Remembering Old Valley Days with Howard Sahm, Los Olivos Dairy Farmer

On a bright fall day more than 20 years ago, Howard Sahm and his wife, Ruth, welcomed my oral history students and me to their 19th-century house tucked away on a back street in Los Olivos. Mr. Sahm, who died in 2011 at the age of 85, had lived his entire life in this very house, built by his grandfather. “This was all our dairy property,” he said, encircling widely with a gesture of his arms. “It was run by my father and me until 1964.”

He had known Los Olivos in a very different era. He shared boyhood memories of playing marbles on the corner, making newspaper kites, and delivering papers on his bicycle for a penny a paper. “I’d go five and a half miles every day, out to the stores, by the schools, up Figueroa Mountain Road…,” he recalled. “It was gravel roads until the1930s, when they put down the blacktop. In later years, if we wanted to go to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, we’d ride our bikes into Solvang. There was a theater there where the Bit O’ Denmark is, and there was a bowling alley next door.

“Later, when I got to driving, after I became 16, there’d be a Saturday-night dance every week, old-time dances here at the grammar school or Santa Ynez, and then the regular dances down in the Veterans Hall in Solvang. We had live music, not albums. Our band instructor was Bob MacDonald, and the principal, Hal Hamm, he played the clarinet, and then there was Ivan and Ellen Sorenson — he played the fiddle and bass fiddle, and Ellen played the piano. For the dances up here, it was banjo, fiddle, piano … square dancing. We danced with everybody — two-step, foxtrot, polka. Girls asked boys, too. We liked ‘Melancholy Baby,’ ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart,’ … songs like that. Ruth and I used to dance, and we never missed a polka, but then I had the stroke a few years ago, and my right foot wouldn’t quite track. And now I wouldn’t have air enough to polka.”