Saratoga News Birdcalling columnist remembers Mrs. Rice well By Willys Peck A couple of columns ago, I referred to a pantheon of celebrities associated with Saratoga, this in connection with Josef Sigall, the internationally known portrait painter whose name lives on in Sigal (missing an "l") Drive in the Saratoga hills. I should have mentioned among those luminaries one Bertha Marguerite Rice, some of whose activities were centered on the same hillside that sheltered the artist. Her project there was the Boys' Outing Farm which, if I have my geography right, was a little farther up Norton Road. Needless to say, "outing" back then was not sullied by its present verbal connotation concerning sexual orientation. An outing was, in its dictionary sense, an excursion or pleasure trip, which is exactly what the homeless children she encountered in San Francisco needed. We're not talking present-day homeless, we're talking 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire homeless, whose predicament was essentially the same. She was instrumental in organizing the Boys' Outing Farm Association, which maintained the Saratoga operation until 1938 as a place for city children to experience country living. In its later years, it was known as Camp Roland, named for Mrs. Rice's son. My own memories of Mrs. Rice are, to express it mildly, vivid. This is because she latched on to me at a time when, because of a laryngeal quirk, I was able to imitate birdcalls, a talent that disappeared with the years. But back in the mid-1930s, I was at my reluctant height and Mrs. Rice would include me in presentations she made at schools concerning nature study, wildflowers and bird lore. I recall especially a couple of these, at the old Moreland School and at Campbell Grammar School. The 1894 Moreland School building, at Saratoga and Payne avenues, still had a bell that was rung by means of a rope extending through the ceiling of a second-floor corridor. I was impressed because Saratoga Grammar School had to get along with electric bells. As Roland Rice was driving us to one of these schools in their Model T Ford coupe, I remember Mrs. Rice remarking that she was getting $5 for the gig. What I got was fame, which was OK with me, only I wished she hadn't kept introducing me as "Willard." Mrs. Rice's life revolved around wildflowers, bird lore, conservation and, in her earlier years, the women's suffrage movement. In each of these areas she played key roles. For example, during the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, she got Gov. Hiram Johnson to proclaim April 24 as California Wildflower Day. At the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, she gave lectures and supervised programs during Wildflower Week. In all of these nature-lore enterprises she was assisted by son Roland, who was an expert photographer. In that black-and-white photo era he used watercolor paints to give the pictures a lifelike hue; they were truly works of art. In setting up a wildflower exhibit at, say, the Foothill Club, she would include actual blooms arranged in test-tube racks to augment the pictures. In December 1933, she set up such an exhibit in Renn's store, now the Village Rendezvous, and conducted a contest for schoolchildren to see who could identify the most wildflowers. Mrs. Rice also was an author, producing books on Women of Our Valley and Builders of Our Valley. In 1959, at the age of 87, she was working on a book about personalities in the San Jose area. Born in Iowa, she had lived in the Santa Clara Valley since 1894, a lot of that time in Saratoga. She and her husband, Warren L. Rice, were divorced early in this century. Mrs. Rice died in 1962 at the age of 90, having been preceded in death by her son. Her spirit lives on in the work of various environmental groups. Sigall Spinoff: My announced intention to get the extra "l" on Sigal Drive is small potatoes alongside another name correction that could be made. Would you believe "Stephens Creek Boulevard"? According to Mary Lou Lyon of Cupertino, a well-known historian of California and the West, that's how the thoroughfare, creek and reservoir named for Capt. Elisha Stephens should be spelled. More on this later. [ Back to Contents Page | Saratoga News Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Saratoga News, December 30, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.