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OJAI VALLEY Memorable Trees

The following article first appeared in the SPRING 2021 (VOLUME 39 NUMBER 2) issue of “Ojai MAGAZINE” on pages 122-123. The magazine was published by the “OJAI VALLEY NEWS”. It is reprinted here with their permission.

LOOK BACK IN OJAI
with Drew Mashburn
Contributed on behalf of the
Ojai Valley Museum

OJAI VALLEY Memorable Trees

TARZAN had nothin’ on me and my buddies!

In about 1966, Mark Madsen — Viking descent, not raised by apes, but kinda ape-ish — and I decided we’d build a tree fort. Mark’s parents had moved to Modesto, so Mark moved in with me to finish out the school year at Matilija Junior High School.

Circa 1965 – 1966. Drew Mashburn, Mark Madsen and Blake Mashburn ( Drew’s brother) in Drew’s bedroom when Mark was living with Drew so he could finish out the school year of 1965 to 1966. This home was on S. Rice Road in Mira Monte. Drew’s father donned the home the “Poor Man’s Ponderosa”.

We knew of a huge Coastal Live Oak that was on a hillside in the old English Walnut groves that bordered the upper end of Mirror Lake and overlooked the railroad (now, the “Ojai Valley Trail”) in Mira Monte. The grand old oak’s limbs reached the ground clear around its large drip line. It was perfect for slipping under to hide because nobody could see you. This made it a great place to construct our private tree fort. We let a few of our buds know about the fort and had them give us a hand in erecting it. Not just because we liked the guys, but because we needed to rob the wood of their dads. We’d already stolen all of my dad’s extra wood and most of his nails.

I’ll bet that tree was about 60 feet high. I don’t recall how we did it, but we hung a thick, manila bull rope from about 30 feet up or better. We’d swing from one thick limb to about 3/4’s of the way across the tree’s canopy, then latch onto a smaller rope and swing a few feet further and set onto another large limb. We found an inch-thick steel cable, then attached it way up high in the oak. We stretched it out beyond the tree’s outermost limbs, then secured it way high in a Southern California black walnut tree. We even put a pulley on the cable, but we could only hang onto the pulley and ride it about halfway from one tree to the other because the cable sagged in the middle. That cable was just too dang heavy for us to get taut enough. Sometimes, we’d sling a leg over the cable and shimmy under it from one tree to the other.

Our tree fort’s floor was about 15 feet above the ground level. High enough to keep the enemies at bay. We had a bunch of dirt clod, rock and sling-shot fights with Scotty Alderson , Russell Glen and a few other dudes that were jealous of our nesting spot. Eddie Kneeland took a sling-shotted marble in the back. His mom never let him visit again. It’s good nobody got killed or lost an eye, but I’d never give up those fun times.

Unfortunately, the beautiful old oak and tree fort were razed so the Mirror Lake tract homes could be built. Fortunately, tree protection laws have been established to prevent further needless destruction of our heritage trees.

Before Mark’s parents hightailed it to Modesto, they lived in a cool old Craftsman home on N. Signal Street in Ojai. Their front yard was enclosed by many tall bushes. I have no idea what type of bushes, but a couple of them yielded tons of small, firm berries. These berries made great ammo for our small, lightweight sling shots that cost us about a dime each at the TG&Y Store. We’d load up all of our pockets with as many berries as we could stuff in them, then we’d hoof it down to the northwest corner of Ojai Avenue and N. Signal Street. (This was pre-automated traffic signal days.) On the corner was a tall tree. It was just inside the tall stucco wall of The Oaks Hotel’s property. We’d climb up onto the top of the wall and perch there until the coast was clear, then clamber up into the tree where the thick foliage concealed us. Out came our slingshots and berries. We never shot any people or animals, but man, did we splatter bunches of vehicles as they proceeded through the intersection! To this day, I believe Mark was the instigator.

