50s: Ojai Grandparents

I took my first plane trip in 1958. It was a small propeller plane from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. A commercial airplane, but tiny. The flight took less than an hour. Our parents dropped Chip and I off at the gate and our Grandad picked us up in Santa Barbara and drove us to their home in Ojai. 

In those days, we dressed up for the planes. Women wore high heels. Kids wore the church pants. 

smoking fish with Grandad

Grandad and Grandma lived in an idyllic small house under a huge oak tree at the foot of the TopaTopa mountains. Theirs was literally the last house before the undeveloped wild leading up to the mountains, but it was still only a comfortable walk for two boys from there to the movie theater in the old center of town, what we called “Spanish” arches. Ojai was nothing special back then, just a small rural town in the mountains above Santa Barbara. 

Grandad and his next-door neighbor took us fishing on the Pacific Ocean. The neighbor had a small boat on a trailer, with an outboard motor. We woke up well before dawn and drove to the ocean. One day we caught like 17 bonita, a fighting fish related to tuna. Grandma turned up her nose and complained, but Grandad set up his homemade smoker and smoked them all over three days. We went in a small boat with an outboard motor so far out to sea that we couldn’t see land. That was scary, inherently. But I was there with my Grandad, a big man with strong arms who seemed to be always smiling, and always safe.