I do remember, though, that it was a bit of a hike, and I also remember an oak tree. Scanning the skyline today, and the occasional oak trees thereon, I think our vantage point may have been somewhere around the present Parker Ranch development. Back then, of course, there were almost no houses in that hillside area and the trek was through fields and woods.

About the Macon: It was a rigid airship ("lighter-than-air" in the technical sense, and I always liked the poetic connotation), not to be confused with the much smaller non-rigid blimps that were based at Moffett in later years. A dirigible had a framework made of an aluminum alloy called duralumin. A blimp had no such framework but was simply an elongated gasbag, with control surfaces, a control cabin and engine.

The Macon was 785 feet long, or, to use the usual comparison, longer than two-and-a-half football fields. Its maximum diameter was almost 133 feet, comparable to the height of a 10-story building. Most of its interior was filled with gas cells containing 6 1/2 million cubic feet of helium. There was also space for a hangar containing five airplanes, crew's quarters and ballast cells, and a control car outside the framework.

With something that size, even though it was a few miles away, we kids had what amounted to a grandstand seat as the dirigible nosed down, was pulled to earth by ground crews and guided into the monstrous hangar that had been completed just a few months before. It truly was a sight to remember.

For the next 16 months, one could say that the Macon was a fact of life in Saratoga. It never landed here, of course, but because of the proximity of the air base (we called it Sunnyvale Air Base originally, and I'll get to that in a minute) the dirigible was at a fairly low altitude as it passed over on arrival and departure and we could hear the eight engines, sounding like a swarm of angry bees. From a corner of the Saratoga Grammar School grounds, we could look across the valley to the hangar and, when the doors were open, see the dirigible's giant fins.

Not only could we see it in the air but, after a short drive, could look at it up close in the hangar when it was at the base. I suppose the word "terrorism" was in the vocabulary at the time, but it had no relevance at Moffett Field in those Depression years. Joe Sixpack could take his family there, check in with a guard at the gate and go into the hangar. The Macon filled most of it, but I also remember a blimp, the J-4, sharing the space. Usually one or more of the airplanes were on the hangar floor, fenced off by ropes.

On one memorable occasion, my dad pulled some wires as editor of the weekly paper in Los Gatos, and maybe as a reserve Army officer, and arranged to take my older brother and me on board the dirigible itself. We got to go in the control car and also see the crew's quarters, but the airplane space and launching mechanism were off-limits. Like everything else involving the Macon, though, it was a memorable experience.

As to the Sunnyvale Air Base, legend has it that, although the field properly was part of Mountain View, the authorities didn't want the word "mountain" connected with anything involving dirigibles. The situation was solved when the base was named for Adm. William A. Moffett, chief of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, who was one of the 73 men who died when the Macon's sister ship, the USS Akron, went down off the New Jersey coast in April 1933.

The Macon's days were also numbered. It was the fifth U.S. dirigible, and one of only two surviving at the time. The other was the German-built USS Los Angeles, which had been decommissioned in 1932 and ultimately was broken up for scrap in 1939.

The Macon's demise occurred on Feb. 12, 1935. She had been taken up while some structural repairs still were in progress, and it apparently was structural failure that caused the airship to fall into the ocean off Point Sur. Unlike the Akron, on which 73 men were lost, just two died in the crash of the Macon.

In Saratoga, we learned of the loss from newspaper deliverers driving through the streets in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 13, shouting the tidings. It was a major story and they sold papers. It was a sad day.