2014 July PASO Magazine

Paso Robles Celebrates
125 Years
Compiled by Chris Weygandt Alba
Two Pioneer Day Marshals and lifetime friends, Ray Pesenti Sr. (2009) and
Art Von Dollen (2011), went home to heaven together in May, two days apart.
Our Pioneer Day Queen of 2008, Eleanor Heaton Sachs, passed away in
February, pleased by the great continuity of her life. Here are some last words
from them, shared with Paso Robles Magazine in their Pioneer Days.
I have watched the automobile
become the mode of travel. I remember
following a horse around while farming.
We didn’t get to town much. My
folks hunted to help feed us. We
worked hard but got to play a lot.
We had a lot of fun fishing Jack
Creek. It used to be a pretty good
stream year round. Back then, a lot
of the ground you couldn’t work to
put the crops in, it was too wet.
Winters were winters. We had water
running in every gutter and crick.
I’m just one of the lucky ones to
have lived a long life. I’ve done a lot of
things, did work I enjoyed, and I’ve seen
a lot of changes. There are a few things
I might have done differently, but I
don’t know what I could have done
that was any better. I enjoyed my life.
Raised on wild
game, Ray
treasured a
“store-bought
breakfast” at 17
while exhibiting
his 4-H hog in
San Francisco.
Eleanor’s ancestors
Mary Pate and
William Gillis (circa
1880s) were children
of a pioneering
Southern belle and a
pioneer pig rancher.
My maternal greatgrandmother
came
from the South. She
stepped off the ship
in San Francisco
in her velvet shoes
and hoop skirt, and
sank five inches
into the mud.
She said I want
to go home and
I will walk.
She had been
coddled all her life,
but she came out here to the wild
wooly west and she adapted. Her
husband was killed and she raised five
children. She must have had a very
strong will. You couldn’t run to town
for a loaf of bread.
Mom was born on her property.
My dad was born over the hill at the
Heaton house. He insisted that I be
born there too, in the house that was
built by my great-grandfather when he
settled here in the 1880s.
My bedroom is three feet from where
I was born. We built our own house on
that land almost 50 years ago, and on
that land I raised my children.
Art farmed all his life on land farmed by
Von Dollens for over 100 years, and he
never wanted to do anything else.
A neighbor told me that in 1898,
a real dry year, maybe four inches
of rain, it was so bad, people would
hang a sign on a horse that said,
“You feed me, you can have me.”
There’s a saying around here:
This would be poor country
if it weren’t for next year.
You always hope, depending on
the rainfall and also when it comes.
You put everything into your crop.
You have money in your pocket you
borrowed to maintain your equipment,
buy fertilizer. You prepared
land the year before, saved your
seed, and in the fall you get the
first rain, wait ’til the first crop of
weeds comes up and then plant
behind it.
Then you sit back and wait on
the good Lord. You do the best
you can. You remember the good
years, and you remember the bad
ones. If you raise a good crop,
there’s a good feeling to it.
I have done what I wanted to do.
July 2014, Paso Robles Magazine 31