Saratoga Stereopticon

Saratoga landmarks are portals to the past

Bank robbed in 1937

By Willys Peck

Prisoner of the Past could be the title of a forgettable paperback novel which, for all I know, actually has been written. The term also suggests some kind of psychological theory--I hesitate to use the term mental illness--that really hits close to home. Paraphrasing the late President Grover Cleveland, "It is a condition which confronts me--not a theory."

The condition of being a prisoner of the past comes about through (a) living too long (b) in the same place. This mental incarceration manifests itself in a tendency, nay, compulsion, to look at familiar landmarks and locations and think of them in terms of what they were 40 or 50, even 60 or 70, years ago. Take, for instance, those two large evergreen trees at the northeast corner of Saratoga Avenue and Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. Back around 1931, Saratoga-Sunnyvale (then called Mountain View) Road consisted of the two present southbound lanes. There was ample room on that corner for a gas station, which is what Shell Oil Co put in there. The proprietor was a man named Atkinson who carried out various craftwork projects when he wasn't pumping gas, and who also thought the premises should have a modicum of landscaping. He put in one of those trees and the other was planted almost 10 years later by the proprietor at the time, George Lanphear, member of an old Saratoga family.

As I have pointed out in a previous Stereopticon column, Saratoga, small as it was, did not lack for automotive service. Were you in need of a lube job? You could take your pick from Saratoga Garage, Varner's Garage, Hansen Motor Service, or the Shell, Mobil, Associated or Richfield gas stations. And if you wanted a horse shod or a plow repaired, there was Bert Bertelsen's blacksmith shop up the street.

I never walk past the Saratoga Inn Place condominiums without thinking of their namesake Saratoga Inn and wondering if the eucalyptus trees at the rear of the property, but visible from the street, are the ones that framed Dorothea Johnston's Theatre of the Glade. Yes, I wrote about it a few years ago, but for us memory cons, it's a place worth revisiting. Dorothea was the daughter of Mrs. Elizabeth Johnston who ran the Saratoga Inn. From 1934 to 1941, Dorothea staged plays, mostly Shakespeare, on the Inn grounds at the base of the hill adjoining Saratoga Creek. Olivia DeHavilland played the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1934 and went from there to Hollywood. At least one other young actress, impressed by the "star factory" mystique, came to Saratoga for a summer's season but did not progress further.

The venerable Hogg Building on Big Basin Way is populated by images from the Saratoga Drug Store, where you could enjoy an ice cream soda while your prescription was being filled; Metzger's Market, where I drove a grocery delivery truck in 1941; Pat Bucaria's barbershop, where the sounds of banjo music could be heard during slack time; and the old post office, where in summertime millionaires from San Francisco found themselves rubbing shoulders with migrant prunepickers in the narrow lobby. Nowadays the millionaires are from Saratoga and prunepickers are an endangered species.

Then there's the bank, now The Bank, of pub note. I can easily conjure up the visage of Lewis Scott, the one-man staff when it was the Bank of America branch in September 1937 and Saratoga had an honest-to-goodness bank robbery. This wasn't a lousy note-over-the-counter caper, this was a couple of young men with a .32-caliber revolver who apparently meant business. Scott had no choice and handed over some cash. But when they left, he dashed out into the street with his--rather the bank's--revolver and fired after the fleeing car, hitting its door post with one shot and another shot hitting the grease rack at the aforementioned Shell station. The robbers subsequently were captured near Fullerton and became prisoners of other than the past.

Maybe they got paroled, which is more than I can get as a prisoner of the past. Even Bill Clinton couldn't have done me any good in his 11th-hour pardon-a-thon.

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