Oral History: Paul Melmed — April 17th, 2015

Summary:

Paul Melmed moved to Lafayette and established the Melmed Learning Clinic when he completed his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at Berkeley in 1970. He soon established close ties with local pediatricians and began helping students overcome reading and other learning disorders by “making kids feel good about themselves, and making parents feel good about their kids.” He describes Lafayette as a community where families look out for each other, and for each other’s kids. His work continues on after 47 years.

Oral History

Ryan McKinley: This is an oral history interview for the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project. The date is April 17th, the time is 10:15 PM, the interviewer is Ryan McKinley, and I’m interviewing Paul Melmed in his office in Lafayette, California, and here we go. If you could just state your name?

Paul Melmed: So I’m Paul Jay, J-A-Y, Melmed, M-E-L-M-E-D, and my birth date is 5-3-42, so I’ll be seventy-three years old next week. A couple of weeks, actually. My work has always been with children and students and then adults, working with people who have had some issues with their own learning differences. I moved to Lafayette from… well, I guess I could back up a bit. I grew up in Denver, Colorado, and I went to the University of Northern Colorado, when I went to that school which is in Greeley, Colorado , 50 miles north of Denver, all my buddies went to CU, to Boulder, and I went to the teacher’s college, so I was in special education and received my BA in Special Ed with an emphasis in Speech and Language Problems, then I came to Stanford in 1964 and was admitted to the Department of, it was actually the School of Medicine where I studied Speech Pathology and audiology, speech and language differences with an emphasis in hearing and language processing, and after that time—you’re really taking me back here—then I worked actually the Job Corps which was in Pleasanton, California, the Santa Rita Prison area, in that area, and it was Camp Parks, which is now all developed, but at that time it was just a wasteland, and it was an old World War II deployment station, and they changed it into, during the Johnson administration-era War on Poverty that became a Job Corps, and I worked in the education department, basic education with language issues with kids who were having significant problems, these were sixteen to twenty-one year olds whom the Army was even saying no to during the Vietnam War, so I saw kids from Cleveland and Chicago and from Detroit and New York City and Atlanta and Houston and these, in fact, one of my students, who was George Foreman, who was the toughest guy in the camp, I remember, so we were trying to work with, bring their skills up to level, and I was accepted at Berkeley, and had my Ph.D. in Berkeley in the school of educational psychology and learning disabilities and reading disorders and at that time, nobody was really doing that much in terms of trying to make a case for people who learn differently and their learning styles, and so I guess I was a pioneer in the field of learning disabilities at that time, and got married in 1968, we’ll be celebrating our 47th wedding anniversary and came to Lafayette from Montclair where I lived before. Lafayette was a little village of maybe twenty thousand people and it hasn’t really grown significantly since then, but I lived by Springhill School and Acalanes High School and lived up the street on Springhill Road, and I’d lived in the same home since 1975, so lived in the same home, and in ’73 we started looking for places here, almost moved, then actually settled down in 1975 here, and started the Melmed Learning Clinic in 1970 after I finished Cal, and I was on 957 Dewing Avenue in Lafayette, off of Mount Diablo Boulevard, and it was sort of nestled in it now, which is a very vibrant downtown area, but there were a couple of professional offices on Dewing Avenue, and the office that I rented for twenty-three years was Dr. Edwin Giroux, and Dr. Giroux was the town doctor before I moved into his office, he was here thirty-five years in that same office, 957 Dewing Avenue, and then I started renting from him after he retired, and I was there twenty-three years in the same office, and it was a time where I had to meet professionals that were in Lafayette and they later became, and at that time, they were already established, most of them, physicians, pediatricians, who were working with families and parents of young children and would talk with them about how things were going in school, and after I would meet with a lot of the pediatricians, and I was actually a guest speaker many, many times at Mount Diablo Hospital and at John Muir Hospital, speaking about the pediatric group about the importance of doctors being involved in developmental pediatrics and learning more about learning disabilities and learning differences, so that when they spoke to the moms who were coming to see them with their children, that they would have some knowledge of a field that was emerging, so there was help for a lot of these kids who were extremely, extremely bright, but there was a mismatch between their style of learning and the way the schools were presenting the information, and so I guess I would consider it a breakthrough, it was acting here in beautiful downtown Lafayette, and some of the pediatricians I remember just walking down the streets on Mount Diablo Boulevard, one is Sheldon Cook, who was here forever, is a wonderful doc.

