When Monita Porter moved from Atlanta to Fresno to help the Fresno Metro Black Chamber of Commerce run a program investing in Black-owned businesses, many in the community worried there wouldn’t be enough Black entrepreneurs and business
Move over, Bills mafia: Josh Allen’s biggest fans hail from small California town [Los Angeles Times]
The earth is dead-level flat here, as unwavering as a Johnny Unitas haircut, an endless quilt of farmland that produces cotton, wheat, grapes, melons and pistachios. In normal times, on a given fall night, you can stand in one tiny town and see the glow of the football field in the next, from Kerman to Tranquility to Mendota; Firebaugh to Dos Palos to Los Banos.
Ribbons of two-lane roads and generations of bitter rivalries separate the farming communities of the San Joaquin Valley, where local sports border on religion and high school heroics harden into lore. Yet these days, these elbowing towns feel as one, with everyone pulling in the same direction, the Hatfields proudly linking arms with the McCoys.
Josh Allen is only player to have number retired by Firebaugh High School
Alex Gutierrez, Josh Allen’s baseball coach and quarterbacks coach at Firebaugh High School, talks about the quarterback’s number being retired by the school.
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Alternating red and blue “Allen 17” banners will festoon O Street through the middle of Firebaugh this weekend. Allen’s extended family owns about 1,200 acres of farmland in the region, not counting the land his late grandfather donated for construction of the high school.
“Our community, it’s a pretty special place,” said Allen’s father, Joel. “We kind of take care of each other.”