Note: The title card in the video is incorrect. The month is July.
Summary:
George has made numerous contributions to the growth of Lafayette from a small town to the thriving community it is today. He and his family moved to Lafayette in 1957, he became involved in the incorporation campaign, and served as Lafayette’s mayor in 1976. He has been on the board of the Lafayette Historical Society for over 40 years and has been instrumental in the preservation of Lafayette’s first fire engine, “Old Betsy”.
Oral History:
Jeannine Kikkert: Hi, I’m Jeannine Kikkert of the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project talking with George Wasson. My son Patrick will assist with this interview. Today is July 22, 2013. Let’s start with your full name and please spell it, and where were you born.
George Wasson: Well, do you want my middle name as well?
JK: That would be good.
GW: George, I think you know how to spell George, G-E-O-R-G-E, Wingate, W-I-N-G-A-T-E, Wasson, W-A-S-S-O-N, and my birth date is September 21, 1923.
JK: You’re proud of being your age, aren’t you, and you should be. Who and where were your parents, and what is their background, George?
GW: Well first I was born in Schenectady, New York. My father is a Purdue graduate, graduated from Purdue in 1913, and he took a job with General Electric which is in Schenectady, New York. My mother is a Vassar graduate and she was born in Brooklyn, in fact, my father was first of all born in Hope, Indiana, and I think it was 1889 or something like that, my mother was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1895 and she eventually went to Vassar College and graduated in 1917 and took a job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and that’s when the two of them met. She actually was with several other Vassar graduates who were “the first lady engineers that went to work for General Electric”, now they were not really engineers, but they were hired in to do engineering-type work, and so anyway they met and got married sometime I guess about 1919 or 1920, my father had been in World War I, and after that came back to Schenectady and they got married, soon after that, in an appropriate amount of time, my brother was born in 1922 and I was born in 1923 and my sister was born in 1924, so my mother always said she was pretty busy raising children, having three kids in diapers at the same time. Then we moved from Schenectady, New York down to Philadelphia, where General Electric had another plant, my father worked there in the engineering department, and I lived there until it seemed like it was forever and ever, but I went to all the grammar schools and high schools and everything, graduated from high school in 1941 and went off to Purdue, and I was there in December 1941 when we had that incident in Pearl Harbor, and I figured I was not ever going to finish up before I’d be drafted, so I dropped out of Purdue after the first semester and went to work for a while, and then eventually I went to work for General Electric to begin with, and then the draft came along, and I went into the Navy and was fortunate enough in the programs that were available, if you got into what was called “Radio Materiel School”, which was the school which taught you how to take care of and repair radar, and so I was a little bit ahead of the times, and eventually I got assigned to a, well, first of all, in that program, there was a six-month course which was in California, and I figured I was never going to get any place west of the Mississippi, so I decided rather than go to Bethesda, Maryland or Houston, Texas, or Chicago, I decided I would go to Treasure Island in San Francisco, so I was here for, actually, seven months, and having gotten to Treasure Island and then finished up the rest of the Navy things, I figured there wasn’t any other place in the world to live. After the war, I went back to Purdue and finished my degree in electrical engineering, and then decided to go to law school, and the company wanted to hire someone who was an engineer who knew something about electronics, and it was in Detroit, so I went to Detroit where I went to law school and eventually met my wife, I was living with a group of bachelors and her family lived just behind us on another street, and we were married in 1952, and she says I never told her that I was going to come to California, but I did, I’m sure I told her from the very beginning. Anyway we moved to California in 1957, and fortunately her aunt and uncle lived in Oakland, she had a sister who was married out here and lived in Pleasant Hill and so we were fortunate enough to find a home in Lafayette, and halfway between Pleasant Hill and Oakland, and so it was a happy relationship, so that got me to California and to Lafayette, and in the course of time we had three children, two were born in Detroit and one was born out here in California. After that, my church background was with the Episcopal Church on the East Coast, and they were proposing to build a new Episcopal Church in Lafayette, and so I got involved with it, that’s St. Anslem’s which is on Michael Lane, and our home was on Michael Lane, the one that we bought, and so I got active with them, and in the course of several discussions over whatever meetings and so fourth, I met one day, and we got talking about things that were going on in Lafayette, and Lafayette was then beginning to talk about incorporating, it was still an unincorporated area in Contra Costa County, and he had been very active in the Lafayette Improvement Association, and so he said, “Well I think you ought to get into the Lafayette Improvement Association”, so I joined them and was active in that for a whole bunch of years, eventually became president of that, and then the group in Lafayette was talking about incorporating as a city, and the Improvement Association was involved with that and I got involved with that as well, I was a candidate for city council on the first vote, I didn’t win that one, and eventually became a candidate in another set of opportunities and eventually was elected to the city council in Lafayette after the city had been formed by… and I was elected in 1974, and eventually became the mayor in 1976, and I always say, people ask, “When were you mayor?” and I say, “The best time ever to be mayor, 1976, a centennial year”, so we had ribbon cuttings and candidates coming through, at that time Gerald Ford was the president and he came through, he spoke in Walnut Creek, and all of us local mayors were on the podium with him, so I always tell people that I have shook the hand of a president.
