Michele and I went to the Woodside Jr. Rodeo on the 4th and I kept thinking Nobody can look at this and not think that California is a western state in a way that I should have realized was already trying to talk myself into liking it. Less than 5 miles from our home is the home to The Mounted Patrol of San Mateo County and every year they hold a junior rodeo that Michele and I went to for the first time this year.

The parking lot was full of oversize SUVs and pickups towing horse trailers and people wandering around wearing cowboy hats.As an aside, this was probably the first time in, atleast, ten years that I have been to a California event that the trash barrels were not segregated by recycling and trash. End aside.

California’s Rodeo Heritage goes all the way back to the late 1700’s when we were a province of New Spain. Less than a year after we became a state in 1850, the legislature passed the 1851 Act to Regulate Rodeos formalizing rodeos as part of our culture. As another aside, I grew up saying ro-day-oh  and people still use that pronunciation, which comes from the Spanish, when talking about the San Francisco Grand National Rodeo or the California Rodeo in Salinas, or the Beverly Hills street, but most of the time, rodeo is pronounced ro-dee-oh which comes from the Texan mispronunciation. End aside.

As Gail Cousins said, Rodeo is great entertainment, at a horrific cost to the animals. I’m not so sure about the great entertainment part, but it was hard for me to sit there, watching a rodeo and not think about racism and animal abuse.

For starters, when the contestants are introduced, the ones on foot are mostly Mexican-American and the ones on horses are mostly European-Americans.I assume that is because, owning a horse is a rich person’s enterprise and, if you want to do something in a rodeo but don’t have a horse, you are left with bull riding (or calf riding since this is a junior rodeo). Calf riding seems terrifying for the kids and calves alike. Its one redeeming factor is that it has a long heritage – going all the way back to bull riding in Crete about 4000 years ago – going back to a time when we , humans, had a different sensibility. In my book, that doesn’t offer much redemption.The horse events are more fun to watch, not because they require more skill, but because everybody, animal and rider alike, seem to be having a better time.  Then came the pig scramble in which young children chase even younger piglets. This being Woodside at the hyper wealthy, northwestern, edge of Silicon Valley, the piglets were heritage – Red Wattle and Berkshire – free range, pigs from a local farm. My hope is that they return to a more peaceful life on the farm, but, while they were here, the squealing piglets were tracked down, for our pleasure, by the marauding children. It was fun in a sort of Why am I enjoying watching these pigs get terrified? way.  Watching the rodeo, I kept thinking rodeo is part of California’s heritage, but I kept saying to myself, But it’s not our only heritage. As even another aside, rodeos are not just a Western US thing, somehow, the Germans became fascinated by Cowboys and Indians, over a hundred years ago, and now have their own rodeos as the picture of Gina Schumacher, the daughter of the great German Formula One driver from Germany, Michele Schumacher, riding in a rodeo on their family ranch in Switzerland, testifies to. End aside.

When I started this, the Confederate Battle Flag was in all the headlines and Heritage not hate was the shibboleth of the day for those people still flying that hateful flag. The combination of the rodeo and the flag got me thinking about heritage and, especially, California’s heritage. When the Europeans discovered California, it was already occupied by people who had discovered California about 15,000 years earlier.

There was no European Native American Thanksgiving, in California the opening sequence of our contact was for the Europeans to set up a series of slave camps. The indigenous people were rounded up and forced to build the Missions that we so love. When I was a kid, somewhere around the fourth grade, we were taught that the Spaniards were here to bring Culture to the Indians. Now, I am glad to say, the fourth graders – approximately –  are being taught the real story; that these were slave camps.

We must have liked those camps, however, because we re-instituted rounding up people and putting them in camps when World War II started. Once again, the people rounded up weren’t Europeans. This time, they were Japanese. To be clear, these were American citizens , most of their families having come to California before the Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of almost all people from Asia, so they were second or third generation Californians (I am sure that alot of their families had been Americans and Californians longer than my family which only came here in the 1890’s).

Everything I read tells me that racism in California was and still is milder than most of the country, but we still redlined housing for all people of color until integration was shoved down our throats when the Feds started enforcing the The Fair Housing Act of 1968. All in all, much of my heritage, as a Californian and an American, is pretty shameful.That collective heritage is not something for which I am proud and I wonder why anybody would be.

I want to think that all the people who fly, wear, decorate their car or jet ski, or otherwise let us know their Mission Statement with a Confederate Flag, aren’t racists, but they make it hard. They keep talking about heritage, but that heritage is nasty, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist, pretending that it isn’t doesn’t change it. Still, as bad as I think our California heritage is, I am still very proud of being a Californian and I suspect that is the same for many Southerners.

