Here is the transcript of the 18th State of the County speech by Mick Gleason. He will be chairman of the Kern County Board of Supervisors for 2016.
January 27, 2016

Good evening. My grandfather, Pop Gleason, emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1908. He arrived at Ellis Island and while at the registration desk, he misspelled his name. His name was Benedict Gleeson, G-L-E-E-S-O-N, but he spelled it G-L-E-A-S-O-N. He never explained why…. Over the years, the Gleason family has developed two theories about that.

Half of the family thinks that he misspelled his name because he was uneducated, nervous, or just distracted while signing in. The other half believes he deliberately misspelled his name because he was shedding his Irish heritage and fully immersing himself in the American Dream. He was turning a brand new page and wanted to be a full-fledged American. Nice story – but I know the truth.

My grandfather Pop Gleeson misspelled his name at Ellis Island because he was running from the cops! The County Tipperary Police were chasing him for some beef! He was on the lam!! Damn fugitive!! But nobody really knows…..

Anyway, Pop met a beautiful Irish lass; her name was Margaret Skelley. She was from Yonkers, he was driving a cab in Brooklyn. They got married and like all good Irish Catholics, they began procreating immediately!

They had seven sons and each of those boys grabbed hold of the American Dream with both hands. I had an uncle who was in a landing craft at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Another uncle was a Lieutenant in the US Navy aboard a destroyer in the Pacific. My dad was a member of an invasion force steaming toward Japan when Mr. Truman decided to change the course of the war – and history – forever.

Each of those seven boys married and in turn savored the hope, the freedom, and the unlimited possibilities of being an American. And once again doing their duty as good Irish Catholics, they had about fifty offspring, of which I am one. Many of us became doctors, lawyers, business people, or went into other professions, but out of all those Gleasons, I think I am the only one who has ever aspired to enter the world of politics!
I often wonder what Pop Gleason would be thinking if he were alive today. So all I can say is, I’M SORRY POP, but at least it’s better than being a lawyer.

I am truly proud to represent the First District of Kern County. Because Kern County’s story is America’s story. Like my grandfather in Brooklyn, people came from all over the world to make a new life in a place where opportunity has no limit.

Each of us has a story to share. In 2016, Kern County is celebrating its 150th year, and we have a wonderfully rich and colorful history. Kern County is no stranger to excellence and achievement, often great achievement. By honoring our past and taking time to understand it, we gain a better sense of who we are and how we can shape our future.
Exploring our past is much more than analyzing commodity prices, or understanding the El Niño weather patterns that shape agriculture, or the geology of our oilfields, or the role Kern has played in defending our national security.

Kern County is built on the courage and resolve of the men and women who had the guts to make a stand here. The people who migrated hereand broke the ground with pick and shovel, or built a family business from nothing, or bet everything on a wildcat well or broke the sound barrier or worked dawn to dusk in the fields so their children would have a better life. We are truly a blessed people with a great story, and we need to celebrate our blessings.

An important part of our history was made by our sponsor tonight, Rio Tinto Minerals. Rio Tinto operates the largest borax mine in the world, which began in 1913 in Boron and is still operating today. The company’s 20 Mule Team brand has been famous for over a century, and it holds a permanent place in the legacy of the American West that Kern County shares with the world. Please join me in thanking Rio Tinto for five straight years of State of the County sponsorship.

In 1866, the State Legislature created Kern County from parts of Tulare, Los Angeles, and San Bernardino counties. The very first Board of Supervisors had only three members — and Supervisor Maggard tells me he liked it better back then.

Today, your Board of Supervisors is united in our desire to do our part to make Kern County a wonderful place to live and work. I’d like to introduce them. From the Second District, my friend and fellow East Kern resident Zack Scrivner. Representing the Third District, our senior counselor on the Board, Mike Maggard. From the Fourth District, a man who did an outstanding job leading the Board as chairman last year, David Couch.
And representing the Fifth District, a person who has carried the County’sfight to Sacramento and elsewhere, Leticia Perez.

