Saratoga Stereopticon
Grammar School alumni plan reunion
By Willys Peck
As the terms are now used, I'm not sure when a custom becomes a tradition, or vice versa. However, I'd like to think that the annual Saratoga Grammar School reunion partakes of both meanings, even though the Y2K event, scheduled for Saturday, July 29, will be only the sixth.
I appreciate these gatherings for several reasons, the main one, of course, being that it's the only time I get to see a lot of people with whom I don't ordinarily cross paths. On a somewhat commercial level, I can always count on the event for at least one Stereopticon column. And the setting in Wildwood Park is rich in memories of my first years at what is now denominated Oak Street School.
Which brings up the matter of when "grammar" was dropped from grade-school names in favor of "elementary," a question that got kicked around at a recent planning committee meeting. There was no consensus, and my suggestion that it was when the schools stopped teaching grammar hardly rated a yuk. But I was able to get a handle on the issue with my collection of old telephone directories, which, with a few gaps, goes back to 1924. What I found was that the January 1952 directory lists Saratoga Grammar School and the one from January 1955 lists Saratoga Union Elementary School. Not having the intervening phone books, I can only conclude that the change occurred in that gap.
This business of seeing people after a lapse of years always packs an emotional impact, especially for us senior citizens. The unspoken question--I'm sure on the part of both parties--is, "When did you get old?" I have the same sensation when I attend reunions of my World War II Army unit, the 20th Armored Division, and realize that some of these superannuated specimens were once driving tanks. Ye gods, I think, you can get hurt doing that. (OK, so what was an old codger like me doing packing an M-1 rifle?)
Wildwood Park, as I have mentioned above and in an earlier column, has academic memories in that it was on the route I walked from our house at the end of Marion Avenue (no, I don't buy the "road" designation) to the school. Back in 1929 when I started first grade--there was no kindergarten then--a child of tender years could walk alone anywhere around here without danger. In fact, I still remember going by myself on the first day of school, my mother having done the necessary preliminaries in signing me up. No big deal. I'd say the distance, along trails, then through the park and up Fourth Street, was something less than half a mile, and it took about 15 minutes.
With a one-hour lunch period, I could go home for lunch, and I still remember how I envied one of my first-grade classmates, who lived at the corner of Oak Street and Komina Avenue, because he could go home and play with his toy cars during recess.
In an earlier column, I commented on the unusual nature of a grammar--read elementary--school being the focus of a reunion. High school and college reunions, yes, but grade schools? Part of the impetus may come from the fact that Saratoga Grammar School originally had eight grades, but even though the range is now kindergarten through fifth grade, there is no limitation on attendees having to be from that earlier era.
Reunion time is always an occasion to dig through files and bring out items like class pictures and the scroll-like panoramic pictures--I have them from 1933 and 1936--when the entire student body, numbering 150 or so, was included. You don't see those panoramic pictures anymore, but they were great in their time. For instance, I have one of the dirigible USS Macon outside the big hangar at Moffett Field.
Other items of school memorabilia include graduation programs and copies of the "Aero Vista," the school annual compiled by eighth-graders. Volume I, No. 1, from Feb. 1, 1930, lists Olivia de Havilland as editor. Her sister, Joan, was an associate editor of the 1931 issue, of which Louise Garrod Cooper was editor.
Apropos of my earlier senior-citizen comment, my status as such was driven home a few days ago in a conversation with a 24-year-old. He had never heard of Olivia de Havilland. I didn't have the heart to ask him about Joan Fontaine. Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
