Alan and Bonnie Aerts hang out in front of their Monte Sereno home with Jack, their very large dog.




Photograph by Paul Myers







Coin Collector

Alan Aerts amassed his fortune a quarter at a time with his coin-operated vending machines, and now owns an estate in Monte Sereno crawling with collectibles

By Oakley Brooks
Photography by Paul Myers

Alan Aerts' plush office, in the corner of his Monte Sereno home, is filled with curiosities. There is the collection of gold coins from the days of Jesus, the ornate table from Windsor Castle, drawings of 12-foot-high Christmas wreaths in the works for Aerts' holiday lawn display next winter. And stuck along the wall of a security closet nearby is Wilt Chamberlin's signed jersey, lined up with those of a dozen other NBA greats.

But what's grabbing my attention is Jack, Aert's mastiff, who's leaning his 205-pound body into my leg and presenting his formidable jowls.

Jack looks like he could quietly swallow a goose while no one was looking.

"He's all bark and no bite," says Aerts, 45, his thin, red handlebar moustache curling into a smirk.

This is the world of Aerts, the vending king of Silicon Valley. A former bread delivery man and grocery store clerk, Aerts has built a fortune by placing soda machines and candy bar dispensers in virtually every commercial area in the South Bay. Now, he lives at the top of the hill that used to be the site of the Claravale Dairy, in a six-building estate that caused a stir in a neighborhood of big houses.

When Aerts couldn't get the square footage he wanted in the new house by constructing a cavernous basement, he added outbuildings following completion of the main, 6,400-square-foot house. A small movie theater, a pool house, weight rooms and several garages went up, all in a Monte Sereno loophole that doesn't limit auxiliary buildings. (The city has since changed its laws to limit construction on outbuildings.)

"We certainly see intriguing houses, and this was one of them," says Brian Loventhal, Monte Sereno's city manager.

Aerts reminds me that he's downsized here on Danielle Place, from his family's old 17,000-square-foot Decatur Drive spread, which held an indoor gun range.

We head out of the office and into a game room nearby, where life-sized stuffed-animal moose and lions heads hang over a mini-arcade.

"We could never kill an animal," Aerts says.

Around the corner in the powder room, he flicks the light on over a marble sink, set on an antique cabinet that's had its top lopped off.

Two hand-carved mahogany plates from South America--a familiar feature throughout the house--are inlaid on either side of the bathroom door.

He leads me up a Y-shaped staircase, by a decadent guest room, and up another narrow set of stairs to the attic.

It's barely tall enough to allow Aerts' 6-foot-5-inch frame. Several glass cases display neatly placed 1920s and '30s-era play space guns and suits. The cases also hold models of futuristic cities and space stations from the same era.

The attic is just the beginning of Aerts' child antiques--in various corners of his estate he has every professional basketball card made until reproductions filled the market recently, old Flintstone-powered cars and dozens of vintage Coke machines and bottles.

I ask him what he collected as a child.

"We weren't rich; if you got one toy you made it last," he says.


Photograph by Paul Myers

The marquee outside the Aerts' theater harkens to film's classic moments.




Stick with staples

At age 13, Aerts marched down to the corner house on his West San Jose block--the one with the shaggy lawn--and told the neighbors he'd mow it, weed it and edge it for a buck.

"We'll give you $2," they said.

Aerts took on yard maintenance for the rest of the block. He double-cut each lawn, leaving a diamond-shaped pattern behind. He fed cats and walked dogs when neighbors were out of town. And he earned enough to buy himself the fanciest eight-track player around. But it wasn't enough.

"I'd lie in bed at night and I couldn't get to sleep," he says. "I wanted a real job so bad."

He snagged a stock-boy job at Payless Shoes on Prospect Avenue in Saratoga at 15, and on his 16th birthday showed up for a bagging position next door at Albertsons. Aerts also flipped burgers at a local fast-food joint. He wanted a Porsche that year and could have afforded it, but Marilyn and Gene Aerts decided against it. Instead, Alan kept a muscle car, for drag racing, at his girlfriend's house.

Alan Aerts never had much interest in school in junior high--he says he grew his sideburns long, was booted out of class regularly, and led his fellow students in sit-ins in the recess yard at Rodgers Junior High.

