In November of 1960, Bakersfield, California, a small yellow house on Oleander Street, three blocks east of the railroad tracks. Margaret Calloway is 61 years old and the sheriff’s deputy is carrying her husband’s armchair out the front door. It is a Tuesday morning. The neighbors can see it from their porches.
A city truck is parked at the curb with its engine running. Two men in work clothes load boxes into the back. A deputy in uniform stands on the porch step with a clipboard. He is checking things off. Margaret Calloway is standing in her own front yard in a house dress and her husband’s old cardigan, the gray one with the missing button on the third snap, and she is watching them take it all. She does not make a sound.
Here is who Margaret Calloway was. She came to Bakersfield from Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1936, 19 years old, in the back of a truck with her mother and two younger brothers when the dust took everything the family had east of the Cimarron River. Her father had already gone ahead of them.
He was working the oil fields near Taft, sleeping in a tent city with 400 other men from the plains. By the time the truck reached Bakersfield, he had saved $47. That was everything. She met Thomas Calloway in the fall of 1938 at a church social in the Kern County Fairgrounds. Thomas was from Beaumont, Texas, a big, quiet man with a mechanic’s hands and a way of listening to a person that made you feel like you were the only thing in the room.
He had been working the railroad yards since he was 17. He had a lunch pail and a good name and nothing else in the world. They married in February 1939. They rented a house on Oleander Street for $22 a month. Thomas worked the Southern Pacific yard as a freight handler. Margaret took in ironing. They had one son, James, born in 1941, and one daughter, Patricia, born in 1943.
Thomas was 34 when Pearl Harbor happened and wanted to enlist. The draft board classified him essential at the railroad yard and would not let him go. He appealed the classification twice. They turned him down twice. He drove a freight locomotive every night for 4 years on the Pacific Coast rail lines that moved war material from the ports to the inland depots.
He never talked about what he felt about not going. But he gave blood every 6 weeks at the Red Cross station on Chester Avenue without fail. Every 6 weeks without missing once for the entire duration. After the war, he bought the house on Oleander Street. He paid $6,000 for it. He put 1,200 down everything they had saved in 6 years of working and ironing and doing without.
He carried the note with Kern County Savings and Loan at 4 and 1/2%. He paid $29.40 every month without fail, the same way he gave blood without missing once. He worked the railroad yard for 31 years. He came home every night at 6:15. He had supper with the family. He helped James with the long division that James could not get right until the seventh grade.
He drove Patricia to piano lessons on Saturdays, even when the car needed a water pump and he could not afford the part yet and had to drive with a jug of water on the seat beside him and stopped twice to fill the radiator. He was not a man who made speeches. He was a man who showed up. In March of 1957, he went to see the company doctor about a cough he had been carrying since winter.
The doctor sent him to the hospital on Truxtun Avenue. They took pictures of his chest. The pictures showed what the pictures showed. He worked as long as they would let him, which was 14 more months. He died in May of 1957. He was 50 years old. Thomas Callaway left Margaret with the house, an insurance policy that paid out $600, a 1951 Ford pickup with a bad clutch, and a railroad pension that came to $41 a month.
The note on the house was $430, still owed to Kern County Savings and Loan. The monthly payment was $29.40. Margaret had James’ help for a while. He was working at a filling station on Union Avenue, and Patricia sent what she could from Sacramento, where she had married a school teacher the year before.
But in the summer of 1959, the filling station closed. James found work at a cannery in Fresno and had to go where the work was. The money from Sacramento thinned out when Patricia had her first child, and her husband’s salary covered only so much. Margaret took in ironing again, the same way she had in 1939, the same board, the same steam iron Thomas had bought her in 1951, the same careful work.
She was 60 years old pressing other people’s shirts at a dollar and a quarter a basket. She made the payment in September. She made it in October. In November, the steam iron burned out, and she had to buy a new one at the hardware store on 19th Street, $15.60. She did not make the November payment. She wrote a letter to the bank explaining what had happened and telling them she would make it up in December.
The bank wrote back. The letter was polite. It said what it said. She made half the December payment. A man from Kern County Savings and Loan came to the house in January. He was not unkind. He sat in the living room and looked at the payment ledger and looked at his own papers and told her what the law allowed him to do and what it required him to do.
