Edgar McDowell, whose lucid recollections of early Los Altos included meeting the city’s unofficial founder, Paul Shoup, died July 24 at his home in Palo Alto. Mr. McDowell, who never married, was 96.
Born in 1908 on the Stanford University campus, Mr. McDowell moved to Los Altos with his family in 1920. Mr. McDowell followed his father into a lengthy career with Southern Pacific Railroad, where his path would cross with Shoup’s. In a 1999 interview with Merry Edwardson of the Los Altos History Museum, Mr. McDowell recalled how his father and Shoup became “well acquainted.”
“When the Southern Pacific tracks were built through Los Altos, Paul Shoup started the Los Altos Land Company, which acquired properties, which is now downtown Los Altos,” Mr. McDowell recalled, “and subdivided it and sold it off in lots. Paul asked my father to help sell lots. Instead of getting cash as a commission for lots he sold, he got lots himself.”
The McDowell family built a house on one of those lots, on the corner of Orange Avenue and Washington Street.
Shoup, who became president of Southern Pacific, also hired Mr. McDowell for his first and only job. In June 1926, shortly before graduating from Stanford, Mr. McDowell approached Shoup on a train and told him he was interested in working for the railroad.
“He asked me two questions. One, What branch of service would you be interested in starting out in? I told him I thought the station service would be a good place to start to learn the railroad business from the ground up. The second question was, What day do you want to go to work? I told him. He said, ‘If you’ll write me a note confirming this, you’ll get an answer back telling you when and where to report.’ In other words, it took less than five minutes to get my job, and then I worked for the company for 42 years.”
Mr. McDowell joined Los Altos Boy Scout Troop 37 as a Scout in 1920, then worked on and off as a scoutmaster. He remained in scouting until 1951.
“I continued a connection with that troop as long as I lived in Los Altos, and then, even when I moved back to Stanford in 1943, I remained an officer of the area council, which had its headquarters in Palo Alto but included the Los Altos troop in scope.”
An avid Stanford alumnus, Mr. McDowell stayed connected with the university through his passion for football. “It turns out that I got so interested that even after I retired, I started going to all the Stanford football games away from home, and as a result, I have seen more Stanford football games than any other person,” he said in the 1999 interview.
Mr. McDowell also claimed to have run for school board in 1936 while in Los Altos. He did no campaigning and lost by two votes.
On the national level, Mr. McDowell said his family was interested in President Herbert Hoover because of his parents’ acquaintance with the Hoovers – the families had been neighbors at Stanford.
“We were invited to spend election night in the Hoover home on the Stanford campus with Mr. Hoover as the returns came in and were posted on the blackboard there. I still look back on it as the most exciting night of my life. It just happened that John Philip Sousa and his band were giving a concert at Stanford that evening, and by the time the concert was over it was known that Mr. Hoover had been elected president, and so Sousa marched his band up the hill to the Hoover home and serenaded him.”
Mr. McDowell recalled Los Altos as a rural community, comprising mostly orchards, during his residence here. Scouting was a big activity in town.
“It was a small town, and you knew most of the people. … I can give you an idea of the size. The phone number that we got in 1920 was 56. There weren’t an awful lot of phones even in Los Altos. When you’re in a small town like that in a day when not everybody has an automobile yet, you tend to do things locally and organize things on your own, and get to know each other. You feel that you’re all part of this small community.”
Former Los Altos Mayor and Los Altos Community Foundation President Roy Lave recalled McDowell’s aid in editing a chapter on transportation he wrote for the Los Altos history book “Los Altos: Portrait of a Community.”
Lave described McDowell as “a very nice and gentle man.”
Mr. McDowell is survived by nephews and nieces: James McDowell of Vancouver, Canada; Sandra Klonsky of Dana Point; Alice Widdess of Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Anne Young of Millersville, Md.; and Walter McDowell of South Lake Tahoe.
Cremation and private burial took place at Alta Mesa Cemetery, Palo Alto. The family requests contributions in Mr. McDowell’s memory be made to the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health.
