Simpkins Swim Center Photo exhibition Highlights Story of Live Oak – Santa Cruz Sentinel

Live Oak – Despite his broad geographical area, Santa Cruz County only has four integrated cities: Scotts Valley, Capitola, Watsonville and the namesake of the district. The rest of the district consists of non -legal communities, in which the boundaries can sometimes be a little blurry.

Live Oak is such an example. For many, the mid-county community of 17,000 Santa Cruz and Capitola and almost all houses and almost all houses are listed under Santa Cruz addresses. However, Live Oak is a municipality in itself with its own school district, library, pool and many parks and beaches. It is also a place with a lot of rich history, and a new photographic exhibition in the Simpkins Family Swim Center tries to record this story by a variety of vintage photos that are exhibited until September.

The exhibition “What you do not know about Live Oak in photos” was curated by Bill Simpkins and Reed Geisreiter, whose families have been living in Live Oak for generations, and tried to answer many questions that people may have asked over the years: Who was Paul Minnie? Why are there so many Calla lilies everywhere? Why is the Twin Lakes Church in aptos called when Twin Lakes State Beach is in living oak?

Simpkins said that the project dates from 2016 with the adoption of measures, a bond of 67 million US dollars to finance projects in the libraries Santa Cruz County.

“Aptos has inserted a new library, Scotts Valley has entered one and they make one for the city (city center),” he said. “We already had a library for the Live -oak area, so that at that time nobody really knew where I could spend the money.”

This led to a new library attachment at the pool, but Simpkins said that nobody was sure what to put in. After realizing that Live Oak had no history museum that resembles those in Capitola or Aptos, he decided that a photo exhibition was a good starting point for the start.

Simpkins said the goals of the exhibition were triple: to give the residents a feeling of local pride, to teach the students the local history, especially in the immediate vicinity of the coast of the middle school, and people give people a distraction of splitting matters.

“It only seems that too many people fight against each other,” he said. “We can have that together.”

With photos from the archives of the UC Santa Cruz and the public libraries of Santa Cruz, Simpkins tried to choose particularly interesting pictures, and wrote capacity signatures in a way that was accessible to everyone.

“I always believe that people come in museums and they are going and they probably remember 10% or 5% of what they have seen,” he said. “I tried to create things that were interesting and that would remember. The information we have up here is not really deep. I tried to write them for a fifth grader.”

The photos are displayed in the lobby of the pool and in the appendix, and there is even a map of live oaks with symbols that correspond to the pictures. While people have different ideas of live OAK, the exhibition defines its limits as Highway 1 in the north, the 41st Avenue in the east and the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor/Woods Lagoon in the west.

The first photo from 1909 shows a field on the corner of East Cliff Drive and 17th Avenue, which bloomed with Calla Lilies, which was planted by the Portland World Fair organizer Colin Mcisaac and became so prominent that the area was known for a time as a Lilydale. The lilies continue to grow in the region today.

“At that time, the industry still exists in our neighborhoods,” said Geisreiter.

Those who wondered how the design for the Windmill Cafe at the East Cliff Drive was created will answer this question through the exhibition. It was built by Ro Lincoln to sell light bulbs in his shop Los Robles Nurery, which developed into Buckhart's sweets in 1936 and until it closed in the early 2000s. A restaurant is operated on on the construction site today.

The exhibition also shows Live Oak's story as a Mecca for pulling up chickens and eggs, including a grain storm on the other side of the street from today's Simpkins Swim Center.

Simpkins said this explains why many living oak houses have so long, narrow actions.

“They were designed so that they have a house and the chickens in the back,” he said.

This explosion in egg production attracted many people from the middle west and also explains the name of one of the streets of Live Oak: Paul Minnie Avenue. While it was easy to assume that this road is named after a person, it was actually named after a group of settlers that came from St. Paul, Minnesota.

The exhibition also examines Live Oak's aviation history, namely the airfield in front of the Chanticler Avenue, where many double -decker landed in the 1920s and 30s. A pilot that landed in Live Oak was Elinor Smith, who was named in 1930 as the best pilot in America in a survey on licensed pilots and dried up Amelia Earhart. She was even the first woman to be seen on a box with wheaties, albeit on her back.

“At that time, women could not only be on the back of the box,” said Simpkins.

This remained true until 1984 when the Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton was exhibited on the front of the Wheaties boxes.

Other photos show the Jacks – or Tetrapods – from the Walton Lighthouse, which were produced in Live Oak in 1963. Two hundred -year exhibition in 1976. Another photo shows the students of the coastal school who attend the train during a DC exhibition.

The exhibition also explains the mystifying origins of the name of the Twin Lakes Church. It was built near Schwan Lake in 1890, but torn down in 1947 to make room for a new church. The church tower continues to live on the corner of the five branches, and Twin Lakes opened a new church in aptos in 1973.

One of the more grim features of the exhibition is a photo of an indigenous monument on the site of the old Holy Cross Cemetery, which was installed in 2016. Simpkins, who contributed to sparrowing the efforts, said when the Santa Cruz mission was demolished on Hauptstraße in 1885 to make the new Hörkirchen. From them did not live after 12.

“They dug up almost 2,600 bodies and put them in ox car and brought them here to the cemetery on the Capitola Road expansion,” he said. “About 1,500 of them were American indigenous people. A friend of mine, Jim Thoits, and I thought they should be recognized.”

In cooperation with the local historian Norm Poitevin, to whom the exhibition is dedicated, Simpkins and Thoits used a base circle to find out where the tomb was located. Through the Catholic Church, they were able to identify all deceased and list them with arrowheads next to the Christian names of the deceased. Simpkins said that this had come about as a compromise with Valentin Lopez, the President of the AMAH Mutsun Land Trust, who believes that Christian names should not be used for indigenous people.

“I said,” Well, Valentin, that's all we have. We have a number or the Christian name, “he said.” I didn't just want to set up a number, so we made a deal where we use your Christian names, but … We put an arrowhead next to the American native. “

The exhibition will run until September and an exhibition via Live Oak's surfing scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. Simpkins said that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, which will have its own exhibition to surf, will help, but his exhibition will concentrate on surfing in live oak.

“In the 1960s and 1970s there were 20 surfboard manufacturers in the Live OAK area,” he said.

Geisreiter said the exhibition would give visitors stories about things about live Oak, about which they might have always been surprised.

“There are great stories that emerge from this small exhibition that tell a little story about Live Oak that are nowhere else told,” he said.

The Simpkins Family Swim Center is from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and on weekends from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in 979 17th Ave. open.