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CACHE brings to life the art, culture and history of California’s heartland.

CACH-Exeter Logo

CACHE brings to life the art, culture and history of California’s heartland.

Exeter History Telling – The Legend of Joe Doctor

by Dwight Miller

Welcome to the first of what I expect to be monthly articles on Exeter area history, called “Exeter History Tellers”, sponsored by the Center for Art, Culture and History-Exeter (CACHE). The purpose of these articles is, consistent with the mission of CACHE, to bring to life some of the infinite stories of our local past. There are so many fascinating stories about the early days of the Tulare Lake Basin, that area marked by the Kings River in the north, the Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers in the south, which all filled Tulare Lake over time.From the rich histories of the indigenous peoples to the Fresno-Kings-Tulare-Kern counties of today, there are thousands of human-interest stories. I will be sharing a few in the months ahead.

I begin by acknowledging and honoring a few of the historians who have influenced me in my journey to learn these stories:

  • Katherine Small wrote extensively in the 1920s about people and places of Tulare County.
  • Frank Latta was prolific in his stories of the Yokuts and Kern County history from the 1930s to his death in 1983.
  • Annie Mitchell, a Tulare County pioneer, was prolific in her writing of the county in the 1960s-70s.
  • Louise Jackson, an Exeter native, has produced five fascinating books on local history from the Indigenous peoples, the Visalia Electric Railroad to Mineral King.
  • John Mangini, authored the 1976 book, Exeter-Now and Then, the story of Exeter’s business life and more.
  • Katherine Mangini and Dorothy Tyhurst, compiled Passing in Exeter–a collection of over 3,500 local obituaries from the 1910s to 1990s.
  • Terry Ommen, a Visalia historian continues to bring a love of Tulare County history with many articles, books, and speeches on local lore.
  • Chris Brewer, Kern County great-grandson to Col. Baker, the namesake of Bakersfield and Exeter historian has highlighted specific stories of our locality through numerous books and pamphlets.
  • Jay O’Connell, Three Rivers native, has done fascinating research on the Kaweah Colony, train robber Chris Evans and the Hmong history of the Valley.

In this opening article I highlight Joe Doctor, a prolific writer and local legend when it came to telling stories of our past. I am working my way through the thousands of articles he wrote in his career as the editor for the Exeter Sun from 1937 to 1966 and then a columnist from 1976 until his death in 1995.

Born in 1911, Joe Doctor’s early years were in north central Kansas as the youngest of the three sons of Pete and Bessie Doctor. His parents divorced in the early 1920s. His mother re-married in 1924 and moved to Lindsay, California where Joe graduated from high school in 1929. He attended the University of Kansas as a journalism student, no doubt influenced by his mother’s brother, the internationally famous writer, Damon Runyan. Joe distinguished himself at KU and was spotted shortly after graduation by Exeter Sun Publisher, Watson Clawson in 1937. He was immediately hired to be the editor of the Exeter paper. Watt said he “struck pay dirt” that day in Lindsay when he hired Joe. In Watt’s own words:

“Joe Doctor proved to be the very man I needed as he was intelligent, analytical and safe. He never went off the “deep end” and was always willing and ready to seek council when the going got rough.
Joseph E. Doctor was the most accurate reporter I have ever known and was never inclined to editorialize in a news article. I never knew of a single case in over twenty years of reporting that he was accused of misquoting anyone. He had the faculty to remember details of a speech, even to a figure that was uncanny.
Of course, Joe made a name for himself and the Exeter Sun and went on to become a historian of no mean ability and a few years ago wrote, “Shotguns on Sunday” a story of the life and deeds of one Jim McKinney, one of the last of the “bad men” of this part of the country.”

After his sojourn with statewide life, he returned to write columns for the Exeter Sun from 1976 to his death in 1995. These columns, under the byline, “Strictly Personal” and “Heritage” ranged from musings about current life and politics to the retelling of stories from the past, ensuring that readers of the next generation would not forget the people who had gone before and shaped the present. One of his favorite tactics for generating an article was to revisit the Sun archives and find a story from the past that would get his attention. He’d then retell that story from a present-day perspective and add his opinions. The results were fascinating.

There were several areas of interest that particularly piqued Joe’s interest. One was the history of the Kaweah Colony, the failed effort to build a Socialist utopian community in Three Rivers and Giant Forest in the 1880s and early 1890s. Joe delighted in interviewing elderly colony members who could give him first-hand accounts of their experience in that unique story–arguably one of Tulare County’s most interesting. He spent days going through the Kaweah Colony room of Bancroft library at UC Berkeley where most of the original papers from the colony are housed. He turned over all his research to Jay O’Connell to assist him in telling that story in his outstanding book Cooperative Dreams A history of the Kaweah Colony.

Joe had an abiding interest in local Native American people and their stories. He wrote many articles of the rock paintings in the foothills, their history, the customs and native life of local tribal peoples. He was fond of the local Icho family and in 1952 decided that he would take action to ensure that their native language was preserved in some way. He arranged to take several family members to the KFRE radio station in Fresno and utilize their modern technology for recording conversations in their native tongue. He reported that those recordings were then turned over to the Tulare County Museum. Unfortunately, those recordings have not been located.

Interviewing members of pioneer families was one of his favorite sources of stories. His conversations in the late 1930s or ’40s with people who’d been born here in the 1850s, ’60s and ’70s allowed him to develop a deep sense of what early Tulare County life had been like from firsthand sources. Those folks, in their 80s or 90s at the time, had plenty of stories of what the big flood years were like, the deadly droughts, the era of wheat farming, the coming of the trains, the development of irrigated land, citrus and grape growth, the loss of Tulare Lake, the coming of electricity to the valley, transition from horse drawn wagons to gas powered trucks for hauling goods and people and more. He synthesized all those interviews into a comprehensive viewpoint and would pass those insights with wit and humor on through his columns.

One of his great joys in his later years was the Death Valley Liar’s Club where he would often join others in rousing story-telling. Appropriately, Joe was a charter member of the Tulare County Historical Society. Of all the many organizations he belonged to this was probably most dear to his heart. He served as a director, Vice President and President. A few years ago, Joe’s grandson, Nate Wallis, went on a mission to find and copy as many Joe Doctor articles as he could in the digital archives of the Exeter Sun. There are thousands and it will take a long time for me to wade through them but I plan to do just that. This self-described, “Country Journalist,’ captured so much of our history that still needs to be told.