JK: Yes you have, and you were a president.
GW: And to kinda wrap all that up, I only stayed on the council for one term, and eventually when I was getting off of council, Lou Repetto was head of the Historical Society which had been formed a couple of years before that, and he said, “You know what we really ought to do, is make sure that the past mayors should be on the board of the Historical Society”, and so I became a member of the Historical Society on the board, and I guess I’m one of those, as my wife always said, “Your problem is, you just don’t know how to say no”, so eventually, I’ve been on board with the Historical Society since 1978, let’s say. Anything else that you’d like to know about how I got here and why?
JK: Well, we do have a good story from you. We’d like to know something about, well, I guess those are your social activities, the Historical Society and the Improvement Association and things like that, and one of the questions was that this would probably be in your background, what did you do after school when you were a young person? Did you do any sports or what were you interested in in high school?
GW: Well, both in high school and in college I was on the swimming team, I’m a springboard diver, I was much slimmer and trimmer then than I am now, but I was on the high school swimming team, I was captain of the swimming team, and at Purdue I was one of the divers, and in fact I went to the intercollegiates one year at Yale from Indiana, I had a great time driving all the way from Indiana to New Haven. After that, again here in Lafayette we decided we needed to have a community swimming pool, so we formed Rancho Colorados, which is just the next street over from where our home is on Indian Way and I was involved in the building and formation of Rancho Colorados, and also our son by that time was into Little League Baseball, and so I got involved with the Little League Baseball activities, and let’s see what else…
JK: What about your holidays? Are there any special celebrations as a child growing up or even now that you do celebrate?
GW: Well, back in Pennsylvania, of course we’ve always had, in fact, we even called it “Decoration Day”, which is now called Memorial Day, and you used to get your bicycles all decorated and there would be a local parade, so we’d have those things, of course the Fourth of July was always a big time. During the winter season or football season, I was a cheerleader in the high school, and anyway, there are times when you play a football game in Pennsylvania when it still is plenty cold, like the big game with our archrival, who was the nearest township was always played on Thanksgiving Day and sometimes the field would be frozen, which was no fun, but that time, incidentally, schools always played their games on Thanksgiving Day, but the University of Pennsylvania always played Cornell on Thanksgiving Day so people would go to the high school game in the morning then go into Philadelphia to see Cornell in the afternoon. Oh let’s see…
JK: You usually had snow for your holidays, but not here in Lafayette
GW: Well, we’ve had snow in Lafayette.
JK: But not during Christmas, probably.
GW: No, no, there have been times… in fact, one time, my wife was down shopping here in the Safeway store, and they all looked out window and it was snowing, and it was just beginning to make a little crust on the street, and by the time she got home, she made tracks up our driveway trying to get up to the house, so we do get some snow.
JK: I remember the one time in April…
GW: Yeah, it happens.
Patrick Kikkert: People remember when it snows around here because it’s so rare.