RM: I interviewed him.

PM: Oh did you? Sheldon was super, he used to walk, you know he looked like Gregory Peck walking down the street, and he would come by my office all the time, and we’d lock up, sometimes go around the circle, and Peter Shieff was another super pediatrician in the area, and there was a very large pediatric practice in Concord called the Diablo Valley Pediatrics, and one of their two veteran doctors, they both lived here in Lafayette, one was Allan Berkin, and the other was Jean Lipson, and they lived here in Lafayette and their practice was in Concord, so they used to refer a lot of kids to the clinic as well, so usually on Fridays I can just remember walking up Dewing Avenue to Mount Diablo Boulevard, and the Seafood Grotto was there, which was a great place, they had a fresh crab cooker out on front of the restaurant, right on Mount Diablo Boulevard, and every Friday during the crab season, it was the place to be, and the family was Panfilli, that had been in Lafayette much before I got here, Sonny Panfilli and his family owned the Seafood Grotto, and that was a hangout for a lot of folks. Other places were the Sambo’s, which was a restaurant down on Mount Diablo Boulevard, we used to take our kids, and of course Diablo Foods has been here for a long, long time, and so I feel like it’s been so much a part of—it is—it’s been a part of my life, but I think what I’m most grateful for is to be able to live in the same town that I had my professional practice, and I’ve been in practice for forty-five years, and right now we’re in an office that I moved to after the twenty-three years on Dewing Avenue and this is an old tunnel road, a good move because downtown Lafayette is so congested now, as it wasn’t before like I told you, we used to just walk around, now it’s pretty tough to park, and to be… you wanna try to get in and out of there, the restaurants are fantastic and all, but here I am at the east end of the town and close to the freeway and it’s easier for folks to get in and out. In the old days, families would bring their kids to my clinic for tutoring after I would evaluate them, and they would come twice a week from Antioch and Pittsburg and Martinez and from Concord and Danville and all the way out to Pleasanton, but it wasn’t so difficult to pick up the kids from school and drive to Lafayette, spend an hour here at the clinic, and then go back home. Now, it’s difficult, so with BART, I remember some high school kids who would come over on BART with their girlfriends, and their girlfriends would hang out in the living room listening to all the moms talking about their little kids, and the high school guys and girls would be working on their math or whatever else they were working on, and I can remember once getting a phone call from a young woman and she told me that she used to come with her boyfriend to the Melmed Learning Clinic on Dewing Avenue, and that now she has a child, she was unmarried, but she used to remember hearing the moms talking in Lafayette about their kids and their learning problems and wanted to make sure that her child was gonna be okay, and would I mind seeing her, and when she walked into the office on Dewing, it brought back so many memories and here she is coming into the office with her little seven year old, and I told her that’s everything’s just gonna be fine, and she got very tearful and she said, “You know, I remember all the moms talking about so many different things, but you never did anything but to thank them for coming and reassure them that everything’s gonna be okay, and I thought maybe you would talk with them about learning problems and all but now that I see, when I think back, that it became an informal almost therapy and counter and support for one another, there we were talking about all kinds of things, talking about restaurants in Lafayette, where they get their nails done and who does their hair, and every once in a while, they’d talk about their kids, so it became a safe place and I feel that safeness here.” When I think back about what my raison d’etre, my reason for being in all this, if I could put in a sentence, it’s to make, and I think it’s been the atmosphere of Lafayette that’s allowed me to develop that over the years, is to make parents feel good about their kids, and in Lafayette, that’s always been at the forefront, parents feeling good about their kids. I used to support all of the LMYA, which was the Lafayette and Moraga Youth Association, use to support all those teams, in fact, the kids used to tell me that they still have their Melmed Learning Clinic T-shirts for baseball and basketball and softball an soccer, and my wife Ronnie, who’s a super teacher, she has her Master’s Degree in Education and she was a supervisor at St. Mary’s College of teachers and she taught in San Lorenzo, inner