Chapter Three:

The Early Years

George Faulstich grew up in a world far different from what it would become. His early 20th century Peninsula was a hardscrabble place of small farms owned by recent German and Irish immigrants. These were families scraping by and hoping that their children, through luck and pluck, would do better. The wealthy professionals who would later turn Silicon Valley into a network of coffee houses and health clubs were nowhere to be found. Nor were there even many people. One Faulstich neighbor remembers being able to see from his house near Redwood City to San Francisco, with only farms and orchards stretching to the city.

Even the words to describe this world may mislead. What were called “farms” meant that the people living there bought enough land (which at $25 for a subdivided plot was abundant and cheap) to hold a cow or two. Old timers looking back recall that every family had cows because they needed milk for the children. In a bit of an overstatement, one recalls, “Everybody was poor, except if you were the gold people.” Poverty wasn’t defined by whether you had money; it was determined by whether you had food. As long as you could feed your family, you were all right. And that’s where “farms” came in. With land you could grow crops and raise some cows. That meant your family wouldn’t go hungry. And if you had extra milk, well then, the kids could sell it to neighbors down the road.

By their eighth birthday the children would be put to work delivering milk. Any hesitation surrounding employment for little ones this young was dismissed in a story told by neighbor Francis Britschgi. At 82, Britschgi still remembers his mother arguing with her husband about her boys being sent out to deliver milk to neighbors down the road. “The boys don’t know the route,” she protested. “The horse does,” replied the husband. Sure enough, the horse stopped at each house where milk was due.

The Lorenz Faulstich Family

On April 18, 1906, San Francisco suffered one of the worst natural disasters in America history. An earthquake of 8.3 magnitude struck, killing thousands of people, destroying 28,000 buildings and leaving most of the city in ruins. In November of that year, Lorenz Faulstich arrived in the city looking for a better climate than he had found in the hot summers and freezing winters of Brooklyn, New York. He rented a house at 27 Bernal Avenue and sent for his wife Minnie and their two-year-old son Henry. Lorenz was not the type of man to be discouraged by an earthquake.

At the age of 14, he had decided to go to America when his older brother had chosen to use the already purchased ticket. As the second son of a basket marker in Eisenach, Germany, Lorenz could see more of a future for himself in America. Arriving in Philadelphia he was taken in by an uncle who trained him as a butcher. A few years later, taking advantage of the training it provided and perhaps to prove loyalty to his country, Lorenz enlisted in the Marine Corps. He served for five years—mostly on ships—in and around the Spanish American War. By the time he was discharged in 1901, he was 26 and had risen to the rank of Sergeant. He would become a citizen in 1902. He had also met the woman he was to marry, Minnie Behlen.

One of Sergeant Faulstich’s duties was to purchase food for the officers when his ship docked. The task took him to the Behlen Bakery in Brooklyn. Here he met the German Family’s 17 year-old daughter, Minnie. After a five year courtship they married on October 21, 1903. The newlyweds lived above the bakery. Their first son, Henry, was born the next summer. He was a frail child who barely survived. Their next child, Ruth, lived only a week and was buried on Christmas Eve, 1906. Lorenz had delivered both children. Perhaps the distress of attending the birth of fragile babies set him to looking for a better climate in which to raise his family.

In San Francisco, Lorenz put his Marine training as a draftsman to use in finding work. In April 1907, he got a job with the Otis Elevator Company. His pay of $75 a month put him and his family securely into the middle class. On July 20, 1907, Lorenz delivered his third child, George Washington Faulstich, named after his mother’s youngest brother. He was a healthy, active baby, and so was his younger sister, Marion Anna Elizabeth, born two years later on August 1, 1909.

