Donald Pardini Remembers Old Navarro (Part 2)

In 1942 Donald finished seventh grade at Navarro’s Laurel School, and began middle school, 7th to 9th grades, at Boonville’s Con Creek School, today the Anderson Valley Historical Society museum.  The bus ride from Navarro up to Boonville took about an hour each way with many stops at farms and ranches along the way.  Bus drivers were Dave Boyd and Bill Witherell. 

His principle teacher at Con Creek was the famous educator of many Valley generations, Miss Blanche Brown.  Among Don’s new best friends at Con Creek were Floyd Johnson, Hoyt Ross and Clyde Paul.  There was no formal sports program for the middle schoolers of Anderson Valley, but extra-curricular baseball did continue at the homemade ball field in Navarro across the McDonald-to-the-Sea highway from Zanoni’s store.

By the nineteen forties Navarro, also called in Boontling “Iteville” and its citizens “Ites,” never mind the local citizenry was multi-ethnic, Finns, Brits, Scots, Welsh, etc.. And the population was considerably reduced from its peak in the 1920s mill days of, Ernie Pardini believes, four thousand people. Donald remembers there were still perhaps fifty inhabited cottages scattered along the Old Highway from Joe Pedro’s garage at the south end of town, up the Soda Creek Road to above the Laurel School, and a few down McDonald-to-the-Sea halfway to the Company Ranch barn at the Navarro River North Fork. 

I will guestimate there might have been 400 people living in Navarro when World War II began.  I love remembering the state road sign south of town on Highway 128 fifty years ago that told us Navarro in 1971 was 280’ above sea level and its population 67 souls.  The reality is that no one, including the federal Census Bureau, knows the actual population of unincorporated California’s hundreds of small towns, not we locals, not the census takers trying hard to find everyone, not the deities above.  That number 67 was there on the sign for my first thirty years living in The Valley; today it reads “Pop 142.”  Sure!

I should record a little about the Company Ranch. Before the internal combustion engine, the Caterpillar crawler and logging truck entered rural industrial Anderson Valley and the rest of the US, the basic skidding equipment was a bull ox or mule team, sometimes as many as eight to sixteen creatures harnessed together in pairs.  To skid the logs from the woods down to the mill the oxen teams were hooked to the logs with heavy ropes and chains to enable them to literally drag this multi-ton load from logging site to the nearest landing alongside the Albion Branch railroad where they were then loaded onto flatcars, then hauled to the mill yard.

Most efficient way to manage the inventory of needed bull teams was for the logging company to have a ranch to maintain the stock during the non-logging season during the winter months.  Navarro lumber company had such a ranch, old woodsman and friend Bill Witherell estimated this fenced property was about three hundred acres. He and I used to do our “deer hunting” story telling in his 1946 four wheel Ford jeep on this property.  We would enter the ranch on a narrow dirt road just above the old Navarro dump up Soda Creek Road and head west just below what was the top of the Flynn Hills ridge that runs west to the Navarro North Fork across the stream from today’s Boy Scout camp.

This upper part of the ridge was all open grassland fenced near the top simply with stakes and barbed wire, so there was little chance of actually seeing a deer (it wasn’t hunting season anyway), but the real purpose of the voyage was story-telling anyway.

After the ranch “road” ran a mile or two north to above the North Fork, it swung left and downhill til it met the stream on our right where there were alders, pepperwoods and a few young growth redwoods and Doug fir, our first chance to actually find a deer.  Near the bottom of the grade the ranch road got wider and more solidly compacted.  And there stood the fallen down remnants of a magnificent old barn, four sidewalls, redwood shake roof and all, but collapsed into a sitting position from front to back, a sad sight for both Bill and I. 

I never did dismount the jeep to explore, but my recollection is that the hay barn itself was about 100 by forty feet, and there was clear evidence of a major livestock population, pieces of multi-corral fencing, and some other buildings that might have been pig pens or maybe even sleeping quarters for ranch hands.  A few years ago I walked up the old dirt ranch road from Highway 128 wanting to do the exploration I didn’t accomplish back in the seventies.  I couldn’t find a trace of the old structures.  I asked around town about its disappearance, and I believe Skip Bloyd told me he and his brother Mick had salvaged almost all the lumber, framing as well as siding, to put to better purposes.  That was good news to hear about the old Company Ranch barn being recycled.

Back in Donald’s dining room, I asked him about his childhood recollections of World War II and its impact on the Navarro community.  He remembered that within a few months of Pearl Harbor the federal government actually appeared in town, probably the FBI, looking for German and Italian non-citizens to lock up.  Thus was the surprise and fear at the US government level caused by the Pearl Harbor sneak attack.  In Navarro the Feds didn’t find any spies.  They did confiscate Nildo Frachi’s guns because he hadn’t gained citizenship yet.

