Summary:
Dorothy’s family moved to Lafayette from San Rafael in 1956. Her father wanted to be closer to his work at the Lawrence Lab in Berkeley. Their home was located on Yorkshire Court bordering what is now known as the Trail Area. At that time the railroad was still running and Dorothy remembers walking to Stanley along the railroad tracks. She graduated from Acalanes in 1960, then attended UC Berkeley.
Dorothy’s mother, Angela Broadhead was one of the founders of the Lafayette Historical Society and its past president. Dorothy followed her mother’s footsteps and instrumental in the LHS moving to their new library location, organizing and cataloging collections, recording oral histories, starting the Speakers Series, and a past president. Before the library location some of collections were displayed in a small space furnished by a bank in what is now Walgreens. The rest were with the CCC Historical Society in Martinez.
Oral History:
Ryan McKinley (interviewer): This is an oral history interview for the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project. The interviewer is Ryan McKinley. The date is August 5th, 2015 and the time is 11:00 AM and we are in the historical society room. If you could state and spell your name for the record?
Dorothy Walker: Okay. My name is Dorothy Walker, D-O-R-O-T-H-Y W-A-L-K-E-R, and I was the past president of the historical society.
RM: Could you state your parent’s names?
DW: My parents are Paul and Angela Brodhead, Angela was an early founder of the historical society, and was their secretary and editor of their newsletter.
RM: And were they originally from Lafayette?
DW: No, we came as a family in 1956 in May and my brother and I spent one month in our respective schools at that time, Stanley for me and Lafayette Elementary for my brother.
RM: Coming here, could you tell me a little bit about what you remember about the town in 1950 at that time?
DW: I remember very little of the town, other than the… traffic went through Mt. Diablo, the freeway had not been opened and was still under construction, and I do know of various buildings that have changed, and like the Safeway was much closer to the curb, originally, and then probably in the mid- to late-60’s we moved back away and parking was moved forward, there was a Franco’s florist, and Petar’s was on the corner of Oak Hill and Mount Diablo, they were very distinctive buildings, and Bill’s Drugs was on the corner also at Oak Hill and Mount Diablo, it sums up what became CVS. Well, I was at Stanley, and of course Lafayette Elementary has been there for forever basically where is it now.
RM: The CVS where it is now, is that where the drug store was before that?
DW: No, it was on Oak Hill on Mount Diablo, I mean it didn’t become CVS for quite some time, because Bill’s Drugs, it was a different pharmacy even before then, but Bill’s Drugs was there, and it moved to the current location where CVS Drugs is now on Mount Diablo up by Mountain View.
RM: When you first moved here, where did you live?
DW: Where I live again today I purchased the home from my mother at 965 Yorkshire Court here in Lafayette, it’s an older section of town when we were there. When we first came, the railroad was still running through the town and subsequently in the mid-sixties, and it was early after we moved in that the actual train stopped. It wasn’t until after the mid-sixties that it was converted to the trail, the Lafayette-Moraga trail that it is today, so it was kind of exciting, usually once a day the train went through and we walked along the tracks to Stanley School but you knew when the train was coming, it was pretty regular, so it was not a big deal.
RM: The area where you moved in, was it very rural or was it developed?
DW: No, it was pretty much developed. The only thing that wasn’t developed was the area where there was the one stop where the train in Lafayette, I believe, which was a gravel material, various gravel and dirt, I don’t even remember the name of the company that was there, but they would offload gravel and sand at that stop, and then, subsequently all that… when the company was gone, then they built like six houses in that space on Moraga Boulevard, so my home is very close to Moraga Boulevard, but a challenge to get to ‘cause there’s no cross though that’s close by.
RM: As a child, you mentioned walking along the tracks and things like that, what were some of the other things you did while you were growing up?
DW: I was in eighth grade when we came, so I then, after that summer, moved on to Acalanes, and we were lucky enough to have a pool, which was one of the reasons why my family purchased the house in Lafayette because both my brother and I were quite upset about leaving my former location and all our friends, so we spend mostly all our summers in the pool to be sure. It is no longer a pool, I have subsequently filled it in.
RM: Do you remember why you came to Lafayette?
DW: Yes, we had been living in San Rafael when the ferries were still running before the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and my father had taken a job at the Berkeley Radiation Lab. It’s subsequently been renamed the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the commute was difficult at times because of the ferries so he wanted to move somewhere where it was easier to commute to and from and Lafayette seemed to be a good place at that time, so for whatever reason, I don’t know the reason the chose Lafayette, but I did look at the subsequent mortgage and in 1956 they paid $18,500, their mortgage was for $18,500 at the time. It’s kind of interesting because I now have the same home and it’s worth a considerable amount more. I purchased it from my mother in 1987 so at that time I paid a little over $150,000, so in the twenty odd years that also increased quite a bit as all Lafayette values have.
