City of Sunnyvale

(Denise) We remember Sunnyvale looking a lot different than it does today. Including this court, it looks a lot different. But anyway we came here and lived in this house and my father landscaped and put in these bricks and everything.

As a child here it was a lot of fun because the neighborhood ended right over here, I could show you, and it was just orchards. That was our playground, where the orchards were. And my two friends lived right across the street there and that was just one lawn across. And our big thrill was to throw a ball over the wire, which you can't see, and we used to do that for hours.

(Nancy) And you went to the cherry orchards, which were in back of the houses here.

(Denise) There was a cherry orchard over there. Actually there were walnut orchards over there and there were three houses. Then at the end of my street was my school and beyond that were more orchards. That's where the cherry orchards were. And we used to pick cherries. Once we got in trouble and we had to drop the cherries and run out of the orchard.

(Denise) If there weren't orchards, there were fields and we used to take boards and just float, you know make little boats when it rained. In the wintertime the grass would be really high and we'd just play in the fields and it was great to have this as a playground. There was one little store down there, Holiday Market, that we could go to.

(Nancy) It was the closest store we could go to. At that time you could not walk to any stores except for that. There were no department stores close by. The Library was on Murphy Street. It was a little storefront library that was rather sad. And just after we came down, if memory serves, they started building the present library, which is a marvelous one. A nice place for kids but very hard on mothers [who were always] driving everywhere for everything. It was very tiresome.

(Denise) Especially this side of town. This side of town was underdeveloped compared to the other side of town where the library and downtown is so that's why we used to drive downtown. My mom used to drive us downtown to Murphy Street to go to the movies which were 50 cents, where Pals Restaurant is now. So that's where we did everything, but it was far for her to take us anywhere and that's before Vallco was here or anything else was around here. That's why we ending up eventually moving to the other side of Sunnyvale.

(Nancy) The minute we moved they announced they were building Vallco.

(Denise) And everything else around here. That's when this area built up, after we moved.

(Nancy) In 1965.

(Denise) But of course I was sad.

And I saw all the orchards going and that was really sad. You'd walk home from school and another orchard would be going.

On that side beyond this court, that's where the walnut field was. And there was a huge tree house over there. Nobody ever tended to it. There was an old house that we used to call the haunted house and you could go in there and there were dead rats everywhere. It was a huge old house. I wonder what ever happened to it. So that was the big fun field over that way. It looks like there's still some walnut trees left. You can get there if you go around to the next street.

It snowed here back in sixty-something. I do remember it snowing and our father called us in the middle of the night so we played over there and made snowmen.

If we wanted to do something and have some fun we'd go to the movies, Sunnyvale Theatre. It was fifty cents to get in. We'd go across the street to Newberry's, or was it Kress? It was across the street and we'd buy candy there for ten cents, then we'd go to the movies for fifty cents and we'd stay all day. And then Murphy Street, before the wall was there, it was just one long street. There was one department store, Harts, and that was the only elevator that I knew of in town. We'd ride up and down the elevator until we got in trouble. But I mean that was the excitement here.

(Nancy) And Kirkishes was on the corner, it just sold working men's clothes and uniforms for Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and things like that. And that was about it. There were just tiny stores and restaurants.

The bored housewives in the neighborhood here would take their little kids once a week and go bowling and they had babysitting for the children. We did that for a couple of years and I later decided that I would rather read and resigned from the bowler's league.

(Denise) That was at Futurama Bowl, it was kind of a landmark building. I think they finally tore it down, recently. It had big sparkly domes, remember that?

(Nancy) Very 1960s.

And to go shopping here, you had to go to Valley Fair, which was very small and not very interesting, or to Stanford Shopping Center, which was certainly different from what it is now but it was still very nice. That was it.

Denise and Nancy Alexander
Living in Downtown Sunnvyale

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(Denise) So we moved from the other side of Sunnyvale, over to this side of Sunnyvale, Iowa Avenue, because this was the side of town that was close to downtown and there was a lot more to do.

(Nancy) And it was close to the Library for homework.

(Denise) Right, and my mom liked it over here cause it was close to the library and downtown.

(Denise) Actually this street was a dead end over on the left here. Our house was the last house on the block. So it was kinda neat, we'd come out here and play baseball and everything. Beyond our house here was a cherry orchard and across the street, that was a huge field and you had to walk through the field to get to the next block over.

Now of course it's a busy street here. Kind of a thoroughfare. And from here you could walk to town.

(Denise) I went to Benner School here, the junior high school. We can in the summer just before I went to junior high school here.

(Nancy) and that's just down a couple of blocks down Iowa, towards town. And the Grammar School, Carson, you'd just go left and go down a couple of blocks to the grammar school. And that's called Vargas now, but it's the same school.

(Denise) That's where all my brothers and sisters went to school. It was nice living over here. We could walk downtown or ride our bikes.

(Denise) On our property we had three apricot trees so we used to cut the apricots and dry them.

(Nancy) Over in Los Altos on Grant Road. That was lots of fun. We'd get all the kids in the neighborhood to come with us and they thought it was great fun. So it was rather slave labor but fun for the kids.

(Denise) If you walked behind my house, mostly there was a bunch of land which was owned by the Calas and you'd have to walk through their land to El Camino. You had to cut through the land. And so that's where all the pumpkin patches were and all the Christmas Tree lots and also there was the little homes, I guess, dwellings where the pickers would live that worked for Cala. So they were all close by, there.

There was still a lot of the feeling of the orchards here and the pickers and it was a seasonal thing. Downtown there was a whole encampment of pickers that would come. Right beyond downtown, right beyond Evelyn there was a whole town of them.

