Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

The face of business has changed over years

A recent incident reminded me of a column I wrote several months ago concerning the changed business climate in downtown Saratoga. The earlier column was prompted by the likelihood that the Saratoga Drug Store would close as the result of disagreement over a lease. Fortunately that never came to pass, and the Saratoga Drug Store, something of a landmark, is still with us, as I hope it always will be.

In the recent occurrence, a friend told me how his sister-in-law, who was leaving for the East Coast, went downtown to get a paperback book to read on the plane. It seemed a reasonable enough expectation that, in a town where overall literacy is comfortably above the third-grade level, there would be a bookstore. There wasn't.

Had she known of it, and had her schedule jibed with the open hours, she might have found something at the Book-Go-Round, the used-book outlet operated by the Friends of the Library. Or, had she journeyed to the Argonaut Shopping Center, she might have found something at Longs Drug Store.

If she had tried a sufficient number of months earlier, she would have found the honest-to-goodness Saratoga Book Market. Over a 20-year period, there has been such a store at three different sites in the Village. The first one, if memory serves, opened in 1978 in Plaza Del Roble in a location that has seen several businesses come and go. I remember the opening because the star, in more than one sense of the word, was Joan Fontaine. She was there autographing copies of her just-published book, No Bed of Roses.

"I don't believe it," she said when I told her my name on presenting a copy for autographing. "I don't believe it."

This surprise, feigned or otherwise, was very flattering, since we really never had been acquainted, even though we attended Saratoga Grammar School at the same time. She graduated in 1931 when I was in the second grade. In recent years, however, my wife and I have been graciously received as guests in her home in Carmel Highlands.

All of which brings up a parenthetical observation concerning the generation gap. Every now and then, I am rudely reminded that there are people old enough to vote, or even buy a drink, who have never heard of Saratoga's homegrown movie stars, sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. It seems incredible, but there it is. Remedy: Look for late-night TV showings of Rebecca (1940) and To Each His Own (1946). They're out there somewhere.

Back to the bookstore. When the first location closed a few years later, the proprietor told me that the only really good business day he had was when Joan Fontaine was there signing books.

Admittedly, in this age of Barnes & Noble and the availability of books through the Internet, the independent bookseller's lot is not a happy one.

The most recent bookstore seemed to do a good enough business, so many Saratogans were sorry to see it go.

And so we segue neatly into the matter of Saratoga's changed commercial image. I think it can be summarized by saying that, today, Saratoga is the kind of place where you can buy a new luxury car but you can't get a lube job; where you have a choice of salons to care for your nails but you can't buy any of the hardware variety; where groceries can be delivered but you have to push the cart out to your car in the parking lot.

It was not ever thus. Within living memory, there was a new-car dealership at Varner's Garage, corner of Oak Street and Saratoga-Los Gatos Road, now a vacant lot; two other auto repair shops besides Varner's, as well as four service stations; a lumberyard that sold builder's hardware, joined in later years by a hardware store; and four grocery stores where home delivery was a given. All of these, plus many other useful establishments, were in what we think of as the Village. One by one, they gave way to other uses, the latest to go being the excellent car repair and service facility at the only downtown gas station, now Union 76.

Not being either an economist or a sociologist, I won't try to offer a theory as to the forces through which these changes were wrought. All I know is that I miss these places. Maybe all this should just be chalked up as the bleatings of an old man who has lived too long in one place.

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