Born in a ghost town: Robert Baca recalls his childhood in Kelly

On Saturday, with the windows down and the heat pressing on we headed up the mountain to check out the 28th annual Kelly Fiestas.

On the drive up, I thought about the last and only time I had been to Kelly Fiestas to see my great uncle Arthur Pino. I met him with a recorder and camera, determined to capture as many family stories as possible. On a picnic table, we sat in the shade on the side of the Kelly church. I watched his cloudy eyes as he relived his lifetime in Magdalena. Together we laughed and cried, and a deep appreciation of my family history grew.

When we arrived at Kelly, we piled our plates with food, hugged and chatted with a couple of folks. Then I put on my journalism hat and started taking photos. And that’s when I was introduced to Robert Baca. With a big charismatic smile and soft eyes, he proudly told me he was born in Kelly in 1933. I recognized a hardiness and glow, which I also had seen in my grandma and her siblings. Some might call it salt of the earth; All I know is that they just don’t make people like that anymore.

“See that little hill there two blocks away? That’s where our home was. We were born in that house,” Robert told me as he pointed to the site where his childhood home once stood.

I asked him about his earliest memories of Kelly, and he described the main street as a tunnel with commercial buildings lining each side of the road and busy with people. He said that Kelly felt like a big city to him when he was young.

He was only seven years old when everyone was forced to leave Kelly. He said the mining companies owned all the land and kicked them off. The Kelly church was moved to its current location after everyone had moved away. Like most of the families, his family relocated to Magdalena, where he graduated high school in 1952.

I realized he was about the same age as my grandma and asked him if he remembered Lucy Pino. Robert shook his head but recalled a Pino he was friends with, but his first name had escaped him. We figured out that during his thirteen years in Los Angeles, he became close with Eddie Pino, my great uncle. It turns out the two of them were boxers at that time. I never met Eddie but the only photo I’ve ever seen of him was in the boxing ring.

Robert walked me over to meet his older sister, Nora Baca (Key). When he said her name, my brain started spinning like a Rolodex. I shook her hand and could see the name Nora Baca in my grandma Lucy’s handwriting. I blurted out, “I think I have a picture of you!”

A quick search on my phone revealed a black-and-white photo of a group of schoolkids in front of the entrance of a clapboard building. Robert looked carefully at the photo and said the building looked like the old one-room schoolhouse that used to sit on the outskirts of Kelly. Nora put on her glasses, but my phone screen was just too small.

I left Kelly with a feeling that something serendipitous had just happened.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I put more pieces of the puzzle together. In fact, I realized that I also had a photo of Robert at his first communion, standing next to my grandma.

In 2020, I shared a couple of my grandma’s old photos on the MagE board, the local Magdalena email group, and Robert’s son reached out to me and said they were of his dad and his aunt. We attempted to get together so I could show them the photos and record their stories. Covid had a way of getting in the way of the best-laid plans.

Be that as it may, our meeting unfolded unplanned yet perfectly timed, in some ways making it feel a little bit more special.

Robert told me that he has a tablet with thousands of photos of Kelly in its heyday and invited me to stop by sometime to see them.

In my line of work, where accuracy is a priority, I was reminded that family stories might not always be factually historical, but they play a crucial role in strengthening our cultural heritage and enhancing our understanding of the human experience across the decades.

Our Old Timers hold a lifetime of knowledge that should not be overlooked.

How lucky are we to have the opportunity to be in their presence?