RM: And did your mother continue to live in Lafayette?
DW: No, she moved onto Rossmoor and has stayed there until her death last year at 97.
RM: Could you tell me a little bit more about her involvement with the Historical Society?
DW: Well, she was working part time in the library and was part of the Friends of the Library, and then a number of people discussed and informed the Historical Society because they felt that the library had become somewhat of a repository of information about the city and they just wanted to ensure that subsequent information was kept so I think it took them about three years to get their status as a non-profit, and, or, maybe it wasn’t a non-profit then, but whatever formalized requirement with the state took them a little while, and my mother wrote the newsletter, was the editor and she also, over time, did the windows that brought various collections of the members together and she helped design the layout of those displays, and it was done in what is going to be the Walgreens Drugs, so it’s up by Upper Happy Valley Road near the Wells Fargo, but it was down and it was part of… a bank offered the space for them to have displays, and I don’t remember the bank, but they were there for many years, and we have pictures in the archives of some of those displays I know they took from various members, you know, old heirlooms of various kinds, I remember one most distinctly which was old valentines and postcards, and that was kind of sweet and all, but it ranged from farm equipment to household goods to clothes and so forth, so that was one of the things she enjoyed a lot as well, I don’t think she had any problem with writing, and she continued to be a member, I guess until she left Lafayette, and was involved, and she was the one who got me involved in being a member and then Marshall Duncan, who was still, I believe, the vice president, asked me to come on the board, and, subsequently, by default, ended up being the president, and at that time we were beginning to worry about what it would take to get our space in the new library, how we would get it organized and what was involved, so that got us to do some inventorying, and we had been very lucky to have a number of our memorabilia stored at the Contra Costa Historical Society in Martinez, and they had given us space, and so we had to go over there and do some of the inventorying, we got a lot of information from them regarding how we should handle photo collection and it was very helpful that we got others who have gone through some of this before, and we also worked on trying to find a software that would help us do some of the inventorying, once we had inventory, putting it down in a format that was useful and consistent with other museums and we also negotiated with the city regarding how we were to utilize the space in our lease arrangements, and so we got everything stated pretty much what was necessary for that. I don’t think there was anything that anybody else couldn’t have done, but it did just sort of fall to me, and we organized in various groups and so there’s an archive group that assesses any donations and there are people that help with the displays up in the main part of the library, that was one of the things we negotiated a certain space so that the people would know to come to the history room here. We worked also when the library was beginning to open as an adjoint meeting with other groups, mostly of course the Friends of the Library and also the Foundation, worked with the city and their… I think it was their contractor, I’m not sure that it’s still the contractor who handles the management of the building, and just on issues as they came up and what our concerns were once we got the space.
RM: And that was about 2009, right?
DW: At the beginning, the transfer, all of that was happening, we went to the city counsel to confirm that we were interested and were willing to sign and whatever was necessary so that there was some testimony that was requested of us. Our archives had been in the old library, so certainly, if there wasn’t a space for us here, we would have just moved our things over to Martinez, I guess, the physical things. Bill Ames, who formally owned Bill’s Drugs, had given us space to build our paper archives and photos, and we did a lot of our early transcribing of the information from the backs of the photos onto software, and at his offices which are above CVS, so that was also happening at the same time because we wanted to get as much of the background stuff accomplished when we were open for business, so that if people came in and asked for old pictures of old homes or pictures of pioneers or whatever, we would be able to locate some of those, hopefully within easy reach, but I don’t know what we would have done had it not been for Duncan had monitored the city council for years, insisting that there be a room here when the new library was created, and so I don’t think there was ever really a question that we would not have a space, and also they, the city, had given them monies to the historical society over the years to do various functions, we had worked with the city on the 150th, the Sesquicentennial, and so I think there was a long ongoing relationship with the city and the space, although not everything we would have liked is, you know, way, way above a small little closet in the old library, and so we were delighted when we were offered the space and what it was, and we’re happy, I think. I don’t think there’s anything more that’s nuanced about it, it’s just that we were very busy and we met regularly as in weekly almost in the summer before we opened up.
RM: Going back to your mother for a little bit, when she was starting it, that was in 1960, 1961, is that correct?
