Type of Programme

Type of House: Large Detached House

Teaching Qualifications and Experience
Bachelor of Arts (Economics): 1956-1960, Doctor of Law, J.D.: 1963-1969. Chikako: Undergradutate Degree in Home Economics: 1965-1967

Hobbies and Interests
Patrick: Old cars, habitat conservation, skiing, travel. Chikako: Ceramics, skiing, travel

Excursions and Local Attractions
San Francisco tour, Wine country tour, Sacramento (state government) tour, Marin County tour, Yosemite Park tour, U.S. Air Force Museum (Atwater, CA) tour, Lake Tahoe tour, Silicon Valley tour, Hearst Castle tour, Carmel-Monterey tour, Strybing Arboretum tour, Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Academy of Sciences (Golden Gate Park) tour. U.C. Berkeley campus tour, San Francisco Giants baseball game, Alcatraz tour, etc.

Accommodation, Facilities and Local Area
We are very young at heart. We have friends of all ages from their thirties to more than 100 years old. We are friendly and outgoing, especially with new families moving into our neighbourhood. We both head committees for the Board of our homeowners association (Native Plant Committee and Social Committee). We have friends all over the United States, Japan, and, in Germany and Austria. Whenever we travel, we make new friends. We would hope that our students would become a part of our extended world family. Patrick cares passionately about the English language, as does Chikako, who studies it continuously.

We have just taken title to our new house in Alameda, California. The house is of wood frame construction with off-white stucco outside walls and dark gray concrete shingles on the roof. The style of the building’s architecture is French. Alameda is situated on an island in San Francisco Bay with good beaches washed by the comparatively warm waters of the Bay. We are reached by a number of bridges and the Webster Street tube, which carries vehicular traffic under the estuary and ship channel between the City of Oakland and Alameda. The eighty-five acre, four hundred and eighty five home Bayport development is situated on the site of former servicemen’s housing for the now closed Alameda Naval Air Station, which, although undergoing adaptive re-use and redevelopment, continues to be the berthing place of a number of ships, including the aircraft carrier Hornet, which serves as a museum and tourist attraction. Warmington’s architects have produced designs that attempt to capture and mirror the historic character of old Alameda. Our home has 2,361 square feet of living area, including on the second floor three bedrooms, two baths, a retreat which we use as an office, and, on the first floor a living room, dining room, nook, powder room, kitchen, family room. Student bedrooms will include a study desk, lamp, dresser and closet storage. As this is written, Bayport Alameda is an estimated twenty-five percent complete. The house’s two car garage is of ample enough size to accommodate Patrick’s historic 1955 Packard Patrician, which has been in the McNamara family since it was new, and, also, Patrick’s wood working shop. There is ongoing Bayport construction to the south, north and west of us. Our new home is sited on a corner, across the street from dedicated land that will become a city park. We have excellent views of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Oakland skyline, the Oakland Hills, the San Francisco skyline and, even, the coastal mountain range that extends into Marin County. There are bus routes that are convenient to the development. Also, there is a ferry service, a short walk away, to Jack London Square (a major tourist attraction in Oakland, with such interesting sights as the presidential yacht Potomac, which was the waterborne retreat of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the main line of the Southern Pacific Railway, which runs right down the street in the middle of Jack London Square) and to the ferry terminus in San Francisco. We were very fortunate to get a home that has back and side yards of good size. We look forward to developing these spaces over the coming months and, daily, are working on our own designs for them. We intend to incorporate in the designs a patio for cook outs, boxwood hedges, a small vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, an arbor and trellis to support a wisteria vine, and, a green house for the growing of native plants to be used by Patrick on his habitat conservation project on nearby San Bruno Mountain in San Mateo County. We anticipate carrying out with our own hands all of the construction and landscaping work that is involved. Our residence is located just a five minute drive’s distance from the Lake Merritt station of the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system. BART will give our students mobility to most destinations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Excellent commuter bus lines and ferries supplement BART in conveying travellers to locations such as Muir Woods (with its redwood grove), Stinson Beach, Sausalito, and, Pointe Reyes Station in Marin County and countless other San Francisco Bay Area destinations.