This placard announcing the end of Peninsular service suggests that copyediting was an art that could have been put to good use.
Saratoga Stereopticon
Recyling works well for beer and columns
By Willys Peck
OK, folks, here's a pop quiz: What does a topic for this column, any topic, have in common with a beer can? Answer: They both can be recycled. This analogy came to mind while I was groping for the one and dipping into the other of these elements. Why not, I asked myself, write about a topic already covered? Just as an empty beer can has intrinsic value, so might an already-written-about subject in Saratoga history. The choice was easy. I'd just recycled a program for the Saratoga Historical Foundation, giving a talk on the Peninsular Railway interurban line serving this community, in which I covered material presented in 1993. And I'd written a Stereopticon column on the Peninsular in July 1996. I'd say that's a decent interval and the time is ripe for a reprise.
In the dictionary, "peninsular" is the adjectival form of peninsula, making it an appropriate modifier for a transportation system serving what San Francisco society writers were pleased to call the Deep Peninsula. Actually, the enterprise started out in 1902 as the San Jose, Saratoga and Los Gatos (later shortened to San Jose-Los Gatos) Interurban Railroad Co., which proposed to build an 18-mile electrified line between San Jose and Los Gatos. The company experienced the usual transportation-industry vicissitudes of the time, ranging from financing crises to corporate battles over routes, until, some time around 1904, the Southern Pacific Co. emerged as the real power as it did in so many other instances. The Peninsular Railway Co. of California was incorporated under that name in 1909, after the system had been built.
To present-day observers used to seeing empty or nearly empty transit buses, two things should be kept in mind concerning the Peninsular Railway. One, public transportation back then was a moneymaking proposition, hence the epic battles for control, and two, before the advent of motor traffic and paved highways, it made eminent good sense to obtain a franchise to lay interurban tracks alongside and sometimes in the middle of county roads. At least that's the way it seemed to the promoters at the time, but if there was any single factor that shortened the Peninsular's life, this was it. Picture a Peninsular car rumbling along the middle of Santa Cruz Avenue in downtown Los Gatos, or traveling up the middle of Big Basin Way in Saratoga. Automobiles beware; that thing is bigger than you are.
The line opened between San Jose and Los Gatos, through Saratoga, in March 1904. The following year the "Campbell cutoff" was opened, affording a complete loop around the central part of the valley. Later, the line was extended along Stevens Creek Road, through Los Altos and up to Mayfield, or South Palo Alto. It also branched off at Saratoga for a line to the former Congress Springs picnic grounds.
When I gave the recent talk to the Historical Foundation, I consistently used the term "streetcar." Later, an audience member took me to task for this somewhat demeaning reference to what was a true interurban. He was right, of course, but I was reverting to colloquial use at the time. To us country folk, if it had a trolley and ran on rails, it was a streetcar. Today it would be called light rail.
Reproduced on this page is the placard announcing the end of Peninsular service, and those people really needed a copy editor. "Effecting" instead of "affecting" (today, they'd probably say "impacting") and Bascome with an "e". The good Dr. Louis Hazelton Bascom, namesake of Bascom Avenue in San Jose, must have been turning over in his grave.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