JK: That’s when they take a picture, especially in the old days it was an occasion for that.
GW: One of the other things is around eastern Pennsylvania, for instance the US Golf Open golf tournament was played at the Marian Golf Club, which was nearby where I lived, and I used to caddy there and we used to do our snow skiing and sledding o the hills of the Marian Golf Club, so it was a great place to… nice, open fairways that your could so a long ride on.
JK: There have been a lot of changes when you first came here and what it is now. What would you change if possible? I know you’re pleased with Lafayette, you contribute to it so much.
GW: I guess the thing that really needs to change in this whole area is they gotta flatten out some of the hills, only because the problem in all the community here is that Lafayette is in a valley and hills all around it and the nearby community of Moraga or Pleasant Hill or Walnut Creek have to come into Lafayette to get either to Oakland or to get to what is now 680 to get further south. The worst thing that happens is that we just don’t have enough through streets, you can’t get from Moraga to Walnut Creek or Oakland without going through Lafayette or Orinda, and one time, there was a proposal for a freeway that was supposed to come from Richmond all the way through and through Burton Valley and through over the hills back there to get to Alamo or Danville, and there was also a freeway that was called the Shepherd Canyon freeway, which was to come from Park Boulevard in Oakland, and then down through Moraga and come out, and eventually get to Martinez.
PK: This is the Canyon area.
GW: Yeah, through Canyon, and they were beautiful places to go through, very difficult to build a road, and eventually they never did get built for many reasons, funding and the difficulty of building them, but without those roads, all of the traffic, again from Moraga, the Canyon, that area, has to come through Lafayette or Orinda to get someplace, so the worst problem we have in Lafayette is, as exampled today, when you start doing roadwork on Moraga Road, anywhere near the corner with Mount Diablo Boulevard, you’re gonna tie up a lot of cars, just no way to avoid it.
JK: Now what would you say is the best that remained?
GW: The best that remained? Well I think the best that remains is that we did not build roadways or cut down the hillsides. We still have all of our hillsides and with very careful control over hillside construction, we haven’t filled them all up with little dinky houses climbing up the hillsides, so you got our area, Burton Valley, there’s a lot of homes in the valley, but mostly nothing going up the hills, and the same with Happy Valley and Springhill, you just make sure that houses are done so they don’t destroy the hillside appearances. We built our car at home, actually a little hole in Burton Valley, with a beautiful view of all of Lafayette, and when we were building the house, in fact before we built the house, Burton Valley was just a walnut and pear orchard area, and our first home was on Michael Lane, and my wife would walk or kids to school through a walnut orchard, and on the way back, in the fall, she would pick walnuts.
PK: That seems to be a common thread of the people who lived at that time, twenties, thirties, forties, almost into the fifties that when they were kids they would be picking walnuts and pears and the like from the orchards that were from around here.
GW: Well, you asked what we did on vacations and things, we were active with a group of people who, actually the center of it was the Lafayette Square Dance Group, and we used to go camping, always two weeks into end of July and August, but one of the guys in that group, Les Johnson, his home was on Las Huertas, just off of St. Mary’s Road, and I don’t think he was born in Lafayette, but he grew up here, he said when he was a teenager, he used to work for the people that owned those walnut orchards out there, he would drive a tractor, do things like that. That area, his house, and the old Oliviera house, one the worker/owners of some of the property, and the Burton Ranch House, were the three houses off of St. Mary’s and through that area, all the rest of that is sometime after, let’s say, 1940 or something like that, most of that was still very much just a walnut and pear orchard.
PK: So you were a camper and a dancer, a man of many talents I would say, but your civic interests are special.
