Gina Reyes (City of Ventura), Mary Thompson (Vice President Olivas Adobe Historical Interpreters-AKA docents) with Glenda the doggie, Frank Shugart (Olivas Adobe Historical Interpreter) and Kathryn Dippong Lawson (City of Ventura) sprucing up Olivas. Photo by Richard Lieberman

by Richard Lieberman

The Olivas Adobe, an adobe structure, was built in 1841 by Raymundo Olivas on the north bank of the Santa Clara River. While the home was built in 1841 it was expanded in 1849 to include a second story which made it unique at the time. The land had originally been part of a grazing area for the cattle herds of Mission San Buenaventura. Olivas and his wife and twenty-one children lived at the site until 1889. It later became Max Fleischmann’s hunting lodge and after his death, his foundation donated the land and the house to the City of Ventura.

Two city workers and two volunteers took advantage of the city ordered temporary closure of the site to make needed repairs and perform routine maintenance.

Kathryn Dippong Lawson, Public Arts and Historic Sites Manager for the city of Ventura said, “Parks and recreation oversees Olivas Adobe and normally at this time of year Olivas Adobe is full of concerts and rentals and we don’t have the time to do a lot of maintenance.” She also added, “We decided in this time we would take care of some things that we wanted to take care of. Our Ramadas (small wooden carts) that are in the courtyard get moved around during an event and we decided to replace the top of them.”

“The tops are replaced with branches found in the river bottom which are difficult to find.” Said Frank Shugart a volunteer on the project.

“We decided to do this while the site was shut down this was just a good time to do it.” Said Gina Reyes Historic Site Coordinator for the city. “We have been working on this for three weeks and hope to finish by the end of the week,” said Gina Reyes. Gina oversees all the historic sites which includes the museum and runs all cultural tours and excursion programs.

“This time of year, we have a stage up every weekend making it difficult to accomplish any of the normal maintenance needed,” said Frank Shugart a volunteer for the project.

Mary Thompson, Vice President of Olivas Adobe Docents and historical interpreter is also a member of the Board of Directors. Mary in addition to her many duties at Olivas Adobe is also on staff at the Ventura Breeze and has been for many years. Mary is also responsible for decorating the outside of the venue for the Christmas Holidays. “I also plan events and field trips,” Thompson said. “I have been volunteering here for the past eleven years,” she added. Mary goes back a long way on her journey to becoming a docent and general volunteer “I first came here on a school field trip when I was in the fourth grade,” “My sister was also married here in 1977,” she said.

Hopefully we can all look forward to a time when the Corona Virus is better controlled and Olivas Adobe will once again be open to the public.

Leaving plenty of room on a wave at C Street in Ventura.

by Amy Brown

Years ago in the Bay Area I remember just learning to surf, paddling back out to the lineup with an ice cream headache and what little strength I had left after yet another humiliating wipeout, when a surfer rode a wave straight towards me. I didn’t know what to do to get out of the way, so I froze. I had a vague plan that combined hoping that the oncoming surfer would steer around me, with some ambiguous idea that if I remained motionless, maybe they wouldn’t be able to see me being so stupid, like in Jurassic Park. I was wrong. It is the responsibility of the paddler to get out of the way, and in doing so, avoid going right in front of someone riding towards you—you go behind them, or speed up and get out of the way to avoid being run over.

Surfing is an incredible way to experience the ocean—gliding down the face of a wave, feeling the combined peace and power of the ocean propelling you—it’s no wonder that surfers have a reputation for being laid back. However, the fastest way to see just the opposite from the lineup is to paddle out without knowing and following surfing etiquette. This code of conduct is for everyone’s safety and enjoyment, and if you are out there without adhering to it, you are in danger of hurting someone, or at the very least drawing the ire of the entire group.

All surfers started out as beginners, so there is some tolerance for the learning curve, but it is the beginner’s responsibility to learn the basic tenets and avoid being a kook—a pejorative term for someone who is either disrespectful or seriously (and often dangerously) ignorant. So whether that’s waxing the underside of your board or having fins the wrong direction, or—infinitely worse—taking off on waves that aren’t yours, learn how to avoid this label and you’ll have a better time, and so will everyone else. Check out Kook of The Day on Instagram for some cautionary tales. Thankfully Instagram didn’t yet exist while I was trying to teach myself to surf, otherwise I could have been featured on that site with shocking regularity.

