Instigating fun part of Ramona mayor’s party platform

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN LAURA CAMPBELL
It was a self-proclaimed Year of Jubilee that brought “California sisters” Pat Wick and Jessica Gilbert back from Napa Valley to their roots in Ramona.

And, in the five years since they resigned from corporate jobs in California to move out here, the dynamic duo have brought a spirit of celebration and a sense of connectedness to the quiet little town on the northern edge of Marion County that has held their hearts and dreams since childhood.

Wick’s role as mayor and her sister’s as city clerk since 2003 have only played a small part in that, Wick said.

And their penchant for planning festive events like the annual Fourth of July Parade dates back to before they even moved out here, much less held public office.

“That we would do, my sister and I, whether we were in office or not,” Wick said.

The sisters have visited Ramona regularly for years, attending family reunions in the town their parents, grandparents and other relatives called home for so many years.

Eventually they took the yearly opportunity to liven things up a bit in town, Wick said.

“My sister and I started the parades in town at our family reunions, back in 1998,” she said.

They would invite the town residents to join their fun, she said.

Now the sisters not only coordinate events in Ramona, they also own four houses, the bank building and the original barbershop and run a business, California Sisters, LLC, that includes their bed-and-breakfast, Cousin’s Corner.

“When it comes tax time, we are very aware of how many buildings we have,” Wick said with a laugh.

The B&B was the second house they bought and renovated, the first being the one they live in and call the Ramona House.

Wick said she bought the “shell of a house” back in 1990 and renovated it during yearly summer trips from California, where she and Gilbert lived for 30 years.

They now share their business name, California Sisters, with the particular breed of butterflies they found fluttering in the bushes around the house when they first saw it in 1989, Wick said.

The sisters’ involvement in city government also goes back farther than the five years they’ve lived here, she said.

“We used to come to city council meetings whenever we were there in the summer, just for the heck of it,” Wick said. “We wanted to say we’re interested in what you’re doing.”

So when they moved to town, it was a natural transition to take on more official roles in the council.

As positions became vacant and Wick was asked to fill them, she quickly moved up from councilor to vice mayor to mayor in 2003.

“Here all of the sudden I found myself mayor,” she said. “So I tried to run the business of the town like you’re supposed to.

“But city council was not something that anybody really wanted to do,” she added. “I wondered how long I’d want to do this.

So Wick said her first goal was to restructure to way city council conducted its business, a challenge made easier only by the fact that all of the council members were even newer to town than she was.

“As a group, we set some ground rules, to say how we wanted to behave, what we wanted the council to work like, how we wanted to treat each other,” Wick said.

“And it’s worked out really well,” she said. “Our council meetings are really productive-they’re not short because our council is willing to deal with difficult problems. I’m really proud of them.”

Still, Wick said she would have turned down the chance to serve as mayor again if Gilbert hadn’t stayed by her side on the council as secretary and then city clerk.

“She made the job of being mayor easy,” Wick said. “So I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it again if you will.'”

Both in and out of the city office, Wick said her sister is the perfect sidekick for any project.

“She’s the organizer who’s always doing troubleshooting,” Wick said.

The recent election showed that the sisters’ collaborative efforts to make serving on council a more appealing job have paid off.

“We had nine people running for five seats,” she said. “They tell me you used to have to beg, or you talked somebody into it because they owed you a favor.”

Wick’s ultimate goal has been to have a similarly improved atmosphere for the whole town, she said.

“I really wanted the people in Ramona to feel good about themselves,” she said.

And Wick’s main message to the approximately 100 residents of Ramona is that they are a big part of making that happen.

“People come to small Midwest towns expecting a Mayberry-like experience,” she said. “On the surface, that is possible, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, there are some ways you have to behave, some things you have to do to make living in Ramona a good experience.”

Wick and her sister take seriously the event-planning they do to help make being in Ramona a fun experience for residents and visitors alike.

“That has nothing to do with me being mayor,” she said. “That just has to do with being there in the town.”

The town’s Fourth of July parade celebrated its seventh year last month, growing bigger and better each time, Wick said.

“This year we had such a long parade-and it wasn’t just stock equipment and ambulances with sirens, it was honestly a parade with floats and all this kind of stuff-that we were late starting, because it took them longer to get it all organized,” she said.

Other events include lighting up the town and having a live nativity at Christmas, as well as holding a Mother’s Day tea in May that brings in women from all over the county.

“We do stuff that’s fun, so that people would want to even drive through town,” she said.

And the season for seeing scarecrows on a drive through Ramona is quickly approaching, Wick said.

“That’s our next big thing this fall,” she said. “The scarecrows will start going up all over town.”

The sisters’ work in the town has had a tangible effect, it seems-45 of Ramona’s 95 residents have moved in over the last five years.

“That makes a big difference-to have people move into town that weren’t just transient, that actually wanted to put down roots, that had children,” Wick said.

More families moving to town has definitely changed the demographics of what has been mainly a retirement community.

“When we first came into town, there were very few children,” Wick said. “And now I watch the kids get on the bus as they’re getting ready to go to school, and there’s a lot of them.”

And having more kids in town leads to more opportunities for the sisters to plan fun activities.

“My sister hired a dance instructor to come in and teach all the little girls in town a routine so they could all march in the parade and do this routine,” Wick said.

“I would love to see more of that,” she added. “I would love to have workshops for the kids all summer, because now we have such a bunch of kids.”

Wick said she would also love to see more businesses, such as a grocery store and a gas station, added to their bed-and-breakfast and the restaurant, Ramona Cafe, open three days a week.

“I think it would be easier on the citizens-their taxes wouldn’t be as high-if we had a few more people and we had some other businesses in town,” she said.

Wick thinks that more East and West coasters like her and Gilbert will eventually find their niche in small Midwest towns like Ramona.

“Kansas is an undiscovered spot,” she said. “I think that things will upswing for Kansas, because it’s such a nice place to live.”

But realistically, Wick doubts such economic growth will happen anytime soon, and she’s mostly okay with that.

“Like any mayor, I would wish that we had more businesses in town,” Wick said. “But the truth is, we don’t have housing for people.

“And I don’t feel a need for it to be drastically changed, because its charm is that it’s small,” she added. “We have a lovely park, and we’ve got paved streets, and it’s idyllic in that way.

“So it’s nice just the way it is,” she said. “I would just like to see Ramona maintain.”

But Wick said she’ll always be happy to hear that residents of the surrounding rural area are claiming Ramona as their own.

“More and more support is building from families who claim Ramona as an address but don’t live within city limits,” she said.

“We’re always grateful when they, too, invest in Ramona as their town because many times they represent our history-the family names that have built and invested in this county for generations.”

Wick has been sharing stories of small-town life in Ramona with people of surrounding areas for years through her columns in the Marion County Record, she said.

And she and Gilbert are in the process of publishing her second book, a collection of these stories with photographs, titled “Another Day in the Country.”

Her first book, published in 2000 by their own Magician’s Ink Publishing, is called “Emmy Takes a Census” and tells the true story of a local girl who decided one day to count all the dogs in town.

Magician’s Ink is another part of the California Sisters business, through which they also hold seminars, appear for speaking appointments, write newspaper columns, take on writing projects, teach art and run the Dirt Gamblers Museum at the old bank building that also houses their office.

Wick, also an artist and photographer, said she hopes to eventually open an art gallery and gift shop in the old barber shop, to display and sell arts and crafts created by Wick and other local artists.

Wick said it was strange to realize that she and her sister might be the last of their family to live in the area.

“We might be that last generation, and we had never seen ourselves in that way,” she said.

“And yet here we are, spending another day in the country.”

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