Floyd Squires Taking Heat Again

Floyd Squires is in the news yet again. This time he’s taking heat for not having some of the buildings he owns retrofitted for earthquake safety. He’s not the only one, probably just the most well known.

I kind of admire his spunk at what seems to be a reluctance to knuckle under to authority. Not that anyone can just spend thousands to hundreds of thousands for building retrofitting at the drop of a hat.

He does seem to resist authority, though. I always get a kick out of reading the Legal Notices section of the Times- Standard when they list all the properties that are delinquent in property taxes. You go down the list and one after another are Squires’ properties.

Cracks me up. My kind of guy.

I think he might get a bad rap by some in the county. I knew the Squires family way back when I first moved here in ’73. In fact, the first apartment we rented up here was the Squires apartments out on Pigeon Point Road.

His mother and father, Floyd and Ruth Squires, owned a number properties in town. They used to hire some of us starving college students to do painting and other work for them on occasion. We appreciated the opportunity.

I worked for Floyd Jr. once, that I can recall, painting the house on the corner across the street from the gas station at the corner of California and Harris, in Eureka.

Floyd and his wife treated me well and were easy enough to get along with. Wonder why people keep getting on his case? Probably because now, just like back then, the Squires didn’t have a problem renting to riff- raff, like me.

As the North Coast Journal pointed out a while back in an story about Floyd Jr. and accusations that he’s a slumlord, he might well be doing society a favor by renting to people most landlords wouldn’t.

When you do that, you’re bound to collect a lot of garbage, both figuratively and literally, so maybe that’s just Floyd’s lot in life. I never had a problem with him.