LOS GATOS Town Council members interrupted a Feb. 8 study session to pile into a couple of cars and head down University Avenue to Andrews, where Campo di Bocce was staging its grand opening. Linda Asbury, executive director of the Town of Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce, orchestrated a ribbon-cutting ceremony, with Mayor Joanne Benjamin taking charge of the bigger-than-life scissors.
The ancient game of bocce ball may be unfamiliar to some. There were lots of people checking out the game's rules and watching as experts demonstrated the gentle art of rolling a ball close to a smaller ball called a pallino. Owner Tom Albanese, who's passionate about the game, and who had to overcome the doubts of many friends when he first proposed the idea of a bocce ball club in Los Gatos, couldn't keep the grin off his face
THE LOS GATOS Kiwanis Club presented Ernest Patterson, Los Gatos certified public accountant, with its George F. Hixson Fellowship at the Feb. 13 meeting. Patterson, a past president of the local club, was hailed for his 37 years of service and a perfect attendance record, President Rusty Rinehart said. The award is named for the first international president of Kiwanis.
HAVING a float in the annual Christmas Parade isn't always smooth sailing. The February Cat's Paw, the newsletter of the Los Gatos Yacht Club, describes some of the troubles the intrepid sailors had with their red-and-white "tugboat El Gato" in the parade. According to outgoing vice commodore Rich Horton, the volunteers who constructed the float had rigged the smokestack so that Larry Brown could enter the pilothouse through a secret hatch and insert the hose of a fire extinguisher so the stack would spew large quantities of simulated smoke, which it did. The trick worked nicely, but right in front of the judges' stand, half the smoke came back down the stack into the pilothouse. Brown had to scramble to get out. "It reminded me of a Keystone Kops silent movie," Horton says.
A second mishap occurred when the weight of the float caused the car that was hauling it to slip its transmission. "At every stop we breathed a sigh of relief when the car started up again," wrote Horton. But they managed to finish the parade.
RETIRED Los Gatos pharmacist Fred Callis, 88, toted up 50 years as a member of the Los Gatos Rotary Club. District Governor Carolyn Schuetz helped celebrate as Rotarian John Pencer introduced him. Callis was born in W. C. Fields' favorite town, Lompoc, and attended high school there. He graduated from the USC School of Pharmacy in 1931 and met Lucia Roach in San Diego in 1938; they married the next year. Fred served as pharmacist's mate aboard an aircraft carrier in WWII. The couple came to Los Gatos in 1946 and bought George Green's pharmacy on E. Main Street, which had been founded in 1904.
Lucia Callis, who spoke in connection with the honors for her husband, is a handwriting expert who has entertained at clubs and aboard cruise ships. She once read my character in my signature, and it wasn't all flattering.
A NEW member of Los Gatos Rotary, Bob Skinner, an engineer who has served with several firms including General Electric and Texas Instruments, told the club he grew up in a town back east so tough that a newcomer was frisked to see if he wore a gun. "If he didn't, they'd give him one," Skinner said.
ROTARY Club chairman for the Feb. 23 Great Race is Stewart Elnar. Ted Braucht is the club's public relations chair.
INDUCTION into Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society, is certain evidence that a student is one who burns the midnight oil. Holly Faber of Monte Sereno, a senior at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., was one of 16 out of a class of 700 to win election. The daughter of Andrew and Sandra Faber, Holly graduated from Los Gatos High School in 1993. She will enter Mt. Sinai Medical School in June 1998. Fluent in French, she took part in the university's Semester in Paris program.
IT'S not only in Los Gatos that folks are trying hard to preserve things. Members of the Los Gatos Kiwanis Club heard speakers Lenny Kohm of The Last Great Wilderness Project and Dorothy Thomas of the Gwich'n Indian Nation, Old Crow, Yukon Territory, in northwestern Canada. They urged that the pristine National Wildlife Refuge be protected from the exploitation of its oil reserves. Kohm showed slides depicting the results of oil development at Prudhoe Bay. Thomas said her people's traditional way of life depends on migrating caribou herds.
THE LOS GATOS Lions Club, which can always be depended upon to do well in the food line, hosted its annual Cioppino Feed and auction Feb. 15 at St. Mary's Church. Lion Bob Skubis chaired the affair, with assistance from Lion Paul Grabeel. President Bob Davies reported tickets were sold out. Lion Tim Rossaaen vowed he would cook for 250 and not one more.
LIONS may know better than to play poker with a guy named "Doc," but they enjoyed a big poker night at Bay 101 card club, in San Jose. With 24 Los Gatos Lions and an equal number of Almaden Valley Lions squared off in a tournament, each player put up $100. When all but eight had lost their money, the octet battled it out to determine how the pot would be divided. The Los Gatos players came home with $3,498 for their club, to Almaden's $1,302. Bay 101 put up a buffet dinner.
PERSONAL gripe: Drivers who turn too suddenly into downtown driveways. As a pedestrian, I frequently observe (and sometimes holler at) drivers who wheel into parking lots at street speed, without looking out for walkers. I can jump five feet if necessary, but some seniors lack my agility.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 19, 1997.
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