Chapter 9 - California (continued)

Now married, the two wanderers continued to explore California during 1928. In a post script to this letter, Dad mentions a third member of their party, a little Boston Bull Terrier, Buster, pictured here. Sadly, Buster was stolen in San Francisco.

"Northern California presents a different type of scenery; the coast is more rocky and rugged and inland we have the big forests and rolling prairies.

San Francisco is a damp, cold and misty city and is very disappointing after seeing the brand new cities of the south.

We have been here for some time now, and my health, never the same since my pneumonia attack in Chicago, has been wretched. Gert has worked much more than I have and besides this, she has come home and pitched right in again.
 
It was in this very locality that Robert Louis Stevenson¸ lonely Scot, wandered; sick, undernourished and without money, a dreamer of dreams, (a lost soul, misunderstood and rejected by men. The horror of loneliness!)

On a recent camping trip, up to the country of the giant Redwood trees, it happened that we had our tent by the side of a river near a boat landing. A man and his wife came ashore with a fine catch of striped bass. After the general remarks of admiration had subsided, the lady accused me of being English, whereat I was insulted, whereupon her husband was insulted, as he was English. Soothing our injured feelings with a laugh, however, we found that they were a Mr. & Mrs. Turner, she from Edinburgh and he from London, both in this country upwards of twenty years. Mrs. Turner can talk as broad as Princes Street and Alfie still drops his h’s. But such folks – just the essence of kindness.

We have visited them over several week-ends since, and upon their suggestion, we are now going to their town in an effort to find something to settle down to. They have given us the run of their beautiful modern house and have practically called one of their fine rooms “the Kid’s bedroom”.

Such kindness in a foreign country is almost tear inspiring, but any effort at verbal thanks is immediately met with: “Hawd your braith tae blaw your parritch”.” (porridge) 

At the end of this letter, Dad provided his family the Turner’s address in Petaluma, California and it seems that he and Gert stayed in Petaluma. Two years later, in 1930, my half-sister Joan (pronounced Joanne) was born there. Although I don’t know a lot about this time, I know Dad established a trucking business and had somewhat settled as he'd hoped. His business letterhead read:

Arnold Roberton
Private Contract Carrier
Petaluma
Daily store-door delivery service between San Francisco and Santa Rosa
Telephone Petaluma 10403
115 Payran Street, Petaluma

However, an unforeseen turn of events was soon to disrupt everything.

Chapter 8 - The Great Adventure (or Cherchez La Femme)

"Gertrude Llewellen Burrill is her name and she is two months younger than me. Born in Oregon, she was brought up on a remote ranch in Canada, their nearest neighbour being twelve miles distant. Unused to the ways of the cities, she is more at home in the saddle than on the tram. She is devoted and loyal and can go anywhere that I can, whether it is to the top of the highest tree or to the foot of the most treacherous ravine, whether it be to Timbuktu or Camlachie.

(I met her at the Alexandria, where at times, I had to supervise a number of girls as well as my own crew. She was different from the rest... and we got married in November, meaning to keep it a secret. Two very fine boys, who worked under me, came to live with us in our hillside apartment and the news soon leaked out, however.)

Since leaving Los Angeles, we have been all over California together in our Velie touring car...

Situated on a road leading to nowhere in particular, and cuddled to the side of a mountain, Palm Springs is, indeed, an oasis on the California desert. An artist in anything would surely find this place irresistible – such a variety of color and such incomparable sunsets! On the horizon, in any of the three directions that it presents itself, volcano-looking mountains arise, like dark forbidding sentinels, guarding this restful spot from the outside world and its attendant worries.

After the rains in months of October and November, the desert thrusts up its floral thanksgiving – thousands and thousands of beautifully hued verbenas help the many-colored cacti and heather-like sagebrushes to make up a landscape that one will always remember.

The township of Palm Springs is beautifully foliaged with stately palms, graceful pepper and aromatic eucalyptus trees, not to mention the orange, lemon and grapefruit groves.

Twenty miles distant, in the Coachella Valley, are some of the most advanced date farms in the world, while a little further to the south lies the famous Imperial Valley, noted for its treble and quadruple crops of everything, the whole year round....

Spain meets America in the vast Southland, where to this day, stand the Spanish Missions of the conquest era; wonderful, picturesque, old cloisters where one can well imagine the shaven, quiet-voiced padres of another age praying for the conversion of the heathen Indians – and later giving them shovels and axes, with which to show their appreciation of the new Faith."

