Felton Was so Fine: A Teenager's Impressions of 50 Years Ago, with Excursions into the More Distant Past

By Dr. David Glass and Preston A. Boomer

Caption: Confused, as usual, in Ramponis Algebra Class, 1958

(To the right of the picture):

(The Rev. Dr.) Dave Glass has two home villages. His well-received previous book, Aptos was Idyllic, chronicles his childhood where his mothers family resided. He then spent his teen years in the Felton area, where his fathers family has lived since the 1860s. This book provides a detailed and whimsical description of Felton half a century ago, with colorful, previously unpublished memories of up to 100 years ago and earlier.

Praise for Aptos was Idyllic on Amazon.com:

X Great book with charming short stories about growing up mid-century. . . . A must for anyone who lives or has vacationed on the California coast.

Boofy

X K an amusing and engaging reflection on growing up in the wild-to-a-kid west of small town CaliforniaK. You will laughK and have some nostalgic moments that linger.

T. Williams, Seattle

Others say about the author:

X Gad, what an alchemist!

Preston A. Q. Boomer, Legendary Teacher

X Read it? [authors doctoral dissertation] Maybe when I retireK. Not!

Christine Glass, Authors Wife

X Dirty Dave [authors Camp Hammer nickname] is the best storyteller we know!

Former Campers from Seaside, California

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483674247

Dr. David Glass

(The Rev. Dr.) Dave Glass has two home villages. His well-received previous book, Aptos was Idyllic, chronicles his childhood where his mother’s family resided. He then spent his teen years in the Felton area, where his father’s family has lived since the 1860s. This book provides a detailed and whimsical description of Felton half a century ago, with colorful, previously unpublished memories of up to 100 years ago and earlier

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

To Felton’s Hub

Map%201.JPG

T HE BEAUTIFUL VILLAGE of Felton is now approached by the new extension of Mount Hermon Road from Scotts Valley. The new road bypasses the center of the conference grounds for which the road is named. Back in the 1950s and 60s and earlier, most people got their first view of Felton as they rounded some curves below the Mount Hermon Center and suddenly looked out over the broadest part of the San Lorenzo Valley.

This lovely view looked down an incline to where Mount Hermon Road met Graham Hill road coming in from the left. Part of that downhill stretch passed over Zayante Road and Zayante Creek as it flowed toward its junction with the San Lorenzo River. The first landmark in Felton that people would notice as they left the woods and started down the hill was the little white church on the opposite hillside. It was once the Felton Presbyterian Church, but by then was the Faye Belardi Library, the Felton branch of the Santa Cruz County Library system.

As one passed the end of Graham Hill Road, he reached the valley floor. Behind him to the left was the Felton Depot of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The depot was no longer active, though trains did pass through it on their way up Zayante Creek to the Olympia Sand Plant. Until 1940 the railroad continued through tunnels and over the mountains to Los Gatos, but a violent winter storm and heavy maintenance costs caused the Espee to abandon that track, In the 50s, therefore, trains only ran south to Santa Cruz, and from there out to the main line at Watsonville Junction. The old depot was a stop on our school bus route, the building being occupied by the family of one of my sister Kathy’s classmates.

The area is now the well-known Roaring Camp tourist railroad attraction. Back then remnants of the old railroad were still intact, such as the elevated water tank with its huge spout standing ready to be lowered to fill the boilers of the recently retired steam locomotives.

Across the railroad tracks to the west, and to the south all the way to the Big Trees Grove of Henry Cowell State Park was the huge, very active main yard of the Santa Cruz Lumber Company, owned and operated by the Ley family of Felton. Their redwood timber stands and mill north of Boulder Creek were still producing massive quantities of redwood lumber in those days. I spent a little time now and then at the far back area of the yard, because Harold Gouin was in charge of the lumber drying kiln back there. Harold was my best buddy Dan Gouin’s dad, and had started out working for The Company (Santa Cruz Lumber) out in the woods north of Boulder Creek after his graduation from tiny Boulder Creek High. He was now more comfortably living out middle age in his home in Felton and spending his working hours checking gauges and maintaining the drying kiln.

