All events are scheduled at Port Hueneme Historical Society Museum 220 Market St. in Port Hueneme at 11:00AM except otherwise indicated.
June 14 5:30 at Historic Bard Mansion Hueneme Spirit Award: Helen Brant As we look at the history of Port Hueneme spelled out on the walls of the Museum, the one constant, even during the economic hard times, is what old-timers used to call the “Hueneme Spirit,” a characteristic found in individuals—and fortunately there were many—who were more motivated by service than by self. The main idea behind the “Hueneme Spirit” is the so-called “Golden Rule,” a philosophy that is hardly new but not as widely practiced as it might be.
Still, ever since Thomas Bard platted the Friendly City by the Sea, the “Hueneme Spirit” continues to exist in such individuals as longtime resident and civic activist, Helen Brant. For further information on attending this event, please contact Becky at (805) 798-3975 or email[email protected]
June 14: Circle of Service Exemplar: Capt. Mike and Cheryl Saum
The word “exemplar” not only means “a typical example” but also “a model of excellence.”
The Hueneme Museum is an all-volunteer operation. Contributions can be as varied as the individuals who choose to commit their time, energy and expertise. Our unpaid staff operate as educators, docents, researchers, electronic gurus, distinguished speakers, and workshop leaders.
The Museum’s “circle of service,” however, remains united in a singular goal, namely, creating a gathering place for the community to celebrate history and culture. Cheryl and Mike Saum will be our first recipients. For further information on attending this event, please contact Becky at (805) 798-3975 or email [email protected]
June 15 Dr. Jose M. Alamillo “La Voz de La Colonia: Colonia’s News Source from 1926-1932”
La Voz de la Colonia, a Spanish-language newspaper, was recently discovered in the basement of the E.P. Foster Library in downtown Ventura. This newspaper, founded by Oxnard businessman Jesus Jimenez, was published from 1926 to 1932 in the city of Santa Paula, California and was widely circulated throughout Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. Dr. Alamillo’s research project used La Voz de la Colonia to reinterpret key historical events and issues in Ventura County history including the Mexican Immigration, the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster, Community & Labor Organizing, School Segregation of Mexican Children, the Impact of the Great Depression, and Baseball & Boxing in the Mexican Community. Dr. Alamillo received his PHD in Comparative Cultures at University of California Irvine. His academic work covers Chicana/o cultural history with a focus on labor, immigration, gender, leisure, and sports. He is the author of Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town (2006) and co-author of Latinos in U.S. Sport (2011). His new book, Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. He is currently working withLatinos in Baseball in the Barrios and the Big Leagues, a multi-year community collecting initiative and exhibition at Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
June 22 Linda Bentz “The Chinese In Ventura County”
Linda Bentz, who researches Chinese fishermen, California-built Chinese junks as well as Chinese American women and families, researched and wrote the script for the documentary Courage and Contributions: the Chinese in Ventura County. She has also published scholarly essays in books, journals, and newsletters. In 2012, she and co-author William Gow completed Hidden Lives: A Century of Chinese American History in Ventura County. She is currently the Vice President of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and serves as the historian for the Ventura County Chinese American Historical Society. She also has extensively investigated the presence of Chinese abalone harvesters on the Channel Islands by working with the National Parks Service and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. Ms. Bentz is the mother of four sons and lives with her husband in San Pedro.
June 29 Connie Korenstein “History of the Port of Hueneme” This presentation tells the story of the development of the Port of Hueneme–beginning in 1865 with Thomas Bard’s vision of a wharf capable of shipping out all the crops harvested by local farmers. Central to this story are not only the ups and downs of the wharf through two generations, but also the dream of a thriving port in the sleepy little town of Hueneme that the father, Thomas, passed on to his son, Richard. Richard Bard’s struggle to build the port, though, was finally realized, despite considerable opposition, controversy and a World War. Connie Korenstein is a retired educator who devotes her time to historic research, tours, living history presentations, historic fashion consulting, and community events. She has a collection of historical characters that she has researched and portrays in costume, sometimes solo and sometimes with a cast of other characters. Connie is a docent at Heritage Square and the Channel Islands Maritime Museum in Oxnard, as well as the Dudley House in Ventura. She has also been trained to guide tours at the Bard Mansion.
