A big thank you to Scott M. Rich for sharing these photos of his mother, Lorna Rich, at Mount Rubidoux's Peace Tower and Friendship Bridge — taken March 10, 1942, the day the family relocated to Riverside after being evacuated from Hawaii following December 7, 1941. (Scott M. Rich)
Sunday Gazette: June 14, 2026
Hello Riverside, and Happy Sunday! This week's Snapshot Sunday comes with a story. The photos above show Lorna Rich at Mount Rubidoux on March 10, 1942 — the day her family arrived in Riverside after being evacuated from Hawaii following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her son Scott shared them with us, and we're so glad he did.
Thank you to the Subscribers who became paid supporters this week: Barbara Ann Burns, Sandy Hardina, and Elizabeth Miller. Your ongoing financial support is vital to our success in serving Riverside with the news it deserves!
From the Kitchen Garden: June, The Summer Transition Edition
Tips on what to plant, when to pick, and what to watch out for in your home garden.
Raincross Gazette reader Barbara Bennett and husband Steve Walag in their newly installed and planted garden by Kitchen Gardens by Kim. (Kim Malstrom)
June is the month when Riverside gardens make a dramatic shift. Cool-season crops that thrived through winter and spring are beginning to struggle as temperatures warm up, while warm-season vegetables are finally hitting their stride. If your lettuce is suddenly shooting up flower stalks, your cilantro is blooming, or your spinach is turning bitter — don't worry, you aren't doing something wrong. That's exactly what should be happening this time of year.
This is also the month when tomatoes begin to set heavy fruit, peppers start growing rapidly, and squash plants seem to double in size overnight. If we hit a sudden stretch of high temperatures, deep watering may be necessary. A well-watered garden handles heat far better than a thirsty one. Check your irrigation system now, before the hottest part of summer arrives.
If you're harvesting more zucchini than your family and neighbors can eat, try shredding and freezing it for future zucchini bread or muffins.
Neighbor of the Week is a series profiling the hidden heroes of Riverside, doing incredible works of service throughout our different neighborhoods.
Jill Johnson-Young in her office at Central Counseling Services, where the bookshelves behind her reflect a career spent helping others navigate grief, loss, and life's hardest passages. (Brenda Flowers)
Jill Johnson-Young knows grief the way only someone who has lived it can. A licensed clinical social worker, a widow twice over before the age of 50, she has spent her career walking alongside people in the hardest seasons of their lives — through dementia, terminal illness, and loss. That experience isn't incidental to her work. It's the foundation of it.
A Riverside native and North High graduate who later earned her degree from UCR, Jill co-owns Central Counseling Services, a group mental health practice with locations in Riverside and Murrieta, alongside its nonprofit arm, CCS Education and Wellness. Both grew out of long careers in child welfare and adoptions, but Jill's path took a decisive turn through hospice care, where she spent 15 years as both a social worker and clinical director. It was in hospice work that she saw, again and again, families blindsided by a reality most people don't know: dementia is a terminal illness. That recognition drove her to start a dementia support group 17 years ago — one that continues today as a monthly online gathering and has grown into a training ground for CCS students and a resource for therapists across the region.
Grief is the other pillar of her practice. Every Friday, she hosts the Friday Grief Chat on Facebook alongside a colleague in Illinois — a wide-ranging conversation about all things grief, including interviews with practitioners, researchers, and advocates from around the country. The two recently returned from presenting together at the International Death, Grief and Bereavement Conference. Jill also speaks nationally and locally on end-of-life topics, dementia, and grief support. ("A big room," she says, "is like recess for me.")
Her community roots run deep. She is the daughter of a UCR founding chemistry faculty member who became Graduate Dean and a mother who was a force in local volunteer life — involved in adult day care that became Care Connexxus, in helping women escape domestic violence, and in the establishment of Highland Park. Those roots show in how Jill lives. She is active at First Congregational Church of Riverside downtown, engaged in local wildlands and wildfire preparedness advocacy, and connected to a network of Riverside organizations serving vulnerable neighbors. CCS Education and Wellness students are currently working alongside Project Food, the Riverside Free Clinic, and Family Promise. She dreams, still, of a hospice facility where terminally ill unhoused people could receive care alongside their pets — without having to leave at 7 a.m.
At home on the hillside near Box Springs, she and her family keep watch over their city, tend a garden, and make a habit of rescuing senior dogs who have been overlooked.
This week, we’re staying in the same general neighborhood of paper and memory, but moving from “Wish you were here” to “I am here.” Our creative nudge is a bookmark.
I own plenty of bookmarks; they are nearly effortless to acquire. I find them in bookstores, gift shops, libraries, and sometimes tucked into used books like tiny time travelers from someone else’s reading life. I like them. I keep them. I save them in responsible little stacks.
And yet, the moment I need one, every bookmark I own goes into hiding. I assume they gather somewhere under the furniture, laughing at me while I reach for whatever is nearby: a napkin, a receipt, a business card, or once, in a moment of questionable literary improvisation, a raw angel hair pasta noodle. Not recommended.
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