Video: Orlo Steele & Gerald Angove Interview (August 8, 2012) (63 minutes)

Full Transcript of the Video:

Hello, my name is Robert Moore and I'm with the Nevada County Historical Society. This is August the 8th, 2012 and we're sitting on the back porch of Mr. Jerry Angle's house and we're also in the presence of Orlo Steel and we're going to hear their stories of Nevada County and their youth and they can tell us they've been traveling the world and here they are back home again. Something brought them home. Okay, Jerry, as far as I know, Angle is Cornish for blacksmith and could you tell us a bit about growing up Cornish in Grass Valley? Yes, I was born in Grass Valley but I'm one of five generations. My great-grandfather came from Cornwall in the late 1850s, I think, but I don't know the exact date and they all came here to work in the mines. The Cornish were in demands because they had a background in hard rock mining and particularly how to dewater mines. The Cornish Pump is a very important part of that process and three brothers came here and worked in the mines and then changed, went into the hotel business. One had a hotel where the Bret Hart Hotel is now and another was on where the City Hall is. My grandfather, Angle, I'm not sure when he came and there are all kinds of different stories but then he married a tembe which is that side of the family who came very early. The tembe side is the one that was the first ones here. And they too were Cornish? Yes, the tembe were the original, it's very Cornish name. In fact, there's a street named after the tembe in Grass Valley. Angle of course is very Cornish but my grandfather was a miner and worked at the North Star and then the Empire and then at one time in his life he and Bourne went to Africa together. Which Bourne is this? Star, excuse me, it was Star, George Star, not Bourne, I get the two mixed up Star. They went where now? They went to Africa to look at gold mines and diamond mines and then came back and my grandfather acquired malaria and died very young so my grandmother who they lived on Bennett Street which is not and they had a four bedroom or five bedroom house, my grandmother opened a boarding house and my father had to quit high school as a sophomore to support his mother and he went to work in Yosemite Valley then came back and worked for the PG&E for 45 to 47 years and in Hills Flat that's where I remember my first memories are there growing up. So you grew up in Hills Flat, that was kind of a neighborhood and you were surrounded by Cornish, was it a communal living situation with a predominantly Cornish? It was Cornish and Italians and Chinese mostly Cornish and Italians and because the Idaho Maryland mine was close and most of them didn't own cars, my grandfather for example never drove a car in his life on my mother's side but we were raised on Scanlan Avenue and we lived there then we moved with my grandmother then we moved on Hughes Road and our house there was had Nevada County Golf Course was very old on one side and the Gallico Slaughter House on the other side so when the wind blew I didn't have a lot of friends so but and so I was removed there when I was I think in third grade and you exploited your situation you had the golf course on one side and the slaughterhouse on the other and as a young man you got a little scared up a few bucks off these places yeah I had to provide my show money so I cat-eat but my two businesses were I sold golf balls and then I sold worms because most of the fishermen most the golfers were fishermen and I'd get a coffee can and I'd sell it for a quarter or fifty cents and I could go over the slaughterhouse because of all the stuff running down the hill and they all would buy worms from me because it was the ninth hole and they were about to be through so I lived there and through my high school years. Angle of Enterprises and then Orlo you came from the Bay area as a young man and joined the community of Grass Valley when you were in fifth grade how did that transition go you went from a metropolis to a pretty small community were you accepting of that oh yes this was a great place to come of age even then the the predominant thing that was going on of course was the Second World War has started I moved here as you say in the fifth grade when I was nine in 1942 and we'd spent the summer in Siskiu County and and arrived here that after that summer I had older sister and at the time my dad had gone to work for a fellow by the name of Roy Trimrow Sr. who was a well-known name up here they had an outfit called clinch mercantile on Bennett Street and that was a wholesale mine and mill supplier so my dad had been working for him for a year and actually he commuted back and forth and then we moved here in 42 that was about the same time that the they had to stop production in the mines and then my dad along with Downey clinch who was still working and young Roy Trimrow were also engaged in taking out a lot of the machinery of the mines at the time for example up at the Zibright I remember going up there that first that first year that's off of highway 20 yes right up there in Bear Valley and they were taking out a lot of the machinery there and other other mines at the time was that to support the war effort mainly that was yes they were sold at scrap there were some some things that were sent down to Hawaii for example from the narrow gauge railway that was sent down to Hawaii to help the war effort down there was there a problem with productivity at that time is that why they dismantle the mines yes as a matter of fact in October of 1942 the war production board come out and said that the gold was not a strategic material that was needed for the war copper was but gold was not and so they suspended the production of gold at that particular time and so places like the Empire or the other mines could continue to do the maintenance but they could not run mills or produce gold at that time and that was not changed until about May or June of 1945 when they could resume operations again so what my dad did was he he went into the retail business he started a store which is in the Masonic Temple today that's Caroline's coffee and he had a hardware store it was called steel supply I think Jerry probably remembers steel supply we had Wilson supporting goods and and and and