Roots in Redwood City

Around this time San Francisco real estate companies were offering free excursion trips down the Peninsula to look at available land. Lorenz, with an immigrant’s ambition to improve the lives of the people in the family, took one of these trips. Marion’s daughter, Marilyn Anderson, speculates that the Peninsula reminded her grandfather of the green rolling hills that he had left behind in Eisenach, Germany. Whatever the reasons, on June 15, 1909, he bought two 25 x 120 foot lots on Fifth Avenue in North Fair Oaks, Redwood City. He paid $650: $15 down and $10 a month. Years later, in September 1920, Lorenz purchased eight more lots of Fourth Avenue. As his children were married they were each given tow of these lots on which to build their houses. While Lorenz spent his weekends building the family house on Fifth Avenue, the family lived in a couple of different places. Margaret Katherine was born July 29, 1911, and on February 12, 1917, William Lincoln rounded out the family.

The house on Fifth Avenue soon turned into a little farm. Lorenz bought cows for George “because he took care of them” and soon there were enough cows to make and sell milk and butter. There were also horses, turkeys, chickens, ducks, a goat named Billy Whiskers, dogs, sheep, rabbits, pigs and “just about everything we could raise.” Younger sister Marion recalls that her Mama did most of the work with the animals. Papa used his training as a butcher when they needed meat and worked in the garden evenings and weekends. The older boys and Marion helped by cleaning the pens and gathering eggs.

Right to the Point

The Faulstiches blended in with the other German families who moved to the Peninsula in the first years of the twentieth century. Lorenz was honest and he was hardheaded. One recollected, if un-provable, story underlines both traits. This was a time when a man’s word was his bond and a handshake was all that was needed to guarantee it. Apparently Lorenz had a package delivered to his door one day. He was asked to sign his name to acknowledge receipt. To Lorenz this sounded like the stranger didn’t trust him. “I’ve already told you I accept the package. Is my word not good enough?”, he asked the perplexed deliveryman. “But,” the man insisted, “I need a signature for my boss. You’re supposed to sign this here receipt.” “That isn’t my problem,” Lorenz replied. “If my word won’t do, well you can just take the dang package back with you.” And with that the senior Faulstich closed the door.

When this stern, military father wanted to make things clear to his children it was probably in German. Whether his second son listened can only be imagined. George always spoke fondly of his father. Some of his friends thought that much of his drive came from a desire to please his father. Both his admiration for his Papa and his rebelliousness come across in this tribute he wrote:

Whenever Papa was around we’d have to work—we’d ‘hip-to’ and be good kids. Papa and I did a lot of things together. Sometimes we would sit up all night and just talk. He helped me in many ways—he bought cattle and horses for me because I took care of them. We would get the discarded railroad ties to use for firewood. He was very stern. When I was about 12 years old I crossed him and he chased me to give me a lickin’, but when he couldn’t catch me. I sat on the railroad track until midnight. When I came home he forgot about it… Papa was a hell of a man — he was my dad!

They were certainly different people. Lorenz was an extremely neat person who always wore a coat. All the remaining pictures of him show a man with a trim mustache, wearing a tie and dark jacket. He also valued education, was known to correct other people’s English and was very well read. Interestingly, he never went to the movies. When Minnie wanted to go with other family members, Lorenz would stay home, saying that movies were a waste of time because you couldn’t learn anything from them (he did enjoy listening to Amos ‘n Andy on the radio).

Inherited Energy

George was certainly more carefree than his father was. But he still admired and copied him. In his early married years George would come home from work, shower and dress in a suit and tie for dinner with his family—just like his father had done. The immigrant’s drive and passion that Lorenz had for hard work, shower and dress in a suit and tie for dinner with his family—just like his father had done. The immigrant’s drive and passion that Lorenz had for hard work were passed on to all the children. And, while he did not have his father’s European respect for formal education, George did inherit the genes of a tinkerer and inventor who could solve most problems with his hands.

