Summary:
Susan was born in Lafayette in 1945 and has lived here, or within 5 miles of Lafayette all of her life. In the 1930s, Ina Schmidt, her grandmother, bought property in Lafayette and developed the Lafayette Garden Estates next to what is now El Charro Restaurant. Susan remembers an area of farms, and walnut and fruit orchards. Lafayette was a close community; life was much simpler then and kids had lots of freedom to roam the area. She talks about places in town, of her activities and the gradual changes that began to take place. A fascinating view of life in early Lafayette.
Oral History:
Ryan McKinley: So this is an oral history interview for the Lafayette Historical Society, the Oral History Project. Today’s date in August 17th, 2015, the time is 11 AM, and we are in that Lafayette Historical Society room inside the Lafayette Library. If you could just state your name and spell it…
Susan Mott: My name is Susan Mott, M-O-T-T, my original name we Susan Wallace, W-A-L-L-A-C-E, and I was born in Lafayette, and I’ve lived within five miles of Lafayette all of my life, and I just turned seventy.
RM: Could you just give me the year that you were born?
SM: Oh, 1945. My family came to Lafayette in 1935 and the reason they came here is my grandmother needed to supplement their income, they had moved from San Francisco in 1909, approximately in the 1920s, they moved to Berkeley, and she needed to supplement their income and how she did that was she went door to door selling, they’re like, encyclopedias, and they’d come in a big old set, and this was what every family had to have for their children to read. She was so successful, and these would be all of your nursery rhymes, and things that you’d find in Fairyland in Oakland type things, she was so successful in her sales that she grew to the top person and was so successful that she decided, well, I think I’ll go into real estate, so she got a real estate license and she was the first woman realtor in Berkeley in the twenties, and she decided she wanted her grandchildren to grow up in the country so she came out to Lafayette and she saw some land, the land would be right next to El Charro all the way to Mt. Diablo Blvd. to the gas station and it would incorporate all the land down below, and she subdivided, well, first of all, my mom and dad, it was all walnut orchards, it was all farms, walnut orchards, there was Friendship Farms, and her property she called Lafayette Gardens Estates, so she named it Lafayette Gardens Estates… let’s see, this was my grandmother back then, Ina M. Schmidt, and this is what it looked like, this was a two lane road through Lafayette and this is what all the land looked like back then, this was the little house, it was a Cape Cod cottage and that’s where I was born, and as you can see, there’s the Lafayette Garden Estates sign and all this land, she subdivided and put in the sewers and put in the roads and all the utilities and then when my mom and dad and me and my sister lived in the little house, part of the rent money that they paid to her mother, my grandmother was to knock all the walnuts off the walnut trees, and to… you know we used to… it was quite a process, all my life, I mean a lot of my life doing this is selling them to the Walnut Creek Nut Factory…
RM: How did you do that? Did you just hit the branches and pick them up off the ground?