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He said the bank had no choice in the matter. He said it twice, which is the number of times a man says something when he does not quite believe it himself. The foreclosure notice came in the mail in February. She had 60 days. Margaret Callaway sat at her kitchen table with that notice, and she read it three times.
She folded it in quarters and put it in the drawer under the silverware. Then she went back to her ironing board, and she kept working. Her neighbors knew what was happening. On Oleander Street, things like this did not stay private for long. The women on the block left food on her porch, the way women on that kind of street had always done for one another, a casserole dish, a loaf of bread wrapped in waxing paper, a jar of pickled green tomatoes from someone’s garden. Nobody said anything directly.
They just left the food. Nobody could stop what was coming. The city truck arrived on the first Tuesday of November. The county had been efficient about it. The debt was $61.50, two missed partial payments across 14 months of trying. The house had been sold at the county tax auction 3 weeks earlier to a property holding company out of Los Angeles, whose name appeared on the deed as a set of initials followed by Holdings, LLC.
Nobody in Bakersfield had heard of them. The new owners had been quick about the writ of possession. 2 days notice. Margaret packed what she could into cardboard boxes and stacked them in the hallway. Her clothes, Thomas’s watch that had stopped in the hospital, the children’s school photographs. The Bible that had come from Tulsa in the back of that truck in 1936 with the family names written inside the cover in her father’s careful hand.
She had packed these things herself because she would not let a stranger touch them. The rest, the furniture, the kitchen table, the four chairs Thomas had brought home one by one in the bed of the pickup because he could only afford one at a time. All of it was to be removed to satisfy the claim.
The holding company had sent the city truck and the two work crew men to clear the property. The armchair went first. Thomas’s chair, the one he sat in every evening after supper to read the paper. The fabric on the right arm was worn through to the stuffing from 30 years of use. One of the work crew men carried it out the front door over his shoulder like it weighed nothing.
He set it in the truck bed next to a box of Margaret’s good dishes. Margaret watched from the yard. Her neighbor, Edna Purcell, 63, came across the property line and stood next to her without saying anything and put her hand on Margaret’s elbow, which was the best thing Edna Purcell knew how to do, and she did it.
The deputy checked items off the clipboard. Inside the house, drawers scraped open, feet moved on the linoleum, a dog somewhere on the block barked twice and went quiet. The city truck engine idled at the curb. The man had been driving north on Chester Avenue when he saw the truck. He was in a dark blue Cadillac, a ’59 model with a California plate.
He had driven down from Los Angeles the night before for a location meeting at a ranch property east of town that a producer was considering for an upcoming picture. The meeting had finished by 9:00 in the morning. He was heading back to the highway. He did not know Oleander Street. He had turned onto it by accident following what he thought was a shortcut through to the on-ramp.
He saw the city truck first, then he saw the two men loading furniture, then he saw the deputy with the clipboard, then he saw the woman standing in the yard in the gray cardigan. He did not slow down immediately. He drove past the house at regular speed. He went to the end of the block. He sat at the stop sign for a long moment with both hands on the wheel.
Then he made a U-turn. He parked the Cadillac against the curb two houses down. He sat for a moment. He got out of the car and stood beside it and looked at the scene down the block. He was a big man, 6 ft 4, in a tan canvas jacket and dark trousers and a working man’s hat, not a costume hat, not a fancy Stetson, but a plain felt hat that had been worn in actual weather.
He had been up since before 6:00. He had not shaved that morning. Nobody on Oleander Street recognized him yet. He walked down the sidewalk slowly, not hurrying, looking. He stopped at the edge of Margaret Calloway’s front yard, outside the property line, and he stood there and watched. He did not announce himself.
He did not approach the deputy. He watched 1 full minute, then he turned and walked back to the Cadillac. The neighbors who saw him walk by thought he was someone’s relative from out of town, or maybe a man from another city truck crew checking an address. He carried himself the way a man carries himself when he does not feel the need to explain what he is doing.
