By Linda Taaffe

At the eleventh hour of his second term on the Los Altos City Council, Francis La Poll moved to correct a 1999 council decision that otherwise would have lingered in the archives as a city folly. The council unanimously stripped the name Conner from the park on the corner of San Antonio Road and Edith Avenue Tuesday night.

The name Conner Park has drawn snickers from locals ever since the same five councilmembers named the parcel after the city’s first mayor and founder, A. Watson Conner, only to discover later that he disliked public parks.

“He hated parks,” said former city attorney Anthony Lagorio, after the park’s dedication in 1999. Lagorio, who worked during Conner’s time on the council in the early 1950s, added, “He once said, ‘Every man has a park in his own back yard. That’s why we put in 10,000-square-foot lots.’”

The top citizen vote-getter at that time was Twin Palms Park, submitted nine times. The city’s recreation commission reviewed all the citizen submissions and chose three names, Village Park, Village Gateway Park and Village Corners Park, to submit to the council. La Poll was the one who added Conner’s name to the final list of suggestions on the ballot, and the name won out after a painstaking process.

La Poll said he hadn’t made the motion, but he had supported the name Conner - a decision that has been weighing on his mind ever since.

“I think we did a disservice to a man who did not support parks. I don’t want him to roll over in his grave by having a park named after him,” La Poll said last week.

The council dusted off the original list of 104 names suggested prior to the park’s dedication in 1999 and unanimously renamed the 0.75-acre site Village Park, despite a suggestion from La Poll to call the park Corner Park - the city would have to change only one letter of the current sign, he explained.