Late last year, Arbuckle edited and published an 81-page booklet, San Jose Women: Colonial Days to the 1970s, A Brief History.

The city of San Jose commissioned his father, Clyde, to write The History of San Jose in 1970 for the city's bicentennial in 1977, but it took his father 15 years to finish it.

After its completion, his mother, Helen, noted the lack of women in her husband's book and spent the next few years gathering information for her own book of San Jose's historical women.

"I noted in the preface that her project was similar to Sarah Winchester and her mansion" because she kept adding to it but never felt it was finished, says Jim, who still lives in the Willow Glen house his parents built.

Contributed photograph Woman of Substance: Helen Arbuckle wanted San Jose women to be recognized.

Clyde died in his Franquette Avenue home in January 1998 at the age of 94. Helen died the following December of a stroke, having just turned 91.

Because he's the son of San Jose's official historian, some people assumed that Jim had taken up Clyde's duties. And with Helen passing before she could complete her work, Jim said he was approached several times and asked what, if anything, would become of Helen's project. There was a lot of community interest in the project being completed, and many people offered to help with money or materials, he says.

"I didn't want to make a big book. I just wanted to get something out there that was readable and could be read quickly. It's been fun," he says. "I didn't think I was going to need money, and it turns out that with this new technology"— word processing software and desktop printing—"you don't."

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer Worth the Read: 'San Jose Women: Colonial Days to the 1970s, A Brief History' began as an essay and turned into an ongoing research project for Helen Arbuckle until her death in 1998 at age 91. Her son, Jim, completed the book.

Jim says the first printing, which consisted of 250 copies, is sold out. He's already sold a handful more of the second printing of the book—an additional 250 copies.

For Jim, the response to the book reaffirmed the importance of his mother's work.

The book's beginnings date back to the late 1970s, when Helen was writing a report for her writers group, The Monday Club, about historic women in San Jose. Later she wrote an award-winning essay about researching that report for the Pioneers Society of Santa Clara County in 1980. That essay became the preface to Jim's book.

Her main work was that essay, and she wanted to expand on the subject but over the years too many distractions prevented her from completing the project, he says.

Arbuckles says it was California's first female attorney, Clara Shortridge Foltz, who inspired his mother to turn her Monday Club project into something bigger.

Through her research, Helen learned that Foltz made the lecture circuit, talking about suffrage, and became a lawyer sometime before coming to San Jose. Foltz married at 15, divorced her husband and had five children to care for by age 27.

There's more to her story—and to every other historical figure's story in Helen's book—but Jim only included a couple pages' worth of information on each woman's career and philanthropic activities.

"I kept seeing other directions the work could go in, but I didn't want to fall into the trap my parents fell into," he says about Clyde and Helen's tendency to gather more information than they knew what to do with, which delayed the completion of projects in a timely manner.

"I wanted to pretty much get my mother's work out. I started doing a lot of other research, but then it wouldn't have been her book. I wanted it to be mostly her work," he says.

Jim had a strong temptation to add more information on the various women in his mother's book as he researched, but he resisted looking too much further into any one person's history.

"I had to stop and tell myself, 'I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to get a book out. Let somebody else do it.' Hopefully, people will read it and do their own work," he says.

Though Foltz was the one who inspired Helen to expand on her project, her heart went out to one woman in particular who had some great accomplishments but lived and died tragically, Jim says.

"I remember my mother talking about having some sympathy for Laura Watkins," he recalls.

"My mother hadn't included Laura in her 1980 essay. But Watkins' father was an alcoholic."

Laura was born in 1833 in New York as Laura Broughton. Her family moved to Michigan with futile hopes that the father would stop drinking.

"She married at age 17 and had a lousy time. When she came to San Jose Laura became heavily involved with the Women's Christian Temperance Union," he says. "My mother interviewed a granddaughter and learned that one of Laura's daughters married A.P. Hill, the painter, and the granddaughter remembered Laura as a bitter old lady who was sarcastic. The granddaughter at this point was rather old and said, 'If I had gone through the same thing I might have turned out the same way.' "

As for Willow Glen women, Jim says only one was included: Winifred Jecker Steiner. Though Willow Glen isn't specifically mentioned in the book, Jim says Steiner lived on Willow Glen Way for several years. She came to San Jose during World War II, when the government created programs to educate the public about food preservation and nutrition. Steiner, a specialist assigned to Santa Clara County, ultimately made use of mass media such as newspapers, radio and even television as an advisor to KPIX-TV.

In his research, Jim began to develop an appreciation for Sarah Knox-Goodrich.

"Goodrich was a dynamo who just didn't sit back," Jim says. "She accomplished quite a lot."

Goodrich became an investment tycoon after the 1867 death of her husband, William Knox of Knox-Bean Bank fame. Instead of living off her husband's fortune, she managed his estate while organizing the San Jose Women's Suffrage Association in 1869.

Jim admits that it took some effort to get the momentum going to pursue the completion of his mother's project. He said people who knew that Helen had been working on a project would ask him whatever became of it.

"But it didn't register with me too much because I was working at the time," says Jim, who was a full-time technical writer.

But that changed when he went to a Barnes & Noble event about a year ago and David Crosson, president and CEO of History San José, noticed Arbuckle at the back of the audience during a museum event and he said, "I see Jim Arbuckle here. So, how's your mother's book? What's the status of that project?"

Because all eyes were upon him, Jim says, "I just responded by saying that I was looking into it."

Crosson says, "The city has needed some inclusion of women in history, so to that degree I encouraged him, and I'm glad to see it finally came out. Without Helen or Jim a great deal could have been lost."

Once Jim felt he had enough information to go to print, only one step remained: finding someone to do the cover art.

He called up Willow Glen resident Anna Ballarian, one of Helen's best friends.

This book "was a chance to integrate people living and dead in this package. I mean, the living ones are Anna and me!" he chuckles.

Ballarian mentioned to Jim that 15 years ago Helen had asked if she'd be interested in designing the cover.

Jim asked Ballarian to design the basic layout, which include ovals for portraits of the women in the book. She created simple brooch frames using short, soft pen strokes.

Contributed photographs Carrie Stevens Walter (left), Elizabeth Gallimore and Clara Foltz.

The book's brooch-like cover art consists of three small oval portraits, which Ballarian simply worked by hand, drawing the cover design to scale without any further modifications by Jim.

"The pictures looked like cameos, so I wanted to make frames that gave that impression," Ballarian said.

Jim said he hopes Helen's book will make an impression on historians.

"I think it's the essence of my mother's work," he says, "and I hope that it'll lead other people to do something fuller."