Summary:
Born in 1917, Edwin Quenzel was 98 when he gave this interview. He was raised in Berkeley and served on U.S. Navy battleships in World War II. After the war he moved to Lafayette and began a 50-year career as a licensed building contractor. Mr. Quenzel also built sets for the Dramateurs for many years. His wife Nancy both directed and acted in plays.
Oral History:
Jeannine Kikkert: Today is September 24, 2015. I am Jeannine Kikkert of the Lafayette Historical Society, the Oral History Project. My son, Patrick, will assist with the interview. This interview is for Mr. Edwin Quenzel and his son, Randy. Now the first question I would like to ask you, first of all, is can you tell us where you were born and what brought you to Lafayette? Where were you born?
Randy Quenzel: They want to know from the beginning where you were born and how did you get out here?
Edwin Quenzel: Well, I was born in Berkeley.
JK: Good. All right.
EQ: 1917.
JK: All right, and…
EQ: I thing that was wrong. (laughs)
JK: What brought you to Lafayette? Why did you come to Lafayette? The weather?
RQ: Why’d you come to Lafayette? They want to know from the beginning how you got out here and how we moved and developed.
EQ: Our neighbor, when we lived in Berkeley, he owned all this, see? He lived about two doors from where we lived on Curtis.
JK: His name, what was his name?
EQ: He had seven acres here, I think.
RQ: Wasn’t that Mr. Price?
EQ: Mr. Price, yeah. Yeah, he was a carpenter, really, and he lived in Berkeley about three doors down from where we lived. In fact, he built my family’s house there ‘cause he was… he worked for some outfit, I don’t know. I was too small at that time. I knew him later, of course, and then he had owned this up to the (?)
RQ: Through the Revere.
EQ: The road ended right there, at our place. Right just about where we’re sitting here, there was a creek here, went right through. You remember the creek?
JK: Your place is on Acalanes, or Hidden Valley?
RQ: My house is, the original house is on Acalanes and his house, he built it in, what, ’56, is on Hidden Valley, and the road wasn’t here. The street wasn’t.
EQ: Our original land came put near where we were sitting, so when they put the roads through, they bought this van from us, and then I got a piece on the other end over there. Hidden Valley Road ended way over there, you know, on the other side of the church property.
JK: Did you build your house yourself? You didn’t have a…
RQ: He’s a contractor.
JK: You’re a contractor? All right. And you were married when you came to Lafayette?
RQ: Oh yeah. He built my house on Acalanes in what, ’47, my house. That was built in ’47.
EQ: I built that for my mother.
RQ: Right, she lived here.
JK: What was her name?
RQ: Leena.
JK: Leena, all right.
EQ: I guess that was… when I got out of the Navy…
RQ: After. It was after. It was about ’46.
JK: He was in the Navy.
RQ: In ’45, and then he built the house here in like ’46 or ’47, right in that era.
JK: All right. You and Nancy were married in Berkeley?
RQ: Yeah.
JK: How many children do you have?
RQ: Well, there’s three of us.
JK: Would you like to give us their names?
RQ: There’s… my oldest sister was Linda, she passed away a few years back, and myself, Randy, I’m the middle, then I have a younger sister Karen, who lives in Danville. So we’re all close.
JK: Very close.
Patrick Kikkert: Mr. Quenzel, where did you go to school? What school?
RQ: What high school, or what schools in Berkeley?
EQ: Oh, Berkeley High School. I graduated from Berkeley High.
PK: Do you know any interesting stories about your school days, your favorite subjects, and so forth?
JK: Hobbies?
EQ: About my Berkeley High School days?
JK and PK: Yes.
EQ: I was born and raised down on Curter Street.
RQ: You knew, what, you knew Billy Martin, wasn’t it?
EQ: what?
RQ: Didn’t you know Billy Martin?
EQ: Uh, no, I knew of him.
RQ: Because he was in your school at the same time, wasn’t he?
EQ: Billy Martin?
RQ: I think he was…
EQ: If you’re in a different grade, different grades lead out at different times, because that was one of the guys that had a car.
JK: He did? What was it? What was it?
EQ: A little Chevy. A little Chevy roadster. My mother let me buy a car.
JK: Very sporty.
EQ: So I had a car to go to high school.
JK: Oh well, that was special. Not everyone had a car to go to school.
EQ: About a year after I got a driver’s license. I was too young to get a driver’s license. So when I’m fighting to get my driver’s license, they asked me, “when did you learn to drive?” The question she asked is, “How did you get here?” I said, “I got my car in the back.”
JK: Driving without a license.
EQ: They said, “When did you learn to drive, without a driver’s license?” “Oh,” I said, “my parents used to go down to the valley during the December, and I used to go down, and they used to let me drive an old truck on the farms there, which wasn’t true, I mean, I had to give something, and that’s how I told them I learned to drive. I just learned to drive just by going up and down Curter Street.
JK: Right in Berkeley, of all places. Were you in sports in school?
PK: Sports. Were you in sports in school?
JK: Basketball or wrestling…
EQ: Sports?
JK and PK: Uh-huh.
EQ: I wouldn’t say that.
JK: We did want to know about you.
EQ: I was too busy driving.
JK: Now I know that you were involved with Dramateurs. The Dramateurs, you and Nancy. And Randy, I see your name.
RQ: A little bit. Not much for me.
JK: I see it in the album they made, you should come, Randy, and see that. It’s quite nice. What did you do with Dramateurs?
RQ: The Dramateurs. They wanted to know what you did in the Dramateurs.
EQ: At the Dramateurs? Boy, I made the sets up.
JK: Oh, you did? What did Nancy do?
EQ: I made a lot of the sets.
JK: Wonderful! I see the pictures of them, you know.
EQ: And then I did some of the building.
RQ: Right.
EQ: I did some remodeling at… we built a place up in the back, remember, for the… what was his name that… I can’t figure out his name. He ran all the lights.
RQ: The lights and stuff, you mean? Ed Aszklar?
EQ: Yeah, I helped him build that.
RQ: But my mother directed and she acted a lot.
JK: Did she??
RQ: She did. She was in all kinds of plays but she directed quite a few.
JK: Well, that’s wonderful. I’m sure you had a good and full life, because I love the stage myself.
