According to the L. Times , students at a local high school worried that their sports uniforms would engender more legal letters. In an effort to smooth things over, town leaders suggested to Abercrombie that the company open an outlet in Hollister. The company does not have any recollection of this request.
Most of them work on the surrounding farms or in the few nearby factories. Hollister is an unglamorous town, but its name is now associated with some degree of taste and status all over the world. Which is odd, because the town benefits in almost no way from this success. The rise of the Hollister brand has been especially strange to me, because it was my great-great-grandfather T.
Hawkins who helped found the town of Hollister. Growing up, I was confronted daily by his white-bearded face, in an old photograph that hung in our living room in Illinois. A few feet away, his rifle, which he carried from Missouri to California, rested over our mantel. This is when T. Hawkins was born, the eldest of nine children, his parents farmers, their people having travelled from Ireland and England and Scotland to the early Virginia settlements.
The Hawkins family lived in two adjoining log cabins with one roof covering both. The boys of the family slept in the attic, near the clapboard roof, and listened to the tapping of the rain in the summer.
But in the winter when the wind blew the fine snow would drift through the interstices between the boards of the roof. In the morning, we would awake to find the bedding and the floor covered an inch or more in drifted snow.
It seems at this distance a rough life; but I do not remember that we ever considered it so, and it certainly served to make one hardy and self-reliant. They hunted squirrels and quail and the occasional possum, and they ate their own pigs, in bacon and ham form, three times a day, for months on end. You have to assume it was a fabric that breathed. Hawkins attended the customary one-room schoolhouse, a few months a year, until he was sixteen.
At that point, with his younger brothers able to take on his duties at the farm, Hawkins was freed to pursue his education. He tried his hand at teaching, and then medicine, before returning home with three hundred dollars. I was content to remain idle for a short time, spending my days floating down the Meramec in my canoe or resting under the shade of the trees. But this could not last long, and soon I commenced to look around for something to do. From our home the nearest village was twenty miles.
Scattered here and there was a country store. There was none nearer than seven or eight miles from our place, and I conceived the idea that I could establish myself in the business.
I immediately went to work with a carpenter, and by the end of July, I had a building twenty by forty feet, with shelving and counter complete. I had already gone to St. Louis to a firm who were engaged in the business of furnishing country stores, and as I was entirely ignorant of what I needed, they selected a stock invoicing about two thousand dollars, on which I paid my three hundred dollars, and the balance they carried for me.
First, a wholesaler provided T. Second, although Hawkins had no experience in retail sales, the wholesaler was risking the credit, with no collateral. Third, Hawkins was all of twenty-one years old. The store was successful. As a good many rough characters visited the mountains, it was not considered safe to leave the store, a half mile from the nearest house, over night.
The next year, he married Catherine Patton, a well-bred woman from two old Southern families. Within a year, her health began to fail, and their doctor recommended that they move to a milder, drier climate.
Hawkins sold up, and began preparing for a trip out West. By the time he was ready, he and Catherine had a baby, a boy named T. This was not the great emigration of the gold rush, ten years earlier.
The Hawkinses saw other wagons only intermittently. They expected to come across ample bison to shoot and eat, but found none; during the journey, they were able to kill only two antelope. Instead, they relied on trade with Indians, with other travellers, and with settlers. There had recently been a notorious event, the Mountain Meadows massacre, in southern Utah, in which a hundred and twenty men, women, and children from Arkansas were killed by Mormon militias masquerading as Native Americans, and so the Hawkins party joined forces with another wagon train heading West from Illinois.
But the Mormons they encountered as they neared Salt Lake were friendly, Hawkins wrote. As we had been living on bacon and salt meats, with no vegetables for so long, I sought out a large house which I thought gave promise of affluence.
I knocked on the front door, but received no answer, so I went to the back of the house, where under a tree sat a large, solid-looking man with a babe on each knee, while a dozen other children, from two to eight years, were playing around. Two women were washing clothes in the same tub, while a third was hanging them the clothes, not the women out to dry. It was my first view of polygamy. The man, as all others I met later, looked fat and happy, while all the women looked tired and careworn.
