Though the neighborhood is in Los Gatos, it doglegs out into Saratoga, Campbell and Monte Sereno. The people who live there love their neighborhood, but they struggle with where they belong in the bigger picture. It's like a land without an identity, a kind of no man's land, "a finger of the town," Austin says, "that has different issues from the rest of Los Gatos."

Just off Quito, between Pollard and Bicknell roads, Old Adobe Road appears to be in Saratoga. Though its address is in the incorporated town of Los Gatos, the children attend schools in the Campbell Union School District (CUSD), a fact that lowers property values significantly. The children also play in the Quito Little League.

The Old Adobe neighborhood may be tiny and isolated, but it's mighty. Residents get involved in downtown Los Gatos issues. Once the neighborhood residents gathered hundreds of signatures and packed town hall to stop the building of a jail in the hills off Highway 17. For 36 years, they've hosted the biggest garage sale around these parts. And despite our fast-changing, monster-home-building times, the neighborhood has managed to remain a stable, down-to-earth place for families.

Some of this has to do with the old-timers.

Dolores Simoni, one of Old Adobe Road's original residents, often provides the spark that gets things going. She's the one who got 200 signatures opposing the jail. She's also the one who started and continues to organize the annual Old Adobe Road garage sale every August.

The garage sale today is a festive event with children hawking lemonade, cookies and hot dogs, and neighbors catching up on news about each other's children and grandchildren. But browsers come from all over the valley.

"We've had as many as 2,000 people come," Simoni says. "There are times when you can't drive down the street because of all the people."

Simoni says the garage sale phenomenon started when Augie Argabright, the coach of the San Jose Cindergals Amateur Athletic Union track team, asked Simoni if she would have a garage sale to raise money to get young women on their team to the 1972 Olympic Games. This was before Title IX gave women equal rights in athletic opportunity and funding.

At that time Simoni's daughter, Terry, placed 10th in the nation as a sprinter in the 400-meter run. Fifteen families got involved that year. Since then, the garage sale has been the source of funds for such things as Girl Scout troops, soccer teams and college spending money, as well as money for local Olympians. "We helped send Francie Larrieu, Cyndy Poor and Jackie Dixon to the Olympics," Simoni says.

Jennifer Austin, special education teacher at Rolling Hills Middle School, discovered Old Adobe Road 20 years ago, when she went to pick up her babysitter at Sarah Gummersall's house. Turning onto Old Adobe from Quito, Austin drove alongside the creek, where deer sometimes graze, until she came to where large ranch homes line the street.

"I saw a for sale sign next to Sarah's house, and that was it. I loved this neighborhood then, and I love it now," Austin says. Though new families with small children have moved in, many original owners, like the Gummersalls and the Simonis, still live on Old Adobe.

Gummersall and Simoni recall Old Adobe's rough start when they moved in in the 1960s. Developers had built more than 30 sprawling 3- and 4-bedroom ranch homes there on speculation but had difficulty selling them. Simoni says the builders went bankrupt.

Gummersall's house sat empty for two years before she bought it for $35,000. "We wondered how we were going to make the payments," Gummersall says. Eventually the neighborhood grew, and over the years spawned more large ranch homes and cul-de-sacs.

"People always tell me how pretty our street is," Gummersall says.

Part of the reason for the neighborhood's good looks is that builders were careful to preserve the trees, such as the oak trees on the Simoni property. Simoni says that when the builder brought in soil to level the land, he built retaining walls around the base of the oak trees to keep them at the original ground level. "If he hadn't done that," Simoni says, pointing to two huge oaks in front of her house, "these would have died."

But trees are also somewhat of an issue for the residents.

Sitting in her large kitchen, Gummersall points to the magnolia tree in her front yard. "The town of Los Gatos planted magnolia trees along the street," she says, explaining that property owners are not allowed to take them out and if one of the trees dies, the property owners have to replace it with another tree at their own expense. "The town won't trim them, either. We have to trim them," she says. "I think when it comes to services, we are at the bottom of the heap."

