Terror On Massol Avenue!!!

In the days when Elvis, the Drifters and Roy Orbison were prominent in the “Top 40” on the pop radio stations, we would visit my aunt in, what was to become, Monte Sereno. She lived in a small, older house near the end of Viewfield Road, just a bit more than half a mile from Santa Cruz Avenue and Highway 9 intersection. Aunt “Dee,” and her family, lived on a couple of acres on a gentle hillside, with an old style water tower right outside the back door with a small barn that served as a two car garage across the driveway.

Dominating the drive’s big circle were three or four huge Eucalyptus trees that always had this back yard drowning in endless droppings of these tree’s bark, which would fall in little strips and get pulverized into a fine, light tan powder by the shoes and tires that tread on it.

Unlike our place in Almaden, with a similar layout, but in the middle of the table top flat, working fields of vegetables, Dee’s place was on these grassy, rolling hills with no furrows or rows but occasional oaks strewn about. Her nearest neighbor was raising a few horses and several odd beef cattle, but that was it. This was more of a “country” setting rather than a “farm house” like our place, with the tractors and trucks and a gas pump all clustered around the back side of the weathered, old barn. Dee’s neighborhood was a gentler place, just outside Los Gatos, on the little highway that went between Saratoga and Los Gatos.

Whenever we visited Dee during the day, my little sister and I would take off on our own little hikes and go exploring the creeks and natural berry patches that lay on the edge of the dry creeks at the foot of the hill. Really, there wasn’t much to do around there.

Dee had three sons, one about five years older than me and two that were much younger than me. I remember the both of them being born. I never got really close to any of the three but we did have our own minor adventures when we’d get together. When I was around ten or eleven, Joe, the oldest of the litter, was getting very involved in cars. He and his friends were building them up and tearing them down. He had a very highly polished ’57 Chevy convertible that was bright red with a white top and accents and a white with red interior. While the car wasn’t brand new, it was Joey’s pride and joy. He kept it sparkling like it was still on the showroom’s floor. Joe wasn’t so much the mechanic as more the user, the car “show off,” we might say. He loved to be seen driving with some pony-tailed, bobby-socked girls, in their tight sweaters and pedal pushers, their arms wrapped around his neck as he pulled the car into the school parking lot for the next sock hop. It was Joe’s friends who really intrigued me, the mechanics, the greasy guys who had cigarette packs rolled into the sleeves of their grimy, white tee shirts. These were the classic bad boys of the 1950s, be it on motorcycles or in ground pounding dragsters.  These “dudes” are the ones you didn’t mess with. They always had broad shoulders, sharp jaws, big fists and a steely gleam in their eye. You never questioned or challenged this sort, they had testosterone dripping from their pores and clouds of adrenaline wafting from their snouts. The young girls were in fear of this sort, but they’d often swoon when offered a ride in or on the greaser’s heavy metal steeds. I could never figure that out. Girls can be so fickle, I used to think.

Joey had this one mechanic friend, Turk, who lived on Massol in the Almond Grove District of Los Gatos. The streets of the Almond Grove were very unique to me. The front of the houses on the Almond Grove streets had no driveways, just paved walks to the front door. This always seemed very classy to me. The only residential neighborhoods I was familiar with were the tract houses being built up around our farms. They always had a big garage door on the front of the houses and a driveway running to the street. In Almond Grove, the cars had access to the houses from the alleys that ran parallel to the streets but at the back of the houses.  Here, the garages were facing the ally, not the street . . .

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