Aptos 2015: Year in Review

By Noel Smith

2015 was a year of cycles from loss to gain. We lost family members (Jennie Donating), WWII Veterans (Bruce Onto), Some in the midst of life (Cathe Gangly), Some much too young (Coco Allenby, Jeannette Mariner), and Community Leaders (Frank Giuliani, Frank Lewis, Rick Meyer). But the legacy of these and so many others goes on and continues to enrich the lives of the living.

Then there was the loss of the famous Post Office Jumps mountain bike track after eight years of flying bikes and developing fearless mountain bikers. But because of its showing the way, three more bike parks now exist in the county with one more planned and efforts are underway to replace the now vanished jumps.

Also for the past fifty years the Village Fair (aka Aptos Apple Barn originally the Hihn apple packing shed built around 1891), has served as a treasure house of memories in the form of antiques, oddities and the hard-to find. The business of selling the artifacts of history, the recent, the old, and the almost forgotten there is over and the transition of the jump track and the apple barn to the new Aptos Village has begun.

Aptos had two incidents of thoughtless destruction. One was a hit and run in June that left Nicole Brown of Aptos paralyzed from the waist down with the teenage driver arrested just days later. The other was the vandalism of three cars intentionally set on fire and 16 other cars with windows smashed, parked in the Rio Del Mar and Seacliff Drive neighborhoods in November of 2014. The three Aptos teenage suspects were arrested in October of 2015 with one of them having been extradited from Florida.

On 2015 we celebrated culinary continuity in our community with the recognition of 50 years of Manuel’s Restaurant hosted by Leonardo and Patricia Santana, Thirty years of Severino’s,
and 25 years of Seascape Village and the Palapas.

We also celebrated the 4th of July in 2015 as we do each year and the Chamber presented its Man and Woman of the Year Awards to Zach Friend, 2nd District Supervisor, Santa Cruz County and to Christy Licker of Caroline’s Thrift Store.

Aptos Sports continues to be a center of community pride with the accomplishments of its Little League teams at all levels, the repeat league and CCS championship of the Mariners football team, SCCAL Girls Volleyball Co-Champions, SCCAL Boys Basketball Champions, the Mariners Wrestling Team and the accomplishments of its girls cross county team as League and CCS Champions.

The La Selva train trestle was completed and dedicated opening up the whole of the rail corridor from Watsonville to Davenport to potential freight and passenger service in the future.

A new series written by UCSC scientists and initiated by Gary Griggs, Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UCSC on such topics as sea level change and ocean noise has become a regular feature in our newspapers.

And finally, a twenty-year effort to provide a community park in Seacliff saw its completion with the ground breaking and ribbon cutting occurring within 120 days of each other for the Seacliff Village Park. Two generations of Santa Cruz County Supervisors of the 2nd District, Ellen Pirie and Zach Friend saw it through along with the project’s originators Pepper Golesh and Kate Minott.

Looking to the future in 2016 for Aptos is the beginning construction of Aptos Village, continued construction and controversy concerning the Monterey Bay Rail Trail and the elections of 2016 with several local sales and property tax measures concerning everything from libraries to transportation on the ballot.

Happy New Year!