Bob Balmanno
Sunnyvale Memories

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My family came to Sunnyvale, my parents, in 1943.  There were 5 children in our family. My oldest brother was eight years older than me and my youngest brother was eight years younger than me, so we were spread apart age-wise.

And where I grew up was on Vine Street which at that time, in the early 50s, was the edge of Sunnyvale, when it was about 9,000 people. When my parents came it was about 5,000 people, in '43.

Some of my first memories are of the orchards that expanded all the way out; radiated out from the hub of the town which was at that time very small.

And my first year going to Saint Martin's School, which had just opened not long before that, I was actually walking out the back door through an orchard to get to school.

One of my best memories from the 50s about the orchards is going from El Camino in Sunnyvale to Saratoga on the Sunnyvale-Saratoga Road which was seven miles and there wasn't a single commercial or residential area, except for a couple of old houses and the Donut Wheel in Cupertino.

And there's still a doughnut place there.  It used to be an old rickety place and that was the only structure 'til you got right to downtown Saratoga.  Seven miles of straight orchard.

The orchards on this side of town were more cherry and apricot, and as we went down towards the Bay, the ground turned around Maude Avenue or Duane towards a darker hue. You could actually see it at one point. It was a brown then it turned this grayish color. The grayish area was where they grew pears and tomatoes.

One of my first memories was in about '57 when they had the great flood. Well, for two weeks it rained very hard. They had just finished Lakewood Village. We- our family, my older brothers and my father- we had built a boat from scratch, a sixteen-foot boat and I was very unhappy because he wouldn't let me go out to go through the streets in Lakewood Village in the boat to see if there was anybody there.

Actually, only a few people had just moved in, it was 98% not inhabited yet, but it was just when they had built it. There were about three or four feet of water out there because of the flooding; the ground just got saturated and the water went down and the Old Highway 101 had about 6 inches of water going across it just constantly because of the inundation of the water. And back then the water table, which has decreased over time, was very high below the Valley.

I remember as a child playing at the Old Murphy House. We used to call it a haunted house, and my understanding is that it was the first frame house ever constructed in California.

It was shipped from New England, broken down into parts in 1849, put on a boat and it went around the Horn because there was no Panama Canal then, brought back here, ported at Alviso, brought over and reassembled. And at that time it was the only frame house in all of California. So when it was torn down I thought it was a great loss, really unfortunate. The explanation still to this day is that it was a fire hazard, which I believe is a cover for other reasons why they destroyed it. It was a loss of the most historical building we had. Very regrettable.

Wheat was grown in this valley in the 1870s and 1880s, and harvested with a whole bunch of horses harnessed together, pulling huge threshing machines that were about 40 feet long.

And the first orchards were planted by Italians that came in the 1890s. By 1910 farming was a huge thing, a huge success so the valley was completely covered with orchards.

And because the orchards came in, the canneries were built. There were two big canneries: Shuckl's and Libby's. Libby's, up until the 1930s, was the largest cannery in the world, in Sunnyvale. After that some larger ones were built in San Jose.

Libby's was built out of wood originally. There was a huge fire I think in the early 40s or late 30s, where half of it burnt down. They re-built that half out of metal and brick. And then the second half was burned down in the early 60s. There was a huge fire, the biggest fire, in there and I remember seeing it as a child, sitting out on the front lawn on a hot summer night with all the neighbors- even though it was a half a mile away- watching it burn down.

But the Valley very quickly went from being fields of orchards to being high tech and electronics and other things. FMC and Lockheed were the big ones coming before the electronics, and the electronics came in. That all happened in the 60s, within one decade.

Anyway, when I was about 19 I got a chance to study abroad and I didn't come back home 'til I was 26. At that time I was living abroad in both Europe and Africa and when I came back I decided that I wanted to become a writer so I stayed at home all that time and I've been writing since then because I had family and friends close by.

And since that time I saw Lockheed come in and be a huge employer of over 20,000 people and that really made a big difference. During that time, that's when a lot of the housing came in and that was a big change there. And also, then you have the beginning of the start-ups in the electronic industry. The term Silicon Valley was coined to express the changes in this area.

There were a lot of high-tech and electronic industries in the area, but at that time the culture was very different. People who worked there were young and had long hair, they drove old Volkswagen Bugs and beat up vehicles and there was this notion of it being kind of an anti-materialistic crusade; technological things were still part of the counter culture in the 60s. This included people who had started up these places and so forth.

In fact when you look at the transition from all of the people working in the canneries in the area there was a sense that the people who worked in the assembly lines were seen as following exactly in their mother’s footprints. Instead of working in the canneries where they were sorting fruit they were working in the high-tech places sorting the components and so forth. There was a very strong sense of that continuation going on.