Someone should write less-sordid area history

November 21, 2003

Are we as Oakleyites set to live in the perils of our past to the end of eternity or can we just get over it and move on? All towns have some kind of sordid history. There are always ghost stories, gangsters that ripped the streets with gun fire, a mysterious murder or even the KKK, but when I read a local history book the other day I thought I was reliving an episode of the Wild Wild West from the 1960s television show. All that was missing was Robert Conrad playing Jim West being "entertained" by the ladies, and Ross Martin's Artemus Gordon disguised as a Chinaman and pulling out his pearl-handled pistol.

While I was out shopping in Oakley last week I stopped in on Holly and Steve Harland from Good Scents Flowers. Holly is an avid history buff and told me about a book she found at M&L Ace Hardware which told about Contra Costa County's history. She loved the flavor of the book and enjoyed reading all the highlights from the past. That is until she got to Oakley.

While the histories of other cities in the book were four, five and six pages long, Oakley's was just one page that painted a sordid picture of an era most would probably rather forget. The book is called "Old Times in Contra Costa" and is written by Robert Daras Tatam. I've seen copies of this book at the library in Antioch. It was first published in 1993 and reprinted several times until 1996. That was the last date on the copy that I purchased.

The headline on the top of the page for Oakley reads: "Oakley's Wild Past: Gambling Parlors, Opium Dens, Crooked Bankers, Prostitutes--All In or Near the Nortoriuos Oakley Hotel." It would be interesting for you to read the whole page, but since I'm limited on space I'll just highlight one passage that was a little disturbing to the Harlands and myself.

"The population was cosmopolitan," Tatam writes, "Chinese worked in the fields; men from India worked on the dikes and levees in the Delta; Mexicans worked the packing sheds, and there were farmers and merchants of Irish, Portuguese, German, and Italian descent, to name a few.

"There were many more men than women; prostitutes prospered in the upstairs rooms of the Oakley Hotel. Downstairs there were Chinese men smoking opium. Several of the stores on Ruby Street were gambling joints, where stacks of $20 gold pieces changed hands from minute to minute."

Here's my favorite part. "....Oakley has changed. The packing sheds disappeared after World War II when refrigerated trucks started picking up crated vegetables in the fields. The gambling joints, opium dens, and prostitutes are mostly gone..."

Mostly?

I look at these words and I say it is time to write a new history book on Oakley. Time to talk about the struggling pioneers who came to this territory when no one else would, to make a better life for themselves. The land was barren. Just like we know today, the soil had no implements for growing anything. But these pioneers found a way to make it work by growing almonds, walnuts, olives and even fruit-bearing trees.

They were family men and women who probably would never step foot in or around the Oakley Hotel that this man describes. Some report that the history buffs got a little carried away with what was really going on at that time. The only people who know what really happened are probably long gone, but Oakley is filled with families that have lived here all their lives. There are many senior citizens that were born and raised here. Many have great stories to tell that probably don't have anything to do with the goings on at the Oakley Hotel.

These people won't be around forever and if Oakley wants to clean up what the history books are saying this would make a nice project for someone.

Oh, and by the way, according to the police and sheriff departments it has been decades and decades since someone in Oakley has been arrested for gambling, opium dens or prostitution. So I guess it really is "mostly gone."

Roni Gehlke's column on life in Oakley appears each week in the Brentwood News.

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