EQ: You’ve noticed I don’t hear very good. Well, I’m in my nineties so, you kinda lose some… you lose something.
JK: And it’s not just nineties.
PK: It’s not tough getting to a hundred, it’s getting to two hundred.
JK: Do you miss anything about the way of Lafayette? How long has it been since you’ve been downtown?
EQ: What was that?
RQ: She wanted to know if you miss anything about they way Lafayette used to be, and, how it’s changing.
EQ: Oh yeah, I has changed a lot. Especially this area.
JK: Well, you should…
EQ: You see, there was no church out there and it was just a hillside and hardly any trees, it was all wild and up this hill. I used to go up when I was… maybe when I was around ten years old or something like that, I’d take a tire, a car tire, take it way up top the hill, and roll it, let it go come down.
JK: Is that in Berkeley?
EQ: No, right here.
JK: Right here? When you were that… did you say when you were ten?
EQ: Yep.
JK: Did he come out here? Oh, you used to visit Lafayette before you moved out here?
RQ: Oh yes.
JK: Who did you visit with?
RQ: My grandmother, she moved out… your mother moved out here in the thirties, didn’t she? She was living out here part time.
EQ: I’m just trying to think when she didn’t, well, she came out, but she wasn’t living here.
RQ: No, but…
JK: Visited.
EQ: We had an old…
RQ: Well, she used to help Mr. Price, this used to be pears, and she used to come out and help him to the pears and the walnuts and stuff.
EQ: For Mr. Price.
RQ: For Mr. Price.
JK: All right, very good. Now I know the he was out here when he was young and he used to go sliding down the hill.
EQ: The creek used to go right through just about where we are here, right on through, and so this was all blocked off, you know what I mean it was, well, he had his tractor, Mr. Price had that tractor, and this was his pear orchard here, there was, I think, seven acres. Something like that, I’m forgetting that.
JK: We have two pear trees that were part of the orchard up there…
RQ: I still have one.
JK: You still have one. You still have fruit.
RQ: Yeah, good tree.
JK: Well, how old would they be? About seventy? Eighty years old?
EQ: Let’s see… Acalanes Road, and it’s just about over here.
JK: Eighty or ninety.
EQ: I must remember it’s all mud.
PK: I can tell you that… you told me that was gravel to about right here, and that was dirt. I understand that Elam Brown, the pioneer of Lafayette, build Acalanes Road in the 1860’s, that old road up to Glorietta.
RQ: Oh, did he?
PK: Yes, so it’s a very old road.
EQ: It just went up here a short ways, and the road used to end. Well, you remember, was it…
RQ: I don’t remember that. I always remember it paved.
EQ: Was it… I guess it was built… I figure when they built it.
RQ: But all of Acalanes, you know how it is from Hidden Valley up, how windy and twisty, the whole thing used to be that way.
PK: Before 1970 or ’68.
EQ: Something like that, yes.
JK: Were your neighbors close to you? Did you have activities with neighbors?
RQ: Here?
JK: In this area.
RQ: Yeah, there used to be block parties…
JK: Block parties??
PK: Mr. Valenti, wasn’t it?
RQ: And a lot of times he used to have it up here at…
EQ: Raveredito?
RQ: Ravereditos, they had parties.
JK: Were there dances someplace, of that sort? I heard that…
RQ: There used to be a dance hall down the street, there was a…
JK: We lived in a dance hall neighborhood.
RQ: Yeah. Remember, Dad, on… across from Fura, there used to be that old, wasn’t there like a park or something you could rent, a hall, a picnic area?
EQ: Yeah, there was different stuff down there, I remember.
RQ: ‘Cause I remember they had an old barn, but they has parties in it.
JK: Too bad we don’t have pictures of those!
RQ: No, they tore all that down when they straitened out the road. I remember as a kid climbing in there and stuff.
JK: Do remember a barn before then?
PK: No, that was before my time.
JK: It did curve quite a bit. They straightened it out and now they make you drive slow anyway.
EQ: Well, when I first came out here, of course I was small, you know. When I got a little bit bigger, people had a horse down there.
JK: Oh did they?
EQ: There was a freeway there.
JK: All right.
EQ: Everybody had about seven acres here, a pretty good acreage, you know, around, and then they had a horse there, and we used to go down there and…
JK: Ride the horse.
EQ: No, we never rode it…
JK: Oh you didn’t ride it, but you’d look at that horse…
EQ: To see the horse.
JK: To see the horse. Didn’t you used to have a donkey someplace? A donkey or…
EQ: Well, we had a horse here, for my daughter…
RQ: We’ve had a horse and donkey here.
JK: A horse and a donkey!
EQ: So she rode…
RQ: And actually, right here on the intersection, where it goes up dead ends on Glorietta, that used to be all pasture.
JK: For the horses?
RQ: The horses used to be in there.
JK: Oh, well, it’s certainly different now.
RQ: That old… it was just the grass…
PK: The whole Acalanes… Hidden Valley was the dairy farm for Elam Brown, because it was a nice, flat area for dairy cows, you know, they don’t like hills, and then later on it was divided into Hidden Valley and Acalanes just after the turn of the century.
RQ: Okay, I didn’t know that.
PK: And, see, the subdivisions, the individual subdivisions, these were called ranchettes, and they… this was actually the first subdivision in Rancho Acalanes in 1909, so each of these were individual orchards where one could buy and plant fruit and nut trees, now these are individual subdivisions.
RQ: Oh, I see.
EQ: But the Ravereditos, the Italians, they owned a quit a bit of land up, and every now and then, you’d hear a shotgun, I mean a rifle firing.
JK: Rabbits?
RQ: No, deer.
EQ: The Ravereditos are having deer tonight.
JK: Oh my!
EQ: When they heard that gun…
JK: You’d know.
EQ: They’re having deer tonight.
JK: Golly. We had a deer two days ago in my fig tree, and you know, they need water and food right now.
RQ: Oh yeah, they’re all over.
JK: Yes, and turkeys. And turkeys. Did you have turkeys long ago?
RQ: No.
JK: But they are now.
RQ: Never saw turkeys before.
EQ: What’s that?
RQ: Years ago, we never saw turkeys.
