My father would have been 100 years old today. He was 35 when I was born and 51 when he died in a helicopter crash off Carpinteria on Nov. 7, 1966. I miss him still today.

He was born just three years after the RMS Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg. Europe was engaged in a war so horrific we can hardly imagine the horror of those trenches where millions of men died.

My grandmother was a teacher on an Indian reservation in South Dakota and provided a home and life for my father that way. He never knew his father but was raised by a man of the Lakota Nation and given strong values of work, family and love.

Learning to ride a horse and to be nearly self-sufficient at an early age was a great education during the Great Depression. Graduating from high school in Pierce, Neb., he soon went to serve in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) as a cook. Two years later he joined the Navy. It was 1936.

He told me of reading about the crash of the German airship Hindenburg and the capitulation of British Prime Minister Chamberlain to Hitler. He said at that point, he knew there was going to be a war.

He was serving in the Pacific Fleet on the USS Pennsylvania (BB38) when the fleet moved to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Alton Manzer, Darryl’s father.

No, he wasn’t in the Navy on Dec. 7, 1941. He had been discharged the year before and became a police officer in Long Beach where my oldest sister was born. He wanted to join, but they wouldn’t take him because he was a policeman and had a child. Three years later, my other sister was born. He never did get back to the Navy.

When the Korean War started, I was a newborn baby. We lived in Gorman. He was a deputy sheriff with the LASD.

During his lifetime, he knew of Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. I’ve lived under more presidents. I often wonder what he would have thought about modern politics. I have a feeling he would very much dislike our current political situation.

Alton Manzer at the monument for the historic oil well in Pico Canyon.

In late 1966, he knew my mother was going to die from the cancer she had contracted years before. He moved us from the Pico Cottage to Carpinteria. He gave my mother a modern home with all the appliances of a modern place. He went too far in debt for that, but he did it – for my mother.

He had never flown in an aircraft before we moved from the SCV. He had to fly in a helicopter to the offshore oil platforms. On a trip back from them one morning, the aircraft crashed.

My mother died 9 months later after she and I had moved back to the SCV. She lies next to him in Eternal Valley, not far from the Frew family.

He witnessed so much in his 51 years. I like to think he has seen the last 49, too. I wish I had asked him what he thought of how our valley has changed. He would have said it was a wonderful thing. He liked progress.

One hundred years ago he was born. One century passed. I miss you, dad. You are not forgotten. Happy birthday.

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, where he serves as executive director of the SCV Historical Society. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com. His older commentaries are archived atDManzer.com; his newer commentaries can be accessed [here]. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].