Local Scouts Spruce Up Alta Mira Club
Eagle Scouts and parents join Alta Mira Club caretaker and rental chair Shirley Mendez (rear) and San Leandro City Councilmember Corina Lopez (second row, second from right) in front of the club at 561 Lafayette Ave., San Leandro. Eagle Scouts, from left in front row, are Marcus Thai, Scott Wong and Sydney Yee. Parents, in second row, are (from left) Thuan Thai, Anna Wong and Priscilla Lee.
Two Castro Valley Scouts and a fellow Scout from San Leandro have come to the aid of San Leandro’s beloved but aging Ygnacio Peralta at 561 Lafayette Ave., carrying out Eagle Scout projects to update the building.
The house, one of the oldest historical buildings in the county, was built in 1876 and is better known as the Alta Mira Club, after the organization that has run it since 1907. While many public events are held at the structure, it receives no public funding, making it hard for the club to maintain the building.
Members of Castro Valley Scout Troop 789/2789 have come to its aid, in the form of community service projects needed to attain Eagle Scout, the scouting’s highest rank. Troop 789/2789 meets every Thursday evening from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. at the Palomares Hills Recreation Center Clubhouse at 6811 Villareal Dr. in Castro Valley.
Eagle Scouts Sydney Yee of Castro Valley and Scott Wong, of San Leandro, have already completed two of the improvement projects, while Eagle Scout candidate Marcus Thai of Castro Valley is about to start work on a third.
Yee is one of the very first female Eagle Scouts, only after a few years after young women were first allowed into the longtime Boy Scouts. They are now simply called the Scouts. Eagle is the highest rank, earned by relatively few, and it requires the completion of a community service project.
Yee’s project was to install pavers in the path behind the club to allow easy access to trash and recycling bins. They were previously reached by slogging or wading through a sometimes waist-deep muddy area, according to Alta Mira Club caretaker Shirley Mendez.
“After Sydney finished the path, one of the men from the recycling company stopped by to personally thank us,” Mendez said. “He said getting to the cans before had been quite a challenge.”
The Alta Mira Club’s side along Leo Avenue is now adorned with beautiful flowers that use little water during a drought, Mendez said. That’s thanks to the drip irrigation system built by Eagle Scout Wong and his father Ronald, she added.
Thai said he is about to start building a low fence in the club’s small parking lot, with help from his father Thuan. He expects it to take several weeks to complete.
He explains that vegetation and a neighbor’s fence on one side are vulnerable to cars overshooting small wooden blocks at the pavement’s edge, and his low fence would protect both.
Marcus is a junior at Castro Valley High School, where he especially enjoys English and history classes and plans to go to art school after graduation.
Yee is a sophomore at Castro Valley High School, where she enjoys chemistry, labs, and water polo, and where she expects to swim in the spring. She’s enjoyed much about scouting, but especially summer camp at Camp Wente, near Occidental in Sonoma County.
“I got to do all kinds of things I’d never have gotten to do otherwise,” she said. “Archery, rifle shooting at the range, horseback riding, even ax-throwing!”
Wong was a 20222 graduate of San Leandro’s Arroyo High School who now attends UC Merced and returned to do his project.