1,500 old friends play in the street
By Kathleen Acuff, Town Crier Staff Writer
 Joe Wolf and Bonnie Perkins, Los Altos High School Class of 1965, dance at the Los Altos High School 50th anniversary celebration held on Main Street Saturday. |
Los Altos High School is 50 years old - and looking good. The recently completed five-year makeover retouched, replaced, retrofitted or - let’s be frank - lifted, tucked and polished everything on campus.
When they came back last weekend for the school’s jubilee, alumni found a building once again fit and attractive. Classrooms have been wired for Internet access; the faculty has learned to use the new technology; and the small, outdated library has become a large media center.
Thirty acres of apricot trees came down in the spring of 1954 so the original building could go up. The first class of mostly middle-class and affluent white students from Los Altos and Los Altos Hills graduated in 1958. Now the student profile looks more like that of surrounding communities. About half the student body is Caucasian, about one-fourth is Hispanic, about one-sixth is Asian, and African Americans and Pacific Islanders are among the other students. Many students are the children of immigrants, and about half come from blue-collar families.
Los Altos High supporters celebrated the school’s history and progress this past weekend with a host of elaborate activities that included a colorful school carnival, downtown Los Altos street party, an alumni baseball game and barbecue.
The first class went to school in a town smaller and quieter than it is now - except for the train that ran where Foothill Expressway is now and stopped at the station that has evolved into an antique shop.
Robin Hill Peacock’s family moved from Seattle to Cuesta Drive in 1951, and she remembers only two things disturbing the peace.
“I could hear the whistle of the train from my house, and I heard a donkey every morning. Everything was so quiet,” she said.
Peacock, who now lives in Tigard, Ore., has returned for every reunion of the Class of 1959 since the 20th. She attended Los Altos schools from the fourth grade on and “knows most everyone.”
The self-described “newlywed of 12 years” was seated with her husband, Bill, and two former classmates, Sharon McGee Sicklesteel of Oroville and Joyce Walthers Bertozzi of Mountain View, a few steps from First Street. Main Street was closed to traffic from First through Third streets. Color-coded tables were arranged along the blocks by decades, starting with the 1950s at First and ending with the most recent graduating classes at Third.
The three alumnae said theirs was a “pretty close class.” They recalled happy years in which friendships thrived on shared activities at church, in school, in Scouts.
“We did a lot of things together. We used to go to Monta Vista drive-in, we used to ride our bikes around town. It was just clean fun,” Peacock said. “We had never heard of marijuana, and you couldn’t smoke a cigarette within a mile of the school or you’d get in trouble.”
The longtime friends agreed that high school was very different in the 1950s. They didn’t recall any high school pranks.
The men of their class began meeting every December at Mac’s Tea Room when they were 21 and have continued to meet elsewhere since Mac’s closed. Bertozzi said the Class of ‘59 took over Shanghai Gourmet restaurant on Main Street Friday night and closed the place down, talking and laughing long after other diners had headed home.
“I think we overwhelmed them,” she said with a smile.
After she graduated from LAHS, Bertozzi went to work for Hewlett-Packard, loading circuit boards on the assembly line. “It was a very different place then,” she noted. She worked for HP for 40 years, “till the split,” and now works as an administrative assistant for Agilent. Sicklesteel worked as a secretary and reared four children - “What can I say?” she asked with a laugh. Peacock worked as a clerk-typist for an insurance company in San Francisco, then moved to her mother’s hometown in Oregon.
Another pivotal moment in 1959
Jeff Birchenall, Class of 1964, is a commercial pilot now because the circus came to town in 1959, when he was 13.
“In the vacant lot where the Consignment Shop is now, they had a helicopter that gave five-minute rides. I bought a ticket with the $5 I’d saved up - that was a lot of money then - and we went up and out to the Bay, and I was hooked on flying,” he said.
After graduation, Birchenall studied for two years at Foothill College, then enlisted in the Navy for a shipboard tour of duty in Vietnam. Back home in 1968, he began flying out of Moffett Field with the Naval Reserve.
Now a resident of Fresno, Birchenall told stories of his past, reminiscing about his days at Covington School, on the LAHS track team, cruising up and down El Camino in his ‘55 Chevy Bel Air and being part of “the hot rod scene.”
“It was just like the movie ‘American Graffiti,’” he said with a grin.
Birchenall likes to think of “all the friends I made and all the crazy things we did” - which included putting Jell-O in the school pool and capping the flagpole with a toilet. He and his friends rolled all over town on skateboards they made by nailing a piece of plywood to a skate. They also enjoyed the Monta Vista drive-in - 50 cents for a movie, 25 cents for a hot dog - “those were good times.”
Mark “Maddog” San Juan, Class of 1978, attended the street party with his sister, Suzy San Juan, Class of 1981, and his mother, Jean San Juan, who has taught dance to most of the town during the past 46 years. San Juan is a drummer living in Mountain View and dedicated to theater work. His specialty is light and sound effects.
“I wouldn’t be involved in theater work now if not for the theater work I was exposed to at Los Altos High School,” he said.
“We were a bunch of guys and liked to blow things up,” he said, laughing heartily. “It didn’t matter what the play was, we found some excuse. For ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ we filled the cafetorium with dirt, dug trenches, and blew things up!”
The student who didn’t think twice about handling explosives was also the second violinist in the school orchestra. His nonchalance about physical danger won him the role of the Fiddler his senior year, when the first violinist declined to get up on the roof in the school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Making it happen
At 6:30 p.m., the caterers were still setting up, Sabra Dexter was tweaking the party decorations, and only a few alumni talked in small groups or explored Main. The street was livelier by 7 p.m., and the party began to swing after the band started at 8 p.m.
On the stage erected at the Second Street crosswalk, the Hit Men performed popular songs from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The four alumni made what former cheerleader Sherry Steindorf Auerbach, Class of 1975, enthusiastically called “a great band, a great band!”
Prominent among the decorations was the logo designed last year by Margo Liptsin, Class of 2004. She combined the high school’s original mascot, the knight, with the eagle that flew to LAHS after Mountain View Union High School closed in 1982.
Auerbach headed the committee that organized the weekend, giving special attention to Saturday night’s party. Joyce Imprescia and Judy Russell saw to the earlier, all-day carnival on the school’s soccer field that raised money for student clubs and activities.
Dexter sent out three bulk mailings of 16,000 invitations, many of which she has been told were never received, and got back 1,356 checks. Auerbach said she thought another 150 people were at the party as well.
“The best attendance is from the 1960s, with the 1970s close behind,” Dexter said. She is a friend of Auerbach’s though not an LAHS alumna. Her husband is a member of the first graduating class.
The weekend opened and closed with sporting events: on Friday, a golf tournament in Gilroy; and Sunday, an alumni baseball game followed by a barbecue and concert on the school green.
It was the kind of weekend that makes everyone but the organizers say, “Let’s not wait so long to do this again.”
