A Hungarian sabreur escaped a revolution, crossed America with a band of refugee athletes, and found a second father in the hills above Los Gatos One morning in the mid-1950s, when there were few houses on the steep roads above Los Gatos, three-year-old Richard Maddux heard a tremendous noise coming up the mountain. It began …
Provenance Most of what survives from the past does not arrive with paperwork. This bell arrived in a parking lot, handed across a tailgate by a man named Mark and his wife Judy, whose family had kept it for three generations and had finally run out of room for it. Mark’s grandfather acquired it in …
Read more “A Bell for Joan’s Porch: Identification of an Unmarked Bronze Ship’s Bell”
On the Melvin Mortuary record for Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young, one name is particularly difficult to decipher: T. F. Kilmartin, San Jose, entered in the space for the certifying physician or coroner. The name belonged to Thomas F. Kilmartin, Santa Clara County coroner, and following it leads well beyond Ruth’s death in February 1954. Kilmartin …
Read more “Thomas F. Kilmartin: A Name in Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Final Record”