A friend on an errand was heading up to Greenfield the other day and asked if I’d like to tag along, and because the town had been on my mind of late, I readily took her up on the offer. I was feeling a bit guilty, as one who is cited above as King City/Greenfield columnist, for not knowing enough about the town as I once did to be able to really give its residents anything worthy to read. For those of you who don’t know, I started life here in King City, but after a while (I dunno how long, two, three days maybe) my mother apparently decided that because she had a husband and another child in a house up in Greenfield that is where we should go, and so I spent the next 19 years and six months in the town. But on this day, behind the wheel of my friend’s car, I navigated through some older sections of town, on streets still home to some notable buildings.
The city has made a way for renovation of the old Beyer Building/Economy Market to be continued as multi-use; there are no real changes yet, but these things can take time, so hopefully that downtown anchor building will soon be active again. As one who spent many years attending the Methodist Church, now over 110 years old, I wasn’t fond of a new paint job, but I figure folks get more out of what goes on inside the building than what the outside looks like and that is the important thing to them. And that building is one of two in town that I know of with fireplaces made from Arroyo Seco River rocks. The other is the old Girl’s Scout Hall, which has been home to the Lion’s Club for decades. I haven’t been inside that building for many years but can still visualize the wooden walls and that fireplace. I can even remember when the school district used it for what was at that time called “special class;” this was for students with learning disabilities, undiagnosed in the late ’50s and early ’60s in small town schools, and for those whose parents did not speak English at home.
This second situation is why so many of my Mexican classmates didn’t make it past first grade and were held back. Had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with language skills. And according to Ticino native Catherine, my Greenfield News co-worker in the early ’90s, this was also the plight of the Swiss of a generation before mine. Maybe seeing old buildings of our youth isn’t just the memory of the architecture but the recalling of how we operated as a community and how it affected the rest of our lives. Or maybe that is just me.
***
In about 1971, a friend of mine labeled us, a smattering of local males in our late teens and early 20s, as “redneck hippies:” a rather astute appraisal given our upbringings. From about 1969 on, a few of us took a negative stance toward the Vietnam War less on ideological grounds and more on just not wanting to see any more local boys get killed over there. We were anti-war but pro-warrior. Also, until the lottery system was used, we didn’t want to get drafted and die over there ourselves. Back into the mid-’60s there had been anti-war protests in the streets, some very large and in some cases they got violent and people died. But during that time, we never had a sense that democracy was at stake, never felt that the “establishment,” no matter how wrong headed, was not going to abandon the safeguards that guarantee American democracy. Last Saturday I joined millions around the world who feel this time democracy truly is at stake but have confidence the present “establishment” will not prevail and we the people will.
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Let me end this with a mea culpa. First, I will explain that because I am a member of the planning commission, I will not go into any more detail than required. In a column where I took issue with the balance of a news article, I referenced a California State website and used information I “found” pertaining to construction materials. What I found was not complete enough and had I done due diligence and scrolled down multiple pages (as I have since done) I would have found my error in using that reference. When something like that happens, often the publication will get notified, preferably in a signed letter to the editor; in this case it was an email. I became aware when my editor informed me of one person’s claim that I was wrong. And that person was the writer of the article I criticized, Luke Hamilton. And he is correct. The subject at issue, the one I was wrong on, is specific to some of the discussions between the commission and the applicants. That was good work on Luke’s part. A community needs involved young people.
Let me resort to a past when America’s Favorite Pastime was unfettered by high-tech gadgetry and the changes they have brought to the game, to a time when Umpires were gods and their word was final. The Electoral College goof of a couple weeks ago and now this gives me two strikes. Three strikes and “Yerrout.” My only hope is the Ronald Reagan treatment. When an announcer for WHO radio out of Chicago, Reagan was stationed in a tall building in Des Moines, Iowa, where he would relay the game to a wider listening audience. Once when his “feed,” the broadcast from WHO, was cut he had one batter foul off balls for 12 full minutes, some say, (some dispute) it came to 27 foul balls until the feed was reestablished. With that kind of treatment, I’ll keep swinging a while longer.
Take care. Peace.
