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Monday, Jun. 01, 2009

Central Coast Hadassah honors local historians Dan and Liz Krieger

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Central Coast Hadassah is proud to honor two individuals whose contributions have made a difference in the lives of many, Dan and Liz Krieger. Their commitment to recounting the history of the county is invaluable and Central Coast Hadassah wants to acknowledge those efforts.

Central Coast Hadassah has been in the SLO community for more than 40 years, and a number of its charter members continue its mission of Israel advocacy, education, and healthcare. At a national level, Hadassah has been funding healthcare in Israel and pre-Palestine for nearly a century, seeing that medicine serves as a bridge to peace. Central Coast Hadassah supports these international efforts, and annually recognizes those contributing to our local community. The Kriegers are great friends of the community and Central Coast Hadassah. We hope you enjoy reading their story.

-Lauren Bandari Central Coast Hadassah

What brought you to San Luis Obispo as an adult?

My teaching job at UC Davis was terminated by Gov. Regan’s 1970 budget cuts to the UC budget. Liz wrote letters on my behalf to all the CSA campuses with history departments She asked does Cal Poly had a history department.? It didn’t when I was an undergraduate, but I knew that as a CSU campus it had a more diverse mission in general education support. Several months later, I got a phone call to come down for an interview. It was a horrible market for history professors, but Liz wanted to stay at the Madonna Inn. It was $32 a night, which we could afford.

The next day, August 20, 1971, I may have been the last tenure track professor to have been hired on the spot. We overhead the Department Chair, Gene Smith, say, “I want this man hired now!” He told me that they could only pay me $8800 a year because of the Nixon wage freeze, but I said I “would happily teach for no pay at all.” We were both thrilled and fell in love with the campus and its students.

Can you recount a memorable first experience in SLO?

When I was five years old in 1945, my grandparents led me on an exploration from Compton near Los Angeles up to San Francisco. We drove through San Luis Obispo and on north through the Chorro Valley. I had been in the High Sierras, the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, but had never seen anything that captured my attention so completely. I am certain that it was the proximity of the Cerros (peaks) to Highway 1. It was also the diversity on the land from the huge military encampments. World War II had just ended. I remember dairy farms with five gallon milk cans along the roads, Mission San Luis Obispo and most of all Mission San Miguel.

It was a hot day in September when were returning from San Francisco. My grandmother said that she knew a cool place to stop. When we walked into San Miguel Mission, it was nearly twenty degrees cooler. I looked at the colorful painting inside the church. The designs meant nothing to me, but the colors and the neo-Egyptian motif of the altar held me transfixed.

My grandparents had to drag me away. My behavior became a “family legend.” I came home to find that my mother had given birth to a baby sister while we were away. I just wanted to go back to San Luis Obispo County.

Since you have resided here, how have you seen SLO grow in its infrastructure, businesses, community groups, and cultural makeup?

San Luis Obispo city has grown by nearly 40%. Other parts of the county have more than doubled in population. Some of the haphazard growth is disturbing. We could have done things a lot better. But overall, the city and the county have grown in attractiveness, from Mission Plaza which opened shortly before our arrival through the city’s tree planting program which erased our concerns over a nearly treeless city center. Plus the variety of restaurants, the symphony and Pacific Coast Repertory Opera, foreign movies at the Palm, the Performing Arts Center, the Clark Center, the numerous local historical societies and their museums, all make the SLO life in the 21st century a good deal more compelling than it was in 1971.

How do see SLO’s historical legacies like the Mission, old Chinatown, the Railroad district, and Cuesta Pass influence the community today?

The Cuesta and the Southern Pacific, now Union Pacific Railroad, define our county even to the present. If you don’t like the chilly summer in Pismo you can have summer heat with less than a fifteen mile drive. There is a somewhat different culture between the County Seat and North County. Just read the letters to the editor. Both Mission San Luis Obispo, founded in 1772, and the railroad, completed in 1894-1901, served to hold the amorphous societies together.

The Railroad District once housed the largest workforce in the county. They travelled the length of the county from Watsonville to Ventura and gave us a sense of being whole. Before the railroad workers, we had the Chinese who constructed the wharves and county roads and laid down the first road beds for the “iron horse,” losing many lives in the process. These are the people who made it possible for the farmer to get his butter and cheese to market.

Learning about our history is invaluable to understanding our present, but we can only do so if we have resources available, such as teachers and recorded material

We were amazed to find fourth and fifth generation families living here when we arrived. For California, where seemingly everyone in our generation was born out of state, this was unusual. We were honored to become friends with these pioneers and to hear their stories.

We feel that a sense of history helps provide “spirit of place.” We are all here now and we have come to share that spirit of place. Without it, our daily lives have diminished meaning.

Was there a certain moment in your lives that drove you to dedicate yourselves to serving your respective fields as professor, librarian, and authors?

