Ken Kramer: Put yourself on a San Diego timeline, okay?

And back to 1967, when a place you know was just starting to go.

Or how about 1895, the year a small group of folks established a first of its kind, or even earlier, how about 1887, when this man right here had the biggest dreams all but forgotten today, and well, there's something else about him, you'll hear the story.

Or 1863--yeah, we'll make a stop in that year too to see some remarkable history that goes back to well before that.

And something in the backyard that's been around longer than any of us could possibly remember.

And maybe it was 35 million years ago, when this was the hottest place anywhere around here.

Grab some treats, snuggle up with a good warm dog because it's show time with more stories too, all of them true, about San Diego.

male announcer: "Ken Kramer's About San Diego," the history and people of the area we call home.

Here's Ken Kramer.

Ken: Let's go back.

Come on with me.

So many places to go and things to see.

Hi, I'm Ken Kramer.

We are at Mission Trails Regional Park this time for reasons which will become obvious as we proceed along through the show, but our first stop is actually north of here and a little bit inland.

Now I would say that comfortable walking shoes are in order.

It's not a difficult hike, but it's well worth it, as you will see just for the history.

I think it is a nice day in Carlsbad for a walk.

Super easy to get to off of Tamarack Avenue.

The trail crosses a small dam that impounds rainwater down there, and it is, you see, the way to get to the Volcano.

And you say, "What?

There are no active volcanoes in San Diego County today," and you'd be right.

See, this was a very, very long time ago, and if you were right here--really, there's the sign, and here's the Volcano, Mount Calavera means "skull" in Spanish, and yes, it really is what's left of a little volcano not far from the residential streets of Carlsbad today.

It was back in its day in a very tiny way, very spectacular as a geologist could tell us, and luckily we have one.

Dr.

Pat Abbott: Good to see you, Ken, come on in.

Ken: Dr.

Pat Abbott, professor emeritus, Earth and Environmental Sciences at San Diego State.

Okay, first thing he says, we shouldn't think of it as like a Hawaii volcano with lava spewing.

No, this was more like a Mount Saint Helens, blowing up rock and gas, but on a much, much, much smaller scale.

Dr.

Abbott: It's the kind of thing that people living in the neighborhood would have been able to move away from, watch it for a few years, and it would have quit.

It would not have killed or harmed anybody.

Ken: That's if there was anyone around to see it, which there wasn't.

Dr.

Abbott: It's most definitely prehistoric.

Nobody was around when that volcano was erupting.

Ken: And when was that?

Well, maybe 20, or 25, or 30, or 35 million years ago or so.

Dr.

Abbott: I can say as a geologist looking at it in the field where the sandstones nearby that are like 40 million years old, I can sow that they are baked or burnt, so the magmas shows it's younger than 40 million years, but I can't be more specific than that.

Ken: Okay, so it's very old, and a couple of things you think of a volcano as being cone-shaped, right?

And back then this was, but-- Dr.

Abbott: But it's also loose material so that erodes easily, and what's happened there in Carlsbad is the side has eroded away here, we now see inside the throat of it.

Ken: And walk right into that throat, right into the middle of the volcano and look up, look around.

Dr.

Abbott: And in the throat of it you see these hexagonal columns.

They almost looks like Greek architecture.

It's the kind of a thing that when the magma was cooling in the throat of the volcano, it shrinks and pulls into hexagonal-shaped vertical columns.

Ken: See them?

Yes, there are big geological forces at work here, but Dr.

Pat Abbott says-- Dr.

Abbott: But this is just a tiny little thing, a little thing where below the surface a bit of magma had accumulated.

Some gas burst through the surface, blowing stuff into the air for a while.

The gas is expanded, a little bit of lava comes out.

It took place at maxima for a few years, and it's a one and done.

It is now extinct.

It will never erupt again.

Ken: Which is good news for Carlsbad and their volcano known as Cerro de Calavera, Skull Hill, which holds the distinction of being in fact one of the smallest volcanoes in North America in the Lake Calavera Preserve in the city of Carlsbad.

An easy walk on a nice day to see some ancient history about San Diego.

Ken: All right, to another peak now.

This one within the city of San Diego at Mission Trails Regional Park.

A lot of people take a look at it and they say, "Oh, it must be a volcano too."

But we checked with Pat Abbott, and he says, "No, it actually has no volcanic origin whatsoever."

What it does have though is a lot of visitors.

Estimates are that a million people a year visit Mission Trails Regional Park and hundreds of thousands of them climb this mountain, never knowing its history.

Well, since we're right here and it's right there, what is the story?

Ken: October 1984, and notice if you will this plaque being dedicated because we're gonna come back to it.

It recognizes this mountain as being the highest one in San Diego, 1,591 feet above sea level and very hikeable.

