Former Bakersfield record store owner launched Janet Jackson
by Bryce Martin

In 1986, Janet Jackson released an album titled Control on A&M Records. "What Have You Done For Me Lately" was the first single from the LP. It was her third album and the first two fared poorly. This one, though, was about to launch her like a moonshot.

The single was brought to Olen Harrison, a record promoter who owned Advance Music in San Francisco, a one stop shop with distribution. From there, the disc, promoted by Harrison, climbed near the top of the local music charts and went on to become a nationwide hit credited with launching the bigtime career Jackson was seeking.

Harrison, a southerner by birth, was living in Palo Alto, Calif., when, in the early 1950s, he made a move to Bakersfield, Calif., where he worked as a disc jockey at radio stations KBIS and KAFY while owning a retail record store called The Record Shop. In 1955 he went to San Francisco and continued in the music business until the 1989 earthquake. He died in 2000.

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Grammar-challenged Bakersfield song titles
by Bryce Martin

Hey, what do you want? These are country boys through and through. Sometimes song titles are written "countryish" on purpose, such as Fuzzy Owen's *"Yer Fer Me," and sometimes not, as in the ones below from Bakersfield 45 rpm records and LPs.

1.
"Put Me on the Welfare" (Darrell Gene)
Maybe it's just me, but shouldn't the article "the" be eliminated?

2.
"Opal, You Ask Me" (Tommy Collins)
Asked.

3.
"Hag and I" (Bob Teague)
Hag and Me.

4.
"Sing a Song" (Dennis Payne)
The line "I have sing a song" from where the title is born should contain "sang" and not "sing."

5.
"Bulshipers" (Red Simpson)
Technically, this may be correct, with one or two "p's" but it looks bad.

6.
"Scotish Guitar" (Gene Moles)
A "tt" I should see.

7.
*"Your For Me" (Buck Owens)
Go for "yer" for effect, or the contraction "you're" for "you are."

(This gets an asterisk because Owens wrote it and published it as "Your For Me" but when it came out on vinyl it was corrected by the record company and printed as "You're For Me." The song was published by Fuzzy Owen's Owen Publishing. Fuzzy did a hick version of it on record and titled it "Yer Fer Me.")

8.
"The Whizer" (The Bakersfield Five)
Even with instrumentals where just about anything goes concerning song titles, wouldn't "The Whizzer" just look better?

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The Little Church in the Wildwood
by Bryce Martin

I was driving home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield
Listening to gospel music on the colored radio station
And the preacher said, "You know you always have the
Lord by your side"

"Far Away Eyes"
(Mick Jagger-Keith Richards)
1977

Sort of like Mick Jagger (sort of because the actual event preceded The Rolling Stones song) I was leisurely driving down Union Avenue one quiet Bakersfield Sunday morning when most of the radio stations were broadcasting religious programming. I finally gave in and quit twisting the knob. Music from a piano sounded so familiar. Not the song itself as you might expect but something about how the music was being played. A voice came on, not a familiar voice, but a voice that spoke a familiar language. "Tune in again next week," it said, "when you'll again hear a broadcast from the Little Church in the Wildwood, Sarcoxie, Missouri. Until then..."

Sarcoxie, Missouri? I knew it. Here I was miles from home in California, and just a little bit of home I recognized right off from a snippet of radio.

There amounted to town churches, but a good number of churches in Missouri remained from pioneer days and were located in what might aptly be described as the wildwood. One could only imagine that was not exclusive with Missouri. There was in fact a song with a title about a church in the wildwood, and I was told years ago it was a song written many years hence about a place far from Missouri.

I knew the gospel show from Sarcoxie was not a live broadcast. Radio stations played either a tape or a long-play record submitted to them. it amounted to a paid advertising from the church doing the promotion to the radio station. The church in these instances always asked for money, usually near the end of the broadcast, to stay on the air. No money from your area and they moved on to another area.

Church music was a part of growing up. I heard it not only in church and local radio and television programs, but around my house with songs from Grandma as she sewed and did chores and at the houses of relatives who practiced songs of worship and praise on parlor pianos.

