Every year the Campbell Chamber of Commerce chooses someone to honor as the Citizen of the Year to recognize their outstanding contributions to the community of Campbell. The Downtown Campbell Business Association (DCBA) also chooses a person to recognize for their contributions toward making Downtown Campbell the place that it is. It's a rarity that the same person gets named for both awards in the same year, but we're pleased to say that Brooke Ramirez was chosen for both honors.
Later this year, Bombshell Boutique will have been in business for 18 years and nearly all of it in Downtown Campbell. We're paying tribute to our DCBA Person of the Year by publishing some photos of Brooke doing what she's been doing right from the day she got to Downtown Campbell.
The earliest photo is from 2009 at our annual Creepy Crawly Halloween. Can you believe that our Trick 'r Treat was once a tiny event? At the time, Downtown Campbell was also a small downtown that was teetering on being a dead downtown.
Fast forward 15 years and we're still a small downtown with some challenges that most popular downtowns don't have, but if the difference between that Halloween and our current ones are any indication, we also have some advantages. The greatest one is culture. One event at a time and one year at a time, a rotating cast of characters kept working together to create culture in Downtown Campbell and Brooke's been one of those characters the entire time.
Brooke will be the first to identify a long list of other characters who should also be mentioned in the same breath and that much is true. The culture of Downtown Campbell is a culture of many hands and we're all standing on someone else's shoulders, but very few people manage to show up so consistently for so long.
Since you can't really summarize someone showing up all time for nearly 2 decades, we'll keep it simple and say this: Brooke, thank for having a big heart and thank you for always being ready to give without having concern if it'll ever come back to you.
