Fresno Growing Up by Kent Sorsky

FRESNOGrowing Up A City Comes of Age: 1945â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1985

Stephen H. Provost

Fresno, CA

Fresno Growing Up: A City Comes of Age: 1945–1985 Copyright © 2015 by Stephen H. Provost. All rights reserved. All images copyright by the author unless otherwise noted. Published by Craven Street Books An imprint of Linden Publishing 2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721 (559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447 CravenStreetBooks.com Craven Street Books and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc. ISBN 978-1-61035-250-5 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Provost, Stephen H. Fresno growing up : a city comes of age, 1945-1985 / Stephen H. Provost. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61035-250-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Fresno (Calif.)--History--20th century. 2. Fresno (Calif.)--Social life and customs--20th century. I. Title. F869.F8P76 2014 979.4’83053--dc23 2015023748

Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgements/ About the Author. . . . . . . . . . ix

Part 2

Part 1

Fast Food and Funtime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Fresno’s Happy Days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Radio Wars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Central Valley Soundtrack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Swinging Into Fresno. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Producers and Consumers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Marquee Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Towering Presence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Reel Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 The Stars Under the Stars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Water, Water Everywhere. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 It’s a Jungle in There . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Fresnocentric

The Heart of a Growing City The Salad Bowl. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Highway Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Dust-ups and Flare-ups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Gone Forever. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 They Paved Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Charge … It! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Main Dragged Away. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Fresno State Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Color Gallery

Downtown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fulton Mall Statues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Around Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Retail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Entertainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fresnostalgic Life and Leisure

63 65 66 67 68 69 70 iii

Fresno Growing Up

Part 3

Fresnolympics The Games We Played

Greens and White Stuff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let’s Go Bowling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kings of the Road. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Down for the Count. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Hockey Game Broke Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diamonds in the Rough. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A League of Their Own . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Have Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . High School Heights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Building a Doghouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grant’s Tomb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

154 158 161 168 173 179 191 197 202 206 210

Timelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Foreword Am I a Fresnan? Well, let’s see. I know the difference between dolma and sarma, I prefer bierocks to Big Macs, and I can’t sleep at night unless there’s a fan purring in my bedroom. But I’ll let you decide. Just east of Roeding Park there’s a small stretch of pavement marked Tancredy Road. It’s named after my great grandfather, who planted a grape orchard there after moving to Fresno from Italy in 1916. My grandfather had a jazz band, Nick Tancredy’s Red Hot Peppers, who were the house orchestra at the Hotel Californian and had a regular slot on Fresno’s first radio station, KMJ, in the 1920s. He and my grandmother, Shirlee, gave birth to five daughters, Italian beauties all, one of whom is my mother, Dee. On my dad’s side, my grandfather Paul Opperman was manager at Dale Brothers Coffee for 33 years. His wife, Myrtledell, was a nurse at Fresno’s Hammer Field hospital during WWII. My father, Don Opperman, was an Eagle Scout in Fresno’s Troop 3, who worked his way through school delivering The Fresno Bee. That’s where he met my mother, who worked in the paper’s circulation department. They were both in 11th grade at Fresno High, and they’ve been together ever since. I arrived the same year as Fresno television, 1953. I made my media debut before I was in kindergarten as part of the peanut gallery on Channel 47’s Old Forty Niner and, thanks to Fresno’s Ross

Bagdasarian (aka Dave Seville and The Chipmunks), could recite the complete “Ooh Eee Ooh Ah Ah” libretto before I knew my ABCs. When President Kennedy came to Fresno in 1962, the family went to greet him, and I got to shake his hand. It’s amazing as I look back on it now, though at the time I got a bigger thrill out of meeting Hopalong Cassidy at a Food Bank grand opening in Fig Garden. Besides, my heroes were closer to home—Uncle Jimmy Weldon and Webster Webfoot and the funniest man who ever lived, the host of Channel 30’s Funtime, Al Radka. Fresno’s summer heat never seemed to bother me much in those days. I was at that wonderful age when I could leave the house with nothing but a fifty-cent piece and be gone all day. My cousins, Nicky and Steve, and I tubed the Kings River, rode our bikes to Friant Dam and surfed the streets on homemade skateboards. The only real hazards were red ants, donkey head stickers, and salt loads fired by angry farmers when we scaled their barbed wire fences for sweet purple plums. The only time we were in serious trouble was when we tried to capture pigeons by climbing the north screen of the Starlite Drive-In and the fire department had to bring a hook and ladder to get us all down. What’s amazing about that is even though the drama was covered by local TV news,

our parents didn’t learn about it for over 50 years, which proves to my satisfaction that childhood prayers are, indeed, sometimes answered. Then there was the time our parents dropped us off at Warnors Theater for the kiddie matinee. It was a new Disney film—or so they thought—called The Birds. While the folks were horrified when they realized what had happened, we boys took it all in stride. By that time, we’d been in several cars that’d locked their brakes in Tule fog and skidded to a dead stop on Highway 99—a terror far beyond anything Alfred Hitchcock ever devised. For Fresno boys of our generation, there was another rite of passage—a dive from the third tier of the Weymouth Pool tower. I don’t care what anyone says—I was there and I know—the Weymouth high dive was twice as tall as the Empire State Building, and you had to be careful never to dive during a breeze or you could miss the pool altogether and crash land in Selma. Steve Provost’s book brings it all back so clearly, you can almost feel the sting of Bactine from being in the sun all day or smell the burning maple leaves on a Fresno winter afternoon. Fresno Growing Up is a mother lode of memories and a thoroughly delightful read! —Dean Opperman June, 2015

Introduction It was like a scavenger hunt. Finding much of the material you’re about to read took me through stacks of old newspapers (mercifully available in virtual form these days), scores of online resources and numerous personal interviews. Like most scavenger hunts, it was a lot of fun— occasionally frustrating but more often quite rewarding. Having grown up in Fresno and having spent the majority of my life there, I had a nice head start. In many cases, if I didn’t know something, I knew where to look. In other cases, I stumbled upon information I hadn’t thought to include but which, once I came upon it, seemed essential to the story I wished to tell. That story follows the loose parameters of Fresno’s boom years in the two generations following World War II, roughly 1945 to 1985: the Baby Boomers and their offspring. The parameters are loose because history is, by its nature, a continual flow of information. It doesn’t simply start one year and end at some point down the line. Some things happened before 1945 that provide insight into what came later, and some of events during the period resolved themselves after ’85. Context is important, and I wanted to provide some broader context for the period covered here. So you won’t just read about the multiplex theaters that popped up in North Fresno during the 1970s; you’ll also read about their predecessors, the stately downtown movie houses built during the first few decades

of the 20th century. You’ll read about the waves of immigrants who came to this valley and shaped its unique culture, going as far back as the 1880s. Not everything that you’ll find ahead happened in Fresno. Some of it occurred outside its bounds, driven by people intimately connected with the city—people such as Bill Vukovich, Mike Connors, Tom Seaver and others who aren’t household names. Entire volumes could (and have) been written about some of the topics covered here. My goal was to provide an overview, spiced with as many interesting details as possible, of the period in question. I sought to cover some of the major events, such as the advent of the Fulton Mall, the destruction of the old courthouse and Fresno State’s victory in the Mercy Bowl, to name a few. But I also wanted to include stories and tidbits that might not be so widely known. I hope some readers will stop and say to themselves, “I didn’t know that!”, while others smile inwardly at a reminder of some all-butforgotten piece of their own past. Several books have been written about Fresno’s early days and stately homes, but less time has been devoted to the city’s boom years. Much has been said about its politics, but less about its culture—what (and who) made Fresno the city it was and has since become. Those are the topics I sought to address in this volume, from the Big Fresno Barn to the radio wars of the 1960s; from the old Fresno Falcons to the NIT champion Bull-

dogs of 1985; from Fig Garden Village to the Sunnyside Drive-In. It’s not a history of politics but of people, and some of it is my own personal history, as well. I grew up as Fresno grew up; I wasn’t merely an observer, but a participant. What lies ahead will include occasional personal observations and recollections, as well as some insights from my father, who spent some four decades as a professor at Fresno State. But this is not a personal memoir, it’s a biography of a city. Cities should have biographies, I think, not just histories. A biography is, literally, a “life record.” Cities are, in a very real sense, living entities that grow in directions that their founders could never have imagined, much as children grow up far differently than their parents could have conceived.

Beginnings I personally arrived in Fresno twice. The first time, I presume, I was ushered in by a doctor and a nurse at the old St. Agnes Hospital near downtown. The second, I was welcomed by an oversized neon hand waving to me from the Fowler exit and supposedly belonging to one Madam Sophia. It’s been there as long as I can remember, so the lifeline for that particular business must have been particularly long. But I doubt even Madam Sophia could have foretold the twists and turns Fresno’s history would take as it grew from a rural agricultural city into a major metropolitan hub. vii

Fresno Growing Up

I chose the title for this book for two reasons. The first is personal: I grew up in Fresno; well, at least for the most part. I was born there, in the aforementioned hospital at 530 W. Floradora Ave. The hospital opened in 1929—a day early, its website says, in order to provide emergency surgery for a 3-year-old boy. It would make a wonderful introduction to say that I was that little boy, and now here I am, all these years later, alive and healthy enough to write a tale of this fine city. But I wasn’t. I haven’t been around quite that long, and I wouldn’t qualify just yet for a room at the senior living facility that came to occupy the space where the hospital once stood. Still, I lived a good portion of my life in Fresno. My parents, a university professor and his former supervisor at Douglas Aircraft, rented a home near North Fresno Street, but didn’t stay there long. Most of my earliest years were spent in a three-bedroom, two-bath tract home on Bengston Avenue, near West and Shaw. It was the kind John Bonadelle and other real estate developers were churning out to meet the demand of twenty- and thirtysomethings who were too young for Benny Goodman and too old for the Beatles. We moved away in 1972, when my father took a job as dean of new program development in the California State University system in Southern California. The gig was only supposed to last a couple of years, but it stretched into half a dozen. By the time I returned to Fresno, I was a full-fledged teenager, enrolled as a sophomore at Bullard High School and on my way to what I felt sure would be greatness as the next J.R.R. Tolkien.

viii

The neon sign outside Madam Sophia’s in Fowler has advertised palm readings to passing motorists on Highway 99 for decades.

Instead, I took the practical route. Writing books wasn’t any way to secure a stable income, so I pursued a degree in journalism at Fresno State. Later, I would work for the Tulare Advance-Register, the Visalia Times-Delta and The Fresno Bee (twice—the first time as a prep sportswriter and the second time running the copy desk). Along the way, I did a lot of growing up … and so did Fresno. Hence, the title of this book. Somewhere between the start of World War II and the end of the Reagan presidency, Fresno stopped being a sleepy little town and started being what Fresno State football coach Jim Sweeney once called “a sleeping giant.” This is the story of

that rich period in Fresno’s history, a period when the city surged northward with all the urgency of a prospector chasing gold in Alaska. Sometimes, we struck a rich vein; other times, we abandoned what had once seemed like a promising claim. But it seemed like whatever happened, things never turned out quite the way we expected. As a kid, I thought Al Radka would live forever, homegrown department store Gottschalks was a fact of life and listening to Dean and Don on KKDJ’s The Breakfast Club was one of the Ten Commandments. Certain things never changed … until they did. What lies ahead is a selective chronicle of how and why they did: a look at Fresno’s coming of age. Growing up is never an easy process, and it certainly hasn’t been for Fresno. It involves, in many cases, setting aside the dreams of childhood that didn’t quite work out and setting our minds on the future. The scars are there, and some of them run deep. But that doesn’t mean we should forget what seemed like an age of innocence, a simpler time when skinned knees were cured by a trip to Arthur’s Toys and breakups were soothed by listening to Boss Radio. Such comforts shouldn’t be casualties of adulthood. Sometimes, just remembering them is enough to make new dreams seem possible. Author’s note: The quotes interspersed among the chapters are from others who grew up in Fresno. They were provided in answer to the question, “What are your fondest memories of growing up in Fresno?” as posted on the Facebook group You Know You Grew Up in Fresno When .…

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people who provided their thoughts, recollections, photos and stories of Fresno for this project: Katherine Andes, James Benelli, Terry Betterton, Dick Carr, Gary Cocola, Bruce Conte, Scott Cohoe, Nat Hanson, Donna Stephens Harris, Craig Kohlruss, Bill Kuebler, Lanny Larson, Dick Lee, Gini Lipari, Vicki Luick, Jim Medina, Tom Nast, Lance Nix, Dean Opperman, John Ostlund, Tracy Parker, David Provost, Roger Rocka, Rick Thompson, Lance Tullis, Will Weymouth, Kent Sorsky, and Jaguar Bennett.

About the Author Stephen H. Provost was born and raised in Fresno, where he attended Bullard High School and graduated from Fresno State with a degree in journalism in 1986. He has spent more than a quarter-century as an editor, reporter and columnist for daily newspapers in Central California: the Tulare Advance-Register, Visalia Times-Delta, and, for fourteen years, the Fresno Bee. He has also worked at a teacher and has published several fiction and nonfiction books under the name Stifyn Emrys. He’s a definite cat person, but he bleeds Bulldog red (doesn’t everybody?) and has fond memories of cheering for the NIT basketball champs at Selland Arena, browsing the shelves at The Upstart Crow, and strolling down Christmas Tree Lane on chilly, sometimes foggy, December evenings. He works for The Tribune in San Luis Obispo and lives with his wife on California’s Central Coast.

Part 1

Fresnocentric The Heart of a Growing City

They Paved Paradise America was at peace, and Fresno State College officials were worried. The war’s end had lit the fuse for the baby boom, and the city’s population was about to explode. Fresno had seen steady population increases of about 16 percent in each of the previous two decades, but midway through the 1940s, it was becoming clear that a new phase of rapid growth had begun. By the end of the decade, the town would be half again as large as it had been just before Pearl Harbor, and that rate of growth was forecast to continue. Few felt the pressure more acutely than Fresno’s college students. Simply put, the campus at Blackstone and McKinley avenues was full up. A year earlier, many male students had been unable to find living accommodations on campus, and had moved into former army barracks near Ratcliffe Stadium. Some married students were living at Hammer Field, the army air base at what would later be known as Fresno Yosemite International Airport. College officials weren’t exactly thrilled with the situation—the barracks were far from ideal for studying—but they figured that some housing was better than no housing. Still, a long-term solution would have to be found, and not just for the housing shortage. Classroom space was at a premium, too. In 1946, plans had been announced for a $350,000 industrial arts building. Enrollment in the program had

Street between McKinley and Clinton. The second more than doubled in a single year following the was a 154-acre plot of land owned by the Markarend of the war, from 120 students to 275. It had ian family on the east side of Blackstone, north of gotten to the point that courses were being held Shields. on Saturdays off-campus at Fresno Technical High Plans seemed to be coalescing in early 1948, School. when Governor Earl Warren recommended that But would one new building be enough? $3 million be set aside for construction of the new Increasingly, the answer seemed to be no. The campus. Even before Warren’s announcement, a rapid growth at Fresno State led state Sen. Hugh group of college faculty members had decided to M. Burns of Fresno to call a legislative committee make an investment in the future. In February, the meeting on campus to discuss the issue. professors purchased 80 acres of land roughly equi“The local hearing is of vital interest to Fresno distant from the two sites residents because the being considered, where needs for expansion of the “All the fig trees, and the grapes they announced plans to FSC during the next 10 develop what they called years should be consid… even found cherry trees in the a faculty homesite area. ered now,” Burns told The center of an almond orchard. The owner sold the land Fresno Bee. “The expansion to the faculty group at of the college to double its Never went hungry. Old man present capacity within the Scogart once said, ‘Take the whole cost. “The property was the next 10 years is forecast by watermelon if you’re hungry. Just closest available to the many persons.” college farm, the present Meanwhile, plans were pull some weeds while you are campus site and the two being made for an entirely going along.’” areas which … are being new campus, which the – Don Hogan considered as potential college president promised sites for the new camwouldn’t be more than pus,” said Ralph Jack, a three-quarters of a mile professor who was one of the group’s trustees. “It is from Ratcliffe Stadium. Two plots of land were beour hope to obtain a site which will make possible ing considered. The first was to the east, on First 31

Fresno Growing Up

country homes for faculty members within a reasonable proximity of the new campus.” A few months later, in June, the state public works board chose the Blackstone Avenue site over the eastern alternative, which was deemed a hazard to children who would be attending an elementary school on the new campus. The Blackstone site consisted almost entirely of a fig orchard with a few buildings belonging to the Markarian family, but it was—unlike the other property—already equipped with electric lines and sewer mains. All that needed to be done was to condemn the property so it could be seized through eminent domain. Even as the site was chosen, wheels were already turning to set the nascent plan in motion. Frank Thomas, the retiring college president, said construction might get under way before the end of the year. A general building plan was already in place, calling for at least 16 structures to be built. “It already has been determined that the new campus will face either west or south,” he added, “but the plan will have to be completed in detail to fit the specific site.” Thomas added that he hoped the housing shortage would be addressed quickly. The former army barracks housing many students from outside the city had never been intended as a permanent solution, he said. “My own opinion is that the dormitories ought to be among the earliest buildings on the campus. This is the key to a marked growth in the enrollment of the college. Out-of-town stuThe Thomas Administration Building, one of the first built on the new Fresno State campus at Shaw and Cedar, was named for Frank W. Thomas, who served as president of the university during the 1940s.

dents are frustrated now because there is no place for them to live.” It all must have seemed very exciting at the time, but it didn’t work out quite the way anyone thought it would. Plans for the new campus were proceeding nicely … until they collided head-on with another proposal that had been building momentum over the postwar years: the idea that Fresno State should have a full-fledged school of agriculture. Of course, it made sense. Ag was at the core of Fresno’s iden-

tity, and what better place to study it than in one of the nation’s most productive farming regions? The whole idea got started back before the war, when some dairymen donated 26 heifers to the Fresno State College Agriculture Club. Unfortunately, the club didn’t have anywhere to put them. So a committee was formed to raise money that would be used to purchase farmland within ten miles of the college campus. By the time the war was over, the committee had racked up $500,000 toward its goal, along with more cows to join the

They Paved Paradise

original bunch. The committee used the money it raised to purchase two parcels of land, one near Hammer Field and the other by Bullard and Chestnut, near Clovis. The former was deemed an unsuitable place for the farm when a survey found its soil “infested with noxious weeds” and too sandy to serve as farmland without excessive irrigation. Opponents at UC Davis and Cal Poly, seeking to protect their turf, argued that Fresno State shouldn’t have its own school of agriculture, but Fresno State—under new president Arnold Joyal— pressed forward with a request for $700,000 to purchase a site for just such a school. At the same time, Joyal said, the state public works board was scheduled to consider the removal of the college to its new site at Blackstone and Shields. Meanwhile, the state moved ahead with its lawsuit against the Markarian family, seeking court approval to confiscate the coveted fig orchard. The case went before the Superior Court in March 1950, and the state received the property the following month in exchange for compensation totaling $327,500. About that time, the manure from all those cows hit the fan. The fundraising committee had already donated the land at Bullard and Chestnut for the new school farm. But the state decided it didn’t want the main campus to be separated from the ag department by several miles. Assemblyman James Crichton, who had introduced a bill to purchase the Markarian property, began working on a bill to buy 650 acres adjacent to it for the farm. The property donated by the fundraising committee, he said, should be sold. Others had different ideas.

Among them were the faculty members who had purchased those 80 acres with an eye toward making their homes within walking distance of the new campus. Suddenly, they faced the prospect of inhaling methane from uncomfortably close bovine neighbors on the new farm—or, worse still, with the possibility that their land would be seized through eminent domain to accommodate it. Neither option held any appeal. City planners didn’t care much for the idea, either. Land values in the area were rising, but they would be likely to do an about-face if the farm went in on the property. A fig orchard was one thing, a dairy was quite another. Prospective residents and retailers wouldn’t like the idea of a smelly old farm smack in the middle of Fresno’s new frontier any more than the faculty members did. Plans for the new campus at Blackstone and Shields were largely complete, and groundbreaking was imminent when it became clear that the whole idea would have to be scrapped. With state officials standing firm in their demand that the main campus and ag school be placed on adjoining parcels, there was no alternative left but to abandon the site and build the new campus next to the donated land near Clovis. The move was formalized in December 1949. Less than a year later, ground was broken at Shaw and Cedar avenues. What happened to the Markarian family’s fig orchard? Well, the state—having seized it through eminent domain—suddenly had no further use for it. In early 1952, it was sold for a price “in excess of $300,000” to a group that planned business and residential development on the site.

“Leveling and grading will begin almost immediately, with the first job being pulling out the fig orchard,” said Chester Bergfeld, head of the Manchester Mortgage Company. “At least 25 percent of the area will be reserved for business development, sort of a secondary Fresno central business district. There will be ample shopping facilities and parking space, and I hope some of the major department stores will locate in the area.” Within the next few years, Bergfeld’s vision became a reality. In fact, Manchester Center was serving shoppers a good three years before the new Fresno State campus was finally dedicated.

It was hard to miss Manchester Center, thanks to this huge neon sign that stood along the side of the road on Blackstone for many years. Fresno Neon Sign.

