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Published on 06/30/1997 All articles from this issue

Memories of early Los Altos

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By Linda Taaffe

Town Crier Staff Writer

Lenore Hammack came to Los Altos as a child in 1920 and helped her mother operate the first pharmacy in town.

When members of the Foothills Congregational Church accidentally discovered a 1914 time capsule buried beneath the church floor last September, they inadvertently uncovered a piece of Hammack's childhood.

The capsule's train schedules, map of Los Altos, and list of parishioners from Christ Episcopal Church, where Hammack attended Sunday school, are familiar pieces of memorabilia for Hammack, who examined the contents of the time capsule for the first time recently at the Los Altos History House. Hammack said the time capsule brought back memories of a Los Altos much different than today.

"Los Altos was a wonderful place to grow up. We (the children) had the run of the town," she said. "It was just orchards here when I was a girl. We used to play and build tunnels in mustards that grew 3 feet high over our heads."

The Los Altos that Hammack remembers as a child only had a handful of businesses. The price of apricots was the big topic in town. The 5 p.m. train delivered mail every weekday and the town's population would swell during the summer with families from San Francisco who came south to escape from the city's fog, she said.

The only theater in town was a makeshift movie house in the Scout Hall where residents watched home movies, until Paul Shoup's brother, Jack, and a barber named Jack Gregory, opened a bona fide theater.

"Jack's wife would play the piano after she put the baby to sleep, so the music might not start until half way through the film," Hammack said.

Hammack came to Los Altos when she was 5. Her father, Frederick Grimes, worked for McCaskie Cash Register Company (now NCR) setting up agencies throughout the West. After searching the entire state for the "ideal" place to live, Hammack's father bought a lot in Los Altos that had been used as a chicken farm, Hammack said.

Unfortunately, Hammack's father only lived in Los Altos for two years. He died during a flu epidemic in 1922, leaving her mother Nellie a single parent.

This hardship didn't send Hammack's mother retreating back home. She became one of California's first woman pharmacists and established the first pharmacy in Los Altos, Hammack said.

Hammack said Mr. Steinmetz, a family acquaintance with liberal ideas, encouraged Hammack's mother to become a pharmacist. He offered her a job at his drug store in Palo Alto, while she attended pharmacy school in San Francisco.

Although this was an unusual choice for a woman during that time, Hammack's mother needed a career to support her young daughter and herself, Hammack said.

Because the law required that a registered pharmacist be in the store during operating hours, Hammack said her mother became "an absolute prisoner in the pharmacy." Hammack essentially became the homemaker in the family while her mother worked long hours, she said.

"I didn't feel neglected even though my mother was working, because I knew everyone in town," Hammack said. "It was very easy to raise someone in Los Altos during that time. No one locked their doors and kids were pretty safe."

Since pharmacists were one of the only people who could sell alcohol during Prohibition, Hammack's grandmother, who was a teetotaler, convinced her daughter to do the "proper thing" and sell the store to Larry Nelson, who continued to operate the store as the Los Altos Pharmacy.

With all of the rapid development in this area, the name of the Los Altos Pharmacy is one of the few things that has remained unchanged since Hammack first moved to Los Altos, she said.

"Playing in the orchards is something kids here just don't have a chance to do anymore," she said.