SM: They had long poles, they were bamboo poles, extremely long and very, very heavy, and you had to wait until the nuts, the walnut husks were almost opening and then you knocked them, I mean it was months of work, and then you’d hull them with your hands, you’d take the husks off, your hands would turn black because that’s what happens, so you’d have black hands in the summer, and then they would have big saw horses all around the property and they would have these big boards with ridges and then they would dry them out there on all these, of course rats were a little bit of a problem, they dried them for a period of time, I’m gonna say maybe a month or six weeks or so, and then they had these jute bags that they put all the walnuts in and then they sewed them up and took them to the Walnut Creek Nut Factory, and it was probably a two and a half, three month process to do this, and it was also, once they did subdivide the lots, and it was Mom and Dad’s job to sell the lots. I think at one point I found some papers that showed, my grandmother was going to build houses and sell the houses on the lots, but because of all the work of doing this, I think she gave up on that one, but my parents, eventually when I was five, they had the big house built—we called it the Big House, it was very small—this is an example of… first of all, let’s see… this was my grandmother, that’s Ina, very proud, she was president of Soroptimist, she went to England and carried her hat in a hatbox to meet the Queen. She was formidable. This is a picture of… this is me when I lived in the little house, and this is me and my two friends who are my best friends today and as a reference point, this is El Charro restaurant, so the El Charro restaurant was huge in my memories because the Garcia family, they were wonderful people, and all I’d have to do is go to the back porch and say, “Charlie, Charlie,” you know, they had these wax flowing candles in beautiful bright colors and he would save the wax for me, and then he would give me the box with the wax candles that were used up and we would take them home and let the wax melt in the sun and use it like clay and make things. Life back then was incredible. We played in the creeks, rope swings, climbed the hills, the hills were full of wildflowers, above Carol Lane we would go up in the hills up there and we would dig caves and how we didn’t get killed I have no idea, but once our chores were done on the weekend, our time was whatever, as kids we could walk to town, go to the pharmacy and have five cents for a cherry coke or a lemon coke or if we wanted to see a movie it was a dime, and you’d wait here at the park theater, wait around the corner, let’s see, where should I go next? Okay, getting back to El Charro, El Charro just had its anniversary of sixty years about five years ago or so and they had a contest of who had the best memories or El Charro and of course I won, and you can have this, that kinda tells you little bit about, you know, where I was coming from then.
RM: When you were growing up, El Charro was in a different location than it is now.
SM: No, same location. Yeah, this little house, El Charro was right here. There was a creek that ran down here, and El Charro has always been where it is now, and that parking lot behind El Charro that great big parking lot, if you were to park your car, that house is my big house they built when I was five, not big and falling apart now, but it was big then. Let’s see, so in reference, here’s Mt Diablo Blvd., it was a state highway, two lanes, and our little, let’s see, El Charro is here, I mean would be here, there was a big farm, the Daly Ranch, at one time this was the Daly Ranch, just huge farm, it had horses and chickens and all kinds of animals, our little cottage was here, we had the big house built here, this was a vacant lot for many, many, many years that they’d continued to do the walnuts, even when we moved here, this was the last plot to be sold which is now, let’s see, this would be Starbucks, and this would be 7-11 or something like that, and of course over here would be the gas station, Grandmother wanted this to be Elizabeth Avenue, but the city wouldn’t let her call it that, so they called it Dyer Drive, this was going to be Dyer Drive and this was going to be Elizabeth, but this whole thing is Dyer Drive, so all the lots were sold, and of course it was a very, very close community back then, even when they would have baby showers and things, people would gather in the walnut orchards and put chairs under all of the trees and have their little gatherings, let’s see, the next big property next to us was Friendship Farms, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Friendship Farms, if you ever go on the highway there and, as a reference, if you go down about to here, you can see it says “Friendship Farms”, this whole thing was called “Friendship Farms”, it was a beautiful property, farms, and you’ll find people don’t even know it’s there, it’s called the Orchard Gates, and they’re big, white, cement structures, and it says Lafayette Orchards, nobody notices it, but this was a huge reference point because the Greyhound bus would go on the highway and all we’d have to do is walk across the highway here and go like this, and the Greyhound bus would stop and pick us up and of course, Walnut Creek Broadway wasn’t there yet, nothing was here. If we had to do any shopping, we went to Oakland and so we’d hop on the bus, go into Oakland for the day with our gloves and our hat on, and take the bus, and then going home, we would tell the Greyhound bus driver, “Orchard Gates,” and as soon as we’d say “Orchard Gates,” they would let us off here, and it was considered a privilege of being dropped off at Orchard Gates, but it was just a neat way of getting around, equally you could get on the Greyhound bus and go to Walnut Creek, and as kids we would do that and go to the park, it was a big deal to go to Civic Park. We had a lot of freedom as kids, we got twenty-five cents a week allowance and it was amazing what we could do with that twenty-five cents.
