Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

Cherish Montalvo, the jewel of Saratoga

With its atmosphere of affluence, this is the kind of town where you would expect to find a Villa Montalvo. It's simply your basic hillside pad with a view; a tad ostentatious, perhaps, but one that goes with the territory. The Great Gatsby is alive and well in Saratoga.

When Sen. James D. Phelan built the place in 1912, however, Saratoga was just a small agricultural town, only a few years removed from its lusty lumbering antecedents. There were, to be sure, a few creditable mansions already, and more were to follow, but Montalvo easily was the crown jewel. The story of Montalvo and its squire is fairly well known: how Phelan entertained the rich, famous and powerful, how he was devoted to the arts and wanted to see his manor preserved for their encouragement, how a small cadre of townspeople saw to it that these ideals were preserved when there was a very real threat that the property would be sold for real estate development. It's a rich segment of Saratoga history and worthy of telling and retelling. Few communities have such a rare asset in their midst, and Villa Montalvo should never be taken for granted.

I have my own Montalvo memories, of a relatively trivial nature, to be sure, but, I'd like to think, part of the fabric of history. They come into focus this time of year when the Phelan Library Committee, of which I am pleased to be a member, sponsors the annual Montalvo Book Fair. This year's event, on March 28, will have 25 dealers whose offerings will include rare books and prints, the kinds of things that the senator himself probably would have wanted to acquire.

But about those memories. I can't say that I actually ever saw Sen. Phelan, but I do remember my dad talking about him, especially the time he said the senator was going to shoot off some fabulous amount of fireworks on the Fourth of July. That must have been in 1930, the summer of Phelan's last illness, and the fireworks display never happened. The senator died on Aug. 7, a couple weeks before I turned 7.

I like the story told by the widow of James T. Richards, a native New Yorker who came to Saratoga for his health in 1889 and died in 1954 at the age of 99, which says something about healthful climates. When he came here, Richards and Henry Plant bought 110 acres in the Piedmont Road area, opening that section for development, and Richards sold Sen. Phelan 20 acres where the villa now is.

After Richards' death, I remember his widow telling of the time he refused an invitation to lunch tendered by Sen. Phelan because he didn't approve of the goings-on at Montalvo. I didn't press the point with Mrs. Richards, but I suspect it had to do with Prohibition and the fact that dyed-in-the-wool Irishman James Duval Phelan wasn't exactly running a temperance operation up at the Villa.

On a strictly personal level, my Montalvo memories go back to the late 1930s, when the San Francisco Art Association's Montalvo Foundation was making a stab at keeping the grounds open to visitors and hired high school students to be on hand Sunday afternoons to park cars and keep an eye on things. I pulled this duty a few times, substituting for my brother, and the really memorable feature was the turntable in the garage. There were very few visitors, maybe one or two cars per afternoon, so that left ample time for doing homework and for the fun-house feature in the garage. And it was a garage--I'm not sure when it became a carriage house, but it wasn't on my watch. Anyway, one could get on the turntable, which was used for positioning cars in the octagonal building, and, with one leg, get that thing revolving to the point where centrifugal force would throw one off.

I think, too, of dramatic productions in later years when three generations of my family performed in the outdoor amphitheater, named for Lilian Fontaine. I was in a Gwendolen Penniman production for the Olympiad of the Arts; my dad had been in a Lilian Fontaine production, and my son appeared there with the Valley Institute of Theatre Arts, or VITA. On another level of drama, I became a vicarious participant in the 1951 trial when the San Francisco Art Association and certain heirs of Phelan's tried to break the charitable trust as being impossible to fulfill. As a San Jose Mercury reporter, I got a daily rundown from one of the Montalvo Association spokesmen in attendance at the trial and wrote the story as if there reporting it.

The result of that trial is a bright spot in local history and a tribute to those who brought it about. Cherish that landmark.

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