Margarita Espinosa

From Palo Alto Wiki

Margarita Espinosa was a long-time resident of Palo Alto and lived in Channing House.

In 1910 her father moved the family here from New Mexico to take a teaching position at Stanford. Espinosa attended Castilleja School and Stanford University, where she majored in English. She returned to Castilleja as a teacher and eventually became headmistress, a position she kept until she retired at age 65. She then joined the Peace Corps and served in Korea.

[edit] Memories

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

"I started teaching at Castilleja about 1928. It was actually very much the way it is now. Much smaller, of course.

"Palo Alto was a nice place to grow up in. We had a big two-story house on Middlefield with a big back yard, an apricot tree and a peach tree. We had many neighbors and the children were always over at our place. We were very family-oriented. My parents liked to have the neighbor children come to play at our house.

"I remember walking downtown. We walked everywhere then. There weren't many shops, but there was the movie theater, and my family used to take us to see the films of Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark. Of course they were very particular about what we could see, but the fairy tales were always fine.

"There was a streetcar that ran up and down University Avenue and my father used to take it to work at Stanford. I think many professors rode the streetcar to work then."