Oral History: Ken and Marge Cusick — December 6th, 2015

Summary:

Ken and Marge Cusick, long time residents of Lafayette, tell stories of their neighborhood and area which has changed dramatically since they came here. Cusicks moved to the Springhill Valley in the early 1950s, and continue to live here today.

Ken had a dentist practice in Berkeley that attracted many of his Lafayette neighbors. Marge taught at Montecito Elementary School for 5 years; during her first year she had over 50 students in each of the two kindergarten classes she taught each day. They raised 3 sons who attended Lafayette schools and were involved in Boy Scouts.

Oral History:

Ken and Marge Cusick Oral History Interview Transcript

Ryan McKinley: This is an oral history interview for the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project. Today’s date is December 6th, 2015 and the time is 1:35 PM. The interviewer is Ryan McKinley and I’m interviewing Ken and Marge Cusick in their house in Lafayette, California. If you could just state your names and spell them for the record.

Ken Cusick: Your turn.

Marge Cusick: I’m Marge, born Marjorie, J-O-R-I-E, Cusick, and this is my husband Ken, Kenneth.

KC: I’m Ken Cusick, last name is C-U-S-I-C-K.

RM: When did you come to Lafayette?

KC: Well Marge graduated from college in 1951, and she got here on provisional credential for a year and then we got married in 1952 when I started dental school, so she taught out here for five years, and then when I graduated from dental; school I went into the Army for a couple of years, so when I came out, which was 1958, she wanted to live out here and I said I didn’t care, I was going to practice in Berkeley, and there were no rentals in Lafayette at that time. Somebody told Marge that Contra Costa Country was the fastest growing county in the United States at that time. So anyhow, a teacher who she taught with said that the Hoskins had a place up around the corner and they had a little rental and the people just moved out so why don’t you go talk to them, so we moved in there, and we were there how many years, five? Five years, and then we bought this place. We moved in so we’ve been here since ’52 or ’53 here in Martinez, and it’s changed a lot in that period of time.

MC: Actually, we’d never been in the house when we bought it. We bought the lot, there was… somebody had a… we looked and looked all over Lafayette for a house to buy, couldn’t find one, I mean it just… there weren’t many, the demand was great, and so I heard about this lady who had a lot for sale, so I talked to Virginia and I said…

KC: Virginia David was the lady’s name. She’s recently been widowed.

MC: And she was gonna sell the lot and move because she met somebody and remarried, and we looked at the lot, we didn’t know anybody who had built the house, I mean what are we gonna do with it? She had… she decided to…

KC: She went to Hawaii and met a man who was a widower, I mean, friends introduced her, so they got married, well, they already had a house, she called me on the phone, said, “Do you wanna buy my house?” I’d never been inside of the place, and I said yeah, so I said… in those days, you couldn’t get a second marriage, but I said, you know, I just started my practice, everything I had was tied up in the lot, she said, we’ll find out how much you can get for the lot, or, how big of a mortgage you can get on the house, and then I’ll just give ya… using the lot as collateral, so anyhow we had to move the house without an exchange of funds.

MC: Well, we’d never been inside the house, but she had three children, we thought, well, that’s been enough, we have one…

KC: Two.

MC: We had two at that time.

KC: Then the third one was born when we were here. So here we are. When we moved here, Nat Martino, the old house up at the end, everything across from him was empty, Paulie’s house had been built since then, and there were two houses up the hill, and nothing else, just a dirt trail, so that’s all been built since then, just like Blackhawk up on Springhill was new to us when we… it was not new, it wasn’t there when we moved in.

RM: And so this road on Martino Road, it was just the first few houses, or it was basically…

KC: Well, that house there belonged to the Whitehorns and…

MC: Dunbars?

KC: No, then the Farmhouses was next to them, that was Louie Martino, then on up toward that little road that goes straight, his son Jimmy lived, Jimmy Martino, and then Louie Martino lived on the other side around the turn, and the Hurchers lived up there, and that was the end of the road, and then there were a couple of houses up there.

MC: Who lives there now, the Hurchers, I don’t even…

KC: Oh, I think it’s Setzer.

MC: Yes, that’s right, Setzer.

KC: Setzer married Hank Hurcher’s widow, and they lived there and she passed away, I think his son lives there now, and the house across from us, and then Betsy’s house was the last place on that side, until you went to Louie’s house up on the hill, on that side of the road, and Betsy’s house belonged to the teacher that…

MC: …That I knew when I was teaching because I taught at Montecito.

