Summary:
Percy and Tom Whitten, father and son, were interviewed by Julie Sullivan in November 2005. In 1960 Tom and wife Patricia settled in Lafayette. In that same year his parents bought 4 lots on Lafayette Circle and built apartments on them. For six decades up to the present day members of this family have been active as landlords and real estate developers in the downtown area. They also raised cherry trees, dawn redwoods, and Monterey pines, and helped restore the Town Hall Theatre and other historic buildings.
Oral History:
When you admire the flowering cherry trees at the intersection of St. Mary’s Road and Glenside, the Monterey Pines near Stanley School, or the Dawn Redwoods at St. Mary’s College and a dozen other places around the area, you’re looking at Percy Whitten’s legacy. All these trees were his gifts, but perhaps his most visible gift is the Jennie Bickerstaff Redwood in front of Diablo Foods. Percy didn’t plant it, but in the 1970’s when the city wanted to cut it down, he stood in their way.
“We had a big fire in the store in 1976,” explains Tom, Percy’s son. “Part of the tree was badly burned and looked awful, and the city wanted to cut it down. My dad knew that the one tree that would come back after a forest fire was the Redwood. After a couple of years, it turned into a beautiful tree. My dad was a visionary,” Tom says proudly.
Percy was born in San Francisco in 1897 and grew up in Berkeley. After attending high school, he worked in the shipyards during World War II. “Before that, he worked for a lumber company and got interested in construction,” Tom says. “He built some stores in Berkeley. When I was born in 1931, he had a little ‘mom and pop’ store there with living quarters above it. We came out to Walnut Creek for two years from 36 to 38, where my parents had forty acres. My father operated a grocery store kind of where Target is now, in the general area of the walnut factory.”
Tom’s mother was a nurse at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, where coincidentally Tom’s future wife, Patricia, also worked as a nurse. Tom graduated from UC Berkeley in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering and earned a masters in Civil Engineering there in 1953. He and Patricia settled in Lafayette in 1960 soon after they were married.
“My parents came to Lafayette about the same time we did,” Tom remembers. “My dad bought four lots on Lafayette Circle and built the Whitten Manor apartments at #101. I did the design. I bought the middle lot there, and my wife and I lived in an old house for several years.” Tom and Patricia moved to their present house in Lafayette in 1963. Tom worked for the State of California for 38 years in building inspection before retiring in 1992. They have two sons, Bruce and Jim, and four grandchildren. Tom has one brother, Bill, who also lives in Lafayette.
“In 1964, my dad bought the lot on Mt. Diablo Boulevard from Jennie Bickerstaff which is now Diablo Foods. The only thing on it at that time was her house (and the Redwood tree),” Tom remembers. “The biggest shock to my dad when he started construction was she had never hooked up to the sewer system. He built the grocery store there around 1965 and rented it to an outfit (U Save, then Lee Brothers). Ed Stokes (owner of Diablo Foods) worked for them. My dad thought the property was an excellent location for a commercial building, and having been in the grocery business, he knew the tenants. He did quite a bit of development in those days.
“Originally, he owned the property where Fiesta Square is. Then he decided the taxes and the bank loan were pretty expensive, so he sold it. He kept the property on the other side of the street where Petar’s is. He sold the Cakebox bakery, which is still in Fiesta Square, to the people who operated it,” Tom explains. “The property originally consisted only of what is inside the square. It used to have stores all down the middle of the square, and the creek used to run through it. They filled that all in, but the creek is still there by Petar’s. There used to be a creek right through where Diablo Foods is now.
“My dad also built the building where the Lafayette Health Club is, 85 Lafayette Circle, and the building where Dallas & Company hair salon is on Hough Street. They were originally small stores. After my parents moved to the area, they lived in Whitten Manor. My dad never had an office. He had two apartments. He lived in one and had the back one for his office.”
Percy’s fascination with building continued into the mid-1970’s, when he was almost 80. “He expanded an eight-unit apartment building to sixteen units,” Tom says. In 1974, Percy was named Lafayette Citizen of the Year, and in 1992 the city issued a special proclamation honoring him on his 95th birthday. Percy passed away in 1995.
