Summary:
Mary McCosker looks back upon growing up in Lafayette at a time when she and her brothers could pretty much roam free—riding horses, swimming, and playing outdoors (there was no TV in the home) when they were not in school. Her great grandfather, a Berkeley Professor, had purchased land in Lafayette, and Mary’s parents decided to settle here, in what was then a pretty sleepy small town. She says: “I did not appreciate how nice it was to grow up in Lafayette until later on, looking back at the experience. It was idyllic. It is very different for families and kids here today.”
Oral History:
Ryan McKinley: This is an oral history interview for the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project. The date is August 20th, 2015 and the time is 4:05 and the interviewer is Ryan McKinley. So if you could state your name and spell it for the record.
Mary McCosker: My name is Mary McCosker, M-A-R-Y M-C-C-O-S-K-E-R.
RM: And when were you born?
MM: My birthday is October 27th 1946.
RM: And what were your parents’ names?
MM: My father was David Stuart and my mother was June Brescini Stuart.
RM: Were they originally from Lafayette or did they move here?
MM: They lived here. My dad grew up in Berkeley and my mom grew up in San Jose and they met at Cal and after they… they were married during the war, and when my dad was overseas until I think December of 1945, and then when he returned, they lived in Lafayette in a little home that was owned by my great-grandfather but he had also purchased, and I think it’s the 30’s, I’m not positive, I could do some research, but he purchased property in Lafayette, a very large amount of property, and it became sort of subdivided, and my dad and my mom bought a piece of land from him, so when I was I think one or one and a half we moved into the house I grew up in in Lafayette which was between Highway 24 and Acalanes High School.
RM: You said your grandfather had the land…
MM: My great-grandfather.
RM: Were they from Lafayette originally?
MM: They were from Berkeley.
RM: And they just bought land up here…
MM: Right. My great-grandfather was born in Chicago, and then because someone in the family had health issues they moved to Ohai to the desert, but he was a professor at Cal and was a president at Cal for four years, and heard about his land which was up where Pleasant Hill Road is, all the way up to the top of the hill, going towards Walnut Creek, so nut sure of the acreage, but he purchased it, and so several different family members bought property and my grandmother lived next door to us as I was growing up, my dad’s mother, who would have been his daughter, and she sold real estate in Orinda, and other family members purchased some property and so there was some, when I was growing up, quite a lot of family around, other people too, obviously, ‘cause that’s a large piece of property, and I have a great aunt and uncle who lived in Berkeley, they built a pool there and so, not a home, but just a pool, so the pool is still there and I think the daughter owns it, so we do a lot of family get-togethers at the pool there.
RM: So it’s just a private pool somewhere?
MM: Right, it’s just a pool with a big fence around it and it has a cabana and they’ve recently sort of redone the cabana part so her sons insisted that my cousin put in a dishwasher, so we do Fourth of July there and Easter there and other times of the year, so it’s real fun, it’s a big family thing.
RM: Do you remember your great-grandfather talking about what the land was like?
MM: I don’t remember him talking about the land, He died in, I think I was ten, I think it was 1956, I can remember there were family get-togethers on a part of the property, I remember where there’s a home today, there was a home be built for his half-sister and that home is still there near the pool, but next door to it was just a big open lot, and there was a brick, kind of a fireplace there, so we lived across the creek from that piece of property there, and I could remember as a youngster, which meant probably eight or nine or something, I can remember waking up in the morning and going across the creek in my nightgown, and he would be making coffee over an open fire where you would put water in the pot and add the coffee and it boils, I don’t think I ever had any coffee but I remember sitting by the fire and being with him, and then on his birthday in June every year, all the great-grandchildren would be called on the lawn of the house where his half-sister lived, he would have a table he would set up and he had silver dollars, and he would ask you where you were going to college, and if you said you were going to Cal, then you got a silver dollar. I can still remember that. But I remember too, on a… I think it was a Sunday in September and I think we were getting ready to drive to San Jose to my grandparents, my mother’s parents for dinner, and he had a heart attack, my great-grandfather had a heart attack, and I can remember looking across and seeing him kind of slumped down by a tree, leaning against a tree, and I remember my dad running over there and my dad going to the hospital in the ambulance with him when he died, so some things are really vivid in your mind even though they’re fifty years old, but he was a pretty remarkable gentleman.