RM: These handwritten “SOLD” signs with the process, is that your grandmother’s handwriting, or is it someone else’s? These forms there…
SM: That’s my mom, yeah, that’s my mother because my mom really was in charge of selling the lots. She was Ruth Wallace and my father was Clifford Wallace, he was a Lafayette fireman for many years, and fireman, you know traditionally, they would have, they would work for two days and have a couple days off. When he was off, he was a gardener to Henry J. Kaiser, which was the beginning of Kaiser Hospital which, his house was right on Moraga Boulevard, lovely home, before they had the Hawaii house built, and they got to go and visit them in Hawaii. Let’s see… see, there’s so much repetition, but they’re all for different purposes, so many papers had to be submitted to various people, let’s see, we had a very, very close neighborhood, and all of us kids grew up together and all of our families knew each other, it was a golden age, so we all went trick-or-treating together, and the interesting thing about this picture is these are the Ide girls, they were the only Japanese family in Lafayette, they owned Harry Ide’s Nursery, they were my friends, they were a neat, neat family, loving, kind, we’d go play in the nursery, we’d even go play up at the cemetery, and unfortunately, their father was interned after Japan, and for some reason, I never did know the reason. The kids and the mom wasn’t, and he ended up with TB for many years, and I remember him in bed in their house for many years. Very nice family. Let’s see, my parents, I can’t tell you what I went through when the passed, it’s quite incredible, but I don’t know if they’re interested in papers, now this is the end of the war, and there’s some pretty exciting things, this is the end of the war. My father worked on the bomb, before he was a fireman, he worked at Lawrence Radiation in Berkeley, and you can see, this is San Francisco, when the war ended.
RM: Is it from the San Francisco Examiner?
SM: This one’s from the San Francisco Examiner, and I think one of them is from the Oakland Tribune. This article from the Daily Gazette Berkeley Daily Gazette, shows where they built the bomb, they built the bomb in Berkeley, right here at the Lawrence Lab. These names are every name that had to do with making this bomb, and on the back, my dad’s name, Clifford Wallace is on there, but all of these people… I have some medals and some things at home that were things that were given to him as a tribute to that, that was a really horrible thing, let’s see what’s going on here, oh, this is interesting, part of what I’ve done with my life, I don’t know why I’m bringing this up, I made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, this is me, picketing the Girl Scouts, and the reason why we were doing that was I was a Girl Scout leader and organizer for Girl Scout troops in Pleasant Hill, and they wanted to raise the cost of families to pay 20 plus dollars a year for these girls to have to privilege of being a Girl Scout, and so we were picketing because the troop that I had, the kids were so poor, that they would have to do an exchange in uniforms, they couldn’t… you know, this type of thing.
RM: That’s from what year, 1970?
SM: This is 1974. Let’s see, when I was in high school, I was a candy striper over at what used to be Concord Community Hospital, I was in the band, I worked in the nurse’s office, and the Girl’s Athletic Association, I was very, very busy in high school, but one other interesting thing I did, my aunt was an artist, Catherine Hoover, and she was part of the Las Juntas Art Association, in Pleasant Hill, which was a very large artist group, and among the group was Katie Madsen, who turned out to be a national portrait artist, just famous, and because of my association with my aunt and closeness, she asked me if I wanted to be an artist’s model, and I was about a junior in high school, and I thought, oh good, and chance to relax, because I was so busy, and I did… you could probably find oodles of paintings of me, some of them I’d wear a bathing suit, and it was just for figure, some of the were just in different settings, and anyway, twenty five years after I sat, I was paid real good money too, this would be in ’62, I was getting seven to ten dollars an hour to do this but I was an expert at it, I would sit for fifteen minutes, take a five minute break, then sit for fifteen minutes, and it was kinda nice, but twenty five years later, my aunt connected with this artist who did a painting of me, and she lived up in Canada, and she made arrangements to have the painting she did of me come back to my family, and the walnut Festival, which was always a big thing in Walnut Creek, and it was down at the park, Civic Park, they always had an art show every year, and her painting of me won first place, and it was on the front page of the paper, I don’t know where it is, so when I went to school, all the kids at Acalanes said, “Oh, I saw your picture in the paper!” and all of these things, so it’s hanging on the wall in my house today, this is the painting. Let’s see, along the way, okay, another thing that the closeness of our neighborhood, all the ladies got together, a lot of them, and they created this dinosaur for a parade at lake Merritt, they had a children’s Halloween parade, and all the ladies got together and made this costume, you might say of a big dragon, and I’m right there, and here’s the little article about it.
