He tested into “bonehead English” at Bakersfield College and later flunked out of BC.
However, Oildale-born and raised Gerald Haslam is now a published author with over 28 books of nonfiction essays, short-story collections and novels to his credit as well as numerous literary honors.
These honors include the 2006 Josephine Miles Award from the PEN organization in Oakland for a compilation of his fiction and nonfiction works titled “Haslam’s Valley,” the 2001 Western States Book Award for his novel “Straight White Male,” the 2005 Ralph Gleason Award from “Rolling Stone” magazine, BMI and New York University for his book “Workin’ Man’s Blues: Country Music in California” and many others.
In 1998, Haslam was anointed with the appellation of Laureate of the San Francisco Public Library. His latest novel is “Grace Period,” about an aging Catholic newspaperman with prostate cancer who falls for a doctor with breast cancer.
The first Visiting Eminent Scholar in the Humanities for the Norman Levan Center for the Humanities, Haslam worked as a professor of English at Sonoma State University from 1967-1997. The Eminent Scholars program is a continuing series.
The self-proclaimed troubadour for the unsung California Central Valley, Garces High School and BC graduate Haslam is a prolific writer, and he admitted during his lecture Nov. 7 at BC’s Fireside Room about his life and work that he is not a genius.
“I don’t have great soaring talent, but I have persistence,” Haslam said.
Haslam talked at length about the overlooked and underrated California Central Valley and how the Central Valley does not fit the accepted notion of the California of popular culture.
Haslam at some point became interested in celebrating the cultural richness he believes that he found in the Central Valley after noting that the area was not frequently written about. Haslam believes that focusing on the Central Valley’s cultural richness and the complex layers of human drama and dynamism he found in the Central Valley will dissolve the area’s image of being a God-forsaken cultural wasteland with just 300 varieties of crops, a dearth of palm trees and no beaches.
“There are cultures bumping up against each other here,” Haslam said. “This is the absolute core of California,” he said. More than 100 languages are spoken in the Central Valley, Haslam said.
He also noted that a number of poets including Gary Soto and Robert Duncan had emerged from California, but there were few California short-story writers and novelists. Out of his concern for Central Valley recognition and the need for a wider California literary base, emerged Haslam’s short story “Doll,” written in the 1960s, which focused on the negative attitude about California’s “Oakies” and other stories and novels such as “The Great Tejon Club Jubilee,” as well as nonfiction essay collections including “The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland” and “The Other California: The Great Central Valley in Life and Letters.”
“I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s here,” Haslam said of his work delineating the cultural complexities of the Central Valley.
Haslam admitted he listens to conversations everywhere he goes in the Central Valley, and he is a persistent observer and note taker. He even looks at tattoos and reads the bumper stickers on cars. During the lecture, he remarked that one difference between the Bay Area and the Central Valley is that expensive Bay Area cars often have “Free Tibet” stickers, and Central Valley cars typically have stickers that concern the Rapture and the right to bear arms.
Haslam frequently haunts Central Valley barbershops, restaurants and honky-tonk bars and was even part of the campaign to save the old Blackboard bar from being demolished.
Haslam mentioned that when he was growing up in Oildale, he lived across the street from Ralph Trout who owns Trout’s bar in Oildale. Once in Bakersfield’s old Casa Royale restaurant, he observed, and later described in a short story, a patron as having “a face gouged from metal.” Another time in the same restaurant, Haslam said he watched elderly couples dancing in the “clutch and hug” style.
Haslam noted that one elderly man was dancing with a woman who had no legs; apparently the man managed this by holding the woman’s posterior. A part of one of the many bar conversations Haslam has heard over the years, which wound up in a short story of his, ran something like this:
“Carpe diem. What’s that?”
“Fish of the Day,” someone in the bar answered.
As Haslam’s audience chuckled, Haslam quipped, “Someone should have said, ‘That means, Carp of the Day,'”
Haslam also described a barbershop conversation he overheard between two patrons. One of the patrons sported an arm tattoo that said, “Coon ass.”
“‘Cause my daddy was a Cajun,” the tattooed man said.
“It should have said, ‘Dumb ass,'” the other remarked.
Haslam also described the time when he was visiting someone at Mercy Hospital, and he overheard a dying elderly woman in one of the rooms bawl to a relative: “Your feet stink, and you don’t love your Jesus!”
“Some things you can’t make up,” Haslam said.
Haslam has jotted down these and other anecdotes in small notepads and sometimes even on toilet paper and on the edges of newspapers. He routinely carries a small notepad, his “palm pilot,” as he put it, in the pocket of his shirt.
During his presentation, he displayed his current pad in a blue-checked shirt pocket. In his home in Napa Valley, he has at least 4,500 quarter-full pads containing, he says, 40 years of observations and thoughts. Haslam says that he has always been a morning writer, and before he began having health problems, he usually began work on his essays, stories and novels around 5 a.m. Haslam says he never draws up outlines, and he also emphasized that he writes on feeling and impulse and never from logic. Writing a novel typically takes about five years, he said.
Haslam admonished prospective writers to use the heart more than the head. Haslam reiterated that writers should not be afraid or ashamed to write about the people and places they are best acquainted with. Haslam repeated that he felt obligated to do that.
“Oildale ain’t to be degraded,” Haslam said.