Fresno Growing Up

Giving a Fig That fig orchard the state had seized for the campus it never built wasn’t just any fig orchard. Without the man who planted it, Fresno might have looked a whole lot different. I grew up in an area of the city known as Fig Garden and listened to a radio station called KFIG. My parents bought groceries at Fig Garden Village, and on the weekends (and sometimes during the week), some of my classmates at Bullard High used to spend the weekends partying out by the fig orchards on the northwest side of town. Being a loner and an introvert, I never joined them, but I suspect there was some drinking and smoking—the illegal kind—going on. It was no accident that the school parking lot off Barstow Avenue was known as the domain of the “Barstoners.” Without Henry Markarian, none of that might have existed. Markarian came to Fresno County from Armenia at the age of 10 in 1882 and planted the fig orchards on Blackstone two decades later. By 1918, the year of his death from a bout of influenza, that orchard was the world’s largest and he was known as the “fig king of central California.” He was the first president of the California Fig Growers Association and made the first shipment of figs across the Rocky Mountains. At one point, he owned 20 percent of all the figs grown in the United States. But even more significant than this was his friendship with a lawyer-turned-developer from Kansas named Jesse Clayton Forkner, who came to Fresno two years after the death of his first wife in 1910. Upon his arrival, Forkner lost little time in contacting three people. One was Markarian. 34

Another was photographer Pop Laval, whom he invited to create a visual record of 6,000 acres he had an option to buy from the third man, property owner E.E. Bullard. Derisively referred to as “hog wallow” because it was covered with large mounds over a layer of hardpan, the land was considered poorly suited to farming. But Forkner realized that Fresno was growing northward. Fresno State Normal School had opened just the year before his arrival, and the Bullard land lay just beyond along Van Ness Boulevard. He also firmly believed that no plot of land was useless, and that God had directed him to the area so he might transform it into a new paradise. So what if the land appeared unworkable? Forkner contacted Laval and asked him to look the place over. “Now you’re a photographer—an artist—and, from what I hear, a good one,” Laval recalled Forkner telling him. “And it takes imagination and skill to make a good picture out of a poor subject. Well, you certainly had an opportunity to do just that this morning when you took that panoramic view of that hog wallow land.” Forkner told Laval that by the time he was through, the photographer would get a chance to set his camera up “in this self-same spot, and facing it will be a veritable Garden of Eden.” The creator, he said, had furnished “all the tools and materials that are required: All that is left is for man to make proper use of them.” Laval asked Forkner what he hoped to plant on the land. “Why fig trees, of course,” he responded. Forkner’s reasoning was simple, if he wanted to create a new Eden, he’d have to start with the

tree that had furnished the first humans with their clothing, according to the Book of Genesis. In the same way, he hoped to clothe the old hog wallow in a glorious raiment of fig orchards, very much like the one Markarian had planted on Blackstone. It was Markarian himself who affirmed Forkner’s belief in the project that would come to be known as the Fig Gardens. Markarian told him the land would be perfect for figs. All he had to do was level off the ground and blast the hardpan loose to expose the fertile soil underneath. So Forkner bought 48 tractors off the Ford assembly line and equipped them with scrapers and disk tillers (a process that intrigued Henry Ford so much that he came out to Fresno to see it for himself ). Then, Forkner lit up the future fig orchards with 660,000 pounds of dynamite—roughly a pound for every fig tree he meant to plant there—in an exercise that must have sounded like the Fourth of July. Markarian showed him how to plant the trees about 30 feet apart, so they’d have room to grow, and how to irrigate the land using rows of ditches. But the area wasn’t just about figs. It was an exercise in sustainable living, long before that phrase came into use, exemplified by the slogan “Not simply a place to live but a place to live better.” Among the orchards, Forkner laid down 120 miles of oiled and surfaced roadways. And he planted decorative shade trees—eucalyptus, oleanders and other varieties—one for every ten fig trees he put in the ground. The deodar cedar, a conifer native to the western Himalayas, became the sentinel of Van Ness Boulevard and the centerpiece for a holiday tradition. Every December, a stretch of Van Ness from Shields to Shaw would be transformed into

They Paved Paradise

Christmas Tree Lane. Festive scenes and colorful lights would adorn the homes on either side of the street and the branches overhead, a practice that began in 1920 when a resident decorated a single tree to honor a teenage son who died in an accident at home. When all was said and done, Forkner had added 6,000 more acres, creating a community that dwarfed Markarian’s plot and rivaled the entire city of Fresno for sheer size, stretching all the way north to the San Joaquin River. Forkner planned

a community with homes of varying sizes, including large estates and mansions along Van Ness and smaller homes lining the side streets on either side. Among the first homes built was the De Vaux estate on Maroa, which later became home to the Fig Garden Swim & Racquet Club. A trolley line was even installed, running all the way from downtown to the San Joaquin River. The trolleys, of course, didn’t last, laid to rest as the automobile came of age. At least a few people must have seen it coming. Standard Oil of Cal-

ifornia built Fresno’s first full-service station on North Van Ness Boulevard in 1926; Russ Clements purchased it two years later and operated it until his death six decades years later. Eventually, it was placed on Fresno’s register of historic places. “The place has been here since ’26, and it’s the oldest service station that’s still running,” said owner Jim Medina, who no longer sold gas The Russ Clements gas station, seen here in its incarnation as Van Ness Auto Repair, has been operating on North Van Ness since 1926.

Fresno Growing Up

as of 2013 but operated his Van Ness Auto Repair business from the same canopied building. He installed two vintage Standard Oil pumps, one Chevron pump and a Sinclair pump, out front for old times’ sake. “Back in the day, this was the outskirts of Fresno, and people would gas up here,” Medina said. “It’s always been a Standard station.” Forkner took the outskirts of Fresno farther north when he bought and developed the Bullard land. The original owner gave his name to an eastwest thoroughfare (Bullard Avenue), as well as two schools I attended (Bullard Elementary and Bullard High)—neither of which was situated along that avenue. Forkner had a street named after him, too. In time, Fresno grew up around his original development, which maintained its own identity as an unincorporated area outside the city. As of 2010, more than 5,300 people lived there. Without Henry Markarian’s expertise, none of it would have been possible. At the age of 46, Markarian fell ill with influenza-pneumonia and died just 13 days later—six short years after teaming up with Forkner to create Fresno’s new Eden. Markarian left four children— Theodore, Dick, Athenia and Les—along with that fig orchard and a beautiful new home that was just being completed on his property. That home would be torn down a quartercentury later to make room for a new campus. A campus for the college that had once been called Fresno State Normal School. A campus that was never built, but instead gave way to a huge retail development called Manchester Center.

Today, almost all the fig orchards Forkner planted are gone, too. In the words of Joni Mitchell, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Manchester Center Fresno State’s decision to abandon the Markarian property for a new home at Shaw and Cedar left the Shields and Blackstone area open to retail development. And with the advent of Manchester Center, with its glowing neon sign, the intersection became the new frontier of Fresno growth … if only for a few short years. Blackstone’s primary purpose had long been funneling cars through town to Yosemite, but development had been creeping steadily northward and, increasingly, there were places to stop along the way. Fresno State College, a couple of city blocks south at the McKinley intersection, had been in place for a few decades. Manchester was the next logical step. The anchor property was a sprawling new twostory Sears store, which stood at its north end, detached from the rest of the center, across Dayton Avenue. Long’s Drugs, which had opened its first store in Fresno back in 1942, set up shop at the prime Shields and Blackstone intersection. A second major department store, Rhodes Brothers, was added in 1959 at the southeast corner of the center. Around the time the new shopping center opened in the mid-’50s, a landmark McDonald’s franchise restaurant sprang up on the southwest corner of Shields and Blackstone, across the intersection from Manchester—which could perhaps best be described as a mega-strip mall.

Though most of the shopping center itself was only one-story, Rhodes Brothers’ store rose two stories above the ground. Four brothers had founded the chain in the late 19th century as a coffee shop in downtown Tacoma, Wash. (One of them split off and moved to Seattle, where he founded an unaffiliated group of Rhodes Department Stores. These were ultimately purchased by Lamont’s—a chain that was subsequently bought out by none other than Fresno-based Gottschalks.) The Fresno Rhodes Brothers, attached to the southeast corner of Manchester Center, went through a series of changes over roughly two decades. Its name was shortened to simply Rhodes a year after it opened and, in 1969, the entire chain was purchased by the Hawaii-based Liberty House chain. In another change, the Fresno store was rebranded as Liberty House. Change has, in fact, been the rule for Manchester Center. More than two decades after it opened, it became an enclosed mall, later abandoning its exclusive retail focus and adopting a mixed-use strategy, with retail and office components. In the early days, though, the emphasis was on openness. The place was huge: a U-shaped layout of shops that reached out to embrace a large asphalt courtyard reserved for parking. A walkway just north of Long’s connected this main parking lot to additional parking along Blackstone; pedestrians who traversed it passed beneath a row of half a dozen distinctive metal arches rising overhead. There they could catch a glimpse through the windows of broadcasters on the air at the KEAP radio studios. An “annex,” or secondary strip mall, stood at the property’s eastern edge.

They Paved Paradise

Shoppers peer in the window of a shoe store at Manchester Center. The hairstyles give away the time frame. 1966. Lance Nix.

The new center had everything anyone could possibly want. In addition to the two department stores and the drugstore, it had a “five-and-dime” Woolworth’s just to the north. Next to that there was a Mayfair supermarket. Both stores had a strong presence in Fresno, with Woolworth’s later opening a location in the newer Fashion Fair and Mayfair operating a location in the Tower District.

(Nowadays, Woolworth is out of business and there’s just one Mayfair left—in Los Angeles.) If you wanted fashion, you didn’t have to settle for Rhodes or Sears; you could check out smaller specialty stores like Rodder’s or Lerner. There was also a Mode O’Day, one of the first tenants and a decent-sized national chain. The name, no doubt, helped attract shoppers to

the new center. By the time Manchester opened, Mode O’Day had already been around a couple of decades, and more than 700 of the retail shops were still in business across the country more than a quarter-century after it set up shop in Fresno. Mode O’Day was a franchised operation. The concept was simple: “Selling women’s apparel direct to the customer through franchised stores, the savings were passed on to the customers.” As a child and a teenager, I spent time at Manchester Center, but women’s clothing wasn’t exactly my speed. One shop that did attract my attention, much later, was a place called the Upstart Crow. The name, according to the company’s website, is a reference to William Shakespeare, once labeled an “upstart crow” by a contemporary named Robert Greene. “While Greene’s work has been largely forgotten,” its website states, “the legacy of his Upstart Crow has inspired countless generations.” The Upstart Crow, which opened at Manchester in 1976 and lasted about a decade there, was an inspiration to Fresno, too. Just inside the southern entrance to the mall’s indoor incarnation, it offered an eclectic mix of coffee, books and city culture, and is notable for helping pioneer the bookstore-coffeehouse blend. I once walked in to find a string quartet playing near the back, where post-hipster types were sipping pre-Starbucks java while engrossed in various selections from the shelves. The coffee deal was sure a lot better in those days: You could buy a coffee cup for three bucks and get if filled up for 75 cents. Then, if you wrote your name on it, you could enjoy free refills. Food was available, too. The Crow served quiche there 37

Fresno Growing Up

The building that once housed Rhodes, the eastern anchor to Manchester Center, was converted into Caltrans offices decades later.

for two-and-a-half bucks or coquilles St. Jacques (scallops in a brandy sauce, served up in the shell) for four and a quarter. Affordable culture at its finest. In his book The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Lewis Buzbee describes the Upstart Crow as “something of a theme park, where the atmosphere … was as much a draw as the merchandise. There were foreign periodicals, chessboards, plenty of big tables and comfy chairs.”

That was culture. Unfortunately, the place closed up shop abruptly in the summer of 1987 and gave way to a different bird-themed store, Red Robin. Despite the appeal of bleu cheese burgers and fries to my personal palate, it wasn’t quite the same. Years later, there was still at least one Upstart Crow (the Fresno store was part of a small chain) operating. I stumbled upon it by chance at Seaport Village in San Diego, and it was almost as cool as the old

Fresno place. All it lacked was the dimly lit ambience that made Fresno’s location a sort of hybrid bookstore/cave. There was always food at Manchester. Even after many of the retail stores were converted to office space, there was still a small food court upstairs. But, as with so much about Manchester, it used to be a whole lot. In the early years, if you were hungry, you didn’t have to venture across the city’s busiest intersection to McDonald’s. You could stay right in Manchester and pig out at Perry Boys’ Smorgy. If you had a sweet tooth, you could satisfy it at See’s Candy. For a time in the 1960s, Manchester was pretty much the epicenter of retail in Fresno, but that started to change with the advent of Fashion Fair, the city’s first major indoor mall. Manchester tried to play catch-up with a $30 million renovation and expansion that began in 1978 and changed the outdoor center into a two-story, air-conditioned retail smorgasbord. The grand plan included knocking down the eastern annex, a 45,000-square-foot building that by that time looked worn and dated, and adding a third major department store: the venerable Gottschalks. A few years later, the street that had separated Sears from the rest of the development was blocked off and torn up to make way for a corridor connecting the two sections. But instead of ushering in a new era, the transformation marked the beginning of the end. Liberty House closed a few years after Gottschalks opened, giving way to a discount store called Home Express. The mall never had a third major department store after that.

They Paved Paradise

A plan to add a third level to the mall in the mid-’90s never came to fruition, and even the addition of a 16-screen multiplex Signature theater (a little east of the old “annex” building) failed to reverse its flagging fortunes. By that time, the mall was 60 percent vacant. Unable to attract new retail tenants, its owners shifted their strategy and leased out most of the upper level as business space. Offices for the Fresno Adult School, the City of Fresno utilities department and a charter school occupied former retail spaces. The Rhodes building became home to the biggest new tenant, serv-

ing as offices for the California Department of Transportation. Founding merchant Long’s Drugs, which had moved north in the center to the old Mayfair supermarket slot some years earlier, finally called it quits in 2007 after a half-century at the mall. (The Long’s chain itself was bought out by CVS, and a new location opened just down the street on Shields.) In perhaps the greatest blow, the Great Recession claimed the entire Gottschalks chain in 2009, leaving the center with Sears as its only major retailer.

Manchester Center in 1956 Arnold’s Beauty Salon

Freeman Shoe Co.

Mode O’Day

Baldwin’s Jewelers

GallenKamp Shoes

Rickman Bros.

Bank of America

Kirk’s

Singer Sewing Co.

C.H. Baker Shoe Co.

Long’s Drug Co.

Straus’s

Cover Girl

Manchester Camera & Record Shop

Trend O’Fashion

Mayfair Market

Youngsters

F.W. Woolworth Co. Fabrics by the Yard

Weil Bros.

Charge … It! Fresno’s northward march didn’t stop at Manchester. Far from it. Ten years after the shopping center opened, a new phenomenon hit town. It wasn’t quite Wal-Mart, but it was the rough equivalent for its time, at least in California. It was called White Front, a division of Interstate Department Stores, and the city had never seen anything quite like it. A huge, deep archway beckoned visitors to step through the glass doors and feast their eyes on the long row of appliances, all in white, that gave the store its name. In front of the Blackstone Avenue store was a huge parking lot—evidence that the store expected to do a booming business. Indeed, the 17th store in the growing chain was forecast to rake in some $13 million in business that first year. “Its central location in California makes it the ideal link in the chain of White Front stores, which will stretch from San Diego to Sacramento before the end of the year,” Interstate President Sol Cantor boasted. White Front had begun more than three decades earlier in Los Angeles, where it had two stores and focused primarily on appliances. In 1959, however, Cantor’s group bought the company and began transforming it into a one-stop shop for everything from sporting goods and automotive items to clothing, televisions, luggage, cosmetics, jewelry and household décor. The stores were immense at 150,000 square feet, just a little 40

less than today’s average Walmart Supercenter. In the same vein, some White Fronts also featured grocery sections. The grand opening of the Fresno store was set for May 27, 1965, at 10 a.m., and White Front did all it could to get the city excited. The mayor and other local dignitaries were scheduled to be on hand, along with a few celebrities. It was a tradition for White Front, with its Los Angeles ties, to call upon Hollywood stars and semi-stars to help promote its new stores. Password host Allen Ludden was on hand when a store opened in Portland. Bill Cosby, Troy Donahue, Jayne Mansfield and

The White Front logo as it appeared in an ad, complete with a small representation of the archway at the top. c. 1970. The Fresno Bee.

Sebastian “Mr. French” Cabot from TV’s Family Affair also appeared at various White Front grand openings. The celebrities scheduled to show up for Fresno’s ribbon-cutting are less recognizable today: “television favorite” Gail Davis, best known for her small-screen portrayal of Annie Oakley; Rick Jason of the World War II drama Combat!, which ran for five seasons on ABC; and Marvin Miller from the CBS show The Millionaire. An ad in The Fresno Bee two days before the store’s gala debut laid out the grand ambition that was White Front: “Imagine shopping for a television set and being able to choose from 10 different brands—in every conceivable style and model. Or perhaps you will be looking for a radio … you’re sure to find just what you want in a selection of over 120 different models. Whether you’re looking for a crib for the new baby, a major appliance for your new kitchen, a popular brand of cosmetic, a lawn mower, a power drill, a new camera, a set of automobile tires, a new sofa, a bottle of Scotch, the latest hit records, a swimming pool, a baseball glove and bat, an air conditioner, an electric appliance, a barbecue or patio furniture, a pair of shoes or smart new fashions for the entire family … you’ll find it here.”

Charge … It!

Fresnans either loved White Front or they hated it. It was either the ultimate in convenience or a bloated monstrosity that amounted to a big black eye on Blackstone. The rapidly expanding chain opened its Fresno store at the corner of Ashlan with 150 employees staffing no fewer than 45 departments. A year after the Fresno store came into being, White Front’s parent company acquired a chain of toy stores that had been founded as Children’s Supermarket, and expansion continued. By 1968, Interstate was operating more than 100 department stores in addition to eight toy stores. The latter, like the White Fronts, were big operations and, just like White Front, they did strong business. A few years after the Fresno store opened, however, White Front began to lose its luster. Aggressive expansion into the Pacific Northwest didn’t go well, hampered by poor planning and logistical problems. The company lacked any distribution centers outside California, so it took a while to get merchandise up to Washington and Oregon. Ads touting sale prices appeared in newspapers, but customers showed up to find the items weren’t in stock because they hadn’t arrived yet. White Front eventually abandoned the Pacific Northwest and filed for bankruptcy in 1975. The toy stores were all that survived. Their founder purchased what was left of the company and rebranded it under the toy store’s name. No longer known as Children’s Supermarket, it had evolved into a warehouse-style outfit called Toys “R” Us. This store proved to be far more successful than White Front had ever been, expanding to more than 1,500 locations across the

Looking toward the southwest corner of Fig Garden Village.

country and playing a key role in driving longtime Fresno fixture Arthur’s Toys out of business. In a dose of irony, however, Toys “R” Us started struggling when faced with competition from none other than Wal-Mart, the chain that succeeded in filling the very niche that White Front had once occupied.

Shop Till You Drop The new freeway had helped solve one problem by diverting traffic around the city center, but had it helped create another? With the freeway built and a new grid of one-way streets in place downtown, bumper-to-bumper traffic jams had been reduced and the streets were safer. But that also meant

fewer people were coming downtown. Sure, there were the weekend cruisers on Fulton, but most of them didn’t spend money, except at Stan’s Drive-In or maybe one of the movie theaters.

“Riding my bike to Mayfair Market and Potter’s Drugstore; bowling in junior leagues at Cedar Lanes; Bee route; sneaking out on a late summer night to go swimming at McLane.” – Brad Davis

Fresno Growing Up

There were still several major retailers downtown. Gottschalks, JC Penney and Newberry’s five-and-dime had stores there, among others. But the freeway bypass kept would-be shoppers from even seeing the store signs, and some locals found the new maze of one-way streets daunting, if not downright prohibitive. An Oakhurst resident expressed his frustration in a letter to The Bee. “We used to go to Fresno to trade several times a year before,” he wrote, “but now we never venture into the downtown area and seldom into Fresno at all. Strangers who are not up to date on your rules and regulations get confused with the one-way streets.” The letter was written in 1963, several years after Fresno adopted the one-way grid. It took more than a little getting used to.

Allen Funch, right, developed Fig Garden Village, described in this sign as “a complete shopping village of 60 stores and shops” with all the “services and selections of merchandise available in a metropolitan area.” 1956. Photo courtesy of Fig Garden Village.

Parking meters were another problem that kept people from venturing downtown. Manchester Center had a huge asphalt lot filled with free spaces for its patrons, and it wasn’t the only new shopping center in town. Fresno was growing fast, with regional shopping centers popping up all over the place. These strip malls weren’t just markets, drugstores and barbershops. They had a whole range of retail options that eliminated the need to leave the neighborhood. Fig Garden Village opened about the same time Manchester did, on Shaw near the north end of old Van Ness Boulevard. The relaxed, ranch-style architecture with gabled roofs and wood shingles really did make it feel like a “village”—and one with a wide variety of shops from which to choose. In addition to Village Drugs and Village Foodland, it offered fine dining at Harvan’s (later Pardini’s), women’s fashion at three locations and even a fullfledged department store called J.M. McDonald’s (that had nothing at all to do with the burger joint). The store, which later yielded its space to Gottshchalks, could trace its origins to its namesake, a former retail executive who had helped build the JC Penney chain. For many years, it served as the largest retail anchor for the center. There were other attractions, too. I remember going to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour for very loud, stomach-expanding experiences. Friends would always dare one another to finish off “The Trough” (for pigs). Farrell’s offered some kind of prize for those who managed to do so. I’m not sure what it was, because I never saw anyone actually do it, but simply being able to brag about the accomplishment itself was reward enough. An

even larger offering called “The Zoo” was on the menu for $8.95 or so. But Farrell’s wasn’t just about the ice cream, it was about the atmosphere. Menus and much of the restaurant were the definition of Americana: Red, white and blue were everywhere, and the waiters were all decked out in straw hats and costumes that hearkened back to the era of silent films. Whenever someone told the waiter about a birthday, he’d lead a mini-parade through the restaurant, banging on a big bass drum. I don’t think my parents liked the place, for the same reason they didn’t like the heavy metal music I favored at that age: It was just too loud. Why drive eight miles to shop downtown with that kind of selection? It was all about convenience.

Fig Garden Village tenants in 1963 included: Bilsten’s TV, Record and Appliance Olan Mills photography Cover Girl women’s fashions Bank of America My Hardware Bashford Travel Agency Cashion’s Dresses Valley Camera Larre’s women’s wear Patrick James Men’s Shop Village Drugs

Charge … It!

The Bank of America building downtown in 1964, six years after the bank began a grand experiment—the credit card—with Fresno as its guinea pig. 1964. Lance Nix.