Westinghouse appliances and it was a good thing particularly right after the war it worked pretty well and is that where you first got your first employment well actually I Jerry I had my first employment I was a caddy out at the out at the golf course I also set pins at the Oast Club like a lot of us did they had a little four was two four alley and that was the only bowling alley in town I think and we we set pins in there and and and other things and of course the war was going on so a lot of our friends had shoe shine operations going for the soldiers who were in town and things like that why were the soldiers here in town on liberty local boys come back well no these we had the Camp Beale had been established that first year that we were here and I remember us standing on the corner of Alta Street which is where I lived and I still do on Alta Street Main Street and watching the 13th Armored Division come rolling through Grass Valley and this was probably only one route but and all day long tanks and tracks jeeps trucks half tracks I think they had at that time and all these troops this was the 13th Armored Division which trained at Camp Beale and eventually deployed into the European Theater and then following that we had the 81st Infantry Division and that eventually deployed into the Pacific do you think that was the seed planting for your career well I followed the war very very closely as a boy I think we all did we all had our maps and and and we and we did follow the war and the progression in the particularly in the Pacific and D-Day so that was those were big happenings for us okay Jerry you say that you grew up in the Hills Flat community and I believe you alluded earlier to different communities within Grass Valley Boston ravine and other communities so when you grew up did you identify with your own little neighborhood there was there kind of a turf that you established yeah the Hills Flat kids we the way we got our baseballs and baseball bats there was a there was a minor league team here and they'd break their bats and we'd get the bats and nail them back together and put black tape around them and then when the balls would go over the fence we'd use those balls and and we played there was no organized little league or stuff but we played we played hardball at Memorial Park and it was the Hills Flat kids against the town kids so we actually had semi organized of course it ended up in a little fight once in a while but no Hills Flat was actually Hills Flat was actually a community it had grocery stores restaurants bars the Galino Dairy was there there was it was a basic community and the reason we lived there my dad worked for the PG&E at the gas plant now that's what they and it made the gas that people use in their homes which now is natural gas but when we came and when my dad first started to work there and the narrow gauge train came in and they hauled this stuff called lamp black which was oil and something else mixed and I can remember I could go see my father at the gas plant and all I could see were eyeballs and teeth and the bull Durham sack hanging out of his pocket because they were covered with with this black stuff and my dad worked there all the way through 1970 when they when they turned when they let him turn on natural gas because he went through the the that era he went through the propane era and because they used to haul big propane trucks up and and then then he worked there and finally he when he laid let him there's a picture all you have somewhere that but he actually got to turn on the valve and so he quit after something like 43 to 45 years with the PG&E retired and but didn't live very long after that in fact most the men in that plant died of lung cancer now they were all probably all smokers but they also lived in this lamp black and stuff and they all had bad coughs and that kind of thing so we we lived on Hills Flat and then we moved to Hughes Road where I but dad was still working at the plant in fact during the war the reason dad didn't get to go in the service is because he was the only one who could operate the plant because the parts were there in 1904 or something and dad was a good mechanic and they actually put a destroyer horn on the top of the holders which you can see in the picture and if that pressure went down to a certain level that horn would go off if my dad wasn't there in 12 minutes to turn something else on the place would blow up so that was that was why he stayed with the PG&E but that was that was my growing up years and my family and and like Orlo we we always I set pins we always had a job I mean there was something it wasn't like now poor kids can't work they won't let them go to work but we from the time we for 10 or 11 or 12 there was always something I even had a shoe shine box but I wasn't very good and couldn't do that but the soldiers to get drunk and give you a lot of money anyway so mr. steel as a young man you pretty much always had a job I like everybody we also had allowances you know but you had to work for your allowances weeding everything else my mother was was kind of a tartar for discipline and and made sure that we earned whatever small amount we got so we would augment that with other other jobs on the outside which they always encouraged us to do among addition to setting pins in the in the bowling alley in catting and I remember I worked for my dad and then I also in his store and then later on while I was in high school I worked at my grandparents ranch in the summertime and then during the school year I worked at the JC penny which in in those days was on mill street where Yuba blue is today but if you look at that facade that was JC penny and the manager was a fellow by name of Brooks Hartman who was a good friend of my parents they were he was also an elk like my dad and and so I worked as a stock boy and then I remember we have heavy snows I'd have to shovel the snow off the roof there at JC penny and just dump it on the mill street we'd be a pile of snow up there more snow than today or these days yes as a matter of fact we had a couple of storms Jerry may remember it was my sophomore year it would have been you probably in the eighth grade but we had we were out of school for for two weeks here the first was because there was so much snow I remember it was about a storm