Thursday, Jun. 12, 2008

Woman grew up at Yosemite

Yosemite Falls booming in the spring. The moon rising over Half Dome. A glint of morning sun on El Capitan and Glacier Point. The elegance of the Ahwahnee Hotel.

Yosemite National Park offers unforgettable views and experiences for tourists, many of whom might visit there only once in their lifetimes.

For Modesto's Lee Nixon DeLaMare, Yosemite represented more than the melding of nature and recreation.

It was her front yard, her back yard and her home for 11 years of her childhood.

As one of the "Yosemite kids," she considers herself among the fortunate few who got to live year-round in the world's most picturesque valley, surrounded by granite walls, teeming waterfalls and lush forests.

Yosemite's park archivist will get her memories, along with those of other former Yosemite residents, on record. DeLaMare hopes other former Yosemite residents will participate in the oral history project titled "I Remember Yosemite ... ," detailing how they once lived, worked, learned and played in the national park.

From 1945 through 1956, she lived in a small home at Happy Isles, where her father ran a state-owned fish hatchery. Gene Nixon, born at the Sisson Hatchery near Mount Shasta, spent his life enhancing the fish population in Northern California lakes, rivers and streams.

He ran a hatchery along the Kings River before moving the family to Yosemite in 1945, when Lee was in first grade.

Happy Isles was indeed a happy place, though it had some drawbacks.

"It's between Half Dome and Glacier Point," said DeLaMare, 68. "It gets cold up there during the winter. It gets no sun. And whenever the power went out, we were the last to get the lights back on."

The bears weren't as annoying there as they were -- and are -- in other parts of the valley, DeLaMare said. They'd scrounge first at the dump and then the campgrounds before working their way up to the hatchery.

"We were the dessert stop on the bear cafeteria trail," she said.

Her father used electric fencing to keep them from feasting on the hatchery fish, and stung them with bird shot from a .410 shotgun if they persisted. Sometimes, park officials would trap the bears and relocate them to the high country.

"My dad would laugh whenever they did that," DeLaMare said. "He said the bears would be back (in the valley) before they (the trappers) could make it back."

Yosemite residents continued their practice of growing victory gardens in the meadow even after World War II ended. And they had their own society structure, DeLaMare said.

"There were the parks service people and the Curry Co. people," she said, the latter being the concessionaire for nearly 70 years, until 1993. "There were four groups in the park who were invited to all of the events or none of them."

They included the Rev. Al Glass and his wife; Dr. and Mrs. Avery Stern; Standard Oil Co. executive Sturge Culver and his wife, Jess; and the hatchery crews, including the Nixons.

DeLaMare got to watch the famous Yosemite firefall -- embers of a bonfire cascading from Glacier Point -- each night. Park officials discontinued the 88-year-old ritual in 1968.

She attended the three-room school on the valley floor, and the perks of growing up in the park went beyond the scenery and fresh air.

"Every Wednesday during the winter, they'd close the grammar school, the Curry Co. would provide a bus and we'd go up to Badger Pass for free skiing lessons from Nic Fiore," she said. "We got ballroom dancing lessons. We had Halloween parties at Sentinel Beach (along the Merced River). We had play days in the spring at the campgrounds."