A Kid, His Guns, and His Badge: Antics, Antidotes and Tragedies of a Rural California Cop

By Jim Waddell

A Kid, His Guns, and His Badge by Jim Waddell

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638145073

Jim Waddell

Colonel Jim Waddell was a clerk of petty sessions and coroner before joining the Australian Regular Army in 1989. He has served as Director Legal At Headquarters Joint Operations Command, Director of Army Legal Services, Directory of Military Justice and Director of Chief of the Defence Force Commissions of Enquiry.

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Chapter 1

Growing Up in Mayberry (Escalon)

I had just as well start at the beginning. I was born in this quiet little community in the last part of 1948—right in the middle of the baby boom, but nobody called it that back then.

Escalon is a small city in the southeastern portion of San Joaquin County in the central part of California.

Old Pioneer Hospital where I was born after my mom climbed the stairs to the birthing room

I was born in Pioneer Memorial Hospital, which actually originated as a two-story home. It was built in the 1860s and was the home of Escalon’s founder and first settler, John Wheeler Jones. The structure still stands today.

Escalon’s historical society claims the maternity ward was on the second floor, requiring moms in labor to climb the stairs. I don’t remember my mom complaining about that.

Our house was known as the Blackmore residence, apparently due to its original owner. This was also a two-story house, located at the corner of St. Clair Street and State Highway 120. McDowell’s tow service occupies that corner now.

The early years in this home consisted of my mom and dad, sister Judy, and maternal grandparents. Our extended family on my mom’s side was large and local. And they all lived on or near St. Clair.

St. Clair Street was about five blocks long, and we had a relative on every corner or cross street, the entire length of that street.

The closest relatives were a very short block away on the next corner. My mom’s sister Elizabeth and husband Angus Largent. Judy and I called them Unc and Libby. Their two sons were John and Tom.

The next block had two families who were related. Mom’s cousin Hazel lived on the corner with her family. Three houses away were her mother and two sisters. And in the next block was my mom’s aunt Grace. We had that part of town surrounded.

I realize all this familial information may not be of interest. However, it needs to be stated as this coziness had quite an influence on my childhood.

Some of my earliest memories include a song taught to me by Uncle Angus (affectionately known as Unc). Unc was a real character and had a profound and early influence on me. An electrician by trade, he was chocked full of knowledge in areas of great interest to a growing boy, things like guns and fishing poles. He raised chickens and rabbits for food. He played the harmonica and liked whiskey. I was barely old enough to talk, but Unc had me singing On Top of Old Smokey, an old folk song. The only problem with that was he switched some of the words, replacing them with words not suitable for use in Christian homes. Proud of the song I learned from Unc, I anxiously dashed home to display this new talent, the results of which got my mouth washed out with hand soap.

Unc’s two sons, John and Tom, were ten and eight years older than I am; and their bedrooms were a haven for an adventurous youth looking for fun and trouble. They had BB guns, baseball equipment, footballs, and forbidden magazines in that bedroom. A note here is in order. I don’t know why, but I developed an early, intense, and a lifelong interest in guns. It was probably because home television being in its infancy, cowboys and Indians were the centerpiece of programming. At least they were for me. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Range Rider, Hop-along Cassidy, and, of course, The Lone Ranger were the earliest shows I remember in this category. In fact, my mom told me I used to sit in my high chair and eat a piece of Sunbeam bread into the shape of a pistol and shoot everyone in the room. (Today, that sort of behavior would cost my parents thousands in counseling costs.) My father, a World War 2 veteran, had no use for guns, no liking for guns, no interest in camping or fishing or any other kind of sport other than team sports.

Dad loved baseball, football, basketball, and golf. That is he liked watching those sports. He would never play. What this meant to a boy who loved the idea of guns and such, my uncle’s house, a block away, held so much more interest than my own did, which is why I spent so much time there.

Apparently, I had a problem of wetting my pants back in those days. I say it was a problem because I can remember doing it and mostly I can remember the punishment, meted out by my father when he came home from work.

My mom told me in later years I was actually potty-trained back then, but I was so busy playing it was easier to wet my pants than to interrupt whatever I was doing. It didn’t take long for me to start remembering to go.

We had a fishpond in the backyard. It was about fifteen feet in diameter and knee deep to an adult. It contained large gold fish, a few carp, a few toads, tadpoles, and water spiders. The fishpond scared me, at least in the early years. I had dreams of really nasty creatures living there. As I grew older, I used that fishpond as a fishing hole after learning that sport from Unc, which, of course, got me into all kinds of trouble with my parents.