that came in about it was three or four feet on the ground and the second week is because the pipes froze at the high school now this is the grass valley high school so they couldn't run school in grass valley but we were out of school for two weeks around February perhaps a welcome break from school I'm just guessing here or you were get out get back to school I need to regress a minute I've got a good story for Orlo's orlo's father when I was in grammar school we played workups and you had to have your own the school didn't provide any equipment you had to have your own glove well they sold Wilson sporting goods and I found the glove I wanted but it was 10 bucks and I didn't have 10 bucks but they put the glove away for me and I paid him a dollar a week from my catting job until I got the glove and so as I say we always had to work and we always had something there were so many jobs like Orlo I worked in the in the woods later and stuff and we always had but but I think it was a work ethic of our parents my father not only worked for the PG&E he was a mechanic for Galenos at the dairy and then during the war there was a dance hall here called La Bar Meadows and my father worked as the bouncer on Saturday nights at the La Bar Meadows and my mother ran the kitchen so I went out there as a 10 year old and a little old lady's taught me to dance and I had to help my mother I got paid so much for working in the kitchen but that's where all the military came up from Camp Beale and it was a really a part of the one of my father always had at least two jobs he never there was always something that he was working at but he also had a work had a statement that that I've never forgotten and that something that is really part of our family tradition that if you make your living in a community you have a responsibility to give back now he would do particularly with seniors he would take wood to them he would do repairs he was a pretty good mechanic and a pretty good carpenter and he would build things for them but he was very giving if he wasn't working he was doing something for somebody in high school Jerry you were pretty active in athletics I played through sports all four years I played football and I was a roaring freshman at five two 128 pounds at grass valley high school got knocked cold in my first game against Orville and I played football for four years and I played basketball three and I was in track four years so not all that big in size but a lot of that was hard well I grew a lot I would but not a lot compared to when I graduate from high school I was only still only five eight about 165 pounds when I finished at Stanford I was 511 185 I grew I only I finished high school at 17 so I didn't grow a lot I mean with the size of the kids now they wouldn't have let me even suit up you know but we were all small there was nobody big on our in our teams or it was one of the bigger guys in our in our high school in those days and you also played football at grass valley high school yes that was the only actually that was the only sport that I played I did not play basketball or or run track or anything but football I was a offensive center and defensive tackle the whole game yeah we wish to play the whole game and then that was both in that we had junior varsity and then varsity but you were automatically varsity when you became a junior or your last two years and the first two years uh you're automatically in the in the no matter what no matter what size you were and let me just let me just say that grass valley had some marvelous teas particularly the class of 47 which when we were freshmen uh had some people like Albert ally who is still remembered and commemorated by the gym up at the Nevada Union High School he was a splendid athlete and later came back and was a coach and we had Tommy Hooper and and and Frank Hooper and and and and tj but no he was I think the class behind it but who was uh trying to think of tj's real tj's real Larry four who's a dentist here was a splendid athlete he was played not a football and and baseball but I think was a boxer as well and would be an interesting guy to interview up here and there was much community support for the football program absolutely as a matter of fact we would play on friday nights if it was a home game on the old hennessey field that's where he had lights and uh and the next morning uh if you didn't do well boy there everybody would see you on the street they would let you know you know what was done right and what was done not so well done well i've been over to the seros library and i've done a little research on these guys this is mr orlo steels senior class president uh senior class president and number 56 on the football team and this is rather coincidental but we have another senior class president mr jerry angolf number 46 student body top dog basically and you said that there was a little competition between nevada city high school and grass valley high school i'm just guessing here yes it was uh well we we couldn't even go to nevada city i mean you didn't dare date a girl from nevada city yet we was the biggest big armistice day football game and it was the last game game of the year and usually it rained my father played in grass valley nevada city game in 1924 and i played in the last one in 1951 now we have a lot of friends in fact we get together with uh milo pillow who was a real outstanding athlete at nevada city high school but in those days we probably met we fought it was we didn't fight with anything but fists so they were and we all boxed i mean it was a requirement buzz ostrom who was the football coach had been a top boxer at chico state so we had a golden gloves uh thing at the high school and everybody boxed you didn't have a choice as far as buzz was concerned he was our coach i mean our beef beer i'm one of the football coaches but we had a lot of good boxers that went on to college boxing and and uh other athletics you said that you played in the last game in 1951 for grass valley high what happened then they stopped it because grass valley grass valley and nevada and nevada city unified in the high school became in 1952 fall of 52 became the the nevada union high school and the campus is located on ridge road that's that is the new campus originally the upper classman went to grass valley