He got in the Cadillac. He drove two blocks south and stopped at a phone booth on the corner of Oleander and Niles. He was in the phone booth for 11 minutes. The owner of the cleaners on that corner, a Korean War veteran named Harold Stem, watched him through the window and recognized him halfway through those 11 minutes and did not say anything to anyone because something about the man’s posture inside the phone booth, the way he stood straight, one hand pressed flat against the glass, made Harold Stem understand this was not a moment for interrupting. The man made three calls. The first call was to his personal attorney in Los Angeles. The second call was to a man he knew at a title company in Bakersfield. The third call was to a bank officer at California First Bank on Truxton Avenue, a man whose name the attorney had given him in the 30 seconds between the first and second call. When he came out of the phone booth, he stood on the sidewalk for a moment. He took off his hat and held it in his hands and looked at the sky and put it back on. He
drove back to Oleander Street. The truck was still there. The house was more than half emptied now. The kitchen table was in the truck bed. Three of the four chairs were in. The work crew was coming back out with the fourth. The man parked the Cadillac, got out, and walked directly to the deputy on the porch step. He did not raise his voice.
He said, “I need 5 minutes.” The deputy looked up from his clipboard. He was 26 years old and had been on the job 18 months. He looked at the man in front of him and took a short, involuntary step back, not out of fear, out of the sudden, vertiginous recognition that the face in front of him was a face he had been watching on movie screens since he was 7 years old. The deputy said, “Sir.
” The man said, again quietly, “5 minutes. I’m not asking you to stop your work. I’m asking you for 5 minutes.” The deputy said, “Yes, sir.” The man turned to the work crew. “You can set that down,” he said, meaning the fourth chair, which one of the men was holding on the porch steps.
The man set it down on the porch without question, the way people put things down when a certain kind of voice speaks to them. The man turned to Margaret Callaway, who was still standing in the yard with Edna Pearsall’s hand on her elbow. He crossed the yard to her. Up close, she could see the deep lines in his face, the gray at the temples, the way a man looks who has spent decades working outside in the California sun.
He was not what she expected. She had not expected anything. She did not know who he was. She was 61 years old, and she did not go to the pictures much. He said, “Ma’am, my name is John. What’s yours?” She told him. He said, “Mrs. Callaway, are you current on your note with the bank, or is there other debt on top of the mortgage?” She said, “There is no note anymore.
They foreclosed. They already sold it.” He said, “Sold to whom?” She said the name on the papers, the initials, and the Holdings LLC. He nodded once. He said, “When did the sale go through?” She said, “Three weeks ago.” He looked at the house. He looked at the truck. He looked at the clipboard in the deputy’s hand.
He said, “Will you give me 1 hour, Mrs. Callaway?” She looked at him. She did not know why a stranger was asking her for an hour, or what he intended to do with it, or who he was. She was standing in her front yard in her dead husband’s cardigan, watching men empty her house. She had nothing to lose by giving a stranger an hour.
She said, “All right.” He turned to the deputy. “Is there a procedural hold I can request through the county clerk’s office to pause this removal pending a title challenge?” The deputy opened his mouth. The man said, “I know there is. I’m asking if you know how to make that call.” The deputy said, “I can radio the office.
” “Do that.” The man said. Harold Stem, watching from the cleaners, told his wife about it that evening. He said the man stood on that porch step and talked to the deputy for 3 minutes in a voice too low to hear across the street. And when he was done talking, the deputy got on his radio. And 10 minutes later, a sergeant’s car came around the corner from Niles Street. The work crew stood in the yard.
The city truck idled. The fourth chair stayed on the porch. Two more cars arrived. A man in a business suit got out of a tan Ford. He had papers in his hand, and he and the man in the canvas jacket stood on the sidewalk and talked, the papers between them, for perhaps 7 minutes. Then the man in the canvas jacket went to the Cadillac and came back with a leather portfolio case, the kind an attorney carries.
He had gotten it from the back seat. He was in the Cadillac long enough to write something Harold Stem could see the movement through the windshield. When he came back out, he had two documents in his hand. He handed one to the man in the business suit and kept one himself. Harold Stem told his wife he could not read those papers from across the street and two storefronts down.
But he watched the man in the business suit read the papers twice and then look up at the man standing in front of him with an expression Harold Stem described as a man who has just been told something he did not believe was possible and now has to decide whether to believe it. The man in the business suit folded the papers.
He said something. The man in the canvas jacket said something back, one sentence. The man in the business suit nodded and went to his tan Ford and drove away. Then the man in the canvas jacket turned to the deputy and said something. The deputy got back on his radio. The city truck turned off its engine.
The work crew sat down on the truck’s running board. Edna Purcell, still standing next to Margaret in the yard, said later that she had not understood any of what was happening, not the papers or the calls or the man in the business suit. She had understood only this, the truck turned off its engine.