My father, upon hearing of my laziness to go to the potty, decided his little boy needed something to make him remember. One day, when he came home from work and found my pants wet, he took hold of my legs by the ankles, held me upside down, and dunked my head in the fishpond. I was afraid not only of drowning but also of being eaten by the monsters that lurked in that place. I was so petrified he was sure his punishment worked. It took one more incident for me to really get the message as he did it for longer and dipped my head almost to the nose. It worked. From that time on, I became a poster boy for below-the-belt hygiene.

I credit my Uncle Angus and my grandfather for instilling in me an appreciation for life the way it had been for decades and longer. Raising animals for food was as natural to our family as breathing. By the time I was old enough to go to school, I had been taught the entire process of slaughtering, scalding, cleaning, and packaging of chickens, rabbits, and any other type of small, domestic or wild, edible creatures.

Unc took me fishing when I was barely old enough to hold a rod and reel. We went to nearby creeks and ponds and caught blue gill, bass, and catfish. After my second or third trip, I was an old hand at scaling and cleaning our catch. This being in the mid-1950s, Escalon had a meat locker downtown on Main Street.

Main Street Escalon in the 1950’s

Many a time, I accompanied my mom or my aunt Libby or my grandfather to the locker where we always had space rented for the butchered chickens or rabbits. I don’t recall any of us having had deep freezes back then. Later in another story, I’ll tell about another uncle that influenced me throughout my life and further developed my interest for hunting, fishing, and life in the country. Meanwhile, back to Unc.

My dad and his side of the family loved baseball, and in a small town like Escalon, it was just natural I would try out for little league. I loved playing baseball on the playground and at school, and I thought I was a pretty good player.

After little league tryouts, I made one of the teams, which actually made me a little nervous. Now I would have to perform. It wasn’t difficult to hit, catch, and throw in the casual games on the playground; but when it came to an official game complete with uniforms, parents, relatives, teachers, coaches and umpires present, the Waddell kid froze. I was assigned to right field. Right field is where the least talented player got stationed.

Not surprising, every time I got up to bat, I got called out on strikes. Occasionally, I struck out swinging. I went almost all of that first summer without even making contact with the ball when I was up to bat.

If I may be allowed one little excuse, Unc was often in the stands along with a pint of whatever bourbon he was favoring at the time, stuck in his back pocket. Through his whisky clouded eyes, he had a different opinion of what a strike was than the umpire did, even if I swung and missed!

It was Unc’s opinion his nephew was another Mickey Mantle in the making, and he had no problem letting the umpire know about it.

It went something like this: Umpire said, Strike one. Unc said in a very loud voice, You blind bastard! Umpire said, Strike two. Unc said, Get a real job, you jerk. Umpire said, Strike three. Unc said, You’re blind as a bat, you SOB. (But he didn’t abbreviate it.) Umpire said, "You’re out. I said, I know. Umpire said, I’m talking about him," pointing in the stands.

My dad, who was hardly ever confrontational, had enough. He pulled Uncle Angus out of the stands and stuffed him in the car, and off they went. Rumor had it, instead of taking him home, Dad took Unc to the Valley Inn, one of the two local watering holes, where they spent the next several hours discussing the low quality of umpires in Escalon.

The season was not a total loss because in the next game, I got not one but two hits. My dad was so desperate to see me get a hit he offered to pay me a dollar if I could get a hit and get on base. This must have been around 1957 or 1958. At that time, a dollar bill for a ten-year-old kid was big money.

Apparently, our coach was just as concerned as my dad about my lack of offense, so he told me to try and get on with a bunt the next time I got up to bat. So I squared off and stuck the bat out there, and that pitcher must have been really good, because he succeeded in hitting my bat. The ball rolled out about ten or fifteen feet toward second base.

The pitcher went for the ball, the second baseman went for the ball, and the first baseman went for the ball. None of them reached the ball as they all collided with each other before they got there. As bad as my hitting was, when it came to running, nobody could run faster back in those days. I took off like a scalded cat and reached first base before any of the fielders got back to their feet, let alone get me out.

I eventually scored, and when I crossed home plate, I looked up in the stands and saw my dad grinning from ear to ear. I yelled up to him, Does a bunt get me the dollar? He nodded that it did. The next time up, I had so much confidence I smacked that ball into the gap between left and center field and ended up on second base. That made me feel like I really did earn the dollar rather than collect on a bunt.

Across the street (St. Clair) from our house was a little hamburger stand called Bud’s Frosty. This kind of place preceded fast-food restaurants as we know them today. It was outside service only with a few picnic tables under the sycamore trees that lined the streets in the part of town.