high school and i think seventh eighth and ninth went to what was nevada city high school which is no longer there it's where the seven hills school uh is now but they it was condemned and uh that was torn down but yeah we we played with that's when they played the first year of unification i think was nevada union was in 19 a fall of 1952 grass valley high school as i recall was about 500 students nevada city high school was 250 to 300 so they were quite a bit smaller than we were and i'm sure that was part of the reason also the unification would make it uh because most of the schools in our league were about that side i mean they were eight or nine hundred maryville placer they were larger schools so jerry am i to understand that your enemies those awful people that lived in nevada city all of a sudden are on the same hallways and on the same football team as the grass valley guys how did that go or was that slow to uh homogenize you know that didn't happen until i graduated i was in the last class of grass valley high school in night fall and the spring of 52 was the last one and we had a we used to we had a big deal about the unification we had it actually had it at grass valley high school on the stage and the two student body presidents and the two principals and we had this big thing we wrote the constitution for the new high school and student government it was a big deal i think basically going back to why we unify i think it was also a little bit of a economic thing you could not pass a bond issue the one of the corny's traditions you could raise a lot of money for a donation if somebody really needed something or they'd give it to you but the idea of tax was just anti it's an anti-cornish thing from way back going way back and they have a celebration in in cornwall called the angof sort of celebration which is some i think maybe distance relative who was a blacksmith but he led a rebellion against the throne for extra taxation in cornwall he didn't make it he was drawn and cornered at the tower but he started that corny's i mean that that tradition of anti-tax has been a corny's tradition and it was very relevant uh it they they tried five times to get a tax override finally i think the fifth time it passed to build a new school very interesting and there was some compromised reach just discussed some one of the compromises which even today some people are not sure don't know that the uh when nevada union was formed they kept the uh title miners which was our name at grass valley high school but they adopted the colors of blue and gold which were nevada cities colors and that was part of the compromise well that's a very important part also you guys experienced a lot of things together you went to high school together and eventually to stanford university and in order to support yourself and your tuition fees you got employment during the summer yes not only summer jobs but also at the university jerry and i i think are both can be living testaments that stanford is not a rich man's school in in my case i worked at the empire mine when i got out of high school i was scheduled to play freshman football and we had a mining engineer uh but uh who had been at stanford and he said come on up at the mine and i'll get you a job and get you in shape uh for freshman football and uh so i did and i went to work at the mine as a mucker at the five thousand foot level and and he did get me in shape that was uh pretty hard work could you amplify a bit on the job of a mucker what would you wear uh when did you how long were you down there what would you eat what was your daylight well i went to work uh uh the day after well after the monday following uh graduation from high school and i worked right up until the time was that i had to go down a report for at stanford for for football which was about mid september in those days uh i worked uh with a good cornishman uh by the name of norman wasley uh and we worked as a three man team at the five thousand foot level and the our third person was a mule skinner because we had a mule at our level so we would arrive at the mine at usually about six fifteen go up to in where our street clothes go up into the dry uh which is where the shift boss was and we had two lockers up there we take off our street clothes walk through a shower room into another locker room where we where we had a locker and that's where we kept what we called our diggers and that was Levi's and and long john's and and kept your hard hat and boots and that sort of thing in there and your lamp and and that's where you put that on and then go down to the collar of the shaft and get uh get whatever you needed for your lamps and the miner would get new bits and that sort of thing and then about five minutes to seven we would walk up the head frame and they would have all the man skips all coupled together and we'd take up our position on those man skips and then at seven o'clock in the morning they'd blow that whistle and we'd start descending at six hundred feet a minute in our case we went all the way down to the 4600 foot level which is in that in that shaft uh that's the bottom of that then we had to walk three quarters of a mile and right underneath the old gold right underneath the uh the old post office here in grass valley on on auburn street there is a nether at the 4600 foot level there is a nether hoist room uh right there and that services a nether shaft or as the corny shea wins that goes down to the 8000 foot level so we'd get on that and go down another 400 feet and we'd be at the 5000 and then that was usually you know uh i would you know was bucking usually it was a very small space and the miner was drilling his holes and the mule skinner was was transporting the you know the ore back and forth and uh we'd work usually muck about uh and muck by his way anything that's been blasted you know from pulverized dust to to donikers big rocks or anything else it's just referred to as the muck you had a crew you had a mule skinner you had a miner and several muckers no just i was the one just one mucker and mucky is is become the lowest skill of all the skills in a mine between timbermen and other things mucking is the lowest skill that's where most miners and engineers for that matter also always start as muckers were you on the business end of a shovel