Chapter 19

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

—Henry Ford

By 1949, Randy Parks was considered one of the largest and most highly regarded homebuilders in Northern California. His subdivisions were sprouting up everywhere, and he was churning out entry-level homes by the dozen throughout Sacramento; homes that are still esteemed for their design, quality and locations. One Randy Parks subdivision, approximately 40 acres, was being developed behind one freshly transplanted Italian family’s rental home on El Camino Avenue in Pennland Park, still revered as one of Parks’ most notable neighborhoods. Pennland Park was part of a greater surrounding area known as Cottage Park, which had been sold off in tracts that were originally part of a huge mid-19^th Century Mexican land grant called Rancho Del Paso, which spanned most of modern-day Arden-Arcade.

While Benvenuti stared out the back window of his home on El Camino Avenue, surveying the mostly fallow grasslands, pondering his future and what he would do now to support his family, his gaze settled upon something curious, and he watched intently as construction workers busily set building blocks atop newly graded lots. The ever-inquisitive Benvenuti, eager to find out what was happening just beyond his doorstep, approached the workers. Instead of asking them what they were building, he asked them an unusual question. When he got no initial response, he continued down the line repeating the question until finally one worker, clearly annoyed by the interrogation, reacted in a hostile manner toward him, posturing as if he and his fellow workers were being insulted.

In the mid-20th century, builders did not use concrete blocks in the foundations of homes in the United States east of Kansas City. Homes in the East featured large cellars, and the foundations required larger spans and footings dug deeper in order to get below the frost line, in contrast to the concrete block and pier foundations that were the common method in the West. However, blocks were used in the East for the foundations of chicken coops to provide drier conditions for raising them. Sunday trips to a favorite destination required a route that skirted the more congested highways, beating a path right through a town that had made an indelible impression on Benvenuti. Passing through, the young man would marvel at the thousands of chicken coops dotting the landscape, especially the ones that were still in the process of being constructed to meet the demands of a booming population. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, New Jersey’s Ocean and Monmouth counties were the largest egg-producing region in the United States, and among their townships, Toms River was the single largest producer.

“Well I was lookin out the window on El Camino about two weeks after we moved there, and I see a bunch of guys droppin 2×4’s and little blocks,” recalled Benvenuti. “And I remembered those little blocks from New Jersey because we used to go down the shore on Sundays every weekend, down near Atlantic City and Asbury Park. And the highway was so jammed that we used to go on a shortcut through a little town called Toms River, and that town was full of chickens, see.”

Settled by Jewish farmers mostly transplanted from New York, Ocean County, New Jersey quickly became an egg-producing capital. In the early spring of 1910, Sam Kaufman, owner of the biggest bar in Brooklyn, was worried about his sick daughters. He knew he had to get them out of the stale New York City air. Perhaps he could buy a farm. But the Catskills, where he first looked, lacked schools and he had five daughters to educate. Then he learned of Toms River, near the sea in central New Jersey. It was only 75 miles south of where he lived in Brooklyn. Toms River had reasonably priced farmland, a small-town atmosphere and only 800 inhabitants. Most importantly, it had a good high school. Kaufman became the first Jewish farmer there, where he grew corn, wheat, potatoes, and peanuts and raised cows. But his chickens were his greatest contributions to Jewish farming.  The first farmer in the area to raise poultry, Kaufman’s initiative began the egg sales that became a mainstay of Toms River’s Jewish farmers. 

In 1922, the nutritional benefits of vitamin D were discovered and farmers learned that by adding it to chicken feed they could greatly increase egg production, thus sending the sale of eggs on a mercurial climb. Some Toms River farmers would raise over 7000 chickens. 

