Featured - page 29

After traffic safety concerns expressed by residents, Redwood City is proposing to install additional stop signs at the intersection of Clinton Street and Harrison Avenue and make it a four-way stop.

Currently, the intersection adjacent to North Star Academy, a K-8 elementary school, and McKinley Institute of Technology, a 6th-8th grade school, features stop signs on Clinton Street but not on Harrison Avenue. Right-of-way conflicts at the intersection, and high pedestrian activity from the schools are reasons residents cited as concerns about traffic safety, a city report states.

At the intersection, Harrison Avenue carries about 1,780 vehicles per day and Clinton Street about 1060 vehicles, a city study showed. While no collisions have occurred at the intersection in the past 36 months, the city said the intersection meets the city’s criteria for stop signs on residential streets

“The proposed stop signs will increase pedestrian and bicyclist safety,” city staff said.

A notice about the proposal was mailed to residents within 200 feet of the intersection on April 8, and also to the chairs of the Mt. Carmel Neighborhood Association. No concerns or negative feedback was expressed. The cost to install two stop signs is about $2,000.

The proposal appears on the Redwood City Council consent calendar agenda on Monday, May 18.

COVID-19 testing sites operated by Verily have been added to East Palo Alto and Daly City on a rotating schedule. Meanwhile, Verily will continue to operate the testing site at the San Mateo County Event Center, according to the county.

The expansion of sites provides better access to testing to northern and southern parts of the county and will help San Mateo County meet state guidelines on testing for the virus. A coastside testing site is being planned, officials said.

The county needs to administer about 1,200 tests per day, through hospitals, private testing companies, and the free program available through Verily, county officials said.

“Testing is key to understanding the spread of the disease and to further opening our economy,” County Manager Mike Callagy said in a statement. “We want to make sure that there are no barriers, including geography, that might prevent someone from seeking a test.”

Starting Monday, May 18, testing will be done at the old Serramonte High School campus in Daly City on Wednesdays and Thursdays and the YMCA in East Palo Alto on Fridays and Saturdays, the county said. The tests are free and available without restriction to anyone who makes an appointment in advance. To make an appointment, residents can visit Project Baseline’s website here. Following the test, residents will receive results and other information by email. San Mateo County Health will reach out to residents who test positive.

The expansion of sites provides better access to testing to northern and southern parts of the county. A coastside testing site is being planned, officials said.

Can’t make it to the testing sites? The county can help. Individuals who go through the screening process at the Project Baseline website and receive an appointment time can call (650) 779-9375 Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 4 PM to arrange free transportation.

TESTING LOCATIONS & SCHEDULE

Mondays & Tuesdays – San Mateo
San Mateo County Event Center
1346 Saratoga Drive, San Mateo
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Wednesdays & Thursdays – Daly City
Serramonte High School
699 Serramonte Boulevard, Daly City
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Fridays and Saturdays – East Palo Alto
Lewis and Joan Platt East Palo Alto Family YMCA
550 Bell Street, East Palo Alto
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Sundays
Testing locations closed

Photo: Verily offering drive-through testing at the San Mateo County Event Center. Credit: San Mateo County

By now, you may have heard about the urgent need for blood donations during the COVID-19 pandemic. As early as April 2, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration expressed an “immediate need for blood and blood components.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented challenges to the U.S. blood supply. Donor centers have experienced a dramatic reduction in donations due to the implementation of social distancing and the cancellation of blood drives,” according to the FDA.

On Friday, May 29, the local community has an opportunity to assist in this effort. A blood drive will be held from noon to 5 p.m. at the gym at Red Morton Community Center in Redwood City. To make an appointment, visit bloodheroes.com, click donate and use the unique sponsor code, RWC.

File photo

San Mateo is covering “walk” buttons with tape and reducing the need to press them at busy intersections, in another effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The city posted the notice on Facebook today, saying the walk signals will automatically light up when the light turns green, allowing pedestrians to cross safely. Twenty-four downtown intersections have been made automatic for the walk sign, the city said, which also means longer wait times at intersections for drivers.

“We thank our neighbors for their continued patience and cooperation in helping everyone do their part to slow the spread of COVID-19 in our community,” the city’s post states.

