City of Sunnyvale

Returning to the Sunnyvale area after being away for about thirteen years, I view both its past and present with renewed interest. I enjoy seeing the familiar Libby's fruit can towering over Evelyn Ave. and the train tracks.

Once I happened to pass by Hendy Ironworks Museum and what I discovered made me wonder about possible connections to my family's history.

I turned to my mother for answers to my questions and this became an opportunity to learn more of her story.

Mom arrived in California in spring of 1943 and took a job in the Navy auditor's office at the construction site of the second hangar at Moffett Field.

This office, like everything associated with the defense activities that had mushroomed in the area because of World War II, was in great need of employees and hired her as a junior accountant, even though she had no experience along those lines. She was put to work reviewing the invoices that came in for payment. Now we think of Moffett Field as located in Mountain View, but Mom remembers that the letterhead read: Moffett Naval Air Station, Sunnyvale, Calif.

The influx of construction workers had quite an impact on the business of both towns. Mom remembers the cowboy-booted workers filling the few available restaurants at noon and how they seemed rootless, having come from "jobs" in Panama, Alaska, Southern California. On the few occasions when she had to run errands to the contractor's shack, she was struck by both the rough language and the danger of the construction work.

They finished building Hangar 2 in 372 days, began the 3^rd hangar and then the wind tunnel.

By 1943 the housing supply was taxed beyond its limit with the influx of people. Mom felt fortunate in finding a place to live on an apricot ranch on Whisman Rd. in Mountain View.

She says the cots she ate that June & July were the juiciest, sweetest fruit she has ever tasted. Her landlady hired school children to cut fruit and lay it on the screened frames, and prune-plum picking was another job the kids could handle. Everybody worked.

Mom was picked up for work by a carpool driver, or it would have been a long walk to Moffett. People who owned cars were happy to get carpool passengers because it increased their wartime ration of gasoline. Though traffic was a tiny fraction of what it is now, the roads were already inadequate. El Camino Real was a three-lane "highway", the middle lane was supposed to be for passing. Highway 101 was known as "Bloody Bayshore." Mom's sister, a nurse at the original O'Connor Hospital (then called O'Connor Sanitarium), told of the nighttime emergency cases brought in from that route. There were no hospitals between San Jose and Palo Alto.

What there were, she says, were small towns, divided from one another by orchards and fields and bearing the most prodigious and delicious crops of fruit.

My mother and her sister persuaded their parents to come to this area from Milwaukee, WI, which was still suffering the effects of the Depression, where anyone over the age of 40 had no chance of finding a new job, and where there was nothing but domestic work available to a woman with no particular education.

Through work connections her sister had, Mom says they were able to rent a house in Palo Alto. Her mother found work in the canneries --first Del Monte in San Jose and briefly Libby's, then Schuckl in Sunnyvale.

The company processed local fruit and tomatoes trucked in from the central valley, mostly under contract with the Safeway stores. She became accustomed to the long hours on her feet, enjoyed the cafeteria lunches, made new friends, joined the Teamsters Union when it organized the shop and felt the satisfaction of earning her own money.

Mom's father was hired at the Hendy Ironworks in the fall of 1943 and trained to be a journeyman machinist in a matter of weeks.

The drill press that he was required to buy is still in the family. There was a great deal of pride in participating in the war effort, both for Mom's mother in preparing food and for her father in turning out the materials required for the war.

After the war, the demand for Hendy's products disappeared and many workers were laid off. Westinghouse bought the plant to have a west coast source of electric equipment for its utilities.

A long strike ensued and her father filled his days by hiring out as a gardener. Although they later retired from their jobs there, Mom says both of her parents remembered that the roots of their independence lay in their wartime experience in Sunnyvale.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to deepen my connection with my family's history. I think both my mother and I would to see some return of the orchards and their apricots!

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