Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Where everyone knows your name

By Daryl Glen

When I returned to Los Gatos and the West Valley, the scene of much of my youth, several years ago, I was unprepared for the changes I would find. The California Actor's Theater, where I ushered when I was a freshman theater arts major at Santa Clara University, was defunct, and the quaint candle shops I remembered on Santa Cruz Avenue had been replaced by stores selling sunglasses.

The Black Watch, where I'd never been old enough to drink when I lived in the area, was still open, however, and one evening I decided to stop in and see what all the fuss was about. I took a seat by the door and was almost immediately greeted by a dapper old man speaking in an Irish brogue, wearing a blazer and cap and sporting a gray pony tail.

"This place is like my living room," he said, claiming the stool next to me. And then, turning to the bartender: "Get my nephew a drink," pointing to yours truly. I had just met Les Quinn, Los Gatos' unofficial, one-man welcoming committee and one of the town's oldest and most vocal residents--a man, according to former Black Watch bartender Mike Garrett, "with one of the biggest hearts in town," and, I was soon to learn, a man with more "nieces" and "nephews" than Los Gatos has cell phones.

Talk to Les, as I did that night, and you might learn that he settled in Los Gatos in 1951, long before most of the current residents had been conceived, let alone closed their first deal. He might tell you he's "lived a life that most men have only dreamed of," and that at age 71, he can still hold his own with the cream of Los Gatos. He might even tell you to go to downtown San Jose and look in the microfilm archives for the local newspapers from the early 1950s if you're skeptical of his claim that he once served "under three flags."

The son of a Dublin used-book dealer--which perhaps explains the literary bent that has caused him to turn the conversation to James Joyce or recite his own poetry to me on more than one occasion--Les enlisted in the Irish Army at the outbreak of World War II, when he was just 14.

"I borrowed my older brother's I.D. card," he explains. "They didn't check you out as closely back then." He was quickly promoted to the elite Irish or King's Guard as a paratrooper, where he eventually made more than 100 jumps, some behind German lines. "I was at both D-Day and the Crossing of The Rhine," he says. When the war ended, the now seasoned soldier of 19 did what came naturally--he re-enlisted, this time with the British Colonial Police, who sent him to Israel, where the new nation-state was being formed. "I stood on a wall in Jerusalem and watched the Palestinians and Israelis snipe at each other," he says. "But I didn't interfere. I was there to keep the peace."

He was later sent to Malaysia, and, as fate would have it, the United States, where he enlisted yet a third time--flag No. 3--for the Americans, just as the Korean conflict was building.

When the war ended and peace and prosperity were the order of the day, Les turned to making his way in the civilian world. Maybe it was the relative privilege of living in Los Gatos, even back then, but Les enrolled in nearby Sullivan's Barber College and eventually opened one of the town's well-known salons, Leslie's, which he operated at the corner of Santa Cruz Avenue and San Mateo Street for 16 years, until 1974, when he sold the shop to become a landscaper.

"I needed to spend more time out-of-doors," he explains. By then he was an inveterate Los Gatan.

Les eventually married and divorced five wives. "All millionaires," he says, adding that he never took a cent when he divorced because he could make his own way with his shop.

Back then his way often led him to entertain one or another of the well-known visitors who sought out the little resort town at the base of the mountains for its ideal climate, among other amenities. Les still speaks of the night he traded stories with Richard Harris at the Black Watch and the time he met Mickey Rooney at the Toll House.

As you might guess, in the Los Gatos of 1998, Les spends less time with Old Hollywood and more with Generation X. Some nights he finds himself surrounded by his own coterie, often of Silicon Valley sirens.

Occasionally he even seems to have a leprechaun or two nearby. Like a true Irishman, Les loves the Lotto, and I've seen him win big more than once in the years I've known him. So far a really big win has eluded him, but when he hits it big, he knows where he's going: "Back to Ireland, just one more time." Still, several friends swear they took him to the airport to catch a flight to Dublin five years ago-- and he beat them back to town in a taxi.

"Cold feet about seeing the relations," he explains. "But next time ... "

On a recent afternoon, I ran into Les on the street at the end of a hard day he had spent clearing a local architect's property. He looked more fit than most of the weary boomers descending on town in their leased BMWs. We walked the mile to Safeway so that Les could buy meat for the stew he was cooking that night in the studio apartment he rents on the edge of town, but where he spends little time, preferring to be with friends in the place where I met him, the place he says is "like his living room."

As we waited together for the bus in front of the supermarket, he gestured to the hills overlooking the town. "I had it all. Porsche, Mercedes, two houses. I lived on $500 a day when that was a lot of money. But you know what? I'm happier now that when I had all that. What makes you happy isn't material things. It's being happy with yourself. And having good friends, like yourself."

There's something for the new breed of Los Gatan to ponder, I thought as the bus pulled up.

Daryl Glen is a Los Gatos Resident.

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