This practice—I prefer to think of it as a rite—has certain ramifications, which I explored in a column a year ago using the Augean Stables as a metaphor. As you will recall from mythology, cleaning the stables of their 30-year accumulation of animal waste constituted one of the 12 labors of Hercules, who accomplished the task by diverting a couple of rivers through the stalls. I liked the imagery, since it somehow suggested the endless piles of books, papers and documents that I have accumulated over the years but can never summon the resolve to dispose of.

Now and then, though, I like to think of some of this material as being useful. For example, just recently I had some correspondence with actress Olivia de Havilland (OK, so I'm a name-dropper) and got to wondering about her last dramatic performance in Saratoga before she went to Hollywood. I knew it was as Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I was curious as to who some of the other players were.

So I dug out the program—it was on June 22 and 23, 1934—and there were some familiar and not-so-familiar names. The play was the first produced by Dorothea Johnston in her Theatre of the Glade behind the old Saratoga Inn, and the production was designed and directed by Frederick Stover, who also played Bottom the weaver.

Olivia, incidentally, had just graduated from Los Gatos High School and had a scholarship to Mills College in Oakland. But she went directly from this Saratoga production to Hollywood for a screen career that was to be capped by two Academy Awards.

Stover had been a standby in Miss Johnston's shows. I remembered him as the gryphon in the 1933 production of Alice in Wonderland, in which Olivia played Alice and I played the duck. In 1940 he played Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a show that he also designed and directed.

Another familiar name from the 1934 Dream production was Robert Baines as Demetrius. He played Romeo in Miss Johnston's Romeo and Juliet in 1938 and later went onto an acting career on the New York stage. Several of my grammar school contemporaries were in the 1934 show, and, if I hadn't been with my family on vacation at the time, I no doubt would have been recruited to be among the "other fairies attending their king and queen."

As it was, I did get a part, as Starveling the tailor, in Miss Johnston's 1940 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Digging my way to the theater programs, I came across a couple of 1949 copies of the Saratoga Observer, in which "Death Curve" was a hot topic. Never heard of Death Curve? Well, if you've ever driven over Mendelsohn Lane between Bonnie Brae Way and Piedmont Road without incident, you can consider yourself a survivor. Some of us thought of the Death Curve appellation as overkill (to make a bad pun) because it really didn't seem that hazardous. There may well have been a fatal accident or accidents there, but so had there been on other turns that didn't rate that notoriety.

In any event, the state straightened the section in 1950, just 10 years after realigning the segment that resulted in Austin Way. Now there was a piece of highway that needed straightening. Austin Corners, where Quito Road comes in, and even the bottom of the brick hill where Bainter Avenue comes in, saw their ample share of accidents.

The Death Curve realignment didn't take place without controversy. The Saratoga District Improvement Association went on record as being against the project because it was seen as a step toward bringing a "four-lane superhighway" through the Village.

Four lanes of Saratoga­Los Gatos Road into the Village? Somebody is going to have to do something about that stone wall.

Which brings up another long-forgotten document that surfaced—a 1956 proposal by the Santa Clara County Planning Department, issued just after Saratoga incorporated as a city. The county planners suggested that the city create a pedestrian mall along Big Basin Way in the Village, with vehicular traffic prohibited. That traffic would have been routed to a "circumferential parkway."

Have we been missing something all these years?