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Saratoga Stereopticon
Throngs helped landmarks fade into history
By Willys Peck
It could have qualified as a classic senior moment. There I was, standing in the middle of Big Basin Way, unable to determine from supposedly familiar landmarks whether I was at Third Street or Fourth Street or maybe all the way up to Fifth Street. I really couldn't say.
It was reassuring, though, to realize that my confusion wasn't from mental lapse. This seeming disorientation resulted from thousands of people milling about on the town's main street, and I do mean thousands.
According to the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, there were upwards of 27,000 at the Celebrate Saratoga! street dance on Saturday night, Sept. 25. A goodly throng by anyone's reckoning, and a goodly celebration. The huge but orderly crowd seemed well pleased with the array of entertainment and food booths lining the historic route of lumber wagons that once came down from the mountain, giving the thoroughfare its original name of Lumber Street.
Not that Saratoga hasn't known crowds. In the heyday of the Blossom Festival, which had its last full-scale performance in 1941, as many as 10,000 people would converge on the town, and they were nicely accommodated in the natural amphitheater site now occupied by the Saratogan and Creekside condominiums on Saratoga Avenue.
Other local concentrations of humanity come to mind, such as the troop "invasion" that occurred three days after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
This was the subject of an early Stereopticon column in which I described the arrival from Fort Ord of a battery of Army Field Artillery, about 125 men in all, who were encamped along the creek in Wildwood Park and the Blossom Festival grounds. The rains came, the creek rose and Saratoga provided the troops with its own version of combat with the elements.
The men were here until late February 1942, when they were moved to a camp near Palo Alto before being sent overseas.
Meanwhile, back on Big Basin Way, there I was, speculating as to my exact location and, in a moment of woolgathering, trying to visualize the streetcar tracks that ran up the middle of the pavement on the way to Congress Springs picnic grounds. They'd been there, all right, until March 1933, when the Peninsular Railway shut down and Peerless buses took over the service to San Jose, Los Gatos and beyond.
And was it my imagination, or could I discern beyond the brightly lighted street the outlines of Hansen Motor Service and the W.V. Wood trucking yard?
These two establishments, where the Village Center parking lot is, would have a tough time surviving official condemnation today. Hansen's garage was an adequate structure for its purpose and I owed the proprietor an immeasurable debt of gratitude for enabling me to keep my 1931 Chevrolet running in 1941 and 1942, but the collection of junked cars behind and beside the building could have qualified as a first-rate eyesore. Bill Wood's trucking yard wouldn't have garnered any landscaping awards either.
Still woolgathering as my wife and I worked our way through the horde, I thought about the various occupants of the Hogg Building, including its recently departed tenant, the Saratoga Drug Store.
At the upper end was the post office, where my dad had presided as postmaster for 11 years until he retired in 1954.
Next door was Pat Bucaria's barbershop, where the proprietor's banjo music could be heard issuing through the screen door during slack moments in the tonsorial trade.
Next door to that was Metzger's Market, predecessor of Buy & Save, where I cut my mercantile teeth as a grocery clerk and delivery truck driver. The $18 for a 60-hour week seemed adequate in the summer of 1941.
It's a subject I've touched on before in this space, and it comes to mind in this surge of woolgathering reminiscence brought on by celebration. I'm referring to the things Saratoga Village had and lost: auto repair shops, a hardware store, drugstore, variety store and, yes, even a blacksmith shop.
Anyone have use for a batch of wool?
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
