Sweet Memories

They call themselves “The Over 65 Avenue Gang.”

Pass by Russell’s Donuts on Ventura Avenue any morning and you’ll see them huddled around the newspaper racks out front. Each of the dozen men will have a Styrofoam cup in one hand and, more likely than a jelly doughnut, a lit Marlboro perched firmly between thumb and forefinger in the other.

“We’re here rain or shine,” Gilbert Sauceda, 65, said at the doughnut shop the morning after violent thunderstorms.

As they casually shoot the breeze in the same spot each morning, the men with weathered faces are not only a permanent fixture on Ventura’s oldest thoroughfare.

They are part of the historic avenue’s lively past.

Take Sauceda, who was born in a small house off Ventura Avenue. He went to nearby schools, then worked as a foreman at Las Palmas Chili Factory, a salsa company once located on North Ventura Avenue, for four decades.

“I’m an old Ventura Avenue boy,” he said.

Guido Barron grew up in the same neighborhood and went to grade school with Sauceda, who is five years his junior.

“I’ve known this guy since he was a baby,” Barron said on one drizzly morning. “He was so cute as a kid, everyone called him Beauty.”

There’s also Ventura Avenue boyhood pal Pete Duran, 66, who worked for Sauceda at the chili factory for 37 years. He named his former supervisor godfather to his daughter, Anna, who is now 33.

At 63, Jim Monahan is one of the youngest old-timers who frequents the doughnut shop at 571 N. Ventura Ave. Each morning, he grabs a cup of Joe before heading to American Welding Co. across the street. Born and reared in a home off the Avenue, he now owns and operates the welding business his father opened in 1928.

At the unassuming doughnut shop, where the list of coffee choices range from regular to decaf and there are no croissants in sight, Ventura City Councilman Monahan is just one of the guys.

For Monahan, who has been on the council for 21 years and acted as mayor in the late ‘80s, the meeting place is one way to hold onto the past. He remembers the avenue when it was the sparkling hub of the city.

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Beginning in the late 1920s, oil companies began sprouting along the street.

“This avenue was booming with oil wells,” Monahan said, waving a hand toward the rolling hillside where many oil rigs can still be seen bobbing their heads up and down. “At one time, there were 5,000 wells. We were the fourth largest oil county in California.

“At one time, you could see hundreds of guys with lunch boxes driving up the hills to the rigs,” he said.

The avenue began a downward spiral in the mid 1980s after major oil companies such as Chevron, Texaco and Shell moved out, Monahan said.

“At one time we had it all,” Monahan recalled. “But over-regulation was the beginning of the end.”

County and city officials make little secret of their anti-oil company sentiment, referring in one city document to the “Oil Field Trash” as a blight on Ventura Avenue.

Monahan, whose welding business relied on the oil trade, was so enraged that he ran for a seat on the City Council in 1977 and won. But his influence could not stop the inevitable changes to the avenue, which is now one of the most rundown corridors in the city.

“The decline is, I don’t want to use the word depressing, it’s just kind of sad,” said Monahan, whose welding business over the years has dwindled from 100 employees to three.

But the dozen men at the doughnut shop try not to dwell on the negative. Neither does Monahan when he stops by.

Instead, they spend the time marveling at the latest freakish weather, or gossiping about matters such as Babe Ruth’s alleged drinking problem, or worrying about a friend’s health after his triple bypass surgery.

And, of course, they reminisce.

“Hey Gil, remember Hobo Jungle on the other side of the river?” Monahan asked after plunking down 40 cents for a cup of black coffee. “Or where the road made an ‘S’ on Thompson Boulevard, and so many vegetable trucks turned over there, we called it Salad Bowl Curve?”

Many of the men remembered catching 12-pound steelhead from the Ventura River around World War II. Then, children swam in a watering hole at the river. An Army camp was set up at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, they said. And the Casa DeAnza apartments were then a lovely place to live.

The 400-square-foot meeting spot has had many former lives, as well. In the early 1930s, it housed E.T. Jones Confectionary. By 1939, it was the Chili Grill restaurant with huge ice cream cones on each corner. Then it became Pinky’s Restaurant.

Byung and Won Jung Yoon opened the doughnut shop about 15 years ago.

“It’s a very different area, but the people who come here are honest,” Byung Yoon said. “It feels like a family.”

Some of the doughnut shop regulars who have been visiting the place for several decades in its various incarnations say it feels like a second home.

“People ask me, ‘Why do you go down there every morning?’ ” Sauceda said. “I tell them, ‘I have friends I like to have coffee with. They’re my compadres.’ ”