The Age of Plastic Not only did Fresnans have a lot of new places to shop; they had a new way to shop, as well. In 1958, Bank of America decided to conduct an experiment, with Fresno as its guinea pig. An experiment in plastic. The bank had been part of Fresno—and its skyline—for four decades, ever since it built a nine-story skyscraper on Fulton Street. That was back when it was still called Bank of Italy, before its name switched national affiliations at the start of the Great Depression. As the 1960s approached, the bank decided to do what it called a “drop.” It wasn’t going to bomb Fresno, but the exercise would be explosive nonetheless. The age of the all-purpose major credit card was about to begin, and Fresno was ground zero. In September, 60,000 residents of the city received an unsolicited piece of plastic in the mail. But this wasn’t junk mail. It wasn’t even an application to be filled out. It was a live, ready-to-use

credit card, with the name “BankAmericard” plastered across the front. Fresno was chosen for the experiment for a couple of reasons. First, nearly half the population did business with Bank of America on some level, and second, its population was (to borrow a phrase from Goldilocks), not too big and not too small, but just right. It was also far enough off the beaten track that, if the experiment failed, few people outside of financial circles would hear about it. In fact, the “drop” itself was so low-key that it was relegated to a six-paragraph story on an inside page of The Fresno Bee. The cards had credit limits of $300 to $500, and merchants who accepted them were required to pay Bank of America 6 percent of the purchase price. They were sent out to all B of A customers, entirely free, creating an instant customer base. With so many cardholders out there, retailers would be hard-pressed to shun the program, which meant added purchasing power for their clients … and that 6 percent revenue boost for the bank. Everyone came out a winner. The retailers no longer had to worry about collecting from customers who fell behind on their payments; that was the bank’s job now. Before the cards were even mailed, 300 shop owners had signed up for the program. In the ensuing months, more credit cards went out to customers in Bakersfield and Modesto. The program became a model for the coming age of plastic that was to follow, with other credit cards soon to follow. BankAmericard’s biggest rival would be Master Charge, which began out west, too, as a cooperative effort among Wells Fargo and three other

California banks. In time, BankAmericard became Visa, Master Charge morphed into MasterCard, and the debt began to pile up. In 1970, the federal government outlawed the kind of “drop” used in Fresno. By that time, Fresnans had even more choices of where to shop.

The Strip Mall Meanwhile, other strip malls and regional centers were popping up all around the city. The Mayfair Center, in the late 1940s, had been the first to appear, even before Manchester and Fig Garden Village. Built at McKinley and First, it was laid out like a diamond, with strips of stores built around a curious two-story “Ivory Tower” at its center. The developers apparently built the tower first and used it as an administration building; they would climb up to the second floor, from which they could survey the progress of the subdivision that was growing up around it. Like Fig Garden, the center had a variety of tenants on top of the standard market and drugstore. During this period, businesses were changing. Increasingly, the markets were “super” and the drugstores were a whole lot more than pharmacies. The concept of the supermarket had been born in Queens, N.Y., when a former Kroger employee named Michael Cullen opened the first of several stores he called King Kullen in the midst of the Great Depression. He accommodated the automobile by adding a parking lot and created separate food departments. Cullen’s basic philosophy was “pile it high, sell it low,” and his concept fit perfectly into the postwar boom. Safeway adopted 43

Fresno Growing Up

A view from the air shows the Mayfair District, with the shopping center’s distinctive diamond-shaped layout at First and McKinley. The center was anchored by Purity Market, which sold the Mayfair Center store to McMillan Food Stores in 1964. Other stores in the center included Potter’s Drug, M-V Music and Pauline’s Sportswear. c. 1966. Lance Nix.

a similar model and opened its first Fresno supermarket in 1951, with other chains following. Among them: Mayfair, Purity, McMillan’s, Giant and Foodland. Drugstores, meanwhile, were no longer just places to get a prescription filled. Gradually, they began offering some of the same items traditionally found at five-and-dime stores, while adding photo departments, soda fountains and other services. Thrifty Drug, which had several stores around town, was known for its ice cream—which was so popular it continued to be sold under that name after Rite Aid acquired the chain years later. Triple J opened in late 1962 at the Ashlan Park shopping center at Cedar and Ashlan. That neighborhood was growing rapidly, thanks to the new Fresno State campus just down the block, and the 27,000-square-foot store was a popular destination for a lot more than its drug counter. If you wanted something to eat, you could sit back and relax in a 34-seat dining room. You could order a hot cup of 44

joe at the coffee shop or, if you had a green thumb, you could step outside and browse in the garden section. If you were a kid, you could buy a comic book and then head back behind Triple J to check out a stock car racetrack called the Pit Stop. (A second Triple J opened seven years after the first, at Palm and Bullard avenues in northwest Fresno.) Ashlan Park had the feel of something between a strip mall and a regional shopping center. The developer built a breezeway between two of the buildings, and a W.T. Grant variety store moved in shortly after the center opened. If you couldn’t find it at Grant or Triple J, you probably didn’t need it. The center also offered men’s and women’s fashions, a shoe store and other retailers. There was no need to head downtown with that kind of convenience just around the corner. Fresno was beginning to learn the meaning of urban sprawl.

The Ashlan Park shopping center was the first major regional strip mall in northeast Fresno, anchored by Triple J Drugs and W.T. Grant.

Main Dragged Away By the end of the 1950s, the new freeway alignment of U.S. 99 was open. It was progress, but some areas that had once been a symbol of Fresno’s glory were left behind. The Belmont traffic circle had been built in the early 1930s, at what was then the north edge of town. One function it served was to slow southbound traffic along U.S. 99 as it approached Fresno at Roeding Park, funneling cars through a short tunnel beneath the railroad tracks and onto H Street. Some of those cars came from a burgeoning motel row just north of the park. Travelers would pass these motor inns one after another heading south, and they remained standing decades later, shadows of their former glory. At the north end stands the Astro, with its distinctive soaring tower that lit up in brightly colored neon near Dakota Avenue; and farther on, the Star-Lite Inn. Then, approaching Roeding Park, more of them line up to greet drivers with once dazzling but now faded neon signs that rise almost like grave markers at the side of the highway: • The Flamingo • The Paradise • The Sands • The Holiday • The Paradise • The Town House

The Fresno Motel sign, with the image of a bikini-clad swimmer (complete with bathing cap) doing a swan dive into a pool of blue waves, is perhaps the most distinctive sight along a route that offered both convenience and comfort to those visiting Fresno. Situated just north of the city proper, the motor inns offered travelers a place to stay that was within walking distance of popular leisure sites like Roeding Park, with its lake, picnic area and zoo. If you stayed at one of these places, you might have treated yourself to a dip in the pool or a buffet; you would have been safely beyond the bustle of the downtown core, yet close enough to get there in about five minutes. But when the new freeway went in west of Roeding, these old oases dried up. No longer directly off the main highway, they found themselves on what amounted to a frontage road running parallel to the railroad tracks. As time passed, the city grew north and left them behind. The area deteriorated to such an extent that it became a haven for drug deals, monthly renters and prostitutes. Chain link fences topped with barbed wire went up around some properties, and some closed altogether. One review on the online travel site Expedia dated 2013 called one of the places “dark and creepy,” and another complained of “prostitutes and drug dealers in and around the hotel.”

The Fresno Motel along Motel Drive, north of Roeding Park, boasted a fancy sign, but the neighborhood has changed a lot since the place was built.

Fresno Growing Up

The transformation didn’t happen overnight. Two new amusement areas added to Roeding— the Playland amusement park in 1955 and the Storyland children’s theme park in 1962—made the park an even more popular destination. But out-of-town visitors who wanted to visit Roeding Park would enter from Olive and Belmont avenues on the north and south, and they got to those entrances via the new freeway, not Old 99. In 1968, the Town House was still advertising fine dining at its restaurant, featuring broiled tenderloin and mini lobster tail. The ad, however, was in a local newspaper and aimed at local customers. The basic problem was that the motels along the old highway had been built to serve an out-of-

town clientele, but now most of the people who used the street were local … and there weren’t that many of them. The shift in heavy commercial and vacation traffic to the freeway also meant fewer cars using the Belmont circle as a gateway to town, leaving it to be used primarily by local traffic, such as weekday and weekend commuters. This was fortunate for the latter because, after 1964, they no longer had the option of cruising Fulton. It was closed. Not just closed, but filled in with concrete. Where the old main drag had once been, there was now a new pedestrian mall.

The Sands Motel on Motel Drive is a shell of its former self. Its name recalls a Las Vegas resort, but the reality is much less impressive.

Malled In At a certain level, Fresno has always wanted to be San Francisco. “The City,” they called it. No further elaboration needed. There were those in town who identified more with Los Angeles, only about 20 miles farther to the south than San Francisco was in the opposite direction. One of Fresno’s principal downtown streets might have been named Wilshire or Sepulveda after a famous L.A. boulevard, but it wasn’t. It was named Van Ness, for one of the streets of San Francisco. And when baseball’s Giants and Dodgers both moved west in the late ’50s, Fresno’s minor league team signed on as an affiliate of the former. The Li’l Giants, they were called. Even Fresno’s downtown seemed to emulate San Francisco’s, with tightly packed skyscrapers and (for a time) its own trolley system. But the trolley tracks were torn up in 1939 amid complaints that the overhead wires were an eyesore and the trolleys were blocking automobile traffic. The cars won. But pretty soon, there was too much traffic downtown—even without the trolleys—and Fresno was spreading out like a many-tentacled monster toward the suburbs. As the ’50s wore on, it quickly started to resemble San Francisco not nearly so much as Los Angeles. The reason was simple, really: San Francisco was hemmed in on three sides by water, but Fresno (like Los Angeles, and unlike the city by the Bay) had room to expand in all directions. Perhaps it grew primarily northward because, as Gottschalks chairman Joe Levy once put it, “in

Main Dragged Away

cow counties, you always move with the wind. You move away from the smell.” His was as good an explanation as any. But absent any watery constraints, Fresno’s leaders needed a suitably beguiling fragrance to lure residents back toward the city center they were fast abandoning. A fragrance of sophistication, not fumes from the tailpipes of the ever-present automobile. The kids who came to cruise Fulton didn’t buy anything from downtown merchants; neither did the travelers passing through town. Something radical had to be attempted. In that cause, Fresno found an ally in an architect named Victor Gruen. Some say Gruen was a visionary; others consider that vision misguided. Whichever camp you fall into, there’s no denying he was influential. An unabashed critic of the car culture and its red-headed stepchild, the American suburb, Gruen saw suburbia as a collection of “detached lives in detached houses” that amounted to “the greatest collection of vulgarity … ever collected by mankind.” With its billboards, motels, gas station

“When I was little, my mom and I would take the bus downtown to watch the Christmas parade and then go shopping afterwards. The mall was all decorated, and JC Penney’s would have animated Christmas displays in their windows.” – Sherri White Hicks

and industrial lots, it was a “land of economic and racial segregation, with phony respectability and genuine boredom.” In a breathtaking stroke of irony, Gruen’s most lasting contribution to the American landscape turned out to be profoundly suburban: the indoor shopping mall. Compounding that irony was the fact that just such a mall would be blamed for the ultimate failure of Gruen’s vision to transform Fresno’s downtown—not into a little San Francisco, but into a miniature version of his own hometown, Vienna. Gruen, a socialist who emigrated to the United States when the Nazis annexed Austria, maintained a wistful, idealized vision of his youthful home. Dismissing U.S. metropolitan areas as “seventeen suburbs in search of a city,” he lauded instead the European model exemplified by Vienna: “The city is the countless cafes and sidewalk cafes of Vienna, from the ornate ones to the little ones called Tchochs, where a person with little money may spend hours over a cup of coffee and a newspaper.” Instead of rushing from one place to another in smog-spewing motorcars, Gruen advocated a leisurely stroll through an integrated community. Indoors or outdoors, it didn’t matter. Gruen’s greatest legacy, the nation’s first indoor mall in Edina, Minn., was based on just such a template. His original design included apartments, a school, medical facilities, a park and a lake … none of which was ever built. Similar plans would be made for Fresno’s downtown—with similar results. Gruen’s ideas were radical, to say the least. Recruited to offer a plan for Fort Worth, Texas, he

Fulton Street as seen from the Security Bank Building before its conversion into a pedestrian mall. 1962. Lance Nix.

proposed relegating all service and delivery traffic to an underground business district, leaving the surface as the exclusive domain of pedestrians. Fort Worth rebuffed his vision as too “dramatic,” but Fresno remained interested in Gruen’s ideas— others of which were equally dramatic. Gruen presented a proposal for a 36-acre “superblock” centered on Fulton Street, which would no longer be a street at all but, rather, a pedestrian mall and outdoor park/art gallery. Trees would be planted, sculptures would be added and fountains would be installed. Edgardo Contini, Gruen’s point man for the project, said simply, “There is no precedent.” 47

Fresno Growing Up

Broadway, the city’s main thoroughfare, was blocked off and uprooted, with traffic diverted to H Street, a block to the west. Mariposa and Merced streets would be converted into pedestrian cross-malls between H and Van Ness. Parking garages would be added (the most eye-catching, a double-spiral structure at Van Ness and Inyo, was built in 1969). It was a complete reimagining of downtown, reworked almost from scratch. The Bee put it this way: “The Fresno plan appears to be the first one which has taken an entire central area—nearly 2,000 acres of it—torn it apart and put it back together again.” As Gruen’s vision began to take shape, another architect, Garrett Eckbo, was brought in to work on the details. He brought to life a vision of a pedestrian walkway that meandered like a stream between high-rise embankments and thriving retail way stations. Along the way would be fountains, planter boxes that were home to shady trees, arbors and sculptures—“some by artists of world renown, some by competent lesser-known artists,” including local people, art committee chairman O.J. Woodward said. Among the sculptures ultimately chosen for display: • Aquarius Ovoid by George Tsutakawa of Seattle, a fountain bearing water across and through its oval structure, whose fluid shape complements the liquid it bears. • Trisem, a sculpture by Fresno artist Newton Russell that features stacks of smooth stones rising parallel to one another and appearing to be precariously balanced.

• An all-wood clock tower rising 60 feet that was designed by Jan de Swart of Holland— it’s among the mall’s most distinctive and recognizable works of art. • The Visit, a bronze sculpture of two women by Clement Renzi. • La Grand Laveuse (otherwise known as “Washer Woman”), a bronze by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the famed French Impressionist painter.

“The Washer Woman” is perhaps the most famous sculpture to have earned a place on the Fulton Mall. Created by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, it was one of several sculptures visible at various points along the pedestrian street.

The initial results were encouraging. The superblock opened on September 2, 1964, to a crowd The Bee described as the largest ever to converge upon downtown: “It was a crowd scene from a Hollywood spectacular, the county fair and the opener of the World Series all rolled into one,” gushed reporter Edwin M. Clough. The governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, kicked off the Fresno Festival celebration with a speech that called the mall a “shining example of how a dedicated community can meet the gigantic problems of growth.” A teenager in the crowd threw an egg at him. It missed. Another egg, aimed at local congressman B.F. Sisk as he was leaving, hit a local attorney squarely in the back. But the success of the opening left everyone confident that no one would come out of this experiment with egg on his face. Indeed, during the first week it was open, an estimated 250,000 people strolled the mall. The worst problem reported was an excess of pigeon feathers, which had clogged the fountain filters at the north end of the mall. All appeared to be proceeding according to plan. The mall wouldn’t stand alone downtown. Other improvements were in the works. The Del Webb Townhouse, a 22-story monolith, was the city’s first new skyscraper in nearly four decades when it opened in 1964. Only the Security Bank building was taller. Two years later, a new downtown convention center opened with an arena, exhibit hall and live theater. The City Council rejected another vision for the convention center, a design that looked like a

Main Dragged Away

sundial, with 2,400-plus parking spaces radiating out from a central, circular arena. The plan also included a golf course and a downtown lake (a proposal that, decades later, would resurface and again fail to reach fruition). But getting the convention center built at all was far from a done deal. In April 1963, an $8 million bond issued to finance the project fell far short of the two-thirds approval needed to advance it, gaining less than 60 percent of the vote. Opponents, led by a group called Fresno Citizens for Better Planning, wanted to rely on private enterprise to fund the project. The group offered three alternative sites: one near Chinatown, another south of Roeding Park and east of the freeway, and a preferred 20-acre site to the north that the council had rejected previously. That location, at Ashlan Avenue and Motel Drive, had the advantage of being on donated land, and proponents argued that it would relieve traffic congestion downtown. The disadvantage was it lay a full two miles north of what were then the city limits. So much for downtown revitalization. Eventually, however, the current location won the day and downtown appeared primed to enter a new era. Then it all fell apart. In 1965, scarcely a year after the mall opened, a Santa Barbara-based developer named Gordon MacDonald proposed a 58-acre shopping center for First Street and Shaw Avenue in north Fresno. Gottschalks and JC Penney, both downtown retailers, were to have stores there, along with the Broadway-Hale chain of department stores (which operated Weinstock’s) and some 30 specialty busi-

Shoppers look for holiday deals on Fulton Mall in December, 1966. © California Department of Transportation, 1966.

nesses. Initially, the enterprise was to be called Fresno Fashion Square. “This is to be a new concept in shopping centers,” said Howard Thomas, an attorney for the developer, “with the department stores anchored at each end of an air-conditioned mall.” He estimated the center would create 2,000 jobs and $30 million in business annually.

There was a catch: The land was zoned for residential, not retail development, and a rezoning application would require approval from the Planning Commission and Fresno City Council. Merchants of established businesses were, understandably, opposed. City planners, likewise, were “in violent disagreement,” producing a nine-page position paper that argued it would blow the area 49

Fresno Growing Up

plan out of the water. Fresno had just completed an update to its College Community Plan that preserved a 14-square-mile area around Fresno State for residential and neighborhood commercial use. An indoor mall would render that planning null and void. The Planning Commission found itself squeezed between the developer and the planners. It initially voted to delay consideration for two weeks—then, after most of the audience had left, reversed course and approved it. Mayor Floyd Hyde said he was “shocked and disappointed,” and asked the commission chairman to meet with him and explain what had happened. There’s no word on what he was told at that meeting. But the city council itself had the final word anyway, and the panel decisively rebuffed both the developer and commissioners on a 6–1 vote. In addition to fears over the potential effect on downtown, council members were worried that Shaw might turn into another Blackstone, with strip development up and down both sides of the avenue between the mall site and Fresno State. Fresno Fashion Fair (the new name for the project) appeared to be dead in the water. “I think our children will thank us for this,” Hyde said after the vote. But the final say didn’t turn out to be final at all, and Hyde would soon change his tune. The developer was not about to just go quietly into the night. If Fresno wouldn’t rezone Shaw Avenue to allow the project, he could build it in Clovis instead. Then Fresno would lose out on all that potential sales tax revenue, but the new mall would still be close enough to draw suburbanites away from downtown. 50

It would be the worst of both worlds. In late March, just a couple of months after the council rejected the project, a bewildering piece appeared in The Bee. The developer, MacDonald, had sent a letter to Hyde and other city officials, saying he’d been getting phone calls from “various persons” claiming to represent “official sentiment.” These unnamed persons had been sending “vague, oblique” signals that the door wasn’t really closed to MacDonald’s project. In the meantime, MacDonald revealed that he himself was working on a new proposal—but that was all he was willing to say. MacDonald was the one being vague and oblique. Yes, he said, he was still interested in coming to Fresno. But beyond that, he was playing coy and keeping everything close to the vest: who had contacted him, what had been said and even the nature of his own plans. To reveal such details, he told The Bee, would serve no useful purpose, and he didn’t want to encourage speculation, citing unfounded rumors that had already arisen about his plans for Fresno. “I retain my interest in the Fresno area,” he told The Bee. “I think that should speak for itself, and I don’t think I can tell you any more than that.” It didn’t take long for Hyde to respond. The very next day, an article appeared in which the mayor seemed to be bending over backward to accommodate MacDonald. His letter to MacDonald, released to the media, read as follows: “Ever since our recent hearing concerning the Fresno Fashion Fair, I have been anxious to write to you personally to express some thoughts about the project. … My purpose in writing you is to express my personal interest in the very fine project you have contemplated for Fresno. It seems to me that

there should be a way in which we can solve our planning problem and work with you in developing a project that would be an asset to the City of Fresno as well as to you and your associates.” What was the nature of this project? Was it Fashion Fair? Something else? Hyde, like MacDonald, was playing coy. But the difference in tone between the two principles was impossible to miss: MacDonald was “still interested,” but Hyde was “anxious.” Before long, the picture started to come into focus. A parcel at the north end of Fulton Mall had proved to be a trouble spot, with Cooper’s department store and Montgomery Ward the only tenants in an area bounded by Merced Street on the south and Tuolumne on the north. MacDonald proposed taking out an option on the parcel, in the hope of attracting a new department store that would strengthen the area. In September 1966, he told The Bee, “To make promises would be foolish, but I would do whatever is in my power—and that might be considerable—to help the downtown area.” What would MacDonald get out of it? The answer became clear three months later, when the City Council reversed itself and voted 5–2 to approve the Fashion Fair project, with Hyde among those switching his vote: “As a legislative body, we are responsive to the needs of the total community,” he said. It was just another in a series of vague, oblique statements. Was the project approved because of the carrot (MacDonald’s promise to help with downtown), the stick (the Clovis option), or some combination of the two? Fresnans were left to read between the lines.

Main Dragged Away

Forever 21 became the third tenant to serve as the eastern anchor of Fashion Fair, following Weinstocks and Gottschalks.

Fresno Growing Up

In September of the following year, MacDonald signed an agreement with the Fresno Redevelopment Agency to develop the north end of Fulton Mall, placing a 10 percent deposit ($60,780) on the purchase price of $607,000. But it was only an option to buy: the deposit was refundable if MacDonald failed to entice a major department store chain to locate on the site by August 1, 1968. In the meantime, Fashion Fair went forward. Was MacDonald’s promise just a ploy to keep a headlock on the north Fulton property while he built his indoor mall? There were those who thought so. And when August 1 arrived, MacDonald had indeed failed to lure a major department store to the site. It wasn’t that they weren’t interested, he said, it was “merely a question of timing”: All the potential tenants were already overcommitted to other areas. As a result, MacDonald felt he was justified in approaching the redevelopment agency to ask for his money back. Redevelopment agency member J.D. Rafferty voted against giving it to him, accusing MacDonald of tying up a choice piece of downtown property while he went forward with Fashion Fair. But a deal was a deal. The agency had gone into its dealings with MacDonald with its eyes open, agency member Jack Kazanjian said: “We knew what we were getting into. We gambled and we lost, but I think we learned something.” He left unsaid exactly what that something was, but the lesson should have been clear from the beginning, some contended. “A long time ago, I predicted this was going to happen,” city council member P.J. Camaroda told The Bee. “I am disgusted with the situation. We

just are not doing things in a businesslike manner. In the future, when a man ties up property for a year or two years and he does not come through, he should lose his deposit. That way, there would be more incentive to put together a deal.” Fashion Fair was completed in 1970, with workers using a helicopter to lower 10 air condi-

Looking south along Fulton Mall.

tioning units—weighing between 300 and 5,000 pounds—onto the roof of the massive structure. The Fulton Mall, in the meantime, continued a slow decline. Some major tenants left and focused on other locations. Montgomery Ward shifted its focus northward to a huge store at Blackstone and Bul-

Main Dragged Away

lard, leaving the mall the same year Fashion Fair debuted. Coffee’s menswear had a store in Fashion Fair; so did JC Penney, which held on to its Fulton location until 1986. Others, such as Roos-Atkins and Cooper’s, simply closed up shop and abandoned the Fresno market. Among major retailers, Gottschalks was the last to leave, abandoning what had been its flagship location in 1988. “The mall as it was conceived and built was really kind of a beautiful thing,” Roger Rocka said. “With all the artwork, it was just gorgeous. But then the city started approving shopping centers and undercut it. It wasn’t the mall’s fault.” There’s no question the city had found itself badly outmaneuvered in the Fashion Fair affair, and there’s little doubt that the new mall contributed to the problems that lay ahead on Fulton. But Fashion Fair was just part of the problem. Indeed, that problem predated Fulton Mall, and the pedestrian concept itself had been an attempt to stop the bleeding of an already wounded patient. As progressive as the plans for Fulton Mall may have seemed, the motivation behind them was, at its core, reactionary. Long before Fashion Fair opened its doors, shoppers were being drawn away by other far-flung retail centers on the fringes of the city—the strip malls Victor Gruen loathed. Manchester Center had already opened, luring Sears, Rhodes and Woolworth, among other tenants. Fashion Fair merely followed in its footsteps, continuing a trend that had been under way for more than two decades.

By 1974, it seemed the city had completely capitulated, adopting a general plan that promoted “multiple centers” for shopping at major intersections. Periodic attempts were made to lure major retailers back downtown, the most notable being an intense lobbying effort aimed at Macy’s. The stumbling block, once again, was Fashion Fair: Macy’s wanted a store in Fresno, but not downtown. The indoor mall was its destination of choice. The city tried to play hardball, telling Macy’s it was downtown or bust. But the retailer called the city’s bluff by using the same strategy Gordon MacDonald had used in his quest to build Fashion Fair in the first place: It threatened to hightail it out to Clovis and let the community on Fresno’s northeast flank rake in all the sales tax dollars. Its bluff called, Fresno caved and allowed Macy’s to build at Fashion Fair. Meanwhile, the downtown mall succumbed to the reality of its location. It wasn’t close to the suburbs, where the more affluent had found refuge. Instead, it was just across the tracks from the gritty, lower-income neighborhoods of old Chinatown and West Fresno—neighborhoods the city had neglected as it sought to revitalize downtown. It was, in a sense, inevitable that the mall should end up opening shops to serve patrons from these nearby environs, rather than those from the faraway suburbs to the north. As the big department stores closed, small ethnic retailers and discount centers took their place.

The middle class and wealthy suburbanites stayed away, complaining of crime and safety issues, but often also reluctant to mingle with people who didn’t speak their language or share their culture. None of this had anything to do with Fashion Fair. Dan Whitehurst, who became mayor in the 1970s, explained it succinctly to the Los Angeles Times: “Wherever the middle-income people are, that’s where they want to be. And in Fresno, because of the development patterns, those people are not downtown.” In February 2014, the Fresno City Council gave upon its 50-year-old experiment and decided to put an end to the pedestrian mall that had once been lauded as a bold step into the future of urban development. On a 5–2 vote, the council adopted a plan to open Fulton back up to traffic. The dream was over for the Fulton Mall. Meanwhile, Fashion Fair had expanded more than once and continued to draw throngs of shoppers, especially during the holiday season. Mayor Hyde didn’t stick around for the opening of Fashion Fair. He took a job in Washington, D.C., as assistant secretary for Model Cities in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1969. A few years later, he reflected on Victor Gruen’s vision and what went wrong. Fresno, he said, wasn’t Vienna.

Downtown

The doors to The Grand downtown still bear the symbols of the building’s original owner, the San Joaquin Light and Power Corporation. The historic Fresno water tower is seen illuminated at night. The tower, at Fresno and O streets downtown, stands 109 feet tall. It was a functioning water tower from its completion in 1894 until 1963, boasting a capacity of 250,000 gallons of water. It was remodeled in 2001 to become a visitors’ center.

A view eastward along from the Fulton Mall shows three styles of architecture, with the Pacific Southwest Building in the foreground, the Holiday Inn (formerly the Fresno Hilton) at center and the courthouse in the distance.

Fulton Street at San Joaquin, looking south toward the Mall area near twilight. The Grand, formerly called the San Joaquin Light and Power Building, the PG&E Building and the International Trade Center, is prominent at center-right. It was the city’s tallest building when construction was completed in 1923.

Downtown The 15-floor Pacific Southwest Building, also known as the Security Bank Building, stands watch over Fulton Mall. At 219 feet high, it was the tallest building between Los Angeles and Oakland for more than four decades, beginning with its completion in 1925.

The Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church at 2226 Ventura Ave. was built in 1914 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

The Memorial Auditorium at dusk. Built in 1936, it has played host to events ranging from concerts, circuses and fashion shows to boxing matches and auto shows over the years. It was the site of the 1956 California Democratic Convention, featuring that yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presidential ticket of Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver.

Fulton Mall Statues

“The Visit” by Clement Renzi was installed at the north end of Fulton Mall.

This sculpture of granite boulders by Fresno artist T. Newton Russell is among the many that were installed along the Fulton Mall.

The distinctive clock tower on the Fulton Mall, with the Guarantee Savings Building in the background. Dutch artist Jan de Stewart created the all-wood clock tower, rising 60 feet high. The 12-floor Guarantee Savings Building, originally known as the Mattei Building, was built in 1921.

Sunlight bathes the “Yokuts Native American” statue by Clement Renzi near the south end of the Fulton Mall.

Around Town

The Van Ness Avenue underpass north of Shields serves as a gateway to Christmas Tree Lane during December.

This stone structure marks the entrance to an early subdivision off Van Ness Avenue south of Shields.

Fresno Yosemite International Airport is still called Fresno Air Terminal by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Retail

The eastern anchor space Fresno Fashion Fair was originally occupied by Weinstock’s and, later, by Gottschalks. When the latter, a Fresno institution for more than a century, closed its doors, Forever 21 moved in.

The “Ivory Tower” was the original centerpiece of the Mayfair Center at First and McKinley.

The south entrance to Manchester Center.

Blackstone Avenue, looking north from the center median just south of Shields. At left is the McDonald’s and a former Winchell’s Donut House. Beyond the trees at right (unseen) is Manchester Center.

Education The water tower at Fresno State.

The Ag Sciences Building was one of the first constructed at Fresno Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cedar and Shaw campus.

The library at Fresno City College was completed in 1933 when the campus still housed Fresno State - then known as the Fresno State Teachers College. It was built to match the style of the Old Administration Building, which opened 17 years earlier.

Entertainment

The Tower Theatre marquee is seen on a late fall day.

The Big Fresno Barn sits abandoned and dilapidated on Shields Avenue, about five miles west of town.

Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theater in the Tower District.

William Boyd, aka Hopalong Cassidy, rides his horse, Topper, in Fresno’s Centennial Parade downtown on April 20, 1956. Boyd was originally invited to serve as grand marshal in the parade, but no mention was made of his horse. When local children discovered this, they launched a letter-writing campaign that generated more than 2,000 requests and resulted in Topper’s inclusion. This photo was taken by Wilbur Dowd and provided courtesy of his daughter, Melissa Dowd Beene.

Sports

A historical marker points to the place where Frank Chance Field once stood at Cedar and Ventura.

Selland Arena downtown opened in 1966 with a capacity of 6,582. It was expanded in 1981 to hold more than 10,000 fans and for many years served as home to the Fresno State menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s basketball team and Fresno Falcons hockey teams. The biggest concert acts to visit Fresno once held court here.

The western stands of Ratcliffe Stadium, built in 1926 and renamed in 1941 in honor of Fresno Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first football coach, Emory Ratcliffe. The 13,000-seat stadium hosted the West Coast Relays and four Raisin Bowl games, beginning in 1946. Fresno State moved its games to Bulldog Stadium in 1980, but Fresno City College and Fresno Unified high school teams continued to play there. Ratcliffe was the site of the Rolling Stones concert in 1965.

Part 2

Fresnostalgic Life and Leisure

Fresno Growing Up

The retro-style McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on Blackstone Avenue south of Shields, built in 1997, was designed to emulate the original McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that opened in the same location 42 years earlier.

Fast Food and Funtime Art Bender was a drummer in a swing band, working at an ice cream shop in San Bernardino called The Cone Castle, when one of his customers approached him about a better gig. A burger gig. The guy’s name was Maurice, and he had been operating a barbecue drive-in with his brother for eight years, complete with carhops and a sit-down dining area. It was in a circular building, a lot like Stan’s Drive-in in downtown Fresno, and the menu included everything from red hots to giant malts to 25 different barbecue items. The brothers, however, noticed that hamburgers were selling better than anything else, so they had an idea. Why not just streamline everything? Reduce the payroll by cutting out the carhops, simplify the menu and make everything self-service? Then, they could use the savings to charge really low prices for just a few items. They closed down the store for three months, did some remodeling and put a big “opening soon” sign up in the parking lot. It just so happened that, when Maurice walked into The Cone Castle that day, he and his brother were just about ready to reopen their Famous BarBe-Q restaurant as the first “drive-in hamburger bar” in America. They needed someone to open the store for them, and Maurice had heard Bender was a hard worker. Bender, who needed the cash, jumped at the opportunity and wound up serving the first hamburger hot off the grill.

franchise was in Phoenix, and the brothers sent When the owners talked about streamlining the Bender out there to open the place. He also opened menu, they’d been serious. They didn’t even offer a couple of other franchise locations, until there fries or milkshakes in the beginning, and the selecwere about nine in all. Bender became the road tions later settled at nine. If you wanted to splurge, guy, opening restaurants, training workers and suyou could get a triple-thick shake for 20 cents, but pervising installation of the equipment. He’d set half the items on the menu (Coke, fries, root beer, up deals with the local butcher to buy the beef and coffee, orange drink) were just a dime. Milk was a with the town bakery to get the buns. couple of pennies more, and, for the main course, After his second stint in Phoenix, where he you could choose between a 15-cent hamburger worked as manager for about a year, Bender deand a 19-cent cheeseburger. cided he wanted to go back to California. The average burger in those days cost a quarter, That’s when a popular kitchen appliance so it was a bargain. changed everything. At those prices, employees were hardly makHamilton Beach was causing fits for the coming a killing. Bender went to work for the brothpetition with its low-priced ers at a dollar an hour, milkshake mixer. The marand five years later “Coming home from school and keting rep for Prince Caswas making 35 cents watching The Mickey Mouse Club tle Multimixer was feeling more—as the brothers’ the heat, so it definitely top lieutenant. Not exwith Uncle Bill, then Al Radka. caught his attention when actly a king’s ransom, Sixties TV was really a marvelous the brothers ordered eight although it was enough of his machines. An idea to buy plenty of those time for a kid.” hit him. If he could control “tempting” cheeseburg– Jim Parnell more of the restaurants, he ers he’d been cooking. could sell more of the mixThe place quickly ers—and make a profit off what seemed to be a became so successful that the brothers started popular new fast-food concept in the meantime. offering franchise deals. Nothing elaborate. For (They didn’t call it fast food back then. The broth$900, someone could buy plans for the building ers referred to it as the Speedee Service System, and and advice on where to get the materials. The first 73

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they even had a cartoon mascot named Speedee—a winking burger-headed fellow in a chef ’s cap—to help promote it on their signs.) The mixer salesman approached the brothers with the idea, but they weren’t keen on opening more restaurants. They had enough on their burger-filled plates. So he made a different pitch, offering to take over franchising operations for the chain. When they agreed, he opened his own franchise in Illinois, under Bender’s supervision, on the understanding that Bender could then return to California and open up another franchise for the San Bernardino native. The restaurant, though, wouldn’t be in San Bernardino—where it would have competed with the original—but, rather, in Fresno, where Bender would stay on as manager. Instead, however, Bender wound up taking over the franchise himself because the original franchise holder died before it even opened. The new place on Blackstone, just south of Shields, served its first burger in 1955. Broad glass windows and stainless steel counters across the

front welcomed customers to one of three windows: one for ordering fries and two for the other menu items. The big sign out front showed mascot Speedee offering up a hamburger from beneath one of the golden arches that would become the restaurant’s trademark. Two more arches bracketed each side of the building. Bender eventually owned seven McDonald’s franchises, and the mixer salesman—Ray Kroc— bought the chain outright from Dick and Maurice “Mac” McDonald in 1961. Six years later, he replaced Speedee with a new mascot, a clown named Ronald, and the original Fresno store was eventually replaced with a more mundane looking 1970s version … which in turn gave way to a retro re-creation of the original in 1997. The business was the first franchised location of McDonald’s under Kroc. By 1968, McDonald’s had three Fresno stores. That’s right, just three—half as many as a local burger chain called LesterBurger.

McDonald’s became famous for its signs that bragged of “more than X million [hamburgers] served,” but it wasn’t the only chain serving up burgers in bunches. Norm Christensen owned Norm’s Drive In at the Mayfair Center, where he boasted that he had sold half a million of his “eNORMous” hamburgers by 1953. The figure surpassed a million just a few months later. The burgers they were so good—at least according to one of Christenson’s ads—that he limited customers to 10 apiece “to discourage resale of these delicious hamburgers by other restaurant owners.” In 1953, Christenson opened a second location on Palm, a block north of Shields. By the early ’60s, he had a chain of five eateries throughout the city, having added outlets at Broadway and Amador, Elm and North, and Blackstone and Shaw. There he sold burgers called Li’l Giants, also the name of Fresno’s minor-league baseball team, through the mid-’60s. Christensen also held the concessionaire’s contract at Millerton Lake and ran Clawson Boat Works on Blackstone south of Shaw. His original Mayfair drive-in later became Mmunchy’s, “home of the 12-cent hamburger.” 74

The Crewcut Kid McDonald’s may have made history with its franchise at Blackstone and Shields, but it was never a Fresno institution the way LesterBurger was. Sure, McDonald’s had Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar, but LesterBurger had the irrepressible Al Radka and Mr. LesterBurger. Who was Mr. LesterBurger?

Norm’s advertises the Li’l Giant burger in the summer of ’63.

Fast Food and Funtime

Start with the famous smiley face, stretch it out to a horizontal oval and add a C-shaped nose. Then picture a crew cut lifted directly off the head of comedian George Gobel, with bug eyes staring out from behind a pair of Harry Potter-shaped glasses. He was often depicted licking his lips and rubbing a hamburger-shaped belly. That was Lester, in all his cartoon glory, confidently declaring his burgers were “YUMMY!” Les Lindley founded the chain at a single location in 1958 upon graduating from Fresno State College. He later told The Bee that he started out

A LesterBurger ad from 1966. At the height of its success, LesterBurger had more locations in Fresno than McDonald’s did, but unlike McDonald’s, owner Les Lindley never transformed the chain into a franchise operation, and all the burger outlets eventually closed.

working seven days a week and, on some days, only brought in $20. Most of that went back into operating costs, and he never managed to net more than $100 a month initially. Of course, it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds: $100 in 1958 would buy you more than $800 in burgers in 2013. Business, of course, improved, and the chain expanded, offering deals like a special “full meal” sale: “a giant ‘yummy’ LesterBurger, golden french fries and a huge 20-cent drink” for 89 cents. LesterBurgers were scattered all around town. In fact, if you drove down Cedar Avenue, you’d pass no fewer than four of them. The most visible of the bunch was at the southeast corner of Blackstone and Clinton, just north of Fresno City College. Pretty soon, there was talk of starting franchises, and it seemed like Fresno was on the verge of having its very own McDonald’s-like success story. But ultimately, Lindley decided to operate only in Fresno and make “what I think is real quality food.” When the time came to follow through on some franchise plans he had been pursuing in 1969, Lindley backed away. “The money was suddenly very tight,” he told The Bee, “and I had this feeling that we might get one or two restaurants off the ground, but probably no more. So I pulled out of all the … preliminary franchise agreements.” A couple of years later, Lindley was confident enough to purchase a parcel of land on the south side of Belmont, east of Chestnut, for a new drivein to replace one at the northwest corner of the same intersection. The entire cost of the project, including the land, was $100,000, a big step up from the $100 a month Lindley was netting when he started out, even allowing for inflation.

Lindley’s business doubtless got a boost from Al Radka, Fresno’s Mr. Television, who promoted LesterBurger on the airwaves. He would ask about the ingredients of a burger, from the bun to the patty to the tomato, and when the list got to lettuce, Radka would say, “Lettuce eat!”

LesterBurger locations: • Blackstone and Santa Ana • Belmont and Chestnut • Cedar and Shaw • Cedar and Tulare • Cedar and Clinton • Cedar and Ventura • Blackstone and Clinton

Uncle Al and Co. Radka, a former Fresno State football player and student body president, was to Fresno’s local TV what Milton Berle was to network television. He wore crazy hats and funny costumes. He made the same questionable puns time and again ... and got a laugh each time. Perhaps most importantly, he talked to kids like they were real people. “Uncle Al” cut his teeth on musicals at Fresno State and, after serving four years in the Army Air Corps during World War II, returned to the Central Valley and got involved in broadcasting. He worked in radio and early television on KFRE-TV, hosting a show in the mid-’50s called Open House. Gary Cocola, who would later become chairman and CEO of Fresno-based Cocola Broadcasting, was still a teenager when he was invited to appear on the show each Wednesday afternoon. 75

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“I was 17 years old at San Joaquin Memorial High School in 1956, and the principal chose me to represent the school on a new TV station coming on the air,” he recalled. The first half of the show was dedicated to music by the Buddies, the house band at the Hacienda. During the second half-hour, from 5:30 to 6 p.m., a student from each of Fresno’s four high schools would come on the show and rate records—a segment Radka called the Traffic Pops Record Judges. “He patterned it after Peter Potter’s Jukebox Jury radio show,” Cocola said. “They’d judge the records and say it was either a hit or a miss. He would play three records in a half-hour, and then he’d go around with a microphone to each of us, and he’d say, ‘Gary, what did you think of that one?’ … Then we’d vote by holding up a sign shaped like a stop sign. On one side, it would say ‘Go,’ and on the other side, it would say ‘Stop.’” Radka wasn’t just on television. He spent much of the day working on the KFRE radio station. This was before federal regulators adopted rules in the early 1970s preventing a single company from owning radio stations, TV channels and newspapers in the same media market. (KMJ radio, Channel 24 and The Fresno Bee, for instance, were all owned by the McClatchy Company at the time.) “Al was on the radio at this time doing a six -hour Saturday afternoon show called The Gay Ride,” Cocola said. “He had a mythical companion with him, and he used to drive around with her. She was called Mrs. Winterbottom. He would ask her questions on the air as he drove around. ‘What do you think of this, Mrs. Winterbottom?’ You can see he was a pretty inventive kind of guy.”

Because KFRE operated a 50,000-watt radio station, Radka could be heard from the north end of the San Joaquin Valley all the way down to Bakersfield. “Everyone knew Al Radka from the radio,” Cocola said, “so he was at that time Mr. Radio and Television.” Later, Cocola would join Radka as co-host of another show called TV Record Hop, which once again invited local teens to rate pop records, very much as they did on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. In fact, Cocola recalls Radka telling him, “Let’s do American Bandstand in Fresno.” This was back before KFRE’s television station was exiled to the UHF band. Until the early 1960s, Fresno’s affiliate with the Columbia Broadcasting System was Channel 12. It was only later that federal regulators mandated the change to UHF, with its touchier television dial, and the station became Channel 30. It was there that Radka hosted perhaps his most well-known show, a children’s program called Channel 30 Funtime. A studio filled with young children joined Radka, singing the show’s theme: It’s Funtime! It’s Funtime! It’s Channel 30 Funtime! We’re happy to see you! We hope you’re feeling fine! We brushed our teeth and washed our face! And now we’re smiling in our place! It’s Funtime! Channel 30 Funtime! We’re smiling, why don’t you!

Then cartoons and other shorts were interspersed with Radka doing some gag, or talking to the kids lucky enough to be in the studio for the show. There was a time when Radka seemed to be all over the television: hosting telethons, serving as emcee for old Three Stooges shorts in the 3 p.m. justafter-school timeslot, and promoting Channel 30’s reruns of Lost in Space with guest appearances by Robbie the Robot. I remember becoming a huge fan of that robot, along with Dr. Zachary Smith and Will Robinson, probably because I first saw them on Channel 30. (Only later did I defect to the U.S.S. Enterprise after my father introduced me to Star Trek, similarly in reruns.) Radka had done his job with this very young Fresnan. He was, perhaps first and foremost, a promoter. After he retired from Channel 30, he started an ad agency, serving as pitchman over the years for Lamoure’s Cleaners, Producers Dairy (where he was every bit as recognizable as company symbol Hopalong Cassidy) and, perhaps most famously, Madera-based Oberti Olives. In one commercial for the company, Radka was shown falling asleep in bed while counting, not sheep, but cans of Oberti Olives. In another, he dressed up as William Tell and prepared to shoot a can of olives off the head of his “son,” who turned his back rather than risk being hit in the face. Radka sought to reassure him with a few lines of doggerel: “Fear not, my lad, you can trust your dad. But now for O-b-e-r-t-i, I shall let the arrow fly.” It was no use, however, as the arrow pierced the poor actor’s head straight through. Inexplicably, it appeared to have gone through his head sideways, even though he supposedly had his back

Fast Food and Funtime

to the off-target Tell. Such inconsistencies were not only forgiven but expected of Radka, whose slapstick style owed something to the shorts featuring Larry, Curly and Moe that he presented. Kids, needless to say, loved it. For Radka, it was always about the kids. For many years, he helped organize Fresno’s annual Hot Stove Dinner, which brought baseball stars to Fresno during the offseason and raised money for youth baseball programs in Fresno. Radka wooed the likes of Johnny Bench, Bobby Bonds (Barry’s father, for those too young to remember) and cowboy legend Gene Autry to the event. In 1974, he brought in Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn and Fresno native Tom Seaver, a future Hall-of-Famer himself. A couple of years later, the main attraction was home run king Hank Aaron, who signed 600

baseballs that were given to all the youngsters in attendance. Radka died in 2005, and a park was dedicated in his honor the following year on the north side of Belmont, out near Fowler Avenue in Southeast Fresno. At the park’s dedication, City Council member Mike Dages quoted former Mayor Dan Whitehurst in tribute to Radka. “Al Radka loved Fresno and made it fun to be here,” Dages said. “He was part of our lives, like Captain Kangaroo and Davy Crockett. Al was something Fresno had in common. He was a constant, like the summer heat and the winter fog.”

Around the (UHF) Dial

Radka wasn’t the only TV fixture during the formative years of Fresno television, and some of the most familiar faces appeared on programs aimed at the younger set. During the mid-’60s, Flippo Jr. came on right before Al Radka and the Three Stooges in the 4–5 p.m. KFRE time block. Flippo started out as the alter ego of marketing director Harry White, who dressed up as a clown to help promote the station. In the early ’60s, the station decided Flippo was ready for prime time … which, for kids, meant the after school timeslot. KFRE hired Kingsburg High graduate Marv Harrison to play the role for the cameras, and he stepped into a costume crafted by the Fresno State theater department. Eventually, he had three of them, inAl Radka, left, joins Webster Webfoot and Webster’s pal Jimmy Weldon on camera. cluding one influenced by the Fab Four. Photo courtesy of Gary Cocola.

He got hold of a Beatles wig, dyed it a vivid shade of red, and stuck it on his head. The result, like the Beatles themselves, was a hit. When Hanoian’s Market at Cedar and Butler threw its grand opening celebration, parents were invited to “bring the kiddies” so they could meet Flippo, who appeared along with a “mechanical robot” (is there any other kind?) from popular radio station KYNO. On television, Harrison had a run of about a decade, presenting Popeye cartoons along with “games, puzzles contests … and just plain foolishness and fun.” He came into Fresno living rooms from a homey set populated by an assortment of guest characters. Captain Kangaroo had Mr. Moose and Mr. Green Jeans, but Flippo had Lucy Goose and Effie Mae Prunedediddle. The good captain had a talking grandfather clock? Well, Flippo had a talking rocking chair named (what else?) Granddad. Later in the decade, Flippo’s show moved to mornings, where it could be seen right before Captain Kangaroo and opposite Webster Webfoot. Who was Webster Webfoot? If you lived in Fresno during the 1960s, you wouldn’t have to ask. Jimmy Weldon, a voice actor and ventriloquist, created Webster and joined him in front of the cameras, starting in the 1950s and continuing throughout much of the following decade. Although he was a Fresno fixture, the talking duck with the blue baseball cap and matching scarf got his start as a radio voice Weldon used while working as a disc jockey for radio station KWCO in Oklahoma right after World War II. The character was born almost by chance, when Weldon walked into the office one day doing an off-the77

Fresno Growing Up

cuff impression of Donald Duck. (He would later use his “duck voice” for the cartoon character Yakky Doodle, a fixture on The Yogi Bear Show in the early ’60s.) Weldon—or perhaps more accu-

In 1964, KFRE rolled out what it called “a new concept in television entertainment,” two-and-a-half hours of locally produced shows starting at 3:30 p.m. with “Flippo Jr.” and carrying through until 6 p.m. cartoons, followed by the CBS Evening News. 1964. The Fresno Bee.

rately, Webster—proved so popular that he moved his act to a larger radio station in Dallas, which was branching out into television. For the visual medium, Weldon had to fashion an actual Webster hand puppet. The character’s popularity grew to the point that the pair earned gigs on a Los Angeles t.v. station and as host(s) of Funny Boners, a children’s version of Truth or Consequences. Weldon first came to Fresno in 1956 and, after a few years in Hollywood and New York, returned to the San Joaquin Valley in 1961 for an extended run. Not only did Webster have his own show in Fresno, but Weldon—a licensed pilot—also flew him to Salinas and Bakersfield for programs airing there. Like Flippo, Weldon and Webster made appearances around town throughout the decade. They presided over giveaway drawings at six local Palm markets, handed out free ice cream at the Arnold Palmer Driving Range across from Fresno State, and showed up for an Easter egg hunt at Giant Food Centers. Community service events included an appearance in United Givers Plan charity parade—along with Radka, Flippo and cowboy star Gene Autry—during the summer of ’64, and numerous visits to local Sunday schools. Back then, local television consisted of just four stations: three network affiliates and one minor independent, Channel 53. Large antennas sprouted like silver weeds from the roofs of Fresno homes whose occupants could afford them. The less affluent had to settle for the rabbit ears or “silver circle” TV antennas that came with the set. We had an old Zenith—or was it a Magnavox?—black-and-white TV with two channel

knobs. One was for VHF, or very high frequency, stations (channels 2–13); the other covered the UHF, or the ultra-high frequency bandwidth. It was easy enough to tell the difference: the VHF dial locked into place with a loud click when it reached a defined channel number, but using the UHF knob? Well, imagine Goldilocks trying to work a combination safe: You had to get it just right. If you went slightly past the station number in either direction, you ended up with a fuzzy reception, or sometimes a barely discernible image from out of town. Bakersfield channels 29 and 23 were right next to Fresno’s 30 and 24, respectively. There had been confusion almost from the beginning. In 1945, nine television stations were operating in five U.S. cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Schenectady), and other markets were eager for a piece of the visual pie. But things weren’t exactly progressing at lightning speed. Nearly three years later, there were still only a dozen stations nationwide, with construction permits issued for 54 more. In May, the McClatchy Broadcasting Company filed an application for a station, and two weeks later a group called the Television Fresno Company followed suit. Its station, it announced, would be ready within six months of receiving a go-ahead from federal regulators and would broadcast a signal strong enough to reach from Earlimart in the south to Livingston in the north. The problem for both groups and many others like them was the part about getting the green light from federal regulators. As it turned out, the would-be Fresno television pioneers wound up staring at what amounted to an

Fast Food and Funtime

indefinite test pattern. The city wouldn’t get a television station in 1948. Or 1949. In fact, it would have to wait five years before the government got everything sorted out. Competing applications, technical issues and overlapping frequencies made the entire process a lot more convoluted than anyone had envisioned. As the complications piled up, the Federal Communications Commission placed a freeze on new station applications in 1948 while it tried to sort out the various frequencies so they wouldn’t interfere with one another. “In the early days of television, there were only VHF stations,” Gary Cocola explained. “They couldn’t build any stations in Fresno, because the signals from the stations would interfere with the stations from San Francisco and Los Angeles, and they were going to build transmitters up on mountaintops.” After the big cities to the north and south had their pickings, only Channels 10 and 12 were left open. It must have seemed to Fresnans as though they’d been put on the back burner when Channel 6 in San Luis Obispo hit the airwaves in May 1953, and would-be Valley viewers were still without a single station. They wouldn’t have much longer to wait, though. Regulators had finally decided which frequencies would operate in the central San Joaquin Valley, setting aside two VHF frequencies and more than a dozen UHF bands. Then, it was just a matter of deciding who would get to operate on those frequencies. Two local radio stations (KARM and KFRE) were battling it out over Channel 12, while Channel 47 also drew

interest from multiple parties. Gene Chenault of radio station KYNO applied for it, as did John Poole, a Los Angeles broadcaster who wanted it as part of a five-station chain he envisioned. Poole owned a prominent radio station that broadcast off Catalina Island, dubbing it “the musical isle on your dial.” Its signal was so powerful it managed

VHF Channel 10—Bakersfield Channel 12—Fresno

UHF Channel 17—Bakersfield Channel 18—Fresno Channel 21—Hanford Channel 23—Bakersfield Channel 24—Fresno Channel 27—Tulare Channel 29—Bakersfield Channel 30—Madera Channel 33—Delano Channel 34—Merced Channel 43—Visalia Channel 47—Fresno Channel 53—Fresno Channel 66—Merced

to penetrate the San Diego market and even cross state lines into Nevada and Arizona. Poole, who also headed the first UHF commercial television station in Los Angeles, didn’t win the battle for Fresno’s Channel 47. But he got a foothold in the market nonetheless, managing to grab Channel 53 and also snatching up a Fresno radio station. (Poole was fond of the call letters KBI: His southland radio station was KBIG, its Fresno counterpart was KBIF, and his Fresno television channel was KBID.) Meanwhile, another applicant emerged to challenge Chenault for rights to Channel 47. J.E. O’Neill was a farmer and leading Democrat in the city who applied to operate a station at that frequency. He and Chenault eventually reached an agreement, agreeing to a temporary merger, with the radio operator withdrawing his application. Amid all this jockeying for position, the first local station began transmitting in June of 1953 on UHF Channel 24. It belonged to the McClatchy family, which had announced its intentions to enter the broadcasting industry four years earlier. The McClatchys also published The Fresno Bee and ran a local radio station with the same call letters, KMJ. The mascot for all three media outlets was an animated bee named Scoopy. It was designed by none other than Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney, to serve as a symbol for the company’s newspapers (all named The Bee) in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto. The style of the mascot, still used by the chain’s three Bee papers, is unmistakable. For an idea of what he looks like, simply replace Mickey’s ears with a pair of antennae, add a couple of wings and a stinger, downsize the shoes 79

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and accent with some orange-and-black stripes around the middle. Voila! You’ve got Scoopy. Back in the days before 24-hour programming, he made an appearance on Channel 24 each night to sign off for the evening, donning a nightcap and tucking himself into bed before yielding to the overnight test pattern. Scoopy wasn’t the only connection to the Disney family in Fresno television. The daughters of Walt Disney, doing business as Retlaw Broadcasting (“Walter” spelled backward), purchased KJEO, Channel 47, in 1968 from its original owner. Channel 47 had been the second station to sign on in Fresno, after KMJ. Its call letters, KJEO, incorporated the initials of station founder Jack E. O’Neill, a cattle rancher whose interests went far beyond broadcasting. For nearly two decades, he was either director or president of the Fresno District Fair. He also served as president of the Westlands Water District for most of the 1950s, while lending his expertise and sponsorship to the agriculture department at Fresno State. Both the O’Neill Forebay at the San Luis Reservoir, 88 miles northwest of the city, and O’Neill Park at the university are named in his honor. Originally an affiliate of the Columbia Broadcasting System when it debuted in 1953, KJEO moved to ABC four years later with the arrival of the third station—whose parent company also operated Fresno’s longstanding CBS affiliate. By the winter of that year, The Fresno Bee’s new television log included listings for four channels: Along with KMJ and KJEO, it offered the evening’s schedule for KERO (Channel 10) out of Bakersfield and KCOK, an affiliate of the old “fourth network,”

DuMont, which had won the right to broadcast via Channel 27 out of Tulare. The following year, Poole’s Channel 53 began transmitting, bringing the total to five. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t remember these last two. KCOK—which broadcast such memorable (?) titles as Koob’s Krew, Taylor Maid and Feather Your Nest—changed its call letters to KVVG a few months after signing on. The affiliation with DuMont probably didn’t help its fortunes. The network was at a competitive disadvantage against the “big three,” all of which started out in radio and could pull plenty of on-air talent from that medium. DuMont, by contrast, got its start as a manufacturer of television sets and equipment. It did have a few stars to showcase, including Ernie Kovacs, Morey Amsterdam (later a regular on The Dick Van Dyke Show), and Jackie Gleason, who originated The Honeymooners as a sketch on the network’s Cavalcade of Stars. Its wrestling matches proved popular, as did a melodramatic and sometimes nonsensical science fiction series called Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Ratings overall, however, were far below those of the other networks, and DuMont aired its last program (a boxing match) in September 1956. Channel 27 only barely outlasted DuMont, with its owners pulling the plug the following year. Channel 53, operating as an independent with no network affiliation, was even less enduring. It dropped off the air in mid-1954, a scant five months after its debut. After its demise, KMJ moved into the station’s downtown studios. McClatchy had originally planned to remodel the Fresno Ice Arena into a new, state-of-the-art studio

for the station, but abandoned those plans and instead began broadcasting out of cramped quarters in the old Fresno Bee building (later home to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum). While all this was going on, the battle was still raging over Fresno’s lone VHF license, Channel 12. KARM and KFRE were both determined to win federal approval, and neither side was willing to back down. KARM attorney Floyd Hyde (who would later become mayor of Fresno) charged that KFRE was too commercial, and his client got the upper hand in 1954 when the federal examiner recommended in its favor. Its rival, however, appealed that recommendation to the full commission, arguing that its coverage of community news was superior. What happened next made interesting political theater. Four votes from the FCC were needed to award the license, and three of the commissioners voted for KFRE. Two voted for KARM, but two others voted to deny both petitions—leaving neither with the votes necessary to prevail. At the last moment, however, one of the KARM supporters switched his vote, tipping the balance decisively toward KFRE. His name, interestingly enough, was Robert E. Lee. What was behind the switch? That’s what the Senate Investigating Committee wanted to know. It so happened that Lee was a good friend of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist crusades resulted in the blacklisting of many in the entertainment industry. He’d had little exposure to broadcasting before his appointment in 1953, having previously served as an FBI

Fast Food and Funtime

agent and top aide to director J. Edgar Hoover. His political connections were apparent. The rumor mill was greased even further by the involvement of Richard Nixon’s campaign manager, a California lawyer named Murray Chotiner, and perhaps even Nixon himself. All this over a Fresno radio station? Yes, the license was worth a cool million and the battle had been bitterly fought, but the idea seems farfetched. Still, this was the era of McCarthyism, when paranoia was the order of the day and suspicion fell on just about anyone who didn’t parrot what the crusaders had defined as accepted dogma. As it turns out, Chotiner had become involved with the case in 1954, after the examiner’s initial recommendation in favor of KARM. At that point, KFRE president Paul Bartlett told his attorney he was ready to call it a day and concede the license to his opponent. He would not go quietly, however. In withdrawing, he would issue a statement contending that the process had been rigged—that political influence had been used against him. The irony? This was the mirror image of the allegation eventually made against Lee for voting against KARM. Bartlett’s attorney, however, advised him not to act quite so hastily. He said he’d enlist the help of an investigator to determine whether any arm-twisting was, in fact, going on behind the scenes. Chotiner, a guiding force behind Nixon’s political career dating back to the then-vice president’s first congressional campaign, was that investigator. But when he submitted his report to Bartlett, it concluded that no one had tried to rig the game after all. Bartlett’s suspicions had been groundless. This conclusion left

Bartlett with no trellis upon which to hang his sour grapes—and every reason to pursue the matter. If he really was dealing with a level playing field, perhaps he could turn the tide. So he decided to appeal. As for Lee, he later said Senate staffers had tried to implicate him in “some sort of fix” by alleging that Nixon had discussed the case with him and Chotiner had tried to influence him. Certainly, Lee’s association with figures such as McCarthy and Hoover must have raised suspicions, which were expressed in print by Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson. This left Lee indignant. He insisted the column was full of inaccuracies, and he wrote a letter to The Post, which his advisors talked him out of sending. The crux of the matter is that Lee said he never met or even heard from Chotiner. His own explanation as to why he changed his vote was much more pragmatic: “The case had been deadlocked a long time. I finally wrote a concurring opinion that awarded the license on a 4–2 vote. I indicated my belief that it was time to resolve the case; I was much more concerned that the public get the service it needed than I was with the respective merits of the applicants. Either of them could do a creditable job.” And so it ended with a whimper, not a bang. The folks at KARM had a tough time swallowing such a bitter defeat, but there was nothing more they could do. Lee, meanwhile, survived the allegations against him and served longer on the FCC than any other commissioner, including a brief stint as its chairman, before ending his tenure in 1981.

KFRE received Fresno’s only VHF license and debuted in 1956 on Channel 12, but it didn’t stay at that location on the dial. As more televisions became equipped to receive UHF stations, the Federal Communications Commission sought to create consistency within markets. Los Angeles, for example, was dominated by VHF stations, but Fresno would be a UHF town, with KFRE moving up the dial to its new position in the early ’60s. This was the age of test patterns and Ed Sullivan. Remote controls? Not back then. Most shows were in black and white, at least until the mid-’60s, after which they gradually began being “brought to you in living color on NBC.” Or CBS. Or ABC. The “big three” reigned supreme with their network news coverage: Walter Cronkite led the pack on CBS, while Huntley and Brinkley shared anchor duties at NBC. Locally, one of the most recognizable names in television wasn’t a newscaster, but the sports director at KFRE. Gus Zernial had spent a decade in baseball’s American League, playing for four different teams. “Ozark Ike,” as he was known, led the league in home runs and runs batted in during his third season and hit a career-high 42 homers for the Philadelphia A’s in 1953. He retired after the 1959 season and soon moved to the Fresno area, where he started making appearances at functions such as service club meetings and a benefit baseball exhibition. By 1964, he had begun contributing a regular five-minute sportscast on KFRE radio and doing play-by-play for Fresno State sporting events. He 81

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also worked with Radka on the annual Hot Stove Dinner, serving as co-chairman of the event before leaving KFRE in the mid-1970s. Later, he was instrumental in the push to bring Triple-A baseball to Fresno. When that push succeeded, he served as

Gus Zernial, pictured here with the A’s in 1953, became a sports journalism fixture in Fresno starting in the 1960s, shortly after he retired. Bowman baseball card image.

broadcaster and community development director for the team, the Fresno Grizzlies. Sharing the anchor desk with Zernial back in the early days of KFRE’s evening newscast, Action News, was another figure well known to Fresnans, Roger Rocka. Rocka came to Fresno from Sacramento in the mid-’60s and saw plenty of changes during a decade behind the anchor desk. During his time at the station, he covered a protest march led by Cesar Chavez during the United Farm Workers grape boycott; the turmoil at Fresno State; and the Chowchilla kidnapping in which a school bus driver and 26 children were buried alive in a truck (they were later rescued). Rocka recalled how the weather report worked in his early days at the station, before the advent of computer-generated maps. When Rich Freeland did the weather segment, “he would use a spraypaint can and all sorts of other things to do the weather, so we had a runny weather map.” Unfortunately, little visual evidence remains from the period. “At that time, it wasn’t easy to save or preserve things,” Rocka said. “You couldn’t just make a digital copy. You had tape, but it was expensive, so things just didn’t get saved. Even if we did a documentary, it would get used two or three times, and then it would be erased for commercials or something else.” Rocka, who also served as the station’s news director, made a bold move by hiring Karen Humphrey as the first woman to appear on the air during a Fresno newscast. In 1989, Humphrey would

break another barrier when she became the first woman to serve as mayor of Fresno. “When I hired Karen, I got a lot of heat for that,” Rocka remembered. “People said, ‘You don’t want a woman doing the news.’ It was because they didn’t think people would accept it, and they thought we’d lose business because we had a woman newscaster. She broke a lot of ground. She’s a strong person, and she was able to take the heat. She was a good writer and solid journalist.” At the time, Channel 30 was owned by Triangle Publications, a media group that also published TV Guide. It was owned by primarily by Walter Annenberg, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain from 1969 to 1974. Triangle’s flagship station in Philadelphia is credited with pioneering the Action News template that became so popular during the ’70s and beyond. KFRE was among the first stations to adopt the approach, which succeeded in part by packing more stories into its telecast than rival Eyewitness News allowed over at KJEO. Both were fairly rigid formats, a change from the earlier days of television, when journalists like Edward R. Murrow were given a much freer hand to investigate the issues of the day. “It was a big change, and not just at Channel 30 but in the whole business across the country,” Rocka said. “Up until the 1970s, the news at different stations was pretty independent. If you traveled across the country, you’d see a lot of different ways of doing the news. “But what happened in the ’70s is you had the birth of these consultants. You’d see the same

Fast Food and Funtime

brand everywhere you went. Action News. Eyewitness News. You can’t argue that it worked, but it was very different than trying to do a thorough job of reporting. Our sarcastic joke used to be, ‘If Jesus came back and you didn’t have video, you wouldn’t lead with it.’ … When the formulaic news came in, it was less about exercising news judgment and more about production values.” The more rigid formatting was part of the reason Rocka left the news business, though he remained a visible figure locally with the opening of his music hall in the Tower District. After Rocka signed off for the last time at Channel 30, John Wallace took over the anchor’s chair at KFRE and was joined two years later by Nancy Osborne. The two spent the next decade as co-anchors, consistently pulling in the market’s top ratings; Osborne would remain behind the desk for 35 years. Her longevity was surpassed by that of another Fresno broadcaster, Bob Long, who spent four decades at Channel 24. He delivered the midday and evening news, presented election returns and produced short local history segments called On the Map that proved to be among his most popular features. Long would take a camera crew out to some empty field, abandoned building, historical marker or intersection that had once been noted on the map. Rivaling or even surpassing Long among recognizable faces on KMJ during the station’s early years was “Nancy Allen.” Long himself would later refer to her as the first lady of Fresno-based television. Her name is in quotations because that wasn’t

really her name. It was a stage name local producers created for the host of a daily afternoon show spotlighting topics of interest to local women. That position had yet to be filled when Lorraine Hanna headed down to the studio on a whim to throw her hat into the ring on the last day of tryouts. According to one report, she didn’t even own a television set at the time. Despite this apparent handicap, she got the job. During nearly two decades with the station, starting in 1954, “Allen” hosted various shows for the station with titles such as Reflections, Crossroads and The Nancy Allen Garden Show, appearing both in the morning and afternoon at various times during her tenure. She shared the screen with syndicated daytime hosts such as Gene Rayburn, Loretta Young and Merv Griffin. But she was perhaps best known as presenter of the Movie Matinee each afternoon during the ’60s. Hanna often focused on lighter subjects, as when she interviewed a Beverly Hills art consultant on how to choose the right paintings to go with home décor. During the 1960s, she presided over a fashion show to benefit a local church’s youth group and, later, helped select a dairy princess to represent local milk producers. But she could also tackle meatier topics. In her very first year with the station, she conducted an interview with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, toward the end of her tenure in 1970, she hosted a half-hour program on drug abuse among local youths. The discussion featured a panel that included future sheriff Hal McKinney (then a captain with the department’s narcotics and vice

squad), a Fresno psychiatrist and a recovering heroin addict. That same year, Hanna was featured at a downtown event marking the 25th anniversary of the United Nations.

An ad for Action News with Roger Rocka from the year the format debuted, 1970. 1970. The Fresno Bee.

