyard was the thing. You had to have good grapes, and the way to get good grapes was to apply the right techniques to the right piece of land.
It wasn’t just the land, of course. It was attention to every detail — from soil management to cork selection.
Meyer was a purist — he even had to train the barrel makers who’d won contracts with Silver Oak. Meyer demanded kiln dried barrels with a light “toast.” Not charred, please.
The aging of the wine was the key, though. Meyer and Duncan decided their wine would be aged for 30 months in oak barrels (nowadays strictly American oak, which Meyer preferred to French oak or any other, because of its subtle vanilla).
Over the years, Meyer also took the lead in developing ways of fighting vine pests and diseases, such as Pierce’s disease, phylloxeraand eutypa, a fungus that attacks vines at their pruning wounds. As president of the American Vineyard Foundation during one stretch, he helped track down millions of dollars in private and public funds to fight those plagues.
“You have to be crazy to be in the agriculture business,” he said, “because so many things can go wrong. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry.”
Still, he loved his work. Until his interest began to wane around 1999-2000, he couldn’t wait to get to the office every day.
But Meyer was able to keep things in perspective. Family and God came first. Meyer often told the story of the time he and his sons were tossing the football around in front of the winery when a car pulled up. The occupants wanted him to open the tasting room.
He told them the winery was closed on Sundays. They offered money. Incensed, he ran them off.
“The Lord has taken care of me, and I always insisted on recognizing Sunday as a day of rest,” Meyer said.
One day about four years ago, Meyer said, he caught his toe on a wire and stumbled — something he’d no doubt done many times over the years.
“I used to be pretty athletic,” Meyer said. “I’d usually hop about two times on my good leg until I could get my balance. This time I fell flat on my face. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ And it just got worse.”
A visit to the Mayo Clinic revealed he had a degenerative brain disease — cells in his cerebellum were drying out. Within a few months, he was walking with a cane.
But that’s not why he sold his interest in the winery, he said. It wasn’t his “touch of diabetes,” either. It was simply time to go.
“I’ve never missed Silver Oak,” he said. “It’s like a chapter in my life and I’m glad it’s over.”
He continued to make port with Matt Meyer, the second of his three children, but he was otherwise retired and happy about it. At the time of his death on Aug. 6, he’d been talking to Matt about turning over full operation of their enterprise, Boonville-based Meyer Family Port.
Meyer is survived by his wife, Bonny, and three children, Chad, Matt and Holly; his mother, Edith; and two sisters, Jan and Judy.
“Justin loved life,” Mike Stepanovich, of the Bakersfield Wine Society, said. “He just walked around with a continual sparkle in his eyes, like he and life shared this great joke. He’ll be missed.”
The writer Gerald Haslam, a fellow Garces graduate, eulogized his lifelong friend Saturday afternoon in Napa.
“... I can never talk to Justin without encountering Raymie,” Haslam wrote in the afterword of “Plain Talk,” Meyer’s 1989 book, “and I like them both.”
Originally published in August 2002
For a lot of people, there is something daunting and unapproachable about fine wine. There are prerequisites, it seems: good breeding or perhaps some sort of advanced degree. Bonus points for an expensive German car. At the very least, a handle on the proper use of the word “bouquet.”
For Justin Meyer, wine was always something people drank because it tasted good — nothing more.
When Meyer, a self-described “Bakersfield Okie” and co-founder of Napa Valley’s Silver Oak Cellars, died this past week, the wine industry lost a great innovator. Wine lovers lost a friend and wine novices lost an advocate.
“I sometimes think the wine cognoscenti, gurus, and snobs, have harmed the cause of vino as much as they have helped it,” Meyer wrote in “Plain Talk About Fine Wine,” his 1989 book.
“They speak a language that intimidates and confuses people, giving the impression that only a select minority can genuinely appreciate good wine.”
Meyer had a regular guy’s appreciation for food and beverage, racquetball and life.
Meyer died from a heart attack Tuesday afternoon at age 63 while he and Bonny, his wife of nearly 30 years, were visiting friends in Markleeville, near Lake Tahoe.
Meyer, who gave the The Californian an interview at his home June 18, was semi-retired. In January 2001, he’d sold his half of Silver Oak to his partner, Ray Duncan, with whom he’d co-founded the business in 1972. Meyer was looking forward to spending the last years of his life helping one son make his way in the wine business and enjoying stress-free time with the rest of his family.
Meyer took a circuitous path to wine-making fame. His path led from the playing fields of Garces Memorial High School to the religious order of the Christian Brothers to the leadership of a cabernet sauvignon-only winery of international renown.
Meyer was born Raymond Meyer Jr. in Bakersfield on Nov. 11, 1938. His father and maternal grandfather worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, his mother for a dry cleaners a block from the house.
He attended St. Joseph’s, a now-defunct Catholic grammar school on Bakersfield’s Oregon Street. Then he enrolled at Garces, which at the time was run by the Christian Brothers, an order of Catholic monks. The Garces girls were sequestered into separate classes taught by Dominican nuns.
After his grandfather died, the Meyers moved out of their house and took up residency with Justin’s widowed grandmother. From the time Meyer was in eighth grade, it was Grandma who did a lot of the raising. But Meyer also made himself comfortable at friends’ houses throughout the neighborhood — a predominantly Hispanic part of town. He developed a taste for Mexican cuisine and became fluent in Spanish.
“Raymie,” as he was known at Garces, played football (as a running back) and baseball (he pitched and played right field). As class president for much of that time, he helped plan school dances and charity drives for the local poor. He paid attention to his classroom work only as much as was necessary; if his grades kept him eligible for sports, that was good enough.
He delivered The Los Angeles Tiimes, washed dishes at a local eatery and, during his last two summers in Bakersfield, installed attic duct work for his Uncle Leo’s business. That sweaty work, as much as anything, convinced him his future was beyond Bakersfield.
His father, Raymond Meyer, a 6-foot-2, 280-pound laborer for the railroad, was a tough, blunt-spoken man, and he was determined to impress upon his children the importance of education. He underscored his point in a memorable way: Do it, or “he’d kick my butt until my nose bled,” Meyer said.
Meyer graduated in 1956 and spent a semester or so at Bakersfield College.
Then he entered the Christian Brothers order, intending to teach at a high school like Garces somewhere on the West Coast.
The Brothers, as is their tradition, gave him a new name: Brother Justin.
Meyer studied for 18 months at the Mont La Salle novitiate near Napa, where he took vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience, studied religion and worked several jobs at the monastery.
Then he packed his bags for St. Mary’s College in Moraga, where he studied economics — and prayed a lot.
In between there was school and little else — though Meyer, banned along with the other seminary students from participating in intercollegiate sports, befriended the college’s baseball coach and volunteered his time as the team’s groundskeeper.
