Marnie Jenkins is hardly a country bumpkin, having lived in no
less than three countries. But while she still loves to travel, she
calls Hollister her home and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Hollister – Marnie Jenkins is hardly a country bumpkin, having lived in no less than three countries. But while she still loves to travel, she calls Hollister her home and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Jenkins, 62, was born and raised in Canada, where her parents allowed her to run a bit wild in her youth.
“I’d like the world to be safer for children today, the way it was when I was a child,” she said. “Kids need to roam, instead of having to panic. I remember being cautious of strangers, but never scared to death.”
A changing political climate, however, caused Jenkins’ family to head south to the Golden State in 1956 when Jenkins was 13, where they settled in the Bay Area.
“My dad left British Columbia when socialized medicine came around,” she said. “He didn’t want somebody in Ottawa telling him how to run a hospital.”
After a brief return to Canada upon her high school graduation, Jenkins returned to San Jose. There she met a young officer in the Army, through a friend at work, and the two were wed in 1974. Although Jenkins was attending nursing school at the time, she chose to follow her husband when he was stationed in Bavaria – where they lived for eight years in a refitted SS barracks. Her husband even worked in one of Hitler’s old offices, she said. Instead of nursing, Jenkins took a job as an Army librarian because it was the only job she could get, and focused on raising her two children.
“But Germany was really lovely,” she said. “Skiing was part of my children’s curriculum.”
Germany may have been lovely, but the stresses of a military marriage were not. Jenkins divorced her husband in 1982 and decided to bring her children back to America.
“I look back on that and I think I must have been nuts,” she said. “I left Germany with two kids, a dog and nowhere to stay, and I had a job here and a place to live within 10 days. When you’re young, you don’t think about things like that. You just do it.”
The decision to move to Hollister was almost an arbitrary one. Jenkins wanted to be near her parents, and her father was preparing to retire.
“The major reason we moved here was because my father was an avid golfer,” she said. “He decided that Hollister was the ideal climate for golfing.”
Once settled, Jenkins’ hands were full. In order to support her children, she put her medical training to good use. She took a job managing a medical office in Gilroy, as well as working as a paramedical examiner for San Benito County administering physical exams for those who desired health insurance. All this while attending Gavilan Community College and making straight A’s.
Now that her children are grown, Jenkins enjoys travel as much as she ever has. She plans to journey with her 93-year-old mother to Alaska this Christmas, to spend the holiday with her sister.
“My overnight bag is always packed,” she said. “I’m ready to go anywhere at the drop of a hat.”
