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Saratoga Stereopticon
Many a quaint and curious volume-in spades
By Willys Peck
It's a good thing Edgar Allan Poe was born when he was. If he were around today, he'd no doubt be surfing the 'net as he "pondered weak and weary" over this website and that.
But in 1845 when he uncorked "The Raven," he could write of "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." Now there's a term that resonates with me since it describes, as the saying goes, the one thing I ain't got nothing else but. However, I enlarge on the term "volume" to include newspapers, pamphlets, pictures and just about any other printed material. Still "quaint and curious" though.
For instance, here's a copy of the 1931 "Aero Vista," the mini-magazine that was put out each June by graduating eighth-graders at Saratoga Grammar School. The editor that year was Louise Garrod, now Cooper, and the associate editors were Cecily Fisher, now Kyes, and Joan de Havilland, later known as Joan Fontaine.
Louise had a nice piece in there titled "A Survey of the Improvements in the Saratoga School." In it she observed that this class "was the first to start as the first grade in the new building and spend all its school years there until graduation." Kindergarten, it might be noted, was a latter-day refinement.
The "new building" was and is the 1923 structure that is about to be enlarged. It replaced the 1898 building, which replaced the 1869 building, which replaced the 1854 Sons of Temperance Hall that served as the town's first schoolhouse. All were situated in the same immediate area, making it an historic site, a fact recognized by the City Council in deciding the fate of certain eucalyptus trees.
Other improvements noted by Louise included the addition of a school bus (hey, couldn't we use a few of those now?), the donation of a movie projector, the purchase of a slide machine and the opening by the PTA of a school cafeteria.
Her classmate Joan contributed an essay expressing appreciation for, among other things, "work which has helped to cultivate our creative abilities and imagination, such as poetry, basketry, sketching, nature study, etc." Joan also designed the "Aero Vista" cover on the theme "going up," depicting the Saratoga Grammar School and Los Gatos High School. The kid had artistic talent; she could have made a name for herself. OK, that's right. She did.
Delving further into the stack, here are a few pamphlets put out by the Saratoga Improvement Association, later Club; the Saratoga Board of Trade; and the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, with prose as purple as the prunes depicted on the cover of one of them. (Yes, Virginia, there really is a fresh prune. Around here we don't talk about drying plums into prunes.)
A 1908 pamphlet, "Saratoga Sunshine," quoted the eminent 19th century poet and author Bayard Taylor's thoughts on the Saratoga foothills: "Then let me purchase a few acres on the lowest slopes of these mountains, overlooking the valley, and with a glimpse of the bay. Let me build a cottage embowered in acacia and eucalyptus (!) and the tall spires of the Italian cypress."
A profusely illustrated Saratoga Improvement Club brochure, circa 1920, modestly described the town as the "most delightful place in the world for year-round homes." And in 1928, the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce pulled out all the stops in a handsome booklet that included a poem by Sheldon P. Patterson, whose name is perpetuated on a plaque at the entrance to the former Village Library, now the Book-Go-Round. Titled "The Mountains from Saratoga," its final verse reads:
"And so it is as one's way winds
Through foothills by some deep ravine;
O'er all the beauty that one finds
In every near and lovely scene
The mountains prove their power;
Inspiring power to stir the sense
Of worship, awe and reverence."
"OK, Raven," I imagined myself saying to Poe's dour and morbid feathered friend, "how's that for quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore?"
Quoth the Raven: "There's the door."
Some ravens just don't get it.
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Saratoga, California Since 1975