I got mixed up a little on two songs, "The Bible Tells Me So" and "Jesus Loves Me." The first one was written by cowgirl Dale Evans and the second one Grandma sang around the house. What created most of the mixup was that "Jesus Loves Me," whether intentional or not, references the other song with its line "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

I'd hate to think what lyrics I might get mixed up growing up today. Was that "ho" or "mo?" And what kind of memories I might have from them.

A stretch? A cheap shot? As I look around, I think maybe not.

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When Edison Highway was the cool spot
by Bryce Martin

Edison Highway was the main entry to Bakersfield coming from the east before the bypass changed things. The Lucky Spot country music tavern, a long loaf of a building, stood on a sun-bathed corner on Edison to partner with a slew of other beer joints, liquor stores, second-hand stores, garages, and fruit and vegatable stands. All of the businesses lined the south side of the road. The railroad track ran alongside the north side for several miles, that and some scattered packing sheds. I will always remember one business in particular, one of those oases you see along the desert advertising itself as a last chance. A traveler leaving town and heading east faced a long, hot trek of highway back in the 60s when legendary Bakersfield and Mojave desert summertime conditions were bound to be hot ones. Travelers didn't want to be the ones they had seen stalled on the side of the road roasting in the sun until who knows how long. As a sure-fired attention getter, one of the gas stations had a huge billboard with a big-breasted cartoon girl wearing a bikini. ICED JUGS -- JUGS FILLED FREE, the sign read. Not to be outdone, a gas station right next door to it offered the same, FREE ICED JUGS, but no bikini-clad girl. Both places always had an overflow of cars.

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Two Bakersfield Bars
by Bryce Martin

Tex’s Barrel House: On my last evening visits during the early 1980s, the unremarkable and poorly-lit pod of indifference held mostly elderly and low-income patrons content with shuffling along in a flat-footed version of the Cotton-Eyed Joe. And the usual bar drunks you find anywhere.

Tex's Barrel house: It's a perfect name for a Bakersfield honky-tonk, Bakersfield being an oil and farming town. Barrel house: a building on the refinery grounds where barrels are filled with various grades of oils for shipment

How about having a “straw in the cider barrel?” That is to have an interest in a well in a producing field; reservoir.

Country people can relate to apple cider, hard or soft. They can grow the trees that produce the apples and ferment the juice that makes the drink, all homegrown.

So, roll out the barrel and have a barrel of fun, as the song says. It'll be even more fun when the barrel, or keg, is filled with beer and you're holding your honey tight on the dance floor with a fiddle playing a slow waltz from a quartet of backing musicians on an elevated stage.

The Blackboard is another beer joint. Windowless and like a cavern, its ambiance inspired the country classic (classic title, anyway) "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Loud, Loud Music." The Blackboard got its name from the oil business. “Oilfield people came in, of course,” said part owner Joe Limi, years ago. “They got to writing on the walls.”

Just the word "blackboard" is part of country music's history. Who can forget Hank Thompson's sad reading from "Blackboard of my Heart" from the 1950s?

My tears have washed I Love You
From the blackboard of my heart

Limi found out that the oil workers were just leaving information about new wells starting up, the locations and the companies, and other details to help others of their sort looking for jobs.

Some info was plain enough and some was for the oil savvy only. Wells and prospective drill sites nearby were promoted and some remote ones “out where the wildcats prowl and the hoot owls mate with the chickens.”

“We put up a big blackboard for them to write on after that,” Limi said.

Limi said he didn’t understand most of the writing, but figured someone did.

Call it “creekology,” if you will, a term for early, unscientific geology. Or, in Bakersfield, maybe that's “oilology.”

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The Hottest Club in Bakersfield
Or, That's Life... Movin' West
by Bryce Martin

The Golden Lion was a moderately large lounge in the Holiday House, a low-slung building in Bakersfield on Old Highway 99 where White Lane crossed.

The structure at 2300 S. Union Ave. was once a Holiday Inn. The new Holiday Inn relocated about a mile to the west, down White Lane and at an exit just off the new Interstate 5. The older building may have changed names but you can spot a dead and repurposed Holiday Inn by the shape of its sign, and on this one the "Holiday" part stayed the same.

