Brief Respite

On a day of anger, frustration and disillusionment, I retreated briefly into a certain room where a handful of white-haired ladies were tending to the past with quiet, gentle diligence. It was the Lompoc Historical Society, where the shelves are lined with volumes of family histories and the cabinets are crammed with old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters and memorabilia sorted and labeled by volunteers with a focused sense of mission. It's an ongoing labor of love.

Shirley was identifying the line-up in an old school photo.

“That was Rosie Maloney, I guess. And who’s that on the end? Mary Lou? We don’t know who that is on the other side of Esther Harris either. Maybe Hazel?”

“I don’t remember her maiden name,” said Myra. “She’d be in the annual. That’s the best place to check.”

As for me, I was just poking around. I wanted to find some stories and this was a good place to look. My friend Kam Jacoby had clued me in. He’s been scanning historical photographs of Lompoc houses and buildings and street scenes, re-photographing each from the identical angle and location of the original, creating hauntingly beautiful composites of the past and present in seamless coexistence.

I too am fond of time traveling. In particular, I thought it would be fun to see whether any memories of Camp Cooke were housed in this shed. My father had been stationed there in the 1940s; in fact he wrote for the Camp Cooke Clarion, not exactly a big-time newspaper, but Myra had heard of it.

She placed three heaping files on the table in front of me, all labeled “Camp Cooke” in blue marker pen. I voraciously perused black and white photographs of soldiers and barracks and pretty girls, read letters, telegrams, and get well cards, even savored a fancy printed menu for an officers’ holiday dinner, and it was a thorough meal indeed: roast tom turkey with sage dressing, snowflake potatoes, giblet gravy, carrots and peas, lettuce and tomato salad, chocolate cake, ice cream, cigars, cigarettes, mints, coffee, punch, and beer.

At this point, a charming fellow named Jim Reynolds walked in. Myra told him I was interested in Camp Cooke.

“Camp Cooke? I was one of the surveyors. My last day there was March 2, 1942. We watched the first company roll in and then went on to build the road to Hunter Liggett. All sagebrush and chaparral back then.”

“I remember going out there in a ’46 Ford," said Myra. "Someone was sitting on the fender and we hit a bump and he bounced up and left a big dent in the fender.”

“Yes, it was all open country,” said Jim. “We'd go out there and hunt coyotes in the old days.”

“And it would get real foggy,” Myra continued. “You couldn’t see a thing. We got lost once and we just went ‘til we heard the ocean, then we knew which way to turn.”

“We would work for a few hours, and then go down to the surf and have lunch,” said Jim.

I was enjoying their casual reminiscences as much as the odds and ends within the folders on the table, and I began to regret that I hadn’t brought my tape recorder.

But as I flipped through pages a familiar image caught my eye. It was Zombie, the beloved wire-haired terrier of Camp Cooke’s Buzzer Company canine corps. When I was a little girl, I’d seen a snapshot of Zombie in my father’s long-since-vanished photo album.

I had a recollection, too, of an article he had written about Zombie in the Camp Cooke Clarion.

I had a feeling…

And there it was. The story by my father, with the byline Pfc. S.W. Carbone, dear and familiar and clear as day. Not a Xerox copy, either, but my father’s article, lovingly clipped by some anonymous reader and pasted into an album to be discovered by me decades later in this most unlikely place. It was a sad story, about Zombie’s death, but touching and beautifully written. Someone else had thought so too.

I would have been gleefully satisfied with that, but there was a second article by him as well, this one a humorous profile about a fellow soldier written for a column he called “Private Lives”. I recognized not only my father’s name here but his voice -- his easy, natural eloquence embarked this time upon a laugh.

And something that had receded like dreams in fog suddenly seemed real again. I smiled.

It was a good day to hang out in the old days.