In early 1962, he graduated and joined the staff at Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento. He remembers that time fondly.
“It was a boarding school then, an all-boys school of about 200 to 300 students, and we had some problem cases,” Meyer said. “You could shape them up, and then they’d go home for the summer and when they’d come back they’d have all their old habits back. But I loved it.”
The long black robe he wore to school every day was hot, but it wasn’t a hindrance in the school yard.
“At recess, you’d have a kid come up and announce, ‘I can beat you in handball, brother,’” Meyer said, laughing at the memory. “I’d say, ‘No, you can’t.’”
And then he’d prove it.
Meyer coached basketball and baseball, served as an assistant foot- ball coach and doubled as bus driver.
“The only thing about the job was, you had a room full of kids and when (the school year) was over, they were gone,” said Meyer, who in later years established a scholarship fund for students in the Napa area.
Wine beckons
In 1964, Brother Timothy Diener, a lifelong mentor, gave Meyer a new assignment: wine-maker. Profits from the Christian Brothers’ Napa Valley winery funded the order’s various schools all along the West Coast, so it was a significant assignment. In more ways than one.
The Brothers tried Meyer in every job they had at their Mont La Salle winery, then they sent him to UC Davis, where he earned degrees in viticulture and enology, followed by a master’s in horticulture. He returned to Napa and did a little bit of everything, from the vineyards to the laboratory to labor negotiations. The Brothers emphasized mass production and a full palette of consumer choices.
Changing direction
Keeping up with the many jobs and many wines became overwhelming, and in 1972 Meyer called a man he’d met a year before — Duncan, a Colorado oil man who’d been looking to break into the wine business. They agreed to start their own winery, and in July Meyer left the Brothers.
He also resigned his vow of chastity and married Bonny Smith, whom he’d met at UC Davis. Bonny was a psychology major who’d needed tutoring in Spanish. Meyer was willing and able to help — if prevented by his vows from pursuing all possible aspects of the friendship at the time.
Duncan had purchased nearly 1,000 acres of wine-country land, some of it promising and some of it not. An old dairy milking barn was on one of their newly acquired properties, situated roughly between the Silverado Trail and Oakville, and they set up shop there in September.
They’d hoped to call their winery Silverado Cellars or something similar, but another winery owned the rights to the name and wouldn’t sell it, so they combined “Silverado” and “Oakville” to create the name Silver Oak.
The old Keig dairy was an ugly stucco building with an open attic and big holes in the wall, where cows used to butt their heads while they were being milked. The men insulated it, added wood shutters to block out the sun and added air conditioning. It was humble, but it would work.
The milking shed was situated in the middle of a retired cow pasture. Meyer took down the barbed-wire fences, installed the stakes and irrigation system and planted the vines. For the next three years, that’s practically all he did: plant vineyards.
All Meyer ever wanted to make was cabernet sauvignon, a full-bodied red. He picked cab for two reasons: At Christian Brothers he’d never had the luxury of devoting himself to perfecting any one thing; and Napa Valley was perfect for cabernet — this, of all the places on earth, was the spot to do it.
Many fellow vintners thought him crazy. Just one wine? A red? In the midst of a white-wine craze?
“It would have been like Ford only making Thunderbirds,” Meyer told The Detroit News in a 1998 interview.
But that’s what he and Duncan set out to do. They took their first haul, from a 20-acre vineyard in the Alexander Valley, to the Christian Brothers for crushing and fermentation. Then they transferred the immature wine to their old barn and put it in barrels.
While they waited for the wine-making process to run its course — they’d decided five years was about right — they looked after other interests.
Meyer and Duncan had planned to build a new winery, but when bankrupt Franciscan Vineyards went up for sale in 1975, they bought it and switched their operations there. They bottled up the winery’s existing inventory, which was aging in tanks and barrels, and sold 30,000 bottles for $1 each. Restaurateurs backed up their trucks against Franciscan’s freight loading dock and bought dozens of cases at a time.
Meyer sold out and bottled more, to the dismay of many of his fellow vintners. (They sold Franciscan in 1979 to a group of German investors, although Meyer stayed on as the winery’s president and winemaker until 1981.)
Meanwhile, Meyer and Duncan still hadn’t tasted their own wine — not in the condition they intended to sell it, anyway.
Things were slow those first few years for the three-person team — just Duncan, Justin Meyer and Bonny Meyer, who was the winery’s sales manager. It was, after all, a sideline for the Meyers, who were raising a young family while Justin and Ray Duncan ran Franciscan. Their ambitions for Silver Oak were still humble.
Hitting the big time
Finally, August 1977 arrived — time to taste the 1972 Alexander Valley cabernet. It wasn’t the best Silver Oak they ever made — but it was the first.
Things changed in a big way when the 1974 vintage, uncorked two years later, won a gold medal at the Los Angeles County Fair. (Meyer and Duncan later decided to stop entering wine competitions: Lose and your reputation is tainted; win and demand soars beyond its already impossible level. Still, their wines were so good they managed to win competitions they didn’t realize they’d been entered in.)
Silver Oak started making its Napa cabernet in 1979 — in part, Meyer said, to please the critics who tended to prefer the more tannic reds. So they had the smooth, “feminine” Alexander Valley version and the bold, austere Napa, and both were successes.
Wine critic Robert Parker, writer- editor of the influential Wine Advocate newsletter, assured the winery of lasting credibility when he wrote favorably about Silver Oak’s Alexander Valley cabernet in 1982. From that point, the wines sold out early every year, and Parker continued to give Silver Oak good scores over the years.
They’d hit the big time. One year, 4,000 people lined up down the street on release day, and Silver Oak sold $1.5 million worth of wine. Few customers blinked at the prices, which surpassed $50 a bottle long ago.
Meyer helped change the way people thought about wine-making. In the early ’70s, the winemaker was the thing — you had to have a genius in the back room. Meyer, who considered himself a viticulturalist first and foremost, changed that attitude. Suddenly the vineyard was the thing. You had to have good grapes, and the way to get good grapes was to apply the right techniques to the right piece of land.
It wasn’t just the land, of course. It was attention to every detail — from soil management to cork selection.
Meyer was a purist — he even had to train the barrel makers who’d won contracts with Silver Oak. Meyer demanded kiln dried barrels with a light “toast.” Not charred, please.
The aging of the wine was the key, though. Meyer and Duncan decided their wine would be aged for 30 months in oak barrels (nowadays strictly American oak, which Meyer preferred to French oak or any other, because of its subtle vanilla).
Over the years, Meyer also took the lead in developing ways of fighting vine pests and diseases, such as Pierce’s disease, phylloxeraand eutypa, a fungus that attacks vines at their pruning wounds. As president of the American Vineyard Foundation during one stretch, he helped track down millions of dollars in private and public funds to fight those plagues.