I was the new ID checker for the lounge operated now by my old boss Bobby Cline. I had worked for him before salvaging iron. I drove his heater-less pickup truck south each morning to the top of the summit at Castaic, up the often foggy and steep climb on the gray asphalt early each weekday morning with two black men as my passengers. They were co-workers I picked up at their residences on Cottonwood Lane. We cut cement-laden railroad track from tunnels in the mountains, loaded the iron strips on a truck bed and sent them on their way with a driver who showed up in the afternoon to Cline's salvage yard in Bakersfield.

When that job played out, Cline took over managing the Holiday House. It was just a few years back that he operated his own steakhouse, the Buckhorn, a place famous in this area of town for its sign -- "Wine And Dine With Bobby Cline."

I even had a free room at the motel. I worked Friday and Saturday nights. That was it. I was paid "transient pay." That is, I made up a name each week, was given a check with that name and they cashed it for me. It was all done at the front desk. Each week, they would get a good laugh at the name I picked. "Who are you this time?"

I found out that the guy who had this job before me, Rick Sessions under previous management, had applied for the job again but was turned down. He was too rough on the customers. I was told he'd tear an arm off and beat a guy to death with it. He was an older brother of singer Ronnie Sessions, who came into the club a few times. We sat around and talked over a beer a few times. Ronnie was confident he would be hooking back up with Gene Autry's Republic Records.

It was a dead club then. Not long after, it was the hottest club in town. Al Garcia and the Rhythm Kings packed them in. A large Mexican clientele showed on weekends. A regular was a Mexican I only knew as "Fast Eddie," actually as I only bothered to know him by. That nickname was supposedly for his pool playing prowess. He was really upset each time he came in, reminding himself and me how it should be him who had my job. "That's life," I told him, "movin' west." That was one of my favorite lines. It was a voice-over ending the show each week from an old television western series called Frontier in the 50s. "That's the way it happened, movin' west," were the exact words as covered wagons rolled onward. I'm confident he didn't know that nor would most anyone else. Still, I could appreciate my own sarcasm more than most anyone else.

A resident for a few weeks was Jim Manos from Phoenix. He was a phone man. "Just put me in a room with a phone, a phone book, some index cards, some oatmeal to keep me going, and I'm in business anywhere." He would organize and stage charity events for a fee, such as donkey basketball games between the police and fire departments in cities around the country. He was in Bakersfield to do a Kern Country Fish and Game barbecue that was to feature cowboy movie stuntmen from Hollywood.

On Sunday mornings, Jerry Gianinni liked to go to the Mint bar on 19th for what he called "church." He was a Holiday House regular who had just joined the Eagle's Club and was a volunteer fill-in bartender for Cline. The Mint opened at 6 a.m. all days. It was owned by Bud Walston, known as the "Mayor of 19th Street." Gianinni would always set it up for at least a couple of people to join him. One morning I "snuck" in with the group. As it turned out, they were cliquish and didn't like it much. I drink on while they plotted against me.

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10 Country music myths
by Bryce Martin

1. Dwight Yoakam is not from Bakersfield, Calif. He wasn't born there (Kentucky). He didn't grow up there (Ohio), and he has never lived there. The closest he has lived to Bakersfield is where he is now, in the Los Angeles region about 130 miles to the south.

2. Johnny Cash never served time in prison. Most people I've learned over the years don't know the difference between "jail time" and "prison time." Prison is the "Big House," the place you go for the more serious crimes and longer sentences. Jail might just be an overnight stay or shorter. When you are released from prison, you are on "parole." When you are released from jail, you are on "probation." It's a state prison; a city jail. There's a big difference between the two. Cash had some very short stays in jail, but he never served time in prison.

Okay, two.