KC: …And I don’t remember who was the next house up from Betsy. I’ve forgotten now, and then the Boroviacs lived on the corner, the Boroviacs were all overachievers, I mean they were talented musicians, one of them played semi-pro basketball, all of them played, and, you know, swimmers, they just… anything they undertook, they did well, but neat people, and in those days, on this side, there was a bunch of kids, all about the same age, so there was always, after school, ‘course you could play in the street then, now it’s like the speedway, if you’re going 25, people think you’re looking for a place to park, but the kids would play in the street, and everybody in the neighborhood knew everybody, they were always digging out in the back lot, and the Whitehorns had built Fort Stevens, which was made out of redwood grape stakes, it had two towers in it, and there must be almost a hundred thousand dead Indians around there somewhere, but it was all pear orchards back there.

MC: We had no idea of the fruits we had there, thirty five pear trees, and Virginia left her canning, cattle, and the shelves for the jars…

KC: You couldn’t give pears away, because everybody had pears.

MC: And Nat raised eminently prized pears on his… Nat Martino.

KC: Nat was from the old country, and he was an arm-waving Italian, he was a wonderful, wonderful person, but if you tied his hands together, he wouldn’t be able to speak, “This-a tree, I’m-a plant it in 1927, she’s-a win-a gold medals”, and he could tell you every branch on every tree, I just loved to talk to him, and the kids in the neighborhood adored him, he was just a wonderful man.

MC: I think the other thing I inherited besides the pear trees were recipes for pears.

KC: Everyone on the neighborhood was… Else McHugh who lived down the street was the grandma of the neighborhood in those days, and everyone went to her for advice on how to do anything. I remember when her son was a junior high school classmate of mine, and they moved out here, he used to…

MC: And that was Berkeley, when they lived there.

KC: Yeah, old Mac was… I would drive to Berkeley, was a pharmacist in Berkeley, I didn’t know him but he was a pharmacist in Berkeley, Robin was in my class, up though junior high school, I think, then they moved out here. So that’s pretty much where it was, or is, any questions beyond that?

RM: I was curious, if you could state your parents’ names and where they came from originally.

MC: My parents were… I came from Southern California…

KC: I married a reformer.

MC: He was Northern California, and my parents were from… my mother was from Illinois, my dad was from Pennsylvania, and they were…

KC: Her dad graduated from high school and practiced law in Oregon and then joined the Army in World War I, then he came out and worked for the VA in Alaska, and in those days in Alaska you didn’t tell anybody you were there for the government because (?) sending people up there were on the lam, but he worked there for a while then he started a law practice in Oregon, and eventually, somehow, he came down and lived in Long Beach, and that’s where Marge was born, and then she went to Mills College, and her mother was from Alton, Illinois, which, they like to say, people in St. Louis can’t take a drink of water until somebody in Alton flushes their toilet, but that’s about all you can say for Alton, and then my father was born in Nevada and my mother was born in San Francisco, and I think it was called Goat Island then, The San Francisco anchorage to the Bay Bridge was Goat Island, or Goat Hill, but she was raised in Berkeley, and my dad was raised in Nevada and I was raised in Berkeley, and then my dad worked for the railroad so I was born in Fairfield, back in those days if you counted the horse and cattle there were five thousand people and he was a conductor of the railroad and he was working freights and he transferred to pasture service so he moved to Berkeley, and that was when I was about four or so, in essence I grew up in Berkeley and went to the Berkeley school system, including Cal.

MC: We were both four in 1929, right?

KC: Yeah. Her dad and my dad were about the same age, I’m the youngest of eight children, so I was a well-known afterthought, and she was an only child, so the minister said, “?”

MC: We were both spoiled.

KC: No, she was spoiled. I have four big brothers who kept me from being spoiled. But we had fun, Berkeley was, in those days, two jaywalkers in the same day was a crime wave, but times have changed, and then Lafayette was just… we didn’t have Highway 24 then, they just had Mount Diablo Boulevard, and there wasn’t much traffic on it, and Marge, when she started teaching, her dad had had a stroke, she retired and they moved up to Lafayette, so they rented a duplex and Marge lived with them in Mosswood Village, which is on the other end of town, so she knew Lafayette and I didn’t, other than driving where she lived when I was dating her.

MC: And there was nothing to rent.

KC: No, no, Jane Vittorio, as I said, in those days, it was the fastest growing county, and the superintendent of schools is Dr. Ellis, and his secretary would drive around trying to estimate how many bedrooms there were to estimate how many children they were going to have.