Chapter 7 - California

"When we ascended to higher altitudes of the foothills of the Lower Rocky Mountains, we were able to get a more comfortable night’s sleep, making our beds from fresh cut pine boughs; and the vigorous freshness of the woodlands was a pleasant change after the continuous rolling wastes of cactus and sage brush.
Crossing the mighty Colorado River at Topock and striking camp on the western bank, we held council in order to determine the exact state of our finances. Since no one of us had slept in a bed under a roof for some four or five months, we decided that it would be rather a novelty to head for a city, and it was a gamble whether it would be San Francisco or Los Angeles. The latter won.
Although I had seen similar scenery in Florida, the trip into Los Angeles was none the less enjoyable. Over the highway we sped, with orange and lemon groves on either side, offering their fruit to those who cared to pluck it. The lazy spell of the desert and wilderness was broken by the ever-changing panorama before us. Fresh green pastures; sleepy contented cows; peach, apricot and apple orchards; avenues of palm trees and endless citrus groves filled us with eager expectations of Sunny California.
If Los Angeles is a “City of Beautiful Homes”, its surrounding suburbs are Hamlets of Palatial Mansions, where, in the pretty palm-shaded piazzas, the busy men of Yesterday sit in reflection of their life’s efforts, many of them illuminating their recollections by sipping cocktails concocted from imported scotch whiskey – made two weeks ago last Tuesday in a Chicago basement....
After working for brief periods at Hollywood and Santa Monica, I secured a position as Head Supply Man in the Alexandria Hotel, one of Los Angeles’ leading hostelries, and was boosted to the job of checking in the food control department. After seven months my work there terminated rather unexpectedly when the institution changed hands and the system was discontinued. It was during this time that I entered on the Great Adventure."

Chapter 6 - Mesa Diablo

Continuing his trek in 1928, Dad describes crossing the Mesa Diablo in New Mexico. I was interested to find that Roswell seems to be the nearest city in that locale. If he and his companions witnessed anything out of the ordinary during those remote nights on the desert, he neglected to mention it when writing home to Scotland. In any case, it sounds as if he may have been a lot more focused on the ground than the heavens.

"We will pass quickly over the month or so spent by four sun-tanned men travelling, carefree and happy, over desert and mountain, where only the seldom travelled trails told that any human had been there before. Ralph was born in this country, of Swedish parents and had traded with peons in Mexico, leading a pack train of burros. Jack was a German by birth but a gold prospector by choice – only he had run shy on his grub stake. Slim wasn’t much of an American, in fact he wasn’t much of any old thing, except that he was a good “dry country” man with an uncanny way of finding water holes on the barren wastes. If he had a hundred dollars in the sole of his socks, nobody ever knew it for at no time did he remove his shoes.

On Mesa Diablo, the bleached skeletons of animals large and small told the tale of relentless sun and the scarcity of water, and the hot wind came blowing through the windshield of our Buick touring car, like the breath from some devilish furnace. The going in the frequent sand was slow and heavy and we had to stop at frequent intervals to allow an overburdened engine to cool down.

Despite the good water-carrying facilities that we had, we were forced to ration ourselves on water, as the car consumed most of our supply and many times our tongues were hanging out by the time that we reached the next water hole. The air was so dry that, as soon as one commenced to sweat, the sweat drops were immediately claimed by the atmosphere. With the glass standing about one hundred and twenty, a handkerchief, soaked and held out to the “breeze” would be completely dry in about seventy seconds. We tried it! At nights we slept on the sands, all huddled together and surrounded by a treated rope (over which a rattlesnake will not go). This was an ordeal for me, because if the various insects, scorpions and lizards that abound in those parts."

Chapter 5 - The Great Desert

"The Great Desert of New Mexico and Arizona was a country of romance and glamour to me, and I must say that those regions possess a history that dates back several thousand years. The Santa Fe and surrounding valleys hold evidence of a civilization that existed before the birth of Christ. There, in the ruined cliff dwellings, in the dim, distant ages of the past, dwelt a race of people who were diminutive in size, very ingenious and inclined to be socialistic; while, in other districts, specimens and traces have been found of men and beasts of equally remote periods. Some of the adobe pueblo dwellings show very good architecture, and even after the passing of the centuries, make tolerably good homes for the Indians who have homesteaded them.

Most of the Navajo Indians, however, live in hogans - - little, round, dome-shaped huts made from logs, interlaced with boughs and mud. There is a hole about a foot in diameter at the top of the dome, and through this the smoke of the fire, which is in the center of the floor, winds its way out. Hogans are strong and stand up to the violent wind, rain, and sand storms that prevail during the different seasons of the year in the valleys and canyons; they are, therefore more practical than tepees and wigwams of the more northern tribes.

