After we painted the exterior walls of Ba this week, we continued on to paint the storefront of our neighbor Elsa’s Bakery.  Not only are we renting our space from Elsa and Manuel, they are our colleagues and friends. Now in their eighties Manuel and Elsy Vargas are in the bakery every morning, usually before dawn running the business. They arrived from the Yucatan when they were teenagers, lured to California by a job picking cantaloupes. While the pregnant Elsy cleaned food trucks full-time Manuel learned the trade of baking in a french bakery in Santa Monica.

They purchased this bakery and the building from its builder, who ran the kitchen for forty years, Manuel and Elsy are the second owners of the ninety-two year old building.

Mr Vargas brought his French technique to the business and made baguettes and Pain au chocolate. They bought up the adjoining buildings as investments and  to create homes for the families of some of their five children,  twelve grand kids, and three great grand children.

When the supermarkets evolved into big corporations they did their own industrial baking in-house and that wiped out a lot of independent Mom and Pop bakery’s like Elsy’s. The Vargas’ hung on through their retail business and  the restaurants they cater too. The space I rent from them has been empty since Von’s and Ralph’s left the communities. It is easier I suppose to take a check from me than to get up at three in the morning to bake that much more bread. I suspect Mr Vargas would be just as happy doing either.

So Julia and I  are painting their storefront in the colors they chose to show our  admiration to the original Mom and Pop.