But the Campanellas' neighborhood was on the cusp of a housing boom, which would eventually expand Willow Glen's boundaries and its population. Chet Campanella nostalgically recalls his home being at the end of the road, with blossoming orchards only 40 feet from his street.

"I'd wake up in the morning and look across the street and see these rows of beautiful trees," he says. "You would look at that and say, 'Man, this is paradise.' In those days we would call Willow Glen part of the Valley of Heart's Delight because of the fruit."

He remembers the riotously blooming cherry orchards and ripe fruit that would fall to the ground, turning the land into productive gardens.

While the orchards have long since vanished, Campanella, 72, keeps his agricultural interests alive by creating his own quarter-acre of paradise in his backyard. The peach and apricot trees that came with the house have died, but Campanella has replaced them with olives, figs, grapevines and persimmons, as well as a vegetable garden.

The space for the garden was one of the reasons Campanella wanted to buy the house, he says.

"And we liked it because of the fact that it needed a little bit of work, but it had three bedrooms and a two-car garage," he says.

Campanella, whose father emigrated from Italy, grew up in San Jose and was well versed in the agrarian lifestyle. Like many Italians in San Jose, his father helped prune the fruit trees, while Campanella worked in a cannery to pay his way through college.

He remembers his father, an orchard foreman and later a builder, hiring German, Italian, Spanish and Mexican workers to help harvest the fruit.

When the land switched uses from farming to residential, many laborers had to leave the Santa Clara Valley for central California, Campanella says.

"It does make me sad, because I used to love the beauty out here," he notes. "Now it's like a concrete jungle."

Campanella says his two daughters, Vicki and Lisa, grew up playing in a neighborhood that grew many young families who also wanted three- or four-bedroom homes.

A trusted builder

By the 1950s and early 1960s, the influx of people had created a brisk housing market, which pushed development west of Meridian Avenue into the land that was once orchards.

Campanella purchased his house, built by developer T.J. Martin, on Castile Court for $18,000 in 1960.

"I'll have to admit there were nights where I'd lay awake wondering how I was going to make the $180 payment a month for the next 30 years," says Campanella, who was a pharmacist for more than 40 years. "That was scary in those days, because our take-home pay was about $500 a month."

As the orchards began to disappear and the technology boom took hold, housing became a high-demand product.

"It's sort of scary, what it takes to buy a house now," Campanella says. "Payments are $2,000 to 3,000 a month. I have to take a deep breath."

The valley's home prices also seemed high in the 1950s to another family who moved into the neighborhood. The Moras, who first moved to Kiner Avenue in 1957, east of Booksin Avenue, purchased a home in 1974 on Trona Way near Kirk Park.

Frank Mora, who was seven years old when his family moved to Willow Glen from Scranton, Pa., say his family couldn't believe the prices compared to those back East. A three-bedroom, one-story house in Willow Glen cost $14,000­16,000, while a large, two-story Victorian home in Pennsylvania only cost $7,000 at that time, he says.

Mora's family chose to stay in the area because of the weather and family ties, he says. His sister and brother live nearby on La Mirada Drive and Koch Lane.

Mora, 52, remembers walking home from Schallenberger Elementary School at age seven and collecting walnuts from the ground in his pants cuffs to give to his mother. She would bake them into chocolate chip cookies, he says.

And the connection between the two families—the Campanellas and Moras—dates back more than 20 years. Vicki (Campanella) Medaxian's and Cindy (Mora) Saracco (Frank Mora's sister) have been friends from the time they attended Willow Glen High School. And the bond with the neighborhood has remained strong for both families.

Cindy Saracco and her husband, David, purchased their home on La Mirada Drive in 1987. Campanella, who went into real estate after retiring from the pharmacy, helped the Saraccos find a home to buy. Cindy, 41, grew up with Campanella's daughters and asked Vicki to be the maid of honor in her wedding.

David, 44, who grew up in East San Jose, likes the neighborhood for its quiet streets and convenient location, he says.

"Willow Glen has a neat culture, neat architecture and old quaint homes," Cindy says. "It's not just suburbia."

Cindy adds that she liked the houses in the neighborhood because she grew up in a T.J. Martin home on Trona Way.

T.J. Martin built most of his homes in the early 1960s and "his developments were pretty popular," David says. "They were good, solid construction and suited families well."

That longtime neighborhood loyalty was just what he was looking for when he bought his home on Morocco Drive in February 2003, says Bob Greenwood.

Greenwood wanted to live in a neighborhood where the original owners were happy with their neighborhood and chose to stay, he says.

Besides the home's location in an older, established community, he also liked its design.

"T.J. Martin makes a good home," says Greenwood, who's married and has one daughter. "The kitchen's in front to watch the children outside." Greenwood's kitchen faces the front lawn, and he likes having a full view at all times of his daughter playing in the front yard.

Friendly neighbors

While the Saraccos say the neighborhood has changed from those early years and there aren't as many children, there is still a strong family atmosphere among residents.

Cindy Saracco says neighbors watch each other's houses and look out for one another.