As one moved up the flat area toward Felton, on one’s left was a large, barren spot which is now a lovely local park. The area was bordered on the south by a short row of small houses, one of which was occupied by our classmates Bert and Henry Stevens, and their Dutch immigrant parents. To the west of that flat area was the ancient approach to Felton spanning the San Lorenzo River, the well-known Felton Covered Bridge, one of three such surviving structures in Santa Cruz County, about which more will be noted later.

On the same stretch of road on the right, the land is now bisected by the new Mount Hermon Road extension. The Mount Hermon Association in the early 60s became increasingly agitated by the heavy and rapid traffic running through the very center of their conference operations into the San Lorenzo Valley. The Association lobbied long and hard for some kind of bypass around the conference grounds.

Such an undertaking was, of course, destined to be very expensive, but Mount Hermon’s case was bolstered by the deteriorating condition of the road on the Scotts Valley side. Henry J. Kaiser operated a large sand quarry there, and as many cubic acres of sand were removed on the south side of Mount Hermon Road, the roadbed, itself built over sand, became preposterously unstable, in need of constant repair, and increasingly dangerous, often impassible in wintertime. So eventually Mount Hermon’s repeated applications bore fruit, and the road was rerouted. It now goes around to the north of the conference grounds, over Zayante Creek and Zayante Road, and down the hill to the valley, opposite the local park.

But that was in the future in the 50s and 60s. The area opposite what later became the park was at that time a large and lovely meadow bordered on the north by forest. About half of the meadow is now occupied by a shopping center anchored by a Safeway store (once the third incarnation of my cousin Nick Pagnini’s Roy’s Market). The western portion of the meadow, across the new road which bisects the old property, is meadow still, but much diminished. It is still known by Felton old-timers as Annie Ley’s.

Annie Ley, who was the reclusive matriarch of the Santa Cruz Lumber Company Ley family, lived somewhere back behind the tree line at the edge of Annie Ley’s, the meadow. I never saw her or met her, but Dad told us that one of the few people allowed to breach that tree line to visit her was my Grandma Glass (born in Felton 1n 1883, died in Santa Cruz in 1954). Dad said that other prospective visitors to Annie were likely to be met with a shotgun. If true, succeeding descendants of Annie must have mellowed, because the one I knew from high school, Marsha Ley, was a nice, quiet, pretty girl a little younger than me, who followed me, if I recall correctly, a few years later to our common Alma Mater, Westmont College.

Annie Ley’s bordered the San Lorenzo River, and if you crossed the new bridge, built in the 1930s, you entered Felton proper. The road ended at what is still Felton’s familiar crossroads, but without, of course, the busy traffic and actual traffic lights.

This intersection, for the purposes of this book, is what I call The Hub, from which the spokes of Felton radiate. To the west, the road becomes Empire Grade, and moves quickly and steeply up out of the valley. To the south, Highway Nine moves through what was and is downtown Felton, while to the north the highway passes through a narrower section of the valley, Felton itself ending about halfway between downtown Felton and downtown Ben Lomond, with Brookdale and Boulder Creek beyond.

I’ll provide descriptions of the people and places immediately surrounding The Hub in later chapters, but this essay must conclude with a fond early 60s memory of the actual Hub itself. Felton had occasional outbursts of civic pride, even having become officially incorporated for a time in the 1880s, with my great-great-uncle E.J. Rubottom as mayor. One such attempt at local improvement was the erection, around 1961, of a lovely fountain right in the middle of the intersection. The Felton Fountain, as it was known, cascaded electrically pumped water down a tower of rocks into a pool at the fountain’s base, and then recirculated said water. Everyone was in basic agreement that the fountain added to Felton’s charming ambiance.

It wasn’t very long, however, before the fountain became what is called in the lawyers’ trade, an attractive nuisance. It so happens that cascading, recirculating water, if infused with liquid soap, can form many cubic yards of foam, enough to block an entire intersection. It was considered funny by everyone at first, and even inspired an appreciative article or two in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The joke continued for too long, however, and after perhaps the fourth or fifth iteration thereof, my dad happened to encounter the again-blocked intersection. His cousin Red Sinnott, a Felton volunteer fireman, was cleaning up the mess once more, while uttering vile, unprintable imprecations with regard to the unknown pranksters. The Felton Fountain was subsequently removed, with the pranksters uncaptured. I don’t know for sure who the culprits were, but since the statute of limitations ran out about half a century ago, I can mention that my high school pal Ben Trevor once remarked that one regular size bottle of Ivory Liquid was all that was required.

