John Joseph Alvarado was born October 10, 1933, on Dana Ranch outside Guadalupe. His father worked as a sharecropper/ranch foreman, and his mother was a housewife. The Alvarado family spans seven generations in Santa Barbara County. John’s grandfather Andres Alvarado passed away in Santa Barbara in 1921. His grandmother Isabel Alvarado passed away in 1941 and is buried at the Santa Inés Mission. Both his parents, Feliciano (1988) and Vicenta Ramos Alvarado (1994), are buried in Guadalupe, along with two of their nine children: John’s sister Isabel Perez and younger brother Lawrence Alvarado.
John enjoyed a rambunctious childhood, playing sports, working, and earning a wage at a young age. He attended schools throughout the county, including La Cumbre Junior High and Santa Barbara High School. From 1953-1955, he served in the United States Army during the Korean War and received a National Defense Service Medal. His platoon was featured in the Audie Murphy film To Hell and Back. After the army, John studied business at Allan Hancock College.
He married Romelia Natalia Hidalgo in 1956 in Guadalupe. First working as a farm inspector and warehouse supervisor in Santa Maria, by the early 1960s John had bought his first home and taken on extra work at Wilson-McMahon’s Furniture Store. He eventually became the store’s sales manager. By the mid-1960s, the Wilson-McMahon team asked John to travel as far as Juneau, Alaska, to open new stores as the business expanded. He even moved his growing family to Seattle for a brief spell to open a new store.
