New website takes us way back in time in downtown San Carlos

Got a yen for Peninsula nostalgia? Have a hankering for a kinder, gentler, less traffic-choked period in our checkered history?

Check out a new website devoted to a loving look back at downtown San Carlos and how it evolved. It can be found at www.walkbackintime.com.

It’s the product of a dedicated group of folks with long and fond memories of a previous age. Led by John Ward, who grew up in San Carlos decades ago, the contributors all have deep roots in that village.

The website includes photos, maps, old advertisements (the retail prices are instructive — Amazon was nowhere to be found) and other memorabilia devoted to the downtown business district from the 1940s through the 1970s. The glitzy Carlos Theater is a special focus.

Mom and pop enterprises were the norm in the years after World War II mercifully concluded and the area began to grow. It was an era when high-end restaurants were not nearly as numerous as they are now.

It was a much simpler time — and one we probably cannot return to as fiscal circumstances, property values, technology and the economy in general have altered the local landscape once and for all.

Liquid release

You can learn something new in suburbia every week. I know from personal experience.

Despite tired canards to the contrary, it isn’t boring in the burbs. Witness this recent spectacle in my little Peninsula neighborhood earlier this month.

A wandering resident had returned from a trip. She parked her trailer on the street in front of her home, aligning it quite nicely with a sewer line clean-out on city property near the curb.

Then, faster than you can blurt “Watch your step, big fella,” she attached a custom hose to the trailer, aimed it properly into the clean-out, secured it and, whoosh, the noxious waste material from her junket was on its way to the local bio-treatment facility.

Hey, who knew? It was not unlike a scene from that Robin Williams film, “RV.” Fortunately, the liquid material in this case remained where it was supposed to.

That was not the case in the Williams comedy.

Can of worms

Authorities in the San Mateo County Community College District continue to struggle with the fallout from the sudden departure of their former chancellor, Ron Galatolo.

His hasty exit from the district’s central office and an ongoing investigation by the county’s district attorney into aspects of his performance (reports indicate that fiscal matters are of particular interest) have generated intense concern and speculation.

At the same time, a call has gone out for volunteers to serve on the district’s construction bond oversight committee. Given the reportedly clouded financial nature of the Galatolo matter, one has to wonder why anyone would want to hop on board any district advisory body that deals with hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ cash.

Pez Museum

Burlingame’s quirky Museum of Pez Memorabilia has shut down. Word of the closure started to filter out in the community last weekend.

There were immediate expressions of sadness and disappointment posted on social media. In its heyday, the museum was said to contain at least one example of every Pez candy dispenser available.

In operation since 1995 and located in a small shop on California Drive not far from the downtown Caltrain depot, the establishment, run by Gary and Nancy Doss, had become something of a tourist lure over time.