“My dad was quiet, but he had a very dry sense of English humor,” Tom remembers. “One of his hobbies was the Dawn Redwood tree. He sent them to school districts all over the state, to the state capitol and the governor’s mansion. A professor from Cal Berkeley got fossils of the seeds from China and grew the trees, then taught my dad how to grow them. My dad also grew Monterey Pines, which he gave to the Lafayette, San Ramon, Moraga and Orinda school districts. At the end of World War II, he bought timber property in Humboldt County, anticipating the building boom that was about to happen. Then he reforested it. He was an early pioneer in that effort.
“The Department of Forestry wanted people to clear an area and plant the trees in rows, but my dad wouldn’t do that. His theory was to plant them in the brush because it protected them from deer. When they got big enough to be removed from the brush, the deer left them alone because they were too hard. The Department of Forestry gave the seedlings out for free in the spring, but he had to buy them in fall. He was the first to plant the seedlings then. My dad lived long enough to see Humboldt College bring students to his property to see the way he grew the trees.
“For many years, my parents had forty acres in south Walnut Creek on Castle Hill Road that my dad bought in the 20’s. When we lived in Berkeley, that was our get-away home. Everybody had their summer homes by the Walnut Creek. A friend of theirs wanted to buy half of it, twenty acres, and it was quite a hassle because back then nobody ever bought such a ‘small’ parcel. Today there are over forty homes on that property.”
Tom remembers raising walnuts. “We knocked them down with bamboo poles. You could tell a kid whose family raised walnuts, because his hands were all black from the husks. The only place you could sell them was to Diamond in Walnut Creek. We put them on trays, got the husks off and let them dry.
“I saw my first color movie, Snow White, at the Walnut Creek movie theater in 37 or 38. Mt. Diablo Boulevard ended at Main Street then. The nut place was where Target is today. We used to be fascinated, because they unloaded the nuts on the other side of what is now California Boulevard and a conveyor belt ran overhead to the factory.”
As an adult, Tom used to catch the Greyhound bus to go into San Francisco. “The station was where Campana’s Music is. Downstairs was the ticket office and upstairs was a home. The buses used to go around the building. That was the only way to get to the city until they put BART in.”
Tom was on the board and served as president of the Old Town Hall building in the mid-1970’s. “We tried to preserve the building, which was originally built on mud. We put in a concrete foundation. The back room used to be nothing but mud, and we put a slab in there. The Dramateurs, who ran the plays, didn’t have much money, and neither did we. We did a lot of volunteer work.”
Today, Tom’s brother owns the buildings where Petar’s and Dallas are located, and Tom owns the Diablo Foods property.
Tom remembers Lafayette’s early personalities. “Petar had an old wooden building on the north side of Mt. Diablo that was torn down. He was quite a character, the old European style who’d kiss all the ladies on the hand. Charming, very charming and always dressed very nicely. He was originally the maitre d’ at Bimbo’s in San Francisco. It was famous when I was a kid because it had the nude in the fish bowl. It was on Columbus, if I recall. Somehow or other with photography, they would project an image, not too clear an image, of a mermaid swimming around in this giant fish bowl.
“Cape Cod House was very upscale, and the Planter’s Dock restaurant on the hill by the Jewish Temple had a big waterfall. My kids used to raise tomatoes for the Seafood Grotto. They put them in a wagon and hauled them to the restaurant.”
Tom remembers taking a helicopter from Lafayette to SFO. “It wasn’t expensive, because the airlines underwrote the cost. When I was a kid, there was a drive-in restaurant, the El Nido, near where Orchard Nursery is today. My family used to drive out here from Berkeley for hamburgers.”
He remembers BART and incorporation as “huge changes” for Lafayette. “The commuter association was opposed to BART. At the time, the cost seemed high; now it seems like a good idea. We thought if they could land people on the moon, they could uncouple the cars of the train, take people to their homes, and hook the cars back up. We were ahead of our time.”
Tom has noticed an increase in the number of apartments in Lafayette. “There were hardly any in the 1960’s. Even the little streets near the schools have more multi-family buildings. There will be pressure to build more apartments. I see gradual growth. We’ll become more of a city.”
Excerpted from “Voices of Lafayette” by Julie Sullivan. This book is available for purchase in the History Room.
Leave a Reply