Mission City Voices: Childhood Sweet Eats in Santa Clara 

I grew up on the last block of Benton Street in Santa Clara – right where it dead-ended at Calabazas Creek. On the other side of the creek was the Napredak Yugo Slav Social Club Hall, on Lawrence Station Road. 

During my formative years I attended Saturday catechism classes at St. Justin’s Catholic Church on Homestead Road, right next to the City Main Library. After class a group of us would rush across the street to spend our weekly allowance at Stan’s Donuts. Everybody’s favorite was the large, raised, glazed donuts – still warm from the fry. With the first bite came that wonderful yeasty aroma. Stan’s was at one end of the Mariposa Shopping Center. For variety we would visit the Safeway grocery store at the opposite end of the Center.

Safeway had a good selection of candy including one of my favorites: Rollo caramel and chocolate chews. Rollo’s were shaped in a tapered cylinder with a depressed top containing three concentric circles. Another favorite was the Hershey’s Semi-Sweet chocolate bar. It was made of dark chocolate and had a bitter taste that piqued my interest and enjoyment. I liked the way that it could be broken into six rectangular pieces. 

They say the twig doesn’t fall far from the tree, and I wasn’t the first one in the family to have a sweet tooth. My mother’s sweet of choice was Rocky Road from See’s Candy. I bought her some for every Mother’s Day. My father favored two candy bars: Milky Way with its chewy, chocolaty center topped by caramel and surrounded by milk chocolate; and Three Musketeers, chewy, whipped chocolaty center with a darker chocolate outer coating. He liked to store them in the freezer. After dinner he would cut one into pieces and share it all around. My dad expected to conclude every dinner with dessert – even if dessert amounted to a single bite from a candy bar.

On cold, rainy nights we might have another treat – hot Ovaltine. Hot chocolate is nice, but I loved Ovaltine’s malt flavor. In those days Ovaltine came in the form of granules not powder. Most of the granules would dissolve in milk, but there always remained a few undissolved granules floating atop the milk. It was a treat to slurp the granules into my mouth and crunch them to get a burst of malt flavor. Commercially available products weren’t our only treats.

One year, in June, we all piled into the family station wagon and drove the three miles to my Aunt Jean’s house on Homestead Road in Cupertino. There, we filled several paper grocery bags with ripe apricots picked from the orchard that surrounded her home. Using those apricots, my mother made thirty apricot pies! She put the unbaked pies in the full-size stand-up freezer that we kept in the garage. Her practice was to put a frozen pie in the oven as we sat down to dinner. By the time that we were finished eating the main meal the steaming pie would be ready to be served for dessert. We feasted on apricot pie – one slice each – two or three times each week for two months. 

When I was a bit older, I’d meet up with a schoolmate to ride our bikes from his house near Curtis Middle School on Pomeroy Ave. to the Swenson’s Ice Cream Parlor at Franklin Mall. I remember still the thrill of eating their Thin Mint ice cream.

And those summer days at Napredak Hall? We feasted on my great-grandmother’s Povatica (Potica) – thin pastry dough rolled up with butter, cinnamon, sugar, finely chopped walnuts, and raisins. There was also apple strudel; Orenacha (similar to Povatica, but with a chocolate and honey filling); and cream puffs (Krofi). 

Those were idyllic times feasting on ambrosia as we grew up in Santa Clara.