My father was John Joseph Blach, and my mother was Georgina Irene Powers Blach. I'm the third of their 12 children. My parents met in San Francisco. Mother was a nurse at Mary's Help Hospital.
** missed drop char **Dad was from Austria where he learned X-ray from one of Wilhelm Roentgen's students. X-ray technology began with Roentgen's discovery in 1895 in Germany.
Dad built a country home in Los Altos in the late 1930s so we could spend our summers in a nice atmosphere with a better climate and more space.
The house was on Canyon Road, the road they call The Twisters - 4 miles out of town, where Moody (Road in Los Altos Hills) gets very winding with hairpin turns.
We would stay the whole summer. I loved it. Of course, when you are a family member you come along whether you liked it or not.
It was great to have so much space.
We got a chance to climb the hills and see the trees, and nobody bothered us. I remember once we visited a retired person who had a garden. He was kind enough to show me several different plants and how they grew.
He had onions and carrots, and I remember eating them right there, right out of the ground. I was absolutely amazed, because coming from San Francisco you didn't see any vegetable gardens.
We used to say that Los Altos had 500 people, counting the chickens and the dogs and the people. When discussing the neighbors, my parents would say, "Leave them alone. That's why we came out to the country, and that's why they came out here." So we left the neighbors alone to have their privacy, and they did the same for us.
On the Canyon Road, they had a little country store where you could buy staples - it was run by Fred Gurney.
They had one gas pump, and you would pump the gas up into the cylinder glass tank. You could see the gasoline filling up; it was the color of tea.
They didn't sell too much gas up there, though, because there weren't too many people up there.
Later we moved to Los Altos full time. I went to Los Altos Grammar School from the seventh grade on. We moved closer to town to a house on El Monte and Hawthorne (avenues). Dad got horses for the kids because gas was rationed.
He even bought a cow for milk. Everything was such an adventure. Those are times I remember so vividly.
- Adapted by Donna Shoemaker for Los Altos History House.
E-mail: LAHistoryHouse@aol.com