(Nancy) All the little hovels, really, that were there, where people lived.

(Denise) So we were all really aware of all that in those days.

Of course that's gone. And my school, Benner, down the street, that is no longer there. There is a tract of homes there. But the school that was the Elementary school is still there and that's the senior center now.

(Nancy) And you used to go to Washington Park and you would be the scorer for your little brothers little league games.

(Denise) That's right, Sunnyvale National Little League, which is still there and my father was the coach for both my brother's teams. That's still going on today. My kids have played in that league, my girls.

(Nancy) The park was beautiful in those days, too, until the seventies [when] there were some drug problems apparently in Sunnyvale. They tore, pulled down all of the higher bushes and just left tall trees that you could see under and it's not quite as attractive as it used to be.

(Denise) But they redid the park; it used to be a forest. It was very pretty; huge pine trees, and then that would be our school. Benner School was across from the park so all the windows of the school faced the park, it was very pretty actually. Those were the Science rooms and you would go out and do your science in the park across the street, in Washington Park.

(Nancy) And you used to always go swimming in the Washington Park pool in the summer. So that was nice, they could walk there.

(Denise) And it's still there. My own children have swimming lessons there, as I did.

(Denise) I went to Sunnyvale High School. We had a bus that picked us up on Bernardo down on the end of the block here, and then later I drove, but that was when the first mall was built, which was Mayfield Mall which is now Hewlett Packard on Evelyn. And that was the first mall they had, I think in the United States. It was the first indoor mall. So we'd hand out there. That was the beginning of the "hanging out in malls" era.

Denise and Nany Alexander
High School Days

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When we moved to the house on Iowa, I was supposed to go to Fremont high school, but they changed the zoning, and I ended up going to Sunnyvale High, which is actually still here and it's now Kings Academy.

When I went to school here in the 60s it was a nice school. When I first started there was a senior lawn and only seniors could go on it and football players were the biggest thing in the school. Then as time went on it became 1968 and of course when I went to school we had a dress code.

I got sent home for wearing culottes or skirts that didn't quite touch the ground when you bent down, we got tested all the time to make sure that our skirts were long enough, to our knees, and of course it was the 1960s- one day they had a big protest here, all the kids kind of demonstrated and had a sit-in and nobody went to class.

I didn't participate, but I was kind of glad it happened. And the kids protested, and they wanted to change the dress code, the guys wanted to wear beards, be able to have facial hair and I think they even wanted to be able to smoke somewhere on campus and the girls wanted to wear pants and actually the police came, and it was a big thing. But it actually changed the dress code, they did get it changed, and from then on when I was a senior, we could wear pants and the guys could have facial hair.

In those days we were aware, we started the SECF, students for an environmentally correct society, and all the environmental issues started coming. So high school changed in the four years I went there from just school functions to a lot of environmentally aware clubs. Protesting the war in Vietnam was very big then; in art class they would make armbands and posters to protest the Vietnam War, so it was really a transitional time.

Then of course there were those assassinations that happened, Martin Luther King and Kennedy, and then when Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died in the 60s, 1968 I think, they blasted the music out on campus, and that was a big event that day too, they were blaring the music. It was a pretty good school.

Of course living on this side of Sunnyvale in my high school years, you could hop on the train, you could go up to San Francisco when you got older, you could go up to Palo Alto, and we used to hang out at Stanford at the shop there, I started working at the bookstore at Stanford Shopping Center, Books Inc. so it was fun living on this side of town. There was more to do, and there was a bus line, the bus was right there downtown, you could hop on that and get around a little more, so you were more mobile living over here.

We used to hang out at White Front which was kind of the first discount store, which is now Kids R Us, that's on El Camino, and then they later built Toys R Us which was haunted from the time I was young and still haunted supposedly today.

So growing up in Sunnyvale, I saw a lot of changes, I'd walk home from the bus stop, and especially in my high school years, I'd get off the bus and there was another orchard being torn down, and I'd run home very sad, the whole thing was before my eyes. So many people were coming here, the electronics industry was picking up, it wasn't just Lockheed any more, it was all the companies and industry coming here to Sunnyvale.

Rapid development changed a lot of things all of a sudden and brought a diverse group of people here, which was kind of interesting; people from all over the world were coming here. Some of the growth brought culture here because they opened the Sunnyvale Community Theatre, so I ended up working there on one of the first productions they had ever done and that was nice, there was more for teens to do here. So I was one of the first people that worked at he Sunnyvale Community Theatre, which is still going on today.

We used to go to the drive-ins... there were drive-ins in those days. There were three drive-ins in Sunnyvale you could go to, that was a different cultural thing. You could walk in to one drive in over here, close to the school, it was called the Free Show because you could walk in. Drive-ins were a big part of life in those days.

After I got out of Sunnyvale High I went to De Anza Junior College, which was brand new, so that was really a nice school. After I got out of De Anza I went down to Los Angeles. I was going to go to school and ended up living in LA 18 years, and I had come back and then gone back to LA then come back here again. And when I came back here the last time, even though I was really sad it had changed so much in Sunnyvale, still there was a lot of good things about it.

One of the good things is that the city of Sunnyvale is very well run, it's efficient, you can get things like your street fixed. When I lived in LA you couldn't get your street fixed, for example; if something was wrong you'd call but nobody would come. When I came back to Sunnyvale I called and they came in 5 minutes to fix the pipe on my street. It's a very well run city, which you can appreciate if you've lived somewhere else. They've always put money into the library which I thought was wonderful, because other cities' libraries were closing in the bad economic times.

The city has more parks per capita than any other city of its size, a very diverse population that lives together and they all seem to get along here, which is nice.

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