Jerry Secrest's letter above asks why the developer (Sand Hill Properties) is being "punished" because there is no grocery at Edgewood Plaza. The answer is simple: it's because Sand Hill Properties promised to provide an operating grocery store along with other public benefits when it sought approval to build tens of millions of dollars of new homes on the site. Sand Hill's promise was enacted as part of a city ordinance, making each day it does not uphold its agreement a misdemeanor. So far, Sand Hill has committed many hundreds of these misdemeanor violations. That's why it is being fined now. It was previously fined for knocking down a historic building on the site that it had pledged to carefully restore.

Mr. Secrest, who lives in Portola Valley, didn't explain in his letter why he might be particularly sensitive about penalties against shopping centers. It turns out he co-owns one in Redwood City that has itself created controversy. A sister paper of the Weekly reported last year that after losing a lease at that center, a former tenant described the owners as "greedy" and "cruel." The paper reported that the owners were not interested in having mom-and-pop tenants. So Secrest might not be the best person to advise Palo Alto about how to run shopping centers.

Perhaps Palo Alto should do what Cupertino did: vote Sand Hill Properties out of their city!

I'm not sure what Ms. Bauriedel considers fast-track but the process to supplement personnel resources at Rinconada Pool has been going on since last year.

Many residents told the City that they wanted more lessons and pool time than is currently being offered. The original reason the City put out the RFP last year was because they were having trouble recruiting lifeguards and swim instructors for summer lessons and extended hours. Teens who used to fill those roles seem to be less interested nowadays so it's a real concern.

It was an open bid process with I believe 8 parties contacted to provide bids and only two submitted bids. The winner, a local entrepreneur who is an honorable community-minded person and has a first rate organization, offered lessons that were well-received this past summer and is moving slowly to make plans for next summer. He has been working with Parks and Rec staff and commissioners (and PASA and Rinc Masters) to come up with solutions to make MORE pool hours available to the community at competitive prices. It's great that the lap swimmers are stepping up to be more involved and I hope you will make everyone who wants to swim at Rinconada feel welcome.

Any Palo Alto residents interested in swimming are more than welcome to join the Rinconada Masters which has been operating for over 40 years, under the guidance of Coach Carol MacPherson and assisted by former Olympian, Terri Baxter-Smith. We have plenty of room during our workouts and a Swim4Fitness program if your strokes need a tune up. Please check out rinconadamasters.com for workout times and fees. Just over half our swimmers live in PA and the others in surrounding communities. We welcome the latter, just as Palo Alto residents are welcome at the other Masters' and lap swimming programs in the area.

There is also room to swim during the lap swim hours and for kids and youth in the PASA program. All three programs run year round.

We are very lucky as Palo Alto residents to have many pools and swimming options open to us all year round within a 20 minute drive.

On the passing of Mel Johnson, 1921 - 2017
Milford P Johnson has passed on to the next life. He was the last of our parent’s generation, born during the Great War and Roaring Twenties, to pass away. 95 and ½ good years are a great run on life. He often stated that he had no regrets in life and was grateful for everything life had brought his way. An introverted Swedish-American, he led a quiet life. Not rich in material wealth, he had a large family, and was much beloved by family, friends, and relatives. Tom Brokow wrote a book about these Americans entitled “The Greatest Generation”. I agree. There are several reasons why we know them by that name. Do we know of any other generation tested as much through famine, drought, poverty and war? Was that extreme hardship they faced early in life inherently necessary to forge them into a generation that could conquer the world, and then eagerly give it back so they could live a normal life and create a better world for their families to come? I’ve often wondered that.
Mel lived through some pretty big changes in his life; it was a time in America that we wouldn’t recognize anymore. Our parents grew up in a time where they walked miles on a dirt road to school or rode a horse. That was a time in the Midwest when most people actually owned a horse. Our parents came from farm country in the flyover states. There, only a few people were able to afford tractors, so a lot of fields got plowed by horse and hand, using a horse drawn cart to take crops to the co-op silo 10 miles away. Mel grew up in Deer River Minnesota, eating watermelons grown in a dry lake bed (this ecological disaster occurred before industrialization and global warming). Later in life when dining out he would finish everything on the fruit plate unless they had watermelon. He’d had enough to last a lifetime. My father’s family was sharecroppers, picking crops and fruit on land owned by others. This was at a time in America when former slaves had become sharecroppers in the south, moving on to own their own farms and sending their children to college.
On a trip back to the Midwest years ago, my aunt took us by the dance hall where my parents met. During the Big Band Era of the Great Depression, one few pleasures (I would add smoking and drinking whatever passed for beer or moonshine to the list) the kids could afford to indulge in was dancing and they could dance pretty well. Later in the 60’s and 70’s they would throw parties, dance to music and make a little bit too much noise as a young me lay in bed trying to sleep. And during their kid’s weddings in the 80’s the army of aunts and uncles would descend on the dance floor, cutting a rug with formal dances that we never learned (Foxtrot, Charleston, Turkey Trot, Lindy Hop, and lots of other hops).
The twenties were unkind to rural America, and 1920’s America was still mostly rural, even California. After the ‘War to End All Wars’ was ended by our grandparents and America’s entry, and a few million Spanish Flu deaths, America was no longer needed to feed the world. The end of our trade surplus produced massive overproduction, ending in 1 of 4 farms sold for costs during the 20’s and crops burned to reduce supplies. Things couldn’t get worse until they did. The 30’s when our parents were kids and young adults brought the Depression. And the most pre-industrial global warming the world had seen for some time. So for twenty years, rural America was on the ropes and our parents moved away to where the jobs were, and the dust bowl wasn’t, to California. Things couldn’t get any worse until they did again. Japan took out our Navy in Pearl Harbor bay.
Once again America was called on to push expanding armies back within their original borders and free Europe from Nazi Dictatorship. Less than four years later, starting from scratch and little military, they defeated the world and gave the vanquished back their countries as democracies. You have to ask: has any other generation been persecuted with such poverty, so many setbacks, World War, only to return victorious, lift their foes back on their feet, pick up their lives and make something of themselves?
And they did make something of themselves. They worked their jobs, raised their children, sent them off to the colleges they were never able to afford to attend, and travelled the country in long station wagons (for the modern reader: two cars welded together that included a lot of back seat fighting) keeping in touch with their friends and the relatives who stuck it out at home.
They grew up in a time where they took horses to school and they walked on the moon. They didn’t have radios when they were young, and they created TV, transistors, computers, LED’s, printers, cell phones and everything we use today that makes modern life what it is. What generation has overcome such challenges in life, and made such progress? Most of modern day progress is really just taking what they did and taking it to the next level, then the next. There is no doubt that we were honored to know them, to be raised by them, to have benefited from their many sacrifices, and although we ignored most of their advice, looking back now, we recognize them as the heroes they were. And maybe we should have listened to them more, probably.
It is my sincere prayer that somewhere in heaven, Count Basie and Benny Goodman made it up there and there a generation of workers, smokers and drinkers are showing how well they can Take the A-Train. These dancers were our parents, kid’s grandparents and their kids’ great-grandparents. Will the world ever see their equal ever again? I hope so, but I’m not counting on it. Ken Carroll, 2017

The On-line reporting by category is becoming disorganized. If there is one heading on schools then put all of the school issues under that heading. Right now we have school issues all over the place. That means that if someone starts a new topic they need to insert it under the correct heading or the staff needs to place it under the correct heading. Schools are now - and always have been a major topic for this town. I no longer have children in the school system but truly wonder how and why there is so much controversy.

> How about a suggestion that the Edgewood Plaza residents form a co-op to run the market in the Plaza.

Why bother to publish a letter with an idea that is so obviously clearly unreasonable and impossible even before you get to the end of the sentence? You can't dump the management of something totally unrelated to someone's housing development on them because they live nearby or you want to defend a corporation. WTF?

Ken Carroll, thanks for your thoughts and remembrances. It is scary how much and how fast we are losing connection to the land, history and community and becoming almost detached conveyor-belt products for industry that barely treats people any better than livestock any more. The more people we lose, the more connections with the past that atrophy, the less sense of self and understanding of the world people have. Things were not perfect in the past, but the path forward seemed a lot more clear and lessons easier to learn and remember.