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Publication Date: Friday, February 08, 2002

A century of change/Living memory

She is Pleasanton's oldest native, as far as she knows. Elizabeth Ziegenfuss Hall, born here in 1902, grew up on Second Street between Neal and Angela and continued to live here all her life. She still resides in the home that she moved to in 1922 shortly after her marriage.

"I'm pretty comfortable in my own house even though I have to restrict myself from doing the things that I want to do," Elizabeth said last week. "It's just, who gets to be 100 years old and lives by themselves?"

"People who are pretty tough!" answered her nephew, Phil Henry, who also lives in town.

At 99-1/2 (her birthday is June 20), Elizabeth remains active, with a sharp mind that would put many of us "younger folk" to shame; her excellent memory bears fine witness to life in Pleasanton during the last century's early decades.

The fourth child of Thomas and Edith (Butner) Ziegenfuss, Elizabeth grew up with three older brothers, Howard, Wilfred and Lincoln, and two younger sisters, Donna and Mary Edith. Their mother stayed at home while their father worked as a butcher, leaving their house at 5 in the morning and coming back at 8 at night.

It was a time when everyone knew each other in the small town of Pleasanton - the 1900 census estimated a population of 1,100. It was before Main Street was paved, and children played in the dirt streets; before cars; before electricity was common; after water pipes but before indoor plumbing. She remembers the long trenches in the streets when the sewer lines were put in.

"I was probably 12 years old," she said. "We got into trouble because we were running in those ditches. They were deep and people could be buried in there if they had a slide."
Quakes, fires and floods

One of her earliest memories was of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when she was only 4.

"The boys got out of the house, and my mom and my cousin ... got out and took the baby, my sister, with them. After it was all over they remembered that they'd left me in the youth bed underneath a real big picture," she recounted. Fortunately, she was safe.

Not much damage occurred this far from the quake's epicenter - a few broken dishes and things knocked off shelves. But as a precaution, her father went out and flagged down the morning train in case the railroad trestles had been weakened in the shake.

Like the other children, Elizabeth attended the only school in town, Pleasanton Grammar School, just two blocks away at First Street and Bernal Avenue, where the school district offices are now located. But in 1909, just after she started first grade, disaster hit the school - fire.

"I can remember my daddy taking me out in the back yard ... and hearing the bell from the school tower drop when the bell tower burned," Elizabeth said. For more than a year, children were taught wherever there was space, until a new school was completed on the same site. In the meantime Elizabeth and her classmates used the newly completed Oddfellows Hall on St. Mary Street and later moved to a warehouse office where Cole's Market on First Street is now located.

The school, which went up to the eighth grade, had one class for each grade with about 15 children in each.

"People came from 3 miles out," Elizabeth said. "There was a stable and a place to feed your horse and put your carriage on the school grounds." She attended high school in Livermore.

Fires were not an uncommon experience back then. The warehouses and racetrack barns were most at risk, because of the hay stored in them. If it was brought in too green and not thoroughly dried, the tight bales of hay could ferment, get warm and spontaneously combust.

"I can remember two or three warehouse fires, and believe me, they were fires and they burned for days," she said.

The fire department was volunteer and relied on a loud fire bell, now in front of the Railroad Avenue fire station, to call in the firemen.

"It just went 'Bong, bong, bong' until everybody in town was awake," she recalled. In the early years, she remembered that men, not horses, pulled the hook and ladder truck and the hose cart. Later the department got a mechanized truck.

"They must have bought a second-hand one someplace, because they would get my brother (who was a mechanic) out of bed," she said. "'Linc, Linc, there's a fire and we can't get the truck started!' And he would go down and start the truck for them."

Floods were another calamity that happened occasionally downtown as well as further north where Hacienda Business Park is now situated. As a young child, Elizabeth recalls seeing houses flooded on St. Mary Street and Pleasanton Avenue, possibly caused by the new railroad trestles collecting debris in the flowing creek.

"They had to go in boats to get into their homes, but most of them were built at least 4 feet off the ground," she said. Floods also endangered livestock on nearby fields.

"They always took the cattle out of those fields down there (in winter) because they were afraid they would drown. In fact, it's not too many years since a flock of sheep drowned on the Bernal property."

But many of her memories are of happier events, such as the fair parades, July 4 picnics at McKinley Park, and trotting horse races with sulkies. At school, graduation was a big occasion as was the annual May Day celebration.

