the public trust after his death his vast land holdings, preserving for the generations the open space five minutes from our homes. The park, threaded by walking trails that were probably first cut by loggers and horse ranchers, is a combination of Joaquin Miller's visionary industry, and the second growth of the redwood forest, now in about its sixteenth decade, and said to be the oldest second growth redwood forest in the West. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the refugees came streaming to our side of the bay—filling the Fruitvale District, and venturing up the hill. There were now streetcar lines and more neighbors; on the site of today's Redwood Heights Elementary School, a Mr. DuBois owned a nursery where he grew cut flowers to sell to local florists. Post the 1989 earthquake, the school was rebuilt to meet stringent safety standards. In the 1930s, some neighborhood residents privately paid to install streets and sidewalks in front of their homes—each homeowner paying about $1,900 over ten years' time. Several neighbors founded the Redwood Heights Improvement Association in 1944. "Improvement" was a veiled reference to segregation—the name was changed to the Redwood Heights Neighborhood Association in the 1980s when neighbors changed its purpose to supporting the elementary school and encouraging the socializing that makes for a pleasant and safe way of life. Developers completed the Lincoln Square Shopping Center for about $500,000 in the early 1960s, and the new Holy Names College. Herb and Ethel Sandal managed the Improvement Association almost single-handedly in the 1970s. They presided over the widening and straightening of Redwood Road—a project meant to deal with the traffic generated by the new housing development in the Crestmont Neighborhood on the west side of Redwood above Highway 13. The Sandals had themselves come-of-age in an era of open racism (the law against inter-racial marriage was not rescinded in California until 1949). They sweated through the taking of homes on the west side of Redwood Road through eminent domain, and fought the proposals for putting in their place apartment houses and multi-unit low-income housing—in favor of the small, neatly kept single-family homes which ironically, for people who believed that "improvement" meant low-ethnic-diversity, immediately welcomed a host of new immigrant families whose contributions have helped make Redwood Heights the culturally intriguing place it is today. Post World War II, from about 1947 to 1964, Americans everywhere turned