Younger, Wilder El Cerrito Remembered by Eugene Lukes, 95

A little bit of history relevant to this story: Eugene Lukes, who visited El Cerrito as a college student in 1930s, moved to a part of the city in the 1950s where my father's parents also built a house around the same time. He almost literally on rocks in the same neighborhood in the '60s. I interviewed Lukes recently, and the following are the stories about El Cerrito that he shared. This is an edited version of a somewhat longer interview.

Late 1930s, we were living in Berkeley on Acton Street just south of University Avenue. They were building houses here in El Cerrito. In 1940—I graduated from Cal in 1936—I was a purser on the ships of the first of the Dollar Steamship Line, which became the American President Line. 

El Cerrito in the '30s was an exciting place. It was the gambling center of Contra Costa County, maybe in the Bay Area. El Cerrito was the social sewer of the East Bay. The gambling and sometimes other activities that go along with gambling, and then there was a dog track down where the (El Cerrito) Plaza is that later became a motor movie. It was run by a man called Blackjack Jerome.

Of course we weren’t really welcome out here. In the early 1930s—this was the depths of the Depression—college students didn’t really have any money anyway, and we had even less then. You’d be surprised how little some college students got along on those days, maybe eating one meal a day and an apple or something.

We’d come out here if somebody had a car. There weren’t very many who did. Our route was usually along Colusa past the cemetery and down Fairmount.

On Arlington the street car came up. It was a single track. On the lower side there were some wide places and the street cars were doubled there. At the wide places they could pass each other.

In my college days there were dances at the Berkeley Country Club (in El Cerrito, now called the ). I think I went twice in college. I couldn’t afford more anyway, and they weren’t very expensive then. I guess an invitation to dance might have been two or three dollars.

I was a lot more popular in my senior year than any other time because my brother and I inherited an old car from an aunt and uncle. We were one of the few college students around that had a car. It wasn’t great, but it got us there. It was a Graham-Paige four-door sedan. It got so little for turn-in value that they gave it to me. My younger brother was a freshman at Cal at that time. Our allowance was a gallon of gas a week, and a gallon of gas was sixteen and a half cents, but that got us through the week.

We had this pretty respectable-looking car, and we could go to the dance. You know the Mira Vista Country Club? That was the Berkeley Country Club. It became the Mira Vista Country Club around World War II when it went belly up and some people from Richmond bought it and renamed it.

The Mira Vista district was then sort of a new housing development along upper Barrett and Arlington below the country club just north of Cutting. It was privately owned, but it was open to the public too, for a fee. They operated as a sort of semi-private club for years before the members bought it and made it totally private.

When we came up Arlington Avenue, we went through a forest of eucalyptus trees up here and particularly where you entered into the country club. That was a solid mass of trees except where some big houses were, three or four big estate-type houses. Those were part of the first development around the Berkeley Country Club.

Where Brewster comes off of Arlington, the big estate in there, they own one of the big soap factories now. Across the street from it, in the Arlington Park, was the Arlington Stables—the house and a horse riding ring and a family. A man and a woman lived there, and they kept horses in the stable.

Some of them owned horses around here like people had boats. The little girls who lived in this neighborhood, including my daughter, couldn’t wait until they were 12 years old, so that they could go down to the Arlington Stables, shovel some of the manure and get a ride on the horses around the riding ring.

Little girls and horses seem to go together, you know. Down at the stables there would be half a dozen 12- to 14-year-old girls cleaning stables and grooming horses all for the sake of riding a horse around the ring. I think the park takes up a larger property than part of the tiny stables did.

We moved to 1431 Arlington in 1951. Then they started building (more) houses on Arlington.

Where the () school and the playground is was a gradually sloping meadow, and you could enter it from down here. You could also enter it from up at the north end of Madera. Madera wasn’t a street then.

Sunday morning young people used to drive out there and that was fair necking ground. In weather like this, they’d get out there and lo and behold, the next morning you’d look out there, and there would be mud up to his hubcaps, a disgruntled father coming out of there with shovels and equipment to get the car out. It was always populated by one or two cars, especially on a nice night.

The street was empty until you got down to 1431. When we came to Arlington Avenue there were probably only three houses on the whole block. The land was all part of some trust that was administered by a bank later acquired by the Bank of America. They also owned the field out there. I think the bank was the American Trust Company.

This property (where Lukes' house is now) belonged to Francis Wilson the undertaker, a mortician in the (Wilson & Kratzer) funeral home now on San Pablo Avenue.

He had a house down here (down the hill from Lukes' house by Madera School) on the corner. It was the first post-war ultra-modern flat-roof house. It was in two sections, and it was really almost two houses. It was a pretty good slope there. He was below the rocks, just below the school turnaround. The living room-dining room-kitchen thing was closer down by the street and then he had sort of a covered breezeway and then there was another structure attached which was the bedroom structure. It was an expensive house, on two levels with a passageway between them. It was on the corner where the big yellow house is now (across from Madera School's back entrance).

In the ‘50s we had—twice, within two or three years of each other— the "once in a hundred years" rainstorm in October, and it really rained up here. What had happened was a typhoon from the China Sea which moved eastward, which usually ends up near the Hawaian islands and gradually peters out at that point. It missed the Hawaiian islands at that time. … That typhoon ended up here, and we had rain like you wouldn’t believe. The water came down these hills, and there were streams everywhere. Every place there was a gully and if there wasn’t a gully, the stream made one.

It took out a water main that crossed over and came down from Arlington, down this street. There was a pub house across the street—where there’s now Maiden Lane. It looked like a major mountain stream boiling water down there.

It took the Wilsons' house out. It went across the street, but they were more fortunate. It flooded their front yard. The water came in the front door, went through the house and out the back. It didn’t damage it terribly; they were able to salvage it. He was a war veteran with one leg.

That was in the early 1950s. At our house on Arlington I was always drainage conscious, I don’t know why. We had all the water coming down in the front and I had a drainage system that took it down the side of the house and out the back without going through the house. We didn’t suffer any real damage. A lot of water came down these hills.