I graduated from high school in June 1972. In late August, I moved into the student dormitory at Bellarmine College Prep in San José. No, I didn’t have to repeat my senior year of high school, although that might not have been a bad idea. About a dozen college students, mostly juniors and seniors, were employed as prefects in the dormitory to supervise the boarding students in the afternoon and evening hours and on weekends. I was a college freshman, but one of my Jesuit teachers at St. Ignatius College Prep in The City had invited me to consider a job in the Bellarmine dorm. It was a good call. 

San José and the Santa Clara Valley were quite different in 1972 than they are today. The term “Silicon Valley” did not exist fifty years ago. Apple Computers was founded in 1976. Intel had been around since 1968, but I’m not sure anyone knew what was happening there. Hewlett-Packard had been around for a long time — since January 1939, but I had never heard of them in 1972. Microsoft made their debut in 1975, Yahoo! in 1994, and Google in 1998. Facebook was the new kid on the block in 2004. In 1972, the “sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley,” as Jack London called it in Chapter 1 of The Call of the Wild, was affectionately known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. The fertile farmland here was home to hundreds of acres of cherry, apricot, prune, peach, pear, and apple orchards. That’s the San José I experienced in 1972.

From the very beginning, I loved living in the South Bay. Having grown up in the cold and foggy Sunset District in San Francisco, I savored the opportunity to go outside wearing shorts and a t-shirt, even in the evenings during the summer and fall. The pace was much slower here than what I had experienced in The City. Public transportation wasn’t so good, so I learned to rely on my 10-speed bicycle to get around. When I had the time, I’d ride my bike to visit friends in Los Gatos, Willow Glen, Almaden, Santa Clara, and other parts of the valley. One day, one of the other Bellarmine prefects and I rode our bikes to Pleasanton for the day to spend some time at the Alameda County Fair. I even ventured up to The City on my bike, mostly along the El Camino Real. 

To enhance the furnishing in my room at the Bellarmine dorm, I purchased two dozen square cinder blocks and some pressboard shelving at The Handyman on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Santa Clara. My cousin, Dan, hooked me up with a guy at Santa Clara University who used to collect appliances which had been abandoned in SCU dorm rooms at the end of each school year. He sold me an old, but functional full-size refrigerator and freezer for $25. I made sure to keep a healthy supply of Wilson’s Bakery chocolate chip cookies in my room at all times. For my basic grocery items, I walked around the corner from the dormitory to Bob’s Market on Emory Street, just off Elm. And even though my meals were provided in the Bellarmine dining hall, just up University Avenue, at the Alameda, was Sambo’s, where I could get breakfast, lunch, or dinner any time of day or night. 

The primary downside to living in San José fifty years ago was the air pollution. Unleaded gas had just been introduced, but was not yet available everywhere. There were many days when the hills to the east of downtown San José were completely obscured by a thick layer of smog. I recall playing tennis and having difficulty breathing due to the poor air quality. Much improvement has been made in this regard in the past fifty years.

After graduating from Santa Clara University, I made the decision to stay here in the South Bay. For seven years, I rented a cozy two-bedroom home on Lincoln Street in Santa Clara. Then, a year after getting married, Kathy and I moved into our current home in West San José. The orchards are gone. Traffic on the roads can be brutally congested at any hour of the day, with an alarming number of drivers paying little heed to driving laws. Bicycle riding is a dangerous venture now. Crime is far more prevalent than it was in 1972, as is homelessness. Despite it all, as proud as I have always been of being a native San Franciscan, I am grateful to call San José my home.