Devil House(8)

I’m sure of this now. Live and learn.



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THE ORIGINAL FOUNDATION of Devil House dates to sometime in the 1880s, a hopeful plot atop which several structures would perch during the decades to come. Then, it stood unremarkably among several buildings like it on an oddly shaped strip of land jutting out from Main Street at an angle, near the recently laid tracks of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad; where the railroad ran, jobs and opportunities followed, and Milpitas, already an occasional harbor stop for prospectors, was growing. If you acted fast enough and set up a lunch counter near where the workers were still laying track, you might make your fortune, or enough to pass for one on what was still clearly the frontier. That was Devil House’s original form: a diner on Main Street, six tables and a long wooden counter.

The bricks and beams belonged to the railroad, but the café from the walls in belonged to a guy named Lonnie Roberts. Lonnie was young and optimistic; he’d grown up in San Francisco, where restaurant cash registers great and small rang out from noon to midnight. It seemed like an easy way to make a dollar if a man could make it work. But competition had been stiff in town; San Francisco’s boom cycles ebbed once in a while, and if you wanted to make any waves in its already-crowded chophouse-and-lunch-counter scene, you had to hustle. It seemed to Lonnie that there were other possibilities.

There are several extant photographs of the exterior of Lonnie’s in Milpitas, at the time a leisurely Sunday drive from San Francisco. Block letters hand-painted directly on the brick storefront above the doorway advertise hopefully to the street: LONNIE’S OPEN DAILY 11–3. HOT SANDWICHES TO ORDER 15￠. I remember spreading three printouts across the bedspread at the motel: they were grainy, hard to tell apart. The price of the sandwich goes up in one of them, and the hours expand to breakfast in another. In one, there’s a man in the frame; he has no hat or coat, which sets him apart from most photographs of the day, but he’s very clean-cut, and he’s wearing suspenders. A cook? A friend of the photographer’s? Lonnie himself? The past is charming and safe when you’re skittering around on its surface. It’s a nice place to linger a moment before seeking the lower depths.

Roberts enlisted during the Second World War, and died in the Pacific Theater; you have to do a lot of digging to find his name in government records of the war dead, but it’s there, KIA beside it. It’s unclear whether Lonnie’s remained open awaiting his return, but by 1945 it’s closed. For the next few years it seems to have been used for storage.

Sometime in the mid-fifties it got rented out again, this time as a soda shop. In a contemporaneous Mercury News article about teenage lifestyles, you can see how its new owners had retained the grill, but traded out the counters for something more modern. A picture, probably staged for the newspaper photographer, accompanies the article: there’s a waitress, a cook, and a few customers, all smiling a little too brightly. This one feels more alien to the eye than the older pictures in my file. I call this the proximity effect: the closer you get to the past, the less believable its particulars seem.

The Sunliner Grill has become a hub for young men and women in Milpitas on Friday nights, the story reports. The latest hot rods can be seen parked along Main Street beginning from early afternoon, in contrast to the quieter hours of the workday in this growing suburban enclave. Old pictures of Milpitas don’t look far removed from the days when people came west in covered wagons; the line about the growing suburban enclave sets the stage for the approaching future.

Things get blurry for the Sunliner Grill after that. It would take a team of dedicated gumshoes going door-to-door to piece together any kind of consensus. In the online comments sections of news stories mentioning it, I found a few older people volunteering their memories; one recalled that he used to buy comic books there as a child, which was probably a superimposition of later memories onto earlier, fonder ones.

By 1974 at the latest, anyway, a place called Valley News is doing business from the same address. The proprietors of the Sunliner Grill may have owned the building outright by then, hoping to steer it into a different line of business; but there are several other possibilities, none of which can be determined without access to the deeds of sale, whose final resting places in dusty filing cabinets can only be conjectured. Often the holdings of large interests are sold at auction, but just as often they change hands with little or no public notice. Usually they leave traces: in the classified ads, in local interest stories. I haven’t been able to find either such source here.

All I can say with certainty is that, at some point, the railroad sold the short strip of land on Main to a private owner, and that, while the railroad had been meticulous about keeping records, landlords are lone wolves. They enter and exit the scene without notice. At some point, a San Jose man named Vernon Gates shows up and buys out a few of the railroad’s former holdings: their declining states made them perfect additions to his portfolio. His was a well-known name among many people in San Jose who hoped one day to forget it.

The people who lived in properties owned and managed by Vernon Gates couldn’t afford to rent from anybody else. They were at his mercy. He owned at least half a dozen multi-tenant buildings; if you were to walk past any of them, you’d usually see several window units jutting out, condensation dripping to the ground below. Changes in local economies are the trade winds on which men like Vernon Gates drift; they try to land in spots where they won’t be noticed, and they keep their eyes open for new opportunities, since doors begin closing after word gets around. To rent out rooms like the ones Gates had on offer is to be forever in need of new clientele.