RM: Once you came up here, what did your mother and father do?
MM: My mom was basically a homemaker, she did some tutoring of high school students in French and she also did some substitute teaching. My dad started off at the high school at Acalanes as a history and government teacher and he coached the swim team, and then in 1959, he took a job at the University at Cal and his job was to, it was called “Relations with Schools”, and his job was to drive up and down California and visit high schools and talk to students about attending Cal, something they don’t have to do anymore, they have too many people wanting to go there, and he left Cal in, maybe the late ‘60’s, and took a job with PG&E, and was their educational scholarship person, they gave scholarships, so he oversaw that program, and then he retired probably shortly after my first child was born so probably maybe in the late ‘70’s he retired, but he loved his land, the land that he owned there, he loved… we had fruit trees and we had gardens every year and he really liked that and he actually always said he would retire at 59 and he did, so he and my mom then were able to do a lot of traveling and things like that.
RM: What did you grow in that garden?
MM: We had apples and apricots and probably peaches and maybe pears, I remember the release creek runs sort of around our property before it goes under Highway 24, so I can remember in the summertime he would build these dykes and things around the fruit trees and then he’d pump water out of the creek and flood the creek, or flood the orchards to water them, and I can remember we would go in the house and take off all our clothes, especially our underwear and put on old cutoffs and go and wallow in the mud, it was really fun. It was a very idyllic childhood. We had chickens, he had chickens that laid eggs, and he grew a lot of flowers, my mother’s father grew camellias, so we had camellias, but we had, I think he probably had beans in the summer, corn probably, tomatoes for sure but, you know, he was really big into growing things. It was fun.
RM: And growing up, did you work with him growing things?
MM: Well, all I really remember is the terrible things but I remember we had walnut trees in the front yard, and I can remember every fall he’d get these big poles and knock all the nuts down and we’d have to pick them up, and I hated that, I hated leaning over and having to pick up all these dumb walnuts, and then he’d dry them on these big wooden trays, and then he’d husk them and crack them, and take the nuts out, and he had bags of walnuts that he would then take to the walnut growers in Walnut Creek and sell them, so my patents were fairly thrifty; Dad, as a high school teacher, didn’t make a lot of money, but it was always nice to have him here in the summer. We did a lot of camping for vacations, because it was fun, my dad was a Boy Scout, it was really fun and fairly inexpensive, it was really fun, I can remember the big huge Hershey’s chocolate bars, not the little ones but the real thick ones, I remember that was always a big treat for when we went camping, we got to have those chocolate bars. We played lots of sports, we played outdoors all the time. I had a friend named Nancy who lived in the neighborhood, we used to ride bikes all over the place, and you didn’t have to worry about your kids, you didn’t have to worry about all the things that happen to kids today or that you’re leery of, just remember, we had on the hillside across the creek from our house and up the hill behind the pool that whole hillside where Camino Diablo runs today, I can remember I had a horse, and my grandmother had a horse and my cousin had a horse, so we would swim in our bathing suits in the pool for an hour or two, we’d put on our tennis shoes, we’d chase the horses into the corral, we’d get on the horses bare back, ride around the neighborhood, and then come back, let the horses go, and go swimming, I mean things you really wouldn’t let your kids do today, but it was really fun, we had a great… we played basketball, my brother and I played basketball against some neighborhood boys, brothers who, they always fought and hugged the ball but they never beat us because we were always good about sharing the ball and we played “Run ‘Em Down” with the tennis ball, made my youngest brother be the guy in the middle and we played pickle, but we just spent lots and lots and lots of time out of doors, I was a real tomboy so I played with my brothers a whole lot.
RM: You have two brothers?
MM: I have two younger brothers and they’re great guys, even today still, we really get along very well.
RM: Do you remember much about the neighborhood, or did you come into downtown Lafayette when you were… ?