There is one more person I’d like to introduce, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who has a message for us tonight. (Play McCarthy video greeting)

The same pioneering spirit that gave birth to Kern County has kept us moving forward throughout our 150 years. Tonight, we are going to explore that path, and we want to start the journey with some images that portray a small piece of where we’ve been and what we’ve done as a County. (VIDEO: By the Numbers: 150 Years of Kern County)

As you can see, ours is a colorful history of dreamers, doers, movers and shakers. I would like to share a little with you about some of the people who blazed the trails, sacrificed, worked hard, and laid the groundwork that made Kern County what it is today.
The earliest humans were the Coso people, who left their petroglyphs and pictographs throughout the desert in eastern Kern up to 16,000 years ago, where we still celebrate their history each November with our Petroglyph Festival in Ridgecrest. In all, there were an estimated 20,000 Native Americans of many different tribes living throughout Kern County when the Spanish came.

Kern’s early visitors included Father Garces, General Fremont, and Kit Carson, who found the Tehachapi and Tejon passes that made Kern a natural crossroads even then.
Kern’s gold rush started when Richard Keyes found a rich vein in 1853 in the Kern River Valley. The mining camp of Hogeye sprang up and then became Keyesville. The town of Rogersville, near the now famous Big Blue Mine, started after a miner named Lovely Rogers picked up a rock to throw at his stray mule and saw that it held gold.

Rogersville was soon cleaned out by the local temperance league, so the miners moved to Whiskey Flat, where a saloon keeper had laid a plank across a couple of whiskey barrels to serve the miners. The town eventually gained respecta

bility and a new name, Kernville, where we celebrate Whiskey Flat Days every February.
An 1864 gold strike at Clear Creek led to the founding of a rip-roaring boomtown named after a place in the Bible: Havilah, or “place of gold”.

Havilah had nearly 20 mines, nine stamp mills, 13 saloons, plenty of gambling houses and dance halls, stores, and eventually, four churches, the first public school in Kern County, and a parochial school. A stage coach ran daily from Whiskey Flat through Havilah to Caliente, and guess what: it was robbed about as often as it ran. Havilah became the seat of our brand new county.

The same year gold was discovered up on the Kern River, things started happening down here in the Valley. Edward F. Beale was appointed as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and he formed the Sebastian Indian Reservation, the first in California, on what is now Tejon Ranch. Beale later formed the giant ranch that we know today, but he had quite a career before that.

Beale was born in Washington, D.C, the son of a Navy paymaster who had earned a Medal of Honor in the War of 1812. After sailing all over the world as a naval midshipman, Beale arrived in California just in time for the Mexican-American War. He was detailed to the cavalry and became a hero by escaping through enemy lines with Kit Carson to bring reinforcements from San Diego to a surrounded U.S. Army force. So Beale was the first Navy brat to live in Kern County.

Before he founded Tejon Ranch, Beale was commissioned to build a thousand-mile wagon road from Fort Defiance, New Mexico to the Colorado River, and the Army procured camels for the surveying trips. The Camel Corps ended almost before it began, but Beale’s Wagon Road became a famous shortcut for immigrants to California, and later became part of historic Route 66.

It took a flood – and a man with a plan – to get Bakersfield started. Col. Thomas Baker looked at our swamp and sagebrush and saw a great place for a city. After the Great Western Flood of 1862 – by all reports a Godzilla El Niño that destroyed a quarter of all the taxable real estate in California – Col. Baker acquired the rights to drain the Kern Delta. He planted his famous alfalfa field about where Rabobank Arena is now and set crews to work building levees and bringing some order to the Kern River.

Baker gave most of the land he reclaimed to people who settled in his new Eden, then built a toll road from Bakersfield to the boomtown of Havilah. By the time he died in 1872, his colony of Bakersfield was only two years from becoming the County seat.

Baker and Beale typify the kind of people that built Kern County: people with big dreams, and more importantly, the ability and perseverance to make them happen. This has been especially true for Kern’s major source of wealth: the oil industry. There are many great tales from the oil patch – the Kern River discovery in 1899 that started the boom, the legendary Midway-Sunset field in Taft, and the Lakeview Gusher in 1910 that blew for 18 straight months.

