Summary:
Jack Marchant and his brother Paul began building houses together in Kensington and North Berkeley at the end of World War II. They moved to Lafayette to continue this work in 1950. When Lafayette was incorporated in 1968, Jack was a member of the first City Council. The demand for new homes was very strong during this period, and farms and ranches were regularly becoming available for purchase. Jack and his associates were ready to turn them into homes and neighborhoods, eventually building 1600 homes in Lafayette.
Oral History:
Ollie Hamlin: This is Ollie Hamlin doing an interview with Jack Marchant and his wife, Esther, at their home at 1043 Meadowlark Court in Lafayette on November 30, 1984.
Jack Marchant: I want to tell you a story about an experience I had with Henry Kaiser many years ago. I wrote him a letter and asked him if he would supply the concrete to be used for the Mt. Diablo Therapy Center. My kid brother and Essie and I were interested in it, and after writing this letter, Mr. Kaiser called me back and said he would furnish ALL the concrete we needed for that project, and I have never forgotten that. At the time he didn’t want me to tell anybody, because he was afraid that everybody else would want him to do the same thing.
Then the other little story I like to tell is about John Jannsen who lived right down here in Lafayette. He was sort of a buddy of mine—I used to be friends with a lot of other tractor drivers—and he was working with a shovel, and he turned and said to all of us there “I don’t feel good”, and then he just fell over dead. You will have to forgive me if I cry a little. Now let’s get back to you.
OH: There are a few basic questions I want to ask for the Lafayette Historical Society. When was it that you first came to this area?
JM: About 1950.
OH: Where did you grow up and go to school?
JM: I was born in Havana, Cuba. I lived in Berkeley from 1914 to 1942. I attended local schools in Berkeley, University High School, and got an AB degree from the University of California in Berkeley.
OH: You worked with your brother, Paul, didn’t you? Was he older or younger?
JM: Paul was my younger brother, and we worked together for a long time. We worked up in Kensington near Berkeley for quite a while before the war. I think we built about 90 houses up there in North Berkeley. It was under the name of Marchant Brothers. Then Paul went overseas in the service, and he had a lot of experience with the Engineers Corps. Later on, it was under the name of Marchant Construction.
OH: It seemed to me that your home building was pretty much localized to the Lafayette area, and also in Orinda.
JM: Yes, to a degree we built in Lafayette, and Orinda and Danville and Rowland Orchards in Reliez Valley and many other areas. There was one area in particular over the hill which was one of the nicest with a lot of old timers still living there. It was immaculate, and the same people stay there, and they enforce their restrictions, and they get the city somehow to keep their streets paved. That’s more than I can do here.
OH: You had a reputation for having satisfied customers with your home buyers. You must have had a good follow-up system.
JM: Well, we always tried to do our best. We were always proud and glad to hear good things about the re-sale of Marchant homes.
OH: Jack, you had a style of your own in your homes. Did you have a rural background to develop your ranch style home?
JM: Not really. I had read several books, and I liked the colonial the best, but we also built a few contemporaries. There is a doctor down the street who is a radiologist at John Muir Hospital, and another one nearby which was contemporary, but most of them were colonial or western ranch style.
OH: That style seems to last with the years, and it is popular. You also had a career in teaching, didn’t you, before you started building houses with your brother?
JM: Well, that was in between. It was during the war. I was in the maritime service and overseas for 3 years, and after that I taught school for 3 years. After I joined up with Don Lawrie and did business as Marchant and Lawrie for a short time.
OH: I remember that name.
JM: My brother, Paul, had a very tragic ending. He was flying up in the mountains near Bishop, and he got caught in a big storm, and he was killed in a plane crash.
OH: My wife and I do see Shirlee from time to time who was Paul’s wife, and she is now married to Teller Weinmann who is an old friend of hours from Piedmont. They now live in Woodside. Teller’s father, Dewey Weinmann, was a judge in the Oakland area many years ago.
You bought the land from my father, Judge Hamlin, where Silver Springs is now in about 1953.
JM: Yes, I still have one of those old cast iron lanterns and a wooden watering trough around my place at home here which came from your ranch.
OH: Yes, those were the old gas lanterns which used to be around Lake Merritt in Oakland before they had electroliers. My grandfather, Dr. Hamlin, had a summer cabin up in the hills above the Silver Springs area, and he had a friend who salvaged a few of those fancy gas lamp posts and installed a string of them on the way up to the cabin in the hills. He had them all electrified, and they were great.
I guess you had a theory of how to go about purchasing land for your projects.
JM: Yes. I would get together with Lee Schell, whom I brought into Rotary and is an old friend. We would get together and work out an estimate of what the land would cost to develop, and work from there. We brought in acres of land which would give us a chance to do a nice job and mostly in colonial or California ranch style or whatever. I had a book one time which went into those old colonials back east, and I just kind of fell in love with that style. For the most part, they were the California Colonial Ranch style.
OH: Are they easy to maintain?
JM: They are attractive. As I say we would buy a piece of land, and we would get together and make an estimate of what the property would yield, how many sites, and if it looked good, we would go ahead with it. Lee Schell is an old friend whom I brought into Rotary as I did with many of the old timers in Lafayette. Walt Meima, retired plumber, is another.
OH: Well, I would hear about your reputation of satisfied customers all the time, and I’m sure you like to hear about that also. And you also stayed with the same sub-contractors most of the time.
JM: A good deal of the time, but now and again we would shop to make sure we were getting the right prices. Plogco Sheet Metal are old friends of ours.
