 |
|
|
|
Kenneth Peake
Monte Sereno dairy farmer Kenneth Peake dies at 91
By Jeff Kearns
About a month ago, Ken Peake took delivery of his new Guernsey, Heather, from a farm in Petaluma.
Peake, who ran the Claravale Dairy in Monte Sereno for 67 years and sold it in 1997, was heartbroken when his cows finally left for Watsonville last June.
But Peake was a much happier man last month, with his new Guernsey grazing away just outside his bedroom window. "The Guernseys are back in Monte Sereno," he proudly announced. "It's a good feeling."
Peake, 91, died Thursday of natural causes in his small white farmhouse at the dairy.
Born in Berkeley in 1907, Peake founded the farm in 1931, when he moved his herd out from Campbell. And after that, it didn't change a whole lot. When he sold the dairy last year, it was the only dairy left in Northern California that sold unpasteurized milk directly to customers.
After studying business and journalism at San Jose State College, Peake went into the dairy business because his eyes weren't so good and, well, he loved animals.
Peake stubbornly held on to the farm for all those decades while all the valley's farms were subdivided and conquered, and never changed the way he ran the place.
He woke up every morning before dawn and milked the cows by hand. Then he put the bottles in his green '69 Chevy pickup and delivered them to his customers. It was more or less the same way he started in 1927 on his mother's farm in Campbell with his first cow.
He even met his wife, Margaret, when he started delivering milk to her grandparents' farm in Los Gatos. They married in 1946. She died in 1994.
The Bicknell Avenue farm originally sat on 12 acres, but it shrank over the years to the one acre it is today as Peake sold off an acre here and there to cover the dairy's mounting financial losses. Multimillion-dollar homes loom over the former grazing land, but the barn and the farmhouse still stand.
Peake was fond of giving tours to young students, and the city of Monte Sereno considered making an effort to preserve the farm last year, but that plan didn't go anywhere.
Before that, in 1996, a group of Monte Sereno residents who wanted to save the farm started the Claravale Dairy Foundation, but gave up after a year of fundraising, citing a lack of donations.
Peake sold the dairy in 1997 to Ron Garthwaite, a former geneticist who started helping Peake run the farm in 1995. Garthwaite eventually picked up Peake's delivery route and started delivering the milk but moved the operation to Watsonville last year..
Graveside services were held May 25 at Madronia Cemetery in Saratoga.
|
|
|
|
Saratoga, California Since 1975
