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Sun, sun go away--we're looking for a rainy day!

By Willys Peck

As a certified, card-carrying rain-worrier, I regard this pleasant springtime weather as the next thing to a natural disaster. Well, that may be putting it a bit too strongly, but I'm looking at the figures and I see that we are more than 5 inches below normal rainfall as we get into April. April, of course, is known for the showers that bring May flowers, but I doubt that such precipitation will bring us up to where we should be. We need a prolonged drenching.

Getting into such negative thinking brings up the word "drought," which really is pushing the envelope beyond limits. It's an intriguing thought, though. It was drought that was responsible for the Dust Bowl, that Midwest climatic disaster of the 1930s that induced a westward migration from Oklahoma and other stricken areas. I can remember the encampment along Los Gatos Creek in Campbell that was typical of settlements in the Bay Area and other locations. These were people looking for and desperately needing work.

Mention of the drought and resulting Dust Bowl brings up the classic historic novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, which detailed the travels and travails of families forced from their land by nature's fury. I dug into my files and came up with a Nov. 4, 1937, issue of the Los Gatos Mail News and Saratoga Star, when my dad was editor, and there was an interview with the author when he was about one-third through with The Grapes. Steinbeck, then 37, lived with his wife in the hills near Los Gatos.

The headline refers to "Dust Bowl Refugees," but the text states, "Left without work principally because of the modern tractor, thousands of sharecroppers are moving across state borders into California each month ... " I'd never heard that about the inroads made by tractors. I always thought the drought was the precipitating factor behind the migration. The story includes this interesting comment: "Steinbeck predicts that because of complete evacuation, the Middle West will eventually revert to barren prairie land." Things just didn't work out that way. Did they?

Getting back to the local rainfall deficiency, I'd like to think it doesn't have anything to do with global warming. We've had dry years before, and they've been followed by wet ones. Let's hope that we're not destined to become Silicon Dust Bowl.

Speaking of the Mail News and Star, my wife and I were gratified and flattered to have that recent glowing account published in this paper, but I would like to make a correction. The story stated that my dad had been editor of the Los Gatos Daily Times. Actually it was the weekly Mail News and Star. It was also stated that I had done a stint at the Los Gatos Daily Times, which I hadn't. I did write some "Saratoga Brevities" for my dad's paper.

I've already mentioned in this column my tendency to look at various buildings and locations and think back to what they had been. One of my favorite locations for this is Fourth Street between Big Basin Way and Oak Street. Today there are concrete stairways going from one level to the other. But years ago, it was an unpaved street, or what passed for one. The contour has been changed to allow for the stairways, but once it was a precipitous roadway over which no one would drive.

No one, that is, except the "grocery boys," who drove the local delivery trucks. That was the local legend, anyway. I never tackled it when I was driving a delivery truck back in 1941. My deviltry was flooring the throttle on Shumer Road, now Reid Lane, and Douglass Lane.

My familiarity with that stretch of Fourth Street came when our family lived at the end of Marion Avenue (who said Road? Check the 1929 telephone book) and that was along the route that I took walking to grammar school. Back around 1930 there was a rickety wooden stairway up that stretch of street, and one time I saw a dead cat under one of the steps. It was an exciting discovery.

"There's a real live dead cat under the steps," I announced at home. Back then, "real live" was my term for "genuine." There was predictable amusement on the part of my parents, who asked if it wasn't a "real dead live cat." I like to think that's how language is learned. Using examples.