Monday, 16 June 2014. Hope all of you had a great weekend. I got calls from my sons and their families in Virginia and Kentucky, so Sunday was a very good day.

Looks like this week, we may be once again submerged in the debate about billboards. I’m staying out of it until after the council meeting Tuesday. I hope tempers can be kept in check and a viable solution can come out of it all.

So far it looks like the city of Santa Clarita could spend a lot of money on a special election. Both sides have dug in for a little “trench warfare” over electronic billboards. Stalemate will ensue. Not sure we like that.

The old discussions of the Pico Canyon oil field have once again surfaced. Little did we know that a “medium” was used to find oil. What it looks like, per an 1869 news report, is just simple want of money. Is that so wrong? However they started the well drilling, it was started, and seven years later a little well became the commercial success everyone was looking for years earlier.

If you happen to visit Mentryville and walk up the canyon to the picnic grounds at Johnson Park, you’ll find the replica oil derrick with a real steam engine and some pumping equipment. No big deal to move that stuff with the trucks of today. Now think of the men and equipment needed to move those types of engines, and to hoist wheels up the canyon walls above the CSO No. 4 well.

Those early rigs had to be carried from the coast by wagon and teams. The railroad wasn’t completed until 1876. Later, equipment did get shipped in by train, but it still had to be transported five miles to Pico Canyon. (And Towsley , too.)

We might still be waiting on the first well if the rules and regulations of today existed back in 1876.

We have so many rules and regulations today, it makes it difficult for kids to play. We have a generation of kids who might never know the joy of peddling a bike with the wind blowing through their hair. I think our grandchildren are missing out on the rituals of summer, such as skinned knees, elbows and maybe toes. The toes got skinned when your feet slipped off the pedals and your flip-flops fell off.

While it is good we are more safety-conscious today, I am also concerned that kids don’t get to play in the dirt like previous generations. I think our bodies built up a lot of immunity from various germs and disease. Nowadays we have sanitizing lotions and sprays that keep us safe but, I believe, less resistant to the germs our body used to fight off in a minute or two.

When I think the fact that grandma died at age 94 of a whole list of ailments that 50 years previous would have been listed on the death certificate as “natural causes,” now we have to add a label to whatever ails us.

Hand sanitizers, sanitary wipes for kitchen and bath, and additional lists of items to keep things clean and well, sanitary.

Gosh, we had soap and water. Pine-sol. Boraxo. Scouring powder. Really bad cuts and scrapes got hydrogen peroxide. Minor ones had the obligatory tincture of Mercurochrome.

Did your mother ever take a tissue from her purse and wet it a little with her mouth to get the offending dirt from your face? You know, just before church was to start?

Here in the SCV, we had a level of clean that might not have met “city standards,” but we did have a way of teaching city folks about our country ways.

Once we took two or three steers to market in our 1960 Chevy pickup. We actually left when it was dark and got to the stockyards near La Puente at first light. After dropping off the steers, we went to have breakfast with my aunt and uncle.

Well, little kids on the way to school had never seen what comes out of the south end of a cow traveling north. In this case it came out of the cow and ran down the outside of the stock racks. Those kids had to touch the stuff. I have to admit, I was laughing pretty hard at the time. I was the only one who could see outside of the window. Those children were already on the bus before we got out to tell them to wash off using the hose.

No special wipes then. I’ll bet not one of those kids got sick from it. I still laugh a little, thinking of that incident, like I laugh when I recall the time I told a city kid where he could urinate. (He had asked.) Was it wrong for me to say, “Just go on that white electrical insulator there on the fence?”

I’ve never heard a scream like that again. The sound folks in the movies make, come close to the sound of that scream. I still have to admit I was laughing for days after that. Electric fences pack a pretty good shock, you know.

I still know that should I be in an accident, I will have on clean underwear. Yep, clean undies and most of the dirt out of my ears (didn’t want to grow carrots there) meant I was presentable.

I still hold that the term, “clean and sanitary,” might not mean the same for me as for the conditions in an operating room. I also hold that we are raising a generation that might not get dirty ever again.

Except between their ears.

Darryl Manzer grew up in the Pico Canyon oil town of Mentryville in the 1960s and attended Hart High School. After a career in the U.S. Navy he returned to live in the Santa Clarita Valley. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com and his commentaries, published on Tuesdays and Sundays, are archived at DManzer.com. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].