Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Señor Gato sketches from the files of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Picture from the Past

John S. Baggerly

Marcellite Wall and her family left their mark in town

The hazy, lazy days of summer have drifted into the past, and Señor Gato is back in school doing what he does best--annoying people, particularly teachers.

Followers of the Señor will recall that in mid-July he mistook a jackhammer for a pogo stick and gave himself a brutal shaking at a street paving fronting Little Village.

The Señor appeared on the pages of the Los Gatos Times-Observer in the 1960s, when Marcellite Wall, a former Disney studio artist, gave Gato life and a streak of mischief.

After being named Los Angeles' top high-school artist, Wall was hired by the studio as an "inker" and spoke the part of Minnie Mouse for a number of years.

When Wall and her husband, Richard, an interior decorator, and three sons came to Los Gatos, she became a clerk at Green's Pharmacy, owned by Fred and Lucia Callis. Wall designed a comic label for the Callises' patented cough syrup. And she relied heavily on cats in her design of a local pageant.

Son Richard Jr. became a local fire chief; Camden, the tallest,was a varsity basketball player at Los Gatos High School and UC-Berkeley; and Mike was known for his pistol-popping balloon act.

From The Terraces, where Lucia and her husband, Fred, reside, Lucia gave an update on the Wall family. After the death of her husband, Richard, Mrs. Wall married local architect Harry Lincoln, designer of Van Meter School. She died two years ago. Richard Jr. lives in retirement in Grass Valley; Camden, unable to pursue a profressional basketball career because of a knee injury, lives in Homer, Alaska; and Mike sells antiques and prints in Seattle.

It was fireman Dick Wall who said, while living and working in Los Gatos, "I have never seen a cat's skeleton in a tree," referring to the many calls for firemen to rescue kitty. Of course, the local laddies responded and did rescue a few felines. Many had escaped their prison by the time firemen arrived.

Señor Gato would surely need rescuing.