Fresno Growing Up

The spotlight also found her outside the television studio, as she appeared on the stage in a reader’s theater version of The Hollow Crown (dramatizing events in English history). She even played the lead role in the Fresno Community Theater’s production of The King and I. In the early ’70s, Hanna—who married a Fresno State music professor and became Lorraine Hanna Martin—gracefully left the cameras behind and shed her Nancy Allen persona. She continued to live in Fresno into her 90s. During the 1960s, daytime television was the province of soap operas and game shows, interspersed with occasional movies and syndicated programs like The Galloping Gourmet. One of the simplest game shows was something called Dialing for Dollars (not to be confused with Bowling for Dollars). It was a syndicated concept that originated on radio toward the end of the Depression and, like so many other shows and concepts, made the transition to television when the new medium came along. At one time or another, it ran at various times in more than 50 cities across the country.

The concept was simple. The host would announce a password or number “up” or “down”— known as the count—used to determine who would receive the next phone call, along with the amount of money at stake. He would then call the person selected and, if the person was watching, he or she would be able to repeat the information and win a cash prize. The game accomplished a couple of things. First, it was a cheap way for local stations to fill airtime, and second, it kept viewers glued to their sets during those all-important commercial breaks. In Fresno, the man doing the dialing was Dick Carr, who hosted the show first on KFRE, and later on KJEO during breaks in a morning movie. The amount given away wasn’t huge, but it was enough incentive to keep viewers watching. “Dick Carr may never reach his goal of giving away a million dollars on the ‘Dialing for Dollars Movie,’” KJEO proclaimed in one ad. “But we’ve mailed out around $10,000 to lucky winners so far. If you’re watching, you might get part of that first million. And in just 206 more years, we’ll start on the second.”

Carr moved from KYNO radio to television in 1965 and stayed in Fresno for nearly a decade after that. After leaving for Portland, he returned around 1980 to work for independent Channel 26, owned by Harry Pappas, before it became a Fox network affiliate. At the time, the station didn’t have a news department, and Pappas wanted to start one. He asked Carr to handle the job, and the result was a newscast that aired an hour earlier than its competitors’ broadcasts. “My best friend in the world, Gary Bentley, was at Channel 47 at the time, and he said, ‘If I were you, I’d put that thing on at 10 o’clock,’” Carr said. “That was his good advice to me. Of course, we were going up against Hill Street Blues, so it took a while for it to catch on, but eventually it took hold.” When it did, The 10 O’Clock News Hour became a popular alternative for those who wanted to get to bed a little earlier than their fellow Fresnans. By that time, the Dialing for Dollars era in Fresno was long past, but the show and others of its time continue to be a source of nostalgia for those who grew up during the era.

Fresno’s Happy Days In the ’50s, a lot of families didn’t have television, and radio was still the medium of choice for many. One of the most popular features was a show called Stan’s Private Line on KMJ. Billed as “the Valley’s most popular request and dedication program,” it was sponsored by a place called Stan’s Drive-In, part of a small chain with other locations in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Bakersfield. In Fresno, the show aired late at night, in a two-hour block starting at 11 p.m. or midnight. The sponsorship tie-in was creative, however, because it encouraged people to order more than just a meal at the eatery. In addition, they could submit a song request to the carhop, who would send it along to the DJ. Only songs requested at the drive-in got played on the radio. If you wanted to hear your favorites, you had to head on down to Broadway and Sacramento for a bite to eat. Ingenious? Sure. In the days before in-dash CD and MP3 players (and even well before cassettes), the radio was your only option for listening to music on the road. If you were a young person out cruising around Fresno, a stop at Stan’s was pretty much your only chance to help control the playlist. Even better, the convergence of all those cars at the drive-in created a de facto concert hall. They’d all have their windows open to give orders or accommodate

Exactly what “the main” was changed over serving trays. With everyone’s radio tuned to the the years. From the ’60s onward it was Belmont same station, the result was a just about as cool as and, increasingly, Blackstone, with some overlap a proto-boom box—the constraints of mono notbetween the two. But during the ’50s, it was Fulwithstanding. ton Street downtown. Broadway was just a block The place was routinely packed throughout over from Fulton, so the decade. The sign out it was simple enough front showed a female “Nickel ice cream at Drug Fair, angel to turn the corner and carhop in a cap, high find your way into the heels and short skirt, cookies at Lauck’s Bakery, cruisin’ parking lot around leaning backward as she Belmont, Blakely’s Swimming Pool, Stan’s circular buildbalanced a platter of Wonderland Roller Rink, a dollar ing… if there were any fountain confections in spaces, that is. front of her—perhaps and 65 cents for three movies at the After Stan’s closed an ice cream sundae Sunset Drive-In.” and several blocks and a root beer float. of Fulton Street was The eatery served “bar– Kenny Hayes closed to traffic in b-q” sandwiches, fried the ’60s, many of the chicken, fish and salads cruisers shifted to Belmont, an east-west thoroughalong with cocktails and coffee. Also on the menu: fare to the north of downtown. It was a logical sweets. You could order buttermilk hotcakes, with choice for a couple of reasons. For one thing, there “maple syrup or a yummy berry syrup and lots was a natural place at the west end of the strip to of butter.” If you preferred, you could have some turn your Mustang, GTO or Chevelle around and strawberries (in season), or a peach pie with real head back the other way. More than three decades whipped cream. There was even something for the later, a lot of people were talking about a planned kids: a baby bottle or something from a complete “innovation” at the new River Park shopping cenline of baby foods. Stan’s was open for breakfast, ter: the traffic circle. But traffic circles weren’t anylunch and dinner, but it was in the evening hours thing new to Fresno. We’d had one for decades out that the place really lit up as a destination for at Belmont and Old 99. It was the perfect place young people “dragging the main.” 85

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for Fresnans dragging the main to reverse course without missing a beat. It helped that there was a popular drive-in on Belmont just east of the circle at Palm: a place called Mars, where you could get a Ranchburger and Coke for half a buck. Charles Chitchjian had opened Mars in 1947 with 80 parking spaces and room for 24 customers at the counter inside. Chitchjian would later operate other eateries in

Fresno, notably the Carriage House Smorgasbords, with locations at Olive and Blackstone and in Fig Garden Village. Fried chicken was the marquee dish there, and Chitchian said the two restaurants served as many as 4,000 chickens a week. At Mars, by contrast, burgers were the main draw. Chitchjian chose the Mars name for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was snappy and futuristic. For another, it was cheap—since neon

sign makers charged by the letter. They put up a searchlight to attract customers and put ads in The Bee boasting that the new place “outshines them ALL for good FOOD.” Mars had plenty of competition. Angelo’s, founded in 1954, was over on Olive Avenue, just east of Roeding Park, and there was a whole string of drive-ins on Belmont at one point or another. Just one block west at Stafford was the Barrel, which

Angelo’s Drive-In, founded in 1954, found itself in the path of the planned bullet train and was scheduled to make way for that project 60 years after it opened for business.

Fresno’s Happy Days

had a distinctive barrel-shaped building where you could order Dale Brothers Coffee, salads, fountain drinks and “all kinds of sandwiches.” It also had a dining room where you could sit down for Chinese food, featuring the establishment’s specialty plate of fried noodles. Farther west, out past the circle and Roeding Park, were the Alaska Drive-In and the Triangle, which was still operating a half-century later, serving burgers, corn dogs, fries and other traditional offerings much as it has since opening in 1963. One modern innovation: In the new millennium, it added a website. Moving east from the Mars, cruisers could find other social and confectionery way stations. The Port George, just up the street at Belmont and Echo, made its debut in 1964. George McKelvey and his wife purchased the old Reed and Bell Drive-In and invested $40,000 in a major overhaul. The new eatery featured new equipment and double-decked aluminum parking canopies, along with an electronic ordering system. The female carhops at the Port George wore sailor outfits, but the place wasn’t actually named after the Caribbean port of call famous for its tales of pirates and hidden treasure. The inspiration came instead from a drink McKelvey had invented, using port wine. For cruisers heading east, it was up to Abby and the Royale Drive In, which featured 26 parking spaces and a 160-foot canopy. It also had something called an “electronic” eye customers could use to submit their orders from the stalls. When it was first built in the ’40s, the Royale (where you couldn’t work as a carhop unless you were under 25) was a block over on Blackstone. The restaurant

moved east in 1960, when the owners built a new eatery and leased out the old property. At that point, Abby had been converted to a one-way street for northbound traffic only, which made it simple enough for cruisers to continue their journey up the “boulevard of dreams.” Some cruisers did the full circuit, heading all the way up to Bob’s Big Boy at Shaw before turning around and driving back the other way. Those who didn’t want to go that far could always stop at another Bob’s, at Belmont and Blackstone, and drive back west from there. Jim Boren—who became executive editor of The Fresno Bee shortly after I left—wrote a column on “dragging the main” for the paper way back in 1973. Some young people, he wrote, went out to cruise Belmont because there was nothing else to do. The regulars, however, did something else, only when Belmont was quiet. There were three rules of the road: First, if you were cruising for action (wanting to meet someone of the opposite sex), you’d never travel with more than two in a car. This reason was purely practical: If you hooked up with someone, two couples could fit in the same car and keep right on rolling. Second, it was fashionable to sit down low in your seat and peer out over the dashboard. This was called “low-riding”—though the term took on a different meaning a decade later, when cruisers started customizing their cars with hydraulic pumps, so they could lower the undercarriage within a few inches of the road. Third, you never sped away from a traffic light. You rolled out casually into the intersection.

Triangle on Parkway Drive is as old as I am.

Cars would pull up next to one another, and their occupants would literally hang out—the windows—to socialize. It was kind of a 20th century version of speed dating. No need for commitment; just social window shopping on wheels. One unnamed girl told Boren that on Belmont, she could meet a guy without feeling cheap, “and if it turns out that he isn’t worth it, I can always tell him to beat it.” It wasn’t always just innocent fun. There were street races and arguments over girls. With so 87

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many teens and young adults gathered in one place, tempers could run high. One night in 1964, a disturbance in the Mars parking lot caught the attention of the restaurant manager. When he tried to figure out what was going on, a 21-year-old man kicked him and whipped out a stiletto, slashing his shirt. The hothead—who had been drinking—then turned his attention (and the knife) on a bystander, knocking a cigarette out of his mouth before he left. Police took him into custody several blocks away, but not before he attempted stab one of the arresting officers. The phenomenon of dragging the main wasn’t unique to Fresno. Just up the road in Modesto, The Bee’s sister newspaper carried the following report on October 6, 1958: “Three girls ‘dragging the main’ in Modesto last night had the wits scared out of them when a man pulled alongside them and began firing what looked like a gun. “The girls … said they stopped at a corner on 11th Street a little after 10 o’clock when another car pulled alongside them and the man in it said something to them. “When they asked him what he said, the girls stated, he reached into his pocket and pulled out ‘what looked like a gun’ and began firing it. They said ‘it shot sparks and flames out the barrel end.’ “The girls drove off and pulled into the alley next to Burge’s Drive In.”

Burge’s was built in a circular configuration a lot like Stan’s, and in fact, it offered a similar radio dedication service. A DJ had a remote station inside the drive-in; the customers would tell him what they wanted to hear, and he would spin the records on the spot. The place inspired a young George Lucas, who grew up in Modesto and wanted to make a movie based on the cruising culture of the early ’60s. The result was American Graffiti, starring the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams and Harrison Ford (then a working carpenter, whom Lucas cast after hiring him to build cabinets for his home). The film resonated with audiences so much that it served as a basis for the top-rated TV show Happy Days, also starring Howard. American Graffiti was Lucas’ first major success and the immediate predecessor of Star Wars. It was about Modesto and was filmed in the Bay Area. But it could have just as easily been set in Fresno. The tagline to the trailer asked potential audiences, “Where were you in ’62?” For many young Fresnans, the answer was they were dragging the main, which at the time was Fulton Street. But within a couple of years, that had changed.

Radio Wars Ventura Boulevard and Universal Studios—had It’s funny how some things stick in your memory. been imported from (gasp) my own hometown. I can remember riding down Shaw Avenue toward Yes, that’s right. The sound that virtually defined Clovis in the back seat of my parents’ car, a big rock radio in the ’60s and early ’70s might have blue Pontiac Grand Prix. I was 7 years old at the been born in Liverpool and Detroit, but it was time. A song came on the radio called “Joy to the packaged in Fresno, and KYNO was its original World,” and when it was done, the disc jockey andistribution center. nounced the name of the band: Three Dog Night. Throughout the 1950s, the station had been It was the first time I had actually stopped to take among the most popular in Fresno, but then, in note of who was singing what. 1962, a real threat arrived from Hawaii—of all The year was 1971, and the radio station was places. The threat went by the name of Ron JaKYNO. It really couldn’t have been any other cobs, who had set up the first Top 40 station in station. the islands before arriving in San Bernardino, at Growing up in Fresno, everyone listened to the age of 23, to put his own spin on a radio staKYNO, which was known at various times as Boss tion there. No sooner had he set up shop than he Radio and the “Big 13.” What I didn’t know at loaded everything he owned into a U-Haul and the time was exactly how big, in historical terms, headed north with disc jockey Frank Terry in Terthis particular radio station was. A couple of years after I heard that Three Dog Night song, I left Fresno for a few years to live in Southern California. There I started listening to what “Driving out in the country with the was then the most popular station in Los Angeles, 93 KHJ. windows down and radio blasting, It sounded a lot like KYNO. enjoying the smell of the orange blossoms; I figured that, with most things, Los Angoing up to Millerton Lake in the summer geles had set a trend and little ol’ Fresno had followed merrily along. Only later did I realand staying way after dark; sounds crazy, ize I had it backwards. The signature sound but listening to KYNO radio station.” that was coming through my transistor radio in the San Fernando Valley—home of – Robyn Lynn Lovelace

ry’s Corvair. Their destination was a Fresno radio station with the call letters KMAK. Their mission: To bring down KYNO. One of their first hires was a guy named Bob Morgan, who had just gotten out of the Army and needed a gig. He took the job on the understanding that he’d be given the coveted morning time slot, but he later found out that Jacobs himself had dibs on that position. When the station went on the air in May 1962, Jacobs had the drive-time slot and Morgan was working noon to 3. They eventually reversed roles when it was clear Morgan was getting better ratings. Jacobs offered Morgan a suggestion: Instead of saying “good morning” to listeners, he should say, “Good Morgan.” It became his signature hook. Jacobs also put a lowercase “e” at the end of the station’s call letters, encouraging listeners to pronounce it as K-MAKe, instead of kay-mack. Hype was a big part of the formula. Jacobs dreamed up the bright idea of inviting the Beach Boys to play live on the roof of the station’s McKinley Avenue studios as part of a “water festival,” complete with women in bathing suits and an inflatable pool. With Morgan behind the microphone, Terry, who was handy with the skins, engaged in a drum-a-thon to drum up interest for the station the following year. An on-air promo89

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tion from the “KMAKers contest cubicle” invited listeners to identify a nondescript sound, along with its point of origin. The reward for success? A new color television. The irony of the old medium using the new to promote itself was not to be missed. Since few shows were broadcast in color at that point, at least KMAK was ahead of the curve. The station soon found itself ahead of KYNO, too. “The Robert W. Morgan program is Fresno’s No. 1 midafternoon radio presentation,” Morgan announced in an affected, pseudo-British accent. “KMAK listeners know that, and the official Hooper rating proves it. Mr. Morgan thanks you.” He must have liked the more formal name (Robert W. instead of Bob), because he wound up using it in Los Angeles a few years later, when he moved there to work under a guy named Bill Drake. Drake wasn’t actually his real name. Philip Yarbrough had adopted the pseudonym in the ’50s because it rhymed with WAKE, the station in Atlanta where he worked as a disc jockey after dropping out of college. After a promotion to program director, he moved to a San Francisco station where he received a call—actually, several—from KYNO chief Gene Chenault. This was the same Gene Chenault who’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get his station into the television business more than a decade earlier, and he was hardly new to the game. In fact, Chenault had been instrumental in shifting the emphasis of Fresno radio from talk and information to music, back when radio seemed about ready to wave a white flag in the face of television’s onslaught. About the same time rock ’n’ roll was being born on the guitar strings of Chuck

Gene Chenault’s memo to KYNO staff introducing Bill Drake as programming director. Courtesy of John Ostlund.

Berry and the swiveling hips of Elvis, Chenault had gone on a mission. He’d traveled across the entire country, listening to every successful radio station he could get his ears on. Taking notes, he returned to Fresno and applied what he’d learned, using the new musical craze to help his station grab half the entire Fresno listening audience. “At the time, rock ’n’ roll was thought to be just kiddie music,” said Dick Carr, who came to the station from Sacramento in 1960 and worked as a disc jockey there during the first part of the decade. Chenault, however, used this “kiddie music” to gain a stranglehold on Fresno’s radio ratings.

Despite Chenault’s success, however, Drake didn’t knew who he was. Drake wasn’t in the habit of taking calls from people he didn’t know, so Drake ignored them until a mutual acquaintance, Stockton station owner Knox LaRue, brought the two together. When he finally did hear Chenault’s pitch, Drake (who was used to working in big cities) told Chenault he probably couldn’t afford him. But Chenault was determined. Drake said he’d take the job if he got two stations, two salaries, a Cadillac convertible and an apartment. If he was trying to discourage Chenault, it didn’t work. The Fresno

Radio Wars

station owner took him up on the offer, put him in charge of KYNO, got him a consultant’s job at a Chenault-owned station in Stockton, and brought him to the Central Valley. Drake told Chenault he was in some “serious trouble” in his competition with KMAK, but the newcomer was up to the task. He didn’t change the station’s on-air team; instead, he changed its strategy. In a blatant pitch to younger listeners, he called it Boss radio, using a slang term that was in vogue at the time on the West Coast. It was kind of like “hip,” or “cool,” or “groovy,” but with more punch. Then Drake consciously worked to pack more music into each hour. He told his DJs to keep the chatter short and sweet, and he held the line on commercials, reasoning he could charge a premium for the ads he did run if a bigger audience were listening to a “more music” station. “Working with Bill Drake was a treat because he was dedicated to his less-talk, more-music, tight-playlist format, but was still willing to incorporate news,” said Lanny Larson, who worked for the station starting in the summer of 1963 as a news gofer. “KYNO had a reputation for news reporting and an emphasis on local, local, local.” The Johnny Mann Singers, a vocal group who had backed the likes of Buddy Holly’s Crickets and Eddie Cochrane, were enlisted to sing the threeto five-second jingles that announced the station’s call letters and frequency. The jingles were much shorter than the 30-second kind some stations were using, again allowing more room for the music, and they were sung a cappella. But the way the jingles were placed also made a difference: KYNO played them coming into a song rather than at the

tail end, the way KMAK did. This was important because KMAK’s strategy alerted listeners that a commercial was just around the corner … and it was time to change the channel. Since KYNO at 1300 was right next to KMAK at 1340 on the dial, it was a simple matter to switch the station. Under Drake’s strategy, more people would be switching to KYNO than away from it. There was a signature countdown of the city’s 30 biggest hits every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Of course, there were also promotions. Carr remembered one in particular, involving him and a fellow disc jockey: “Sam Schwan had a promotion where we were going to have a bowling contest, and the loser would have to wear an iron mask. I told him I could beat him blindfolded, so we went down to Cedar Lanes. I put on a blindfold and, when I bowled, some guys would be down there knocking down pins with a stick, so Schwan ended up having to wear the mask. He wasn’t too happy about that.” KYNO also dreamed up a publicity stunt to help Fresno zoo officials, who wanted to build a small animal nursery. Half the net proceeds from the two-hour event at the fairgrounds would be donated to the cause, with larger animals doing their part to help their more diminutive friends. The highlight of the day was a series of races in which local media personalities and college students challenged one another, with the help of ostriches, camels and elephants. Carr took part in the ostrich race. “Somehow, we ended up at the fairgrounds with a lot of the jocks wearing Arabian costumes,” Carr recalled. “Bob Walker looked like he was wearing

something out of I Dream of Jeannie, and we were all giving him a bad time.” Things got even more interesting when the race started. “They had these ostriches that were racing and hooked them up to two-wheeled carts, and they gave each of us brooms. You held one broom in each hand, and if you wanted the bird to go to the left, you’d hold out the broom in your right hand and the bird would, hopefully, shy away from it.” Unfortunately for Carr, it didn’t work the way it was supposed to: “We started the race, and the next thing I know, I’m lying on the ground, trying to figure out what the hell. The guy who ran over me lost his broom trying to keep from running over me. Then the ostriches took off and eventually went off the racetrack onto Ventura or Chance (Avenue). I strained my neck and ended up in Fresno Community Hospital for three days.” Ostriches weren’t the only things the jocks raced. One night, they went out to famed west-side speedway Kearney Bowl to race the same hardtop cars seasoned drivers took out on the track every weekend. The event was at night, and the DJs were the last group to race, after the main event. That wouldn’t have been a problem, except the event promoters had given them as much liquor as they wanted during the evening. Carr said he stayed sober during the evening because he didn’t want to risk wrecking the car he was driving, and he was able to avoid doing so despite some problems with the other cars. “I think it was going to be about a six-lap race,” Carr remembered. “They let us drink anything we wanted, and by the time it got started, we had six 91

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guys, four of whom were probably bombed out of their mind. Sam Schwan ran Gary Gilbert into the wall, and Gilbert almost fell out of the back of his car. Then he (Schwann) went on and hit Bob Elliott. They shouldn’t have given us all that beer. I’m not even sure why we were out there racing to begin with.” There were publicity promotions, and then there were giveaways. Of the latter, Bill Drake’s personal favorite involved the KYNO Millionaire, who would drive around town just giving away money. Larson, whose job at KNYO included working on station promotions, created news reports of listeners receiving winnings from the Millionaire, who was actually Fresno State theater professor Phillip Walker. “We’d put him in a trade-out limo and throw money to the down-and-out in West Fresno, drive up to restaurants and comp meals or go into a store and buy what someone wanted. It was all part of the bigger treasure-hunt promotion to help boost ratings. We’d announce that we’d buried $10,000 somewhere around Fresno and began broadcasting obscure clues designed to prolong the treasure hunt through the ratings period.” Despite the Millionaire moniker, the station never actually gave away a million dollars, even on one of its regular “million-dollar weekends,” but it gave away hundreds at a time. Listeners could win the contents of the “Boss vault” by correctly guessing the amount (“Guess how much is in it, and you’ll win it!”). Or they could win a cool thousand by using clues to determine “Location X.” There was even a game called Safecracker that was played

lottery style: “There’s $500 in cash in the KYNO safe,” the jock explained. “Its combination lock has three stops—each stop from 0 to 9.” Correctly guess three numbers in the right sequence, and you’d win the money. “Crime does not pay, but KYNO does,” the station declared. Sometimes, however, the promotions could go awry. Carr recalled one such incident, involving a key, a coin-operated public scale and a famous Fresno landmark. “We had a key to a car, and they hid it in the old Security Bank building in an old weight machine,” he recalled. “It just so happened they had a

guy go out there to repair the weight machine, and he found the key two days after we hid it. We had to give him the prize and hide another key.” KYNO also sponsored rock ’n’ roll shows, such as a Christmas concert one year at the Memorial Auditorium. Sonny and Cher were the headliners, with the Road Runners and two other local bands also on the bill. Prices for reserved seats? Just $2.50, $3.50 and $4.50. Those were the days. The station even played matchmaker: “If you’d like to meet new friends and have a ball, join the KYNO date bureau,” one disc jockey invited. “Couples will be selected to double-date with the KYNO hit-paraders: a night out on the town with dinner and show. It’s open to people—single of course—of all ages.” Listeners just had to send in an envelope containing their picture, contact info, age, hobbies and a description of someone they’d like to go out with. It was, the announcer declared, “another fun service to the community” from KYNO. The KYNO-KMAK fight was brutal. It was no-holdsbarred, and it could get ugly. Drake said Jacobs had people Disc jockey Sam Schwann and the KYNO van stop by Horn Photo. Photo courtesy of John Ostlund.

