My Story

By Roger H. Guichard Jr.

My Story tells the tale of one man's coming to adulthood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because of his international focus, the Author had said little about a subject that might interest a reader familiar with his existing body of work, that is, himself. So, he has turned a penetrating gaze from his customary subjects--people and places in the Middle East and South Asia--to a subject that provides context for his earlier books.

From family histories of eighteenth-century Cevio in the Swiss Alps and Marseille in Provence; from childhood, youth, adolescence, and early adulthood in the United States; to the Navy and the Vietnam War; from "First Footsteps in the Middle East" to "Timeline," "Red America," and "Iran Odyssey," these chapters play out against the backdrop of the family history now provided. As such, this work represents the capstone to a full career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666770414

Roger H. Guichard Jr.

Roger H. Guichard Jr. is a management consultant who has lived and worked for most of the last thirty years in the Arab and Muslim worlds. He is the author of Niebuhr in Egypt (2013).

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Preface

Several months ago, a colleague observed that I had written extensively about other people and other places but very little about myself. He thought that this background might be of interest to a reader familiar with my existing body of work, perhaps providing context lacking in some of the earlier books. I ran the proposal by my editor at Wipf and Stock, and he replied positively. The response came as a bit of a surprise, given my belief that I had shot my bolt with Middle East Tapestry. So, I began looking at the books again with a view to discovering what, if anything, of value I could add to the already published works.

Several hurdles presented themselves at the outset. The most difficult has been the maintenance of a consistent authorial voice dealing with material that, in some cases, is decades old. In other cases, it is relatively new, having been written largely from scratch over the past few months. The first three chapters—The Guichards, The Dolcinis, and The Early Years—represent general family background and are probably the closest thing in the book to conventional biography. The next five—The Frenchmen on the Hill, The Navy, The Decade of My Discontent, First Footsteps in the Middle East, and Graduate School—are in rough chronological order, although each is devoted to a particular issue or phase in my life. Finally, the last three chapters—Red America, Timeline, and Iran Odyssey—represent a kind of commentary on the issues raised above.

A review of this existing material has convinced me that radical surgery is not called for. Rather, I will continue with my by-now-familiar extended anecdote but updated to reflect the changed times and ensure that material is not repeated. The definition of anecdote, a short, amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person, captures my approach to descriptive writing, particularly to biography. It is an instinct rather than a learned discipline. But the anecdote remains a kind of default setting throughout the book. It is in that spirit that I write about myself and my extended family, with accent on amusing. It is not intended to be sarcastic, and I apologize at the outset for portraying anything in any way other than fondly.

However, an issue has crept into the discussion that I didn’t anticipate. Perhaps innocently, I suggested in The Early Years that the story of an individual is inevitably the story of family, and that is certainly true of me. I say innocently only because I didn’t realize at the time I wrote the first draft that aspects of my story might have unpleasant ramifications for some. The relatively anodyne treatment of family in The Guichards and Red America reflects not an attempt to gloss over the issue but, rather, to place it in its rightful context. Still, it represents a kind of uncomfortable truth that America periodically visits on its children. The ethnic and religious mix of the city of New Orleans has always been varied, as reflected in baptismal records I found at the cathedral in New Orleans. It also gives scope to those who would make an issue of ethnicity. But I am getting ahead of myself. The rest of the story will be told in the accounts below.

It has also become clear that a rough timeline of my assignments might be useful to the reader and will lend context to what has gone before. So, I have provided one. It is included in a new chapter entitled Timeline, covering the thirty-plus years living and working overseas, mainly in the Arab world but also in West Africa and South Asia. I hope this brings greater clarity to the story I am telling. Finally, Iran Odyssey picks up the tale much later in 2017 and chronicles the surprised reaction of a veteran of the region to the extraordinary phenomenon of post-revolutionary Iran.

