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Friday, March 23rd, 2007 09:41 am
So, due to issues of time zones and having an flist that takes several hours to read if I read it all (not that the flist has that many members, but its members are that prolific -- mostly the rss feeds from news organizations and I must admit I mostly only skim the headlines and it still takes forever), by the time I found Jo's Kentish Village game there were already 219 comments on it and I thought I better not (and I'm late already anyway but I don't want to go, which I will explain later when I come back).

So, I decided to name myself. I am not so much El Sobrante because I spent most of my childhood there but because it means "the leftover" because it was a corner between two Spanish land grants and I think that is cool. When I lived there, it was populated by factory workers and it had just been integrated by a Communist Party initiative (which is why we lived there). There was a bankrupt dairy farm across the street and a movie theater down on the San Pablo Dam Road (and a branch of Fry's, yes that Fry's, which was a grocery store chain at the time). On the roads leading up into the hills there were truck farms and a pig farm. If you went down the Dam Road a bit there were oil refineries. It was windy all winter and white-hot in the summer. Lots of grass fires. People tended to commute to Emeryville, Oakland, Richmond, Port Chicago to work, and the fire trucks came from Pinole. I think the police came from Richmond: the bookmobile certainly did. There was a lady down on the Dam Road who did ironing, and her house had a big horseshoe driveway and lots of prickly pears. If you walked up past Hillview School and kept going you'd be in Tilden Park right up behind the University of California.

Something El Sobrante has now that it didn't have when I was growing up is a sikh temple. There's an organization of El Sobrante Greens. Another thing it has is Save El Sobrante which appears to be an organization which wants to preserve the sprawly suburban character of the place? They don't want mixed-use, town-center type of development, but they do want development -- I think? It looks like they are opposed to land-use planning on principle. They have a bad link to some Santa Cruz right-wing thing.

What Spanish place name belongs to you?
Friday, March 23rd, 2007 05:44 pm (UTC)
I'd have been happy to do you one. There are still people asking me for them, and I don't see why polite people in distant time zones should suffer.

El Sobrante sounds really cool.
Saturday, March 24th, 2007 06:48 am (UTC)
Now if it were Oregon town names, I could be Drain. Or Sandy. All things, considered, I think I'd rather be Coos Bay, though Cannon Beach is named after a real cannon.

BTW, you have an extra " in one of your <a>'s--LJ is barfing HTML.
Saturday, March 24th, 2007 07:09 am (UTC)
By marriage my Spanish place name is Castro. His nibs' people came up from Baja with DeAnza in 1776. His nibs' Castros (there were many Castro families in those wagons) were granted the land grant that was Santa Cruz to Watsonville, ridgeline to the sea. Oh, let me tell you what happened to that land grant.

(We all have stories ... his nibs has more than most ...)

Or I could choose San Carlos, another place his nibs' people -- the post '49 white EastCoast folk who emigrated -- wound up.

John Wesley Brittan made a bucket selling flat pans and pick axes to the gold miners and used the lucre to buy the rancho that was San Carlos.

Then the crashes came in the early twentieth century. Who could pay the land taxes? All lost. Land sold. Alas.

The family tried to get back the land that had been granted to the railroad with a promise that the land that wasn't used for track would revert.

... Guess not! All the land lost. Lawyers rich. How unusual is that!

... but there still is family history there, family names. There is a street called Brittan that you can see as you're tooling down 101, a street called Belle (after g'ma), other streets named for family.

My personal place name? I'd probably choose "Alcatraz."

From where I watch these days, I see the pelicans heading left toward the Gate, toward open waters and lunch, returning right for a tuck-in at night.

The pelicans are so beautiful and it warms my soul that they're with us.