DW: I would guess, I really don’t know the time. I was too busy as a teenager to know what my mother was doing, but she always loved history and so I think it was a natural thing for her to get involved, she was also involved in AAUW, American Association of University Women, and worked to get scholarships for women interested in science and math, and that’s the only thing that I remember her getting involved in besides the library, she really enjoyed her job a lot. She worked part-time and worked not only in the Lafayette Library but over time she worked in Moraga and Walnut Creek Libraries as well. I think they rotated them on some basis.
RM: And the libraries are probably smaller than they are now.
DW: I think they are quite a bit small. Well, in fact, when we got here, the library was owned by a two-room, it was an older home which was essentially two rooms, have you seen the picture of that? It’s really, I mean it was probably seven hundred square feet or something like that, it was just that small, and it was there for, probably, five or six years before the new one was built on the same location, and that was, you know, phenomenal in terms of the size and of course it became inadequate very quickly, but you know, this one is probably going to be the same in due time, but it is remarkable how many people do use the facilities, we’re really pleased about that as a library taxpayer, I’m delighted that so many people do use it and the types of programs that are available, so that was another thing that we began. Every year there was always a speaker at our annual potluck, but then because we had a lease, we began a speaker series on issues about the area and so that brought in some funding for us. Back to my mother: I don’t know that, they just had dues at the time when she was a member, and I don’t know that she did a lot of the photos, trying to keep those and clipping the newspaper articles and so forth that were related to people here and/or the city, so some of the materials that are here were from her and from others that work regularly trying to maintain the ongoing history of the city.
RM: What’d she do? You mentioned she did some interviews, did she do some oral histories as well?
DW: She did lots of oral histories, and I think she went to a class with, I think, Betsy Willcutts and I don’t remember who else she talked about, yes, she spent quite a bit of time, I think that was later on I think she became more interested in the oral histories, and only did she do the interviews, but she did some of the transcripts, I think many, most, and another one of our members, just before I can on board, had those tapes converted to the CDs, which are around somewhere, here in the archives, so her voice is immortalized, I guess.
RM: If you could tell me what your memories of Acalanes and what that was like, how you think things have changed, and things like that.
DW: Well, I remember Acalanes, it was very big, relative to the school that I came from in San Rafael and Stanley that one month. I was the new kid on the block, most of the people in my classes had been together, so I had made acquaintances from my neighborhood, but that’s about all. I worked relatively hard doing all the university prep classes at the time, and was an okay student, anyway, it was enough to get me into Cal, and so I’m grateful to Acalanes for that. I don’t think I got involved particularly in any of the activities that were offered by the high school, so I was pretty much involved in my own stuff, whatever that was at the time. I don’t have any standout memories except for Friday night footballs, and I think I did go on a ski trip or two with Acalanes, I don’t remember anything else.
RM: As part of a school excursion?
DW: Yes, I think it was somehow organized by the school, but the class that I enjoyed the most was Physical Ed, which was a modern dance class, I was able to do that for three of the four years, that was kind of a nice thing.
RM: Who was the teacher for that?
DW: Millicent Hamburger. Now that you mention it, she’s probably the only name that I remember of all of my teachers, and she was honored in one of the subsequent annual, you know, that you get every year, and she had been there for fifty years or something like that so, a pretty remarkable woman, and one of the nice things that the history society got was from another teacher who I also had, now that I think of it, and he name was Ms. Nichols, and she donated all of her yearbooks, the annuals, to us, so we have the complete collection up to 2002, 2001 or ’02 I believe and hopefully we’ve been able to get some subsequently I don’t know.
RM: And those went from when, up to about…
DW: About 1950, or something like that. I mean she was one of the first teachers. Another one of the teachers was a long time member of the Historical Society, Ruth Dyer, who was the longtime secretary for the Historical Society and almost all of the, what do you call them the agendas and all of the reports from meetings were all done in her very small handwriting, but we transcribed a lot of that writing so we kind of know what was going on over the years that she was… so, in fact, I do remember a couple more teachers. It was a very well-rated high school at the time, and so many of us went onto universities.
RM: Did you take a bus from where you were?
DW: No, somehow there was carpools, I know, at least three years, but I don’t remember how I particularly got there, other than a couple years we did carpooling, and of course everybody got their licenses at sixteen, so we were able to drive fairly early on.
RM: Did you do summer jobs or anything like that?
