August 8, 2005 – Building a Nest in Silicon Valley

August 8, 2005 – Building a Nest in Silicon Valley

On October 9th 1974, the Holiday Inn at 1217 Wildwood Avenue, in Sunnyvale California was one of the few chain hotels in the area now known as Silicon Valley. Across the freeway from the hotel back then was a large billboard at the southwest corner of the Highway 101 and Lawrence Expressway interchange. It proclaimed that the open field that extended south from the freeway to where Oakmead Parkway is today and west to Bowers would soon be home to new hotels, office buildings, and restaurants. (The sign was up for over ten years before all it promised had been delivered.) The sign had much in common with me. I had aspirations of what I wanted to become but had not advertised my intention widely, though I had shared them with my wife IM—our two daughters ME and RD were too young to appreciate what they heard us discussing over dinner in the house we rented at 1408 Sherrye Drive in Plano, Texas. That was just before we began packing our belongings for the move to California. All our major decisions were made during the course of a meal. (On July 10th, 1967, we decided over lunch at a Denny’s in El Paso, Texas off Interstate 10 near Cielo Vista Mall to take the job at Bendix Field Engineering Corp. in Greenbelt Maryland.

In the last two places we had been, everyone had already gotten there ahead of us. The military aerospace segment of the American economy had financed a great deal of economic growth during the 1960s, the Viet Nam war producing jobs at home building munitions, war machinery, and supplies—food, clothes, and medicine to supply an army of over 100,000 men and women. NASA was a line item in the Federal Budget throughout the 1960s. I had participated, not very profitably as a member of the U.S. Navy. Those who started their professional careers at the end of the 1950s rode the economic wave the military-aerospace sector of the economy created. In 1967, when I left the Navy to start in civilian life at Bendix, that economic sector was tapped. This would become clear when President Richard M. Nixon took over in 1969 and began to slash the military budget as he started to wind down the Viet Nam war. Layoffs resulted and I barely missed being let go from Collins Radio, my employer throughout our six years in Dallas. Maryland and Texas were about military contracts and large contractors who fed off them. My new employer, Diablo Systems Inc. (newly acquired by Xerox Corp.) was a company that exclusively served the commercial sector of the economy. Unknown to me I had stumbled in front of the next great growth wave of the U.S. economy—information technology altering every aspect of our lives. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was already developing the elements of the personal computer.

When my wife IM, our daughters ME and RD, and I moved into room 109 of the Holiday Inn that Wednesday evening 31 years ago, our first priority on Thursday was to start looking for a four-bedroom home with a backyard and a good school close by. The nest-building instinct that had been pent up during the years in Dallas had now been unleashed and IM and the girls wanted a place they could call their own. We had an appointment with a relocation service my new employer Diablo Systems had provided to us. The service was located on Lawrence Expressway between Granada Avenue and Benton Street in an office building close by the Hungry Tiger Where I had my interview lunch a month earlier. We had called ahead to arrange a time to come by to get our consultation. California was culturally quite different from Texas. The concept of a relocation consultant would not compute in Texas. We were to find a number of cultural differences as we began to settle in, one of the first being the population density. In California, stores, gas stations, everything… had more people in them than we’d ever experience in Plano. The checkout line at the Gibson’s Discount department store on Jupiter Road in Plano was crowded but not crowded like in California. Gibson’s competed with K-Mart and Target and would undercut the larger chains’ prices hence the store’s larger crowds.

The consulting service had explained the pros and cons for most of the housing developments in the Bay Area from north of San Francisco down both sides of the bay and the communities east of Oakland to south of San Jose. Houses we could afford in Plano were selling for $22,000 to $25,000 for a 1400-square-foot house. The same size house began at $33,000 ten to fifteen miles south of San Jose, about as far south as we wanted to be. Further north, the price for the same size house increased an average of a few thousand dollars per mile. We settled on a new home in a development West off the Hellyer Avenue Exit from Highway 101. Singer, the sewing machine company, had a housing division that had developed a neighborhood along Hellyer Avenue between Senter Road and Hellyer Park. We found a place we could afford across from Hellyer Elementary School, which had gotten good rating in the statewide survey of schools the consulting service showed us. ME could walk across the street to school—she was already a month late getting started and we were anxious to get her enrolled. RD had some time before she would start. Putting your first born in school is one of the many Rubicons parents cross during their lives—in retrospect 12 years flew by but we were so preoccupied with getting both girls into the system and helping them do well we didn’t see the time flowing by so fast.

I started work at Diablo on October 14th, 1974. We moved into our new house at 745 Hellyer Avenue on Friday November 1st, thankful to be out of the Holiday Inn and in our own place, even without furniture, which would not be delivered until the following week. We spent the weekend roughing it eating off paper plates using plastic utensils eating take out and sleeping on sheets and a blanket on the floor in the master bedroom. It was an great adventure the kids enjoyed but the sight of the moving van pulling up in front of the house on Monday was a welcome sight. I took the day off helping unpack and assembling beds and rearranging furniture to IM’s liking. By Tuesday, we were moved in IM had missed two months of school and we were getting pretty worried. IM spent Tuesday with school registration class assignments. I returned to work to bring home the income that would help pay the monthly mortgage of $222.27 a month, 17 percent of my monthly gross pay of $1330.00. We were making ends meet and had something to spare at the end of each month.

The routine of computing up Highway 101 from Hellyer Avenue to Lawrence Expressway would occupy the next three years of my life, in the office by 8:00 AM, punched out at 6:00 PM, home a half-hour to forty minutes later depending on freeway traffic. Life was good.