Emergency/Disaster Preparation
The mini-theme of this newsletter is emergency/disaster preparedness (E-prep). Members of the BPA have played a significant role in Palo Alto's overall efforts in this area, often as the driving forces that kept the effort alive. Three in particular stand out: Art Bayce (profiled in this issue), Katie Edwards, and Inge Harding-Barlow. All have retired from E-prep (and from the BPA Board). We are attempting to restart e-prep for the neighborhood, and there are attempts to revitalize the City's efforts. We have several volunteers to take this on, and could use several more.

In e-prep planning, the perspective of residents can contribute substantially to the result. For example, should an earthquake (or other event) shutdown the Hetch Hetchy pipelines, the City has plans (in progress) to re-activate City wells that were shutdown some years ago. If the City's water mains remain intact, this should be adequate. However, none of these wells is close to our neighborhood: the only one on our side of the railroad tracks is near Stanford Shopping Center. Someone looking at this plan with a Barron Park perspective immediately asks "If there was a serious fire in southwestern Palo Alto during such a disaster, would the Fire Department be able to truck enough water over here to effectively fight it?" Remember, it isn't just the residential areas, but the Stanford Research Park and nearby commercial facilities. While there is a City well on Matadero (near Josina), it is not on the City's list of wells to be refurbished and maintained because it has levels of contaminants (mainly manganese) that are somewhat above the thresholds for use as normal tap water. The BPA has been arguing, unsuccessfully so far, that geographic distribution of the wells is more important that absolute purity because they are intended primarily for short-term use during an emergency, especially since the City can selectively activate individual wells as needed.

Another example where local knowledge was highly relevant popped up during the emergency evacuation drill in 1987. At that time, there was far more semiconductor work being performed in the Research Park and there was serious concern about whether residents could be warned quickly enough should a release of toxic gases occur. The Fire Department's plan was to have fire trucks drive slowly down the streets and use their speakers to alert people to the problem. The drill showed that many residents did not hear the announcements, especially those with large setbacks from the street (including flag lots), and those with substantial landscaping in front. The announcements were adequate for houses closer to the "normal" suburban model: limited setbacks from the street, with lawn, flowerbeds and only small hedges in front. A similar problem with hidden constraints occurred during the San Francisquito Creek flooding in eastern Palo Alto in February 1998: because the speakers on the fire trucks were mounted under the trucks, and thus were rendered ineffective in neighborhoods were the water was already rising in the streets.

In this area, housing costs force many city employees to live long distances from where they work, and this needs to be factored into the plans. Having residents participating in the planning process is important: contrast an official asking himself "In case I am not present when the disaster occurs, is there an adequate mechanism for handing off my responsibilities?" with a resident asking the corresponding question "What does it mean to ME if you ...?" The resident will be focused on what that absence means in terms of delays and reduced effectiveness of the response.

In Palo Alto — as in most jurisdictions — the Fire Department (FD) is responsible for e-prep. In their normal day-in, day-out operations, the FD, and other emergency response professionals, work best as self-contained teams: participation of outsiders maynot only impair their effectiveness, but endanger members of the team. Most interactions with the larger community occur as part of their educational activities which focus on prevention (reducing hazards) and handling the short interval until the FD arrives and takes over, for example, safely evacuating a burning building and administering first aid in a medical emergency. The typical disaster plan mirrors this division: the FD, police, and paramedics handle the many individual emergencies that are part of the overall disaster and the role of residents is to be prepared to take care of themselves during the initial period (typically put at 72 hours). Palo Alto is ahead of most other cities in recognizing that the emergency response professionals will be overloaded during a disaster and offering training to residents so that they can help take up some of the slack (PANDA: Palo Alto Neighborhood Disaster Activity).

However, the day-to-day activities of emergency response professionals create a mindset where there are victims, rescuers and onlookers. This institutional bias/ mindset carries over into the disaster planning, and thereby missed that there is more to a disaster than dealing with an intense series of emergencies.