But the bigger issue that comes up from time to time in this neighborhood is the school district. Simoni moved to Old Adobe Road because her children were already attending Campbell schools. "I wanted to keep them in the school district because we were happy with it," Simoni says. "I don't care about the prestige of the Los Gatos schools."

But some do care.

Diane Bogart, a Realtor who lives close to Old Adobe, off Bicknell, and who's been selling property in the Old Adobe neighborhood since 1985, says, "Children going to Campbell schools is a hot topic around here. People move to a Los Gatos address so their children can attend Los Gatos schools."

And though houses on Old Adobe sell for some $1.5 million, owners could get a lot more if the school district was Los Gatos. Residents of the neighborhood have raised this school issue several times.

"We've had big wars," Simoni says. And these school district wars can get complicated. Old Adobe parents have even battled with Saratoga parents.

Adobe children attend Marshall Lane Elementary school (CUSD) just across Quito Road, and so do children from Saratoga who live in a section of the Sobey Road neighborhood. Saratogans wanted to annex Marshall Lane into the Saratoga Union School District.

"They wanted to take it from us," Simoni says. "We helped start the PTA, the resource center. We helped raise the esteem of the school, and they wanted to take it."

But the time when the little bridge that Old Adobe children must cross to get to Marshall Lane was crumbling, Jan Dickerson, an Old Adobe resident, was able to get the town of Los Gatos and city of Saratoga to both pay to restore it.

Photograph by George Sakkestad The residents on Old Adobe Road in Los Gatos get together each year for a huge garage sale. Chris Weberg looks through a box of toys, hoping to find something for his 2-year-old son, Benjamin.

Austin runs into district problems at Rolling Hills, too. Rolling Hills has a Los Gatos address, but it's not in incorporated Los Gatos and not in the Los Gatos Union School District. However, many children who attend Rolling Hills live in Los Gatos. Austin wanted the rangers from Rinconada Park (a nearby Los Gatos park) to come to the school and give a nature talk and slide show to her students. The ranger could not come to the school because it was not a Los Gatos school.

"He was so nice," Austin says, "but his hands were tied." She arranged for her children to walk to the park and meet with him for a nature talk. "This kind of thing is frustrating," Austin says.

Districting and identity problems aside, residents on Old Adobe love their neighborhood. Not too long ago they even enjoyed a neighborhood farm.

As recently as 1998, the Claravale Dairy Farm was just a short walk up Bicknell Road to Via Lomita. Wistfully, Gummersall and Simoni recall the dairy farm that Gummersall's children used to walk to to buy chocolate milk. "Of course that wasn't the dairy's milk," she says, smiling, "but it was fun for my kids."

The farm, owned by Ken and Margaret Peake for almost 70 years, was one of only two dairy farms in the state licensed to sell unpasteurized milk.

"The farm was one of the glues for the neighborhood," says Bogart. "The Peakes welcomed everyone. They generously took children on tours of the farm."

"We'd take Brownie groups up there," Simoni says.

Neighborhood people bought milk there. "Mr. Peake even delivered, and the milk came in bottles," Gummersall says.

"It was like a walk back in time," Bogart says.

After Peake's death, residents around the dairy farm, tried valiently to keep the farmland from being subdivided for housing. They formed a foundation to buy and preserve the farm, but their efforts proved too little too late. Much of the farm land off Bicknell has been sold to people who've built so-called "monster homes." But Old Adobe Road and its little cul-de-sacs have managed to keep monster homes at bay.

In fact, nestled in the midst of the neighborhood, with its access off Quito Road, is the old adobe house for which the street was named. The house, built back in 1854, when Los Gatos was part of a ranchero, is now a small part of a bigger house, but it still stands. The tiny house has lasted these 150 years through many changes. It even survived a fire in the 1890s.

According to Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf, the old adobe house is the oldest surviving house in Los Gatos.

That's a bit of irony for a neighborhood that Los Gatos tends to forget.