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The Record Tulsa Flood of 1984
by Bryce Martin

Several years ago, a handful of radio stations had the reputation of being able to "break" a record. A musical 45-rpm vinyl variety. One of those stations, as I understood, was KVOO-AM in Tulsa, Okla. With so many records coming out each week, it was difficult if not impossible to get your record played, especially if it was on a small, unknown label. These radio stations could send your record out on the airwaves like ripples on a brook, reaching a wide and huge audience.

I was fairly sure that wasn't going to happen. Still, why not play the odds.

I mailed two of the 45s -- the label yellow with plain, red letters -- to KVOO right before the Memorial Day holiday. For no particular reason except that was when I had my first chance to send it out to some selected radio stations for potential airplay. It might be a good time, I reasoned. The regular disc jockeys are probably going to be off for the holiday and some new guy is going to be excited when he opens the mail and sees the title "Stormclouds Over Tulsa." The fact that the word "Tulsa" was in the title might invite a spin.

It wasn't a recording of me, but one by someone on my record label, Brymar Records

I reasoned that my 45 might catch the eye of the station's big guy, Billy Parker, a name I had known for years and one of the nation's top country music disc jockeys. When I thought of KVOO and Tulsa I automatically thought of Billy Parker. Maybe he would not be able to resist the novelty of the title. I had been getting some minor airplay at tiny KCHJ-AM in Delano, Calif., right outside of Bakersfield, but a rotation on the turntable at the giant, clear-channel KVOO would be big-big.

It didn't go as thought out. Three days later, about the time the station might have received the 45, a flash flood hit Tulsa like no other flash flood ever had before. Incredibly, 14 people lost their lives in the roaring waters and, as one would imagine, the city was torn apart in all ways and manner. In some areas of Tulsa, 15 inches of rain fell within hours. Yes, 15 inches.

As inconsequential as it might be, I've always wondered about the fate of those two records, and I've always hoped that no one misunderstood and thought it somehow a cruel joke.

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Keeping it Safe at the Bakersfield Santa Fe
by Bryce Martin

Safety was a topic touched upon even if only slightly at every daily shift change meeting. At precisely 3 o'clock on the hour each afternoon, all swing shift crew hands gathered in a small room in the roundhouse for the daily briefing from the day's foreman.

At each meeting the same question was asked: "Does anybody have anything to say about safety?"

And each time, the same person said, "Use Trojans."

Sometimes real safety concerns were addressed and dealt with.

There were few reminders posted, stapled, painted, pasted or otherwise displayed regarding safety. One was the safety slogan with the odd looking little man named Axy Dent printed on blue shop wipe rags, or cloths (some called them "towels").

The crudely rendered little man was rushing forward to, one can guess, keep from getting wiped away.

The 17-inch by 14-inch wipe rag read:

Work Safely
WIPE OUT
AXY DENT
On The Santa Fe

The slogan also appeared in a painted square on the sides and in the middle of Santa Fe cabooses.

Watch Out
For
Axy
Dent

A circle was drawn in the square to contain Axy Dent, the fleeing figure.

Axy Dent?

It was not just a bad choice for a name, it was a bad choice for a slogan name in Bakersfield. The city was rich in agriculture and oil produce and products. Oil was big and Occidental Petroleum was a familiar name, or "Oxy" for short. Oxy Dent. It should have been Occidental's wipe rag.

To my way of thinking -- and I'm sure I put far more thought into those wipe rags than any of the other rail hands -- just the name "Axy Dent" used as the punchline in a key national safety slogan seemed such a stretch as to undermine the entire concept. Were all the good names taken? On the other hand, the drawn figure was so crude and folksy I was rather taken by its whimsical nature.

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A Man Known by His Books, George Barbarow
by Bryce Martin