I dearly loved the hamburgers Bud made. He was a short stocky man, always wearing white clothes with a white cook’s hat on and a cigar sticking out of his face. I don’t remember ever seeing him without his cigar, even when flipping burgers or making milkshakes. (If he ever did drop ashes in the food, it didn’t matter; it was a real treat getting to have one of Bud’s burgers, shakes, or even a Coke).

If our little league team won, the coach would take us to Bud’s for Cokes on him. If any of the team members hit a home run, it was a burger and shake. Needless to say, all I got that summer was a few Cokes paid for by the coach.

Speaking of food, during those preteen years, I didn’t really appreciate how good of a cook my mom was. As I got older and experienced other cooking and restaurant food, it made me go back home as often as possible for my mom’s food.

Since so many aunts, uncles and cousins all lived within a ten-minute walk at the longest, I learned early on to make the rounds before dinnertime, especially if I knew what my mom was cooking and if it was something I didn’t particularly like.

Escalon during this time in history had telephones but not the kind with dials. Most were stuck up on the wall in the kitchen, with the earpiece separate from the rest of the device with a long cord. The person using the phone had to stand and speak into the mouthpiece on the box. When you wanted to call someone, you picked up the earpiece and turned the crank a few times which rang a bell in the operator’s house. The operator being Mrs. Stroble who, in addition to being the town’s phone operator, was also the person who received payments for local utilities.

When I found something one of the aunt’s had cooking for dinner that I liked, liked more than what Mom had planned, I worked out an invitation to dinner. I would grab and stand on a nearby chair, grab the earpiece of the phone, and crank up the phone a few times. When Mrs. Stroble answered, I would say, Would you please tell my mom I’m eating at Aunt Lucy’s tonight? Mrs. Stroble would say, Okay, Jimmy, I’ll call her now. I never did have to tell Mrs. Stroble who I was. She knew the sound of my voice and probably the sound of everyone else’s voice in town too.

I remember eating many meals at Unc and Libby’s. I was especially fond of her scrambled eggs. There was something about them that was different. They weren’t as yellow as most and had a slightly different flavor. After going after those eggs for several years, Unc informed me one time they were eggs mixed with brains. They just didn’t taste the same after that.

As stated earlier, we shared a residence with my mother’s parents. I believe I was around five years of age when my grandmother died of a heart attack during the Christmas holidays in 1953. My grandfather was Robert C. Spear. We called him Papa. Papa had a woodworking shop in the cellar of our home. In his retirement years, he did fine woodworking, making things such as furniture, cabinets, and even some church furniture. Now, some fifty-three years after his passing, we still have several pieces of furniture in our home that he built.

Papa was the epitome of a nice old gentleman. My earliest memories of him were singing old folk songs to me, particularly Old Dan Tucker. Papa taught me how to spell, even before I started elementary school. He would sit with me at the breakfast table and teach me how to spell words off the cereal boxes and milk bottles. Yes, bottles. The kind when emptied, we placed on the porch for the milkman to pick up and replace with full ones. The milkman was Mr. Hale, the husband of my fourth-grade teacher. When I got to kindergarten, I could spell words such as Cornflakes, Cheerios, homogenized, and pasteurized. I didn’t learn to spell butter until a few years later as our butter was delivered by Bernice Derickson, who churned it from milk obtained from Hale’s Dairy, and it came in plain paper without a label. Papa would sit there with me, going over those words until I had them memorized. Learning how to form syllables that young helped me immensely throughout life.

I remember spending countless hours with him while he was working in the basement building cabinets or other furniture items. I don’t ever remember him being angry at me over any of my normal childhood behavior issues. Well, almost never. There was this one little incident.

I don’t remember how old I was, maybe eight or nine. By this age, I had watched enough of Papa’s woodworking skills I must have thought they were passed on to me through osmosis. I decided it was time I had a pistol, like the ones Roy Rogers on TV had. Papa was away so I had the basement/woodshop to myself.

I selected what looked like a satisfactory piece of wood that would make a fine pistol. I had been taught to never touch any of Papa’s power tools, and I had heard enough stories to be sufficiently afraid of them. That didn’t, however, stop me from using any of the many hand tools in that shop. By this age, I’d had plenty of experience driving nails and screws and in a limited capacity, using his handsaws.

What I wasn’t very good at was recognizing the difference between hard and soft wood, scraps, or very fine and expensive pieces of oak or other choice varieties Papa had in mind for some project.

