Photograph courtesy of Willys Peck
This is how those at the Saratoga Grammar School reunion remember their alma mater.
Saratoga Stereopticon
Reunion awakens nostalgia for school days
By Willys Peck
Having eight letters and four syllables, the name "Saratoga" lends itself to what is known to cheerleaders as a "spell yell." Thusly: S! S! S-A-R-A! T! T! T-O-G-A! S-A-R-A, T-O-G-A! S-A-R-A, T-O-G-A! Saratoga! Saratoga! Ya-a-a-a-y!
Have I lost you so soon? I bring it up because I was reminded of this kind of activity at the recent Saratoga Grammar School reunion in Wildwood Park. Not that anyone was leading school yells, however. But these reunions always send me delving into stacks of memorabilia, and one document that I can count on surfacing is the 1931 eighth-grade publication, Aero Vista, to which I have had occasion to refer in an earlier column. The memory-jogger this time was an item in it headed "Yell Leaders," which told of rally assemblies before speedball (a variation of soccer) or baseball games. That's right, there were inter-school games back then, Moreland School being the only opponent that comes to mind.
Being a mere third-grader at the time, I didn't mingle with the big kids, but held them in considerable awe. One such was Jimmie Clayton, who was eighth-grade class president and a yell leader to boot. Also, he was a movie machine operator, which, in my estimation, gave him almost godlike status.
But the indelible memory of him that I retain concerns leading the above Saratoga yell during a rally assembly. He really had the spirit. Jimmie Clayton was of the James A. Clayton family, which subdivided the historic Glen Una Ranch around 1919.
Saratoga also had its own fight song, "Fight On," using the melody of University of Southern California's "Fight On for Victory." Instead of fighting on for USC, however, our words had us fighting on for SUG (Saratoga Union Grammar). At least it rhymed with victory.
That reunion also caught me up short on my knowledge of the components of Saratoga Union School District. I was trying to put together some questions on a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire format, one being: How many districts did it take to make up the present Saratoga Union School District; is the correct number two, three or four? I was all set to give three as the correct number when the sage of Mt. Eden Road, Vince Garrod, who not only knows his prunes but also his school districts, pointed out that the correct number is four.
OK, for $32,000, can anyone out there--besides Vince--name the four districts? You have 30 seconds (silence). Well, here they are: the original Saratoga district covering the central area; Booker School District, where the building was located near the present Saratoga Springs resort on Highway 9; Austin School District, which took the Saratoga district's boundaries into the present Monte Sereno; and, here's where I went down in flames, a portion of the old Lincoln School District, which was divided between the Saratoga and Cupertino districts in the early 1920s.
Of those, the most recent memories center on Austin, where the school building is still in use as the Next Generation Preschool. Saratoga took over the Austin district in the late 1920s, and there were people at the recent reunion who had attended Austin School. This meant they took the streetcar to Saratoga School (all right, you transit purists, the Peninsular Railway was an interurban, but we yokels always referred to the rolling stock as streetcars).
That building had an interesting career of recycling. After the school shut down, it became a grocery store. It has also been headquarters for the Los Gatos Art Association, a Montessori school, and now the preschool.
Once again, my wife contributed to the Saratoga reunion flavor by distributing dried prunes. Pitted, yet, denying one the pleasure of spitting seeds. As far as I'm concerned, pitted prunes might as well be sold as pitted dried plums.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