"We played games and things, and they would have maypoles set up and have maypole dances. It was a real holiday," she said. "And on Memorial Day, we marched out to the cemeteries ... I can remember one of the teachers whose brother was lost in a war before WWI, probably the Spanish American War, and we put flowers on his grave every year."
Summers in Sunol

Elizabeth missed out on the early movie-making in Pleasanton the summer that "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," with Mary Pickford, was filmed here. While most of the town's population took some part in the movie, Elizabeth, who was finishing high school at the time, was sent to stay with family in Sunol to avoid being quarantined for scarlet fever. The illness hit several members of her family, two summers in a row.

In fact, her escape from confinement at home was a narrow one. "My sister, Mary Lee, and I were sleeping together and she said, 'My throat is so sore.' I said, 'I'll tell Mama but don't bother to get up.' So I got out and got to school!" she said, laughing. "Mind you, we were sleeping in the same bed!"

Her Aunt Molly came with her buggy to bring Elizabeth to Sunol, where her mother's family was from. They operated summer resort cabins that had been established by her Grandfather Butner after the railroads came through.

"The women would come out and spend the summer there and the gentlemen would come out on the train for weekends or overnight," Elizabeth said. Her aunt also maintained a library in their large house, which is still standing and now owned by the East Bay Regional Parks District.

Elizabeth remembers how they kept food cool without the advantage of an icebox. Outdoor cupboards enclosed in gunnysack cloth were placed under a tree, and water from their well would drip on it all day. The evaporation would keep the food cool and fresh, at least for a while.
Early family history

Elizabeth's grandfather settled in Sunol after crossing the Central Plains by covered wagon. Her grandmother arrived in Milpitas by way of ship around Cape Horn, and she then walked to Sunol. The only livery rig available in the area, Elizabeth explained, was coincidentally being used by her newlywed paternal grandparents in Mission San Jose.

Elizabeth's Grandfather Ziegenfuss was a butcher and her father became one, too, working in Mission San Jose. When he was delivering meat to Sunol, which had no butcher, her parents met and became acquainted. In summer he would transport meat by rig, but in the winter, the rains swelled the creek and made deliveries more difficult.

"My father used to swim the Alameda Creek on horseback to bring meat," Elizabeth said. "He could carry half a beef on his shoulders."

When Elizabeth was growing up in Pleasanton, her mother was protective of her children, especially the girls, not allowing them to wander more than a couple of blocks from home.

"We had to have business in town to be on the Main Street," Elizabeth said. "She didn't approve of girls hanging around downtown."

Perhaps one type of business downtown made her mother wary.

"We had about 12 or 13 bars and two churches then," she said.
Chinatown

Her mother was also cautious in sending her children to one of the Chinese laundries in town, for the clothes to be washed when she was ill.

"She would never send one, but would send two of us to pick up the laundry," Elizabeth said. "And she'd say, 'Don't go in back of the front wall! Don't go past the counters!' Why, I don't know. I suppose they lived back there and, of course, opium was something that was used by the Chinese at that time. But I can remember Sam Sing so well and he was perfectly trustworthy."

Her mother always requested a "rough dry," that is, no ironing, because she didn't care for Sing's method of ironing - spitting out a spray of water to moisten the clothes.

Sing's laundry was part of a tiny Pleasanton Chinatown on Main Street just south of St. John Street. Elizabeth also remembers one of the Chinese venders, who would walk along Main Street on Fridays selling fish.

"He came with two huge baskets and a yoke ... (bringing) fish from the city. He'd go up and down Main Street, chug-chug-chug- chug-chug," she said, imitating the sound he made as he walked on his cork-soled shoes. In addition to fish, he sold coconuts and what probably were lychee nuts.
Her husband's early years

Despite parental restrictions, Elizabeth's older brothers sometimes managed to sneak out at night, leaving through a gabled part of the roof. Bill Hall, whom Elizabeth was later to wed, was one of her brother's friends who sometimes joined in such escapades. The Ziegenfuss house was something of a refuge for Bill, who had a difficult childhood, and Elizabeth's mother took him under her wing.

Born in 1896, his early years were spent in an orphanage in San Francisco until the 1906 earthquake. As one of the older children, he was then sent to another orphanage in San Rafael, which also took in delinquent boys.

"He was raised under very, very strict regulations," Elizabeth said. "And he was always afraid to break a rule in any manner." Later he lived at a youth home in Berkeley. During that time he met Ernest Hall, who owned a grain warehouse in Pleasanton, when he assisted him with finding a dairy.

During the ride, Hall asked Bill, 14 at the time, if he would like to come live with him in the country. The idea appealed to Bill, perhaps because he loved horses plus it was a way to escape his present circumstances. In the casual manner of the times, the Christian Brothers who ran the youth home let him go the same day. By nightfall, he had packed his belongings and arrived at the Hall homestead on Vineyard.