GW: One of the guys in that group, he was always traveling around for various business reasons, and we’d always try to go to a different place every year, and we’d go to Big Sur and we went to Shasta and we went to Pine Crest and we went to lots of other places, but one of the trips, we were at Shasta in a group campsite, and there was probably twenty families, all in tents, and during the night, the bears came in, and my wife said, “If we go camping again, you gotta get me up off the ground!”, so we have actually acquired a trailer, different kinds of trailers, and one of the last things we found was, this same guy was coming through up near Chester, Lake Almanor, and he said, “That would be a great place”, so he found a campsite in Greenville, which says that it’s near Lake Almanor. Well it turns out it’s about five miles away from the lake, but eventually we found a campsite at Lake Almanor, and this would be about 1968 or ‘69 or something like that and we never went any other places after that. The whole group, eventually that campsite got, as many things happened, they decided they would build a bunch of condominiums on the lake, so our campsite was gone.
JK: Did you do fishing?
GW: No, I’m not much of a fisherman. Well the important thing, at Lake Almanor, there are two golf courses, at that time, there are now three, and I like to golf, so one of the other guys like to go fishing, and what we always did, we did a lot of things, swimming and boating during the daytime, and then promptly at 5 o’clock we’d have happy hour, and all of the adults would decide to get the others and tell about what they did during the day, so I asked a guy who went fishing, I said, “Well what did you do?” He said, “Well, I was… it took about 5 hours worth of fishing, and he was stream fishing, and I said did you catch anything, he said, no he didn’t, he said, “George, what did you do?” I said, “I played golf”, he said, “How long did you play golf?”, I said, “About five hours”, “Well, okay, so some people like to go fishing five hours, and some people prefer to play golf for five hours”. But we had at one time, as my wife used to say, there were fourteen year old kids in that group all at Lake Almanor, one family had four girls, another family had three boys, it was a whole bunch of teenagers, which makes a nice little campground. The owners of that campground were originally from Orinda, and when we first arrived there we said, “We’d like to come in with a group”, they said, “No more groups, we had a group of motorcycle people last week, and we don’t want to have that anymore”, and we insisted that, convincing them that we’re really quite respectable people from Lafayette and we did not have motorcycles or anything, and so they agreed to let us stay there for about thirty years.
JK: This is almost like an extended family?
GW: Yes it was, and they had twin daughters and a son, two boys and two girls, and they were all in that same age group, it made for a nice community.
JK: Good memories.
PK: During your years of public service, with the city and then with the improvers, can you tell us about some incidents that you think were challenging, that you accepted a challenge, and how you overcame them or not?
GW: Well, for instance, the Lafayette Improvement Association, formed when Town Hall was built in 1914 and it was originally a part of what was then called the Lafayette Improvers Association or something like that, anyway, we do any planning for the city in Lafayette, we had to go to Martinez, and that was always the problem, someone would plan a subdivision or something like that and we’d have to go all the way to Martinez, not that it was a long way, it was just the county, and they had lots of things going on in the county, so you never got immediate attention, and that was really the drive of why Lafayette decided to incorporate, they wanted to have local control over things because at that time, you know, somebody would come in and buy twenty or thirty acres of land and decide they were gonna do a big subdivision, not that they were not good subdivisions, but there were a whole lot smaller lots and things of that sort, and not that you had to have a big lot, it just was a lot of outside control rather than… and the same thing with roads and things like that, you needed something done on the roads, you had to go to Martinez, to the Traffic Commissions or those kind of people in order to get something done, so the important thing about the Improvement Association was that we were able to kind of make a good name for ourselves, you got that good concept of what Lafayette ought to be and we did not want to be just another building of all kinds of different things, so it worked out very well on the city council, again, forming from the very beginning, getting a general plan for the city was a big chore for the first city council, and the first and second. I was on the third city council, the fact is you got a lot of things to do, and most of the people, like me, had no experience at all, being a part of a municipal business or corporation or whatever it might be, we were fortunate enough to get Ernie Mariners, our first city council manager, and he led the city councils through an awful lot of improvements over the years, but again the biggest challenge has always been, well, for example, when Lafayette was first incorporated, I think there were, like, six or eight gasoline stations on Mount Diablo Boulevard, and each one of them had a big sign or two signs and everybody around had big signs and the city council, the city decided, “We don’t wanna have that”, they had no objections to the service stations, but they did not want to have a bunch of signs all over the place, so first thing they did was for the Sign Commission, and we started enforcing sizes and the kinds of signs you would have. For instance, the Chevron station on Happy Valley Road and Mount Diablo Boulevard, their signs were bigger than the city was proposing, and they said, “Well, we have this size sign”, and the city said, “You can have that size sign if you’d like, but you’re not going to put it in Lafayette”, and the same with ’76 or Amco or whoever it might be, everybody had to have the signs down low and the appropriate size.
