Echoes of Camp Cooke

In 1942, my father was assigned to the 145th Signal Company in the 5th Armored Division at Camp Cooke, now Vandenberg Space Force Base. He drove a half-tractor and operated a radio but never saw combat, and before long, he landed himself a desk job as a writer for the Camp Cooke Clarion. 

I remember seeing a snapshot of his office, complete with water cooler, Northern Pacific calendar, and the plain round face of a wall clock that read 20 to 11. He wrote poems, book reviews, and essays for the Clarion, taught an Italian language class, and did his share of drills and KP duty. 

He also possessed an inclination to document, taking many pictures of jeeps and barracks, buddies in uniform, the happy mayhem of mail call, and, once, a rodeo featuring Leo Carrillo. He kept these images in a handsome leather album, and as a child growing up in 1950s New York, I was fascinated by them. World War II had ended just a decade earlier; the raucous city was still good-hearted and full of postwar optimism. 

Yet there was already something compelling and elusive about those black-and-white photos of stark, new barracks on dusty fields, jeep convoys along desolate hills, and my father in uniform, dark and handsome, gleaming with dreams, a familiar stranger. 

Sometimes, the soldiers went into the nearby town of Lompoc, which opened its scrawny arms to them in a warm embrace. One day, my father walked into the USO center on Walnut Street to book railroad tickets, and he impulsively entered a recording booth set up for the soldiers. Now, etched into a wax record and a digital file, my father’s voice is accessible to me, like magic, across the decades.

“This message will announce my homecoming verbally,” I can hear him say. “I will be home around January 5. We’re having a heck of a time trying to get tickets for a steam liner, but by 10 o’clock, we will know whether we have succeeded….” 

When he discovers he has more time on the record, he sings “My Old Kentucky Home,” an incongruous choice for a young man from Brooklyn, but a suitably homesick kind of tune. 

Seventy years later, I entered the very building where my father made this recording. Now a recreation center, there was a small, recessed fireplace in the lobby, a counter that may have once been a soda fountain or a bar, and an open area with a polished floor and a stage. I could picture people dancing in here. 

The soldiers went into Santa Barbara, too. Tony’s Log Cabin Restaurant at 532 State Street promised real Italian cooking. Photographers offered soldiers’ portraits for $1.25. A parade of tanks drove right past The Granada Theatre. The prettiest girl my father ever saw was seated on a white stucco wall, waving to the soldiers as they passed. Bougainvillea covered the wall like a magenta waterfall, and mountains loomed like dreams in the hazy distance. 

“It was a beautiful part of the country,” he told me. “I always wished I could return.”

Back then, I did not know where Camp Cooke was, and I certainly could not have imagined that someday I would live nearby, although my father’s affinity for it might well have been an unconscious radar leading me here — dreams often require more than one lifetime to fulfill. Whatever serendipitous forces were at work, I somehow found my way to California’s Central Coast and made a home here. And over the years, I found numerous excuses to visit the base, looking for my father.

On a tour during the 1990s with historian Jeff Geiger, we ascertained that my father had been at the south base, now windswept fields with not a building left. “This is entirely Air Force now,” Geiger told me. “Virtually all the old buildings are gone, and you have to look hard to find remnants of the army.” But he showed me a tin cup and a corroded, shallow helmet he had found in a field. “This is the kind of helmet your father would have worn,” he said. An old railroad bridge that my father had photographed was still standing, and we recognized the distant profile of Mt. Tranquillon in one blurry photograph.

More recently, I had the privilege of seeing the base from a very different perspective on an excursion with members of the Lompoc Valley Historical Society. Focusing on those who were here many centuries before the arrival of Europeans and soldiers and rocket launches, we went to look at Honda Ridge, on whose smooth, glassy surface the Chumash people left designs in red pigment over the course of thousands of years. It is a hallowed place that contrasts oddly with the launch pads and modern facilities that have been built in the decades after Camp Cooke. 

The meanings of the symbols remain a mystery, but it was not hard to feel the presence of the artists. I stood in silent reverence and felt the wind on my face, suffused with sage and sea and sand –– and all the ages blurred. I saw that in the search for my father I had been skirting the edges of a greater mystery. Entering time’s portal, I felt my father’s love, but I also encountered souls that far preceded him, and I understood that we are all part of an ongoing saga. I am left with a sense of immensity and wonder.