Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

A large funeral for a small boy took place at this former incarnation of St. Mary's Church at Bean and Tait avenues.

Picture from the Past

Many woeful tales contribute to the history of old Los Gatos

By John S. Baggerly

'Never was there a story of greater woe than that of Juliet and her Romeo." Thus did William Shakespeare end his poetic, tragic account of the end of young love. During the past century Los Gatos and Saratoga also witnessed the deaths of young people, not including victims of wars.

Perhaps the first casualty was a young student at a mountain school engaged in a dangerous game of a group weighting down a tree limb and then all letting go at the same time. This youngster forgot to release his hold and the limb snapped back, hurling him to his death. His funeral was held at St. Mary's Church, then facing N. Santa Cruz Avenue at the corner of Bean Avenue.

On a clear May day in the 1920s, two grammar school sisters planned to pick wild flowers in the hills above Lexington. A third girl did not arrive on time so the sisters started hiking up the railroad tracks to the tiny town of Alma, located in what is now the basin of Lexington Reservoir.

The girls were part way across a trestle when they heard a train coming southward. They turned and ran northward, back towards Los Gatos. Before reaching safe ground, they decided to jump from the trestle, not realizing how far the distance was to the creek bed. By then the engineer of the slowing train saw the accident and stopped to help and fill out a report, mandatory in case of accidents.

Somehow the mother of the girls, an employee at Crider's Department Store, was summoned to the grim chore of identifying the girls. The dead girl was taken to Melvin's Mortuary, where mother and daughters lived in quarters upstairs. The injured sister was taken to Los Gatos Hospital, a short-lived enterprise at the top of Loma Alta near what became the Ming Quong Home for orphaned Chinese girls rescued from child prostitution in San Francisco. She recovered from the accident.

In 1933, an unhappy young man hurled himself under the wheels of the incoming commute train from San Francisco. Some schoolboys found a small hunk of scalp--with hair attached--and brought it to Los Gatos High School, much to the vocal horror of female students and the silent wonderment of males.

In the days before Saratoga obtained its own facilities, students came to LGHS by streetcar or automobile. Cupid knew no boundaries, however. One boy, a half-mile runner on the LGHS track team, was known for running to Saratoga on weekends to visit his girlfriend. Faculty and friends could only guess what he smelled like when they visited.

But back to our stories of woe: Another Los Gatos boy, driving home from visiting his Saratoga girl, smashed his car into a tree and was killed. It was said that the couple had broken up. This tree and several others were located in narrow island separating the two-lane Highway 9.

At the outset of World War II, a Los Gatos enlisted man was killed during military maneuvers in Louisiana. He was hit by a vehicle during a nighttime call to "move out."

The LGHS Class of 1972 yearbook was dedicated to three boys, one struck by an car while crossing Main Street in front of the school, while the other two were killed in car accidents. Several years later, a '72er was killed in Santa Cruz when a car hit him while he was riding his bike.

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