i was that's right i was my job was to to shovel whatever had been blasted the day before in our case into a little go-devil car and it would go up and be put into a you know into a a bin and then be hauled out and it would be about eight ore cars a one ton of ore cars a day so that was that's what the mucker does you were on that shovel for eight hours i suspect you were ready for freshman football at stanford yeah by that time yes but it was one i a job i appreciated and uh and i'm today uh still a docent at the empire mine and i think i'm the last among the docents who actually had been underground at that mine that's an amazing story that's just an amazing story and you might people always ask and what was your pay and it was in those days it was a dollar an hour for a mucker and actually that was pretty good money you could you could rat hole a couple of bucks and put that toward your college education you bet that got me through almost the first two quarters actually on tuition tuition in those days at stanford was a hundred and eighty dollars i think a quarter so i was able to to do that and then combined with my college jobs i also was a hasher as was jerry and a hasher is somebody who works on tables uh in our case i worked in a girl's dormitory uh and generally all the athletes generally were given hashing jobs or priority in getting a hashing job and you work two meals and you were given three and i never paid for a meal in my entire time at stanford i doubt that jerry did either i was always hashing plus i had other jobs of cleaning up the the stadium and after football games and things like that was orlo steel being at stanford instrumental and you going to stanford did he influence your decision it was a whole different world for me fortunately or unfortunately i never worked in the mines uh everybody in my family except my father worked in the mines in fact my uncle virgil was one of the last three people at the mine when it closed but he worked in what they called the amalgam room and he told me stories of gold coming down the the mix with the mercury i'm not sure how that worked but we were they put it in wash tubs so the gold there was that much gold coming down but i never worked in the mines no i was very fortunate in a way i had a pretty good high school athletic career and because of that i was i got a tuition scholarship to stanford so i had my tuition paid by the time i got there was really expensive was 250 a quarter 220 well was yeah it was by the time i finished it was 250 yeah so now it's now it is now 40 thousand just for tuition it's about 59 thousand dollars a year to go to stanford now but i'm like orlo i didn't i don't think i ever uh paid for a meal because i hashed all four years at uh i actually worked at the attorney house one one year but i worked most of the time at a girl's girl's dorm as well you guys had tough duty working at the girl's dorms that's tough duty yeah well i actually didn't like waiting the tables on the snobs as far as i was concerned but i uh worked in the dishroom and if you worked in the dishroom you got all three meals uh except you know in the fall i had training table so i had i didn't have to pay for i didn't i but i still hashed from my other other meals but i didn't lose that job and then i also had all kinds of jobs uh i was a campus rep which was really a good pretty good deal in fact i was making more money at my campus reps jobs than i got in my first teaching job when i left stanford that's an understory but they provided three squares i'm thinking that was a losing proposition for stanford university you guys are starting to bulk up and then get ready for college football can you elaborate a bit more about your job at the mine yes as i mentioned i worked at the 5 000 foot level which took us about 50 minutes just to get to work the three of us the miner myself and the mule skinner we had to go down to the 46 which took about 10 or 15 minutes then walked three quarters of a mile over to this uh other uh shaft or winds and then went down another 400 feet where we got off mule skinner then would would start taking care of the mule the miner and i would walk in to where we worked which took about another 10 or 15 minutes and we were working in a winds that means it went down it's a a shoot that went down off the drift could you spell that word or i i believe it was called uh w uh i nz a winds maybe it's y nz but it was pronounced a winds and it was only about four and a half uh feet high five maybe and 12 feet wide and we were following a ledge that went down and we were down about 40 or 50 60 feet off the drift uh first thing what happened was the the miner would water everything down as you know the bane of the of the miners up here is silicosis that's that dust from the from the quartz that silicon dust would get and be ingested into somebody so as a passive measure you would uh water everything down so you would not inhale that dust also because of the nitric glycerin that was in the dynamite would give you a headache if you if you got that and so that would keep that dust down and i'd help the miner set up his his pneumatic drill and he would start start drilling his holes four feet deep into that face and i would start mucking out what we had blasted the day before and i would do that into a little go devil car that went up on a track and the the mule skinner by that time would get in and he would be running that back and forth and we did that until around two o'clock after lunch uh people ask go well what was the light down there was it hot and the answer was uh not really it was pretty much the empire was a fairly well ventilated mine and so you had air that was going down in there and and it was hot enough you'd work up a good sweat but i remember stopping i always had to put on a jack-o-lantern to stop for lunch because you'd get really get chilled and then after uh about two o'clock the mule skinner would start tramming that ore out and the miner and i would then set charges uh into the 20 to 22 holes that he had dug four feet in length and uh we usually had a wooden pad and he would start fusing his these sticks of dynamite and it was my job to kind of tamp them in there uh very good now these were not electric caps and the miner always said now tap her lights on tap her light uh we need uh