My family has been in the arts for a long, long time. Our first gallery opened in 1980 in New Jersey. It was my mother’s gallery, named The Williams Gallery of Fine Art. So when I opened my first gallery here in Oakhurst, I named it after hers: The Williams Gallery West. People assume we’re a gallery of western art, ...

I’ve always had a love of the outdoors. Mom got me into garden club when we lived in Bermuda when I was nine. I got my garden badge when I was a Girl Scout. My dad was also a fisherman so I fished with him all the time. Even deep sea fishing. My dad was also a big hiker. We started ...

Jim:  In the Marines I was a technician and then went to a small ultrasound company that was bought by Phillips, and that’s where I met Shirley — she was interning there. Although I was working as a technician, in my heart I’d always been a physicist. That interest was noticed by the physicists there and they pulled me into their ...

“I’ve been a sort of a loner all my life. I could easily be alone and do things on my own. I’ve probably seen at least a hundred movies and ninety-five were by myself. “I was roughly thirty-years-old when I decided to go live in the wilderness in Northern California. I’d been living in Hawaii growing marijuana, and I was really, ...

“I was always an artist. When my mother wrote my name to help me learn it, I was more interested in the different colors than the letters. Although I’ve had various jobs, they’ve all centered around art or design. “I even taught art in a women’s prison. There was a program called Arts and Corrections and I really felt like ...

“I think I was ten and a half. I wasn’t yet eleven because Pearl Harbor hit when I was eleven. I had had bad tonsils all my life but when my parents told me I needed them taken out I would cry, and that was the end of it. “One day I visited my neighbor who was warm and friendly. ...

This is Us is a series of local profiles, with first-person stories about something significant in their lives. It’s a way we can get to know the people in our community on a little deeper level. We have so many fascinating people in our community. In the six years that I’ve lived here, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to ...