The ranch, as I mentioned, was known as the world's largest bearing prune orchard, which suggests that there may have been larger orchards that weren't producing. This one did.

First, the name. We go back to one George W. Hume (a name perpetuated in Hume Drive), who rose from boyhood poverty in New England to become wealthy through Pacific Coast salmon canneries. His son, George Francis Hume, who took the name of Frank G. Hume, assumed management of the 680-acre tract acquired by his father that fanned out toward the Santa Clara Valley from San Tomas Aquino Creek. The elder Hume had acquired this land in several parcels. A total of 350 acres was in prunes, 160 trees to the acre.

The owner of one of those parcels was an Oakland doctor, George W. Handy, who had a daughter, Una Hawthorne Handy, whom Frank Hume married in 1892. According to one source, it was Dr. Handy who named the property Glen Una, after his daughter, with reference to the glen, or small valley, that was part of the creek landscape. Over the years, I have heard "Una" mostly pronounced as "eewna," but occasionally, someone will come up with "oonah." Personally, I go for the former pronunciation.

Young Frank Hume was a man of patrician tastes and scientific foresight. He built what may have been the valley's first hydroelectric plant, a generator powered by a water wheel up the canyon that was used in winter. There was also a steam power plant. The result was an array of incandescent and arc lamps that illuminated, among other places, the 15-acre dry yard, where the handling of some 18,000 trays was done at night to avoid the dust stirred up by the daytime traffic of horses and men.

Despite Frank Hume's avoidance of Saratoga in setting up his telephone line, he did use this town's name on the packing boxes. I like to think that, even back then, the town had a certain clout. The ranch had a year-round staff of 25 men, a number that increased to 75 to 100 during the fruit season. According to a contemporary account, the income from the orchard was from $100 to $125 per acre.

Other distinctive features of the Glen Una ranch were what may have been the valley's first private swimming pool—Frank Hume was an avid swimmer—and the distinctively painted wagons.

The ranch itself was a super, up-to-date operation. The packing house, which was on a plateau, was a two-story structure measuring 55 by 185 feet, equipped with an elevator and, of course, electric lights that could be seen from far across the valley. A cable railway powered by a stationary steam engine carried fruit from the dry yard up to the packing shed.

Frank Hume, still in his 20s, died in 1897, and his wife continued improvements on the property. The house was known as "Dotswood," after Mrs. Hume, known as "Dot" to her friends, and later bore the name "Ojo Del Monte," or "Eye of the Mountain." This house was bought in 1923 by Maj. Gen. and Mrs. C.G. Morton, who gave it the latter name.

I can't say for sure just when the Glen Una ranch faded out of the prune-growing picture. In my own childhood and youth, I remember Glen Una as what today is known as a high-rent district and what in grammar school we kids referred to as "where the rich kids live." We always thought of it as a district or locality in itself. It was simply Glen Una.

One childhood memory remains indelible in my mind. This was the open field along the west side of Pepper Lane, from Park Drive to Sunset Drive. It was a place where airplanes could and did land. I'll never forget the time in 1937 when, from the Saratoga School playground, we could see a plane landing in the distance. The eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bertha Seely, who was also the principal, let me go early so I could ride my bike there and see Charles Duisenberg, who had just landed there in a Piper Cub.

For me, this was Glen Una's finest moment.