"Hello, sonny boy," he said. "I see that familiar glazed look in your eyes. You're trying to think up a column."

"As a matter of fact, I am," I said. "I think I may have something coming up."

"Why don't you face reality and just pack it in," persisted Sam. "You've been at this for almost eight and a half years, you're teetering on the brink of senility and there's no point in trying the patience of either one of your readers; they're both fed up. You're a has-been. Face up to it."

"Just for that," I said, "I won't quit. I'll go ahead with my latest idea."

"Which is?" pressed Sam.

"Vocal music in Saratoga," I said. "I was at a recent concert here at Saint Andrew's Church given by youth choruses, including the Saratoga High School Cantare Chorale, directed by Jim Yowell. My granddaughter is in that group. The whole presentation was excellent. In fact, there was a rehearsal that I also attended where the school orchestra's string section performed, filling the aisles, to accompany the Saratoga singers. I'm not trying to say that Saratoga is unique in having this kind of talent, but it's just naturally hospitable to it. You expect it; talent goes with the territory. We have it here and we welcome it from other sources."

"Hmph!" hmphed Sam. "Big deal."

"Why, I remember when Richard M. Nixon sang here," I said.

"Sang?" repeated Sam, "you mean 'sang' as in 'squealed'? Was this about Watergate?"

"I mean 'sang' as in 'song,' " I said. "He was in the Whittier College Glee Club, which was known as the 'Ambassadors of Song,' and they gave a concert here in 1934 in the Foothill Clubhouse. I was there." At this point, Sam retreated and I went on mentally reminiscing about that era. I was only 10 years old at the time but I do remember the concert and, though hardly an aficionado, I liked the music.

There's an angle here worth mentioning. Nixon was a classmate of Saratoga resident Robert Grunsky, known as "Gopher" Grunsky on the Los Gatos High School football team—Saratoga didn't have a high school then—and Nixon spent the night at his friend's place, a Julia Morgan-designed house on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. I've often thought that, if they wanted to, the present owners could have a bronze plaque on the house: "Richard Nixon slept here."

Eight years later I attended Whittier College myself for a few months, until summoned by the Army, but I never got into the touring-glee club end of things.

Mention of Nixon calls to mind the fact that he was not the only presidential timber to be in Saratoga. In 1915, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, came here on the invitation of Sen. James D. Phelan to be a speaker at the Blossom Festival. As described in Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years, this came about because there was an official party from Washington, D.C., coming to San Francisco and the Panama Pacific International Exposition. President Woodrow Wilson was burdened by details of the growing European war, but he sent Vice President Thomas R. Marshall and the young Roosevelt in his stead. Both were to be speakers at the Blossom Festival.

All this was well and good, but, as often happened with the Blossom Festival gambling on the weather, it rained on the appointed day. What started as gentle precipitation developed into a downpour. Vice President Marshall didn't bother to leave San Francisco, but Roosevelt and several others did come. There was no festival to attend, but there was Sen. Phelan's Villa Montalvo, where a high old time was had by all. Roosevelt, incidentally, was much impressed by the natural beauty of Saratoga, and he wrote and said as much.

It's possible that the other President Roosevelt, Theodore, may have visited Saratoga; he did plant a redwood tree in Campbell and he also gave a speech in Los Gatos in 1912, on his way to a ceremonial tree dedication in the redwoods north of Santa Cruz. Another possible presidential visitor would have been Herbert Hoover, whose home was in Palo Alto.

Saratoga doesn't need presidents to get on the map, though. Never did.