Radio Wars

tailing him after dark, talking back and forth on car radios and trying to catch him breaking some law. Morgan, the former soldier who’d fired one of the first shots in the battle of Fresno, would later say that Fresno was where he first learned about war. When KYNO started its giveaways, KMAK upped the ante. “After our promos began, rival KMAK announced its own treasure hunt, but with more money,” Larson remembered. “Just a couple of days after their hunt began, the treasure was found. We announced that the Millionaire had miscalculated how much was in the treasure and it was more than KMAK’s—and it took a few weeks to get enough clues to dig it up in what had been farmland north of the San Joaquin River.” The fight for market share was intense, with all eyes focused on the so-called Hooper ratings, the radio counterpart of the Nielsens at the time. Still, it didn’t take long for the battle to turn in favor of KYNO. When the smoke cleared, Drake and Chenault had won. Decisively. “Bill Drake came in and kind of shook things up,” said Dick Carr, who was born as Victor Alan Karsner. “When KMAK ran a contest, we would run one with more money. If they offered $5,000, Chenault would go to $7,000.” KMAK was at a disadvantage all along, Carr said, simply because its transmitter was far weaker than its rival’s. “KMAK was a 1,000-watter, and KYNO at that time was 5,000 watts,” he explained. “So they didn’t have enough of a signal to do anything outside the city area. They couldn’t get national (advertising) buys.” Within a year or so of beating back KMAK’s challenge, Boss Radio had more listeners than the

Dick Carr, left, and Chubby Chapple share the booth at KYNO in 1962 in this photo from the Fresno High School yearbook.

other 13 stations in Fresno combined, the Stockton station running under the same format was No. 1 in its market, and Ron Jacobs was on his way back to Hawaii. He wouldn’t stay there long. In 1965, after applying the Fresno formula successfully in San Diego, Drake got the opportunity to test it out in Los Angeles, where he plugged it into the console at KHJ. Most of what they’d developed in Fresno remained intact. The Johnny Mann Singers delivered the station’s frequency and call letters a cappella. The jocks were given strict guidelines to follow. Even the old Millionaire promotion was recycled and reborn with a Hawaiian theme as the Big Kahuna. That was Jacobs’ idea. He had returned from the islands and wound up meeting with Drake.

Amazingly, the two had never actually bumped into each other in Fresno. At KHJ, however, the former archenemies became allies in the next stage of the Boss Radio invasion. Drake hired Jacobs as program director and former KMAK jock Bob Morgan (now Robert W. Morgan) to do the morning show. Jacobs would stay with the station a few years, then would go on to other pursuits. He would wind up creating a show for Casey Kasem modeled after the old countdown shows at KMAK and KYNO: “American Top 40.” He was also the brains behind the San Diego Chicken, a ubiquitous presence at sporting events (including a few in Fresno) during the 1980s, who started out as a costumed mascot for San Diego station KGB. Chenault, Drake and Jacobs had done more than merely create a format; they’d created the very concept of formatted radio. The Drake-Chenault partnership didn’t stop at Los Angeles, or even at Boss Radio. “Drake-Chenault signed a contract to do consulting for the RKO stations,” Cohoe said, mentioning outlets in Boston, Memphis and Windsor, Ontario, among others, in addition to KHJ. “Demographically, they were everywhere in the country. They were able to start and maintain, for a significant period of time, supreme dominance.” At the peak of their success, Drake and Chenault were syndicating six distinct formats to more than 350 radio stations. Meanwhile, new disc jockeys came to Fresno to replace the original crop, many of whom moved on to bigger markets. Johnny Scott, one of KYNO’s most popular disc

Fresno Growing Up

jockeys during the late ’60s, would go on to join KHJ under the name Bobby Ocean. There was the Real Pete McNeal, who emerged in Fresno about the same time the similarly named Real Don Steel was following Morgan in the afternoon slot in Los Angeles. There was Ted Jordan, who worked at KYNO in the early ’70s and used the kind of intro that became a staple of the Boss Radio format. Opening the 4 p.m. hour of his show in 1971 to the theme music from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Jordan intoned: “Four o’clock in the mother city of the Valley, babies, and your superstar has arrived! I’m gonna sit right down on this little stool, double-clutch the tables and whip those 45s around. Let’s work it!” I moved away from Fresno a year later and didn’t make it back until 1978. By then, almost everything had changed. KYNO president John Ostlund, who began in a sales position at the station in 1974, put it this way: “In life, things evolve. Boss Radio was once leading edge; then over time, it became trailing edge.” I got back to find that John Wallace, who’d been the news announcer at KYNO until 1974, was on television. Ted Jordan had quit the business to become a gospel musician, forming a band that played out on the far northern reaches of Blackstone at a barn-type Christian nightspot called the Agape Club. He wouldn’t have been whipping 45s around, anyway, because most record buyers had forsaken them in favor of LPs (or cassettes or, temporarily, 8-tracks). Boss Radio was dead or dying, although Fresno did have a cool hard rock station with the call letters KBOS on the FM dial. Frequency modulation was the wave of the future for

music radio, now that stereos had largely replaced transistor radios. I was a sophomore in high school, and everyone was talking about how a band I’d never heard of called Supertramp was playing two sold-out shows because a local DJ named Ray Appleton had been playing their records like there was no tomorrow on another FM station, KFIG. A year later, yet another rock radio station would debut, boasting a morning show called the The Breakfast Club, staffed by a duo named Dean (Opperman) and Don (Fischer). The station was KKDJ-FM 105.9, which boasted a hard rock format for most of the day but made its mark during morning “drive time,” with Dean and Don’s outrageous comedy routines starting in the late winter of 1980.

Opperman and Fisher were both music buffs, with Opperman describing his broadcast partner as being like an older brother. Both are writers and music historians (The Breakfast Club took its name from a long-running radio show out of Chicago), with Fisher leaning more toward rockabilly and hillbilly swing, while Opperman’s tastes run more toward jazz and big band music. Still, comedy is the field in which they’ve had perhaps their greatest impact. During the Breakfast Club years, the pair created colorful characters with names like Aunt Penny, sports guy Chub Feely, Old Dr. Gold, Blind Lemon Pledge and Joe The Grey Grocer. “Don and I do all the characters, and we have roughly an equal amount each,” Opperman said. “My favorite character? They are like family and

Dean Opperman and Don Fischer ruled the airwaves for much of the 1980s with their KKDJ morning show “The Breakfast Club.” Photo courtesy of Dean Opperman.

Radio Wars

really seem to have a life of their own. You might think I like Bobby Volare best, but I’m a real fan of Chub Feely, which is a Don alter-ego/character.… Of my characters, I like Aunt Penny best: She’s the most versatile and says things I can’t.” For the record, Bobby Volare was Opperman’s lounge singer alter ego who was a Elvisesque version of Weird Al Yankovic before most people knew who Yankovic was. Wearing a pompadour bigger than Dan Aykroyd’s prosthetic conehead from SNL, he crooned songs with titles like Foggy Fresno Nights, Coalinga Was Gone, and Nights in Visalia. His Clash parody Lock the Snackbah even made it to No. 3 on the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento show in 1983. Opperman was inspired to create the Volare character by happenstance after a ZZ Top concert at Selland Arena in early 1980. He recalls that the band invited the pair to party with them back in their room at the Holiday Inn. “Don and I drove over there, but we didn’t hook up with ZZ Top for some reason I don’t remember. So we were killing time at the bar listening to this awful band called Phoenix Express, and the lead singer was an Elvis impersonator, but he wasn’t joking. He really thought he was channeling the King. He had the pompadour and the jump suit, and for some reason he kept breaking into the song Volare about every fourth or fifth tune. He was dead serious, but Don and I were in hysterics.” The pair decided not to sleep, since they had to be up at 4:30 and go on the air. Opperman continues: “We were on the air live, and I flicked the switch on the old Tapco reverb box we had in the production room, which gave

Don Fischer in his Chub Feely persona. Photo courtesy of Dean Opperman.

me a super echo-y voice. And I just started imitating the lounge singer from earlier in the night. I think Don introduced me as Mr. Volare, and somehow that turned into Bobby Volare.” A series of fortuitous events led to the pair getting the gig at KKDJ in the first place. Opperman had been working at KCBS in San Francisco when he lost his job in a format switch and found himself looking for a new position. He

drove down to San Luis Obispo, where he rendezvoused with Fischer and Jeff Riedel. Both had gone to Cal Poly together and had met at the university’s radio station, KCPR. “I was driving through Fresno and heard about this new radio station that was about to go on the air, so I drove over to the office and met the owner, Wally Huesser. He was about 60 days from putting the station on the air but had no idea what he was going to do with it, format-wise. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I said, ‘Wally, give me a week, and I will be back with a proposal for you.’” Opperman went back to San Luis Obispo and met Fisher and Riedel, both of whom ended up joining the fledgling station, Riedel as music director and on-air talent. Deborah Catlin, another alumnus of Cal Poly radio, would also join them. “Wally bought my proposal even though I didn’t know what … I was talking about. Next thing I knew, I had the keys to a brand new FM station. Sweet! What was doubly nice was everyone in the industry knew we were clueless, yet a year later, KKDJ was No. 1.” And it stayed there for a decade. Opperman and Fisher were still on the air in 1994 when the economy tanked and the station changed hands, leaving them out of a job, despite their consistent success in the ratings throughout their tenure. “I’m not bragging, but there’s no secret to it,” Opperman said of the duo’s success. “We set out to do Saturday Night Live on the radio every morning, and I like to think we largely succeeded. Our ratings are something I’m very proud of. Don and I 95

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were No. 1 in most (demographics) the entire time we were on the air. At one point, we set a record for the highest ratings in FM radio history, and as far as I know, that record still stands.” That’s not hard to believe given the number of radios that were tuned into KKDJ on the way to Bullard High and waiting for that first bell to ring in the early 1980s. The balance of radio power later shifted toward AM talk radio, and the format at old 105.9 has changed several times since then.

Last I checked, it was a talk station with the familiar KMJ call letters. KBOS changed to a rhythmic contemporary format. KFIG started broadcasting sports. KYNO moved up the dial to 1430, but at last glance, it was playing classic radio hits again. It would be nice to say that some things never change, and maybe they don’t: talent, for one thing. “The actual show would be just as funny (today), because funny is funny,” Opperman said of

The Breakfast Club. Comedy is the only segment of show business where it doesn’t matter how old you are, how you look, how hip you are, etc. Rodney Dangerfield was funny to everybody. I see no reason why Don and I wouldn’t be No. 1 again just like we were for 14 years.” Anyone who remembers the skits and characters from The Breakfast Club back in the 1980s would be hard-pressed to disagree.

Part 3

Fresnolympics The Games We Played

Kings of the Road Too many cars. The complaint echoed through City Hall and the state Capitol time and again during the 1950s and ’60s. It led to one-way streets downtown, new freeways and a host of other innovations. But sometimes it seemed as if Fresno could never have too many cars. Like the rest of America, the city had a love affair with the automobile that stretched back almost to the time of its invention, when men competed to perform ever-more-impressive feats of speed and endurance in their gleaming (or dustcovered) horseless carriages. In 1915, legendary racer Barney Oldfield came to Fresno for a match race with local boy Earl Cooper. Major league pitcher Dutch Leonard, who we’ll meet again shortly, served as starter for the race. Oldfield, the first driver to record a 100 mph lap at the Indianapolis 500, didn’t have enough horsepower to match Cooper, who won it and a $1,200 prize that went along with it, while Oldfield pocketed $800 for his troubles. Cooper wasn’t the only local figure to try his hand at the then-new pastime of pushing a horseless carriage to its limits. In 1908, Norman De Vaux saddled up his 24-horsepower buggy and set off from Oakland for Fresno, a trip he completed in a breathtaking seven hours and 16 minutes. The time shattered the previous record of nine-

and-a-half hours, and De Vaux had a place in the record books. De Vaux must have liked what he saw in Fresno, because it became a focal point for his family’s future endeavors in the budding automotive industry. Eight years after his record run, brother Delbert moved his family down from the Bay Area to open the first Chevrolet auto dealership in the San Joaquin Valley. After a falling-out with company founder Louis Chevrolet, De Vaux teamed up with his brother to sell a namesake automobile Norman began producing in Oakland and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The company produced a coupe and sedan, priced at $595 and $795, and claimed to have taken 8,000 orders in the spring of 1931. Unfortunately for the brothers, the Great Depression was well underway, and many of those orders didn’t

pan out. It actually produced fewer than 5,000 of the cars before creditors—including the engine manufacturer—came calling, and the company had to call it quits. But this was hardly the end of Fresno’s fixation with the automobile, which would manifest itself in countless ways over the years to come. At the height of the Depression, the motor vehicle offered a means of escape. Cross-country auto races gave way to contests on fixed tracks, including many on a mile-long wooden oval installed at the Fresno Fairgrounds for $250,000. The winning speed for the first race held at the track, in the fall of 1920, was 96 mph. But the track itself lasted just seven years. Splinters often flew up, hitting racers in the face, and at times entire boards would come loose. Bennet Hill, a driver who pronounced the track

“One of my fondest memories of my Fresno childhood was when my father took me to Romo’s Auto Wrecking. He needed something for his Rambler, (and) he got me some Impala emblems. When he was taking off one, the trunk slammed down; he moved and the trunk broke his sunglasses. After all that hassle, I decided I wanted the taillight that was off sitting on the seat. He said, ‘Next time, we will get the taillight.’ We did, and now I have a 64 Impala.” – Xavier Ripple

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“the fastest mile track in the world,” was hit in the face by one such board, which broke his protective goggles and left his face strewn with blood. In another race, a board split off and knocked a driver’s crankcase loose—a piece of which then slammed into another racer’s carburetor, causing it to fall off. The wooden track was hazardous for another reason, as well: wood could burn. A fire in 1924 destroyed a section of the track, and another fire struck a couple of years later. In 1927, organizers decided to rip up the track altogether, and auto racing at the fair was discontinued. It remained popular elsewhere, however, with one such race drawing 75,000 fans to the Municipal Airport Speedway in Los Angeles. Fresno had its own airport—and its own speedway built right alongside it. The airport started as a strip of farmland owned by Wilbur Chandler, a state senator whose interests ranged from banking to vineyards to petroleum. He bought a large plot of farmland west of Fresno in 1917 that came to be used as an airstrip. Chandler would put his seeds in the ground, harvest his crops, then turn the land over to local pilots as a de facto runway until the next season. It wasn’t long before the arrangement became more formal. In 1923, pilots staged a Thanksgiving Day event billed as the “World’s Greatest Aerial Circus” at the site to raise money for a real airstrip. They delighted the crowd with races, wing-walkers and skydivers, but it wasn’t enough to get Fresnans to invest in the idea. Two bond measures that would have provided money to purchase the land from Chandler failed. The point became moot when Chandler decided to donate a hundred acres to the city in 1929, and in November of that year,

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10,000 people attended a ribbon-cutting to dedicate the new airport. An oiled runway, control station, hangar and superintendent’s house were installed on the site at a cost of $50,000. Less than a year later, some 20,000 people greeted legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh when he made a brief stopover at Chandler. He may have been the most famous person

to visit the site, but a future two-time Indy 500 winner who competed right across the street would have given him a run for his money. It wasn’t long after the airport was built that they started racing cars there. A group of investors had purchased some property from Chandler right near the airstrip back in 1927 to build what they envisioned as an amusement park and athletic

Kearney Bowl is seen from the air in 1969, a year before it closed. Photo courtesy of Rick Thompson.

Kings of the Road

grounds. The site, called the Italian Entertainment Park, would include a social hall with a dance floor, along with a baseball diamond and football field. But early on, auto racing became the main attraction. In 1935, an ad in the July 31 Fresno Bee announced the advent of night auto races every Sunday at 8:15, starting August 4 at the Fresno Airport Speedway. The banked oval began as a dirt track, with a paved surface added later. Drivers like Johnny Boyd and Billy Vukovich cut their teeth in the shadows of a massive wooden grandstand that encircled the track. Boyd finished as high as third in the Indy 500 and made the top six four times in a dozen starts. But it was Vukovich who would become one of the biggest sports legends ever to come out of the San Joaquin Valley. Vukovich started racing in his teens, during the Depression, to bring in extra money—$15 for winning a race was standard. He finished second right out of the gate and won his third race. He was only 18. During the war, he earned extra money repairing Jeeps and trucks, which he used to buy a midget race car for $750. Midgets are, for the uninitiated, exactly what the name indicates: small cars with big horsepower that typically run on four cylinders and race on short tracks. When the war ended, Vukovich was back behind the wheel, picking up right where he’d left off. Driving for the Edelbrock dirt track racing team, the “Fresno Flash” won consecutive series championships on the West Coast, running midget cars in 1946 and ’47. A few years later, he gave Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles—site of the second and third NFL all-star football games—a

rousing sendoff by winning six of the last eight races ever staged there. The next stop was the big time: the Indianapolis 500. Vukovich led for 150 laps in his second start at the Brickyard in 1952, only to have a pin in the steering arm fail with just eight laps to go and send him crashing into the wall. After that, he returned to racing midgets at the Fresno Airport Speedway again, but Indy hadn’t seen the last of him. Johnnie Parsons, who was a frequent visitor to the Fresno track as well, won at the Brickyard in Bill Vukovich drove this car to victory in the Indy 500 in 1953 and 1954. 1950 and raced against Vukovich at Indy in that ’52 race. contend with Parsons that day; his rival was at the His assessment of Vukovich? track, but his sponsor wouldn’t allow him to race “I never saw such speed and daring as Vukovich for fear that an accident would keep him out of the put on in last year’s (Indy) race,” he told The Bee 500. The extra caution didn’t help at Indianapolis, before the 1953 race. “Once I was going down the where Parsons completed just 86 laps before an enstraightaway about 135 miles an hour, and Vukovgine failure relegated him to the sidelines. ich passed me like a flash. I looked down to see if The day was marked by blistering conditions the switch in my car was on.” for what’s often called the “Hottest 500.” The merParsons picked Vukovich as a driver likely to cury soared into the high 90s, and the temperature contend for the Indy championship that year, and on the track was 130-plus. The heat forced some it turned out he was right. entrants to use relief drivers, but as a Fresno native, Vukovich tuned up for that race by claiming Vukovich was no stranger to sweltering heat. After the 50-lap main before nearly 5,000 fans at the starting from the pole position, he recorded the Airport Speedway, a little more than a month before heading to the Brickyard. He didn’t have to 163

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fastest lap of the race and led all but five out of the 200 laps he completed to post his first Indy victory. Though he started back in the pack at No. 19 the following year, another triumph followed, with Vukovich setting a then-record with an average speed of 130.85 mph and earning nearly $75,000 in prize money. It was a far cry from the 15 bucks a race he got for winning when he started out nearly two decades earlier. With his share of the purse, Vukovich invested in his hometown, buying a pair of gas stations, including one at Hazelwood and Butler in the southern section of the city, which remained standing into the 21st century. In 1955, Vukovich seemed poised for a threepeat at the age of 36. His strategy heading into the race was simple: “I just stick my foot on it and go,” he said. “I sit there and get tireder and tireder, and wonder if my car’s going to fall apart. And then I tell myself, ‘Bill, if you don’t win this, you may have to go back to work,’ and drive a little harder.” Vukovich drove hard that day. After starting in the No. 4 slot, he quickly grabbed the lead and held it for 50 of the first 56 laps. Then, on the backstretch, a gust of wind hit one of the cars running just ahead of him. A second driver swerved to the infield in an attempt to avoid the first, and Vukovich was left with just a few feet of open space between his car and the wall. He went for the hole, but before he could reach it, the second driver lost control of his car and flew back onto the track, hitting a third car … which spun directly into Vukovich’s path.

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Vukovich’s Offenhauser Hopkins Special went airborne, came down nose-first, somersaulted four times and burst into flames. He died of a fractured skull. Had he won the race, Vukovich would have become the first person to win it three years in a row. Nearly sixty years later, it remained a feat that no one had ever accomplished. Competitor Walt Faulkner of Long Beach prophetically stated before the race that Vukovich was all but unbeatable. “Vuky is the greatest race driver in this era,” he said. “You can beat him only if his car fails or he wrecks. You’ll never beat the man.”

