Photograph by George Sakkestad.
Bill Wulf's apartment is literally a museum of local history.
By Clarence Cromwell
It was love at first sight when the young William Wulf laid eyes on a retired Peninsular Railway Co. interurban trolley. No. 61 was a green-and-cream-colored electrical car manufactured in 1902. And seeing it on blocks under a makeshift roof, the wheels removed and stored nearby, broke his 17-year-old heart.
He paid an elderly lady $150--all he had--for the hulking car she'd bought from Peninsular and put in her backyard for a spare room.
But his plan to hire a moving company and transport the 45-foot, 27.5-ton car to a friend's house near Villa Montalvo would have cost him more than $1,000, which he didn't have; he ended up getting his money back, and someone else got the car.
Some 41 years later, it's the same old Bill Wulf. The boy who wanted to save the old rail car grew into a historian intent on documenting or preserving evidence of Los Gatos and Santa Clara County history. At work, he's an orderly for Valley Medical Center. Wulf has also uncovered--and corrected--a great deal of local history; he's accumulated an impressive collection of important artifacts that cover shelves and tabletops in his small San Jose apartment.
Wulf himself has become a colorful character in Los Gatos life.
In certain ways, though, the 57-year-old bachelor is still something like the train-crazed kid who wanted to buy full-sized rail cars. He's put so much energy into collecting historical memorabilia that even the bathroom and what would be the bedroom of his apartment are full of artifacts. Old photos and signs cover the walls. On a cabinet in the living room is the Smith and Wesson six-shooter that Sheriff James Lyndon toted between 1894 and 1898. There are headlamps and lanterns from steam locomotives that chugged up and down local lines, over the Santa Cruz Mountains and around the San Diego area, decades ago. He even has the telegraph key from the old Los Gatos train station on a desk in what used to be the bedroom, before he turned it into an early 20th-century railway telegraph office. He sleeps on a sofa bed in the living room.
Wulf said he always wanted to earn a four-year degree so that he could become a librarian or a history professor. But after he earned his AA degree in history at San Jose City College, he had to go to work at Valley Medical Center to help out his family. That was in 1960.
"In a way, I'm glad it turned out this way. I had more time to devote to reading and collecting," Wulf says.
With a historian's eye for detail, Wulf can recall dates with the familiarity most people reserve for their own birthdays and Social Security numbers. Telling a visitor about his family's move to a house at Daves Avenue and Winchester Boulevard, he recalls that it was on June 10, 1948.
Besides dates, Wulf also knows exactly where to find any of the thousands of documents and photographs filed away in his archives.
Wilma Thompson, another local historian, has met with Wulf once a week for eight years to discuss historical matters; one of them always has something new, she says.
"He's researched it and I've lived it," Thompson explains. She's 75 and has lived in Los Gatos since 1927.
Thompson adds that she's always been impressed by the impeccable order of Wulf's archives.
"His records," Thompson says. "I've not quite seen anything like it."
Local officials, historians and journalists have all learned that it's best to check with Wulf before treading on historical territory. He's straightened out the record more than one time when well-meaning, but mistaken, history buffs broadcast untruths. After politely but firmly chastising the town for celebrating its birthday on the wrong date (Cityhood was granted when approved by the state, but the town recorded only the date when it asked to be incorporated) Wulf went on to inform school district officials recently of the real centennial of Los Gatos High School.
Local newspaper reporters and columnists receive a call from Wulf if they give inaccurate historical data. Some of them, like Los Gatos Weekly-Times columnist John Baggerly, have come to count on him when they want to confirm historical facts.
"He's just one heck of a good historian," Baggerly says.
He started an interview for this article with a good-natured knuckle-rapping for a reporter who used information from a certain history book in an article about Forbes Mill; the book, alas, gives the wrong date for the construction of the mill.
Forbes Mill, in fact, is one of Wulf's specialties. In 1976 he discovered that three letter books containing copies of all the letters written by Forbes Mill founder James Alexander Forbes for a period of years were stored away at the California State Library in Sacramento, so he drove there to make copies. Copies weren't allowed, so he began to transcribe the books by hand, but eventually talked librarians into letting him photocopy 100 important letters that reveal the history of Forbes Mill and of early Los Gatos. Among other things, letters revealed that the mill was built in 1853, and not in 1850 as earlier believed. The discovery was particularly important because the town grew up around the mill, but little information was then available about it or its founder.
"This was my biggest discovery," Wulf recalls with a smile.
He's listed in the bibliographies and photo credits of 50 railroad books and Santa Clara County history books. He made a calendar, illustrating the history of the hospital where he works.
Wulf has also named quite a few of the streets in town; he presented the town with a list of historical street names so they can meet a state requirement to name streets for historically important people and places.
Acquaintances and other historians have urged Wulf to write his own book of local history, but he declines.
He's more the collector.
Wulf says he guesses his love of history grew out of his early love for trains. The thrill of trains may have something to do with where he lived. At his family's first house, a Victorian that stood at 407 N. 4th St. in San Jose, steam locomotives thundered along the tracks no more than 20 feet from the house during the 1950s.
"To have this go by your house when you were a little boy--it was just breathtaking," Wulf says. After the move to Los Gatos, he shared his love of trains with Billy Jones, a retired railroad engineer who got his start as a teen in the 1890s, washing steam locomotives. Jones lived a few blocks from the Wulfs and collected railroad engines. Some of his railroad cars now run on a track through Oak Meadow and Vasona parks.
First it was trains, then it was old trains. Somehow, Wulf says, local history became the next logical step. That explains why a large part of Wulf's collection pertains to area railroads and interurban cars.
Wulf says people probably considered him a little eccentric for championing preservation of old buildings like the Lyndon Hotel long ago, before it was fashionable to do so, and for collecting old things.
He responds, "I guess I was ahead of my time."
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, October 9, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved