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By Root 423 0

quarry, tearing tawny scars across a cheek of the hillside. The machines sent plumes of dust into the air above the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Large wooden placards declared that the equipment and quarry belonged to the Kaiser Cement Company. The earth in the dumpsters was going to form the substance of the towns that were being built on the plain that spread below the quarry. The trucks rumbled by rolls of barbed wire, coasted past signs that warned of a steep incline, tested their brakes, rolled onto a country lane, and negotiated the thin bends and chuckholes that led toward Cupertino, a village that was trying hard not to become a town. From the quarry gates, on those weekday mornings in the mid-fifties, the position of the crossroads that formed the center of Cupertino was revealed by the cylindrical shapes of some clay-colored feed and grain silos.

In the fifties the Santa Clara Valley was still predominantly rural. In places the greenery was broken by splotches of buildings. From a distance it looked as if someone had spilled small loads of garbage that had then been smeared and raked across parts of the valley floor to form a string of small towns that worked along the plain between San Jose and San Francisco: Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, San Carlos, Hillsborough, Burlingame, and South San Francisco.

Most of the towns still had the manners and style of the thirties. The buildings rarely rose over two stories. The automobiles could park at raked angles on Main Street. Corners were frequently decorated with a State Farm Insurance office, a gas station, a branch of the Bank of America, and an International Harvester franchise, and in towns like Cupertino there had been, not so long before, concerted campaigns to lure a permanent dentist and doctor. The center of the world was immediate: a town hall built with terra-cotta tiles in Spanish mission style and flanked by a library, police department, fire station, courthouse, and stumpy palm trees.

But the towns were separated by all sorts of differences. Each had its own climate which grew warmer the farther away a town was from the San Francisco fog. At the southern end of the Peninsula the summer climate was positively Mediterranean and a little seminary that overlooked Cupertino could easily have been set on a quiet hillside in Tuscany. The towns had their own councils and taxes, their own ordinances and quirks, their newspapers and habits. There were mayoral elections brimming with the rumors and innuendo stirred by a community where people, if they did not know the mayor, at least knew someone who did. And the towns were, of course, separated by jealousy and snobbery.

The lawyers and doctors who built homes in the hills of Los Gatos said to themselves—with not a touch of jest—that the brains of San Jose slept in Los Gatos. The people who lived in Los Altos Hills looked down on the Los Altos folk who lived in the flatlands. Palo Alto with its gracious trees and Stanford University had an airy feel and a few electronic businesses started by former students. Towns like Woodside and Burlingame, set above the plain, had the tony touch of horses, polo games, and rigidly exclusive golf clubs. Burlingame had been home to the first country club on the West Coast. But the people who lived in nearby Hillsborough often gave their addresses as Burlingame for fear of being mistaken as parvenus. And beyond San Carlos, San Bruno, and Redwood City there was windy South San Francisco—an industrial footnote to the city itself—sited below the approach and takeoff paths to the San Francisco airport. Here was a clump of steel mills, foundries, smelters, refineries, machine shops, and lumberyards where the City Fathers had advertised their muscular temperament when they had authorized bulldozers to scrape in giant letters on the hill behind the town the slogan SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY.

But now, right across the valley and especially around Sunnyvale, there were gaps in the orchards and signs