They travelled across the Bear River, and only then did they experience the kind of hardship and tragedy that all Western travellers had come to expect. In the Illinois company was a dare-devil of a young man, and when the cattle were well into the river he followed them on his horse. He had about reached the middle, the horse swimming gallantly, when the man and horse suddenly disappeared. After a time the horse came to the surface further across, but we never saw the young man again.
We camped on the bank and all hands turned out to search for the body. The ferryman assured us that it was entirely useless, that Bear River never gave up its dead. They traversed the Sierra Nevadas. Hawkins finally arrived in Mountain View in The health of Catherine Hawkins initially improved, but she died less than two years after the journey. To some, this would have seemed like a cruel trick played by a malevolent god.
But Hawkins decided to stay in California. I realized, however, that hard work and unceasing work was the only panacea for me. Hawkins bought two hundred acres just north of Gilroy and married Emma Day, the daughter of a farmer. In , they had their first child, Charles, and by Hawkins was a father of four and a prosperous farmer.
Though he was largely self-taught, that year he shipped, he wrote, ten thousand centals of wheat to San Francisco. Hawkins soon heard about a Colonel W. Hollister, who owned twenty-one thousand acres of agricultural land nearby.
For many years, that land had been in the hands of Spanish clergy, after most of its Native American inhabitants had been expelled or drawn into the mission system. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, much of it was given to Mexican soldiers and settlers. By the end, he had only a few thousand left, but when the Civil War began Hollister made a fortune selling wool that outfitted the Union Army. By , Hollister was ready to sell his property, part of a ranch known as San Justo.
Hawkins organized a group of local farmers to buy the parcel for three hundred and seventy thousand dollars. They split the land into fifty tracts, leaving a hundred acres in the center for a town site. They were about to name the town San Justo when one of the men objected. Does every town in California have to be named after a saint? Hawkins had one more child, and gave up farming to establish the Bank of Hollister. Eventually, his five children had eleven children among them, and all but one thrived.
She was my constant companion, and we loved each other with a devotion I had never known before. He named it the Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital. I stood on its white stone steps, wondering what had happened.
But first I had to wait. She was a new arrival, and a talkative one, having high expectations for the Scouts of Hollister. While I waited, I flipped through the brochures on a table in the office. When I got a chance to talk to Taylor, I asked about the golden hills, commending the city for preserving them.
Taylor was not so sure she agreed. It might not have been the official chamber-of-commerce line, but Taylor implied that the town would not mind anyone building on the hills. The recession had been tough, Taylor said, and they were looking for any bright spots. There were too many tattoo parlors, she told me, and she lamented the karate studio that had recently closed under suspicious circumstances.
But, she said, the town would soon have a Walgreens, and everyone was excited about that—no one more so than Debbie Taylor. She asked me what brought me to Hollister, and I told her about T. Hawkins and my connection to him. I had no idea what she was talking about. She gave me the address—it was far from the site of the original building—and I left, the two of us marvelling at the lucky timing of my visit. They seemed baffled to see me.
Then I saw a mother and her middle-school-aged son sitting on a couch, waiting their turn. Loud hip-hop overwhelmed the room.
It had been done with a confident hand, and the boy was thrilled. He and his mother left, and I sat down. He was looking at the back of my head, and his two friends were looking at me. He turned his head side to side, revealing an intricate design that would require regular upkeep. It was the work of an artist. I told the barber to just take an inch off anywhere he saw the need, and he got started.
Another man entered, athletic and tanned, with an array of tattoos on his arms. Then the barber turned to me. It was the question his two friends had been waiting for. Trademark law is a complex field, and such disputes are typically settled in civil court. After all, tourists regularly roll into town looking for the surf-wear store, assuming the clothes are made in Hollister.
The nearest Hollister Co. Hollister Mayor Eugenia Sanchez sees a positive side to the dispute: The clothing line may spark greater interest in her hometown. The best side hustles for musicians and music lovers. Strike at Kaiser Permanente averted two days before deadline.
Stocks close higher, but indexes still end week in the red. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Hollister, Calif. Reporting from Hollister, Calif. More From the Los Angeles Times.
0コメント