A Bit of Nostalgia at Peggy's Sue's

An awesome place to stop and visit

As most travelers realize, there are three essential items needed for an adventure: a mode of transportation, fuel for that mode of transportation, and fuel for the travelers themselves.

Transportation comes in many forms but all need fuel - not many folks feel confident if an airline pilot states rather joyfully over the intercom, “Welcome folks to We May Make It Airlines. On today's flight, we may have just enough fuel to make our final destination. My co-pilot already has his rosary beads out, just in case.”

Nope, not booking that airline.

According to the American Automobile Association, most traveling is conducted by driving the highways and byways in personal vehicles - of course, a pair of open eyes when driving anywhere in Southern California will prove that also.

“Doesn’t anyone work?” one driver may ask while sipping on his Mango Dragonfruit Refresher - of course with added coconut milk. “It’s two in the afternoon and we’re at a standstill in the Cajon Pass.”

All conveyances that transport folks from here and there need fuel, no matter which type of energy-producing fuel that may be.

Pull up to a gas station and within minutes the traveling group is back on the road, or pull your EV into one of those plug-in thingies and then take a long lunch and a nap and then you are back on the road again, eventually.

But the inner fuel for the travelers is one of the best parts of getting from point A to point B. There are so many choices along the roadways of America. Small diners, chain restaurants, fast food joints, curbside entrepreneurs, and places that have not seen an ‘A’ in their window since opening day.

There are also those favorite spots that we find ourselves drawn to time and again while traveling familiar territory, and one of those for me and my beautiful wife, Laureen, is Peggy Sue’s along Interstate 15 in the small town of Yermo.

A lot of 'nice' rides show up at Peggy Sue's

Not only is the eclectic eatery a great place to fill up the old stomach, but it is a fun destination to stretch one’s bones while wandering the interior and exterior of the establishment.

My personal history with the iconic restaurant goes back decades. In another life, I taught at the small but academically strong Silver Valley High School. A great place where staff really worked with their students to ensure a good quality education.

One of the programs I was involved with, Peer Counseling, had students interacting with fellow students to resolve various negative issues that may be causing personal angst. And nobody likes angst. It dealt with students talking with their peers on a one-on-one basis which is often more beneficial than an adult trying to make sense out of a teenager's life.

“My parents don’t understand me,” one teenager may say to a Peer Counselor.

“That’s because parents are dolts who often wear mismatched socks,” may have been the reply from my well-trained Peer Counselor. I always thought humor was a great way to get to the root of any issue.

I also used to say, ‘If you have issues, we have tissues.’ The point was, that my students believed in their heart of hearts that they could be the ears and voice for teenagers to listen to without giving advice, unlike adults who always had concrete solid answers for every problem that a fourteen-year-old was dealing with.

Really?

We raised four daughters - I still don’t know half of what the girls said for the entirety of their teenage years. I just nodded or told them to ask Mom.

Besides being a legitimate school class, we also operated a school club so we could hold various fund-raisers in which we could put on events schoolwide for the students at Silver Valley High School. And, that is where I came into contact with Peggy Sue Gabler, the owner, who along with her husband Champ, purchased the establishment in 1987.

Our Peer Counseling Club held its first car wash at the famed restaurant and Peggy Sue herself assisted, so naturally, it was a great success. She was charming and affable and even gave my students a good tip for washing her car in addition to free pizza and soft drinks.

It’s a good memory, and so Peggy Sue’s has been a favorite stopping place whenever we travel north or south along Interstate 15.

But, even without those personal recollections on my part, the joint is a cacophony of sights and sounds - and just a downright fun place to wander, even if putting on the feedbag isn’t the traveler's number one priority.

However, who could turn down anything on a menu that features such sandwiches as the Patti Page Patty Melt, the Mickey Mouse Club Sandwich, the Fabian French Dip, or the Big Bopper BLT?

If it sounds as though the customer may have stepped into a time warp when entering the double doors of Peggy Sue’s, they would be correct.

In fact, the front doors are ensconced below a huge facade of a 1950s jukebox. Don’t ever say Rock and Roll is dead in Yermo!

When Champ and Peggy Sue bought the restaurant, it was small and in need of a major facelift. They did not hesitate to sink hard-earned money from the time Champ spent working at Knott’s Berry Farm and the Hollywood acting career of Peggy Sue. In fact, she was so well-known in those Hollywood circles that as a person wandered through the restaurant, they would spy dozens upon dozens of movie posters and personal photographs showing Peggy Sue sidling up to some of the most notable actors from the silver screen.

