Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

Newspaper clippings make past live again

Just when I think I'm ready to discard piles of outdated documents that could serve no useful purpose, one surfaces that somehow saves the whole collection. It's happened before with this source, and it happened again with the file of miscellany maintained by my dad, Llewellyn B. Peck, a veteran newspaperman given to looking things up, even during his later years as Saratoga postmaster.

This particular fragment was a clipping from the San Jose Mercury Herald, now Mercury News, from May 1940, with a headline: "Wealthy Widow Suffocated In Saratoga Fire." Do I ever remember that one!

Our family lived on Orchard Road at the time, next to the "wealthy widow," Mrs. Mary Y. Patterson, whose house was on a large lot, landscaped and fenced. She was the widow of Raymond Patterson, described in the news story as onetime dean of Washington, D.C., newspaper correspondents, and was the aunt by marriage of Joseph Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, and Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson, publisher of the Washington Times-Herald, both famous names in journalism.

I remember Mrs. Patterson very well. She was friendly and extremely bright, an inveterate smoker and an omnivorous reader. In those years, my mother was giving book reviews at adult education classes in the San Jose area and up the Peninsula, and she and Mrs. Patterson used to have long visits over the side fence, discussing books and current events.

On the night of May 10, 1940, I had taken a girl to the junior-senior prom at Los Gatos High School, getting back around midnight since I had to be at a housecleaning job the first thing Saturday morning. About 4 a.m., the fire siren atop the Saratoga Garage--now the firehouse--set to its ear-shattering wail, and my parents were aghast to be awakened to the all-enveloping glow only a hundred feet or so from their bedroom window. Mrs. Patterson's house was aflame, and she was in it.

As events were reconstructed later, it appeared that Mrs. Patterson had fallen asleep while sitting in her chair reading. It seemed likely that a forgotten cigarette had started the blaze and Mrs. Patterson, blocked from the front door by flames, had been overcome by smoke before she could exit through a rear screen porch. She was not burned herself, and rescuers carried her in a blanket to our house, where she was laid out on the living room floor. But it was too late.

The all-volunteer Saratoga Fire Department did a masterful job in confining the flames to the front part of the house, and they took pains not to get water on the vast collection of books. Perhaps in consequence, they had to be called back a second time to extinguish flames that broke out on the roof.

There was a sequel the following year that gave an almost bizarre twist to the tragedy. That occurred when the house was bought by Arthur and Anne Dodge Bailhache, she being the resident director of Montalvo for the San Francisco Art Association, which at that time maintained the center for the arts. It was not surprising that she had definite ideas about decor for the house that was being rebuilt on Orchard Road.

For one thing, there was that mantelpiece, a heavy section of southern pine that Mrs. Patterson had shipped from Washington, D.C., where it had been removed from the White House during a 1902 remodeling. Historic or not, to Mrs. Bailhache the mantel was "out of proportion to the small room and looks clumsy," according to the Mercury Herald, which ran an article and picture on Feb. 15, 1941. Mrs. Bailhache didn't care what happened to the wood, and therein lay a story.

The picture and caption accompanying the article illustrated some basic newspaper tenets of the time, which could be summarized as follows: (a) If you're using a picture of an inanimate object, e.g. a mantelpiece, include a pretty girl. Relevance is not a factor. (b) If, indeed, the girl is pretty, say as much in the caption for the benefit of obtuse readers. (c) If possible, work in some play on words, however lame.

The caption, in part, read as follows: "But no mantle (the wrong spelling, denoting a cloak, was consistently used in the story. Send that copy editor to the showers) could be 'board' when topped by pretty Patricia Swetland (she was perched on the mantel in a quasi-cheesecake pose), dramatic student of Miss Dorothea Johnston in Saratoga."

There is hardly a denouement. I don't know what happened to the historic mantel. I do know that one Christmas, I think it was 1932, Mrs. Patterson gave my brother and me pieces of wood and some nails said to have come from the White House. I have them yet today.

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