Here’s a really cool story in the Modesto Bee today about Lee Nixon DeLaMare who spent her childhood in Yosemite and what it was like in the post World War II days. Lee’s father ran the fish hatchery at Happy Isles.
The Modesto Bee | Woman grew up at Yosemite: “As one of the ‘Yosemite kids,’ she considers herself among the fortunate few who got to live year-round in the world’s most picturesque valley, surrounded by granite walls, teeming waterfalls and lush forests.
Yosemite’s park archivist will get her memories, along with those of other former Yosemite residents, on record. DeLaMare hopes other former Yosemite residents will participate in the oral history project titled ‘I Remember Yosemite … ,’ detailing how they once lived, worked, learned and played in the national park.
From 1945 through 1956, she lived in a small home at Happy Isles, where her father ran a state-owned fish hatchery. Gene Nixon, born at the Sisson Hatchery near Mount Shasta, spent his life enhancing the fish population in Northern California lakes, rivers and streams.
He ran a hatchery along the Kings River before moving the family to Yosemite in 1945, when Lee was in first grade.
Happy Isles was indeed a happy place, though it had some drawbacks.
‘It’s between Half Dome and Glacier Point,’ said DeLaMare, 68. ‘It gets cold up there during the winter. It gets no sun. And whenever the power went out, we were the last to get the lights back on.’
The bears weren’t as annoying there as they were — and are — in other parts of the valley, DeLaMare said. They’d scrounge first at the dump and then the campgrounds before working their way up to the hatchery.
‘We were the dessert stop on the bear cafeteria trail,’ she said.”