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Summing up an outlook in two words ... uh, acronyms

By Willys Peck

Being an 83-year resident of Saratoga, with the exception of time spent in the Army and at college, I find myself more and more offering LIP service to my community. I'm not referring to the dictionary's "insincere expression of devotion or good will," I'm referring to my acronymic reference to Living in the Past. It's getting so that I can hardly look at a local structure, landscape feature or artifact without associating it with something I have experienced.

My most recent experience of this nature had to do with the Saratoga Foothill Clubhouse, which was the focus of activities for the club's centennial observance. That's right, the club began as the Foothill Study Club in 1907, and in 1915 famed architect Julia Morgan designed the much-admired structure on Park Place.

I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow I got roped into the cast of a centennial dramatic production written and directed by club member Corinne Carter. It was quite a spectacle, and a portion of it will be repeated at a fundraising event April 28. I bring it up here because the time I spent on the premises gave me a healthy dose of LIP service.

My earliest memories of the Foothill Clubhouse go back to my early childhood when my mother, not being in a position to hire a baby sitter, brought my brother and me to the clubhouse when she attended meetings. My brother Albert, older by two years, and I occupied ourselves with various playthings in the alcove off the main hall while the ladies held their meeting in adjoining fireside room.

My next experience there, which I never tire of talking or writing about, was being in the 1933 production of Alice in Wonderland that starred Olivia De Havilland in the title role. I was the duck--no name, just "duck"--and it was a speaking part. I uttered two words: "Found what?" And I wonder how many actors can remember their line(s) over a period of 74 years.

This came to me in the recent centennial production as other cast members and I waited in a room just off the stage before making our appearance. I thought back to 1933 when I waited in that same room, wearing my duck's-head mask.

I can't remember the year, but I was still in grammar school when I made another appearance in the clubhouse playing the title role in The Cricket on the Hearth, and no, I wasn't the hearth. "Spirit of the Cricket" was the reference on the printed program.

My other clubhouse appearances were when I was taking piano lessons from Dorothy Rice, daughter of an orchardist who was the town's justice of the peace. The first was in 1935 when Miss Rice plunked down $5 to rent the Foothill Club for a recital by her pupils. Five dollars was quite a sum back then. I remember my selections as "Brownie's Frolic" and "Distant Bells." We're not talking Chopin here.

The next year, 1936, Miss Rice used the Federated Church hall for the recital, and the following year she was back at the Foothill Club. I can't remember the names of my pieces, but I do remember doing some terrible fumbling on the keys and generally messing up the whole thing. That's when I quit the piano and concentrated on my ocarina, or sweet potato.

Another function I remember attending at the Foothill Club was a concert by the Whittier College Glee Club in 1934. Richard Nixon was among the singers. Yes, the Foothill Clubhouse has had its celebrities. In more recent years, I like to think of the dancing classes held there by the late Betty McClendon of Los Gatos, who was the personification of ballroom dancing in this part of the valley.

It's not exactly an acronym, but I have another letter-combination that is quite important in my life, something of a credo, in fact. It's NTAA, for Never Throw Anything Away. I think it's something of an inherited trait, since my dad, a longtime newspaperman, was somewhat the same way. Sometimes these things prove very useful, like a collection of telephone directories going back to 1924.

Newspapers are another category, such as several concerning the St. James Park lynching of the Brooke Hart kidnappers in November 1933. Then there is the one with the PEACE! headline 7 1/4 inches high from August 1945, when the Japanese surrender ended World War II.

Yes, LIP service and NTAA pretty well describe my intellectual perspective.