city kids, does well, and one of her friends who was the assistant manager of a bank here in Lafayette, the two women coached a second grade soccer team here in Lafayette, and they were undefeated. The second year, all the men coaches would actually come and scout them on practice on Thursdays during the weekend games right at Springhill School and at other places they used to play, and they would scout them and the thing that was different about these two women that made their teams never lose is that they made the kids feel so good about themselves and the parents backed away, and the kids played as a team, a real team, and they listened, because they were both great teachers, and the person she was coaching with have kids of her own, and the kids sort of bought into the fact that we can do this, we can win this, and it spilled over into a sense of well-being, a feeling of confidence, a feeling of self-worth, and like I said, I think that through the years, being surrounded in an atmosphere of everybody’s in this together, that we’re developing a community here, schools that are really superior, families that look out for one another and coach each other’s kids, and then my clinic where I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job with… a youngster would come in and I would identify their strengths in learning and then teach to those strengths. I’ve produced through the years, you know, thousands of kids who are doing pretty well out there. I actually get calls from grandmothers of the children who I used to see about their little grandkids, so this is another further generation though, coming though the clinic. Just to back up on this, what the town was like, I remember the hangout was Lucky’s grocery store, which is now Whole Foods, and there was a Freddy’s Pizza where kids used top hang out, particularly on weekends and off of Mount Diablo Boulevard there’s a donut shop that’s still there next to the drug store, next to the CVS drug store now, Diablo Foods, that whole strip, that was it, and the other place, of course, was Lucky’s that’s kind of at the other end, and because Springhill School and Acalanes High School are so close to each other, and I lived, I still do, up Springhill Road, which was a torn up street at the time, and you would see so many of the elementary school kids, and then they all filtered into Stanley, so students from Happy Valley School or Burton Valley or Springhill, and at that point there was another school that’s closed now, all the schools fed into Stanley, so at one point, every kid in the city went to the same school for seventh and eighth grade, and I still remember when sixth grade was included in that, there was a lot of controversy about that because a lot of teachers who were elementary school teachers knew, particularly boys at the end of the fifth grade were certainly not ready for a middle school experience, so a boy who was ten and a half or eleven years old to be in the same school as someone who’s thirteen years old or fourteen, that’s the decision to make and I think they did it for economic reasons, they opened Stanley for sixth, seventh and eighth, before, it was just seventh and eighth, but the point is then you have all the kids together, and it wasn’t until eighth grade graduation that they would split off again, and then some went to Acalanes and some went to Miramonte and some went to Los Lomas, so in a sense, and some went to Campo, so in a sense, when there were community events, everybody knew each other, it was really a village, a super cool, fun place to be, an atmosphere of… a sense of safety and an atmosphere of “I’m as happy for you and your kids as you are for me and my children.” So we raised three kids here and they all went to public school, all from Springhill then Stanley then Acalanes. My middle son is in his sophomore year, he was a super-duper athlete and he went to De La Salle for the last two years, not necessarily for athletics, he played all the sports but at that point he was a tennis player, but things weren’t going as well as… they wanted us to move out of Lafayette and move to Florida so he could play tennis, and I wasn’t going to move to Florida to play tennis, so I said you can go anywhere you want, and he went to De La Salle, and he finished at De La Salle, in fact he was Athlete of the Year at Acalanes and then at De La Salle he was up for Athlete of the Year and he lost to a Monty Tumor and Tumor was a super football player for the New York Giants eventually. All of my kids did well here in the public schools, extremely well, my son whom I just talked about, David, he went to Berkeley, and graduated Cal, and went to UC Davis Law School, he lives in Los Angeles now and practices. My daughter, after Acalanes, went to UC Santa Barbara and then she went to San Francisco State and she has a