Cover Story continued
<from Home page>released “The Wall” and the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious died of a drug overdose.
The then three top television networks had a monopoly on TV entertainment – withMASH, Dallas and Alice among the Top Five shows. Walter Cronkite dominated theevening news. General Hospital moved to the top of daytime ratings for the firsttime.
President Jimmy Carter was flummoxed that fall by the taking of hostages in the U. S. Embassy in Iran. Barack Obama graduated from high school that year. Kate Hudson, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Heath Ledger were born. The notion of small, easily accessible cell phones was years away, as was the idea of a readily available personal computer hooked up to the internet.
The residents in the Santa Cruz of 1980 thought they had already experienced dramatic change. In 1962, the University of California had located here, with the first students arriving in 1965 – and the county population had more than doubled from the 84,000 people that called Santa Cruz County their home in 1960.
When UCSC opened, Santa Cruz had one of the highest percentages of older people in the nation. The area was a hub of tourist activity from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The rest of the year it was left to the locals.
The arrival of UCSC left behind that sleepy, older Santa Cruz forever. By 1979,campus enrollment had grown to about 5,500 students, but university leaders wereworried the campus had topped out. By the time the sons and daughters of BabyBoomers came of university age, UCSC enrollment tripled to more than 16,700 in2009.
The newcomers to Santa Cruz in the ‘60s and ‘70s were more environmentally oriented and also concerned about the rapid growth. In 1980, voters had just passed a measure that not only slowed the number of annual building permits allowed, but zoned for greenbelt areas surrounding the City.
Political activism moved in many directions. The voters taxed themselves a half-cent sales tax for public transit. Rent control came within a few votes of being enacted.
Santa Cruz had been a safely Republican county forever. Presidential candidateRonald Reagan would win the County in 1980 with 43.5% of the vote, turning outto be the last time a Republican would lead the Presidential voting here.
The Santa Cruz Sentinel had been publishing for well over a century at this point, and had been owned and run by generations of the McPherson family. It published each afternoon and had never endorsed a Democrat for President. An attempt to start a competing daily, the Morning Star, had failed in the mid-1970s. The McPhersons eventually sold the paper after 100+ years in family ownership. And then, the Sentinel broke its tradition by endorsing Democrat Bill Clinton for President.
The alternative world of journalism was thriving in Santa Cruz before the Student Guide’s first issue arrived. A series of alternative weeklies had published on shoestring budgets since shortly after UCSC arrived – from the Free Spaghetti Dinner to Sundaz to the People’s Buy and Sell Press. The Santa Cruz Times started in 1976, renaming itself the Good Times shortly thereafter and switching its focus to entertainment. It shared the weekly journalistic scene with the collectively-published lefty Phoenix, the Santa Cruz Independent, and UCSC’s City on a Hill Press. The Santa Cruz Weekly, formerly the Metro, is the latest incarnation of that long tradition along with the still-publishing Good Times and City On a Hill.
The Catalyst started in the old St. George Hotel in the late 1960s as a cooperative business. In 1976, it moved into an old bowling alley on Pacific Avenue and soon was one of the few businesses open into the night, as downtown Santa Cruz closed up at about 6 p.m. Virtually no one lived in the core downtown, except at the Palomar. There were still two downtown department stores, Leasks and Fords, and you could actually buy clothes and hardware at different downtown locations.
After the earthquake, that completely changed. The downtown of today – coffeehouses, trendy shops, plenty of restaurants, bars and theaters open into thenight – with hundreds of people living on upper floors of buildings built afterthe 1989 earthquake, would be unrecognizable to the Santa Cruz denizens of 1980.
In 1969, the Nickelodeon opened as a one-screen theatre on Lincoln Street in an old bakery. By 1976 it opened a second screen – and in the ensuing years added additional space and was joined in ownership with a longtime downtown theatre, the Del Mar.
Above where Jamba Juice is now, you could step into the past just by going upstairs to Don Yee’s Tea Cup in the old Flat Iron Building. The Santa Cruz Hotel’s Red Room had photos of the former Miss California winners decorating its walls. The Bubble Bakery, which gradually became the Bubble Café, operated just down the street – by the 1980s still a traditional bakery and breakfast place, but one of the few places in the world where you could get Huevos Rancheros made with tofu. The Bubble and the Tea Cup didn’t make it after the ‘89 earthquake.
In the early ‘70s, local bus service was operated by the Santa Cruz Transit Company. There was one hourly run up to campus in those days, and UCSC students taxed themselves for bus service just as the Santa Cruz Metro came into being. By 1980, the Metro’s downtown transit center was a bus pullout by the old Long’s Drugstore at Front and Soquel streets. The site of the old Penny’s store became Metro Center in the early 1980s, and anchored increased bus service across the northern part of the county.
The local car of choice? Probably a Volkswagen van. The idea of a traffic jam was Ocean Street to the beach and Boardwalk on a warm summer day – backing up traffic on Highway 17, which was full of twists and turns and had no center divider. Political tension began and continues today between those who want to widen the highway and the environmental movement that does not.
The Santa Cruz of 1980 seemed to those who were here then as a place that had recently grown and was forming its own modern sense of community, on the brink of many different political, cultural and economic changes. The downtown of today is around-the-clock with an ever-vibrant culinary, journalistic and economic climate. The Student Guide has been there all the way, through all this change – chronicling it all.
John Laird is a former Santa Cruz Mayor and State Assemblyman who came to Santa Cruz in 1968 to attend UCSC. <END – back to Home>