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By Root 469 0

of a new world moving in. Most of the trucks from the Kaiser Cement quarry were making for Sunnyvale. Draglines, cranes, and road scrapers were waiting for the concrete and steel that was being used to build the quarters for Lockheed Corporation’s new Missile Systems Division. By 1957 Sunnyvale was six times larger than it had been at the end of World War II and was beginning to qualify for inclusion in national almanacs. The municipal chatter had an energetic ring of tax bases, assessed valuation, building permits, zoning requirements, sewer lines, and water power. There were rumors of new businesses, speculation that one of the major automobile companies would decide to build a factory in Sunnyvale. As the fifties drew to a close, Sunnyvale’s Chamber of Commerce gleefully reported that the town’s statistics were hourly becoming obsolete and that a new worker was arriving in Sunnyvale every sixteen minutes of the working day. The publicity pamphlets said it was “The City with the built-in future” and “Boomtown by the Bay.”

The newcomers to the city that was “reaching high” and “pacing the future” were part and parcel of America’s push toward a suburban way of life. The homes were insulated from the bustle of a community and a store was a car-drive away. The houses themselves had an unmistakable Bay Area look. They were low-slung, single-story homes with roofs that were either flat or tilted slightly like those of a garden shed. (The real-estate salesmen said that young boys found it easy to recover their model airplanes from the roofs.) But from the outside it was the garages that dominated the facades, making the rooms look as if they were tacked on as after-thoughts. The large metal garage doors seemed like the obvious entrance.

Brochures told of radiant heat, “the modern and healthy way to heat a house,” of wood-paneled walls, cork and asphalt tiles, hardwood kitchen cabinets, and large closets with glide-in doors that “swing with the greatest of ease.” What the pamphlets didn’t say was that the local fire departments joked that these combinations of posts and beams would burn to the ground within seven minutes—and that the black community was isolated on the wrong side of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks and the wrong side of the freeway.

Most of the families who moved to Sunnyvale were lured by the prospect of jobs at Lockheed. Many were careful and studious. They asked the real-estate agents where the rumored freeway—Interstate 280—might run and checked the projected route on maps at the Sunnyvale City Hall. They asked friends for recommendations on schools and were told that Palo Alto and Cupertino had the best reputations along the entire peninsula. There was talk of enterprising teachers, federal grants, experiments with new math, and open classrooms.

They visited the school district and found a map that pinpointed the existing schools and revealed where future schools might be built. Then they discovered the eccentric nature of the boundaries of the Cupertino School District: They didn’t have to live in Cupertino for their children to attend the Cupertino city schools. The school district included parts of San Jose, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale, and the fortunate houses sold at a premium. In a few places the boundary even divided houses.

Jerry Wozniak, an engineer in his mid-thirties, was one of thousands to be recruited by Lockheed at the end of the fifties. He, his wife, Margaret, and their three young children, Stephen, Leslie and Mark, settled in a home in a quiet Sunnyvale subdivision that lay in the catchment area of the Cupertino School District.

At the other end of the Peninsula, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted their first child, Steven. Often during the first five months of his life they wheeled their baby under the imitation nineteenth-century streetlamps, over the tram tracks, and across the beach in the shadow of the damp sea wall, the fog, the pewter skies, and the gray gulls.

SUPER SECRET SKY SPIES

Hush-hush, super-super, top-secret Lockheed