The Texaco Warehouse and things that may or may not go bump in the night

(On the right side of the building you will see a green wood addition, this was a screened in porch with a door that opened to a long staircase up to our apartment.)

Tomorrow night is Halloween so I thought I’d post a fun little story from about 1963. I would have been six years old at this time and as I have previously mentioned we lived in an apartment located in the rafters of the old Ilfeld / Johnson’s Texaco Warehouse. Great setting for a spooky story don’t you think?

(This is the staircase but at the time of this story the windows on the left were covered so no natural light came in except from behind as you walked up the stairs.)


(This is a view of the warehouse from the top of the stairs. Now its empty but it was filled with barrels and various other oily grimey "stuff")


(This is a view of the kitchen taken from the living area,)


Grab a cup of hot chocolate and pull your grandmother’s quilt up to the tip of your nose and settle yourself in front of the fire while I tell you one of my memories of a dark night long ago.

Campy Cara..very campy. Ok, I’ll get on with it…

As I mentioned in earlier postings my family lived in (as we call it) the Texaco Warehouse apartment for several years. It was built possibly as early as 1917 next to the railroad track. Nights in the apartment were filled with noises. Both local and tourist traffic going up and down Route 66 during the day and the lonely rumble of the trains rolling along in the inky black darkness of the nighttime.

To the south of the warehouse was the Midland Hotel, a scary place on its own, then turning back to the east a small vacant lot kept safe from trespassers by an old rusty wire fence. You know the kind, heavy wire twisted and crimped into a pleasing design with arches running along the top. It looked great until the first boy came along and pressed his hand down on the top in order to jump over it and then the fencing was permanently bent out of shape for the rest of eternity. Every now and then you run across a piece of the tetanus laced fencing close to a long abandoned house or a forgotten cemetery.

My dad’s business was next to that vacant lot. Medley’s Café with it’s curios shop packed full of real Mexican Jumping Beans, heavily tooled leather wallets and purses, cedar jewelry boxes laminated on the top with colorful pictures of Jesus, post card racks and comic books, with the every present trays and baskets of authentic handmade Indian jewelry made by that some Japanese tribe my father ran across on one of his buying trips … south of the border no doubt…typical tourist trappings.

Next to the restaurant was Medley’s lounge and after that was a service garage. The name of the garage is not available to me at the writing but a funny story is. Around this same time my sister La Vonne had a best friend named Loretta Sanchez. Now anyone who ever knew Loretta could tell you as easily as me that she was a little spitfire. She always reminded me or a young Rita Moreno. Now Loretta had a crush on a mechanic that happened to work at this garage, a handsome guy named Larry Cockrell. She has apparently made quite a study of Larry and his comings and going because she knew that it was Larry’s habit to take a break at a certain time and he would step out onto the sidewalk and smoke a cigarette on his break. One day Loretta with LaVonne as her accessory in crime climbed up on the roof of the garage and waited for Larry to take his smoke break…waited with a bucket of water. Before long Larry did just what she expected and stepped out on the sidewalk to have a smoke. He had just lit his cigarette when the girls poured the bucket down on his head. With no drama or emotion he simply looked up at the girls and said “You put my cigarette out”.
You already know my father was in the restaurant business and everyone had their place in the business. My father cooked and ran the whole show, my mother would cashier and wait on tables and my sisters waitressed also. I was too small to be any help and La Vonne, not liking to wait tables, eventually decided she would rather take care of me than work at Medley’s. She and I would stay home alone in the Texaco Warehouse until the restaurant closed which was usually about eleven o’clock by the time everything was cleaned up and made ready for the next morning.

We were so close to the heart of town, just steps away from the corner of Main Street and Route 66. There was always something happening that we could see from our apartment high up in the ware house. My mother had her couch pushed up against a line of west facing windows. Many nights I sat and watched out of those windows at the people coming and going.

On this particular night my sister had her radio on as she studied and I played. Of course it was tuned into KOMA- Oklahoma City. What a great station. As the saying goes, it provided the sound track to the movie of my life. Man I miss that station, but back to my story. That night the disc jockey interrupted the music to make an announcement that an unidentified flying object had been spotted and that he would make more announcements as news came in.

Without considering the hundreds of miles between Oklahoma City and Santa Rosa I was instantly terrified. Every episode of Outer Limits I had ever seen came rushing to mind as I envisioned bug eyed silver men in spaceships landing their craft on Route 66, ducking into the Del Rey café (visible to the west from the apartment window) for a quick cheeseburger (man I miss those cheeseburgers) before shooting all of us down with their ray guns and taking over the planet.

My sister LaVonne on the other hand was instantly obsessed with the possibility of space travel, UFOs and aliens. Despite my tears and fears we turned off all the lights and spent the rest of the night kneeling on the couch with our elbows perched on the window sills (the same ones pictured above) watching the sky for signs of movement. KOMA played on the table next to us and we waited breathlessly in between Beatle tunes for updates.

I don’t remember whether there were any updates or much else about that night except the life lesson of how I was so terrified by something my sister found so fascinating and exciting. Perspective…isn’t that the word I’m looking for?