Saratoga Stereopticon
Sam saves the day with the suggestion of 70
By Willys Peck
It had been some time since I heard from Sam, my acronymic inner voice, Subliminal Argumentative Mouthing, but it was hardly surprising to have him turn up the other day. I was groping for a column topic and that's when Sam gets in his best digs.
"Are your eyes that glazed over or are you looking through cellophane?" was his opening gambit.
"I'm thinking," I said. "Cogitating. Wooing a fickle muse. Please leave me alone."
"I shouldn't be doing this for you, sonny boy, because you shot your bolt a long time ago," said Sam. "But, I'm giving you a topic."
"Don't do me any favors," I said. "But as long as you brought the subject up, what's the topic?"
"Seventy," said Sam. "Think about it. Seventy."
"Seventy what?" I asked.
"Seventy years," said Sam. "Think back 70 years. Can you remember 1932?"
"Like it was yesterday," I said, not mentioning that there are times when I can't remember what I was doing on the previous day, "but so what?"
"If you can't think what to do with it, then you're in the wrong racket, which is what I've maintained all along. Just take the ball and run with it."
With that he was gone.
Yes, I can remember 70 years ago quite clearly. On Feb. 13, 1932, my parents, older brother and I moved from a house at the end of Marion Avenue (OK, we've been through the road-avenue issue before, but there's one road direction sign on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road that agrees with me) to a new house on Orchard Road.
Actually it was called Oakwood Avenue then, and by the time the name was changed in the early 1950s, the orchards were long gone from that street. I always thought "Oakwood" had been derived from Oak Place, at the upper end of the street, and the fact that the Wood family owned the orchard property that was subdivided along much of its length.
I recall my folks saying that the lot and the house--which they'd had built largely according to their design--cost around $5,000. This was at the bottom of the Depression, when, to a family in extremely modest circumstances, $5,000 seemed comparable to the national debt. Having served in the Army in World War I, my dad had been able to get a veteran's loan.
In 1932, I was at Saratoga Grammar School in the fourth grade during the first part of the year. In my sunset years, I think of the teacher, Meredith Rowell, as an extremely attractive brunette. Back then, I regarded her simply as an excellent teacher who saw to it that we got our work done. One of the things that stands out about 1932 was the way the school went all-out in commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Washington. You'd have thought he was the Father of His Country or something, what with the dramatics and pageantry that went on.
It must have been in May of that year that we got our first look at the dirigible U.S.S. Akron as it flew over on its way to the Sunnyvale Air Base. I always liked the story, probably true, that Sunnyvale got the location credit even though the field was in Mountain View, the reason being that mountains weren't something people in dirigibles wanted to contend with.
I remember our family driving up to see the Akron after it had been moored to a temporary mast. After driving some distance along a road overhung with trees, we all at once caught sight of the silvery mass that was the dirigible, absolutely the largest movable object one could imagine. Images like that tend to stay with one.
The Akron was here only for a matter of weeks, then returned to its base at Lakehurst, N.J. It went down in a storm off the coast of that state in early April 1933, with a loss of 73 men. Meanwhile, preparations were being made here for the arrival of the Akron's sister ship, the U.S.S. Macon, which was to be based at what later became Moffett Field.
Another 1932 memory involves the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt when he defeated Herbert Hoover who, rightly or wrongly, was getting much of the blame for the Depression. Being something of a local boy--his home was in Palo Alto--Hoover had much support around these parts. It was also the pivotal election that decided the fate of the 18th Amendment, the end of Prohibition, and around grammar school there was a lot of talk about "wets" and "drys."
Probably my greatest achievement in 1932 was learning how to ride a bike--a borrowed one, of course.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