EQ: No.
RQ: Just the last fifteen, twenty years.
EQ: I don’t remember seeing any turkeys.
RQ: We used to have deer before we fenced, the deer would just come in and wipe out all the…
JK: Vegetables?
RQ: Everything. Apples…
EQ: Remember how the deer used to come in our front yard and eat the apples? So I had to put up a fence to keep the deer out.
JK: Yes, that’s the only way to keep them out.
EQ: Well our property ended over there and of course, there was no road going through…
RQ: Hidden Valley Road.
EQ: …so that was a whole different, what we used to say, breed of cat over there, you know. That side, what the people were talking about.
RQ: Yeah, it was different, different people…
JK: Different world, too. They’re wondering about… I knew that you drove a car, and what kind was it and where did you park it. Well, you have a driveway right there, of course, and would you go into Lafayette for gas and repairs?
RQ: Pretty much. We usually went to Orinda.
JK: You did?
RQ: ‘Cause it was on the way…
JK: It was just as close from one to the other.
RQ: It was on the way into town, and it’s much more convenient. For shopping, my mother always went to Lafayette.
JK: Now, it says, how did you get to work or, yes, you worked here in Lafayette mostly?
RQ: No, you mostly always worked in Berkeley.
JK: Oh, I see. All right.
RQ: The business and everything was in Berkeley.
JK: The business was in Berkeley. That’s important to know.
EQ: Let’s see, I don’t think I built a couple houses…
RQ: But see, what, we lived in…
EQ: I built one for Lois that time.
RQ: Right, for my aunt down in…
EQ: Right around, second street down.
RQ: And Flenny. But my grandmother lived in my house nine-eleven. She got sick, and we were living in Kensington in a house that we had built, so she gave him, I think, this backside to the property, and then we moved out here and took care of her.
JK: I see.
RQ: And that was in the 50’s.
JK: Nine-eleven is the one right on the corner.
RQ: No, Nine-eleven is on the corner, I’m nine-seventeen. I’m sorry. I’m the next house down.
JK: Your mother wasn’t at nine-eleven then. It was the other one. Nine-eleven was
RQ: That was an old packing shed. Nine-eleven used to be an old packing shed or a deer… the cornerhouse. That was moved in here, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it across where the road is?
EQ: I’m trying to think now.
RQ: I thought you said it had been moved over, didn’t Harris move it over?
EQ: Well, there was a garage there, and they used it for a parish. I don’t remember moving there, but…
RQ: The cornerhouse, from what I understood was, past of it was used for a packing shed, and then, like, a hunting lodge, when they would come out and hunt, and I think my grandmother, I don’t know if she stayed there, but we bought that in… when did we buy Nine-eleven? Wasn’t it ’78 or ’79 or something like that?
EQ: You know because that was a different owner…
JK: There was a woman living there…
RQ: Beth Barrons.
JK: A musician of some sort?
RQ: She was a violin teacher.
JK: A violin teacher.
RQ: And she owned this whole corner…
EQ: Because this end of it over here, that was at…
RQ: Beth.
EQ: Beth had it, yeah. And then she passed away, and her son, actually it wasn’t her blood son, but son, in New York, wasn’t it?
RQ: Yes.
EQ: He called up one day about wanting to sell that place.
RQ: We had won this end of it. As we mentioned before, she had broken her hip and had stayed in our house for, like, six weeks recuperating, she was back home fine. A year or two later, she fell again…
JK: That’s tough.
RQ: And we couldn’t do it again, we had two little girls, so she went into a nursing home, he got power of attorney, and when he was out here visiting her, we told him, we’d always been able to buy the property, about a month later, he called up and here’s what the price is, we got some estimates, and we called him right back and he bought it.
JK: All right.
RQ: And it was a mess. The house was…
JK: Well, she was old and trying to take care of it, wasn’t she?
RQ: People didn’t even know there was a house there, it was all ivy.
JK: Yes covered.
RQ: We owned it over a year and we didn’t know there was a garage there, remember? It was so overgrown you couldn’t see, and when we purchased it, the… purchased it for, I think it was 83,000 dollars, and the county said, no, it’s undervalued, what are you going to do with the property? I said, we were gonna fix it up. If you tear the house down, we’re gonna reassess it to a hundred, so the house was a 20,000 dollar detriment to the property, but we fixed it up and it’s still the same house. But it was over a year, we didn’t know there was a garage, The whole year was… you couldn’t even walk through the yard.
JK: That’s a funny story.
RQ: It’s true.
JK: You have a lot of funny ones around here.
PK: Can you tell us the story of how you built your house and had to deal with the water coming down
EQ: Well, the creek went right through our property, actually, he said it pretty well.
JK: Would it flood in?
EQ: And then, I spent a few years now, and the city went ahead and piped it. It was right over here on the side here…
JK: We see all of it, you know when we drive by.
EQ: There’s a big concrete tank because the creek coming down is a four foot flow, they called it, and this was a four foot flow here, wasn’t it?
RQ: Something like that, yeah.
EQ: And it would be too much hitting on the one spot. They were afraid of a big storm, it might back up and catch those other houses.
JK: Oh.
EQ: So the city put that big tank right there, and that would take the first flash of the flood.
RQ: Yeah.
EQ: And then… I don’t know how they drained it or…
RQ: It goes to that other creek.
EQ: It was right over there.
RQ: But prior, when the creek came through, you piped it. The original pipe you put in. He put in the original galvanized culvert and piped the creek, and then he said my grandmother used to get, when they were digging swimming pools and doing stuff around, they would bring her the dirt, and from what I understand, she always had cold beer, so the truck drivers would dump the dirt and get a beer or two, and then this is all from different swimming pools from the whole area, and that’s what filled it in, but it started to corrode…
JK: Oh.
RQ: And they either had to go through our property and replace it, or go around, and we put some money into it so they wouldn’t go through, and I knew there would be a fight, so we went around, but we have a concrete line ditch that goes from street to street, and that was one of the contentions, we had to leave that, and we wanted it anyway for safety, because when they were grading the hill, we had a huge flood, I think it was in ’62, was it in ’61 or 62?
JK: ’62, I think was the huge flood there.