“You have to be crazy to be in the agriculture business,” he said, “because so many things can go wrong. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry.”
Still, he loved his work. Until his interest began to wane around 1999-2000, he couldn’t wait to get to the office every day.
But Meyer was able to keep things in perspective. Family and God came first. Meyer often told the story of the time he and his sons were tossing the football around in front of the winery when a car pulled up. The occupants wanted him to open the tasting room.
He told them the winery was closed on Sundays. They offered money. Incensed, he ran them off.
“The Lord has taken care of me, and I always insisted on recognizing Sunday as a day of rest,” Meyer said.
One day about four years ago, Meyer said, he caught his toe on a wire and stumbled — something he’d no doubt done many times over the years.
“I used to be pretty athletic,” Meyer said. “I’d usually hop about two times on my good leg until I could get my balance. This time I fell flat on my face. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ And it just got worse.”
A visit to the Mayo Clinic revealed he had a degenerative brain disease — cells in his cerebellum were drying out. Within a few months, he was walking with a cane.
But that’s not why he sold his interest in the winery, he said. It wasn’t his “touch of diabetes,” either. It was simply time to go.
“I’ve never missed Silver Oak,” he said. “It’s like a chapter in my life and I’m glad it’s over.”
He continued to make port with Matt Meyer, the second of his three children, but he was otherwise retired and happy about it. At the time of his death on Aug. 6, he’d been talking to Matt about turning over full operation of their enterprise, Boonville-based Meyer Family Port.
Meyer is survived by his wife, Bonny, and three children, Chad, Matt and Holly; his mother, Edith; and two sisters, Jan and Judy.
“Justin loved life,” Mike Stepanovich, of the Bakersfield Wine Society, said. “He just walked around with a continual sparkle in his eyes, like he and life shared this great joke. He’ll be missed.”
The writer Gerald Haslam, a fellow Garces graduate, eulogized his lifelong friend Saturday afternoon in Napa.
“... I can never talk to Justin without encountering Raymie,” Haslam wrote in the afterword of “Plain Talk,” Meyer’s 1989 book, “and I like them both.”
Originally published in August 2002
Friday, April 3, 2009
Jack Johnson: Black activist, no; boxing champ, yes
By ROBERT PRICE
If you were still trudging back from the outhouse and missed it, I'll fill you in. As revealed Monday and Tuesday night in PBS' outstanding new documentary by Ken Burns, Bakersfield was once home to the best-known athlete in the world -- the heavyweight boxing champ. And not just any champ: a groundbreaking, polarizing, bigger-than-life scoundrel-slash-hero.
Jack Johnson, the world's first African-American heavyweight boxing champion, didn't consider himself an activist, but few others in those days -- if indeed anyone -- stirred dreams of social justice and equality in the hearts of U.S. blacks more than he.
Johnson, who was champion from 1908 to 1915, lived in Bakersfield off and on (but mostly off) from 1901 until perhaps 1911. Records aren't clear.
But, as suggested in "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a four-hour PBS documentary that made its debut this week, his stay was a memorable one.
Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, and started boxing at the age of 16. Kicked out of town for staging an illegal fight in 1901, Johnson hopped a freight train for Denver and eventually landed in Stockton, according to Geoffrey C. Ward's book, upon which the documentary of the same name is based.
That autumn, a squat, tough-talking Bakersfield saloon owner named Frank Carillo convinced him to move to this city.
Carillo, his toughness underscored by the knife scar across his cheek, had quite an operation. He staged illegal cockfights and then tipped off accommodating police officers, who would raid the events, arrest the spectators and step aside while Carillo lent them bail money at exorbitant rates. So it went in Bakersfield, a tough, semi-lawless remnant of the Old West.
Bakersfield's blacks lived in a small, clearly defined section of the town, but Johnson managed to rent himself a room in the white neighborhood. And soon enough, he was keeping the company of white women, further inflaming things.
Carillo arranged a Nov. 4 fight between Johnson, then billed as "Jack Johnson of Denver," and Hank Griffin, the son of a runaway slave and his American-Indian wife, at New Harmony Hall on lively Cottonwood Road in Bakersfield.
"The fight was one of the cleanest ... ever witnessed in this city," wrote The Californian. "... Both men (were) breaking nicely from the clinches. ... Griffin landed many hard punches during the evening, but so did Johnson."
Griffin, a good defensive fighter known as "Mummy" Griffin for his skeletal build, won the 20-round bout on points, although Johnson later claimed they'd fought to a draw. He also claimed that he'd gone into the ring despite a fever, and that he'd knocked Griffin down twice. No one else seemed to recall the knockdowns.
The men fought three times more in later years -- a draw each time.
Johnson never fought in Bakersfield again, but he did fight for Carillo. In 1902, he faced George Gardner in San Francisco. Carillo, working in Johnson's corner, had bet on the outcome. Halfway through, apparently unsure about the safety of his money, he waved a pistol in Johnson's face, hoping to convince Johnson to try a little harder. Johnson won on points and, apparently unfazed by the gun, retained Carillo as his manager.
But not for long. Johnson fought Fred Russell in Los Angeles on Dec. 4, 1902, and was winning handily after seven rounds. But in the eighth Russell kneed him three times in the groin and Johnson, doubled over in pain, could not continue. Johnson won the fight -- and most of the purse -- by forfeit.
As soon as word got out back in Bakersfield that Johnson had collected a paycheck, several shopkeepers got a warrant for Johnson's arrest, claiming he'd failed to pay his bills. Johnson did tend to have trouble keeping up on his accounts payable, but Bakersfield merchants didn't cut him any slack, either.
According to The Californian: "It is said that Jack has made himself somewhat obnoxious to the various persons ... who made the charge, claiming that he is living in the forbidden district and beating bills."
Carillo promised the court that his client would pay whatever he legitimately owed. But shortly afterward, Johnson fired Carillo, charging that his manager had made off with his thousand-dollar purse from the Russell fight. Johnson chose to stay in Bakersfield, however, where he lived with a succession of "wives," some of them white.
It's not clear how long Johnson maintained a home here. He criss-crossed the country -- and the world -- during his reign as champ.
In 1911, according to the late, great Bakersfield historian Bill Rintoul, Al Thackery, who ran the Green Store on Main Street in Taft, dangled a "bankroll as big as your arm" to bring the Jack Johnson-Jim Flynn heavyweight championship bout to Taft. He failed, for reasons unknown, but Johnson's local connection must have remained strong all those years for Thackery to have been so emboldened.
And Bakersfield evidently got into Johnson's head sufficiently for him to conjure it up in his 1927 memoirs.
Of Al Kaufmann, his opponent in San Francisco on Sept. 9, 1909, Johnson wrote, "Kaufmann had no more chance of blocking my left than a turtle has of running down a Bakersfield jack rabbit."
