Chapter Five:

The Water Business

As the roaring 1920’s sank into the Depression of the 1930s, George switched businesses – from delivering milk to delivering water. Why he made the change is not clear. Because of the Depression, in late 1929, Lorenz was forced into early retirement at age 54. Four years later he would be dead of cerebral hemorrhage. When he retired, he was paid $75 a month, half his salary at the time. This change in his family’s income may have played a role in the switch. Another story claims that George followed his older brother Henry into the water business and took over his routes. Maybe George just saw more opportunity in bottled water. For someone who had to cut and bundle hay, and then raise, feed, birth, milk and care for cows, day and night, bottling and delivering water must have seemed an easier step toward a respectable business.

George became the driver on the Peninsula route for the Mountain Springs Water Company, based in San Francisco. The Peninsula route covered the area from the southern edge of San Francisco to as far south as San Carlos. Spring water at the time was considered a luxury item or, as Bud Hunt put it, a product for “health nuts.” This meant delivering bottled water mainly to the big estates of families like the Crockers and the Bucks. It is easy to imagine the charming young driver, full of energy, engaging his customers along his route, working from dawn to dusk, and planning, always planning.

The two years he worked for Mountain Springs were put to good use. No one knew George doubted that he disliked working for another company. He later told Sparky that during this time he scrounged up discarded equipment and materials that he would need when he had his own water business. He collected old three-legged water stands, discarded bottles and used shelves. Then he stored the stuff in his garage, knowing that sooner or later he was going into business for himself.

His opportunity came in 1932 when part of the company, including the Peninsula routes, was sold to National Ice Company (later to be Alhambra Water). According to Sparky, his grandfather stayed with the new company for only a few days. The he quit. During this brief time he lined up the accounts on his route, getting them to agree to buy water from him. With that salvaged equipment stashed in his garage George was almost ready to start his own business. But he needed water.

Finding Liquid Gold

He had, of course, thought of this. He had found a spring in Hillsborough, on the Carolans Estate. With his customers secured, George went to the people who owned the property and said he’d like to buy water from them. He first called this company Natural Spring Water Company. Soon he had set up his equipment with a hose from the spring, where he would wash, fill and then load bottles onto his truck. His house on Fifth Avenue was transformed into corporate headquarters, with Altha working as the bookkeeper and her brother Bud Hunt helping out. The spring was right next to the highway on a country lane called Black Mountain Road.

The corporate legend of George discovering this spring while “riding on his ranch in the mountains” is probably beside the point. George Faulstich would have found the water he needed in the Sahara. A few points seem to have been modified in the passing years: George started his business in 1932, not 1937; he didn’t deliver the water to “neighbors and friends,” who in the North Fair Oaks community of Redwood City during the Depression couldn’t have afforded it; and the company’s name came from the road to the spring, not “…because the mountains behind the spring cast a dark shadow at sunset.” What isn’t arguable is that this 25-year-old high school dropout was on his way to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Even at this point George was tinkering, trying to improve the business. Perhaps the best example of this was his conversion of a 1929 Klyber truck. The truck was a wreck, in fact not a truck at all. It was a demolished touring car with little left but the hood, the result of a collision with a train. Working with his father-in-law Ed Hung, a skilled carpenter, the two men rebuilt the Klyber into a delivery truck that held 28 5-gallon bottles. The bottles lay in specially designed “pigeonholes” cut into the sides of the wooden panels. Buying cheaply what others saw as junk and converting it to a tool useful for his business was a pattern that would be repeated often in George’s career. Years later his grandson Georgie would rebuild the truck and it would be used in local parades as a symbol of Black Mountain Spring Water Company.

The Good Years

The business was growing fast enough so that more space was needed. George had been leasing a garage on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park where he could keep his truck. Altha was keeping the books and seeing to it that their small business and homelife at the Fifth Avenue house ran smoothly. At the Black Mountain spring, Bud made sure the bottles were filled and loaded onto trucks. This three-person operation was clearly only an awkward and temporary solution for an expanding enterprise. George, who was doing practically everything himself in the water business, was also spending his weekends in a typically hectic way. He would cut hay in Redwood City, and just as he had built houses for his parents, so he built one for his family, which was now his wife and daughter. In 1936, the family moved to Carmelita Drive. The business came with them. The new home, designed and built by George and Altha, would eventually have a swimming pool, a tennis court and horses out back. It also frequently housed the company’s two trucks and bottling equipment.

The water business was to last beyond this first spring. Sometimes in the winter a hard rain would turn the spring water from clear to cloudy. Marketing this to wealthy customers as pure spring water was tough. The company needed another source of water. By 1936, George had found land where he would locate both his growing business and his family. During one of his weekend horseback rides he discovered the spring at 800 Alameda de las Pulgas. He bought an acre around the spring and over the years began accumulating the property on which the family fortune would be built.

Black Mountain was a family business housed in what looked like a family home.

The story behind the purchase of the Alameda land is shrouded in time. George and Altha’s daughter Darma recalls that there was a dairy owned by the Van Camps on the property. Her father traded a tractor to them for one acre surrounding the spring. Bud Hunt remembers George getting the right to graze his horses on the back pasture of 300 acres. Over the years George would add to this property. As he got the money he would buy a few acres here, another parcel there and so on. Shortly after buying all the land in 1939, George added a building where he could put his business offices and park his trucks. It wouldn’t be until 1950 that George had built his own house and could move his family to the Alameda.

The Empire Begins

In 1936, the company hired its first employee, Bud Hunt, Atha’s brother. Now there were two trucks, two drivers, and two routes. Each driver could deliver some 50 to 60 bottles a day. With Bud driving, George was freed up to work on things in addition to delivering water. This meant buying land, building houses and caring for his growing family. That same year he moved his business from the Carolans Estate to the property on the Alameda. It was here that the business would prosper and expand. The war years made everything more difficult. Men were in short supply to drive the trucks. Wartime rationing made finding tires and glass bottles hard to do. In 1942, Bert Miller joined as the second employee, adding another truck and another route to the business. By 1948, a full time bookkeeper was added. And by the 1950s there were five trucks covering routes on both sides of San Francisco Bay.

As with any growing business there were strains. George was working day and night, and expected everyone else to do the same.