Oral histories reveal a different Salinas

28 interviews help open the towns past

Dec 8, 2012  

For fun, there were endless movies. Then, across Main Street from the popcorn fragrance and red neon glow of the Fox Theater, stood the Pep Creamery, popular teen hangout.

“A quarter bought you a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate milk shake,” Dorothy Wallace recalled.

Gazing tenderly into each other’s eyes was free.

The Pep Creamery is one of the Salinas images Wallace recalls when she thinks of her hometown between World War I and World War II. The National Steinbeck Center will present clips from recorded versions of her recollections and others Thursday at 12:30 p.m. at the Steinbeck Center, plus recordings of other long-term Salinas-area residents. They’re discussing the Salinas they knew growing up. (To hear the free program, RSVP by calling the Steinbeck Center at 775-4728.)

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The 28 interviews aim to preserve memories of agricultural Salinas, of Oldtown and of Chinatown. They were compiled by students from California State University Monterey Bay’s Oral History and Community Memory service learning class, taught by Prof. Rina Benmayor. Another major focus is on Latinos who settled in Salinas before World War II or who came with the Bracero program in the 1940s and ’50s.

The interview clips are part of a much larger oral history project focusing on the many ethnic groups that have helped shape the city’s history.

The idea that the oral history project should include Salinas years between the wars originated with Ruth Andresen, a Steinbeck Center volunteer. Andresen and Elizabeth Weldon-Smith of the Steinbeck Center put the between-the-wars effort in motion, to include the interview with Wallace.

The viewing time is an hour and a half.

For many, a blissful time

Before World War II rattled the pillars of humankind itself, Salinas, as Wallace had known it, was a place of seemingly sweet contentment.

“Everybody in town knew everybody, and everyone knew the name of every street and they knew every 3-digit phone number,” said Wallace, a 1939 Salinas High School graduate. “A lot of residents hadn’t ever been to San Francisco. We were content to be where we were. It was a small town, and we thought we had everything.”

She and her friends would drive to Monterey for dinner at the Del Monte Hotel or swim in the hotel’s pool.

“It was a peaceful and relaxing life, but that was not reality,” she said.

Wallace’s father, C.A. McAdams, had owned McAdams Buick on Abbott Street.

“The houses all had single garages, because even if you could afford a car, you had just one,” Wallace said. “You could also leave the keys in your car because nobody stole anything.”

Next door to the Steinbecks

For a while, her family lived in a house next to the one in which John Steinbeck’s parents lived, though John was then away at Stanford University. Wallace’s bedroom window looked out on the Steinbecks’ flower garden.

Another recollection has to do with commerce. There were no strip malls scattered horizon to horizon, no big-box stores when she was growing up, Wallace said. For serious shopping, all paths led to Oldtown, the center of the known commercial universe.

“Everyone went there to buy whatever you needed from hats to meats to gloves to groceries,” Wallace said.

Plus, businesses offered home delivery from laundered shirts to milk in a bottle.

The town was close-knit, one reason being its many social and service clubs, Wallace said. Everyone belonged to the Women’s Club or the Catholic Daughters or the Elks Club, which sat in an expansive room above the Fox Theater and featured a prime view of the passing parades. Affiliation became part of a person’s identification, Wallace said. It helped bind the community together.

Wallace went on to graduate from Stanford University with a master’s degree in English. She taught modern dance, tennis and other classes at Salinas High School, where she made $1,700 a year. To save money, she moved in with her parents. She was married in 1944.

The trauma of war

If any provincialism was left on the home front, it all vanished with the advent of World War II, with the casualties taken by American soldiers and especially with news of the Bataan Death March, an event that traumatized the entire town and nation, too, Wallace said.

She referred, of course, to the 114 men in the Salinas area’s own Company C of the 194th Tank Battalion. They were serving on the Bataan Peninsula when Japan invaded the Philippines Dec. 8, 1941. Only 46 returned home. Among those who died was the man to whom Wallace was engaged.

“The loss of our boys that went overseas was terrible,” Wallace said. “World War II was like an egg-beater stirring everything up. The war expanded thinking. It brought in new people and new ideas and new technologies we didn’t have before. World War II changed everything.”