Although the idea was adoption, it didn't happen until three years later and his adoptive mother was never fond of him, Elizabeth said. But because he was determined not to return to the youth home, he worked very hard for the Halls.

"He worked until he dropped many times," Elizabeth said. "He earned his keep. He came to school every day, but when he came home from school, he had chickens, turkeys, cows and what-have-you to take care of."

Sometimes Mrs. Hall would come by the Ziegenfuss home searching for Bill or to complain that the Ziegenfuss boys were a bad influence. She'd stop at the house in her rig, and because the very short, stout woman had difficulty alighting, she would call for Elizabeth's mother to come out.

"'Well, Bill didn't come home last night,' she'd say, or 'didn't come home until 4 o'clock,' and Mom would say, 'At least he was in good company!'" Elizabeth recalled with a laugh.

He ran away a few times, said Elizabeth. Phil Henry teased her, "He must have been sweet on a girl here or he wouldn't have come back."
Education, marriage

Elizabeth's mother, however, discouraged an early marriage and encouraged her to get additional education. She spent six months taking business classes in San Francisco, and worked three months at a job before she and Bill were married in May 1921. As a wedding present, E.E. Hall gave them part of his property and they built their house on it.

It was completed in 1922, but not without some difficulties, including digging out the nearly impenetrable hardpan soil underneath. Bill bought dynamite to blast out the area so that they could have a full-sized basement to serve as a cool downstairs during the summers.

"We got a hole as big as a kitchen and he says, 'Mom, I can't do it. I just can't afford to buy the dynamite to get that place dug out.'"

Nevertheless it served well enough to store milk and make butter and cream produced by a jersey cow that the elder Hall has also given them. They also had a few horses that Bill rode for pleasure.

Bill began his career working in Hall's warehouse office, but he soon moved on to the Bank of Pleasanton, which later became the Bank of America. During World War II, he worked in accounting at Camp Parks, and subsequently at the Lawrence Livermore Lab until his retirement in 1967. The couple had three children, Bill, Betty and Yvonne.

During World War II, Elizabeth finally put her business schooling to use when she took a job as a bookkeeper in an office for servicemen's housing at Kottinger Village, where Kottinger Place senior housing is now located. Ultimately, Elizabeth was put in charge of this facility and one on Dougherty Road in Dublin called Komandorski Village.

The shortage of housing for servicemen and their families, and later for returning veterans, was acute in the area, she said.

"There was absolutely no housing in town," said Elizabeth. "Every barn, every chicken house - there wasn't a thing to rent." Elizabeth herself rented out a small room in her house to a serviceman and his wife for a while.
Jam sessions

One of the Elizabeth and Bill's favorite pastimes during their life together was playing music, he on the trumpet and she, the piano. They frequently, sometimes weekly, had jam sessions at their home with friends. Bill also played in an ensemble for social gatherings around town.

But that came to an end when he experienced some dental problems and ended up having his teeth removed. Despite reassurance from his dentist that he would be able to continue playing his instrument, that proved not to be the case.

The loss was painful to him, and Elizabeth stopped playing the piano in sympathy.

"I just figured he was hurting when I was playing," she explained. "He would stand behind me and go 'da-de-da-da-da,' you know."

Bill died in 1980 and two of their three children have also passed away. Her surviving daughter, Betty, lives in Whittier in Southern California and Elizabeth visits her frequently and is considering relocating there as well.

However, some of her relations live in Pleasanton, including Phil Henry, and three of her grandchildren, Scott Seerey, Monica Miller and Kathy Robbins. Four great-grandchildren - two in high school and two graduates - also live in Pleasanton.
Life today

Apart from her extended family, Elizabeth says she hardly knows anyone here any more. It's probably the biggest change she has experienced over the years, and something she misses most.

The landscape has become unfamiliar as well.

"I'm not driving anymore," said Elizabeth, who quit just a few years ago. "But if I were, I'd have to stay on Main Street. I could not find my way in this town, because I have gone places with other people and I'm lost and that's all there is to it."

Nevertheless, Elizabeth's outlook on life remains positive.

"I've had a good life. I can't deny that. And it's been a long one, that's for sure," she said. "There are lots of things to be proud of and lots of things to be sorry about, but I've had a wonderful life. I have no regrets whatsoever."

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Amador-Livermore Valley Historical Society, which provided tapes from an interview of Elizabeth Hall in June 2000 by Ed Kinney and Jerri Long. Some material from the interview was included in this article.

The interview was part of an on-going oral history project for ALVHS. To learn more about the project, call 462-2766.