Los Gatos Weekly-Times

People columnist admits to being a bit 'off plumb'

By Dale Bryant

Since his passing on June 14, the Los Gatos Weekly-Times has run several of Bob Aldrich's most memorable Op/Ed pieces. We ran them in the space where his "Our Town" column ran for 15 years.

Now it's time to move on. We think Bob would have been the first to say it's time to get back on track. It's time to tell the stories that go on behind the scenes in Los Gatos, stories about the small joys and successes, as well as the offbeat tales that make us smile.

Bob's column was about people, plain and simple.

A community newspaper needs a people column, a place for all those stories that don't fit elsewhere in the paper but which really need to be told. Although we are retiring "Our Town" like a star football player's jersey this week, we are pleased to introduce "Main Street," a new people column about the community life of our town.

We didn't have to look far for our new columnist. Mary Ann Cook has been writing cover stories and helping us laugh at ourselves with her Op/Ed pieces in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times for several years. She lives in town and knows the community. In fact, she was once the editor of the old Los Gatos Times Observer.

Several people expressed an interest in writing a people column. What we especially liked about Cook was her sense of humor. She not only knows how to poke around to find out what's happening, she has an ability to see the quirkiness in a situation. She doesn't take herself--or others--too seriously. In fact, she describes herself as being "a bit off plumb," and that's just what we were looking for.

In addition to editing several community newspapers, Cook worked as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Denville, N.J., and a daily in the Houston-area town of Pasadena, where Midnight Cowboy was filmed and where the country & western bar Gilley's is found. She calls Pasadena "one of the last enclaves of the beehive hairdo and the double-knit pantsuit."

She also served as interim executive director of the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature from 1991 to 1992.

We'll be passing tips along to Cook, and we hope you will, too. Meanwhile, when you're on Main Street, N. Santa Cruz Avenue or any of the other places where people congregate in town, and you see a woman lurking about in a trench coat and green eye shades, jotting things down in her notebook, introduce yourself. You may find yourself in "Main Street."

Dale Bryant is the editor of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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