George Barbarow had rows and rows of stacks of literary magazines in his house in East Bakersfield. The house behind him he owned as well as this one. The one behind him fronted the street, was much larger and he used it for rental income. He said he never made much money during his working years. He was retired, and in his latter years had worked with the state on road and highway projects.
Many of his cache of magazines dealt with the arts and were published in New York. For one, I don’t recall its name, he contributed regular movie reviews. He also wrote reviews on books and plays, and was considered an authority on renowned novelist James Agee, according to Barbarow and backed up by his numerous contributions on his favored subject in the major periodicals he held as witness.
It was a mini-library. I didn't think of him as being eccentric -- he was hoarding books, not cats -- since I knew many of the books bore a direct relation to him. I was careful, though, not to disturb the crawly things. The small house in the springtime was a haven for black widow spiders.
Most of his literary and film criticism and essays were published in the late 1940s and early 1950s and covered Hamlet to Hitchcock. He was one of the first regular contributors to Hudson Review (New York).
His family emigrated here from England and settled in the Brooklyn region of Greater New York. Born in 1915, he was nearing 66 years of age.
He had just recently taken to collecting ephemera. Little stacks of advertising for a Pepsi promotion that fit over the necks of the bottles, for example, rested on a corner table. He had begun to collect old cars. Not classic models, just old, big cars, the V-8s. They didn’t cost much and he felt they would appreciate in value fairly quickly. He had three in his backyard, and not much room for any more. He had baseball cards, rather recent ones 15 to 20 years old, such as Sandy Koufax, and some worth a little money. He didn’t know their value. I did and filled him in. That’s how I met him. He had run a newspaper ad offering his baseball cards for sale. He had several cards from the Wings Cigarette airplane set, trading cards from the 1940s I had seen a few of when I was a kid in the ‘50s and the memory of which brought on pleasant pangs of nostalgia. He had the first issue of Sports Illustrated.
With the old cars and the ephemera, he either expected to live a long time and cash in on his smartly amassed collection, or he anticipated his humble bounty to soar in value in short time. I didn’t buy any of the cards, just wrote down the dollar amounts for him on each one on a sheet of paper he could use as a guide, since he had received some calls and had set some appointments to show them.
I enjoyed visiting with him occasionally and a few times we’d go to the nearby Tam O’Shanter on Alta Vista Drive and down some suds. Having an interest in all facets of movie making myself, as well as of having a knowledgeable overview of its development over the years, I experienced a rush of emotions as I realized I had an expert in front of me who could tell me what he thought were the best movies ever made. He said he hadn’t been to a movie in years, and didn’t feel like he’d missed anything. “The last good movie was Intolerance,” he said. I knew of the film he referred to, though I had to look up the year it came out. I knew it was a silent film. It was from 1916 I discovered. It was his way of joking, I’m sure.
A few months later, he told me he had cable television installed and had watched a slough of movies. One he made a point of heaping praise on was Tilt. That kind of shocked me coming from him. I had seen it and remembered Brooke Shields and Charles Durning in it, but recalled nothing much about it memorable.
He had enjoyed studying economics over the years and prized a favored observation from economist Milton Friedman: “If you want to keep blacks down, raise the minimum wage.” It was Friedman's keen insight Barbarow found brilliant. Friedman was not advocating the oppression of blacks, stressing instead that minimum wage laws were anti-black.

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It's in the cards
by Bryce Martin


In southeast Kansas, during snowy, cold winters, baseball cards were a multi-sourced form of entertainment.

Take a particular year and arrange them in numerical order. Or, sort the players by teams, by their last names in alphabetical order, by position -- and at whim as your imagination roamed.

I looked carefully at my duplicates (I called them "doubles" even though I might have a jillion of one player, and was not aware of any card collecting terminology until much later in life) and kept for myself the cards with the clearest reproduction, the ones nearest to perfect. The stack of rejects I ended up with were my trading cards.

A wealth of information was on the backsides of the cards. Some sets had full names of the players ("Theodore Bernard Kluszewski"), some had cartoons with little known information about the player. Others had full minor league and major league stats for each year. Others had major league information, and no minor league details.

With thousands of cards, I always looked at "place of birth," mainly to see if anyone was local. A pitcher named Morrie Martin drew my interest. I was from Galena, Kans., just across the line from Joplin, Mo. He was born in Dixon, Mo. A relative? A quick check indicated he was not. To this day, I know the birth places of star players and the obscure alike.

I noticed everything about the cards. Once, when I was nine-years-old, I opened a pack of 1952 Topps at recess and showed one of the cards to a classmate. He looked at the card of Frank Smith, finally saying, "So?" "He has the same initials as yours," I said. "Oh," my friend said, smiling. His name was Frank Sturgis.

