2 weeks Ago By Tony Wade
The following events took place in 1955: Tony Wade, Back in the Day In Washington, D.C., a young Jim Henson introduced the earliest version of Kermit the Frog in the premiere of his puppet show "Sam and Friends" on WRC-TV.
In Money, Mississippi, Black 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten and killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His murderers, Roy Bryant and J. W.
Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury. In Anaheim, the Disneyland theme park opened. Meanwhile, back in Vacaville .
.. An article in the Vacaville Reporter contrasted the July 1921 founding of the Nut Tree as a small roadside fruit stand on what was then Highway 40 (now Interstate 80) to the July 1955 opening of the Nut Tree Airport.
The Nut Tree grew from its humble beginnings to an internationally known leader in food, gifts and hospitality. The airstrip was built on the Nut Tree ranch just north of the Nut Tree itself using a mixture of clay soil and oil. Most of the work was done by one employee with a tractor and under the supervision of Ed Power Jr.
, a co-owner of the Nut Tree. While there were numerous cities in Solano County with drive-in restaurants, Vacaville became the only one with a fly-in restaurant. While Sports Illustrated didn’t start their well-known swimsuit issue until 1964, the Vacaville Reporter featured pictures of women wearing swimsuits or other sexy attire on the pages of the sports section regularly as early as 1955.
One of them shows a bikini-clad woman named Robin leaning against a helm of a ship while another showed a woman in short shorts using an early version of a remote control. In the Nov. 25 issue of the Vacaville Reporter an article was published with the headline, “VAGRANTS ON THE LOOSE IN SUISUN.
” It reported that the Suisun City Chief of Police declared vagrants had entered the city in large numbers and became a menace, particularly to women and store owners. He cited the case of a homeless man who should be in a mental institution. Again, this was in 1955, not 2025.
A 60-year-old fruit packer who lived in San Francisco dreamed of retiring to a ranch near Vacaville with his wife. They had visited numerous times and in October 1955, after one such visit, the man and his wife had an eager conversation about ranch plans until they reached the approach to the Bay Bridge. The man missed the turn toward San Francisco and momentarily became confused.
He made an improper U-turn to get to the right road and as he did so, he saw a motorcycle lying on the edge of the highway beside the still form of its rider. When he got home the man told his wife that he had struck the rider and that he should turn himself over to the police. He wouldn’t eat for two days, that Sunday and Monday.
Then the wife awoke Tuesday morning, saw a light burning in the garage and discovered her husband hanging from a rafter. She reported the suicide to the police who, after a thorough search of records, reported there was no accident involving a motorcycle. The man had driven for 40 years without an accident and the article concludes that “in his mind he conducted his own trial – as judge, as jury and, finally, as executioner.
” In March 1955, 30 property owners on North Street signed a petition addressed to the city planning commission requesting that the name of their street be changed. They stated that the name North was no longer appropriate because there were at that time already a number of homes north of the street and hundreds more in the works for the future. They also pointed out that with the continued growth of the city, North Street had become a main thoroughfare running from Dobbins Street to Orchard Avenue and it would probably extend beyond that.
On April 15, 1955, the Vacaville City Council gave final passage to the name change. After discovering this story in microfilm I went to the Vacaville History Facebook group run by Zachary Fruhling to hopefully get a first-hand remembrance from someone. I struck pay dirt with old-school Vacan Kenneth Berner who had posted the following in 2020: “I moved to Vacaville on North Street in the winter of ’53-’54.
Sometime not long after we moved into our house, a woman came to the door and asked my mother to sign a petition. The petition asked that our street be renamed Mountain View Avenue. Since we lived in a town with a Spanish heritage, my mother suggested that the name should instead be changed to Monte Vista Avenue.
That is why I ended up living at 332 Monte Vista Avenue until I graduated from Vaca High in 1959.” Fairfield freelance accidental local historian Tony Wade is also the author of The History Press books “Growing Up In Fairfield, California,” “Lost Restaurants of Fairfield, California,” “Armijo High School: Fairfield, California,” and "Growing Up In Vacaville." Reach Tony at toekneeweighed@gmail.
com ..
