After 25 years with the VCPUSD, Gary Pay heads off into retirement

Gary Pay plays the mandolin with The Ash Street Ramblers at Bates Nut Farm in 2009.

BY: DAN KIDDER

After 25 years anywhere, you’re going to end up with some stories to tell.
But it’s not every day that you’d get to talking about your week and end up explaining how you and a coworker chased a snake through a parking lot with a trash can.
Such is, or rather has been, the life of Gary Pay for the past quarter century as the head of maintenance and operations for the Valley Center/Pauma Unified School District (VCPUSD). But this summer, Pay will ride off into the sunset of retirement.
“This is the best school district in California,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine spending twenty-five years working anywhere but here.”
The result of simply answering a “help wanted” ad in a newsletter, Pay drove down from Lone Pine to Valley Center for his interview, and knew he’d end up staying.
“When I drove into the area and saw the schools, it really seemed like this was my kind of place,” he says.
Since then, Pay says he has come to appreciate the community’s commitment to the school district, especially shown in the consistency of the school board.
“This community is fortunate to have had such a stable school board all these years,” he says. “I’ve worked with Henry Van Wyk my whole career here, Barb Rohrer has been here fifteen years, and all of the four superintendents I’ve worked under have been such a stable influence. It’s been very consistent, which is nice.”
Pay has in turn become a valued contributor to our community, from serving as the president of the Valley Center Lions Club to getting “talked into” filling the same post in the Valley Center Girls Softball League (VCGSL).
“Pat Tousley has a way of talking you into helping out, one way or another,” he says with a laugh about one of our town’s staunchest supporters of girls softball. “But that’s what I love about our community—those connections. It’s a great community for that.”
Those connections become especially important in times of crisis, as our town has experienced time and time again.
“I’ve worked with Tony Lopresti from the water district for a long time, and we’ve worked together through five disasters here,” Pay says. “In the fires of 2007, I stayed here the whole time, transporting food to the high school, getting lights set up, and taking care of the logistics that need to be taken care of when you have a thousand people staying in your facility for a week. In times like that, you see the same people you see every day, people in the community, working together to help each other get back on their feet.”
When the school year ends and he finally begins his retirement, Pay admits that he won’t miss some things.
“It’ll be nice not to get those phone calls at two or three in the morning,” he says with a smile. “I’ve been on call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the past twenty-five years. That’s OK, it’s what I signed up for. But when you work toward a goal like this, it seems so far away, but when you get close, it doesn’t sink in right away that you’re almost there.”
As for his plans in retirement, Pay says that one of his favorite hobbies will get to fill a more central role in his life.
“I’m going to get more exercise, and I’m going to play more music,” he says, referring to his spot in the local bluegrass band, The Ash Street Ramblers. “We’ve got a fiddle player who is a teacher from the Escondido School District, an artist from LA and a bass player who works for NASA working on the next Mars rover—it’s quite a mix of people.”
Pay, who plays the mandolin, first met the group’s guitar player, Ken Simon, who retired from the Valley Center Municipal Water District, when they used to get together in Simon’s office to practice. From those humble beginnings came a band that played in the Millpond Music Festival, the Julian Bluegrass Festival, the Tea Party at Grape Day Park, the Bluegrass On The Greengrass at Skyline Ranch, and a number of shows at Bates Nut Farm, where they will be playing again in October and November. Be sure to check out The Ash Street Ramblers on their Web site at www.ashstreetramblers.net for more information.
But no matter where retired life takes him, Pay says that the memories of his time with the school district will pile as thick as the green spiral notebooks filled with his work projects that he still has covering his desk.
And when the new head of maintenance and operations takes over next year, he or she will be able to look up the proper way to catch a gopher snake in a parking lot with a trash can.