Birth Plate

This commemorative plate was gifted to me when I was born. It is one of my most treasured possessions, and also my most personal Covina collectible. Except for my years away at college, it has been on display in a place of honor everywhere I've dwelt my whole life, and as such, it's an everyday reminder of my ultimate roots in the town of my birth.

2024 was a year of difficult losses for me, but in the end, I decided I should not add to those losses by killing off the one thing I love that I have the power to keep alive. So I will resume posting here, even though doing so carries with it neither reward nor recognition. It's a thankless job, but someone has to do it!

 

Is it worth it?

I'm losing hope this blog is ever going to attract a decent-sized audience. My latest post got only 16 page views in a month. Other articles show a similarly abysmal level of traffic in the last 30-day period.

Lowering my spirits even further is the fact that I've been writing this blog for over 18 years now, and Covina Past still has only 1 follower. On the whole internet, just one person is interested enough in my content here to subscribe to it?

This is disheartening to say the least.

What's to be done? One thing I believe would help my blog gain readership is if the Covina Valley Historical Society were to regularly post links to my articles in their newsletters and socials. It would help even more if the Firehouse Museum were maintained in a manner that allowed its holdings to be used for historical research. They have a treasure trove of printed and photographic material in their trust, but it's completely inaccessible. There's no phone, no email, and it's only staffed for a couple of hours one day a week. Meanwhile, dozens of bound volumes in their archive just sit locked away gathering dust, along with thousands of photos stashed away in envelopes, never to be digitized and thus effectively lost to present and future scholars. This is very frustrating to someone like me who is eager to turn this invaluable storehouse of information into something truly useful.

If I still lived in the Covina area, I could and would get directly involved in the Historical Society and go full activist on the research and education front, but I'm 700 miles away now and have no means to travel, so that isn't an option, unfortunately. So I'm kind of left without hope that any of these things are ever going to change.

And then there's simply the matter of time. I just turned 70 a couple of months ago, so this could very well be my last decade of life, and I really have to ask myself: is this blog a productive use of my remaining years on this earth? Would someone of any age think it's worthwhile to write for such a tiny and apparently indifferent audience? I think the objectively obvious answer is no, it is not.

Consequently, as much as I love Covina and its history, I've decided it's probably for the best that I wrap things up here. I'll continue to do research on my own, and there are a couple more topics in my queue that I've been working on that I feel I owe it to myself to publish on this blog, but after that, I think the time has come for me to move on.