In the early '80s Los Gatos was a meat-and-potatoes town. This scene at the Sweet Shoppe (later Gilley's) shows how Los Gatans ate before croissants, coffee roasters, designer burritos, bagels and juice bars arrived on the scene.
By Dan Pulcrano
With this issue, the Weekly-Times rolls the clock back to 1982, before the Black Watch was college cool, when there was no Gap on N. Santa Cruz Avenue--only Chrislow's, Christopher's and Adrienne's. Gas stations and tire shops still occupied downtown corners, and bakeries had names like Polly Prim--that is until Fred's Shoe Box became Le Boulanger, starting le croissant revolution (which was later displaced by the bagel invasion). 1982 was the year that a store that sold funny smelling teas and macrame plant holders (Kaldi's) was sold and renamed a "roasting company," something few of us had heard of before, back when Los Gatos Boulevard was a place to buy Oldsmobiles, not organic escarole.
In those days it was not uncommon for those who owned homes in Los Gatos to make a living within the town's borders. But a shift occurred with the birth of the personal computer revolution in the late 1970s. Los Gatos became a choice bedroom community for senior executives of high technology firms.
Commercial rents and mortgages rose, and a different political culture emerged. Residents wanted tighter controls on development, and candidates affiliated with old school notions of land use lost control of the town government.
Amidst this backdrop of change in Los Gatos' political, commercial and residential complexion, the town's principal communications vehicle--the Times Observer--had been sold to an out-of-state corporation, and many residents cared little for the changes that occurred under its new management. When the idea of a locally owned newspaper was floated, residents and businesses supported it with investments, subscriptions and advertisements.
The Los Gatos Weekly launched March 10, 1982, and thankfully it was not a slow news year. The first cover story looked at a petition drive to recall councilmembers Pete Siemens and Tom Ferrito, which made it onto the ballot but failed to capture majority support.
That fall, a new face, given to an easy smile, emerged on the political scene. Her name was Joanne Benjamin and our editorial praised her as "the outstanding candidate of the election."
Another newcomer, Randy Attaway, also surfaced. While noting his inexperience, we suggested that in the future he might make "an interesting addition to the council."
In June, the Silicon Valley power dining spot L'Ermitage burned. I stood and watched the smoke rise with a young waiter named Alain Stabler, who commented sadly, "Everything was going so well." Today Alain co-owns Cafe Marcella.
A meltdown of a different type occurred when 9,000 telephone lines went dead for a day after GTE attempted to upgrade its switching software. Management at first tried to cover up the procedural violations that caused the outage, but the Weekly reported on the true causes.
A few months later, the state's Public Utilities Commission was deluged with 1,114 responses to a Los Gatos Weekly survey about the quality of telephone service. Despite a GTE attempt to pack the ballot box, traced to their postage meter, 82 percent of the respondents called their phone service "poor," "very poor," or worse. The utility was forced to spend millions upgrading its service.
For the Weekly's young staff, these were exciting times journalistically, and there wasn't a better place to practice the craft. Los Gatos was a town in transition, and there were many walking reminders of the humble mountainside town of yesteryear, among them, Dr. Horace Jones, 81, who had removed John Steinbeck's tonsils and 85-year-old Admiral Thomas Inglis, who had founded Monte Sereno. You could still buy a nice house for less than a quarter million dollars, and commercial rents were well under a buck a foot.
I'd better stop now, because I'm starting to sound like Bob Aldrich, a gentleman whom I met that year. The town has changed during the decade-and-a-half since the Weekly began publishing, and the newspaper has no doubt shaped some of those changes. Whether it's a better town than it was is now a judgment distorted by the soft focus of nostalgia. Though it's hard to imagine a better spot than Los Gatos in the early '80s, it's still a pretty damn good place.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, March 5, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.