Philip K. Dick's "hermit house"
707 hacienda way
san rafael, california 94903
Philip K. Dick moved to this house in San Rafael with his fourth wife in 1968. After they separated, a rotating cast of characters would live and do drugs with him at the house. It would earn the nickname 'Hermit House' and this time period in his life would become the basis for A Scanner Darkly published in 1977.
I saw Sean Penn's good friend, Susan Sarandon, at the San Rafael Trader Joe's sometime between 2000 - 2004 when I was living in Santa Rosa. She wasn't wearing a stitch of makeup but it was definitely her.
That was during the same time when I used to have to go to San Rafael every Sunday night to drop someone off at the downtown transit center. Afterwards I would often go into the Open Secret bookstore and gift boutique to get a drink or snack before driving back up to Santa Rosa and I would often see Ram Dass there sitting satsung and doing his thing.
One of the oldest communities in the Bay Area at the foot of Mt. Diablo, Diablo has some of the oldest homes and buildings in the Bay Area. Comprised of both old money and "new old money" (some of it from the Gold Rush era, no doubt) the earliest structures date back to the 1870s.
In the early 1900s, tycoon Robert Noble Burgess (a partner of William Randolph Hearst) built a resort and vacation homes where San Francisco's elite could escape from the summer fog.
A golf course was designed by Jack Neville, the golfer and course architect who designed the world-famous Pebble Beach Golf Course near Carmel and the famous "17 mile drive" in northern California.
Herbert Hoover once gave a speech at the Clubhouse.
PG&E geodesic dome, next to Aerojet nuclear reactor. Episodes of Mythbusters have been filmed here.
"Aerojet General Nucleonics Company" was located in San Ramon.
Jack Parsons was a founding member and vice-President of Aerojet.
During the early to mid-60s, "Aerojet built a large concrete pad in San Ramon, CA, for the purpose of rocket engine testing for the space program. Before it got used, President Johnson and NASA decided to move these activities to the upcoming space center in Houston, TX."
San Ramon California, the Nuclear Reactor is still in operation
This was the site of Aerojet which made nuclear reactors for colleges and research institutions. When they started the nuclear reactor San Ramon had a population of less than 200 people within a mile of the site. Today it is in the middle of the city and the city parks its school busses on the site of one of the radioactive labs. At any one time was building 10 portable nuclear reactors.
Today the City of San Ramon parks its School Buses on the site.
