Author Archives: David L Stevens

About David L Stevens

David has been the creator and maintainer of Trona on the Web since 1996. He has been creating websites since the beginning of the World Wide Web. He is not the best person to be the webmaster for a Trona Website but someone needs to do it and Doug Polly isn't with us any longer. David worked in maintenance for the San Bernardino City Schools, retired from Honeywell, worked in IT for a while, as school bus driver until COVID-19 made it too dangerous. David is now retired and spends his time gardening, collecting stamps and learning to cook.

Did You Know?

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Did you you know that Amelia Earhart‘s husband George Palmer Putnam died in the Trona Hospital in 1950?

George Palmer PutnamHe had Just completed his popular book, Death Valley and its Country. The Putnams liked Death Valley so well they later purchased interest in Stove Pipe Wells resort. When he became ill while he was there he was rushed to the Hospital in Trona. The picture on the left is from the SVHS Library.

Joe Whitelaw’s aunt, Mary Margaret “Peggy” Gauslin, lived in Trona  when she was ten. She  joined the Ninety-Nines, an association for women pilots, soon after she soloed in February 1930. She was a member until 1936, and was active in air shows. Amelia Earhart was a charter member of the Ninety-Nines which was founded in 1929.. Peggy probably never knew Amelia but it is an interesting coincidence. Peggy was born in 1905 and lived in Trona from about 1914 to 1918 while her father was building and then managed the California Trona Company plant. There are several pictures of her and her family in Trona on this web site.

According to a Curtiss-Wright newsletter dated April 6, 1930, Peggy and two others that week became part of the 200 (female) licensed pilots on record at that date.  “Of the 200, 17 were transport pilots, 22 were limited commercial pilots and 161 were private pilots.”

Later in Peggy’s life she worked for the Los Angeles Times as a clerk. She died in Orange County in 1990.

Trona 1940 US Census

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This week I spent some time looking at the 1940 census for Trona. It was quite interesting and I think it would be worth my time to study it in more detail. Here are some interesting examples:

  • The population  in 1940 was 2014.
  • My father’s salary was $1800 a year as a laborer.
  • My father paid $12 a month for rent.
  • A chemical engineer made $3000 a year.
  • The barber, butcher, dentist, bartender, deputy sheriff and the priest all worked for AP&CC.
  • Not everyone in Trona came from Oklahoma, Arkansas or Missouri.
  • Harvey Eastman Sr. was born in Cuba.
  • There were 21 single women and 1394 males including married men and children.
  • There were 780 men living in bunkhouse or tents.
  • There were 32 women living bunkhouses.
  • There  were 1160 people that had lived in Trona since 1935.

In 1920 the population of trona was about 700 and in 1930 it was about 1000.

To look at the 1940 census for free I recommend using the LDS Family Search site. As far as I know it is the only free site that is indexed and searchable by name.

https://familysearch.org/

Trona to Austin

Trona to Austin: How Life Snuck Up on Me

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Some of you may remember Paul “Butch” MacLean, especially if you you were in the class of 1959. I don’t remember him at all but I do remember the places and the people that he wrote about in his chapters about Trona. Paul didn’t write this book in hopes that it would be a bestseller. He wrote it so that his children and grandchildren could read about and know about his life.

If like me you grew up in Trona about the same time Paul did you should enjoy this book. If you grew up as an ordinary child and became an ordinary man like most of us you will be able to relate to Paul and the story of his life.

I’m glad that he decided to share his story with the rest of us by using a self publishing service. The book is a fun read. I can recommend it.

Alice (Mladenka) Tansley

Alice (Mladenka) Tansley – Class of 1960

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I just received word that Alice Tansley Class of 1960 passed away this morning (May 10, 2013) as a result of a heart condition. She has been living in Winston, OR along with her husband Bill Tansley, who graduated from Trona High School in 1958. Thanks to Durwood Sigrest for calling me right away to let me know. He said that she had had a heart attack a few days ago, but had seemed to doing fine when she came home from the hospital. But Bill was unable to wake her up this morning and the doctors were unable to save her.

