The Chicken Warhead Incident

And continuing on the chicken theme from previous posts.... you'll agree that the odds of a bomb dropping on American soil during World War II in someone's backyard was, well, low - right?

Granted, there were some strange things happening in 1945...but of course we're also talking about Redwood City, CA - so where else is a bomb going to drop -but on your friendly chicken coop in our own Friendly Acres neighborhood, naturally.

Raising Backyard Chickens

While real estate advertising for Friendly Acres of the 1930s and 40s pitched the opportunity of raising chickens in your new plot of land - chook farming seems to have been something that has ebbed in and out of fashion - but nonetheless continued to appeal to successive generations.

I didn't realize how much of a marketing factor raising chickens was to the purchase of buying a home in Friendly Acres back in the day, until I came across some old real estate ads for the district.  It really was part of the sales pitch for the middle to working classes.  The depression of the 30s had made self-sufficiency a buzz word.  And in the 40s it was very much part of the War Dept.'s  homefront strategy of thriftiness tied in with the Victory Gardens program.

March 28, 1938.  Burlingame Times and Daily News.

The Peninsula's Fastest growing district

By June 1936, Harry Friend who was 46 by now, was already an established realtor up and down the Peninsula and living in Friendly Acres, with 6 homes already built in the district and ten more under way.

Having purchased several hundred acres of the Sweeny Ranch, south of Redwood City and on the eastern bayside of Fair Oaks, he was continuing a tradition of development and home building that had started before him with the creation of the Fair Oaks subdivision after the 1906 earthquake, which lured San Franciscans to the seemingly safer and more bucolic southern end of San Mateo County. 

One of the earliest advertisements for Friendly Acres is from 1936 showing him headquartered out of San Francisco and operating a local tract office.

Caroline Kennedy visits the Old Fox

We had a rare treat in Redwood City this week:  a visit from a member of the Kennedy family no less.
Caroline Kennedy spoke before a packed house at the Fox Theater this week.  All tickets apparently sold out several days in advance.  The people in the audience looked to be mainly those who had lived through and grown up with Camelot.











The purpose of her visit, sponsored by Kepler's bookstore of Menlo Park, Cargill (surprise!) and the Fox Theater (who look to be under new management and/or adopting a new strategy by including lectures as part of their offering), was to hawk a book on her mother, "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy" by Michael Beschloss, to which Caroline had provided a foreword.