The Sunnyvale Sun

Cover Story

Photograph courtesy of Martha Stalios

In the early 1900s, this was what some rural homes looked like in Sunnyvale. Today, some widows in their 80s and 90s still occupy small homes on the same street, which originally cost $8,000. In later years, one husband referred to the street as 'Widows Street.'

'Widows' Street

Longtime residents Martha Stalios and Emily Morales remember when young couples could afford a house in Sunnyvale

By SANDY SIMS

There must be something about the air in the neighborhood where Martha Stalios lives because the women on her street live a long time, into their 80s, 90s, some to 100. They outlive their husbands--not so unusual--but they stay put long after.

It's a quiet street in the Heritage District Neighborhood of Sunnyvale. Its small bungalow homes were built in a time when young couples with modest incomes could afford to buy a house.

Stalios, who turned 95 early this year, has lived on her street since 1936, in the house her husband, George, built. That's 70 years.

Emily Morales--whose husband, Nino, died in 2000--has lived next door for almost 50 years. Morales, a slim, fit 88-year-old, walks regularly with Teresa Silva, another widow on the street.

Morales calls her walking partner a "'newcomer.' She's only lived on this street for 28 years," Morales says.

Morales and Stalios lived their younger years on that street in another Sunnyvale era, when acres and acres of orchards perfumed the air in spring and many on their street were employed by the orchards and canneries.

"Look at [Sunnyvale] now," Morales says, sitting in Stalios' living room. "It's all industrial."

Stalios remembers fondly the 48 seasons she worked at Shuckles cannery. She says she can't believe she's still getting a good pension from a company that's long gone. At one time, she says, some 2,000 people worked at Shuckles during the fruit seasons.

"I walked there every day," Stalios says. "Now it's all apartments."

The Heritage neighborhood is bounded by El Camino Real, Mathilda Avenue, Central Expressway and Fair Oaks Avenue. Most of its long-ago residents walked to their jobs.

Workers in this area also spent their time after work enjoying a drink or two at the bars on S. Murphy Avenue.

Morales, who moved with her husband to Sunnyvale from Oakley, in Contra Costa County, has spent her life as a traditional homemaker. She never learned to drive a car, which wasn't unusual for women of her era. She remembers when being a homemaker meant working hard full-time. She kept a garden, cleaned, shopped. She says she washed, starched and ironed some 20 shirts a week.

"The boys needed white shirts at school on Fridays, and Nino sometimes wore two shirts a day," she says. Nino, her husband of 62 years, died at 82. He was part-owner of Miramar Billiards, which is still open on S. Murphy. Nino's partner was the son of another widow on the street, Maria Fernandez. She lived to be 100.

Stalios has a hard time getting around, even with her walker. Her hearing is all but gone, but she laughs a lot. She giggles as her favorite chair, a recliner, dumps her on her feet. With the help of a walker, she makes her way to the kitchen table. Her granddaughter, Elaine Alper, says Stalios laughs all the time.

Still the same

The house is clean and much the same as it has always been. There's an old floor-model Zenith consul radio/record player in the living room. The Stalioses could have listened to President Franklin Roosevelt's World War II broadcasts on that radio. The stove they bought from Ferry's Hardware in 1938 for $150 looks sparkly white. The wood-burning section on the left is no longer used; only the gas section on the right is. Alper says family recipes actually taste better when they're cooked on that stove.

The Stalioses were not so traditional. George was the one who loved to cook. In fact, Stalios says she never did cook. Her job when she wasn't working at the cannery was to "spade" the garden in the backyard where George grew his vegetables.

Those vegetables graced the table at the Stalios' Sunday barbecues--often for as many as 40 friends and family members. These gatherings, however, didn't usually include neighbors.

Morales says the families on the street rarely mixed socially.

"We waved to each other, sometimes talked at the fence, maybe visited once in awhile."

Stalios shrugs her shoulders in agreement. "I don't know why," she says.

A tradition

Tom Carrig, active in the Heritage District Neighborhood Association, says that's the way Sunnyvale was and in some cases still is. "Families were so large, they were too busy socializing among themselves." He says they also kept within their own ethnic groups.

Laura Babcock, who chairs the Heritage Park Museum project, agrees. She says families usually only socialized outside the family at ethnic gatherings in a social hall.

"There used to be two drugstores on Murphy Avenue," Babcock says. "The Italians went to one, and everyone else went to the other one."

Sunnyvale has always been a diverse community, Babcock adds. She says the Chinese and Japanese came first to build the railroad, and then when the valley became agricultural, the Italians, Croatians, Portuguese, Spanish, Mexicans and later the Greeks came to work in the orchards.