And in the sudden silence of that November morning, with the engine gone, she could hear the sparrows in the oleander hedge along the property line, which had been there the whole time, and which she had not heard until that moment. The man came back across the yard to where Margaret Callaway was standing.
He said, “The removal is paused pending review. That’s the most I can do today.” She said, “What does that mean?” He said, “It means your furniture comes back inside for now. It means nobody takes anything else today.” She said, “And tomorrow?” He said, “I’m going to buy the property back from the holding company.
” She was quiet for a moment. He said, “The man you just saw is from a title company. He’s confirming the current owner of record. Once I have that confirmed, my attorney will contact the holding company and we will make them an offer.” She said, “Mister.” He said, “John.” She said, “John, I don’t understand what you’re doing. I don’t know who you are.
I don’t have money. I can’t pay you back. I can’t pay anybody back.” “That’s why we’re standing here.” He looked at her for a moment. He said, “Your husband worked the Southern Pacific Railroad for 31 years.” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Freight handler, maintenance of way, running war material up the coast for 4 years, 1941 to 1945.
” She did not answer. She was looking at him. He said, “The men who kept the trains running during the war never got a parade. Nobody put them on the newsreel. The factories got the newsreel. The ports got the newsreel. The men driving freight at 2:00 in the morning on a coastal rail line with no lights because the Navy was worried about Japanese submarines, they just went back to work after the war and nobody said anything about it.
” He paused. He said, “Your husband paid for this house. He paid for it with 30 years of work and 4 years of that before it and nobody ever paid him back what that was worth.” He put his hat back on. He said, “This isn’t charity, Mrs. Callaway. I don’t do charity. Consider it a debt that has been overdue for a long time and is now being settled.
The The holding company in Los Angeles received a call from a Bakersfield attorney that afternoon. The attorney made an offer on behalf of an unnamed buyer for the property at 1147 Oleander Street, Bakersfield, California. The offer was $4,800 full cash, immediate close, no contingencies. The holding company had paid 2,200 at the tax auction.
The holding company said yes within 2 hours. The deed transferred on Thursday, November 10th, 1960. On Friday morning, the man from the title company drove to Oleander Street and knocked on Margaret Callaway’s door. He had a document with him. He had been asked to deliver it in person. Margaret Callaway opened the door in her husband’s gray cardigan.
The title man handed her the document. She read it. She read it again. She looked up at him. She said, “This is my name.” He said, “Yes, ma’am.” She said, “This says I own it.” He said, “Free and clear. No note, no mortgage, no lien of any kind.” She held the paper with both hands. They were shaking.
She said, “Who did this?” The title man had been told to say that the buyer wished to remain anonymous. He said that she said, “I need to know.” He said he had been asked not to say. She looked at him for a long time. He was a young man, 24, and he had been doing this job for 18 months and had delivered a lot of documents to a lot of doors.
He told his wife that evening that he had never once felt, in all those deliveries, that he was carrying something that weighed as much as what he had just put into that woman’s hands. It was Harold Stem who told her 3 days later. He had watched the whole thing from the cleaner’s window, and he had recognized the man from the first minute, and he had held it in for 3 days, and on Monday morning, he could not hold it anymore.
He walked across the street and knocked on Margaret Callaway’s door and told her. She sat down at her kitchen table with her hands in her lap. She did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, “The Duke.” Harold Stem said yes. She said it again quietly to herself or to Thomas or to nobody in particular.
She said, “The Duke.” Margaret Calloway lived in the house on Oleander Street for 22 more years. She continued taking in ironing until 1965 when Patricia moved back to Bakersfield with her husband and the two children. Patricia took a job as a school secretary and the family helped Margaret with expenses.
James came back to Kern County in 1968, married, and settled in a house six blocks from Oleander Street. Every Sunday for the rest of Margaret’s life, at least one of her children sat at her kitchen table. Thomas’s armchair went back to its place beside the front window.
The worn patch on the right arm was never reupholstered. Margaret would not let it be. She died in January of 1982. She was 82 years old. The wheat was not in the ground. This was California, not the panhandle, but the orange trees in the backyard that Thomas had planted in 1952 were heavy with fruit, the way they always were in January.
