Oakland Underfoot

2861 Chelsea Drive

History in the high hills.

4712 Scotia Avenue

Kids could have been my contemporaries, although I didn’t leave marks like these.

1985 Scotia Avenue

A lot of these around here. The neighborhood homes are quite homogeneous, like a cookie-cutter piece of suburban places where I spent my tender years.

12 Shetland Court

This tract up in Grass Valley has about a hundred R. D. Stoecker marks, half from 1957 and half from 1959, with just two or three from 1958. And they’re debatable.

6310 Camden Street

Once upon a time, the mighty Oakland construction company McGuire and Hester laid a lowly sidewalk in front of a gracious home in the Seminary Park neighborhood. I have only one other dated mark from this firm, from 2004.

Bancroft Road at 68th Avenue

This is in the middle of Bancroft, on the median at the crosswalk.

First there was Cal Cragun, starting in the 1930s. Then, starting in 1940, there was Cragun & Cragun, whose marks were simply a double-stamp of Cal’s mark. I’ve found examples up to 1947. Then there is this lovely new custom stamp, sign of a thriving business. So why have I only found a single example in two-thirds of Oakland? I think it must be because they were headquartered farther south somewhere.

The date of this mark is a conundrum. I think the original mark reads 1954, but this must have been emplaced in a later year—I just can’t tell what year.

3238 63rd Avenue

Finally I have a clean example from this year.