My name is Sharon Abernethy and I am the mother of five. I live in Santa Cruz, California and I’ve lived here almost all my life, except for a stint in Los Gatos and seven years in Oregon.

I was born in San Jose, but as a young child I lived in Santa Cruz. I think we moved from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz when I was about four. Then we moved back to Los Gatos when I was in about the third grade. We lived there and I eventually attended high school at Los Gatos high, and went to college at San Jose state. I came back to Santa Cruz when I was married in 1962.

Early on, my father worked as a draftsman for a company that built homes, particularly in Aptos. Sometimes I can still recognize his house is because they used Carmel rock around the foundation of the home.

My dad had asthma, which is why we moved to Los Gatos which had a warmer climate. My mother had grown up in Los Gatos, and we stayed there for years. I loved Los Gatos high.

My grandmother and grandmother have a little write-up in one of Margaret Koch’s history books about this area. They just lived here a very long time. So I figure simultaneously with the Salz Leather tannery getting started up my grandfather would have been working as a sawyer. He built a cabin up on Summit road that we owned until nearly 1960. Then we sold it.

It’s still there but it doesn’t look like a cabin anymore. They had lived in Los Gatos but they always had this cabin.