Listics

Here in the Town of Dunn Sandhill Road runs due south past the Town Burying Ground all the way to the Rutland Town Line Road. In Palo Alto Sandhill Road runs from 280 to the Stanford Med School. I think it’s on the line between Menlo Park and Palo Alto, but it could be entirely in the communicty to the north. Across the freeway I suspect it wanders into suburban Woodside, a fortunate community that saw the prices for average middle class houses go through the roof in the days the raw2 meat men descended on the valley.

Stanford owned a lot of the land around Sandhill Road, but in thhose days they were focusing their development efforts a few miles south on Page Mill where Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, EPRI, and a few other high tech companies built their headquarters . In a few years Linus Pauling would take his Nobel Prize money and build a nice facility up Sandhill toward the freeway, but even then, except for a few structures that accumulated around Pauling’s Institute, the road had a nice uncluttered feeling, brown hills, a few oaks, and the anonymous entrance to SLAC just down and across the road from Pauling’s place.

I’m thinking it was 1973. Moscone hadn’t been assassinated yet, I lived on Castro at 18th above the all night donut shop and parked my acid green Fiat in the parking lot behind the Castro Theater across the street. That color is making a comeback this year in women’s fashion. Every weekday, if I could get the car started, I’d tool down the 280 to Stanford and slave away at a consulting job I had in the Office of the Dean, and VP for Medical Affairs. I was a glorified file clerk, but I made good money. At night I’d write book and live music reviews for the San Francisco Phoenix under the pseudonym, “Phantom Flash.” Don’t even ask…. The editor assigned me that name and it was probably appropriate.

The Phoenix was a last gasp underground paper. The Oracle had come and gone, the Barb was collapsing into personals and massage parlor ads, and the Bay Guardian had yet to blossom into a mainstream alternative.

Lately I’ve been informed that Sandhill Road on the peninsula is where the venture capitalists hang out. Don’t mistake me for one of them.