Rancho Santa Margarita Remembered

One weekend in 1974, Jerome Baumgartner sat with his father and listened to stories of his childhood on the Santa Margarita Ranch. Jerome had heard these stories many times before, but this time was different: this time there was a tape recorder going. That weekend was the first session of what was to become a remarkable oral history of one of the biggest and most important ranchos in California history, a quarter-million acre ranch with tens of thousands of cattle and hundreds of horses, not to mention vaqueros, Chinese cooks, and a vast extended family of remarkable people. But Rancho Margarita Remembered is not just a history of a Southern California cattle ranch. More important, it is the recorded memory of a child's view of a unique period of history of rural America - the first twenty years of the twentieth century - and what it was like to grow up in those times.