One of the best oil stories is about Clarence Berry, the man who started what would become one of the largest independent oil companies in the nation right here in Kern County. He was the son of a struggling farmer in Fresno, and he knew he wasn’t cut out for that life. So in 1896, newlyweds Clarence and Ethel Berry and his brother Fred caught a steamer from Seattle to Skagway, Alaska, then went even further north by foot and dog sled to the gold mining town of Fortymile. But the place was already so picked over that Berry didn’t find any gold and had to work as a bartender. He was almost broke when word came of a new strike upriver.

Berry knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so he borrowed money from his boss, and in a few hours they were on their way to the Yukon. The Berry’s staked their claim just ahead of the stampede that sent 100,000 miners to the Klondike goldfields.
After making millions on this and other claims in Alaska, Clarence Berry rolled it all into the Midway-Sunset Field in Kern County. He and Ethel formed the Ethel D. Company, the first of several enterprises that would form Berry Petroleum. So at about the same time Clarence Berry was digging lucrative holes in the ground out here, my grandfather was misspelling his name in New York!

Over more than a century, Clarence Berry’s company weathered many oil busts, but it came through stronger each time by keeping costs down, hanging onto its most valuable properties, and building cash reserves. Three years ago, Berry Petroleum sold for more than $4 billion.

The story of oil in Kern County is still being written, and I assure you it is far from finished. Oil and gas remain one of America’s most strategic assets, and Kern County will continue to lead the way in providing them to the nation. When visitors first saw Kern County, the fertile soil that makes us one of the most productive farming counties in the nation lay beneath a largely barren landscape with a river running through it. It took vision to see the potential lying there, and constant innovation to realize that potential.

This capacity to invent and reinvent comes naturally to Kern County, where the creation of “baby” carrots has persuaded hundreds of millions of people across the planet to eat more of this vegetable than our parents everthought possible. Talk about innovation!
Kern also virtually invented demand for pistachios by growing them bigger and tastier than those red-dyed things from Iran that used to gather dust on store shelves.

Kern’s number one cash crop, table grapes, is largely an immigrant story. Joseph Di Giorgio came to Ellis Island from Sicily at the age of fourteen to sell his father’s lemon shipment, and he built a fruit empire that eventually stretched from Arvin to Florida. Another Sicilian, Joe Giumarra, had a pushcart in Toronto, then a wholesale market stall in L.A., and then started a family grape business that continues today.

Delano is home to many families who came to Kern County to grow grapes as they had done for generations in Croatia. The Caratans, Pandols, Zaninoviches, and many others came to the San Joaquin Valley with very little and they built thriving companies that employed tens of thousands of people while gaining a worldwide reputation for top quality fruit.

In 1965, the people who picked that fruit organized a grape strike and boycott that lasted five bitter years and gained a national spotlight. The United Farm Workers emerged with contracts from most of the big growers for better wages and improved working conditions.
Those years left wounds on both sides of the picket lines. But the farms have continued to prosper, and fifty years later, many of the sons and daughters of those farmworkers are now doctors, lawyers, teachers, and business people.

Likewise, the children and grandchildren of the Dust Bowl era stand on the shoulders of their parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice.

There is one more Kern County tale, the story of military aviation and national defense. We have racked up so many “firsts” in the history of aviation and aerospace that I can’t begin to list them all, but I do want to talk about a few of the people who’ve made history in Kern County.

The most famous is General Chuck Yeager. In 1947 he piloted Glamorous Glennis on an historic flight that broke the sound barrier. But before he was a test pilot, the West Virginian shot down a dozen enemy planes over Europe in World War II from the cockpit of a P-51 Mustang – including five Messerschmitts in a single day. And this was after he was shot down over France and escaped to England.

We even have our own Wright Brothers, Burt and Dick Rutan. Burt is a brilliant aviation and aerospace engineer, and Dick is the daredevil who flew many of his brother’s inventions. Dick Rutan and Jana Yeager flew the Voyager aircraft around the world on a single tank of fuel, and Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One launched from Mojave Air and Space Port to complete the world’s first privately funded space flight.