MM: I don’t remember… I remember as a child before I went to, say, middle school, I remember they had the big walnut festival every year, and there was a big parade down Main Street in Walnut Creek so I can remember going and standing on the sidewalk and watching those parades, I don’t really remember coming into Lafayette until I was in high school and I had friends who lived kind of off, on the other side of the BART station, there’s Glen Road and Thompson Road, South Thompson, I remember riding my bike from home and visiting my friends there, but I don’t remember coming into town, but my mom and dad when they were first married and lived here used to walk from the home to the Park Theater on Mt. Diablo Blvd. to go to the movies, I mean they told me that they did that so, but the town was really different then, very small and sort of sleepy.
RM: Do you know if Mt. Diablo was just a dirt road then?
MM: No, it was I’m sure paved, but it was probably two lanes, and you know the cars in the late 40’s, I mean there probably weren’t that many cars I mean unless after the war, I would imagine people owned cars and trucks here, but not like to the extent, I mean I think a family would have a car, not like now where you would have… each parent has a car and the kids have a car so… but I’ve seen, we have pictures here in the history room of the 30’s on Mt Diablo Blvd. and there’s two lanes and everybody kind of just pulled off the road, there weren’t parking places like today, and there were no stoplights, no stop signs, now it takes forever to get through Lafayette because it’s so crowded and so many places to stop, so… but I don’t remember really coming into town, I remember where we shopped when I was young, over by Mangia on Moraga Road, there was a La Fiesta grocery store, and I remember, I can remember that, going in there with my mom, there was a group of stores called the Co-op, it was like Consumer’s Cooperative, it had a grocery store over on Geary Road, and you would give your number when you checked out, so I guess you accrued, I don’t know if there was a rebate involved after a time or… but I remember going there with my mom and she used to take this neighbor of ours, this older lady who had a wooden leg, she was from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick or somewhere, interesting lady, I remember shopping there with my mom, I don’t even remember where our doctor was, our pediatrician, probably on Dewing maybe, I think when you’re a child, unless it’s some big thing, event, it’s hard to remember, all I know is that we wandered a whole lot more than kids do today. We played outside all the time, nowadays everyone has iPads and computers and Wii’s and video games, you know, I remember we didn’t have a television, but our neighbors had one, so I can remember watching Howdy Doody in black and white and the mom would cut up carrot sticks and celery sticks and olives while we watched. I remember the really big thing was we watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and that was really big, it was black and white, of course, but it was just really amazing, the first TV, I sure the quality was really awful, but we could only watch Howdy Doody for a while because the little boy in the family was scared of Clarabell the Clown so we had to switch to something else, but there wasn’t much else to switch to in those days. TV was not like what it is today.
RM: That grocery store you mentioned, did it just take over where Mangia was, or…
MM: It was that whole, you know, where Good Earth is, and that whole piece there, it was a big, huge store, I don’t really remember what it looked like inside or how you got in, I just remember it was there, I remember being there, I remember once I purloined a pack of gum. My mom found out when I got home so she drove back and made me take it back and apologize, so good way to thwart theft in the future. Maybe that’s why I remember the story because I remember that event, but there weren’t the number of stores, I mean I don’t think there were that many grocery stores in Lafayette. I know at one point there were like seventeen gas stations in Lafayette one time in the sixties or the fifties, compared to now, that’s a lot but I couldn’t tell you driving down Mt. Diablo Blvd. where things were, I didn’t pay attention or maybe I didn’t go out as much, I stayed home more.
RM: And where did you go to elementary school?
MM: When I started school, I started at Montecito, which was, it used to belong to the school district, and then when the school district downsized in the seventies, they sold the property to the mayor, the mayor group, I think it’s called the White Pony, so it’s a private elementary school now, if you go towards Walnut Creek on 24 and there’s an overpass, El Curtola, it’s on the right hand side of the freeway down there, so I went there kindergarten, first, second, and third, and then they built Springhill School, so it was a brand new school so I went there fourth, fifth and sixth, then I went to Stanley for seventh and eighth because it was only a junior high then, it wasn’t a middle school, and then I went to Acalanes for four years.
