Being designated a correspondent rather than a reporter meant that I could carry a camera, since the newspaper's Central Coast department, to which I was assigned, handled the "country beats," as in out in the sticks. We're talking rural here.

The West Valley beat comprised Los Gatos, Saratoga and Campbell and the intervening territory. Of these communities, only Los Gatos was officially a city, even though when it incorporated in 1887 it was as a "town." The only other such municipal designation in Santa Clara County is the town of Los Altos Hills, incorporated in 1956, the same year as Saratoga.

As can be imagined, the West Valley of the time was not a hotbed of breaking news. The most came from Los Gatos, which, being a corporate entity, had a town council, planning commission and police department, all of them yielding news stories at one time or another. For instance, I regularly covered town council meetings, dictating my stories to the Central Coast desk, and they appeared the next morning.

For all its metropolitan overtones, Los Gatos was still a small town, exactly one square mile in area, with a population of 4,000. Saratoga's population probably was about 1,200, and I'm not sure about Campbell. Incidentally, the latter community was the next incorporation, in 1952, and it was a good source of news stories.

Los Gatos had two mortuaries at the time. Each operated its own ambulance, which was one way of generating business, especially on the recently opened Highway 17 over the mountains. Part of my daily routine was checking the mortuaries; deaths were news. Back then, you didn't have to have been involved in some newsworthy activity during your lifetime in order to get a significant amount of ink on your demise; all you had to do was die.

The school districts always were a fairly steady source of local news. Twice I got on the wrong side of the Saratoga district, once for a story, in 1951, on a forthcoming tax-increase election. Having written about certain bond issues, I knew about the two-thirds majority required to pass those measures, and I assumed the same majority was needed for a tax increase. I said as much in a news story. Wrong. It was only a simple majority that was required.

This tax measure had generated a fair amount of opposition, and one of its chief foes made quite an issue of claiming there was some kind of a plot involving the school district and the paper. He said the statement was intended to assure the opponents that defeating it wouldn't be so difficult. A retraction on my part was in order.

The other situation arose when the Saratoga district was planning its second campus, initially called Fruitvale School, and later Redwood. The property, on Fruitvale Avenue, had been the old Saratoga sewer farm, which was a story in itself. It had to do with the Saratoga Sanitary District, a tax-levying agency that included little more than the Village and which constructed a trunk sewer line that ran down Saratoga Avenue, angled off about Douglass Lane and ended up in a plot off Fruitvale Avenue, where a two-compartment septic tank was constructed in 1912.

The idea was to have the septic tank drain into cesspools around its perimeter, but they proved inadequate. An adjacent orchardist let the district run the effluent from the septic tank onto his land for irrigation, which was fine until the property was slated for sale. In 1941, the sanitary district leased those 19 acres adjacent to the septic tank and sold the fruit from the exceptionally well-fertilized trees. By 1948, the district was able to buy the property. Only a couple of years later the Saratoga district was hooked onto the Sanitation District No. 4 trunk lines, and the sewer farm was surplus.

This was the property that the Saratoga Union School District acquired for its new school. In the interest of journalistic accuracy, I referred to the sewer farm in the several news stories I wrote about the purchase and the subsequent school building. This didn't sit too well with a number of parents, who let the school district superintendent, Dan Ungaro, know their feelings, which he relayed to me.

Looking back, I can see some relationship between the sewer-farm school and my insistence on honoring the Iroquois Indian word "se-rach-to-que," meaning "floating scum upon the water," as the origin of Saratoga's name. That reference, of course, was to the mineral water source at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the one near here, which had the same chemical content.

That's the press for you, always digging up the dirt.