Page 57 - People & Places In Time

Growing Up In Exeter
Downtown Exeter circa 1910 ~ About the time my grandparents arrived
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because
we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty; and yet it all seems limitless.”
Paul Bowles ~ The Sheltering Sky
E xeter today, has remained a small town; though it has grown to somewhere beyond 10,000 people. In the 1940’s it was a very small town of perhaps 3,500. I haven’t lived here in over fifty years. However, when I’m in town, I see only the Exeter where I grew up. The town, it was said at the time had more millionaires per capita than any other city or town in the US maybe, maybe not. These so-called millionaires were the farmers and ranchers whose land surrounds the town, the economic soul of Exeter; for that matter the whole of the central valley is about, land and agriculture, to which we are inextricably a part. Even today when I hear a family name that was part of that time, I will recognize the family and their role in the building of Exeter; it’s how I’m able to weave new people that I meet into the fabric of my past. If I can’t place the name, then they are likely new to town. In the 1940’s the families that built the town, and our family is one of those, still remained active in the community and in some instances they still are.
Following victory over Japan and with an end to war in Europe; the soldiers who returned home, were the young men and boys who had left only a few long and difficult years before. They returned to marry the girlfriends with whom they had grown up; not always of course, sometimes they met someone from a neigh- boring town, which was really just the same. Those surrounding towns, Lindsey,
Downtown Exeter circa 2017 ~ With the original granite curbs quaried in Yokohl Valley
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