OH: In 1968, the City of Lafayette incorporated, and you were one of the first councilmen. Was that a positive experience for you?
JM: Oh yes. Originally the first council acted as both a Planning Commission and the City Council, and later on we realized it was too big a job for the council alone to handle, so they formed a Planning Commission, and that was a big step in the right direction.
OH: As I remembered one of the first things the new City Fathers went after was to revise the signs and to bring down some of those big, huge real estate signs on the boulevard. The real estate guys were probably the worst offenders.
JM: You’re right. I had forgotten that. You remember a guy named Tom Duffy who had the biggest sign in town” He is still around here.
OH: That was an important element to change the looks of the boulevard.
JM: For a while there, it seemed like everybody in town was vying to have the biggest sign. Esther was in the group called the Lafayette Design Project, and we had such a time getting the PG&E and the telephone wires down in the middle of town.
OH: Yes, that took a while, but that was the major step forward. You continued to do some building and developing after the city incorporated. Did you find that the permit process changed much?
JM: Well, some. You remember Rudy Kraintz. He was a good friend of ours in Martinez. Also, Tony DeJesus in the building department. I understand that he owns quite a bit of land around Lafayette.
OH: It could be, but I am not aware of that. You were on the first City Council, what would you say were the main pluses and minuses of incorporating?
JM: I think it was a good thing.
OH: Orinda is now going through the process. I think Lafayette tried three times at the polls before they finally voted for incorporation.
JM: I think you’re right. There certainly was a time when everyone in Lafayette was vying for the biggest sign, and I think Tom Duffy outdid them all.
OH: It really shows now on the boulevard that in recent years they have taken the wires down and gone underground and landscaped Mt. Diablo Blvd.
JM: That project we did out there in Happy Valley, they were all underground. Happy Valley Dell, that’s the one. They have more original owners than most, and their streets are beautifully paved. I don’t know how they do it. I’ve tried for years to get this street re-paved with no luck.
OH: Going back a few years, were you on the original Board of the Lafayette Federal Savings & Loan Association? You were with them a long time.
JM: The old Lafayette Fed. We used to meet at our home up the hill on McGraw Road. We would meet there for hours and plan this thing. At first, we were going to have a bank which is little more flexible than a Federal Savings, but there was another group which was about ready to file, and they talked us into joining with them. That was the original group Lawrence Wallace, a hell of a nice guy, Harry Morrison, Don Doughty, Lloyd Kind and Bruce Howard. Now it is called Cap Fed (Capitol Federal Savings from Sacramento).
OH: Those are all old names around town. Bruce Howard is a good friend of mine, and I still play tennis with him. He is retired now, but he is the busiest retired guy I know with all his activities. He must have started in the early days of Lafayette Fed.
JM: Harry Morrison was the first President. He made himself President and Chairman of the Board too. There is an old story I like to tell about him. He used to drink a lot. We used to keep telling him that our loan association couldn’t afford it, so one day I took this cane or one like it, and my snow cap, and I had a patch ready in my pocket and I stood up and I said, “Beware you pirate—I’m Old Man Silver and I’ll get you if you don’t do things right around this place”. And that really went over big.
OH: Well, that Savings and Loan Association is still going strong as ever, and particularly since it became Cap Fed.
JM: They seem to be doing all right. I have a good friend down there by the name of Terry Horan.
OH: Now one thing I want to discuss. Weren’t you connected with the Lafayette Senior Citizens Project in Lafayette?
JM: Oh yeah. We owned a big bunch of property on Moraga Blvd. Hirsch Morton and I designed a project once that we thought would be great. I got up and made a talk about it, and everybody in town seemed to boo me, so I said it wasn’t worth it to me to have to walk down the street and to see people I would like to have as friends, that I value as old friends, not being friendly to me. I gained a lot of friendship that way.
OH: What kind of project was it? Multiple? That seems to be a very stable project, the senior citizens’ housing.
JM: We owned the whole block in there from Moraga Road down Moraga Blvd., and down to Golden Gate Way with the exception of the Nursery School.
OH: You owned the whole block?
JM: Yes, and we still own a lot of it except what we sold to the Senior Citizens Project. That project is well kept up, and it has a tremendous waiting list.
OH: They finally have a project like that in Orinda now near the Orinda Community Church. The people objected to it at first, but it seems to be a very necessary thing. Similar to Rossmoor. There are a lot of happy people living in Rossmoor.
JM: Oh yes. Hirsch Morton lives there now.
OH: I didn’t know Hirsch moved out there. He doesn’t seem old enough for that.
JM: We used to have an awful lot of good times down at his place. He is one of our best friends.
OH: He is a very jolly type of person. I guess he used to work for you.
JM: Yes, way back. Originally, he worked for us as a draftsman. That’s when we were really going strong in that funny little office in the back there. One day he caught his ring on a bale of wire, and he went scooting over the top of this bale of wire, and it is a wonder he wasn’t killed, but somehow, he landed just right and got out okay. He and I had a lot of good times. Still do.
OH: Hirsch is still very active for the City of Lafayette.
JM: He lives in Walnut Creek now, but he feels like he is still part of Lafayette.
OH: Jack, I think that’s all the questions I had for you today. I would like to take along this newspaper account you gave me about yourself (11/18) which would provide some more background. You are a very important fellow to the City of Lafayette, and the Historical Society wanted you to be interviewed. An oral history doesn’t have to be exactly accurate about dates and places because it is just whatever you remember. It is just as important to get the person’s own reflections on the matter. I want to thank you very much for your time and effort for this talk.
JM: You are more than welcome.
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