Author Talk: Wyn Wachhorst, A Town Like No Other: Palo Alto Stories

Join local author and friend of the Palo Alto Museum Wyn Wachhorst for an intriguing author talk on his latest book, A Town Like No Other: Palo Alto Stories (2025).

PROGRAM
Welcome—Marguerite Gong Hancock, President & CEO, Palo Alto Museum
Author Talk and Book Readings—Wyn Wachhorst
Audience Q&A
Book Sales & Signing

Launched by Leland Stanford to complement his new university, Palo Alto is perhaps the only literal college town. With its symbiotic connection to Stanford, Palo Alto became the electronics hub of the world long before it fathered Silicon Valley, even decades before Bill Hewlett and David Packard's Addison Avenue garage. In a small house on Emerson Street in 1909, Lee de Forest invented the triode vacuum tube, opening the age of radio. In that same house and year, Cyril Elwell founded Federal Telegraph, and Palo Alto became the global source for electronic equipment. But the history of the digital revolution is only part of the Palo Alto story.

From its beginning, the city reflected its Stanford roots—a love of learning that would launch one of the nation's top school districts, a rational perspective that would preserve good government, and a commitment to community that would focus on fairness, foster tolerance, and favor social reform. Pervading the history of Palo Alto is a wholesome counterpoint—progress and preservation, reform and reaction—a unity in diversity that could lend a creative, often adversarial color to local culture, seeding the music of the sixties while leading the world into the digital age. A community in the best sense, ever involved in the issues of the day, it is a town of educated people with a passion for education, of environmentalists and philanthropists, of seminal artists and innovators. Perhaps the same connection to Stanford that gave birth to the information age had long before helped shape a communal climate in Palo Alto, one as equitable as its seasons are temperate, a community of judicious leaders and conscientious citizens—pioneers and politicians, inventors and developers, merchants and humanitarians, teachers and healers—many of whose stories will be told here.

Books may be purchased on site. Free admission.

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Host or Publisher Palo Alto Museum