The Order appears to have been constituted almost exclusively of veterans of the "Spanish War", as they called it. California (1902–1948) Ricks remained in California from after the war until his death. He lived first in Los Angeles and other cities in southern California and moved to San Francisco in 1904. Relative to eastern states, California in the early 20th century did not have a large Black population; it started to grow substantially following World War II. California was nonetheless home to a variety of organizations, including the NAACP, that fought Jim Crow laws in the American West. Ricks was involved with the NAACP while in southern California. He was also a member of the Los Angeles Men's Forum, an organization founded in 1903 which aimed to "encourage united effort on the part of Negroes for their advance". In San Francisco, he worked various jobs before becoming an office worker at the California Packing Company (later renamed Del Monte), where he remained until 1946, two years before his death. As of 1915–17, he lived at 120 Market Street in San Francisco. He remained involved in electoral politics in San Francisco, serving on the Republican State Central Committee and as a judge of elections. Ricks was a cellist and singer. In 1915, he performed in a choral concert at the Hamilton Auditorium in Oakland. The community organized the concert as an alternative to the stage version of The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which was performed for several weeks in San Francisco that year, beginning on March 1. Ricks died on September 14, 1948, at a veterans' hospital in Oakland. He is buried in Golden Gate National Cemetery. Poetry Overview Ricks's poems deal with a wide variety of subjects. His papers, held at the Bancroft Library, include over 450 poems and almost 100 short stories. The 1914 work "The Whistle-Maker", after which Ricks's only collection is named, compares a performer who makes and plays whistles to figures in classical mythology such as Orpheus and Pan. According to a biographical sketch of Ricks held by the California State Library—likely filled out by Ricks himself—he published work in the Los Angeles Times and Oakland Tribune, among many other newspapers, and lost a substantial amount of his work in the 1906 San Francisco fires. He first published in the Pasadena Daily News-Star in 1902. Newspaper poetry was quite common in