(Mary speaking): there are big eucalyptus trees near our home. One year our kids built a tree house. I could watch them through the kitchen window. They were young; Aaron was about two and the rest of them were ten or eleven. The whole neighborhood got together and built the three – story tree house.

The “carpenter” was on the top floor and the rest were on the bottom when the whole thing came crashing down on top of all of them. The kids had lined the tree house with old rugs that they had found. John had called me from work and told me not to let the kids go into the tree house; he warned me about fire. I checked on the kids and they all had lighted candles in the tree house. Well, they would never have gotten out of there, especially in eucalyptus trees which are full of oil.

Another time with the tree house they let a bum live there and we didn’t know it. He was using our address to get his mail.

One time pat crawled up in the big tree down by the highway. He was sitting up by a branch when a hippie came along. Pat yelled out: “hi, how’re you doing?”

Pat practically scared the hippie to death because he didn’t know where the voice was coming from.

Pat told him: “I’m up here!”

The hippie asked pat to come down and talk with him. Meanwhile our family had just sat down to dinner when pat walked in with this hippie. Well, what should we do except said another place at the table for the fellow?

We didn’t have any spare bedrooms for the fella to sleep, so he slept in our shed that night. The hippie era was crazy. Our kids were always bringing home people they had met on the street.

Our kids had a friend named Danny Ramirez and they used to visit his mother because she cooked the best burritos in Half Moon Bay. When they didn’t like what we were cooking for dinner our kids headed over to Danny’s house.

All the kids played Pop Warner football. We lived in a tiny, little, skinny, narrow house, and the whole team would come for sleep – overs.

One time the Ford Company had some big empty trailers near here. We didn’t know it but the big adventure at the time was to sneak out and go get into those trailers. One night we cut one of the neighbor kids hanging on the bedroom window trying to lower our kids out to go mess around on those trailers.

They used to farm the fields around our home. Between crop seasons our kids would go make a baseball field or football field out of that farmland. They spent weeks building things!

There was a kid named Joe (Sp?) who lived near here. He’s a big name now but back then he was a bully. His dad had a tractor. As soon as our kids finished building a baseball field you would come along and plow it up. Joe was about the same age as our kids. Later on, we figured out that he was probably ticked -off because he had to work while our kids played.

One time I stopped him and told him that I didn’t want to see him around again with that tractor.

There used to be lots of kids here. When they all left the street became very quiet. Now it’s coming full circle again.