Oral History: Barbara Langlois — March 24th, 2016

Summary:

Barbara Langlois was appointed to the City’s Planning Commission in 1973, only five years after moving to Lafayette from El Cerrito. The next year, she won election to the City Council, and in 1975 she became the first woman to serve as Mayor. In addition to her duties as an elected official, Barbara was also a founder and leader of the Lafayette Langeac Society, an organization which celebrates Lafayette’s connection with the homeland of the French General after whom the Lafayette is named.

Oral History:

Betsy Wilcutts: It is May 24th, 2016 at Piedmont Gardens. I am Betsy Wilcutts from the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project, here to introduce George Watson, former Lafayette mayor, who will be talking with Barbara Langlois. George?

George Watson: Thank you. Well, what we’ve done in the past is have a casual conversation, but I think Betsy asked you what is your full name, and how do you spell it? You can tell us.

Barbara Langlois: My full name is Barbara, H., that’s for Hall, my maiden name, and Langlois, L-A-N-G-L-O-I-S, that was my husband’s name.

GW: Where were you born?

BL: I was born in Berkeley, California.

GW: Okay, and do you want to tell us when you were born?

BL: Well, it was December 24th, 1921.

GW: Okay. I presume that you don’t have any parents still living?

BL: No, no, they’re both gone.

GW: And were they natives of California?

BL: My father was, but not my mother.

GW: Okay, let’s see, and do you have any brothers or sisters?

BL: I had one brother, one sister, they’re both gone now. They were both older than I.

GW: And what were the other questions we had here? Who were your favorite relatives?

BL: Oh gosh, that’s a hard one.

GW: Anyway, one of the things I remember, you and I were campaigning for city council at the same time, and one of the things that you always said was that one of your ancestors grafted the first English walnuts onto a black walnut rootstalk. Do you have any idea of when that was? Generally, you don’t have to be precise.

BL: Probably in the 1860’s or ‘70’s. Yeah, it was my grandfather that did that. He had a friend who was a botanist, and he bought a son of an English walnut, grafted it onto the native black walnut, and started the walnut industry in California, because black walnuts are, they taste good but they’re not very easy to eat.

GW: They are terrible!

BL: …but the English walnut is what we had on our farm. That’s where my father was born.

GW: And where was that? Was that in…

BL: It was in Alamo, Alamo, California, yeah.

GW: Okay, I know you were married to Gordon Langlois, and Gordon, I knew him, was part of the Chevron Research organization…

BL: That’s right, he worked for Chevron.

GW: …He was a catalyst specialist. Now as I recall, after you were married, you lived eventually in El Cerrito.

BL: Mostly lived in El Cerrito, we lived in three different houses in El Cerrito, oh, thank you very much.

GW: And did you live long in any one of those houses?

BL: Well, I lived approximately ten years in each house, except for when I moved, and even in Lafayette, I only lived there about ten years, but then we moved to Piedmont Gardens, and I’ve been here…

GW: Let’s get back to your… after you lived in El Cerrito…

BL: Yeah, after we lived in El Cerrito, then we went to Lafayette.

GW: …when did you move to Lafayette? Doesn’t have to be exact here, but…

BL: It was, see, it was about, see, Shirley went to school at Acalanes, Marilyn, who was born in 1950, yeah, she, it was about 1960.

GW: Why did you select Lafayette, do you have any reason for that?

BL: Well, I knew the general area through my family, I always wanted a swimming pool, and Lafayette was warm enough, in El Cerrito, we swam in the El Cerrito swimming pool, but it really wasn’t warm enough to swim outside, but what we found in Lafayette this small, not a very special house, but a very small, much smaller and not as big and fancy as our last house in El Cerrito, but they had a swimming pool, a small pool, so that’s why we moved there.

GW: Now, you mentioned that at least one of your daughters, maybe both of them or all of them went to Acalanes High School…

BL: Just my youngest one. Marilyn went to El Cerrito High, Richard is my oldest, he went to El Cerrito High, we had a foreign student when we lived there, we took a family trip, I call it the Great Trip, to Europe in 1966, it was all three kids, we bought a Volkswagen bus, and while we were there, Marilyn found out that she had been chosen as an AFS student in Switzerland, so we left her there for a whole year, and when she came back, she found out we had moved, she was very upset about this, but we’d figured Richard had already finished college and Shirley was having some growing-up problems, so we sold put big house in El Cerrito and moved to Lafayette and we lived there about ten years, you see, I was married to Gordon for, when he died in 2001, we were at Piedmont Gardens then, I’d been married to him for 57 years.

