Saratoga Stereopticon

Local library started out as a box of books in a drugstore

By Willys Peck

He's back. I'm referring to Sam, my acronymic inner voice, Subliminal Argumentative Mouthing, who can be counted on to intrude on my consciousness in moments of stress, indecision or just plain ruminating. One of his favorite themes is the notion that, after more than five years, I should be packing it in, column-wise. "Towel-tossing time" is his picturesque metaphor.

"Well, Sonny Boy, I see you're reduced to using a crude device to set up another column," smirked Sam. "When are you just going to call it quits?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I harrumphed.

"I'm talking about your last column and your reference to Mrs. Grace Richards being a sorority sister of Julia Morgan, the architect, as if Mrs. Richards' name was a household word around here. I would say that 98.5 percent of your two dozen or so readers have no idea of who Grace Richards is, or was. You just didn't say. Apparently, though, she was from Saratoga, so that gives you an excuse to use her as the subject for another column. Saves you from writing an otherwise awkward preamble. I call that a cheap trick."

"I call that ingenuity," I said. "I'm building anticipation. Suspense."

"If that's suspense, then 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' is a cliff-hanger," snorted Sam.

Sam's snide comments aside, Mrs. Grace Richards and her husband, James Tracy Richards, are suitable column subjects, as they have been previously, because they both left their imprint on this community. One of the really significant aspects of their respective lives is the fact that James T. Richards came to Saratoga for his health in 1889 and died 65 years later in his 100^th year. Got that, real estate people? You can sell more than just prestige: healthful climate!

With Henry Plant, brother of his first wife, who later died, Richards bought 110 acres in the Piedmont Road area, where he and Plant built several houses. Richards also sold 20 acres to Sen. James D. Phelan, who built Villa Montalvo there in 1912. His second marriage was to Grace Fisher, member of a well-known missionary family, and the couple played an important part in the development of the Federated Church.

Not only was his wife's college association with Julia Morgan a factor in having that distinguished woman design the church, but Richards himself headed the building committee for the structure, which was built in 1923 and dedicated the following year. He also served on the church's board of deacons for 25 years. Richards Hall in the church is named in his honor.

Mrs. Richards was also a force in the community, and it might be said that she gets as much credit as anyone for the building of Saratoga's first real library, now occupied by the Book-Go-Round, at Oak Street and Saratoga-Los Gatos Road. Saratoga's library started out as a box of books in a drugstore and later occupied the former Christian Church building on Big Basin Way, after the members of that flock joined the Congregationalists to form the Federated Church.

When that facility proved inadequate, the women's Foothill Club took the lead in promoting a library building for the town, and the club president appointed Mrs. Richards to head a community committee to achieve that end. The effort was successful, and the new library opened in 1927.

One of my favorite memories of Mrs. Richards involves the time in 1958 when my wife and I invited her to our house on her 90^th birthday. There were other guests, and we were all having our lunch outside, overlooking the creek. Mrs. Richards was telling how, when Sen. James D. Phelan invited him to Montalvo for lunch, her husband declined because, good churchman that he was, he disapproved of the kind of things going on up there. She did not dwell on specifics, but it may well have had to do with Prohibition and drinking. Sen. Phelan was not, to use a term then current, a "dry."

Her narrative was enhanced by the fact that, as she spoke, one leg of her chair was slowly sinking into a gopher hole. She never lost her equilibrium, however, and was soon helped to solid ground.

An earlier memory is of the time in 1934 when Mr. and Mrs. Richards had some young relatives visiting them and they invited my brother and me to have lunch with them. Afterward, they took us to hike the trails of Montalvo, where they had special entrée in the days before the San Francisco Art Association was making any effort to put the estate to its intended use.

And that night of March 31, Easter eve, I went to a concert at the Foothill Club given by the Whittier College Glee Club. In the bass section was one Richard M. Nixon. Was there something portentous in the fact that one of their songs was "The Last Roundup"?

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