DW: Not really. I did, I think, my senior year, but otherwise, there was nothing available or nothing that I was interested in, whatever my parents were indulgent in, maybe babysitting, but nothing serious. My brother was able to do more jobs. He’s two and a half years younger than I was, and he worked with my uncle who had orchards in the Central Valley, so he was more involved in… and he was also on the wrestling team, I remember that, so it was good to have all that hard labor. It was… he had to keep his weight down, which was an important aspect of the team.
RM: What are some of the big changes you’ve seen over your course in Lafayette?
DW: Well, I think, sort of the gentrification I guess, and of course the biggest change was the freeway coming through, so that changed, sort of, the character of the city and the city certainly made decisions about keeping it semi-rural, as they like to say, so now downtown has changed quite a bit, you know, in terms of the number of apartments, that are now I guess condominiums are coming in evolving, and the whole character of the town, it’s probably… oh, I was just going to say, backing up for my mother, she got involved in the… when the city was trying to incorporate, both because she was involved in the historical society and it was a major event, but I think she favored getting the city to have more, be more responsible for itself and so forth, but I think that was one of the things that changed the city a lot, when it became incorporated, I believe that was in ’68. After Acalanes I went away to school, and got married shortly thereafter so I wasn’t really back in the area until about 1970, so that’s when I think a lot of the changes in the city occurred in that same time as the incorporation, being able to make their own decisions, whether to allow high-rise buildings, whether to do the building on the hillsides and not the tops of ridges, and those, I think, build the character for the city, the decision to just keep it a suburbia.
RM: May I ask what year did you graduate high school?
DW: ’60, and then I graduated from college in ’64.
RM: And you didn’t come back until about 1970 after…
DW: Well, I came back to Berkeley, so that wasn’t exactly Lafayette, although I would visit the family and so forth.
RM: And when did you come back to live in Lafayette?
DW: In ’87, that’s when I purchased my home, my mother’s home, my family home.
RM: Do you miss anything about the way Lafayette used to be, or any specific area?
DW: No, I don’t think so, I think it’s a wonderful town and the fact that they involved so many people in the process of change, and I actually, at one point was on one of their commissions. It came to be known as the Circulation Commissions and it was sidewalks, trails, and something when I first joined, and so we would meet monthly and discuss issues of how to move around and through the city and so forth, I did that for about seven or eight years, and then got so busy with the starting of the library that I excused myself from that, and then after we were pretty much settled here for about a year or so, my mother was healthwise not doing well and I needed to spend more time with her and that’s when I let go of the reins, so to speak.
RM: Couple more questions about your mother when she was founding the original society, was there a group of people she was working with, or was she kind of on her own?
DW: Definitely members who, they had regular meetings and started the annual potluck which was held, at the time, right here on this spot with the American Legion Hall, they had their annual meetings with speakers and I think the membership probably ebbed back and forth, but there was always a serious core group of people who were the most involved, I know she helped find the speakers, organized who would do what, very organized lady herself, and it really was her most serious involvement, the kinds of things that she did on a regular basis.
RM: Do you remember any of the people she worked with, like a close friend or something like that?
DW: Well, I know that Ollie Hamlin was one of the first people who, I believe his name is on actually the incorporation papers, and so she would have known them. Ruth Dyer, again, was always involved, and she lives in the city, which was no problem for keeping in touch. Chris Schneider, who was one of the presidents at one time, and she was also, I don’t know what her exact title was, she was involved with the cemetery, and she was still around a year or two ago. Marianne Hoisington has been a long time member of the group. I’m trying to remember the name of the woman who was really the organizing force for whom the Friends of the Library, I believe, named their room, I’m drawing a complete blank as to her name, but I know my mother kept up with her for a very long time, and the Willcutts, who… Betsy still helps here, as you know, and she, I’m trying to remember, I believe she got involved with the oral histories, and her husband helped with some of the organizing around the software because… and putting some of the photo information on software, on the computer. I’ll think of a few more, I’m sure, right now, that seems to be the majority of people. I can name all of the members of the board, but I don’t know if they’re original members with my mother.
RM: And this is my last question, did you have any hopes and visions of what Lafayette may be for the future or what you wonder will happen?
DW: No, I don’t. I do intend to stay here for as long as I’m able and we’ll probably get involved with the new organization called the Lamorinda Village which helps seniors stay in place and they help find needed services of various kinds to help with the place and I believe the city is encouraging that organization. I guess as someone who grows older and stodgy, I pretty much like the way it is, I think the choices that have been made over time, keeping the suburban aspects of the city, I think, are really important, and the involvement of the community itself and so many activities, a lot of which involve the library as the meeting place, but it’s just a great place to come and be.
RM: Interview ends at 11:40.
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