RM: What do you remember about Springhill being brand new at the time?
MM: I remember it was so new when we first started out that they didn’t have milk delivery yet so we couldn’t have milk for lunch, we had to drink water, and I remember that was not my favorite thing. It was really neat to go to a brand new school, it’s strange because that school was built in, let’s see, what would it have been? In the fifties, ’56, say, and then I lived here long enough to see the school rebuilt, they tore it all down when I was on the school board in Lafayette, we tore it down and rebuilt the whole school as it was today so it’s sort of like it’s gone through a whole cycle, but I remember more about the portables, that they had horrible portables in the rain when they redid it a second time. I remember the playgrounds, they had an upper playground and a lower playground where the field was. The multi-purpose room in Springhill was where the upper playground was, and the girls of course had to wear dresses and frou-frou slips, those puffy slips, and I was very much a tomboy so I spent a lot of time playing with the guys, kickball and baseball, but I can remember playing basketball on the upper playground maybe in the fifth grade, and the ball went down the ramp, so I chased it and ran out of my puffy slips, but I think I was the only girl, there was another girl maybe, there were only two of us on the boy’s baseball team, and we played other schools in the district so it was fun, but girls now have it so much better, you can wear pants or shorts or whatever, had to wear stupid dresses that were always so cold in the winter, and very impractical to be outside so… they didn’t have intercoms that they have today. I remember Eleanor Deal was the principal, she was a lovely lady but very scary because it was very quiet and stern, sort of your… wore a two piece suit, you know your sort of prototypical principal, I guess, she was really an amazing educator. I remember I teachers, I don’t remember much of the everyday kind of stuff, but it was a nice school.
RM: Do you remember the building layout or anything? Was it a single giant building?
MM: No, it was a long… have you seen the Springhill today? Okay, So it was sort of laid out the same way, there was that long corridor that went all the way towards the high school, but there wasn’t that second story, obviously the multipurpose room wasn’t there, so they still had the circular turnaround I think and then the kindergarten rooms were maybe over a little to the right of where they are now. I was on traffic patrol in fourth or fifth grade or fifth and sixth grade, and so we wore little hats, we wore sashes, and we had these metal stop signs with wooden handles and we would march, I was a, no, was I a captain or was I a lieutenant? I can’t remember, but we would march out and somebody would march… we’d actually stop traffic on Pleasant Hill Road if you can imagine, nowadays you would get killed doing that, but there wasn’t as much traffic obviously then, but we would stop traffic so the people could cross Pleasant Hill Road.
RM: Was it as wide then?
MM: It might have only been two lanes, I’m not sure. I can remember some kids would be yelling things like, “Lady, your rozen rod’s dragging”, I mean people didn’t go as fast as they are now, but today, you wouldn’t want anybody out on that road because it’s like a major freeway thoroughfare but obviously, I mean there wasn’t the volume of traffic commuting, as many people commuting from Martinez and stuff like that, so it could have only been two lanes, I don’t remember.
RM: Do you remember any big school activities that you may have done there? Assemblies or anything like that?
MM: I remember I ran for student body office as a sixth-grader. Didn’t win, but I had a second cousin who went to school there so we were going from class to class making little speeches and she raised her hand when I was in her classroom and said, “Just because she’s my cousin, does that mean I have to vote for her?”, and the teacher said no, of course not. I don’t really remember, they probably didn’t have big stuff like the kids do today, like speakers and things like that, I can’t remember anything like that, just remember a lot of sports. When I was in the sixth grade, I was in a combination of fifth and sixth grade, that was sort of interesting, I remember at Montecito in the third grade, I was horribly disillusioned because we were cleaning the classroom for open house when the parents come every spring, and we’d all cleaned our desks and done all this stuff and the teacher must have been messy and I remember being horrified when she opened he top desk drawer and just swept everything off the top of her desk into her desk, closed it and locked it, and I just thought that was horrible. Maybe Type A neat freak or something, but I remember Mrs. Thompson. I had a man teacher in fourth grade and a man teacher in, in fifth and sixth I think I had man teachers, and then I went to Stanley and met some new people, there were a lot more schools feeding into Stanley then there are today, so there were kids from all over Lafayette, lots more different schools, so I made some really close friends there, friends that I kept through high school that I still an in touch with now. I don’t really stay in touch with too many friends from elementary school, but definitely friends that I made in junior high and middle school and on into high school and we still see each other several times a year, it’s fun. One of the mothers of a girl I know is still alive at Rossmoor, she’s like 94, so we always have lunch at her house, because it’s fun, she loves to see all the girls again, but it was a really idyllic childhood, this is a really nice place to grow up. Not so sure anymore. It’s just different, everybody’s at a faster pace and people have au pairs and they work… to afford to live here you need two jobs in the family but the kids don’t seem as self-sufficient, they seem to have parents that hover a lot, but I don’t know. It’s a nice place still though. I can’t complain.