MC: So they didn’t have any idea.

KC: So they took a wild guess, and Marge was just hired because the other teacher had a year’s absence or something, so she ended up with, what, fifty-two in the morning and fifty-three in the afternoon, students, now they complain if they have twenty or thirty.

MC: And the afternoon was fifteen minutes later than the morning session.

KC: So she had to get all the children out, well, you’ve talked to Mary McCosker, she was in Marge’s first class, but her mother, thank goodness, stepped in, ‘cause Marge didn’t know Lafayette, and you had to figure out who was on what bus, and of course, in the winter, everybody wore yellow slickers, fifty-two yellow slickers and get them off, and then you had anytime left to leave.

MC: And boots!

KC: I went to visit her class one day, it was like looking at a beehive, but she survived it and she really loved teaching so I took her away from a wicked commercial world and she’s been nagging me ever since.

MC: Yeah, I had Mary in my first class, she was just wonderful. She was just, as a child, she was just as she is now.

RM: So when you came to do your teaching apprenticeship when you did your fifty-two students, were you just placed here, or did you have a request?

MC: No I didn’t… there were no jobs available, anyplace, and I applied every place and I decided, this was a great spot because it was close (?), and anyway the superintendant… someone took a leave of absence I guess from Montecito so he could place me there.

KC: She was not an education major, but in her senior year she had done some supervised practice teaching with a teacher in Alameda and I think she tipped Marge off into coming out here, but Marge had a provisional credential at that time, she eventually became a credential teacher, but they took her kindergarten classes and made five first grade classes out of them and then she started teaching one of the classes, she went into first grade, she got promoted that year.

MC: The kindergarten teacher had come back from her leave, so…

KC: I think the kindergarten teacher probably saw what was coming, so… but it was tough on the school district. It was a … you know what a WAG is? A wild you-know-what? That’s what they thought was coming, they thought, well, we got plenty of room… oops! So that was the initial…

MC: Well the thing is, my first year, I had no idea, first day of school I had no idea where the streets were in Lafayette, I mean it was Greek to me, the thing that saved me was my room mother showed up, so they organized my bus routes for me because I had five bus groups, I don’t know where… I dunno.

KC: And the kids didn’t know.

MC: Yeah, they didn’t know where they were, except for their home.

KC: But when we first moved here, everybody in Springhill Valley knew everybody in Springhill Valley. It was a neighborhood, not a residential area, if you understand my drift. You know, people drop in and visit get to know each other and San Reliez Court down there, they’d have blocked the street off because it’s all a private street anyway, we’d have dances and parties, they’d always have a Christmas party for the kids…

MC: Once a year party.

KC: …And, you know, all kids of activities, so you could walk down the street and have a stop and visit with everybody, and it was great, it was really fun, it’s not now where people just live here, they don’t even know each other. It tears my heart out to see kids, they go to the same school, same class, and they’re walking home, they’re not even talking to each other. We used to come home, there’d be ten of us walking home together, so it’s a different world.

RM: When you first came here, when you were in Montecito, do you remember what Mount Diablo was like, and kind of the shops, the few shops that were around there, or anything like that?

KC: Harry’s Nursery, and I don’t think there was anything beyond Harry’s Nursery, maybe the auto shop there, and Lafayette Circle, the Roundup Saloon that was here, of course, the best place… …on Thursday nights, I guess, you know where the pharmacy is, CVS Pharmacy, that wasn’t there, and the boy Scout Troop used to have their Christmas tree lot there, and so it was pretty much in there, and Safeway was just a little place on the corner, there used to be a Lucky and a Safeway…

MC: Lucky where Whole Foods is now.

KC: Yeah, no, because that was a hill, and the Bruzzone’s bulldozed that all, it was everything, you know, where the post office is, everything this side of it was a hill, and they bulldozed it flat and put in that shopping district, that wasn’t there, and the post office, I don’t know where that was, and there may have been a couple of gas stations or something further south, or further east, I should say, so it was just a small town with a whole bunch of kids.

MC: Well they had no idea, Doctor… …was superintendent, I had no idea how many children.

KC: And Pleasant Hill Road was just two lanes, now I don’t know whoever’s tried come onto Martino Road when they let Springhill School out. Bring a lunch. So you know, they’ve made a lot of changes, and also Springhill School was here, but it was an older building when my boys went there, they built a new one, and one time, Springhill got so crowded they, on the other side of Reliez Valley Road… is that right? What’s the extension of Springhill?