I have been in the middle of one major disaster (the Hurricane Agnes floods of 1972) and on the periphery of several other disasters. My experience is that officials grossly underestimate the toll on residents of stress: stress from worry (are family, friends, neighbors safe?), from uncertainty, and from frustration at not being allowed to help when there is so much that obviously needs to be done. A large amount of chaos is an inevitable part of any disaster, but my observations are that the plans failed to cover some fairly basic things. A common problem is that because there is no system for marking when a building has been checked for people needing help, some get checked multiple times and a few get missed. Unnecessary checks are not only a waste of time, but often involve people unnecessarily risking life and limb. Ideally, coordination of such activity should be part of the official plan, but there are too often impediments, for example, official concerns that any such provisions would be taken as authorizing and encouraging random volunteers to engage in potentially hazardous activities.

By definition, disasters are infrequent and largely unpredictable, and this makes work on e-prep very challenging. First, it is important, but a low priority. Do not expect much participation by the general public before the disaster actually occurs. Second, it must be simple enough to be used and good enough to be worth using. Third, preparations once in place must be trivial to maintain (and update), preferably as a trivial add-on to an established routine task. Fourth, since it is uncertain whether they will ever actually be needed, the up-front investment needs to be small. As an example of simple and good enough: During the 1972 flood, the company I worked for had payroll working while we still had water in the computer room: they arranged for delivery of cash (lots of cash) and made approximate salary payments (smallest bill distributed was a $20). Most employees had had to flee their homes with no advanced warning, so they had no proof of what their normal salary was. Solution: presenting a company ID, or having someone with a company ID vouch for you, was enough proof to get the default payment for that work week. Payments were recorded and several weeks later we wrote a simple program to make the needed adjustments to people's pay.

Conclusion: In the emerging round of e-prep activity at the City level, our neighborhood needs people to work with representatives of the other neighborhoods and with City staff to ensure that Barron Park issues and problems are understood and addressed. It would also be very useful to identify what we could practically do as a neighborhood to supplement our individual preparations.

If I had to summarize what I think of Arthur Bayce in a phrase, it would be "Citizen of Barron Park". Art first joined the Barron Park Association Board in 1964, shortly after he came to the neighborhood, and served, with one brief leave of absence, for 35 years, finally resigning due to health problems at the end of 1999. During this time, Art was involved, in one way or another, in nearly all of the BPA's major initiatives and ongoing programs. Inge Harding-Barlow characterized him in a 1996 newsletter article as "A behind-the-scenes doer!"

Art was born in Cleveland, Ohio but corrected this problem at age nine by migrating to California. He grew up in Oakland and attended UC Berkeley, earning a BS in Chemistry and an MS in Metallurgy, then an MA in Education at San Jose State. He took a job as a Metallurgist at SRI when it was still Stanford Research Institute and got an apartment in Menlo Park. Two years later he concluded that home prices were too expensive in Menlo Park but he didn't want to commute more than five miles. On a map, he drew a circle with a 5-mile radius centered on SRI. It touched on Barron Park, which he eventually visited. Liking what he saw, he responded to an ad touting new homes on Paradise Way and bought a partially completed one, on the spot. It was $3,000 cheaper than a comparable home in Palo Alto (Barron Park was still unincorporated County land at the time). He has stayed right here ever since. After leaving SRI he worked elsewhere, and finally as a Lecturer in the Materials Engineering Dept. at San Jose State University until retiring in 1991.

When Art joined the BPA Board in 1964, the organization was poised for a revolution. Known then as the Barron Park Improvement Association, its President was "Mrs. Russell Riley". Although it was still dominated by a small group of extremely conservative small business-oriented board members who had joined when Jack Silvey was President, new board members who represented the new professionals moving into Barron Park were beginning to make their weight felt. The political situation was very confused, with Realtor Mike Golick forming a rival group, the Barron Park Citizens for Annexation in 1965. The Golick group's annexation bid failed in the City Council.

