Montecito’s Dirt Bike Days

Montecito! (excuse me) While our fairly liquid little village has never been known as the “Home of the Mink Stole,” neither has it ever sported the tagline “Central Coast Epicenter of Tweens Helling around on BMX Bikes.” That branding would likely have been discouraged by the Montecito Association. The descriptor, though, would not have been inaccurate. “We were just free in Montecito. We lived close enough where you could ride bikes and skateboard or walk, and parents didn’t worry about anything.” Trent Watanabe has been the Montecito Journal’s Art Director for 18 years, and is an accomplished artist in his own right. He is also the perpetually grinning ambassador of an earlier time in this town. “The look is the same Montecito. When I’m by School House Road and around Mount Carmel, those are kind of the back roads we took. They feel the same. The mix of little houses and big houses hasn’t really changed. But there were a lot more kids. I remember a lot more kids playing around and riding bikes.” 

Watanabe recalls the Montecito of the early-80s thru the early-90s as a forested province of trees and creeks and shade-dappled, leafy declivities a kid could sidle into from a friend’s yard and get happily lost in. “You’d go out the back fence and then basically walk down the trail to the creek,” he says. “There were vines that grew up the oak trees that leaned over the creek, so you could grab a handful of vines and swing out over the water.”

He fondly recalls his pedal posse threading through the town like a diminutive and benign biker gang in OP shorts. “I wore Stubbies, though,” Watanabe is quick to add. “They were baggy.” In Watanabe’s telling, Coast Village Road itself was a kid-friendly “downtown” of snack shacks, burger joints, and camaraderie – a mile-long strip of immersive fun and mischief. Kids would even be dropped off there while the parents ran around doing errands. “I remember just always hanging out on Coast Village Road,” Watanabe says, laughing. “You know, ‘Let’s get a burger at the Snack Shack and go ride bikes!’” If you see a gaggle of laughing kids in baseball caps racing bikes down Coast Village Road today, do take a photo. It’ll have the same cachet as that of a plesiosaur doing the backstroke in Loch Ness. “I went to MUS. After school we would go to the pharmacy, which was inundated with kids buying candy. Kids were just waiting for the bus we all took. It was a regular town. We’d go into Pierre Lafond as a group and buy bagels and stuff. There isn’t a kid in Montecito who hasn’t fallen into the Pierre Lafond fountain at some point.” 

Watanabe and his pals made prodigious use of the town. From late afternoon explorations of the dissolving, haunted cottages of the old Hammond’s estate, to skateboarding in mildly sketchy parts of SB because that’s where the best spots were, to sneaking onto the Casa Dorinda grounds and roaming – the gang was always outside. How did they escape the bottomless algorithmic vacuum of social media and gaming? “Pong? That was it. And maybe Atari was starting to come in. But we didn’t sit around inside at all. I don’t remember ever sitting inside. We lived outside so much I remember it would feel weird when we had to eat food in someone’s house. We were always, always outside.” 

Watanabe is not what they used to call a “cool customer”; an inscrutable guy affecting a detached aloofness. The man is actually cool and wears a perpetual grin – and he unabashedly loves Montecito. He has always loved Montecito and embraces every nourishing civic epoch he’s had the good fortune to grow through here. When he talks about the town his eyes look into the past with 20/20 vision. “Along the row where Jeannine’s is now, there was a 31 Flavors three doors down. And then across Coast Village Road from that was Jurgenson’s. And behind the library near the Upper Village there was this tree house, and we’d go hang out there. It was kind of like Stranger Things,” he laughs. “The upper village had a toy store called The Yellow Balloon, and we’d go up there and buy these little parachute men. Then we’d go to the grocery store, we’d call it the little market. Montecito was like a small neighborhood.” 

When school-aged Watanabe moved into his first paid work, it was in a Coast Village hub/hangout where the town’s citizenry rubbed elbows with other Montecitans representing an array of species. “It was a dog salon called the Pampered Poodle before it was the pet shop,” Watanabe says. “Then this person at the dog salon opened up the Montecito Pet Shop. This is in the early nineties.” The adorably frenetic hamsters and stoic Bearded Dragons were an attraction that turned the place into a sort of Grand Central Ark for the kids at loose ends on any given day. “I had a friend named Matt, and his littlest brother used to come into the pet store, and he’d just hang out. All the kids would come to the pet store and just hang out all day.” Watanabe laughs. “Sometimes they’d hang out for so long you’d start putting them to work! Yeah, it was really fun.” 

The Montecito Pet Shop was an inevitable conduit for the whole of Montecito at that time. “It was a pet shop, so it didn’t matter who you were – you still had to feed your cat or have your dog groomed. So they all came through. Steve Martin, Jonathan Winters, Christian Slater, Dan Cortese, Kathy Ireland, Rob Lowe. Jonathan Winters’ brother David was my junior high science teacher,” Watanabe adds incongruously, the says “I even met Steven Seagal in the shop.” What sort of guy was he? “He was cool. I remember showing him this chameleon. We had this giant chameleon, and I remember handing it to him and Seagal’s hands were freaking giant. His fingers were three times as big as mine! He was tripping out because chameleons have these clasping hands. And he was kind of relating it to martial arts and stuff. He was super nice and very cool.” Silk Kimono? “Nah, but he did have a kung fu shirt kind of thing.”

Trent Watanabe is an avatar of ‘80s/‘90s Montecito. From afar, the town is powerfully unlikely; a sun-drenched, enchanted village where movie stars cavort with liberated royals, and everyone has an opinion about polo. But Watanabe knows the true beating heart of the place – a workaday hometown of moms and dads ordering rabbit hutches, making peanut butter sandwiches, getting the car fixed. A town is a collection of friends and neighbors, days and nights – and a repository of shared memories, some of them piercing, even in magical Montecito. Thrumming, complicated, communal life makes the neighbor your family. Watanabe is just the sort of guy who feels this. Montecito has long since captured him. One anecdote may be particularly emblematic of his affection for the place. Yeah, we’re headed back to the pet store.

“This person called, and she’s like, ‘…my daughter’s in your store, can you call her to the phone?’ You know, it’s a mom looking for her little girl. So I said ‘Of course! Tell me your kid’s name and I’ll call her to the phone.’ And the lady says, ‘her name’s Sigourney.’” Watanabe pauses. “We all knew Sigourney Weaver was in the store. I was like, ‘oh, sh*t.’ I waited a second then yelled out, ‘Hey Sigourney! Your mom’s on the phone!’”