GW: Well, first of all, Betsy and the other person here, she’s a widow you’re a widow, I’m a widower, actually, I won’t go into the details but you’d had more than one, but anyway, let’s get back to… when you moved to Lafayette, what got you interested in Lafayette political activities?

BL: Because Gordon had been very involved in politics in Lafayette and El Cerrito and he was Mayor of El Cerrito, you know.

GW: What year was he mayor there approximately?

BL: Oh gosh, it was about 19… well, he was elected into the city council in 1964, we had a foreign student living with us from Germany at that time and he helped campaign, rang doorbells and all, and so I learned how to run for office, when we moved to Lafayette, I decided I wanted to go back to school, well why don’t I renew my teaching credential from way back years ago, well, I wrote to the state, asked what should I do, what courses should I take to renew my teaching application, they wrote back, “You don’t need to do anything”, because I had taught for almost five years and I had been active in things so they just gave me a teaching credential, so I started teaching, but it wasn’t too satisfying, it was a long commute, so I stopped.

GW: Where were you teaching, what school district or…

BL: Richmond. I taught… what was the name of the junior high that doesn’t exist anymore? Anyway, I taught there and then I thought, this is not really what I want to do with my life, so I got involved in the League of Women Voters, you know that organization? And it was very important to me. Through the league, I got interested in Lafayette city politics, and started observing meetings and so forth, then I just said, “I could run for office here!” I thought, well, that’s crazy, because that was in… you could tell…

BW: I think it’s maybe in 1974, yeah, Spring of 1974 with the city election, three of the five seats on the city council were to be voted on.

GW: Yeah, but that’s when she was running for the city council, but you were on the planning commission for the sign commission first?

BL: Yeah, for just a year or so, and then I decided to run for city council, and so I did, and I knew how to run through Gordon, so I was elected, see, Ned Robinson and you and I and two other people were running, but I worked harder than the rest of you.

GW: Well, we don’t know about that. Maurice Moyalle was one of them and the other one was Bob Petter…

BL: Bob Petter, yeah, but anyway so Ned Robinson got the highest vote, you got the second highest vote, I was elected but only got the third highest vote, but for some reason, the powers that be got together and decided that I should be mayor before you, so that’s how I got to be mayor.

GW: Well, that’s the important thing, is that really, the members or somebody on the city council decides who is going to be the next mayor, we usually had a progressant, if you’re gong to be on the city council for four years you’ll be mayor at one time or another.

BL: Yeah, usually, not always, but generally that happens.

GW: Then one of the years, you decided not to run again and I decided not to run again, and so…

BL: Well, Geremiss stayed because I could not have been elected, I was very controversial in Lafayette. I disagreed with a lot of their policies, with the general plan, then there was the Kaiser Estate thing, oh, that was a terrible thing, but because of that… but Gordon had decided to retire early, so that’s when we had already thought about leaving Lafayette and going to the Moraga Country Club, which is not really a country club, but, so we were going to move there, so that’s why I didn’t run, but I (inaudible) I didn’t because I never would have been elected, but you would have been elected because you were kind of out of this controversy, and we (inaudible) Burton Valley, so you stayed, you were a good citizen of Lafayette, and I left and I became not a good citizen of Moraga for… we lived there for about twenty years, but that’s when Gordon had retired, and we did a lot of traveling.

GW: One of the things that, for instance, at Gordon’s memorial service, you had mentioned that you had a German or French student living with you… well, first of all, during the time that you were on the city council and active in Lafayette, you were very active in forming the Lengeac Society…

BL: Oh yeah, the French sister city.

GW: And that was very successful.

BL: It was, but it’s not anymore, it’s fallen by the wayside, but it was worth doing.

GW: One of the things that I say at the memorial service, one of your foreign students that lived with you from Germany… I thought there was one from the Orient…

BL: There was one from South America, Uruguay.

GW: Well, apparently, you had a lot of foreign students that lived with you at various times.

BL: We had only two that actually lived with us for a long time, but I was involved in the AFS program in general.

