This habit—actually more than a habit, it's a compulsion—accounts for an incredibly unwieldy store of documents, pictures and related material that I have come to refer to as Ground Zero. Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll get it all sorted out and cataloged. Meanwhile, I just dip into it in the expectation of finding something relating to a particular subject.

For instance, here we are in early spring, the season of the annual Saratoga Blossom Festival, a topic in a recent column. What brings it up here is a page from the April 6, 1919, San Jose Mercury Herald (now the Mercury News and no, I wasn't around in 1919) with a headline: "Ten thousand people attend Saratoga's 20th Blossom Festival." It was quite a bash. Those thousands were gathered in the old festival grounds on Saratoga Avenue, site of the present Saratogan and Saratoga Creekside condominiums. It was a natural amphitheater with a backdrop of trees that still grow along the creek today.

In the morning, there were guided hikes into the hills, where people could look out across the valley and its blossoms. In the afternoon, under somewhat threatening skies, there was the program that featured a choral concert and an address by Sen. James D. Phelan, of Montalvo note.

Digging further into the stack, here is a file labeled "Hostelries" which includes a column by the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen devoted to the then-new Inn at Saratoga, on Fourth Street (not to be confused with the old Saratoga Inn, adjacent to the festival grounds). Caen's column, which appeared Feb. 22, 1989, described being in the Joan Fontaine Suite as he talked on the phone to violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, who was staying in the Olivia De Havilland Suite.

Caen noted that the sisters, who grew up in Saratoga and "haven't spoken to each other in years," had been invited by Inn builder Joe Kordsmeier to be honored guests at the 1987 opening but "declined upon learning that the other had been invited." The suites named for them are on separate floors.

The same file yielded a brochure on the original Saratoga Inn. It's undated, but a clue is the fact that it lists daily room rates from $4 to $5.50. Breakfast and luncheon are 75 cents and dinner is $1. Sunday dinner is listed at $1.50. I can remember Sunday dinners at the Inn in the 1940s and '50s. The Inn closed sometime around 1960.

Another brochure describes the Los Gatos Lodge, formerly the Nippon Mura Inn, and now La Hacienda. It, too, is undated, but some clue is afforded by room rates of $4.50 to $6.50 a day, and $28 to $40 a week. Also, the brochure notes that Peninsular Railway trolley cars "stop at our entrance." The cars quit running in 1933.

Talk about dead subjects, here's a notice of the public hearing on a petition to create the Saratoga Cemetery District in July 1927. Apparently my dad had it to print as a legal notice in the weekly Saratoga Star, of which he was the publisher. Madronia Cemetery has also been a topic in this column, but I don't think it's out of place to exhume a few facts again.

Madronia started as a dedication of property to the area residents by Jose Ramon Arguello, chief owner of the Quito land grant. It originally comprised slightly more than two acres and, in the absence of any governmental corporate entity, was administered by a volunteer group, the Madronia Cemetery Association, which was organized in 1863. The name Madronia, incidentally, is a coined word, derived from the Spanish word for madrone, which had a tilde—a little curved line—over the "n" giving it a "nya" sound.

The Madronia Cemetery Association had no taxing power and depended entirely on donations and volunteer work for maintenance. Some people kept up their family gravesites and some didn't. As the years went by the necessity of a governmental structure became more obvious; the district was the result. The cemetery itself has grown from less than two acres to 12 ¹/2. There are some 5,000 burials now and it is estimated the area will meet the need for an additional 50 to 75 years.