Carl Kowall: About This Book
ABOUT THE BOOK
THE STORY OF EL DORADO HILLS
By Carl Kowall
About this Book:
The Story of El Dorado Hills is about more than the birth of a city. It’s the story of a man, and the team he worked with, to create a modern community for a modern time. It’s a story of vision, and perseverance, and how sometimes the most important part of seeing a vision come to life is being willing to let go and let others carry it forward.
When developer Allan Lindsey first laid eyes on El Dorado Hills in the late 1950’s, that’s all it was: hills. Thousands of acres of rolling, grassy hills, populated by more cattle and wildlife than people. Where others saw only open space, Allan saw something more. He was a man of enormous imagination, matched only by his energy, courage and kindness, and today’s El Dorado Hills was his idea.
One of the men who worked with Allan during those years was Carl Kowall. Carl was a core member of Allan’s team, and one of the first eight residents of El Dorado Hills. “The Story of El Dorado Hills” is his chronicle of working with Allan through the years of hard work to buy land, formulate a development plan, obtain water rights, and build the town’s first fire station, schools, water and sewer treatment plants, and nearly 2,000 homes and residential lots. Carl was also there in 1967, when the bottom fell out of the real estate market in the Sacramento metropolitan area, the project’s financial partners pulled out, and everything came to a standstill. For Allan and Carl, that was the end of the story, but that was certainly not the end of the story of El Dorado Hills.
The vision that created El Dorado Hills was carried on by others—today their work is recognized as some of the best master-planned development in the nation. Allan Lindsey’s vision of a “modern community for a modern time” is today thriving in the foothills east of Sacramento. In telling how it happened, and how it almost never came to be, The Story of El Dorado Hills is a story that can help guide the future of El Dorado Hills, and other growing communities, well into the future.
About the Author:
Carl Kowall was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1930 and first moved to Sacramento in 1949, after graduating from high school. His first stay in California’s Capital city was short—as the Korean War heated up he joined the Coast Guard, where he served for three years on a destroyer in the Atlantic.
Upon being honorably discharged as petty officer first class, he returned to Sacramento to attend college on the GI Bill and, after a brief stint back in Pennsylvania, returned to Sacramento yet a third time and made it his permanent home. He continued college at Sacramento State University while working part time as a mechanical engineer in a plant that manufactured school furniture.
In 1958, he joined Allan Lindsey’s team as an employee of Moss & Moss Real Estate and later became a project Manager with Allan’s El Dorado Hills Corporation. For the next ten years, Carl and Allan, along with a first class team of legal, construction, entitlement and development experts literally began to build El Dorado Hills from nothing.
In the late 1960’s, after the financing for El Dorado Hills dried up and the project work stopped, Carl went on to own the Sacramento Rubber Company, which he successfully operated for the next 20 years.
Never content to sit still, Carl also went on to teach real estate courses at the University of San Francisco, was a frequent guest lecturer at Sac States Graduate School of Business, bred and raced horses, raised two children and had two beautiful grandkids. Carl still works today as an independent commercial real estate broker with offices in downtown Sacramento. He and his wife Lorie have been married for 55 years. And counting.