Many of the Navajo, Zuni and Hopi Indians of these parts are very angry at the production of a camera; while they know what it is for, they seem to think that it contains evil spirits and they are consequently very reluctant to be photographed. Notwithstanding the considerable amount of pictures taken by me of hose tribal villages etc., I can safely say that not one of them was given to an Indian. Upon being shown their own pictures, they display little interest and immediately hand them back. This peculiarity I attribute to the absence of looking glasses in their communities.

I am enclosing a couple of pictures that were taken in an Indian Village, far from the beaten track of the white man and eighteen miles from the nearest telephone. You will notice that the Navajo are wearing their “Sunday best”, the cheap shoddy rejects from the cities, and you may well wonder how many hides they had to give for these garments. In the background of two of the pictures you will see the hogans I spoke of and will also draw your attention to the three-day-old papoose strapped, Indian fashion, to a board and all ready for

transportation."

Dad, jodhpurs and all, poses with the group on the right.

Chapter 4 - Gallup, New Mexico

The next letter I have is dated August 19th, 1928 from San Francisco, California. Dad would have just turned 25.

“Adventure, once more, has whispered its magic travel words in my ear, and beguiled me to follow some almost unexplored by-ways, through the mysterious sierra-land of the Great South West. By automobile and stock-saddle I have been so far from the railroad that one could soon forget their noisome traction.

Since my home letters are so punctuated with thousands of miles, I will endeavour to make this one an abbreviated synopsis of my travels and doings from the time of my leaving Chicago.
Excepting my trip to London by train, this journey from Chicago to the desert town of Gallup was the only really lengthy railway trip that I had ever made, and while it was full of interest, I must say that railroads are not my style. I have covered as much mileage on horseback as I have on trains! I have covered more mileage by automobile in the last four years than I have ever covered before, on land or sea, my Baltic, North Sea and Atlantic crossings included. So I will start in New Mexico.

Gallup is the typical frontier town, populated by Indians and Mexicans; its industries are mining and oil drilling. Possibly no town of its size consumes so much illegal liquor, and on the main street, every third doorway leads to a gaming house – with roulette wheel and faro tables complete. Had it not been for my Scottish songs and jokes, I surely would have starved in that hectic and iniquitous berg.

Soon I was following leads given to me by chance acquaintances, and later I managed to squeeze into a railroad construction outfit that was going to do some double-tracking in the SantaFe Valley. I was attached to the bridge gang, and was soon working with a bunch of six-foot, standard gauge Swedes - - - drilling hard rock with churn drills and sledge hammers and blasting for bridge foundations.

After I had survived that job for a while, I was promoted to the job of camp supply driver. In this capacity, I supplied four camps with everything from beef to dynamite and my rolling stock was an ancient Lizzie, disguised as a two-ton wagon. Nightmare of nightmares!! Bouncing over the sage brush where no roads existed, up and down old water-courses, over rocks enough to build a city, and right behind me, enough dynamite and black powder to blast a city. My aged “Chariot of Fire” had all the idiosyncrasies of its class¸and these, combined with the large area of virgin land I had to traverse daily caused me to carry my blankets with me. When night overtook me, I would walk fifty yards from the truck, build a fire and make myself comfortable in the manner of the Navajo Indians, who, for the most part were friendly and had shown me “how”. "

Chapter 3 - Chicago

"It was while I was in this region that I finally decided to extend my tour in the direction of Chicago and I can assure you that it was a great journey. I was not in any hurry so my daily average was only a little over a hundred miles, my total mileage being fifteen hundred and thirty six, and the time taken was fourteen days. I believe I was meant to be a wanderer as I am never more in my element than when I am living close to nature and roughing it....
On the outskirts of Chicago, I camped until I could find work and lodging in the city, and on the evening of the second day of my search I was successful in both respects. It was with reluctance that I packed my outfit and went to work...

My plans for the future are somewhat indefinite just now. The old desire to write still being to the fore, I am inclined to think that in travel I have the best immediate future, but occasionally I become uncomfortably aware of my abbreviated education, and although I believe that I have the ability to put my thoughts on paper, (also I may add that I have heard many a queer tale), I find myself greatly lacking when it comes to phrasing and punctuation. So my decision at it stands just now, but which is liable to be changed at any time, is that I will remain in Chicago at present, and in a year or so if I am no further ahead in the march of commercial life, I will start on an extensive “work and jump” tour of the world, during which, I have no doubt, I will visit Britain.”

