I enjoy the vibes of a good city. I grew up in Montana and still remember the excitement of arriving in San Francisco and San Jose, CA in 1969 to go to college. Just reading a good column by the late Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle was a new experience to me, then a journalism student, because there weren’t any big-time columnists like him in Montana newspapers.

Later, I got to meet and interview Caen for my hometown Billings paper. Subsequently, while still a student at San Jose State University, I interviewed his assistant, Jerry Bundsen, a cartoonist and leg man for Caen, and a graduate of SJSU. It didn’t hurt my grade that Bundsen used to date my then magazine teacher, Delores Spurgeon, when they were both students there!

California in one sense is like one big city to me that has become my “beat”. There is a certain electricity in the California air that I miss when I return to the vast, wide open spaces of Montana, or other more sparsely settled states. The magnetism of California draws me back every time. I’ve gone to Folsom Prison with Johnny Cash and June Carter in 1968 to record a concert that became historic. I hung out with a crazy writer by the name of Ray Bradbury in the late 60s and early 70s that led to doing a biography on him, Ray Bradbury Uncensored!

Today my wife and I are retired and live in a waterfront condo in Stockton, CA, across the street from the largest marina in North America. We can go for a ride in her 6′ fiberglass paddlewheel boat with a cheat electric trolling motor on it to glide around the man- made lake, or walk across the street to get in our 26′ runabout cabin cruiser to access 1,000 miles of waterways in the California Delta estuary. We love to hop in the cabin cruiser to go to Taco Tuesdays at Windmill Cove on the Stockton Deep Water Channel about 20 minutes cruise from our home port and meet new friends there. Or, when company comes, we frequently take them to downtown Stockton where we can just sit on the Janet Leigh brick plaza in front of Starbucks, next to the City Center Cinema, and people watch.

Stockton has invested millions of dollars in the facelift redevelopment program downtown and you can now choose going to the movies at the multiplex theater, taking in big name entertainment at the Bob Hope Fox Theater, or attending the Stockton Ports baseball games at the waterfront ballpark. Weber Park across from City Center Cinema also offers a great variety of entertainment that ranges from the annual Asparagus Festival to ice skating during the Christmas season. I believe Stockton, which suffers from a lot of bad press, due to crime statistics, is the new Cinderella city of California.

The great thing about living in the city of Stockton is, if we want country, just going out in the boat on the California Delta is like dropping through an imaginary black hole that takes us back to the 1800s with rural scenery, no signs, and is free of franchise restaurants.

We feel we’ve got it all and housing prices are rather reasonable by California standards. My wife keeps telling me not to write articles like this to tell other people about it, for fear there will be too many people moving here, like what happened to us in our last residence of Morgan Hill, where we lived for 20 years. Sorry, Dear, but the website said they pay money for articles.