Issue date: January 13, 1999
By BARBARA WOOD
Way back when Silicon Valley was known as the Valley of the Heart's Delight and producing bumper crops of apricots instead of stock-option millionaires, when horsepower referred to horses instead of luxury cars, and there were wide open fields instead of trophy houses, Jacques Audiffred grew up in Woodside.
Little Jac's town was a place where kids entertained themselves by pulling elaborate pranks, where an eccentric millionaire might keep lions or deliver the Sunday newspaper to his wife from an airplane, where the milk would stay cold even if the power was out as long as Tony the Iceman made his deliveries, and where the Saturday night dances at Independence Hall sometimes turned into bloody melees.
Beatrice and Albert Audiffred and their only child, 3-year-old Jacques, moved to Woodside from San Francisco in 1920 at the advice of the boy's doctor, who felt the sickly child might benefit from the Peninsula's climate.
Said the doctor: "Why don't you come down to Woodside? Beautiful nice dry weather, no fog to bother you all year around."
Sure enough, once in Woodside, Jac's croup never returned and his family never left.
Woodside in those days had just about everything one needed. There was Neuman's and Holt's for groceries, Beck's Meat Market, Arata Feed and Fuel, a couple of barbers, several gas stations and the Woodside Inn hotel behind Neuman's (now the parking lot of Roberts). The Little Store was a small grocery with a two-pump gas station.
Tony Zaepffel, known as "Tony the Iceman," filled an essential need, keeping iceboxes cold. He stored large blocks of ice in a thick-walled building he'd had specially built to stay cold, and delivered the ice door to door. Ten pounds of ice would last a few weeks, Mr. Audiffred says, slowing melting into a drip pan that was usually a child's responsibility to empty before it overflowed.
Where the Canada Corners shopping center now stands, at the corner of Canada and Woodside Roads, there was a large spring-fed frog pond.
"You'd walk down Woodside Road at night, after it got dark, and you could hear these frogs croaking, millions of them. We'd clap to shut them up," Mr. Audiffred says.
Then the frog pond's owner, Electa Abecassis, decided to sell the property to Leo Koboski, who built a little shopping center where the frogs had croaked. Along with Leo's Garage, the center housed Peterson's Fountain, Demma's Grocery, The Brown Jug liquor store, a barber shop and the Woodside Insurance Company.
Mr. Audiffred's father was the real estate salesman who sold the property. Mrs. Abecassis asked him to bring her the money in cash. "He told me, 'You know what she did when I took her the money? She sat on her bed and threw it up in the air,'" Mr. Audiffred says.
Things sometimes got wild in young Jac's town. The building which is now Woodside's town meeting place, Independence Hall, was then on Albion Avenue near Woodside Road. "They used to have dances there every Saturday night," Mr. Audiffred says. Unfortunately, "those days you went out and got in a fight if you got tired of dancing with the girls." The place got the nickname of "Bucket of Blood" before it was shut down by court order in the 1920s.
The building took on a totally different character when it was later refurbished and renamed "Scout Hall" and taken over by the town's Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
Lots of the homes in Woodside, both the large estates and the small cabins in the Glens, were occupied only in the summers or on weekends. The city folks who owned the big houses would call the locals such as Eliza Silva, who would go in and strip the sheets off the furniture and air out the houses to prepare for the visits.
Without video games, remote-controlled cars or television, the local children figured out ways to entertain themselves.
Woodside Road, Highway 84, was a prime playground. "We did a lot of skating on the highway -- roller skates, these were the old iron wheels," Mr. Audiffred said.
A group of children would gather uphill on Canada Lane, with one child at the bottom to look out for cars. If the road was clear the children would skate down and see how far they could get toward the firehouse before rolling to a stop.
Almost anything could be turned into a source of amusement -- even an old tire. During the Depression, when even rubber was dear, Jac' and his friends would plant a tire in the middle of the highway. When a car stopped to try to salvage the tire, the boys jumped into action.
"We were back there grabbing the tire, running into the bushes," Mr. Audiffred says. The game ended when "somebody got smart one time and parked right on the tire," Mr. Audiffred says. "He picked up the tire and away he went, so we lost our tire."
"Halloween was special," Mr. Audiffred remembers. Boys would go and take people's gates off the hinges. "They used to go down behind the school and bury them," he says. "Finally they caught on to where we were hiding them."
And pranks weren't limited to Halloween. "We took a buggy apart one time and put it on the front porch of the school; then, we put it all back together again," he says. "Gee, that was a job."
The only problem was that once the buggy was snugly ensconced on the enclosed porch, blocking the front door to the school, no one could get it back apart.
Of course, there were a few things to occupy Jac' other than pranks. "There was a pond in back of a house on Albion Avenue," he says. "My friend Billy Harrigan and I built a raft and we would go over there and play like Huckleberry Finn for hours on end."
Or he'd catch a ride with the delivery boy from Beck's Meat Market when he had a delivery at George Whittel's estate on Kings Mountain Road.
"He had a lion over there on the back porch," Mr. Audiffred says of the eccentric millionaire. Once the meat was delivered, Mr. Whittel would often offer to let the boys come to the lion pen. "We'd watch him feed the lion," Mr. Audiffred says.
The Whittel menagerie also included monkeys, pheasants and an elephant, Mr. Audiffred says. He remembers hearing stories of Mr. Whittel taking the lion to his summer home at Fallen Leaf Lake at Tahoe. "At that time the lion was real small. They'd put a collar on him and take him down and take him into the gambling palaces."
Animals were not Mr. Whittel's only eccentricity. Every Sunday morning, Mr. Whittel would drive into Palo Alto, pick up a newspaper, and rent an airplane from the airport along El Camino Real near Embarcadero. He'd fly to Woodside, circle low over his house and cut the engine for a moment. "He'd yell, 'Here's the paper,'" Mr. Audiffred says. "You could hear him yelling."
"As the paper would drop down, the engine would rev up and he'd fly off."
On Sundays Jac' and his family attended the Woodside Village Church, which was then just the little chapel. "Benjamin St. John was our preacher," Mr. Audiffred says. "Those of us that attended church would see that we sat on the aisles during service." Mr. St. John always closed his eyes for the final benediction, "Be and Abide with us for evermore, Amen." Just as he would say "Amen," the kids would run out of the church, Mr. Audiffred says. "He pulled a fast one on us one Sunday, when he hesitated saying the word 'Amen' and we piled into each in the doorway."
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