I attended kindergarten in 1956-57 in Mrs. Sutherland’s class at Ojai Elementary School. Mom and Dad used to let me walk to school and home which was on E. Aliso street and backed up to Sarzotti Park. Why do I mention this? Well, I don’t recall climbing any trees before my kindergarten days. The kindergarten building was behind Ojai Elementary School (AKA: Nordhoff Grammar School) which faces Ojai Avenue. In front of the school are several really old pepper trees that line the sidewalk that parallels Ojai Avenue. I don’t think there’s a single one of them that I failed to scale their gnarly old trunks. They are some of my favorite trees in the entire Ojai Valley.

But, there are many other trees that I have found or find to be special and/or memorable to me in our lovely valley like: The huge old Coastal Live Oak in my front yard that I recently found a barely decipherable ’49 (year?) carved into its bent trunk; the monstrous old oak in my buddy’s (Danny Nickerson’s) Park Road home that had a rope swing on which we’d swing for hours on end; the leaning pepper tree that was in front of the Hitching Post hamburger joint (now, Seafresh Restaurant) and next to the old hitching post where we saw horses tied in the shade; the white bark birch trees my Dad planted on his well-manicured dichondra lawn on E. Aliso Street; the old English Walnut trees at my parents S. Rice Road home that Dad named the “Poor Man’s Ponderosa”; “Sparrow Hawk Tree” near “Crack-In-The-Rock” between old man Mercer’s citrus orchard and Shelf Road. Martin Ford introduced me to this area where we hunted with our wooden “Wham-O” slingshots; Ojai’s “Bicentennial Tree” on Soule Park Golf Course that used to be a stagecoach stop and where I’d cool down the three summers (’67, ’68 and ’69) I worked on the maintenance crew during high school; the huge Modesto Ash at my S. Padre Juan home that I built horseshoe pits under and played many a great game with my friends and family; the enormous Modesto Ash I had to have removed at my present home because it was lifting the home’s foundation. That sucker cost me $2K to remove, but worse yet, because it was so big, I had to pull a $100 building permit and provide an arborist’s report; and the list could go on and on.

We had and have so many wonderful trees in the Ojai Valley. Please….respect and honor them. Some of them will leave you with some very special memories!

Coastal Live Oak with bent trunk in Drew Mashburn’s front yard in Meiners Oaks.

Pepper tree located on the N/E corner of Ojai Ave. & N. Montgomery St. on the grounds of Ojai Elementary School (AKA : Nordhoff Grammar School). Drew Mashburn scaled this tree several times when he was in kindergarten.
1970. Rick Askam, Lonnie Davidson and Drew Mashburn enjoying the shade of an English Walnut Tree in the front yard of Drew’s parents S. Rice Road, Mira Monte home (AKA: Poor Man’s Ponderosa).
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THE PLANE TRUTH ABOUT OJAI’S AVIATION HISTORY

The following article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of “The Ojai Valley Visitors Guide” which was published by the “Ojai Valley News.” It is reprinted here with their permission.

THE PLANE TRUTH ABOUT OJAI’S AVIATION HISTORY

Story by
Perry Van Houten

Along the airfield’s perimeter was a low barbed-wire fence, and a grove of English walnut trees grew on the south and west sides. A few locals remember a restaurant across Highway 33 from the airstrip, The Airport Cafe, in the present location of Ojai Termite & Pest Control. A bar directly across Baldwin Road from the airstrip was known as The Refuge.

“AIRPLANE RIDES $8.00”
The sign was posted on the window of the two-seat Aeronca Champion parked at Henderson Field in Mira Monte. Twelve-year-old Drew Mashburn lived nearby on South Rice Road and might have been on his skateboard in 1964 when he noticed it. He had never flown in an airplane, and he knew this was his chance.

A few days later, Drew and his best buddy, Mark Madsen, 11, spotted the plane’s pilot standing there. They scraped together eight bucks between them, hoping the pilot would let them both cram into the passenger compartment of the plane. But the pilot insisted the price was $8 apiece.

The boys returned the next day, and the day after that, and begged. “I can remember the pilot actually threw his arms up above his head and he says, ‘Alright, I’ll go ahead and I’ll take the $8, and I mean not a penny less,’ ” Mashburn says. Wild blue yonder, here we come, he thought. His whole family gathered at Henderson Field for the occasion.

