It’s a new year and time to set my goals for my research and this blog. One of my main goals this year is to digitize all the Susie Spindletop’s Weekly Letters. I have most of them, and I should be able to obtain the others with the help of a newspaper archive and the Sam Houston Regional Library & Research Center. I will add that all my research is stored at the Jefferson County Historical Commission.

The second goal is the Historic Magnolia Cemetery Tour—I want to talk about the origins of where we came from and where we are. In 2013 and 2014, the Liberty County Historical Commission (LCHC) created a superb program to raise funds for its work. They went all out on history and even dressed in period clothing. To me, this was spectacular, so I wanted to bring a history-based tour like that one here. I got my chance to bring history alive in 2015 with the help of Judy Linsley and the McFaddin-Ward House. We did a cemetery tour for the docents of the McFaddin-Ward House. It wasn’t like the LCHC  program, but it was a start. It was me and Judy, who knew a lot more than I did, taking a tour of the cemetery and telling stories of interest to the residents. Afterward, Judy and I did a couple more cemetery tours for the Beaumont Heritage Society.

At first, the Beaumont Heritage Society didn’t want to do a “happy hour” in a cemetery, but after not finding any other place to hold it (I assume), they changed their minds and went ahead with it. I guess it was a success for them because about thirty-five people signed up for membership of the society. It’s amazing how money changes your perspective. We did the second tour in 2016, and it went well, but after Hurricane Harvey happened, we stopped the event. At the time, Magnolia Cemetery was not in a good state. There were many problems, and management is correcting many issues that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. It is getting better.

In 2021, Kelli Maness, Magnolia Cemetery Board President, reached out to me to bring back the tour. I saw they had a new board and were making a significant effort to turn things around, so I agreed. We planned the event and it went great. For those who have taken the tour, we did a Thursday evening from five to seven, and a Saturday morning from ten to two. Our attendance was excellent on Thursday, to the surprise of a friend who thought no one would come out. Saturday was also good, and we achieved our goal of promoting Beaumont and SETX history.

In 2022 things were no different, except for the love the Beaumont Enterprise andKBMT showed us when promoting the tour. I’ll also give kudos to the folks at KFDM, who promoted the Magnolia Cemetery lecture at the McFaddin-Ward House Museum. The tour went well and we are planning the third Historic Magnolia Cemetery Tour for October. This will not be an October ghost tour but a history one. We have grown from two people presenting SETX history on a walking tour to ten to eleven presenters stationed throughout the cemetery. The great thing about this is that the presenters are either researchers who have studied the people they talk about or relatives who are proud to tell their families’ stories. We don’t give 3 x 5 index cards and tell someone to speak for four hours. (Sorry Galveston Historical Foundation—I know you changed your evil ways but I only volunteer with the Candy Lady.) We want the history of our area to be known through past residents, and so many good people volunteer their time and research to help out. I am grateful to everyone who helps out because no money is collected from the printed program, tour, water, or snacks during the event. This is education for the public, and you’re welcome because it’s free. I want to thank everyone who gives their time and knowledge to make the tour possible.

I also want to thank Kelli Maness for caring enough to provide the guys with the proper equipment to tend to the cemetery grounds. She is also the one who is trying to save Magnolia Cemetery, which is a not-for-profit organization. Her work will not go unnoticed.

This week I did a bad thing. I changed the channel from DISH scapes to the History Channel. And boy, they were on a marathon to throw in all kinds of ancient astronaut theories. Some of the Sumerian gobbledygook—I can see the point. But then they mentioned the Battle of Los Angeles (1942), and that’s when the expletives came out. I know a bit about this time, and I want to use the good people of the Port Arthur News as references because the Los Angeles Times from 1942 is not digitized, as far as I can tell. Hmm. Aliens? I think not, but I will reference a John Belushi movie later.

On the night of February 24 and the morning of the 25, 1942, all hell broke loose in the sky over Los Angeles, California. Antiaircraft positions opened fire, and they hit nothing. No, I’m not going to pin the gunners as storm troopers from a galaxy far, far away, but when you shoot at ghosts, the bullets fall to the ground, and it rains metal over a panicked civilian population. The total number of deaths was five; three car crashes and two heart attacks. So, what the hell happened that night must be explained by what happened the evening before. I knew nothing about this story until I heard it mentioned on Dan Carlin’s podcast. Dan Carlin is not a historian; he is a diehard history researcher who gives his opinions on certain subjects with added factual content. He grew up around Ellwood, California, and this is where the story begins.

On February 23, President Roosevelt prepared to make one of his fireside chats that all the US would listen to at the time. In the meantime, the Japanese ordered their submarine I-17 to fire upon a refinery in Ellwood, California. Its mission was to attack the facility, but there was not much damage. The main issue was that a foreign power attacked US soil. Something that hadn’t happened since the War of 1812 and the Battle of Baltimore. The submarine was huge. Some accounts compared it to a cruiser or a destroyer, but since it had only one 14 cm/40 11th Year Type naval gun firing at the shoreline, people quickly figured out that there was no mass invasion of the Western United States. Actually, the whole point of the action was to mentally screw with the civilians along the California coast. And it worked. They were scared, and then February 24 happened.

The Battle of Los Angeles was covered across the nation; I added a few headlines and articles from the Port Arthur News. I’ll also add that in one of the articles, L. E. MacDonald, a clerk at the West Los Angeles police station, was quoted as saying,

“As I watched the searchlights, anti-aircraft fire broke out. I saw a plane that seemed to be up at least 20,000 feet. It looked like a butterfly.”

A butterfly? Could it be that L. E. MacDonald mistook a plane for something even more ominous from Japanese lore? Could that “butterfly” actually have been a 怪獣 kaijū awakened from its sleep in the 1950s by nuclear testing? Could it be the creature that goes by the name of モスラ Mothra? If so, how did it time travel to 1942? I have no idea, but since I brought it up, maybe the ancient astronaut theorists will run with this new possible finding. Hell, it’s at least worth an episode.

No more History Channel for a while. All this talk of Ellwood, California, makes me want to rewatch that classic 1941 movie, which is loosely based on the events above. John Belushi was an ace in this movie, but Slim Pickens was the best.

Until next time, Aliens or モスラ Mothra?