Kam and I have decided it's time to turn our attention back to our Guadalupe project, so yesterday we headed west on 135 and north on 1, past ranches and fields and the scruffy old warehouses and industrial buildings and railroad tracks, past the cemetery and the Living Water Church and the now familiar storefronts and houses in the heart of town. The streets were deserted and the wind was howling. It was a good day for time travel.
Our focus was Dorothy (Dot) Smith Knotts, whom we’d first encountered in a delightful 1933 photograph of three young schoolteachers––Ruth, Thelma, and Dot––astride a painted deer of cast concrete, being silly and smiling prettily, their skirts hiked a bit to reveal rolled up stockings. We’d already talked to another Guadalupe resident named Shirley, who was a little girl in those days and whose father owned the small stucco dwelling that often served as residence for new teachers, but we needed more story to bring the image to life. Who really were these women, and what was going on in their world? It takes some anecdotal detail, an added dimension...one needs to harvest nouns and hear voices. And that's the fun of it for us.
Shirley had been way too young then to remember much, but she told us that one of the three teachers, the one called Dot, eventually had a daughter who is still well and local, working in the tire shop, as a matter of fact, just a few blocks away. So yesterday we headed over to see her.
Her name is Janet Glenn, and she had graciously brought in three photo albums for us to explore, dark crumbly covers, sepia-toned pictures mounted lovingly with names and captions carefully handwritten. It was so humbling to be entrusted with these, to turn the delicate pages and look into lives. It's always such an honor to be given access to the personal memories and history of a family. Kam and I sat and scrolled through quietly, occasionally interrupting Janet’s work with our questions, but she was patient with us.
Dot Smith was born in 1905 (and died in 1983) but we were seeing her now in her sun-dappled youth. We caught glimpses of her laughter and spirit, saw her holding her beloved cat Snookums, posing at picnics with friends. A native of Chico, she attended Chico State Teachers’ College and taught for a time in a one-room schoolhouse. Having seen the photo of her sitting with her teacher friends on the deer statue, it was sobering to learn that her fiancé, Percy Little, had been killed in a plane crash less than a year before that picture was taken, a tragedy that changed the course of her life. It was only after Percy's death that Dot accepted a teaching position at the Guadalupe Joint Union School, relocated, and began life anew in Guadalupe.
And it was a good life too, though not without its hardships. Dot taught for many years, mostly fourth grade, but also what we'd now call middle school. She was the enthusiastic and creative kind of teacher who loved to organize plays and costumes for the kids. She was always artistic, and did watercolor paintings. As for her cooking, we don't know, but when her biscuits came out hard, Janet told us, she gave them, in an act that was a mixture of mischief and mercy, to the hoboes who were always passing through during the Depression years. She found a new love, George Knotts, married him, and had three children, one of whom died in infancy.
She had close and enduring friendships––Janet points out Adalyn Hanadel in one of the old photos, and says, “I remember her as Ad, and she and my mother remained friends well into old age, all their lives, really.”
I sort of feel like I know Dot now. With a mere fifty years or so between our lives--which is nothing when you’re sliding around the decades as Kam and I do--she’s almost a contemporary, and I’m certain I would have liked her. Suddenly it's summer, 1932, and there she is hiking along volcanic rock at Lassen’s Chaos Crag...or posing on a pier in a smart hat and suit...or enjoying an expedition with friends at Feather River, Oroville. She was a schoolteacher, a wife and a mother, a woman who loved to laugh with her girlfriends. She endured great loss but kept on going. She knew the playground sounds of children, the rolling fog and California light, this wind coming over the dunes.
May 30, 2013