George Sherman

Death Notice

The Trona Branch Library

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The Trona Branch of the San Bernardino County Library was and still is an important part of the Trona Community.  In 1918 there was a note in the San Bernardino County records about the county library in Borosolvay being closed due to the Borosolvay plant being closed. It indicated that the books were to be sent to the Trona Branch of the county library.

The July 9, 1938 edition of The Trona Potash, a weekly paper, had a notice that read:

Library Hours
Austin Hall
From 2 to 5 P.M., from 6 to 9
P.M. weekdays. From 2 to 10 P.M.
Sundays and holidays.

I had a hard time remembering the library being in Austin Hall between the pool hall and the men’s restroom on the corner. After my brother Joel jogged my memory I do remember at least one time when mother parked the car in front of it long enough for Joel to run in and return a book.

I don’t know if I was ever inside.  I do remember very well the Library being moved to the Trona Club House about 1948/1950..It seems like it was there for a long time but Joel reminded me that was there for less than a year while the new library building was being built.

I’m guessing that this was at the time that all sorts of remodeling was going on in Austin Hall. The barber shop that was on the Main Street side was moved to Bunkhouse Number 8. I am sure my first haircut took place while it was still in Austin Hall. The space vacated by the barber shop was used to expand the post office and add more mailboxes. That way fewer people had to share mailboxes. We still shared ours with Uncle John. Even when the new post office was built he still had his mail sent to our mailbox.

The General Mercantile Office was moved into the space where the library was. The space it vacated in it’s old location was used to expand the grocery store. If you have a better memory of this than me me feel feel free to correct me.

The library moving to the clubhouse was a big deal for me.  The clubhouse was just across the street from us and the librarian told me that if I could sign my name I could get a library card and check out books.

I had my mother write my name on a piece of paper for me and I kept writing over and over trying to memorize all the letters and the order they were in until I thought I had it right. Then I would take it to my sister or my mother over and over again until the finally told me it right. At least it was right enough to pass the librarians inspection. My sister pointed out to me that both my first and last name had a “V’ in the middle and that both my first and last name began and ended with the same letter. It’s no wonder I wrote in mirror images until I was about ten.

I became the libraries most frequent customer. I was a big help to the librarian. Every day I would go over and sort the children’s books according to size and every day I would go back and they would be messed up again. Finally the librarian had to ask me to cut it out and tried to explain to me the basics of the Dewey Decimal System.

Enough to Make a Poor Woman Cry

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Linda (Cunningham) Monroe wrote the following about arriving at their new home in Argus about 1945:

I remember when we arrived at that ‘”little house” – my Mom cried. I was four. It was the first time I had seen my mother cry. Now I understand why. It was a shack. Literally! I’ve a picture of the my sisters and I standing in front of the shack with the outhouse in the background.

The inside of the house was covered with cardboard and the roof was a tin roof. My Dad eventually bought the property – with 3 houses (?) on the lot for $500. I have that deed somewhere. He took down two of the houses, expanded our home, adding a bathroom (yea!), kitchen and living room. It was probably very hard on my Mom. But they provided a good home for us.

I’m quite sure that Linda’s mother wasn’t the first  or the last woman to cry on their first day in Trona. My guess is that more than half of them did. Here is a quote from a book called The Seven States of California: A Natural and Human History:

The 250-square-mile valley took getting used to. In 1946 an English war bride traveled to Los Angeles, where her husband met her and drove her home to Trona. She wrote:

 “California was sunny and green, and beautiful along the coast. After two days spent in sight-seeing, we set out across the desert for Trona. The scenery became gradually bleaker until finally we reached Poison Canyon and the view of Searles Lake. My husband then asked me if I had ever seen anything like this before, and I answered, “only in pictures of the moon”

I know there were many time my mother felt homesick for her red dirt farm in Habersham County Georgia.