Master’s degree in Education, and she’s raising three kids in San Francisco and they come out to Lafayette twice a week and it’s the same feeling, I can remember, with my kids that my grandkids are having here in Lafayette out of the city and out to this beautiful place with open space, and our youngest son, Zane, he graduated Acalanes and he went to Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa, and he went to UCLA Law School. Unfortunately we lost Zane at age twenty-six to a GBM-IV brain tumor in 2006, and at that point I sort of put things on hold in my own professional life and I officially retired in 2006 after that dramatic situation, but unofficially I still see students and we’re here in my office on Old Tunnel Road because it’s pretty tough, like I told you, a grandma calls me, and says, “Oh, are you still testing students, Dr. Melmed? Can I bring my child to Lafayette, or grandchild, and see a doc I’ve known forever?” or even St. Mary’s coaches have students who come in from different countries to play ball, and I do a lot of testing of athletes as well who have had learning disabilities and qualify under NCAA regulations, so I’ll get calls from coaches and they’ll say, “Gee, I know, I’m so sorry about… I’ve heard so much about what happened in your family, but if you’d just see this student for me, I’d really appreciate it,” so I still do testing, but I gave my office, gave the practice, gave my clinic to someone that I hired thirty-five years ago and I said, “Here’s the key”, and she said “What?” and I said, “Now it’s yours, I’m not gonna sell it to you, it’s yours, on one condition, that if I ever feel like I want to see a family or have to see a student that I could rearrange the schedule and I’ll just use the office”. She said, “Is that all?” So there will be a Melmed Learning Clinic, it seems like, maybe for another twenty-five or thirty, or who knows how many years that she’ll be doing this, and it’s a good thing because again it’s provided a lot of help for a lot of students through the years. The Chamber of Commerce wasn’t so involved in professional offices, professional practices, they were much more interested in businesses in town which was fine, and then they started to reach out, which was a good thing, and started to recognize the fact that, like I told you, so many wonderful pediatric practices in this town and other professionals who, psychologists and psychiatrists and people like myself who are doing work, they started to recognize that these are really businesses as well, although they are professional business, and so I think the Chamber’s been very supportive of encouraging other professionals to open their practices here. I’m probably one of the few that maybe live in Lafayette and have had a business, a professional business, in Lafayette for so many years. I can remember one, his name was Tim Ward and he’s an architect who lives, his kids used to play on my wife’s team, built he’s had a practice here for years and years and years as well and lives here in Lafayette. The last thing I want to talk about, if you had any other questions, is, the kids used to come here, and this is a fun story, Granny Goose was a bakery that made pretzels and they made a lot of potato chips and Frito-Lay and that kind of stuff and there used to be a Granny Goose truck that would make deliveries at Lucky’s and then they would stop at some restaurants, and then they would come to the Melmed Learning Clinic on Dewey Avenue. The same guy who made the delivery at Lucky’s twice a week would come to the Melmed Learning Clinic and drop off a seven pound box of pretzels, so I used to give, after every class, a student would come, and we used to work in groups of four or less, and there were eight classrooms, eight little clinic teaching areas, with four kids in every class. At one point I had three clinics, twenty-five people on the staff, we’d see two hundred and fifty kids a week, this is the largest private learning, tutoring and testing diagnostic clinic in Northern California, There’s one larger than this in Southern California in Camarillo, private, there are franchises, The Reading Game, Sylvan Learning, and those kind of places, but a freestanding private learning clinic only in Lafayette, and this is the biggest one in all of Northern California, so Granny Goose used to come, after every class, I would give a little cup full of pretzels or sugarless gum, that was a treat afterwards, so when a kid came to the clinic, you know, think about it, you’d be there yourself, you’d come twice a week, sometimes on BART, sometimes your mom would drive you, drop you off at the clinic, you’d do this thing with a tutor, after a while it pretty much becomes a drag, the only reason you’d come here is maybe for the pretzels and the sugarless gum. I would always know how business was