RQ: And all the mud from the church and everything came down and it was right up to the front door. The whole front yard was sill, it was just a lake, and then they re-graded everything and they came in and they put that big ditch in the front, so everything slopes down, then we concrete lined that so no water collects because we’re afraid of this creek here behind the church plugging up, and it has, and if it overflows and it comes down ours and now it goes through that safety, that channel we put in, and we have bridges, concrete bridges across it, so it makes it kind of nice for us, it looks nice, but it’s all concrete lined with old driveway approaches and sidewalks from Berkeley, when they would build an apartment house, they would take out the concrete sidewalk and then bring it home. I don’t know how much concrete we got…
EQ: Oh, yeah.
RQ: We must have thousands of yards of broken concrete, everything is lined.
JK: Berkeley is here.
EQ: Yeah, I was building houses in Berkeley and apartments and stuff, so like you said, we’re… the sidewalk. I’ve got a whole stitch going all the way around where I built.
RQ: Yeah.
EQ: As a concrete.
RQ: Yes, everywhere.
JK: That’s being smart, you know, and not wasteful, I mean you can use those…
RQ: Oh yeah.
EQ: But we were all pretty lucky to get the corner.
RQ: Yes.
EQ: That came fast, I made a phone call, and Mandy came up and he got a hold of me and told me about the phone call, so we called him right back, and I think we made the deal right then.
RQ: Yeah.
JK: That was fast.
EQ: Oh yeah, and…
JK: You knew what you wanted.
RQ: He said he was going to have his attorney drop the papers and everything, and I was all, well, you don’t need to do that if you don’t want, we’re just going to take it like it is. We’ll just go to the title company, so we did. We went to Lafayette, we drew it all up, and we bought the property, there’s no… took a few days, a week.
EQ: Well, you know, the county came out first, and put an evaluation on it, and when the county comes around, and puts a value on a piece of property, boy, they sure can put it up high! Remember, they put it up to a hundred thousand, something like that.
RQ: Yeah.
EQ: Something like that. Well, we jumped on that one quick, and we made the deal that same night, didn’t we?
RQ: Something like that.
EQ: And I bought it. I told them, I said, “I’ll handle all the closing costs, I’ll take care of all that, you don’t have to worry about that at all,” and I asked him, “Would you accept this size offer I made”, I thought it was a fair offer, he did too, he said okay, I said, “I’ll take care of all the other costs”, so that worked out fine.
JK: That worked out fine.
EQ: The cost wasn’t too much.
RQ: Yeah.
JK: You know, the taxes are so high now, it’s just… sky-high.
RQ: So no, it was a beautiful piece of property.
JK: I wanted to ask one thing about services, no, health and safety. Did you leave your doors unlocked in those days? I used to when I was younger.
RQ: We still do.
JK: Well, what can you tell me about it?
RQ: We have almost an acre and a half and it’s completely fenced in, and I built electric gates, and actually what I did is I took garage door openers and flipped them on their sides, and that’s my gate openers, that’s the cheapest way I could do it, and it works fine, I’ve had those for twenty-five years, but we have three dogs, and there’s always a dog there, the neighbor has a… each house has a dog, and the one is a black lab/pit bull mix, and just a real sweet dog, but nobody comes in, ‘cause they get greeted right there. I leave the keys in the car a lot of times.
JK: Did you walk in your neighborhood after dark?
RQ: We used to go on vacation, we’ve gone on vacation and left the house open for a week, nobody around. Never had a problem, and we’d forget.
PK: But you people used to have problems with the driveway because it connected Hidden Valley with Acalanes and people would use that as a shortcut…
RQ: Yes, on Sunday for the church. The church people would come down through. We even had a Highway Patrolman come through one day, he made a shortcut.
EQ: When my wife parked her car in the driveway once , a guy came in here and tooted the horn, because you got the car in the way!
RQ: Oh yeah, he was mad.
JK: “This is my driveway! This is not the street!”
RQ: “This is our private driveway!”
EQ: It’s getting just about that time when I told Randy, I said, “Lookit, I’m gonna gate the place!” So I built a gate on each end.
JK: Good idea.
RQ: So we had the highway patrol came through one day. I guess there was traffic up here or something and he just took a shortcut and came through.
JK: How do they know that it goes through though?
RQ: You can kind of see… I guess you can see.
EQ: Well, when I got out of the Navy in World War II, I went into the contracting business, so I got a license to be a building contractor, a state license, of course, I don’t have it now anymore because I don’t need it, but I had it for about 50 years, I guess. A contractor’s license used to cost five dollars, the last time I think was five thousand! It was way up there.
JK: Oh, my gracious.
RQ: That’s expensive.
JK: Well, I guess the movies was only five cents at one time also.
EQ: Well, I did a lot of building in Berkeley, I built a lot of stuff in there.
JK: That was your…
EQ: I had a partner for twenty years.
JK: Did he live in Berkeley?
EQ: And we spread, but we did some of the big buildings in Berkeley, he and I. If you know Berkeley.
JK: I don’t know it well, but Patrick…
EQ: We built the Golden Bear Hotel, I built the Presbyterian Church…
JK: Good, very good.
EQ: In Berkeley.
JK: You had a good business and they kept you busy all the time.
EQ: Oh, I loved building. I fit right in. I wasn’t a misfit.
JK: No…
PK: Kept you out of trouble.
EQ: Yeah, it was just my life.
PK: Later on, you taught yourself welding, and you liked to make sculptures and such, didn’t you?
EQ: He did all that.
RQ: No, you did a lot of the…
EQ: The welding?
RQ: You did a lot of the gates.
EQ: Well, yeah, yeah.
RQ: You did a lot of welding around…
EQ: I forgot about making all the gates.
PK: That’s what impressed me, that it was something you just took up yourself, you taught yourself bowling and…
EQ: ‘Cause I put all the fences up and the gates, and you could see, you can’t see the gates there yet, but I liked to do that. You sure get an education, doing welding. Remember the time we welded up the gate, on the other side we got it all welded up on the ground, see, it had no bowl in it, I said “Hey, let’s straighten it all out”, and it broke.
RQ: It was brittle.
EQ: That’s how you have to learn.
