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| Youth Participant - Joel Krammer |
| Binding |
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In the past month, the City of Solana Beach put its finishing touches on a
monument that bound the community together over the sandy walls of a gap carved
by passing trains. Today, residents can briskly walk over the Rosa Bridge to
Solana Beach's coast alongside their neighbors. But in the earlier Solana
Beach, bridges were not the usual order for binding neighbors together.
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Maurice was from a small town. Grant, Iowa had roughly 500 residents, nearly
all farmers. Grant, and a handful of neighboring towns, was also the sole
region that Maurice had ever seen until his graduation from high school at age
16. Immediately after graduation he ventured out West, hitchhiking his way to
Washington and Oregon, where he picked apples before a temporary return to his
family's new settlement in Minnesota. But he came back. Quickly.
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The Solana Beach that Maurice was attracted to in 1937 was a small town the
size of grant. Conley's Dairy on El Camino Real, where Maurice worked for 25
years, was a common representation of the Southern California farming community
that he was a part of.
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No longer. Today the agriculture industry that Maurice participated in when he
first came to Solana Beach has long since been replaced with a growth that has
magnified the size of the community and its neighbors into the thousands. With
the increase in development, the community has found it necessary to build
structures like the Rosa Bridge to connect the gaps formed by recent
construction. However, alongside this bridge lies a wealth of communal adhesive
yet to be applied.
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It is in the straining of even the youngest ear that the glory of a Solana
Beach legacy can be heard. It does not require the drumming of bullets from a
young farmer's escape through the South Pacific battleground to deafen an ear.
The norm of the present, that regular fear to confront a past who is rocking in
a chair next door, prevents binding with much greater ease. The Aged are here
to speak, to share the pages etched in hands that grew cornstalks, that picked
apples, and in the hands that only regarded a bridge as a section of the road
on the ride out to the West.
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Grant, Iowa may still have 500 residents, but Solana Beach and the population
of greater Southern California have experienced a spasm of growth. If we as a
community can listen past the norm, and adhere to the speech of our elders
rocking next door, that spasm may only be the growth and completion of the
legacy of Today.
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