Photo credit: City of San Mateo

After hearing support for closing parts of Laurel Street to vehicular traffic in order to allow outdoor dining, San Carlos City Council formed a subcommittee Monday to further explore the plan.

At Monday’s meeting, council discussed two proposals, one to temporarily close the 600-800 blocks of Laurel Street, and another to implement a slow streets program on residential streets that discourages vehicular traffic in order to provide more open spaces for neighbors to be physically active while social distancing.

The Laurel Street closure proposal received strong support from council, which now aims to conduct extensive outreach with merchants and other stakeholders before moving forward. Some concerns were expressed about parking availability. Vice Mayor Laura Parmer-Lohan posed a question about the ability for businesses to social distance while operating outdoors.

City staff proposed a range of ideas that included closing the street during a certain time period, such as the late afternoon to evening. Along with business outreach, the city is also exploring the financial costs to close Laurel Street.

The council was less enthusiastic about implementing a slow streets program in residential areas, despite similar programs underway in other cities such as Redwood City and San Mateo. The city’s police chief Mark Duri expressed opposition to the plan.  Councilmember Adam Rak suggested implementing a Sunday pilot on Old County Road, an idea supported by Councilmember Sarah McDowell. Vice Mayor Laura Parmer-Lohan supports trialing slow streets on a certain day of the week.

Whether closing Laurel Street or implementing a slow streets program, among the city’s main focuses in exploring street closures are their impacts on emergency and delivery vehicle access, on existing businesses, homes and other facilities, and on collector/alterial streets, public transportation and bicycle and pedestrian routes.

Photo credit: City of San Carlos website.

After the shelter-in-place bomb dropped on local businesses in March, Chris Chambers wondered whether his would be considered “essential” and could stay open. “I was very worried when I first heard,” the 34-year-old president of the 86-year-old family business called Davies Appliance recalls. “I didn’t understand what essential was for sure, and the more we were open, the more we realized that we are an essential business.”

Right off the bat, local hospitals ordered extra refrigerators. The fire department needed laundry appliances. “And the panic buyers and the people who just bought $500 worth of food from Costco—and the refrigerator died,” Chambers says. “I mean what are they going to do?” Since the beginning of the coronavirus shutdown, Davies Appliance has managed to stay open, albeit by appointment only, in an almost a speakeasy style. Overall sales are down 30 to 40 percent from last year.

The shock to the system is completely new to Chambers, but it has an ironic parallel in family history. His great-grandfather—the pugnacious scrapper who for decades ran “EZ” Davies Chevrolet—came through World War II as an essential business too. Al Davies had been delayed getting his new dealership building at 1101 El Camino Real (where Sequoia Station is today) completed, and when it finally opened in January 1942, war had just been declared after the attack on Pearl Harbor the month before.

Detroit automakers were marshalled into the all-consuming war effort and built everything from tanks to torpedoes. Al and his brother Tom had a heavy investment on the line, and it became difficult to obtain new cars. So Davies Chevrolet became a Firestone dealer, selling Firestone tires and sparkplugs and Firestone “phonoradios.” Firestone bikes and Firestone washing machines. And other brands of stoves and fishing gear, and table tennis sets, kitchen mixers, golf clubs and footballs.

This story was originally published in the May edition of Climate Magazine. To view the magazine online, click on this link.

“About anything that they could get their hands on,” says Virginia Biddle, 85, the oldest of four daughters. She and her husband Joe, 86, own Davies Appliance and are delighted that their grandson picked up the torch and is carrying on a business that has been essential to the family’s identity.

And perhaps Redwood City’s as well. Davies Appliance likely is the oldest retailer in the city, but the company’s roots go all the way back to 1916, when Al Davies’ older brother, Ed, started an auto repair shop on the corner of Vera Avenue and El Camino. Six years later, the expert auto mechanic turned Davies Auto Co. over to brothers Al and Tom. They first sold Willys-Overland cars, but in 1932 became a Chervolet dealership.

Enter Frigidaire

In 1934, General Motors bought the Frigidaire company and asked some of the Chevy dealers to display refrigerators on their showroom floors, Virginia Biddle says. The company started making washers and dryers and eventually appliances began to crowd out the showroom cars. So Al Davies bought the building at 1580 El Camino, where Davies Appliance is today, and it became a separate business.