RQ: Yeah, there’s some tricks you have to do but it’ll get brittle if you…
JK: We’re talking about the radios that we had in those days. That was what we had, no television, I guess you had a newspaper, probably, sure, and you say you were in the Navy, you were a young man at that time and no family, wasn’t married yet?
RQ: Oh yeah.
JK: Oh, was married?
RQ: And had…
JK: And children?
RQ: My sister was born in 1940, so, you know, he got drafted…
JK: Went into the Navy. Well, good for you.
PK: What was your specialty? What were you in the Navy?
JK: What did you do?
EQ: I was on the North Carolina.
RQ: The battleship.
EQ: The battle ship North Carolina, yeah. I fired a 40 millimeter, a quad, the guns, anti-aircraft.
PK: Were you a gunner’s mate or…
RQ: FT. That’s a fire patrol.
EQ: I was called a fire controller. That means firing the guns, not putting fires out. Oh yeah, I was on that a couple years, but they laid off of the battleships. The Japanese were smarter now. They didn’t come near, because look at the firepower we had. Unbelievable, the firepower we had. We had guns all over.
PK: A lot tougher than the ones at Pearl Harbor. The battleships, they had the North Carolina, Missouri, Iowa, those types were a lot bigger and a lot tougher.
EQ: Well, having been stuck out there, the battleship was your safest bet, and your best job. I worked third class in a short time, and I worked on the main battery, “The Plot”, we used to call it, which had charge fire a lot of the guns, from there, they could fire it a couple of decks down.
RQ: Even then, it was computerized.
EQ: It’s all fired down, down below, and so it worked out pretty good for me. In a short time, they gave me a station, a maintenance station, and it was a good thing, nobody bothered me, it was the second highest point on the battleship that operated the guns.
PK: The fire control.
EQ: All I had to do, my job, go up there and take on the instrument they had, I’d have to point it down to the main deck at the back, they had marker on it, on the spot, see? I had to take this big instrument, if you wanna call it, move around where they fired it from, and then take my optics and get to that spot and mark it, there’s a gauge, see, however I was putting it, mark it, and I had to mark it on the wall there, everyday I did that, and that’s about all I had to do. Not much at all. The reason for that was those guns have to be accurate, sixteen inch guns, the shell that they throw out is eight feet tall, sixteen inches around, so you know you’re firing some big equipment, they wanna know where it’s gonna go, so I took a reading, all the time and marked it on, so if they come up, the crew that operated that gun on that station, they would know exactly on the reading where they’re gonna hit. You know, on their step. That was my job, just to take care of that.
JK: Did you see any…
EQ: So being on a battleship wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t quite a cruise liner…
PK: You could say in every major Pacific battle…
EQ: …But it was pretty good. We had ice cream, an ice cream place and, well, being an battleship, they had all the good stuff on there, like…
PK: A big vessel like that.
EQ: And I had a nice, soft job.
PK: Well, no one really had soft jobs in the war, but…
EQ: If you keep your nose clean, do what you’re supposed to do and do it right, the people over you, they’re gonna notice that, I mean, they knew what I was doing, because when a job came up, that was the best job you could have on a ship, I thought, but I was a… I never got out of line, you know, I did what I had to do, even if I hated it, being on a warship, but if you do it right, and I did, and it worked out pretty good.
PK: They knew you were a responsible person.
EQ: Yeah. I was there in Japan when they signed the peace. We went in the next day on the battleship.
PK: Tell us more about it, where were you in Japan and what did it look like?
RQ: He wants to know what you saw in Japan.
JK: Where…
EQ: Oh, the peace, with the Japanese, we were gonna, we were getting all set, November first of that year, we were gonna invade Japan, because we were getting information, and so we knew we were gonna have a hotspot coming up, of course that’s where they dropped the A-bomb, and we were about, we used to stay on that battleship, we used to stay at least a hundred miles off the coast of Japan because they could come out with planes, you know, but they go over two hundred miles, they gotta go back again, and we were probably even further, I don’t know, but I know we were out because we’ve never had any trouble with any Japanese bombers coming out after us, so we knew that they had to go out and come back, and we were too far out to make a smooth trip, so we had it pretty good.
PK: And you didn’t go ashore in Japan, you never went ashore.
EQ: No, that was after the war, because as soon as they signed the peace, well, we were in Tokyo Bay, yeah, I was there…
JK: That’s I wanted to know exactly.
EQ: That peace, the next day, we had a big navy out there, I’ll tell ya that. We had three different groups, you know, we had four battleships in each of those groups and that’s the… we were heavily armed, so when they signed the peace, you could see those ships headed to the States.
PK: Everyone wanted to go back home.
EQ: The aircraft carriers, and you could just see the front end doors, and the speed, you know they were…
JK: As soon as they could.
EQ: You know they were going wild. We went in, they got the thing signed, and then we left, and I got into Pearl Harbor, and a transfer came in for my type of job to go to San Diego, to school, so I jumped it. The war was over and all, but I still took it because I didn’t know when in the hell I’m going to get back. Well, you know when you got that many people out there, you don’t just load them onto a plane, so I figured I’d jump on that, because I would have to wait two or three months anyway to get out. I was on the last end, I mean, I had only been in there a couple of years, and you know these other guys, they’re gonna raid and they’re gonna get out, so you have to kinda play it a little bit…
RQ: He was at Hiroshima and the Marianas and all the… you know the turkey shoot and all that? He went through all the… he won, like, five battle stars, I think you were in five different battle, five battle stars or something?
EQ: Oh, yeah, yeah.
JK: Oh, gracious.
EQ: Six
RQ: Six.
EQ: Well, you will get ‘em, if you wanna know how the Navy is situated, you got all these ships, and we go into a base, sometimes it’s a big island, and some of these islands in the South Pacific in that area are big, and there’s maybe six, seven hundred ships in there supply ships, war ships, you know, ‘cause it’s a big base, you can always see the other end of this bay, there’s only on way in, a big way in, and that’s where all the supply ships and all the supplies… we had ships here with supplies on ‘cause I got talking to some of the guys, we’d go ashore on the island there, they’d be out there for eight months, the same load on the ship, on the supplies because we were moving forward, and you gotta have your supplies, you know, I don’t know what they had, a lot of food and stuff, or I talked to one of the ships there, they had a lot of ammunition, so they gotta sit there, you can talk about, you go ashore, you talk about some wild sailors, they were stuck there for eight months on an old ship with some supplies on it.
