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The Secrets and History of El Cajon Music and Cowboy Culture in the Raisin Capitol of California

By Dave Good (http://www.sandiego.com/writers/dave-good) • Mon, Nov 28th, 2011

It was a deal made during the heat of summer. In August 1868, a German named 3 17 108 293 (http://loc Isaac Lankershim paid cash money to the heirs of the Pedrorena family for some -secrets Like Share farmland that sat roughly in the middle of their El Cajon Rancho. The land was reduced to white dust from the drought and the air must have been hot as a pizza oven on that day but Lankershim’s vision was undeterred, even by the wild fires that would explode and gut much of the county in the coming weeks. It was, by all accounts, a massive burn and it would not be the last.

In fact years later Cave Couts, a military man and cattle baron married to Ysidora Bandini, daughter of Juan Bandini of Old Town fame would write about the conflagration of 1868. He described it in terms of a series of “fires that burned from the mountains to the ocean.” Newspapers in the 1870s and 1880s reported that fires sometimes burned uncontrolled here for months on end. But no matter. In Southern California the land boom was on and neither fires nor floods or even earthquakes would slow it down.

The original El Cajon Rancho was a breathtaking sweep of 40,000 acres that (http://static.sandiego.com/articlefiles/f5b9a24d- 11c3-4ac2-837e- included what we now think of as East County. When Spaniards rowed up the San 1bc6e5009ed4/el_cajon_main.jpg) El Cajon City Diego River in 1769, they got as far as where Santee or Lakeside is today (the river Seal Courtesy Photo would have thinned out there and become impassable) and they claimed everything for the King of Spain. Later, friars from the Mission San Diego de Alcala would engender the Kumaayi to tend their vineyards and livestock on the Rancho Santa Monica, as they called it. But little else happened until Mexico’s Governor Pio Pico made a final California land grab, changed the Rancho’s name to the equivalent of the Box Valley, and ran the missionaries off.

The Mexican government owed a debt of $500 dollars to the Pedrorena family, which Pico paid in full with the El Cajon Rancho as chattel. A quarter century later, when Lankershim paid out a dollar an acre for the farmland in the valley, Pedrorena’s heirs would be the first to make serious money off of would one day become known simply as El Cajon.

Lankershim moved on to develop the San Fernando Valley, hence the seven-mile boulevard that bears his name. With an overseer named Amaziah Knox and an attorney named Levi Chase, Lankershim commissioned a sell-off of his investment to speculators who in turn renamed their parcels to suit. Bostonia Ranch, for example, was sold to a group of investors from Boston.

Meanwhile, there was a gold rush happening in Julian. A major wagon trail used by miners spooled down from the mountains and ran directly through El Cajon and onward to San Diego. This would become Main Street. Main intersected another natural passageway that ran north-south; this would become Magnolia Street. Mule teams often overnighted at the intersection of Main and Magnolia, so much so that Knox smelled opportunity. He built the Knox hotel there in 1897. A head count around that time showed a population of 90. The valley was fertile and suited for the growing of citrus varieties. Today, old growth grapefruit, lemon and orange trees can still be found. But the biggest cash crop for that first wave of El Cajon planters was grapes, the kind of grapes that are made into raisins. El Cajon became known as the raisin capitol.

A quarter of a century later the population topped 500, mostly white, and most of them farm workers. Much of El Cajon’s early population came from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, Iowa and Michigan. The majority of them were men, and they moved west for the farm jobs. They settled into the valley and they brought porch music. After hours there was square and round dancing, hillbilly hollers, bluegrass and country picking going on.

By 1940, the population had barely doubled. And in the coming decade only four thousand more moved into the valley. Growth was slow until 1950. But by then, it was evident that a city manager was needed because things were happening. There were jobs in San Diego, and El Cajon grew faster than any community in the nation. The population reached some 38,000 residents by 1960. Farm land gave way to miles of nearly identical cheap tract homes built to shelter workers attracted by Southern California’s new industry: aerodynamics.

But throughout the population explosion, El Cajon retained its West Texas image. It was a redneck cow town, even if there were no cows. And for entertainment there was the Bostonia Ballroom, a huge dance hall and country music honkey-tonk near Second and Broadway.

In 1952 the Ballroom was being managed by a fiddle player named Cactus Soldi and a bandleader and television host named Smokey Rodgers. Under their direction the Ballroom turned into a major stop on the West Coast circuit and for decades El Cajon was treated to the biggest names in country music: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Lefty Frizzel, Bob Wills, Patsy Kline, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many more that are now long forgotten.

In the early 1960s, when an 18-year-old from Rancho Santa Fe named Chris Hillman wanted to learn bluegrass mandolin, he came to El Cajon. He joined a band with some of the locals. They called themselves the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, and Hillman played his first public concert on the stage of the Bostonia Ballroom.

“El Cajon,” Hillman says, “Was every bit as important to country music as was Bakersfield. It just never got the credit.”

Hillman would later co-found the Byrds, the Desert Rose band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Manassas. One of his band mates in the Squirrel Barkers was an East County teen named Bernie Leadon, who would go on to co-found the Eagles in 1971. Yep – those Eagles.

1952 was also the same year that Soldi and Rodgers opened their Valley Music on Main Street. It was a music store that gained a reputation for being the place to trade if you were a pro. Johnny Cash once bought a guitar there; years later, a teenager named Frank Zappa would purchase records from Valley Music during the short time that his family lived out near Grossmont.