Finally, as a Navy man, I have to tell you about a few of the amazing people—military and civilian—who helped to make China Lake the nation’s premier weapons lab and testing ground.

The U.S. Navy does not believe in fair fights….we believe in killing the enemy and winning each encounter. From its early rocketry and free-fall weapons to covert devices, strategic missiles, and even submarines, China Lake has invented more concepts, components, and systems to help our fighters than anyone can ever list.
Every aviation weapon that has ever been used by the Navy in conflict since World War II has been rigorously tested in China Lake.

During the Korean War, our forces had no weapons that could stop the enemy’s large Russian tanks. In just 30 days, the ingenious team of experts at China Lake designed and built on the base 500 antitank rockets that stopped the Soviet tanks in their tracks. China Lake has repeated that performance many times in many ways and places that are still classified.

One of the founders of the Naval Ordnance Test Station – NOTS – was Dr. Charles Lauritsen, who shaped the unique military-civilian team that made China Lake work. He was a Nobel Laureate and Cal Tech professor who helped lead the World War II rocket program and the Manhattan Project, and he hired some of the finest scientists and technicians in the world to work at China Lake.

Rear Admiral William “Deak” Parsons was the top Navy member of the Manhattan Project team, who actually armed the Hiroshima nuclear device in-flight. Admiral Parsons made sure that military and academic people worked together at NOTS, and he evolved “the China Lake Way” of cooperating for success.

Dr. Bill McLean, China Lake’s longest-serving Technical Director, was “the father of the Sidewinder missile.” The Sidewinder is not only the first, but easily the most effective, air-to-air guided missile ever invented. It’s had many, many changes since the early ’50s, when the Navy bragged that it cost less than a new Volkswagen.

My good friend Scott O’Neill, who just recently retired as Executive Director at China Lake – a USC guy, but we won’t hold it against him – helped introduce the Spike missile, the smallest tactical guided missile in the world.

Since our enemies now embed themselves with civilians and make direct assaults more costly to innocent lives, scaled and precise weaponry like the Spike missile is critical.
During the conflicts in the Middle East over the past decades, O’Neil helped evolve a 24/7 response team that has repeatedly found almost immediate solutions to combat the IEDs and other irregular warfare weapons and tactics that were deployed against our soldiers.
China Lake remains an ongoing experiment, and I am so proud to have been part of it. From the very start, it succeeded because of a fiercelyindependent culture that embraced innovation, initiative, and risk — the same traits that have propelled all of Kern County for so many decades.

The weapons and aircraft developed in Kern County help our warriors to win the battles that America fights, but the deciding factor in any conflict is the human spirit. Earlier I mentioned the courage of Kern County’s people, and first on that list are the men and women who have served our nation in battle.

Could I please ask all the Kern County veterans honoring us here tonight to stand and accept our humble acknowledgement. We applaud your courage, your honor, and your love of country, values to which we can all aspire. Thank you.

My wife Robynn and I are so fortunate that we came to Kern County and stayed here. Kern County has become our home. Your Kern County Board of Supervisors is all in. Each of us is totally dedicated to making our County a place we can be proud of.

I am humbled by the legacy that has been entrusted to us and proud to have the chance to build on that legacy. I know we face many hurdles in the year ahead, but so did the people we’ve heard about tonight. Like them, with courage, sacrifice, and a lot of hard work, we will come out stronger on the other side.

We are not defined by the price of a barrel of oil, or how much rain falls from the sky, but rather by the character of the people who live here. We have achieved great things in the past, and we are going to do amazing things in the future. As long as we continue to embrace the pioneering spirit of those who made Kern County’s first 150 years so successful, I am certain that our next 150 will shine even brighter.

Earlier I spoke of my grandfather – who, I should make clear, was not a fugitive from the law. He was a simple man, a wise man, and mostimportantly, an honorable man. I know exactly what my grandfather would tell us if he were here today, and that is this:
Kern County, be proud of who you are, but not boastful. Be bold in your dreams and your decisions, but not rash. And whatever you do, be fearless in your resolve.
Good night, God bless you, and God bless America.

This is part of the January 29, 2016 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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