because if you had hit that thing too hard why why get your attention so but he wanted them in there good and snug and then he'd cut all of his fuses the last thing we did was take all of our machinery out and then we would start lighting those fuses and he would cut them off in a so they would go off in a sequence and the first ones that would go off was what he had to have a five hole burn number two here two here in the square and one right in the center and all the charges all those holes would be filled with with dynamite except that center one of that five hole burn would be left vacant because that would give it something to give so then when they all want to start going off and we would go out and count the charges going off the first ones would go would be that five hole burn and that would blow a cavity in the face and then the one come in from the right some could come in from the left lifters from the bottom come down and that kind of kept the semblance of a tunnel as you went down then we would retrace our steps be back down at the bottom of the 46 at 3 30 in the afternoon which was the end of the shift and then we start our set up and as we were going up the night shift would be would be coming down once we got up to the surface or what we call the collar of the shaft we drop our lunch buckets right there retrace our steps back up to the dry and go in where we had our kept our diggers take those off which are now wet with perspiration and water coming down hard hats and boots put that put away take a shower right in front of the shift boss and then go over to our other locker put on our street clothes and go down and pick up our lunch buckets which have been subject to inspection to prevent high grading that was a passive way they they they had for uh was to create dries for preventing high grading which is taking home samples of the of gold you know taking them home I suspect it took a few minutes to straighten back out you were in a hole that was four and a half foot tall I did most of my mucking down on my knees yeah I grew up on Scandling Avenue and Hughes Road and everyone who comes now talks about how pristine Wolf Creek was and how the air quality was so nice growing up Wolf Creek ran gray with cyanide sand color out of the Idaho Maryland mine and where I lived on Hughes Road somehow incidentally the blood and other kinds of things went down into the creek off of the hill and it went through hills flat but going through hills flat it went through a log pond which was andriades and from andriades it went through hillback motors and so here was all this blood and stuff going through the log pond and then the log pond went through the the uh uh garage and that's where they dumped all the excess oil and stuff there and that in turn went into Wolf Creek in in in hills flat and that then went through grass valley and right in grass valley where the post office is now across the street where the service station is was a laundry and all the suds and all that stuff so the the it was a pretty good mixture you did not go near Wolf Creek below the below the Idaho Maryland mine we did catch fish above it then also during the logging time there was something like 20 mills operating in the area and they and and the mines had their mill and the sawdust was not processed it was burnt so you had all of this sawdust burning so you had a gray sky a gray creek so it wasn't you know they those those are the things that made the community the logging and mining etc but at those times it was not a pristine area to live in and so that was you know one of the areas then what we did for kids when we had recreation and i started doing it as a as a little kid and it was a big community thing like Olympia was many many years i don't know when the first year but they had a thing called the sunday school picnic all the sunday schools from grass valley i think and nevada city i know from grass valley went to lake olympia lake olympia had a lake with canoes and row boats and there was an island in the middle that was used as a dance hall and a roller skating rink where was this located if you went into the brunswick area and if you started out uh the colt out towards the colfax highway on the right hand side uh where percos you know the percos restaurant is behind that i think there's still some remnants of it back in the trees was where lake olympia was and there was a pool but there was also a 39 foot tower and there was a trapeze that used to go out into the water with and it had it we had a one-armed lifeguard i'm serious frank was the one-armed lifeguard and his arm was cut off at the at the elbow and he taught diving to many of us but we used to go there starting i went there in the fifth grade and we learned to go off of those towers and the the most fun was that trapeze and you went out on a little board about eight inches wide threw a rope over the trapeze which had a little hook on you pulled it back and then you swung out on the trapeze and did flips or whatever you could do to go into the water now i could go any day of the week that we could i could i walk from hues road but i couldn't go on sundays because my folks said on saturday night they had a big dance there and the guys would puke into the into the lake and so they didn't want you doing that but i don't i had your infections and other things from i'm sure that's what it was from but the canoes you had canoes and you and you could we had great times dumping everybody in canoes it was a great central location was probably one of the places where grass valley Nevada city got together more than any place else but it was a it was we didn't have a lot of formal recreation uh the other main recreation that everybody did i don't know if oral played or not but i played softball in the summers that was a big memorial park was seven nights a week uh they've named the field eva field less eva was announced it forever but all of the the pool hall which is no longer there i played for the okay pool hall and i played for pgne i think i wasn't much of a baseball player but uh anyway everybody in town played played softball yeah dmlas had a softball team it was fast pitch but it was again those were the kinds of things you did in the summer in the evenings if you could we're not too damn tired after working all day anyway that's