El Cajon high school alumni Jerry Raney and Dan McClain (aka Country Dick Montana) started a band called the Beat Farmers. One of Raney’s classmates was Lester Bangs, an El Cajon writer who would find fame as a rock critic for both Rolling Stone and Creem magazines.

The roll call of famous El Cajoners includes ex-Padres Dave Dravecky, Kurt Bevacqua, and Bret Boone (descendant of Daniel Boone) who made his name with the Mariners and the Reds. Five- time NASCAR Cup Winner Jimmie Johnson grew up in El Cajon but ironically never raced at the now-defunct El Cajon Speedway. Lest we forget, Olympic diver Greg Louganis is also from El Cajon.

Today, almost half of El Cajon’s population of 95,000 is Chaldean, meaning Christian Iraqi. Some 47,000 Chaldeans, the second largest such settlement in the U.S. next to Detroit call El Cajon home, and some of the local businesses now reflect the new ethnicity of the Big Box Valley. Even El Cajon's mayor once called Main Street ‘Little Baghdad.’

Cowboy culture has become an afterthought, having been replaced by Hispanic, Somali, and Arab cultures along with numbers of the infirm and the elderly. Rest homes abound. Rancho San Diego and Granite Hills may be upper middle class communities, but there are also 58 trailer parks in the valley for a total of 1,927 spaces.

For various reasons, El Cajon did not make CNN Money’s Top 100 Places to Live in 2010 even though for years world famous Buck Knives were made in El Cajon. The knife factory moved out in 2006 but Taylor Guitars remains, employing hundreds and churning out an astonishing 500 artisan level instruments every day. . If the tallest building in 1897 was the Knox Hotel, today that honor goes to the El Cajon jail, a nine-story skyscraper that was built in 1983 at a cost of $38 million dollars. It would have cost far more had the County Board of Supervisors not moved to save nearly $600,000 dollars by cutting back on the amount of concrete used in the walls.

But the net result of using drywall and Styrofoam instead of cement was that the jail earned a reputation for being an easy place from which to escape. And by 1990, 11 prisoners had done just that. Citing budget cuts, officials closed the jail in the summer of 2004. It sits empty today, adjacent to the 1,142-seat El Cajon Performing Arts Center, which has been closed for renovation since 2010.

In the shadow cast by the empty jail house sits the late Olaf Wieghorst’s rustic home, moved from its original location to the arts colony behind Main Street. Wieghorst, a former stunt rider in a Denmark circus who migrated to El Cajon at the age of 19 became in his time a world-class artisan, an oil painter and a sculptor of bronzes considered to be in the same league as those of Frederick Remington.

Also within that tall jailhouse shadow sits the Hell’s Angel’s clubhouse on Main. It is a clean, white, single-story building with red flames painted on the outside and a warning not to park in front unless you are a member.

And less than a mile from the Dago Chapter’s front door is the Unarius Academy of Science. The Academy has been called the knowledge hub and meeting place for a space cult formed in 1954 by Ruth and Ernest Norman. According to the Normans, 33 space ships from some sort of galactic federation were coming to earth in the year 2001, possibly to land in the parking lot next door.

They did not.

Downtown El Cajon But the sun does rise and set every day on El Cajon’s Atlas missile. Parked more or Courtesy Kevin Spence less in front of the San Diego Aerospace Museum at Gillespie Field, pointed toward the heavens, the rocket ship represents late 1950’s space technology. In 1962, such an Atlas rocket built by Convair blasted now-Senator John Glenn into orbit. However the model 2E on display is an ICBM, meaning that it was outfitted to deliver a nuclear payload during the Cold War.

Such a time never came, of course, but the Atlas missile stands in proud and silent testimony to the time in our history when Convair was the largest of civilian employers here and some 41,000 San Diegans, nearly half of them women, worked the assembly lines. People came here in droves from all over the Midwest to get those jobs, and for them the affordable, expansive bedroom community of El Cajon was now the place they called home.

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Don't forget Mark Malone who lived in El Cajon a graduate of El Cajon High School who went on to play for Arizona U. and later the Pittsburg Steelers. I lived in El Cajon from the age of 7 to 21. It will always be my home. We lived up off of Greenfield Drive, on Clark Drive, right on the corner. Good and sad memories dot my mind, but never the less I love El Cajon, California. We had 16 orange trees in our back yard, my dad cut six of them down, I remember sitting up in them and pulling oranges off the stem and eating them right there sitting on the branch of the tree. Built a retaining wall along the front property; still there today, Dad died 4 yrs after building that wall, that was back in 69, due to the injuries he sustaind in the war.

LOVE... El Cajon.

I use to live in El Cajon for about years 9 years before moving to Glendale, AZ. I have not be back since I moved to Arizona. I would be really dissapointed if I tour El Cajon and not see some kind of sign posted saying Home of NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson 5 time Sprint Cup Championship. Hope to see it posted when I go there in March 2012. Thanks. Steve Bray

I also when to El Cajon Speedway from 1960 to 2005, dont remember when it was shorten to Cajon Speedway. Even though Jimmie never race there its a stock car racing town. The sign would look cool, and Jimmie's fans would want there picture taken in front of his amazing accomplishments.

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