MC: Quandt.

KC: Yeah, on Quandt they had a school there for, what, the third, fourth or fifth grades or something, that was after our boys were, you know, in high school.

RM: So was that around the 1960’s or something?

KC: I think so, yeah.

MC: Yeah, I’m trying to think, where was Quandt?

KC: Remember where the Boy Scout Hut was?

MC: Yes.

KC: The school was down below it, and that was the end of Lafayette too. There wasn’t anything on the other side, I think just Acalanes High School. I don’t know if you’ve had occasion to meet him, but there was a fellow by the name of Bud Multhrop, who was in the first class to spend all four years at Acalanes which, it was fun to talk to him because it was entirely different, the kids rode horses to school, and of course during the war… that was the first school that was laid out, you know, spread over in the country, or in the world, and people used to come out all the time from all over the world to look at the layout.

MC: Really? Acalanes?

KC: I remember I was working in… and that was in the fifties because I had a part time, well, it was a summer job as a teamster, and we were laying water line or a gas pipe and it went right past Acalanes, and they’re still building it.

MC: Where was the hospital?

KC: Oh, I think just after the war, just before World War II.

MC: Yes, because it was build when I was 22, it had been built.

KC: It had been built then, yeah, the parking lot and such, well, gas was rationed so in those days you had to use those things at the end of your ankles to get to school, but our oldest son now teaches at Acalanes, as does his wife, but I think he’s the senior teacher in the district now ‘cause he’s been there almost 40 years.

MC: In the Acalanes district.

KC: In the Acalanes district, yeah.

MC: ‘Cause that’s different than Lafayette.

KC: Well, yeah, it’s a separate school district, it isn’t Acalanes, but the teachers were great in those days, and it was just a different generation, but St. Mary’s in Santa Clara would, on December 8th, the first day after December 7th, 1941, the entire student body enlisted, both schools, they were empty, so I ran for the ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program, pre-flight schools, why, they would have gone out of existence, but that was before my time, I was the last class in high school, I graduated from high school in ’47, and I was the first class that didn’t get drafted, so when I went to Cal I was one of the few non-veterans.

RM: When you were here, was Stanley Middle School there?

KC: Yeah, I think Stanley was here. That was the Middle School.

MC: I think it was just being built.

KC: The boys went there.

MC: Yeah, the boys went there, but when I was teaching…

KC: Well, they had all the grammar schools, so then they had the intermediate school, or junior high school in those days, I guess, and then they went to Acalanes for four years.

MC: I know that but before the boys were in school…

KC: I don’t know, because I wasn’t driving over that part of the world.

MC: I don’t think Stanley was built…

KC: Well, they had some kind of intermediate school, because in those days, middle school went to the sixth grade.

MC: I know that.

KC: And then they went to Stanley for two years or three years or whatever it was before they went to the system the have now.

MC: But before they went to it, I’m not sure, I think it was built while I was teaching, I don’t know.

KC: That, probably, when they built it.

MC: Yeah, while I was teaching.

KC: That was the age when the didn’t have tractors, just horses. Horses and mules and a scraperboard.

MC: I can’t remember that.

KC: We weren’t into it that far, we were still trying to figure out where to hang a picture. We had a good time… that little cottage that we rented, Dr. Hoskins, who was a… at any rate, he taught agriculture, but he was a chemist, but he owned thirteen acres, all of that land in there where they now have the big mega mansions, was just open land.

MC: They owned the property just above Blackhawk, because Blackhawk wasn’t built…

KC: Yeah, yeah, I think part of Blackhawk was their property. Blackhawk was not there.

MC: It was built while we were here, after we’d moved in here. So then from Blackhawk Road up the high school, didn’t they?

KC: Yeah, and I remember one time I was out in the carport locking the car getting ready to go to bed, and I heard a noise out in the back of the house. The Wooders next door to us, Robin, had a horse, okay so I heard a noise out in the backyard, it was pitch dark, there’s no light in a mile, so I’m groping my way outdoors and I encounter this big, hairy thing, that’s when I lost my hair, (?) had gotten out of her corral or whatever it was, Dr, Hoskins bussed a room in there, so it turns out she got out, was munching in her backyard, such as it was. That was life in the country.

