AT AGE 13, Jandé Kyes of Los Gatos is the youngest member of a 35-member exhibition vaulting team that will perform at the Olympics in Atlanta on July 25 and 29. Lest we confuse this sport with pole-vaulting and gymnastics, Jandé, who will be a freshman at Los Gatos High School this fall, performs this vaulting from a horse moving at a canter or trot, and it requires a combination of strength, gymnastics and dance. Jandé has been doing this since she was only 5. She's one of the youngest ever to make the exhibition team. She trains on the Garrod Family Ranch in Saratoga, where the Mt. Eden Vaulting Club is based. Team members don't own their own horses; instead 8 or 10 of them share the cost. Vaulting is an exhibition, not an established Olympic sport.
THE RECENT death of flamboyant attorney Melvin Belli recalls some history associated with Holy City, the cult community founded by "Father" William E. Riker in the mountains above Los Gatos. After World War II began, Riker expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler's racial policies, writing letters to newspapers, as well as to the German dictator, and issuing pamphlets. According to Holy City by Betty Lewis of Watsonville, Riker's enthusiasm for the Nazis led to an investigation by the FBI, and Riker was arrested on Oct. 31, 1942, and charged with sedition.
Riker fired his first lawyer and engaged Belli to defend him, a task the San Francisco attorney took on, though he called his client "the screwiest of screwballs." Belli required a $2,500 fee up front, with $5,000 more to be paid at the completion of the trial. Riker was acquitted of the sedition charge and drove off in his red, white and blue sedan, after expressing a wish that Jews and Gentiles might live together in peace. As for the remaining $5,000, Riker told Belli he would arrange a place for him in heaven, which Riker said was worth much more. Belli sued his client in May 1943.
Earlier in the same month of Riker's arrest, a Holy City resident named Joseph Witzig, 58, was bludgeoned to death, and another man injured in an argument and a Holy City denizen, I.B. Fisher, 60, was arrested by Santa Clara County sheriff William J. Emig. According to Lewis' book, Father Riker feared that enemy planes would bomb Holy City and start fires, and the workmen were putting up ladders for fire protection when the argument broke out. Fisher served 2 1/2 years of a 5-year sentence before being paroled. He lived on Summit Road and died in 1980 at the age of 82.
THE National Council of Teachers of English appointed Susan Kankel, Fisher Middle School teacher, a regional judge for its 1996 Promising Young Writers Program. The competition, in its 10th year, cites some 400 8th-graders for exceptional writing skills.
SOME FOLKS thought John León had retired after he sold his salon at 540 N. Santa Cruz Ave. to Kerrie and George Brandau, but not so. "I continue to run my business, John León hairstyling on the premises of Brandau Brandau," he says.
LOS GATAN Tom Shafer sends an article from the October 1995 issue of Automobile, about Harry Bennett, who was Henry Ford's strong-arm man for a quarter century. Bennett was notorious for his tough strike-breaking, which angered labor, especially after the deaths of four strikers on "Bloody Monday," March 7, 1932. The writer states that "Bennett died in a nursing home in Los Gatos, on Jan. 4, 1979, a few days short of his 87th birthday."
MARK Aug. 25 as the date for the annual Town Picnic. The community-wide event is the Los Gatos Lions Club's major fundraiser.
THE OLDEST Boy Scout troop in the county is Troop 501, which originated in 1918 as Troop 2, "making it the oldest continually operating troop in the county and we think in the western U.S.," says Scoutmaster J. Carol Cooper. The Boy Scouts started in the U.S. in 1910. An earlier troop started in Saratoga but was soon abandoned. Scouting in the Santa Clara Valley, edited by Mardi Bennett, gives the whole history. (Summer gremlins made me call Troop 539 oldest.)
A FOOTNOTE to Roberta Heid Blake's reminiscence of her Los Gatos childhood: The town's population was about 600 in the mid-1930s, but it grew rapidly in the years just before WWII. The census figure was 3,600 by 1940." We got more and more people from the east, and then coming to the World's Fair, and the military was growing in our area," Blake says.
There were 92 in Roberta Heid's 1944 Los Gatos High School senior class. "The whole school had only about 500 students," she recalls, "even though students were bused here from Saratoga, the mountains, Almaden Valley and Willow Glen. None of these areas had high schools of their own. They were brought in on Peerless buses."
"It was a great town to grow up in!" says the former LGHS librarian.
THIS COLUMNIST also grew up in a town of 600. Difference is that Elmwood, Cass County, Neb., is still 600.
Mention of the 1940 San Francisco World's Fair reminded me that my mother and I took the train from L.A. to see the fair. I remember taking a cab across the Golden Gate Bridge, three years after its completion. To complete the picture, we had been at the Chicago World's Fair ("Century of Progress") in 1933 and the New York World's Fair ("World of Tomorrow") in 1939. A different world then!
Longtime Lions Club member Frank Bonacorsi was presented with a Life Membership, joining 11 other Los Gatos Lions in that honor. Bonacorsi has been a chief organizer of the Los Gatos Children's Christmas and Holiday Parade for 25 years.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, July 24, 1996.
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