Olga Stapleton
From Palo Alto Wiki
Olga Stapleton (d. 1998) and her husband, Harold, came to Palo Alto from Duluth, Minn., in 1945 and opened the bubble-gum-pink Stapleton's Florist shop on Waverley Street. "There were big, beautiful department stores and a cafeteria," she recalled. "Those were the days when when the police would come around and check that your doors were locked at night."
Today, Stapleton's is one of the oldest businesses downtown, having outlasted the big, beautiful department stores and cafeteria. After her husband's death in 1992 until her own in 1998, Stapleton ran the business herself, usually wearing her trademark leather clogs and tam-o'-shanter.
[edit] Memories
Stapleton's memories were printed during the Palo Alto Centennial in 1994.
- "One thing that always stands out were the high school luaus, back in the '60s. We always made the leis. We used to stay up all night, stringing leis, because they had to be strung by hand. We would use six dozen carnations for each lei, and sometimes we would make 150 leis. That's around 10,000 carnations. They used to have so many luaus. They don't have luaus anymore."
