Leo Ray Estes 1935-

While living in Texas, life to me was one endless summer. I had no chores, unless I count carrying water and wood, or sloping hogs and feeding chickens, or gathering eggs from time to time. I played all day. I used to enjoy the thunder storms, and liked to stand on the porch and watch the rain and hail. It smelled so fresh and clean, and I guess there was the ozone from lightening also. After the rain I would play in the drainage ditch, and catch crawdads. James showed me how to tie a bit of bacon rind on a piece of string and fish for crawdads in the ditch. He also had me reach into crawdad holes to pull the big ones out. He said his arms were too big to fit down the holes, but I believe he was afraid to put his hand in because you always got pinched grabbing those creatures. We also climbed trees if we could find one with a limb low enough to get a start. There was also “kick the can”, hide and seek, tag your it, last tag, rock throwing, drawing in the dirt, making houses and roads out of dirt, digging clay from the drainage ditch and molding it into ropes and such. Dirt and mud was always fun to play with. Cowboys and Indians was a good stand by. I learned to ride a bicycle by putting my leg through the opening under the saddle bar, as I couldn’t reach the peddles any other way. First I learned about balance by being set on the seat and someone giving the bicycle a push. I had no way to stop the bicycle except to fall off. Play was a little bit of rough and tumble.

I have since learned those early years were supposed to be hard times because of something called the Great Depression, but I didn’t know anything about that. I am sure that grownups who had known better times were aware of the shortages of things, but kids adjust and are content with what is. We didn’t have televison to make us want what we couldn’t have, and everyone I knew had no more than we did.

When I was six years old, I remember Bill and I staying with Aunt Lucille while Mother worked. Uncle Jim and Lucille were living in an old war surplus tent, and she was washing dishes in a pan on the table. Aunt Lucille was crying, and I asked her what was wrong. She told me her brother was being drafted into the Army, and would be going away to the war. You see World War Two had just started. I didn’t really have any concept of what a war was about. I just had some vague idea of adventure and excitement. She thought of her brother going to his death, but I thought he was going to have an adventure. I remember grownups talking bad about someone who had pushed a straight pen into his ear to destroy his hearing so as to be classified 4F. He was a draft dodger, and that was bad. Everyone I knew was in favor of the war, and I never heard anyone speak against it.

There was a lot of prejudice and animosity directed against Japes and Nazis. Picture shows and Funny Books were full of stories about the dirty Japes and Germans. I had never seen either, but I knew they were bad people and hated them for it. That was easy to do as we all looked down on blacks, Mexicans, Indians, Jews, Catholics, Episcopalians, Yankees, and a dozen other life forms. I had never met any of those listed except for black people, and those were mostly from a distance. We occasionally saw a Negro walking down the road going to or from town. I learned later they were not allowed to live inside the city limits.

Now oddly enough, Mother would sometimes take us kids for a walk into the country where she would always stop to visit Aunt Easter, (pronounced Ant Easter) an elderly black lady that had been a slave until she was eight years old. I remember that black family was always very respectful, and would bring out a chair for Aunt Easter and Mother to set on the porch to visit. We kids just stood around and leaned on the side of the porch, while the black kids did the same. They must have been Aunt Easter’s grandchildren. We never talked to the Negro children. We just stared. Not to be rude or anything, but just looking at something different. Mother always spoke kindly of Aunt Easter, and her family. I never gave it any thought, but I learned from this that there were good Negroes.

In time I learned there were good folk in all the other groups I had been taught were bad. My family moved to Guadalupe, California in 1944 where Daddy was employed as Freight Clerk with the Southern Pacific RR. Guadalupe was and is a racially integrated community. There I learned that the racial prejudices I carried from an all white community in Texas did not hold water. I suppose there are even some good Democrats.

One day in August 1945, before I was 10 years old, the War with Japan ended. Bill, a playmate named Elicio, and I heard automobile horns blowing, guns being fired in the air, and sirens wailing. We heard from one of the grownups that the reason for all the noise was the Japanese had surrendered, and the war was over. We were excited because all the grownups were. I organized my two companions and myself into a three man parade, and we marched up and down the dirt road by our house beating on pans and buckets for an hour.