JK: What are these for, Randy, we want to look at these. What are these plans for?
RQ: Years ago, there was plans for, at the… these are the drawings for, remember the pool they wanted to put down here in Hidden Valley? Remember, they wanted a swim club?
EQ: Oh yeah.
JK: A swim club.
RQ: Down at Hidden Valley.
JK: Hidden Valley.
EQ: That was near the freeway.
RQ: Yeah, kinda where Arbor Road is, down in that area. They were gonna, I guess the whole valley was gonna, you’d put in your membership, or something, I found these…
JK: But it never did come to be.
RQ: No. Somebody drew these up and… it’s the Orinda pool, it’s just a real preliminary, just kind of a generalized…
JK: Nice!
RQ: I thought it might be interesting to see some of these.
PK: I never heard of that project. Was it supposed to be near West Arbor or Arbor Way?
RQ: I think Arbor Way, down in there, but the freeway was all… before the… elevated and everything, it was just a highway, you’d just go right through town, and when you left the valley, you had to go across traffic. There was a lot of accidents here…
EQ: Oh yeah, when we first moved in here… oh, that was terrible.
RQ: When we first moved in here, at least once a week, you’d hear cars sliding and, oh, you could hear accidents all the way up here.
PK: …no signal over here, either. You had to…
RQ: There was no signal. You had to cross two lanes of highway to get into the other lane to go into town, and Lafayette was so bad, there was hardly any signals yet and it almost go all the way through to turn around to come back.
JK: Oh my.
RQ: Remember, Lafayette, you couldn’t even…
EQ: Yeah, you see, these two valleys were separate. That one ended there, and then ours went up over, on the other side, and then it was stuck right there over there, but then the church, they finally put that road up, that whole hill was all grass, remember? Every damn summer we’d have a fire there…
RQ: Fourth of July. It would burn the hill. Every year, so I used to take the hose and hook all our hoses together and string… you know we had a hose bib in the front and I’d hook all the hoses together so I could… I’ve even gone across the street and hosed down as far as I could, hosed the hill down, but every year it would burn, not a whole lot but…
EQ: Well, the grass got so high, you know.
JK: And it was hot and dry.
RQ: Oh yeah. Now they put the goats up there.
EQ: But the church, then, when they found the… planted the trees in there. They grow up pretty fast, don’t they? It sure cleared that up.
PK: A lot less erosion now, I imagine, with all the trees there.
RQ: Yeah, because it used to slide, this corner used to slide all the time right here in the corner. The mud would come down the hill.
JK: Well, we remember that even, you know, fairly recently.
RQ: The fellowship hall had a lot of problems in years past, the hill was crumbling and they put some reinforcement and such, and then they had the path that went up there that also had problems, created problems itself and then they put those old bales of hay and so forth that kind of fixed it.
JK: Or crest. Used to go through…
RQ: Used to go through.
JK: And then…
PK: …1962 and say that was the big year, all the floods.
RQ: When, in ’62, they had just graded Glorietta here, the short piece of Glorietta, and all the mud came down, and it came through the little house over here in the corner and the whole street, and after it had quit, the water kept coming and what happened was it broke the water main, remember, it broke a four-inch or whatever pipe.
JK: All that water.
RQ: So it still kept coming. Nobody knew.
JK: You’ve lived through a lot around here.
PK: They were saying they couldn’t have pushed Glorietta to connect the two pieces.
RQ: They were going to…
PK: They were going to, but they couldn’t after that.
RQ: Is that, I don’t know why they…
PK: They said that it was too unstable over there.
RQ: Oh, is that what it was?
PK: And it’d be too expense to try to grate it.
RQ: There was a fellow, my mother knew about it, but there was a fellow, the house right at the end, where it was going to go through, he was some kind of an engineer and he was afraid of fires, so he had a complete concrete house, everything was concrete, the walls, the ceilings, everything, who was that? On the end?
EQ: On the other end of that one…
RQ: And his wife was so happy because the state got it because they were going to put the road through, ‘cause she hated the house, she never did finish it.
EQ: Didn’t a creek come down there, a little creek?
RQ: There was a spring…
EQ: That’s where Linda’s horse fell down through that bridge.
RQ: Through the creek and there used to be springs up in there. It’s still moist, it’s still, springs do come out.
JK: Dangerous times.
EQ: Our daughter had a horse, I built a little barn for the horse.
RQ: It’s still there.
JK: What was the horse’s name?
RQ: Jubilee King.
JK: Jubilee King.
EQ: (inaudible)
RQ: Oh, yeah, he tried… he put his head down and he dragged it right off.
EQ: (inaudible)
RQ: Yeah, you couldn’t fit. He just put his head down and there was a beam and maybe there was that high off his back.
PK: If he weren’t careful, he’d…
RQ: Oh, he’d just pull you right off. Oh yeah, and he would do it on purpose.
JK: Oh no, so smart.
EQ: So we had, and then after a while, she took the warship up to Happy Valley for a while…
RQ: Yeah, there was a big area on Happy Valley, Happy Valley Road.
EQ: But I remember now that little barn I build that morning, oh yeah, on the water, we had a laundry tray, you know, those concrete laundry water things, I got one of those and filled it up with water for the horse, so I go, and we had the horse in the yard there, and I go to check the water, the darn thing is empty, see? Okay, I fill it up, I fill it up again. I go back an hour or two, the damn thing is empty. Goddamn it, how the hell did it get empty? Looking for leaks and all, you know, found out what the horse was doing. After I left, he put his head down and pulled the plug out!
RQ: He’d be right up to his eyes in water!
PK: Smart horse!
RQ: And then we’d put bricks on it, just a couple bricks, and he would work and work and work, he’d take his nose and he’d move the bricks out of the way, and then he’d pull it. So then what you could do, you had to line the whole base of the tub solid with bricks so he couldn’t move it. Yeah, he was something else.
JK: Amazing!
RQ: What, he’s bored.
JK: Got in trouble, didn’t he?
EQ: We knew there was something going on.