July 6 Councilmember Sylvia Munoz “History of the Cristero Rebellion”
Sylvia Munoz Schnopp, the author of the soon-to-be-published Abandoned Angels, traces her heritage back to the early 20th Century in Ventura County.Currently serving her third 4-year term as a Port Hueneme City Councilmember, she recognizes that her leadership role and civic engagement was set into motion by several ancestors who attained judicial appointments and political offices in Mexico. Sylvia, herself, learned about the Cristero Rebellion, a “holy war” lasting from 1926 to 1929 and rarely mentioned in history books, from her father, who was only a boy at the time. While Sylvia’s paternal grandfather permitted the family’s heritage ranch to serve as headquarters for the Cristeros, Sylvia’s maternal grandfather was friendly with the Federale forces establishing their big city presence not far from their home. Her subsequent research would show that the three years of upheaval marked a time when the Federales made practicing one’s faith a crime in Mexico. More than 90,000 people perished.Sylvia had no idea that two serendipitous events would occur before her book could be published. First, the film “For Greater Glory” (starring Andy Garcia) was released by the Knights of Columbus in July of 2012, thus creating national interest in her topic. Second, and even more importantly, Sylvia discovered that a number of local families were personally connected to the Cristero Rebellion, and she had the opportunity to interview them for the KADY TV website.
July 13 Annie Little “Feral Cats and Shore Bird Restoration on St. Nicholas Island” For the past 23 years, Annie Little has worked as a Wildlife Biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She recently transferred to the National Park Service. Since 2002, she has been the lead avian biologist for the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program. In this role, she oversees the implementation of multiple seabird restoration projects on the California Islands and the reintroduction of the Bald Eagle to the Channel Islands. Annie’s focus is the conservation of unique island ecosystems, including eradication and control of invasive species, biosecurity, habitat restoration, and re-establishment of native species. Annie is the U.S. coordinator for the Trilateral Island Initiative which promotes island conservation and collaboration among partners in Canada, U.S., and Mexico. Annie is stationed at Channel Islands National Park in Ventura, California. She graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a B.S. in Biology: Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution.
July 27 Richard Senate “The Paranormal in Ventura County”
Internationally known researcher and author, Richard Senate, will be speaking about the haunted buildings in Port Hueneme and in other locations around Ventura County. Senate has appeared regularly on the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. He is also the author of numerous books on ghosts, ghost hunters, and phantomology.
August 3 Jim Kosinski “North and South Civil War Navies”
Jim Kosinski, who is a volunteer at the Channel Islands Maritime Museum, will take you on a tour of Civil War history from the vantage point of the naval vessels of the Union and the Confederacy. The naval war was one of sudden, spectacular lightning battles as well as continual and fatal vigilance on the coasts, rivers, and seas.Union President Abraham Lincoln set the Union’s first naval goal when he declared a blockade of the Southern coasts. His plan was to cut off Southern trade with the outside world and prevent sale of the Confederacy’s major crop, cotton.
The Southern states had few resources compared to the North: a handful of shipyards, a small merchant marine, and no navy at all. Yet the Confederates needed a navy to break the Union blockade and to defend the port cities.
August 10 Gerry Olsen “Western Ventura County Grades”
Even a decade ago, if you owned a late model car and resided in the western half of Ventura County, you might have felt the urge to gun the engine, hold your breath, and pray that your vehicle would make it up the whopping seven percent Conejo Grade.
Further north, you may have also found yourself journeying up and down the so- called Norwegian Grade. What you may not have realized about what is now a gradually ascending and descending road is that between 1900 and 1911, Norwegian pioneers and their workers carved the two-mile stretch of what is now Moorpark Road out of a steep hillside—totally by hand. These pioneers used nothing more than their own picks, shovels, and ordinary farm equipment to provide a safer route for transporting hay, wheat and barley to the western end of Ventura County—especially to the farmers on the Oxnard Plain and the ships tied up to the Hueneme Wharf. Gerry Olsen has published a biography about his Norwegian immigrant grandparents, Nils and Ellen Olsen, who settled in the Conejo Valley during the late 1880s. He is a former public information office for the Ventura Community College District, a member of the Camarillo Ranch Foundation, and retired newspaperman. He is also the author of Don Adolfo Camarillo: A Living Legend, which was released just in time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Don Adolfo Camarillo’s birth.
