The good-looking younger man stares out at Freeway 46: jacket collar popped, hair slicked again, blue eyes and parted lips frozen in a come-hither stare.
He factors to an indication for a fuel station — and the East of Eden Fudge Manufacturing unit.
He’s the late actor James Dean. Or, reasonably, an unlimited picket cutout of him. The fuel station, Blackwell’s Nook, is the place the 24-year-old star of “Insurgent And not using a Trigger” made his ultimate cease earlier than dying in a automobile crash in 1955.
It was such hallowed floor for film buffs, even after the unique constructing burned way back, that followers had been repeatedly caught making an attempt to steal items of the outdated basis.
However 68 years have handed. Reminiscences are fading. Folks nonetheless ask the cashiers about Jimmy Dean — simply not fairly as a lot as they used to.
Pictures of actor James Dean grasp inside Blackwell’s Nook in Kern County.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
Today, indicators plead for folks to purchase one thing. Something.
“YOUR PURCHASES ARE THE ONLY REASON WE CAN STAY OPEN IN THESE TRYING TIMES,” reads the red-lettered signal by the entrance door.
To maintain going, the 103-year-old fuel station in rural Kern County is embracing one thing troublesome: Change.
The shop’s Fifties-themed Perpetually Younger Restaurant — which closes early now as a result of enterprise by no means recovered after the COVID-19 pandemic — is perhaps changed with a extra trendy espresso store, stated proprietor Brock Smith.
Smith is planning to put in electrical car chargers, hoping of us will linger and store. A number of years in the past, he began utilizing photo voltaic power to energy Blackwell’s Nook — a serious transition in a spot surrounded by California’s largest oil fields, with a whole bunch of pump jacks nodding close by.
“We wish to change it up a bit bit,” stated Smith, who speaks with understatement.
As for Blackwell’s Nook’s brush with Hollywood historical past?
“It’s kinda neat.”
The filling station stands on the treeless, windswept intersection of Highways 46 and 33, on the well-trodden path between the Central Coast and the San Joaquin Valley.
A determine of Marilyn Monroe sits on a stool as customers go to Blackwell’s Nook in January 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
The tiny, unincorporated neighborhood close to the filling station can also be named Blackwell’s Nook.
A person named George Blackwell opened the station in 1921 on the crossing of what was then two dusty trails. He died in a bike crash in 1924 — a 12 months, like so many in Kern County, of catastrophic drought.
“As summer season drew close to, mud changed air, useless cattle changed sage brush, and a Mannequin T Ford and some 10 gallon cans changed life on the nook,” reads a yellowed 1959 newspaper clip hanging on the wall.
Drought turned to flood. Trails turned to highways. And alongside these highways got here the farmers and Okies and oil rig roughnecks who would eternally form the tradition and panorama of the San Joaquin Valley.
On Sept. 30, 1955, Dean — described by The Occasions as “certainly one of Hollywood’s brightest new motion-picture stars” — sped by way of rural Kern County in a silver Porsche 550 Spyder nicknamed Little Bastard. He and his mechanic, Rolf Wutherich, driving shotgun, had been headed to a race in Salinas.
After getting a dashing ticket south of Bakersfield, Dean pulled into Blackwell’s Nook, the place he was stated to have purchased an apple and a Coca-Cola.
The again facet of a large picket cutout of James Dean tells the story of the actor’s 1955 demise close to Blackwell’s Nook in rural Kern County.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
From there, he made it 26 miles west, on Freeway 46, which was then U.S. Route 466. Simply over the San Luis Obispo County line, the actor’s tiny sports activities automobile slammed right into a Ford Tudor pushed by a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo scholar making a left flip onto Freeway 41. Dean died immediately.
Blackwell’s Nook turned a shrine, of kinds.
Dean’s orange-tinted racing goggles — stated to have been discovered by a married couple on their approach to Cayucos — are displayed behind thick glass in a lighted case close to the restrooms.
His face is in every single place: On work and posters. Jars of stuffed olives. Pistachio wheels. Bottles of native uncooked honey.
“The primary time I got here in, I used to be like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ ” stated Maya Woods, who was touring final month from Santa Cruz to Palm Springs for her twenty third birthday. This a part of western Kern County, she stated, is “kinda sparse,” and it’s grow to be her go-to cease.
“The entire little diner? Fudge, nuts and jam and all that? And all of the random little issues in right here? It’s tremendous cute and tremendous enjoyable and fascinating and distinctive.”
Woods, a bartender, was touring along with her aunt, Kajsa Johnson, a instructing aide who’s 4 months youthful than her.