Campanella remembers that when he and his family moved into the neighborhood in 1960, they were greeted by the "Welcome Wagon," a group of women who welcomed new residents with baked goods and coupons and answered questions about the neighborhood.

Although the Welcome Wagon's no longer in existence, neighbors still gather for celebrations, Campanella says. His next-door neighbor, Scott Diehl, holds birthday parties at his home, and Campanella hosts a July 4th barbecue for more than 40 people.

The Saraccos and Campanellas also have a tradition where Campanella brings his grandchildren to the Saraccos for Halloween, and the Saraccos reciprocate with a visit the week before Christmas.

Greenwood simply created his own version of the Welcome Wagon.

When he moved to his home, Greenwood visited 25 houses and introduced himself to the neighbors.

"I like the sense of community," he says. "The area is nice and folks are pleasant."

Greenwood's family moved from the eastside of San Jose and had limited their search to homes within the 95125 ZIP code, because he wanted to live in Willow Glen, he says.

These close bonds make neighbors more enmeshed with each other's history and are what new residents want to be a part of, says 42-year-old Trona Way resident Prabha Werner.

Werner says neighbors also share in the joy of births and graduations. When her daughter was born 12 years ago, her next-door neighbors made a banner, she says.

And with neighbors who go back for decades, the ties are even deeper. Mora calls Trona Way neighbor 82-year-old Dora Iudice "everybody's mother and grandmother."

A San Jose native, Iudice and her husband, Carl, a well-known barber at The Village Barbershop on Lincoln Avenue who passed away in 1996, bought their home on Trona Way in 1963. They had been living in San Francisco, and when they visited Iudice's mother in San Jose, "the kids got rosy cheeks," Iudice says. Her husband suggested moving to San Jose for the children's health. They lived first on San Luis Rey Avenue and then on Meridian Avenue, until they settled into a house on Trona Way.

Iudice, with three grown children and grandchildren of her own, says she has been a mother figure her whole life. She even keeps a toy chest full of toys for neighborhood children when they come to visit.

Her cooking is legendary on the street, Mora says.

"She's a hotel, motel, bed-and-breakfast place," he says. "She'll take everybody in."

Iudice often sits on the front porch and waves as neighborhood children pass.

"There isn't a person in the world I dislike," Iudice says.

When one of Iudice's neighbors developed blindness, she took her shopping every Monday. "I've got more friends," she says, "and I can't even keep up with the family I've got."

Although the friends and memories have stayed constant, the amount the area has changed is astonishing, Iudice says. She remembers when Meridian Avenue was a one-lane street and Monterey Road was a dirt road during the late 1920s, she says.

Iudice's parents and grandparents emigrated from Sicily before World War I. Her grandparents owned an apricot ranch on Sierra Road, where she was born in 1921. While she was growing up, her family helped harvest the fruit on her grandparents' farm.

"As soon as I knew how to handle a knife, I cut apricots," she says. Her family worked together to pick, dry and sell the fruit to warehouses. In the summer, she made 10 cents a day picking prunes from dawn to 6 p.m. with her four younger brothers.

"I used to stand on prune boxes to scrub their overalls when my mother worked in the cannery," she says. Iudice, who was the oldest, says taking care of her brothers contributed to her love for children.

And her parents' knowledge of the land came in useful when Iudice and her husband wanted to buy a home in Willow Glen.

"My dad said this was a good spot because the ground was solid," Iudice says.

Her dad's advice proved true when only one item fell off the shelf during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, she says.

"Other people in Willow Glen had their chimneys fall down," she says.

A work in progress

Many of those chimneys were part of homes built by an array of developers.

Campanella witnessed housing developments spring up throughout his neighborhood. He even remembers the names of various builders: T.J. Martin, Joseph Cirone, Joseph Eichler, and Ken and Jack Blackwell. T.J. Martin was the builder who built the homes between Curtner and Foxworthy avenues and from Meridian Avenue to Briarwood Drive, including Campanella's home.

And after 30 years, many of the residents living in homes built by developer T.J. Martin are renovating their yards and remodeling to include the conveniences of modernization.

When the Saraccos bought their home, there was a lot of deferred maintenance to be done, Cindy says.

"We decided to buy into something that was largely a mess and fix it up ourselves," she says. The couple went through three months of interior remodeling, fixing up the kitchen, entryway and laundry room, she says.

The Saraccos also built raised planter boxes for their vegetable garden in the backyard so that their 69-year-old tortoise, Josie, couldn't destroy the crop.

Greenwood was also eager to make home improvements and was stuccoing an exterior wall on a recent weekend.

He says he'd also like to extend his backyard fence closer to the sidewalk to take advantage of some of the extra concrete walkway.

Campanella has made no shortage of facelifts on his property. The original building is the same, but he added a brick walkway and many trees.

He jokes with next-door neighbor Diehl, who also makes home improvements, that Diehl "has to keep up with the Campanellas," he says.

Over the last 20 years, Campanella has planted numerous trees, including a crepe myrtle and a Japanese Christmas tree, and he added a waterfall constructed three years ago.

Now, after having lived in the area for more than 40 years and witnessing the changing face of his neighborhood, Campanella still says, "We're going to stay here forever. It's just what we want."