JK: A big improvement.
GW: It sure makes a difference, and a lot of the landscaping of Mount Diablo Boulevard is made of much great difference, in fact, before the 24 was built, I commuted to San Francisco in the Greyhound bus and everybody came right down from the tunnel, came down through Orinda then round and round through Orinda, past the theater, out onto Mount Diablo Boulevard and down into Lafayette and all the way to Walnut Creek, and it was just a chore, not that it’s not more traffic today like it did then, but is sure is not bumper-to-bumper traffic all day long, so traffic is one of the serious problems the city faces, and parking, when I got onto the commission, or onto the city council, we decided, we really ought to do something about parking, so one of my campaign things was to form a parking commission, and so we did. We haven’t produced a whole lot of parking but we’ve at least established, we did a survey to see how many parking places were needed and how many we had, and needless to say we came up woefully short for parking, so it’s still a serious problem today, just a soon as you start doing some repair work on the street.
PK: It’s interesting that Lafayette has no dedicated parking structure the way, say, in Walnut Creek,
GW: Well, when you think about that, one of the recent discussions has been increasing a building back in what’s called, we used to call it the BART block, but it’s Lafayette area, and the people on the other side which would be south of Mount Diablo Boulevard were objecting because that would impede their view to the hillsides above them, all right, so where would you put parking? Well, probably, on top of Diablo Foods and the CVS Pharmacy, now you build a structure and the people on the other side, the south, will begin to say, “You can’t do that, now you’re taking all of our view”, so unless you put that parking underground… there’s really no place to put it, if for example, where McCaulou’s is, you may remember, that was a hillside, and they graded that all out and put in McCaulou’s and the Safeway store and now Whole Foods, lots of other things, but people don’t realize that at one time that was a big hill, and all of that stuff was created out of there and all of that toward Martinez…
JK: I have the solution… much smaller cars.
GW: That’ll work too!
JK: And speaking of cars and vehicles, we want to know more about your association with Old Betsy, when you first, you know, became a keeper.
GW: Well, going back a whole lot, one of my very, very close friends kinda grew up in our family back in Pennsylvania acquired a Model T Ford while still in high school, and we did a lot of things with that, rode it around to lots of places, in fact, we took a trip from… his grandparents own a place in Ocean City in New Jersey, and we went from Ocean City, New Jersey with the Model T Ford up to the New York World’s Fair in 1939 or ’40 or something like that. we had, I think, on the total trip, we had 23 flat ties and the car broke down a couple times, you could fix a Model T in a great hurry, the reason I say that is that when all of a sudden, John Calleo, I’ve long time said that Tony Lodges was the one that found Old Betsy in kind of a junkyard out in Pleasant Hill but it was John Calleo who found it and it was suggested that it was Lafayette’s original and first motorized fire engine and we really ought to acquire it, so I was on the council at that time, and we said, oh yeah, that’s a good idea, and somebody said, “Yeah, but who’s going to drive it?” and I said, “Well, I owned a Model-T when I was a teenager, and I know how to drive it”, so when the city acquired it, I then became the driver and enjoyed it very much, and for thirty years we had it in our garage while it was being refurbished and now it’s here in this library building which makes it very visible and at least I can get two cars in our two-car garage now, but my association with it was, again as a teenager, I knew a Model-T and knew some things about it, and fortunately a Model-T is a car that an engine and a body and a style that you really can’t kill it, it will work, you can get parts for it, and it’ll keep running for ever and ever and ever and ever.
PK: Pretty much indestructible.
GW: Yes, until you run it into a tree.
PK: They didn’t have planned obsolescence back then.