“They had all kinds of chicken coops for miles,” he continued. “And I remembered them very well because we went there so many times and I seen those little blocks with the redwood on em so you could nail the stringers on em. So they would toenail beams, the 4×6 beams into the block to hold it down. And when I saw ‘em dumpin that I says to my wife ‘they’re gonna build chicken coops here.’ But I didn’t own the house, I was just rentin it anyway. I was just wonderin, it’s such a nice area that they wouldn’t be building chicken coops (would they?). So I went out there and asked the guys, they were layin out stringers, and settin up beams, puttin the little blocks, and I says to them ‘hey you guys building chicken coops here?’ They didn’t say nothin they just looked at me. I thought gee, they’re not friendly here at all. So I went down to the next guy, there was a whole row of ‘em, they were settin up a whole row of these beams and blocks and the guy says to me ‘if you don’t get outta here I’ll hit you over the head with a 2×4, get the hell outta here’ he says. I thought what’s wrong with these guys, what am I doin wrong, I’m only askin a question. They thought I was kiddin ‘em, that they were buildin cheap homes. I had no idea whatsoever!” Benvenuti probably knew more about construction than he let on, and one of the many characteristics he perfected during his lifetime was to reserve for himself the true depth of his knowledge and understanding of certain things; in other words he held his cards close to his proverbial vest. In fact, his cousin Peter Pardine was a master builder who had constructed the Reverend Angelo’s first house of worship, completed in 1947, under the watchful eye undoubtedly of the reverend’s son. Originally known as the Christian Apostolic Church, it serves Assemblies of God parishioners to this day in its original location at 605 Lackawanna Avenue in what is now Woodland Park, New Jersey (formerly West Paterson). It is now known as the Calvary Assembly.

“So a guy heard down the line he called me over and said ‘come here, you from the East?’” continued Benvenuti. “I says ‘yeah, why?’ He says ‘cuz well uh, you don’t know what they’re doin here’, I says ‘no, why are these guys mad?’ He says ‘no, these are homes.’ He says ‘they don’t make cellars here, they use these blocks for the beams.’ I said ‘well in New Jersey they use ‘em for chicken coops’. So I says oh my god, no wonder why they’re mad at me. So I went back and told ‘em, I says ‘I’m sorry I come from the East and I never saw this in my life except for chicken coops’. So they got friendly and we got to talkin and I got interested and I says ‘my god, I says what are these gonna sell for?’ He says ‘sixty-seven’ and I says ‘thousand?’ He says ‘no, sixty-seven hundred dollars’.” Benvenuti’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “So I didn’t say it to them but I said to myself my god these must be chicken coops, what are you gonna get for seven thousand dollars?” he chuckled.

At the time, a home in New Jersey fetched as much as $30,000 or more. He then made a casual request that would unwittingly provide him the answer to his own question of what he would do for a living and dramatically change the course of his life. “So I looked at the plan and you know I didn’t know nothin about plans but I could tell the home looked real nice,” he recalled. “And I says to the guy ‘can I have one of these plans?’ He said ‘take it’.” You didn’t have to tell Benvenuti twice, and with the plans under his arm he slipped out of sight with the same sense of delight as a kid who was just snuck a piece of candy by his aunt behind his parents’ back; except this was no candy to be savored in the moment, but rather a treasure map that would lead him to an endless supply of it. He wasted no time setting about deciphering it, but he knew he couldn’t do that alone.

Richard L. Spore and Milton F. White were a couple of Sacramento draftsmen working out of the garage of their home near downtown Sacramento in 1949 and were presently churning out plans for local homebuilders like E. W. Corum. The two would eventually evolve into the architectural firm of Spore, White and Van Doren and were the designers of many Sacramento Valley subdivisions over the subsequent decades. When an unfamiliar yet outgoing Italian immigrant still fresh off of a transcontinental migration from New Jersey came walking into their garage holding a set of plans, they must have been somewhat startled to say the least. His choice to seek out a draftsman to undertake the task was presumably to avoid too much scrutiny and the higher cost associated with engaging the services of well-known architects like Joseph Eichler.

Eichler designed homes for many highly regarded and well-established builders like Streng Brothers, who like Parks, were also painting the suburban canvas of California with their tracts. These were rambling, ranch-style homes, the style of which was first introduced in San Diego. Clifford May, a self-taught architect there, is considered the father of Ranch houses, as many architectural historians trace the birth of the style to a house he designed and built in 1931. May told The New York Times in the 1980s: “I rebelled against the boxy houses being built then. The ranch house was everything a California house should be—it had cross-ventilation, the floor was level with the ground, and with its courtyard and the exterior corridor, it was about sunshine and informal outdoor living.”