RQ: Remember, he broke through the fence. If you look at horse fences, you always put the boards on the inside of the posts, because the horse would get up there and start rubbing and leaning, and then he’d pop the… if the boards were on the outside, he pops them off and he just walks off. If they were on the inside, he can’t just push against them, so we found that out real fast. He’d just be out in the garden.
PK: Luckily, though, not a lot of traffic at that time.
RQ: He would just be in the yard, there’s plenty to eat, just to get out.
EQ: But, you know, I can never figure how, with that tray, with that little plug, how he could get down there and get a hold of that goddamn plug. Remember? We had a hell of a time to find that out, and we finally covered it.
JK: How long did you have that horse?
RQ: She had ten, twelve years.
EQ: Oh wow.
RQ: Something like that, at least that. Yeah, he was here at our house, and then he was at this pasture here, and then he was…
EQ: In Upper Happy Valley…
RQ: Upper Happy Valley, there’s a big hillside and they wanted the horse for to keep the grass down, it was all three or four acres, it was all fenced in, but pretty steep, real steep block, but they don’t care, it’s free grazing, so it worked well.
JK: Wonderful story.
EQ: They had an ordinance, the horse had to be fifty feet away from the property.
RQ: Something like that, I think yeah.
EQ: And then, but that never stopped us, I mean…
RQ: Nobody ever complained. We were a little bit close on the other side, but… remember, when we had the horse, there was no house there. So…
JK: You lived in the country?
RQ: Yeah, there was a lot of horses around.
JK: Now this is the…
RQ: That’s the Town Hall. That’s the marquee.
JK: Yes, were they doing some repairs or something?
RQ: I don’t know. I just found those and I don’t know if maybe the Town Hall would like them or I don’t know if the Historical Society wants to look through ‘em.
JK: I’ll run them by Judy and they’ll give you a receipt…
RQ: Oh, sure.
JK: …and she’ll find someone—you’re right about that with the Dramateurs, Randy, you must come down and see that out.
RQ: I’ll have to look at… I’ve still got the… that was from the Laf-Frantics. I’ve still got all kinds of photographs and stuff, I’ve just got boxes of photographs, but it’s finally time to go through it.
JK: Well, you’ve never been to the historical society either, you know it’s in the library, it’s not too difficult.
PK: Sort of the town museum.
JK: This is fantastic. This is wonderful. I know someone will be… now, did you want me to take these with me?
RQ: Yeah, you can take those.
JK: All right, I’ll…
RQ: I’ll just…
JK: Are these yours, Patrick?
PK: Yes.
JK: Okay. I didn’t want to put them with this.
PK: This question is kind of for either of you, what did you like, over the years, best about Lafayette, and what do you think could be improved about Lafayette?
RQ: I dunno.
EQ: Lafayette’s a fast food town…
JK: Edwin was from Berkeley though, then he went to Orinda with his shopping, so didn’t go into Lafayette that much, that often.
RQ: Even as kids, we’d always go to the Roundup. I remember as a little kid, we’d always…
JK: What were you doing in the Roundup as a little kid?
RQ: There’s nothing else around. They had soda and stuff. We’d go in with the dog and my dad would go in and… all of us kids would go.
JK: You did go into Lafayette then, to the Roundup, of course!
RQ: Hey, nobody complains. If nobody complained than it didn’t… but yeah, the Roundup was the big thing.
EQ: I got racked up with the Town Hall.
JK: Yes, you did.
EQ: I did a lot of work at the Town Hall.
JK: Yes you did, and Nancy was right there with you.
EQ: Have you been in the Town Hall?
RQ: Yes, a couple of years ago they had a tour of the backstage, and told us a story about floods there, the water system failed and wrecked everything and…
EQ: I did a lot of work there. I put in a whole bunch of lockers at one time, and then in later years, they took about half of them out, I guess. They were expanding a little bit, but I did a lot of work at that Town Hall. I had to built, I built a lot of the sets, and then we would store some of it in the back…
RQ: As a matter of fact, we stored some of it here, remember?
EQ: Yeah, yeah.
JK: Some of the sets?
RQ: Yeah, in our shop over here.
JK: How wonderful!
RQ: Yeah, some of it was here.
JK: Well, that’s a good life. It really was entertaining and a lot of work, we know that.
RQ: But, you know, Lafayette’s a nice town, it’s getting kind of yuppie now, so it’s kind of getting a little more upscale than…
JK: …you were used to.
RQ: Yeah…
PK: Not as many restaurants these days, seeing as you could either have the very expensive ones or the drive-ins and nothing in between.
RQ: The best was the Squirrel’s.
PK: Yes, that was a good place.
RQ: And that was… boy, when the Squirrel’s left, the whole family was, “Oh boy,” we knew the owners pretty well, and yeah, that was hard, that was sad, the Squirrel’s left, the Squirrel’s Restaurant, but yeah, the best thing about Lafayette is probably Diablo Foods is one of the good things. they’re just good people and really accommodating, nice, but now it’s the traffic, they don’t even go in the afternoons. They just… it’s hard to get through…
JK: No parking…
RQ: No parking and…
JK: And all the meters now…
RQ: Meters.
PK: Well, this may be a little out of field, but things you like about Orinda, you go to Orinda a lot.
RQ: Well, that was back then…
PK: You don’t go now? Not anymore?
RQ: No, very, very seldom.
JK: On the way to Berkeley…
RQ: That was, you were asking about…
JK: Live.
RQ: …about gas and this and that, and that was always stopped.
PK: Well, particularly, favorite things about Orinda when you used to go through?
JK: The gas station.
RQ: The gas station was good. Actually, for a long time, when my kids were small, my wife would take them to the Orinda Park, that was one of the best parks with the slides and the swings and all that, it was real close, really nice park, and I understand that it’s still a really nice park.
JK: Tennis courts there…
RQ: And the theater was always much better than Lafayette, for years it was kind of run down and small, and the Orinda Theater was always nice.
EQ: Well, I haven’t gone to a restaurant in Lafayette in a long, long time. I like Orinda better.
JK: I see. It’s more convenient.
RQ: A little bit.
EQ: I can park right in the front and walk right in to the restaurant there.
JK: Yes.
PK: What restaurant do you like to go to? Do you go into Casa Orinda? The restaurant.
