Memories of Small Town Life in Santa Maria

Susan spent ten years of her young life in the originally small town of Santa Maria. She remembers playing in the streets with her friends, listening to the radio, taking ballet classes, playing War, and watching the parade and rodeo.  Susan feels lucky to have experienced the friendly neighborhood of Santa Maria in the 1940’s. She is grateful of the opportunities and freedom she had in this 10,094 person town which are now hard to find, especially in the big cities.  She says that Santa Maria has changed greatly and has become a city of over 20,000 people, and Susan misses the small town feel. Now in her sixties, she truly appreciates the childhood she spent in Santa Maria.  As someone who loves to study history, she was glad to narrate her life and tell her interesting stories of her small town life.

When we were growing up -- that was in the forties when we were on a street where there were newer track houses -- there were so many children. Most of the families had little kids, and so we had more fun because we would always be playing together and there were different ages, some little kids. My sister was two years younger, so her age and littler than that.  We were just always having fun and playing and having birthday parties, and we’d all go to each others birthday parties.  So that was really a lot of fun too, and we lived next to a field and so we could go under or over the fence, which we really weren’t supposed to.  We would play in the field.  So we had a lot of fun when we were little just because of the neighborhood.

They didn’t have TV. We had a radio. I think TVs were just starting about the early fifties.  But we used to listen to the radio, we didn’t ever listen to news, per say.  I’m sure my parents did, I’m sure they took the newspaper, but I think that we were just too young to be thinking about that too much.  We were aware of the war. There was a boy my same age; his brother was in the war.  And we used to -- you know how you play games when you’re little, you’d play House or something like that -- we used to play war. And I would be the wife, and I would be home. And this little boy, he would go off to war and come back. That was something where we were using something that was going on in the world. Probably trying to deal with it and make sense of it.

There were Hispanic people because there was a lot of farming. Oh, and there also were a lot of Japanese farmers.  So at my school there were Hispanic and Japanese children. My first boyfriend was Hispanic. I remember his name was Ernesto, and that was in second grade or something. And then among my very good friends was a Japanese girl that I still keep in touch with.

To me, it was such a small town that everyone seemed to get along pretty well and there wasn’t prejudice and I was raised because of my mother not to be prejudice against different ethnicities. My mother was born in India so there she had exposure to a lot of different people and different classes, you might say, of people.  So we were always taught not to be prejudice against different people.  The Hispanic people were just part of the community as far as I know. And the same with the Japanese.  Everyone got along as far as I know.

 There was education available for everyone.  There were several elementary schools. I don’t remember the junior high, but I do remember there was just one high school. And everybody went to the same high school.  And they had buses, you know that would go pick everybody up and take them to this high school.  And I think it was a wonderful high school. I believe it was Santa Maria Union High School.  In fact our street was

El Colegio which means the college, so there was also a college in the town which is a very well known college: Hancock College. It was a very fine college, has a good theatre department, and I think it teaches aviation of all things too.

I looked forward to a parade and a rodeo. The rodeo was really a big deal because it was kind of an agricultural community in a way, so there would be people who would be riding horses and cattle.  There would be cattle ranches in the area.  So they had this big rodeo and before the rodeo they had a big parade, I mean big in terms of the town. But they had a few funny floats and I remember a year when Hopalong Cassidy, I don’t know if you remember him.  He was a very popular movie star, cowboy. And he would wear a black outfit with black boots, something black that went over his eyes. He was really famous and I would enjoy his movies.  He was also on TV, but anyway, he was in the parade.  And there was another man named Maudy Montana who was a very famous cowboy too especially with roping.  He did all these wonderful rope tricks. This was during the parade.  They rode in the parade.  We were in a convertible.  My father worked in a bank.  And we were throwing out pennies.  Real pennies.  Just by the hundreds, to the people. That was a remembrance.  But the parade was a big deal and then after the parade they would have the rodeo.  They had a special fairgrounds where they would go and rope cattle and all the things they would do at a rodeo.  And they’d have a big barbecue. And Santa Maria Barbeque is still famous today: the Tri- cut.

Some of my parents’ friends I admired very much.  Oh, one of their friends ended up being the mayor, and he was just the most wonderful person.  Someone you just really respected tremendously, and he was an outdoorsman kind of.  He had an auto parts store, I believe, but he became the mayor.  His name was Leonard Peterson.  And he had a shop called Peterson Auto Parts, I believe.  I don’t know if it would still be there.  I think there were other people, some of my teachers I really respected a lot, but I didn’t know them as well as this man.  And some of their other friends I had a great deal of respect for.  There was one friend of my mother’s named Margery Hall and she was a ballet teacher. And she had a studio that was upstairs above a building and she lived in her studio, and that was just something you would fantasize about. An artist studio, you know, beautiful fabrics, and, what do you call those, screens, you know, to sort of partition off where she could have her little quarters.  We took ballet there. I was in first, second grade or something like that; pretty little.  But I always had a lot of respect for her just because she was not married and she had this business and taught so many people ballet and was very caring toward her students

I think this small town life experience was wonderful.  I think it was a very peaceful place to grow up. And we were able to do things that maybe people wouldn’t do now in this area. We could ride our bicycles in the summer over to the public, swimming pool.  We could ride our bikes to the library.  And we were only like in fourth, fifth, sixth grade. And when I was doing all that, I was ten, so that would be the fifth grade. But my mother would let us do those things. And I donno, it was just a peaceful place, I have to say.  There wasn’t a lot of stress that we have now in a bigger area. There wasn’t a feeling of rushing around.  I don’t ever remember us rushing unless we might have been late for church or late for this and that. But basically, it was friendly, people were friendly, and I think it was a very special time.

Interviewed by Lana Mousessian