That was Johnson. Confident to the point of arrogance -- but, as Kaufmann learned that day, a good judge of his own considerable physical skills.
Originally published 1/19/2005
If you were still trudging back from the outhouse and missed it, I'll fill you in. As revealed Monday and Tuesday night in PBS' outstanding new documentary by Ken Burns, Bakersfield was once home to the best-known athlete in the world -- the heavyweight boxing champ. And not just any champ: a groundbreaking, polarizing, bigger-than-life scoundrel-slash-hero.
Jack Johnson, the world's first African-American heavyweight boxing champion, didn't consider himself an activist, but few others in those days -- if indeed anyone -- stirred dreams of social justice and equality in the hearts of U.S. blacks more than he.
Johnson, who was champion from 1908 to 1915, lived in Bakersfield off and on (but mostly off) from 1901 until perhaps 1911. Records aren't clear.
But, as suggested in "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a four-hour PBS documentary that made its debut this week, his stay was a memorable one.
Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, and started boxing at the age of 16. Kicked out of town for staging an illegal fight in 1901, Johnson hopped a freight train for Denver and eventually landed in Stockton, according to Geoffrey C. Ward's book, upon which the documentary of the same name is based.
That autumn, a squat, tough-talking Bakersfield saloon owner named Frank Carillo convinced him to move to this city.
Carillo, his toughness underscored by the knife scar across his cheek, had quite an operation. He staged illegal cockfights and then tipped off accommodating police officers, who would raid the events, arrest the spectators and step aside while Carillo lent them bail money at exorbitant rates. So it went in Bakersfield, a tough, semi-lawless remnant of the Old West.
Bakersfield's blacks lived in a small, clearly defined section of the town, but Johnson managed to rent himself a room in the white neighborhood. And soon enough, he was keeping the company of white women, further inflaming things.
Carillo arranged a Nov. 4 fight between Johnson, then billed as "Jack Johnson of Denver," and Hank Griffin, the son of a runaway slave and his American-Indian wife, at New Harmony Hall on lively Cottonwood Road in Bakersfield.
"The fight was one of the cleanest ... ever witnessed in this city," wrote The Californian. "... Both men (were) breaking nicely from the clinches. ... Griffin landed many hard punches during the evening, but so did Johnson."
Griffin, a good defensive fighter known as "Mummy" Griffin for his skeletal build, won the 20-round bout on points, although Johnson later claimed they'd fought to a draw. He also claimed that he'd gone into the ring despite a fever, and that he'd knocked Griffin down twice. No one else seemed to recall the knockdowns.
The men fought three times more in later years -- a draw each time.
Johnson never fought in Bakersfield again, but he did fight for Carillo. In 1902, he faced George Gardner in San Francisco. Carillo, working in Johnson's corner, had bet on the outcome. Halfway through, apparently unsure about the safety of his money, he waved a pistol in Johnson's face, hoping to convince Johnson to try a little harder. Johnson won on points and, apparently unfazed by the gun, retained Carillo as his manager.
But not for long. Johnson fought Fred Russell in Los Angeles on Dec. 4, 1902, and was winning handily after seven rounds. But in the eighth Russell kneed him three times in the groin and Johnson, doubled over in pain, could not continue. Johnson won the fight -- and most of the purse -- by forfeit.
As soon as word got out back in Bakersfield that Johnson had collected a paycheck, several shopkeepers got a warrant for Johnson's arrest, claiming he'd failed to pay his bills. Johnson did tend to have trouble keeping up on his accounts payable, but Bakersfield merchants didn't cut him any slack, either.
According to The Californian: "It is said that Jack has made himself somewhat obnoxious to the various persons ... who made the charge, claiming that he is living in the forbidden district and beating bills."
Carillo promised the court that his client would pay whatever he legitimately owed. But shortly afterward, Johnson fired Carillo, charging that his manager had made off with his thousand-dollar purse from the Russell fight. Johnson chose to stay in Bakersfield, however, where he lived with a succession of "wives," some of them white.
It's not clear how long Johnson maintained a home here. He criss-crossed the country -- and the world -- during his reign as champ.
In 1911, according to the late, great Bakersfield historian Bill Rintoul, Al Thackery, who ran the Green Store on Main Street in Taft, dangled a "bankroll as big as your arm" to bring the Jack Johnson-Jim Flynn heavyweight championship bout to Taft. He failed, for reasons unknown, but Johnson's local connection must have remained strong all those years for Thackery to have been so emboldened.
And Bakersfield evidently got into Johnson's head sufficiently for him to conjure it up in his 1927 memoirs.
Of Al Kaufmann, his opponent in San Francisco on Sept. 9, 1909, Johnson wrote, "Kaufmann had no more chance of blocking my left than a turtle has of running down a Bakersfield jack rabbit."
That was Johnson. Confident to the point of arrogance -- but, as Kaufmann learned that day, a good judge of his own considerable physical skills.
Originally published 1/19/2005
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Sun, Fun, Stay, Play - those were the days
By Robert Price
You’ve probably noticed Bakersfield’s roadside “welcome” signs along Highway 99: Gray, ground-level concrete blocks with all the personality of a pair of warehouse doors.
Ah, for the days of the old “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs, those gargantuan sentries that stood at the north and south ends of the city for 17 years or so beginning in the late 1960s.
Playful and cartoonish, the Jurassic twins featured greeting-card poetry so simple and memorable the signs actually developed a cult following. Even for freeway travelers who never once set foot in Bakersfield, there was something comforting about their candy-store visage.
But the signs came to be regarded as truck-stop tacky, and in 1983 they came down for good. But decades later, many people still remember them fondly. And inevitably, some will ask the question: Whatever became of those signs?
The great city-sign savior himself, country musician Buck Owens, once asked that question too. He actually got an answer. Part of one, at least.
It was 1999, and Owens had just unveiled a re-creation of Bakersfield’s new/old city landmark, the blue-on-gold “Bakersfield” footbridge that once spanned Union Avenue. The new version, a near-clone, stands near the intersection of Sillect Avenue and Buck Owens Boulevard outside the singer’s Crystal Palace dinner club.
Once that project was finished, Owens had his people call Dale Mills, the retired director of the Kern County Department of Public Works, to ask about the “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs.
Mills was in on the conception, development and demise of those memorable signs, but he wasn’t sure what had become of them after they were uprooted and hauled away. Turns out nobody knew for certain, not even the man who’d purchased them years before.
