The memoir of W.R. Holman is a tribute to old Pacific Grove, now updated to share with a broader audience.

Self-published as a gift to family and friends in 1979, My Life in Pacific Grove by legendary P.G. figure Wilford Rensselaer Holman, is now making its debut to a larger audience. Forty-one years after Holman’s death, editor Heather Lazare (whose mother-in-law was part of the Holman family) and Patricia Hamilton of Place Park Publication and Pacific Grove Books, are releasing his memoir with the addition of newly uncovered archival material.

As the proprietor of Holman’s Department Store, W.R. Holman was a towering character in Pacific Grove. He and his wife Zena ran what was, in the first half of the 20th century, the biggest department store between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with up to 46 departments and 200 employees, selling everything except alcohol. A solarium on the top floor was a favorite lunch spot for P.G. ladies, who, after picking out muslins and percales, treated themselves to sandwiches and milkshakes.

“There probably isn’t a home on the Monterey Peninsula that doesn’t have a bit of Holman’s somewhere in its rooms,” Holman writes.

My Life in Pacific Grove portrays a coastal childhood in the last decades of the 19th century, and a love for Aunt Minora, who raised Holman along with the Chinese cook and family accountant Lee Chong. Holman considered them the two most wonderful people he ever met.

It also accounts for the memorable year 1906, when, on April 18, San Francisco experienced a monumental earthquake and then, on May 15, the Chinese fishing village at Point Alones was nearly burned to the ground in a suspicious fire.

It was “a pretty complete book,” Lazare says of the original, which Holman dictated to his caregiver at the age of 95. But her mother-in-law left behind “the Holman boxes,” and when Lazare combed through them during the pandemic, she found more worth adding to the story.

The final product now includes over 150 new photographs and the Pacific Grove Charter – “the foundation for Pacific Grove governance” – which Holman fiercely supported. There are also four previously unpublished letters from John Steinbeck to the Holmans.

MY LIFE IN PACIFIC GROVE: A MEMOIR by Wilford Rensselaer Holman, Heather Lazare (editor) and Louise V. Jaques (translator) is available at The Bookworks, 667 Lighthouse Ave., Pacific Grove, and at other local bookstores. More at lifeinpacificgrove.com.