I’ve heard somewhere that there are cells in the brain that when activated can recreate an experience so vivid that the body responds as it did to the original… or as it would were the event actually taking place. That may explain, in part at least, the “willing suspension of disbelief” that theatre, reading, story telling, and movies invoke.
It may also have something to do with my being able to inhabit the house I grew up in, and its environs, as if I were still there. As if it were still there.
My parents bought that house in 1945 from a Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. (They had first names, too, but my brain cells aren’t recreating the audible as well as they are the visual and spacial.) It sat at the junction of South Mathilda Avenue and El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, California. It was build in 1925, and was designed to turn the corner graciously, with the front door facing Mathilda and the breakfast room door facing El Camino. My parents paid twenty thousand for the house and an acre or so of land, a price that scandalized the town. It turned out okay, though.
They lived at the corner location for a couple of years, then bought a bit of orchard a half block away from Dom and Annie Musso, cleared it, and moved the house. The corner was leased to Shell Oil for a gas station even though there were other brands of gas already being peddled on two of the other corners of the intersection; that was post-war suburban America – cars were big and needed oil. Lots of it. Dad built his garage on what remained of the property. Then, ready for anything, they had me.
When our house was set down from the movers’ blocks, Mathilda Avenue was a two-lane road cut through apricot and cherry orchards. Next door to the south the Musso’s had their house, then there was a bit of orchard owned by Nick and Annie Lepesh, their house, an orchard that surrounded a third house, and finally the Richfield gas station on the corner. Behind all the houses and orchards, and where a street should have been, was more orchard, then a solid row of houses along Taaffe Street that marked the western limit of that section of town.
And that’s the way it stayed for my early years of childhood. Sunnyvale was a sleepy agricultural burg, population five thousand. There were three grocers, one post office, and four banks. And in anticipation of what would come to be called The Baby Boom, four elementary, one middle, and two high schools. I can walk that town in my mind as it was in the fifties, and with lots of detail firmly in place. And I can see the inside of the house we lived in from before there was television, when the hearth was still the heart of the home.
In January of 1951, I was standing in my mother’s arms at the front window in the living room looking at the sky.
“Lorraine says it’s tornado weather, and that we should watch out.” I don’t know how I remember this so vividly, I was fourteen months old, and didn’t begin to talk until eighteen months. “She says that if a funnel comes down and it seems to move, we’re not in its path. If it seems to stay still, we go down the basement.” And there in the west a funnel formed out of the grey overcast, and moved rather rapidly to where grandma Zarko lived. We watched. It shifted towards the part of town to the north of us and moved out of sight. Mom called her mother-in-law. She was fine, but her neighbors across the street and about fifty feet to the west had the front of their house taken off.
Stanley Golas, who lived with his wife Bernice in a “tank house” in the orchard between the Lepesh’s and the Richfield station, took movies of the damage the tornado inflicted to downtown. They later bought a real house just behind where the tank house was, and we were often invited for supper and home movies. I’m guessing that my parents flinched at every invitation, but I loved it. We’d always be shown his film on the tornado damage, and for my delight, Stan would run the footage of the Dayliner passenger train coming into station – then run it backwards. After the first couple of times, the novelty had worn off for me, but not for Stan!
A tank house, by the way, was a house build into the four struts that held up a wooden water tank used to irrigate an orchard. Theirs was three stories; a kitchen on the ground level, a bedroom on the second, and a sitting room and bath tucked under the tank itself. The rooms were tiny. Everything in them was down to scale. To a little kid, it was paradise.
Not too long after the tornado, Stan made a movie of Mathilda Avenue taken from his Ford station wagon. He got most of the neighbors onto the side of the road to wave as he passed. I’m there in my mother’s arms again, emoting enthusiastically for the camera. Later that year, Mathilda was paved, and things began to change. The firehouse downtown was closed, and relocated to the new Public Safety Headquarters across the street from us and a little to the north. Stan shot footage of the building’s dedication. It featured young women, in high heels and one-piece bathing suits with prisoners’ stripes, demurely exiting the old jail box (that had been hauled into place for the event) and parading into the new, improved, cellblock. I kid you not. They even wore prisoner-stripe pillbox hats.
The new headquarters also boasted a siren. A very loud siren that went off whenever the firetrucks were called to duty. During the years of duck and cover, it would sound periodically to get us used to the idea of intercontinental ballistic missiles zooming in onto Moffett Field Naval Air Base, with the incinerated town as collateral damage.
That opening ceremony at Public Safety was soon followed by the modernization of downtown and the installation of Sunnyvale Plaza, a shopping center. To make room for this development, the old Murphy School was demolished, and in its place was erected a Hart’s department store with two floors above ground and a basement. When they dug the basement – and those of the other large stores in the complex – they needed somewhere to put the dirt. So, tractors came and took out the orchard behind our house (the orchard ran the length of the block) and dumped the dirt into dozens of piles, The piles quickly sprouted weeds, and provided me and my friends with a setting for adventures that never grew old. The Hills, we called them. They remained in place for three summers, the vegetation becoming ever more evocative and lush. There were hills for lookouts, hills for forts, valleys for hiding places, trails to be named, summits to scale, and a landscape to explore that seemed to us to be endless. And appropriately enough, during the final days of our perfect playground – and as we headed for puberty – one of us discovered the remains of a girly magazine. It held our fascination for days.
Almost as good as The Hills were the apartments-under-construction that replaced them. But they marked a point of no return for Sunnyvale. Within a short period of time, we also saw several new churches put up, a new library complex, and a new city hall directly across the street from our house. The construction sites were neither guarded nor well fenced, so we got to stand on the altars of the churches, rampage through the new council chambers, and climb up to evaluate the apartments even before there were interior walls. And the paved Avenue gained two more lanes, gobbling up thirteen feet of our front yard, and was enhanced with sidewalks.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Silicon Valley was taking shape.
Photo: a postcard from the 1950’s