MC: Well they lived on Springhill Court, it’s the first right turn after you leave Blackhawk, after you go down Blackhawk, and you go up, there are houses there now, there’s Springhill Manor, after the right turn to Blackhawk, and then past that is Hoskin’s, which were where we lived, and the Wooders lived on the corner, okay, if you go up Springhill Road and you pass Blackhawk, and then there’s Springhill Manor in there, and then you go around the curve, and the next one up is Springhill Court.

KC: And that was the end of civilization, except for Roberta Peters, and they lived way up there towards… Chuck Caney had the land up there before the Girl Scout Camp, and he had raised horses and cattle and… you know, people rent horses and go riding on the trails out of there, and his parents, his wife’s parents, wait, her name was Nancy, and her parents ran the swimming pools on other side of the road, so…

MC: On Springhill Road, do you know where the Girl Scout camp is?

KC: That’s at the extreme end of the…

MC: Road, on the right side.

KC: Bob Keany was, he had arms like cannons, you’d commit suicide if you’d gotten in an argument with him. Nice guy, but… and his wife, Nancy was nice and they lived on the other side, before the sharp turn up on the hill, but he was fun to be with, and his wife Nancy, and then across the street from us, the Everetts, well, the Everett’s didn’t live there, it was an older lady and gentleman, he passed away and she live there for a while, and then Phelp Stewie moved in, he was assistant editor of the Chronicle or something, and his wife and Suki Dewey, and Suki was a cute little girl but she had a voice you could hear in Kansas, and Suki was always up to something, fun but at any rate, they separated and moved away and the Everetts moved in, they lived there for a long time, and Whit Everett, he was an outstanding young man, he was the big kid in the neighborhood in a way, by the time my boys were growing up, he was a role model, he was a good student, you know, bathed himself, et cetera, and then I think on the other side of the road was the pediatrician, I can’t think of his name now but that was the only house on that side…

MC: This is on the left side growing up.

KC: Going up on the left side, yeah.

MC: Past Blackhawk.

KC: Yeah.

MC: We lived past, well, we lived across the street, in a little house.

KC: We lived, if you go up near Springhill there’s a real sharp turn…

MC: Just past Blackhawk.

KC: And people would come by and admired the house across the street that was sit back and it kept hitting the telephone pole right in front of our house and acorns would just rain down the telephone pole that the dogs had put there, but I think we sent God knows how much time, bringing water to the distressed mother, and trying to calm the kids in the car that hit the pole. That’s a narrow road, it was a very narrow road then.

RM: Growing up here, what were some hobbies and things that you did or your children did coming around?

MC: They were active in the Boy Scouts.

KC: They were active in the Boy Scouts when they got to be twelve. They had a troop that was actually formed in this neighborhood, and the boy across the street was the senior patrol leader and a young man named Don Cotton down the street was a year or two older than my boys and those three boys grew up and they troop together, in fact, they still get together along with Steve Whitehorn, I mean it was a good sized troop, people from all over town, and it was well led, Don was a little different, in that he said, well he made the patrol leader be the patrol leader, and he didn’t run things, he made sure that things were running, but, kids are naturally competitive, we’d go on hikes, and they’d take a long hike every summer, at least fifty miles in the Sierras, and the patrol leader was responsible for keeping the patrol together and one boy couldn’t keep up. God help the patrol leader if they left them behind, and so he said, “you’re supposed to know leadership, it’s not just a title, you’re supposed to do something with it”, so he would be unpopular with a lot of people, he ran a good tight ship and he had a good group of kids, my oldest son in particular, and Steve Whitehorn and a dozen other kids get together now in their late fifties and go hiking in the Sierras, There’s still, thirteen of them joined, one of them passed away, and all of them stayed together and graduated from high school, and their still in Scouts, well, nowadays, some of them drop out, and you know they become lifelong friends. That was really the purpose, but the Hoskins were, Dr. Hoskins was just a grand… Mrs. Hoskins was of course everybody’s grandma down at that end of the road, and then I know there was a kid I used to pick up and drive to Acalanes every morning on the way to work, can’t think of his name now, and he became president of Boeing airplane industry, which is not to shabby.

MC: He lived about five houses up on Springhill, five houses up from Martino on that side, I can’t think of his name either.

KC: Well, we’ll think of it thirty seconds after you leave. That’s the beauty of old age. You can’t remember what you had for breakfast when you’re still putting the dishes away.

RM: I’m curious, you mentioned all the pear trees and the orchards around, when did those start to disappear?

