Fostering friendship: Los Altos Hills Club cultivates community

The residents had also changed, and Wilson felt like a stranger in her hometown. Apart from a high school classmate she ran into when dropping off payment for a school tax when building her house in the Hills, she said many of her friends and classmates had left the area.

“I came back with the vision of this being a town (Los Altos and Los Altos Hills), having a lot of people that I knew from high school,” she said. “I was very shocked to find that most people couldn't afford to stay in their parents’ homes or they went somewhere else.”

The faces she passed were unfamiliar, and many of the friends she’d made in San Jose weren’t interested in visiting Los Altos Hills; they would accept her happily and with open arms if she made the 18-mile trek south, but they wouldn’t return the favor and drive up the Peninsula to Los Altos Hills.

Wilson found the friends and community she was looking for when she joined the Los Altos Hills Newcomers Club, a social group founded in 1953, three years before Los Altos Hills’ incorporation.

Starting Over

Many in the Hills value their distance from neighbors and the bucolic feel the town offers, but the distance can also make getting to know fellow residents difficult. The Newcomers Club was founded to provide women new to the town a three-year membership during which they could establish friendships and social ties.

Although excited, Wilson was overwhelmed during the first meeting she attended: a book club. She said she didn’t know what to contribute and sat on the floor as unfamiliar   people with longtime friendships chatted. A week later, however, she saw the value of her club connections.

“I went to Safeway probably a week later, and (a club member) said hello to me, and I almost cried. She recognized me and spoke to me,” Wilson recalled. “Having been here for so many years of my life, I didn’t understand. I didn’t anticipate how it was going to feel. The shops were all familiar, but there were no familiar people. And that's why I needed these clubs so much, because I had to start over again and make friends here.”

Wilson, who didn’t learn about the Newcomers Club until she read an announcement about it in the Town Crier, said she often wondered why her mother didn’t ever join the club; then she realized her mother was never new to the town.

“She never was a newcomer,” Wilson said of her mom. “She was working, she was teaching in Los Altos.”

Some of the people moving to the Hills around the time of the club’s founding came from the East Coast, according to Wilson, to work for companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Philco and Ford. The club comprised the newly arrived stay-at-home mothers and wives who wanted to create lasting connections and find a sense of community.

In 1958, many of the women who were no longer considered newcomers and graduated from the group partnered to form an extension of the Newcomers Club, the Los Altos Hills Club, to continue social events and cultivate friendships.

Changing Times

Longtime Los Altos Hills resident Duffy Price joined the Los Altos Hills Club in the 1980s, a time she said was much different.

The majority of women in the club were stay-at-home moms and wives whose husbands were employed in Silicon Valley or at business startups, Price said, while she pursued her career at UC San Francisco.

“It was fun for me to be able to identify with these other stay-at-home women who had different views of what was going on, and I had a more worldly view from being in the city all the time,” she said.

As more and more women began careers of their own, the demographics of the club began to change. Price noted that over the past 20 years, women in the club have become more involved in business, development and entrepreneurship; while those skills all aid the club, their jobs and businesses also made attending meetings difficult.

“We as a club have had to sort of be more mindful that maybe (members) can’t come to every single meeting,” she said. “In fact, that was one of the issues that we needed to address about 10 years ago, when the club started decreasing in viability as we weren’t addressing that the women were now changing in terms of being worker bees.”

Around 2013, Price said, members of the Los Altos Hills Club voted to continue the group and change however necessary to keep the group alive; both Wilson and Price were part of the meeting in which modifications to the club were made.

“One of the things that we did was to have our meetings every other month rather than every month, so that a person working might be able to take an extra lunch time,” Wilson said. “Every 60 days, but not every 30 days.”

The Los Altos Hills Club went from hosting 12 luncheons every year to six, and the events the club sponsored also evolved; rather than a performing bird act or a barbershop quartet, the club welcomed speakers from lawyers to local author and journalist Robin Chapman.

Price and Wilson emphasized the club encourages women to support one another and remain active in the community. Many of the women, including Price, have served the community in different capacities.

“Literally all the women that are on the town council were members before they ever ran for office,” Wilson said. “They were just members, and I think that that’s part of what happens; we embrace each other and you develop a sense of community and strength and that’s all – I think that’s really the point of it.”