Right of way and wave priority are the touchstones of surfing etiquette rules. The surfer with the closest proximity to the wave peak has the right of way. If they pass on the wave, or miss it, the right of way goes to the next in line. And speaking of priority—don’t snake, or cut the lineup by paddling around someone waiting to position yourself in a priority position. And for the love of all things holy, don’t drop in—if someone has the right of way or is already riding a wave, do not take off in front of them. This is incredibly dangerous and incredibly rude.

Another safety mandate: don’t ditch your board. You risk cutting off a surfer riding towards you, or hitting others paddling out and causing injuries. You are responsible for having your board under your control. Now, this doesn’t mean if you catch a wave and wipeout that you have to grab your board midair—ditching refers primarily to abandoning it when paddling. So, if you see a giant wave breaking as you’re sitting on your board or paddling—resist the urge to ditch your board and dive down to escape the impact zone—grab the rails as tight as you can and roll over (turtle) or duck dive if you are using a shortboard.

Acknowledging a mistake will go a long way towards restoring the vibe after you make the wrong call, and if you’re new, that’s bound to happen. Take a lesson, there’s plenty of local pros to help you learn. And don’t forget to respect others, and respect the ocean and beach that provides all this amazing surfing—and leave it cleaner than when you arrived.

Take a virtual visit.

Channel Islands National Park has developed a new digital app to enhance the visitor experience in the park that can also be used to take a virtual visit. The new mobile app is free and available at the App Store or on Google Play.

Features in the app include exploring the islands through stories, sites, self-guided tours, and interactive maps, or finding favorite places, trails, and topics of interest. Visitors can use the app to create a collage of the images from your visit or to track a calendar of current conditions, events, or ranger programs. The app is fully accessible with audio description and alternative text for images. To learn more go to NPS Channel Islands App.

Visitors to Santa Rosa Island will discover a new coastal trail on the marine terrace that boasts stunning views of Carrington and Skunk Points, Water Canyon Beach, and the Torrey pine forest. This short route from the pier to the campground provides a welcome glimpse of the magnificent marine and terrestrial resources visitors will encounter during their stay.

Island Packers, the park’s boat transportation concessioner, has expanded options for day and overnight trips to each of the islands. Popular trips this summer include non-landing whale watch excursions in search of blue and humpback whales and multi-island same day landings at both Prisoners Harbor on Santa Cruz Island and Anacapa Island. Marine wildlife sightings this past week included 14 blue whales, several humpback whales, and thousands of common dolphins.

Kayak concessioner Santa Barbara Adventure Company is providing kayak tours out of Prisoners Harbor on Santa Cruz Island. They will resume snorkel and kayak tours at Scorpion Anchorage on Santa Cruz Island when the new pier construction is completed in the fall.

The National Park Service has more than 20,000 National Park Service employees who care for America’s 419 national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities.

Learn more at www.nps.gov.

Badges are designed to help girls practice ambitious leadership in new fields.

Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast and Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) have announced 24 new badges designed to help girls practice ambitious leadership in the crucial areas of automotive engineering, STEM career exploration, entrepreneurship, and civics, many of which remain male-dominated. In a year of unprecedented global change, our country’s need for strong, broad-minded, and decisive leadership has never been greater. Through new and existing programming, Girl Scouts equips the next generation of female change-makers with the breadth of knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to take charge and do good for the world, both now and in the future.

Steady leadership is essential during a crisis such as COVID-19, from fostering trust and

showing compassion, to managing challenges with agility, to evaluating outcomes of decisions. The Girl Scout program is proven to develop strong and effective leaders—among many positive outcomes, Girl Scouts are much likelier than non-Girl Scouts to take an active role in decision making (80% vs. 51%), which is a critical aspect of leadership.

“Now more than ever, it’s critical that we have strong leaders who can make informed decisions that make the world a better, safer place,” said GSUSA CEO Sylvia Acevedo. “During our current health crisis, the world leaders who have been among the most decisive and effective in addressing the pandemic have been women. With these new badge experiences in STEM, entrepreneurship, and the critically important subject of civics, Girl Scouts is continuing to build the transformational female leaders of today and the future and showing girls the power they have to truly change the world.”

Girl Scouts has made free self-guided activities from select new and existing programming

available digitally to the public through Girl Scouts at Home™, keeping families engaged and connected to their communities. Girls can further engage with the badges and topics through online videos, activities, or special live virtual events. Members can access a suite of Girl

Scouts’ programming digitally through the Volunteer Toolkit, including troop meeting plans and other resources to help girls earn badges and awards. Girls currently waiting to be placed in a troop can join a Virtual Friendship Troop, where they will make new friends and participate in Girl Scout activities from the comfort of their home. Find a variety of additional activities hosted by Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast, including at-home programs and live virtual events, by visiting our At-Home Programs page.