But playing in an informal basketball game at Prospect High School one day as an eighth grader, the 6'3" Aerts impressed Panthers coach Frank Hendricks, and Hendricks took him under his wing. He convinced Aerts to do his homework and put some effort into improving his hoops skills. By his sophomore year, Aerts was starting for Prospect's varsity squad.

"I owe him so much," Aerts says. "I don't know where'd I'd be without him."

At 18, Aerts opted to move out on his own, take classes at West Valley College and begin his working life.

He held onto a grocery job, working nights stocking Fry's Grocery on Blossom Hill Road. During the day he delivered for the Roma Bread company in San Jose. Aerts would work through the night at Fry's, rush to his parent's house to grab a shower and then arrive for bread delivery at 6 a.m. He went without sleep for two and three days at a time.

"I was falling asleep at the wheel on the way home," Aerts says.

At Roma Bread's headquarters, the president, Vince Burgos, always encouraged Aerts to go out with his daughter, Bonnie. Aerts had already broken off two engagements, and resisted for a while before finally relenting. The two went to dinner one night in 1977 with Vince and Bonnie's mother, Rose. After the meal, Aerts took Bonnie for a ride on his Kawasaki speed bike, and they were married six months later.

They built a house in the hills north of Monterey, and, using their garage as his home base, Alan staged his first foray into vending. He'd noticed a collection of arcade games at a restaurant during a bread run in Oakland, and during the Pac-Man craze of the early 1980s, he began buying the games and renting them out, along with cigarette machines. He had more than 300 games in his fleet at one point.

But as home video game systems got more refined, Aerts found that his arcades were going obsolete in a matter of weeks.

So about 20 years ago, he switched his main vending operation to soda pop and snack machines.

"You're always going to need something to eat and drink," Aerts says. "And a good vending machine lasts 30 years."

After a few years of vending, Aerts was regularly turning about half a million dollars in sales every year.

"When I first got into it, I thought 'This has to be illegal, I'm making so much money,' " Aerts says, finding a bewildered look. "I pictured patrol cars driving up beside me on the street and cuffing me right there."

Some in Bonnie's family remained convinced he was running drugs until Aerts leased out one of his vending routes to a cousin of hers, and the family saw for themselves that the business was legitimate.

Aerts built his Custom Vending Systems (CVS) into a virtual monopoly the old-fashioned way. When one of his machines broke, someone arrived to fix it. And Aerts liked to give customers their 50 cents back and four new candy bars on top of it.

Now he runs the vending service more cheaply and efficiently than the cola giants, by getting their soda at a cut-rate price, turning over a huge volume and by servicing his machines around the clock. For 16 years, Aerts stocked his machines with Coca-Cola, until a local Coke distributor began picking up Aerts' rented Coke machines and telling his customers he was out of business.

After he filed suit in Atlanta and the distributor was fired, Aerts jumped to Pepsi. But his Pepsi contract is up in May 2003, and the distributors are already jockeying for Aerts' business, which ranks second only to Kmart in Bay Area sales.

In a good year, Aerts says he pulls in $15 million, in a bad year $5 million. Even in the economic slump recently, he's been adding sales routes as smaller distributors go belly-up.

"Things are pretty sweet right now," he says.

Aerts recently moved CVS into an old frozen-seafood warehouse in Campbell that he renovated himself. His office there echoes the one in his home, antiques and all. And the new warehouse space, adorned with various Scooby-Doo clocks and life-sized cutouts ("I have a thing for Scooby-Doo; I just love 'Danes," Aerts says) is a "driver's dream," according to the former driver himself. Florescent lighting brightens the loading floor, equipped with a special drain that keeps the area dry when a dripping truck enters in the rainy season. Drivers use a marble sink in the bathroom and can rest in a break room decorated with crown molding on the ceiling.

Most of Aerts' time these days, however, is spent at home. He gave up making regular vending runs about six months ago, and with the Campbell facility complete, he goes to the office about an hour a day.

That means more time with Bonnie, 42, and his two sons David, 14, and Ken, 23, at the house on Danielle Place.

Your land

"We wanted to put this fireplace in the middle of the living room, but we had to run the flue somewhere," Aerts says, walking above the main living area on the second floor of his home.

