Telling a Thousand Tales of California

What is your California story, the man asked, and for a moment I was stumped. I knew the sort of story Jim Quay was after: the kind of tales found in the journals of ‘49ers and subsequently told by wave after wave of migrants into California, by railroad laborers and raisin moguls, by fruit tramps and World War II factory hands, stories of passage--sometimes triumphant, sometimes bitterly difficult--into the promised land.

Quay is executive director of the California Council for the Humanities. This nonprofit organization, in its quarter-century campaign to explain California to Californians, has underwritten and staged an array of cultural and historical projects throughout the state.

At present the council is gearing up for an ambitious effort titled: “My Story Is California’s Story.” The idea, Quay was saying over lunch, is to elicit, through a variety of programs, personal stories from Californians that, once collected and woven together, will tell the larger story of California itself.

“We have found,” Quay said, “that when people tell their stories, and other people listen to their stories, it creates a trust that strengthens communities. We also have found that occasions for this kind of storytelling have to be created deliberately; they don’t happen naturally.”

It was at about this point in the conversation that Quay created the occasion for me to tell my California story. Unfortunately, no great narratives run through my family history--no treks by wagon through snow-covered Sierra passes, no journey in overloaded jalopies out Route 66, no mad dashes across the border to the promise of the north.

I considered telling Quay the story about my dad’s father, a Fresno detective who holed up inside an Oakland bank vault for something like 60 days, watching through a peephole for a robber named “The Owl” to show up and deposit his loot. When at last his prey entered the bank, my grandfather walked up behind the culprit and stuck a gun in his ribs.

“It’s all over, Owl,” he said.

I’m not sure, however, what that story says about California. I also flashed for a moment on the story of my Uncle Dumpy and his Saroyanesque misadventure with a toy arrow. To liven up a family party one night, this young uncle had licked the suction cup at the arrow’s business end and stuck it on his forehead.

It was funny, until he started trying to pull off the arrow.

The cup would not release. Other relatives began to tug at the arrow with no success. My uncle’s forehead, meanwhile, began to turn red, and then purple.

For a while there, it looked like Uncle Dumpy’s whole brain might somehow be sucked into that rubber arrowhead.

“Man Devoured by Deadly Suction Cup,” the headline would read in the Fresno Bee the next day.

I was quite young at the time, and I don’t recall how the arrow finally was removed. But Uncle Dumpy, whose real name is Dale, did survive--which robbed the drama of its climax, perhaps, but kept alive my only uncle.

Another Dumpy story: Not too long after the arrow incident, he moved to Los Angeles, where he drove a truck.

A few years later, he brought his family back to Fresno, where he more than once described how, stuck in his truck one weekday morning on one of L.A.’s freeways, hemmed in and not going anywhere, he decided on the spot that he simply couldn’t handle the big city anymore. He quit his job that afternoon and retreated back over the hill to Fresno--another kind of California story, perhaps, but again not exactly Steinbeck material.

In the end, I mumbled something to Quay about my grandmother from Bluejacket, Okla., and left it at that. Fortunately for the council’s storytelling projects, a significant number of Californians come better stocked with material.

In a survey conducted for the council last spring, nearly 44% of those Californians polled stated that they or a family member have a personal story that is “part of California’s story” and worth sharing with the rest of the state. Of those, three out of four responded that their family stories involved coming into California from another nation or state.

Many of the survey respondents couldn’t contain themselves.

“Instead of simply saying they had a story about their grandmother,” Quay said, “they started telling the story right there on the phone.”

They told stories, he said, of ancestors who came to California to find gold or escape civil war, who came to take part in great construction projects, who wound up in internment camps.

“My grandfather came in the Depression,” said one respondent, “because he was starving in Oklahoma.”

Some passed along family stories of relatives who traveled to California from Europe by ocean liner and transcontinental rail, while others spoke of kin who made their passage in a more humble fashion: crawling under barbed wire at the border.

“The variety and the compelling nature of just these fragments,” Quay said, “told us that we have got treasures out there. There are great stories out there, and they deserve to be gathered, and they deserve to be told.”

Just how these stories are to be collected, and in what forums they might be presented, will be determined later this year, after the council solicits and weighs proposals from community groups throughout California. In time, though, the question Quay asked me is to be put to every interested Californian: What is your California story?

Hopefully, it does not involve antic uncles with rubber arrows stuck to their foreheads.

That one’s been taken.