Our History from the Beginning
jumped out to give the kids a thrill, many exhibits, and a barbecue. Both Grace and Petra (now Toriumi, and five years Grace’s junior) remember all the fun parties and activities at the mansion, but all that ended in 1958 when the mansion
by Railroad Avenue, and mail was delivered by truck, but Grace remembers Ellen Clark, daughter of the postmis- tress at the time of the train, telling her about how, when the mail came in, the engineer slowed the train way down and tossed the mailbag out the door as he chugged past the post office. Shortly after the turn of the (20th) century, the Mail- liard children parceled out and sold more than 40 lots in Woodacre. Cottages were built as well as a grocery store which was located at the corner of Railroad and Carson. In 1911, the majority of the Valley was sold by the Mail- liards to the Lagunitas Development Company, who subdivided the property and created most of the lots that exist in today’s four villages. (Many of those lots were raffled off at San Francisco movie theaters in the 1920s.) When the train still ran, there was a grocery store located just proximate to the train stop at Central and Railroad but Grace remembers a grocery store, the White Spot, much closer to the ranch. Adolph and his wife Anne Mailliard had built an 18-room mansion with 12 fireplaces where today the Woodacre Improvement Club is. The mansion also had tennis courts and swimming pool. In 1938, residents of the Valley formed the Woodacre Improvement Club, and obtained use of the Mailliard mansion and property, including the tennis courts and large pool divided into three sections of varying depths. The mansion was the site of wonderful activities and parties as Grace was growing up. The one that Grace remembers most happened the year that Bill (aka Mel) and Thelma Dickson were chairs of the Improvement Club committee, and produced an incredible fundraiser—a full Aquacade, “The Wizard of Oz,” and an antique car show that filled what is now the baseball field. Grace was the Tin Woodsman in the Aqua- cade, and stood so still that everyone thought she wasn’t real! There was also a jungle ride where human “animals”
burned down. The Improvement Club was rebuilt at the site of the mansion and remains a community focus today. In the early 1950s Grace got her first job, replacing her brother, Mel, delivering the IJ (Independent Journal) on the flats. In those days, paper routes were boys’ jobs only, but Grace was able simply to take over Mel’s route. She started out by delivering the papers on horseback, but one day the horse ran away with her, scattering all her papers, and Grace switched to her bicycle for transportation. When Grace was 12, Dr. Nutting, a family friend, asked the enterprising girl to take care of his horse on the ranch. He paid her $32.50 per month, which included feed. The ranch was no longer a working dairy by this time (mid- 1950s), so the family brought in all their hay from the Dickson Brothers Ranch at Black Point; Grace’s $32.50 was pretty much clear profit. This was the beginning of Grace’s horse career. As a young teenager, Grace expanded her horse boarding business to include a string of rental horses from Tahoe who wintered at Dickson Ranch. Ida was the matri- arch of the horse pack. At least once a week, Ida would barge through the corral, gather up her string, and in the dead of the night march them over to a neighbor’s garden for a midnight snack, and then on a neighborhood walk up to the Fire station. At 3am, 13 year-old Grace and her dog Puppet would be chasing after the horses; she would round them up, and with Ida in the lead, bring them back to the ranch and into the dilapidated corral. Years later, Grace’s mother, Thelma, mused to Grace that she wondered how she had let the young girl go out alone in the middle of the night. Summing up her memories of the ’40s and ’50s in the Valley, Grace noted that this was a simpler time when all the young families did things together—Kite Days, Camp Taylor, home parties with games, square dancing at Forest Farm Camp, and travelling dinners. “We were outside all the time and made our own fun. We were really creative.” That fun and creativity can be seen throughout the six decades that Grace has been a leader in the Valley.
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50 th Anniversary
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