RM: And this, do you remember when this was?
SM: Let’s see, it would have been, maybe, ’54? I’d guess ’54.
RM: And this one, was it made of fabric?
SM: Uh huh. They painted, they took fabric, it was an amazing project, they worked on it for months, they got together every week and worked on it, and then they would paint on fabric. The lady who headed it up, she was a very creative person, this is Angelo.
RM: And there’s about ten children in there walking?
SM: My sister’s in there and I’m in there. Another interesting aspect of the times is we had a newspaper. It was a local newspaper, and it was called the “Aunt Elsie Page”, and it was in the Oakland Tribune, and it would run on Sundays, and any child could submit a picture and maybe win a prize and maybe not, and I’ve always been a gardener all my life and as a child, even… I don’t know where I got the idea, but I asked my mom and dad if I could have a little piece of their yard because I want to have a garden and I was like nine years old, and so, I don’t know, no one taught me, no one showed me, no one, you know, said “Here’s some seeds, go plant”, I don’t know, I always had this kind of a thing, you know, building teepees, making bow and arrows, you know, so when I was ten, I wanted to send in a picture to the Aunt Elsie, and I said to Mom, I said, I can’t think of what to draw a picture of, and she said, “Well, Suzie, draw a picture of your garden”, and so I did, and I sent it in, I didn’t win a prize, and this was my garden when I was ten.
RM: Did you have a scarecrow as well?
SM: Yes, I was one of those kids, you know, even when I was twelve, I was… I made a paper-mache witch for the front porch, with the crepe-paper hair and the nose and the whole thing, and then the next year, I did this picture and I won a prize, I don’t remember what it was exactly, but that was another thing I loved to do was fish.
RM: Where did you go fishing?
SM: We would go fishing at White’s Pier, I had a neighbor who rented the cottage, it was still there when Mom and Dad moved into the big house they rented it to the Lorcher family, and Mr. Lorcher would pile us kids in the back of his truck and drive us to Martinez around there to the… there would be Port Costa, and Whit’s Pier would be between Martinez and Port Costa, and there was a pier, and for a small sum of money, you could go fishing there, and we would catch flounder. They were delicious, wonderful. So that started my fishing, so I always went up to Cache Creek or different places to fish, I mean there’s nothing better.
RM: These drawings are from ’56 and ’57 then? And so was it a single page in the newspaper, or was it a whole thing?
SM: It was… I think you’d have a comics page, and then it would be like the lower part. It was called “Aunt Elsie”, Elsie was a cow, I think. At a certain point, my sister, you’ll probably know about this house, my sister bought one of the oldest houses in Lafayette, and this is, she lived and died in this house. This house is, if you go up Carol Lane, and make a right hand turn onto Moraga, or what is the name of that street?
RM: Here it says the house is on Moraga Blvd.
SM: Okay, make a right hand turn, you go over a bridge, there’s a creek, this house sits right there, as a child I went to a birthday party there, it was the Ginty’s owned the house, and I believe the house at one time was a bran on a huge, huge farm and it was converted, here’s all the specs on it, I know the lady who lives in the house today and she was part of the historical society, and this is also about the house, and you can have this.
RM: So your address is 3306 Moraga Blvd.
SM: Uh huh. I think over the years they proved that this house was the oldest and there’s another one I think that’s on the road that goes from the heart of Lafayette to Rheem or out that way…
RM: I think that’s Moraga, yeah.
SM: Yeah, Windy Road.
RM: Do you know when they decided to call the entire lane Dyer Drive?
SM: When they were parceling out the lots, my grandmother was arguing with whoever that she wanted it to be Elizabeth and they said no so they actually, there’s another street across the highway, that very little street and it’s called Elizabeth Street, because she didn’t get it for her property but…
RM: 1942, is that when she purchased everything?