He stuck the chimney inside a composite-looking column, and placed another column next to it for symmetry's sake. They sit at the very center of the house.

On the wall above the living room, local artist Joyce Ortiz has re-created a painting of a medieval family, without the severed horse's head that's in the real piece.

We slide past the painting and Bonnie's extensive shoe collection--in the hundreds--and into the master bedroom.

The hillside view from there takes in many of the homes that filled the late Ken Peake's dairy land, which he sold off piece by piece following Monte Sereno's approval of his subdivision map in the mid-1980s. Peake remained on his last parcel--his small home, his barn and some pasture--under the shadow of Aert's rising house before Peake died in May 1999. In place of the dairy, local developers built a sizable home that sits empty now, the victim of a softening real estate market.

A foundation supported by local homeowners and businesses tried to raise enough money to buy the remaining Claravale Dairy before Peake died. He was one of the last raw-milk producers in the state, visited by three generations of West Valley kids.

Although a substantial chunk of money was committed to the dairy by local homeowners and businesses (those involved refuse to say exactly how much, but it was said to be in the hundreds of thousands), the foundation fell apart in 1997. Some board members felt the group might never raise the needed funds to purchase the remaining land, and a deal with Peake's estate might never be hashed out.

Several times in talking with Aerts, I exposed my Yankee roots by pressing him on why he didn't support the foundation in its effort to save the dairy.

He summed it up very simply one day: "Everything lives through its cycle and becomes something else," he said.

Bonnie Aerts, who grew up mucking around her family's Forward Dairy in the Almaden area, takes a similar tack.

When a contractor at Danielle Place once asked what it felt like to live on a former dairy, Bonnie Aerts responded, "In the valley, we're all on former dairy or farmland. That's just the way it is."

Monte Serenans still wrestle with whether they should have let the dairy go--"From a city perspective, what you have now is a more active use of the land, but from a historical perspective you hate to see it go," says Loventhal, the city manager.

Local resident and former banker Melvin Hulme funded agricultural cooperatives throughout the state but maintains that it wasn't feasible to keep the Claravale Dairy in high-end Monte Sereno.

"I wasn't against the farm, you just can't do it in this area," says Hulme, who drew criticism for airing his view in 1997.

But Karen Vanderpan, who worked with the foundation dedicated to saving Claravale, says she still hasn't gotten over the loss of a neighborhood farm. She'd hoped her grandchildren, now 1 and 3 years old, could see Peake's farm in operation.

"It's sad; you don't have places like that just anywhere," says Vanderpan.


Photograph by Paul Myers

Aerts walks through one of his garages, by some vintage Harleys.




New attraction

Aerts has a different attraction in mind for the neighborhood's new trademark: a futuristic Christmas display. Last year, aliens joined Santa on his lawn for a bizarre scene that drew up to 200 visitors a day. He's already commissioning contractors for next year's spread, which will include an animated surfing Santa in his front fountain and another Santa stuck in the chimney. He's had to rent a separate storage shed for his new collection of holiday decorations.

"I don't have anywhere to put them all," he says from his garage, sliding between the fire-engine red Chevy Tahoe he drives every day and a 1948 Harley with Louisiana State Patrol lettering on it.

Running out of room, he's had to put antique cabinets out in one garage.

His garages hold some of the 15 muscle cars of the 48 he has owned. The garages also store more mint Harleys, old gas pumps and neon station signs. His weight room, in another outbuilding, is lined with Deco-era radios, older slot machines, lighters, fire extinguishers and toy airplanes.

For all his stuff, though, Aerts doesn't have any edge to him. He wears a T-shirt and jeans most days. He answers his own phone. The intercoms at his door and the hidden security cameras are only a thin façade.

"When I was 26 and I'd made my first million I thought I was hot [stuff], and I had the gold rings and the cars," says Aerts. "You grow out of it."

He and Bonnie have contributed regularly to the San Rafael-based Guide Dogs for the Blind and to the American Diabetes Foundation.

He always has several projects going, to burn off some energy.

Right now he's spending several hours a day in the weight room trying to add 50 pounds of muscle by year's end.

And he and Bonnie have plans to build two new houses, one outside of Sacramento and another at Lake Las Vegas.

But they don't plan to leave Monte Sereno anytime soon.

"We're in no hurry," he says. "We like it here."

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