Saratoga News | August 14, 2002

August 14, 2002 Saratoga, California Since 1955

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Sobey Road residents Darcy and Mark Pierce harvest plums from the orchard on their property. At one time, the neighborhood was filled with many orchards.

Sobey: A rural road gone upscale

By Sandy Sims

Mark Pierce moved to Saratoga's Sobey Road in 1987 because he wanted more land. He'd dreamed of fruit trees and vegetable gardens. And back then, a stroll down rural Sobey Road meant Pierce could even feed apples to horses along the way. An idyllic place, to be sure.

Today, Pierce, a San Jose attorney, has his fruit trees and a vineyard, and after several renovations, his home is a lovely Spanish-style with a multilevel garden, a patio in back and a U-shaped driveway in front.

But the horses are gone, and rustic Sobey Road has morphed into a place where Sunday drivers love to ogle the mansions perched on rolling, manicured hills or nestled in the street's hollows. Sprawling oaks have given way to sprawling homes that sell for millions, and equestrians riding horses have given way to joggers and fast-moving cars.

The 2-mile stretch of Sobey Road—a horseshoe-shaped street off Quito Road—embodies the physical and cultural changes as well as some of the ongoing issues that have plagued Saratoga over the last 50 years.

Today's Sobey Road is a far cry from the partially paved country road Nona Christensen and Barbara Tinnison knew in the late 1940s. "We were actually Rural Route 4, Los Gatos," Christensen recalls.

Tinnison's parents bought 20 acres along Sobey Road for the fruit orchards. She and her husband moved onto the land after World War II. The Christensens, who owned Christensen Frozen Foods, moved in in 1950. Both families built on property close to their parents, so the Tinnison and Christensen children grew up running back and forth to their grandparents' homes nearby. The two husbands started Saratoga's Kiwanis club and used to serve Kiwanis breakfasts on the porch at Montalvo.

The land in and around Saratoga was all county property back then, governed by Santa Clara County.

"When the county came to pave our end of the road, many of us were against it," Christensen says. "We didn't like the way they were cutting down all the oak trees." And, true to Saratoga's passion for saving trees, Christensen's father and his neighbor Angelo Bellicitti—real, live tree-huggers—actually stood with their arms around oak trees to save them.

"We also knew that when the street was paved, it would become a speedway for cars," Christensen says. "And it has."

When the Christensens moved to Sobey Road, Santa Clara Valley was still the Valley of Heart's Delight, with its vast fruit orchards. Sobey Road was no exception, a panorama of apricots and prune trees. ("Yes," Christensen says, "they were French prunes, not dried plums.")

"You should have seen it in spring," Christensen says, gazing out her sliding glass door and beyond her patio. "It was all white blossoms out there." And in summertime the prunes, once shaken off the branches, lay in circles around the bases of the trees. Tinnison says the children did most of the prune picking and the halving of apricots. "Schools even held up opening day," she says, "so children could help harvest the fruit."

And youngsters ran and played in the orchards. "Nowadays," Christensen says, "the children mostly play organized sports, and they're even running out of space in Saratoga to do that. And kids have to have 'play dates.' "

Christensen once boarded horses on Sobey Road, mainly for local 4H Club girls. She had an old barn and two riding areas. "Practically every family on Sobey had a horse," Christensen says.

Tinnison says residents then were more neighborly, too. She recalls taking baked bread to people who'd just moved in.

When the movement to incorporate Saratoga as a city began, things were not so friendly in Saratoga. Sparks flew between those who wanted to incorporate and those who did not.

Saratoga historian Willys Peck says, "At that time San Jose was annexing everything." Saratogans who favored incorporation wanted to keep lot sizes large. (San Jose's lot size minimum was smaller.) They also wanted to keep local control of the land. "They didn't want to become just another section of San Jose like Willow Glen eventually did," Peck says.

Some of Saratoga's orchardists, Peck says, wanted the smaller San Jose lot minimums so they could subdivide more of their land to sell. Others were against incorporation, he says, "because they didn't want to bring in another bunch of politicians." Saratoga was getting services through the county, and these people didn't want another layer of government.

"The vote in 1956 was very close," Peck recalls.

"We fought it," Christensen says, "because we liked being county—lower taxes and the services were okay. It actually turned out well because Saratoga requires acre lots."

"After Saratoga took us, Sobey Road was divided," says Christensen, who adds that she has always felt a closer tie to Los Gatos and still shops there today. Tinnison says her mother always shopped in Saratoga.

But troubling district issues developed. A person could live in the city of Saratoga and not qualify for services from its schools and fire department. "We couldn't even be buried in the Madronia Cemetery," Tinnison says.

The districts for Santa Clara County schools, sanitation, fire departments, sheriff's departments and even cemeteries had been drawn up as early as 1927. But the boundaries drawn along creek beds for the new city wound in and out of these districts.

