Mail Call Is Biggest Social Event : Residents High on Town’s Low Profile

A sign on the narrow dead-end country road leading to this town proclaims: “Slow Resort Area.”

It’s more a description of the place than a speed warning.

Television reception means Channel 3 from Bakersfield, providing the wind doesn’t blow or it doesn’t rain.

The biggest social event each day is mail call at 10 a.m. outside the Aberdeen Cafe, gathering place for townspeople.

Aberdeen, two miles off U.S. 395, 15 miles north of Independence, is in the middle of nowhere.

Aberdeen is a trailer park with 65 men, women and children a third of the way up the slopes of 12,591-foot Mt. Perkins just outside the John Muir Wilderness.

Mounted Blackbirds

For want of something to do, Jess Turner, 69, “the Mayor of Aberdeen” (he isn’t elected, folks just call him that) fashions mounted blackbirds out of shellacked burro droppings, complete with feathers, eyes, toothpicks for bills and pipe stems for legs.

The 10 1/2 acres that is Aberdeen is owned by the Department of Water and Power, leased out to Judy and Don Biggs who operate the cafe, the building with the weathered “Aberdeen” neon sign that hasn’t worked in five years.

“Here at Aberdeen the air is clear, the fish are plentiful, the people are friendly and the price is right,” said Ollie Lohr, 54, who moved up with his wife and mother-in-law five years ago from Simi Valley after suffering a heart attack and two strokes.

Trailer space rents for $100 a month. There’s a long waiting list.

“Everybody is on a first-name basis,” said Turner, a resident for eight years. “Everybody watches out for everybody else.”

Crime is non-existent. Three Inyo County sheriff’s dispatchers and two county jail matrons call Aberdeen home.

‘We’re All Escapists’

“We’re all escapists. We can’t stand big cities or even small towns. We like the quiet,” said one of the dispatchers, Florence Nielsen, 50. Her idea of excitement is an evening of Scrabble with friends.

Fishing is the common denominator. Everyone here enjoys fishing. They fish all hours of the day and night in the creek that meanders through the community, in nearby mountain lakes and streams.

Half of the residents are retired.

A school bus takes six elementary and two high school students to and from classes in Big Pine.

There’s only one street in town--Bourbon Street, named by a resident who once lived in New Orleans.

Ernestine Bechtel, 84, lives in the same trailer she and her late husband bought new and parked in Aberdeen in 1930.

Hazel “Grandma” Coffman, 90, likes Aberdeen for the good fishing and because, “I can walk all over the place and no one runs you down.”

Aberdeen isn’t much.

That’s why people like it.