1

The Guichards

They were known as the DRs, after Dominique Rodolph, the progenitor. That distinguished them from the other male members of the family who reached adulthood: the Leopolds, after Joseph Leopold; the RFs, after Robert Felix; and the CPs, after Charles Placide. But they were all Guichards, and they all came from New Orleans. They had owned a good-sized plantation near the great bend of the Mississippi before the Civil War but had lost everything as a result of that conflict. Their father, another Leopold, did not believe in secession and sent his two oldest sons, Joseph Leopold and Robert Felix, to England during the war so that they wouldn’t be drafted. The other two, Dominique Rodolph and Charles Placide, were too young for the draft. His act demonstrated a streak of unconventionality that Leopold passed down to at least one of his sons.

The war was the disaster for the family that the father had foreseen, and at its conclusion they moved into the city and established themselves as small businessmen. In 1877 Dominique Rodolph married Louise Althee duMontier and settled down to life in New Orleans. His brother, Joseph Leopold, had previously married her older sister, Marie Therese duMontier. The duMontiers were well-to-do people from west Baton Rouge parish, and their family owned land on which the present capitol was built.

The Guichards were descendants of Martin Magloire Guichard who had left France in 1794 at the height of the terror. Magloire had gone first to Santo Domingo, where it was thought he owned property. But the slave revolt made it unsuitable as a refuge, in spite of the commitment of large numbers of French troops to the island. An appalling number died of tropical diseases. So, Magloire moved on to New Orleans in the Louisiana Territory, where he married well and became active in local politics. He was a member of the committee that drafted and later signed the constitution of Louisiana when it attained statehood in 1812. Afterwards he served as speaker of the House of Representatives. The years leading up to the Civil War were fat years for the family. The family was prominent in society, and a pair of carafes dating from a visit by the Emperor Napoleon II in 1830 were still kept in the late 1980s by a descendant of one of the brothers They have since disappeared, at least from our view.

Leopold Guichard

Magloire eventually returned to Marseille where he died in 1836. When his will was probated in 1837, the first provision was the manumission of one Victoire and her four children, Virginie, Uranie, Jules, and Leopold, the same Leopold we saw above as the father of Joseph Leopold, Robert Felix, Dominique Rudolph, and Charles Placide. They had all been touched, in one way or another, by the institution of slavery, and even the relatively latitudinarian atmosphere of French New Orleans didn’t alter the fact. After Constance duMorant died in 1810, Magloire paid a thousand dollars for Victoire, a mulatto fancy known for their charms. The two were never married, but Magloire always made provision for her and her four children and she was known informally as his wife. She died intestate in 1877. This mulatto fancy was my great-great-great-grandmother, and analysis of the genotypes of many in my generation shows a consistent finding of about 2 percent African origin among those tested.

Much is made in the informal family history of the respiratory difficulties that made plausible the search of the four sons for a more salubrious climate than that afforded by New Orleans. But surely there was another, more compelling reason. When Dominique Rodolph boarded the train for Arizona in 1894, the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890 was being tested in the courts. This included the separate but equal doctrine that was a major building block of redemption that followed the failure of Reconstruction in the former slave states. Otherwise known as Plessy v. Ferguson, it enshrined the provisions of the act when it was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1896. This attempt to turn back the clock to a state of formal inequality was not welcome to many, and eventually all four of Leopold’s sons would leave New Orleans and move west. The ultimate destination of this first trip may have been Arizona. But DR had a friend in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, and he pushed on to the coast. There, he found the friend in the little mountain town that would later become Ben Lomond. The redwoods in the area had been logged in the 1870s, and the hillsides were still relatively barren. But land was land, and DR decided on the spot to buy. He bought forty acres and sent for the rest of his family. It is interesting that this transaction (and others) would be made in the name of Louise Althee, a reflection of the relative privileged position female mulattos enjoyed in comparison with their brothers in chattel.

