The latest such excursion had to do with the number 65. What, I pondered, was I doing 65 years ago? That would have been 1941, the birth year of a lot of people of retirement age.

For me, though, that was the year I graduated from Los Gatos High School--Saratoga High didn't come along until 1957--and I remember the commencement ceremony was on Friday the 13th, a date that didn't seem to have any adverse effects.

I had already decided I was going to work a year to earn money for starting college, and this being the era when defense industries were getting geared up, jobs weren't hard to find. However, I already had a Saturday job that I could work at six days a week during that summer. This was as a clerk and delivery driver at one of Saratoga's four grocery stores. All were in the Village, and all had delivery service.

The store where I worked was run by Artus Metzger, a former schoolteacher who came to Saratoga in 1907 and had gone into the mercantile business with Joe Corpstein. With Corpstein's death, Corpstein & Metzger became simply A. Metzger, Groceries, Meats, Hardware, Paints: in other words, a general store, located in the space now occupied by the Golden Mirror Gallery on Big Basin Way.

It was still pretty much a general store when I went to work there. For instance, I was able to buy a pair of shoes there, and the stock included quite a bit in the way of hardware and paint. The main stock consisted of groceries and meats, however, and my duties included driving in to San Jose to pick up vegetables, meat and ice.

Getting that ice was something of an adventure. It meant going to the Union Ice Company factory on W. San Fernando Street in San Jose and getting a 400-pound block, which was scored with grooves so that chopping off 25-pound and 50-pound blocks was easily done with an ice pick.

Back at Metzger's store, I'd back up to the sidewalk, slide the block off the truck into the store and the walk-in refrigerator next to the meat department. Home iceboxes were in common use 65 years ago, and there were frequent grocery orders that included 25- or 50-pound blocks of ice. These had to be among the first deliveries since there was no refrigeration on that pickup truck.

Metzger's truck was a 1936 Dodge that had seen better days, since "delivery boys," or some of them, were notorious for their driving habits. I like to think I didn't fit that image, but there were a couple of Saratoga roads that invited a heavy foot on the throttle. One was Shumer Road, now Reid Lane, between Saratoga-Sunnyvale and the present Saratoga Hills Road, and the other was Douglass Lane. I liked to think of myself as a prudent driver, but I did enjoy revving that crate up on those two sections.

Shumer (Reid) was lined with orchards on both sides. Douglass was pretty much the same, but with two or three houses on the Saratoga Avenue end. One day a woman who lived in one of those houses stormed into the store and declared in a loud voice that she would shoot anyone who hit her dog. I'm sure she would have done it, too.

That summer gig at Metzger's involved a 60-hour work week--10-hour days at 30 cents an hour--and the $18 stipend seemed pretty good at the time. It certainly beat mowing lawns and doing house- cleaning, which had been my other main pursuits outside the store.

That fall I got a job in the shipping office of a lumber mill and factory in Santa Clara, the Pacific Manufacturing Co., and made the money for starting Whittier College in the fall of1942. The Army took over a few months later.

But, back to 65 years age and 1941. On Sunday, Dec. 7, the congregation at the Federated Church gathered outside after the service for a groundbreaking ceremony for the new wing that was to house much-needed Sunday school rooms. Then we went home to learn that the country was being plunged into war.

In the panorama of world history, the attack on Pearl Harbor will rank as the dominant event of 1941. In the narrow scope of my own life, 65 years ago is studded with colorful personal memories.