The Cupertino Courier

Letters & Opinions

Editor finds the origins of Cupertino facinating

By Carol Bogart

One of the things I've always enjoyed about working in the news business is the opportunity to really learn about new places and the people who live there.

In the early years of my career, it seemed as though I moved every three to six years.

By contrast, my parents moved just once after I was born. Originally, they'd set up house near my father's family. For most of my life, though, we lived on a farm outside the small Ohio town where my mom grew up.

My assorted moves gave them a reason to travel to places they might otherwise never have visited. Mom especially liked the lush flowering vines and bushes in Atlanta.

Both vowed never to visit me again in Chicago after they got lost going home, and, driving through a rough neighborhood on Chicago's south side, witnessed police frisking a young man flattened across the hood of a cruiser with his hands up.

The only time either had seen that before was on TV.

Their Christmas trips to Denver found them trapped in their hotel room at least twice by surprise blizzards. Even taxicabs weren't running. (It wasn't long before I traded my car for one with 4-wheel drive.)

Were they still living, I think both would have loved everything about California, especially since three of four grandchildren, and now one great-grandchild, all live in San José. (And, of course, their only daughter.)

Now that I'm sort of settled in my new place, I've been studying San José and Cupertino.

For one, I'm within walking distance of St. James Park--talk about history! I'm almost certain I've found the two trees where those two guys were hauled out of the jail and hanged in 1933 after they were arrested in the kidnap/murder of the son of a well-liked department store owner. The victim was thrown off the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge.

A huge mob of angry people lynched the suspects from the trees. They used material from what was then the construction site of the now-Post Office as a battering ram to break down the door to the jail. One version of the story said the trees from which the suspects were hanged were later "removed." But looking at the front page newspaper photo that, from a distance, showed the two hanging from the trees, I'm pretty sure those trees are still there. There are two, pretty close to the Post Office, that sure look like the ones in the photo. Each has had a large, lower limb removed.

Interesting, too, is Cupertino's significance with regard to the DeAnza Trail, and how Stevens Creek used to be called Arroyo de San Joseph Cupertino. That fact leads to another fascinating little bit of history. San (Saint) Joseph was canonized in Cupertino, Italy. In the early 1600s, he demonstrated powers of levitation and "repeatedly went flying around the church"--according to a column written by Harry Farrell published in the Merc in 1978.

But then, along came the arroyo's first white settler, Elisha Stevens, and the arroyo became known as Stevens Creek.

When I worked at my first newspaper in another northwest Ohio farming community about 20 minutes from where my folks had lived, as I started covering the news there, I was amazed at all the stuff I didn't know about the place where I grew up.

I often included various things I'd learned in my weekly column. It was always fun when long-timers would drop by the paper to tell me "I never knew that"--and then tell me other stuff I hadn't know.

For example, I learned that, in a bygone era, when tracts of land were platted, each corner was marked with a "corner stone." The corner stone was buried deeply enough that ground upheavals, such as happen when frozen Ohio ground thaws, won't disturb it. The stone itself was often no more than a good-sized rock of some sort, maybe limestone, maybe granite. The spot is then topped with the corner fencepost.

The local surveyor's office had a collection of corner stones on display, dug up and removed as property lines and fence rows shifted.

I don't know if that's how it was done years ago when Cupertino was being settled. But I'm sure there are plenty of other interesting, little-known facts about this community as well, and I hope you'll share them with me.

Carol Bogart is the new editor of the Cupertino Courier. Contact her at cbogart@community-newspapers.com or call 408.200.1055.