The two “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs were at opposite ends of the city, one several miles south of town at Herring Road and another north of town at Snow Road. They were behemoth, identical structures — 49 feet tall and 60 feet wide, with balloonish, aspirin-shaped mini-signs for each of the four key words and a huge, rectangular marquee below that advertised local events of interest — rodeos, roller skating competitions, harvest festivals and all of the other activities that medium-sized Valley towns hosted in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Highway 99 once brought travelers right through the heart of Bakersfield, but after the new freeway was completed in 1964, highway traffic never came close enough to be tempted by the motels and restaurants along Union Avenue. A confederation of Union Avenue businesses, worried that they’d all wither away and die, decided that a matching pair of colorful signs on the freeway might entice travelers to stop and at least use our bathrooms.
In 1965, the owners of 252 business parcels along Union Avenue, between White Lane and Bernard Street, formed a service area — basically, a self-imposed assessment district, with everybody chipping in to a communal kitty.
They hired the Heath Co. of Los Angeles to design and build the first sign on the south side of the city for $27,000 — and, later, a second sign for the same price.
The steering committee kicked around several ideas. At one point the signs would say “Keep to the Right for / Bakersfield, Playground of the Valley.” Then, at some point in mid-1965, Heath’s designers came up with the idea for the “balloon” signs. But instead of “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play,” the four words would be the distinctly unpoetic “Eat, Rest, Gas, Play.”
Perhaps seeing the inevitable consequences of having a huge sign featuring “eat” and “gas” in the same message, the sign committee revised the slogan to “Eat, Rest, Swim, Play.”
Things appeared to be moving in that direction until the county’s vigilant legal staff advised the sign committee that such wording was a potential violation of laws that barred government entities from promoting private enterprise.
“Eat,” for example, could be seen as promoting Bakersfield’s restaurants, and “rest” suggested that motorists should stop at one of the city’s fine hotels.
No word on whether county counsel was also grimacing inwardly at the clunkiness of the proposed prose.
The identity of the visionary who first blurted out the words “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” is lost to history; God help us if it was an attorney. In any event, the slogan was approved and work commenced on the first of the two signs in late 1965.
That first sign, with eight-foot tall letters in the “balloons” and red, removable, 2-foot-tall letters on the marquee, was unveiled in March 1966.
At the dedication ceremony, Kern County Supervisor David Fairbairn, a member of the sign committee, claimed that Bakersfield had achieved a first:
Never before had businesses come together to voluntarily tax themselves for such a purpose — not in California and, as far as he knew, not anywhere in the country.
The second sign went up in 1968.
The signs became famous, sort of.
Travelers became accustomed to the familiar greeting, and some of them presumably stayed and even played.
But the businesses that comprised the backbone of the service area gradually closed, moved or lost interest. In January 1978, a major windstorm blew through the city and damaged the signs, destroying 45 letters.
Extensive repairs were undertaken in 1981, and it became clear that the two signs would eventually need a lot more work. By 1982, Mills said, “it got to the point where people didn’t want to pay for them anymore.”
People were also growing tired of the seemingly daily outrages perpetrate by pranksters who creatively (and not-so-creatively) rearranged the marquees’ letters to suit their own juvenile purposes.
Steve Gabbitas, one of the then-students hired to change the message on the signs’ marquees every two weeks, admitted in a 1999 interview that the thought occurred to him as well.
“We were tempted to make our own messages, too,” Gabbitas said. “After we put up the message we were supposed to put up, we were supposed to take a Polaroid to prove we’d done it right.
“We always thought we could get away with changing the message after we took the photo — ‘Hey, it wasn’t like that when we left’ — but we never did. We were high school kids. Why would you trust high school kids, anyway?”
In 1982, the county polled the owners of the 252 business parcels in the “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” assessment area about their interest in repairing and continuing to maintain the signs. Of the 112 who responded, only two owners wanted to keep (and pay for) the signs. No wonder: In the 1978-79 fiscal year, maintenance of the signs cost them each $54 a year, but by 1982-83 it was running nearly three times that amount.
The county didn’t want to pay for the signs and neither did the county Board of Trade, the Superintendent of Schools office, the Greater Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce or the city of Bakersfield. The signs were “hokey” landmarks that “paint a truckstop image” of Bakersfield, city councilman Don Ratty said at the time, and most everyone agreed with him.
Most everyone in Bakersfield, anyway. It took a Los Angeles woman to organize a statewide “Save Our Bakersfield Signs” preservation committee.
“I happen to like these signs a lot and I don’t think people in Bakersfield have really thought about this,” L.A. attorney Jerry Simmons wrote in a 1983 letter.
She praised the signs as “so colorful.”
Unswayed, the Kern County Board of Supervisors authorized a sealed-bid sale of the signs, and in March 1983 Airport Bus of Bakersfield won out over five bidding rivals, including Jim Burke of Jim Burke Ford. Ken Jones, the president of Airport Bus at the time, says he got both signs for a mere $1,500 — with the proviso that he remove them at his own expense.
Nostalgia was not the primary consideration for Jones’ purchase: Airport Bus would be using the signs to promote its service to and from Los Angeles International Airport (in ways Jones had not yet clearly identified).
Jones hired a Fresno-area crane company to remove the signs. He stored one sign in the yard of one of his businesses, Coastal Engineering, which then occupied the corner of Rosedale Highway and Mohawk Street, and the other in the yard of the Fresno crane operator. He then set himself to the task of obtaining permits to put the signs back into the ground somewhere along the freeway.
Jones was still attempting to get that authorization, he says, when “a pretty good storm” blew through Bakersfield and slammed his sign to the ground with tornado-like fury. It was a total loss: Jones’ insurance paid off and the sign was scrapped.
Meanwhile, Jones still owed money to the Fresno company that had removed the signs. He couldn’t pay and, exasperated by the whole thing, offered the sign in lieu of cash. The company accepted.
Whatever became of that sign?
Jones, interviewed in 1999, said he doesn’t know. He can’t recall the name of the company that took possession of it, and he says his records from those years are long gone.
Perhaps the remaining “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” sign was scrapped and sent to a landfill. Perhaps it was partially recycled and turned into a new billboard.
Perhaps it’s rusting, intact, in a junkyard somewhere near Firebaugh.
Nobody said much about the signs for the next two decades, at least not to Jones. In the meantime, Jones and his partners sold Airport Bus, and Coastal Engineering went out of business.
Today Jones runs Coastal Netting, which makes the huge metal poles (but not the actual netting) used for the fencing around golf driving ranges.
Jones doesn’t wax nostalgic about his “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs.
“Maybe ol’ Buck can just make his own sign,” he said.
Maybe indeed. Owens, who built his own “Bakersfield” footbridge from scratch, salvaging only the 11 blue porcelain letters, has proved that you don’t need original brick and mortar to evoke memories.
Maybe they don’t make ’em like they used to, but they can sure make ’em LOOK like they used to.
This story is based on a version published on Sept. 19, 1999.
You’ve probably noticed Bakersfield’s roadside “welcome” signs along Highway 99: Gray, ground-level concrete blocks with all the personality of a pair of warehouse doors.