SM: ’42, that’s interesting. ’42, that’s a good question, because Mom and Dad lived there from the ‘30’s… let’s see, they were married in ’36, that’s a good question. Does it say what the property is or does it say land or…
RM: This is just an inspection report on Lafayette Gardens that’s stamped in 1942.
SM: Might have something to do with… that date sounds like when the parcels were parceled because Mom and Dad lived there since, like, in the late ‘30’s, and I was born in 1945 and I was five before the big house was built, so that would have been 1950…
RM: So it could have been, it was owned as a giant section for long before that and in ’42 they got started doing… okay.
SM: Yeah, that would make sense. That would make sense.
RM: What did your grandmother do before she bought all the property?
SM: Yeah, she was a realtor, she was very successful realtor and a real go-getter, and that was back in the days where people didn’t have a lot of money, she was a realtor so long ago that people didn’t have the money always to pay the realtor the fees, so people would pay her with Persian rugs and, you know, different things, my daughter, she’s curator of rare books at Cornell, and in her lovely home back there she got the Persian rugs from my grandmother, and she was a very clever person, she would wheel and deal with people, and she was in real estate for a very long time, it’s just an interesting, the whole thing is very interesting, both of my sides of the family came to America in the late 1700’s, and it’s quite an incredible thing, you know I have a great-great-grandfather that sold gunpowder to George Washington, it was a very long line, my grandmother was matched up with her husband, that’s what was done back then, for money, her family had money and matched her up with Otto Schmidt who was actually adopted by Julia Schmidt who owned Julia Schmidt Pharmaceuticals, which later became Johnson and Johnson, but, along the way, there was no inheritance there because legally, he was never adopted, and they had two of their own children, but the whole history is just incredible, going back there, I have so much of the history of the Whisners and Higbees and Wallaces, it’s just fabulous, but the history here in Lafayette is incredible, there’s no space that you wouldn’t be, I mean we kids were everywhere. This town was ours; if you wanted to roller-skate, we would walk to Lafayette Elementary School and roller-skate up and down the halls on the weekend. There was a little library near Lafayette School, there was a little library and the librarians were Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs. Dix. They were fabulous, they would know everybody that came in there as children. “Hi, Susie, Hi Mary, how are you today? What would you like to read today?” And she would take us over to the children’s books, now this was… we were very young, we were six, seven years old, walking into town… my mom didn’t drive, my dad was working in Berkeley, we were just everywhere and so she started me out, “I think you’d like this, Susie”, and she started me out with the Bobbsey Twins. You wouldn’t know that book, it’s very, very basic child’s book, then when I read all of the Bobbsey Twin books, she said, “Well, I think you would like this,” and there was always something to do that was so full and so interesting that children today have no opportunity, they’re hovered over and taken, you know, they don’t have the sense of freedom of being, you know, I was always… I knew people from miles around in every house because I was always selling something, candy for the band, something for the scouts, cookies, it was always like, “Oh hey Susie, what are you selling today?”, and they would always buy whatever I’d have. It was quite a place to grow up, but it was so wonderful because things were so peaceful and calm, parents didn’t have to worry about harm to their children or anything, and I think the only thing… there was a time I got to be about eighteen, I wanted out of Lafayette, the people in Lafayette never wanted to grow or expand, not that that’s good necessarily because Walnut Creek has gotten out of hand, but I bought my first home when I was 21, my grandmother passed, and she left me $37,000, and I bought my first home right over the hill from Lafayette, you know, where Lunardi’s is? I bought a house up there, on the hill, for $22,000, and I still live in this neighborhood in the house next door, ‘cause it was bigger and I had a couple kids, so I’ve been in that house for forty, some odd years, so I never got very far, I think it’s quite unusual to spend seventy years in such a close area, but that’s it.
