Summary:
Joan and Russell Bruzzone remember Lafayette in the 1950s. They discuss their ongoing residential and commercial real estate activities which created housing for hundreds of Lafayette families and gave the town its major commercial shopping center. To create the Plaza Shopping Center in the 1960s the Bruzzones removed 200,000 cubic feet of dirt from what had been a 65 foot hill immediately adjacent to Mount Diablo Boulevard. They also remember early businesses that were located in their shopping center.
Oral History:
This is an interview from Joan Bruzzone in regard to her husband and her developing real estate business taken on October 2006.
“Russ felt it was a wonderful thing to be able to provide a home for a family.” Joan Bruzzone talks candidly about her husband developer Russell Bruzzone, who passed away in 2001. “I consider him a pioneer and I think he was influential in bringing good to the city.” With Joan’s help and business management, Russell built extensively not only in Lafayette but also in Moraga and Concord. Their projects include the Plaza Shopping Center in downtown Lafayette, the Moraga Shopping Center, the Four Corners Center in Concord, and numerous single-family homes, many in Burton Valley. “We did it with a good deal of pride in what we were doing, Joan says. It meant a lot to my husband. He had a dream, a wonderful dream.”
Today Joan and her six children are still actively involved in building and property management. Joan supervises the three shopping centers. David and Paul are builders. Catherine and Richard are attorneys and Stephen and Kipp manage various parts of the family enterprise.
Russ was born in Oakland in 1926, the son of Dalia Ghiglione and Joseph Bruzzone. His maternal grandfather came to Lafayette in 1906. When Russ was growing up he worked summers on his uncle Joe’s farm in Lower Happy Valley. Russ graduated from Berkeley High, was Phi Beta Kappa in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, then received an MBA from Stanford in 1950. “He convinced his family to hold on to their property in Lafayette while he went to college,” Joan says. “He always knew he wanted to build on it.”
“Russ’s father was a food broker, but if he’d been born at a different time I think he would have loved to have been a developer and builder. He used to take Russell out to look at property, the two of them together. I think Russell inherited it from him.”
Joan, whose maiden name is Eck, grew up in the Marin County City of Fairfax and graduated from Stanford in 1949. She and Russ met when both were working at a subsidiary of Standard Oil and were married in 1951. But it would be a few years before Russ realized his dream of becoming a builder. “Russ hated working for a big company,” Joan remembers. “He and Gordy Coates, the best man in our wedding, were young and industrious and wanted to do something exciting. They decided to go overseas and they figured the best place was Venezuela because it had hard currency, meaning you could get your money out. For some reason Gordy decided they’d make ice cream, which neither of them knew anything about. Gordy was very good at PR and Russ was good at getting things done.”
Russ joined Gordy in Maracaibo and Joan and their 10-month-old daughter Catherine, who was born in 1952, came three months later. “We were producers and vendors. We had five little kiosks. Many was the night we had to set the alarm and go down to what we called our ‘fabrica’, to double check on the electricity, to avoid losing all the ice cream,” Joan says with a laugh. All the recipes had to be modified for the local ingredients and it was especially difficult to make vanilla taste right. Venezuela is just six degrees north of the equator, but the milk was delivered in unrefrigerated trucks, so when it got it, it was already sour.
The experience turned into more of an adventure than Joan counted on. “In September, we found out I was expecting. My twins, David and Stephen, were born in Venezuela in December 1953. Fortunately for us, there was a Standard Oil compound with a hospital and one of the doctors had studied at Tulane University, where they discovered that babies placed in oxygen tents could become blind.” If the doctor hadn’t known this, my son David might have become blind.
In 1954, Joan and Russ returned to the United States, leaving Gordon to sell the business. “I think we only made enough to pay for our transportation,” Joan says. “We were young and it was an adventure. We didn’t mind eating spaghetti.”
Joan and Russ settled in Lafayette in a house on Bickerstaff Road, “right behind the old Bill’s Drugs” and Russ finally began his career as a builder. “We were in it together,” Joan says. “On the weekends, we’d go off and look at houses to get ideas. We had four or five employees, and a lot of the time we couldn’t really afford to build anymore, but we kept going because we had four other mouths to feed. You have to be willing to work 24 hours a day. Russell figured the day would come when he’d be able to make, take more than two weeks vacation, but it was a long time before he got even two weeks. When you have your own business, you live, eat, and sleep it.”
