Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

Of Sunday concerts and school memories

Just as it was seeming that the mother lode of marketable memories was petering out, along came a Sunday afternoon concert in the park. This event not only fueled the fires of Saratoga chauvinism, it rekindled pleasant childhood recollections of the concert's bucolic setting.

As to chauvinism: The Saratoga Community Band, which gave the concert, is exactly the kind of aggregation one would expect to find here. A community that, for instance, has fostered Shakespearean talent, ranging from Olivia de Havilland's Puck in the Theatre of the Glade's 1934 A Midsummer Night's Dream to Annette Bening's Juliet in the Valley Institute of Theatre Arts' 1981 Romeo and Juliet, could be expected to do no less when it comes to musical ensemble.

I don't claim any critical expertise, but neither do I have a tin ear, and I rate the community band as top-drawer. Actually, it's a West Valley College course, and about half of the band's 92 musicians are getting academic credit, according to director Craig Northrup. It's hard to think of a kid I had in a Sunday school class a few short decades ago as already middle-aged, but Northrup admits to being 52. He was a member of Saratoga High School's first graduating class in 1962, and he conducted the high school band from 1972 to 1982. In addition, he directed the Vienna International Music Festival from 1980 to 1995. The distinction he brought his home town over the years helped earn him the Citizen of the Year title in 1978.

Describing the community band's makeup, Northrup said the average age of its members is 48, and there are several who are over 80 years old. He noted that there are 26 engineers, as befits Silicon Valley, and nine teachers in the band. Within the band there are six small groups that play engagements for various organizations. The band itself plays three concerts a year.

For an affluent community, the band represents something of a shoestring operation. The members pay regular course fees, and Northrup credits former mayor Karen Anderson with getting the college to approve the community band concept. The college makes rehearsal facilities available without charge, but as to paying for the music needed for concerts, the band must look to the constituency it entertains. That's why at the recent concert, there was a passing of the hat through the large gathering at Wildwood Park.

Wildwood Park. Now there's a spot that for me is fraught with memories. That's because it was just a whoop and a holler from the house at the end of Marion Avenue where my family lived until I was 812. The whooping and hollering generally occurred on Sunday nights during Prohibition, when festivities presumably were being lubricated through the efforts of various bootleggers.

As I recall, we usually referred to Wildwood as the auto camp because there were a number of cottages along the park's upper reaches. My main recollections, however, have to do with walking through the park on my way to Saratoga Grammar School on Oak Street. As such treks go, this one had to be nothing short of idyllic, although I wasn't thinking along those lines at the time. The route from our house was across a ditch that actually was a tributary of Saratoga Creek with a quite respectable waterfall during the winter; along a path that is now Wildwood Way; down a road through the park; then up Fourth Street to Big Basin Way, with its streetcar track and virtual lack of motor traffic; across Big Basin Way and up the steep, unpaved Fourth Street hill to Oak Street. There was a rickety wooden stairway up the hill, just past the old town jail, which was surrounded by a high wooden fence. There were many cracks in the fence, through which I could peer at the jail itself--a small, unprepossessing wooden building with a gable roof and an elongated barred window above the heavy front door, apparently the sole source of light and ventilation.

The jail, used mainly for locking up drunks, hadn't held a prisoner since about the time of World War I, and it was torn down in 1937 to salvage the lumber. Today, there would be a major effort to preserve it.

So this was my daily walk, which took about 15 minutes each way. Because my mother thought my brother and I should have a hot meal and we couldn't afford school cafeteria fare, he and I walked home every noon, since there was a full hour allocated for lunch.

These were some of the things I remembered that recent Sunday, lounging back on the grass and listening to the excellent music of the community band.

Somehow it all blended harmoniously.

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