BENICIA

BENICIA.
Today is Wednesday, July 8, 2009. Our “Outing” is to Benicia, a neighboring city about 20 miles to the South. We leave Quail Creek at 9:50. The weather is sunny, cloudless and hazy visibility. The temperature is around 70 degrees. Besides Tony, our chauffeur, and Kelli, our Activities Coordinator, there are seven residents along.
While it is a very nice day for golfing, I see only a few players on the Paradise Valley course. Gas at Shell is $2.96 - at Chevron - $3.06 and Arco is $2.88 a gallon. Crude oil is about $60 a bbl. today - down about 18% in the past week. We pass an auto hauler loaded with licensed cars. My first thought is that they were repossessed. Traffic is light on I-80, with more cars going eastbound than in our direction. Another grass fire on the right side. This one has burned a greater area than the previous ones that I have seen, including turning some trees brown. There are not many trucks sitting in the westbound truck scales. This is not a good economic sign.
We exit #80 onto Southbound #680. We whiz by the Cordelia Industrial Park. I haven’t been over this route since we went to Antioch for lunch at Humphrey’s. I can barely see the outline of Mt. Diablo through the front windshield - about 20 miles away. It is interesting to see the green trees sitting on the golden hillsides. They must have deep root systems, as we haven’t received any appreciable rain for three months now.
The Benicia City limit now extends beyond the Industrial Park. We are passing large golden storage tanks on both sides of the freeway. They used to be owned by Exxon, but now they are owned by Valero. We exit form 680 on to 780 and then turn off at East fifth Street in Benicia. This off-ramp is very familiar to me. I used to take it from 780 every Sunday when we drove to Benicia, from Vallejo, to attend mass at St. Dominic’s Church. We liked this small church better than our parish church in Vallejo. The church is more than 150 years old. It is much smaller and warm. It reminds me of the old Mission churches. We are passing new construction on East Fifth Street, which I hadn’t seen before. The last time I saw this area it contained an auto parts store, a restaurant and an empty lot from which they sold Christmas trees. The large building looks like ir will be apartments.
Benicia is an old city. It was founded by Robert Semple and Thomas Larkin and General Vallejo in 1847, on land purchased from General Vallejo. The city was named after the middle name of General Vallejo’s wife. It was the first city in California to be founded by Anglo-Americans.
Benicia is located on the north shore of the Carquinez Strait. It served as the state capitol (the third one) from 1853-1854. The 2000 census lists Benicia’s population as 26,865. The city was the Solano County seat until 1858, when it was moved to Fairfield.
The original campus of Mills College was founded in Benicia in 1852 (Young Ladies Seminary). It was the first women’s college west of the Rockies. The college moved to Oakland in 1871. I mention Mills, because my wife, Marie, attended Mills for a year - before and after our marriage in 1944.
Our first stop in Benicia was at the old Benicia Arsenal, located next to Suisun Bay. The 252 acres was acquired in 1847, and first occupied in 1849. For over 100 years, the Arsenal was the primary US Ordnance facility for the West Coast. The Arsenal was famous for stabling the Army’s one and only Camel Corps, between 1855 and 1863. The Benicia Arsenal was a staging area during the Civil War for Union troops from the West, and during the Spanish American War. The Arsenal is most famous for supplying munitions to Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25’s, for the first bombing raid on Tokyo, on April 18, 1942. Prior to 1940, the Arsenal had 85 civilian employees. By October, 1942, 4545 people were employed, about half of them women.. Because of the labor shortage during WWII, Italian and German prisoners of war and youth from the California Youth Authority were part of this work force. During the Korean War, the work force reached an all-time high of 6,700 workers.
The Benicia Arsenal was de-activated in1963, and the facility was closed in 1964. The space now is primarily used by artists and artisans.
We visited one of the sites - Benicia Artists. We checked out the paintings in their gallery. The prices ran from $300 to $14,000!
From the arenal, It was a scenic ride down First Street to
Captain Blyther’s restaurant. It was very picturesque - sitting on the shoreline. I could see the two Carquinez bridges to the west, Port Costa across the bay and Martinez, across the water, to the east. To the left of this view, were the two Benicia-Martinez bridges. After a nice lunch, we left the restaurant at 1:20.
We are back on Highway 680, heading home. Visibility is still hazy, but we get a good view of the Mothball Fleet. The original motive for mothballing these ships (some of them over 50 years ago), has long seen it’s day. Yet, they still police and maintain the “fleet” at a very high cost. My guess is, that there is no scrap market large enough to pay for the dismantling - a “Catch 22.”
As we leave 680 and merge into 80, I see much heavier traffic than when we were on our way to Benicia. After an uneventful trip back, we arrive back at Quail creek at 1:55. It was a very nice day. Tony gave me the mileage for our round trip - 66 miles.

RCL - 7/11/09.