Looking For Camp Cooke

Anyone who has even heard of it will tell you that Camp Cooke no longer exists. The Air Force took over in 1957 and changed the name to Vandenberg. But I’ve never been able to accept the official version of a story.

My father was with the 5th Armored Division when they rolled into Camp Cooke in 1942. He was assigned to the145th Signal Company, drove a half–tractor and operated a radio, but never saw combat and before long 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 twenty to eleven. He wrote poems, book reviews, and essays for the Clarion. One of his stories, called “The Moment”, was dramatically enacted at the service club; another, a Father’s Day tribute, was picked up by a couple of "real" newspapers. He even taught an Italian language class.I gleaned this information from the clippings and photographs he had saved. He kept the photos in a handsome leather album with captions and commentaries written in ink right along the bottom border of each snapshot: Christmas in mess hall, 1942; Peep - wish I owned one; Mail call - is there one for me?

As a child growing up in 1950’s New York, I was fascinated by all this. 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. “It was beautiful country,” he told me once. “I always wished I could return.”

Sometimes the soldiers went into the nearby town of Lompoc, which opened its scrawny arms to them in a warm embrace. As many soldiers did, my father recorded a few records at the USO facility there. Now, more than 60 years later, I can listen to him over and over singing a sentimental song, sending love to his mother, promising a buddy from Texas the best spaghetti dinner in the world if he ever comes to visit, and flirting unabashedly with a young woman who apparently looked good in a sweater.

There were also excursions to Santa Maria -- there is a picture of him in front of the City Hall there taken on July 3, 1942. (My daughter, whom he never met, once did a cartwheel in the very spot where he sat. It was a delicious little moment, reminding me that things do come full circle.)

Of course there were trips to Santa Barbara, as well. 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 Theater. Daddy told me that the most beautiful girl he ever saw was seated on a white stucco wall in Santa Barbara. Bougainvillea covered the wall like a magenta waterfall, the girl waved to the soldiers as they went by, and he thought he had glimpsed paradise.But I never knew precisely where Camp Cooke was. And I certainly could not have imagined that someday I would live in this region, although my father’s affinity for it might well have been 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 one summer morning I set out in search of the old army base.

Fortunately, there are people like Jeff Geiger who honor the past and protect its bric-a-brac. Geiger had an office at the headquarters building at Vandenberg; his card said simply “historian”. He welcomed me when I arrived with my father’s old photos and newspaper clippings. He didn’t think my quest was strange.“This is all Air Force now,” Geiger told me. “You have to look hard to find Camp Cooke. Virtually all of the old buildings are gone.”“But let’s go back to the beginning. I have some pictures here you might like to see…”

And he pulled out glossy aerial photos of the remote expanse of land from which the base was to be carved. “The War Department bought the land in1941, a total of about 86,000 acres,” Geiger explained. “The largest tract had been part of the Jesus Maria Ranch, a Mexican land grant, and there were parts of other land grants too. They bought a parcel from James B. Rogers, the son of Will Rogers. And the state of California sold them the little town of Surf.”

The untamed land was harshly beautiful. Environmental impact studies were unheard of in those days, and archaeological considerations irrelevant. The world was at war, and the United States was about to become, in Roosevelt’s words, “the arsenal of democracy.” Pictures in Geiger’s office documented how the triangle of the camp was inscribed into a roadless place of wind, dust, fog, and mud and its structures swiftly fabricated. A 1946 history of Camp Cooke tells of Howard Cash, a member of the initial surveying party, “sitting in his truck with dust swirling so thickly around it that he couldn’t see beyond the windshield, listening to the Caterpillars plowing by on all sides. One tractor driver left his vehicle at noon when he came off his shift; the worker following him wasn’t able to find the tractor.”After Pearl Harbor, the crisp white bunkers were repainted drab green, and nightly blackouts were enforced. Tensions heightened further when an oil refinery down the coast in Goleta was shelled by a Japanese submarine. Later a guard at Miguelito Reservoir, the source of Camp Cooke’s drinking water, exchanged fifty shots with what he described as a “concealed assailant.”

The camp was named after Major General Philip St. George Cooke, a cavalry officer from Virginia who served in the Mexican War, the Indian War, and the Civil War (on the Union side). During the Mexican War he led a battalion of Mormons from St. Louis to San Diego; the route he opened up was followed by subsequent stagecoach trails, and later the railroad. But Cooke was an army guy, and this is the Air Force – his name is now gone.

“I found these in an empty field,” Geiger told me, pointing to a tin cup and a shallow helmet, rusty and corroded but intact. “This is the type of helmet your father would have worn. Later models were deeper and more substantial. The owner of this one probably tossed it into the field when the new ones were issued.”

“And this Camp Cooke Bingo card might interest you,” Geiger continued. “There may even be a few of these still in use in Lompoc. A fellow sent this to me just a couple of years ago.”

I showed Geiger the snapshots I had brought. We ascertained that my father had been at the south base, now windswept fields with not a building left. Geiger recognized a railroad trestle beneath which my father had written: “Camp Cooke railroad bridge: this connects us with civilization.” Built in 1904, the bridge is still there.

According to Geiger, a complete set of the Camp Cooke Clarion is available on microfilm in the Lompoc Public Library. I resolved to head over to the library later and browse through, looking for my father’s byline: Pfc. S. W. Carbone, Buzzer Co.

“There’s another place you should stop at if you’re going to Lompoc,” Geiger suggested – “the recreation facility on Walnut. It’s the old USO building.”

I made a point of driving over to the rec center, a modest building I never would have otherwise noticed. 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. In the afternoon stillness, I suddenly realized I had been here before -- for the quinceanera celebration of a young neighbor.

Just like my father, I thought, I have known this room when it was filled with voices, laughter, and music. I felt oddly close to him, as though somehow we had shared a moment.I understand, too, how he felt on bleaker evenings at the base. One of his poems, in a 1942 issue of the Clarion, is called “Night Thoughts in Camp.”

It begins like this:Veil-like fog over the camp: “Blurred light from each street lamp/Barracks but a black outline/Of gloom that pervades this heart of mine…”

Camp Cooke remains in the silhouettes of the hills, the voice of the wind, the loneliness that lingers in the fog. I drive past the outskirts of the base and feel a hundred kinds of yearning here, a hundred kinds of hope. Our fathers are not far away.

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