Centennial of Somis Is Small Affair : Communities: A walking tour and back-yard party mark today’s celebration. The 400 residents call their town an oasis.

Harry Brown, the sole real estate agent in Somis, gave a disclaimer before he explained the attractions that lure people to his town for keeps.

“I’m a short-timer,” he cautioned. “I’ve only been here 15 years.”

In Somis, an old-timer is someone like Jack Kitchen or Phyllis Dwire. They helped inaugurate the Somis school as first-graders--in 1924.

Both still can name the classmates who rode horses to school and left them tied up in a eucalyptus grove until it was time to go home.

“Growing up here was a wonderful experience,” said Dwire, 73.

“It was a great period of my life,” echoed Kitchen, 74. “I loved it. I wish I could go back there again.”

Today these old-timers--along with newcomers like Brown--will celebrate Somis’ 100th anniversary.

Created the same year as the Pledge of Allegiance, Somis isn’t making a big to-do out of its centennial. Instead of a parade, the town of about 400 is throwing a walking tour from 1 to 4 p.m. today. The tour will end with a no-host back-yard party at the home of one of Somis’ oldest families, the Fulkersons.

The distance between now and then is shorter in Somis than in most communities. Large-scale development has been kept away from the town, which lies amid row crops one mile north of Camarillo just off Los Angeles Avenue.

Downtown, an acre of almost-ripe corn borders the main highway, next to a much larger field that is just beginning to sprout. Frequent blasts from a farmer’s rifle echo through town as he scares birds off a new planting of seed.

Tidy wooden houses, built 50 to 70 years ago, line West Street. They have low fences--for style, not security--and sit cheek-by-jowl like little houses on a Monopoly board. Somis has caught an eddy in the stream of time.

“It’s a lovely community,” Brown said. “People are friendly. People know one another. They come out to Little League baseball games. You still have a sense of community here.”

The walking tour will begin at the Somis Thursday Club, a large wood-sided building with a covered porch on the corner of Bell Street and the Somis Road. The women of Somis once gathered there to do fancy needlepoint and decide which ailing neighbors were in need of visiting. The Thursday Club still meets, every second Thursday.

The 1895 building was the original Somis schoolhouse and is now one of the town’s three historic landmarks. The other two, which also will be featured on the tour, are Fulkerson Hardware, the county’s oldest hardware store, and the Somis School, where children learn in the same classrooms once occupied by Kitchen and Dwire.

Admission for the walking tour is $10 for adults and $5 for students. Children are free. Proceeds will benefit the Pleasant Valley Historical Museum.

The school will host a picnic beginning at noon and will feature artisans and entertainment throughout the afternoon.

At the Somis Post Office, Postmaster Charles Adams will cancel envelopes with a special centennial stamp that will be used only until Friday. Collectors from around the country have sent in envelopes to be canceled with the stamp, which was designed by local artist Ray Ayers. The stamp depicts the old Presbyterian Church, a Somis landmark from 1910 until it was torn down in the early 1960s.

The walking tour guidebook will point out the history of several Somis structures such as the first hotel and the house that townspeople built in six days to entice a new blacksmith to town in 1912.

The tour will also pass by Evelyn Catano’s house on West Street. Painted a dazzling daisy yellow, it is easily the brightest home in Somis.

“We know our neighbors. We watch out for one another,” said Catano, who fell in love with Somis when she drove through 17 years ago. She is president of the Parent Faculty Organization at the Somis School. Her children walk across the street to school.

Somis, said Jack Fulkerson, “has been a great place to raise children. It’s a life that I think is almost unique at the present time.”

Fulkerson, 78, is the old-timer’s old-timer, the one to whom everyone else defers when it comes to matters of local history.

The Fulkerson name is one of many family threads that weave through Somis’ history. Fulkerson Hardware was founded in 1912 by Jack Fulkerson’s father, Jonathan. Jack Fulkerson handed it to his son, Bob, after running it himself for 30 years.

Bob Fulkerson and his wife, Oliva, will sponsor the back-yard party that ends the walking tour. Their house had belonged to grandfather Jonathan but had passed out of family hands until Bob Fulkerson bought it back.

“I was born right here on this corner,” Jack Fulkerson said while standing on his son’s patio.

Other families have woven other threads.

Across Somis Road from Fulkerson Hardware is the Somis Blacksmith Shop, a ramshackle shed of corrugated steel.

Its burly owner, John Mahnken, 40, is the third generation of Mahnkens to own the shop, beginning with his grandfather in 1932. Mahnken, who started hanging out in the shop when he was 9, assumed the business from his father six years ago.