GW: What were the controversies that, generally speaking, you said, people didn’t agree with you on, one of the things you said was the Kaiser Estate…

BL: The first thing I remember was, I had just been elected to the council, and you know where Happy Valley Road is, and we lived basically at Upper Happy and South Peredale, well, you follow up where South Peredale or Happy Valley and Upper Happy Valley come together and the roads sort of winds through the hills and ends up in Orinda, so a lot of people in Lafayette thought, why don’t we build a fence there? We don’t want those Orinda people coming in our back door, and so Bob Fisher was very much in favor of this, although he lived in Lafayette, he later moved to Orinda, but anyway, he said one day, “Well, Barbara, we’re going to have to do it, we just have to vote for that gate, to close it”, I said, “I’m not gonna vote for it”. “What do you mean, you’re not?” “We can’t close the road like that”. and I got into a lot of trouble with a lot of people because of that, but I think I was the only one on the council that voted against that gate going up so that people from Orinda could come through the back door, Well, it turned out a moot point anyway because it was a dedicated road, and no city could just close the road that’s already dedicated, so it’s never been closed and it’s never been a problem either.

GW: Well, it still was a problem at that time because it created a lot of potential traffic, Back to the Kaiser estate…

BL: Oh dear, that was a terrible thing. That was, you know where the Kaiser Home was? Right there, it’s close to the border with Walnut Creek.

GW: Pleasant Hill Road and Olympic Boulevard.

BL: You don’t mind if I have my coffee?

BW: Please.

BL: The Kaiser estate, that happened I think in 1935, I was still mayor, the guy who was developing it, he called me and all of us, I guess and offered to give the Kaiser Home to the city as a recreational building, a community center, there was a tennis court, a swimming pool, a nice big house, a lot of land. I thought this was a great idea, they’re gonna give it to us. Well, the catch was, the rest of the land around the Kaiser estate is to be divided into, sort of like, condominiums in one-third acre plots. The thing was that past the city council, I think you and Wally Costa voted for it but Ned Robinson did not and Bob Fisher did not, so when the vote came out, we were glad because we could have this community center, but then the people who lived there… there was a man who lived there who didn’t want his property divided up into small pieces, and so they had a big to-do about the referendum election and it was very, very controversial, great lists of people supporting it and opposed to it. Most people were opposed to it, they didn’t want to make a Rossmoor out of Lafayette, so the referendum passed so that was the end of the community center, the end of that development, and after it was all over, since I had been mayor at the time, I had, and I don’t think I still have it, but I once had a telegram that came to the city council demanding that I as mayor resign, and if I didn’t resign, they would take steps to impeach me, you know, and so I listened to them and I said, well, go right ahead, you’re welcome, any citizen can impeach anybody, but I’ll tell you here and now I do not intend to resign, meanwhile, we’ve had too much trouble, let’s go back to city business. So that was the end of that talk, so I did finish my term, but by that time, what was interesting, we moved to the Moraga Country Club, which was very much like that development around the Kaiser estate would have been, but it’s never happened and Lafayette still has no housing at that time to this day. Anyway, so that’s why by this time, Gordon had decided to take an early retirement, so I didn’t even file to run again because I knew I was going to leave, and then two people on the other side, I think Bob Roach and Norm (inaudible) won the election, and you didn’t run, you could have won.

BW: Yeah, it’s one of those things, if you’ve got lots of time and lots of energy, and lot of support from your employer, that’s all well and good but if you don’t have a lot of time and lots of other things to do…

BL: See, you were still working then.

GW: Uh huh. So then you moved to Moraga, and you didn’t stir up a lot of anthills in Moraga, get people to get you onto the city council, in fact, you knew a number of the people who did, first as Moraga had incorporated by that time, and there were people were running for the Moraga council, many of whom, or some of them, you knew from, you worked with the League of Women Voters…

BL: Yeah, I knew them all, but I didn’t… I applied for one commission, I think it was the space commission for Moraga, but they turned me down, they didn’t… so I thought, well, I’ve done what I can for these cities, I’m through, so…

BW: This is Betsy and I would like to ask a couple of questions, I’d like you to talk a little bit more about the Lengeac Society, how it came about and your experience there, and the other thing is, I remember, didn’t you write an article for the Sun or the Times about walking or something like that?

