Bonnie Gartshore had never seen anyone like them before. Raised in the moldering quarters of New Monterey in the ‘30s, Gartshore was mostly surrounded by the sort of “characters” John Steinbeck put in his stories. But one day, a colorful couple moved into a garage down the street and they posted up a sign outside that read “Dog Island.”
Decades later, the poet that was Bonnie Gartshore recalled the couple:
They were young and beautiful — and, to my child’s eyes, not like ‘real‘ people at all. Tall, strong and haloed with a kind of radiance, they walked down Filmore Street by our house. To two little girls playing with toy cars in the dust it was as if two gods had come down from Mount Olympus and were passing by.
“Look at them,” our mother would say admiringly, using them as an example of what we might become: healthy, confident, beautiful, free. The children making roads in the dirt had never heard of John Steinbeck or Ed Ricketts. But we knew the names of that magic couple who walked down our street: Bruce and Jean Ariss.
Bruce Ariss would become a local icon, a painter, muralist, editor and playwright. And, like the Ariss couple, Bonnie Gartshore was a Monterey original. She was one of the great local characters, a font of knowledge about the community and its storied history. More than that, she was a fierce activist who taught writing classes in prison and who advocated mightily on behalf of women in the Catholic Church.
And, as the example above shows, Gartshore was among the better writers the Monterey County Herald ever had.
I was lucky to work with Gartshore, back when The Herald was crawling with great old characters: Bullock, Weider, Parker, Leonard, Thornburg, Burke, Cross and Germain. They all had stories, that bunch. But Gartshore was the authority.
“She was a walking history book of the area,” said Mac McDonald, a former Herald employee who worked next to Gartshore for a time. “There really was no need to go to the library/morgue at the newsroom if you had any questions about Monterey ‘back in the day.’ They could have just put her desk in the library to field all the questions that came up in an average day at the Herald. She knew everyone and everything that happened back then. Her memory and callback of facts and trivia and history of the area was astounding.”
If there was anything she didn’t care for — and there weren’t many — it was the brash, loudmouth know-nothings who came strutting into the newsroom from somewhere else and who thought they knew what they were talking about. That was me. She wasn’t really a fan, and she rather quickly (and rightfully) put me in my place.
“She had her pet peeves, mostly about folks getting something wrong about Monterey history,” McDonald said.
She didn’t suffer fools, at least not gladly. She was no-nonsense, she was tough and she was down to earth.
She went off to see the rest of the world, for a time, but the Monterey Peninsula was her home.
Born in Monterey on Nov. 23, 1925, she lived through the heyday of the sardine industry, among those Steinbeck characters. “I wasn’t surprised by anything because I had seen it all growing up,” she once said. Along the way, she developed “a delight in reading and curiosity about people and places, and absorb(ed) the values of my mother, who was a mixture of middle-class morality and liberal political views.”
She attended the local Catholic school at San Carlos Cathedral, graduating in 1939, and went to Pacific Grove High, where she developed a knack for writing and where she was editor of the school newspaper. At San Jose State, she edited the Spartan Daily, and graduated with a journalism degree in 1947.
Naturally, she got scooped up by the Monterey Peninsula Herald, as it was called. As was the nature of newspapers at the time, Gartshore was relegated to the society section, the print-journalism ghetto assigned to the “girls” during the era. She wrote of a world of civic organizations, afternoon teas and garden soirees. She stayed at The Herald for 15 years, back when the newspaper published out of offices at Pearl and Washington streets.
She took off, quit The Herald, for an extended tour of England and Scotland. Returning to the states, she worked for the Paso Robles Daily Press, participated in research projects in Big Sur and was associate editor of The Observer, the weekly newspaper of the Monterey Diocese. She lost her job at The Observer, apparently because her activist voice kept seeping into its pages.
She also took odd jobs, including work on advertising brochures and doing publicity for the Monterey County Fair. Surprisingly, she even wrote the introduction to an aphrodisiac cookbook.
Gartshore made her her way back to The Herald, writing occasional stories for the newspaper’s Weekend Magazine. She didn’t have a beat, per se, and her work tended to be feature-ish; her duties straddled the line between news and advertorials. But she was best known around the newsroom for her passion for Monterey County history, writing a weekly history column called “Looking Back.”
More important, she was a valuable asset in the newsroom because she knew where the bodies were buried, who buried them and why. She didn’t mind telling you. In fact, she considered it an insult if you didn’t ask.