Some of this was mitigated in the 1980s with the widening of the Madronia Cemetery's boundaries to include all of Saratoga, Monte Sereno and some pockets of county property, and with the coordination of the county and city's fire departments.

But district issues still plague Saratoga and Sobey Road.

For example, four elementary school districts and three high school districts lay claim to Saratoga children. Over half of Sobey Road residents—though they live in the city of Saratoga—reside in the Campbell Union School district. The dividing line for the school districts is Sperry Road.

Old-timers like Nona Christensen had no problem sending their children to Campbell Union School District schools. (Marshall Lane, right across the street from her house, was called the Country Club School of Campbell when it first opened about 41 years ago.) But many of the newer residents on Sobey Road feel disenfranchised because they live in Saratoga but can't send their kids to the city's coveted, high-performing schools.

Saratoga Mayor Nick Streit, who lives on Sobey Oaks, a small street off the north end of Sobey Road, says his children cannot play in the Saratoga Little League or attend Saratoga schools. "Saratoga has seven school districts, two sanitation districts, two fire districts, and four Little League districts," he says. The Streits send their children to St. Andrew's School. One neighbor sends her children to Sacred Heart, and two neighborhood children attend Rolling Hills Middle School and Marshall Lane Elementary School.

"About five years ago," says Mary-Lynne Bernald, who lives on Evans Lane, just off Sobey Road, "the school district was a hot issue. Marshall Lane [a Campbell Union school] sits on Saratoga property, but we pay taxes to Campbell."

Huge traffic problems have developed on Sobey Road as well because Marshall Lane has grown, with more and more students coming from both cities. As a result of all these issues, children in the Sobey Road neighborhood attend various schools. Some head off to private schools, some to Saratoga public schools and some to Campbell Union School District schools.

All of which may contribute to residents along Sobey Road not being very neighborly.

"Kids are a unifying force in a neighborhood," Mark Pierce says. He recalls his years growing up in the Argonaut neighborhood, where the boys all ran together. On Sobey Road, the children don't "run together" the way they used to.

"There's a trade-off for big lots," Pierce says, sitting in his charming, Spanish-style kitchen. "You have privacy and spaciousness but not necessarily closeness." But then he says there aren't a lot of kids on Sobey Road for his children, 5 and 14, to play with. He's noticed that the people building across the street from him are young and have children. "The couple on the corner is very young. Maybe they will have kids," he says.

And it was kids who brought together a neighborly enclave on Evans Lane, a small street at the north end of Sobey Road named after Tinnison's parents.

"Ours has been a very special neighborhood," says Bernald, who has served on Saratoga's planning commission. She and her husband moved to Evans Lane in 1979. Evans was one of the first sections of Sobey Road to be developed with large ranch-style homes. Four families moved in at about the same time: the Laffertys, the Fernalds, the Bernalds and the Amanatullahs.

Each couple had two boys, and the youngsters all ran together and played in the orchards. After three more children came along, Bernald says, "our 11 kids, in effect, had four moms." By and large the four mothers stayed home to raise the children. Two families sent children to Campbell Union schools and two families sent children to private schools. These families have also forged close ties with Barbara Tinnison and Nona Christensen. "We go Christmas caroling every year," Bernald says.

"They came into my mother's room when she was close to death and sang carols for her," Tinnison says with tears in her eyes.

When the Bernalds moved in 23 years ago, there were only three small housing developments and lots of farmhouses tucked in off Sobey Road. Some of the roads were still dirt. "We had wonderful places to ride horses," Bernald says. "There was even a pond somewhere where locals went fishing."

In the 1980s, on the south end of Sobey Road, Quail Manor was built. The 7000-square-foot brick mansion with gold-tipped wrought-iron fencing was an anomaly then. But Rita Boren, the real estate agent who has listed the place for just under $6 million, says, "by today's standards, the house isn't all that big." With all the jumbo houses there now, Quail Manor is just another mansion. Boren says many of the people moving onto Sobey Road in the1990s made it big in the high-tech industry. She also says that among some groups, Sobey Road has become the hot place to buy a house.

But it's not just homebuyers who think Sobey Road is hot. Christensen, who walks her dog there regularly, says people come from out of the area to walk along Sobey Road. "This is a big bicycle route, too," she adds.

And those who amble along Sobey Road might notice little reminders of the past. The north end of the street has the old country look about it because the Bellicittis' property is still designated as agricultural. And standing at that end are the few sprawling oak trees saved by the arms of a couple of honest-to-goodness tree-huggers. Neighbors there have actually spotted two coyotes. "They got one of my chickens," Christensen says. And there's a horse-crossing sign still standing along the road, a relic of the time when residents could stroll along Sobey Road and feed apples to the horses.