About a year ago, I made a short post about having garbage dumped on our front lawn because we were Jewish and moving to a new house in another town where – some people, at least – did not want us. The picture above is that house, and Michele and I visited it a couple of weeks ago and met its charming owners. While much of the move was not a happy experience for me, that is not what I want to talk about now. What I want to talk about is the house we moved to and I want to speculate a little about my parents.

We moved in about January 1952 to a conservative area of conservative Hillsborough (we had bought the old front lawn of a larger property from the strapped descendant of somebody vital enough to afford the original property). The house took way longer to build than anybody had scheduled and went over budget, so I am guessing that my parents started planning the family’s new home sometime in 1950. It was a different world in 1950.

The United Sates had won The War – almost single-handedly in our mythology of the day – and we were the only major industrial country that hadn’t been trashed which resulted in our becoming a bigger economic power than the rest of the world put together. It was a time of enormous national optimism, in ten years we would even be talking about going to the moon. But it was also a very scary time, The Reds had The Bomb and, as kids in school, we practiced hiding under our desks when the air-raid sirens went off. Joseph McCarthy through the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, was starting to track down Red spies in our government and an inordinate amount of those questioned were Jewish (according to a study by Aviva Weingarten, in 2008, of 124 people questioned by McCarthy’s Committee  in 1952, 79 were Jewish).

As an aside,  today, about 2.2% of the American population is Jewish, the same as in the 1950’s, but the Jewish population was more separate in the 1950’s. Then, only about 17% of Jewish people married outside of the faith, according to a Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project in 2013 (that figure is now 71% for non-Orthodox Jews).

Tony Judt, in Thinking the Twentieth Century, talks about the draw of transnational Communism for people, like Jews, who felt unprotected at the national level. During the rise of Fascism, with its anti-Jewish legislation during the 1920’s and 30’s, the Communists were the only major anti-fascist group (until the war started). The Communist movement championed ideals dear to many Jewish people, like equality and integration, so when McCarthy started to root-out Communists, he did find alot Jews. Of course, doing any sort of progressive activity such as trying to desegregate a public swimming pool in Pasadena, like the Oppenheimer brothers did in 1937, was enough to be labeled a Fellow Traveler which was as bad as being a full blooded Communist. End aside.

As another aside, the spectra of Communism was far from theoretical in our family. In the 1950’s. the House Un-American Activities Committee – HUAC – was traveling around the country, holding hearings, to eradicate Communists and Fellow Travelers, most of them imaginary. Today, having been investigated by HUAC in the 50’s, is something of a honor, but in the actual 1950’s it was something to be feared. We had several members of our family who we were worried about, not only for them, but how their being investigated would reflect on us (in the end, only one person we knew closely was called up and our family name remained unsullied). End aside.

It was far from the worst time to be Jewish, but it wasn’t the best either, and Hillsborough was a place where some, maybe most, of the people did not want us moving in. Why my parents wanted to move to Hillsborough in the first place, I don’t know, but I suspect it was primarily pushed by my mother. What ever the reason, we could have snuck in, could have bought a nice, traditional house, moved in, kept our heads down, and stayed quiet. Instead, my parents decided to make a statement.

They hired a young architect, Ward Thomas, who was not a well known name – and who never became famous, much to my parents disappointment; he was hard to work with I remember being told – and I love that they had enough confidence in their own tastes, their own style,  to hire him.  The house was going to be what is now known as Mid-Century Architecture but, then, it was a statement. Wandering through it a couple of weeks ago, it still is.

The house looks simple and like alot of things that look simple, it is much more complicated. In front, the walls don’t line up vertically, making it much harder to engineer and frame. The master bedroom wing floats effortlessly over the carport with all the actual heavy lifting being hidden from view. The roof drains into a pipe complex which takes the water from over the windows to the far edge of the building, the walls in back are floor to ceiling glass with no shear bracing, the fireplace hearth cantilevers through a large window to become a shelf outside, and on and on. No wonder the construction took longer and cost more than originally expected, almost none of it was routine.

When I was a child, I remember thinking that the house was huge and ostentatious, and I was embarrassed. It pointed out how we were different at a time when I just wanted to blend into The Great Melting Pot. Now, walking around the house for the first time since – probably – 1957, it seems small, and tasteful in the extreme, and I am proud that my parents had the chutzpah to build it. The new owners have updated much of the house, like putting in double glazed windows, but I am delighted that they have honored the spirit of the original house. When it comes to Mid-Century architecture, it is obvious that they are Fellow Travelers.

As a final aside, when we lived here, when it was our home, we had a Standard Poodle named after Émile Zola, who in our home – at least – was famous for defending Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French artillery officer scapegoated after France’s loss of the Franco-Prussian War in 1894. The new owners have a dog named Atticus. I like the symmetry of that almost as much as the fact that this very special house has been so sensitively preserved. End aside.