After drawing my outline of a Colt Peacemaker, that very beautiful piece of finely grained oak went into the vise. I hadn’t been taught what the jaws of a vise will do to even hardwood like oak. I clamped that vise down as tight as I could and selected a handsaw and went to work. I sawed and sawed, and sawed some more. I was getting discouraged that the teeth of the saw would not follow the line I had drawn. That wood was so hard and finely grained it might as well have been a piece of steel. It didn’t take long to realize my project was doomed, so I opened the vise to see lots of marks on the wood where the jaws of the vice left an imprint.

When Papa found that piece of oak, he called me to come down in the basement. He had tears in his eyes and started sobbing. He was trying to explain to me about the cost of fine wood and all the other things I did wrong when he gave up and, out of complete frustration, gave me a swat on the rear. I hardly felt it. It was nothing like my mom’s spankings, which I’ll get to shortly; but Papa never spanked anyone. My sister and cousins were all aware he never spanked. It destroyed me. Just the thought I had angered or hurt him enough to do that, well, it made me cry. Hard. Loud. What happened next was as predictable as August heat rash. Papa started crying, apparently thinking he had really hurt me. So he cried loud and hard.

This basement/woodshop was directly below the kitchen. My mom was in the kitchen and, hearing all the crying and commotion, came running down the stairs to investigate. Seeing us both in hysterics, she thought I had gotten hurt on some tool or something and she started freaking out, screaming, What hurts? Where is it? Papa recovered first and told her what happened. She was so relieved that both of us were not hurt she burst into laughter. Two crying, one laughing. The laughing won. Papa started laughing, too, and me? I was more confused than the stock market on election day. Later, they explained what emotions were all about, but the lesson was learned. I never ever touched another piece of wood without asking permission.

Papa and I weren’t the only ones skilled in woodworking. My mother did pretty well down in that shop too. At least she did this one time I remember. Apparently, during those preteen years, I had somewhat of a behavior problem. Looking back, I don’t see where I was so bad, but I guess it’s not for me to judge.

I do not remember the incident that caused this reaction on Mom’s part, but it must have either been pretty bad or an accumulation of things, but the result was Mom grabbing me by the arm and dragging me down in the basement to watch her build a paddling stick.

Maybe it was that time when she had me all dressed up in a little suit to go to some luncheon, and after begging her, she let me take a jar of Bosco which was chocolate syrup similar to Hershey’s. I had that jar of Bosco out by the car waiting for Mom to come out. I thought I could open the lid and have one little taste. What would that hurt? I guess a lot because I spilled some of that dark chocolate syrup on my snow-white shirt. When Mom came out to get in the car and saw that dark stain on my shirt and on my mouth, she blew all her circuits, grabbed that jar, and poured the entire contents all over me from the top of my head, all the way down. Or maybe it was the time when I was at the Escalon High School football field playing with friends. I don’t know why, but I just had to climb one of the light towers that was easily eighty feet from the ground, maybe higher. I was not afraid of heights, at least not in those days. I was amazed when I got to the top. I could see forever. Everything would have been fine when I got down from that tower if I would have just kept the adventure to myself. But, no, I had to go home and brag about it to everyone I knew which landed me in the doghouse.

Anyway, back to the paddle. Mom drew an outline (just like I had done with the pistol attempt) of the paddle she wanted. If I remember right, it was about fourteen to sixteen inches long with a perfectly shaped handle. What kind of wood it was made no difference because Mom used Papa’s electric band saw like she was born to it. She cut out that paddle in no time at all, and the look on her face turned my blood cold. I wish I could remember what I had done to fire her up. What’s interesting all these years later was her demeanor. Mom didn’t build this paddle out of rage or from a knee-jerk reaction to something I had done. She did this coldly, methodically, and expertly. After she got the paddle cut out, she moved to the sander. This was a bench-mounted device that was originally a grinder as used in metal shops. Papa had converted it to be used for sanding wood. Mom sanded the handle part down really nice and smooth. Just the handle. Not the business end. Whether this was intentional or not, I can’t say. After she got the handle finished, I started really getting scared, thinking punishment was imminent. Then over to the drill press she went. She selected a drill bit that must have been somewhere close to a half inch in diameter and proceeded to drill several holes in the paddle. I later learned that this was to reduce wind resistance so it would strike harder. After Mom finished that paddle, she took it upstairs to the kitchen and placed it on a ledge above the stove, out of my reach. She never did use that paddle on me, but the idea it existed and was immediately available to her must have had the desired effect.

In a small community, a softball league was a fixture in the summer months. Most of the teams were from local churches. One that wasn’t was Bud’s Frosty, the little drive-in across the street from our house.

