Greatest Person: Don McDonald's Passion For History

Did you know, asks Don McDonald with a twinkle in his eye, that the man on whose apricot orchard Los Altos City Hall was built was named in a 1930s-era divorce complaint—as the subject of more than 100 love poems?

McDonald is often called Los Altos' unofficial historian—perhaps even official, ever since 2010, when he shared authorship of Early Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, with the . 

But the fact that McDonald gleaned that juicy detail from hours of research about the town's history proves one thing, he says: He's a trivia buff, not a historian.

"Senior triviologist," he allows. "That was the kind of trivia you don't run into every day."

So what if he contributed hundreds of interviews to the Oral History Program of the Los Altos History Museum?

Or that he has been a guest curator for the Los Altos History Museum or contributed hundreds of articles on local history to its newsletter and the?

Or that the former National Security Agency analyst made a nearly full-time pursuit of scanning decades' worth of Los Altos newspapers from the city's early years, hunting down details that might jibe with others he collected and collated over time? 

Oh, no, says , director of the Los Altos History Museum; he's no trivia buff. More like "history detective," she said.

Without McDonald, that book would have never been done, she added. So many fascinating stories might have only existed in scattered form, in memories of old-timers, tantalizing bits in newspapers, telephone books, aerial photographs and family albums—not in a book, she says.

The book tells the first 100 years of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, part of the Arcadia Publishing Co.'s "Images of America" series. 

When Bajuk first proposed the longtime volunteer take on the project, he turned her down. "Then I thought about it," McDonald said, "and there were some things I thought we should straighten out. Little by little I saw she was right." 

He was the man with both the interest and the ability to pull it off, Bajuk said. And with high quality. He applied the rigor and attention to detail that he has pursued throughout his life, she said.

"It's all out there, but there are so many pieces," Bajuk said. "To take all that information, to synthesize it and turn into a story is something he's uniquely qualified to do."

Not only does the book have academic attention to accuracy—checked and triangulated over multiple sources—but it has context. "He really has that global sensibility about him," she said.

It helped, he said, with characteristic humor, that he is, well, old—he was born in 1918. "I lived through part of that era, so I understand the world that existed better than most."

A former Navy man born in Indianapolis, McDonald resigned his military commission to become a civilian cryptanalyst for the nascent National Security Agency during the Cold War. He had two foreign duty postings, one as deputy senior United States liaison officer in Melbourne, Australia, and the other as chief of the NSA’s largest overseas facility at Fuchinobe, Japan. He received NSA’s Meritorious Civilian Award.

McDonald, named Los Altan of the Year in January by the Los Altos Town Crier, made history a big part of his volunteer life in Los Altos since he arrived in 1970.

It started innocently enough. He was retired from the NSA at the ripe age of 52. In Los Altos, he began talking to old-timers who lived on the block where he was visiting Audrey Harper, an old friend who would become his wife. 

"It's kind of an interesting place, and I was interested in how Los Altos came about. It was not at all clear."  

His next 40 years after retirement, besides traveling extensively, was to develop a second career in retirement as a volunteer. 

So much so that he received the Los Altos-Los Altos Hills Joint Community Volunteer Service Award in 2000.

He's a published poet, with a passion for symphonic and baroque music. Because of his time with the NSA in Australia, he represented Los Altos in its relationship with its first sister city in Bendigo, Australia. He also volunteered at the Bechtel International House at Stanford University, teaching a class on English idioms and tutoring scholars in English, one on one.

McDonald was recognized as an instrumental community volunteer with the John W. Gardner Community Building Award from the Los Altos Community Foundation in 2010.

History, however, has been an abiding passion. He was president of the Peninsula Civil War Round Table and joined the South Bay Civil War Round Table, the Palo Alto Historical Association, the Mountain View Historical Society, the Moffett Field Historical Society and the Society for Aviation History. 

He can't imagine why one wouldn't want to know history, he said.

"What is that saying, 'Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it?' he asked, referring to philosopher George Santayana's famous aphorism.

Perhaps, with McDonald documenting this small corner of the world, that won't happen. Bajuk already has a sequel book project for him in mind, starting from the post-World War II years and leading through incorporation and beyond, she said.

"He's already turned me down for book two, but I'll keep trying," she insisted. "He's too important to lose."