Life on the “Cee-Bar-Cee”

No other place in my childhood had a greater impact on my formation than the Cranston’s ranch.

Graham Cranston was born and raised in Santa Barbara.  He came from a prosperous family, and went an elite boarding school in the East for his high school education.  He subsequently went to Harvard where he majored in English and journalism.

According to my mother, he came back to California after graduation, and worked as a journalist for a while in San Francisco.

I don’t know why he decided to come to Auburn, but apparently he and his mother bought about 4,500 acres of ranch property about sixteen miles north of Auburn, several miles west of Highway 49, and just south of the Nevada County line along the south side of Bear River around 1936.

It seems illogical that a Harvard English major would turn himself into a cattleman, but that’s what he did.  Perhaps, there’s more to the story than I’m aware of.

He and his mother built a large, seven bedroom home on the property including a nursery and a maid’s quarters.  The house was an unpretentious, lap sided, shake roofed, partial two storied house with a “Western” interior motif.  The sheer size of the house made it atypical for our area in spite of its conventional style.

Graham married a local woman, Marsha Dobbas around this same time.  (Interestingly, her brother, Jim Dobbas, married Blair, one of the local Birdsall girls who you will hear more about, later.)

Marsha, was another member of the Sans Souci Club and a close friend of my mother.  The Cranstons had their first child in August of 1938, two months before I was born.  My mother used to say that Robbie and I knew each other before we were born.  “Little” Marsha, aka “Babydoll,” was born two years later.

Me, my mother, and Robbie Cranston, Summer 1940

Robbie and I were close friends, especially through elementary and high school.  We were in cub scouts together, and when there was an evening school event, Robbie frequently stayed overnight at my house.  On a number of weekends, I stayed out at the ranch doing all of the things that young boys could find to do in the company of various inside and outside dogs and cats.

Needless to say, the Cranstons were economically better off than my family and most of the other families of my friends.  In spite of the fact that they were totally unpretentious, down-to-Earth people, I immensely enjoyed all of the amenities of their large house and out buildings.

The west wing of the house contained the now unused living area of Graham’s mother who was now deceased.  Down the hall, Graham had his office which was a cattleman’s paradise filled with his old roll-top desk, drawers and closets filled with guns, and the smell of leather from saddles, chaps, and boots.

The living room housed a full wall of bookshelves filled with everything from Book of the Month Club popular fiction to leather bound sets of the classics.  Starting around my middle school years, I borrowed and read many of those books.  It was like using a private library.

The formal dining room was seldom used other than serving as a place to lay out various current magazines: Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Time, Sport Illustrated, and so on.  I thought of it as the periodical section of the living room library.

I can’t think of any other home where books and magazines were so prominently collected and displayed.  I was aware of the fact that this was a place where knowledge and literature were valued.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was also a heavy public library user.  I had a library card from an early age.  Perhaps being an only child living at the end of a road with few children to play with had a lot to do with it.

My father had been a charter subscriber to Life Magazine in 1937.  He saved all of the editions on a long shelf in our basement.  I spent many a summer day sitting in the dim coolness of the basement pouring over all of the stories about WWII.

Around 1950, Graham built a large swimming pool just off the patio area adjoining the house.  This was a big deal in those days.  Very few people had or could afford swimming pools, let alone one that was 50 feet by 20 feet.  This only added to the resort atmosphere of the Cranston home and ranch.

On several occasions I attended barbeques with my parents.  Graham and Marsha enjoyed entertaining what was basically the San Souci group.  I remember one summer evening event where my high school sophomore history teacher, Marion Dyer, had a little too much to drink.  Marion was an Auburn local, like Marsha.  She was also an old maid.  This particular evening she recounted how she used to date our neighbor, Fred Knutson.  She kept asking Fred why he never married her much to the annoyance of Fred’s wife, Gay.  Fred, who was also “well into the bag,” discretely replied that, “Gay could cook and you couldn’t, Marion.”

The ranch house was located on a small, rounded hill about two miles from Lone Star Road.  Before you reached the house there was a shop and corral area at the bottom of the hill.  There was no barn as you think of a traditional barn building, just a three or four bay garage area for trucks and farm equipment made out of corrugated steel with a machine shop and tack room at one end of the building.  Additionally, there was a storage building for hay and feed.  Lastly, there was a small house for the hired cowboy/farm hand and his family.

Farm and ranch buildings, in general, have a unique smell.  It is a combination of dust, crankcase oil, manure and hay.  I always had the feeling that this particular building had something to say to the observer.  Its lofts were stuffed with stored or discarded house wares, trunks of old clothes and other family items.  I always felt uncomfortable around these items; I almost felt that I was a voyeur looking in on the private lives of the family.