On our last stop, there was a photo of Whoopi Goldberg telling the owners what a wonderful place they had going on the wall by our booth.

As posted on their website, Peggy Sue wrote; ‘We wanted good homemade food and great 50s music.’

And that they accomplished. But as the business grew, and more and more customers came in from the bustling Interstate just to the north, the restaurant had to expand to make room for the deluge of customers they were having every day.

The place reminds me of the Winchester House, without the hauntings, just keep adding on until there’s no more room to add onto.

The couple also realized they had a hit on their hands and decided year after year to not only expand in size but to make stopping at the restaurant not only a food fanfare but a true destination all by itself.

‘We opened a 50s style Five & Dime store with curios and memorabilia, soda fountain, ice cream parlor, and a pizza parlor,’ as stated on the website. "We even created our own Dinosaur park.’

Giant gorillas and dinosaurs await the visitor

As Laureen and I toured the exterior, after refueling our innards for the journey northward, we marveled at what had been created at Peggy Sue’s.

There are tall broad trees that give ample shade during the hot summer months with cooling blue water ponds surrounded by large swaths of green grass giving the entire experience a feeling of entering an oasis within the Mojave Desert.

As oasis for pirates, dinosaurs, and visitors

There is a bandstand that is used regularly for the enjoyment of locals and visitors alike - with bands that no one has heard of and those that may be just shy of getting that record label contract to shoot them into the stratosphere.

Get ready to Rock and Roll

As we wandered the park-like grounds, families were marveling at the life-sized metal sculptures of dinosaurs that show the differences between carnivores and herbivores. A paleontologist's dream for their own backyard.

Of course, my favorite is the giant sculpture of King Kong looking down upon us rather hauntingly - as any oversized ultra-intelligent simian would.

But before leaving this rather fanciful world that Champ and Peggy Sue created, a must-see is the gift shop where every piece of the 50s and 60s reside. There are full-sized posters of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and not far off, there are a couple of hardened plastic sculptures of the Blues Brothers.

The Blues Brothers as Peggy Sue's, Yermo, California

The King, Elvis, not Kong, is ever present - in fact, as a person enters the establishment Elvis is offering to tell the future of anyone brave enough to drop a coin into the slot of the fortune-telling machine.

The King awaits

I dropped one in. 

“Viva Las Vegas,” the mechanical Elvis sang to me while nodding his Elvis face with a turban attached to the dark and perfect hair. “I see in your future not a thing worthwhile. Now the pretty lady beside you, yowie!”

It was time to leave. 

Peggy Sue’s is a must-stop for a quick bite or a lingering to take it all in. No traveler will be disappointed. 

For further information; https://www.peggysuesdiner.com/

John can be contacted at; beyersbyways@gmail.com

 

Calico Early Man Site

Many times during research, we come across a lot of interesting facts. Most research is pretty straight forward but this blog's research turned out to be something unexpected - a very curvy bit of history was discovered.

Anthropology and archaeology are high interests for both Laureen and John and one place they have visited in the past was the Calico Early Man Site which is about 15 miles northeast of the city of Barstow, near the town of Yermo, in Southern California.

The history of the Calico Early Man Site is fascinating, with big time scientific names putting the place on the map for a potential history changing event. 

When did early humans actually populate the Americas? That question was thought to be solidly answered with evidence that approximately 12,000 or so years ago the first humans ventured upon the lands later to become the United States. Of course, some anthropologists postulated that it could be as early as 30,000 years ago but all of this up to interpretation of sites found around the country.

Then along comes the premier anthropologist of his day, Louis Leakey to shake the academic world up like a can of dropped soda.

While Leakey was working in the British Museum in 1959, he had an encounter with a fellow scientist which would change his remaining years forever. The world renowned discoverer of million-year-old hominids in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was suddenly looking at what appeared to be early stone tools from a place named Calico. San Bernardino archaeologist, Ruth DeEtte (Dee) Simpson had visited Leakey in London to obtain his professional judgment on what she had carried half way across the world. Was what Leakey seeing simply naturally formed geofacts or truly human made artifacts?

The British Museum - London

A geofact is a naturally occurring ‘flaking’ of a rock that can appear to be made by the human hand whereas an artifact was created by a human from the past.

The celebrity anthropologist believed that the oddly sharpened stones he was holding were truly man-made. These tools were very similar to ones he had discovered, along with his spouse, Mary, from early human dig sites from around the globe.

Geofacts or Artifacts - you judge

By 1963, Leakey had garnered the support of National Geographic Society which funded the dig site where Leakey, along with Simpson, spent considerable time from 1964 until 1970.

Simpson and Leakey at the Calico Early Man Site

What he found or believed he had found tarnished, and some in the anthropological spectrum believed ruined his credibility totally.

In 1970, Louis Leakey conducted an audio recording for the Pleistocene Coalition News. In this recording, Leakey came up with some pretty hard to swallow statements concerning objects being found in what would later be known as the Calico Early Man Site.

“I have consistently refused to say more about Calico than that it is over 50,000. And I have consistently warned the crew that it may be a great deal more than over 50. But the safe thing is to say that it is certainly over 50 – beyond the range of carbon dating.” (official transcripts from PCN).

Some of his statements concluded that the site showed evidence of human settlement of over 200,000 years.

Leakey’s idea that over 60,000 hand tools had been created at the site without the tiniest bit of human habitation evidence, besides the tools, caused skeptics to simply shake their heads. 

The basis for his theory was there were too many different languages/dialects within the native population of America to have developed within the past 12,000 to 15,000 years (typically agreed upon years by most anthropologists). He believed that many more thousands of years would be needed for the variety and different languages that were being spoken across the Americas.

If, Louis Leakey’s calculations were correct, then the Calico Early Man Site would be the oldest human location ever found in the Western Hemisphere. 

Louis Leakey was so adamant about his finds and would not stand down from them that Mary Leakey and he split up in 1968 after decades together searching the earth for any signs of past human life. Together they had made remarkable finds but this Calico obsession of her husband’s was too much for Mary.

“I ended by losing my professional respect for Louis; and it had been very great indeed,” she wrote in her autobiography after Louis’s death in 1972.

Louis and Mary Leakey in Tanzania - happier times

Of course, this brought out disbelief and worse for those in the academic world. It was called a hoax or worse, Louis Leakey’s last attempt at fame.  

But was the site a hoax or truly a discovery to match the ones Louis Leakey and his spouse, Mary had found in many of their most famous early human digs?

The Controversy begins

It is known that the area compromising Barstow, Yermo, and Daggett was once a large fresh body of water named Lake Manix. The last major glacial episode, during the Pleistocene age, approximately 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago the area was covered with thick ice which slowly melted. Lakes such as Manix formed about 400 to 500 hundred thousand years ago.

Map of dig site(s) and where Manix Lake once covered the area

During this era, the area surrounding the large lake was lush with grass and a variety of plants allowing such animals such as camels, mammoths, saber-tooth cats, eagles, ducks, and whole plethora of other animals to exist.

The lake emptied about 18,000 years ago – probably due to tectonic movements during earthquakes along the Manix Fault, leaving behind what we now know as the Mojave Desert. With that draining and thousands of years of drying the lake bed turned into what we now recognize as the Mohave Desert. Most of the animals, except a few like coyotes and rabbits, became extinct.

In 1972, after Louis Leakey’s death, the area was taken over by the California Bureau of Land Management and soon the site was open to the public. 

The following decades the site was visited year round by the curious, the amateur anthropologist, the college student, and anyone interested in knowing the hidden history of the desert.

Unfortunately, this historical site in the Mohave Desert was closed to visitors approximately two years ago, according to Katrina Symons, Field Manager for the Bureau of Land Management at the Barstow office.

“The extent of the damage was enough that the bureau decided it had to close it,” Symons stated while discussing the vandalism and theft which occurred at the site. “Vandals tore doors off of the two cabins which are at the site along with stealing various items from those cabins. The damage was extensive.”

There's also another reason for the sudden closure of the site. “There is a very serious chance of the Hantavirus at the location,” Symons stated. “That is why the area is secured with double fencing. No one is allowed out there until these concerns are first taken care of.”

The Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is a highly contagious respiratory disease which is transmitted by infected deer mice and other wild rodents, according to the Centers for Disease Control website. The area of the site is home to many of such rodents which could be infected with the disease.

The Bureau of Land Management considers the entire area of the Calico Early Man Site as a public health safety concern, according to Symons.

But, they're so cute

When the site will re-open depends, according to Symons, when the bureau receives funding from the Federal Government. “Before there are any repairs, we must get the all clear on an environmental analysis of the area, especially around the cabins.”

I said, I don't know when it will re-open. Why'd you ask again?

On a side note, when asked separately concerning the controversy of the findings at the site, Symons stated: “The job of the bureau is to honor historical sites such as the Calico Early Man Site and does not delve into the authenticity of the findings. With Louis Leakey working here, it is a definite historical site.”

Day Four - Mojave Road Saga (Ends)

The Fourth day on the Mohave Road started with little sleep.

 A million mosquitoes from the Mojave River just to the southeast of the Afton Canyon campground kept the arms sweeping the air all night. That is not a way to sleep. Even a zippered tent didn’t alleviate the need of the flaying of the appendages. Each time one of the two boys went out of the tent seemed like a siege was going on with the annoying little flying beasts.

I just need the restroom 

Zip the door open and dozens of mosquitoes flew into the tent. OFF – GET OUT – and – WHAT THE HELL! was sprayed in the air and every crevice of the body but to no avail. 

Three in the morning found John rinsing his mouth with bits of chewed mosquitoes flowing out.

No photos here - obviously!

Gross – yes – it’s an adventure right? No, it was just disgusting.

The sun rose and so did two very tired guys. A quick breakfast while being chased around by two of the largest wasps known to mankind made the early morning that much less cheerful.

On the road – thankfully.

Road looking good from the passenger's side view 

The day’s driving was rather uneventful until the end while trying to locate the location of Camp Cady. It sounded like a great way to end the trip - a fort established in 1860 by the 1st U.S. Dragoons near the Mojave River. 

Through the years it was manned by soldiers, abandoned, manned by soldiers and then abandoned completely in 1871. We needed to find the spot where this mainstay of the Mojave Road had been crucial to soldiers and pioneers as well.

But there was a problem.Trying to figure out how to get out of the Mojave River and locate the Manix Wash and up onto firm land. Easy - just follow the deep sand, hang a right on the wash and it's done. Oops, the river bed ended suddenly into tightly knit channels which offered no way out of the river bed. 

Four days and this is was how it was to end? Back track - not even in the equation.

One more try up a dry wash west and suddenly there was a dirt track jumping out at us. It was the Manix Wash. We smiled.

Okay - where was this marker? Taken from the internet.

Two hours later the old site of Fort Cady could not be found. It's like Fort Mojave - is it there or there? 

Who knows but sometimes being near is as good as being there.

Tired, dirty and ready for some sleep, a good meal and just all around relaxing the boys decided to spend the last night at a KOA in Yermo. Pool, showers, snack shop and shade. What else did they need?

A good cigar - a cold beverage and the trip was over. Wonderful experience but an eye opener when traveling in the desert of the southwest.

Pool, showers, and shade - it was Heaven after 4 days of none of the mentioned.

What did we learn? Isn’t that research demands? And the exploration after that research needs to answer those demands if at all possible?

The following is in bullet points – easier that way.

·       *  Realize that sites aren’t always to be found – the general area is good enough many times. It’s the adventure that counts.

·      *  Bring plenty of supplies when traveling in the remote wilderness – overkill is not a thing to be ashamed of.

·       * Be prepared for an event which can turn lethal – sort of like the above point.

·       * Don’t travel alone on the Mojave Road – Casebier says that is not a good idea in his guidebook. It’s not.

·       * Carry good maps and a GPS.

·       * Don’t drive like a ‘Ricky Racer’ – the road or path dictates the speed not the mind.

·      *  Slow down and enjoy the scenery – there is so much to see and witness.

·       At night look up into sky – there’s a lot of stars up there.

·       * The deserts of Southern California are gorgeous and full of life.

·       Just remember – time on this planet is short so get out there and explore it.

A final side note – the day the trip was over the FJ’s starter went out. The vehicle would not start, granted a deep part of the Mojave River was crossed in Afton Canyon and may have led to the malfunction with water rushing through the engine compartment, but the point is if that starter had gone out two days earlier it may have proven fatal. Hot desert days, limited cell service, no full service auto shop, closet town dozens of miles away, and no vehicles seen in four days while on the road point to the direction of a dire circumstance.

You don't want this to happen out by yourself on the Mojave Road!

Enjoy, but do be careful.