♪ I love to go a-wandering ♪ ♪ Along the mountain track ♪ ♪ And as I go, I love to sing ♪ ♪ My knapsack on my back ♪♪ Ken: I read that it was John Muir who said, "Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt."

How many San Diegans have taken that to heart, testing themselves physically, hiking up here, maybe not knowing its history?

The Kumeyaay marked its shadows and observed the winter solstice here a thousand many more years before any American settler came and climbed it or thought to name it "S Mountain."

Students rushed to somehow claim it as their own from the early 1930s through the 1960s.

Every year in a ritual of fall, they, too, climbed the mountain with sacks of lime and spelled out the letter "S" for State, the State College, bright and on clear days visible to the sea.

Today, nature has overgrown the scar, but the hike is the thing.

The air as you climb, clearer and oddly sometimes warmed by the inversion layer.

The traffic noise below slowly starts to fade, and you find yourself above the city that is your home with people who may be neighbors or strangers, but all have come here, all are walking here, all experiencing that familiar combination of physical work out of the body in the escape of nature.

♪ High overheard, the skylark's wing ♪ ♪ They never rest at home ♪ ♪ But just like me, they love to sing ♪ ♪ As o'er the world we roam ♪♪ Ken: There is the matter of what this mountain is called today.

It's worth a minute because Mr.

Cowles deserves that.

In 1887, George Cowles owned about 4000 acres in the El Cajon Valley where he planted a wonderful variety of fruits, olives, and grain.

He also raised thoroughbred horses and polo ponies and tirelessly worked to create and build his little community called Cowlestown, and then he died.

The story is that he worked so hard on Cowlestown that it killed him at age 51.

His widow married a man named Milton Santee, so everything in Cowlestown got changed to Santee, except the mountain, which rightly ought to be called Cowles Mountain.

Do people here hundreds, sometimes thousands a day think of him, or of the "S," or of the Kumeyaay for whom this mountain holds a place of honor?

♪ Oh, may I go a-wandering ♪ ♪ Until the day I die!

♪ ♪ And may I always laugh and sing ♪ ♪ Beneath the clear blue sky!

♪♪ Ken: It might have been lost to development, but voters approved a measure that provided the money for open space, and the city bought it on on New Year's Eve more than 50 years ago, and several years after that dedicated that plaque and carried it up here to the very top of Cowles Mountain, thank you.

Crowded, sure, sometimes, but it is a place of nature in our city limits, and I think John Muir would understand how this particular dirt path has become something rightly treasured about San Diego.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ken: To a more urban part of our county now, which if you were to rewind the clock, certainly was not always that way.

In fact, it had agricultural roots.

If you go back in time, you'll find there was one particular group who wanted to add something to that community.

They couldn't imagine though what it's become today.

Take a look.

Can you make out what's in this picture?

It's pretty old, 1895.

Can you see it's a citrus packing house, which back then would have contained--?

Christian DeMent: Oranges and limes and lemons, citrus fruits, growing abundantly around here.

Ken: And also Methodists.

And to understand why, well-- Christian: In 1895, the closest Methodist church was in downtown San Diego, so it was a two-hour buggy ride to get out to East County.

Ken: East County, back when folks held church where they could, like at the local schoolhouse on Orange Avenue, I'm going to say things have changed.

It's 130 years later and La Mesa's First United Methodist Church is now steeped in local history and its pastor Christian DeMent is determined to honor it.

After all, he did pretty much grow up here.

Christian: From infancy until I was in college, I roamed these pews and these buildings and played hide and go seek in them and-- Ken: There's his great uncle Howell Lewis, music director and choir leader in 1948, who used to play the organ at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park and I suspect would have loved the other thing we came to see here, the organ.

Well, it's pretty hard to miss.

Christian: It is awe-inspiring, so every time I come into the sanctuary, it doesn't get old.

Ken: Built 40 years ago by the Holt Camp Company in Ohio, they came, measured the available space down to the millimeter, then went back to Cleveland, designed and shipped it, and its arrival was an event.

Christian: The pipes were delivered and volunteers from the church helped carry the pipes into the sanctuary and place them along the tops of the pew so it could be installed.

Ken: The other thing, watch as Paul Rosas plays the keys.

There's so much going on behind the scenes.

It's a mechanical organ.

You can see strings are being pulled to move levers that open up the pipes.

Back in the 1980s when church music was moving to electric guitars and drum sets, this was a nod to tradition in a place that has a long history in the community.

Christian: We like to claim that we were the first church that was meeting here in La Mesa.

Ken: With time, the packing house and schoolhouse meeting days of the 1890s gave way to an actual building at Palm and Lemon Avenues, and then the construction of a church, which served for three decades and has since become their social hall.

And in 1955, the church building that has become a landmark in the city today.