They were a considerable brood. Louise Althee, despite her diminutive stature (she was less than five feet tall) had by this time borne him twelve children, eleven of whom were still living: Althee, Rodolph, Bertha, James, Henry, Stella, Etna, Pearl, Waldo, Mai, and Benjamin, who was born in New Orleans while DR was in California. A few months after the birth of Benjamin in January 1895, Louise Althee boarded the train with her eleven children, destined for California. The journey took about two weeks, and all the children caught the measles along the way. The baby Benjamin died of a brain inflammation in July 1895, shortly after the family’s arrival in Ben Lomond. Only one child, Odessa, remained to be born in 1898, and she was later admitted to the Native Daughters of the Golden West. Her parents considered naming her California in honor of their new home but thought better of it. Grandma McGrury, Mai’s tough, little, pipe-smoking mother-in-law always called her Modesto. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Dominique Rodolph Guichard

When the family arrived at their new home, Louise Althee and her oldest daughter sat down in the middle of the rough, dirt road that led to the makeshift cabin that DR had prepared for them and wept. They were not pioneers but city ladies, used to domestic help, and had never cooked, cleaned, or kept house before in their lives. But there were plenty of willing hands, and the family gradually adjusted to the new circumstances. Early photographs show what a different life it must have been. There were pictures of fruit trees and snapshots of one of the boys making bricks. The mountain was gradually filling out after the clear-cutting of the 1870s. But a redwood forest takes time to renew itself, especially when some of the trees had been thousands, not hundreds, of years old. The first things to come back were the ground cover, thick bushes like Scotch broom and blackberries, the latter eventually becoming a mixed blessing. They were tenacious, and while the berries were delicious, their growth could only be managed and it was impossible to eradicate them completely. Then, the shallow-rooted oaks and madrones reappeared and grew to impressive size in a relatively short period of time.

In a normal forest the redwoods would also have made a comeback. They grew either from seeds or, more frequently, from the root structures of the trees that had been cut. As they grew they would compete for space with the oaks and madrones, and eventually, they would win. The trees in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, about fifteen miles from the ranch (as the property would later be called) were an example, frozen in time, of what it must once have looked like. There, the monoliths, some over fifty feet in circumference and three hundred feet high, had monopolized the sunlight and killed all the shallow-rooted trees. They killed each other as well, and from a cluster of three or four trees that had sprouted from the same root structure, only the largest and hardiest had survived. The floor between them was carpeted with ferns, Western Sword ferns, tree ferns, and delicate horsetail ferns that made it look like something in a National Geographic special on dinosaurs. It was all prehistoric and deadly, nature red in tooth and claw.

But on the ranch, it was not a normal forest, and the family had interrupted the process of renewal. They planted corn and beans in clearings on the hillside. They had brought chestnuts and Louisiana cherries from New Orleans, and both thrived. The chestnuts provided stuffing for generations of Thanksgiving turkeys and painful spines in the hands of several generations of kids. The cherries were tenacious like blackberries, and they spread, helped by the wild pigeons that gorged on them when the fruit was in season. But the berries were tiny and not much good to eat. In later years Aunt Odessa made a cherry liqueur from them, but it was not much good to drink.

The family’s real innovation was the fruit trees. They grew apples for export and supported themselves on the trade. The acreage was not great, but the fruit thrived and fetched a good price. There were Yellow Delicious and Red Delicious, Jonathans, Pippins, Alexanders, and Bellflowers. The last were a huge, sweet, green-yellow fruit and the best apple I ever tasted. I have never seen them anywhere else. They also planted a vineyard, but the exposure was wrong and it withered. They tried oranges and lemons, but citrus fruit never did well here. I think it was too cold. But other trees did, and an inventory of trees on the property included apricots, figs, pecans, pears, peaches, olives, walnuts, prunes, and quinces, in addition to the apples, cherries, and chestnuts.

They raised vegetables for the table and had the usual small collection of livestock: a cow for milk, occasionally a goat, a horse called Bill to pull the plow, and chickens and rabbits for the table. Sunday dinner in my memory was either rabbit or chicken, killed that morning by Uncle Waldo. As little kids, we watched, fascinated, as he hit the rabbits on the head with a hammer, cut their throats, then efficiently skinned and dismembered them. He didn’t like to do it, he told us, but someone had to. If the kids were there and needed something to do, we would shoot the chickens with a twenty-two. Fried, the two meats were very similar. Vegetables and fruit grown on the ranch were also transported for sale to Uncle Robert’s business in Oakland. We have several letters from Grandpère, as DR was later known to us, discussing prices for produce grown on the property.

