“Smoke and ash and a tale, or not even a tale.”—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations This is a picture of the top of the Yung See San Fong. Note the porch with six doors, this would have never been built today. And up top, there is a strange little cupola or crows nest. What and odd and …
The above headline ran in the Mercury News because Sanborn Young found the first hard clue in California’s coldest case: two bones in a creek bank, four miles from where the murderer vanished. Then he did what no one else had done in twenty-six years. He brought the whole valley along to watch. Sanborn Young …
In June 1949, three women climbed into the Los Gatos hills to visit Ruth Comfort Mitchell at Yung See San Fong. Doris Frank, Clelles Ness and Claire Loftus were preparing a local production of Mitchell’s one-act play The Sweetmeat Game, and the Los Gatos Times chose an appropriate form for its account of their afternoon: …
Read more “All We Are Are Dust In The Wind: Trying To Remember Ruth”
Ruth Comfort Mitchell, John Steinbeck, and the Strange Nobel Nomination of 1941 “I sent JS [John Steinbeck] a copy from a ‘Los Gatos wild cat to a literary lion,’ and he sent me IN DUBIOUS BATTLE.” Ruth Comfort Mitchell wrote that privately to a friend in 1940. The exchange is worth beginning with because it …
Read more “Ruth Comfort Mitchell, John Steinbeck, & the Nobel Nomination of 1941”
Sanborn’s Last Stand The page above comes from Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, the immense United States Senate investigation that reached California after the political battles of 1938. Buried in its thousands of pages is something unusually valuable to the history of Yung See San Fong: Sanborn Young, near the end of …
A note on the image: I used my AI agent to combine the original column and magazine cover and refresh their faded colors. The original wording and imagery remain as printed and are reproduced here as historical artifacts. The cover’s romanticized portrayal of a Mexican man and its period coverline may read as stereotypical today. …
In the Los Gatos TImes on the front page YUNG SEE SAN FONG (which means – we hope the Youngs’ Home in the Hills or more expansively Pavilion Where We Give Rest and Refreshment to Travellers) February Sixth 1952 Dear Les: Please don’t measure my appreciation of being invited onto your front page by my …
Before the Novels: Ruth Comfort Mitchell Enters Adventure Long before Yung See San Fong became Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Los Gatos home—and before she married Sanborn Young or became a nationally known novelist—she was already building a career in the magazines. Her short story “Enter, the Hero” appeared on pages 264–270 of the June 1911 issue …
A White Stone, Sunset, and the strange new power of KGO In February 1925, Sunset did something more significant than give Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s A White Stone a short review. It acknowledged that the novel had already received substantial attention through another medium: radio. The magazine told its readers that the book “warrants more space …
This is what you would have seen in the newspaper. But there is a story that runs deeper behind it. A love story. A sad story. A story to teach our children. The rest of the article paints a formal portrait, and this one has every button fastened: Chicago and the Board of Trade, Northwestern, …
Read more “Ten Years Behind: The Last Years of Sanborn Young”