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Published on 05/19/1999 All articles from this issue

Cranston's memory takes him back to dirt roads, bucking colts

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Alan Cranston, a longtime resident of Los Altos, got his start in politics at Mountain View High School and eventually spent 24 years serving in the United States Senate (1969 to 1993). He was interviewed at his home in Los Altos by Erin Finnegan in 1995 and by Paul Nyberg in January, 1998. This is the second in a three-part series featuring Senator Cranston's memories of Los Altos.

My memories actually go back quite far, to the first time I stood up. It must have been in 1915. I do remember that far back.

I went to Los Altos Grammar School in 1920, when I was 6 years old. I still have a couple of friends that I met in the first grade. We had a lot of fun just riding our bikes around, hiking in the mountains, playing touch football, baseball and basketball. I was a member of the Boy Scouts, and we had a little building on First Street. My father helped raise the money for the building.

My family owned two horses. I could usually get a friend to ride along with me. It was very open, very rural then. The roads were all dirt. There were no cars to really worry about, just fields where you could gallop around.

I made great friends with one colt we owned. There came the day when I was going to have to break it in. All my friends came to see me get bucked off that horse. They sat on top of the haystack in a safe place waiting for the show. I had never broken a horse, and I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I was an experienced rider, but with some trepidation I climbed up on the horse. It didn't buck at all. My friends were so disappointed.

My father commuted on the train. We used to have a wonderful train that went from Los Gatos to San Francisco - twice going up and then twice coming back. My father commuted to San Francisco for awhile. He was in the real estate business in Palo Alto, but then he started working in San Francisco. He became seat-mate every day of Fremont Older, a famous editor who edited the San Francisco Bulletin, later the Call-Bulletin, and that was one of the reasons I got intrigued by journalism. Hearing stories about remarkable events that Fremont Older had covered in his paper, and crusades the paper had gotten into that just got me sort of fascinated with reporting.

I became a foreign correspondent after I graduated from Stanford. But, I found myself covering the evil deeds of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. After a couple of years, I realized I didn't want to spend my life writing about such unpleasant people. I wanted to be involved in the action. So I quit journalism, hoping I could find a way to get into politics or government service.

- Adapted by Donna Shoemaker

Courtesy of History House of Los Altos