The new professionals on the BPA Board, including Art Bayce, were impatient with the bitter annexation feuds (Golick's was the sixth annexation attempt in 18 years) and were preparing a General Plan for Barron Park. The idea was that, once adopted by the CountyBoard of Supervisors, the General Plan would control development on and near the El Camino Strip. This would protect Barron Park's R-1 neighborhoods from the ongoing invasion of apartment buildings and the commercial strip from the trend toward muffler shops, massage parlors, bars and adult bookstores. Art was a key supporter of Richard Placone, a Stanford Manager and resident of Chimalus Avenue who was spearheading the General Plan effort. During that effort, Art attended many Board of Supervisors meetings in San Jose. At one of these, Sig Sanchez, a Supervisor for the South County area, asked him "Why don't you people just join Palo Alto and leave us alone?". This was exactly what Dick and Art wanted to do, but they were too canny to say so openly while feeling was running so high in the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Art took on the job of Traffic Chair and carried this responsibility about eight years, turning it over eventually to Will Beckett. He remembers pressuring the County at one point to fix a very large pothole in Los Robles near El Camino that was becoming a major traffic hazard. He got it fixed, but he felt that it should be much easier to get the City to respond than to get action out of the County Government at such a distance. Experiences such as these, along with his own assessment of the inadequacies of the Barron Park volunteer fire department (such as leaky hoses and failing trucks) led Art to become enthusiastic for annexation.

After the General Plan was approved and put into effect by the Supervisors, the next initiative by the BPA, now under the new leadership of President Dick Placone, was to find a way to fund a community park in the Bol family's donkey pasture. Art, like the other board members, walked door-to-door explaining the proposal to form a special taxing district to raise the necessary funds. The straw poll showed that the support would be there, so a formal proposal was made to the Supervisors, and election was held, Barron Park voted overwhelmingly in favor, and Bol Park became a reality. This effort, and the follow-on with Stanford and the Southern Pacific Railroad to acquire the bikepath, absorbed much of the BPA board's energies for about ten years, and Art was a faithful supporter of these efforts.

After annexation in 1975 and the dedication of Bol Park Phase 2 (the bike path) in 1978, the BPA leadership turned over again and the organization began to get involved in other issues. Art formed the Emergency Preparedness Committee in 1982. A flyer on earthquake readiness was developed and delivered door-to-door to 1400 Barron Park homes. The reverse side was a questionnaire and mailer, and the response was nearly 10%. This was the prototype of the BPA's many mail-in polls on community issues. The core committee, chaired by Art and including Barbara Brown, Katie Edwards, Verna Graham, and a representative from the Fire Dept., researched and wrote "Living With Our Faults". This was later adopted by the City of Palo Alto and parts of it have been used by Sunnyvale, San Jose and other California Cities. A later update effort was spearheaded by Inge Harding-Barlow.

From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, Art's main contributions were made in support of Inge's ToxSafe committee that organized and led Barron Park's massive effort to get the State Government to clean up the groundwater deep under Barron Park. Our deep aquifer had been polluted with a number of toxic and carcinogenic substances from various sources in the Stanford Research Park. The effort, which took more than a decade, involved multiple federal, state and local government agencies, the industrial firms responsible and Stanford University. During this long battle, Art was Inge's most consistent supporter. As Inge said in her 1996 article; "Why is Art so successful as a community leader? He listens to all the suggestions going on around him and then turns the key ones into a positive course of action in which Barron Park wins." The toxic cleanup has, in the end, been enormously successful, with many of the extraction wells producing effluent with no detectable toxics several years before scheduled. Art was also very involved with the preparations for Barron Park Evacuation Drill in 1987, another of Inge's initiatives.

I remember how much help Art was to the Creek Committee in the early 1990s when we were monitoring progress on the flood control project (the Barron Creek Diversion and Matadero Creek Bypass). He attended many meetings with Bob Moss and myself in the construction trailer on the Gunn High School property, where we worked out agreements with the Water District and the contractors covering bikepath detours, noise impacts, construction hours, handling of creek flows, potential impacts on Mickey the donkey, and many other construction-related details of importance to the neighborhood.