going if I had to miss one delivery ‘cause I had too many pretzels and I knew, wait a minute, not enough kids here, and you see the delivery guy getting a kick out of it, like, “Why am I stopping at this place? What do you guys do here?” It was really fun, it was fun to do that, and it was all along Mount Diablo Boulevard, but I knew that particularly the more macho kind of guys, when they started doing better at the clinic, and doing better means they were getting super grades in school, and I was talking about cutting the tutoring down to once a week, whatever, and then release them, and they’d do fine, and so when they were getting better, they would, instead of taking the pretzels or the gum, they’d say to me, “I don’t think I need any today”, which means they finally, they got onto my gag, which is, “I know why you’re coming here, you’re coming here for the pretzels”, but no longer, now you can do it on your own, so it’s a wonderful place to be, my wife and I still live in the same house, our kids, of course are gone, and hopefully be able to stay there for a long, long time, we’ve seen the city change quite a bit, not so much for the residents, they still seem to be doing pretty much the same, although now there’s more senior housing, there’s opportunities, there will be, for lower income folks to come in and have a place to live in this beautiful town, which I’m all in favor of, the traffic is horrendous, to get folks in and out of here is tough, the support for schools, as you know, The Acalanes High School district is the number one district in the state of California, and within that district, Miramonte High School is the best, Acalanes is second, Campo, third, and then Los Lomas, of those high schools, against any other high school in the whole state, is tremendous, and to have, to have two of those high schools, all of them so close to this downtown area, the kids here are really super kids, who are desirous of wanting to do well and many of tem are wanting to move back here, but affordability becomes an issue, so I know on my own street, Springhill Road, there’s two families, one has sold their house to their son, and I remember the son when he was born, my neighbor, in fact, he lives there now with his wife, and she’s going to have her second child, and he was there when he was a little two-year-old, so he bought his dad’s house, and then another, they’re still living at home because they can’t afford to live, so they’re in transition, so I would hope that, and I know they’re coming back, my own daughter would love in Lafayette and where she was raised, but they live in San Francisco, it says a lot for a city that’s been around for so long, that the next generation through wants to come back an re-inhabit the place they grew up. I would imagine that when you look across the country and towns that mostly, I don’t know about most, but a lot of people can’t wait to get out of town, who go to other places, but it’s still going to be here, and I think with BART here, Lafayette’s going to be here for a long, long, long, long time, with a city council that still tries to protect the semi-rural feeling and flavor of the place, they’re the watchdogs for what happens here, you now, for families who want to build ten thousand square foot houses, they’re saying,” It’s not in keeping with what that is all about, controversial things that go on in this town, the opposition to building 320 units or 80 units off of Deer Hill Road and the freeway on 24 and Pleasant Hill Road, there was just an uproar. You can’t do that, it’s not what this town is, and is that exclusiveness, or is that a lack of inclusiveness? It’s what it is, it’s a preservation of a sense of well-being for those folks who are here, and is it discriminatory or is it… you know, these are hard issues for small towns, but the best thing I think that ever happened to the town, was in the general plan, to include their ridgeline and hillside ordinance which says that you can’t build a home on a ridgeline in this town or a hillside, 250 feet on either side of the ridge, so that a person who lives low or a person who lives high, everybody, has an opportunity to see open space, and I think that for a feeling of comfort, more towns need to start doing that, you can go to other cities very close to here, you can’t have every city look like Daly City, and if you allow that to happen, all these hills will be filled up with homes right away. A very good friend of the director who’s going to be retiring soon of Save Mt. Diablo, to be able to drive on 24, and to just look out and see a place open is terribly important for a sense of comfort, and we’re so fortunate to be able to do that, so I’m grateful for all these years, like I said, I’m seventy-three years old and this has been a good run for me, I don’t look seventy-three, right?