It is a rich history, Christian DeMent says-- Christian: But not being nostalgic, really looking to how this is going to be the place that we live out in our future as well.

Ken: Meantime, happy 130th birthday to La Mesa First United Methodist Church and happy 40th to the organ, and thank you to Christian and Paul for allowing us to drop in for a look around and a listen for this story about San Diego.

♪♪♪ Ken: There's a place I wanna take you now where on lazy afternoons the art of conversation is combined with a sense of history, and I tell you this is a place where you can really find both.

Sitting on a porch on a sunny summer afternoon in conversation with Jim Van Meter, he will tell you-- Jim Van Meter: There's so many people that are jealous of my life 'cause I'm always smiling, cracking bad jokes or good jokes, and I tell them, I got it made.

Ken: He loves it.

From the palm trees and the year-round green grass of the open field next door, to this place where he's happily worked and engaged in countless conversations for almost 50 years now.

Yes, he says, it's an old house.

Jim: 1863, the building is as old as our Star of India in San Diego.

Ken: Wood for the door frames came from a ship that ran aground in San Diego, and the sun-dried mud bricks to build it came from right next door where there's a spring, freshwater spring.

Jim: This brought everybody, brought the traveling Native Americans.

Now, people like to ask, "How long ago was that?"

Well, as long as you can imagine.

Ken: And for just the last nearly half century or so, Jim has lived here in a little cottage on the grounds of what is truly a museum.

Jim: They call me caretaker director raconteur.

Ken: At the Bancroft Ranch House Museum on Memory Lane, named for Hubert Howe Bancroft, a writer, historian, prolific researcher into California history.

He owned the house, and before him a school teacher, clock repairman, and salt salesman named Rufus Porter, and before him Augustus Ensworth, and before any of them, indigenous people who migrated through the desert to the coast with the seasons.

Jim: This actually is a day's walk from here to our port.

I walked it twice.

Ken: This was a stopping point, he says, because of the water.

Jim: Water is a big deal.

I mean, to us now we turn on the faucet, but, going way back, you had to find good water.

Hope you didn't get sick.

Ken: Through the years he's had conversations with students who come here, they dig down and find the evidence that, yes, here was dependable spring water that was life-giving.

Jim: About a foot down is the mother lode.

That's about 100 years ago, and then you start finding pioneer stuff.

Needles, beads, glassware, broken glass, metals that can't make any sense of 'cause it's decomposed, tools.

Ken: You can see them on display in rooms that take you back generations and well beyond, and if you're lucky, maybe have a conversation with Jim whose knowledge of things around here is nothing less than encyclopedic.

Jim: You know, everything here has a story and I'm a storyteller.

Ken: Well, soon enough our conversation came back to that historic spring which is right next door.

Jim says it doesn't spring so much nowadays with all the development nearby.

It's not fresh and drinkable like a decade of centuries ago.

And on this hot summer day, you had to kind of notice the ground getting mushy where once the spring provided gallons of water a minute.

Today he had to show us-- Jim: So, if you go down enough right now, this is all gooey.

We go down about a foot and water'll come up.

Ken: But so many reminders are still around.

A rock pond that once provided water for sheep, a rock building that served as a guest house, countless artifacts and traces of the past here on the property preserved and documented.

And if I may say, Jim Van Meter himself, who is always up for a conversation about the ranch house and seems to have been custom-made for what he does here.

Jim: Well, every day is an enjoyment.

I meet different people on weekends and I get to share history or questions, and they share with me and I learn.

Ken: And one thing more, as you might have known or guessed, that spring next to the Bancroft Ranch House has made another mark on our history, too, for that spring is how Spring Valley got its name, in case that ever comes up in conversation about San Diego.

♪♪♪ Ken: Question, did you ever keep a scrapbook, you know, clippings, memories that you set aside for later, and then you come across them and you go, "Wow"?

Well, these aren't exactly clippings, they are video.

It's film from a long time ago, and because you're part of the KPBS family, you might look at this and say, "Wow!"

Ken: Some family photos now of the KPBS family, if we may.

This is a program guide from the celebration of the KPBS TV station going on the air June 25th, 1967.

The radio station had already been on for a few years, but this was the new TV station, and wait a minute.

The call letters are different.

See it says KEBS, Educational Broadcasting San Diego, and it was on what was called the UHF band.

Most TVs back then only went up to channel 13, and, well, KEBS was channel 15.

And so as general manager John Witherspoon explained, a lot of people didn't even know KEBS was there.

John Witherspoon: One of our problems is that many people have UHF and don't know it.

Any set purchased in the last three years has UHF.

Virtually all color sets have UHF.

And, so, many people have the capability of receiving the picture.

Ken: There was one more UHF station in San Diego at Channel 39, located in what used to be a ballpoint pen factory in Kearny Mesa.

