Our family moved to Fontana, California in 1958. We came behind to join my grandfather John Brayer Sr. (1876-1969) already hunkered there. He moved into the valley region freeing himself from the past snow and cheese life of Marshfield Wisconsin. And this was where my father Ralph William Brayer (1921-1999) was subsistence-farm raised before his own WWII exodus into the Italian theater and purple-heartdom. In the 1950’s Fontana had a substantial population of Slovenians at the time, egg ranches, citrus orchard, and the Kaiser Steelmill was in full swing glory, later making our skies literally cough up iron. Slovenean polka music always swung hard at either the Slovene Hall, the KSKJ Hall, or at Mlakar’s Elbow Room on the main drag. It was also the nativity birthplace of the mythical real Hell’ s Angels motorcycle group, filling the taverns that embellished the mother road with smoke and threat, then later coming into prominence in print form by Hunter S. Thompson. My grandfather, upon migration from Yugoslavia, found himself in Calumet Michigan working as a copper miner, and there it was that himself, his wife, and two of their daughters were present in the tragic event which would lead to the Woody Guthrie ballad, The 1913 Massacre. It was amazingly a song which was already in my brother and I’s suburban hobo repertoire. When we finally learned or our grandparents involvement we were already barking it out on stage regularly at a coffee house plopped down in the barrio of Mt. Vernon St., San Bernardino, called The Penny University.