GW: That’s interesting in that regard, you know, Henry Ford just came out with that Model-T in 1908 and they build a whole lot of them and it was being built until 1928 when they finally built the Model-A, but up until then, these were all Model-Ts, and in fact, right now, those engines, the Model-T engines, are used to drive pumps in a lot of farm areas to siphon water out of canals, South America, there’s an awful lot of Model-T engines still running, and again, because you can buy parts, it’s pretty easy to take it apart and put it back together again. At least you can get underneath it, with a modern day car, these little cars that you’re talking about, you can’t even get underneath it, let alone do any work over there.
PK: They’re computer-controlled and you have a lot of sophisticated diagnostic equipment to know what’s going on.
JK: Well, it was a real pleasure for you, wasn’t it?
GW: Yes, I enjoyed it very much, and we’d go to parades and you get to wave at people and people are waving back and waving flags, it’s a lot of fun, and there are still people in Lafayette that remember when it was still a part of then the Lafayette Fire District, which was a volunteer organization really, but they’re beginning to disappear as well, but the Model-T will continue on forever and ever. Well, one of the things that I always say is that, I mean, I can remember in high school you had to make a five-minute speech or something and it just seemed like I could never do that. How could you talk for five minutes? I always tell people, nowadays, just give me a chance, I cold talk for ever and ever and ever. In that regard, for instance, I’m a patent attorney that mixed a combination of engineering and law together, and I worked for Chevron for many, many years before I retired and I’ve been active with helping inventors along the way, trying to keep them from wasting their money, doing things with patents, and it’s always fun to watch a city like this grow and watch inventors grow, and watch this building that we’re in here, when you consider that the old original Veterans’ Hall was really not a very attractive place, and this building here is such a wonderful addition to the city and has so many, many things that go on here, including this activity of the Historical Society. I think the city has done a lot of good things, and I think our planning and the members of the city council over the years have been very diligent about keeping it in, we had originally called it a semi-rural community, well, it’s not that at all, but at least it is not thirty-five stories, buildings all over the place, the concept was to keep it into a residential community where people who lived here could enjoy the activity and all the activities that we do here, and you know we’ve got baseballs and Little League and soccer, in the fall, you’ve got kids playing on every field there is that’s available, because there’s just always something to do right here.
JK: Your children, you said you had, how many…
GW: We had three children, our first was a son, incidentally, when he was getting out of high school he wanted to get into law enforcement, so he managed to get on as a cadet in the Concord Police Department just out of high school, and as a result, 30+ years later, he’s retired from the Concord Police Department as their Sergeant of Police, which is the highest level of Sergeant that they have, and he’s been retired for, he retired at age 50, well you know, that’s a pretty touch life, and then he had two daughters, our oldest daughter is a hairstylist, she has a shop out in Clayton, lives in Concord, she has a son and a daughter, and the son is about ready to get married sometime next year, and our other daughter, our youngest daughter, lives again in Concord, she has three children, two of them are through high school, one is at Chico, one is still going to DVC, and our youngest has a grandson, he’s about ready to graduate from high school, and we have two great-grandchildren, so we’re creating a population in Contra Costa County.
JK: Do you still go camping all together, all of the family?
GW: Well, yes and no, we’re selling our trailer, but as we say, our son is up at Lake Almanor and that’s where we’d always gone, so I will maybe take this trailer before I sell it and go up there for a week or something of that sort, the difficulty is getting there and getting the trailer all set up, it used to be great fun, but you’d come in, set your trailer up for two weeks, and then you didn’t move it again until you got ready to leave. We’ve taken that trailer back and forth across the country many times, one night here, one night there, we’ve been lots of places.
JK: Across the country.
GW: Oh yes, one trip we went all the way to Nova Scotia, and then on the way back we came up into Canada out of Minnesota, at Duluth, then went all the way across southern Canada to Vancouver, then back down again, so it’s been a lot of places.
JK: You certainly had a full life, haven’t you?
GW: I figure, you don’t want to just sit and watch the trees grow and things like that, you gotta be busy doing things.
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