Even when he was young, George’s energy proved immensely attractive to those who knew him. Altha’s sister, Dorothy Miller, remembers that smaller kids liked George and used to hang around him when he was delivering milk. His sister Marion says he used to squirt milk into kids’ eyes and then their mouths as he was milking cows. In elementary school he would drive his father’s car to school, picking up kids along the way until “we’d pick up so many kids along the way that by the time we got to school you couldn’t even see the car.”

Children grew up faster in those days. Certainly farm boys whose small arms were useful in birthing calves needed little instruction from their parents on the birds and bees. By age 12, George had made more than one visit to a neighbor’s barn with friends like Francis Britschgi and Lorraine Hopper. Here the pre-teens mixed observation with participation in a traditional rural coming of age.

This youthful energy was harnessed to an independent spirit that seldom took direction from anyone else. Even at a young age, he “had his own mind.” As one boyhood friend said, “He had his own way of doing things.”

Education on the Job

Not surprisingly, early twentieth century public schools provided little room for “doing your own thing.” George didn’t want teachers or anyone else telling him what to do or how to do it. By his freshman year in high school he’d had enough. He took leave of his formal education with a style that would set him apart throughout his life. One day, not content merely to drive his beloved motorcycle to Sequoia High School, he proceeded to drive it through the school, speeding down the halls to the cheers of on-looking students. The authorities were not as amused by George’s prank. They expelled him. He never went back to that school or any other.

He did resume his milk route. He had worked out a deal with his father to buy cows. Lorenz loaned him the money to buy a cow. When he had earned enough, George paid his father back. Then he would be loaned more money for another cow. And so on. George always paid him back and Lorenz always loaned him more. Even here an underlying theme of rewarding hard work was being established in George’s life. No one was giving anything away, and no one was getting something for nothing. Claudia Winder Leonard summed up the lesson that stayed with her grandfather:

He believed in rewarding people who worked hard. His father did that to him—‘You’re taking care of this cow, I’ll buy you another caw.’ All of a sudden, they have a business. You work hard. You’re rewarded for it.

George continued building a small business. In a few years he had a dairy of 18 to 20 cows at the Fifth Avenue home. Marilyn Anderson says that George and his sister Marion, Marilyn’s mother, would bottle the milk and drive around Redwood City delivering it. They also churned butter. It sounded like a model for a family business that would later resemble the beginning of the Black Mountain Spring Water Company. In Marion’s words:

Papa built a cooler to run the milk over. It was like a corrugated piece of copper with cold water inside of it to keep the milk cold and fresh until we could deliver it. We put the milk in milk bottles that we bought from a supply store. George, Margaret and I worked together to sterilize and fill the bottles, put a milk cap on, rinse the bottles off, put them in the milk boxes and put the milk boxes in the buggy. I had the job of collecting the money and keeping track of who paid. We charged eight cents for a quart of milk.

By the mid-1920s, George was no longer depending on his own cows; he was delivering milk for the Britschgi Dairy, his Swiss neighbors. Soon he was working two milk routes, seven days a week. An attractive girl who knew him at the time observed, “He never had a day off.”

The young lady who wrote that was to become well acquainted with his work habits. Altha Hunt had not been very impressed with George at their first meeting. For starters, he was already going with someone when they were introduced—her girlfriend Isabel Nelson. Then, to make matters worse, when he came around to offer her a horseback ride it was not exactly for a gentlemanly trot around the track. As Altha later told it:

He saddled up a couple of horses for us to ride and he jumped on behind me and put his arms around me and we rode off. I did not like this at all. He wasn’t my ideas of a Galahad.

George was a stylish cowboy riding with the family Dalmation.

But George was never one to take anyone else’s objections as the final word. Flowers and sentimental notes were delivered daily to the Hunt household. Altha’s insightful recollection of her courtship summed up George’s style of doing things in many other activities as well:

He just kept pursing me and never gave up. Once he set his mind on something you may as well give up, because HE wouldn’t. He always got what he wanted.

On November 6, 1927, they were married at her parent’s house in San Jose.