Depending on whom you talk to, the printed word as we know it--ink applied to paper--is on the way out. Knowledgeable prophets of the Information Age speak of entire libraries on a single disk, hand-held terminals for ease in reading and electronic communication bordering on mental telepathy. As for newspapers: Dinosaurs, move over.
Being well into the twilight years, I have hopes that this potential will not be fully realized on my watch. The printed word was responsible for my being in Saratoga, as well as for my being able to stay here, and, frankly, I'd miss the medium.
In 1921, my dad, Llewellyn B. Peck, was assistant editor of the Berkeley Gazette. His deep-seated ambition, though, was to edit a country weekly, which he considered the only worthwhile branch of journalism. As he told it, he had reconnoitered Saratoga some time before, traveling here on his Columbia chainless bicycle. He liked what he saw.
Saratoga was about as country as you could get, and there already was a weekly newspaper--printed in Los Gatos--the Saratoga Star, which had been founded in 1917 by one Lewis C. Dick. Borrowing the money from his mother, my dad bought the paper in 1922. The first issue listing him as publisher came out Friday, March 31, 1922.
The big news then was the Saratoga Blossom Festival scheduled that weekend. Given the vicissitudes involved in growing prunes and apricots, picking a date for the festival was a real crapshoot because no one could be sure months ahead of time just when the blossoms would be at their peak. The 1922 festival included an address by Gov. William D. Stephens and musical selections by a 200-voice Festival Chorus and the College (now University) of the Pacific orchestra.
This all took a lot of advance planning and educated guesswork about the blossoms. In 1922, it seems, they were off by a couple of weeks; the blossoms wouldn't be at their prime until later, but it was either hold the festival then or call it off. One of the festival features was a downtown street dance, with "music by wireless."
I'd like to think my dad found some fulfillment in publishing his own paper, but his journalistic talent exceeded his business acumen. Saratoga just wasn't big enough to support a paper; I'd say the Star was about 35 years ahead of its time. The situation was exacerbated, I think, by the fact that my dad always felt a Saratoga newspaper should be printed in Saratoga.
Today, with the word processors and offset presses available even to small publications, this wouldn't be such a daunting challenge. But 75 years ago, it meant installing a flatbed cylinder press, a Linotype for casting the type, and a job press for commercial printing work. The printing plant was at the rear of the post office, then located on Lumber Street (Big Basin Way) in the brick building that now houses a drug store, karate school and a hairstyling studio.
Rather than give up on Saratoga, my dad met the problem by expanding. In 1925, he had the printing plant moved to Los Gatos and established the Los Gatos Star, in competition with the Los Gatos Mail News. Although the Los Gatos and Saratoga versions of the Star each had its own flag or nameplate, the content essentially was the same, with maybe a story or two changed because of locale.
The two Stars, Los Gatos and Saratoga, were published at 37 E. Main St., Los Gatos, in an old building that was a casualty of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In 1929, Hiland L. Baggerly, who had acquired the Mail News in 1927, purchased the Star newspapers from my dad. For two years, my dad maintained a commercial job shop on the premises as Peck the Printer. Along with the printing business, he was West Valley correspondent for the San Jose Mercury Herald.
In 1931, Hiland Baggerly--father of John Baggerly of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times --hired my dad as editor of the Los Gatos Mail News and Saratoga Star, a job he held for 12 years.
Then in 1943, he left newspaper work to become Saratoga's postmaster. He was back in the same building where he had published his newspaper 20 years earlier. But this time he was in the front office.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, June 19, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved