A CALIFORNIA LOVE STORY
Publication Date: May 23, 2023
Publisher: Pacific Dream Publications
About the Book:
At its heart, this book is a collection of my grandparents’ love letters from the 1920s, when they were just two young people from the dusty, landlocked center of the country. They were dreaming of a life together in the still-small community of Oceanside, planted along the mostly raw and undeveloped coastline of California. I came to be the keeper of these letters, and their storyteller, decades later, after they’d passed.
In 1986 I began to compile a simple book for our family. I borrowed a bulky forty-eight-pound IBM Selectric machine to type up the handwritten letters Ray and Dora wrote to one another. This was during a vital period in their young lives—just before the Great Depression and Dust Bowl disasters hammered America. Somehow their love managed to sprout through the dry soil, dust, and poverty of the Midwest before Ray left Dora and his family to find work. First, he hustled by train to the East Coast and worked briefly in bustling Miami, Florida, only to be forced to turn around and race back across the country when his parents moved to the West Coast. This is where his train finally stopped and he found a new love interest. There waiting was a beguiling, sun-drenched, fertile, and ocean-kissed enchantress named CALIFORNIA.
Purchase the Book on:
“I was drawn in by both the love story and the historical backdrop. What a read, what a love.”
— Kristi Hawthorne, Director of Oceanside Historical Society
— Read an Excerpt —
Heritage Park is a small park in Oceanside, California. It features a number of historic buildings that trace back to the days of the city’s founding in the late 1800s. The park includes several simple, aging wooden structures, along with metal machines and tools that were commonly used in that era. The accompanying exhibits attempt to present what life was like at the turn of the twentieth century.
When my grandmother died, in 1978, my mother planted a sycamore tree in the park and placed a small black marble monument at the base of the tree. The monument had the name “Dora Wilcox” etched into it, along with the years she lived. On a visit to the park, nearly four decades later, I noticed how remarkably tall the tree had grown. It was perhaps twenty feet taller than anything else at the park. Then I looked down and was shocked to see that the trunk and roots of the tree had completely enveloped the black marble monument. It was gone. It was as if it had never existed. Time and nature have a way of reclaiming people and the things we have created.
In a quiet way, this moment served to encourage me that my grand- parents’ story—including the effort, love, hopes, and dreams found in their words to each other—is worth preserving. Within their love letters, we find two dimensions of a California love story: their emerging passion for each other, which led to fifty-two years, six months, and twenty-two days of togetherness; and Ray’s deep love for his new Oceanside home, for the Golden State, and for the possibilities he saw for the region’s future. That vision is seen today in many of the places that make Oceanside attractive: the pier, harbor, reimagined beachfront, and community parks throughout the city.
As I visit these places, I’m reminded that the ongoing correspondence between my grandparents was not just words and messages. It was more like promises to each other, and they presented a future of something better, an inspiration and expression of what might be possible.
- John W. Thill