The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Temperance Town: 'Willow Glen was run by Methodists, very conservative and dry; they wouldn't have any liquor stores,' Dick Barrett recalls of the former city during the 1920s and '30s.

Glen journalist's stories reach from Herbert Hoover to email

Dick Barrett recalls S.J. lynching, Moffett Field's birth, and when WG was a two-cop town

By Rebecca Wallace

Dick Barrett sits bolt upright as he recalls watching Herbert Hoover accept the Republican nomination for president more than 70 years ago.

"I was in Stanford stadium as an usher that day," Barrett says from a chair in his Willow Glen living room. "People cheered as he drove around the stadium. And then some fellow way up on the rim of the stadium hollered, 'We're with you, Herb!' I often thought about that later."

Later, of course, was the 1930s, when the United States--and the then city of Willow Glen--got sucked into the Great Depression. And Dick Barrett, who began working at the evening San Jose News in the fall of 1928, was there to cover Willow Glen and the surrounding areas.

For the next 50 years, he worked as reporter, city editor and columnist for the News, retiring in 1977. And now, as the cards wishing him a happy 88th birthday pile up on a nearby shelf, Barrett is a wealth of information about the San Jose area.

Talking to him is like flipping through a thousand snapshots from years past, when Willow Glen had its own two-man police department and a cherry orchard grew where Barrett's house is now.

When Barrett started out at the News, borrowing the valley editor's bicycle to seek out news items, Willow Glen was already a city. When the Southern Pacific Railroad planned to run a main line through the Glen, residents responded by incorporating on Sept. 8, 1927, with a vote of 686 to 364 to keep the line out, according to the book Clyde Arbuckle's History of San Jose.

"As a city, Willow Glen could demand a franchise from the railroad," Barrett says.

But Barrett says that once it became a city, Willow Glen needed a sewer system, and paid for it under an agreement that put a lien on every property. Then the Depression hit, and the agreement made it difficult for people to sell their property, he said. That's when San Jose stepped in with an annexation offer.

"The city manager made [Willow Glen officials] a deal that they'd come in and he'd get 'em off debt," Barrett says. In 1936, the Glen vote was 978 to 871 to annex to San Jose, according to Arbuckle's book.

One Glen, very dry

The city of Willow Glen had a distinctive character, Barrett says: "Willow Glen was very much a town that was run by Methodists, very conservative and dry; they wouldn't have any liquor stores."

Eddie Pracna, Willow Glen's second and last police chief from 1932 to 1936, recalls in a separate interview that his department's office was in a firehouse on Lincoln Avenue near Minnesota.

"I was also the driver of the firetruck," he says. "We had a hall upstairs, over where the engine was kept, and the City Council and any civic entity met there, like the Masonic Lodge. They were a good crowd."

About 8,000 people lived in Willow Glen at that time, along with prune, cherry and apricot orchards, Pracna says: "It was very calm, a nice quiet little town." When the Glen became part of San Jose, Pracna joined the San Jose Police Department. He still lives in the house on Blewett Avenue he's been in for 60 years.

"We used to play horseshoes behind the firehouse," Barrett says. "Joe Hageman was my favorite councilman. He used to slip me info. And he had a grandchild and said, 'We'll call him Willy Glen Hageman.' "

Barrett also has fond memories of Chester Tait, who owned the former Texaco station where Starbucks now stands on the corner of Lincoln and Minnesota. "He always let me use the phone to call in stories," Barrett says.

When the Depression hit the area, banks closed, a man sold apples at First and Santa Clara streets and Barrett got laid off for a few weeks. And some farmers paid for their News subscriptions in prunes.

'The mob was ugly'

As the economic crunch eased, it was back to the journalism business as usual for Barrett. And that meant competition with the morning San Jose Mercury, which bought out the News in 1942. The two papers kept publishing under their own names for many years, except for Sunday's combined Mercury News.

After the News was purchased, "I may have been the last one to give up on the idea that we were competing with the Mercury-Herald [its earlier name]. It had become a habit," Barrett says.

During his career, Barrett witnessed many major area events. "I was in San Francisco the day they transferred Moffett Field to the Navy; that was about 1932 or '33," he says. "It was farmland before. And I covered the construction of the big hangar."

Barrett was also present at one of San Jose's grisliest scenes: the 1933 public lynching of two men who were arrested and confessed to killing Brooke Hart, the son of a well-known city merchant.

"The mob gathered and battered the jail door down with a pipe," recalls Barrett, his voice growing quiet and his eyes haunted as he relives the scene. The angry horde then dragged the two to St. James Park, where they were hanged, he says: "I was there for the whole thing. KFRC radio in San Francisco was doing a play-by-play as it was happening."

He pauses, then says, "The mob was ugly. It was one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my life. For years, nobody would talk about it. I couldn't believe the people in San Jose would do that. It was something you'd expect to happen in Mississippi or somewhere."

When Barrett retired, he was writing six columns a week on politics and reminiscences--and had served on the San Jose Bicentennial Commission. Now he is a member of the Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Society and writes emails, poetry, the occasional letter to the editor and an unpublished memoir called Eighty-Seven Damn Years and Counting. There is also a ham radio in his Glen home, where he lives with his wife, Gertrude.

As the number of newspapers declines and the Internet grows, print media aren't what they used to be. "At the time I retired, I wondered if someone starting today would get to have a 50-year career. Will newspapers be around for 50 years?" Barrett asks without giving a response. "Newspapers are a permanent record," he says with conviction, then adds, "but the paper is made with acid; they'll age and turn yellow."

And part of "progress" is physical: Barrett has seen many changes in the Glen and the valley; orchards disappearing, trees in full bloom being bulldozed to make way for homes.

"Sen. James D. Phelan once said, 'I dread the day when the Santa Clara Valley will be discovered,' " Barrett says with a rueful smile. "And he was right."

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