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Publication Date: Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Three slices of history

By Marion Softky
Almanac Staff Writer

The thing about history -- that it tells such different stories -- shows up in three local books released in the last six months.

These books explore unique aspects of the rich history that led to today's Silicon Valley: local pioneers resting in Cypress Lawn Cemetery; Harry Conley's memories of flying B-17s over Germany; and Severo Ornstein's recollections of "Computing in the Middle Ages" -- BA (Before Apple.)

Who's who of California pioneers

In "Pillars of the Past: At Rest in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park," popular history authors Michael Svanevik and Shirley Burgett introduce some of the California pioneers who ended up in Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma. They include such stars of local history as silver king James C. Flood, whose Victorian mausoleum has 28 polished granite pillars; cable car magnate Andrew Hallidie, who ran one of his contraptions up the hill behind what is now Christ Church in Portola Valley; eccentric millionaire George Whittell Jr., who kept a lion, elephant and assorted wild animals in his private zoo in Woodside; and Congressman J. Arthur Younger, whose death in office triggered the 1967 race in which the young attorney Pete McCloskey beat Shirley Temple Black and 11 others to represent the Midpeninsula in Congress.

More than 300,000 people are buried in Cypress Lawn, which was established in Colma in 1892 by stockbroker and financier Hamden H. Noble. Thousands of California pioneers were later moved to Cypress Lawn from San Francisco, as the growing city expanded over Laurel Hill Cemetery, where many original San Franciscans were buried.

"Cypress Lawn is a classroom of national, California, and local history," say the authors.

Their book tells the story of Cypress Lawn monuments, which represent a treasury of California art and architecture. The authors also give brief profiles of more than 300 of its more notable residents, who have made the cemetery "the most respected permanent address in the American West."

Some of the state's finest architects and artists designed almost 90 private mausoleums, monuments, statues, and Tiffany stained glass windows. The sphinxes on George Whittell's Egyptian Revival mausoleum are in the Greek style, with the bodies of lions and the heads and breasts of women.

The new Cypress Lawn book is an expansion of an earlier book the same authors wrote when the historic cemetery celebrated its centennial in 1992. At that time, John A. Hooper of Portola Valley, whose family is well represented, was president of the Cypress Lawn board of directors. He and then-Assemblywoman Jackie Speier rededicated the cemetery, and unveiled a granite plaque near Laurel Hill Mound where 35,000 San Francisco pioneers are buried.

Mr. Svanevik and Ms. Burgett are familiar to Peninsula history buffs for their many books and articles recounting colorful tales of local history. Most recently they wrote "Menlo Park: Beyond the Gate," and "San Mateo County Parks: A Remarkable Story of Extraordinary Places and the People Who Built Them."

The vignettes in "Pillars of the Past" represent a who's who of people who have shaped San Francisco and the Peninsula. Many maintained estates on the Peninsula to provide food for the family and escape from San Francisco's summer fog. Other prominent local names include: Sharon, Eyre, Fleishhacker, Felton, Hooper, Hopkins, Jackling, Spreckels, Matson, Phleger, Rosekrans, Roth, Tevis, Pope, Talbot, several Hearsts, and feminist writer Gertrude Atherton.

More recent occupants include Atholl McBean, founder of SRI; Selah Chamberlain Jr., one of the founders and an early mayor of Woodside; and San Mateo County Clerk-Recorder Marvin Church.

Others of more-than-local interest include jazz great Turk Murphy; author Lincoln Steffens; and the grandparents of photographer Ansel Adams.

And there is at least one mystery. U.S. Senator David Broderick, who was killed in 1859 by California Chief Justice David Terry in the last major political duel in the country, was buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery under a distinguished granite monument erected by "the people of the state."

But when it came time to exhume him in 1940 for transfer to Cypress Lawn, no remains were found. "Detailed reports of his wound, published later, contributed to speculation that Broderick's remains may have been whisked away to a medical school for study."