In addition, beginning this summer, all councils will also have the opportunity to host their own Girl Scout Cyber Challenge sponsored by Raytheon Technologies, enabling middle and high school girls to learn crucial cybersecurity skills as they compete in challenges such as running traceroutes and identifying phishing schemes. The Cyber Challenge prepares girls to pursue careers in computer science and cybersecurity.

To join or volunteer, visit www.girlscouts.org/join.

by M. Scott

Racism: Defined by Mirriam-Webster:

1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2a: a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles
b: a political or social system founded on racism

3: racial prejudice or discrimination

The History and Dictionary Meaning of Racism

Racism appears to be a word of recent origin, with no citations currently known that would suggest the word was in use prior to the early 20th century. But the fact that the word is fairly new does not prove that the concept of racism did not exist in the distant past. Things may have words to describe them before they exist (spaceship, for instance, has been in use since the 19th century, well before the rocket-fired vessels were invented), and things may exist for a considerable time before they are given names (t-shirt does not appear in print until the 20th century, although the article of clothing existed prior to 1900).

Race/Ethnicity/Humility (ESPN):

“……….In a nutshell, what’s happened to Newton and his contract is unprecedented in recent NFL history. And there’s no explanation for such a small contract for a once transcendent talent other than a league of mostly white executives viewing Newton as not worth the headache, a reputation Newton has not earned.

Regardless, since his breakout season at Auburn in 2010, Newton has been viewed as a problem in need of humility. He is too arrogant, his celebrations are too … celebratory, he pouts when he loses. Never mind that those same characteristics could describe any white quarterback, particularly the one Newton is replacing in New England.
But in the history of American sports, most notably football, Black athletes are expected to be absent of charisma or anger or hubris. Black wide receivers of the previous decade were “divas.” Every season there’s a new boisterous cornerback who elicits media attention and scrutiny: Richard Sherman to Norman to Jalen Ramsey. For Black quarterbacks, if they aren’t viewed as docile or bashful in the vein of Russell Wilson or Patrick Mahomes, they’re problematic. Michael Vick rubbed white America the wrong way long before Bad Newz Kennels.

Sociologists found a link between race/ethnicity and humility, which included the personality traits of “conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional awareness, the absence of narcissism, low self-esteem.” African Americans (and Arab Americans) showed more characteristics that lined up with humility than white Americans. In short, there’s an expectation for Black people to be humble, but not for white Americans.

NFL’s Redskins renamed as Washington Football Team for 2020 season

The NFL team formerly known as the Redskins will go by the Washington Football Team for at least the 2020 season, giving the organization time to choose a new, full-time name. The team has been known as the Redskins since 1933. Gone are the head logo and the name Native American advocates have called a dictionary-defined racial slur.

Is Black Lives Matter a Marxist movement?

From Tom Kertscher (PolitiFact)

Backlash against Black Lives Matter includes branding it as Marxist. The attack has been made in recent weeks by Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer; Ben Carson, Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development; conservative talk show host Mark Levin; and PragerU, which has more than 4 million Facebook followers.

Marxism was developed by 19th century German philosopher Karl Marx and is the basis for the theory of communism and socialism. “Marxism envisioned the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat (working class people) and eventually a classless communist society,” Encyclopedia Britannica and Oxford Reference say.
These days, Marxism usually means analyzing social change through an economic lens, with the assumption that the rich and the poor should become more equal.

In a recently surfaced 2015 interview, one of the three Black Lives Matter co-founders declared that she and another co-founder “are trained Marxists.”

But the movement has grown and broadened dramatically. Many Americans, few of whom would identify as Marxists, support Black Lives Matter, drawn to its message of anti-racism.

“Regardless of whatever the professed politics of people may be who are prominent in the movement, they don’t represent its breadth,” said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University African American Studies professor and author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.”

“There are definitely socialists within the movement, as there have been in every single social movement in 20th century American history and today. But that does not make those socialist movements, it makes them mass movements,” she said.

NY Times (Roger Cohen)

“….no people has found the American lurch toward authoritarianism under President Trump more alarming than the Germans. For postwar Germany, the United States was savior, protector and liberal democratic model. Now, Germans, in shock, speak of the American catastrophe.

