By Don McDonald

Airplanes once landed on two empty Los Altos fields where beautiful homes now stand. One of the fields was used a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Los Altos News reported that Ruth Clifford Hackett and her husband, Donald, had landed their light plane on the Strassburger field.

Ruth later told us that their aluminum-clad two-passenger Luscombe had taken 3.5 hours to fly from Van Nuys. The plane’s side-by-side seating had made it easy for Ruth to serve the fried-chicken sandwiches she’d made. They’d flown up to attend the wedding of her schoolmate Wanda Stern.

The Strassburger field was a convenient landing spot for the Hacketts, being only a block from her folks’ home on Yerba Santa Avenue. After the wedding, they spent the night in her former home. Next morning Donald had to take off alone, because rows of trees at both ends of the field would have made a full-load takeoff hazardous. He picked Ruth up at the Mountain View Airport for their flight back to Southern California.

The Hacketts had landed on a recently harvested grainfield. It was part of the 60-acre Strassburger Ranch, between Los Altos Avenue and Adobe Creek, and bordered by Pine Lane and Yerba Santa Avenue.

An 1890 map shows the land was then owned by H.O. Coloff. He reached his ranch buildings via a dirt lane named for him. In 1906 it officially became the Pine Lane we know today, but it was frequently called “Coloff Road” for many more years.

San Francisco stockbroker Isaac Strassburger acquired the ranch around 1916. By the time his heirs sold it in 1960, it had become the largest undeveloped parcel in Los Altos.

The buyers made it into the Dos Palos subdivision, and a new crop of houses sprouted to replace the ranch’s previous crops.

After the 1941 episode, five years passed before Los Altos got its first dedicated airfield, the Loyola Airstrip. It was located just southeast of Loyola Corners, between the Southern Pacific Railroad right of way and Granger Road. It lay across the tracks from Miguel, Brucito and Thurston avenues. This takeoff-landing strip - 2,241 feet long and 120 feet wide - and a combined house-hangar-office at its south end were built in 1946 by John H. Lyon, a commercial pilot.

The Santa Clara County Planning Commission permitted Lyon to build it despite vociferous neighborhood objections. Presumably the commission was mollified by his promise not to use his strip for business and to discourage its use by others.

Not surprisingly, Lyon couldn’t always keep his promise. Larry Duarte recalls his father once using Lyon’s strip for his own plane, instead of the alfalfa field in Mountain View he normally used. American Aviation Historical Society records show a Ryan STA was based at the Loyola Airstrip at one time, but the Los Altos News account mentioned that Lyon owned a larger four-seat airplane.

Loyola Airstrip was sold and subdivided after Foothill Expressway replaced the railroad. In place of the strip, houses now line the east side of Granger Road.

At the south end, near Grant Road, the original Lyon home, though much remodeled, was there until it was replaced by a new home 10 years ago.