RM: Ha ha, no. I’m curious, you mentioned the Lucky’s was where the Whole Foods is now, and the Diablo Foods, I guess was there, so was there much in between those, like you mentioned the Seafood Grotto, where was that in relation to those?

PM: The Seafood Grotto was across the street from Diablo Foods and Diablo Foods is in the same street as Dewing Avenue, the Post Office was always there. My first office before Dewing Avenue was right half a block further south on Dewing Avenue, and that was the first library in town like in the early 1920’s, I think, it was this little place on Dewing and Bickerstaff, and that was an office space, Sheldon Cook’s office was around there, and the rest of it was a lot of open spaces, the Clock Tower that’s there now where the Radio Shack and all that, not much happened in that space, then you’d have to come all the way down the street past the Lucky store and going east on Mount Diablo Boulevard, kind of around where US Bank is now on the corner, across the street from the library one block down was Sanbo’s and so all the way from the Post Office… at Sanbo’s there really wasn’t much happening except the Lucky store, and it was quite a feeling of, there were some small restaurants, Chinese food, and you could get, no, there was no, you’d take the kids to Walnut Creek to a McDonald’s that was just recently closed actually, so…

RM: We’re past that.

PM: Yeah, that’s where the McDonald’s was in Walnut Creek. I remember when that first opened, actually, so it was a pretty lazy town, on weekends you’d see ball games all the time, all the ball games, everybody was playing ball somewhere, girls and boys, super fun, and competitive but at the same time, the game was over, like I said, because these kids knew each other, they were always pretty much in the same place, so it was really fun, and that was Mount Diablo Boulevard. To me it was like another street, it was busy, but it wasn’t… everything else was like neighborhood.

RM: It was literally open space, there weren’t houses or anything along there?

PM: No, not on Mount Diablo Boulevard.

RM: Diablo Foods, and then there’d be a big open space, I assume to saloon…

PM: There were lots, open lots, yeah, you’d get your sweatshirts here, a lot of the shopping was done, I mean, I don’t remember going anywhere, you’d get your food here, you’d get your gasoline here, yeah, pretty much everything was just here, no need to run around to places, the Park Theater, once in a while there’d be a good movie there, most of the time not, there would be more driving because of the ball games, again, there would be more driving into Burton Valley, or Happy Valley, these were sort of like arteries off of Mount Diablo Boulevard, so the reason you would cross Mount Diablo Boulevard is to get to some neighborhood to play ball.

RM: And when it started in your time here since 1970, when did you start to see those lots being filled in? Was there a specific era, like only in the ‘90s, or fairly recently?

PM: Yeah, I think that was a big shift and when the Safeway store went in, that was a big deal, and that sort of changed the flavor of it, because you know the Roundup Saloon was there, and a couple of little places, and then nicer restaurants, and a more ethnic mix of restaurants brought in a really nice balance of, you weren’t just doing American food, you could have fun trying different sorts of things, it brought in a lot more people from other communities to eat here, and that’s just continued to grow over time, for the better, then the watch repair guys came in, and then electronic guys came in, and the Veterans Hall, which is where the library is now, there was a larger, “older” group of folks who would come in for their activities at the Veterans Hall, and that moved all the way down to the west side of town, with the new Veterans building, very beautiful, and they tore down the Veterans building and put up the library, but that’s all very, very recent, relatively recently, so the growth was exponential in the early ‘90s, then it really started to expand toward the end of the ‘90s and the early 2000’s into town, but again because the city council and those people who were involved, they just didn’t let it go crazy, you know, they really watched this hillside and ridgeline ordinance, so yes, the downtown is expanding and more services are available, wonderful things are happening, but the people who live here can still have a sense of open space, and that’s what makes the town super unique. It’s always been like that.

RM: You also mentioned your road was, when you first moved, a gravel road, you said something like that, was the area already developed at that time, like were there already houses, or were they kind of coming?

