Club Turns New Arrivals Into Newcomers Forever

Arrived: Sonia Jacobs, from Orlando, by way of Pittsburgh. Before that, the Philippines.

Arrived: Jerrie Newman, from Philadelphia, long-term.

Arrived: Luz Mary Holt, from Culver City. Before that, Honduras.

Arrived: Evelyn Tombach, from Pasadena, long-term.

Meet Camarillo’s latest immigrants, its latest wave of arrivistes, its soon-to-be Typical Californians.

They have little in common but circumstance: They hardly know anyone. They’re still getting set up.

They moved here within the last year and have gathered at the house of Debbie Sorensen, originally from Arizona, here now, yet soon to move on again, perhaps to Orlando or back to Arizona: Her house is up for sale.

No matter.

Sorensen’s house on this weekday morning is Camarillo’s unofficial Ellis Island, a gateway of sorts for those not off the boat but instead just off the freeway.

*

Newman, the Philadelphian, is the only one of the four who came here on purpose, strictly speaking.

“My husband and I are very thorough people,” she says. “We took 12 trips to California in six years, decided we’d retire someplace north of Los Angeles and south of San Louis Obispo.

“We’d always start our jaunts from Camarillo--go to Ventura, not like it so much, and come back; go to Ojai, not like it so much, and come back. Camarillo, we decided, was controlled. Quiet. Sort of like a little community of 20 years ago, almost boring. Here we are--it’s just what we want. Does anyone know of a conversational Spanish group?”

Sorensen will look into it.

She, along with Nancy Szany and Elise Jansen, run the Newcomers Club of Camarillo, a not-for-profit descendant of the familiar but for-profit Welcome Wagon. Indeed, Newcomers was formed when some Welcome Wagon members defected to become entirely social and, at times, in the public service by raising funds for the Camarillo Public Library.

Newcomers has evolved into a many-headed hydra. After holding its welcome receptions, it signs people up for a $20 membership that offers organized activities such as arts and crafts, the international cooking and dinner club, ladies movie group, couples theater group, book review circle, wine tasting group, couples bridge, ladies bridge, canasta, couples Bunco, softball, bowling, golf, tennis and co-op baby-sitting. To be perfectly Californian about it, the club has an annual car rally. Nearly 200 Camarillians are members, and for some it’s been a very long time since being welcomed.

Still, Newcomers’ key function is in welcoming. And as Californians perhaps better than anyone know, the arrivals, and thus the welcoming, never ends.

*

Jacobs, Holt and Tombach are more typical of those who show up at the welcomings. Each has a husband whose work brought them here. Each has her own comedic version of the family itinerancy, as well.

Jacobs’ husband is a surgical assistant. He, she allows, likes to keep moving. She misses their just-made friends after only a year in Orlando. She’d heard Camarillo was “by the ocean,” a comment triggering an eruption of laughter.

Holt and her husband had lived in Culver City, a 10-minute commute from her husband’s corporate job, in Santa Monica. But his job shifted and took him to Camarillo. He commuted for hours a day, month after month, and Luz finally realized it was too much. She’s still “adjusting” to Camarillo and seeing her friends from Culver City.

Tombach, the born storyteller among the arrivals, cites a shake-up at her husband’s firm and his need to find another position, which he did, here in Ventura County. So they left Pasadena after 27 years.

Her regret, however, is somewhat tempered. Her Pasadena house was a singed survivor of last year’s fires only to have a wall of mud arrive at the front yard in the slides that followed and then lose much of the interior wall plaster in the Northridge quake. Tombach may now be happily settled in, on the same Los Posas Estates street as Newman, but she and her husband are still the unhappy owners of a troubled Pasadena house.

No matter--at least not at this morning coffee.

Everyone feels quite welcome, and with the enticement of so many activities, it looks like the welcome will last and last.

Which is why Tombach and Newman came up with a revised name for the group, Newcomers Forever.

That’s a happy oxymoron that can only last until members move on again, and new arrivals fill their place. This is, after all, Camarillo, California.