Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 231
I met Dr. William Costello, his lovely wife Annette and their seven children on Sunday afternoon, Sept. 22, following services at Tehachapi Sovereign Grace Church where Will had been installed as permanent pastor the week before. The family came to Tehachapi from Visalia where Will had been pastor of Grace Bible Church for six years before joining the pulpit-supply team of Grace Bible Church of Bakersfield. When Pastor Mike Jarvis resigned from TSGC at the end of 2022, Will was sent to fill in...
Pastor Harold Gordon arrived in Tehachapi on July 1 with his wife CeCe and their 4-year-old son Elijah. They moved to Tehachapi from Oakland for Harold to take over as pastor of Tehachapi Valley United Methodist Church on Shout Rd. Although Harold was born in Los Angeles, his family moved to South Carolina when he was 18 months old. He has a brother and a sister. Their mother passed away when he was young. He dropped out of high school and joined the army and spent three years in Germany. He say...
Pauline McKindley moved from Vermont to Tehachapi in April to join three of her five older sisters on a 20-acre ranch they all purchased in Cummings Valley. She says she loves the openness of the valley and the view from their property, especially when SpaceX launches from Vandenburg. Born in San Bernardino County, Pauline, her sisters and two step-brothers lived there until they all moved to Tucson, Arizona when Pauline was 7 years old. Tucson was her home for 30 years. While in Tucson she...
I first met Edward and Valerie Padua in Philip Marx Central Park during Tehachapi's 4th of July celebration. They stopped by The Loop newspaper's booth in the company of a giant, fluffy, 40-pound, six-month-old poodle "puppy" named Scooby who behaves very much like his namesake. Edward and Valerie had moved to Tehachapi at the end of May from Palmdale, where they had been living for about three years, and were anxious to learn more about their new hometown. Edward is employed by CalTrans Distric...
Merrill Colon moved to Tehachapi in May 2024 from North Carolina, joining members of her family who were already Tehachapi residents. Merrill was born and raised in Vermont and is a graduate of Texas A&M. She said she has lived in many places around the United States, among them being Louisiana and New York. She has had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the world and did spend quite a bit of time in Indonesia. As a result of her travel experiences, Merrill is fluent in French and...
Annmarie Huppert moved to Tehachapi in May from Gig Harbor, Washington, to join her son Stephen Sturm and her three grandchildren. Annmarie was born in Washington and had lived there off-and-on for most of her life, but had also spent time in Tehachapi and on the Nicoya Peninsula region of Costa Rica. Annmarie graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington with a degree in Liberal Arts, emphasis on Public Policy and Psychology. She was a Washington State Legislative Intern, worked in the...
In January of this year Erin Gates moved to Tehachapi from Eureka, California, where she had been Deputy Superintendent at Redwoods National and State Parks. She had two weeks to find a home before starting her new position as Superintendent of the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, located in Keene. The grounds and museum, where Chavez made his home, became part of the National Park Service during the administration of President Barack Obama. Erin grew up in Glendale, California. She says that...
Barb Pfeiffer and John Campbell moved to their new Tehachapi home in January from Monrovia in Los Angeles County where they had lived for a less than a year. They wanted to find a place to live that would provide Barb a place to keep her horse, a Palomino named Trigger and their two dogs, a St. Bernard mix named Ellie and Barb's service dog, a 150-pound Great Dane named Little Lulu. Their new Tehachapi ranch has supplied them with space for everyone. Both divorced, the couple met by chance at th...
At the beginning of April, Cianne McGinnis arrived in Tehachapi from Hanford in Kings County where she had lived for the last three years. McGinnis was actually born in Hanford and lived there until she was five years old. When her father was hired to work in the oil fields, the family moved to Bakersfield where she grew up with her four older brothers. Not overly fond of Hanford, Cianne said she usually claims to be from Bakersfield. She has a nephew living in Tehachapi who suggested she move h...
In February, Air Force Sergeant Crystal Erskine was finally able to move into her new home in Tehachapi, as the owner had been preparing it for occupancy. Transferred from San Antonio, Texas, Erskine and her two children, 15-year-old Danielle and 11-year-old Josiah, lived on Edwards Air Force Base for a while until the house was ready for them. All of their belongings were put in storage during that time. Tagging along in the move was Coco and Cash, their two family dogs. Crystal was raised...
Jacqueline Valencia and Kevin Mendez, along with their 1-year-old daughter Athena, moved to Tehachapi in February from the San Fernando Valley. It is Kevin's work as an avionics technician with Stratolaunch at Mojave Spaceport that brought them to Tehachapi. They purchased an older home in downtown and are in the process of updating it. As with most updated homes in downtown, the façade retains the feel of earlier times while the remainder of the house will be totally updated. In the meantime,...
Elizabeth Mahurin moved to Tehachapi from California City at the end of December 2023. For the last nine years she had been living in California City while working as a substitute teacher, among numerous other jobs there. She retired on Dec. 22. Elizabeth had heard that Tehachapi was safe, beautiful and a nice place to live so she decided to check it out for herself. Accompanying Elizabeth to her new home is her service dog, a Jack Russell Terrier named Patches and two cats – Fernando, a 2...