sort of just a i digress a minute but like olympia was a very special place and and it was in the bruns it was about the only thing in brunswick in those days i mean there's everything that's there now there wasn't really much there at all if anything that i can remember oral to you no so you had swimming there you had a dance hall and you also had a horse track in proximity that was well before our time but that was a actually they raced cars and horses way back i there are some pictures somewhere that i've seen at serals at you where they raced cars and then let's see the train the narrow gauge came right through there so that's when they used to have the horse races and then in 75 i interviewed and at 41 years old i became the president seara college and i was at seara college as president for 18 years in rockland in rockland during that period of time uh let me go back just a little bit placer it was placer college in auburn when we grow up and they used to run buses for all the kids went there then they moved rock the college from auburn to rockland and it became seara college and uh when that happened they they uh we still had buses for a while and going back and forth but at after a while i think it was when prop 13 occurred we had to get rid of the buses wasn't because it it cost the operation as new buses were 350 400 thousand dollars because they had to have all the safety stuff and so we did away with the bus system but we had dormitories so that they uh the the we gave preference to because the campus i don't know if you're aware seara college in com for incorporates all of placer uh and nevada counties including truckie and so it goes from the sacramento county line to the to the nevada county line all of those and so now there is a campus by the way in truckie and there's a campus in actually we took over the hospital in roseville and then we built the campus here now i was able to play a big part in helping get this campus here it took 12 years to get it through the legislative process i mean i would he's being very modest jerry was the moving force to bring that campus here to grass valley and and uh i think everybody recognizes that and and uh it had it not been for him i don't think we would have had a campus here yeah anyway we got took 12 years and a bit of a stressful job yeah well they yeah that was another problem but we uh in order to get the campus here we would never have passed the bond issue i told you the story about bond issues well we found a small thing in the law that if you plan to complete campus they would buy the site fund the building so i actually became a lobbyist almost i stayed in sacramento off and on and and actually had three people who supported me in their strange marriage but uh one very strong republican uh willy brown and john vasconcelos and tim let tim lesley was the top but they were the ones who i mean i paid a lot of money to go there to their fundraisers etc but they helped us get that and get our first campus so we built the first section of the campus for 23 million dollars during that period of time and in addition to something else we went through collective bargaining we went through uh prop 13 which was a very difficult time for education i had two major angina attacks and the doctor finally told me quit or die and so when i was just in the process of getting this campus off the ground i retired and but since that time since i'm a retirement i have uh tried to be active in the community i've been on non-profit boards of some kind ever since i retired i'm now still on the the hospital board and the hospital foundation board just like your daddy said if you take from the community you give to the community or low i think you have a question for jerry i do uh jerry i don't think i've ever asked you but what was the size of seara college in terms of student population and faculty when you first became president which you said was what year 75 and you retired in 1993 and what was what it had grown to by that time when i came in 75 uh it was uh 5 000 students and probably 85 faculty uh when i retired we had between 15 and 17 000 students and we had with full and part-time faculty we had over 385 people and we were teaching in all kinds of locations in fact one of the things that that was a tenet of mine educationally that and a thing that i tried to involve that seara college is that no one should ever have to go more than 35 miles to take a class so when hewlett packard moved we taught classes in their plants we taught we actually became partners in fact a real sidebar but the the vice president at hewlett packard at that time and i played rugby together at stanford in fact they wanted to build near the college but we didn't have enough space but so we had an automatic in with hewlett packard and then another thing that was that we made we tried entrepreneurial things in fact i got criticized for operating too much like a business in 1985 uh buzz ostrom who was our athletic director and i were able to sign a contract with the 49ers and the 49ers trained on our campus for 18 years and we made a deal with them we they used our dorms they used our fields and we minimized the the cost but we got the the rights to sell the i shouldn't say junk all of the the you know paraphernalia that people buy we put in a double wide uh mobile building a bookstore and we were generating between 50 and 70 thousand dollars a year off of that we able we're able to do all of our refurbishing and our dorms and everything uh with that money so we were we had a week the 49ers did not win a championship after they left seara college so we and bill walch and i did a couple of real seminars bill became a really good friend so i had a very very lucky time and i had a great career and i worked with so many great people at seara and it was you know it's really neat to to bring the campus back to my hometown you guys have been around a little bit your careers took you here and took you there and you ended up here you came back home why well i'd been in the uh f a a for three years and and been i've been on travel for about 75 percent of the time uh and so i was i was ready to i i've always wanted to have a i've always had to have a mountain breaking my skyline and washington didn't do that uh we used to as we used to say the best view of wash is