Somis : City Bustle Is Never Heard in Hamlet Where Pace Makes It an Anachronism on Los Angeles’ Doorstep

Three minutes shy of noon, an express train whistled across the field of lima beans stretching east from Somis. Field hands carried a lunch of burritos and sodas from the Somis Cafe and joined a group of men reclining under a row of giant pepper trees.

A knot of boys raced their bicycles up the sidewalk toward Fulkerson Hardware, where Bob Fulkerson was scratching out a sales slip before closing for lunch, just as his dad and granddad had done since 1912.

It was another languid day in Somis, a central Ventura County hamlet 55 miles from downtown Los Angeles where the rhythms of rural life dominate.

Somis, population 375--give or take a few--has defied the outward push of Los Angeles that conjured sprawling suburbs from sleepy burgs from Simi Valley to Camarillo. And it isn’t by accident--residents here have successfully fought off development and are proud to say there isn’t one tract home in the entire township.

“When people ask me where I’m from, I’m reluctant to say Somis,” said Phyllis Dwire, a third-generation local and a town activist. “It might draw people in.”

Right now, the town suits its residents just fine. There’s a friendly mix of ages, with many young families drawn to the rural atmosphere, neighboring many longtime residents who never found a good reason to leave. About a third of Somis’ population is over 65, said Dwire, who heads the Las Posas Advisory Committee, the official group that consults with the county on local matters.

Chumash Indian Name

Somis, a named derived from Chumash Indians, was founded in 1892 and hit its stride when Southern Pacific cut its Ventura-Burbank rail line along the Arroyo Simi in 1900. Farmers settled on the heavy adobe soil of the Las Posas Valley, nurturing a green quilt of lemon and avocado groves and fields of beans, tomatoes and celery.

Farming still is the primary focus of Somis. “Rustling” of avocados (“green gold”) remains the area’s greatest social ill.

Many of the stores in the business district, a three-block stretch of Somis Road, cater to the needs of growers, including a blacksmith shop, the hardware store, a vintage gas station and Somis Cafe, where leather-skinned ranchers gather for 6 a.m. bull sessions over coffee.

A front lawn displaying two used cars serves as a dealer showroom. Speed bumps bring traffic to a crawl along North Street, an inconvenience that protects children walking to and from Somis School.

Friendships are born at barbecues, Little League games and school booster meetings.

The community sense of self-preservation cuts to deeper themes than typical anti-growth sentiments. Residents want to shelter small-town mores and the ties of family, friendship and commerce that make Somis an endearing anachronism on Los Angeles’ doorstep.

‘We’re a Tacky Little Town’

“We’re kind of a tacky little town, but you know everybody,” said resident Hazel Culbert, 78.

Old-timers and newcomers welcome the alternative to suburbia that is found in Somis, a dozen shady blocks lined with well-kept homes, many of them ranch-style buildings dating back to the early 1900s. Somis School, founded in 1895 and built along North Street in 1924, supplies the town playground, a green expanse of baseball and soccer fields crowded with shouting children on warm summer days. After eighth-grade graduation, students move on to Camarillo High School.

The town’s population has remained stable for 30 years; when a house goes on the market in Somis, it sells quickly--often to someone with ties to others who live in the town, Dwire and other residents said.

Glenda Croumie, the affable proprietor of Somis Secretarial who says she’s “in my 40s--early 40s,” said most people choose Somis over bigger communities because “they like the slow pace and time to chat with neighbors.”

Since her husband died in 1980, she’s made a living for herself and her 6-year-old son, Joey, by running a secretarial and notary public service and raising chickens on the side.

“I sell copies and eggs,” Croumie joked as 40 hens cackled away behind the house in the company of a few rabbits and ducks. Orange and lemon trees dot her yard fronting on Somis Road.

“It’s a place where I know my boy’s going to be all right,” Croumie said, recalling a July mishap in which Joey wedged his leg in the ladder of a neighbor’s pool. Ventura County firefighters, stationed just down the street, freed him.

“Now the firemen come by for copies and to say hello,” she said.

Croumie volunteers as a room mother with Barbara Dutton, whose son Erik moves to the first grade with Joey in September. Dutton will be this year’s chairwoman for room mothers for kindergarten through fourth grades.

The demure, 35-year-old Denver native moved first to Camarillo, then discovered Somis eight years ago.

“I like being in a farm area without being isolated on a farm,” Dutton said. “There’s a nice continuity here to meet friends and follow through with them for the rest of their lives.”

Started Toy Store

To support herself and her son after a divorce, she started The Creative Child, a tiny Somis Road toy store featuring puzzles, coloring packets and building-block games designed to prod youthful intellects.