That fall the American Japanese were allowed to return home from their three years of detention in camps away from the costal areas. I had never seen a Jap before, and expected them to look like the yellow caricatures in the Funny Books I read. They weren't yellow at all. I was in the fourth grade when they arrived at school. All of them were very shy. At recess I got into a fight with Kan Utsonomia and we became bosom friends.

Daddy bought land and our family moved to Grover City, California in 1949 on a five acre farm, which was an excellent place to raise children as well as other crops. I worked summers as farm laborer picking beans and hoeing weeds during my High School years, and full time garbage collector the last year of school. Mother and Daddy had affiliated with a Sunday School in Guadalupe, which was supported by the American Sunday School Union, shortly after we moved there in 1944. Later when it grew into a church, they were founding members of the Guadalupe Community Church. Even after we moved to Grover City, we still drove back to Guadalupe to attend church. I went to a church camp every summer, and was greatly influenced all my life by both the teaching there and my parents example. I wanted to be a missionary and have all those adventures in some jungle. I thought a combination of Livingston and Tarzan as being the ideal. I was converted when eleven years old, and baptized when I was twelve. About 1964 I began to question what I had been taught about the Bible and religious beliefs. I now believe the Bible should be read with the same criticism as any book. I do not believe the bible infallible nor should it be literally believed, but can be employed allegorically.

In 1954 I graduated from Arroyo Grande Union High School, and that summer went to live with cousins Charles Boyd and later with Pat (Boyd) and her husband, Ray Harrison, in Oklahoma City while working at William's Candy Company. I returned to California in October of 1954 and worked out of the Labor Union Hall as a construction laborer. About April I started working for the Southern Pacific Railroad as vacation relief clerk until July 1955 when I was hired on as brakeman, but changed jobs to the Signal Gang, where my brother James was working, in December of the same year.

When we moved to Grover City in 1949, Hardy, Bill and I attended school in Oceano. There I made a lifelong friendship with a schoolmate, Ray Godfrey. I met his younger sister, while visiting at his home that year, and little did I suspect then that she would become the most important person in my life. Over the next six years, I became more attracted to Janet and eventually overcame my shyness to let her know that I was interested. Janet and I married two weeks after she graduated from High School. We have had a happy marriage, and the only differences have been over religion, which we try to avoid talking about. We first lived in the San Jose area where I quite my job with the railroad and started attending Junior College while working at part time jobs. The following year my old high school friends were receiving draft notices. I did not want to be thought of as a draft dodger who got married to avoid military service so I joined the Marine Corps in June 1967, (our first wedding anniversary) and was stationed at Camp Pendelton, California, and later at the Naval Ammunition Depot, McAlester, Oklahoma, where our first child, Suzanne, was born. I liked my time in the Marines, but had made up my mind that I would not make a carrier as an enlisted man. I had been put forward for Officer’s Training School, but nothing came of it, so I decided to accept my discharge when it came time. We returned to California upon my discharge in 1960, and I worked at several part time jobs while attending Allen Hancock Jr. College in Santa Maria with the goal of becoming a school teacher. After a case of mumps caused me to fall behind in studies, I dropped out of school and took employment with the California Department of Corrections temporarily until I could complete my education to be a teacher. I retired from CDC in 1990. State employment took the family to live in Shell Beach, Grover City, Johnstonville, Litchfield, Blue Lake, Arroyo Grande and Tehachapi, California, over the thirty years from 1960 to 1990.

I graduated from Allen Hancock College with an Associate of Arts degree in 1963, and continued attending colleges while moving around the state until 1974 when it became obvious that the children were rapidly passing through their childhood without enough time spent with their father. Over the years I accumulated enough college credits for a bachelors degree but not enough in one course of study to qualify for one.

Janet and I have much to be thankful for. Our daughters, who were never any problem growing up, have grown to be mature, responsible, and respected. Three of them have married and have given us the smartest and best looking grandchildren anyone has ever had. At the last count we had nine grandchildren, but we also lay claim to four children of our niece, Michele Godfrey Myer, so the count should be thirteen. Janet’s brother, Ralph, who was Michele’s father, was killed in an automobile accident when Michele was three years old. She lived with us from time to time over the years, and came to live with us when her grandmother died.

I could write more, but I believe it is best for my wife and daughters to tell their own story.

[Contributed by Leo R. Estes 1 Oct 2000 12:00am; last modified by John W. Wilbanks 13 Dec 2000 6:06pm]