Over many years, Al Davies became the unofficial “king” of El Camino Real. He regularly spoke up at City Council meetings and turned his howitzer vocabulary on city staff. (He called one city planner “a donkey. I told him to his face.”) Impervious to other people’s opinions and endowed with a caustic wit, Al Davies ridiculed the downtown revamp of the 1970s with its old-fashioned streetlights. They brought “twilight hour to Broadway,” he told the City Council. “(They’re the) rest-in-peace ones sitting out there waiting to turn it into a beautiful corridor that you can’t see there unless it’s daytime.”

And that old maxim “the customer is always right?” Not to Al Davies. If a customer announced that he wasn’t going to pay a bill, Biddle says, his father-in-law would respond, “Well if you don’t, I’ll knock you out.” And Al Davies was fully prepared to take the billing dispute resolution “outside.”

He had been an entrepreneur all his life, starting with selling newspapers on the street corner in San Francisco at the age of eight. Work was all he had ever known and his business meant everything to him. “I almost went broke a couple of times,” he told a reporter in 1980. “But that just toughens you up.”

“He was down there (the dealership) every morning at 8 o’clock,” Virginia Biddle says. “And he was home for dinner promptly at 6 o’clock. Dinner had to be on the table because dad has to get back down to the garage as soon as he finished dinner, and he closed up at 9 o’clock.”

He was a man of strong convictions. A graduate of Sequoia High School, Al Davies had friends among the Japanese-Americans who had nursery businesses before World War II; he’d sold them cars. When they went to internment camps, he stored their cars for them. “And after the war, they all got their cars back,” Virginia Biddle says. Washed, polished and with a full tank of gas. “That was one thing they still had. They had lost practically everything else.” He was a member of the Exchange Club, whose constitution allowed only white males to join. When his Japanese-American friends were denied, Al Davies quit and joined the Kiwanis Club.

Sundays on the Bay

His single hobby was sailing a fast boat on San Francisco Bay, with his “harem crew” of daughters Virginia, Sandy, Joan and Gayle and his wife aboard. “Besides sailing, business was his everything,” Virginia says. “I mean he ate business, he thought business, he lived for his business.”

The appliance side of the Davies enterprise hadn’t been profitable so Al Davies asked his son-in-law to take it on. A San Jose State College graduate who had worked at Ampex Corp., Joe Biddle began to incorporate more high-end product lines, such as SubZero and Wolf, to expand market reach. “We brought it around in a couple of years to make it very successful and he was thrilled about that,” Joe says.

Davies Appliance today offers a range of product lines, from basic refrigerators and washers and dryers to the ultra-high end, including $50,000 ranges, professional-level pizza ovens, outdoor beer dispensers, coffee systems, wine coolers and barbecues. Davies Appliance was able to compete with chain stores like Sears and Best Buy on price by joining a group in the early 1970s to buy from manufacturers in quantity. The buying group started with three members, according to Joe, and now numbers about 2,300.

When Al Davies sold his former dealership in 1990, he still needed an office to go to every day, so the Biddles, who had bought the appliance business from him in 1970, built him one there. “The last time he came was three days before he died,” Virginia says. Her father had sinus cancer and passed away in 1997 at the age of 92.

A Survivor

The automobile company had survived the Great Depression and come through World War II. Together with the appliance business, the family concerns have weathered good times and bad, including Joe Biddle’s greatest challenge, a major recession in the 1980s. “It was hard to break even but we got through it all right,” he says. That period was “just a slow dip and we climbed back out of it.”

Chris Chambers grew up in the East Bay, went to college on a baseball scholarship and was playing semi-pro in Canada when Grandfather Joe called out of the blue in 2008 to ask if he’d like a job at the store. Chambers gave it a try, went back to baseball briefly but eventually returned to the family business. His wife, Kelsey, did fulltime bookkeeping until they began to have children. Chris’s brother, Jeff Chambers, handles accounts receivables and stepbrother Cody Lowenstein works in sales. Virginia’s sisters own the building.