RM: How did you get to school? Did you walk?
MM: No, we had school buses, so we had to walk several blocks to a bus stop, but if you can imagine, we walked two or three blocks, waited for the bus that then took us from, Acalanes Avenue, which is the street before Stanley Boulevard and Stanley Boulevard’s the one that runs into the high school, so we went from right here to Springhill, so buses took kids everywhere before, I guess, they cut the buses at some point because of the cost, but all the kids rode school buses, so you know, moms didn’t have to carpool, they put the kids on the bus and then they walked home after school from the bus stop. It’s too bad, I mean they have bus service now, but you have to pay and it doesn’t, you can’t have a bus in an area that could compete with AC Transit so not every area in Lafayette has buses that access it, so it’s too bad.
RM: In going to Springhill, what do you remember about being at Springhill or junior high?
MM: Or Stanley?
RM: Oh yeah, I’m sorry, Stanley.
MM: I remember feeling really little with some of the, I mean it’s only two years but when you enter as a seventh grader and you’ve got really mature eighth graders you feel really, I mean I was horribly immature, just a goof-off, I mean I had really nice friends, but we did silly things, I can remember one fellow in our science class in seventh grade, we were all doing the M&M experiment with M&Ms to see if they melted in your hands, I mean we were really silly, kids seem much more sophisticated now, I don’t think I was particularly mature until I was thirty, I had an English teacher in high school tell me that I was as subtle as a Mack truck, but Stanley was fun, it was the first time you actually had different teachers for different classes, I can still remember that my eighth grade English and Social Studies teacher was of Japanese-American ancestry from Hawaii, and that was the year that Hawaii became a state so it was really exciting for her. I can kind of remember where the classrooms were located, but it was fun, just middle school or junior high is such an awkward time for people though, and now you’re sort of out to lunch, even today I see kids at Stanley now, these little boys who are in sixth grade that are little pipsqueaks and then these voluptuous eight grade girls who look older than I do, but they’re hard grade levels to teach, I think it’s a real transitional time for kids, and I remember high school as being fun, I think what makes it all palatable is your friends, if you have a nice friends group, a support group, then we went to football games on Friday nights, and then there were dances, and it was fun, I don’t think I appreciated it, I don’t know how it is with other kids but I don’t think I really appreciated growing up here until later on when I had my kids here, saw them grow up here, it’s a nice place.
RM: And when you were at Stanley and Acalanes, that was in the 1960s?
