COLGR49--specificity of place

[Doug Millison]

You're off the mark.  ;-) 

People who live on the Peninsula (between San Francisco and San Jose) use
all kinds of expressions to indicate where they're going when they go home. 

An important point may be 
that it's suburban, its not San Francisco and it's not arty,academic,
political Berkeley in the East Bay; Stanford University, on the Peninsula,
is "The
Farm." 

Among the Peninsula
suburbs are some of the most affluent in the U.S. -- Hillsborough and
Atherton. Palo Alto and Menlo Park (near Stanford) were also quite tony in
the 60s and remain so, where simple 3 and 4 bedroom homes sell for $1
million and up depending on the neighborhood.

Oedipa's town in COL49 has always reminded me of Palo Alto.

Silicon Valley didn't exist in the mid-60s, at least not beyond its germinal
beginnings at Stanford, and the Ames Air Force Base (now NASA) in nearby
Mountain View, and Hewlett-Packard plus maybe another electronics instrument
maker or two (Varian was another early one).  When I moved to the SF Bay
Area in the very early 70s, San Jose was still the prune capital, so-called
for the 
 miles and miles of orchards that extended to the north and south of that
city -- land that has over the years been turned into bland industrial parks
that house Silicon Valley, which really began to develop in the mid-70s.
Now, of course, "Silicon Valley" stretches all the way around the southern
curve of the SF Bay into what is more properly called the East Bay, up
through Milpitas (which also used to be fruit orchards, as late as the
'80s).


 
 Paul Mackin 
Some current resident of the Bay Area may now tell me I completely off the
mark.