Last year an original flyer emerged for one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests, the notorious multisensory happening at 38 S. Fifth Street on December 4, 1965, at which a band formerly known as the Warlocks played under their new name, the Grateful Dead. A plaque now exists at San Jose City Hall, stumbling distance from where the house originally sat.
However, only a non-curious person would stop there. That house, that same humble abode, came loaded with stories before the Grateful Dead even showed up. With the benefit of time, one can now conjure the muses of nonlinear serendipity and reveal just why everyone in San Jose is one degree of separation from everyone else.
I’m not a Dead head, but Jerry would absolutely love this. Bobby, Phil and Pigpen probably would too. So here we go.
The same house, 38 S. Fifth St, was previously the property of a legendary San Jose figure, Mr. Horace Allen, a rancher and builder of gas stations, who lived in the house for almost 40 years. In 1904, Allen married Cordelia Marks, whose family owned the nineteenth-century stick row house. Their wedding even took place in the house although they did not permanently move in until 1927. Cordelia passed away in 1958, Horace in 1965.
Together, they were quite a pair. In their younger years, they operated a prune ranch in South San Jose, at the corner of Allen and Downer Road, the latter of which became Blossom Hill Road. Allen Elementary School was originally named after him.
In addition to his ranching expertise, Allen also built service stations. The brick structure he designed at 11th and San Carlos in the early ’30s, with its arches, steep shingled roof and multi-paneled windows resembled an old English cottage. For years it was a Mobile gas station, then later a Photo Drive-up. Nowadays, the same building is House of Bagels.
Yes, you’re way ahead of me. As of last month, the former Photo Drive-up was back in the news due to a highly-publicized murder that took place there in 1987. At the time, the murderer worked at a joint called Metro Cafe, which is where La Vic now sits on San Carlos. The ghosts are everywhere, if you just know where to look.
But back to the legendary Mr. Horace Allen. Old newspaper stories reveal all sorts of tidbits. After he retired, Allen took up another hobby at his 38 S. Fifth St home. He started making doll houses for children, including one he even painstakingly built in 1961 for president John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, who was then only four years old. This was a big deal because Allen was a staunch Republican, yet didn’t let politics interfere with his love for children.
At the time, Allen was already a widower because Cordelia died a few years earlier, in the most tragic possible fashion. In 1958, both of them, already moving slowly due to age, were descending the staircase in front of the 38 S. Fifth St house, when Cordelia took a fall and went crashing to the pavement. She was 78.
When Horace Allen passed away in May of 1965, he was 91 and living out his final days in a Saratoga facility. As 1965 unfolded, other tenants then moved into the Fifth Street house, clearing the way for Kesey, who occasionally came to San Jose because his lawyer, Paul Robertson, lived on University Ave in the Rosegarden neighborhood.
Are you keeping up? Good.
In the late ’90s, with a new City Hall set to emerge, the San Jose Redevelopment Agency compiled a gargantuan three-volume environmental impact report of the surrounding neighborhood. Historians were hired to analyze every property in the immediate vicinity. The city published voluminous details about noise abatement, air pollution, shade quality, traffic history and storm water drainage, among other things. Several houses, including 38 S. Fifth St, were then relocated elsewhere.
In the environmental impact report, Horace Allen appears on several pages. Ken Kesey, LSD and the Grateful Dead are nowhere to be found. That’s OK.
Just like Ken Kesey once said, the need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
