Times they are a’changin’
It wasn’t very long ago that Hollister was a town of 7,000
people. Hwy. 101 ran down the main drag in Gilroy and Morgan Hill,
the latter a speed trap of statewide fame.
Times they are a’changin’
It wasn’t very long ago that Hollister was a town of 7,000 people. Hwy. 101 ran down the main drag in Gilroy and Morgan Hill, the latter a speed trap of statewide fame.
Like any other testosterone-crazed boy, my brother and I regarded our driver’s licenses as licenses to commit mayhem. The lesson we learned all-too-soon was that in a small town, even minor transgressions would be reported to the family home – usually before we arrived back at the ranch.
A cousin once took the family car – a white Pontiac convertible, the only one in the county – out on Hwy. 25 and elected to see what it felt like to go 100 mph in a convertible. A Highway Patrolman passed him in the opposite direction. Rather than chasing him down, he called his dispatcher, who in turn called his father. By the time my cousin got home, his father was waiting in the porch, whereupon he demanded the surrender of the car keys. Oh yeah, his father was the district attorney at the time.
Hollister may still be a small town, but it’s more than five times bigger than the town I just described. That smaller town is the town that a caller this week longs for.
Mary Smith grew up in the Hollister that was. She’s a Haybaler, a 1977 graduate. She called this week, not because we are friends, or because we even know her. She called out of desperate frustration.
Mary Smith lives near Marguerite Maze Middle School, on a quiet residential block. She and her husband had just finished decorating the place for the Christmas season with the inflatable lawn art that’s becoming popular. Some time during the same night that she and her husband admired the figures and talked about how each one revealed something special about the personality of a grandchild, they were stolen.
The Christmas decorations were stolen.
The cost – an estimated $300 – isn’t what grieves her.
What galls her – and should appall us all – is that goofy reminders of the season in which we observe the birth of our Lord were stolen. And for what?
Smith’s mother is a widow who lives on C Street. It was only a couple of weeks ago that a burglar stole her wedding ring.
How much should one family endure? This isn’t about a vinyl bag representing Frosty the Snowman. It’s about community.
Smith was frustrated that Hollister has become a place where police officers are no longer able to respond to a report of a residential burglary. Crimes like the one Smith experienced are so commonplace that they do not merit police response.
So Christmas is a little bleaker at the Smith home. Mary Smith can reflect on her mother’s loss of a treasured connection to her late husband. She can look at her lawn and remember the decorations that would have delighted her grandchildren.
She can mourn the hometown that was.
So can we all.
