Nearly a lifetime San Jose resident, Ben Mayberry now lives and works in Marina, California as the marketing & event operations coordinator for the CSU Monterey Bay athletics department. He hopes to become an assistant coach for the baseball team next year. He returns to San Jose to visit his parents frequently, and still thinks of spending the weekend at their house as going “home.”

I was born in San Jose on January 15, 1984.  I spent my whole life in pretty much the same area. We moved when I was six months old so we lived in the same house all but the first six months of my life. We lived off Branham and Snell. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood but it wasn’t in a good area either. It’s working class. People are not necessarily struggling but not well off.

At first the neighborhood was all younger white families. We were surrounded by kids my age — kids my brother’s age — and we all just played all the time, throughout the whole neighborhood. The neighborhood had an elementary school; we walked to school. We had a community park and pool round the corner from my house. In the summertime, we were outside in the morning, all day, until the streetlights came on. We went to the park to play games, went to the pool—that was a daily thing. I played a lot of sports growing up. I played football, basketball, baseball, soccer, all that.

Our little area was a mixture of fields and neighborhoods. I remember playing in the fields. Then, the spaces where all the fields were became apartment complexes and strip malls. I was so young, that became the norm really quick.

Growing up my dad was a supervisor for a distributing company. They distributed for stores like Albertsons, not big stores like Safeway. My dad got laid off from that company a couple years ago. He was 55 years old when he got laid off. It was tough. But right when he got laid off, his buddy, who had a catering company, said come work for me. This guy owned the pizza place around the block from us. When he opened that pizza place my dad was one of the first customers that went in there and talked to him. They became best friends and he offered him a job when he needed it.

After a while the catering stuff got to be too much for my dad and another buddy of his, who owned a landscape construction company, said come work for me, so he did.

My mom worked for Orchard Supply Hardware as an administrative assistant. She worked there for 30 years and just got laid off. Now she works for the Diabetes Society.

Now the neighborhood is way different than it used to be. Not a lot of people who have been there as long as we have.  All of our friends moved away, the families they moved somewhere else. A couple moved to Sacramento, others moved to other neighborhoods. I think a couple of them were renting and moved to another house, that kind of thing. Now you never see kids playing there. It seems like all the houses in my neighborhood, they’re all renters now.

These days our street is pretty quiet. Our next door neighbor on one side, they’re an Asian family—a really big family, they have cousins and uncles and everybody lives there. But none of them speak English. And then on the other side is a younger, wealthier family. They’re cordial and talk and say hi, but that’s about it. My parents kind of keep to themselves. I think they would like to retire somewhere else but who knows when they’ll be able to do that.

It’s weird, because you see a lot of huge apartment complexes go up, but they’re all vacant. They aren’t full, there aren’t people in them. I think that shows that the area was supposed to grow, be more populated, have more people and more money. But it doesn’t.

I don’t know if that’s typical or not, how the neighborhoods change.

Contributed by Liz MacDonald