In his last years on the BPA Board, Art represented our neighborhood on two Blue Ribbon committees of the City of Palo Alto. He was appointed to the citizen advisory committee that worked on the design and siting for a combined Fire-Police Public Safety Headquarters for Palo Alto. Later, he was appointed by the City Manager to the committee that revised Palo Alto's Disaster Preparedness Management Plan. Art has put in 35 years of unpaid service on behalf of his neighbors. It is only through the unsung efforts of many people like Art Bayce that our City and our neighborhood remain excellent places to live. Hail Citizen Bayce &151; and thank you from all our hearts.

History of the Land is Hidden in Our Street Names
Some of the street names in Barron Park are clues to past uses of our land, including a number that evoke the original vegetation cover or geographic features that no longer exist. Many streets were given Spanish names during the 1940s and '50s when it was fashionable to do so.

The Earliest Street
Few records exist of the earliest roads built on the land that has since become our neighborhood. However, it is likely that the first road off the County Road (El Camino Real) was the driveway to Elisha Crosby's Mayfield Farm house, built shortly after he purchased the property from Secundino Robles, the owner of Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito ("Rancho Santa Rita"), in 1853. This driveway is shown in an 1876 lithograph of the Victorian gingerbread mansion Sarah Wallis built onto the front of Elisha Crosby's farmhouse after she took it over in 1857. The driveway was later relocated by the next owner of Mayfield Farm, Edward Barron, who bought the property in 1878. The relocated driveway is now Military Way, and was so named when the original Barron Park subdivision was laid out by Sebastian Jones in 1926. Colonel Jones was the founder, owner and headmaster of the California Military Academy, which occupied the Barron Mansion and surroundings. The area was developed as the Woodland Park tract in 1937 after the Barron Mansion burned down. The tract includes all the homes on Magnolia Drive and those on Military between La Selva and Magnolia.

Another early road was Los Robles Avenue, which was probably laid out in conjunction with the channelization of Barron Creek that was carried out some time between 1880 and 1893. It first appears on the 1926 plot map. Los Robles means "the oaks" in Spanish and almost certainly referred to the magnificent specimens of Valley Oak (California native deciduous white oak) that mingled with great liveoaks along the historic floodplain of Barron Creek.

Matadero Avenue was named, of course, for the creek that it crosses and roughly parallels. It appears on the 1926 map and was probably laid out by the strawberry growers Driscoll and Reiter, shortly after they purchased the Barron Estate in 1919. Matadero is Spanish for "slaughtering place." Upstream in the foothills, the creek formed the boundary between Rancho Purisima Concepcion and Rancho del Corte de Madera. Evidently, somewhere on the creek was the place where the rancheros traditionally slaughtered cattle for the hide trade with "Boston" ships. When first laid out around 1920, Matadero Avenue probably forded the creek or crossed on a wooden bridge somewhere near the current bridge, which was built of concrete in 1929. The bridge was widened at some later date and then lengthened (channel widening) as part of the 1979 flood control work.

The Laguna That Once Was
Laguna Avenue was also laid out in the early 1920s as an extension of Matadero that connected to Los Robles. The 1929 Thomas Brothers map shows it running from present-day Matadero along the railroad tracks to the bend where the Laguna Court now enters from the left. It then turned northeast along Laguna Court to the creek, where there was an established ford approximately opposite La Calle Court. It crossed on the ford, then turned sharply right and hugged the creek's right bank up to where the Laguna Avenue bridge is today. At that point, it made a right-angle turn to the left and followed the present alignment to Los Robles Avenue. This dog-leg course and roller-coaster creek crossing was abandoned and the name changed to Laguna Avenue when the present concrete bridge was built in 1933. It was named for the "lake" (laguna in Spanish) that then existed in a low spot between Barron Creek and the future Shauna Lane. The laguna was used for irrigation. Laguna Court was briefly called "Neal" for the owners of the land between Matadero Avenue and Matadero Creek and across from present-day Bol Park. The Southern Pacific steam train commuter stop at Matadero Avenue was also named Neal.

Roble Ridge was laid out as a private road in 1920 to lead to William Carruth's new house in the oaks at 955 Roble Ridge on Matadero Creek above Bol Park. A Professor of German language and literature at Stanford, Carruth began an "academic colony" of Stanford professors and researchers such as Cornelis Bol along Roble Ridge in the 1920s and 1930s. The ridge was covered with a magnificent Valley Oak (deciduous oak) woodland and provided sweeping views of the Stanford grazing lands on two sides and glimpses of San Francisco Bay far away to the northeast. Roble is Spanish for Valley Oak.