“In the 50s, Russ designed all his own plans. That’s what was so good about his being a mechanical engineer. He always felt it was one of the best majors you could have because it really taught you to think, then apply the process to different things.”
For a while, Russ and his brother, Milton, who lives in Happy Valley, were building together. Then each went his own way. “Russell bought Burton Valley, and most of the houses were built by himself. Jack Marchant, John Osmundsun, or John Prentice,” Joan says. “When Russ told you a prize, that was it. Nobody could negotiate him one way or the other because he knew what he had put into it. It was a complete house.”
“There’s one place in my neighborhood that Russ built that was just remodeled. The fellow who remodeled it said it was so well built, he had trouble tearing it down. He said, you don’t find things built like that anymore, and you certainly don’t have houses made with the same materials.”
As the family grew, the Bruzzones moved to Monroe Avenue. “It was a little college with two vacant lots out front, which we built on,” Joan says. In 1958, they moved again to a park-like area off St. Mary’s Road, where Joan still lives. “We developed the area and bought our home from the Johnsons. Everything about the business was done in our home. Russell did the drawings in the dining room, and the children would hop over the plants laid out on the floor. Our first large commercial development, the Plaza Center in Lafayette, was built in 1963.” The center’s early California Spanish architecture is similar to the town and country center in Palo Alto, which the Bruzzones admired while students at Stanford. “To build the center, Russ moved 200,000 cubic yards of dirt from a hill that was 65 feet high. It took 18 months,” Joan remembers.
“Nick Trujillo, of Nick’s Barbershop, has been in the plaza since the beginning. I call him the mayor of Lafayette. Dave McCaulou (owner of McCaulou’s stores, and David M. Brian) had a junior variety store in Concord when we were building the center and looking for tenants. He was young, but we decided to take a chance on him because he was local and hands-on. He was able to make changes a regional tenant would never do. That was the part of the secret of Dave’s success. He knew exactly what his potential customers wanted.”
“We had one restaurateur who was there for 29 years. He ran Le Marquis. He was a great restaurateur, but after a while he got burned out and mortality rate for restaurants is usually three years or less.”
Russ also developed the Moraga Center in 1960s. “He bought the land from the Utah Construction Company,” Joan explains.
Joan remembers Lafayette when she first moved here. “Hinkson’s Bakery was in the block where the Roundup is. They had great breads. Mort Sparling’s pharmacy was where Starbucks is now. People went there and sat around the fountain and talked. It was like a town forum. Fred Loomis was the manager of Guy’s Drugs, which is in the center.”
“You had to have a car because there was no other form of transportation. The hike and bike trail wasn’t there. It was just a muddy track. When it rained, it was so muddy I had to take my children to school even though it was only a few blocks away.”
All the Bruzzone children graduated from Acalanes High School. All six earned college degrees and the oldest four received advanced degrees. Joan also has seven grandchildren.
“Russ wasn’t in favor of Lafayette incorporation because it added another layer of government,” Joan explains. “He felt that less government was better than more, but nothing stays the same. You get the right people in and they’ll push things forward. You can’t stop progress.”
Joan hasn’t lost her sense of adventure. A former travel agent in her spare time, she still occasionally helps people with travel ideas. Every spring for the past dozen or so years, she has visited Scotland and for the past 10 summers, she’s taken her family to Europe.
A hands-on manager, Joan is often at the Plaza Center. “There aren’t too many family-owned shopping centers anymore,” she explains. “The world has gotten to be a lot more big bucks kind of thing.” And she isn’t afraid to speak her mind. “It’s very upsetting to think taxpayers are supposed to contribute to redevelopment when there’s no real blight. I don’t think it’s right when the rest of us have to do it on our own.”
Joan enjoys having her grandchildren growing up in Lafayette and attending the same schools her children did. “It’s their heritage and their legacy,” she says proudly.
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