Ah, for the days of the old “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs, those gargantuan sentries that stood at the north and south ends of the city for 17 years or so beginning in the late 1960s.
Playful and cartoonish, the Jurassic twins featured greeting-card poetry so simple and memorable the signs actually developed a cult following. Even for freeway travelers who never once set foot in Bakersfield, there was something comforting about their candy-store visage.
But the signs came to be regarded as truck-stop tacky, and in 1983 they came down for good. But decades later, many people still remember them fondly. And inevitably, some will ask the question: Whatever became of those signs?
The great city-sign savior himself, country musician Buck Owens, once asked that question too. He actually got an answer. Part of one, at least.
It was 1999, and Owens had just unveiled a re-creation of Bakersfield’s new/old city landmark, the blue-on-gold “Bakersfield” footbridge that once spanned Union Avenue. The new version, a near-clone, stands near the intersection of Sillect Avenue and Buck Owens Boulevard outside the singer’s Crystal Palace dinner club.
Once that project was finished, Owens had his people call Dale Mills, the retired director of the Kern County Department of Public Works, to ask about the “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs.
Mills was in on the conception, development and demise of those memorable signs, but he wasn’t sure what had become of them after they were uprooted and hauled away. Turns out nobody knew for certain, not even the man who’d purchased them years before.
The two “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs were at opposite ends of the city, one several miles south of town at Herring Road and another north of town at Snow Road. They were behemoth, identical structures — 49 feet tall and 60 feet wide, with balloonish, aspirin-shaped mini-signs for each of the four key words and a huge, rectangular marquee below that advertised local events of interest — rodeos, roller skating competitions, harvest festivals and all of the other activities that medium-sized Valley towns hosted in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Highway 99 once brought travelers right through the heart of Bakersfield, but after the new freeway was completed in 1964, highway traffic never came close enough to be tempted by the motels and restaurants along Union Avenue. A confederation of Union Avenue businesses, worried that they’d all wither away and die, decided that a matching pair of colorful signs on the freeway might entice travelers to stop and at least use our bathrooms.
In 1965, the owners of 252 business parcels along Union Avenue, between White Lane and Bernard Street, formed a service area — basically, a self-imposed assessment district, with everybody chipping in to a communal kitty.
They hired the Heath Co. of Los Angeles to design and build the first sign on the south side of the city for $27,000 — and, later, a second sign for the same price.
The steering committee kicked around several ideas. At one point the signs would say “Keep to the Right for / Bakersfield, Playground of the Valley.” Then, at some point in mid-1965, Heath’s designers came up with the idea for the “balloon” signs. But instead of “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play,” the four words would be the distinctly unpoetic “Eat, Rest, Gas, Play.”
Perhaps seeing the inevitable consequences of having a huge sign featuring “eat” and “gas” in the same message, the sign committee revised the slogan to “Eat, Rest, Swim, Play.”
Things appeared to be moving in that direction until the county’s vigilant legal staff advised the sign committee that such wording was a potential violation of laws that barred government entities from promoting private enterprise.
“Eat,” for example, could be seen as promoting Bakersfield’s restaurants, and “rest” suggested that motorists should stop at one of the city’s fine hotels.
No word on whether county counsel was also grimacing inwardly at the clunkiness of the proposed prose.
The identity of the visionary who first blurted out the words “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” is lost to history; God help us if it was an attorney. In any event, the slogan was approved and work commenced on the first of the two signs in late 1965.
That first sign, with eight-foot tall letters in the “balloons” and red, removable, 2-foot-tall letters on the marquee, was unveiled in March 1966.
At the dedication ceremony, Kern County Supervisor David Fairbairn, a member of the sign committee, claimed that Bakersfield had achieved a first:
Never before had businesses come together to voluntarily tax themselves for such a purpose — not in California and, as far as he knew, not anywhere in the country.
The second sign went up in 1968.
The signs became famous, sort of.
Travelers became accustomed to the familiar greeting, and some of them presumably stayed and even played.
But the businesses that comprised the backbone of the service area gradually closed, moved or lost interest. In January 1978, a major windstorm blew through the city and damaged the signs, destroying 45 letters.
Extensive repairs were undertaken in 1981, and it became clear that the two signs would eventually need a lot more work. By 1982, Mills said, “it got to the point where people didn’t want to pay for them anymore.”
People were also growing tired of the seemingly daily outrages perpetrate by pranksters who creatively (and not-so-creatively) rearranged the marquees’ letters to suit their own juvenile purposes.
Steve Gabbitas, one of the then-students hired to change the message on the signs’ marquees every two weeks, admitted in a 1999 interview that the thought occurred to him as well.
“We were tempted to make our own messages, too,” Gabbitas said. “After we put up the message we were supposed to put up, we were supposed to take a Polaroid to prove we’d done it right.
“We always thought we could get away with changing the message after we took the photo — ‘Hey, it wasn’t like that when we left’ — but we never did. We were high school kids. Why would you trust high school kids, anyway?”
In 1982, the county polled the owners of the 252 business parcels in the “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” assessment area about their interest in repairing and continuing to maintain the signs. Of the 112 who responded, only two owners wanted to keep (and pay for) the signs. No wonder: In the 1978-79 fiscal year, maintenance of the signs cost them each $54 a year, but by 1982-83 it was running nearly three times that amount.
The county didn’t want to pay for the signs and neither did the county Board of Trade, the Superintendent of Schools office, the Greater Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce or the city of Bakersfield. The signs were “hokey” landmarks that “paint a truckstop image” of Bakersfield, city councilman Don Ratty said at the time, and most everyone agreed with him.
Most everyone in Bakersfield, anyway. It took a Los Angeles woman to organize a statewide “Save Our Bakersfield Signs” preservation committee.
“I happen to like these signs a lot and I don’t think people in Bakersfield have really thought about this,” L.A. attorney Jerry Simmons wrote in a 1983 letter.
She praised the signs as “so colorful.”
Unswayed, the Kern County Board of Supervisors authorized a sealed-bid sale of the signs, and in March 1983 Airport Bus of Bakersfield won out over five bidding rivals, including Jim Burke of Jim Burke Ford. Ken Jones, the president of Airport Bus at the time, says he got both signs for a mere $1,500 — with the proviso that he remove them at his own expense.
Nostalgia was not the primary consideration for Jones’ purchase: Airport Bus would be using the signs to promote its service to and from Los Angeles International Airport (in ways Jones had not yet clearly identified).
Jones hired a Fresno-area crane company to remove the signs. He stored one sign in the yard of one of his businesses, Coastal Engineering, which then occupied the corner of Rosedale Highway and Mohawk Street, and the other in the yard of the Fresno crane operator. He then set himself to the task of obtaining permits to put the signs back into the ground somewhere along the freeway.
