Mom and Dad’s response to Pearl Harbor was amazingly swift.  Fear haunted the house on 11th Avenue.  Fear of a followup attack by the Japanese.  By the spring of 1942 they’d sold the house in Oakland and bought a lot in Walnut Creek.

In those days Walnut Creek was little more than a Main Street.

Today freeways outline what at the war’s onset was a network of two-lane blacktop.  Walnut Creek in those days was primarily a junction.  The north-south highway from Martinez through Danville and on to Dublin met the highway that went west to the bay area.

Walnut Creek was a dozen miles away from potential targets.  Moreover, it was beyond the east bay hills.  They felt safe. Besides, it would be an easy commute for Dad to go to his job at Colgate-Palmolive-Peets on the bay down from Berkeley.

Of particular importance, the two-lane blacktop from Walnut Creek to Berkeley did not go over the hills.  Rather a tunnel ran under them.  Shortly before entering it, the highway went to four lanes.

Mom and Dad bought a third of a country acre on 2nd Avenue a couple of miles north of town.  They bought it from Peter Vallino, an old Italian who had emigrated decades before, planted his small vineyard and, every autumn, made his own wine.

Showing the absolute confidence he had throughout his life in his ability to build and/or fix things, Dad first cleared most of the grapevines and then built a house.  Actually it was the size of a two-car garage.

The build did not go smoothly.  At six years old, only two of Dad’s frustrations registered with me.  Whether because he did not have enough money or because he did not know any better, he bought green wood.  Regardless of how fast he worked, as the spring sun beat down. the studs would slowly begin to warp and split.  This called forth the same kind of language Uncle Ted sometimes used.  Dad also had trouble running electrical wires through the studs.  He’d drill a hole and then, before inserting the wire through it, he’d put a white porcelain tube in the hole.  Evidently this was to act as some sort of insulator.  Over and over the tube would break, again accompanied by brisk language.

He finished the outside of the house in early spring.  We moved in.  He worked on the inside for the next few months.

We lived there until 1946.