Santa Cruz author and California authority James Huston once
asked an Oakland man to define the typical Californian. The man’s
reply had the ring of truth:
”
Now you know there ain’t no such thing.
”
Unfortunately, last week that truth rang even louder. Aunt
Stella died at 95.
That’ll beat the odds in most families, but in ours that’s at
the upper end of average. She was 20 in 1931 when her grandfather
William Wilhite
– our first California ancestor who came overland in 1857 – died
at the then-extraordinary age of 96.
Santa Cruz author and California authority James Huston once asked an Oakland man to define the typical Californian. The man’s reply had the ring of truth: “Now you know there ain’t no such thing.”
Unfortunately, last week that truth rang even louder. Aunt Stella died at 95.
That’ll beat the odds in most families, but in ours that’s at the upper end of average. She was 20 in 1931 when her grandfather William Wilhite – our first California ancestor who came overland in 1857 – died at the then-extraordinary age of 96.
That makes Stella a special kind of Californian, one of the last members of a generation that knew our Gold Rush-era ancestors. When they are gone, our connection to a turning point in history will be gone with them.
Stella Harthorn was the eighth of 10 kids, born in 1910 in the Ventura County town of Piru. She was a throwback to a pre-Hollywood California, when “tough broad” was a term she might have proudly applied to herself. She was ornery and independent, the pulse of our huge family – one than throbbed with piss and vinegar.
She was a real looker too, every bit the alluring woman Brando’s Stanley Kowalski would have cried out for. Her Stanley was Fred Johnson, her high school sweetheart. On an Easter break visit home from college, Fred contracted streptococcosis, a disease easily treated today with antibiotics, and died.
His death hit her hard, and Stella never married. She may not be survived by children of her own, but she left behind hundreds of nieces and nephews she helped raise. You know the type: The eccentric aging maid who told you poisonous bugs would eat you if you wandered too far from the house, or would threaten to get her wire brush if you forgot to clean behind your ears. She had a soft spot, too, patiently teaching the clumsy boys to dance so they wouldn’t embarrass themselves.
After her mother died in 1966, Stella retired from her secretarial job at the high school in Fillmore and opened a candle shop in that outdoor gold mining museum known as Columbia, where she lived in a rattletrap house with her sister Alice and notorious brother Tuffy.
Tuffy and Stella were like two eccentric planets in orbit around each other. His shtick was teaching tourists to pan for gold by day – and playing Lothario for the local belles by night. There’s a story that he once got caught in bed with his opponent’s wife while running for Tuolumne County assessor, and won the election anyway.
Stella, meanwhile, discarded the wire brush and became ever more the adventurous aunt, who took young nieces to the Columbia saloon so they could, as she said, “belly up the to bar” for a sarsaparilla to “drink and smoke and chase rich men.” (Though, for the record, Stella hated tobacco.) She was forever on a romp, even at 87, when she once drove over 100 miles to teach some fourth graders to pan for gold, salting each pan with a few flakes to be discovered and treasured.
As she got older the diminutive, lifelong vegetarian became increasingly undomesticated, eating off paper plates and heating the house with a wood stove so badly vented it filled the place with smoke. She seemed to step straight out of the pages of “Roughing It,” and would have felt right at home in the dilapidated cabin in nearby Calaveras County that Mark Twain once shared with Bret Harte and where he learned about jumping frogs.
She disliked shiftless people, and thought John Steinbeck was a communist. But she also shared something with our state’s greatest writer: the belief that anyone willing to work got an even break. She never made a show of generosity, but it was as essential a part of her as was her respect for self-sufficiency. Ask cousin Dean, whose honeymoon Stella paid for, or the young men of Columbia whom Stella would bail out of jail Sunday morning if they had a little too much fun Saturday night.
There’s so much I wish I’d asked her. What kind of man was William Wilhite? Where did the curious family salutation “sether books,” accompanied by a longhorn-like hand gesture, come from? Did she ever love again?
If there are no typical Californians, perhaps it’s because to be truly Californian means to be extraordinary. If that is so, then there has been no better embodiment of the character of the Golden State than Stella.