Johnson was excited to cease for the Fifties kitsch. She’s an enormous Elvis Presley fan, due to her dad. However she, like Woods, has by no means seen any of Dean’s films.
“I don’t even know the historical past!” she exclaimed when she noticed Dean’s goggles and the images hanging round them.
A towering picture of actor James Dean directs guests to cease at Blackwell’s Nook.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
Quickly after they left, a gaggle of beefy, middle-aged motorcyclists in leather-based Harley-Davidson vests beelined towards the toilet. They by no means paused to have a look at the show.
Particulars of Dean’s crash — as soon as worldwide information — have pale from the general public consciousness. Some clients have instructed Smith they thought Dean died on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. Others swore he died in a aircraft crash.
Smith, 64, of Bakersfield, has labored at Blackwell’s Nook for 20 years. He’s at all times shocked what number of younger folks nonetheless know who Dean is. Then once more, there are rather a lot who don’t know.
“I at all times inform them: Google it. There’s plenty of historical past with this man.
“Persons are very . They ask, ‘Was this actually his final cease?’ In fact, you get folks joking round, saying that the place he died was his final cease.”
The pandemic was arduous on Blackwell’s Nook. Its 100-year anniversary in 2021 handed quietly, with out celebration — in contrast to the fiftieth anniversary of Dean’s demise in 2005, when followers dressed just like the actor descended on the shop and retraced his ultimate drive.
Change, and quiet, even have come to Cholame, the little city the place Dean died.
The Jack Ranch Cafe, a restaurant close to the deadly intersection that was crammed with Dean-themed tchotchkes, shut down in 2022 after it, too, struggled through the pandemic.
In its empty parking zone, the facade of a memorial — a metallic sculpture wrapped round a tree — is broken. An adjoining plaque is roofed in chook poop.
Somebody added “Orange County” to the forefinger of a big wood-paneled picture of actor James Dean.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
Even the route the place Dean died, a stretch of Freeway 46 generally known as “Blood Alley” due to its many crashes, is altering.
Since 2008, the California Division of Transportation has been widening the cross between Paso Robles and Misplaced Hills from a two-lane freeway to a four-lane divided expressway.
The lethal “Y” interchange with Freeway 41, which requires eastbound drivers turning north to chop throughout site visitors, as occurred in Dean’s crash, shall be reconfigured with an elevated onramp, stated Jim Shivers, a Caltrans spokesman.
“That Y won’t be there,” Shivers stated of the intersection, now referred to as the James Dean Memorial Junction. “That web site shall be deserted.”
At lunchtime on a latest Wednesday afternoon, the Perpetually Younger Restaurant inside Blackwell’s Nook, with its purple vinyl cubicles, jukebox and work of Dean and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, was empty.
However the close by aisles had been crammed with loud laughter from a gaggle of theater actresses on a street journey between Los Angeles and Carmel-by-the-Sea.
They had been delighted — and shocked — to have stumbled upon Dean’s final cease.
“It was actually as I used to be strolling out of the toilet, and I went, ‘James Dean?’ ” stated Laila Ayad of Silver Lake, who stopped to admire the goggles outdoors the restroom earlier than shopping for a tuna sandwich.
Oil pump jacks alongside Freeway 33 close to Lokern Street close to Misplaced Hills and Blackwell’s Nook.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Occasions)
Sarah Utterback, from Toluca Lake, stated she was impressed, after studying the information articles on the partitions, to revisit Dean’s films.
“He impressed plenty of modern-day actors that all of us love in his very brief, younger life,” she stated.
The historical past on show right here “is sort of morbid and unhappy,” she stated. Nevertheless it’s additionally “so quintessentially California.”
The ladies posed for images subsequent to a 1930 Ford Mannequin A with a 1935 Maytag washer mounted on the rear bumper. It was a reproduction of the jalopies that handed by way of Kern County through the Mud Bowl.
Jack Loucks, a retired mechanic, cobbled collectively the automobile and two others. He used to take them to the annual Mud Bowl Competition southeast of Bakersfield, however that pale away after the organizers — a lot of them Okies and Arkies — grew too outdated.
Loucks, 83, of Bakersfield, used to take the vehicles to colleges on a regular basis. However, he stated, educators don’t appear as fascinated about native Mud Bowl historical past as they as soon as had been.
“Historical past is gonna repeat itself if you happen to don’t begin finding out these items,” he stated with a sigh.
He has saved the Mannequin A parked contained in the filling station for about 15 years. He was in highschool when Dean crashed his Porsche.
Again when everybody was nonetheless speaking about it.
