On a brilliant fall day greater than 20 years in the past, Howard Sahm and his spouse, Ruth, welcomed my oral historical past college students and me to their Nineteenth-century home tucked away on a again avenue in Los Olivos. Mr. Sahm, who died in 2011 on the age of 85, had lived his complete life on this very home, constructed by his grandfather. “This was all our dairy property,” he mentioned, encircling broadly with a gesture of his arms. “It was run by my father and me till 1964.”
He had recognized Los Olivos in a really completely different period. He shared boyhood reminiscences of taking part in marbles on the nook, making newspaper kites, and delivering papers on his bicycle for a penny a paper. “I’d go 5 and a half miles day-after-day, out to the shops, by the faculties, up Figueroa Mountain Highway…,” he recalled. “It was gravel roads till the1930s, once they put down the blacktop. In later years, if we needed to go to a film on a Saturday afternoon, we’d trip our bikes into Solvang. There was a theater there the place the Bit O’ Denmark is, and there was a bowling alley subsequent door.
“Later, once I obtained to driving, after I turned 16, there’d be a Saturday-night dance each week, old-time dances right here on the grammar faculty or Santa Ynez, after which the common dances down within the Veterans Corridor in Solvang. We had reside music, not albums. Our band teacher was Bob MacDonald, and the principal, Hal Hamm, he performed the clarinet, after which there was Ivan and Ellen Sorenson — he performed the fiddle and bass fiddle, and Ellen performed the piano. For the dances up right here, it was banjo, fiddle, piano … sq. dancing. We danced with everyone — two-step, foxtrot, polka. Ladies requested boys, too. We appreciated ‘Melancholy Child,’ ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ ‘Let Me Name You Sweetheart,’ … songs like that. Ruth and I used to bounce, and we by no means missed a polka, however then I had the stroke a couple of years in the past, and my proper foot wouldn’t fairly observe. And now I wouldn’t have air sufficient to polka.”
One of many college students requested him about life throughout the Melancholy. “Everyone was in the identical boat,” he mentioned. “No person had any cash. There was a hobo camp up by the bridge at Mattei’s. They’d come right here and ask my mom for a potato, and I don’t suppose anybody ever obtained turned away. She’d say, ‘Okay, in the event you wanna chop some wooden.’ They’d chop up a half a dozen items of wooden, and she or he’d give ’em a potato, or no matter. However she wouldn’t give it to them only for nothing. They needed to earn it. The work gave them dignity.”
He mused, “I want I had a video of a number of the characters we used to have right here in Los Olivos. There was an enormous bench exterior the publish workplace, and so they known as that the ‘spit ’n’ argue membership.’ These guys would come there within the morning, waitin’ for the mailman, sittin’ on the bench, and so they’d inform tales: the largest fish, or the largest unfold of horns on the deer. One fellow who lived up there, Frank Cooper, was a staunch Democrat, and there was one other man who would argue Republican, and so they’d be struttin’ round, chest ahead, rooster-style, arguing….”
Working the dairy farm demanded increasingly of Howard’s focus through the years, and it was arduous work. “We have been milking 130, 135 cows,” he mentioned. “We furnished milk to Camp Cooke, and we furnished milk to the creamery in Santa Barbara, and so they in flip furnished it to marine bases, hospitals…. We had registered Guernseys, and in later years, we put in some Holsteins with them for slightly extra quantity, much less butter fats. They have been all completely different, and we knew every cow, and all of ’em had names: Bossy, Opal, Suzy, Fanny, Petunia…. We had one which all the time had twins yearly. It was simple to inform ’em aside. Even the Angus — black as shoe leather-based, however each one among ’em was completely different.”
He continued, “Earlier than we bought out, our contract was sufficiently big for one man, but it surely wasn’t hardly sufficiently big for 2, but it took two to function. Then they closed the plant down in Santa Barbara and began transport our milk to Los Angeles. That improve within the freight, and the contract and all that, was simply economically arduous for us. At one time, there was once 12 or 14 dairies proper right here within the valley, and about 55 or 60 in Santa Maria. Now there’s only one right here within the Valley — Jacobsen’s out on Baseline Avenue — and one in Santa Maria.”
He continued, “So, within the late ’50s, early ’60s, it was time to consider promoting. One of many dairy males over in Buellton purchased our cows. And it wasn’t simple. You understand, you’re born and raised with one thing.… Again after we was working, my mom needed to cull a cow typically. It didn’t trouble her; you’d come again, and there’d all the time be one to take the place. However oh, that final day. The final day, it was … it wasn’t simple.”
All these a long time later, Howard Sahm had tears in his eyes remembering. “Nothing was simple,” he advised us. “However my dad all the time had a philosophy — by no means ask a employed man to do one thing that you simply wouldn’t do. You’re employed arduous. And that stands true. You simply work arduous.”
