GILROY
– Longtime Gilroy resident Barbara Drewitz knows much of the
town’s history and has her family’s genealogy in the palm of her
hand. Coming from a large family that’s no small task.
GILROY – Longtime Gilroy resident Barbara Drewitz knows much of the town’s history and has her family’s genealogy in the palm of her hand. Coming from a large family that’s no small task.
“My mother, Alma Mary Finn Rizzi, instilled a sense of family in me,” Drewitz said. “She was adopted, and that’s why she wanted so many children and raised us to be a close family. My mother and father, hard working people, raised eight children.”
Drewitz was the youngest of the children and was born at the old Wheeler Hospital 70 years ago. She has spent most of her life in Gilroy surrounded by family and longtime friends. Her father, Peter Rizzi, emigrated to the United States from Italy when he was a young man; he married Alma Mary Finn and moved to Kansas. The main industry in town was coal mining, and Rizzi’s new bride didn’t want her sons working in mines. They moved west by train, ending up in Gilroy because they had a friend in the area. Her mother worked at the cannery year ’round and her father was a hod carrier, a person who worked with plaster in house construction.
Her parents moved into a house on Carmel Street, near the edge of town.
“There wasn’t much west of us,” she said. “We used to ride our bikes into the old prune orchards, right about where I live now in the Arcadia Development.”
Drewitz went to the old high school in Gilroy and graduated in 1951. Her father had died, and her dreams of going to college didn’t work out.
“I graduated from high school on the Friday and went to work for the bank on Monday morning,” she remembered.
She met her husband at Schillings, the soda shop in downtown Gilroy where the teens used to hang out, after one of the famous football games between Gilroy and Hollister.
“He was in the Coast Guard,” she said. “He was from Minnesota; it didn’t take much to persuade him to move to Gilroy.”
She and her husband started a restaurant in Gilroy called Smedley’s, which lasted about a year before it closed.
“I didn’t make much money, but I sure made a lot of friends,” Drewitz said.
Drewitz found her calling when she went to work for the Municipal Court of Santa Clara County, working her way up from court clerk to the supervisor of 22 people. She worked for the San Martin court for 27 years, retiring in 1997.
Her husband died 17 years ago, but Drewitz is surrounded by family, including daughters Mary Ann, who is a Nob Hill manager in Hollister, Robin, who is raising three children, and Shirley, a stock broker in Carmel who lives in Gilroy. She has four grandchildren who are close to the area.
Drewitz is an active volunteer in the community. She has been the president of Women in the Chamber, a defunct subgroup of the Chamber of Commerce and is a longtime volunteer at the Garlic Festival. She also can be found volunteering at St. Joseph’s Family Center, organizing volunteers to work at Gourmet Alley during the Garlic Festival or orchestrating the St. Patrick’s Day dinner.
Drewitz enjoys traveling with her family. One memorable trip was to her father’s village in Italy, near the Swiss Alps.
“I saw the house where he lived and the church he went to as a boy,” she said. “I was raised by such wonderful parents.”
And why has she decided to remain in Gilroy?
“I didn’t want to be very far from my mother; she was one of the kindest, most saint-like people I have ever known,” she said. “Now, I’m surrounded by my entire family, and they make life worthwhile.”
