Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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We have made it! This year is the 60th anniversary of Tehachapi Mountain Festival. This year is the Diamond Jubilee! A good time to look back at our mountain city, the Land of Four Seasons. I wrote a column in 2014 taken from the 1968 Lilac Festival brochure that I had found in my mother, Marion Deaver's, files – it was the only one she had saved. So, having discovered the library at Tehachapi Museum, thanks to Del Troy, I once again imposed upon her to let me see some of the other old b...
The Brite Valley is located west of the city Tehachapi, in a fertile area surrounded by mountains. It has been known to many generations of Native Americans and later white settlers who discovered the rich soil and temperatures to raise foods for themselves and cattle. The valley is four miles long and two miles wide. The valley's first residents were most likely the Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Paiute) who lived there for thousands of years. They gathered acorns, bulbs, seeds and greens. Their meat...
It's August, which means school will be starting soon, football games will be held . . . and Tehachapi will celebrate its 56th annual Tehachapi Mountain Festival! August is a time for coming home – home for Tehachapi High School reunions of times past, home for the annual Old Timers Picnic in Central Park, and of course the Mountain Festival, which is always held the third weekend of August – this year August 16-18. The Mountain Festival draws up to 40,000 residents and guests to our won...
Ever wonder if the faces on area murals are actually those of real Tehachapi residents? This week I divert from my normal column, taken from my mother Marion Deaver's files, to highlight one of those faces. I met with a much taller Tanner Garrett, son of Greg and Chrissie Garrett, who had his profile added to the BeeKay Theatre mural, which depicts present and past residents of this wonderful mountain city of Tehachapi. The mural was nearing completion when Tanner, a graduate of Tehachapi High...
I found a brochure in my mother Marion Deaver's files from the 1950s promoting a new housing tract planned for West Mojave. I called my brother Bill Deaver to jog my memory about where that tract was located. He laughed and explained to me how the development got its name. Its promoters, Mojave Development, Inc. held a contest to name the tract. A Navy wife stationed with her husband at the Mojave Marine Base told her husband about the development and the contest. He remarked, "If they ever...
My mother Marion Deaver loved flowers – of all kinds. This is a second installment on her love of flowers and how we all learned about them growing up. She loved to make flower arrangements and she liked to grow flowers in her home garden. She also adored it when the desert was blanketed with seasonal wildflowers in yellow, blue, purple, white, orange and even red some years. She would tell my dad Paul early each spring it was time to drive around the desert near Mojave and "scout" out the f...
Found an article by my mother Marion Deaver that she wrote about how the Kern-Antelope Historical Society was created. The article was taken from a letter written from Glen Settle to the Conference of California Historical Societies in June, 1961. Settle was the current president of the historical society located in Southeastern Kern County. Settle was responding to a letter written to him to find out more about the newly created group. The group held its first meeting in May 1959 and was...
Operators kept the major tracks open between Tehachapi and Bakersfield near the turn of the century. Searching my mother Marion Deaver's history files yielded an article from August 20, 1956 outlining the job of telegraph operators for the railroad. According to the article, the men who ran the telegraph only referred to themselves as operators, since everyone knew the guy who operated the telegraph key was the "operator." There were two such operators who ran the telegraph keys from the early...
In my never-ending quest to find articles of my mother Marion Deaver to explore East Kern History, I discovered an old press release put out by the Mojave Faculty Association demanding that a study be done to justify the construction of a new gym for Mojave High School. This article was written sometime prior to the school district holding a bond election to fund such a new facility. A new gym was funded by the sale of bonds and construction started in 1977, according to an old photo I found...
Finding and maintaining water resources in the desert has always been a challenge, but in 1979 the Mojave Public Utilities District faced more than one. In the good news/bad news category, the water district learned in mid-1979 that the Feather River Water project had been completed and Mojave residents would soon be drinking local well water mixed with 50 percent of the state water. In my mother Marion Deaver's article for the Desert News, she noted that the completion of the state water...
After participating in an arduous campaign for the last four months I am finally able to breathe again and get back to the things that I love to do, including writing this column about East Kern history, as told by my Mother Marion Deaver. This time I choose to write about two desert field trips taken by some members of the East Kern Antelope Historical Society. While the articles my mother wrote about the explorations are not all that informative I would like to point out some of the...
I found an article taken from the 1892 "Illustrated Sketches" of Death Valley by John R. Spears discussing the Twenty-Mule Team. Of course, this was from my mother Marion Deaver's extensive files of history of East Kern County and beyond. Keep in mind this book was written in 1892, so when I quote certain portions, remember not everything was "politically correct" in that time over 100 years ago. "If historians and poets have been justified in writing rapturously about the Arab and his steed,...
