A California Story

A Classic Story of Mid-West Immigrants Coming to Southern California During the War

By Philip Roger Shafer

Retold by His Daughter Micaela Porte 

Chapter 1

The Idea  — It started with the letters. The letters from California. The letters from my father’s friend, Walter, had been arriving for over a year, who moved there to work for the defense industry.

Father read them to us at the dinner table. We could hardly believe it. Roses and oranges in winter? A postcard of snow-capped mountains in the background and fruiting orchards in the foreground from Burbank, California.

It was January, 1944. We lived in Columbus, Ohio. I think we all dreamed a lot of California that year.

Christmas had been dreary. Dreary weather, dreary long war rationing, dreary death of Uncle Sydney, prisoner of war, my mother’s young brother, she was so sad. Dreary death of my dad’s mother, Grandma Emma, from a long illness, he was so sad.

I wasn’t sad about death and war. I was ten. I loved sledding, but I busted my front teeth in a jump and all the dental work was making me sad.

“Dear Phil and Edith,

Happy New Year 1944, glad we are alive.
Friends, you must move to California. The place is booming, towns forming overnight. Ask for a transfer, we need good Bell Men.

The war drags on, our condolences to you for the lost of your loved ones in this tragedy…

I miss the snow sometimes, for about 15 minutes at Christmas. Our winter coats hang unused in the hall closet.

Give our love to the family,
Happier New Year to all,
Keep in touch,
Your friends, Walter, Marge, Joanie and Mary”

Enclosed was a photo of Walter and his wife and two teen girls in front of a white Spanish style house, with a lemon tree by the porch, and a Merry Xmas written across the bottom.

My teen sisters grabbed the photo. The girls were friends from school. Martha said, “Christmas Day and they are in shorts!”

Chapter 2

On the Road

Suddenly, it seemed,
My father suffered from sinus headaches,
He went to the doctor to request a medical transfer, and got it.
He was a senior manager at Bell Telephone.
He was transferred to Oceanside, California.
We sold the house for 8000 dollars.
We bought a big black Buick and trailer that could sleep 6.

Then, at the end of March, piled the family, Dad, Mama, Grandpa Emmett, teen sisters, Julia, Martha, Barbara, Roger (that’s me) and new baby sister Sydney into the car and headed west out of Columbus to California.

Then we broke down 25 miles later., not even to Illinois yet!
We stayed in a hotel in a nearby town while Dad got the car fixed.

My parents picked me up from school earlier that morning, at lunchtime, to say goodbye. The teacher said, “Roger is moving to California.” The class sighed and said, “lucky.”
I was going to miss my friends, and sledding.
We had been busy for two months planning and packing, and I couldn’t wait to be on the road to the mountains, the desert, the ocean…

We bought magazines for the car. We ate in restaurants most of the time, except for roadside picnics. “We’re not Okies,” said my parents more than once. My mom had no intention of trying to cook meals for a family of 8 on the trailer cook stove.

Every night we easily found a road house so Grandpa Emmet could have a real bed. He was old. We all slept in the trailer. There were trailer parks established everywhere, since the Depression, since the War, people on the move, like us.

We did about 35 miles an hour. We tried to do at least 100 miles a day.
It took us two weeks to get to California.

The interstate was in progress. Sections were still gravel road. One section in Missouri was new concrete, but every quarter mile there was a gap in the concrete, so the car jolted, then the trailer jolted. My father swore every time.

My sisters were singing, “California, here I come.”

One very rainy day in Missouri, the trailer had a flat tire by a ditch along the road. My dad unhitched the car and sent us into town to see a movie while he fixed the flat. Later he said he was afraid the whole trailer was going to slide into the muddy ditch.

The next day, still in Missouri, my dad sent me into town on my bike , a red flyer, to get some supplies.
While I rode through town someone waved and called out, “Hi, Roger, how’s your baby sister?” I was so surprised, I can promise you, I didn’t know a soul in that town.

We took a detour through Kansas to look for the farm where Grandpa Emmett lived as a youth. There were no signs. I guess he found it by some homing instinct. The farm was abandoned since a long time.

The plains were big.

Everything was so new. We looked at the view. My father decided to take the south road to avoid the Rockies. He was afraid of the steep climb and late snows.

We crossed into New Mexico through relatively easy mountains, the first mountains we ever saw.
We never saw brown skinned people either. We had a black neighborhood not far from ours in Columbus, and went to school with them.
My mom bought me a sombrero at a local market, I loved it, it was green and black felt with gold trim. I proudly wore it in the car, for twenty minutes, when then, it blew out of the open window into the desert landscape. I cried because my dad was not turning around to search for it.
My sisters were singing “Tumbleweed”” which was popular on the radio when we could pick it up near towns. Tumbleweeds were rolling across the road with every gust of wind . It was hot and dry.

In Arizona, we stopped a few days, while my father applied for more ration cards for tires and gas, which was not an easy thing. Once he took baby Sydney and my mom to the ration board as testimony.

One evening Julia called out, “I saw Aunt Millie drive by, I saw their car for sure.” We drove around the town to all the trailer parks and found her, and uncle Will and Sue and Nancy our cousins. They had a very distinctive car, we had a big party.
My mom’s two sisters, Mildred and Doris, and their families were moving to California too. My dad’s two brothers, Blynn and Hubert, and their families were moving too. We weren’t traveling together, so it was a real coincidence to meet up on the road. I guess it was just one of those times.

