Photograph by George Sakkestad.
For her 100th show, Mary Foster (right) interviewed Jo Ann Stacy, president of the Los Gatos History Club, which is about to celebrate its centennial.
By Mary Ann Cook
Most Los Gatans know Mary Foster through at least one of her myriad civic incarnations--Town Mother Goose, Poet Laureate, curator of the Forbes Mill History Museum, Christmas Parade marshall, Santa Claus, Strawberry Patch Granny. But they may not yet have caught up with her on the video circuit.
Foster plays hostess for Los Gatos--Then & Now, a half-hour show which airs Fridays at 7 p.m. on the local cable station, KCAT-Channel 6. Who better to help preserve the stories of others than the official town storyteller, Mother Goose, now embracing the medium of video?
"I'm told I'm a good listener," she says. Longtime Los Gatans reminisce to offer their personal perspectives of the town and preserve local lore while so doing. Foster has no trouble finding enough interviewees. She does it in one fell swoop--attending the Old-Timers dinner held yearly at Villa Felice in May. She comes home with enough recommendations to last her well through the coming year.
She's never stumped for guests, so her most critical deadline isn't setting up the weekly interview: it's beating the Grim Reaper. Since her interviewees are usually elderly, she's always relieved to get them safely on tape. After all, illness or death could overtake them before she does.
Future generations will be able to absorb local history by viewing and listening to Foster's interviews; recently, she filmed her 100th show. For that landmark, producers Foster and Floyd White picked the Los Gatos History Club, an organization about to celebrate its 100-year anniversary.
Club president Jo Ann Stacy met with Foster on the show to share some highlights. Thus were the two centennials combined in celebration. What with Foster curating the Forbes Mill History Museum and Stacy heading up the History Club, one could safely call it an historic meeting.
For the interview, Stacy was outfitted in turn-of-the century garb-- the 19th century, that is. The two women traded historical names and anecdotes. Stacy said club members are rereading minutes from meetings in years gone by; she recalled that the club served as the Red Cross chapter in World War I and II.
Other History Club memories: Fundraising for Belgian orphans during World War I and sending special boxes to the boys in World War II. Much more recently, the History Club held a fund-raiser to help the Forbes Mill Museum get launched in 1984.
The History Club was started by six women, mostly doctor's wives, with the express purpose of studying history and literature. Stacy said these women could be considered early suffragettes, since it was several decades before women would get the vote.
When Los Gatans gather Dec. 6 for the annual lighting of the Christmas tree, all eyes will be on a tree the History Club planted. Although the club in recent years has become more social than historical, Stacy told Foster the centennial has renewed members' interest in the town's roots.
The tie between the History Club and Forbes Mill, the town's history museum is, of course, a strong one, and Foster says this new emphasis will strengthen it further.
"We'll be able to build a more complete history, both for the museum and the club," she says: The club can enrich the museum's displays, and the museum can enhance the programs of the club.
Despite the fact that she's done 100 of them, each interview, each story is as new and as fascinating to her as it is to the viewer, Foster says. There's never a scarcity of enthusiasm: Foster has an unending supply of that quality. She deliberately does very little preparation for these interviews to keep them fresh and spontaneous.
"I just ask them how they got here, and away they go." Only once did someone succumb to stage fright so much that the interview was never aired.
Interviews are conducted in the Forbes museum, aptly enough. The behind-the-scenes side of Los Gatos Then & Now is done by a trio of video makers called Fledbo, composed of Floyd White, Ed Leary and Bob Peck. They met in a course in video-making in 1989 and have been creating videos together ever since.
The idea for the show may have come from White, or it may have come from Foster; she doesn't remember, but it definitely grew out of conversations the two had about preserving local history. It's been airing for some five years now. There are no rehearsals, no re-takes and no editing of the film, except for overlays of relevant photographs, so whatever is filmed is aired. The show will take a break after the airing of the 100th show on Nov. 8 and 15.
Foster is as enthusiastic about her 100th interview as she was about her first. The first was a trek to the DeSaisset Museum at Santa Clara University to view its Ohlone Indian artifact collection, where two docents describe the Ohlone culture. "I wanted to show what kind of life the very first Los Gatos settlers lived," Foster says.