The team members consisted of Bud’s son Bob, along with my cousins John and Tom and several of their friends. Most of these guys were all in their late teens or early twenties and had all played varsity baseball in high school. The team was pretty good and did well in league play that summer. I was around nine or ten when the team was formed, and somehow I ended up being their batboy.

Bud outfitted the team members with white sweatshirts with his Bud’s Frosty logo on the back in green. I was shocked and so honored when the shirts arrived and there was one in my size. I wore that sweatshirt so much it was half worn out before the first game. About this time, my mom and dad decided to offer one of the upstairs bedrooms in our spacious house for rent. Gary Olson was the first tenant. I remember he was nineteen years old and had just gotten a job with ATSF (Santa Fe railway; today, it’s BNSF). That railway ran right through the middle of Escalon and still does.

Gary’s job was to man the train station downtown. It was the old type train depot still seen in many rural parts of the country. Low, two story, and they’re all painted the same dark-yellow color, dull and bleak.

These were the days before Amtrak where each rail company ran both types of trains, passenger trains and freight trains.

After Gary got settled in with his new job and living in our house, I started really liking him, mostly because he was pretty tolerant of a nine-year-old boy following him around like a lost puppy. I was allowed to come to the train station and watch him work. Gary taught me things about the railway, which I thought was really fascinating. There were two large bells that rang in the station when a train was coming our way. The bells each had a different tone. One tone meant the train was coming from Stockton; the other meant it was coming from Riverbank. When that bell rang, I got so excited I would run out to the tracks to meet the train.

The freight trains were called extras and never stopped in Escalon as there was no reason to. The passenger trains were all numbered. There were three passenger trains that came through every day. If there were passengers to pick up or drop off, they would stop; otherwise, they came through at seventy-nine miles per hour.

Being ten years younger than my new hero, predictably, I thought Gary was really something. I told him about the softball team and asked if he played. He said he did, and, of course, I puffed my chest out and told him I could get him on the Bud’s Frosty team. I invited him to come to the next game and excitedly introduced him to Bob Dornan, Bud’s son and coach, telling him that Gary was a great ball player and they just had to let him on the team. With Gary standing right there, Bob obviously had little choice but to invite him to play.

That’s when I learned not all older guys are jocks. Gary couldn’t hit any better than I did in little league. Gary couldn’t run or catch very well either. When Gary tried to throw the ball warming up with the guys, he rarely threw it where they could catch it. Needless to say, Gary didn’t get invited back to the next game. He was embarrassed, I was embarrassed, and the guys on the team were quite uncomfortable also. I remember them giving me looks that would make milk turn sour. Then I started getting worried they would fire me as batboy and I would lose my white sweatshirt with the green letters. I was scared. After the game, Gary left before the others. The players all saw how nervous and embarrassed I was and assured me they would not hold this against me. I kept my job as batboy, but I was forever banned from being a scout for players.

It wasn’t long after this we sold the house and moved to Modesto as my dad was being transferred in his job.

Chapter 2

Growing Up on The Ranch

In what will undoubtedly be chapter 1 if this project ever comes to print, Growing Up in Mayberry described what it was like being raised in Escalon, a small town that later became a city near the south county line in San Joaquin County. I lived there from birth until I was twelve when we moved to Modesto due to my dad being transferred.

Escalon was my official address because that’s where my mom and dad lived, but my heart was divided between our large two-story home on St. Clair Street in Escalon and the Kiernan ranch that was a couple miles north of Salida in Stanislaus County. These two locales were only twelve miles apart, but to a little kid, they seemed a lot farther than that when I was at one of them and longed to be at the other. After all, gas was pretty expensive in the mid to late 1950s, at twenty-nine cents a gallon, and neither my parents nor my aunt and uncle could afford to shuttle me to the other location very often.

The ranch was a diversified farm that was owned and operated by my uncle Bob Kiernan. He was the husband of my mother’s youngest and closest sister, Grace. Bob was raised on this piece of ground that had been farmed by his father; and it produced walnuts, grapes, almonds, and a small twenty-five-cow grade B dairy. Uncle Bob also raised all the feed necessary to sustain these milk cows and their calves, and there was always a huge and often mean Holstein bull he kept on hand to sire his small herd of milk cows.

From an early age, and I mean old enough to remember, I loved spending time with my aunt and uncle out at the ranch. They lived in the only house on that spread with Uncle Bob’s mom, Grandma Louise Kiernan; her daughter Rita, who was the youngest sibling in that family; and brother Ed.

I don’t know why, but since I was old enough to walk, I always liked the farm setting. Escalon was fun being a small town and everything that goes with that, but I loved being out at the ranch where there were cows and tractors and fields of alfalfa, corn and oats, trees and grape vines.

