Authors

The Gang of Five. This photo shows five of the Capitola Book Company authors. Front row, left, the late Tony Hill, and George Ow, Jr. Top row from l to r, Morton Marcus, Geoffrey Dunn, and Sandy Lydon.

 

Duncan Chin

Growing up on Grove Street
Born in San Francisco, Duncan Chin grew up in Watsonville, California, his family's life centered on the family's large, wooden apple dryer. He graduated from Watsonville High School in 1949, and then was trained as an illustrator, a career that dominated his adult life. The sketches in this book began with some boredom-induced doodling in church. His late wife, Anna, encouraged him to expand his drawings, and they are collected here for the first time. Chin now lives in Southern California.

 

Geoffrey Dunn

Chinatown Dreams
Santa Cruz is In the Heart
Geoffrey Dunn, Ph. D., is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and historian. Raised in the Santa Cruz-Italian fishing colony, he is the author of Santa Cruz Is in the Heart and he edited Chinatown Dreams: The Life and Photographs of George Lee. He has produced and directed more than a dozen documentary films, including Dollar a Day, 10¢ a Dance: A Historic Portrait of Filipino Farm Workers in America; Chinese Gold: The Chinese of the Monterey Bay Region; Mi Vida: The Three Worlds of Maria Gutierrez; Miss…or Myth?; and the recently completed Calypso Dreams. He also wrote the original screenplay for the feature film Maddalena Z. The winner of a 2002 Gail Rich Award for artistic contributions in Northern California, Dunn was also the recipient of an Excellence in Teaching award at UC Santa Cruz. He is currently at work on a pair of books, one focusing on the politics of Alaska and the other on Bohemian literary traditions in Central California.

Sandy Lydon

Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region
The Japanese in the Monterey Bay Region: A Brief History
Sandy Lydon is Historian Emeritus at Cabrillo College , Aptos, where he has taught for since 1968. The recipient of numerous awards for his teaching, in August 2001 he was awarded the Floyd Younger Award for Teaching Excellence, an honor awarded by the faculty, staff and students of the college. He also received the 2001 Best College Teacher in Santa Cruz County Award, an honor given him in a county-wide ballot by the readers of the Good Times weekly newspaper. Lydon continues to research, write and lecture throughout the region.
SandyLydon.com

The late Morton Marcus

Santa Cruz Mountain Poems
Striking Through the Mask
Morton Marcus is the author of ten volumes of poetry and one novel, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants and recently Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems and Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988-2001. In 2007, he published a new volume of prose poems, Pursuing The Dream Bone. He has had more than 450 poems published in literary journals, his work has been selected to appear in over 90 anthologies, and he has read his poems and taught creative writing workshops at universities throughout the nation and Europe. Marcus taught English and film at Cabrillo College for 30 years before his retirement in 1998. In 1999, he was selected to be Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year, and in 2007 he was a recipient of a Gail Rich Award for his contributions to Santa Cruz culture. For 22 years, he has been the co-host of The Poetry Show, the longest running poetry radio program in the nation. A film historian and critic as well as poet, his reviews appear regularly in West Coast newspapers, and for the past nine years he has been the co-host of a television film review show called Cinema Scene, which broadcasts in the San Francisco Bay area and on the pod (Cinema Scene.Org). For more than eighteen years, he has served on the steering committee of the Pacific Rim Film Festival, and he has taken part in panel discussions on literature and film at the John Steinbeck Center.
His website is www.mortonmarcus.com

Donna F. Mekis and Kathryn Mekis Miller

Blossoms into Gold
Donna F. Mekis and Kathryn Mekis Miller are the granddaughters of Croatian immigrants who emigrated from Konavle, Croatia to Watsonville, California, in 1901. Their father, Andrew Mekis, was born in Watsonville’s Croatian colony in 1920. The two sisters were raised in Santa Cruz and spent frequent Sunday afternoons with their Croatian grandparents and family in Watsonville.

Donna F. Mekis holds degrees in both Anthropology and Education from UC Santa Cruz. Over the past twenty-five years, she has worked at both UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College, assisting students with the transfer process from two-year colleges to four-year universities. She served as Cabrillo’s Transfer Center Director for fifteen years and is now directing Cabrillo’s new Honors Transfer Program. She resides in Santa Cruz with her husband, Morton Marcus.

Kathyrn Mekis Miller did her undergraduate and graduate work at UC Berkeley. To finance their educations, she and her husband Marshall Miller opened their first retail store in Santa Cruz in 1970. Since then, they have developed a number of successful businesses under the umbrella name Sun Shops, which has now become a second-generation Santa Cruz business. Kathryn currently oversees product development for the family's retail operations.
www.blossomsintogold.com

George Ow, Jr.

Chinatown Dreams
George Ow, Jr., is the son of George Ow and Emily Lee Ow, and the grandson of Sung Sai Lee and Gue Shee Lee, and of Lam Pon and Lam Ow High. He was born in Santa Cruz, California, January 3, 1943, and lived his early years in the Santa Cruz Chinatown with his grandmother Lee's family and the last of the old Chinese bachelor pioneers. A graduate of Monterey High School, Monterey Peninsula College and San Francisco State College, Ow received his M.B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He also served as an officer in the United States Army from 1967 to 1970. Currently a Santa Cruz businessman, land developer and body-boarder, he says: "I was born at the right time and was able to reach high because I could stand on the ready shoulders of those who came before me."