Pat McCarthy’s Well-traveled Brick Comes Home

Pat McCarthy poses with a brick she kept for more than 65 years after salvaging hundreds of bricks with her family to build the family home at 7401 Terrace Dr. Photo by Jon Bashor

Pat McCarthy has a lot of fond memories of growing up in El Cerrito, attending Del Mar Elementary School, Portola Junior High and then El Cerrito High School, graduating 1965.

Learning to drive a stick-shift transmission going up and down Marin Avenue; attending Friday night ballroom dance parties at the Rad Lab with her father; caring for a foundling fawn her dad brought home; and, as a USO volunteer, raising the neighbors’ eyebrows by inviting soldiers to her family home as they prepared to ship out to the war in Vietnam.

But when you talk with her, one item really stands out – a red clay brick stamped with a “P.” It came from the pile of rubble left behind when the Castro adobe burned down one night in 1956. The adobe was located in the parking lot just west of where the El Cerrito Plaza CVS pharmacy is today. Pat’s been carrying that brick around ever since.

At the time, her family was living in a small house at 7403 Terrace Dr. Her father worked with plutonium and other trans-uranic elements at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, or the Rad Lab as it was known. But in their spare time, starting around 1957, the family was building a larger home at 7401 Terrace, just behind the house they were living in. McCarthy’s grandfather was the contractor, her parents did much of the work and the kids helped out too.

To get bricks for outside walls, the fireplace and other parts of the structure, family members piled into their two-tone green station wagon and headed down to the site of the old adobe where the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center was taking shape.

“My sister and I had the job, along with our parents, to clean all the bricks,” McCarthy recalled. “We carted them home in our old station wagon with horizontal sliding windows -- I broke one of them when I threw the brick through the window that I thought was open. We were just young kids!”

The easiest way to clean the mortar off the old bricks was to use a small axe and chip away by hand, she said.

“We made many, many trips filling the car with bricks,” McCarthy said. “That did a real number on the car’s springs.”

It took the family 14 years to complete their new house. She remembers that when they poured the concrete driveway, she accidentally stepped in the wet stuff and had a heck of a time pulling her feet free.

When she left El Cerrito, she took one brick with her, first to Maui, then to Escondido near San Diego and lastly to Idaho, where she now lives. But why lug a well-used brick around for decades across thousands of miles?

After taking the brick to 7401 Terrace Dr. for a last look, Pat met Kristie and Patrick, the current owners who have lived in the house since 2017. She shared some of her story with them, talkedabout changes in the neighborhood and then handed over the brick to the El Cerrito Historical Society.

“It’s historic memorabilia and I wanted to save it,” she said. “And when I decided to part with it, I wanted to find a great home for it

Pat McCarthy’s senior portrait in the 1965 El Cerrito High School yearbook.