One of the stories I remember Dad telling is about his short stint driving a Yellow Cab in Chicago during the twenties. On several occasions as a cabbie, he was dispatched to make pick- ups at the Metropole Hotel, where Al Capone and his associates were headquartered. Stepping out of the elevator, two armed men would flank him on either side asking what his business was. Announcing himself as a cab driver, he would then be escorted to the room where his fare was waiting. I also remember something about him ending up in a blind alley at gunpoint, a narrow escape and a change of career. Chicago sounds like a crazy place in those days.

This was the last letter written to his family in Scotland in 1926. As far as I know, they may not have heard from Dad again for another two and a half years.

Chapter 2 - Syracuse

Continuing from his letter to Scotland in 1926, I love Dad's description of waking up next day.

"I shall never forget the dawning of that next day. I was in the fruit district of northern New York and the effect of the sun as it slowly arose, partly hidden by the chill, early morning robe of dewy mist that clung to the earth, was mystic and wonderful. It was but a few moments before the mist arose and allowed the sun’s rays to reach the dew-drops clinging to the leaves and flowers alike, and then there was laid before me the panorama of an undulating countryside – its rare beauty enhanced by the shimmering effect of the sun and dew. I kept going all that day, sometimes getting a lift for a few miles, until early in the evening when I chanced to meet a master tramp with whom I travelled to Syracuse.

While in Syracuse, I gained a little notoriety by writing a little article for the daily press, in which I reprimanded a noted New York journalist for a snobbish attack on the profession by which I was then earning my bread and butter ( i.e. continental service waiter). The President of the hotel corporation with which I was employed wrote me a letter of “congratulations on my effort”. With the exception of a trip to Albany, the capital of the Empire State, at the expense of the Standard Oil Co. Of New York, with which firm I was offered a position, nothing else of interest occurred at Syracuse.

A little later, I purchased a Ford Coupe, and one day the thought entered my head that I might take a very pleasant vacation. Within twenty-four hours I had procured a complete camping outfit and left Syracuse for the foothills of Rochester."

Chapter 1 - A good idea at the time

From a letter written home to Scotland in Jan. 1926, Dad’s own words describe his ship jumping escapade. He was 23.

“After having accepted just what came along in the way of work in Toronto, which consisted of dish-washing, truck driving, waiting on table, and on two occasions playing ‘extra’ theatrical parts, I secured a berth on a Great Lakes steamer. I lived in the ‘glory hole’ for the remainder of that season, during which time I travelled from Niagara Falls via the famous Thousand Islands and Lachine Rapids of the St. Lawrence River to the sea.

At the close of the season, I spent some time and money on a hopeless endeavour to obtain work again in Toronto and finding myself almost penniless and with an American passport which was overdue, I decided that something had to be done immediately – and it was.

I left the bulk of my luggage with a friend and selecting only a kit bag packed with necessary equipment, I set out to break the immigration laws of the United States of America. Entering into the spirit of the thing I was doing, I cast all my cares to the very winds that I faced as I took to the road, and I assumed some of the careless confidence of the vagabond.

Later I boarded a ship on the Canadian side and asked the mate if I might work my way to Montreal. He agreed, and that night after dark, at Rochester on the American side, I contrived to help a number of deck hands in the task of wheeling a truckload of freight ashore to the customs house. My kit bag was right in the middle of that freight!! While we were unloading at the customs shed, I threw my kit bag with all my might and it landed in a clump of bushes. To avoid suspicion, I remained until the truck was empty and then, unnoticed in the hustle and noise, I dissolved into the kindly blackness of the night. It was important that I should travel as far inland that night as possible so I invested seven cents in a street car ride and when I reached the other end of the city I commenced walking. I walked all that night with the exception of two hours when I tried to sleep in a rat-infested grain car.

   

   

Preface

Thanks to my friend Heidi, I’ve been inspired to create this is blog to remember my father, Arnold Roberton. “Have it your own stupid way” was one of his favourite expressions and over the course of 90 years, he had accumulated quite a few. As well as wanting to preserve and share some of those expressions, I also want to recall what I can about my father’s activities as a socialist, peace activist and photographer throughout his life.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1903, my dad was one of nine children and although it seems the family business was undertaking, his father, Hugh Roberton, was better known as the conductor of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir.

At seventeen, my dad set out craving the adventure of North America. He worked his way across the Atlantic on a merchant ship and although he was originally intending settle in Canada, he ended up jumping ship in the US instead. 

This is his original British Mercantile Marine Identity and Service Certificate issued to him February 6, 1920.