RM: I’m curious, as you were growing up, did you notice things start to develop since you said when you were younger it was almost entirely farms, when do you remember things starting to…
SM: Well, when the people bought the lots and built their homes, then it became, it changed, because it was so, I did enjoy the horses, there weren’t any cows, I know there was a chicken, I don’t think it was startling, I think it was a gradual… Lafayette didn’t change real fast, and that last parcel of land was still there for many, many years. I didn’t really feel the change because our boundaries were so far that we didn’t just stay in our neighborhood, you know, we were up on the hills, even, I don’t know if you know where that fire just happened in Lafayette, up in the hills, there’s a whole hill above BART, there they had a big fire about a month ago, even those hills. We were up there catching butterflies with our nets, and our boundaries were so far that it didn’t really affect us, we walked so far, all the time, all of the schools that I went to, we basically walked, other than when I was in a very small elementary school, and then when I went to Springhill School, we did have a bus, but that was for two years, but to Stanley School, we walked every day, we’d have to start walking at seven in the morning to get there by eight, when I went to Acalanes, we had to walk to Acalanes, you know, it was just part of what we did, on our bicycles, we were all over the place. I remember as a child walking up and down the highway all the time, and that was the days when everybody smoked, and so people threw their cigarette packages out of their car, now this is a dusty little two-lane road, and we’d make up these games, like every time we’d see a cigarette package we’d step on it, and if we found one that said “Lucky Strike” on it, that gave us extra bonus points, and I mean they were all over the road, we’d make up these silly games, you know. We were outside all the time, we weren’t in the house. Once our chores were done on the weekend, we were out of there. Our parents didn’t even know at twelve years old, we’d save up our allowance, our parents didn’t even know we were up on the highway, catching a Greyhound bus, going to Oakland, going to Fairyland, we’d have a great day, come back, we’d always have to be home by five, “Did you have a nice day, Susie?” “Yeah, I had a really nice day!”, and they never even knew we were in Oakland doing these things, and we never got into trouble, we were so fortunate, you know, I might be coming home on the Greyhound bus, and there was one thing, there were maids, there were people in Lafayette that had maids, and they were African American so they’d be on the buses, and sometimes I’d fall asleep on the bus and I’d find myself in some man’s… Change came very slow to Lafayette, I mean it’s so different now, it’s so affluent, we didn’t have a television until I was… oh let’s see, I might have been thirteen, and then in high school, one of my friends got a color TV, and we went over to their house, there’s ten of us, waiting to see this peacock spread its… this was like, “Oh my God”! We weren’t spoiled, we were lucky if we had two pairs of shoes, you know, I wore my sister’s hand-me-downs, and our needs were not what they are today, we weren’t spoiled, and we lived very frugally, and that was passed on from my generation, I still go to thrift stores, I bought baby clothes at thrift stores, it’s just a way of life, it’s a way of not wasting things, and if there’s a use… it’s hard for people to even live anymore, I mean with the fancy cars and the things that they think they really need that they really don’t need to be happy. One of my favorite things to do is to drive to Canyon just to smell the redwood trees, it’s hard to imagine that whole hill area going onto Oakland was all redwood trees. Can you imagine, so beautiful. People are so fortunate to be able to live here because we’re near any place you’d wanna go, you know, the beach, the redwoods, everything, it’s just… one of my favorite places is Pacific Grove, it’s just beautiful. The air is so much fresher.
RM: Growing up, when you caught the (?), was the tunnel here already, or did you go through the… ?
