Pocketful of Eichlers - Page 4

"The postman is, honestly, he's a great guy," Cyndi says.

Although there is no neighborhood organization, people come together when there is a need. Such arose back in the early 1970s when Cupertino decided to bridge I-280 at Mary Avenue for car and truck use.

It would have turned the section of Mary that ran between the Eichlers and Homestead High—it was a pedestrian path then—into a highway. The neighbors had no hint of the bridge until "somebody brought in dirt for the ramps, and nobody knew what it was and who did it," Fritz Beyerlein recalls.

"They put a ramp up on both sides of the freeway," he says, "and the women here from the [Olympus] court would take camping tables, they made coffee there, and protested against that bridge."

The protest worked. Instead of an auto bridge, Cupertino decades later spanned 280 at Mary with the striking, cable-stayed Don Burnett Bicycle-Pedestrian Bridge. Mary Avenue, which runs through the neighborhood, remains a pedestrian way.

Joe Eichler started work on Rancho Sans Souci in 1967, two years after Eichler Homes collapsed in bankruptcy. He was now running a smaller operation, Joseph L. Eichler Associates, and sometimes manned the sales offices himself.

"He was a rough guy," Fritz Beyerlein says of Eichler, whose second sales office in the tract was in Fritz's garage.

"He talked with a lot of rough language. He wouldn't talk about selling the house for a long time. He would walk away, you know, if he saw that you were kind of an iffy guy, right? And I was an iffy guy, right? Number one, I had no money."

To close the sale, Joe said that for letting him use the garage, he would pay Fritz's down payment himself. Sold.

But that scheme, Fritz recalls, didn't fly with the bank. So Joe came up with another. He would help pay for a backyard pool for Fritz and his family, who were newcomers from Germany.

Done.

But Joe was less agreeable when Fritz asked him to alter the dimensions of the master bedroom in the house, which was under construction, to accommodate an oversize German bed.

"He'd brought the lumber already cut to size," Fritz says.