I first met Lionel Van Deerlin in 1960 on the roof of the U.S. Grant hotel.
My father and I had climbed up to better see John F. Kennedy delivering a stump speech in the Plaza below. On the roof ahead of us, reporting for broadcast, was Van Deerlin, my dad's city editor at the San Diego Daily Journal during the late 1940s.
Now that he's made his last deadline, Van Deerlin is being fondly remembered as emeritus journalist, congressman, teacher.
Though I read all his columns as if he were talking into my ear, I savored like rarebits the occasions when, to enliven some contemporary point, he would drift back to Oceanside.
In those Sherwood Anderson-style interludes, he would evoke small-town America and let readers imagine how it had influenced a blithe boy upon whom nothing of the human comedy was lost.
What follows is a sampler of passages from Van Deerlin's columns stretching back to 1983. I've condensed here and there, but every word is his.
Pasted into one of our family albums is a panoramic shot of a whistle-stop that Woodrow Wilson once made in the old Oceanside station yard.
The year was 1920. Clearly visible above the crowd, a certain 6-year-old is perched on his father's shoulders, and wearing his father's felt hat.
The first telephone I remember was on my grandmother's party line. On one side of a wall box was a little handle, with which you could dial up anyone in the immediate neighborhood. Each subscriber was assigned a distinctive ring. (My grandmother's was two “shorts” and a “long.”)
With eight or 10 homes on a party line, the din in her dining room often matched the cash registers at Woolworth's. It could be annoying, too, waiting for others to complete their calls and get off the line, and – hang the First and Fourth amendments! – having nosy neighbors listen in on your conversation.
Charley Goss was the first cop I ever knew. He was police chief in the 1920s. The chief had a way of looking off into the distance when he spoke. To a teenager, this made him seem unusually sagacious. And though I'm certain Goss had never attended a police academy, he displayed the sort of common sense that inspires public confidence.
As a newspaper carrier whose route included hotels, motels and the local pool hall, I was aware that even small-town society has its sinners. Chief Goss must have known it too. But with him, the police role stopped short of Avenging Angel.
Oceanside High dispatched a scrub football team to play San Juan Capistrano. As the highlight of an otherwise undistinguished performance, I recovered a fumble at midfield.
In the ensuing pile-on, my face was rammed several inches into Capistrano's unforgiving topsoil. The result: a highly visible but wholly superficial mark of battle.
My mother, a devout churchwoman, kept a Thank Offering on the dining room table, dropping money into it when there was something to be especially thankful for. Upon noting that my injury was not serious, she thereupon deposited – 5 cents.
In those Depression days, a nickel commanded more respect than today. Yet family and friends learning the amount of Mother's thanksgiving gesture began hailing me as the “Nickel Wonder.” Tough times or not, I thought she might have popped for – oh, say a quarter – in evaluating the spared life of an only son.
I was weaned on a town baseball team that played Sunday afternoon games by the railroad tracks at Wisconsin Street.
Scarcely into my teens, I began covering the games for the Oceanside Blade-Tribune. For this, I was paid 5 cents a column-inch.
That doesn't sound like much money, I know, but I held one highly profitable advantage over my publisher. The Blade-Tribune's Linotype fonts contained no agate type – the 5½-point type small print customarily used in box scores. Carried in full 8-point type, my boxes ran to about four times the column inches they fill in the big dailies.
As one who later became a faithful union man, the words may stick in my throat – but I loved covering those Sunday games so much I would have done it without pay. Sixty years ago? Yes, but I can still rattle off Oceanside's batting order – Stillman, Loneia, Jones, Pete Siva, Stephenson . . .
Chamber of Commerce brochures, bent on boosterism, habitually padded the figure. But more honest Census Bureau statistics for 1930 put the population of Oceanside at precisely 3,508.
From that number, I can tell you that a fellow named Johnny Mann would have been on anyone's list of the half-dozen most popular persons in town. You didn't pass him on the street without stopping for a brief, always upbeat conversation – and, often as not, found yourself later quoting him to others.
Before the war years created Camp Pendleton, Johnny Mann was Oceanside's first and only black inhabitant. Although as a teenager I may have been idealistically unaware of it, there was surely an unspoken barrier to Johnny Mann's upward mobility. He earned his keep by shining shoes. His stand was outside the Second Street barbershop belonging to Luke Siefker, a battered survivor of bare-knuckle boxing days. It occupied the busy zone between a corner drugstore and Watson's Ice Cream Parlor.
At 15 cents per shine, Johnny had no competitors – no one, I guess, who could have thought him an economic threat. He lived beyond the hill on Mission Road. There might have been objections if, in a burst of prosperity, this gracious man had sought a rental among the tidy homes on Horne or Pacific streets, areas as upscale as Oceanside could claim in Depression days.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com