Pombo vs. Sargent The same could almost have been said about another regular on the Airport Speedway track— rechristened as Kearney Bowl during the ’50s— who dominated competition on the quarter-mile banked oval for a decade and a half after Vukovich’s death. Unlike Vukovich, Al Pombo never headed east to Indy. He was content with whipping the pants off any driver who dared challenge him in the state of California. After winning his first track championship at Kearney in 1957, he ushered in the ’60s by repeating the feat for the first of seven consecutive years. By the time the decade had ended, he’d racked up 10 track championships and seven state titles. Big-name drivers such as 1963 Indy champ Parnelli Jones would race at Kearney from time to time, but Pombo called it home. His biggest rival was San Jose driver Marshall Sargent, who was involved in several altercations at the track and, as

one newspaper report put it, “certainly is not a favorite with Fresno fans.” You couldn’t miss Sargent: He was the one in the purple hardtop—the big guy with the fiery temper and the bad reputation. During his career, he tangled not only with Pombo but also with as Vukovich’s son, Billy Jr., not to mention the fans. At one point, he set off on a tour of Australia, where he became involved in a dispute with another driver that escalated into a full-scale brawl. Before it was over, things got so far out of hand that furious fans rushed onto the infield and actually started pulling his car to pieces right in front of him. No matter. Sargent simply returned to California and lost no time in posting a victory in the 50-lap main at Sacramento. Still, Kearney Bowl general manager Harold Murrell was worried about “what might happen” when Sargent hit the track again in Fresno—especially in light of the fracas with Vukovich. During the fiasco, Sargent reportedly challenged all 4,000 spectators on hand at the race and earned the wrath of NASCAR officials who told him, “(We’ll have you) hauled away to jail if you ever pull this act again.” Murrell had good reason to be concerned. “Everyone knows Sargent is one of the truly great drivers, but once he loses his temper, he goes wild. He’ll run another driver into the wall or will drive right over him. He’s lost a lot of money because he wanted to show (the other drivers) who was boss.” Murrell said he had taken precautions by increasing police protection at the bowl and sought to reassure fans that Sargent wouldn’t go after

Kings of the Road

hecklers by running up into the stands. The other drivers, meanwhile, reportedly came to an agreement that, if Sargent went after one of them, he’d have to deal with them all. How much of this was real concern and how much of it was hype is hard to say. As Murrell had pointed out after another near rumble at the bowl involving Sargent three years earlier, “This may not be good for racing, but it’s great for the fans.” There’s no doubt that the passions were real, but when the lights went off, the tempers died down. Pombo would later say that he and Sargent were the best friends in the world off the track— even though, when they fired up their engines, they were the bitterest of enemies. The two men’s names remained so closely linked that an annual

Pombo/Sargent Classic race has been run in their names for more than two decades on racetracks in Hanford and Tulare. Why not at Kearney Bowl? Because the old track on which they waged so many wheel wars is long gone, torn down in 1970 to make room for a government low-income housing project. More than politics may have been at play, though. After a Fourth of July racing program in 1969, a woman named Judy Lichti was driving home to Easton with her husband and their 4-year-old son. There had been a minor incident in the parking lot, in which another car tried to cut in front of the Lichtis as they were leaving. No words were ex-

changed, but the car stopped and pulled in behind the family’s vehicle. John Lichti thought nothing more about it. Then, about 11:15 p.m., a car that looked similar to the one from the parking lot pulled up alongside the Lichtis, as if to pass, near Fruit and Jensen avenues. Instead, however, its occupant whipped out a gun and fired three shots into the driver’s side of the family vehicle. One tore off the little finger on John Lichti’s right hand; another sprayed glass that cut his son; a third killed his wife. The shooter was never found. After that, retired Bee reporter Terry Betterton recalled, Kearney Bowl “stopped being a factor” in the Valley’s racing scene. “It is sad that local auto racing has dwindled to almost nothing,” Betterton said. “It was those kinds of tracks that made racing so popular, a proving ground that produced the likes of Billy Vukovich. Now, instead of guys building cars in their garage, it’s big money, advertising and television. The little guys don’t have much of a chance to compete.”

Rodeo Races and Autoramas Racing continued for a time just outside the city limits at the Clovis Speedway, which had a run of nearly two decades at a venue more widely known

Jerry Thompson leads the pack heading out of the turn in a race at Kearney Bowl in 1968. Thompson later had success at Clovis Speedway, where he won the points title in the final season. Thompson came into that final race leading the standings both at Clovis and at nearby Madera Speedway, but both tracks held their final races of the season on the same night, forcing him to choose. Photo courtesy of Rick Thompson.

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Fresno Growing Up

for a different sort of horsepower—the kind on display at the annual Clovis Rodeo. The man who packed down the clay and put wheels on this half-mile dirt oval was a driver himself. He’d finished second to Pombo in the 1957 points standings at Kearney Bowl, but he soon refocused his attention on another aspect of the game: promotion. For Blackie Gejeian, that didn’t mean just making phone calls and running ads in the newspaper; it meant a 100 percent, hands-on operation that took him out to the track early and in the middle of the action on race day. “I did all the watering and blade work myself,” he told Rod & Custom magazine. “I never saw one race from the grandstands. Whenever they needed something, I was there. My job was to put on a race.” Gejeian’s given name was Mike, but most people didn’t call him that. Like Johnny Cash, he wore black leather and even painted his nickname in gold letters on the side of his car. If Al Radka was Fresno’s Mr. Television, Gejeian personified the automobile in the region for a half-century or more, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s. The races he staged on Clovis’ half-mile flat track drew many of the same drivers who raced at Kearney’s oval, including Sargent, who won the inaugural title in 1960, and Pombo, who captured six of the next seven. Gejeian knew he had to do more than stage races; he had to put on a show. At one point, he even went all the way to Alaska and brought back eight teams of sled dogs; then he wetted down the track so it was super-slick and brought in radio personalities from all the top local stations to serve as mushers. Eight teams of nine dogs each were flying around the track. “The fans were pulling for

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their radio personality,” Gejeian told Rod & Custom, “and the place went wild.” It also went wild for a new generation of drivers. Pombo retired in 1971, but his son Davey carried on the family tradition by winning the last two titles in Clovis. Still, the Clovis venue wasn’t ideal. Unlike Kearney, which was a few miles outside the heart of Fresno, Clovis Speedway was smack in the middle of that city’s downtown. Four years after the track opened, the council was getting complaints. A local pastor said noise from the track was disrupting his church’s Sunday evening services, and one councilmember declared, “I don’t think racing has any business in a city of our size on a Sunday evening.” The council adopted a 10 p.m. curfew, and Gejeian said he’d try to comply, asking for flexibility in the event that an accident might force a delay. But he would get no such leeway: The following year, Clovis police cited him for going 19 minutes past the cutoff. Still, Gejeian managed to keep racing through 1976, when a new round of noise complaints finally led to the track’s demise. He had no such problems at the other racetrack he operated—a drag strip so far outside of town it could rightfully be considered in the middle of nowhere … nowhere being a place called Raisin City, home to maybe a couple of hundred people about 15 miles southwest of Fresno. Gejeian’s trademark at the quarter-mile strip was running four dragsters side-by-side, and just as he did at the Clovis track, the promoter made sure the place was ready to go when race day came. He used a sweeper truck to clean the track, then laid

down a layer of soap and took a fire hose to it so “there were bubbles damn near six feet in the air.” After that, he’d spray adhesive on the asphalt. How fast did they go there? In 1963, nearly 4,000 fans showed up to watch 16 national records fall as speeds topped 180 miles per hour during the two-day West Coast Championships. But Fresno fans hadn’t seen anything yet. “We were breaking records over and over,” Gejeian would say. A decade later, driver John Paxson arrived from Arcadia in his Revell Rocket racer with his eye on a much bigger number. After his fastest run, he said the wind had hampered him a bit, but you wouldn’t have known it from the numbers he put up. Paxson’s rounded his 299.76, clocking up to 300 for the track record. (The world record at the time was 326, also owned by Paxson.) “It’s quite a feeling to go 300,” said Paxson, who said he’d hit the mark about five times. “It’s not easy to describe it.” But the experience wasn’t just about the rocket cars. Plunk down a couple of dollars, and you might get a chance to see motorcyclist Jo Jo Karamegian attempt to sustain a wheelie across the entire quarter-mile strip. You’d also get a look at funny cars, roadsters and all manner of speed demons. The dragstrip shut down in the ’70s, and the property was sold to a new owner who built his home right next to the old track and used it as a runway for his private plane, which he could then park at his front door. The stands have been torn down, but the old weathered track itself was still there into the new millennium, a little more than a mile west of Raisin City on Manning Avenue, past Grantland. A few of the old palm trees are still

Kings of the Road

standing, along with the rows of crops that surround the place. You might conclude that the Clovis and Raisin City tracks Gejeian operated for nearly two decades formed the bulk of his legacy. If so, you’d be wrong. Gejeian was actually better known for building cars than for racing them, or even promoting them. He spent more than a half-century showing off cars, not on the track, but at an annual show called the Autorama. The show was the biggest event of the year for car lovers, and Gejeian traveled all over the country and abroad looking for

Mike “Blackie” Gejeian makes the rounds at his Autorama car show, which he staged for 51 years in Fresno. Photo courtesy of Craig Kohlruss.

cars to feature—and he only included them once. If you missed the ones he displayed one year, you were simply out of luck. If you wanted to see the Ford Zebra driven by Frank Sinatra on the big screen, you had to hit the 1966 show, which also featured a coffin-bodied dragster called Drag-u-la, built for The Munsters television show. If you were curious about a flyingsaucer shaped car called the Sex Machine, you’d have to show up in 1971. To see the Mod Rod driven by actor Michael Cole on TV’s The Mod Squad, a 1974 visit was in order. Gejeian’s 1964 show featured a Jaguar XC400 known as the Double Bubble—a car I remember from the Hot Wheels miniature car collection of my youth. It featured a pair of glass “bubbles,” one over the driver’s seat and the other over the passenger’s side of the machine. All the cars featured at the shows, held during the early years at the fairgrounds and later at the downtown exhibit hall, were eye-catching. In fact, some of the entries seemed so outrageous, it was a wonder they ran at all. But Gejeian insisted that “one of the rules is that they gotta be able to run.” Gejeian built plenty of cars himself, but he never put them in the show until its 50th anniversary edition—the next-to-last one he did before retiring at the age of 85. He built plenty of them over the years, including the famous Ala Kart, which collected more than 200 trophies and was twice named America’s Most Beautiful Roadster. Gejeian came up with the idea for the car the same year he finished second to Pombo at Kearney Bowl. It was a busy year. He and his cohorts had stopped at a coffee

shop and were sketching ideas out on napkins. The name came from the top of the menu, which was adorned with the words “Ala Carte.” Gejeian joined forces with George Barris— who designed the Batmobile for ABC’s hit TV show Batman and brought a replica to the Autorama in 1967—and Richard Peters to create the Ala Kart. They started with a 1929 Model A pickup and attached it to the rear section of a Model T Roadster from two years earlier. Other parts came from more recent models: the taillights from a ’56 DeSoto and ’58 Chevy Impala, a fuel-injected Dodge Red Ram hemi engine, and a Lincoln Continental steering wheel. The interior was decked out in Naugahyde and black velvet with chrome accents, and the exterior was covered in forty coats of mother-of-pearl. Gejeian was proudest of the innovative chrome-plated undercarriage he created—which he boasted was the first of its kind. The only problem was showing it off. Bending down to peer at a car’s chassis isn’t likely to be your first inclination. Gejeian had built a similar undercarriage for his own car, and when he had taken it to the Oakland Roadster Show, he and his cohorts had picked it up every hour and tilted it on its side to give visitors a good look. They couldn’t do the same thing with the Ala Kart, though—it was simply too heavy. So Gejeian went to the women’s restroom, removed the mirror that was over the sink, and placed it under the car. Indeed, it might have been said that all you had to do to get a picture of Fresno’s car culture in the second half of the 20th century would be to take just such a mirror and hold it up in front of Blackie Gejeian’s face. 167

Building a Doghouse When Fresno State built its shiny new campus at Cedar and Shaw in the 1950s, it was a gradual process. Ground was broken in 1950, and the first building to open was the College Laboratory School in 1953. Two years later, the library was dedicated, followed by the cafeteria and bookstore a year after that. But one thing was missing. At the dawn of the new decade, the Fresno State football team was still playing its games across the street from its old campus, at Ratcliffe Stadium. In November of 1964, The Fresno Bee noted that Cal State Hayward was getting ready to open a new stadium in the fall of ’65. It would be smaller than Ratcliffe, at 10,236 seats, but then, Hayward was a smaller school than Fresno State. And, most importantly, it would be new. Ratcliffe wasn’t a bad venue, but it was beginning to show its age. Its wooden seats had a habit of leaving fans with painful going-away presents in the form of splinters in their rear ends. “If Hayward Can Do It,” asked the Bee headline, “Why Not Fresno State?” The campus itself had opened in 1956. Wasn’t nearly a decade long enough to wait? Apparently not. It would be 16 more years before the Bulldogs would make the exodus from Blackstone Avenue to a new home at Cedar and Barstow, and it would be an arduous journey filled with funding challenges, setbacks and even a lawsuit. To get it 206

done, the Bulldogs had to take a significant detour to the north. The far north. The state of Montana, to be exact. That’s where they found three men who would be instrumental in bringing the new stadium to fruition: Gene Bourdet, Lynn Eilefson and Jim Sweeney. The third man in the equation, Sweeney, got most of the credit. As coach of Fresno State for 19 seasons, he led the Bulldogs to eight conference championships and seven bowl games—winning five of them. The first time Sweeney and Fresno State took the field together, he came away with his first career victory as a college coach. But he happened to be on the opposing sideline that day in 1963, when he coached the Montana State Bobcats to a 29–7 victory. Sweeney left Montana State after the 1967 season to coach at Washington State, and that same year, a committee was formed to explore the possibility of building a new stadium in Bozeman, Montana. The proposal for a venue that would hold 15,000 to 20,000 spectators was being championed by the athletic director—the same man who had hired Sweeney. Gene Bourdet, like Sweeney, had been born in Butte and had strong ties to Montana State. Bourdet had played quarterback for the Bobcats’ 1946 team that had tied New Mexico in the Harbor Bowl at San Diego. He became athletic director in

1959 and served in that position until 1970, long enough to get the stadium project off the ground. Working with Bourdet at Montana State was another native Montanan, Eilefson, who helped put together the stadium plan. The stadium was built at a cost of about $500,000 and opened in 1973, but by that time, both Bourdet and Eilefson had left the university and moved on to new jobs. In Fresno. Bourdet joined Fresno State as athletic director in 1971, and Eilefson rolled into town a year later to become the first paid executive director of the Bulldog Foundation. The nonprofit group had been around since 1950, but it really started to get serious when Eilefson arrived. Fund-raising would be his major goal. Upon his arrival, Eilefson was charged with organizing a campaign to raise $100,000. The longer-term goal was to build a stadium, and that would take significantly more money. The state wasn’t going to fund the stadium; private money would be needed, and it would have to be raised locally. That meant getting boosters’ attention, and to do that, the Bulldogs would have to put up some bigger numbers in the “win” column. They’d had moderate success under Darryl Rogers but had won just one conference title in his seven seasons, and hadn’t had a truly remarkable season since their undefeated 1961 campaign.

Building a Doghouse

Now, with Rogers having jumped ship for San Jose State, Bourdet had a chance to make his mark on the program by choosing a proven winner—a popular coach who could rally the community and take the program to the proverbial next

This ad promoted radio broadcasts of high school, college and NFL games on KMJ for the weekend of October 23, 1970. For the record, Bullard beat Fresno High 7–3, Fresno State defeated Cal State Los Angeles 51–6, and the 49ers came back to beat the Broncos 19–14.

level. Sweeney, who had coached under Bourdet at Montana State, would seem to have been a natural choice. But Sweeney was coming off his best season at Washington State, and appeared to be hitting his stride: The Cougars had gone 7–4 the previous year and had finished the season in the national top 20. Still, Sweeney said later he had given serious consideration to taking the Fresno State job in 1972 before deciding to stay in the Pacific Northwest. The wording left one with the distinct impression that Sweeney was either offered the job or, if he wasn’t, that it could have been his for the asking. Instead, the person Bourdet chose was a man who seemed to have the right combination of experience and local cachet to get the job done. J.R. Boone had earned his shot. A star running back at the University of Tulsa, he had been drafted by the Chicago Bears—where he roomed with ageless wonder George Blanda—and had gone on to play six seasons (1948–53) in the National Football League. After that, he returned to the San Joaquin Valley to take up coaching. In 1956, he won a league title in his first year as head coach of the Lindsay High Cardinals, then moved to Sanger three years later and led the Apaches to five league championships in seven years. His greatest success, however, came at Reedley College, where he guided the Pirates to four straight conference titles and a state small-schools championship in 1971. Two years later, he was chosen to replace Rogers at Fresno State. But the success that seemed destined to follow him never came. The Bulldogs struggled to a 2–9 record in their first season under Boone, their

worst showing since 1929. Not all the blame could be placed on Boone’s shoulders, however. He had taken the job on late notice after Rogers resigned in late January, inheriting a young team of players he hadn’t recruited and a pair of freshman quarterbacks. By the end of the season, Fresno Bee sports editor Omer Crane was remarking that Boone “needs more recruiting problems like he needs a budget cut.” Boone, for his part, was said to have been overheard muttering, “Thank God, it’s over.” Except it wasn’t. The dismal won-lost record only compounded the recruiting problems. The cold fact was, Boone would have a hard time finding players who wanted to play for a team that had only won two games all season and, to make matters worse, in an aging stadium that seated just 14,000 people. “It points out the greater need for a stadium of our own,” Bourdet said, “something to sell our recruits.” Unfortunately for Boone, the Bulldogs didn’t get a new stadium and they didn’t get much better, either. They lost their first four games before finishing a bit stronger with four wins in their last six. The 1975 season began with high hopes, as some observers expected the Bulldogs to challenge San Diego State for the conference title. With 15 starters returning from the previous year’s team, there would be no excuses this time. But after an opening-day rout of Fullerton and a 2–2 start, the team went into a tailspin. Injuries were a problem. And the quarterback, a returning starter who had thrown 16 touchdown passes the year before, managed just two in his first 207

Fresno Growing Up

six games to go with a dozen interceptions. Boone changed starters for Week 7, but it didn’t help. A drubbing at Long Beach State capped a three-week skid in which the Bulldogs were outscored by a whopping 100–24. That’s when Boone decided to throw in the towel, announcing his departure out of “consideration to my family, friends, the university and the team.” Meanwhile, up at Washington State, things had turned sour for Sweeney. In the three seasons since taking the Cougars to a top 20 ranking, he had failed to produce another winning record. That didn’t keep Bourdet from considering his old Montana State cohort for the Fresno job when it opened up, choosing him from among a field of four finalists. Despite his recent struggles at Washington State, Sweeney was brimming with confidence. “I think Fresno State is a sleeping giant which is ready to be turned on, and I believe I can touch that hot button,” he said, uttering a quote that would become enshrined in Fresno lore. “I don’t think you will find many people in the coaching profession who think there is a more tireless recruiter than I am.” Bourdet was similarly optimistic: “I firmly believe that Jim Sweeney is one of the great football coaches in America and a proven winner on both the high school and college levels. There is no doubt in my mind that he can turn the program around immediately and move it forward.” The success wasn’t quite immediate. Sweeney lost his first two games as Fresno State coach and struggled to a 5–6 record in his debut

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J.R. Boone was a great success as a high school and junior college coach, but failed to replicate his winning ways at Fresno State, where he was 10–24 in three seasons. Here he is seen at Sanger High School in 1962. Ccourtesy of The Reedley Exponent.

season. The following year, however, proved to be a breakout season for the Bulldogs, who went 9–2 and won a conference title for the first time since 1968. After that, Sweeney left for two seasons to work as an NFL assistant (he would return to coach the Bulldogs again after that), and Fresno State slipped back into mediocrity. But he had helped light the fuse that finally got that long-awaited stadium built. One question was how big to dream.

“In the late ’70s, when the football stadium to replace 14,000-seat Ratcliffe Stadium was first considered, most agreed that it was necessary, but the questions was ‘how big?’” Terry Betterton remembered. “The ‘realist’ said anything over 20,000 was a pipe dream. The ‘dreamers’ wanted more and suggested using the Ag Department property on the northeast corner of Cedar and Barstow to build a 50,000-seat football stadium and save room for the future construction of a basketball arena and baseball stadium.” Eventually, the southwest corner of that intersection was agreed upon and the goal set at 30,000 seats. But some neighbors didn’t take too kindly to the idea of a stadium in their back yard and sued to stop the project. Who could blame them? With no freeways anywhere near the site, traffic could be a challenge once the final gun sounded. Add to that the lights, noise and parking issues, and there were plenty of reasons for northeast Fresnans to be worried. The Fresno County Board of Supervisors was concerned, too, but the project went forward, nonetheless. Fortunately for those living nearby, steps were taken to minimize its impact. Light standards were built at an angle, appearing to lean out over the stadium from each side, so that much of the light shone where it should be: on the field. The stadium itself was a true bowl, with the playing field nearly 40 feet below ground level, allowing it to contain some of the noise. And neighborhood residents were given parking permits allowing them to leave their cars on the street, whereas fans had to find somewhere else to park.

Building a Doghouse

Ground broke in 1979 on the $7 million project, which relied entirely on private funds. Much of the money came via seat options, a concept that worked like this: The majority of the seating consisted of metal benches, which were available to anyone. But seats closer to the 50-yard line were set aside for donors who reserved the right to purchase tickets over a 10-year span. These red seats came equipped with curved backs, armrests and a little more legroom. They also came at a price. For 1981, the team’s first full season at the new stadium, all 5,104 seat options were sold, bringing in more than $5.8 million. It was light years away from the $150,000 the Bulldog Foundation had raised during Boone’s first season as head coach. Despite the roles played by Bourdet and Eilefson, Sweeney received much of the credit. He had, after all, coached the team to its greatest success on

the field in nearly two decades and ignited renewed interest in what had appeared to be a moribund program. In 1997, the playing field itself was renamed in his honor: Jim Sweeney Field at Bulldog Stadium.

“I loved the fact that I was able to see Beatles movies on the big screen at the Tower Theatre during their Midnight Matinees, saw A Hard Day’s Night, Magical Mystery Tour, Help and Let it Be. Each one of these was paired with Yellow Submarine, so I saw that on the big screen many times. It was awesome. … After these shows my dad would come pick us up (my best friend and I were in junior high) and take us to Winchell’s; on the way home we could have very fresh yummy donuts, the best ever I think when they are warm. Butterfield Creamery ice cream place was the best and friendliest small ice cream place. The ice cream was delicious, and the staff was extremely friendly. I was going to stand outside with my puppy while my friend went in and got our ice cream and they said as long as I held my dog, I could bring her in. They all fawned over her, and one guy even gave her a small vanilla ice cream for free. – Tina Lorraine Bridges

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