And a number of the locals either joined up or were drafted in those early days of rebuilding the peacetime American armed forces.  I myself have heard interesting stories about wartime duty and their military assignments from both Bill Witherell and bachelor logger Alvy Price.  Alvy at a weather station in Iceland, where he worked for the Army meteorological service.  The service’s strategically most important contribution to the war in Europe was to forecast with complete accuracy the weather just before the planned June 6, 1944 Normandy Beach landing, windy and squally on June 5, clear and calm on D Day. 

Bill was stationed at an Army Air Corps training base near Wichita, Kansas, where he was a pre-flight engine mechanic for B-17s and B-24s, quite an adventure for a country boy who had, he claimed, never been south of Cloverdale or Iversen Landing near Gualala.  Other locals like Bull Hopper and Bob Sciani worked in the Naval shipyards at Mare Island, Vallejo.

I also inquired about Don’s after school activities, which he reported as mostly doing work on local ranches around Navarro and Philo.  During the shearing season in early June, for example, he worked at Ed Guntly’s, now Holmes Ranch subdivision, bagging wool in ten foot long sacks hung from a tall frame so you could stomp on the fleeces to pack them in tight.  And the same work at Gossman’s, south of Olssen’s and just before the turn-off to Greenwood Road.

Another job he remembers was working at Gossman’s during hay mowing season, probably early summer.  When Don applied for the job Gossman said, no, he was too young.  So he partnered up with his friend Ernest Ridley to work behind the horse-drawn sidebar hay mower pushing the mown hay into windrows for the bailer to suck up.  The two partners split the $.50 an hour wages between themselves, half and half.

Back then school’s autumn semester began late to accommodate the need for pickers for orchard harvest time.  For teenagers there was harvest work all over The Valley into October.  Don remembers working at the Winnie Reilly ranch, known as Reilly Heights where Christine Clark lives today.  The Reilly place had perhaps 100 acres of orchard, one of the largest in The Valley  He also picked apples at Gossman’s orchard, now all vineyard, and other ranches all the way to Schoenahl’s place up Haehl Hill south of Yorkville, known then and now as the Old Chatham Ranch, story to follow one of these weeks. 

Then there was also steelhead and trout fishing down along the Navarro North Fork.  And, Don reports, in those days during The War and with less insiltation the steelhead even made it all the way up Wendling Soda Creek to various holes around Navarro town.

This train wreck story was told me by Don’s son Ernie, himself an informed oral historian of “Iteville” and the rest of Anderson Valley.  Ernie’s written reminiscences are also worthy of publication.  It begins on an icy January day like the ones we’ve seen here in The Valley all winter.  At the top of Mill Creek and the back of Nash Ranch, then Hayward Scott’s, was a wide landing at Hungry Hollow.  Both redwood logs and tanbark were stacked there by the bull teams.  And the harvest was moved down to Navarro on a rail line that began at the end of the Albion Branch line at Guntly Ranch.  Parts of the six mile journey up to the landing were so steep, particularly near the top of the Hungry Hollow ridge that steam power was provided by a couple of cog-driven engines called “shays.”  

One afternoon in January the Navarro Lumber Company dispatcher sent a crew up to Hungry Hollow to gather a trainload of tanbark.  The crew included Oscar Newman, engineer, Don’s father Ernest as fireman, and Harvey Whiting brakeman.  When they arrived at the landing and prepared to spend the night before loading up the bark, there was an obvious layer of winter ice on the tracks at that 2000 foot altitude.  At dawn the next morning they telegraphed the dispatcher at the mill to report the ice on the rails.  The dispatcher told them to go ahead and fire up the engine boiler, a three hour job; by then the ice will have melted, he claimed.

So around 9 AM, the ice having not melted, the crew started cautiously down the tracks back to The Valley.  The grade for the first two hundred yards was almost flat, but then it changed dramatically as they started down the hillside for Mill Creek, perhaps the steepest on the whole rail system.  Within a few feet down the grade the engine and flatcars began to slide down the tracks and the crew began abandoning the “ship,” Oscar Newman first, then Ernest; Harvey stayed aboard tightening a flatcar handbrake as long as he dared, but just before the first curve, he knew it was time to jump. 

Good move, as the engine entered the curve and left the tracks, plunging down into the gulch below the line, taking the flatcars with it.  The train crew survived the wreck of old Number 2. 

Later on in the spring, a millwright team came up to the wreck site and salvaged as much of the engine and cars as they could.  But they never found Shay No. 2’s bell.  The dispatcher blamed the accident on Harvey Whiting, as companies often do.  But he had stuck it out on the doomed train as long as he could.  Another American railroad disaster story right here in the Navarro Lumber Company woods.

It has been a wonderfully nostalgic and educative couple of interviews with Donald and Ernie Pardini I will not forget.  The father and son team are an important repository of our American story, the odyssey of the northern Italian immigrants from Tuscany to rural industrial Anderson Valley, and their settling to become over three generations professional hoteliers, loggers, and memorialists of this chapter of Anderson Valley’s history.  I bet there will be more stories to come.

(Next Week (maybe): Arnaud and Florian Weyrich, their life in wine in Alsace and Anderson Valley.)