San Mateo’s remarkable Williams family

The restaurant on Third Avenue, as well as an earlier cafeteria Williams ran on B Street, was very popular with students from San Mateo Junior College, now College of San Mateo. Williams gave students a discount, allowing his ads to boast that “You will always find a J.C. crowd at Noah’s.” Despite its popularity, Blacks could not dine at Noah’s, even though the staff was African-American, according to the La Peninsula magazine, the journal of the San Mateo County Historical Association.

Blacks “could not patronize the restaurant because their presence might prompt white customers to leave, and the black community in San Mateo was too small for Mr. Williams to maintain his business,” the magazine said in its spring 2016 edition. Williams solved the dilemma by closing Noah’s Ark on Mondays, but informally opening it to black patrons on that day of the week.

The restaurant served more than 1,500 people during its first weekend alone. The opening in January 1925, was a major event with the mayors of San Mateo, Burlingame and Hillsborough in attendance.

“Everyone ate at Noah’s,” Paul Buchanan wrote in a Daily Journal story in 2000. The patrons included movie stars “staying at the nearby Benjamin Franklin Hotel, such as Ginger Rogers and Laurel & Hardy.” California Gov. Friend Richardson was quoted as saying he “longed for some of Noah’s specially cooked ham.”

Noah Williams, who was 74 when he died in 1962, was the father of Les Williams, who is spotlighted in a separate exhibit at the museum, one on San Mateo County and World War II. The son was a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. He reached the rank of captain, serving as the pilot of a B-25 bomber.

Les Williams helped battle discrimination in the armed forces, which was segregated in World War II. He is mentioned in the book “The Freeman Field Mutiny” by James Warren. According to the book, Williams was one of the black officers who went to a whites-only officers club at the Indiana base on March 10, 1945, “and ordered drinks and cigarettes” but were refused service. President Truman ended military segregation just three years later.

The Freeman Field incident “illustrated that the black officer was capable of showing initiative and anger,” Warren wrote. “Moreover, he could also organize and use regulations to his advantage. This action was unprecedented.”

After the war, Les Williams, who died in 2015 at the age of 95, ran a dancing school and went on to attend Stanford University and become an attorney. The San Mateo County Bar Association diversity award bears his name.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.