MM: Uh huh, I graduated in ’64, so I can remember the Beatles, when I was a junior or a senior, the Beatles were just starting to be really big, I remember doing a rally committee skit, being one of the Beatles. The Beach Boys, I mean there was lots and lots of music, there were hootenannies, all the folk music was really big then too. I took two languages in high school, I took four years of French and then I took three years of Russian ‘cause of course that was the Cold War era and so it was going to pay off to know Russian, right? But the man who was our teacher in Russian also taught German and he was very fluent in many languages, but he had actually been in the Russian embassy, he worked there, so not only did we learn everyday language and stuff but he taught us lots of good stuff like swear words and things, practical things, so I’m not sure I could say much in Russian anymore but I could call you an SOB, so it’s funny things you remember, but I was not a science and math person nor am I now and I can remember a boy who lived in the neighborhood I live in now was a year behind me so he was accelerated, he was so smart and was in chemistry with me, we had a chemistry teacher who had been at Acalanes since it opened in 1945, I think, Miss Nick, and you know she was a great teacher, I just didn’t get it, so if I hadn’t had this young man, Bob, as my lab partner, I probably would have grossly failed chemistry. He managed to explain things to me, and it was fun, I think everybody thinks, at least kids at that time did, I think kids are more sophisticated now, but I think that everybody thinks they’re all sort of different and weird and, you know, those years are really hard. The other thing that high school didn’t have that I probably would have really benefitted from that they have now is sports for girls. There was… when you played basketball, they had a basketball court but there were squares, and you couldn’t go out of your square so somebody would throw you the ball and you would stand there and throw to somebody else, I mean you couldn’t, there wasn’t that movement that you have today, I guess ‘cause girls weren’t physically able to do that, right? So when I went to Cal, I played collegiate basketball for four or five years. It was a really neat thing, there really wasn’t a lot for girls to do, except go to the football games and cheer and other than that, so that’s one thing I think has changed for the better, there’s more opportunities for young girls to do, sports especially.
RM: Did they have extracurricular clubs or anything like that for girls?
MM: Did they when I was there? They had a GAA—Girls Athletic Association, but I don’t remember them doing much of anything, there wasn’t swimming for girls, there wasn’t basketball or softball or… there might have been tennis, I don’t know, but there really wasn’t any kind of organized sports whereas now girls play lacrosse, girls play soccer, girls do everything the guys do pretty much, except for wrestling, maybe, but, you know, there wasn’t a lot for girls to do, aside from just going to school, and it’s too bad, I’m glad that it’s changed, ‘cause I think it opens up opportunities for girls to have physical activity too.
RM: Being in high school in the 1960’s do you remember the tumultuous… the Kennedy assassination, things like that?
MM: Yeah, I do, I do. I remember, I was telling someone the other day, my parents’ generation, the seminal event was Pearl Harbor, and for my generation it was JFK, and for my kids’ it was 9/11, but it was on a Friday, and I was in my fourth period English class right before lunch at Acalanes, and I can remember someone coming in and saying something to the teacher, and so at that point they sort of… it was lunchtime and everyone was wandering around, I remember my brother who was two years behind me in school, he and another boy went out and lowered the flag to half-staff, and then we, I think we were sent home, I think we went home early, and then it was Saturday and I remember on Sunday morning we were watching television and we saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot by Jack Ruby, I mean it was live, it was just really, and then the funeral and all, it was really, really, really… I mean it really, ‘cause television wasn’t that… relatively new still, but just to see that black and white television and all that happening live, nowadays everything’s on Internet and Twitter and you get a Facebook message immediately, that was really, that was really, and then I left Lafayette and went to Berkeley, and my first semester at Cal was the Free Speech Movement with the police and the tear gas and the arrests, and that was really wild too, I mean talk about coming from a more sheltered environment, and then all of a sudden, you’re in the middle of that, so it was really interesting. Cal was the Ground Zero for all of the protests, you know with the war and all, it was really different and then very different from my growing up here, even though it’s such a close geographical place, it’s just a whole different world. Very interesting.
RM: And after Cal, did you immediately move back to Lafayette?
