WATSONVILLE—Stephen Gerald Bankhead was a longtime Watsonville resident who made learning about Pajaro Valley’s history—and relaying it to the community—his passion in the latter part of his life.
Most recently, he wrote the Pajaro Valley Past column for The Pajaronian, taking it over from historian and author Betty Lewis, and also examined and critiqued local politics for this publication. He was also a regular contributor to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Bankhead, born on Jan. 21, 1947, died on Feb. 21 after a brief illness. He was 75.
His wife Alice described him as a man who cared deeply for the community in which he grew up. Bankhead moved here from Visalia while in elementary school. He would have graduated from Watsonville High School in 1965, but he enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, where he got his GED, said his friend Janey Leonardich.
Bankhead was Secretary of Friends of The Watsonville Library and Head of Poetry at the Santa Cruz County Fair. He also belonged to the American Legion and Sons of Italy.
More than anything else, his friends describe him as a quiet, intelligent man with a deep knowledge of local politics, and who was not afraid to state his opinion in writing.
“He talked with his pen,” Leonarcich said. “If he had something really important to say he’d put it to paper.”
Leonardich said that Bankhead’s death from cancer came as a shock to many.
“He never told anyone,” she said. “I told Alice, ‘he did it his way.’ He just wanted to be private about it.”
In fact, Leonardich said, Bankhead refused to turn to the Veterans’ Administration when he got sick, explaining that those services were for “people that really need it, like the injured.”
“That’s how he felt,” she said. “He wasn’t out there to grab whatever he could grab. He was out there to help others.”
Former Watsonville City Councilman Emilio Martinez said he and Bankhead would frequently talk politics at the Villager, a tiny, cozy neighborhood pub in East Lake Village that serves as a watering hole and a gathering spot for locals.
Martinez described Bankhead as an observant, intelligent man with a keen and frequently acerbic sense of humor.
It was in the Villager that Bankhead found a small fellowship of friends who still gather to sip their drinks and talk about the events that shape their community, their world and their lives.
“Steve Bankhead was a prince of all men,” said owner Eric Johnson. “He was a good guy. There’s not anyone here who would say a bad thing about him.”
Roseann Marquez, who was nursing a glass of white wine Wednesday afternoon, said Bankhead was a generous man who “would do anything for anybody.”
“He was a family person,” Marquez said. “He loved his wife dearly, took care of her 100%.”
Marquez said it was an annual Thanksgiving meal hosted by Alice and Steve Bankhead that gave her a place to go for the holiday.
Leonardich, president of the Watsonville Woman’s Club, said Bankhead frequently helped out around the building.
“He was the silent little guy where, if the parking lot needed something, he would do it,” she said. “If the building needed something he would do it. He would kind of shuffle in, take care of it and go home.”
Pajaronian editor Tony Nuñez described Bankhead as “a prolific storyteller of the Pajaro Valley who had a passion for sharing the history of the place we all call home.”
Nuñez said that Bankhead’s reliability helped ease the burden of a job whose responsibilities included overseeing the entirety of the newspaper’s editorial output.
“Steve was an invaluable source of information in my early days as editor, and he never missed a deadline as the writer of the Pajaro Valley’s Past column,” he said.
That included submissions even after his health began to fail last year, Nuñez said.
“He was devoted to Pajaronian and to the people that make up the Pajaro Valley,” he said. “He will be missed by many, both those that knew him by name and those who knew him only by the words he wove into stories.”
