The film also appeals to me because of its Saratoga angle. This is a subject that I've written and spoken about before, so you can consider yourself warned. The Saratoga angle has to do with the June 10, 1946, issue of the old Life magazine, with a picture of the late Donna Reed, then a winsome 25-year-old, on the cover. She played opposite Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, and, according to the story inside, had grown up as a small-town farm girl in Iowa.

In her first major film role, Ms. Reed's press agents saw the need for her to be "reindoctrinated" with small-town atmosphere. To accomplish this, "they dispatched her to sleepy little Saratoga. (pop. 2,645), a farming community near the Santa Cruz Mountains. The town's farmers and friendly yokelry greatly enjoyed her visit." There is a picture of her on Big Basin Way lapping a vanilla ice cream cone as she "rests between visits to town characters." Yokelry. Town characters. Words to live by.

There were other pictures. One had her peering in the window of the Saratoga Fixit Shop. Another had her seated in the "pride of Saratoga, its only fire engine," as she talked to Carl Taylor, town constable and garage proprietor. Others showed her talking to Ted Scarlett, who had the "town's only taxi"; having a soft drink in the town drugstore and talking to attendant Dollie Nardie while enjoying "the small-town privilege of a free look at the magazines." Finally, there is a picture of her as she modestly raises her skirt while wading across Saratoga Creek, "local fisherman's paradise."

At the time, nitpickers like me were able to point out that Saratoga had not one but two fire engines, the 1937 Diamond T in which Ms. Reed was pictured, and a 1928 Ford Model A. Also, calling Saratoga Creek a "fisherman's paradise" was something more than a reach. There was a time when the designation might have applied, but not in 1946.

What seemed to gripe most people, though, was the overall implication that "small town" meant "hick town" or "rube town." In an earlier account of this, I went to the trouble of parsing the word "yokelry," and was able to come up with "yokel" as a "country bumpkin, especially a typical countryman, slow-witted, obtuse and gullible."

"Bumpkin" came up as "an awkward country fellow; a clown; a country lout." All of which gets us to "yokelry," defined as "the mob of stupid, unsophisticated country folk." All right, fellow Saratogans, if the shoe fits, wear it. Come to think of it, though, a lot of yokels didn't wear shoes.

I was able to capitalize on one phase of that article, though, and that was the reference to "town characters." In a Stereopticon column eight years ago, I expressed the desire to be known as a "town character," such as those allegedly visited by Ms. Reed. Some friends in City Hall and some with the California History Center at De Anza College collaborated in seeing to it that I had a mayoral proclamation naming me the official town character. It was signed by then-Mayor Gillian Moran on Dec. 2, 1997, and it is among my most prized possessions.

I'm also the designated city historian, but that's a pretty run-of-the-mill kind of title. "Town character" has, well, more character. My guess is that Ms. Reed's press agents chose "sleepy little Saratoga" for her to be reindoctrinated in because actresses Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine came from here. The magazine writer didn't bother to go into the town's cultural heritage, which was considerable even back in 1946. In this particular context, culture doesn't sell papers. Yokelry does.