ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE FIELD the bands for each of the teams were warming up and coyly battling it out with one another so that by the time the sound of each reached the middle of the field a new song was being made. Folks still out in the parking lot, even in the intersections towards Ed’s station, the surrounding neighborhoods, they thought it was one band playing some zany Celtic dance number with an element of flatted melody lines adding an Eastern twist. The local police, in fact, were receiving more than a few calls given the Middle Eastern paranoias spreading like flies at the time.    “Listen to that!” Hellhewon perked up, Ms. Oliver on his shoulder. “Now that’s something! Gives you some hope, huh, Sargie?”    Patting and encouraging him, “Now there’s the Matt I know,” with a wink to O’Suillibean heralding quickly with five or six kids hauling fold-out chairs. They were heading for the VIP tent set up this side of the bleachers on the grass—and just in time. Homecoming guest Ward Craven was arriving with his wife and co-star, Ksen O’Hara, as O’Suillibean’s volunteers hurried the chairs along. Craven, now in his sixties, was the star of “Skipper” (1961-1963), the TV series about the Yankee whaling captain who adventures up and down the California coast looking for all six hundred remaining gray whales. Although the show lasted only a short period, its nostalgic value had increased recently and was now in its first re-runs on Channel 13 KCOP, on its way, they say, to becoming quite a hit. Craven and his wife Ksen met in Episode 24 when the “Skipper” takes a Fornay wife (named Juana Maria in the show), played by Ksen. It was that episode, “Nidever’s Come to Get You,” that they were scheduled to give a reading of at halftime. The Moor marching band had even spent the last two weeks rehearsing the maritime-themed music from the show. Craven by this time in his life, retired with the Fess Parkers and Vera Ruba Ralstons of the world, had begun to really think of himself as the Skipper, buttoned up in his pea coat, ivory pipe, arm around Mrs. O’Hara-Craven and given to the annoying habit lately of calling her his “little squaw.” The hearty old guy had even begun taking up scrimshawing just about anything he could get his hands on—fence posts, soap bars, dark chocolate—while Mrs. O’Hara-Craven, the real pants in the family, accommodated him, practicing a rather elaborate form of West Coast basket-making, acquiring quite a reputation in the process. Her reproductions of both Fornay, Miwok, and Chumash water-carrying baskets—including the asphaltum-covered insides—had been quite the rage over the last fifteen years among the Hollywood set. Indeed, the Skipper, at the height of some of his more obscure dementia, would horde the baskets and other material items she had made in the workshop fabricated by the Skipper in the style of a wooden sailing vessel, saying to her, “I will trade you beads and liquor. My people will pay you well.”    This afternoon in the ninety degree heat, bolted into his coat, cap and persona, Craven sat looking at the children and teenagers peering into the tent to see who he was su-posed to be, this star that they might know, that their parents might even know but likely who knew. Ksen sat next to him, holding his hand and keeping an eye on her mad sailor man who was tasting the salt of what? His last spray in the public eye? Just have to see how those re-runs went.

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Copyright © 2005, The El Fornio Historical Society
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