36 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} working at Lyngso when she was in junior high. Initially intending to become a special education teacher, Terry, at 23, instead took on the running of Lyngso’s onsite concrete batch plant. In the 1980s, she stepped up to the role of president when her parents retired to travel around the country in their motorhome. Now 95, her dad, founder John Lyngso, claims that the business originated back in 1936, when he was an eight-year-old living in San Francisco. As John recounted to Terry, he and a friend built a cart and went into the hills to collect “meadow muffins from the cows and sold them to the gardeners in the neighborhood.” Later on, when Terry’s Danish grandfather, a carpenter, started building homes in Belmont, John excavated the sites and bought land in San Carlos to store the Alongstanding pillar in Peninsula landscaping is in transition as Terry Lyngso, the last leader of the family-run business, prepares to sell Lyngso Garden Materials to the company’s dozens of employees. How does it feel to let go of so much history? “It’s hard,” admits Terry, who began dirt. John also did grading and worked on the 101 freeway. After a contractor asked him to haul in some quartz pebbles and they sold out right away, John brought in more products and set up a company in 1953. “The focus was always on the landscape contractor and homeowner,” Terry says. “My mom worked in the sales office, took deliveries and answered the phone, and dad did the deliveries. They worked all the time when we [three girls] were little. Fortunately, we lived next door to my grandparents.” Both families lived in Belmont, not far from the Lyngso business, which operated on what are now runways at SFO. In 1969, airport expansion triggered the Lyngso Garden Materials’ move to Seaport Boulevard in Redwood City. In 2015, Lyngso uprooted again to its current location on Shoreway Road in San Carlos. Terry calls it a great space with more than five acres to showcase all of their sand, gravel, concrete,
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