Happily for Liz, her mother (Paula Ogren, who now lives in San Luis Obispo) “forced” her to learn to read by hiring a tutor the summer after third grade. Almost all of Liz’s mother’s European relatives died in the Holocaust, and Liz’s dad (Bud Ogren, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr and died recently in SLO) was from a Swedish family with an equally strong sense of social justice,

So Liz easily identified with Japanese Americans forced into relocation camps, Choctaw Indians sending money to Ireland for famine relief in 1847 despite their own Trail of Tears, and blacks denied access to restaurants and public bathrooms in the Deep South. Teaching high school history and civics, and then selling kids on reading for 38 years as a librarian, were infused with passion for “the real history” of people who, though different, are just like us. Fortunately, today’s beautiful books for children help tell this “real story” so much more honestly than books for kids fifty years ago.

The last four years Liz has been privileged to share her love of children, books and history as a volunteer at Hawthorne School.

Do you have an especially surprising historical fact to share about California history? SLO history?

The history of our state and our region are inextricably linked. The isolation of Spain’s remote outpost of empire continued well into the American period. For California, the first railroad linkage didn’t happen until 1869. For San Luis Obispo, the first standard gage locomotive didn’t come down the Cuesta until twenty-five years later. That cultural and economic isolation left a distinct mark on the way California’s cities and towns are laid out. The towns of San Luis Obispo County reflect this.

When writing your book, War Comes to the Middle Kingdom, (along with coeditor Stan Harth) which is based on local historical accounts from the WWII years, 1939-42, did you learn of an inspiring local story?

The account we titled “Japanese Odyssey in San Luis Obispo County” tell the story of a people segregated on the basis of their race and ethnicity, who were forcibly removed and placed in concentration camp-like relocation centers. The FBI reports released under the terms of the 1970’s Freedom of Information Act proves that none of the Issei or Nisei were guilty of espionage activities. Their response at the time was to tell one another “it cannot be helped.” But in the end, they said that something like the relocation order could never happen again. They demanded and received a Presidential apology under Reagan.

We were also impressed with stories of young people who grew up here during the Great Depression. They never travelled further than Paso Robles or Santa Maria. The Second World War came and they themselves, or soldiers who trained here whom they got to know, were soon travelling across America to every one of the world’s continents. And some wives born in this county wrote with amazement of following their soldier husbands to army camps in the unreconstructed South.

Your coverage of Holocaust survivor stories has been well-received and widely read, which shows the community sees the importance of preserving the history of these stories. What are your thoughts on the relevance of discussing what happened to our world during World War II?

Despite the undoing of Holocaust deniers like David Irving in courts of law and Austrian prisons, such denial is alive and well. Liz and want my students and Times Past readers to hear the stories of survivors first hand. We try to bring every possible local connection to the Shoah into my classroom or community forums from survivors of Auschwitz and Sobibor like Irving Klein and Thomas Plant to Kindertransport participant Marion Wolfe to the daughter of a Danish “righteous gentile,” Evie Justesen .

Jewish history in SLO is remarkable, as many of the original families, such as the Sinsheimers, were very civically engaged. Do you know of recorded material on Jewish groups in SLO? Are there any historical tidbits you know to share regarding SLO’s Jewish families?

Even before the Sinsheimers came in the 1870’s, Lazare Godchaux from France bought the Mexican land grant of El Paso de la Robles for $8,000 in 1849. In the 1850’s, the Cerfs , Goldtrees, and others helped make San Luis Obispo a vibrant commercial center.

Lazar Blochman started the sugar beet industry on the Central Coast in 1880’s.

The late Dr. Norton Stern, founder of the Western States Jewish History Journal, directed me to The Jewish Cemetery nearly thirty years ago. The gravestones and burial recordings list names like Orenstein, Kaplan, Goodman, Berkowitz, Meyer, Chern, Cohen, Friedman, Heller, Kreidel, Fleisher, Kaiser, Goodwin, Bryant, Blochman, Rosenblum, Cassner, Weill, Klein, Lehmann and Gottschalk from the 19th century. Dr. Stern repeatedly asked the question “How did this cemetery happen in such a remote place?” It’s a story that I hope to write someday.

The SLO Historical Society and museum is a wonderful resource for the community residents. Do you have ideas on how to link its bevy of information with the schools so SLO children know their area history? Does the County library system offer such a program? Are there more programs, either new or existing, you suggest to teach the area’s adults about California history?

The staff of the County Historical Museum, the South County Historical Museum and the various other historical facilities are entering into consortiums to do exactly this. Interlinked websites will facilitate this process.

County Superintendent of Schools Julian Crocker has fought to keep “History Day” alive in some of the schools. It is the one single program that directly involves students with primary research. Alas, all this takes resources which are diminishing as rapidly as the economy.

At the San Luis Obispo Library, reference librarian Lynn Weich is a fount of information, with tremendous files and a California History Room.