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Saratoga Stereopticon
Little breaking news but plenty of characters
By Willys Peck
In a previous Stereopticon column concerning the beginning of my career 50 years ago with the San Jose Mercury Herald, now Mercury News, as west valley correspondent, I commented on the paucity of breaking news stories hereabouts. That isn't to say, however, that there wasn't anything to write about because there was.
Since newspapers don't depend entirely on man-bites-dog episodes for column inches of type, there is room for character studies as brought out in interviews with people who do or have done interesting things. Just as Saratoga was scarce on breaking news, it was rich in, well, characters, people whose stories were worth newspaper space.
For instance, there was the 1951 interview I had with James Tracy Richards, who came to Saratoga for his health in 1889. The fact that he died in his 100th year, in 1954, must say something about salubrious climate.
Not long after coming here, Richards and Henry Plant, the brother of his first wife, who later died, bought 110 acres in the Piedmont Road area where they built several houses. Richards also sold 20 acres to Sen. James D. Phelan, who built his palatial Villa Montalvo there in 1912.
In 1890, Richards joined the Saratoga Congregational Church, one of two assemblages that later joined to form the present Federated Church, and he headed the building committee for that entity's original structure. This is the one designed by famed architect Julia Morgan, who had been a University of California sorority sister of his second wife, Grace Fisher Richards. Richards Hall at the church is named in his honor.
Among early interviewees, in July 1950, was Carolyn Smiley who, with her longtime friend from Boston, Maude Meagher, started construction of the landmark Casa Tierra (House of Earth) at Quito and Sobey roads in 1941. The two women literally created the structure from the earth on which it stands, doing practically all of the work themselves in fashioning the adobe bricks and putting them in place.
Casa Tierra was created to serve as headquarters for their World Youth magazine. The wing of the house used for the editorial office and printing plant was used by a later owner, physicist R. Maurice Tripp, for his research laboratory.
As an aviation history enthusiast, it was especially rewarding for me to interview another Saratoga resident, Harry W. Huking, who, as a United Airlines captain in 1952 was called the nation's ranking commercial pilot.
This was a story angle in itself, but what fascinated me particularly was his experience as a pilot for the U.S. Post Office Department in flying the early air mail. This was when the standard mail plane was the World War I-surplus De Havilland 4, which had earned the opprobrious nickname "flaming coffin" in combat. There was no one shooting at the mail planes, though, and the DH-4 performed well enough for its day.
I can't resist the temptation to quote a couple of paragraphs from my story detailing, as he told it, his experience on a night run over the Sierra to San Francisco:
"By climbing to 12,000 feet, he manages to stay above (a cloud bank over the mountains). He has never before had trouble with the carburetor icing up and the possibility has never occurred to him.
"Soon the motor starts to rev down. Then it stops. The plane goes into the cloud bank in a spin. Huking pulls it out of one spin, but, being unable to tell anything of his direction or position, he falls into another one.
"This keeps up until the plane hits the trees. It is a total wreck, but the mail is saved. So is Huking, who wakes up three days later in a hospital."
With stories like that, who needs breaking news?
Department of Mea Culpa: In my last column, I wrote that, in 1949, Campbell was still five years away from incorporation as a city. It was only three, and I should have known because I covered the whole process for the paper.
Culpa, but hold the Mea: Reference was made in that column to "Rev. Dr. Louis Mendelsohn." What I had written was "the revered Dr. Louis Mendelsohn."
C'est la vie.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
