Cloverdale resident since 1928
What brought you here?
I was born and raised here. Actually I was born on the kitchen table of my Aunt Cam Fitch in Healdsburg. She was the midwife for all the family way back and my parents just happened to be down there visiting that day.
What keeps you here?
My grandparents had several ranches around here, and my parents worked on all of them. At one time my grandmother was the downstairs maid of Madam Preston. My father and I took the running of the ranches over when my grandfather died and my grandmother was too old to take care of it. The acre we live on now used to be a 40-acre ranch but we sold it off little by little. The prunes, peaches and grapes we grew couldn’t pay the taxes anymore. In 1948 I was in town with boxes of grapes in my 1927 Chevrolet when I saw Evelyn. I asked some of the kids who she was and they said, oh, she’s the new girl. And I said I was going to marry her and they said, well, she’s already engaged. But I looked her up and one day at the skating rink which was the old Citrus Fair building, I saw her mother and asked if it was OK if I married her daughter. She told me I’d have to ask her daughter about that. Well, I persisted and I won. She got rid of the guy she was engaged to and we were married in her home. That home is now part of the History Museum, the Gould-Shaw House, but back then it was where she was living with her family. We stayed in Cloverdale because we like it here. Where are you going to find anything better?
