MY CHILDHOOD ON
QUINAN STREET By Stella Faria, Pinole Historical Society
20 MARKETPLACECONTRACOSTA.COM NOVEMBER 2018
Downtown Pinole with Quinan Street in right foreground, ca.1908. Photo courtesy of the Pinole Historical Society.
After the death of my father in a February 1929 explosion
in the nitroglycerine plan at the Hercules Powder Company,
my mother was forced to move from the company-owned
house in the village, which had been in our home for about
two-and-a-half years.
We moved to a rental house at 621 Quinan Street, in
Pinole. It had only two bedrooms, but one was large enough
to hold two double beds, which accommodated four young
girls under the age of ten. We had discussions about who
slept with whom and whose turn it was to make the bed or
tidy up the room. Otherwise, we settled into our new home
quickly.
At a Pinole Historical Society meeting on May 4, 2018,
I finally found out where the Quinan name originated.
Mr. Quinan was a superintendent at the Hercules Powder
Company and a close friend of the very influential Edward
M. Downer.
Mr. Downer served on the Pinole City Council from 1903
until his death in 1938. Mr. Downer founded the Bank of
Pinole and later purchased controlling interest in Mechanics
Bank. It may have been Mr. Downer who submitted Quinan
as a street name.
Quinan Street is parallel to Tennent Avenue and is only
one block long from Tennent Avenue to Park Street. It
was just a little street in downtown Pinole, but it is now
one of the highlights of Old Town Pinole. Many of the
original houses have been restored and some are now small
businesses.
In the early 1930s when I was a child everyone was
beginning to suffer from what to become the Great
Depression. There were at least 20 children from modest
families living on that short block. I would like you to know
something about the families to which they belonged.
On a corner of San Pablo Avenue and Quinan Street
lived Sterling and Mary Kelley and their son, Sterling Jr. Mr.
Kelley had a job with Remington Rand; Sterling was an
only child so he always seemed to have all the latest and best
toys on the block.
The Sassone family lived next door. They were Sterling’s
grandparents, since Mary Kelley was a Sassone. They had a
son, Arthur, who was a quiet, studious person, so we did not
see him very often.