Many of those old families have stayed on, and now there are generations of them in the area, Carrig says.

"They are still close families," he notes, especially those in their 50s and 60s. He laughs as he answers an email from his brother.

Stalios, whose family is of French descent, grew up on the north side of the railroad tracks. At the time, it was mostly marshland called the "lowlands." She says the bay was only six miles away, and she remembers taking walks to Alviso.

The trek West

Her parents had moved from North Dakota in 1906, the year of the San Francisco earthquake. They were homesteaders who, Stalios says, "took care of property on Lastreto Avenue for the government until it became theirs."

Stalios was born on Lastreto--some 10 or 12 blocks from where she lives today--in the house her father and his friends built. That was before there were such things as building permits. She says the house had no foundation.

"It was rickety," she says. "It wobbled when we walked around inside, so we played outside."

There were four boys and four girls in the family and the income was modest.

"We played with rocks and tin cans," she says. "We didn't have toys."

Stalios' father worked at Libby's cannery as a janitor and earned enough to add a second section to the house. Stalios says her mother worked for $1.50 a day as a housekeeper and drove a horse and buggy to work. She remembers her mother smoking a corn cob pipe.

They bought groceries in large quantities--flour by the sack.

"We made our own bread, and we had meat once a week; we'd kill a chicken or a rabbit," Stalios says. The rest of the week they typically subsisted on a pot of beans and fried potatoes.

Little formal schooling

Stalios' education ended with the eighth grade. She shrugs her shoulders. Finishing school wasn't so important back then.

She and George eloped in 1926 when she was 15, and he was 27.

George Stalios was an immigrant from Greece who'd joined the Army during WW II at the age of 16. He lied about his age. Years later, he arrived in Sunnyvale from San Francisco with 10 cents in his pocket.

"He got off the train and decided that's where he would stay," Stalios says.

George Stalios went to work at Hendy Iron Works as a crane operator and held other jobs. Hendy's, which had moved from San Francisco to Sunnyvale after the 1906 earthquake, was the city's first industrial operation, eventually employing as many as 12,000 people during WWII. The company, just a few blocks from the Stalioses' home, was famous then for building engines for WWII Liberty ships. It was bought by Westinghouse in 1947 and then by Northrop Grumman Corp. in 1996. The building is still there on Hendy Street, and so is the Iron Man Museum.

George Stalios retired in 1965 and died in 1985.

Stalios says her husband bought a used car every other year until 1936, when he bought his first new car, a Plymouth. That was also the year the Stalioses bought their piece of the Larson subdivision for $300 and built their home (with an 18-foot by 18-foot basement) for a total of $3,200.

"You can't build a dog house for that now," Stalios says.

She says she gets calls daily from Realtors who want to sell her house. They tell her she could get $700,000 to $800,000.

"Where would I go?" she asks.

Morales gets those calls, too. She paid $8,000 for her house.

"I wouldn't sell it for a million," she says.

Some widows on the street have gone. Morales says Anita Perez, who's in her 90s, went to Texas to live with her daughter. Rosa Carillo moved to Los Angeles to be with her son. Others have died. However, Morales says, there are still seven widows living on their block.

"My husband called it Widows' Street," she says.

These days Morales comes every morning to help Stalios dress. She fixes a pot of coffee and some cereal.

The two women take life as it comes. Their children are grandparents now. Family members are moving to places where they can afford a home--Santa Cruz, Sacramento and further.

Morales says what keeps her going are memories and the contact with her family. Her sons come around to take her shopping, and they take her to family gatherings and celebrations.

Stalios says she misses her car. She misses the fishing trips she and her husband enjoyed together. She laughs and says they used straight pins for hooks. She doesn't like being dependent on others, but she's come to love being home and the comfort of her favorite chair. She refuses to buy a hearing aid. "I'm too old to spend that much money," she says and laughs.

Outlived her daughter

She lost her eldest daughter to cancer, and the younger daughter has multiple sclerosis. "I hate that I can't help her," Stalios says. She relies on her family for help. Her grandchildren drop by daily. After Stalios' recent fall and short stint in a nursing home, a family member has been staying nights with her.

The sounds of Stalios' two great-grandchildren playing in the back yard drift into the kitchen. Alper, the mother of the two children, pulls out a scrapbook she created and lays it on the kitchen table. There's the wobbly house Stalios' father built. There's George Stalios, a handsome young man of 16 in a WW II uniform. There's Martha Stalios at 15. There's the fish they caught, the children, the grandchildren. There's a life lived 95 years in Sunnyvale.