MM: No, I was in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and then when I came back, I had received my teaching credential prior to going into the Peace Corps, so I had a friend who was teaching in Moraga, so I got a job at Donald Rheems School in Moraga, and I taught there for seven years, I started teaching in the early seventies, got married in ’74, and then had my first child in ’77, so I took a year’s leave from teaching, thinking I’d come back and never did. So I had three kids, but I was involved in… they went to a cooperative nursery school here in Lafayette so I was involved in that for seven years, I was on the school board in Lafayette for thirteen years, so we’ve lived here since 1974, so forty years, there’s been a lot of changes in the town, just the traffic is just unbelievable, and now there’s so much growth going on, building, and the condos going up everywhere, and we live up the hill from Celia’s, you know where Celia’s is in Lafayette, so they’re gonna take that whole area, Celia’s out, and have a big development going in there supposedly, there’s a lot of finagling and wrangling about, acts and egress and the… where they’re gonna put it because the neighborhood doesn’t want it on that little Delores because, you know, it’s just a very narrow street, so we’re trying to get it onto Mt. Diablo Blvd., but the city has really, you know, it’s really really changed now across from Acalanes, on that hill they’re gonna build, we’re gonna put in 300–plus apartments, there was a big brouhaha about that, now they’re gonna do forty homes, a soccer field and a dog run, a dog park, so I don’t know, it’s like at some point, isn’t this enough? ‘Cause it’s getting crazy to try to drive around in here, I don’t know if you ever drive around in Lafayette sometimes, I mean Moraga isn’t quite as impacted because if you’re going to Moraga you’re just going there, but Lafayette seems to be sort of on the way, I dunno, it’s crazy, but maybe I’m just getting old.
RM: So you left in 1964 to go to Cal, did you come back, like, for summers and things like that?
MM: Yeah, yeah. I worked at the… Cal has an alumni camp near Sonora, so I worked there three summers. My parents lived in the house where I grew up until probably the early 1990’s, can’t remember the year exactly, then they moved to Rossmoor, and so they spent I think twelve to fourteen years there. They died five years ago, within about four months of each other which was, you know, but it’s weird when you’re not the child anymore and you’re the oldest one, so most of my life I’ve been here, aside from college when I would, you know, I’d be around.
RM: Can you tell me a little bit more about your time on the school board?
MM: Yeah. I can’t really tell you the year I was elected, I could figure it out. When my oldest daughter was one, which would have been 1978, a friend from college was teaching at Happy Valley School, or she had been teaching at Happy Valley School, and she had had twin girls the year before I had Kate, and there was a program called Early Childhood Education, it was a state-funded program, and so they sort of needed a coordinator and you kept records and you hired aides for the classrooms and things like that, so we job shared that and one day a week, we’d work three days a week, so one week I’d take my kids to her house and I’d work, and another day I’d take her girls and she’d work and one day we had an older lady who would take care of all the kids, so we did that, wow, probably ten years maybe, maybe not that much, and then she took a job as a classroom aide at Happy Valley so I continued on by myself with that job and then she went back into the classroom, she job shared for a long time, she just retired last year, and we were paid, like, I think I was paid two thousand dollars a year for doing that, which was great, but I decided that, I don’t know, I just decided that I was interested in being on the school board, so I ran, and I was elected, and I was re-elected two more times, but then they were trying to get the… ‘cause they were four year terms, they were trying to get things synchronized or something, so I stayed on an extra year which was thirteen, so I think I went off around 2000, maybe, it was interesting because the district had downsized… the enrollment of the district went down, so before there was Montecito School, Vallecito is where Bentley School is today, that was an elementary school, and the they built Happy Valley and Springhill in the ‘50’s, and then there was… do you know where the community center is? That was Burton School, just plain Burton School, and then where Burton Valley is, which is a little farther along St. Mary’s, was Merriwood Elementary and a middle school called Fairview on the same site, and then they had built Ellis School was across from Springhill, kind of across the street, back in there, which is gone too, so then they had downsized, and, so I think they had… they closed Vallecito, they closed Montecito, they closed Ellis, they closed Burton, they got rid of a middle school, they just had Stanley, now the district’s enrollment is seemingly creeping up so it’s sort of hard, you have to plan ahead because otherwise class size gets huge and a lot of schools don’t have the facilities to have extra classrooms, you know that, so it’s really hard because it’s very expensive to re-open a school, I don’t think there’s a school you could re-open because Vallecito is sold, Montecito would be the only one, but it is in such, you know, it was built in ’56 so you probably have to raze it and totally build a new school, and is that economically feasible? So it wasn’t a time of huge crisis, I mean we were lucky to have a superintendant who was here for many years, and then when he retired, he was replaced with a fabulous man named John Frank who did a wonderful job, he was really a people person, the other fellow was more of a financial person, and then they had a series of sort of not-so-great ones and not they have… Rachel Zinn is the superintendant now and she’s fabulous, but education has really changed, now there’s a lot more perscripted stuff coming from the federal government and the state and I think sometimes in education, one size doesn’t fit all, so a lot of school districts like Moraga and Orinda and Lafayette who probably do a really, really good job without intervention, I mean they hire good teachers, teachers tend to stay, they’re bright and well-educated, but I think a lot, these teachers today, there’s not time for individual creativity anymore, so it’s definitely a harder time to be on the school board, really hard, but it was a really enjoyable time, I really enjoyed doing it.
