I'll Always Love Ventura
My dad used to be the vice president of an oil drilling company on Ventura Avenue. I used to live in Ojai where I'd catch the bus every morning in my Catholic school uniform with a bunch of other girls in Catholic school uniforms on the corner of Signal Street and Ojai Avenue, along the wall of The Oaks at Ojai (now an upscale spa, but back then just a nice place to eat dinner for the locals).
The bus would head back toward Ventura and we'd stop in Casitas Springs to pick up Rosanne Cash and her sister at the foot of her parents' long driveway that led up the the long white house on the hill. I saw Johnny once, but mostly his first wife who drove the girls down in her pink Cadillac.Then we'd continue making stops until we reached the Academy of St. Catherine by the Sea. This was back in 1963-1966.
I hated Ventura back then. It was too boring and drab to me. A surf town with conservative values. After my dad was transferred to Iran and I did my senior year at Teheran American School. Then I returned home to start college and many years passed. Finally I returned to Ventura County, had a family, and my appreciation for Ventura deepened until I knew it would always be my home, always in my blood, however small it was and however the wealthy immigrant yuppies from LA and Santa Barbara destroyed it. There were pockets of goodness interspersed with conservative hold-outs. I used to walk a lot at night.
I missed the old County Stationery store, the markers on the graves at Cemetery Park, the wonderful thrift stores on Main Street, and little by little watched more wonderful places close and be replaced: Voltaire's, Top Hat, Bonnie's party store, and so on and so on. Now it's becoming generic and nauseatingly upscale. If I ever want to drive around Ventura I can, any time, virtually, via Google Maps street view. It's quite a sentimental journey--except when I see all the yuppification, all the pretentious BS as outsiders bring their money and transform and corporatize so they can have their little Los Angeles and Santa Barbara bling. And I say, why didn't you just stay there and leave Ventura be? Oh, I know, I'm being bitter and clinging to the past. But I'm sorry. Ventura will always be in my blood, bones, heart. The old Ventura, that is. The pre-1995 Ventura, before everything began to gentrify and all the wonderful niches and idiosyncrasies began to give way to bland homogenization. My memories remain before Ventura becomes more and more destroyed. After we moved to the Westside (Ventura Avenue area), things calmed down because money hadn't invaded that yet. Things were still untouched, old, decrepit and wonderful.
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The bus would head back toward Ventura and we'd stop in Casitas Springs to pick up Rosanne Cash and her sister at the foot of her parents' long driveway that led up the the long white house on the hill. I saw Johnny once, but mostly his first wife who drove the girls down in her pink Cadillac.Then we'd continue making stops until we reached the Academy of St. Catherine by the Sea. This was back in 1963-1966.
I hated Ventura back then. It was too boring and drab to me. A surf town with conservative values. After my dad was transferred to Iran and I did my senior year at Teheran American School. Then I returned home to start college and many years passed. Finally I returned to Ventura County, had a family, and my appreciation for Ventura deepened until I knew it would always be my home, always in my blood, however small it was and however the wealthy immigrant yuppies from LA and Santa Barbara destroyed it. There were pockets of goodness interspersed with conservative hold-outs. I used to walk a lot at night.
I missed the old County Stationery store, the markers on the graves at Cemetery Park, the wonderful thrift stores on Main Street, and little by little watched more wonderful places close and be replaced: Voltaire's, Top Hat, Bonnie's party store, and so on and so on. Now it's becoming generic and nauseatingly upscale. If I ever want to drive around Ventura I can, any time, virtually, via Google Maps street view. It's quite a sentimental journey--except when I see all the yuppification, all the pretentious BS as outsiders bring their money and transform and corporatize so they can have their little Los Angeles and Santa Barbara bling. And I say, why didn't you just stay there and leave Ventura be? Oh, I know, I'm being bitter and clinging to the past. But I'm sorry. Ventura will always be in my blood, bones, heart. The old Ventura, that is. The pre-1995 Ventura, before everything began to gentrify and all the wonderful niches and idiosyncrasies began to give way to bland homogenization. My memories remain before Ventura becomes more and more destroyed. After we moved to the Westside (Ventura Avenue area), things calmed down because money hadn't invaded that yet. Things were still untouched, old, decrepit and wonderful.