PM: In my own street? So Pleasant Hill Road was always Pleasant Hill Road, and I worked on some commissions and committees as well to a road of regional significance, that is, if Highway 24 gets blocked somehow, then how are the folks from Pittsburg and Antioch and Martinez and Brentwood, how do they get to San Francisco? Well, you go 680 all the way around to 580, or you come the back way and you would come through Pleasant Hill Road, that’s a four-lane… and there was a move, and probably someday we may lose, so far we’ve prevailed, to keep that the way it is, always super crowded in the morning, horribly crowded in the afternoon, a lot of people coming in and out, they’re still trying to go the back way to get off of the freeway, the move and the transportation in the Caltrans is to open that up, maybe to a six-lane roads, a regionally significant highway that would that would come through the east end of Lafayette. We’ve opposed that, there’s two schools there, that’s allowed us to keep a handle on it, because that’s a lot of cars now, can you imagine two more lanes and increasing the speed by over 50 miles per hour, so we’ve tried to hold onto that, Springhill School was torn down and then rebuilt, Arc has never gotten a chance to go to the new school, Acalanes High School, a lot of renovation there, there are kids who are going to the old Acalanes, but I would come up, as soon as you’d get off Pleasant Hill Road and you’d go up Springhill Road, at the end of that, is Briones and the Girl Scout camp, and the road becomes a private road about seven-tenths of a mile, off of Pleasant Hill Road is a private road so it was up to the homeowners to maintain it, there’s 250 homes abound from Springhill School all the way back to the Girl Scout camp, and those 250 are called the Springhill Valley Homeowners’ Association, I’ve been on the association board for years and years, and we’ve really tried to hold, to make that road accessible, and finally there was some extra money that came from the city of Lafayette and there was some matching stuff that came in, and so the road was finally paved and now there are sidewalks on either side, but all that time, I mean for forty years, because I think it just happened in the last fifteen years, let’s say, so for forty years or so that was just a bumpy road, I remember when we came out to look at our house, the potholes and the dirt and all that, all the way up, and families used to visit us, and I always knew they’d have to drive so slowly, our kids would always walk on the rough Springhill Road, that’s all resurfaced. In the summertime, each week of the summer, there was a hundred and twenty-five girls, different girls, each week, go to the Girl Scout camp, so the people, mostly moms, who drive up Springhill Road, you have quite an experience, now that it’s paved, it’s pretty cool, but in the old days, all those people would come up and drop off their girls for Girl Scout camp, and that still goes on today, so I’ve seen a lot of changes there, and I think the city’s moving in the right direction, it’s hard to get bonds passed, but they will, and it has been a little bit better to take care of the infrastructure here in Lafayette, particularly roads, but again, I guess if you did an aerial over the city, it probably wouldn’t look too different, I mean, I look at old pictures from the early 1900s of course, and now it’s pretty much the same. I remember seeing a picture of before the freeway came in, all of that was just open from one side to the other, and then whoever made the decision to put that freeway in and how does it meander, interesting, and the BART had to decide where to put its location, that of course changes flow, but our area, the Springhill area, looks pretty much the same as it did, the homes that are there are still there, people are doing pop-up homes now, you know, where they put the… they change the front, maybe they put a second story on it, but the footprints are exactly the same as they were then. In the old days, you know, this was Indian territory, would come through and move cattle, and walnut orchards were here, and move all of that as fast as they could down to Martinez and get it in the water, and take it in boats and move it around, so you know, that was in the old days, now what it’s gonna be thirty years from now, nobody knows for sure, but if the last, at least my little run here for so many years is an indication, I think it’ll probably have that same feeling, hopefully, you know, fifty years from now, good schools, wonderful people, inviting businesses to do their thing, but not to be so ostentatious that we end up looking like Pleasant Hill or Walnut Creek, it it’ll continue to have that semi-rural feel.

RM: You mentioned now they’re becoming pop—so, all the houses on your road back in 1975 were basically the same old story, they all were kind of similar types of houses back then?

PM: Yeah, and the builder, Merchant, was a big-time builder here, and we happened to live in a two-story house and the woman who built the house, she wanted the best builder, who was Merchant at the time, but she wanted a two-story Cape Cod house, so she got what she wanted, and we used to hear stories about how the battles went on, because he had the one-story ranch-style fireplace in the house, that sort of thing, and that’s the way it was, so many of those homes looked like that, if you go up Springhill Road, or if you go, even in Silverwood, other places around here, yeah, all the homes look like they did back then, now the young families that are coming in, just change up the landscape, and again change the front, put on some shutters an maybe, if they can, a second story on it, but I haven’t seen many, if any, just complete teardowns and rebuild. If they’re lucky enough to get an open lot, they’ll build a house, but in many communities, and in other parts of the country, people just buy the house, rip it up, just start over again, that doesn’t seem to happen very much here, I don’t think, I don’t think that really happens, I think they keep the feeling the same way, and that’s probably because the design review committee and the planning commission and, you know, the city counsel, they just have this plan in mind of what the city’s going to continue to look like.

RM: In your time, do you remember the original Acalanes, how different is it now to the current Acalanes, or is it basically the same, just the buildings are redone?

PM: The building itself? The fields are better, the tennis courts are better, the swimming pool’s exactly the same, you know they have the sections, different wings. What we were concerned about when my kids were there was the asbestos.

RM: And that was about ‘70s, ‘80s?

