“It just kind of became mine,” Kathy McPike said, recalling how she came to own the Berry Stop back in 2013. The site was originally home to a Darensberries stand, which McPike worked at for about seven years before its vacancy allowed her to open a stand of her own.
“I was the manager/a little more than a manager, let’s just say,” McPike said, explaining how the experience helped prepare her for the Berry Stop days ahead.
“I was opening and closing, and running the staff,” she listed. “I’ve been blessed with staff. Every year I’ve just had wonderful people working with me.”
As passionate as McPike is about fresh, locally grown strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries, she’s equally fond of people in general. Looking back at her seasoned history running the Berry Stop, it’s the memories of specific people she’s encountered that light her eyes up the most.
“The majority of the people that come are awesome,” McPike said, referring to locals and freeway travelers alike, as the Berry Stop is easily visible from the 101. “We get a lot of regulars and you get to know them, and sometimes they become our friends.”
There’s one particular customer who’s been on McPike’s mind since about 2018, the year she stopped coming by for strawberries. She first visitied the stand around 2014.
“Her name is Dolly—an elderly gal, she had long white hair, and she lived down south but had a boat in Morro Bay. So every week, she would come by and get berries to take to Morro Bay and get on her boat for the weekend,” said McPike, who wishes she knew Dolly’s last name.
McPike called Dolly one of her fondest acquaintances at the Berry Stop and said she was in the middle of writing a book when she last saw her.
“She said I was in one of the chapters, because she loved our relationship,” McPike said. “But after that, I never saw her again. She was an older lady, she might have passed.”
But if Dolly happens to be reading this, McPike said she would love to hear from her.
Like so many of her customers who discovered the Berry Stop while cruising up or down Highway 101, McPike herself is not native to the Central Coast.
“I’m actually a transplant. But I’ve been here for about 32 years,” said McPike, who’s originally from the Bay Area, but was living in Watsonville right before her move to Santa Maria in 1989.
In all the years since then, none have taken McPike by surprise as much as 2020 did, she explained. Like nearly every business owner last March, McPike was worried. But the pandemic’s effect on sales at the Berry Stop wasn’t as harsh as she initially feared.
“At first I thought, ‘We’re just going to die, people aren’t going to want to come out.’ But actually, we did OK,” McPike said. “We stayed afloat.
“I didn’t have to get any of the PPP money because I felt other people needed it more, other businesses,” she added.
McPike also explained that a major benefit of running the Berry Stop, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, is that it’s open on a seasonal basis, rather than year-round.
“This season we opened on Feb. 12, and we’ll probably run it through August, maybe the first week of September,” McPike said. “Business slows down when the pit fruits come in—the apricots, the peaches, the plums. When they start hitting the markets, people are kind of over strawberries for a while.”
But one of the biggest perks for McPike when it comes to the Berry Stop’s location is simply that the fruit she sells is picked just a few feet away from the stand itself. The scenic view doesn’t hurt either, she said.
“I can’t explain the feeling. I just want to say ‘happy.’ It’s a happy place, it’s my happy place,” McPike said, describing the feeling of coming to work each morning. “It’s calming to me, it really is.
“There are very few days that get me flustered,” she added. “And it does happen, when you get some people that don’t understand ‘please don’t touch the strawberries,’ and they want to rifle through them and fondle them.”
This was a problem before the pandemic, McPike said, leading her to enact an informal “you touch it, you buy it” policy.
While the Berry Stop is probably best known for its strawberries, offered by the basket ($4), three-basket pack ($8), half flat ($14), and full flat ($22), the stand also usually offers fresh blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries (depending on the day and availability).
When asked whether she ever gets burned out on strawberries, especially being surrounded by them all day, McPike said she avoids that with a good dose of moderation.
“I don’t get sick of them, but I don’t eat a lot of them,” she said. “Just one, two, or three to put in my yogurt each morning.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood could use some shortcake right about now. Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 6, 2021.