Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Bruce Fitzgerald (left) and his father, Don Fitzgerald, are closing the Woodworker's Lumber Company.

Lumber company closes shop

Three generations ran family business for 47 years

By Clarence Cromwell

At the end of May, the Woodworker's Lumber Company, in the big red barn at 742 University Ave., will end 47 years of business in Los Gatos.

The company represents the last lumberyard in town and has been operated by three generations of the same family. But now the current full-time operator, Bruce Fitzgerald, wants to open a general contracting company in Washington, and his father, Don Fitzgerald, plans to retire.

The family is currently selling off the lumber and its business equipment in preparation for closing out the business.

Woodworker's started out in 1949 as a mill, where Don Fitzgerald's father, Clyde, fashioned custom window and door moldings and other decorative woodwork. He continued to do so at the Woodworker's shop until he died in 1976.

"He liked equipment and tools and things like that. I was the business end, and he was the making-products end," Don Fitzgerald said.

When the Fitzgeralds moved in, an orchard occupied the front of the property, and the remaining buildings of an old pigeon ranch stood at the back. One of the original pigeon sheds and a feather-plucking house remain on the site. A former pigeon-plucker told Don Fitzgerald that the farm had supplied restaurants in San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland during the 1930s and '40s.

The Fitzgeralds bought the orchard and pigeon farm in 1951, and a short time later they leased the rear of the property to a sawmill. The mill lasted only a few years, and the Fitzgeralds bought all the lumber and went into the lumber business, Don Fitzgerald said.

Bruce Fitzgerald got into the family business at about age 8; he started out filling bags with sawdust after school for 5 cents a bag. Now he manages the lumberyard full time, and his father is in semi-retirement after health problems, puttering around the lumberyard about 20 hours a week.

Don Fitzgerald said he's still looking for a developer to purchase his 3.2-acre property. He's tried a number of times to develop the land.

Three years ago, the town turned down a proposal for townhomes. Next, the Town Council told the Riding Company it would not permit single-family homes on the property because the land is zoned for light industrial uses. Most recently, the Fitzgeralds asked for approval to build a hotel and conference center, but that proposal also died because town officials did not favor it.

Don Fitzgerald said he's recently discussed deals with companies that would turn the property into a public storage facility. Town Council members seemed to favor that idea, he said.

When that deal is done, Fitzgerald can spend more time golfing and traveling.

Although Woodworker's is the last, the town had a handful of lumberyards early in this century. The 1938 Los Gatos Telephone Company directory lists four of them.

The Conover Lumber Co. (later Hubbard & Johnson) stood at 140 S. Santa Cruz Ave., where the Toll House Hotel is now. It was there until some time in the 1960s, said town historian Bill Wulf.

The Sterling Lumberyard, Los Gatos' first, once occupied the property that is now Old Town's sunken parking lot. According to George Bruntz's The History of Los Gatos, the Sterling yard opened during the 1880s.

The McElroy Lumber Co. listed its address as N. Santa Cruz Ave.

In the 1960s, a trio of former Sterling employees founded El Gato Building Materials at 565 University Ave., now home to Campo di Bocce.