On the morning she died, the kitchen smelled of them through the window she kept cracked even in winter. The house passed to Patricia and James jointly per the will. They kept it in the family. Patricia’s eldest daughter, Susan, moved into the house in 1988 after her divorce with two children of her own.
She raised them on Oleander Street in the same rooms where Patricia had grown up, four blocks from the Southern Pacific yard where Thomas Calloway had worked 31 years. Susan’s son, Daniel, lives in the house today. He is a mechanic, the same as his great-great-grandfather had been in the years before the railroad. He has two daughters of his own.
He drives them to school past the Southern Pacific yard every morning. He does not know because Daniel’s generation was not told everything. All the details of what happened in November of 1960. He knows the outline. He knows a man stopped. He knows his great-grandmother kept the house. He knows it was the Duke.
John Wayne drove back to Los Angeles that Thursday evening, November 10th, the day the deed transferred. He was due on the set of a picture times the Comancheros, starting principal photography that month. He arrived at the studio the next morning, on time. He said nothing to the director about where he had been or what he had done.
He said nothing to the producer. He said nothing in any interview for the rest of his life about a yellow house on Oleander Street in Bakersfield or a widow in a gray cardigan or a city truck with its engine idling at the curb. He was not a man who made speeches. The story came out the way these things come out, slowly, sideways, through a chain of people who had been there.
Harold Stem told his wife, who told her sister. The deputy told his sergeant, who told it at a union dinner. The title company man told his wife, who had grown up in Bakersfield and never left, and who lived to be 91 years old and told the story to every grandchild who would sit still for it. The man from the Los Angeles Holding Company told it in his own way, the way a man tells a story that bothers him, the way he tells it because he cannot stop turning it over.
He had bought that house for $2,200 and sold it for $4,800 and come out ahead on the transaction. And he knew perfectly well that something had happened on Oleander Street that was entirely outside his balance sheet and that no balance sheet would ever account for. He told it for years. The house at 1147 Oleander Street is still standing.
The oleander hedge along the south property line, the one Edna Purcell stood beside that November morning, still grows there. Oleander is hard to kill. It has been trimmed back and grown again a dozen times in 60 years. Thomas’s orange trees in the backyard were cut down in 1994 when the roots got under the foundation, Patricia cried when they went.
Daniel planted new ones in 2011, Meyer lemons, because lemons do better in that part of Kern County now than they did in 1952. Inside the house in the hallway, there is a framed document on the wall. It is a copy of the deed dated the 10th of November, 1960. Property conveyed in full to Margaret Ruth Calloway, free and clear of all encumbrances.
The buyer’s name is not on it because the buyer would not let it be written there. What is written in the small block of text below the legal description, added at the buyer’s instruction before the document was delivered, reads only, “Conveyed in full satisfaction of a debt long owed.” Below the framed deed, on the small table underneath, there is a photograph in a wooden frame.
It is Margaret Calloway, taken by Patricia sometime in the mid-1960s, sitting in the living room of the house. She is in the chair beside the window, the one with the worn patch on the right arm. She has a cup of tea on the table beside her, and she is looking at something outside the window, and she is smiling at whatever it is, and the afternoon light is on her face.
Daniel Calloway passes that photograph every morning when he leaves for work. He does not pause at it. It has been on that wall his whole life, and it is part of the air of the house, the way the smell of the orange trees used to be. But sometimes, on the mornings when he is a little slow, when the girls are taking their time getting their things together, and he is standing in the hallway waiting, he looks at his great grandmother in that photograph, and he sees the worn patch on the chair and the afternoon light on her face. And he knows, because he has always known it in the way you know the things that happened before you were born, but that made the world you live in, that there is a reason the house is there, that there is a reason he grew up in those rooms and drove past that railyard every morning and had somewhere to bring his own daughters home to. One morning in November, a city truck, an engine that idled and then went quiet, a man who turned around. Every morning the light comes through the front window of the house at 11:47 Oleander Street and falls across
the frame deed on the hallway wall. It moves across the text, across the words times free and clear, across the line that says times a debt long owed, and then it moves on past the window and out into the yard where the oleander is growing the way it always grows, the way it has grown through every November since the day Thomas Calloway brought Margaret to that street with nothing but a lunch pail and a good name and the intention to stay.
The deed is still there. The light still comes. The house is still a Calloway house. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life or with someone who needs to remember that a single person turning around can change what 60 years looks like. There are more stories like this one.
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