I found a copy of a speech delivered by California Division of Highways Edward T. Telford at a New Business Outlook luncheon in Lancaster in August 1962. The copy was discovered in my Mother Marion Deaver's files. Telford explained that in 1962 there were two state highways in the Antelope Valley and included U.S. Route 6 and State Route 138. At that time U.S. 6 ran from Los Angeles through Mint Canyon, Palmdale and Lancaster, to and beyond the Kern County Line. S.R. 138 ran from the Ridge...
When Claudia White, owner of The Loop Newspaper, asked me to write my column about Mayor Ed Grimes, I knew that other columns and news stories would have already been written and published. None of us like "old news" so I wasn't sure how I could do that, but then I remembered that all I had to do was write about my friend of 15 years. You can call it "...the rest of the story," I suppose. I first met Ed and his wife Ruthie when I decided I wanted to serve on the Tehachapi Recreation and Parks...
In my last column I discussed how the Golden Queen Mine was designated to be used as a bomb shelter in the event of a nuclear attack in 1961. I found an article my mother Marion Deaver had saved again from 1961 discussing evacuation plans for the Tehachapi Unified School District. The November article outlined how students were "currently undergoing extensive indoctrination on survival procedures." The District Superintendent Dr. Boyd Lehman wanted the staff and students to be prepared in case o...
I was born in 1950. Now you can all figure out my age! I declare this to emphasize that I grew up during the Cold War after World War II. Because I lived in Mojave with a Marine Base next to me, until 1958, and our close proximity to Edwards Air Force Base (a major flight test facility), children my age in elementary school lived in constant fear that we would all be wiped out by an atomic bomb dropped near us. As children we had no real understanding of how real that threat could be. We had reg...
The city of Tehachapi recently released its 2017 year-end report, discussing projects completed and plans for 2018 which will be completed. I found an article written by my mother Marion Deaver at the beginning of 1963 which, in essence, was a similar report for the city. In 1963 Tehachapi was the only incorporated city in Eastern Kern, having formed its city in 1909. California City did not incorporate until 1965. The article noted that the city's size had grown four times larger since 1962,...
I found an old Mojave newspaper article from May 17, 1956 with a headline proclaiming "Wonder Acres Grow with Mojave Area." An adjacent photo showed a photo of a newly drilled well in Wonder Acres. I thought to myself this would be great, I didn't think I had ever written a column about the area situated between Mojave and California City. However, as I read the article, which had no byline, it began by extolling the virtues of the desert and finally ended by discussing Wonder Acres future...
As usual I searched my mother Marion Deaver's files and found an article about the creation and dedication of Coy Burnett Athletic Field in Tehachapi. As usual, my mom did not have a date on the article. I checked with Mayor Ed Grimes, the "voice of the Warriors" and he said that field was constructed in the late '50s. Anyone with a more accurate date can contact me and I will mention the date in a future column. The field was dedicated on a Saturday when Tehachapi played Trona, for the...
I have always heard the story of how Muroc got its name. The Corum family settled there and when they tried to get mail service for the area, they found that Corum was already being used by another small town. The Corums spelled their name backwards and Muroc was created. I had never heard the "rest of the story." I found an article in my mom Marion Deaver's files about Charles Anderson, who came to the desert for his health and bought the Corum's General Store in Muroc, making a new healthy...
A desert community such as Mojave must have a reliable water source to survive. An article by my mother Marion Deaver details the history of the water supply for that town. Those of you who read this column know my complaint that my mother never dated anything, and this article is no exception. Mojave came into being because of the Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1876 when its rails reached the town. The railroad picked the site for water at the bottom of the hill, at the foot of the nearby...
Searching for something to write a column about can be a slow process sometimes, and going through my mother Marion Deaver's files can be frustrating at best. There is tons of material there, but some of it is her handwritten notes on a subject before she put the article together. Her handwriting is not always discernible and I tend to defer to her written copies of history that she recorded. When I run out of those I will have to begin the arduous task of copying those notes. I recently found...
In searching my Mother Marion Deaver's files I am always amazed thinking that I am going to run out of topics, but then I come across something new. Although I began covering the Mojave Airport District after its inception in 1972 and wrote many articles and several columns about it, I found a couple of articles I had not seen before. The airport district evolved into the East Kern Airport District and today because of tenant's new research and flights to the edge of space is known as the...
I have written about the Kern-Antelope Historical Society meetings, field trips, and special events. While searching my mother Marion Deaver's files I found an October, 1961 quarterly bulletin which featured some of the history of the organization. My parents Paul and Marion, my brother Bill Deaver, and me were all charter members of the group which held its first meeting May 26, 1959 (I was nine). The group held its organizational meeting Dec. 15, 1959, and was incorporated in December, 1960. T...
Over the centuries some areas of East Kern have served more than one purpose. This was found to be true in 1965, when members of the Kern-Antelope Historical Society visited a site near Rosamond that once had been a place where tufa was mined. The tufa was mined to be used in the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. All that was left in 1965 was the remains of one mill tower that processed the tufa. The tufa was then mixed with cement and used for construction. Upon closer inspection by...