When I was stationed at Amarillo AFB in Amarillo Texas in 1962 the boys from the East Coast could do nothing but complain about how harsh Amarillo was. I had to tell them that compared to where I was born and raised the Texas panhandle town of Amarillo was a Garden of Eden.

The description of Linda’s house reminds me of houses I visited on the Seneca Indian reservation in upstate New York in 1963. There we natural gas wells on the reservation but the royalties were not distributed equally among the tribe.

To learn more about Trona women crying visit : To Trona, California residents, that awful smell spells $$$

Trona on the Web © Copyright 1997-2016

The Railway Fish Pond

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goldfish
The Trona Railway office used to have a rectangular lily pond by it’s front door. When I was about twelve. the decided to fill it in. Maybe they decided it was a hazard or maybe they decided that it was too expensive to maintain or maybe they didn’t like the traffic of all the kids that were attracted to it.

Anyway, in the weeks before they drained it one of the railway employees decided that a good way to get rid of the goldfish in the pond was too allow kids to fish for them. The idea was us to catch them and take them home to live out their lives in a fish bowel. It started off with just a few kids but word spread fast and there were more and more. The railway had lent it’s net to the first kids but soon we were resorting to hooks made from pins and lines from sewing thread.

The railway staff couldn’t have imagined that fishing in that pond would become so popular. They had to put an end to it. I don’t know if I remember this right but I think they ended up catching fish for kids that brought a fish bowl to put them in and promised to take care of them. I know that I ended up with two that I did my best to care for.

If You Lived in Trona You Have a Story to Tell

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A few weeks ago Linda Cunningham Monroe send me a story written by Leon Emo, It was called the The Sites and Smells of Trona. Leon gave me permission to reprint his story on Trona on the Web. It is based on his impressions of Trona while driving through on his way to Death Valley over the years and from an interview with Pam Gorden Sanders who lived in Trona until she was in the eighth grade. She is not listed in the Alumni Registry so I don’t know how old she is but I’m guessing that she moved about 1955.

Leon’s story is a  pretty accurate picture of the way I remember Trona. There are some differences, I know Joe Bangwin’s name. This is something Leon didn’t know until this week. I know that grass will grow in Trona if you can afford to waste the water. Even here in Minnesota, The Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, people are starting to rethink the wisdom of the stress it puts on water sources to keep lawns green.

AP&CC had a lawn in front of the plant for a while and they watered the oleander bushes around Austin Hall and the Club House with fresh water to keep them healthy. David Pillot grew what he called devil’s grass while they lived in Trona and I know he also grew grass in their yard out at Valley Wells. There were always roses in the circle in front of the school auditorium.

For a desert town Trona actually had a lot of trees. Many of the old salt cedar trees are gone now but there are still enough of them left to give Trona a distinctive look. They were watered with the salt water from Valley Wells. Now someone has discovered that palm trees can be grown very in Trona. I’d like to know what the requirements of their care are.The executive quarters had a large assortment of plants in it’s garden to be enjoyed by guests and out of town executives.

Leon mentioned that the population of Trona is now about 2,500. Considering that from the 1930 to 1960s the official population was about 2,000 the 2,500 number doesn’t seem so bad. 150 high school students doesn’t seem that bad either when you consider that during the 1950’s there were only 200.

This site is the way I try to tell my Trona stories. Doug Polly told it with with his Upinflames web site that I have preserved. Jess Dominguez tell his stories with his art. Some people tell their stories by way of donations to the Trona Museum or by volunteering to work there. Others are on alumni committees. Some people do it by asking me question or sending me pictures and stories of Trona that I add to this site. My sister does it by preserving our family history.

I’m sure George Pipkin probably holds the record and has written more stories about Trona and the surrounding area than anyone who ever lived. You cannot live in Trona without having a story to tell.