"Big companies weren't considered glamorous back then," he said.
"You should have told me," my friend Angie said to me after we'd rattled off the list of guys we'd both considered "hot" back then and found ourselves strangely in sync with our teenage infatuations.
There were also college professors, the owner of an influential modern lighting company, even an interracial couple (to appreciate how unusual that was, consider that back then the town had a number of country clubs that did not admit Jews, let alone blacks).
Lots of things considered good ideas back then are no longer considered quite so clever: system-built high-rise flats as the answer to slum housing; nuclear power to meet energy needs.
A conceit considered acceptable fun back then, that African art is ugly, is intolerable now.
For people of a certain background, O.K., that kind of thing was considered pretty shocking back then.
The $25,000 settlement the city of Los Angeles offered for the boy's life was considered big money back then, and on Cochran's recommendation, the family took it.
"I didn't have a good feel for the city or the neighborhoods," she said, "so the places I would have considered living in back then, I wouldn't want to live in now".
He remembers exactly when he got his first job because it was on his birthday, Dec. 2. His shows were considered cutting edge back then, with the music of Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine.
One-time newspaper reporter di Rosa had gambled on this place, buying the land to plant to wine grapes back in the 1960s, although its climate in the chilly, foggy Carneros region above San Francisco Bay was considered by many back then to be better suited to herding sheep (carneros).