Its walls are literally coated with its past: 60 years of soot that have painted the interior in shades of black and gray.

He still uses some of his grandfather’s original equipment. In the back of the shop, next to a 100-year-old forge, is an assortment of handmade tools crafted by all three Mahnkens. Their cylindrical iron handles are not smooth like those of mass-produced tools. They bear the indentations of the hammer blows that shaped them.

On the wall behind the forge are wooden planks imprinted with a series of cattle brands.

“Grandfather, father and I made them ourselves,” Mahnken said.

Mahnken, who lives in Camarillo, said Somis has been a good town for business.

“It’s like a little oasis people have in the middle of all this other stuff going on,” Mahnken said.

A block away, Gabe Robles sits in a barber chair and flips through a newspaper while he waits for customers. He never has long to wait. Robles, owner of the Somis Barber Shop, became the town’s barber when a stroke forced his father, Manuel, to retire.

He said people were willing to try him out because they knew his father so well.

“It’s like that here in Somis,” Robles said. “There’s a lot of family owned businesses.”

A similar procession of family names runs through the Somis Union School District, which comprises the one school. Children go from kindergarten through eighth grade there.

Somis has never incorporated as a city, so the school board is its only elected body.

“Jack’s mother and my dad were on the school board,” said Neil Underwood, 71, one of the long-time residents who gathered recently to reminisce.

“So was my husband,” Phyllis Dwire said.

“And so was my ex-wife,” added Underwood.

“My mother was on the school board,” Jack Kitchen said. “She gave me my diploma when I graduated. I happened to be on the school board for my three kids. The day after my third one graduated, I resigned.”

Jack Fulkerson, who spent 26 years on the school board, said, “I gave each of my four children their diplomas, too.”

One of them, Bob, is now a board member.

Somis was cut out of the original Rancho Las Posas land grant by Thomas Bard, who later became Ventura County’s only U.S. senator.

He and a colleague, D.T. Perkins, laid out the settlement in 1892, but the origins of its name still are cloudy. Some believe it is a Chumash Indian word for a variety of scrub oak.

Somis has always been an agricultural town. Early farmers grew corn, wheat and barley and grazed thousands of sheep on the hillsides.

Lima beans quickly became a leading crop after they were brought to the area. Harvesting and thrashing the beans were major sources of jobs every year for townspeople and hobos with nicknames like Lantern Jaw Mike and Painter Ed and Pickhandle Slim.

“The farmers used to bring their beans to the warehouse at Hueneme. The guys would get drunk in Hueneme and their horses would take them home. They wouldn’t have to do anything, just get on,” Underwood said.

Somis’ prized farmland is protected today, but there was a time when townspeople feared Somis would be overrun by the same kind of development that has taken over other parts of the county.

In 1969, the Kaiser Aetna Corp. bought 10,000 acres and announced plans to build Amberton, a city of 90,000 that would have virtually surrounded Somis.

“They wanted to cover with roofs the finest farmland in the world,” Jack Fulkerson said.

But the townsfolk, led by Dwire and others, fought back--and won.

The development was turned back and much of the agricultural land was declared to be a greenbelt. Zoning changes have made it difficult to subdivide farmland and have virtually ensured that Somis will be spared major development.

“It was the very, very big trying to gobble up the very, very small, and the small won,” Kitchen said.

Jack Fulkerson estimates that about 400 people live within the original town site now, compared to about 75 before World War II. “Growth is steady, but it’s been small,” he said.

Somis enters its second century in its own quiet way.

At the Somis Market, cops from Camarillo and farm workers from the avocado orchards line up for Aurora Quinones’ famous burritos and soft tacos. The waitresses switch easily between Spanish and English. The farm workers order to go.

At the Somis Barber Shop, Jose Robles settles down in a barber chair and removes the headphones from his ears.

“Hey, Gabe, I only have one dollar,” the Camarillo High School senior says. Gabe Robles shrugs and tells Jose, no relation, that he can pay the rest some other time.

“I think it’s pretty exciting Somis has been here for a hundred years,” said Gabe Robles, who commutes from Oxnard. “With everything growing around it--Camarillo, Moorpark--it’s amazing how Somis has managed to hold its own size. It’s good. I’m glad.”

His young customer agrees.

“It’s a peaceful town. It’s really calm. There are no gangs or anything,” Jose Robles says.

Isn’t it a dull town for a teen-ager?

“Once you get your license, it’s all right,” he says.