Henderson Field
Don Henderson built Henderson Field in the 1940’s, on family property near the intersection of Highway 33 and Baldwin Road. He ran a small flying school there, commissioned by the Army Air Corps during World War II. For nearly 30 years, the 2,100-foot runway accommodated up to 20 aircraft per week.

Back in the ’50s and ’60s, a popular pastime was flying from local airport to local airport; for instance, from Santa Paula Airport to the Ventura Airpark at Pierpont Beach to Henderson Field in Mira Monte. Well-to-do folks from Los Angeles would fly into Henderson on weekends, including Hollywood stars like Robert Young, Claudette Colbert and Norma Shearer.

“It was the only real, genuine airport I knew of in the Ojai Valley,” says Santa Paula pilot Bruce Dickenson, who had just learned to fly and landed his Piper PA-12 at Henderson Field a few times in the late 1960s. “It was a non-event,” Dickenson recalls, although he remembers there was a big set of power lines pilots had to avoid.

In July 1945, Don Hendeson died in the crash of his small plane near the airfield. He was 37. His son, Don Henderson Jr., was 3-and-a-half when it happened. He says his father had taken off in the fog early one morning for Bakersfield when, for some reason, he decided to return to the airstrip. “He overshot the runway and ended up in the walnut grove, on fire,” says Henderson, now 74. “I often think about how my life would have been different if he hadn’t died that day.”

Henderson Field, which had gone public just six months before the crash, stayed in operation and even opened hangars and a waiting area — with restrooms — in 1949. Pilots landing at night remember being guided down by their wives, who would park at the end of the runway and shine the car lights. The airstrip closed around 1970 and was replaced by the Ojai Villa Mobile Estate, which is still in existence today.

Hardly anything remains of the old airfield, except a portion of the runway sticking through the dirt on the north side along Baldwin Road, and some cream-colored rocks. “Almost directly across the highway from AJ’s Express Chinese Food you will see several boulders. The boulders used to line the entrance to Henerson Field and the hangars,” say Drew Mashburn.

Other Ojai Airstrips
The Ojai Valley’s fondness for flying machines dates back to the earliest days of aviation. A 1929 aerial photograph shows a 1,500-foot airstrip near the “Y” intersection, where Vons is today. “It was removed around the time the Krotona Institute was built because the planes were taking off and landing right over people’s heads,” says Ojai historian David Mason. The Theosophical Society had purchased land south of the runway in 1924 in their move from Hollywood to Ojai.

Mason says a private airstrip on Rancho Cola near Lake Casitas may have been used in the filming of the 1950s TV series, “Sky King.” It was also used as a base for parachute jumpers. A landing strip in Rose Valley at Bodee’s Rancho Grande is shown on the 1991 USGS Lion Canyon quadrangle topographic map.

The Ojai area is also home to a number of heliports, including one that’s still in use at Help of Ojai’s West Campus on Baldwin Road — often referred to as “the old Honor Farm” by locals — plus several scattered throughout the backcountry that are utilized by fire, law enforcement and search and rescue crews. The late actor Larry Hagman had his private Majlar Heliport built on his estate atop Sulphur Mountain.

Crashes and Mishaps
When Ojai’s greatest benefactor, Edward Drummond Libbey, opened a new golf course and clubhouse in 1924, everyone wanted to check it out, including a Navy lieutenant who flew a military plane from San Diego to Ojai to see it for himself. “He circled the clubhouse a few times and then decided he would land on the fairway. But he nosedived into a sand trap and broke the propeller,” Mason says.

The damage to the aircraft took a couple of days to repair, and soon the pilot was airborne and on his way back to base, when again he had trouble. “He managed to take off from the green, and in doing so he hit the high wire running along Ojai Avenue, and it pulled the plane back down and he crashed again on the street, and broke the landing gear.”

Perhaps the most famous aviation mishap in the Ojai Valley was a product of Hollywood. Frank Capra’s 1937 movie, “Lost Horizon,” is based on the novel by James Hilton, who visited the valley in 1934 and exclaimed, “This is Shangri-La!” The plot follows a British diplomat and some civilians who crash land in the Himalayas. Some of the movie was filmed in the valley — although the Ojai footage reportedly ended up on the cutting room floor. However, the valley is still often referred to as Shangri-La.

In 1945, a USAAF pilot crashed his P-51D Mustang fighter plane into Nordhoff Peak, just below the fire lookout tower, while attempting an emergency landing in bad weather. Since the crash, debris from the wreck has been found scattered all over the mountain. In 1980, a U.S. Forest Service controlled burn in the area accidentally ignited unexploded ordnance from one of the aircraft’s high caliber machine guns, leaving the work crew wanting for flak jackets.

An aviation mishap in the Ojai backcountry in December 1949 had a much happier ending. Twenty-six-year-old Glendale pilot Robert Bryant disappeared on a flight from Glendale to San Francisco. He was found a week later, several miles from the wreckage of his small private plane on Topa Topa Peak, in upper Sespe Canyon. A ground party struggled through waist-deep snow to get to Bryant, who survived but suffered from serious injuries and exposure.

First Flight
Back at Henderson Field, Drew Mashburn’s family looked on as he boarded the plane for his first flight. “We started to get in the airplane and the pilot turned around, looked at us and said, ‘Hey, how much do you guys weigh?” Mashburn knew what the pilot was getting at — there had to be a weight limit. “There goes our ride, I thought,” he recalls.

In despair, the boys gave the man their weights. It was too much, but the pilot gave in. “He said, well, that’s a little over, but we’ll make it work.” They climbed in and off they went down the runway. “It’s good we didn’t spring the door in mid-air and fall out,” Mashburn chuckles.

At first, Mashburn thought the little airplane wasn’t going fast enough to get airborne. “It didn’t seem like we were moving very quick. I thought we were going to move a lot quicker. The wheels of this thing were going down into the chuckholes, and that’s probably the reason we couldn’t pick up any speed,” he says.

Bouncing down the narrow strip of oiled dirt, the aircraft passed the Mira Monte Market (now Rite-Aid). In those days, Mirror Lake was down at the far end of the runway, where Woodland Avenue is now. “And that thing kept getting closer and I kept thinking, man, we’re just gonna land in the lake. And at the very last second, up we went, and it was just stupendous. It was like no feeling I’d ever had in my life.”

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Exiled To Mira Monte

The following article first appeared in the “Ojai Valley Guide” (VOLUME 37 NUMBER 2/SUMMER 2019) on pages 154 and 155. The “Ojai Valley Guide” was published by the “Ojai Valley News.” The article is reprinted here with their permission.

Exiled To Mira Monte
(LOOK BACK IN OJAI)
with
Drew Mashburn


My parents built their dream home in 1963 in Mira Monte on South Rice Road just at the crest of the steep hill. We moved into it that summer. I dug on having my own bedroom for the first time, but we were no longer in downtown Ojai where I had lived my entire life with all my neighborhood buddies. I had just turned 12 years old and was about to begin junior high school and would have to ride a school bus for the first time. I had always enjoyed the freedom of walking and riding my bicycle to school. Dang it! I had to figure out how to entertain myself now that I lived out in the sticks.

Long before any of the custom homes were built in this neighborhood, the area had been covered by really large commercial English walnut orchards. I mean acres and acres and acres of the trees with a big ol’ barn full of processing equipment. So, almost every home out there had English walnut trees. But, there were a lot of acres that had yet to have homes built on them. These undeveloped old orchards made for good fun. I hiked many miles through them. I got a bow with arrows and hunted in them. I got a mini-bike and rode many miles through them. They got even better when I made friends with a few neighborhood kids and we took them in together.

It must have rained fairly decently that year because Mirror Lake filled up. It was a natural pothole that ran sort of north to south next to the Southern Pacific Railroad bed and Highway 33. You’ll find it on old maps of the area. It was that spring or early summer I decided to build a raft. I hauled a bunch of wood, nails, and other raft materials down there and began construction. There was nobody there but me. As I was pounding away, I looked up and noticed two big guys pushing their bicycles on the path towards me. I was rather startled, hoped they were friendly but had a hammer to defend myself. They stopped and watched me for a bit. It was kinda like when dogs sniff each other out upon meeting for the first time. Finally, they asked me what I was doing. I told them. They dug the idea. Come to find out, these two soon-to-be fellow shipmates only lived about a block away from me. They were cousins that lived together with their grandparents, and their grandpa had just built a split-rail fence around the home into which they had very recently moved. Rick Askam and Doug Schmelz would become great friends of mine, especially after they offered up the leftover split-rail fencing of their grandpa’s for our use in raft building.

The three of us spent hours upon hours, poling (pushing the rafts with a long pole extended to the bottom of the pond) around Mirror Lake. Sometimes, the train would stop. It was usually just the engine with a couple of cars and sometimes a caboose. The engineer and his assistant would stand on one of the flatcars, fold back the waxed paper in which their sandwiches were wrapped, then chat with us while they took their lunch break. Man, those were good times!

The railroad is now the Ojai Valley Trail. Mirror Lake got cut in half with the extension of Woodland Avenue from South Rice Road to Highway 33. The larger portion of the lake got filled in and the Ojai Woodlands condominium complex and the Ojai Oaks Village mobile-home park were built on top of the fill.

But, let’s go back to one more story from back in the hood. Pretty much across the street from my parents’ home was the Ventura County Sheriff’s “Honor Farm.” That’s where Help of Ojai is located presently. But, when Doug, Rick, and I were young teenagers the farm for low-risk prisoners was in full operation and a barbed-wire fence ran alongside the farm property next to the road. From the fence down the hill to the agricultural fields in the farm, the hill was kept barren to make prisoner escapes about impossible. We figured out when the deputies were not looking toward that barren hillside, we’d clear that nasty barbed fence, then sprint down the hillside into the cornfield. We’d scatter amongst the tall corn stalks, then have hellacious corn fights.

We’d break off an ear and set it sailing towards one another. You could hear the ear crashing through the stalks as it torpedoed towards you. Let me tell you … when you get clobbered in the noggin by a heavy, green ear of corn, you’ve been clobbered! I got nailed several times. Explains a lot about me, I suppose.

I lived in that same Mira Monte home all the way through high school. I ended up loving the heck out of the neighborhood to which I had been exiled. I became friends, not only with Doug and Rick, but their entire family. All the neighborhood kids called their grandparents “Grandma” and “Grandpa.” Big Joe and Mary Silvestri lived next door to Grandma and Grandpa Schmelz. We played countless football games out front of their home. They treated all of us kids like we were their grandkids.

I could tell you about English walnut wars; running across Henderson Airfield as planes were about to take off; cows grazing where Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Circle K are located now; riding our skateboards and anything else with wheels down the steep South Rice Road hill; playing baseball at Grandma and Grandpa Schmelz’s and knocking the balls over the fence into grumpy Mr. Johnson’s yard (Grandma gave him a piece of her mind a few times); asking my first girlfriend to got steady with me while walking down Woodland Avenue; playing and exploring the Ventura River bed; chasing pigs at the Honor Farm; riding my 1961 Yamaha 80 motorcycle at “Devil’s Gulch”; placing pennies, nickels, and nails on the railroad rails to flatten them; watching Russell Glenn’s 4H Club sheep while he was on vacation and walking it on a leash; rototilling for countless hours at Mr. Peacock’s to make a few bucks, but feeling like I was still shaking for about two days after I was done. I think you get the idea.

Mirror Lake seems so long ago. Yet, in some ways, it was only yesterday. The smell of the warm still water permeating the air, the sound of the rustling cattails as the warm summer breeze gently blew through them, the melodic call of the red-winged blackbirds, the constant clicking of the American coots, the occasional croak of a big ol’ bullfrog, ducks rapidly rising from the water while quacking their hearts away, the train rumbling along the tracks and its occasional whistle blasting — it all lingers sweetly on my mind. I was never really exiled.