Okay, maybe I noticed too much.

I liked odd names, foreign names, long and impossible names, any names. Since the region was mostly made up of Cardinals fans, Al "Red" Schoendienst was popular. I doubt if I will ever forget that he was born in Germantown, Ill., no matter that it serves no purpose to know. We remember much in life that seems to have little if any use. If I ever drive through or near Payette, Idaho, I will know that is the birth spot of Harmon Killebrew.

I wasn't scared off or perplexed by the names since I was a good speller. Before my tenth birthday, I was familiar with Betelguese and with Chamaltenango. Betelgeuse my teacher pronounced "Batel-gooze," and said it was our brightest star. Chamaltenango was "Che-mal-tenango" and other than it being in Guatemala, I don't know if we discussed its significance.

The Joplin Miners ceased being in 1954 as a St. Louis Cardinals minor league team, ending pro baseball in Joplin forever. The year before they had been associated with the New York Yankees. At one game, I worked my way to the bleachers and the end of the home dugout. I talked to one of the players, a long-armed pitcher away from the mound today. He told me his name, and I found it in the scorebook, Bob Muesenfechter. Of course, I have never forgotten it. Nor the rhythmic name of another Miner, John Zeleznock.

In the mid-80s, I had a book listing everyone who had ever played in the major leagues, even for one pitch as a pitcher or one at-bat as a position player. I lived in Bakersfield, Calif., so I looked through the entire book, small print and all, and found and old man who was born there by the name of W.H. "Buckshot" May. The book was a little old and it did not list a date of death for May. I found him in the phone book and interviewed him the next day for an article I had published. I searched the book in its entirety for anyone from Galena, Kans. I found George Grantham, whom I was familiar with, and Bill Windle, whom I was not. Few people would go to that much effort. Old habits die hard.
...


A mystery of big league proportions
by Bryce Martin


What are the odds of the 1929 Pittsburgh Pirates having two first basemen, both from the same small town in Kansas?

I have long wondered that question myself.

In 1980, I had a baseball encyclopedia, which I had borrowed from a friend. It listed in alphabetical order everyone who had ever played in the Major Leagues, even if it consisted of one at bat. I found many ways to use the massive book. I was living in Bakersfield. Calif., so I looked through every page to see who was born in that city. An intriguing find was W.H. �Buck� May, a pitcher going back to the 1920s and for whom no death date was listed. I looked in the Bakersfield phone book and there he was. I was able to set up an interview with him for a feature article later published in a local sports publication. I also used it as a chance to inquire about George Grantham.

Well before Mickey Mantle, the best-known big league baseball player to come out of the Joplin Mining District region was George Grantham.

As it turned out, �Buck� May knew Grantham but could offer no details other than he knew he had lived in Arizona (He died in Arizona in 1954.).

Grantham played 12-plus years in the Major Leagues with the Cubs, Pirates, Reds and Giants. He batted over .300 eight consecutive years. His lifetime average was .302.

He debuted fulltime in 1923 with the Chicago Cubs as a second baseman, and later became a first baseman. A left-handed batter and right-handed thrower, Grantham stood 5-foot-10 and weighed 170 pounds.

Born George Farley Grantham on May 20, 1900, at Galena, Kans., the son of Mr. and Mrs. B.F. Grantham, he moved to Goldroads, Ariz., with his family at the age of three and attended grammar school there and later high school at Flagstaff.

Grantham, although an outstanding batsman, was a notoriously bad fielder, thus the nickname �Boots.� He began in organized baseball in 1920 with Tacoma. The following year he went to Portland and in 1922 played with Omaha. In the latter part of the 1922 season, he joined the Cubs. After two years with the Cubs, he was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates where he stayed for seven years.

With Pittsburgh, Grantham played in two World Series. He was so popular in Pittsburgh a street was named after him.

I knew Grantham was from my hometown of Galena, Kans. I even had a 1933 Goudey baseball card of him that mentioned that fact on the backside, and had heard his name talked about in the family from an early age. I looked through the big book for anyone else that might be from Galena. That is when I found Bill Windle.