During my high school years, I had the opportunity to help with the sorting out of the new calves that included the branding, castrating, and dehorning work associated with cattle production.  Unlike the romantic paintings of cowboys lassoing calves, taking them down and tying them up, this was all done in corrals using a special “calf table” designed for immobilizing the critters.  It was more of an industrial process than cowboy work.

The branding symbol was a “C” over a bar with a reversed “C” under it (see above).  I don’t think it had any particular significance other than being the registered marking for Cranston cattle

Also, in the summers, I would help bring in the newly bailed hay that was left in the fields, awaiting the strong backs and weak minds needed to load them on trucks for transport to the hay barn.

This was the extent of my cowboy work.  I knew how to ride a horse, and, in a pinch, I could even put in the bit and the saddle on.  We would usually quit work from about noon to around 3:00 pm, the hottest part of the day.  Being gentlemen ranchers, it was the time to go back to the house for lunch and then a swim before going back to work.

The ranch life was not only filled with cows, but also with dogs and cats. The “outside” dogs consisted of Australian Shepherds headed up by Judy, the mother of all the rest.  The “inside” dogs were a flock of Cairn Terriers who diminished in number over time to Trinket, the remaining baby.  There were also two Siamese cats, and a group of alley cats.  Feeding time was a real chaotic experience.

We inherited two Australian Shepard puppies over the period of a few years.

Around 1958 or 59, Graham sold the ranch and moved into town.  Shortly thereafter, the ranch became the home of the Auburn Valley Country Club, which is still is, today.

Going back a bit in the story, Marcia unexpectedly died of an aortic aneurism in the Spring of 1951.  This was a real blow to the family and to friends.  It took their lives off on a new trajectory, different and unanticipated.

Instead of continuing on to high school with his elementary school chums, Robbie entered a prep school on the Monterey Peninsula.  Little Marcia, of course, had to continue on without her mother.  Graham was saddled with the role of being both parents, and he fretted to my parents and others that he wasn’t doing an adequate job.

Even at my young age as a high school freshman, I could see that the burden was crushing on Graham.  He was now an unsupervised drinker who continued to be up at the crack of dawn to be a rancher, but the evenings were supplemented with a beaker of martinis.

Robbie returned home and enrolled in Placer High after a lonely year.  We continued to be good friends, and I continued to spend time at the ranch.  Graham worked hard at being a good father, and would take Robbie and me on day trips, especially to San Francisco to plays, and boat and auto shows; events for “boys of all ages.”

In 1955 the Detroit automakers came out with cars that were the first significant departure from the pre and post WWII design styles.  The most striking feature in all of the Big Three models was wrap around windshields.

Graham bought a canary yellow Buick Century convertible with a green top.  This was a hot car in both appearance and power, especially in the minds of high school aged boys.

This was in this car that Graham took us to San Francisco for our “boys of all ages” trips.  The journeys also included Socratic lectures by Graham on all sorts of subjects from Shakespeare to physics.

It was during this time period that I began to realize what a door opener Graham was for my imagination.  Auburn and Grass Valley were sleepy, unsophisticated little towns where the expectations of most people didn’t extend very far beyond the immediate area.  Graham, on the other hand, was what the classicists would call an “educated man.”  He inadvertently made me realize that there was a big, wide world out there to be savored.  For this I thank him even though he never was aware of his influence upon me.

Around 1960 or 61 Graham married his sister-in-law, Blair Birdsall Dobbas.  I don’t think that Graham and Blair foresaw a romantic relationship, but it was logical, in many respects.  They had both suffered the loss of their spouses, they both were exceptionally well educated people, and they both were practiced imbibers.  (See more under “Blair.”)

After their marriage, Graham and Blair basically moved into her family home at Lake Tahoe between the Spring and Fall.  In 1973 we and Pat’s brother and sister-in-law visited them during the Summer.  We both had babies along, Tom and Pam, and both mothers were pregnant with Andy and Mary.  We were staying at Meek’s Bay Resort, a wonderful, old-fashioned, lakeside summer place a couple of miles away.

That probably was the last time that I visited with Graham.  He had lost a lot of weight, and looked like a diminished version of the man who I thought of wearing a blue denim shirt and jeans, along with a straw cowboy hat.  I do remember that we had a good time on that visit.  We sat out on the flagstone patio overlooking the lake.  The alpine air and sapphire blue lake almost made my heart ache remembering how much I had enjoyed this place and view.  It there ever was a physical thing that I would covet in my imagination, it would be this summer house overlooking the Lake.

Several years later, Graham died of two kinds of liver cancer.  I guess all of those martini’s finally got his liver down.  I remember seeing Blair at a distance at the funeral in Auburn, but that was it.

Several years later, she also died, and that was the end in terms of two people of my parent’s generation who had a profound influence on my values, ambitions, and expectations.