An Ohlone house is recreated at the museum. Ohlone Indians of today showed museum workers how to make it and even blessed the tule-reed dwelling after it was made to drive out evil spirits.
The Ohlones had a reputation for basket-weaving. Each basket was constructed for a specific use: for gathering, storing, leaching or cooking the acorns that were the basis of their diet. There were baskets for catching eels and other fish and baskets for conveying babies. The tour provided so much to see and hear that the production crew came back for another visit, and the first program became the first two programs.
All 100 tapes of Los Gatos Then and Now are available for viewing at the Forbes Mill Museum. Foster or a docent is there from noon to 4 p.m Wednesday through Sunday. Docents for the museum are always needed, she says.
You can catch Foster there, or you can see her in her most familiar role in Los Gatos, as Mother Goose in the Children's Christmas and Holiday Parade Dec. 7 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. This will be her 18th appearance.
Having sustained two heart-bypass operations and a liver operation, she is under doctor's orders to ride, not walk, in this year's parade. But she'll be there, because ...
She loves a parade. Though mother of six, she still couldn't talk anyone in her family into entering the Children's Parade with her 18 years ago. So she went by herself, little dreaming that her new persona as Mother Goose, Town Storyteller/Poet, would emerge from that mile-long march.
That first time out of the gate, she rented a costume for the weekend, but fell so in love with the long blue dress and the persona she had created that she talked the costume rental shop into selling it to her. That first one wore out, and she has made her own ever since, using the first one as a pattern.
As the town's own Mother Goose, she has written and delivered poems to commemorate public and private events. She has entertained at schools, libraries, senior centers and homes through the intervening years. Today, even with her curator job, she regularly reads poetry to three senior day care groups in Saratoga and San Jose, as well as Los Gatos.
Foster is also the founder/director of Poetry for Everyone, a poetry group that meets the second Sunday of each month at Forbes Mill Museum. She is a former town Poet Laureate and the driving force behind the annual Poet Laureate of Los Gatos competition. She won third place in a national poetry contest sponsored by the International Society of Poets in Washington, D.C.--and on her first try. This year, she picked up a Merit Award from that group, a medal which she wears around her neck.
She credits living near Lexington Reservoir with the strength of her vocal chords and her ability to project to the back of the house in theatrical productions. When called those six children home for meals, she had to make herself heard all over the hillside.
More recently, she taught visiting Japanese students how to write haiku in English and has self-published two books of her own haiku. The Japanese visitors had no idea haiku was so popular in this country. So delighted were they with Foster's workshop that they later sent her a first-class ticket to Japan. "That trip was one of the highlights of my life," she glows.
Foster served as the town Santa Claus for several years running. She's been the Easter Bunny, Strawberry Shortcake Granny--"so many I can't remember them all," she laughs. So many characters all wrapped up in one community volunteer activist.
Each decade has seen a new project for this woman of many parts: She started writing poetry for the first time at 40. In her 50s she became active in community theater and appeared in a number of plays, her favorite being Quilters, produced by the Old Town Theatre.
In her 60s, she grew active in museum work, serving as a docent at Forbes Mill for seven years before becoming its curator a year ago. She has recently reached the 70-year mark, and for this decade she has a couple of books up those copious Mother Goose sleeves.
One will be an autobiography of her later years--middle age and beyond--called A Crocus in Autumn.. Another will be called The Hell of Being a Parent.
Doesn't sound like the historic Mother Goose, but, hey, that's the Mary Foster version. Those books wouldn't be her first: She's written a history of the Lexington Dam area, where she lives. She directed poetry contests at Lexington School for 23 years and wrote a column for the Los Gatos Times-Observer for 12 years about mountain doings.
Foster chose the the crocus title because the flower is a harbinger of spring in cold-weather climes. It comes poking through the snow to proclaim brighter days ahead. It bursts forth with yellow, white and purple flowers in the dark days of February, when you least expect such brightness or abundance.
Similarly has Mary Foster blossomed with her participation in town functions and responsibilities in the autumn of her life.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, November 6, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved