The Sunliner Grill has become a hub for young men and women in Milpitas on Friday nights, the story reports. The latest hot rods can be seen parked along Main Street beginning from early afternoon, in contrast to the quieter hours of the workday in this growing suburban enclave. Old pictures of Milpitas don’t look far removed from the days when people came west in covered wagons; the line about the growing suburban enclave sets the stage for the approaching future.
Things get blurry for the Sunliner Grill after that. It would take a team of dedicated gumshoes going door-to-door to piece together any kind of consensus. In the online comments sections of news stories mentioning it, I found a few older people volunteering their memories; one recalled that he used to buy comic books there as a child, which was probably a superimposition of later memories onto earlier, fonder ones.
By 1974 at the latest, anyway, a place called Valley News is doing business from the same address. The proprietors of the Sunliner Grill may have owned the building outright by then, hoping to steer it into a different line of business; but there are several other possibilities, none of which can be determined without access to the deeds of sale, whose final resting places in dusty filing cabinets can only be conjectured. Often the holdings of large interests are sold at auction, but just as often they change hands with little or no public notice. Usually they leave traces: in the classified ads, in local interest stories. I haven’t been able to find either such source here.
All I can say with certainty is that, at some point, the railroad sold the short strip of land on Main to a private owner, and that, while the railroad had been meticulous about keeping records, landlords are lone wolves. They enter and exit the scene without notice. At some point, a San Jose man named Vernon Gates shows up and buys out a few of the railroad’s former holdings: their declining states made them perfect additions to his portfolio. His was a well-known name among many people in San Jose who hoped one day to forget it.
The people who lived in properties owned and managed by Vernon Gates couldn’t afford to rent from anybody else. They were at his mercy. He owned at least half a dozen multi-tenant buildings; if you were to walk past any of them, you’d usually see several window units jutting out, condensation dripping to the ground below. Changes in local economies are the trade winds on which men like Vernon Gates drift; they try to land in spots where they won’t be noticed, and they keep their eyes open for new opportunities, since doors begin closing after word gets around. To rent out rooms like the ones Gates had on offer is to be forever in need of new clientele.
But anyone who owns property in California knows it’s a winning proposition, whatever your motivations; and however he chanced across the Milpitas listing, Gates knew a bargain when he saw one.
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NO ONE KNOWS HOW LONG Valley News sold books and newspapers and comic books; no one remembers who ran the place, or what the inside of it looked like before it settled on a winning business plan; no one’s sure when it changed hands and began stocking Playboy and Penthouse behind the counter, or when it introduced harder fare to the racks.
But by the late 1970s it’s not really a newsstand anymore. It’s a porn store. The Mercury News didn’t run an article about its opening, but on Flickr you can find a few scanned pictures of a picket line some locals formed shortly afterward. Comments on the pictures remember the scandal of it; by the time anybody noticed it had changed, people say, it had already been plying its new trade for a month or two. Comparing the exteriors to the ones in old stories about the Sunliner Grill, you can see that not everything’s changed; the bricks are the same, the old awning’s still there and wants replacing. But the front windows, through which you could once see the bustling lunch counter, have been blacked out, and now there’s an OVER 21 ONLY sign nailed to the front door. A VALLEY NEWS sandwich board, in oddly cheery mock-Gothic lettering, still stands out front, but it strikes a discordant note within the scene that surrounds. The initial V and the terminal S are faded almost to invisibility, leaving only faint traces of themselves in the accumulating grime.
In a town so small, a place like Valley News operates on borrowed time. The picket line would eventually have gotten its way if other considerations hadn’t gone out ahead of it. It’s hard to believe, thinking about Valley News in Milpitas, that it ever existed at all, but photographs don’t lie.
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ANTHONY HAWLEY WAS FROM OREGON; he had family all around the Pacific Northwest, and his childhood home on the northeast side of Portland looks, today, just like it did when he lived there. When the sailors came home in 1945, Anthony, then a child, would have seen firsthand inklings of the rapid growth that lay just ahead—new car lots, new factories, and new people moving west. Daniel, his brother, remembers Anthony in his teenage years as preferring late working hours to local nightlife. In town, there were ample supplies of both.