Songwriter’s Son Returns Like an Old Refrain

The phones started ringing at 6:30 Wednesday morning.

Callers from across the nation all wanted to know the same thing: Had the swallows honored tradition and returned to the historic adobe Mission San Juan Capistrano?

Helping to provide the answer was Rafael (Googie) Rene, Tujunga businessman and the annual official “Voice of the Mission.”

“I’m a celebrity when I come down here,” said Googie (everyone calls him that), who spent the day happily chatting with tourists and fielding questions from a swarm of jaded reporters. “It feels wonderful if you can contribute something to an event that is bigger than you are. It’s great to be a part of it.”

Rene is special because, as Father Paul Martin, the mission’s pastor, said when he introduced Googie to a crowd of several thousand people: “If it wasn’t for his dad, this mission would be in no way as famous as it is.”

In 1939, Googie’s father, Leon Rene, wrote the song “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.” The song propelled the town, the mission and the timid cliff swallows into national prominence.

Credit for the song should also go to Googie’s mother, Irma Rene, who was at the mission on Wednesday.

She was making breakfast of French toast, ham and scrambled eggs for her husband 47 years ago when he heard an NBC radio announcer say the swallows had returned. Inspired, Rene retreated to the garage and wrote the song as his meal--which was forever referred to by the family as the “San Juan Capistrano breakfast”--grew cold.

When Rene had trouble selling the song, his wife prayed that it would be a hit, hopping a streetcar to St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in Los Angeles each week. After nine visits to the cathedral, her prayer was granted.

After Leon Rene died in 1983, Googie, who got his nickname for a noise he made as an infant, was asked to continue the family tradition of singing the tune at San Juan Capistrano each March 19.

Rene’s appearance at the mission’s celebration, Father Martin observed, has become “as regular as the swallows.”

As he worked the crowd, the smiling 58-year-old evidenced a style that was a mix between that of a used car salesman and a carnival huckster. Every chance he got, he plugged a record of his father’s singing his own song, which is sold only at the mission. He made a mental note to ask the gift shop clerks to give the record better display. (Other souvenirs available at the gift shop included ceramic swallows--nests are $1.95 extra--crystal swallows, swallow necklaces and swallow postcards.)

On Wednesday morning, the crowd quieted when Googie sang the swallow song to taped backup music as mariachi musicians on the stage lip-synced the chorus. Sitting nearby in the shade of a 100-year-old pepper tree, Irma Rene dabbed tears from her eyes as she listened to her son.

Then, as a puzzled crowd watched, Googie dramatically announced he was bringing the quaint song into the 1980s. He pulled out dark glasses and a black hat and performed a talking “rap” version of the song, with new lyrics.

When the swallows,

not the pigeons or the crows,

come back down to Capistrano,

that’s the day I’ll see all my good friends,

come on let’s wave to the swallows again.

Afterward, to wild applause, Googie gleefully decided he was going to record it. His listeners, Googie bragged, “said it’s sensational!”

Did the swallows, which winter in Goya, Argentina, arrive at the mission on Wednesday? Few people actually saw any, and Father Martin conceded that probably no more than 50 to 100 actually live at the mission anymore. One mission docent ruefully noted that more swallows live under the eaves of the May Co. store in Mission Viejo than reside at the mission.

But the volunteers who answered the phones Wednesday morning at “Mission Control”--a darkened and chilly room in the mission’s museum--conspiratorially continued to perpetuate the myth that flocks of swallows arrive en masse each March 19.

“Everything is fine,” Googie told a disc jockey from Des Moines. “The weather is beautiful, and the birds are darkening the sky.”