Designed by local resident Scott Cuyler, Creative Principal & Co-Founder of Square Peg Design, and made possible by a generous grant from the Orinda Community Fund, this plaque was presented to Orinda Motors by the Orinda Historical Society in 2024, in celebration of the garage’s first 100 years.
At a time when America’s Gilded Age was drawing to a close, bucolic Orinda was being discovered by wealthy sun-seeking San Franciscans – provided they were willing to dice with death motoring through the hand-dug, 1040-foot long, single-bore Kennedy tunnel, with its four-foot midway jog – an engineer’s blunder – before bursting out of the unlit murkiness into Orinda’s radiance.
And while some city dwellers had already invested in summer residences, a few brave commuters were even daring to make Orinda their permanent home.
One such was Miguel de Laveaga who, knowing a good thing when he saw one, built a grand family residence in 1885. Today, it remains home to a fifth generation of de Laveagas.
“Someday,” Miguel mused to his son Edward (known to all his friends as E.I.) “the land in Orinda will become too valuable to hold. We’ll have to give it away and sell the climate.”
Which is exactly how E.I. aimed to make his fortune.
By the mid-1920s, de Laveaga’s newly constructed community stretched all along Orinda Way, with a firehouse, general store, post office, garage and riding academy.
And if Wall Street, many thousands of miles away, had not imploded in 1929, the proposed chapel, church and hotel would have nicely rounded out his plans.
Years passed, and the firehouse, which later expanded to include a minuscule library, morphed into Orinda Village Antiques, while the general store became the much loved Phairs, now silent and abandoned since the 1990s. And it has been many decades since the 1924 riding academy ceased to echo to the sounds and scents of horseflesh.
Today, all that remains of de Laveaga’s model village is the original garage, since renamed Orinda Motors, still servicing the community’s cars, just as it has done for the past 100 years.
Long gone are the Model T’s and Cadillac Roadsters of the 1920s, but in the garage’s Classic Car Center, a cohort of mechanics repair and restore muscle cars from “the golden age of automobiles” – loosely defined by Orinda Motors as 1950 to 1975.
Offering an average 40 years’ experience in the automotive field, these highly qualified grease monkeys “get to live their passion” by working on America’s classic vehicles.
Or, as Mark Twain once put it, “find a job you enjoy doing and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
Allen Pennebaker did indeed find a job he enjoyed doing when he joined Orinda Motors in 1972. In fact he liked it so much that, five years later, he and his wife Terry, bought the company.
Since then the Pennebaker family has been actively involved in community events, the most celebrated being the town’s annual Classic Car Show.
Starting out as an informal get-together in 2004, with just a couple dozen cars owned by like-minded enthusiasts, the hugely popular show has now evolved into a multi-event weekend with spectators coming from far and wide to salivate over the 200-plus cars on show, all centered on the streets surrounding Orinda Motors.
In 2019, The Orinda Association “turned horsepower into senior power” by taking on the car show as a fundraiser for their Seniors Around Town (SAT) program, which allows Orinda’s retirees cost-free access to door-to-door transportation.
Like so many other investors, E.I. de Laveaga lost all his money during the Depression, but unlike most of them, he was so highly regarded by the banks that when he promised he would eventually repay his debts, they were willing to trust him. It took him well into the 1940s to justify their faith in him.
Imagine E.I.’s ghost now, strolling along Orinda Way, looking quizzically at the half-remembered shops (was that Thai restaurant really on his original blueprints?), finally coming to rest at Orinda Motors, and nodding in joy as he recognizes the unchanged garage, with its timeless Spanish roofline, that he built in 1924.
Alison Burns is a staff writer for The Orinda News, President of the Orinda Historical Society and author of “Images of America: Orinda, published 1922 by Arcadia.”