**CLPRA scripts are working drafts for recording sessions. Recorded performances may vary due to editing for broadcast.** Links key: CLP Atlas Informational (with hover) Online Books CLP Author page CLP Intern

W. Storrs Lee (1907-2004) http://tinyurl.com/WSLee

Click the below to hear radio segment.

Military in the Mojave

From The great California deserts, 1963. Read Online

Reader: Daniel Maloney

It often seems as if everyone in California is moving at a frantic and frenzied pace, so much so that even the Mohave Desert seems to have lost its atmosphere of soothing calm.

In his 1963 book The Great California Deserts, W. Storrs Lee noted one reason for the shattered calm, the military's presence in the Mojave.

Over the course of a century and a quarter the desert had seen some weird and wonderful defenders marching across the sands: leatherstockings scouting a passage for overlanders, armies of occupation patrolling the Mexican border, vengeance-seeking posses on the trail of outlaws, veterans campaigning against the Piutes and Yumas, even an Army camel brigade plodding West to subdue unidentified foes of the Republic.

But none of these parades of militia was half as weird, wonderful and sinister as the forces that began assembling in the desert when World War II was shaping up. And the encampments have been swelling ever since.

Down near Twentynine Palms, tubas and trumpets blare across the parade grounds of the Marine Corps Base and echo against the bleak, hot hillsides. Field-dressed troops of the Fleet Marine Force are on parade. In precise formation, units clomp past the reviewing dignitaries, responding like robots to the barked orders. They click, stomp, swivel, shoulder arms, by the right flank march, halt, present, parade rest. Overhead the colors flutter against a dry, cloudless sky. Leatherneck musicians ump and clarion their martial harmony, casting the reverberations far out into the once-silent wastelands.

Although W. Storrs Lee spent much of his life on the East Coast, he was a prolific writer about the California landscape.