Carmen Rae moved into her new home in Tehachapi in October, 2023. Her home is adjacent to that of her son and daughter-in-law Robert and Debra who built the home to accommodate a space for her. Robert and Debra moved to Tehachapi in 2021 with plans to build the home and were a part of a Meet Your New Neighbors article in November 2021. For the last several years, Carmen had been living in Palmdale, where her son Scott was living. Other than her two sons in California, she has a son, a daughter a...
When it came time to retire, Stephen and Tina Hankins began to look for a place to retire. The couple has been married for 23 years, and both had lived in Lancaster since the 1980s. Over the years, the couple found many of the neighborhoods had "gone downhill." They also needed to find a place to live that was nice and still affordable. They discovered that Tehachapi fit the bill and moved into their new community in December 2023. Stephen was born in Inglewood, California and raised in Canoga...
Delores Strider, accompanied by her son Jim Jr. and daughter-in-law Michele, moved into their Tehachapi home in November. Just in time for the holidays. Jim and Michele lived in the bay area at one time but, now retired, moved to Oklahoma City four years ago to be with Delores following the death of her husband, Jim Sr. In 2023, together they made the decision to move back to California. On their way back to the Bay Area, they made a stop in Tehachapi and decided then-and-there that this was whe...
On Oct. 31, 86-year-old Harry Davies moved to Tehachapi from Garden Grove, a community in Orange County where he had lived for over 30 years following his retirement from NASA. He purchased a home here to be close to his son, Tehachapi City Councilman and Mayor Michael Davies and his family. Raised in Los Angeles, Harry said he worked at a stable during his school years. Following high school, he joined the Air Force and spent four years active duty and four years in the reserves. As part of...
It was the end of August when Dorian and Tina Otero moved into their Tehachapi home from Porter Ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Their new home is the perfect place for their entire family, including daughter Cassidy, son Tyler, and Dorian's mother Nancy. The house also includes space for Dorian, who is a digital artist and works from home, to operate his graphics business. Tina spends much of her time as educator for 16-year-old Cassidy, who is a special needs student. Tyler is 20 and studies...
Kim and David Brandon moved to Tehachapi in August of this year from Acton, California. Kim discovered Tehachapi when her equestrian group of 40-something cowgirls, calling themselves the "Galloping Gourmets," made a camping trip to Bear Valley Springs. Kim began a campaign to move to Tehachapi. Once David saw the community, he was on board, as well. Finding a suitable home for them and their equine family proved to be more difficult than they anticipated as the market was somewhat limited at...
Geo Brawn IV and his wife Nancy moved to Tehachapi near the end of June this year. They moved here from Eastvale, California, a little town near Norco and Riverside, where they had resided for about 10 of their 15 years together. One of the deciding factors in the move was the huge growth in that area of Southern California. Nancy said that another deciding factor in the move was a new Amazon fulfillment center that she said made Costco look like a "mom and pop." For years they had heard how...
Anita and Jess Beltran moved to Tehachapi in March from Porter Ranch in the San Fernando Valley. It was Jess' friend of 50 years, Steve Rhodes, who suggested they look at Tehachapi as a place to live, and they fell in love with the area. Jess was born in San Fernando Hospital and raised in nearby Sylmar. At the age of 22, Jess started a custom upholstery business making seats for Harley Davidson motorcycles. He did this for 15 years before he was hired by the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in Van Nuys w...
Olivia Parkinson and Robert Nagle moved to Tehachapi last October to escape the crazy hours they had both been working since they moved to Northridge from Downtown L.A. during the pandemic. Both of them were working on video series at the time, Olivia on "Mayans" and Robert on "The Mandalorian." When production ended, it was time to move. The couple met five years ago when both were working for Fox VFX, a company involved in virtual film-making. Robert was working with facial capture for...
Jennifer and Dan Hassan moved to Tehachapi in April of this year, moving from Kernville where they had lived for the last two years. They had moved there from the Antelope Valley to be closer to their daughter and grandchild. After living in Quartz Hill for 16 years, they wanted to get out of the Antelope Valley and Kernville seemed ideal. However, Jennifer admitted that as much as they liked Kernville, it was just too remote. Their son Christopher and his family were living in Tehachapi, so tha...
Janine Heath and Matt Bogue moved into their mountaintop Tehachapi home on the first of June. From their deck, when the air is clear, they can see all the way to the Grapevine. They moved here from Oxnard where Matt had been stationed at Port Hueneme for the last three years. Having fulfilled his obligations to the Navy, Matt is now a consulting engineer for FM Global, a Fortune 500 company that deals with commercial property insurance. The couple wanted to get away from the congestion of the co...
Alicen Schneider and Ben Eshbach have been living in Tehachapi for about a year. Like many others during the pandemic, they wanted to get away from the LA area. Ben had family living in Tehachapi, so it seemed an ideal place to look. As head of TV Music at NBC Universal, Alicen felt she could still commute to her job three days a week or so. They found a house that they liked but it was a bit of a fixer-upper. While they were considering the purchase, their house in Burbank sold. The real...
Patty and Mike Harrington moved to Tehachapi in October, 2022 from Cypress, California, a community located in northwest Orange County where both of them owned and trained racehorses. When they finally decided to retire, they chose Tehachapi because their last colt had come to be raised and trained in the area by friends who had purchased him. Although they no longer own horses, they do have a darling little poodle named Pip. Patty was raised in the San Juan Islands off the coast of the state...
