I’ve always been conflicted on my personal definition of “home town,” so…
La Crescenta, CA, age 3-8: the first thing that pops to mind is that two of the cops involved in the Rodney King beating are from there. I wasn’t surprised when I first heard that, as it’s kind of a racist town. Probably a good thing I got outta there at a young age.
San Jose, age 8-33: It’s a rather dull city. The only thing that comes to mind is it being the birthplace of little companies like Apple, Google, Ebay, Facebook, etc., etc. (Well, ok, I’m generalizing to the South Bay. It’s all the same.)
Ignatius from Loyola was a mercenary captain defending Pamplona through a siege when he got wounded in one leg. Eventually, that led to his rejection of “wordly life” and founding of the Jesuits. One of his first five companions, Francis from Xavier, was nominally a presbyter in Pamplona’s cathedral when they met - but the meeting took place in Paris, where FX was a student at the Sorbonne and IL became one of his flatmates. All the original 6 Jesuits were from the geographical neighborhood, which leads to the question: do the Basque love discussion because they’ve been going to school to the Jesuits for 500 years, or do Jesuits love discussion because they were founded by a handful of argumentative Basque?
I’m not counting the Sanfermines as a piece of trivia, being that they are so famous, but there’s enough Sanfermines trivia to fill a few books.
According to Wikipedia, there’s only one instance of concurrent 3-digit interstate highways in the US, and that bit of highway ends juuuust to the north of my hometown.
Barack Obama’s forefathers were born and raised in my home village shortly before they made their way over to the US on the Speedwell (the family name was “Blossom” and Deacon Thomas Blossom was born in about 1580).
The book “Tom’s Midnight Garden” was set in the same village, just opposite my infant school.
I used to work in sight of the chuch clock which Rupert Brooke wrote about: “Stands the Church clock at ten to three ? And is there honey still for tea?” (although that was the next village along).
My home town (not the city where I was born, but the one which I’ve lived most of my life in):
(1) was established twice (in 1801 and 1804).
(2) was established as a prison within a prison. It was the place where the worst convicts in Sydney, New South Wales, were to go. (Later Port Macquarie took over this role).
(3) was the site of the only earthquake in Australia to have any fatalities.
(4) is the world’s largest coal export port, handling about 100 million tons of coal per annum.
My hometown was one of the last oil boom towns. The town had maybe a few hundred people before the first big well in Jan 1921.
My granddad left an impoverished family farm at age 20 and traveled to work in the oilfields. He worked in them for almost 45 years. Met my grandmother, married and raised a family in a house provided by the oil company. The house was in the middle of the oil fields.
quoting from an article
The wells aren’t producing much these days. That part of the state has been in decline for awhile.