It eventually became NBC 7, but for KPBS, or as it was known back then, KEBS, this was a big day, a big celebration.

The studios were in the speech arts building on the San Diego State campus.

The staff was at the ready, producers, directors, talent, all skilled and trained.

This was the very first of what would become KPBS TV.

Meantime, on top of Mount San Miguel, a million watt transmitter sent the signal 100 miles.

The Chancellor of the State college system Glenn Dumke was there.

male: Would you say this is the forerunner of similar stations at other state colleges?

Glenn Dumke: I would certainly hope so.

I think educational television has a considerable future.

Ken: Well, that certainly turned out to be the truth, and a couple of things, and thank you to Barbara Nielsen, archives director at CBS 8 San Diego for the historical film they shot that day.

Look at this script from CBS 8 back then.

It reads, "Tonight and tomorrow night we're gonna do something you might not expect us to do.

We're going to talk about another TV station, Channel 15."

And it's true: back then you'd never hear any mention of another TV station, but this was something new.

Educational TV that became public TV, and what about that program guide for the first night of KEBS?

What was presented on this new station for a whole new audience?

Coincidentally, it was the day stations all over were showing a program called "Our World."

Eighteen nations participating in the first globe circling telecast in history, a monumental undertaking, all live, little moments from around the earth.

♪♪♪ It was like this global celebration of shared humanity.

What's occurring everywhere right now, live?

male: Spanish television from the sea, near the mouth of the Guadalquivir.

Ken: Opera in Munich.

[woman singing] Amazing things all happening at once.

male: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Bero Barri speaking to you in Mexico City, and we are attending a birth-- Steve Race: This is Steve Race in the Beatles recording studio in London, where the latest Beatle record is at this moment being built up.

♪ All you need is love ♪ ♪ All you need is love, love ♪ ♪ Love is all you need ♪♪ Ken: That was the first official program on what would become KPBS TV on that opening night, but wasn't the only one, no.

Julia Child: Today, I'm going to show you how to make a real French omelette.

Ken: There was Julia Child, mastering the art of french cooking.

An hour with Peter Ustinov, and then at 11 o'clock p.m.

it was good night and good morning to a new era in San Diego television.

And now a few from you and some random things, too, before we say adieu.

Our story about the Imperial Valley Desert Museum where the history of the Kumeyaay and their connection to the land and the night sky is celebrated, there's a postscript.

An extraordinary mural has been added on the exterior walls by the entrance.

It's called, "Our Song Is Not Over."

It explores the ancient past and transformation of the Yuha Desert land and people over the centuries.

Makes this museum right at the Ocotillo turn off from Interstate 8 even more interesting.

In Lemon Grove, their history mural in the 3300 block of Main Street shows five eras of Lemon Grove history, beginning with the Kumeyaay world.

It's on the south side of the Sonka Store.

South Oceanside 1949 was Acapulco Gardens, at the time the largest restaurant in San Diego County.

Refugio Rohin sent pictures.

His dad owned the place and from his scrapbook there's his dad and Poncho from "The Cisco Kid" TV show on the left and Conrad Hilton on the right.

Up until 1965, thousands of folks went there for parties, graduations, proms at Oceanside's Acapulco Gardens.

Steve Lamb of Serra Mesa was remodeling his home, tearing out a wall when inside he found this: a sandwich wrapper left over, he figures, from more than a half century ago from Hansen's Sandwich Company at State and F Telephone, BElmont 9-1852.

Here's a matchbook cover from them back then--catering available.

Another matchbook from Adrian Durso.

Anybody remember Chateau Basque Restaurant in Boulevard?

I remember going, I wanna say, in the 1980s.

Wish I'd taken pictures of the community dining at long tables and great conversations with everybody else there at Chateau Basque.

Johnny Downs: Something in the air was continental.

Ken: Our story about Johnny Downs.

He was a singer, dancer, movie star, but from 1953 to 1968, we in San Diego knew him as a kids TV show host.

Well, Babette Gardner says she went on that show, got to help with a game called The Magic Key, if you remember that--she certainly does.

And finally, Joe Dyke sent this, lifelong professional trumpet player.

His first paying gig he remembers, was when he was 13, and he got $8 playing at Acapulco Gardens.

Ken: It is fun to think back.

Meantime, that's it for this time and this episode of "About San Diego."

If you want to see these stories again, if you want to communicate with us, if you want to learn more about the stories you've seen here, just go to our website.

It's KenKramerTV.com.

That's KenKramerTV.com, we'll look forward to hearing from you.

Till next time, as always, I'm Ken Kramer.

Thank you for watching and for caring about San Diego.

Bye, bye.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ female announcer: Support for this program comes from the KPBS Explore Local Content Fund supporting new ideas and programs for San Diego.