SM: Oh yes, let me see, when was that tunnel put through? Because, see, the tunnel had to be there, when my mom and dad lived in Oakland what brought them first out to Lafayette was they had dances, and I almost wanna say Moraga, there was a barn where they had dances, it was a bar and a dance place, and that’s what brought them out here, the word was out that that was a really great place to dance and have a good time, and I think my mom encouraged my grandfather to come out and look, back in the ‘30’s, and grandma liked what she saw because she raised her kids in San Francisco next to the park where it was always foggy and cold, she referred to her girls as always having blue legs, and so that’s when she moved to Berkeley, but she was quite taken… she just really wanted her grandchildren to grow up not in a city, and she was a character, she traveled all over the world, there’s no place she didn’t go, she just… I wish I had her energy, I tell you. It was fun, we’d walk down… my friend Mary, who lived across the street, her father was also a fireman, and the reason my dad became a fireman is we had a fire at our house, and somehow, it was in my mom and dad’s closet, this was the day where you had a closet and you had a chain to pull the light on inside your closet, and they had a down sleeping bag up in their closet, apparently someone forget to turn out the light and the down sleeping bag fell on the light bulb and it started a fire, and when the neighbors saw the smoke coming out of the house, and my dad was out in the yard working, he ran in the house, and somehow because of the fire causing a whoosh or whatever it was, he got trapped somehow, and so Mary, my friend across the street, her father, who is a fireman, was home at the time and he came over and dragged my dad out of the house, so after that happened my dad decided, “I would like to be a fireman”, so in those days, all you had to do was go to a firehouse and say, “I wanna sign up”, because he had never been to college, now they did send him to school of course, they had training and school, so Mary and I both had fireman as fathers so we could walk to town and visit our fathers at the firehouse, at this time it was on Moraga Road, of course you know, and so we’d go down and visit our dad, they’d put us up in the fire trucks and ring the bells and all this stuff, and so we were very much a part of the town, you know, we were just… the town was so us, there was nothing we hadn’t stuck our nose in, you know, before the Greyhound bus station moved to near where the firehouse was, okay, the Greyhound bus station was right next to the firehouse on Moraga, so my dad would pull these stunts, he’d go in, there was this elderly couple that ran it, real crabby, can’t remember what their names were, but my dad would run in there and say “Hey, what time does the ten o’clock bus get here?”, you know, pranks like that. One time at the firehouse, my father had an electric blanket, and because there was seven other guys all sleeping in the room snoring and all these things, he had wax earplugs in his ears, he woke up, and there was a flash of flames. Well, his electric blanket had caught on fire, and the guys all got up and got the extinguisher and put out the fire and all that, and the chief was so angry, because, you know, he was the only one with an electric blanket, and he endangered the lives of all the other guys in there, so the next week my dad went out and bought another electric blanket and went into the chief’s office and said, “Hey, what do you think of my new electric blanket?” He had a sense of humor that was… he liked to pull chains. Let’s see, growing up, our favorite vacation was every other year, we went to Yosemite and we stayed at Camp 16, which was tent cabins, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about it, but it’s no longer there, it had its own little store, and it was right along the river there, what’s that river called, Merced River? And they were just tent cabins with wood floors and outside it had a wood-burning stove and a table and chairs, and that was it, we could see the firefalls, and we’d go to the dumps to watch the bears, and the bears would come at night and you could hear people screaming, so we did that every other year, that was our thing, and then every other year, we’d go up to Portland, Oregon to see my dad’s parents, it wasn’t until I was probably a teenager that we started changing things out a little bit, and Hawaii became my favorite place, but that of course has changed since 1958. That’s when Honolulu was something else, it was just unimaginable how beautiful and wonderful it was. My kids went to Larkey Elementary all their young years because we were two blocks from the Lafayette border and two blocks from the Walnut Creek School District border, so my kids were in the Mount Diablo school district, so Larkey is no longer there, it’s now a Christian school, very high-priced one, so they basically went there for those years, and then Pleasant Hill High School, and then they closed Pleasant Hill High School when my daughter was a sophomore, and she was going to have to go to… Ignacio Valley, maybe, and I didn’t want then to have to go so far out there, so I did a little thing and got them into Los Lomas, so they went to Los Lomas. I probably could have gotten them into Acalanes, which is one of the most fabulous schools in the whole wide world, it always has been and it always will be, no, it is true, people that came here in the 70’s, they think, oh, you know, I’ve been here a long time, or something, you know, it’s not… to live in the same place this long, I mean it’s really incredible, and not to ever move away for… I retired from the insurance business, I was an insurance agent for 32 years and I always made sure that my office was just a few miles from home because I wanted to be there for my kids, and it’s such a privilege because some people are on the road for hours a day commuting, I don’t know how they live or have a life. My mother… every day when I came home from school, she either had cookies made, or a cake or a pie, she was the ultimate homemaker, I mean constantly… Dad constantly polishing the wood floors, and we had chores to do, I remember cleaning windows as a young child, sometimes we cold pick, you know, rake the leaves that are this deep, you know, from the oak tree in the back yard, or do you wanna do windows or do you wanna clean the bathroom, and I did ‘em all and you get tired of all of them, you know?