The landlord of her store is Mark Wingert, an eager, young entrepreneur whose shorts and T-shirt are speckled with yellow and white paint.

Wingert, 26, has big plans for the rambling, ex-hotel that, in the early 1900s, offered cheap room and board to bachelor farm workers.

For the last 1 1/2 years, Wingert has remodeled and painted the old hotel and two adjacent houses he owns, hoping to attract restaurants and shops a year from now that can capitalize on Somis’ country charm.

He wants the merchants of Somis to advertise the town as a place to stop and shop, but promises the strategy won’t dilute the farm atmosphere.

“It will be matched to Somis. You don’t put sidewalks, street lights and stop signs in Somis,” Wingert said.

Standing next to the old hotel is Somis Thursday Club, an airy, former schoolhouse that doubles as the town

meeting hall. Inside, hardwood floors have been worn by years of square dancing, wedding receptions and club meetings.

Haven for Lonely Ladies

Once a haven for lonely farm ladies working on their mending, the club remains active with about 100 members. Nowadays, relatively few members hail from Somis, let alone from farm families. Many come from Camarillo, just a few miles south.

But they still gather at noon on the second Thursday of the month, serving up tea and finger sandwiches and listening to harpists and tenors.

One longtime member, Hazel Culbert, lives in a neat, bright yellow house on Bell Street, a stone’s throw from the Thursday Club. A cowbell tied to the gate announces visitors.

Culbert’s husband, Dewey, died 12 years ago, making Hazel Culbert “the last living wife of the five Culbert boys,” who were part of one of Somis’ prominent older families.

Dewey’s brother “Harley Culbert struck oil in the hills, you know,” she said by way of conversation as she stood on the steps outside her home.

Dewey was a citrus grower who, Hazel Culbert reminisces, just before his death asked a neighbor to keep the Culberts’ yard trimmed. The neighbor still mows the lawn.

One block over on West Street, Joaquin (Jack) Ramos Jr. says that growing up with the Culberts and other longtime Somis families--the Fulkersons, the Kitchens, the Livingstons and the Underwoods--”gave the place good harmony.” Latinos and Anglos spent lunch at Somis School trading burritos for peanut butter sandwiches, he said. Today, about a third of the town’s population is Latino, according to residents.

‘Just Like a Family’

“You could always leave your door open here. It was just like a family. In fact, we didn’t even know who was Republican or Democrat,” said Ramos, 57. The walls of his child-weathered living room display portraits of five sons and daughters. A nattering, 22-year-old parrot named Pancho flies between the kitchen and living room.

Ramos was reared in a labor camp that curved around the barranca on the north side of town. His father installed irrigation piping for ranchers.

Until 1979, when he suffered a head injury from a fall from a ladder, Ramos supervised the mechanic’s pool for Pleasant Valley Unified School District. Now he mostly stays at home with his wife, Josephine, who was also born in Somis.

Before 1966, he pumped gas at G. E. (Gib) Sawtelle’s filling station at the corner of Somis Road and Los Angeles Avenue, which is California 118.

Sawtelle, 78, boasts of being “an independent all my life” despite attempts by oil companies to lure him into a franchise. Somis Service Station offers the fill-’er-up-ma’am brand of service popular when he bought it in 1947.

“It’s all big business now--big stations, self-serve, mini-markets. I guess you could call this an old country store,” said Sawtelle, a gruff-talking businessman who wears low-cut boots and a straw hat smudged black from motor oil.

Pumps Nothing Fancy

The vintage 1924 station hangs a wooden canopy over three “not fancy or computerized” pumps. It was used for shooting gas station hold-up scenes in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“I don’t rent the place out for movies anymore. It causes too much confusion with your customers,” he said.

The business caters to farmers. Sawtelle’s grandson, George Littlejohn Jr., drives two 1,800-gallon tanker trucks for deliveries to ranchers, who run their tractors and irrigation pumps with fuel oil.

Sawtelle plans to turn the business over to his soft-spoken grandson “one of these days.”

“You get to be your own boss and you don’t have to answer to a big company,” Littlejohn, 28, remarked. “You also develop lasting friendships with customers.”

In a throwback to pre-gas-shortage times, attendants scramble to check the oil and wash the windows. They also find time to crack open the soda dispenser, grab a cold beer and enjoy a late-afternoon quencher in the service bay.

Trucks laden with fresh vegetables rumble past the station on 118, while commuters--more and more of them these days--catch a glimpse of downtown Somis.

“A few years ago you could play poker out in that intersection,” Sawtelle remembered, gazing at Somis Road and 118. “They’re pushing out from L.A., from the San Fernando Valley.

“I don’t expect Somis will be here too much longer. It will be crowded out by developers, and they don’t give a damn about Somis.”