Many surround Moon family after fire destroyed their home
Wednesday
Gilroy – Two days after watching his Hecker Pass home burn, Dean Moon was surrounded by his family and friends as he walked the charred remains with an insurance adjuster.
The fire destroyed most everything the Moon’s own, from their clothes to decades-old family heirlooms: an antique sewing machine, wooden chairs made by Gerri Moon’s father, a 22-gauge rifle Dean Moon received from his father.
A porcelain cherub and a picture frame sat atop a 60-year-old piano – all of them perfectly black from the smoke – where Gerri Moon once played for her children. The Moons are a musical family and even as they watched the house burn Wednesday, Dean Moon mustered the will to play a few tunes on his accordion to cheer up his relatives.
Moon said the fire started from a wood stove, left burning by one of his sons, who’d left the house for a job interview in San Jose. He was living temporarily with his parents between jobs.
“When I saw the flames shooting up, it brought back memories of my childhood,” Moon said. “My parents’ house burned down in Oklahoma when I was 6. They lost everything in that fire, so we picked up and moved to California. They say you’re only supposed to have one of these in a lifetime. I guess we got more than our share.”
After touring the house and snapping some photographs Friday, the insurance adjuster left Moon with two sheets of paper, each containing 77 lines, so the family could itemize their losses.
“I’ll need 150 or 200 pages of these,” Moon predicted.
Fortunately, one of Moon’s three sons, Doug Moon, lives on a second home on the 86-acre property, which stretches to the top of the green ridgeline south of Hecker Pass. The Moons spent Thanksgiving at the home, and the oldest grandchild, 24-year-old Jaime Hankins, plans to host the 15 family members for Christmas.
In the meantime, she tried to soften the blow for her grandparents by making sure a picture of the grandchildren, some chrysanthemums and an assortment of their favorite snacks were laid out in a hotel room before they arrived Wednesday night.
“They wouldn’t really eat that day,” Hankins said. “This was their home. It meant a lot to them. I want to try to do anything I can to give back to them. They’ve done so much for all of us over the years.”
Relatives aren’t the only ones reaching out to the Moons. Within minutes of hearing word of the tragedy, fellow parishioners at New Hope Community Church began stopping by and calling to extend help.
Pastor Malcolm MacPhail plans to hold a special prayer for the family during weekend services, and the church is sponsoring a relief fund to help the family get back on its feet. MacPhail said the Moons hold a special place in the hearts of the congregation because of years of work giving back to the community.
“A member of our congregation had to go away on a personal family situation for six months and Dean is now kind of watching over the wife and children as a surrogate grandfather,” MacPhail said Friday afternoon. “I just had a cup of coffee with Dean and Gerri for the last hour. He said, ‘As soon as this gets cleaned up, I want to have the kids over right away.’ In the middle of all this, he’s saying, ‘I’ve got to get those kids out here to play.’ That’s the kind of people they are.”
The fire spared the family’s farm operations, which include cattle and goats and fields planted with a variety of fruits and vegetables. The Moons often give away their harvest to friends and fellow church members.
Dean Moon is a former teacher in San Jose who retired about 15 years ago in 1990, a few years after they bought the abandoned vineyard in west Gilroy. Moon built everything on the property from scratch – the Koi pond, the gazebo, the homes on the property. The weeping willows that line the gravel driveway to the home started off as a single small tree given to Moon by his brother.
Over the driveway, the sign still reads ‘Moon’s Happy Acres’ – the name of the motel where Dean and Gerri stayed on their honeymoon.
“We’ve been married 49 years and we’ve collected quite a few things,” Dean Moon said Friday, standing outside the home. The family plans to don gloves and sift through the charred insulation, mattresses and other debris for anything they can salvage. The heirlooms can’t be replaced, Moon said, but he had hope of preserving the family’s history through pictures.
“The kids are going to put a lot back together,” Moon said, looking at his granddaughter Jaime Hankins.
