Niner Stories

For San Francisco fans, the Super Bowl is about remembering a special time.

The San Francisco 49ers resurgence brings back a lot of memories for Bay Area fans. Photo: Target.com

Going to the Super Bowl is all about hard work, tenacity, and making opportunities out of the other team’s mistakes.

The San Francisco 49ers know all about hard work. It took them more than a quarter-century to make it to the 2020 Super Bowl.

I spent the days leading up to the championship contest asking friends and co-workers “Who are you rooting for?”

Not surprisingly, everyone in my circle of California friends is rooting for San Francisco.

For some, cheering for the 49ers brings back memories from the team’s heyday in the 1980s.

“I’d go to the games with my dad,” one friend shared with me. “Those were some of my most memorable times, going to Candlestick to watch the Niners.”

It seems everyone is a football fan around Super Bowl time. Photo: Facebook

Another associate remembers coming to California to work in the eighties.

His career seemed directly tied to the success of the franchise. “That’s all anyone would talk about this time of year,” he told me over tea and coffee at one of our favorite coffee shops. “There was a real culture of winning in the Bay Area.”

There’s a lot of truth to that observation.

Between 1982 and 2003, Bay Area NFL teams appeared in seven Super Bowls.

The Raiders won one and lost one during that time. The Niners won five times.

While the 49ers last Super Bowl appearance was in 2012 , it’s been fifty years between appearances in the big game for the Kansas City Chiefs. Photo: Home Depot

The situation is about the same for Kansas City. Their last Super Bowl appearance before 2020 was in 1970.

I was living in western New York in the eighties and nineties. My team was the Buffalo Bills. But California has been my home for the past sixteen years.

I’ve watched our teams start strong.

I’ve endured the frustration as a season falls apart by the midpoint. And I’ve welcomed the resurgence of both Bay Area franchises as they have embarked on rebuilding campaigns.

Another associate told me a couple of years ago that it was hard to give up season tickets for Forty-Niner games when the team moved to Levi's Stadium. “The ticket prices jumped quite a bit,” he told me. “We had season tickets in the family for decades, but with the team not doing well then and the hike in prices, we felt as if we had no other choice.”

It’s been good for the Bay Area and Central California to watch some quality local NFL action this season.

Putting a winning season together is hard enough. Making it to the postseason is the reward for the teams that can pass muster week after week.

Making it to the Super Bowl is for the elites. For the fans, it’s something to cheer about.

It’s also something that connects to what truly was a special time in the past.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

He has written Course Corrections available at Lulu.com

On February 9, Steve will be the featured speaker at the Merced County Historical Society’s annual meeting. That meeting will be held on the third floor of the Merced County Government Center, 2222 M Street, Merced.

Highway to Hassle-free Access- Segment 2 of Merced’s Campus Parkway will Open Soon

A construction crew working on Segment 2 of Campus Parkway in Merced. Photo: Steve Newvine

Every day, construction crews reach another milestone in the road project known as Campus Parkway.

Construction of Segment 2 of the project is on track to be completed in early 2020.

The project includes the construction of a four-lane expressway from Highway 99, connecting to Highway 140, and will eventually extend to Yosemite Avenue near the Lake Road intersection.

The first segment went from Highway 99 to Childs Avenue. Segment 2 will extend the expressway to Highway 140.

Segment 3 will extend the parkway to Yosemite Avenue.

Campus Parkway will eventually take travelers from Highway 99 to Yosemite Avenue, where it will be easy to connect to Lake Road north to the UC Merced campus. Photo: Steve Newvine

There was one-hundred million dollars provided from the state in the Senate Bill 1 Transportation Package.

That money will fund the current project as well as Segment 3.

According to information from the Merced County Association of Governments website, Campus Parkway will complete the south-eastern portion of the so-called “Merced Loop System.”

That system will one day circle the City of Merced and connect surrounding communities including the City of Atwater.

This map from the Merced County Association of Governments website shows the three Segments of the Campus Parkway project. Photo: MCAG

These projects have been in the works for years.

Delays along the way included efforts to successfully pass a transportation sales tax that made Merced a “self-help” county.

Many leaders point to self-help counties as being in a better position to request state and federal highway monies because these jurisdictions have local “skin-in-the-game” through revenue streams such as dedicated local sales taxes.

Merced County voters passed Measure V, a countywide half-cent sales tax for transportation in 2016.

The sales tax, went into effect in April of 2017, and was projected to generate an estimated $15 million annually for transportation.

Another setback along the way was the recession from the late 2000s through the early 2010s.

Political leaders had to fight to keep local road projects from falling off the funding radar.