BL: I wrote a lot of articles, you see about this time that this controversy came up, I got a letter from somebody, I never found out exactly who, but it was somebody in Florida was adovating that Lafayette was going to have a sister city and it was gong to be Lengeac, in France. Well, I didn’t know anything about it, and I wrote to the mayor of… there was a sister city in… oh, gosh, I can’t remember and… see, Lafayette was very popular as a person here, and Joan Merriman, you remember Joan Merriman, I used to give talks about this, and she said, “Barbara Langlois, you lied!” “Oh no, I never lie.” “Yes, you did!” “Why did I lie?” “You lied because you said that Lafayette, California was named for the Marquis de Lafayette who came and helped Washington during the American Revolution.” “Well, didn’t he?” “No, that’s not true.” We don’t fight with Joan Merriman, you know, so she finally explained that way back in 1849 or 1850, a lot of people sat around this crossroads in California and they needed a post office, so they wanted a post office and so they asked the state if they could name the post office Lafayette, they said no because there were too many Lafayettes in the United States one way or another, so they thought, well, we have to have a post office, let’s call it Centerville. Well, that was available, but nobody liked Centerville, so somebody said, “why don’t you name it for my hometown in Indiana?” and I say, “Well, what’s the name of your town?” “My town was named Lafayette.” “That’s a good name, let’s name it that!” According to Joan Merriman, that’s how Lafayette got its name, from this guy who lived in Indiana where there was another town called Lafayette. Anyway, that made me so… but anyway, it’s a distinctive name, and having this French Connection, we begun to travel by that time, we went to France in the course of this long trip and we met with the mayor of this one city in France, I can’t remember the name of it and we asked if they wanted a sister city in California. No they didn’t, because they already had one in Lagrange, Florida, so I went to this little tiny town of Lengeac and said, “Are you interested in a sister city in California?” Well, they didn’t know, but then there was some guy, he was from Florida, he sent me reams of information about this, I found out later who he was, his name was Calvin Saureg, his daughter had lived with a family in France who had come from Lengeac, so we decided we should have Lengeac, so he wrote to the city there in Lengeac about it and they said, well that sounds pretty good, so they agreed, so in I think 1960 we were going to France anyway, so we wrote and said we were coming, and according to this guy, the couple who had hosted Calvin Saureg’s daughter, made a big deal of it, and they invited me to dinner, they got the mayor of Lengeac whose name was Mayor Chalet, and they arranged to have Gordon and I stay in the Chateau Chevaliac, which was Lafayette’s home, and then we got a good deal for press about this, and I visited schools, I brought back all kinds of things, and then we went on traveling after that, and you see, this is all the…

GW: One of the years after that, the city council or a group of citizens of Lengeac came to Lafayette, California, we hosted them…

BL: They came to Lafayette and it was a terrible trip. It wasn’t well planned, and Susie Lescure, she actually lived in Moraga but she was a native of France, and she felt that this guy, Paul Perrier, who I had been corresponding with, who stayed with us, she really jumped on him, so they rustled up a bus to make a bus tour of California for these French people, the bus broke down, terrible bus, we finally got them all back on the bus, you know how it is, no matter how bad a trip is, he put us all over and, said and done, everybody loves everybody, they got on the plane and left, I’ve never been so relieved at anything in my life, I think we had one reception at your house, so it didn’t work out, while Lafayette, California was happy to, we had a lot of visitors who went to France, and I felt that this area around Lengeac was not a wine-growing area, it was a wheat-growing area, but people didn’t go there, very few, and nobody else as far as I knew from Lengeac came to California, so we finally after, I think it was 1999, we finally ended the organization because nobody else wanted to be president, nobody else wanted to take over. We used to have these wine tastings, you remember Russ Johnson? He was the last president, he lived here at Piedmont Gardens.

GW: I know Russ very well, and he says the same thing, it’s just all of a sudden, there was not much interest in this, it just died a natural death.

BL: And the Park Hotel, you know, was named, they used to have the wine tastings there, and I left a lot of stuff about the Sister City Society, I left it all at the Historical Society, they’ve got it.

BW: We have, I believe, two large, wonderful notebooks that you put together year by year what was going on, it’s very extensive and wonderful.

BL: And I brought an etching of the Marquis de Lafayette that I brought from France and gave it to the Historical Society, they still have it.

BW: They do. It’s hanging in our history room.

BL: Yeah, so it was a bit of California history, Lafayette history, but it didn’t last very long.

BW: Were either of you involved in obtaining the statue that’s in the park?

BL: No, that was Norm Tuttle, he was all excited about it, he used to disagree with Norman, Norman thought Lafayette was the greatest thing that ever lived, I didn’t think he was that great, but anyway, Norm arranged to have this statue made and put into the park, and there was a big to-do there, there was a lot of publicity about it, but the statue is still there, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with why Lafayette is Lafayette, except through this French sister city thing.

GW: Well, the statue is still there, and the city park has gotten smaller or improved or whatever, and it does get its picture taken regularly and a lot of us contributed to the foundation for it and all that stuff, but it’s too bad, we don’t really have a French Connection in the town of Lafayette anymore, until you have someone who is…

BL: Part of the total Bay Area community. Lengeac is just an entity by itself, but Lafayette, California is part of all the East Bay so it doesn’t have any particular identity.