PM: Exactly, in the ‘80s, because the city got, yeah, the last youngster that… our kids graduated in ’95, so there was identification early on about was this a safe place, and then in the ‘90s, early ‘90s, a lot of revisions going on, and then it was… I can still remember huge trucks coming out, the guys with their protective gear on, and they were removing what these trucks that looked like dump trucks, you’d hear this loud noise, and that was going on, they were protected while the kids were in class. I wasn’t sure about all of that, But the classrooms look so much better, I mean the whole school looks so much better now. The small gym, the little gym, that took a long time to be renovated, I mean when our kids were there the tiles used to come off of the floor, many times you couldn’t hold loggings there because it was dangerous, and you never knew what was going to fall from the ceiling. It just goes to show you though, it was always the best school, it was always great education going on.

RM: So the layout was basically the same…

PM: Exactly the same, all the sections are still there, nothing’s been changed the parking lot’s still there, the gym is the same, everything’s the same.

RM: And the remodel was in the late ‘90s?

PM: Yeah, let’s see. Oh yeah, late ‘90s. For sure. In ’95, our kids were still there, so it had to happen in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, probably late ‘90s. Yeah, and all for the better, it looks very nice, it looks great. The drama section is just beautiful and they used to do drama in the cafeteria, that’s where the practices were held, so that’s a superwing now, and the gym looks great, it’s just, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven by there, anytime, day or night, there’s just tons and tons of people, it’s location, during the summer for example, when all the swimming meets go on, county meets go there, thousands and thousands of people, in and out during the summer, not hundreds, thousands come through here, and the school, closes at whatever time, the last class might be at, let’s say, 4 o’clock, something like that, but at 7 o’ clock it just fills up again with adult education all the time, and weekends, it’s full of athletic activities, you know, so it’s used, a tremendous amount of use in that space there, yeah, it’s great.

RM: You mentioned a lot of baseball games and things like that, do you remember other events, pass-the-time kind of events, whether it be church related, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, things like that, any other things like that, community groups that you went to?

PM: Scouting was a big deal, and there were several Cub Scout troops, and then Boy Scout troops, and then of course, as they got… It’d be interesting to know, any local newspaper you read now, the Lafayette Sun, this time of year you start to see how many Eagle Scouts are going to become Eagle Scouts and it just seemed like so many still, and that used to be the case then too, it’s probably just a great place for the Scouting Association because these are people that commit, you know, that’s a lot of parental involvement at the early stage, and then for kids to commit to that, as busy as they are, many of them are super students, and they play musical instruments and everything, and they’re, by the way, an Eagle Scout, and that was the case way back then, I just remember some really valedictorians from Acalanes High School who are Eagle Scouts too, so scouting was a very big deal here and we used to have the derby, what do they call it? You know, they would make cars and…

RM: Oh my God, push cart or go-kart?

PM: Yeah, and have derby races and they would make little models, that was a community event where the winners from each of the troops and the Cub Scout groups would get together and the winning cars would compete against other cars, you know, and have a big picnic and deal afterwards, the Springhill School and Lafayette Elementary School and Happy Valley School, they all do their family, you know, Back-To-School Night became, that was always a huge, huge outing, and then they would do picnics for families, usually on a Friday afternoon, late afternoon, and so the school started doing these family picnics like I said we were involved in all of the sporting activities, church groups have always been open to having community events, the Temple Isaiah, the Presbyterian church, all of those were open places for people to hold different types of activities for their own clubs and associations, so the churches have always been part of this community, supportively, not isolated at all, I didn’t get the sense that there was any isolation, you know, a welcoming kind of feeling here. What else did we used to do? There was Buckeye Ranch, they used to have horses and riding stables there and the guy’s name was Bob Kinney and he was the rancher and he would have classes for riders, and that went on for a long, long time, and it closed, now there’s no horseback riding out there, we were involved in a group that kept Briones, that area, open space, there were some developers that wanted to come in in 2002 and build 127 homes at the end of Springhill Road. There’s a group in Moraga that’s been trying to keep it open space and not build huge developments as well, it’s just part of that sense of openness that we have here, open spaces hat we have here.

RM: Thank you very much.

PM: I hope it’s been informative.

RM: It’s been great, wonderful. The interview ends at 11:15 AM.