Jones was still attempting to get that authorization, he says, when “a pretty good storm” blew through Bakersfield and slammed his sign to the ground with tornado-like fury. It was a total loss: Jones’ insurance paid off and the sign was scrapped.
Meanwhile, Jones still owed money to the Fresno company that had removed the signs. He couldn’t pay and, exasperated by the whole thing, offered the sign in lieu of cash. The company accepted.
Whatever became of that sign?
Jones, interviewed in 1999, said he doesn’t know. He can’t recall the name of the company that took possession of it, and he says his records from those years are long gone.
Perhaps the remaining “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” sign was scrapped and sent to a landfill. Perhaps it was partially recycled and turned into a new billboard.
Perhaps it’s rusting, intact, in a junkyard somewhere near Firebaugh.
Nobody said much about the signs for the next two decades, at least not to Jones. In the meantime, Jones and his partners sold Airport Bus, and Coastal Engineering went out of business.
Today Jones runs Coastal Netting, which makes the huge metal poles (but not the actual netting) used for the fencing around golf driving ranges.
Jones doesn’t wax nostalgic about his “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play” signs.
“Maybe ol’ Buck can just make his own sign,” he said.
Maybe indeed. Owens, who built his own “Bakersfield” footbridge from scratch, salvaging only the 11 blue porcelain letters, has proved that you don’t need original brick and mortar to evoke memories.
Maybe they don’t make ’em like they used to, but they can sure make ’em LOOK like they used to.
This story is based on a version published on Sept. 19, 1999.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Fun with scam artists
I had fun this week with a Nigerian scam artist who had stolen the e-mail account of a local gentleman named Craig Garrett. I got the scammer to promise to do some outrageous things in exchange for a promise of money, which of course I never delivered. You can tell the guy (supposedly an American) isn't exactly up on American culture. There's additional detail at http://www.stubblebuzz.com/ and here too, but if you just want to read the entire two-day exchange, here it is. Evil Craig agreed to increasingly hilarious and bizarre requests just to keep his fish on the hook:
ME: Craig, please tell me where to send the money. I can scrape together a few hundred dollars.
NOT CRAIG : Thanks for the email and your help. I Knew i could Count on you. I will like you to send the money via Western Union Money Transfer. Please the money Should be sent in the name of the hotel management because of the loss of my passport.
Receiver Name: OLASOJI PEREZ
Address: Eko Hotel & suites, room 6, Adetokunbo Ademola Street
State: Lagos
Country: Nigeria
Zip Code: 23401
Please As soon as you send the Money i will like you to email me the Below Details as Follows...
Full Sender Name:
MTCN#:
Sender Country:
Amount Sent:
After I receive the money I will email you on the arrangements to get back home. Thanks once again and I hope to hear from you soon.
your friend, Craig .
ME: OK, I have to run some errands and then I can go to the bank. I only have $600 I can give right now but I will ask Tony if he can spare some also. Can you wait a few more hours. I am so sorry you are going through this. How did it happen? Were you drunk again? Is Matilda with you?
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, I will be waiting to read from you with the western union information so that i can be able to get out of this mess.
ME: The Western Union on Spongebob Boulevard has been closed down for some reason but the mookie told me the one in Legoland is still open so I will go there to-night. You do not have to pay me back, because you remember I never paid you for slaughtering my cow last year. Our freezer is still very full. Thank you. Is Matilda OK? We are very worried.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank, Can you pls try and find another western union location?
ME: OK, will hurry. Dont worry. Love to Matilda.
NOT CRAIG: Ok i will be waiting for you bcos i have no access to phone right now.
ME: Craig, Uncle Fester said he can send $20 but I told him that is not enough, please try to get more. So he said he will ask Colonel Sanders to help. Harvey Hall said he has $400 but is worried about sending all the way to Nigeria. Can you send a photo of hotel manager so he does not worry about sending money? I still can not find Tony.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, I dont have photo of hotel manager. After I receive the money I will email you on the arrangements to get back home. your friend, Craig .
ME: Harvey said that is OK, he will give me $400 to send to you, but you must help him build a fence when you get back to keep the neighbor’s llama from coming into his yard and eating his rutabagas. Is that OK?
NOT CRAIG: Ok , No problem, I will be waiting for the western union details.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Am still here waiting for you pls get back to me now so that i can get out of this mess.
your friend, Craig .
ME: Sorry, Craig, I have been out most of the day collecting money to send to you. You know Frank, your friend who rides that bicycle around all day and screams at children? He doesn’t have any money, but he is worried about you, so he baked two loaves of pumpkin bread and put it in the regular post to your address at the hotel in Lagos. You should get it in two weeks. Please be careful when you eat it. You know what happened the last time he baked pumpkin bread. Hopefully you will be home by then.
Uncle Fester gave me $22 but it is all in nickels. I think Western Union will accept it. He said he will only let me send it to you if you agree to let him take your photograph for his calendar. It is the Buttonwillow Alfalfa Cooperative’s 2010 calendar. He wants you only wearing underwear and suspenders. You can have your choice of April or September. Is that OK?
I have $682. If I can find Tony I am sure he will give me more, maybe $400.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, You can go ahead and send the $682 and when you see tony you send what ever tony give you, Just go ahead and send the money now bcos i have not eat anything since morning pls do not let me die here, I will be waiting for you the western union information.
your friend, Craig .
ME: OK, I will stop waiting for Tony. Western Union is almost closing. What about the photograph for Uncle Fester’s calendar? He is standing here now asking me. He says boxer shorts are OK.
NOT CRAIG: Yes Boxer shorts is ok but let me get home first and will talk about it, Pls am not happy here just try and help me out so that i can get out of this mess. I will be waiting for the western union info.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Pls get back to me am still waiting for the information , Pls do not let me die here pls.
ME: Last night we drove all the way to Legoland to the Western Union and it was just not closed, it was out of business. We called your cousin, Joe Biden, to ask if there is a Western Union in Buttonwillow and he said there was so we will go there today. Tony came home and said he could send $200 but he said it is weird, he just saw you at Der Weinerschnitzel three days ago eating a corndog with Rush Limbaugh. Was that you? We didn’t even know you cared that much about HIV/AIDS but we think it is a very good thing.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, I will be waiting for the western union information , Pls i need to get out of this mess pls.
ME: Still trying to get up to $1050, almost have enough. I have decided to sell my Ford Pinto to get the rest of the money. Thurston Howell says he will give me $600 for it, but I have to agree to date his cousin Lois. I don’t want to date Lois. Lois looks like Danny DeVito. If I sell my Pinto to Thurston, will you take Lois off my hands. Just take her to the movies one time. I don’t think you would have to kiss her or anything. Also, can I borrow your car. OK?
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, One of my friend send me $1000 today so i want you to go ahead and send the $1050 now to complete the money, Pls do that now before western union close here in nigeria so that the manager can be able to pick it up today so by tomorrow i will be prepare to get back home.
your friend, Craig .