GW: But you did say that you stayed, when you visited the city of Lengeac, they had you stay in the Marquis de Lafayette’s home?

BL: In his home, yes.

GW: And that was in the town of Lengeac?

BL: Well, it was just outside Lengeac, it was Chevalliac. It was not quite in Lengeac, but nearby.

BW: Barbara, tell us about the home, his home, Was it large or fancy or…

BL: Well, it was large, but not especially fancy. It was taken over by an American group who made sort of a park out of it, and I think they own the house, but the American flag always flies over it as well as the French flag. The last time I was in Lengeac was, oh gosh, a long time ago. Anyway, then later, Norm Tuttle, you know his wife died, he brought a bunch of kids to France on bicycles, they wanted to visit Lengeac, they drove through town with American flags, nobody paid any attention to them, and then Yvonnie said they finally found the place where Lafayette was buried, well I already knew where it was through another friend, a Swiss friend said he told me, took me to the cemetery in Paris, I think, Picpus, which is a very private cemetery where only the aristocrats were buried in the French Revolution, the aristocrats were mostly guillotined or something, but Lafayette and his wife were saved, she was the aristocrat, he was not. She was younger than he was, anyway, their graves were in this cemetery in Picpus, well we found it through this Swiss friend of ours, and we went there and always the French and American flags are flying over it, but I don’t think anybody else knows it’s there or cares either.

GW: One of the other things you’ve mentioned, your children, and some of them are still alive, and one of them in particular is involved in either Richmond politics or Martinez or something.

BL: Richmond. Marilyn, my older daughter, she was the one who was an AFS student in Switzerland, she came back, went to Pomona College, and then she went back and she lived over several years in Austria in Vienna, and she has two daughters, and they were both born in Vienna, different fathers, we know them both, but she got to be thirty and she had no children, and she wanted two children, so when they came about the ages of three and five, she moved back to California, and worked at the university for a while, and then finally moved to Richmond, then she married, oh gosh, what’s his name, a geneticist, who turned out to be Jessica’s father, Max Larsen, that was his name, and… no, that was not Max, it was another one,

GW: What does she do in Richmond?

BL: Well, she ran for city council, but she lost, in spite of her ringing all the doorbells in time because Richmond politics is very strong. Trying to think what his name is.

GW: And some of your children are not alive, is she the only living…

BL: No, they’re all three living. Richard still lives out in the valley here, Livermore. When he finished, he finally finished college in, well he went to UC Davis and then he went to Berkeley and finished and then he got a fellowship at Columbia University and then he went to school there for several years and got his Ph.D. and that’s where he met his wife Beatrice, whose wife was very interesting, she was born in Paris, her family were refugees from Hitler’s Germany, but they came to this country, and it was a very good marriage, they have two boys who are still doing well and living in the area, but Beatrice died of breast cancer so it was very sad, but then Richard married again, a woman by the name of Gayla McCormick, and they’re still living In Livermore, but they’re beginning to travel quite a bit, and then Marilyn moved to Richmond…

BW: And your third child?

BL: Shirley, that’s why we moved to Lafayette in the first place, so she could go to Acalanes High School, and she worked on the school yearbook, and we had two bathrooms in Lafayette, our small house, and she made one into a darkroom, and so she was very active at Acalanes, but when she started going to college, she crossed off every college that any of the rest of us had been: Cal, Gord went to Northwestern, Richard to Columbia and Davis, Marilyn went to Pomona, she’d have none of them, so she went to Oberlin College, and she graduated from Oberlin College then and later came back to Cal and got a Master’s Degree at Cal, and she’s working, she’s quite a good job now, she’s working at Kaiser, so she’s very helpful to me, she checks my pills, what I need and so forth, and then Marilyn, she’s got the very smarts, ‘cause I can’t read my accounts, but she reads my accounts and does my income tax for me, so they’re very helpful, and Richard comes over frequently.

BW: Wonderful. I’d like to just take you back to Lafayette for a moment, and talk a little bit about your articles and what interested you and then that you wrote about for the newspapers.

