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Living In the Past can provide topics for today

By Willys Peck

There is something anachronistic about looking ahead to future columns when the subject of said columns usually has to do with the past. What's ahead for the past? What future can there be in looking behind? Well, that's where my LIP service comes in, LIP in this case being my acronym for Living In the Past. And I like the late columnist Herb Caen's comment along those lines: You meet a better class of people when you live in the past.

Not wishing to alienate either of my readers, I hasten to add that I really don't buy Caen's opinion. The past is a fruitful source of column topics, though, so here I go again. What was I writing about 10 or 11 years ago? Here's a gem from 1996, quoting the diary of one Alfred Doten, a frontier journalist who visited this area before the Civil War.

"McCartysville [Saratoga's first official name] is a small town of a dozen homes or so, and is supported by the lumber business; the lumber is hauled out from the mills and woods and a depot established there; there is one store; it is a strictly temperance town, no liquor at all being sold here; the only place of the kind I know of in California."

So much for temperance. Now we go ahead a few years, quoting an undesignated publication: "Saratoga was a notorious town in the [1880s] with its sawmills and lumbering back in the mountains. ... There were seven saloons in the village and to be a 'drunk from Saratoga' was the last word in drunkenness. Some of the lumberjacks would work in the timber for six months and then come down to Saratoga and spend all the wages on a 'toot.' "

Another facet of the town, described in the Sept. 21, 1871, San Jose Mercury:

"Saratoga, a fine little manufacturing town nestled in the foothills, is one of the most inviting places in the county. It will probably become a large manufacturing town and summer watering place."

Back in the 1950s, the city of San Jose was on its annexation binge, an activity that inspired what were then called "defensive incorporations." Campbell became a city in 1952, Cupertino in 1955 and Saratoga, as has recently been celebrated, in 1956. Even tiny Monte Sereno was a defensive incorporation, in 1957, residents there fearing the encroachment of Los Gatos or Saratoga.

I liked the line in a San Jose Newspaper Guild gridiron dinner of that era, when a person was asked if he knew where the San Jose city limits were. The answer was, "No, but if you wait right here, they'll be along any minute."

Another topic about which I liked to write a decade ago had to do with working as a clerk-delivery driver in one of the town's grocery stores. Working in a store was something of a rite of passage for teenagers back then, and I felt lucky to have such a Saturday and summertime job at the princely pay of 30 cents an hour. It certainly beat picking prunes.

The procedure was for customers to phone in their orders fairly early in the morning so deliveries could be made before noon. The delivery boys--we were all boys--would walk through the back door without knocking and deposit the groceries in the kitchen. In my case, such tactless entry was challenged only once by the householder. What had to rank as the low point of my delivery career was when I accidentally kicked over an open can of paint on the back porch of a house on Oak Street. I wonder if that "paint job" has survived these 66 years.

The store, where the Golden Mirror is today, was a true general store. The door of the 1936 Dodge delivery truck bore the words "A. Metzger--groceries, meats, hardware, paints." Metzger, whose first name was Artus, was a former schoolteacher who came to Saratoga in 1907 and went into the merchandise business with a Joe Corpstein.

I have vivid memories of going in to San Jose to pick up 400-pound blocks of ice at the Union Ice Co., backing up to the sidewalk and dragging the ice into the store's room-size refrigerator. The blocks were scored so they could be cut up into 25-pound or 50-pound blocks. The challenge was to make home deliveries promptly enough so the ice wouldn't melt too much on the back of the truck.

The memories go back and back. Is that the sum of my future?