This home place, as my uncle called it, was just forty acres; but it was enough to support this family of five. Actually, the forty-acre piece wasn’t quite enough as Uncle Bob always seemed to have another piece of ground rented or leased to grow alfalfa for hay for his herd.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I started staying out there overnight, but I know I couldn’t have been much more than five or six. When I first started riding the tractor with Uncle Bob, he put me on the seat with him, between his legs, obviously so he could hold me in case I started to fall off.

I loved the monotony of riding those tractors with him, going back and forth, discing a field or orchard, mowing alfalfa, raking it into windrows or picking it up, chopping it, and blowing it into hay wagons. Other times, he would have a ridger hooked to the back to put up dirt levees prior to irrigating in either the walnut or almond orchards as all of the irrigating back then was done by flood. Today, watering orchards or vineyards is mostly done by drip lines or micro-sprinklers.

At the ranch, there was a concrete lined canal that bordered the home place on the south side with pipelines coming from the canal to and through various locations with valves for flooding any given field or orchard. A ditch tender worked for Modesto Irrigation District, and he would come by during the growing season, usually every ten to fifteen days telling us we could have the water for so many hours starting at a certain time that was more often than not during the nighttime hours.

As much as Uncle Bob must have hated to get the call in the middle of the night to take the water, there were three creatures out there who became ecstatic when Charlie Cripe, the ditch tender, drove into the yard. Me, Bunky, and Freddie. Bunky was a male English Setter that wandered in one day and decided he was going to live there. Freddie was a female terrier mixed with maybe two or three other breeds, much smaller than Bunky. Bunky adopted me, and we were inseparable. Freddie adopted Uncle Bob, and they were inseparable.

At first, Bob or Grace wouldn’t wake me when it was time to take the water, thinking a little boy needed his sleep. I made such a fuss though they relented, and no matter what time it was, I got shaken awake if I was still asleep; but that was usually not the case because Bunky and Freddie yipped, yapped, and even howled when Charlie’s truck pulled in. They didn’t fuss like that when anyone else drove in. Those dogs knew it was time to irrigate, and there was nothing they liked better than jumping and splashing through the flooded orchards or fields and playing in the gurgling water coming right from the canal and waiting next to a gopher hole they knew would provide them a tasty treat when the water flooded the gopher’s living space.

There was nothing I liked better than being with Uncle Bob in the middle of the night whether it was walking the levees, shovel in hand, closing up gopher holes or breaks in levees. When we weren’t trekking the levees, we were waiting in his old yellow 1950 Dodge pickup, listening to KNBR radio out of San Francisco. Back then, it was a pop music station. Uncle Bob loved music, and that’s where I got my love for it also, I’m sure. We would sit in his old truck and wait until the water in an alfalfa field or walnut orchard got to a certain point, and then we would rush to open other valves to start the water in another check and then return and close those valves. I’m sure he would rather have been sleeping as 5:00 a.m. came early when it was time to start the morning milking chores.

Ed Kiernan

Ed was the youngest of five brothers in the Kiernan family. He was born with a congenital heart defect; and if that wasn’t enough, as a child, he was struck and ran over by a car backing out of a driveway, if my memory serves. Whether the accident was the cause or if he was born that way, Ed was mentally handicapped, and when I got older, Aunt Grace told me he had the mind of a ten-year-old. He was born in 1926, just four years younger than Uncle Bob.

My earliest memory of Ed was that he was a happy guy, strong as an ox, and he took a liking to me. His bedroom at the ranch was in the upstairs tank house, a small room on top of the water tank that supplied the house, yard, and garden. During the years I grew up there, I spent countless hours with Ed up in his room, talking about everything. Even though he was mentally slow, he had an eagerness to learn; and even when I was just eight or nine, Ed would ask me so many questions about things, places, and people. If he had any schooling at all, it wouldn’t have been more than kindergarten or maybe first grade as he couldn’t read, but his sister Rita had taught him to at least write his name.

Whether Rita tried to teach him more and he was incapable of learning or she didn’t take the time, I can’t say; but Ed was illiterate, and he was always showing me magazines and letters he had gotten from relatives, asking me to read it to him, asking what that word meant, what did that headline say, anything in his possession that had writing on it—he wanted to know what it said and what it meant.

I guess because Ed liked me, I remember always being patient with him, and I never tired of his constant questions. All during my preteen years, Ed was an adult who treated me not just as an equal but as a teacher and mentor. It made me proud when I could help him with the written word and things in general.