KC: Well, they had the pear blight, you know, they’re having that in Moraga now, and then all of a sudden, it just dies. We used to have two pear trees next to the garage there, and they died dead, in a week. It just hit ‘em, and my old pear tree, we have three or four trees that are a hundred years old, but they think it’s spread by bees when their pollinating the plants.

MC: This is the first year we had no pears…

KC: We had six, and last year we had about twelve. It’s fun to talk to these different people, find out what’s there, I practiced in Berkeley and it was kind of fun because we had Nobel Prize winners and street people. I had the gamut. And beauty being a dentist, I never lost an argument. “Zzzzz… tell me again what you think!”

RM: You were describing how there were very few houses here when you moved here, when did you start seeing things start to develop?

KC: I think at that time they were developing real fast. They say Blackhawk didn’t exist, and that built up and sold in two years and when the Hoskins, Dr. and Mrs. Hoskins, passed away, the survivors, the youngsters, sold that lot and they built megahouses in there and Joe Montana lived in there for a while, you know, it just kind of exploded, and after that was built they started building up the hill. We used to get up on Saturday mornings and, you know, make a peanut butter sandwich, take a glass of water or can of Coke or something, and they boys and I would go up, follow the trail up, all the way to the top and go across and come down at the other end of the Girl Scout camp. You’d jump deer and everything else, as a matter of fact, you get up there and then there’s sandstone, and we got all kinds of, what do you call ‘em, you crack a sandstone and you get a shell pattern in there, so all that was underwater one time, and my next door neighbor, I’ve gotta talk to him because he just patched right up to the park district and that goes straight up from there.

MC: And that’s up through a new house.

KC: Yeah, that’s been built not too long ago.

MC: A couple years, yes.

KC: The first fellow who lived there, because they backed right up to the regional park district, Ken Brown, whose grandfather or father founded Lafayette owned that property, and he used top raise and train horse riders and what have you.

MC: It was fifty acres, I think.

KC: Something like that, and we were concerned that, because he was the last of the family, that we were gonna be looking at townhouses up on the hill there, but bless us slowly said, “You know, the neighbors will put up with me, we oughta call them a couple of times”, cattle broke through the fence and were in our backyard, and not that we cared, ‘cause they were eating the grass, so I could care less, but he probably wasn’t in back, and them a couple of times he had an Australian Shepherd and it’s their instinct to herd, so they’d get through and herd the cattle or the horses back to the barn, and Marge called and said, “Oh Marge, don’t give it a thought”, but at any rate, when he, towards the end, he said, he offered a gazillion dollars for that. He says, “What am I gonna go with a gazillion dollars?” He said, my neighbors have been damn nice to me through the years, so he said I’m just gonna sell it for a much less price to the regional park district, so were spared all that stuff, and they have a nice trail to walk up there, it’s a good recreation area, I’ve walked it a few times in my misspent youth, gotten lost up there a couple of times.

MC: I remember when Shadow was—Shadow was our dog—she got all the cows here…

KC: Yes, she herded them into our lot…

MC: Yeah, and then herded them back to the barn, I could watch them all the way back up as Mike called them, and I said, “Ken, guess what? Our dog (inaudible) and oh, he laughed, it was so funny…

KC: …just keeps them headed in the right direction.

MC: Gently nudging. It was fun to watch.

RM: Anything you guys miss about the way Lafayette used to be?

KC: You know, it’s much more… you know, downtown Lafayette is, if you’ve ever tried to go there to shop, which is what we do, there’s a perpetual traffic jam, that goes with life, you’re not gonna go anywhere else, our middle son lived in Oakdale, he comes out here and goes out of his mind when he has to go to downtown Lafayette, well I miss the neighborhood hoodishness, and there are people here trying to restore it, the Mac… help me, who lives in Matt’s house? Anyhow, Karen next door, Karen Klein and a friend up the hill, can’t think of her name right now, started having Oktoberfests, they have it at Matt’s house, everybody gets together and they get a couple of kegs and sodas and everybody brings a hot dish, we set up tables and get acquainted with each other, so that’s kinda nice, and then the two of them started a neighborhood watch, so that’s kinda brought the neighborhood back together, so that’s kinds nice to live in a neighborhood like that, well, we’re not looking for conflict, but we don’t have it. It’s a wonderful neighborhood to live in. You should try it sometime. You should have been interviewing us twenty years ago when our brains were working, on one cylinder anyway.

RM: That’s the end of my questions, do either of you would like to add anything else?

KC: No, I think I’d probably bore you to death.

RM: Interview ends at three o’clock.