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Published on 11/23/1998 All articles from this issue

An old-timer remembers

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holidays at Shoup House,

stepping on president's son's foot

A Voice of the Past

Born in 1924, Gordon Ansley spent most of his childhood in Los Altos. He first lived on a street off Almond Avenue near the present site of Los Altos High School that wasn't named at the time. According to Ansley's mother, the paving crew working on the street named it Gordon Way after Ansley, who was a baby at the time.

A relative of one of Los Altos' founding families, the Shoups, Ansley said Paul Shoup suggested that his parents name him Gordon after Shoup's hero, a British general.

Ansley told the following story about his family's holiday celebrations at Paul Shoup's house on Orange Avenue during an interview at his Mountain View home in 1998:

hey had a pretty good-sized dining room in the Paul Shoup house. It was always the Shoup children and grandchildren, my mother and father, myself, my brother Norman, the Shoup brothers and sisters, which included Fred, who would come up from Los Angeles, and perhaps a few other friends.

The main thing I remember about those parties and dinners was that before you got anything to eat you had to stand and give a little talk, tell a joke, recite a poem, do a magic trick or tell something about what you had been doing. You had to somehow contribute to the atmosphere. I always dreaded this. But it was fun.

I also recall that a couple of times, twice, Paul Shoup was a good friend of Herbert Hoover's, and I was invited to supper at their house when Herbert Hoover was there. He was the former president at that time, since it was the mid-1930s. That was interesting.

My mother gave me a bad time because when I was young she told me I stepped on the president's son's foot. I don't remember doing that, but she was always telling me that. We used to have good parties down there.

At the dinners, there was no "children's table." It was just family.

- Courtesy of Donna Shoemaker

and the oral history collection at the Los Altos History House

TC volumes in memory of Ellen Shaw

In memory of Ellen Shaw, the "Pages of the Past" contributor who died Nov. 14, the Town Crier is sponsoring an effort to bind back issues of the papers in which her column appeared and emboss her name on the covers. The paper will supply the back issues, have them bound and include them in the permanent archives at the Los Altos History House Museum.

Tax deductible donations for this effort may be sent directly to the Association of the Los Altos History House Museum, P.O. Box 1165, Los Altos 94023-1165, attention: Ellen Shaw Memorial Volumes.