The first public meeting on the proposed project was in 1999, so the completion of this second segment seems as though it has been a long time coming.

Looking back on the past two decades, our community has undergone a tremendous change.

UC Merced is now part of the landscape.

Campus Parkway will help take traffic to and from the university. It will also serve to help better connect traffic to Yosemite National Park. It’s hoped it will open the City of Merced’s south side to more economic development. One thing is certain. The new limited access expressway will offer less stressful access for many drivers.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

He has written Course Corrections available at Lulu.com

On February 9, he will be the featured speaker at the Merced County Historical Society’s annual meeting. That meeting will be held on the third floor of the Merced County Government Center, 2222 M Street, Merced.

Seeing clearly in 2020- Looking ahead to a decade of change

A new year and a new decade.

We have started a new year and a new decade. It’s time to put it in perspective.

Unlike the start of previous decades, this one comes at a time when change is the operative word.

Forty years ago, I rang in the New Year by watching the movie Citizen Kane at a friend’s house. In the era right before video machines became prominent in homes, seeing a true Hollywood classic film was more of a special event.

In 1980, we knew the New Year would start a decade of life changes.

Later that year, I married my wife Vaune, and then moved twelve-hundred miles away from where my first job was in the northeast United States to take a new position in the south.

Most of the 1980s found me tending to my duties as a father to these two young ladies. Photo: Newvine Personal Collection

As the decade progressed, two children would bless our family and two more job changes took place.

We bought our first house, paying less than what some full size new cars cost.

It was the decade of beginnings.

The shift to the 1990s found me entrenched in the task of parenting. My family would celebrate New Year’s Eve about four hours earlier so that our children could make noise and be in bed close to their regular bedtime.

Later in the decade as our daughters became teens, we started a tradition of going out to dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant, and then come home to watch the movie Apollo 13 on our VHS tape machine.

The 1990s would eventually take me to a new career as a chamber of commerce executive where I would work with business and political leaders. L-R: Former New York State Lieutenant Governor Mary Ann Krupsak, Alan Fusco, me, and Lynn Herzig. Photo: Lynn Herzig

That decade would see me leaving the television journalism field for new adventures running a local chamber of commerce.

By mid-decade, I would add on a part time job as an adjunct teacher at an area college.

Both jobs made an indelible impact on the person I hoped to become. Community service would become an important part of life.

It was a decade of change.

We marked the start of the new millennium in 2000 with a house full of noise from a teenager sleepover and the television on with Peter Jennings anchoring ABC News coverage of the event.

As the whole world was celebrating the year 2000, the broadcast networks were all in for reports from practically every time zone in the world as each part of the planet welcomed in the New Year.
Over the next few years, I would mourn the loss of my mother to cancer, move to the west coast, and effectively push the restart button on my life.

It was the decade of transformation.

My wife and I started the past decade with the purchase of a home in our adopted home town of Merced. Photo: Newvine Personal Collection

Ten years ago, my wife and I were getting serious about moving out of an apartment and settling in again in a house.

By 2010 we had been in Merced three years and spent all that time sitting out the fall of the local housing market.

We weren’t sure even in 2010 that the worst of the recession was over. But we took a chance, met a fine local real estate agent, and found the right place for us.

A grandson arrived during the past decade. His birth has brought new meaning to the words transformative, change, and beginnings.

We opened our home to my wife’s parents when the time came for them to move from their home of more than fifty years.

I’ll never forget my father-in-law calling me shortly after he heard that I was okay with the idea of in-laws moving in with us.

He said, “They tell me you are fine with this, but I need to hear that for myself.” I told him I was fine with it, adding that I saw it as a gift to my wife: I was giving my wife her parents.

The past decade, the tens, was a decade of reframing.

And that brings us to the start of another new ten-year span. We know there will be changes starting with my decision to retire from my full time job later in this year.

What else is heading our way is not known, but if the past four decades have been any indication, it will be an adventure.

I don’t have a bucket list. The closest I came to one was in a column I wrote in 2019 about flying a kite with my grandson.

Some of the other items on my Grandpa’s Bucket list include:

• Watch him perform in a school play
• Enjoy an adventure that ends with the two of us at a real diner (my grandfather did this with me and I never forgot it)
• Attend his high school graduation and his college graduation
• Play some Sinatra and Elvis and explain to him why these artists are so important to me

So with any luck, I’ll knock off everything on that Grandpa’s Bucket list.

I might even start a new list.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

He’s published Course Corrections that can be found on Lulu.com

He will be the featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Merced County Historical Society on February 9 at the Merced Government Center.