Michael Steinberg, a professor of history at Brown University and the former president of the American Academy in Berlin, wrote to me this week:

“…..the events in Portland have particularly alarmed me as a kind of strategic experiment for fascism. The playbook from the German fall of democracy in 1933 seems well in place including rogue military factions, the destabilization of cities, etc. The basic comparison involves racism as a political strategy; a racist imaginary of a pure homeland, with cities demonized as places of decadence.

Black Voices in History

Call out Quote: ”Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”
The Honorable John Robert Lewis
(February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020)

John Robert Lewis was an American politician and civil-rights leader who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020.

Lewis was one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. He fulfilled many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States. In 1965, Lewis led the Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In an incident which became known as Bloody Sunday, armed Alabama police attacked unarmed civil rights demonstrators, including Lewis, Hosea Williams, and Amelia Boynton.

Juan Mancera, George Alger, Michelle Hoover and May Christine Ballestero have helped pass one million.

Our Ventura TV recently surpassed a million online views, all in addition to multiple millions of television views on Ventura cable channel 6 TV.

Our Ventura TV is an award-winning weekly talk-show television series broadcast on Ventura cable channel 6 TV and also published on OurVentura.com as well as on social media networks. The programs are primarily about individuals, nonprofits, community advocates, leaders, artists and organizations who contribute in some way to the Ventura County community.

Since the series began in 2008, the theme for the TV series has been “People doing good things in Ventura County” and the surrounding area. The majority of programs are talk shows featuring guests who are interviewed about their community activities. Additionally, there are music and other creative productions.

The series is produced by George Alger and directed by Michelle Hoover. Several of the most active hosts include Sandra Siepak, MB Hanrahan and Monique Nowlin, as well as George Alger. Some of the key crew include Mary Christine Ballestero and Juan Mancera.

As a result of the pandemic the series expanded to integrate video conferencing so that guests can get their message out from their own home or office.

Producer George Alger said: “We’ve been honored to broadcast many individuals and organizations over the years and we wish to include your message, as well.”

If you’d like to be a guest on Our Ventura TV, just visit OurVentura.com and click “Contact” to get scheduled. There’s no cost for non-commercial messages.

Note: Breeze publisher Sheldon Brown and Staci Brown have been featured on the show.

A replica of the Tomol, might grace the front of our City Hall.

Text and photo ©Robert Chianese [email protected]

Native Chumash representatives, the City of San Buenaventura, and the Ventura Mission Church have reached agreement to move the large statue of Father Junipero Serra that fronts the Ventura City Hall to the nearby Mission grounds. This may end the fight over where to site the statue of this iconic figure, a saint to some, to others an enslaver and cruel master to Native Californians up and down the state.

People’s heightened awareness of America’s real history enables its shameful legacy of enslavement, dominance of indigenous peoples, and oppression of minorities to take center stage. That grows out of the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality this spring, and makes Serra’s central public place in Ventura’s community untenable for many. He should exit his pedestal, a santo obscando. The chain link cage around him protects him from being defaced or torn down before he can be moved, with bouquets and votive offerings signaling support of others.

Who or what to put in his place?

I propose that we Venturans commemorate the original founders of Buenaventura– the Chumash who established a village here called Shishalop. (Earlier residents, the Oak Grove Peoples, are obscured in the veils of pre-history.)

Specifically, a bronze replica of their fantastic ocean-going canoe, the Tomol, might grace the front of our City Hall. As a city monument, the Tomol would honor the Chumash’s look to the ocean and mastery of seagoing life and wise selection of a magnificent site to settle in, as we have done today. Placed on top the Padre pedestal, it would look out to the sea with ancient longing, but also with the heroic energy and ingenuity that these native peoples put to the complex engineering task of building these ocean-going watercraft that enabled strong, kneeling paddlers to cross to the Channel Islands.

A tomol at the Ventura Albinger Archaeological Museum, made by modern Chumash, clearly shows the deep-V curvilinear shape for speed and breaking through waves and planing on top of the water with a high bow and stern. The planking, binding and decorative details show the attention to their engineering artistry. A replica could proudly front our Ventura City Hall.

We already have a sculptural replica of the tomol. It graces the side of the downtown parking structure, vertically aligned with the building, its paddles forming an abstract pattern when the shadows are right. However, it’s more artistry than history and somewhat hidden from view.

A separate tomol sculpture in front of City Hall would bring to civic consciousness Native history and artistry, the painful ravages of racism, and the city’s modern commitment to the accurate portrayal of the past through an object worthy of public excitement and even veneration.