Jeff Goodell, raised in Sunnyvale, posed for this youthful photo op at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. It was an evenings and weekends project. Ray built the fireplace out of salvaged cobblestones and mortar, and he mounted in it a firebox big enough to roast an ox, or so his son says. This huge chimney on the side of a standard Sunnyvale tract house was a folly in our climate, where the mercury rarely falls below 40 degrees. On its own, Goodell's book is a common tale of California in the 1970s.
Divorce claims the marriage, and drugs get custody of one of the children.
What makes Sunnyvale perhaps more interesting is the local angle. By the end of the book, we realize that what's been lost is more than just a kid's childhood vision of a perfect family. Ray was an outdoorsman who loved trees, a landscape architect unwilling to profit from the new business of tearing up orchards and tipping up semiconductor plants. Thus he missed out on the riches that poured into the Santa Clara Valley in the 1980s. Jeff's sister, Jill, also went into high tech.