By GORDY HOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Among city neighborhoods, View Ridge is one of the youngest, established in 1936 by a couple of former radio guys, newsman Ralph Jones and salesman Al Balch. As partners, they bought the hill above Sand Point. Using horse-drawn scoops and hand labor, they built their own houses along the part, Jones at 6800 50th Ave. N.E., Balch at 6850.

Two years later America was at war, and everything but the view fell into short supply.

Albert S. Balch III, son of Balch the builder, was just a toddler then. But the view out his bedroom window embraced the whole world, and the war, or so he thought.

"My very, very earliest recollections of anything are of watching the airplanes taking off and landing at Sand Point," says Balch, who now lives on the other side of town, in Blue Ridge.

"Even at three, I had an idea about war, that all those planes taking off and landing were, of course, connected to it. I knew that the war was overseas somewhere. But, of course, to me, overseas was Lake Washington."

Too close for comfort.

"One night there was a huge fire across that ocean, in Kirkland," he says. "I could see it from my window, and I had these visions that we'd had this direct hit over there, and that those we'd bombed would come here and attack us. I was scared to death."

A child's bad dreams pale against the real thing.

Klaus and Paula Stern are former Berliners who survived Allied bombs and a series of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, to make their home in Seattle after the war. They settled in Montlake to raise a family then moved to a smaller house in the View Ridge area.

Among the pluses for them there is Emanuel Congregation, a small but growing synagogue run by lay members in the 3400 block of Northeast 65th Street, and within walking distance of their home.

"Getting there from here is all up hill," he says. "But it's down hill all the way back."

With his 36 years as a Langendorf Bakery salesman behind them, the Sterns are contented in retirement, surrounded by the families of their two children. Not to forget Sheba and Missy in the back yard.

Sheba is a Rhodesian ridgeback, a lanky and loyal hound picked up at a dog pound in Tacoma; Missy is a springer spaniel.

"We were visiting friends in Tacoma and stopped at the pound just to take a look," Stern says. "Sheba was just lying on the concrete.

"They said she had three days before she'd be put to sleep. That was three years ago. We've had dogs since 1953," he says.

The neighborhood's proximity to everyday shopping tasks is a plus for the Sterns, an important reason why they chose the place 25 years ago. He is buoyed by the news that a hardware store and some smaller shops will be arriving soon at the former Alfalfa's grocery building in the 4800 block of Sand Point Way. The building has been vacant for more than a year.

"That'll be handy," he says. "We haven't had a hardware since Ernst left U-Village."