Serving the community since 1922
Serving the community since 1922
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The City of Shafter has a wide independent streak. For decades, our local leadership has been wary of getting too cozy with our state government. It has long been a mantra around City Hall that we want to hitch our wagon to capitalism rather than Sacramento. Because of this, Shafter has done things that most municipalities have not. In 1995, the community voted to adopt a charter to govern itself by. Since then, Shafter has built a railroad, a container yard and a fiber optic network. We are the...
"I began a motion of the heart toward my origins." When I read this sentence in Wendell Berry's novel, Jayber Crow, I recognized the feeling. It was 2003. I was a third-generation Shafter native, living in Virginia and feeling increasingly out of place. A motion had begun back to my origins. In the book, Jayber is a promising student. His teachers tell him he could rise above his roots. He wasn't interested. "Far from rising above them, I was longing to sink into them until I would know the...
