After getting out of the Army Air Corps in 1945, at the end of World War II, my dad Dave Shepardson wanted to become a farmer. Mom Marion signed on. We would move to Fallbrook, where he grew lemons and my brother Philip was born.
It was there that he met avocado expert and entrepreneur Jack Sparkman. He had made his fortune in Hawaiian Punch and founded the Calavo avocado cooperative.
Sparkman bought most of what is now High Valley for avocado groves and estate development. Dad bought 30 acres and a little house, which dated back to Poway’s early years in the 1880s. Sparkman subdivided a number of large residential lots and put in High Valley Road in its current location.
Previously access had been by a pair of dirt roads, one of which went through what is now Lake Poway. These were imable in the rain and more than once we wound up staying with my grandmother in La Jolla when we weren’t able to get back home.
He planted lemon trees on most of the property, based on his experience in Fallbrook. He also worked with Sparkman on a number of endeavors there, including growing sweet corn (unsuccessfully, as they didn’t realize you don’t plant the entire crop at once), grains and other crops.
My parents soon sold the little house and began work on a new home on the ridge at the west end of High Valley, overlooking much of Poway. Dad did most of the work himself. We lived in the garage while the rest of the house was being built.
With no indoor plumbing, Mom washed dishes in a makeshift “kitchen sink” constructed with a sawhorse and blocks and overlooking the panorama to the west. The new house, built with concrete blocks, commanded that magnificent view.
We loved our home with its amazing views and the wide-open spaces. Philip and I had plenty room to roam, so long as we looked for rattlesnakes. There were lots of them killed as the land was cleared and planted. Mom got a “recipe” for curing the snake skins and accumulated quite a collection, hoping to have shoes and bags made one day.
Eventually it turned out that the process didn’t produce usable skins and we eventually wound up tossing hundreds of them.
We had a collie-shepherd dog named Junior, and a tabby cat named Tooker. It never occurred back then to keep dogs fenced or cats shut in, and Junior ran freely. Until, that is, he was caught in a steel-jaw trap put out by the “government trappers” in what is now Blue Sky Ranch. He somehow made his way, dragging the trap to Whitten Ranch (now Bridlewood) and then laboriously up the hill to the house.
It took four days for him to travel about three miles. A vet saved his foot, but he had permanent tendon damage. He was far from the only Poway dog to suffer this fate.
The traps had been set, allegedly to protect turkey farms, of which there were none nearby.
This was long before a more live-and-let-live attitude evolved toward animals such as snakes and coyotes that aren’t an immediate threat.
Philip and I attended Pomerado Union School, now renamed Midland. I was one of 15 children in the school’s first-ever kindergarten. It was a long drive down the hill to the bus stop.
Before long, Dad realized he wouldn’t be able to his family as a farmer. As soon as he finished work on the house, he got a real estate license and went to work with Poway’s only broker, before setting out on his own as Shepardson Company.
In then-tiny Poway, population barely over 300 when we arrived, it was not only possible but practically necessary to be big frogs in a small pond.
Dad worked with the Chamber of Commerce, the closest we had to a local government, in building the groundwork for the effort to bring public water to Poway, which succeeded in 1954. He was elected as one of the original directors the newly formed Poway Municipal Water District. He also worked with the Boy Scouts and the Sky Watch. The later involved sitting outside their shack with binoculars in case we were attacked by air during the Korean War.
In 1952, Mom noted her current involvements in her annual Christmas missive to family and friends, “…a PTA committee, the job of clerk of the local school board (and with no secretary and no full-time principal this is more than a part time labor of love!)” She was also secretary of the County Trustees Association.
In 1953, they sold the High Valley home to build on 2 ½ acres on Cobblestone Creek Road.
Our first house in High Valley on what is now Vali Hai Road, was modified and added onto over the years by subsequent owners and then scrapped and replaced with a totally new one. The house atop the hill has been sold and resold, remarkably, it still stands and hasn’t been converted into a McMansion. I had a chance to visit when it was resold several years ago and was flooded with memories.
Jack Sparkman went on to develop Valle Verde Country Club, later StoneRidge, where the golf course is now being replaced with housing.