Surviving fighter and flak attacks

In "No Foxholes in the Sky," the late cowboy, cattle broker and master horseman, Harry Conley, brings to vivid life the experience of flying B-17s in 89 combat missions over Germany. His down-to-earth accounts bring home the excitement, fear, horror, pride, boredom, and drama that went into winning the air war with Nazi Germany. And he brings alive the people who did it.

Mr. Conley, who used to run cattle on the Peninsula from Stanford to Canada College and up Windy Hill to Skyline, died in July. He dictated his wartime reminiscences to friend Stuart Whittelsey, who helped edit the book and wrote its foreword. They would ride their horses from Mr. Whittelsey's Woodside home to "The Shack," adjacent to Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, with a tape recorder in the saddlebag. There, they would have lunch and a drink, and Mr. Conley would tell war stories to the recorder and Mr. Whittelsey, who would take them home to be transcribed and edited.

"No Foxholes in the Sky" weaves these recollections from 40 years after the war with excerpts from the mostly upbeat letters Mr. Conley wrote almost every week to his family back in California, describing the events, missions and encounters, from December 7, 1941, until 1946. His mother kept them all.

After enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Conley trained as a pilot in the Army Air Corps flying B-17s with the 95th Bomb Group. He arrived in England in April 1943 after a harrowing flight from Florida via North Africa. On his first visit to London, he met Clark Gable, who was a top turret gunner for a pilot friend.

From being a squadron commander in the 95th Bomb Group, Lt. Conley rose to full colonel in 44 months. He became chief of staff of the 93rd combat wing, under Gen. Curtis LeMay. He flew 89 missions, including Kiel, Regensburg, Munster, and Berlin, before returning to the States at Christmas 1944. He earned 14 medals.

Most dramatic was the 1943 mission to destroy the submarine pens at Kiel in Northern Germany. Lt. Conley commanded a composite group of 18 bombers bringing up the rear of the 76 flying fortresses on the mission.

For hours they were attacked by several hundred German fighters playing a deadly game of aerial chicken. Badly damaged, his plane, called Blondie, still managed to unload its bombs and head back to England, still under attack by German fighters. Somehow Lt. Conley coaxed Blondie over the beach and a row of trees to crash-land in a barley field. Of the 76 B-17s that flew the mission, 16 aborted, and 22 were shot down. Lt. Conley earned his captain's bars and a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Mr. Conley's accounts -- especially to his parents -- also contain light moments, mostly about life on the ground. Like the chapter, "A California Horse in England," where Harry Conley becomes friends with the Earl of Iveagh, who was then Samuel Guinness, and his polo ponies. One of the horses came from San Mateo and was superbly trained as a cow horse in the Californio tradition.

After herding the Earl's cows, Lt. Conley became somewhat of a celebrity showing off California vaquero riding on the English horse circuit. The crowning event was putting on a three-day authentic western rodeo at a soccer field in Norwich, before 75,000 eager Brits. Cowboys recruited from the local Air Force competed, riding polo ponies, and using local Suffolk plow horses for bucking horses.

During his time in England, Mr. Conley met many celebrities, including Winston Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook, General George Patton, actor Jimmy Stewart, and legendary band leader Glenn Miller -- the day before he disappeared. One of the high points was receiving the Croix de Guerre with Palms from General Charles De Gaulle for dropping supplies to the French resistance. The presentation included a kiss on both cheeks from the legendary general. "That was certainly a new experience," Mr. Conley wrote.

A computing explorer (not exploiter)

Severo Ornstein's book, "Computing in the Middle Ages: A View from the Trenches 1955-1983," describes one man's 30-year journey developing key phases of computers as they evolved from vast assemblies of vacuum tubes and wires, toward the trim units with e-mail and Internet that we know today, like Palm Pilots and cell phones.

