Louise Douglas

From Palo Alto Wiki

Louise Douglas grew up in Palo Alto. She and her husband ran Douglas Sewing Machines and Fabrics. She is Palo Alto's oldest merchant. Her first job was at the soda fountain at Liddicoat's.

[edit] Memories

Douglas's various memories were printed during the Palo Alto Centennial in 1994.

"I went with my mother when I was about 14 years old" to a dance hall at the corner of Lytton Avenue and High Street. "We danced the old-fashioned dances: waltz, polka, Scottish dances. My brother and I used to dance up there on Saturday nights. We did the foxtrot and waltzed and of course the Charleston, which my brother and I won a lot of prizes for.

"We bought a little house, a converted chicken coop on South Court. It was not in the city limits. We could look from our house to the Mayfield station. We bought the house for $1,200. We had an outdoor privy. We had electricity but I had to use a coal oil stove." Eventually they added on, and the superintendent of construction for the Stanford Theatre helped her husband put the back porch up.

"Our first telephone number was 453. There were only about 7,000 people in town then. We ended up in Palo Alto when my mother decided to move from San Francisco because of the fog. She took the bus to San Jose and they stopped in Palo Alto to change buses. She was here about an hour and she never did get to San Jose."