BL: Oh, yeah, that. You see that row of books? There’s one kind of checkered, that’s a copy of all the articles I wrote while I lived in Lafayette and Moraga, so it was basically a travel column ‘cause we traveled quite a lot, and so if you read those, I do bring up some things, such as the fifth anniversary of the Kaiser election, I noticed that at the Kaiser House, and then I wrote, when I was mayor of Lafayette I wrote a little column called the “Mayor’s Corner” and so they would have that on the files of the Lamorinda Sun. Yeah, I used to write a lot, and all those books with the plastic binding, those are all diaries of trips we had taken, some exotic and some not-so-exotic, but I felt at the time I didn’t have a lot of money and no jewelry at all, what was I going to leave my kids when I died? Well, I thought I could leave them memories, memories of the things we did, so that’s why I wrote those things.

GW: Was that the reason you wrote this book?

BL: Yes, this is a log. This is, I didn’t bring this up to date. It goes up through, I think, 1907, see, Gordon died in 2011 and then Maury and Phyllis Barusianman, very good friends of ours at Chevron, they were both research chemists, and then, soon after that, Phyllis Barush died, so Maury and I used to have lunch together once in a while, we decided, he had a big, nice boat out on the Bay, but I could not live there, when I was here in Piedmont Gardens, so he moved in here, but then he sort of moved in, but he had an incurable kidney cancer, so he only lived for two years, so we were married in 2005, and he died in 2007, so since then I’ve been reveling around there by myself.

GW: You haven’t found another Ph.D. chemist comes to marry here, or anything like that?

BL: No, not anymore, I can’t see very well, I can’t hear very well, I can’t even read these things, see, this is a log that I wrote every year from the time we were married with some pictures, and the various houses.

GW: Well, it’s a good thing that you have done that because now, if your children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren can come back and say, “What did my great-grandmother and great-grandfather… Gordon, he went to Northwestern, where was he born?

BL: He was born in Burley, Idaho.

GW: Idaho?

BW: Barbara, I’m curious, I don’t know if you’ve been back to Lafayette very much, but what do you think about what’s happened to Lafayette since you left?

BL: Well, I really don’t know, I don’t go back there very much, I think they’ve… they still don’t have many housing like Rossmoor or Moraga Country Club, it’s kept as strictly single family homes.

BW: Actually, we have had a few, in the last couple of years are homes for senior, I believe, most of them.

GW: well, we have… there’s one on Moraga Way or Moraga Boulevard which was a senior citizen housing and then we got a new hotel or new condominium or building that’s supposed to be… the problem nowadays is that the metropolitan, Bay Area control people say, “Well, you have to have so much housing for low-income families…”

BL: And Lafayette didn’t have any.

GW: Well, as I say, “How can you possibly have low income families in Lafayette when a lot, as it were, available for sale at a minimum of one million dollars, just the lot. It becomes difficult, we’re getting multiple dwelling apartments or condominiums…

BL: Maybe it’ll change over time, but I’m really not… most of the people I was close to there, maybe they’ve moved away or have died.

GW: Well, the good thing is, the times that you were involved with the city and our previous city council members have been able to protect the hillsides around us. We’re not going to have people building houses up on the hillside, and so we always have this viewscape, but that means there’s not much more land to develop.

BL: Yeah, there isn’t, so why don’t they just let well enough alone?

BW: Well you know, this has been a wonderful conversation, I want to thank both Barbara and George for sharing your thoughts and all that has gone on, your very busy lives in our community.

GW: And furthermore, we’ve got these kinds of oral interviews with former members of the city council, but we still have a bunch of them that we do not have recordings with, and the difficulty is, some of them aren’t around anymore. I did a thing recently, when Don Tatson was celebrating thirty years involved with the city of Lafayette, I said, “In this group of people, there’s only five of us who are still alive who did not serve with Don Tatson, because everybody else has been on a council with Don Tatson!”

BL: Well, I like living in Lafayette, it was a good town for walking, I used to do a lot of walking and bike riding, but as I think back about it I have good memories, I know exactly where the schools were, where Shirley went to school, and where downtown was, it was a nice town, but I was ready to move on and Moraga was the best place, and when we finished, after Gordon got sick with… he had multiple myeloma cancer, which is an immune system cancer, we knew he was not going to survive, but we needed a place, he couldn’t play tennis anymore, he loved tennis, so we looked around for another place to live and found Piedmont Gardens here where many of our friends have moved, and they were close to the Kaiser Hospital where we felt it might be better for him to be here, so that’s why we left Moraga and came here.

BW: Thank you so much, this has been wonderful.

GW: Thank you, Barbara, for giving us all that background information, and we’ll get it transcribed and you can have a copy of it so you can say, “Well, that’s not exactly what I said.”

BL: Well, anyway, I don’t know if it’s worth anything.