A truck heads down Main Street in Ione amidst cheering crowds during an Ione Homecoming Parade in the mid-1950s. Ione Homecoming was the most popular event in the city at the mid-century mark. Photo by: Courtesy to the Ledger Dispatch A 1956 Chevrolet sits parked mon Main Street Ione in front of two building fronts that were there when everyone drove cars like it. The Chevy is owned by John Strohm, a local who lived in the area during the 1950s. Photo by: Scott Thomas Anderson

Editor's note: This is the third in a five-part series highlighting Amador County cities in the 1950s.

It was raining as the boy dressed in a cadet's uniform hitchhiked down the road.

Just hours before, he'd escaped from the Preston School of Industry. Wandering along the brush, he suddenly heard a car pull up behind him. Two men from Ione - who'd been drinking the gray afternoon away on Main Street when they heard a "Preston boy" was on the make - stepped out to talk to him.

Moments later, the car was slowly cruising up the long driveway to Preston School of Industry with the boy tied to its hood like a 10-point buck. George Tonzi, who many say unofficially "ran" the school for decades, was irritated the boy had gotten loose. He was even more irritated when he spent the next hour arguing with the two local men on whether or not he owed them a $10 capturing fee for the deer-like trophy on their hood.

It's a story the "old-timers" in Ione remember vividly when you ask about life in the 1950s - one of hundreds that recall the busy and crazy times of a little city that was strangely unique.

Sitting on the western lowlands of the county, Ione was more of a "cowtown" than a boomtown in the 1800s. For generations, its sprawling ranches and farms thrived on the backbone of families who still live in the area today. By the 1950s the town had a wealth of employment from clay mines, brick and sand yards and the Preston School of Industry.

Ione was a close-knit community. The average resident could walk down the street naming every family member of every household, including the dogs. Occasionally, teenage boys could get beers secretly passed to them out the back of a bar - and then spend the evening drinking them along the creek side.

Louis Vimina owned a deli on Main Street in the 1950s. She said the city's distance from Jackson and Sutter Creek didn't hold its people back from having good times. "We made our own fun back then," she remembered. "Life was great in those days."

Someone who agrees is Vimina's friend John Strohm, who likes to drive around today in his polished, black 1956 Chevrolet. Now 86, Strohm grew up in Buena Vista and went to Ione High School. "Sutter Creek and Jackson had this crazy rivalry," he said, laughing. "But there were some years when we were able to beat both of them in football."

He added, "It was fun to hang around Ione back then. There were some great bars and most people were friends with each other. Of course, we had some tough cops in those days, too. Man, when they pointed their finger at you, the answer was 'yes sir!'"

In 1955, Republic Pictures in Hollywood decided that Ione's sweeping, uneven valleys and hard-as-nails Main Street amounted to a perfect shooting location for their project, "Come Next Spring." The film told the story of Arkansas stragglers during the the Dust Bowl. The joke among executives was that Ione looked more like Arkansas than Arkansas did.

Eventually, the project brought big-screen beauty Ann Sheridan face to face with Ione locals. Sheridan had achieved stardom in the 1940s, first as a "pin-up girl" and then playing opposite Cary Grant in "I was a Male War Bride." Sheridan and her co-star, tough-guy Steve Cochran, are remembered as having been extremely friendly with the natives. Before leaving, Cochran bought a new two-tone Pontiac from local dealer Stanley Yager.

Marie Nutting, president of the Preston Castle Foundation, has youthful memories of the big movie shoot taking over her Main Street. Fellow foundation member Doug Hawkins was actually put in the film as a child dressed like a pirate for Halloween. In March 1956, "Come Next Spring" premiered in dazzling Kodachrome color around the world, including the Ione Theater on Main Street.

The 1950s were a busy, though turbulent, decade for the Preston School of Industry. Jessie Saner became a clerk in 1953 after her family moved to the area from Elk Grove. Saner thinks of Ione at that time as a warm, safe place.

"The whole town was like a big family," she said. "If your kids were wandering around downtown, they were as safe as if they were in your backyard."

However, Preston's policy of taking increasingly dangerous boys by the 1950s meant the school was not as safe as the town. "There was a really bad riot one time and the boys said they were coming for us in the castle," she recalled. "I remember someone saying to stay calm and not panic. I think they ended it by turning the fire hose on them."

Escapes from Preston were also becoming common. Strohm remembers how one mischievous ward managed to get his hands on a change of clothes and began staying in an empty room in the Ione Hotel. For days, he strolled in a carefree fashion up and down Main Street as if he were another member of the town.

"One day he was hanging out in the bar and a worker from Preston came in for a drink," Strohm said. "I guess he stared at that kid long enough and finally pointed to him and said, 'alright, time to go back.'"

In 1954, another two wards decided to make a cunning escape from Preston's dairy farm. One was a 17-year-old from Fresno County named Raymond Branch. The other was a 16-year-old from Kern County named Merle Haggard. According to the school's files, the latter had been convicted of auto theft and was known to enjoy "singing and playing the guitar." The pair planned to hide out in Ione rather than risking getting caught on the road to Stockton. They were captured at gunpoint by an Ione character known as "Little Feet." After a few more stints behind bars, Haggard went on to become one of the most famous names in the history of country music.

The boys at the school continued to get harder to manage. "They were ornery little guys," recalled Dave Fisher, who became a maintenance worker at Preston in 1957. "As time went on, they got more vicious. In the early fifties, one guard could handle 12 of them at a time. But that all changed."

Later - in 1965 - the school's agricultural instructor, John Wieden, was murdered by two wards in an escape attempt. Fisher remembers it well. "It really affected us emotionally," he said. "But it was bound to happen, the way things had been going for a long time."

 At the end of the 1960s Preston Castle closed its doors for the last time. It was immediately slated for demolition. Saner, who by then had worked at the school for 25 years, quickly became one of the first individuals in Ione to start a rescue effort for Preston Castle. Launching rescue missions was in Saner 's blood. Her father had been one of the heroes who trekked through blizzards in the Sierras to rescue the Donner Party.        

"It was like the end of a story more or less," Saner observed of the closing. "I used to hear of the Castle long before I worked there. I couldn't imagine it not being there. When they closed the Castle, it was like the closing of a book."

Links to other stories in the series

Jackson in the 1950s

Plymouth in the 1950s

Amador City in the 1950s

Sutter Creek in the 1950s