RM: And what was being on the school board like, like a month to month kind of thing?
MM: There was always lots of meetings, I mean we met once a month in a formal setting, but you worked, maybe it wasn’t something official but you spent time on a campus and you talked to teachers and you were involved, because you were on the school board that meant that you did other things related to that, so it was a busy time, I don’t remember it being oppressive, my husband had a software company and he was gone a lot of the time, I mean he traveled a lot, but I don’t remember it being really difficult, but I think it was just being out and about, and because you were on the school board then you were on other committees and things and so you tended to go to other meetings but I think the issues we’re dealing with right now are a lot bigger than what we did, but it was a good time, I mean it was, I think that we did a lot of good things, we had good people who were on the board with me too, I think that’s important, it just takes one person with different kinds of ideas, it doesn’t work well and it throws everybody for a loop, and it’s hard to find people who put in that kind of time, it’s a lot of time sometimes.
RM: Were you on the board when they rebuilt Springhill?
MM: Uh-huh, in Lafayette, or parts of Lafayette, they added onto Lafayette, so those were big decisions and what to do with a school like Springhill, they totally tore the whole thing down, so they had portables and Lafayette out on that field I remember trying to get to the office in the pouring rain, you know, it wasn’t a great year or so, but John Frank really got the facilities in the district up to speed, they did renovations or total remodels on every school in the district, they redid the multi-purpose room at Stanley, they added new classrooms, they did some portables that were permanent kind of portables that were nice, you know, someday I should count how many school board meetings that was. It’s hard to remember now, it’s been over fifteen years, I think, maybe more than that.
RM: Is there anything you really miss about the way Lafayette used to be?
MM: I think it would have been nice if, I mean it’s probably true in some neighborhoods still, but it was always nice to have, where kids could wander around, I mean nowadays everybody is so scared because there’s strange people out there, but just for kids… they have such structured lives, after school you go to soccer and then you have a tutor and then you do this and that, because otherwise you’re not going to get into Stanford or whatever, I mean kids aren’t allowed to be kids as much, and I don’t know if that’s just because there’s such, maybe it’s the communication, maybe it’s the information age that we live in, there’s so much more out there, I wish there wasn’t as much traffic in Lafayette, I wish it was a little more rural and, but everybody wants all the fancy stuff, I just think it lost a little bit of its charm because it’s suburban, but I guess there’s nothing you could probably do about that, I mean I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to live in pioneer times here, when you had an outhouse and a… but so you take the good with the bad.
RM: And where do you see Lafayette heading in the future, or hope it’s heading in the future, if anywhere?
MM: Well, I hope there’s still people who are interested in making the community be a better place, so that’s volunteerism, people who want to volunteer at the book shop or volunteer at the history room or for some other group in the city, the Creeks Commission, but we do have a lot of people who volunteer a lot of their time. I hope that the schools continue to be good because that effects the whole community. People move here, they want to live here because the schools are good. I hope it doesn’t get any more populated, if we could do something like that. I mean, we’re gonna have more people moving in because they’re doing all this building, but I guess that it contains a little bit of its rural charm, I don’t want to be a big city, just that life was a little simpler, but I don’t see it going in that direction, I see it going the other way because everyone always wants bigger and better. But thank you.
RM: Interview ends at 5:05.
I love reading about your childhood and your life in Lafayette! So interesting and so many things I didn’t know about your past. Thank you for sharing, Mary!!