Back when community newspapers mattered, every local newsroom had their resident historian. The Herald had its Bonnie Gartshore. The Salinas Californian had Jim Albanese.
“If an editor asked you where you got certain info for a story and you said ‘Bonnie told me,’ they would go, ‘Oh, OK,’ and never question it,” McDonald said. “I don't think I ever saw that in any other newsroom I worked in.”
But Gartshore’s importance to the Monterey Peninsula extended beyond the newsroom. Sometime after returning to the Monterey Peninsula, she developed a writers’ workshop for inmates at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, driving down to the prison regularly and leading poetry sessions with hardened criminals.
The program became so popular that she was hired by Hartnell College to teach English and speech classes at the prison, a job she maintained for two decades. Even as a middle-aged woman who never married, Gartshore was loyal to the men she encountered in prison. When asked, she told others that teaching in prison was “something useful I could do.”
Alex Hulanicki, a former Herald reporter, recalls the day he tagged along with Gartshore to the Soledad prison. “When we arrived she was treated warmly by the staff, and more so by the inmates,” he said. “She gave them the freedom to express themselves, and she treated them with respect. That’s what we expect of all teachers. Respect.”
Fred Hernandez, another former Herald colleague, said Gartshore took great pride in her work at Soledad. And she didn’t fear for her safety, he said. “They wouldn’t hurt me,” she once said. “I offer them freedom, a freedom to express themselves. They accept me as a teacher, almost like one of them.”
Gartshore wrote her own poetry, publishing two of her collections, and her history columns were published in book form by the Monterey History and Art Association, a collection called “Footprints from the Past.”
Former Rep. Sam Farr recalled that “Bonnie’s devotion to religion … made her a lifelong activist for peace and justice.” She organized religious retreats and programs for Catholic women and wrote liturgies for priests that emphasized female participation in Catholic rites.
In a tribute he presented on the floor of Congress shortly before her death in 2001, Farr noted that Gartshore “picketed with the United Farm Workers before it became fashionable, marched with civil rights and peace groups, helped organize a Monterey memorial of the bombing of Hiroshima, interviewed the homeless and presented programs about humanity in Monterey, Pacfic Grove and Carmel.”
Gartshore heard Farr’s written tribute during a celebration of her life in June 2001. When it was learned she was suffering from an inoperable cancer, several colleagues at The Herald threw together a gathering for hundreds of friends and admirers in the Memory Garden at Custom House Plaza.
“We knew her days were numbered, even if there were no complaints from Bonnie,” Hernandez said. He and a couple other writers, poets and artists gathered at the old Thunderbird Bookshop in Carmel to plan a celebration of her life. They knew they didn’t have much time, and they wanted to do it before she died. Too many people aren’t alive to hear the nice things people say about them at their funerals, but Gartshore did.
Someone found an enormous wicker peacock chair, and they seated Gartshore on it under a large umbrella like she was the Queen of the Realm. She received well-wishers who formed a line that stretched around Memory Garden. The mayors of Monterey and Pacific Grove declared it “Bonnie Day.” The Monterey County Board of Supervisors earlier in the week issued a resolution declaring Gartshore a “historian in residence.”
It was a glorious day, a chance to pay tribute to what former Monterey Mayor Jerry Fry called “Miss Monterey Peninsula.”
Gartshore died less than two weeks later, on June 20, 2001.
In his Congressional tribute, Farr recalled that Gartshore was once introduced at a tribute dinner at Carmel Mission by someone who called her “a true peacemonger and an incorrigible advocate for the poor and the beleaguered.” When she spoke to those who gathered that night, Farr said, she referenced the statues of Benny Bufano, noting that he always turned the palms of his statues’ hands outward. They were, Gartshore said, “open to receive and also to let go.”
Photo of Bonnie Gartshore, ca. 1994, courtesy of Peri Basseri
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Sources:
Monterey Peninsula Herald
"A Tribute to Bonnie Gartshore," by Rep. Sam Farr to the House of Representatives, the Congressional Record, April 25, 2001.
"Footprints from the Past, Volume 1," a publication of the Monterey History and Art Association
"Taking my Cue from the Walrus," by Bonnie Gartshore, Small Poetry Press, 2000.
Fred Hernandez
Charles Davis
Mac McDonald
Alex Hulanicki
Note: Gartshore's signature and the footprint design from "Footprints from the Past."