ME: OK, taking the car to Thurston. Will you take Lois to the movies.
NOT CRAIG: Pls get this money send out now am not happy here pls.
ME: You won’t have to kiss her
NOT CRAIG: Dont worry about her, Just send the money and let me get out of this mess and when i come back i will make sure i make her happy
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Did you got my last email, Pls write me back so that i can know what is going on pls am not happy here . your friend, Craig .
ME: Who is this? The real Craig Garrett just showed up . he had been visiting his mother in pixley and boy is he mad. Frank wants his pumpkin bread back, send it right now. You would have liked Lois too, shes not that bad
ME: Frank says keep the bread he just wants his pan back
ME: Lois would still like to meet you
ME: Craig, please tell me where to send the money. I can scrape together a few hundred dollars.
NOT CRAIG : Thanks for the email and your help. I Knew i could Count on you. I will like you to send the money via Western Union Money Transfer. Please the money Should be sent in the name of the hotel management because of the loss of my passport.
Receiver Name: OLASOJI PEREZ
Address: Eko Hotel & suites, room 6, Adetokunbo Ademola Street
State: Lagos
Country: Nigeria
Zip Code: 23401
Please As soon as you send the Money i will like you to email me the Below Details as Follows...
Full Sender Name:
MTCN#:
Sender Country:
Amount Sent:
After I receive the money I will email you on the arrangements to get back home. Thanks once again and I hope to hear from you soon.
your friend, Craig .
ME: OK, I have to run some errands and then I can go to the bank. I only have $600 I can give right now but I will ask Tony if he can spare some also. Can you wait a few more hours. I am so sorry you are going through this. How did it happen? Were you drunk again? Is Matilda with you?
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, I will be waiting to read from you with the western union information so that i can be able to get out of this mess.
ME: The Western Union on Spongebob Boulevard has been closed down for some reason but the mookie told me the one in Legoland is still open so I will go there to-night. You do not have to pay me back, because you remember I never paid you for slaughtering my cow last year. Our freezer is still very full. Thank you. Is Matilda OK? We are very worried.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank, Can you pls try and find another western union location?
ME: OK, will hurry. Dont worry. Love to Matilda.
NOT CRAIG: Ok i will be waiting for you bcos i have no access to phone right now.
ME: Craig, Uncle Fester said he can send $20 but I told him that is not enough, please try to get more. So he said he will ask Colonel Sanders to help. Harvey Hall said he has $400 but is worried about sending all the way to Nigeria. Can you send a photo of hotel manager so he does not worry about sending money? I still can not find Tony.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, I dont have photo of hotel manager. After I receive the money I will email you on the arrangements to get back home. your friend, Craig .
ME: Harvey said that is OK, he will give me $400 to send to you, but you must help him build a fence when you get back to keep the neighbor’s llama from coming into his yard and eating his rutabagas. Is that OK?
NOT CRAIG: Ok , No problem, I will be waiting for the western union details.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Am still here waiting for you pls get back to me now so that i can get out of this mess.
your friend, Craig .
ME: Sorry, Craig, I have been out most of the day collecting money to send to you. You know Frank, your friend who rides that bicycle around all day and screams at children? He doesn’t have any money, but he is worried about you, so he baked two loaves of pumpkin bread and put it in the regular post to your address at the hotel in Lagos. You should get it in two weeks. Please be careful when you eat it. You know what happened the last time he baked pumpkin bread. Hopefully you will be home by then.
Uncle Fester gave me $22 but it is all in nickels. I think Western Union will accept it. He said he will only let me send it to you if you agree to let him take your photograph for his calendar. It is the Buttonwillow Alfalfa Cooperative’s 2010 calendar. He wants you only wearing underwear and suspenders. You can have your choice of April or September. Is that OK?
I have $682. If I can find Tony I am sure he will give me more, maybe $400.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, You can go ahead and send the $682 and when you see tony you send what ever tony give you, Just go ahead and send the money now bcos i have not eat anything since morning pls do not let me die here, I will be waiting for you the western union information.
your friend, Craig .
ME: OK, I will stop waiting for Tony. Western Union is almost closing. What about the photograph for Uncle Fester’s calendar? He is standing here now asking me. He says boxer shorts are OK.
NOT CRAIG: Yes Boxer shorts is ok but let me get home first and will talk about it, Pls am not happy here just try and help me out so that i can get out of this mess. I will be waiting for the western union info.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Pls get back to me am still waiting for the information , Pls do not let me die here pls.
ME: Last night we drove all the way to Legoland to the Western Union and it was just not closed, it was out of business. We called your cousin, Joe Biden, to ask if there is a Western Union in Buttonwillow and he said there was so we will go there today. Tony came home and said he could send $200 but he said it is weird, he just saw you at Der Weinerschnitzel three days ago eating a corndog with Rush Limbaugh. Was that you? We didn’t even know you cared that much about HIV/AIDS but we think it is a very good thing.
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, I will be waiting for the western union information , Pls i need to get out of this mess pls.
ME: Still trying to get up to $1050, almost have enough. I have decided to sell my Ford Pinto to get the rest of the money. Thurston Howell says he will give me $600 for it, but I have to agree to date his cousin Lois. I don’t want to date Lois. Lois looks like Danny DeVito. If I sell my Pinto to Thurston, will you take Lois off my hands. Just take her to the movies one time. I don’t think you would have to kiss her or anything. Also, can I borrow your car. OK?
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Thank you for the mail, One of my friend send me $1000 today so i want you to go ahead and send the $1050 now to complete the money, Pls do that now before western union close here in nigeria so that the manager can be able to pick it up today so by tomorrow i will be prepare to get back home.
your friend, Craig .
ME: OK, taking the car to Thurston. Will you take Lois to the movies.
NOT CRAIG: Pls get this money send out now am not happy here pls.
ME: You won’t have to kiss her
NOT CRAIG: Dont worry about her, Just send the money and let me get out of this mess and when i come back i will make sure i make her happy
NOT CRAIG: Hello,
Did you got my last email, Pls write me back so that i can know what is going on pls am not happy here . your friend, Craig .
ME: Who is this? The real Craig Garrett just showed up . he had been visiting his mother in pixley and boy is he mad. Frank wants his pumpkin bread back, send it right now. You would have liked Lois too, shes not that bad
ME: Frank says keep the bread he just wants his pan back
ME: Lois would still like to meet you
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Welcome to my archive
This is a companion blog to my main blog, stubblebuzz.com
I will periodically posts things that just seem too long for stubblebuzz, including previously published columns and articles that aren't available elsewhere.
I will periodically posts things that just seem too long for stubblebuzz, including previously published columns and articles that aren't available elsewhere.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)