The eleven children grew up in different ways. The oldest were almost adults when they arrived in California and maintained their New Orleans manners. And pretensions. Uncle Rodolph—or Uncle Roo, as we knew him—never forgot that he was a man of the land, and not these miserable forty acres on a hillside in California, but real land, plantations. He twice used proceeds from his successful foundry business to purchase land in the San Juaquin Valley and set himself up as a gentleman farmer. Neither venture was successful, and each time he went back to the foundry where he was one of the best in the business. He was an interesting-looking man with a dimple in his chin. In later years he went bald. Now, the Guichards were never bald, and the women in particular had magnificent heads of hair. Unfortunately, some of the women had little moustaches and chin whiskers as well. Rodolph was a man of strong opinions. I have heard them called notions, and my father’s generation speak of listening at a safe distance as Uncle Roo and his father had discussions until the veins in their necks stood out. He married a schoolteacher, and they had one daughter, Marjorie Dawn. The marriage didn’t last. I vaguely recall him in the care of a maiden sister in his house in Santa Cruz. The years had probably quenched some of the fire, because I remember him as a genial old man.

There were other families on the mountain who had come to California about the same time as the Guichards, including the Nerneys, who arrived from New York City. Between them and the Guichards alone there were enough children to populate a school. So, DR built one, a one-room schoolhouse that was eventually declared a historical monument by the Native Daughters of the Golden West. Although other structures in the area survived, the Little Red Schoolhouse burned to the ground in the fires of 2020. DR’s oldest daughter, Althee, was one of the teachers. It is a remarkable fact that in this family in the early part of the twentieth century, it was the girls who were educated. Four of the seven daughters, Althee, Pearl, Mai, and Odessa attended the State Normal School at San Jose (to become State Teachers College in 1921, then San Jose State University), where they earned teaching credentials. The boys learned a trade. Aunt Althee married a Scot by the name of Alex McGurrah, but they had no issue.

I don’t remember her except by name. She owned property across the road, which she deeded to the family. We always called it Aunt Althee’s park. It was a pretty little half-acre where the redwoods were making a comeback. But it really wasn’t a park. When outsiders heard of the ranch, they might have imagined herds of cattle sweeping majestically across the plain. It wasn’t like that. Another name we used was Le Berceau, or the cradle. This was how Grandpère thought of the ranch: a place of repose and renewal for members of the family. The French influence remained strong, and Louise Althee, or Grandmère, was never comfortable in English. Her children always wrote to her in French.

Grandpère and Grandmère, Papa and Mama to their children, were strong influences in all of their lives. My favorite photograph of the two shows them on the porch of the ranch house when they must have been in their sixties. She was short and stout with an oval face that recalled pictures of Queen Victoria. There was Spanish blood in the duMontier family, and she passed it on to some of her children. He, on the other hand, was relatively tall and spare with an enormous moustache and a cigarette—the thin, little things they used to roll themselves—looking like a joint hanging from the corner of his mouth. He was known as the Little Voltaire. My father says he was a man of strong opinions but not a bigot, and many of his offspring absorbed the opinions without the education to temper them. However that may be, he was the subject of many stories in the family, some of them probably apocryphal: how he had disagreed with a committee in New Orleans and had to back out of the meeting while covering the refractory members with his Navy Colt. When the United States entered the First World War he announced to anyone who cared to listen that Waldo, his youngest son, would not be drafted: The government, he warned, will not take Waldo. To underline the point, he reportedly bought all the shotgun shells in the general store in Ben Lomond before retiring to his eyrie, his mountain fastness. Well, the government eventually came, and, of course, it took Waldo who served on the Western Front as a woodsman and translator. So far as we know, no blood was shed.

Grandpère was probably a greater trial to his family than to the federal government. He was known for his towering rages and periodically leaving the house in a spasm of dissatisfaction to live for a few weeks in a cabin in the forest. His children brought him meals, and he swept the floor with a gunnysack. Maybe that is where he got the name Jute, the natural fiber common to Bengal. The RFs always called him Uncle Jute. When Prohibition became the law of the land, he regularly sent Waldo to the Napa Valley where the family owned