RM: Was there a local grocery store and things like that?
SM: Let’s see, the only grocery store that was here was across from the fire department, there was a grocery store there, on Moraga.
RM: Kind of where the bank and the La Fiesta Square is.
SM: Yeah, a little bit farther down but was a market, it was a fairly good size, it wasn’t like a mom-and-pop, and of course in those days we didn’t have soda, I mean soda pop, there was no bottles, cans, they did have glass bottle that you could buy a a gas station if you were traveling, or something, that was considered a real treat, but we drank Kool-Aid, I mean that was the thing, you know, Kool-Aid, any snacks that we would have, we’d have carrots or celery or something like that, we didn’t have chips or crackers, things were very different that way, I remember as a child eating horsemeat, and lamb, breast of lamb, because they were very cheap, it’d like ten cents a pound, or something like that, I had a friend that lived, that hill I’m talking about that just had the fire, there was a little farm up there that was on the hill and Sylvia had a couple horses and rabbits and chickens and all that so I’d go up to her house and we would ride horses, but the only thing I can remember about animals per se is when there was still the Mars’ farm behind us, I was very young, I was maybe five and six, and I recall how they would slaughter the chickens is they would tie the feet of the chicken upside down on the clothesline and then they would cut the head off and then the nerves of the chicken would let it go around and around the clothesline and bleed it, bleed it out, and I remember being disgusted as a child, you know, to that whole thing, and it seemed like there was a barn structure on the property that they didn’t know, it was a structure on their land that nobody went to, it was just kind of a structure and they didn’t know it, but me and my friends, we’d sneak behind it and we had our whole little clubhouse set up in there, you know, we’d fix tables and seats and things, we were always figuring out something to do. I remember the flood, one year, it was maybe March or something like that, it started raining and it just didn’t stop, it just, every day, every night, week after week, after week, it was the darnedest thing, and that’s when Broadway in Walnut Creek flooded, and you’d see pictures in the paper of boats, you know, Walnut Creek used to have flooding there, they don’t anymore, but I remember that, but it was very exciting when Broadway came, it was very different of course when it was first built, but it had Penny’s and it had Anita’s and it was just quite a deal, and then there was Capwell’s and there was a little eating place in Capwell’s and just a fabulous thing, and Capwell’s had a basement where cheaper things were that we would shop at. It was a big deal, there wasn’t too much in Lafayette as far as, other than the pharmacy that was where Starbuck’s is now on that corner…
RM: By that Roundup bar?
SM: Yeah, the Roundup bar was, let me tell you, my mother would get so distraught with my dad, he always said the best times he’s ever had in his whole life was in the Roundup. My mom would get all riled up, but you know, back then, for being such a small, small town, they had five bars downtown, they had two on that side, they had three on this side, and they did a big business too. People loved the bars, but then on that corner there near the Roundup, that was where the pharmacy was. In the pharmacy was a fountain where you sat on stools, you know, you picture, and then you could order a cherry Coke or a lemon Coke or whatever, and all the boys would sit against the front looking at comic books, you know, they didn’t say you couldn’t look at the magazines, all the boys would be there doing that, and then it was also a pharmacy and they knew all of us kids, and then there was a dime store, a five-and-dime store, and that’s where we would buy our penny candies, I mean, boy, that was bad, we were bad on that, but otherwise there just really wasn’t much, there was maybe one gas station, the Shell gas station, Mel Neilson owned it and he was also the mayor of Lafayette… just not much here, it’s amazing they even had a library, you know, a small town as it was, so that’s about it, I can’t think of anything else.
RM: Interview ends at 12:30 PM, and the interviewer was Ryan McKinley.
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