Dad got the ration stickers, and new tires. Aunt Millie and Uncle Will left north toward Los Angeles. Uncle Will was in the car business.
We stayed on the south road.
250 miles across the Desert.
We stopped at the sand dunes to play. I will never forget that expanse.
My sisters were singing, “the desert is calling me.”
It was still the plank road in places to El Centro.
We carried extra water to drink and especially for the radiator. We stopped every hour or so to let the engine cool. The desert wasn’t so hot, it was early April.
The mountain pass was steep and windy, but, with a few stops to refill the radiator we made it into San Diego El Cajon valley.

We entered the city by El Cajon Blvd, and turned north toward La Jolla and Oceanside on the Camino Real.
Our disappointment was great.
“Where is the ocean?”

We first saw the ocean more than an hour later rounding Torrey Pines cliff road toward Del Mar.
We stopped. The Pacific Ocean was huge and shining.
My mother cried for her brother lost in the Pacific War.

We were all tired, but almost there and joyfully thankful.
California Pacific Highway to Oceanside, here we come.

Chapter 3

The Arrival

We stopped again in Del Mar to put our feet in the ocean. It was cold. Only 5 minutes, said my father, I want to get to Oceanside before dark. So did we.

Oceanside was a little beach town way north of the City of San Diego, way close to the military base Camp Pendleton. It was in full expansion.
We arrived before dark and found a campsite.
We checked Grandpa Emmett into the local hotel.
We ate something in a local restaurant.
Maybe something else happened that night, but I fell asleep in my bunk in the camper so I don’t know.

What happened that night was that Grandpa Emmet found out that the hotel was run by some old friends of his from his silver mining days in Creede, Colorado, the town which had the distinction of being the place where the killer of Jesse James was slain. Grandpa Emmet says he was standing just outside of the famous photo.
His friends were happy to offer him permanent lodging. Just one of those swell coincidences.
Also my parents found a converted barn for us to live in with a yard for the camper, until the phone company found us better, which wasn’t too long.
Better was being rapidly constructed all over. During the summer we moved into a brand new three bedroom house .

Regular school was almost out for the summer, so we enrolled for next fall. There were also youth day camps for displaced military and other families where you could do crafts and stuff. I built a little table with a dark mahogany stain which I still have.

My sisters started Oceanside High School in the fall. They thrived. Julia was a senior, she starred in the school play, “Arsenic and Old Lace,”
They were a hit.
I started high class in grammar school. There was a small clique of locals, but a lot of newbies, like me. Kids came and went, when their dads were transferred to another base or to war, new families came to replace them.
My father was busy with Bell Telephone expansion.
My Mama was busy with the family and baby, and changing houses.

We were all delighted with the sunny weather everyday, but a co-worker of my father’s told him that although it doesn’t rain much in California, when it does, it pours, so my father bought us all galoshes, which we never wore.

One day, after we had been in Oceanside for almost a year, my mother said she was going for a drive with a friend to La Jolla to visit her great-uncle, who ran a bakery on Prospect Street.

When she came back that evening, at dinner, she said,
“We’re moving to La Jolla.”

And so it was.

Epilogue:

Philip Roger Shafer played on the La Jolla High football team and was class president. An ROTC scholarship sent him to the University of Idaho, where he met his wife, Barbara; they were married in La Jolla at the Muirlands house.

Philip Roger was stationed in Coronado, where his first two children were born, my brother John, then me, Micaela; he was a navy pilot.

He did peacetime cruises in the North Pacific, stationed in Scotland, but took a leave with some friends in a train down to London for Queen Elizabeth’s’ coronation. Also cruises in the Pacific, Japan and Hawaii, where he bought our mom a beautiful set of china dishes that we always used for celebrations and holidays, and a game of Go that we always played and some beautiful fabrics, from one of which, a green blue shantung silk, I made my wedding dress. From Hawaii we got a bunch of grass skirts and flowered bathing suits that we played hula with.

Then the Vietnam war was picking up and our mom made him quit the military as he had finished his service as ROTC because she said, no folded flag in a box was going to do it for her… our two younger sisters were born, Cassandra in old Scripps Hospital in downtown La Jolla, and Laura in Clairemont hospital.

Then he became a teacher of American history and government with his post graduate teaching degree from USC, in high schools, junior college and night school.

Then he got a masters in Urban Planning from SDSU, where he met Floyd Morrow, one of his professors become friend, and became a councilman assistant for many years as Floyd was always re-elected.

He ran for councilman himself in our district of Pacific Beach, but came in second after Mr Martinez.

Then we were grown and off to our California colleges.

He wrote 9 books, historical fiction adventures, sailing boats was his hobby, and we had a canoe that we would drag down to Mission Bay from our house on La Palma St. in Pacific Beach and have grand adventures paddling around the Bay.

Growing up in San Diego was wonderful. We lived in the La Palma St house since July 4, 1965. My parents were instrumental in working for the 30ft height limit, recuperating the beach on Sail Bay from private leases for the people and establishing the Fanuel St Park, and the Calumet Park in Bird Rock.

They were listed as “movers and shakers” in The Reader in 1972.

My father, Philip Roger Shafer, died on April 8, 2026 at the age of 93 in Scripps Hospital, the new one, in La Jolla, a beloved and fun dad, brother, husband, uncle, friend, grandfather and great grandfather and engaged citizen.

That is his, and our California Story.