We spent countless days and evenings together. Because of Ed’s mental infirmity, it was his lot in life to do the menial, hard labor tasks, assigned by the boss, Uncle Bob. When Bob wasn’t on the tractor, he was forever busy in his shop, maintaining his equipment. He was equipped to do about 95 percent of all of the repairs and replacement necessary to keep his farm implements, tractors (he had three and sometimes four tractors), and milking equipment running and in serviceable condition.

Jumping ahead a little, when I was a freshman in high school and took agriculture mechanics, one of the first things I was taught was the latest and greatest methods and equipment for welding. One can only imagine how proud I was when Uncle Bob asked me to teach him what I had learned as he only had trial-and-error experience to rely on to get the job done. They even taught us how to weld using a carpenter’s nail in case you were in a pinch and ran out of welding rod. When I taught that to Uncle Bob, he never bought another box of welding rod. He was always looking for ways to save a buck or two, even though welding with nails was inferior to using commercial welding rods.

I got off topic, back to Ed Kiernan. With Uncle Bob doing the tractor work and necessary mechanics, it was Ed’s job to hoe weeds in the corn or Sudan grass, which was a pasture plant for cows to graze. With most weeds having seed heads where if you left them lying in the field, they would self-plant and multiply, so Ed had to take a wheelbarrow with him out in the cornfield or other pastures, and every weed he would hoe, he had to carefully pick up and deposit it in the wheelbarrow. When full, he wheeled it back to the yard which was sometimes a quarter mile or so and dumped the weeds into a pile and burned them.

Did Ed ever complain? Not once. He so respected, (you could almost say he worshipped) his older brother and never back-talked or said anything negative about the tough tasks he was made to perform. When I got old enough, I was hired to work right alongside Ed. I got paid by the hour; Ed got paid nothing. When I asked Aunt Grace why, she said Ed didn’t need any money. Everything in the world he needed was provided for.

A normal workday for Ed, at least in the warmer growing season, went as follows: Up at five o’clock or five thirty, and when he came downstairs from his pump house bedroom, his mom had a good breakfast waiting for him and Uncle Bob. Immediately after, he walked out to the barn and started the morning milking. This happened at six o’clock; and by the time the last cow had been milked, Ed’s job was to clean out the manure and leftover hay or silage in the mangers, sweep and hose down the barn floor, and then strip and clean the three milking machines along with the (primitive by today’s standards) milk cooling system. He would normally finish around eight thirty or maybe nine. Then it was back to the house for a break and coffee before he started the rest of his workday which was any manual work Uncle Bob had for him to do.

More often than not, it involved a shovel or hoe and a wheelbarrow. He could be off to any of the corn or pasture fields, grape vineyard, or walnut or almond orchards, always on foot as Ed was never allowed or taught to drive any kind of vehicle or machinery. It may sound like I’m critical of this decision by Bob and Grace, but I’m not. Knowing Ed as well as I did, I don’t think he was capable of mastering machinery.

The noon meal was served at noon sharp, six days a week, and it was always a feast put on by Grandma Kiernan. Whether or not she was the best cook I ever ate from, I can’t say, because the work or play I did out there gave me a world-class appetite. That meal always consisted of some kind of meat dish, potatoes of some sort, bread, vegetables, and always a salad. It was always iced tea or coffee or raw milk; but I was never a lover of milk, raw or otherwise, so it was tea for me.

After the noon meal, Uncle Bob always went down for a twenty-to-thirty-minute nap. Neither Ed nor I ever did. I had way too much energy for that nonsense, and Ed would usually get his BB gun and join me with mine and look around the yard for pesky birds that liked to feast on the ripe figs as we had two fig trees, one in the front and one in the backyard.

I was eight when I got my BB gun, and it was a Daisy Red Ryder with a western-style cocking handle. The first year I had it, I wasn’t strong enough to cock it by myself. I was amazed at Ed’s strength when he would cock it for me each time I shot it, which was probably about fifty times every ten minutes. He never got tired of doing that for me.

When we heard the back door slam, we knew it was Uncle Bob and, therefore, time to go back to work. When I was old enough, I would join Ed in one of many menial tasks until about four when it was time to put the machines together. That was to go to the little shack called the milk house and assemble the three milking machines and tote them to the barn to get ready for the evening milking. Before I was old enough to get paid for working with Ed, I would climb on the back of whichever tractor Uncle Bob was driving that day as he had fashioned a cushioned seat on the toolbox behind him for me to ride with him.