A Little Hill That Isn't There Anymore
El Cerrito Road crosses Barron Creek on a wide bridge opening off of upper Los Robles Avenue. It curves around in a U, with the bottom of the U paralleling the Gunn High School property line near the baseball diamond. It was laid out in November, 1945 as part of El Cerrito Unit 1. Residents of the new houses built in the period 1949-55 that backed up to the Gunn property had views of Strawberry Hill and a smaller knoll which then existed near the football field. Both knolls are shown on the 1895 USGS topographic map and in more detail on the 1908 map of Stanford Lands. The smaller one was levelled during the construction of Gunn High School in 1955-56, and the earth was used to fill the swale then occupied by Barron Creek (the creek was undergrounded through a 5-foot pipe). The now-missing hill had been the inspiration for El Cerrito Road's name, which is Spanish for "little hill".

The Encina Grande tract was laid out July 13, 1946. Both Encina Grande Drive and Arbol Drive commemorate a truly massive native California Coast Liveoak (encina in Spanish) that grew at the intersection of the two streets. It can be clearly seen on both the 1941 and 1948 aerial photos, and its crown appears to cover at least a quarter acre.

In the original 1926 Barron Park Subdivision, La Selva Drive is a 1940 hispanicization of its' original name, woodland drive, which evoked the lush ornamental plantings of Edward Barron's "park" through which it wound. It was originally laid out by Barron as a winding driveway when he expanded the park area that Sarah Wallis had planted around the mansion.

Chimalus Avenue was laid out through an area labeled "chimiles" on early maps. Chimiles is an Indian word meaning a tangledgrowth or chaparral. This area, which is slightly downhill from Matadero Creek, may have experienced occasional wintertime overflows.

A Nomenclatural Mystery
The naming of La Para Avenue is a mystery. In 1991, the Publications Committee of the Palo Alto Historical Association was revising their excellent 1979 booklet, Streets of Palo Alto, and I was asked to provide Barron Park History input. The original book had covered most of our streets fairly well, although Barron Park was brand new to the City at that time and there was precious little in the PAHA files. Through my research, we improved the write-ups of about one-third of the streets. However, this one was a complete puzzle. I could not find a noun "la para" in any Spanish language dictionary I consulted. I checked with several educated native-Spanish speakers, but they could not bring any light onto the subject. I finally wrote up a rather tortured speculation, based on my knowledge of the land, which read "The name may have some link to the Spanish verb parar or pararse which means to stop or end. The avenue was once an area of strawberry fields."

In the mid-Nineties, I drew up a map showing Barron Park agriculture in the 1930s. This was based on the 1941 aerial photo, the oral history taken by Ann Knopf from Lena and Ernest Johnson in 1977, and many snippets of information provided me by other "old-timers" over the years. On this map, I recorded the fact that there were pear orchards occupying most of the area between Barron and La Para, La Donna and Laguna Avenues. The pears were planted in the 1930s after the red spider mites wiped out the strawberry fields originally planted by Driscoll's growers in the early 1920s.

It was only several years ago that I came across a map from the 1920s that showed the street name as "La Pera", and my mental light bulb flashed on. La Pera is Spanish for "Pear". I now believe that the original spelling was changed in error, or perhaps to make it easier for English speakers to pronounce it correctly. In any case, I am certain that this is "Pear Street" and was named for the orchards that lined its northwest side.

I hope you have enjoyed the insights into the past that these street names contain. In a future issue I will cover the streets named for our pioneers, as well as those named for developers or members of their families, including the half-dozen named for children.

