This is it.
This is my final column after 36 years with The Press-Enterprise, including 26 happily embedded in Hemet.
I retired Friday.
I didn’t anxiously count the days toward the retirement date, nor did I dread its arrival. It simply felt weird.
After nearly 40 years writing for newspapers — spending much of it joyfully sharing stories about people in the San Jacinto Valley, the San Gorgonio Pass and the San Jacinto Mountains — it will be odd to abruptly stop.
It was a duty I loved and large part of my family’s life.
What would have been my next column? It would have been about Hemetian Vanessa Duve in her role as Poke Mom, a modern-day version of a Soccer Mom. She joins her kids in playing the popular Pokemon Go walking game with her smart phone.
I still have the burn to write about those sort of quirky, real-life sagas, but I’m reluctantly letting them go for a long-planned retirement life. It’s time, but I’m not sure I’m ready.
We will live in downtown San Diego, ride mountain bikes, visit our grandkids a lot and ski as long as our legs hold out. I have a part-time job teaching sailing lessons. It promises to be fun, but I’ll badly miss writing a column.
Retirement ends my unique Hemet assignment.
I began at The Press-Enterprise in the paper’s Banning bureau in 1980, working under my mentor, now-retired editor Bob Marshall. My wife Francie and I made a home in Snow Creek Village at the base of Mt. San Jacinto near Palm Springs.
I was summoned to Riverside in 1989 and asked by the paper’s editor, Marcia McQuern, to move to the San Jacinto Valley with our children, Alexis and Kevin, and write columns about living in the area. She thought I would be in the Hemet area for four or five years.
I liked the job so much I never asked to leave.
Francie became a marriage and family therapist and opened a practice, then later went to work for the Hemet Unified School District. We built a home in a Valle Vista citrus groves that we hoped to sell someday to buy a place to retire in San Diego, which is what happened.
Kevin started preschool at St. Hyacinth Academy. Alexis attended Valle Vista Elementary School in the second-grade class of Carolyn DeMoss. The talented teacher and her husband, Max, remain our close friends.
On one of my first days living in Valle Vista, I bumped into iconic mountain biker Ron Peacock on a trail. He accepted me into the fold of the offroad cycling community. I chased him in the hills around Hemet until he died suddenly at home on Christmas 2014.
We did the Hemet thing.
Our kids received a solid education at Valle Vista Elementary, Dartmouth Middle School and Hemet High. They played sports in Valley-Wide Recreation and Park District leagues. We met friends faster than anyplace we had lived.
Kevin now coaches mens volleyball at San Diego City College and the womens team at Cuyamaca College. Alexis also became an educator. She works for the Aim High nonprofit that helps kids achieve scholastically. She lives with her husband, Ed Bayley, and our two granddaughters in Oakland.
We enjoyed living in the Hemet area and pedaling trails with the Grove Girls and the Valle Vista Boys, led by Howard Rosenthal, Steve Simpson and Matt Brudin.
I had a great time staging fun events and interacting with readers on Facebook. The Bob Pratte Spamoramas were memorable, as were readers’ cellphone art and poppy photography shows.
Readers responded to my whining that no one ever names their kids after me.
A female standard poodle was named Bob Pratte by Valle Vista resident Carl Bennett. Hemet True Value Hardware owner Rick Truskowski, attorney Dave Angeloff, Jerry Young and thoroughbred trainer Marcos Menjivar named their race horse after me, too.
I spent a quarter century charting a Christmas light route through the San Jacinto Valley. I was excited to see the lights shine brighter every year.
Francie retired in June. Now it’s my turn.
The legend of Tahquitz guarantees that we won’t be strangers.
It says that people who sleep in the shadow of the San Jacinto Mountains, home to Tahquitz Peak and Tahquitz Rock, will return.
We’ve slept in the shadow of Mt. San Jacinto for 36 years.
We’ll be back. A lot.
Contact the writer: news@pe.com