August 17 Dr. Rainer Buschmann “The End of World War I”
Dr. Buschman’s talk will provide an overview of the last few months of the First World War as well as its global consequences. Most of us learned that on November 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. If you have always wanted to discover more about the War to End all Wars, Dr. Rainer F. Buschmann is your man. Not only do his students rave about his ability to make history come alive, but Dr. Buschmann team-teaches a WWI history course at California State University, Channel Islands. Dr. Buschmann is professor and founding faculty member in the history program at the California State University Channel Islands. He formerly taught at both Hawaii Pacific University and Purdue University. Buschmann’s research and teaching explores the oceanic dimensions of European expansion and has resulted in five books: Oceans in World History (2007), Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935 (2009), Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899 (2014), (with Ed Slack and Jim Tueller) Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521-1898 (2014), and (with Lance Nolde) The World’s Oceans: Geography History, and Environment (2018). He also edits the world history section of the History Compass and is co-editor of a new book series entitled Nebraska Studies in Pacific World.
August 24 Diane Mautner and Connie Kornstein “Brandeis Sisters on NYC Radio WCOR”
On June 5, 1916, Susan Brandeis Gilbert (February 27, 1893- October 8, 1975) was a University of Chicago Law School student as she and her sister Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush (April 25, 1896- April 30, 1984 watched their father, Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856–1941)—a Harvard Law School graduate, millionaire, socially conscious Boston lawyer and philanthropist (Hadassah, Zionism, and the University of Kentucky)—take the oath of office as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Elizabeth would later teach economics for 42 years at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
In their presentation, “The Brandeis Sister on New York Radio Station WCOR,” the audience will be asked to imagine Connie Korenstein as Susan Brandeis and Diane Mautner as Elizabeth Brandeis in a radio studio conversation about their father, Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The year is 1948, which marked the opening of Brandeis University and the establishment of the state of Israel. Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, served on the Court from 1916 to 1938. Many of the national and international issues facing Brandeis and the court remain major issues today. The presentation will include power point pictures and music courtesy of Raymond Mautner, pianist. Diane Mautner is credited with writing the script.Connie and Diane have collaborated on several other living history programs including “Music of the Gilded Age to the Broadway Stage” and “A Conversation with Lucy Levi and Minnie Cohn” and “An Interview with Sarah Josepha Hale, The Godmother of Thanksgiving.”
The current featured exhibit at the Museum is the recently donated WORLD WAR II AIRCRAFT COLLECTION of Thomas Roy Chatham which includes US Lockheed P-38 Lightning Heavy Fighter, US North American B-25 Mitchell Med. Bomber, US Republic P-47 Thunderbolt Fighter, US North American P-51 Mustang Fighter, US Douglas C-47 Skytrain Transport, US Martin B-26 Marauder Med. Bomber, German Heinkel He 50 Dive Bomber, North American T-6 Texan Trainer, German Junkers Ju 52 Transport, German Junkers Ju88 Transport, Japanese Nakajima Ki-84 Hayate Fighter, Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero, UK de Haviland Mosquito Night Fighter, US Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Heavy Bomber, US Boeing B-29 Superfortress Heavy Bomber, US Vought F4U Corsair Fighter, US Consolidated Aircraft PBY Catalina Seaplane, UK Short Stirling Heavy Bomber, UK Fairey Aviation Swordfish Biplane Torpedo Bomber, UK Submarine Spitfire Fighter, US Curtiss P-40 Warhawk Fighter, US Sherman Tank, German Tiger I Tank, and German Tiger II Tank. The star of the show is the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets, who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima Japan on August 6, 1945. The model is autographed by the navigator, Theodore Van Kirk.
If you did not receive a copy of our quarterly newsletter (Summer 2019) of The Historic Hueneme Herald, please email and ask to be put on the mailing list. The Fall issue will come out in September. Other Museum sponsored events include the monthly Historic Port Tour on the third Friday of each month.
Also offered on a quarterly basis (Next is July 20, 2019), the Museum and Port provide transportation to the Lighthouse for visitors who cannot make the approximately one-mile round trip walk to Lighthouse. In addition, the Museum and the Friends of the Bard offer tours of the Berylwood Mansion in conjunction with the quarterly dinners of the Friends of the Bard. https://www.bardmansion.org/Current-Newsletter.html
Port Hueneme Historical Society Museum
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