SM to honor long-time residents, history at dinner
SAN MARTIN – Generations of history rooted in the soils of San Martin will be honored at the second annual San Martin Neighborhood Alliance dinner for the community’s old-timers.
Many of them come from farming families, and most have spent their entire lives in the community.
Several have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who chose to remain here.
Leo Ludewig, now 81, remembers when the town was a small farming community surrounded by orchards on both sides of U.S. Highway 101.
“Then, people had to drive around a huge oak tree that sat in the middle of it until it was widened in the 1930’s,” he said.
Six generations of Ludewig’s family still live on 30 acres of land on the corner of California Avenue and Monterey Road.
His parents and grandfather bought the land in 1918.
Ludewig remembers his mother Emma running a shop there where she sold special fruit packages back in 1937.
“I used to sell fireworks back when my mother ran the candy store,” he said.
Now, Ludewig runs his own business, a real estate office next to the family ranch. That’s adjacent to a Christmas tree farm and outdoor recreation center with a train ride for children and pumpkin patch that his son Kenneth runs.
Ludewig remembers the real train bringing famous people by, and the train station engineer announcing the engine’s comings and goings.
“Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Liberace even stopped here,” he said.
Ted and Tamako Kubuta, who are also being honored at the dinner, say their fondest memory is still thriving – a Japanese maple tree they planted in their garden more than 47 years ago.
Ted Kubota was three years old when his parents moved to San Martin to farm. That was just one year before the Great Depression.
Ted Kubota, 78, spent most of his life in San Martin except for when his family was sent to an internment camp for Japanese and Japanese-Americans in Arizona.
After being released from the internment camp, Kubota worked for the U.S. Air Force as a civilian.
“I was supposed to graduate from Live Oak high school, but my family was sent to a relocation center in Arizona from 1943-1945,” Kubota said.
With a smile, Kubota said that he still sees a few of his classmates who are around and that they always invite him to the class reunions.
From transportation training in Fort Ord to moving barges and freighters shortly after the war in Korea in1954.
Warren Gwinn, 72, said that six generations of Gwinns, including his wife Ethel and four children, will celebrate 100 years of the family residing in San Martin this August.
San Martin/Gwinn Elementary School is named for Gwinn’s father Raymond, who sat on the grammar school board of trustees for 20 years.
“People said that he had common sense to be able to sit on a board of any big corporation as a self-taught man with only an eighth grade education,” Gwinn said.
Gwinn’s family history began here on a ranch with prunes, walnuts, apricots and cattle farmed by his father and uncle.
Today, Gwinn lives on the remaining two acres of the family’s farm where he and Ethel built their home 42 years ago. Gwinn spends his time tinkering in his shop after retiring two years ago as a cabinetmaker.
From the living room of Rudy Siderits and his wife Maxine’s home, an elm tree planted by Rudy’s parents 57 years ago shades their front yard. It also hangs over their son’s house, which they have a full view of.
The Siderits and their son share a five-acre property bought by Rudy Siderits’ parents who moved to San Martin from New York in 1947 by way of Austria.
“They came to farm prunes and chickens,” said Siderits.
Despite having to get around with his walker, Rudy Siderits, 73, said that he and Maxine get out every now and then for dinner with friends, especially with a group from his alma mater, Gilroy High School.
Maxine said that she honors the past by keeping tables that belonged to her husband’s parents and her art collection.
Connie Ludewig, the event coordinator, who is married to Ludewig’s son Stephen, said that the annual dinner began as a fund-raiser to help with the cost of running the alliance, the township fund to help towards the community becoming incorporated and to honor the older folks.
“We are really lucky to have people who have grown up all their lives here. I find that inspiring,” Connie Ludewig said.
As the old-timers are being honored for their connection to the past, they will share stories of things they remember and things that are affecting their lives now.
“It’s exciting to give back to those who have been such a great part of the community,” Connie Ludewig said.
