Rick and I grew up in Pleasanton, California during the idyllic 1950s, before malls, ten theater cinemas, BART stations with trains running into the Bay Area and corporate office buildings. It was a small town and friendly where the biggest event of the year was the Alameda County Fair with its competitive arts and crafts and animal husbandry on display, the carnival rides and horse races. For the rest of the year, we had a roller-skating rink (which closed down all too soon) and Amador High School pool where I spent summer days. Cheap babysitting for working parents at only 25 cents for the whole day. And I loved it. There’s nothing like being in the water until your fingers and toes prune. And no one cared about getting a tan because we all had one.
When a high school friend, Donna Kamp McMillion, contacted me about her project to collect stories from people who lived in Pleasanton during the 50s, I jumped at the chance to be involved. She had a list of interviewees, many of whom I knew or knew of. Her family had been in the valley for four generations. Her list was long and diverse with people eager to tell family histories of where they came from, why/how they ended up in Pleasanton and what the 1950s offered. When Donna asked if I’d be willing to write the forward, I said “Yes! Absolutely!” She sent me each of the filmed interviews at the Pleasanton Museum (once our town library and city hall) and later, the written transcripts. What a blast from the past reading all those stories and reliving those wonderful years.
Rick and I were both among those interviewed. I tell my family story of growing up on “chicken alley” while my parents built their home from the foundations up. And Rick talked about living up in Castlewood, football games on the golf course, and joining the Marine Corps at eighteen. (He served in Vietnam in 67-68. We lost dear high school friends during those turbulent years.)
It was a massive project, and Donna carried it off beautifully! Cruising Down Memory Lane: Stories of Pleasanton in the 1950s is a hefty, tabletop book packed with true stories and pictures of what life was like in our small California hometown in the 1950s. Rick and I are going to be at the big release party on May 7 at the Veterans Center. The book is a limited print run and can only be preordered through Towne Center Books (Pleasanton, CA). Private donors and Three Valleys Community Foundation helped raise the funds for the project – and all proceeds will go to the Amador Valley High School AV/Journalism Program.
We’re hoping those Amador high school journalism students will catch the fire and start collecting interviews on what it was like in 60s!