Sam Dunton

Frequently, in the summer, my father and I would take an afternoon or evening walk around our hill.  The closest neighbor we had lived about 100 yards down the street from us.  This name was Sam Dunton.  He and his wife had a home that sided onto the street.  It had a big front porch that was sheltered from the street so that it provided a quiet place for sipping refreshments and enjoying conversation.

Mr. Dunton, to my way of thinking, was older than Father Christmas.  He had a shock of white hair, and a large girth.  He was the long-time, elected Placer County Treasurer when he wasn’t spinning yarns on his front porch.

And a yarn spinner he was.  Most people today don’t appreciate the folk art of story telling.  We tend to forget that this was the main source of family entertainment before the advent of the radio and television.

Mr. Dunton’s stories combined local history with humor.  He had the knack of telling tales that might be the truth, but then, they might just be the biggest concoctions of malarkey that you could imagine.

My favorite story was about Mr. Dunton growing up on a farm a few miles south of Davis in the Sacramento Valley.  According to the story, Mr. Dunton’s father brewed homemade beer on the ranch.  Around the turn of the 19th century, he sent a mason jar of this brew up the road to the School of Agriculture at the University of California at Davis for analysis.

About a month later, Mr. Dunton, Senior, got a letter from the Dean of the School.  It said:

“Dear Mr. Dunton:

I’m sorry to inform you that your horse has diabetes.

Sincerely, ……

Well, “Haw, haw.”  What a thigh slapper.  Or, at least I always though so.  Mr. Dunton’s stories generally revolved around boyhood pranks like sending a board with a nail in it down the water-carrying flume that flowed under the seats of an outhouse, or some other silly thing.  These were just the kind of things that entertained an elementary school aged boy like me. He also had stories about drunks and escaped convicts.  Who said that Mark Twain had anything on Mr. Dunton.

Mr. Dunton had a spinster daughter named Alice.  After WWII, she met and married a man named Fred Eber.  I got to meet Fred when he and Alice came to visit the Duntons.  He had been a “beach jumper” in the Navy during the War.  Apparently, they parachuted behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia and set up radio stations to report on the movements of enemy troops.

We were on the side of Tito and the Communists who were engaged in a civil war with the Croats, who were allied with the Nazi’s.  Fred, like his father-in-law, was a good story-teller.  Apparently, he was billeted at a prisoner of war camp where the Serbs or whoever the “good guys” were, would daily send out a party of prisoners to dig their own graves, then shoot them in the next morning.  Again, pretty exciting stuff for a schoolboy like me.

Fred had no children at the time, and took a liking to me.  He gave me his pocket compass and his steel helmet which he had managed to bring back from the War along with a wicked looking 45 caliber automatic pistol (which he didn’t give to me).

Fred went on to go into the loudspeaker repair business with his brother in San Francisco in the late 1940’s.  He did very well, and branched out into becoming a distributor for Sony Electronics, along with other brands.  I ended up buying a lot of hi-fi equipment from Fred over the years.  At one time, he offered to bankroll me in starting an electronics retail store.  I didn’t take him up on it, but I sometimes now wish I had.