The Barron Park donkeys, Perry and Niner, have had a busy time in the late summer and fall. Back in July and August, the boys learned that persistent head butting was a very effective way to crash through the door to their feed shed, resulting in all-you-can-eat meals on demand. The donkey handler crew resolutely built barriers of stacked up wooden planks, old oil drums, etc. to block the donkeys' path to the shed. Perry and Niner just as resolutely crashed through all the barriers &151; and the door — repeatedly foiling their caretakers and accessing an unlimited supply of alfalfa. In desperation a temporary chain link barrier was erected, and at last, mankind triumphed over the beasts of burden. It turned out that the fellow from Express Fence, from whom the fence was rented, used to own a donkey himself. He issued an iron clad donkey-proof guarantee, and he was right, although Perry and Niner mounted a good assault before admitting defeat. Eventually James Witt, owner of the donkey paddock and carpenter extraordinaire, found a way to reinforce the shed doors to prevent untrammeled donkey access &151; for now. The fence came down for good in September.

This grassroots fundraiser for our neighborhood PTAs exploded into a huge event last year with unsurpassed turnout and outstanding community involvement. The 7th annual Juana Run will be Saturday, March 1, 2003. The 8K will start at 8:30am and will loop through the Barron Park neighborhood. The route will be different than last year's race and is pending permit approval. This will be a certified course so if you set a world record, it would count in the record books! How's that for incentive, not to mention another quality T-shirt to add to your collection. Kids' races will start at 10:00am for 5th graders and work its way down to pre-K. The 1-mile race will start at 11:10am.

The 8K awards ceremony will be at 9:30am and the kids' and 1-mile ceremony will be at 11:30am. Awards will be given for the top three in each division in the kids' race and the first place winners in each 10-year age group for men and women for the 1-mile and 8K. Raffle tickets for a vacation package giveaway will be available for purchase. All profits are part of the fundraiser.

Race director Karen Saxena and committee members Dale Reynolds, Jon Vogt, Baldwin Cheng and Brian Sakai welcome volunteers to help on race day. If you are interested, contact Karen through the race hotline at (650)599-3434 [email withheld].

Lunches
We have had two lunches since our last column. In September, while the weather was still good, we met a second time in Bol Park. Driftwood Deli catered again, and we had a large, gregarious turnout. Turnouts seem to be largest for picnics in the park. We will schedule two or three next spring and summer.

Then in early November, we favored Compadres with our attendance. A lovely time — we took over the patio — and had a varied, delicious selection for $10 each, including tax and tip. At every lunch, there are one or more new attendees who have just heard about our get-togethers. We are always happy to have new people join us.

Our next lunch will be in mid-January. Hope to see you there.

Long-Term Care Insurance — What Does Yours Cover?
A friend and neighbor had a stroke recently and, after hospital time and then rehab time, came home to complete his recovery. His mind was fine, but he had lost a lot of motor control and was very weak. He hired a licensed care organization to provide in-home help. Then he submitted a claim to his long-term care insurer. Claim denied!
What happened? There was no doubt that he needed help during the early days of his recovery.

Well, according to the insurance company, the care organization was licensed, but the individual caregivers were not. Our friend's temporary disabilities did not meet the specific limitations spelled out in his policy. Extreme weakness did not count. Etc., etc, etc.

The burden of our message here is: Have you read your long-term care insurance policy? It may be boring, certainly not fun reading, but when you are flat on your back is not the time to discover its idiosyncrasies. For example, this situation that our friend found himself in goaded us into reading our own policies. We found that, when we submit a claim, it is the company that contacts doctors, etc., to get supporting data for the claim. If home care is allowed, the company contracts directly with the care provider, we can't do it ourselves. In both respects — and several others — our policy is different from our neighbor's. They all have limitations and restrictions, and they are all different.

The Counsel on Aging has a Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program (HICAP) that will provide help in dealing with health and long-term care insurance issues. Their counselors are at Avenidas two days a week. Call and make an appointment for a private meeting with a counselor if you are having any kind of problems with health or care insurance.

Services Offered
We continue to offer services for seniors. If you would like to find out more, please phone. We could

Run an errand for you or with you.
Do small odd jobs at your home.
Help you learn to use e-mail.
Stop by for a visit, or give you a daily phone call.
Find information that you might need about any specific service available to local seniors.

You can reach Julie Spengler at 493-9151 or Mary Jane Leon at 493-5248.