CHAPTER 2

At the Western Side of the Hub

I ’M NOT A Felton native, but I have been familiar with the village from my earliest childhood, and have had earlier information passed down to me. As earlier noted, my grandmother, Katherine Hickey Glass, was a Felton native. Early in life she served as a local midwife, and was eventually known as Aunt Kate to two or three generations of Feltonians, and cradled scores of Felton babies in her arms, right down to her death in 1954. She used to tell stories to her grandkids, myself included.

My grandfather, Charlie Glass, had an even earlier connection to Felton, having been born there in 1871. He died in 1943, a few months before my birth, but many San Lorenzo Valley relatives and cronies survived him, and sometimes filled me in with details of his early life.

The intersection of Mount Hermon Road, Highway Nine, and Empire Grade, what I call the Hub, was that area of Felton with which I was most familiar in my early childhood. It was, of course, the jumping-off point for family excursions further up into Ben Lomond, Boulder Creek, and Big Basin. These excursions were sometimes in the cab of the old Jimmy, the venerable GMC truck from our family’s H.H. Ledyard Wholesale Grocery company in Santa Cruz. When I was a preschooler, my mom hadn’t yet perfected the art of minimalist camping, so Dad would have to take the Jimmy up to Big Basin, loaded with beds, cribs, and enough other household appurtenances sufficient for Mom, my sister Kathy, and I to live for a week without lacking for any comforts of home whatsoever.

As we would enter Felton and make the turn up Highway Nine, Dad would tell us of his childhood summers in Felton, which he spent with his Aunt Bird and Uncle Nick Sinnott. He’d point up the Empire Grade hill and remind us that the family, by then headed by his cousin Catherine and her husband, Roy Pagnini, was just up the first street to the right. We knew the place, because we’d sometimes stop by to pick up Grandma Glass, Aunt Kate to the Sinnotts and Pagninis, who would often spend a week or so with them while visiting all her old friends in Felton. Sister Kathy and I resented Grandma’s Felton visits a little, because during those stays she wouldn’t make her weekly visits from Santa Cruz to us at Aptos, and, after all, she was our Grandma, and only their Aunt Kate.

We also remembered the intersection because the first, very ancient house up Empire Grade on the right was the site of a Felton family reunion, the only one we ever attended. The old house was, I was told, the one-time home of the Shaw family, Mary Shaw having been the sister of our great-grandfather, Dan Hickey. Her daughters, Edith and Esther Shaw, lived in Santa Cruz, and were something like great-aunts to us.

The actual event, from a small boy’s viewpoint, was a blur of meeting some very old relatives, a few of whom I already knew, introduced to us by our proud Grandma, another confusing excursion into meeting some more adults, cousins of my dad, and a few small children as well, our second and third cousins, some of whom I came to know about a decade later. My older Watsonville cousin Gary still remembers the same event, with a similar memory of childhood confusion. The highlight of the time for us kids was when the visiting in the old house ended, and all the families with kids went down the road, across the highway, and down to the shallow river for a swim. What was our first introduction the Felton stretch of the San Lorenzo River ended way too soon as our parents impatiently whisked us off to our home in Aptos.

Moving ahead a decade to 1958, our parents moved us, along with little sister Patty and little brother Michael, from Aptos to that unique suburb of Felton, the small community of permanent residents, Mount Hermon. We moved on a Friday and Saturday, and before school started on Monday, Kathy and I on Sunday afternoon took our bikes and began to explore our new environs on our own.

After a brief bicycle tour of San Lorenzo Valley High/Junior High, we found ourselves back at The Hub, the Mount Hermon Road/Highway Nine/Empire Grade intersection. On the southwest corner there was, and still is, a modern building containing several businesses. We were happy to discover that one of the businesses was the Felton Bakery—a bakery being one business our idyllic Aptos had sorely lacked. The Felton Bakery was open that afternoon, and we fortified ourselves for the trip up the hill to home with two or three fresh donuts apiece, one of which I recall had a delicious lemon filling.

When we got to school the next morning, we found that the school schedule included what they called brunch, a short period where we could purchase Planters Peanuts (five cents), or wonderfully fresh donuts (five cents, plain cake; ten cents, glazed) at the Student Store. The donuts were delivered right at brunch time in a blue