is from lifting off from reagan airport you know that's so i would and and um we had had a house here the house in which i was raised which my mother had left to me into my sister and and we had had it uh at least uh to a couple for eight years and so we and ended that and we thought we would come back here uh as i mentioned my wife is from hawaii and we also thought about retiring in hawaii but i we wanted to come back here fix the house up get it ready for sale and then after three or four years we might want to move back to hawaii but by that time my wife had become enamored with a place i had become involved and uh in a number of things in our church and in and other things here plus the backpacking and the fishing and many many friends so we were very happy to come back here and uh jerry and i became reacquainted at that time we hadn't seen each other in all those years in between and our wives have become good friends so we uh we've enjoyed it people ask me all the time uh that usually they're talking about the the uh uh roadblocks and the traffic here and they said well a lot of changes since you were you were a kid here in and i said and generally i say yes and most of them are for the better you know uh and and i mean that this was still a mining camp when i left and we came back and we have so many things now that make this such an attractive place even though it was a great place to come of age it's even better than it was when i was growing up thank you orlo this community is much better off jerry why did you come home well there there are a couple reasons uh one is i still had a lot of family here my mother and father were here my mother was here my father already passed away and my mother's health was not wonderful and then i met my wife who lived here and uh and uh so the last seven or eight years of the college i commuted from here and you know it was it was great because i was building the campus or helping to build the campus here i thought and uh so that was a real reason and i also uh had my roots here i really believed in the the community and i i could hunt and fish i don't hunt much anymore but i fished and loved the outdoors like orlo i i lived in the San Joaquin Valley and i missed the trees terribly and i missed the outdoors and and i was much more active uh uh up until recently and hiking and doing all the things but a lot of us just family related i have cousins and and as orlo will contestify uh i have i'm related to more people than i want to know many times actually going back as a kid growing up here that was another thing about a small town you didn't have to you didn't dare get in trouble because everybody's parents disciplined you there was none of this stuff about you know and and if and if my if i said my teacher did something my dad said you probably deserved it there was none of this stuff with the teacher my teachers were never wrong i mean my dad really who didn't finish high school would really respect it my mother finished uh at st mary's and it was uh had a and then she had it and became an L vn and they worked at do what state hospital but no it was it was i came back because my roots are here my family's here my kids none of them could come here because there's no jobs for any of them they're all fortunately excuse me some of them are in a sacramento roseville area so all but one one is a fisheries biologist up in oregon but the rest of them are are close by so uh and we're very involved in the community or don't i or many and some other activities that we we overlap and we've actually had a group that kind of fell apart where we used to get together for breakfast and we told the same stories all the time but there were about 10 of us there from grass valley and the vat of city and we'd have breakfast once a month or so it was a really i wish we'd had a tape recorder at some of those because some of those people have now passed away and there are some stories that would you really really beneficial for you or it seems to accept the change in grass valley in the vat of city quite well how about yourself is that difficult for you to accept the change no in fact i'm like or better and i and i really one of the underlying things of choosing the college site a grass valley in a vat of city have always had a musical tradition my grandfather was a bandmaster here in 1898 played a a cornet and his brother was in the the corner and in the band and so i was hoping to bring the vat of city and grass valley together because one of my plans was to build a really first-rate theater but that didn't happen because of budgets but uh so that was a real thing and i think and you know music in the mountains is a really activity we helped uh helped them we hired hired paul perry to teach choir for us and we enrolled all the music in the mountains people and they could keep enrolling forever and then the state changed the law that you only could take it twice so we had to lose that but it was a moneymaker for us and it kept paul because music the mountains came off but no and you know the culture of the community is there's always been music here there's always been but the drama and the quality of the music i mean i this summer going to the the concerts at the fairgrounds and stuff and that's another sidelight to our high school career the fairgrounds is where we played we actually the baseball diamond was out there when we were in high school it was a big they played what was it class c or something baseball and then our forestry class they talk about all these beautiful pine trees and stuff that don't have well that was our job was to prune those trees or the class the class's job and then we had a great cross country and track coach and we used to build miles of fire line because of the northern california championships and cross country we're out there at the fairground so there's a real uh investment in our families from the fairgrounds as well thank you gentlemen this community is much stronger with you guys coming back i happened to agree with your dad that you should get back to your community i want to thank you guys for taking the time on this august eighth appreciate all your stories i think these stories are very important the nevada county historical society is gathering oral histories and i'd love to listen to a good story thank you