Chris Chambers was surprised how much there was to learn—the brands, thousands of model numbers and sizes. “It takes a while to learn what will fit in each person’s home correctly,” he says, “cause if you do that wrong, there’s going to be major issues.” A business owner also has the challenge of doing what’s best for the store. A salesman might benefit, for example, by offering free delivery and installation. But that impacts a store’s bottom line.

The company sells a lot of Frigidaires—along with an array of luxury appliances with the latest in wi-fi connectivity. Stainless steel remains far and away the most popular finish, but consumers are also going for flush wood panel doors, as well as custom-color range hoods. During the shutdown, Davies Appliance has been upgrading its SubZero display area.

About five years ago, Chris Chambers implemented a no-commission policy; salesmen receive a salary plus a possible bonus. Tension is reduced in that environment, he believes, and customers get good service, whether or not “their salesman” is helping them. Davies Appliance has 13 employees; several have worked there for decades. “We’re small enough that we don’t have a ton of employees, and are able to take care of them and give them a good living.”

Davies Appliance has been surviving the absence of foot traffic in part thanks to builder and property management accounts, some as far away as Lake Tahoe, who are still placing orders. Chris Chambers looks forward to reopening but worries about how soon customers will feel comfortable being in stores. If Davies Appliance hadn’t been deemed essential, surviving would be a lot harder, he says, but Chambers recognized that a downturn was always possible and tried to prepare with a financial cushion.

“I have a lot of pride in being family-owned and us being here for four generations,” Chris Chambers says. “That’s very rare. And I know that if something were to happen, it would look bad on me and I just want to make sure to do my best to keep the family name going in this area.”

San Mateo County intends to break from the Bay Area’s more restrictive health order and align with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Phase 2 guidelines, effective May 18, County Health Officer Dr. Scott Morrow announced Wednesday.

The Phase 2 guidelines will allow curbside and delivery activities for non-essential retail, as well as logistics and manufacturing and other businesses, to open with modifications, such as social distancing protocols. This state roadmap provides more information on Newsom’s phased approach to reopening the economy.

The new county health order that’s in line with the state order will be released later this week, Dr. Scott Morrow said in a statement.

“I am encouraged that data about COVID-19 cases, hospital capacity, and other indicators show some stability so that San Mateo County can now enter the early stages of Phase 2,” Dr. Morrow said. “I want to remind everyone these modifications are not being made because it is safe to be out and about.  The virus continues to circulate in our community, and this increase in interactions among people is likely to spread the virus at a higher rate. Whether these modifications allow the virus to spread out of control, as we saw in February and March and resulted in the first shelter in place order, is yet to be seen. The social distancing and face covering directives, along with the prohibition on gathering, will remain in place since the risk of exposure to COVID-19 looms large for all of us. The public and open businesses need to fully do their part to minimize transmission of the virus.”

Photo: Dr. Scott Morrow, courtesy of San Mateo County

More than 1,000 donors have contributed a total of $8.2 million to the San Mateo County Strong Fund, which provides emergency relief grants to individuals and families, small businesses and nonprofit groups impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to organizers of the Fund.

The Fund was created less than two months ago, with the County contributing $3 million in seed money from the Measure K local sales tax. Fund donations are directed to three categories: individuals and families to help cover basic household expenses, small businesses to help them avoid layoffs, stay open or reopen, and nonprofit organizations that provide services to the county’s most vulnerable residents.

“We are pleased to see that so many donors have opened their checkbooks to help those who are really struggling during this unprecedented pandemic,” said Warren Slocum, president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. “Every dollar donated to the San Mateo County Strong Fund goes to those most in need. Seeing our community pull together like this – neighbor helping neighbor – is heartwarming and so important.

The Fund is still raising money to support residents in need. Those interested in making a donation should visit the San Mateo County Strong website.

San Mateo County has now added a Food Assistance page to its website providing resources for community members in need.

The website features a link to the Great Plates program that delivers nutritious meals to older residents from local businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also posts meal distribution sites for local students, from elementary school through college, as well as general food assistance from the Second Harvest Food Bank, the CalFresh program,  and the Women, Infants & Children program, which supports women who are pregnant or have kids under age 5.

Visit the Food Assitance page here: https://www.smcgov.org/food.