Riverside icon the Fox Theater shines bright as day becomes evening and guests arrive for a performance. (Brenda Flowers) Have a photo that captures the spirit of Riverside? Share it with us and help celebrate the beauty of our community!
Wednesday Gazette: November 12, 2025
Hello Riverside, and Happy Wednesday! It's National Happy Hour Day, a tradition that dates back to 1913 when the U.S. Navy used the term for scheduled entertainment time. During Prohibition, "Happy Hour" meant time spent at a speakeasy before heading to dinner. Whether happy hours are your thing or not, today's a great opportunity to nominate a neighborly and helpful server or bartender who makes Riverside a friendlier place. Send their name and story to newsroom@raincrossgazette.com!
Thanksgiving may well be the most American of all holidays, nearly universally celebrated within the United States. It features American values like family and gratitude. While families might vary in whether the protein for their Thanksgiving dinner is a turkey or a tofu-nut loaf, most dessert tables are going to feature a pumpkin pie. If pumpkin pie is the unifying feature of Thanksgiving dinners across the nation, it is worth asking, "Just how American is pumpkin pie?"
Let's deconstruct a pumpkin pie recipe to answer that question. The plethora of contemporary pumpkin pie recipes all share a pumpkin and spice custard filling with a crust. They all appear to have roots in a "Pompkin Pudding" recipe in Amelia Simmons' 1796 book, American Cookery.
The universal ingredient is pumpkin. But what is a pumpkin, and is it truly American? Pumpkin is the fruit of certain members of the viny squash family (a big family with familiar members such as cucumbers, melons, and gourds). A pumpkin can come from one of three different species: Cucurbita pepo (classic Jack O' Lanterns as well as most summer squashes like zucchinis and winter squashes like acorn), Cucurbita moschata (includes butternut squash and is the primary source of commercial pumpkin puree), and Cucurbita maxima (also Hubbard and Turban squashes). All of these species are among the oldest domesticated crops, going back ten thousand years or more to their origins. Cucurbita pepo was domesticated in North America, in what is now the American Southwest and northern Mexico. The others hail from South America. By the time that the Pilgrims had arrived, domesticated C. pepo, including its pumpkin variants, had long expanded its range throughout temperate North America. So far, so good. Pumpkin has (North and South) American roots.
The entire McCollum family will cross graduation stages simultaneously in 2026 after Marine veteran Michael Sr. used his military education benefits to enable his wife and three children to pursue degrees at four different universities.
RCC's men's track and field team received State Assembly recognition from Assemblymember Leticia Castillo for winning their ninth state championship under coach Jim McCarron while maintaining a 3.14 team GPA across 83 student-athletes.
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