Carl Shoup moved to Los Altos with his family about 1912. His father worked for Southern Pacific railroad in San Francisco, and was given the task of creating a new town called, "The Heights" or Los Altos. Shoup received his doctorate degree from Columbia University and taught at Columbia. He worked for the United Nations for several years and spent time in Africa, the Near and Far East, as a roving taxation expert. His Los Altos family home was on University Avenue.
He told the following story during a 1998 interview with his daughter, Dale Shoup Mayer, while at his home in New Hampshire.
Los Altos was a small town with just a few businesses and two railroads running through it - steam and electric. I recall my childhood as a very pleasant time. Los Altos was very small, with perhaps 30 or 50 houses. There was no movie in town, so in the evening we read a book. Somehow the evenings passed all right. It was a quiet sort of life, and not a great deal doing.
At some point, there was a tennis court right alongside our house. I mention this because it shows how copious space was. We didn't have a house next door, just space all around. There was no crowding, no people to look out for, just a very simple, nice place to live.
I went to high school in Palo Alto, because it was the only high school around. I would ride a pony into Palo Alto to a stable. I would leave him there, go to school, and then in the afternoon, go back to the stable and ride home.
I met my future wife in 1923 when I was at Stanford. She was a sophomore and was going back to her home in New York for the summer. I had only known Ruth for eight or nine months, but that was enough. I thought it would be fun to drive back east and marry her. I had a friend with family back east, so we decided we'd go together. The two of us set out in a rumble seat Model T Ford in early summer, 1924, after we had both graduated. I think it took us about 28 days to drive back there, and we had about 26 flat tires. In those days there were absolutely no highways at all. You used local roads from one town to the next.
When we got to the eastern side of the Sierra, the car broke down. We got to a small grocery store and the man inside heard the noise and said, "I think we can fix that." He reached down into a drawer and pulled out a piston rod with a bearing on it, and said it was for our car. Amazing. Ford must have been shipping pistons to grocery stores all over the country. It is really something that we got across the continent with no more trouble and no accidents.
- Courtesy of Donna Shoemaker and the Oral History Program of Los Altos History House.