Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Letters

Teen's random act of meanness hit its target

I hope this letter will be read by the young person I encountered on Los Gatos Boulevard:

Congratulations! Your moment of devilish folly really succeeded. I'm the old man you "egged" on Los Gatos Boulevard. It worked! Even though I don't know you, and you don't know me.

It was a "surprise," and I was really startled.

I'm sure you aimed for the windshield, but as happens sometimes with pranks, you missed. The egg hit the frame of the open driver's side window. I'm old and a little unsteady. I'm glad I didn't crash to the right or swerve to the left into oncoming traffic.

You could have caused me to be killed or to have killed some other innocent party, maybe someone you know if you live locally, maybe your own grandfather or the kids on your street.

You did disrupt my afternoon. I was nicely dressed, heading for a meeting. I did need to go home and change my spattered clothes. I had to scrub parts of the exterior of the car. The egg may not come out of the fabric upholstery. I have arthritis, and it was very painful to reach the egg spatters on the inside of the rear window. My afternoon was very delayed.

I bet you laughed like hell because you had successfully done a random act of meanness. Please learn that dumb is not even amusing.

May your grandfather not meet one of your friends!

Bill Buckman
Los Gatos

Heintz property sale will fund medical research

It is difficult to understand the opposition of certain individuals in Los Gatos to the SummerHill Homes project on Blossom Hill Road. The property known as the Heintz Property, approximately 110 acres, was donated to the UC-San Francisco Medical School for the purpose of funding research projects in the field of ophthalmology.

The Proctor Foundation of the UC-San Francisco Medical School is a longstanding research and development facility for the treatment of eye diseases and the training of ophthalmologists throughout the world.

Funding for higher education and especially for medical research and development has been very low in the past few years. The sale of the property will raise a considerable amount of money needed to continue researching diseases of the eyes.

Recently, the UC-San Francisco Medical School was honored by the appointment of Michael Bishop, M.D., as the new chancellor, effective July 1, 1998. He will be a member of the three-man board of governors of the Proctor Foundation. Michael Bishop is a Nobel laureate.

The entire medical school is known throughout the world for its research of all types of medical problems and diseases. The sale of the property to SummerHill Homes by UC-San Francisco does not benefit any individual or groups.

The funds are for the betterment of mankind. The fund will create an endowment in perpetuity with the income being used for research.

I will not go into a discussion of the project itself, other than to say that the development planned for the property is very generous to the public. SummerHill Homes' plan is providing for 80 percent of the land to be held as open space. They plan to build only 47 homes on the entire 110-acre parcel, with homes occupying approximately 20 percent of the land. I know enough about real estate and housing developments to know that when 47 homes are to be built on a total of approximately 110 acres of land, it is not cramming homes on to the property, as mentioned by Patricia Laveroni in a recent letter to the editor.

I have been a regent of the University of California since 1989. We went through an extremely difficult period of fund imbalance in the early to mid-1990s. We cannot pass up this opportunity of making funds available to the UC-San Francisco Medical School [because of] a small group of individuals who, for various reasons, may oppose this project. I hope that the administrators of the town of Los Gatos will approve the project.

S. Stephen Nakashima, Regent
University of California

Latest GTE phone book misses too many numbers

When trying to reach numbers in San Jose or Campbell that are not in the new Los Gatos telephone directory, one can either call information and neatly annotate the number in the margin of your directory, or have weekly coffees to which each invitee could bring 10 important numbers not found in the GTE "Everything Pages," which could be traded on cocktail napkins and subsequently stuffed into the pages of your directory. Instead of trading daily Washington gossip, you could trade phone numbers, which could be cleverly added to your directory on post-it notes: yellow for San Jose City offices, pink for San Jose State University departments, etc., all the while finding solace in the fact that, in some undeveloped country with a primitive telephone system, there are thousands just like you doing the same thing.

C. F. "Chuck" Weber
Los Gatos

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