JK: Favorite restaurant.
EQ: We used to go on a Friday when they had the crab, we’d get a crab sandwich.
PK: At Casa Orinda?
EQ: At Orinda, yeah, and I forget what the name of it is, but anyways…
PK: Oh, you like the Hof Brau?
EQ: The Hof Brau? No…
JK: The Willows? That was a long time ago.
EQ: Oh God, I forget where… anyway, they sell beer there, a nice glass of beer (inaudiable) just before noon, when they got the crab out for the sandwich, and make a crab sandwich.
JK: So you and Ed were good friends, how did you become acquainted?
RQ: The neighbor next door…
JK: To them or to you?
RQ: To them.
JK: To them.
EQ: Don Stevens bought the house next door, and he was the Vice President of Standard Oils, of their crude oil sales, he traveled all over the world, everywhere, and these were friends of his, I think, they used to take care of his house, and they’re Dutch, the Kaisers, and when Don Stevens moved out here, from Europe or whatever, they kind of came with them, and they bought a house over on Crest, and so they’ve been out here for years.
JK: So that’s the connection now. Now I know. I know Penny used to say that she was visiting the Quenzel quite often.
RQ: So that’s how we became real good friends.
JK: And still are. She said she’s down here, visiting. Well, this has been so enlightening and so very interesting. I really appreciate your time to do this for us. Are there any other thoughts that you want to share? That you can think of that…
RQ: No.
JK: Are we tiring you?
RQ: Oh, he loves it.
JK: He loves it, good! Well, we’re going to have to come and visit, even if we’re not going to have an interview for the Lafayette Historical Society.
RQ: Lafayette used to be real easy to build here, a lot of it was county, When my house was built there were no inspections or anything. I think he said the fire chief would come.
JK: Just do what you want.
RQ: Pretty much, but the fire chief would inspect it for occupancy. As long as he deemed it safe… and then when we remodeled years ago, we just went out to the county and got the permits, got everything in a couple hours, came back and started working. Now it’s months. Sometimes I think they kinda make things too hard.
PK: Well, on behalf of the Lafayette Historical Society, we both want to thank the two of you for…
JK: Edwin and Randy…
PK: For all your stories and contribution…
JK: To the community really.
PK: Yes, good, Not just to us but…
RQ: Thank you.
JK: For letting us come by here. We really appreciated it. Well, come by and say hello sometime.
EQ: I think I’ll probably spend the rest of my life in this place here.
JK: Not going to go on a horse anymore, are you? Slide down the hill?
EQ: Yeah, treat me good, and I’m handicapped now, you know.
JK: Well, it’s so convenient to be with Randy…
RQ: You can look right across and see his bedroom.
JK: Throw a stone, throw a stone over.
EQ: In fact, they’ve taken my house away anyway.
RQ: Actually, well, my wife is beginning, she’s not real healthy, she’s diabetic and heart problems and that, so I needed somebody to help, ‘cause I still kind of work, we have a lot of property in Berkeley.
JK: Oh, I see. Are you a contractor as well? What work do you do?
RQ: I worked for Alta Bates Hospital for thirty-four years.
JK: My youngest daughter was born at Alta Bates.
RQ: I work at the Herrick site over on Dwight and Haste. There’s several different hospitals. I’ve worked over there for years and so we have a lot of property that we take care of, so the house was sitting empty, so my daughter moved in, and my son-in-law and they’ve got three little girls, so the house actually, it’s full now, and it’s really worked out nice, somebody needs to live in it.
EQ: Well, the reason I moved in here, I moved in a little earlier, I didn’t have to move here, but my wife had to have a twenty-four hour service, so this was the most sensible place to take her.
JK: They didn’t want to separate the two of you.
EQ: We had to take her somewhere, and I’ll tell you, at Rossmoor is not the place to be, it’s not the place to be, so then I finally moved in. I didn’t have to move in when I did, but…
JK: You wanted to be with Nancy.
EQ: They put us into one bedroom anyway, the last big bedroom, and then they gave us the other room over here…
RQ: Well, we’re paying for two rooms, everybody gets a separate room, so we fixed up one as a bedroom, and fixed up this one with some easy chairs and a table and a TV…
JK: A den!
RQ: …so he’d have a living room, and it works nice, you know, it’s a separate part of the house and…
EQ: Well, you see, they can only have six people here on the license, I guess, so we had to do something with my wife, they didn’t want to leave her at any other place, so I figured, heck, I’ll move in. it’s been good for me, I’m taken care of.
JK: How long have you been here? How many years? How long?
RQ: About eighteen months, two years.
JK: Year and a half to two years.
EQ: Two beds in our room…
JK: But it’s very close to what you wanted it to be.
RQ: And then he fell and broke his leg…
JK: It’s nice to have someone around to be there.
RQ: And then he had to go somewhere so that worked out.
JK: I see.
RQ: So it works out well for us because… actually, my grandkids, they come up and check up on my wife all the time, the oldest is four, five, going on five, so she comes down and checks and we come up and we have dinner together almost every night so we have like three generations having dinner, and it works out very well for us, and it works out great for them.
JK: It’s so nice to meet you again, Edwin and Randy, thank you for taking the time.
RQ: Oh, no problem. It was good.
JK: Really appreciate it so much, well…
EQ: Well, I’ve been married for seventy-five years, and if I wasn’t here, she would really miss me. I know that because they usually put her in bed before I go to bed and then they get her all set up and then I have to go and kiss her goodnight and so I’m right there and I’ve got a little space on my bed, so then she’s happy then. She knows, We’re married that many years so you’re tied.
JK: You’re one.
EQ: She and I, we’ve lived a nice life.
JK: You have.
EQ: I can’t complain, I can’t complain.
JK: And you have a wonderful family too.
EQ: After I got out of the Navy, into the building, I got a contractor’s license and all that, so that was something I liked and I did.
JK: That’s good, to do what you like. No other way.
EQ: Well, there was some things in life I didn’t like, of course.
JK: But we don’t dwell on that.
EQ: I sure didn’t like to be in the Navy as long as I, I was only in there a couple of years so that wasn’t bad.
PK: Well, thank you very much.
RQ: Thank you.
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