HOW ARE things in Listowel? Last fall, the Los Gatos Museum Association Newsletter published an article by museum board member Joe Cusick about the visit he and his wife, Kathy, made to Ireland in May 1995. The Cusicks visited Los Gatos' sister city, Listowel, where a "welcome" sign at the town's entrance read, "Twinned with Shawnee, Kansas, Downpatrick, County Down, and Panissieres, France." No mention of Los Gatos.
In January, Cusick received a letter from two of their Listowel hosts. Frank Pierse wrote, "I checked those two twinning signs, and they now proudly boast of our relationship with Los Gatos." Thanks to the Cusicks for giving our Irish friends a prod, and may the little brook still be leaping there.
A FAMILY reunion luncheon and party held Jan. 31 at the Guardian of Los Gatos, 2560 Samaritan Drive, where she moved last year, honored Marion Harrio-Gifford on her 100th birthday. Born in Michigan in 1896, she was just 5 when her mother died. An older sister dropped out of school to help care for seven children. After Harrio-Gifford's study at a Minnesota business school, she arrived in San Francisco aboard the ship Rose City in 1919. She worked for a law firm for 30 years, as a legal secretary and retired as office manager and personnel director. As part of her work Harrio-Gifford attended many meetings for planning of the Golden Gate Bridge. She remembers typing the final contract for an engineering firm to explore the Bay bottom.
Harrio-Gifford also can take credit for helping to name San Francisco's Maritime Museum. The city's former Mayor Roger Lapham had appointed a committee to organize a "marine" museum and she corrected the error, as the museum was to do with the commercial side of seafaring.
ART DOINGS: Dolly Cahill Johnson, who has a showing of her painted kites at the 2wenty-9ine East Main Cafe to March 20, also has 36 of her paintings on view in the California Cafe at Old Town. Johnson changes the paintings there every three or four months. Bruni Sablan, whose painting of Duke Ellington was chosen recently for the Smithsonian Institution's permanent collection, appeared on KKUP-FM (91.5) on Jan. 31 for an interview with Paul Rickey Jr. during his 7:45 p.m. Art Scene program.
POETRY for Everyone, a group that meets on the second Sunday each month at 2 p.m. at Forbes Mill Museum to read poems aloud, invites those attending Feb. 11 to bring a poem suitable for Valentine's Day. Group leader Mary Foster says anyone who likes to read their own poetry or someone else's is always welcome.
AT Los Gatos Kiwanis Club, Sue LaForge, project director for the National Council on Aging, introduced five people who have worked for our town under the Title V, Senior Community Service Employment Program, which finds job-training positions for those 55 and older. LaForge showed a video on the project.
FANS OF the Weavers, the quartet that popularized labor and folk music, will remember Ronnie Gilbert. She will be honored at a
5 p.m. reception on Feb. 9 at the Steinbeck Research Center, One Washington Square, San Jose. Gilbert will perform a one-woman theater piece about the labor agitator Mother Jones in the University Theater next door to the Steinbeck Center. Major donors to the Steinbeck and San Jose State University College of Humanities and the Arts are being recognized. Another 5 p.m. reception there, on Feb. 23, will honor the celebrated Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
The research center will be one of the sponsors of the second annual Cannery Row three-day forum Feb. 16-18. Talks and explorations of John Steinbeck's old stomping grounds in Monterey are planned. A second International Steinbeck Congress is scheduled for March 1997 at SJSU. The onetime Los Gatos author continues to be studied and written about.
YOURS TRULY was the invited guest of Rotarian Marlon Smith at the Los Gatos Rotary Club lunch-eon Jan. 23. I'd mentioned here that Smith was "fined" for not getting the club's attendance at the Christmas Cotillion into the press, which presumably included this column; I expressed doubt that Smith would ever get his $20 back after a mention. Said club president Mannie Rice, "Mr. Aldrich, you were absolutely right!"
The speaker at that luncheon, Stanley Underdal, a history professor at SJSU, said Hollywood and John Wayne-type westerns, with howling "savages" attacking wagon trains, gave a false impression. Indians often helped covered-wagon travelers as they struggled across the plains and mountains to California and Oregon.
True. I'd add, however, that there were clashes between white settlers and Indians on the plains. When I was a kid, there were still a few pioneers around who had lived in the sodhouse days, and I heard their stories. They told tales both of Indian kindness and so-called "depredations," most of which happened because of misunderstandings between white and Indian cultures. Government treatment of Indians was shameful. There were more massacres of Indians by whites than vice versa.
For anyone interested in learning about Native Americans, I'd recommend some reading: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown; Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn, both by Mari Sandoz; The Sodhouse Frontier, by Everett Dick; Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, by James C. Olson; Sitting Bull, by Stanley Vestal; Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt. Of course, there are many more books on the subject; these are a few I found absorbing.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 7, 1996.
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