The Fremont Podcast
The only podcast dedicated to telling the stories of the people and places of Fremont, CA. The diversity and integration of people and cultures of Fremont truly makes it a special place. This podcast explores these stories.
The Fremont Podcast
Bonus Episode: A Good Run. Bill & Sharon Retire from Local News
Thank you, Bill and Sharon.
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Intro and outro voice-overs made by Gary Williams.
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Hello Fremont, this is Andrew. This is a little bonus episode. We've got some news for you, if you don't already know it the owners of the Tri-City Voice newspaper, bill and Sharon Marshak, are going to retire. They have owned and run and produced that little paper for over 20 years and they're going to stop. They're going to take a break. They are going to go home and hang out with their dog instead of, you know, running the only newspaper in Fremont seven days a week while hanging out with their dog in the office.
Speaker 1:In addition to being the editor for this podcast, I have written articles for the Tri-City Voice and I think my name is still on the masthead. And, of course, one time I asked Bill if I could make a podcast for the Tri-City Voice. He said yes and he let me do it until the pandemic shut it all down. So I wish them well and I wish them a happy retirement. The Tri-City Voice, the paper itself, is not going to be shut down. According to someone who knows, it's going to be operated by a different company and, from what I can tell, the offices of the Tri-City Voice here in Fremont are going to stay here in Fremont. I think that's important. I used to work for the Argus. Back when the Argus was the Argus and before the Bay Area News Group that owns what they turned into the East Bay Times, moved the offices out of Fremont, over the hill and a ways away.
Speaker 1:I think it's important that the Tri-City Voices office is, you know, for as far as I can tell, going to stay in Fremont, because when you're not in the city that you report on, you don't do a very good job reporting on it.
Speaker 1:It's not really possible to do that and you certainly don't report on it as often. We here at the Fremont podcast we're certainly not journalists with a capital J, but we did talk to people who were here and we tried to do little stories every once in a while about things that were going on. And if we were successful at all it's because we all live here. We are here in the community telling stories about the community to an audience made up almost exclusively of the community here in Fremont. When a news organization is based elsewhere, you're going to get less coverage. And I said, we here at the podcast don't do journalism with a capital J and you could argue that the Tri-City Voice doesn't have the biggest capital J in the journalism department. In fact, bill Marshak told me that the newspaper is essentially a community bulletin board.
Speaker 2:And that's what we try to do. So in a sense we're just like a big community bulletin board. You know, everybody gets a say in this thing. Now, obviously I've got restraints in the time that we can put print and how many places we can distribute to that sort of thing, but we try to be open as much as we can to whatever's happening in the community, in all these communities.
Speaker 1:And I think there is great value in having that. The Tri-City Voice does do a lot of reporting but on the weeks when it doesn't do a lot of heavy lifting reporting, it's still really good to have a community bulletin board in the community. We here at the Fremont Podcast have actually interviewed Bill and Sharon Marshak and, as sort of a retirement send-off, I wanted to play a clip for you from that episode teach you in high school.
Speaker 2:She had an espresso maker at home and she had an espresso maker at work and she lived on espresso running back and forth over the hill because it was long hours and trying to figure out what to do and I knew nothing about production.
Speaker 3:I didn't even know what a printer looked like a press. I kept looking to see where the press was.
Speaker 4:Bill, did you have a job in printing or publishing or anything? No, what were you doing?
Speaker 2:I was in financial services at the time, okay, so I worked pretty close to home, okay, and I had clientele. Absolutely no thought of going into newspapers or publishing or anything of that nature, and none of my background really lent itself toward that at all so it was all happenstance.
Speaker 2:I'm always curious about areas that I live in, and since my job really entailed driving around and seeing people and a lot of different folks in financial services, I had no problem going around the area and just taking a look. But I wasn't into this business at the time, I was just curious about it.
Speaker 3:They said nothing happens in Fremont.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the common wisdom you know was nothing happens here. Yeah, of course. If you ask any kid anywhere in the world what their town is like, probably 99% of the time they'll tell you nothing happens here Right Exactly. That's the common response.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But we got that from more than just kids here, and so I just found it hard to believe, because we came from Aptos, which is a very small area, and there was a lot happening and I thought, well, gee, this area is much larger and it's just impossible for nothing to be happening here. It's just a matter of finding out what it is.
Speaker 2:We had a printer where we'd print the pages out to take a look at it and I'd lay them out on the floor to look at all the pages, and my cat would walk on all of them. She just decided that I was laying them out for her, and I'd rather be jumping around on top of them too.
Speaker 4:So, it was really a home business, if there ever was one and so you were designing these out of your house, out of your house.
Speaker 3:You didn't necessarily have an office or anything. Oh no, we had no office.
Speaker 4:Oh my goodness that was our first one, that is. So you were telling me the story earlier that you were printing these out and trying to hand them out for free to people Is that right? And you said this is the first one what's happening. It has a picture of Mission San Jose on the front and you were saying that it was being misunderstood for being a real estate catalog and people just didn't want it because they couldn't afford to buy a house.
Speaker 3:We had a hard time convincing them that it was about Fremont.
Speaker 2:We did it all. We pretty much. You know I wrote the articles. Most of them we had some people who helped us. We went out and sold advertising. We sold advertising before we even had the magazine.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 3:We had to sell it for about a month before it was created.
Speaker 4:Right, you had to find a way to fund it.
Speaker 2:I guess, yeah, you had to convince people that it was going to exist give some homage to all the different folks that are here, whether they're newcomers or they've been here for years and years. You've got to recognize their existence and you have to tell people, other people, they are not just a monolith Like you. Look at some of the communities here and if you're not part of that community, you might think, oh, they're all the same, these are all you know. If they're from Pakistan, they're this way. If they're from India, they're this way. If they're from you know, some other area of Africa, they're this way. That's not really true.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like saying I'm from the United States, so therefore this is the way I act. If you're from the United States, you know that each state can be different. Each locale can be different. It's the same thing for the other communities and other countries. So we tried to expose that to the general population so they understood that all these people are here, they're real people.
Speaker 2:they come from different different backgrounds yeah yeah, and here's what they do and here's why they do it, and they may look a little different. They may look a little different, they may dress a little different, but they're people just like you are. Wow, and that was the idea. The idea was to bring our community together to feel as a cohesive unit, and I have to say that, through all the problems that we've had nationally and internationally, and even regionally, this area has been relatively calm and I think it's because people do understand. They see on a regular basis people that may have different customs than they do, and we've grown accustomed to that.
Speaker 3:We've helped them to come together too, to go to the events, to hear their stories and to fight their battles with them. We fought for parks, we fought for religious continuity and we tell their stories and help them to tell their stories and to celebrate who they are, so that they're not afraid of each other anymore. They've come together a lot, wow.
Speaker 1:There's a lot more to that interview and if you'd like to hear the rest of it, check out Episode 5 of the Fremont Podcast. We just released Episode 122, so Episode 5 was a long time ago. If you'd like the Fremont podcast to continue to make episodes, let us know. Easiest way, I guess, is to log on to Instagram, but we've got contact information all over the internet. If you'd like us to keep going, make more episodes, talk to more people, find little stories here and there, let us know. I mean, as this tribute is a testament to, we're not going to be the only game in town. Tri-city Voice newspaper is going to keep going, but if you'd like us to keep making episodes, let us know that that's true. But if you'd like us to keep making episodes, let us know that that's true. Bill Sharon, genuinely thank you for all the opportunities you've given me. No-transcript.