Unless I was detailed to do something more important, I would help Ed with the evening premilking chores. Once these things were done, we went to the house, washed up, and had the evening meal, which was almost always just as lavish as the one we had at noon. From midsummer on until I left to return to school in early to mid-September, the noon and evening meals always included sweet corn, grown in the field with the field corn to become silage. This was in the far field, next to the railroad tracks and Highway 99. When I was there, it was my job to pick a dozen or so ears, bring them to the cow corral, and shuck them for dinner, leaving the shucks for the cows that always circled around me, knowing I had a treat for them. Some of them couldn’t wait and tried to pick the ears out of my hands.

After dinner, it was the evening milking. Milking the cows and the subsequent cleanup took until about seven or so. That’s when the day’s work was finally done. The field work was always six days a week, the milking was seven.

After the evening milking was done, more often than not, Ed would wander over to any one of several neighbors for a short visit. This could be the Ciccarelli family, which was close to a mile away or old man Lee Warburton who lived alone. Sometimes, it was the Webb family, or if he went the other way down Hammett Road, he would visit Jess Hammett, another man who in his eighties, also lived alone in an old wooden primitive house.

Sometimes, I would go with Ed, but he never invited me to the Ciccarellis, and I can’t remember why. If it was to Jess Hammett’s place, I would always go as he was really a nice guy, and I liked him a lot. Usually, though, I would go as far as the irrigation canal with my BB gun and shoot at toads or water spiders while he went on. I would wait for him to return, and then we would walk back home to a small dish of vanilla ice cream, and everyone was in bed by nine to rest up for a repeat the next day.

Grace Kiernan

She was my mom’s younger sister by just a year and her best friend. She was Uncle Bob’s wife and was clearly his best friend also. I was the closest thing she had to a son as she and Uncle Bob had no children of their own. I think they tried, but God had other ideas, although I don’t know why; they would have made wonderful parents. I can say this because they practically were my parents, having as much influence on me as my own parents did.

I lived with Aunt Grace and the rest of the Kiernans at the ranch, on and off for the better part of ten years. I spent most of every summer with her/them during those years from the time I was six years old well into my high school years. The same with most every Christmas and Easter vacation during the school years as I loved life on the ranch, and I clearly loved Aunt Grace and Uncle Bob.

I wouldn’t have done this or wanted to had I not been warmly welcomed by all of that family and me being pretty perceptive as to people’s moods and expressions. Had I gotten any idea I was in the way or not wanted there for any reason by any of the family members, I would’ve been on the next stage out of Dodge as the expression goes.

There was nothing really extraordinary about my aunt Grace. She was just a good, thoughtful, loving woman. She was devoted to Uncle Bob, and she was always good to me. All those years I lived there, I didn’t think too much about it, but Aunt Grace never had a chance to be a real wife to her husband. She rarely cooked a meal, as that kitchen was Grandma Kiernan’s domain. She never had a house or home of her own, as that’s the only place they ever lived from the time they got married. When I got old enough to understand things, my mom told me little things here and there and how she felt so sorry for her little sis for these reasons.

Aunt Grace was always supportive of me and my life’s activities, attending important school functions and, of course, my First Communion and Confirmation, both blessed Sacraments in the Catholic faith. However, she wasn’t all that supportive of my decision to pursue a career in law enforcement. I had always been skinny little Jimmy; and no doubt most, if not all, of my family members thought of me that way as even when I was in my twenties, I was only 140 pounds soaking wet and stood just five feet nine in my socks.

It wasn’t that Aunt Grace was against law enforcement; she just didn’t see me as a deputy sheriff. One night in early 1970, right after I was sworn in as a deputy, it was my first shift on patrol on my own. I was working the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift in the beat that covered all of north Modesto. This included the ranch north of Salida. I kept driving around that area, anxiously waiting for when I knew she and Uncle Bob would be up so I could proudly pull into the ranch yard in a patrol car. I was so disappointed at the reception I got as neither one of them seemed all that excited to see me.

As I said earlier, I’ve always been pretty perceptive as to people’s moods, especially people like them whom I’ve known all my life. Dejectedly, I told them I had a call to go on. I had to leave because I was so uncomfortable being there, and I was literally brokenhearted. These were my second parents, and they showed zero excitement for what I had achieved.

Later that day, I went to see Mom and told her how disappointed I was and told her what took place at the ranch. She looked at me with a dead stare for what seemed like an eternity until a tear rolled down her cheek. I said, Mom, it’s not that big a deal. She said she had been waiting for the right time to tell me and that time hadn’t arrived until now. Aunt Grace had been suffering from cancer of the pancreas. What a shock that was. I didn’t know much about health and medicine, but I