He tells how the major advances were made long before Steve Jobs came foraging for technology at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, where Mr. Ornstein was then working. The result of the Xerox PARC work, of course, was Apple's MacIntosh and the personal computer revolution, which converted computers from arcane technology into personal appliances, money, and a revolution in how the world works and communicates.

It was partly irritation with the recent PBS special, "The Nerds," that spurred Mr. Ornstein, who lives in the hills west of Skyline, to write that earlier history. The programs focused on Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others who adapted technology developed by others to build financial empires. "The focus turned out to be once again on the exploiters rather than the explorers, and the history I'd known and experienced was largely ignored or glossed over," he wrote.

A geologist by training, Mr. Ornstein decided that working on computers at MIT would be more fun than searching for oil. He describes his career, from programming punched cards, batch-processing, and paper tape at Lincoln Laboratories, through hardware design for the first truly personal computer, LINC, in the early 1960s. Built with transistors but not yet computer chips, LINC consisted of a box the size a coffin, plus related equipment. It was built for research in neurophysiology for the National Institutes of Health. It could be stuffed in a station wagon, Mr. Ornstein noted.

Another career move brought him to BBN, where he was one of a team of seven who built the technology to make the Internet work. Specifically, they developed the IMP computer that actually handled messages between computers for ARPANET, the forerunner to today's Internet.

Then on to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where many of the extraordinary developments of the past 30 years converged. There Mr. Ornstein helped develop the laser printer that went with the Alto, the first real personal computer.

"It was the first computer that looked like what we have now," he said. "It seemed like a miracle at the time."

Under the leadership of George Pake, formerly of Portola Valley; Bob Taylor of Woodside; Jerry Elkind of Portola Valley; and others, teams of creative, often outrageous, scientists armed with beanbag chairs, created the basis for the Internet, practical personal computers, and laser printers.

Credit also goes to Doug Engelbart of Atherton, who developed not only the computer mouse at SRI, but many techniques of handling and displaying information that we take for granted today. He was "one of the truly great innovators of the modern computer era." Mr. Ornstein wrote.

Before retiring almost 20 years ago, Mr. Ornstein co-headed the team that was building the Dorado, a bigger, faster, more powerful version of the Alto.

"Computing in the Middle Ages" gives a personal ride through the extraordinary developments that laid the foundations for Apple and Microsoft. It introduces the reader to some wonderful characters, and gives a feel for the nuts and bolts of world-changing research. It also contains some funny stories.

"Computing in the Middle Ages" is one of the few good books about the history of computers, said Bob Taylor, who won the National Medal of Technology in 1999 for his leadership in developing personal computers and the Internet. "It's accurate. It emphasizes the right things, not just people who got rich," he said. "Severo contributed in many different dimensions of computer innovation. But he didn't get rich."

Since retiring, Mr. Ornstein and his wife, fellow computer maverick Laura Gould, have designed their elegant house in the woods, and pursued other interests. In the early 1980s, they founded and led Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Mr. Ornstein has been transcribing and publishing the music of his father, Leo Ornstein, a wild and radical composer and pianist early in the last century, who died in 2002 at the age of 109.

Mr. Ornstein and Ms. Gould live with two cats -- black Max and a rare male calico named George. They enjoy hiking, and have spotted half a dozen mountain lions in the Peninsula hills.

INFORMATION

** "Pillars of the Past: At rest in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park" by Michael Svanevik and Shirley Burgett. Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation, Colma, California. Second Edition 2002. $16.99. For information, or for tours of the cemetery the third Saturday of every month at 1:30 p.m., call 755-0580, or visit cypresslawn.com.

** "No Foxholes in the Sky" by Harry Conley. FNP Military Division, 6527 Main Street, Trumbull, Connecticut 06611. 2002. $35. This can be ordered through Kepler's Books.

** "Computing in the Middle Ages: A view from the Trenches 1955-1983" by Severo M. Ornstein. www.1stBooks.com/bookview/10798. $4.95 electronic; $10.50 paperback; or call 888-286-7715.