Willis Brewer (Bill) Windle. Born December 14, 1904, in Galena, Kans. Height: 5-111/2; Weight, 170. Died in Corpus Christi, Texas, on December 8, 1981.

Listed as a first baseman along with Grantham, Windle batted once (he hit a double) in 1928 with the Pirates and he went hitless in one at bat in 1929. That was his Major League career.

Did it just happen, two guys from Galena on the Pirates at the same time? From an odds standpoint, it is not likely. It sounds more like a �buddy plan� of some kind. Grantham, as popular as he was in Pittsburgh, could have arranged it. It remains a mystery.

TODAY'S FOLKSY EXPRESSION OVERHEARD: "Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash."

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SKEWED SOUTHERN MANNERS
by Bryce Martin

Southerners, by most all accounts, have a lock on politeness, reverence to traditional manners, and overall goodwill. You cannot be unaware of all the catch phrases - "southern hospitality," "down-home manners," "southern charm" - and all things genteel.

Arriving in Nashville 10-plus years ago from Bakersfield, California, and judging on my own, I am not entirely convinced. In comparison between the two cities, all manners fly out the window in Nashville when it comes to navigating by car by cart or by foot.

In Bakersfield, Calif., and in all California communities I have spent time in, the pedestrian in a crosswalk is king. Traffic going both ways slows and comes to an orderly stop, with an occasional screeching of tires, and remains stopped for as long as it takes the pedestrian or pedestrians to cross safely. Okay, certain crosswalks are dangerous enough to have their own Website, like the one that warns motorists of local police speed traps. But, in Bakersfield and throughout California, crosswalks have a history. Pedestrians really do have the right of way, and it is a clear and mostly observed law. The idea is purely alien in Nashville.

Crosswalks are identified by painted lanes in California. Their existence is a way of life, as familiar as a line of palm trees. You grow up with the words �PED XING� - painted on the asphalt between the crosswalk lines. The habit is so embedded that you see people in the middle of a sidewalk so reluctant to cross over that they walk to the end for safe passage at the crosswalk.

Minorities, especially, know the rules in California. �You don�t get no money if you get hit outside the lines,� a young black man once told me.

Driving in traffic? Honey, hush. In Bakersfield, the freeway traffic during prime driving times may be humming along bumper to bumper at 70 miles per hour. This creates a �herd effect.� You go with the herd whether you like it or not. Slow down and you may be crumpled; speed up and you may exchange more than paint. You are part of a group, with no room for individualism. As bad as it sounds, it works amazingly well.

In Nashville, there are not as many vehicles during prime driving hours as are moving in Bakersfield, allowing the problem of varied drivers to display their own personalities. Vehicles yo-yo dangerously and create chaotic ebbs and flows in traffic speeds and patterns. Bakersfield traffic moves fast and linear; Nashville traffic does the herky-jerky.

In Bakersfield, if, say, six cars are stopped at a red light and all will continue in a straight line once the light turns green, a pattern will quickly emerge: Once the light turns green, all six cars will soon be going the same speed and with the same distance in between. That is partly due to the habits picked up with the �herd effect,� and more to do to in being considerate of drivers behind them. In Nashville, that sixth car will be lucky to even see a green light, since the drivers of the cars in front show no consideration for the trailing drivers. Some cars in the line will nearly touch and huge gaps will space out the others.

Going shopping is another exercise in bad manners in Nashville. In Bakersfield, large businesses have signs on front doors. You enter on the right and you exit on the right. Inside, you have right aisle traffic and left aisle traffic. It is orderly and pleasantly efficient.

In Nashville, no such signs or traditions exist. If you try to take a cart in the right door, someone is coming out that door, and the other door, too. The aisles are even worse than the entrances and exits when it comes to a balance of order.

Nashvillians, in my estimation, could learn much from those rude and laid-back Californians.

TODAY'S FOLKSY EXPRESSION OVERHEARD: "Cuter than a new speckled pup in a red wagon."

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