Frank Calton

Developer-Visitacion Associates
Initial distillation

I hired on with Crocker Land Company in 1960 as a civil engineer working on doing site planning in Crocker Industrial Park (Brisbane). The development of the industrial park had started a year earlier and the first buildings were under construction when I went to work at Crocker. The streets were in for the first unit and I was doing engineering and site layout for building.

When I was intensely involved in San Bruno Mountain it was for about a year when Foremost McKesson bought the Crocker Land Company. So for about a year before Amfac got involved Foremost McKesson was wondering what that asset was worth and what could be done with it. My position was manager of land development.

I was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and we lived in different places and I graduated from high school in San Jose and from there I went to UC Berkeley. I graduated in 1956, 40 years ago. I was always interested in community planning and local government and why things developed as they were.

In those early days there was no land planning discipline. It was part of civil engineering, so that's what I took at Berkeley. My emphasis was on the sanitary engineering part of it. I was interested in water works and sanitary sewage treatment.

Then we moved to Richmond where we lived for 35 years, up until very recently. Around 1963 I got a paid position on the Richmond planning commission. I spent two years there from 1963 to 65, while I was working for Crocker Land Company. I got familiar with general plan legislation and why that was being done. It was for environmental impact reports.

So when I was on the planning commission and we were making plans I thought that everything should be in balance. If you had a community you had to have open space, you had to have provision for jobs, you had to have adequate infrastructure to service what you were doing. At that stage of the game, I didn't know a whole lot about endangered species, but I did have a sense that there had to be open space. One of the woman on the planning commission, who I got to know pretty well, was one of the initial people in the Save The Bay Association. So we use to talk about these kinds of things, you know, quite apart from my work at Crocker Land Company.

I spent two years in the army from 56 to 58 and then two years working for a small civil engineering consulting firm in Modesto.

I really can't say that I was interested in camping and nature. In all honesty I was interested in playing ball and I had a paper rout and I went to school. It was pretty routine. During World War II, being into the environment was not encouraged; we had gas stamps.

There was a lot of political actions on San Bruno Mountain, like the marches over the mountain. The people didn't want Ticky Tacky houses where they all look just the same, as the old song went. The Saddle area together with the ridge lines were the chief areas of contention. At that time nobody had a real focus on what the primary issues were.

It was emotional, at least I thought so. From being on the planning commission, I always believed you can solve problems by talking with people, so any time I was invited by any group, I'd go.

I was pretty young at the time and I always got along well with Sherman on a personal basis. I went to public meetings and had contact with the elected people. We were trying to influence the political process.

I got to know Bette and Mimi and I think we developed a mutual respect. I was at meeting with the political leadership and LAFCO and with the management of Foremost McKesson. Sherm Eubanks was my boss. We assembled a team of professionals to develop a balanced plan, given all the input. We were also trying to understand the nature of San Bruno Mountain and all the other kinds of input that I was receiving. I thought we had a pretty decent professional team, in terms of doing the appropriate land planning.

I thought we were moving ahead in a favorable direction and then one day I heard that Amfac was considering a west coast office. They had their Hawaii company, the ??? motel, they owned I Magnin and a couple other stores. I went down to Los Angeles to meet with them cause we were talking about some office buildings in the Saddle. I wanted to find out whether that was a realistic objective from a marketing point of view. So the next thing I knew they decided to buy 50% of the project and when that happened I moved on and did other things. That's why I was only involved with the mountain for a year.

I thought that during that year we were making pretty good progress. We were trying to take in a lot of input and still move ahead relatively quickly. Of course this was before the butterflies and all the other kinds of endangered species considerations and we just didn't know about them at the time.

We did some photographs and brochures and tried to communicate the setting and the beauty of the area. I was already gone when the Citizen's EIR was done. John Vogly was the landscape architect and he was the one who defined plants and animals and so we tried to consider all those kinds of things. Your complaints about our EIR, that wouldn't be John Vogly's fault because he did what we asked him to do. We didn't have a lot of sensitivity to natural kinds of things. We were on a learning curve, too. I think everybody was.

When I was involved there was no awareness of the shellmounds. The studies must have been done later. I think we knew that indians had been in that area just as we knew that indians had been in just about every place in the Bay Area. But we didn't have any idea that there had been any habitation. I did hear there was one down in the Colma area or maybe it was Daly City, I've kinda forgotten. But in those early days we didn't worry too much about that and I guess the thought was, well it's so windy there on San Bruno Mountain, they'ed probably look for a more sheltered place. But that was what you might call novice thinking anyway.

There's 3 or 4 cross currents. That's why I was talking to everybody. So I could work through the process to determine balance. There was some opposition. It was not from the leadership of your group (CSSBM) but I think they were affiliated with your group. They were pretty adamant and didn't think we had any right to do anything on the mountain, as private developers. I don't remember the names of the individuals but I remember once I went to one of the local highschools, it may have been Jefferson Highschool and it was the first time I had kinda been yelled off. They had some students there who clearly weren't interested in listening to me.

I had been invited to some festivity like Earth Day or something like that. They just yelled that I was rippen em off. They were not interested in hearing anything. But that was about the only time where I felt that. Mostly with people, we may have had differing points of view but atleast we were willing to listen to one another. And I was always willing to listen to anybody.

I was 12 years on the schoolboard in Richmond where I spent a lot of my spare time working with the Urban Creeks Council. One of the things we did was stop the county flood control from putting a concrete line in where there was a creek next to a school.

The county had the core of engineers and everybody else on their side, but I know just enough about flood control to know that we were being snowed and so we stopped it. It was brought to my attention by the Urban Creeks Council and I thought they had a good point. There didn't need to be a concrete line channel. It could be restored as a natural creek and it could be a learning experience for the kids. It happened to be right through north Richmond, probably the poorest area economically in the entire Bay Area. That happened maybe 10 years ago. They did a good thing.

I can't say I've been politically active either way, but when it came my turn to do something well then I did it.