Comptche native, James “Jimmy” Ciro, turns 100 on March 27th. Ciro’s noteworthy life transcends a period of time in the Mendocino Redwood region that began in an economy of large sawmills, local railroads, steam donkeys, lumber schooners, hand logging, hand woodworking tools, logging camps, small profitable family farms, wood cook stoves, tan bark harvesters, bootleggers, and railroad split tie makers. In his hundred years this rural old growth redwood economy evolved to see the Great Depression, World War 2, the emergence of tractor logging, log trucks, lumber trucks, small independent sawmills, chainsaws, commuting in a car to work, rural electrification, refrigeration, propane, tourism, grocery shopping, radio, television, and a second growth redwood economy. Jim Ciro experienced most of these changes directly and can speak with some knowledge about all of them. He is the last person living who can remember the 1931 Comptche Fire.
Jim’s parents were immigrants from the rural Lake Como area in the Lombardi region of Italy and were one of a large number of rural Italian families that came from there, to work in the Redwood logging economy of the Mendocino Coast going back into the 1800s.
Jim Ciro is a very private person, but graciously granted the following interview to Rowan Kawczak in 2014 for Rowan’s American History class at Mendocino High School:
WWII & GREAT DEPRESSION INTERVIEW SUMMARY WITH JIMMY CIRO
by Rowan Kawczak Mod. Am. Hist. April 20, 2014
It was just like any other Tuesday morning for young Jimmy Ciro, as he got ready to embark on the mile-long walk to the nearby Comptche Schoolhouse. Little did Jimmy know though, that later that day there would be a devastating stock market crash that would forever change and influence his life for better or worse. The day that this stock market crash took place in the US, would eventually become commonly known as Black Tuesday, would ultimately leave millions homeless, and their life savings most likely lost forever due to the shutdown of a multitude of banking companies across America. This wasn’t the only horrible event to take place in Jimmy’s life during the next few years, the small town of Comptche, which wasn’t home to a single well-known person, was soon hit by the destructive Comptche Fire. This blazing fire followed soon after the crash, destroying his family’s home and most of his remaining possessions in its wake.
Jimmy’s childhood was unlike any normal one you would experience in this day and age. At the age of 13, he could be found on Don Philbrick’s property, “…watering and feeding the turkeys, while about 200 eggs were being hatched in the incubators,” he told me. His work wasn’t close to finished there though, as he also had to pick two pounds of huckleberries almost every day of the week, along with other children from his school. Once they had been picked, he would “put them in a machine that would sort out the ripe ones, and take off all the leaves from the branches.” “It was just work, work, work,”
Jimmy said, and if he returned home with less than his quota for the day, he was sent back to pick up the rest before he was given dinner for that night. “If you came home and griped about what was on the table, you went to bed and that was what was warmed up on the table the next morning,” he explained.
When the fire struck his hometown of Comptche, everyone was hit hard, and he lost everything, save for “the clothes on [his] back, and a redwood fence post” his father had set in their backyard. Jimmy told me that each and every time he needed his clothes washed, he had to “wait inside the bathroom until they were dry,” so he had something to wear when he came out. Everyone in Comptche felt the harsh effects that the harsh rampaging fire left behind, as it raced across the entire area surrounding young Jimmy Ciro’s house. There was a bright side though, to this bleak and seemingly hopeless scenario that closely coincided with the Great Depression. As we were talking about this subject, Jimmy told me that this unimaginably difficult period of time actually brought their community closer together. He said that people would help one another rebuild their previous lives, as he said for example, “one day you would come down and help me work on my house, and then the next day I’d come work on yours.”
When it came to the topic of WWII, Jimmy described his time serving on Mare Island near Vallejo with a deep insight into small yet important details. When I inquired about his wife(Caroline), he told me that he got married at the age of 19, and if she “had stayed alive for five more years, [they] would have been able to spend [their] 80th anniversary together.” Jimmy stated that he only served four years as a mechanic (welder) on Mare Island though, as “it wasn’t the right fit” for him. His answer on the topic of his personal views towards the Japanese was extremely surprising. Jimmy told me that he didn’t actually have any type of hatred or prejudice against the enemy soldiers, and the only emotions he recalled had been extreme fear and insecurity. This may be attributed to the fact that he was never sent to fight overseas, so Jimmy didn’t ever get the chance to interact face-to-face with the enemy. Regardless, I was still amazed at this, and with further questioning, he said that he really didn’t have the time to worry about racial prejudice and political happenings. “There was just too much work to do, to worry about things like that,” Jimmy finally said.
Currently, Jimmy lives in a small blue house on his and his son’s 80-acre property, where they raise herds of longhorn cattle together. He doesn’t have anyone tend to him on a daily basis, and when I offered to simply help him carry in a couple of pieces of firewood, he politely refused and told me that “he needed to do it himself, for the exercise.” Amazingly, throughout all the pain and suffering he’s been forced to endure over the years, he’s recently reached the age of 91, his birthday being the day before our interview.
After our interview, we shook hands, and all I could think about was how immensely disparate people’s lives were back then, compared to those that many Americans live in today. In our daily lives, I believe that we are constantly losing sight of how privileged many of us are, and how what we take for granted in this day and age is extremely far from what most people had during the Great Depression and WWII. Personally, I think the people who survived this unfathomably cruel era, are in some ways unsung heroes, who have been hidden behind the dusty curtain of history for much too long. This interview helped me piece together a more in-depth picture of the things that people during his lifetime were forced to live through, and how difficult it would have been to simply survive during the Great Depression and WWII. I was overwhelmingly surprised at how many hurdles Jimmy had to leap over in his lifetime, simply for a chance to live his days out in peace. It looks to me as if Comptche truly does have a celebrity in its midst after all.
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