Jim Howerton spent his boyhood on the Hollister Ranch and the Las Cruces area of Gaviota during the 1930's while his father, Bud Howerton, was a manager of cattle operations at the Ranch. It wasn't a bad place to grow up.

"A lot of times, we'd just fool around by the crick," says Jim, "I found the perfect arrowhead once in one of the washes. It was a beautiful arrowhead. I wish I knew what became of it."

"And we rode horses, of course. Our horses were named Chico, Chapo, Cholo, and Little Red. Cholo was the best stock horse that ever lived. My father won a hand-tooled saddle on him at the fiesta -- it was probably worth about a hundred dollars even then, a couple of thousand today."

"Before the fiesta, my brother and I would ride in the mountains behind the Ranch to get the horse in good shape. We'd ride double. And sometimes we'd play cowboys and Indians and get the horse going as fast as we could, and then we'd fall backwards off him into the hay. Now if my own kids had done that, I'd 'a killed 'em."

One rainy Christmas, Jim's brother Bill got a balloon tire bicycle. "It was raining like the devil," says Jim, "but we had to try that bike, rain or shine. I remember going beyond the big pepper trees in the wet adobe earth. The mud was so thick, we had to push the bike back home because the wheels wouldn't turn."

"There were very few people living on the Ranch in those days," Tony Ochoa tells us, "and the road was just dirt. There was no paving whatsoever. When it rained, tires would spin, sink, or skid. It was foolish even to get on the road."

"But, oh, what a paradise for kids! Maybe we'd throw rocks at birds or go fishing off the pier. Maybe we'd walk along the railroad for a ways, or climb up to the chicken caves. No one ever said, 'Don't go here. Don't do that.' I would do anything I wanted."

"Of course, we played in the water, too. There were no surfboards. Body surfing was all we did. The bigger the waves, the better. But we knew to avoid the breakers that crash. We rode only the ones that crumble. Those were the beauties."

"There was a little tree on the side of the road near the big house," J.J. Hollister recalls. "I found a rope at the barn, tied it onto the tree, and I swung. Whenever a car came by, I could sit up there and watch."

"Sometimes butterflies would fill the eucalyptus trees near where the office now is. I would toss a stone to make them fly. It was so beautiful."

"Growing up on the Ranch makes you more you more self-sufficient," says Miranda, who spent much of her 1990's childhood here. "You have to entertain yourself…but it's never boring."

"I left the Ranch," says Tony Ochoa, "but after all these years, the Ranch has never left me. Tell the kids -- they will one day leave, too. But the Ranch will be there. It's engraved in your heart, somehow. They don't know it now, but it will be there."

A Ranch childhood is a special gift.