"It was built in 1925," Zarko says. "When they moved it, they said it was so heavy because it was built so solid."

Zarko's house used to sit less than a quarter of a mile away, at the corner of what is now S. Mathilda Avenue and El Camino Real. When the Shell Oil Company came calling, wanting to buy the space where their house stood, Zarko and her husband, Pete, agreed to relocate.

Rapid development is just one of the many changes that Zarko has seen over her 94 years. Born to parents who owned apricot and prune orchards in Cupertino, Zarko has an eyewitness account that made her an ideal docent at the Sunnyvale Historical Society's museum.

But age is now requiring her to slow up a bit. Zarko has stepped down as a docent and her position as the docent scheduler, which she has held for eight years.

"She is still as sharp as a tack," says Laura Babcock, who heads the society's fundraising efforts for the museum. "We go to her when we have a question. If it's a business, she can say what it used to be and who owned it, and if it's a house, she knows everyone who used to live there. We should all be so lucky."

Zarko's parents were immigrants from the area of Eastern Europe now known as Croatia. They came to the United States in the early 1900s and raised five children, including Zarko, on their orchard near what is now the intersection of Homestead and Stelling roads. As a child, Zarko attended Cupertino Grammar School but helped in the orchards during the harvest in the summer.

"It didn't hurt us to work. We still had enough energy to play," she says. "We would pick the apricots and put them in the sulfur house to smoke all night. When they came out, they were golden and all full of juice."

She knew of her future husband when she was young—his father harvested prunes and socialized with her father when he would go into Sunnyvale to shop. "Pete's father came out [to the orchards], and I asked him, 'Why don't you ask your boys to come out here?' " Zarko recalls. "I think he was really surprised that I asked that."

It was still a number of years before the couple went on their first date, which was to an auto show in San Francisco in 1935. Zarko continued her schooling, with pals Marty Mathiesen, Miriam Calvert (later Stelling) and Mathilda Mariani (later Souza). She went on to Fremont Union High School (as it was called then) with them, attending classes in the Wigwam before the rest of the school was built. Illness forced her to drop out.

But in 2003, she was awarded an honorary high school diploma thanks to the efforts of the Fremont High School alumni association.

"I had my tonsils taken out, and it caused this nervous condition," Zarko says. After about a year of recuperation, she attended beauty school in San Jose and opened her own beauty shop in Cupertino down the street from the general store at the Cupertino Crossroads.

Around the same time she started her beauty shop, her future husband and a friend opened a garage on S. Murphy Avenue. Pete had previously worked for the Radio Shop in Sunnyvale. He'd served as technical backup for a team that broadcasted shows via an old type of radio called the Echophone.

The two married in 1935, and Pete kept up his interest in machinery in a number of ways. During World War II, he went to work at Hendy's Iron Works, where he helped with the production of Victory ships. After the war, he returned to his auto shop and brought home his work by repairing antique cars. Their home on Mathilda still has a six-car garage, where Pete repaired old-time cars like REOs, Model Ts and Hispano-Suizas.

When Pete died in 1988, his funeral procession was lined with antique cars snaking through the streets of Sunnyvale.

Zarko had her own activities as well—she continued her beauty shop until she stopped to concentrate on raising her son Dave, who was born in 1949. He now operates his own theater company in Factoryville, Penn.

Zarko used to belong to a flower-arranging club called Floraphiles, and is a longtime member of St. Martin's Catholic Church, where she chaired an annual bazaar for 30 years.

After church every Sunday, she has breakfast with longtime friend Chiyo Winters, who also belongs to the historical society. Even with an age difference of nearly 30 years, the two always have a lot to talk about.

"I remember meeting her for the first time when I went to pick up a piece of the old jail at her house. The bars were made at the iron works, and her husband donated the remainder to the historical society," Winters says. She also recalls Zarko's unending craftiness, which has recently manifested itself into dozens of aprons that Zarko sewed out of extra material to donate to a garage sale.

"She made me a sink scrubber out of these scraps of nylon netting, but I didn't feel like using it for scrubbing," Winters says. "I decided I'd rather use it for a pin and wore it to breakfast one Sunday. She recognized it."

Zarko used to get together with her old grammar school buddies for potlucks at the Cupertino Historical Society, but now she's the only one left. She has also outlived all of her siblings, even though she was the oldest child. The Sunnyvale Historical Society recently recorded Zarko on video, giving an oral history that few could say they've experienced.

But with cars whizzing by just outside Zarko's front door, it's not difficult for her to forget when things were much different. "In the '20s, we would go sit up by the Junction and see a car go by every once in a while," she says.