'Radio entertainment" seems like a small thing for Caldwell's Sweet Shop to advertise, but remember this was the 1920s and '30s, when radio was new and everyone had their favorite shows: Amos and Andy, One Man's Family, and big band music coming from romantic hotel ballrooms across the land, such as Santa Catalina Island's palatial pavilion "overlooking beautiful Avalon Bay."
World War II GIs carried radio language overseas, where their music was coming from camp so-and-so "overlooking the Company A latrine."
Today's illustration is an advertisement that appeared in a 1920s Los Gatos High School yearbook, The Wildcat.
What about the Caldwell family? We turned to Eleanor McLean--Mrs. Richard Belden--who resided in the Almond Grove district as neighbor and grammar-school classmate of Ethel Caldwell, whose parents were founders and owners of the Sweet Shop, at 39 N. Santa Cruz Ave.
Eleanor, formerly a resident of Santa Barbara, is a longtime subscriber of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. She moved in recent years to Tucson, Ariz. She writes, "The Sweet Shop was next door to the theater with a side door going into the outer foyer. There was an apartment over the sweet shop where the Caldwells lived when I first met Ethel. And on the north side of the theater was a barber shop."
I met Ethel either in kindergarten or first grade (University Avenue School) in 1921 or '22. I believe she was in the Tom Thumb Wedding, which was photographed on the high-school grounds with kindergarten-age boys and girls dressed in their homemade costumes. Peggy Lucier, a classmate of Eleanor's, was draped in a gown fashioned from her family's piano shawl. Miss Lucier's photo of this event appeared in this space some years hence. Miss Lucier, later married, departed town many years ago.
Belden continues: "The Sweet Shop was great, with a long marble counter and stools, a five-cent table of all kinds of candies, a glass cabinet and shelves loaded with delicious candies and toward the back were booths where you could have sandwiches served.
"In the rear was a big room where the family, including the help and I, could sit and talk family-talk or do homework. Ethel was a pretty little blonde girl, quite precocious and bright. We were very best friends until they moved to San Jose. I understand that Ethel married quite young to a Santa Clara University football star during Nello Falaschi's era." Falaschi, a Los Gatan, became a New York Giants linebacker.
Eleanor McLean Belden and Edward Arthur "Ted" Fletcher of Sacramento were classmates since the second grade and are 1935 graduates of Los Gatos High School, as was David Hibbs of Napa who died earlier this year. The three have been helpful with this column.
In Tucson, Mrs. Belden lives close to another 1935 Los Gatos High graduate, Virginia Dobler Sporleder. She married Kellog Beach after the death of her husband, a longtime force in the early Los Gatos Volunteer Fire Department.
This Caldwell's Sweet Shop advertisement appeared in a Los Gatos High School yearbook and is courtesy of Doug Neale, Los Gatos auctioneer and owner of Neale's Hollow, Saratoga.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, September 11, 1996.
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