As early as 1944, Sunset featured May in several articles about the ranch house, and in 1946 the magazine published a collaboration issue with May, called “Sunset Western Ranch Houses.” May played a dominant role in 17 of the 43 designs featured in the book. Four printings and 50,000 copies later, the book could be considered a success and May’s national stature rose as a result. As famed California historian Kevin Starr noted, “No single Sunset book before or since has had such a profound effect on the architectural environment of the Far West as it was being so rapidly actualized.” House Beautiful, another prominent magazine, also celebrated May’s vision. A twenty-six-page article in 1946 helped, but in 1948 the magazine actually built one of May’s ranch homes. Titling it the “Pace Setter House,” it devoted an entire issue to the May-inspired home.

In the wake of such fawning praise, May secured twenty commissions to build the design all over the nation. Sunset appreciated May’s craft so much that in 1951 they commissioned him to design their new Menlo Park corporate headquarters. The 30,000 foot “suburban Western home” stood as a physical monument to Sunset’s admiration for May; daily tours of the building only reinforced May’s place among 1950s architects. Sunset’s 1958 work, an updated version of the 1946 book, “Western Ranch Houses by Cliff May,” consisted of only May’s creations, an accomplishment, Balgooy notes, experienced by very few architects. When movie stars like Gregory Peck and Olivia de Havilland took up residence in ranch homes, this too raised both public awareness and admiration of the style. Ranch housing, opined historian Thomas Hine, “conjured up powerful dreams of informal living, ideal weather, and movie-star glamour.” While the support of publications like House Beautiful and Sunset no doubt greatly boosted May’s profile, his 1952 collaboration with his associate architect Chris Choate resulted in the design of suburban tract housing within reach of middle class families. In order to sell their designs to California developers, May and Choate formed the Ranch House Supply Corporation, and within a year had sold designs to 30 different builders.

“I went down to a planner, they had planners in them days, they had architects too but these were done by planners and the architects did the big buildings, you know like commercial buildings,” he recalled. “So I went down there and they were three guys, workin in their garage. So, I says to him, ‘could you make me this plan?’ He said ‘no, that’s Randy Parks, that’s a registered plan. He’s one of the biggest builders in California’. I said ‘well can’t you change it a little bit?’ I didn’t know nothin about a plan. He says ‘yeah, we can change it’. I said ‘why don’t you make it a two-car garage, this plan is a one car garage.’ And I was thinkin about my provolone,” he recalled, followed by his signature bellowing laugh. “I needed a bigger garage! So anyway, ‘he says yeah we could do that’ and I says ‘and put a little fancy top on top of the garage,’ cuz I seen some of the houses had bird houses you know (in reference to the signature bird boxes under the eaves of the roof over the garage that were one of the defining characteristics of Parks’ designs). So I said ‘put something up there to make it look different.’ He says ‘yeah we could do that. Let me work on it and I’ll call you’. So he calls me a couple days later and says ‘come on down I’ll show you.’ So it was almost the same plan except for the little changes like the two-car garage, and I said ‘that way I can put the appliances, you know the washer & dryer, in the garage instead of the kitchen like they were on the Parks plan;’ so the bigger garage had got me thinkin, you know? I didn’t know the first thing about it, but I thought the garage would be a better place for the appliances than the kitchen. He made a nice plan.”

Partly because of his love for Provolone cheese, Joe Benvenuti had just created his own version of the California Ranch House. Now, it’s uncertain, at least not well documented, if Benvenuti was the first homebuilder to use a set of knockoff plans to get his start. He definitely wasn’t the last. Serial entrepreneur George Rosenthal, famous for his legendary Sunset Marquis Hotel, emulated houses he observed being built in the San Fernando Valley when he founded Raleigh Enterprises in 1953 to do that very same thing. More than emulated, he proudly boasted of stealing and modifying another builder’s plans–noting that his modifications did not succeed in hiding the fact they weren’t his design.