The Palo Alto Weekly ran a picture of two geezers with medicine balls in an otherwise empty Cubberley hallway, to signify or suborn apathy about that important public asset. I think they’re thinking by publishing these weak messages that if people underestimate and under-value the asset, we the people will let the developers snooker us for the umpteenth time. The developers will buy it cheap, make billions and then give a kickback to the corrupt Weekly. The Weekly that is pro-development.  And undermines our ability to self-govern. And has flunkies in leadership like Pat Burt, Ed Lauing and Greer Stone (who we were stupid enough to vote for but they really work for the powers that be, point towards power like a magnet pointing towards the North Pole – the North Pole that Ginsberg calls Moloch Moloch Moloch! – excuse the mixed metaphor).

It seems leadership, and the pro development press, want to suppress the fact that there have been many vital activities and ad hoc good use at the former high school, which shuttered in 1979, my freshman year at Gunn. I produced more than 150 events at 4000 Middlefield between 1994 and 2001, in the theatre, the multipurpose room or the amphitheater. Here is AFI from summer, 1996. We sold 4o4 tickets at six dollars per head. The theatre seats 325 but we had standing room in the throw for another 80 or so. The picture is a little blurry, but that is singer/leader/composer Davey Havok flying through the air, not sitting on the drum kit riser. 

Many of the bands I used to book at the Cubberley now play The Guild— The Guild is a $35 million privately funded asset in nearby Menlo Park. Blink-182 played the school auditorium and went on to sell 20 million records; they had 150 fans that Sunday in 1997 and earned me back $900. It was Earth Day. Six dollars a head,  two for one if you rode your bike.

I think Palo Alto leadership or really We The People should assign -that’s the legal word for give away—all 30 acres to the Cubberley Alumni Association and let them figure it out. For example, to Ed Fox and Paul Trainer of class of ‘71 who had a reunion with about 100 of their classmates at Mitchell  Park Sunday; a few then came to our Mads Tolling jazz show in the bowl.

If I was a VC I could raise $50 million for just about anything, just among Cubberley people –and I didn’t even go there. But I played basketball for Hans Delannoy, who has invited me to Zotts with the Mulcahys and Earl Hansen, and also coached Tim Ruff— Brett Baird pointed out that a man I never heard — a former Cougar QB –built the Colorado State football stadium. There is a man name Twohy who scored only one basket for Cubberley and draws cartoons for The New Yorker. I would trust him with the 30 acres more than Kou, Stone, Burt et al. Dividing the pie is literally dividing the house. PAUSD and We the People are the same. To pit us against each other benefits the developers. This is a good place to repeat my line that superintendent Don Austin seems like a guy who played Division III football without a helmet and has no clue.

There were four hundred former Cubberley students at Gunn with me, many of whom wrote in the yearbook: Once a Cougar, Always a Cougar. Cross that credo with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”and maybe you’ll see what I’m getting at. These people can bring it!

It was a mistake to shutter Cubberley. We wounded these people. They have a chip on their collective shoulders. So they therefore have the incentive and the capacity to make themselves whole again. To make us whole again. 

To repeat: give all 30 acres to Fox, Trainer, Delannoy, Mulcahy, Mulcahy, Ruff, Graham, Baird, Baird, Twohy, the Oswalds, Earl Hansen, Tim Ruff. 

and1: Kent Lockhart (1963-2023) went to Cubberley; run a picture of him as a symbol of the campus, not the medicine ball guys. Come on!

Edit to add: turn out, or seems, that one of my so-called “geezers” is a retired partner at Fenwick & West and married to a current Menlo Park council member; not as obvious but as a taxpayer I’m ok assigning Cubberley to The Estate of William Fenwick — I’m of the belief that executor is my Dartmouth classmate Tony Fenwick, the former Menlo star, and it still stings that he baited me into throwing an ill-considered long inbounds pass, which he intercepted after first leaving his man open, in a scrimmage at Stanford camp….