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”
At Yung See San Fong, the Youngs’ Los Gatos home, stood a small cabin where Ruth Comfort Mitchell worked on her novels. It was a private space dedicated to hard work. No trace of the building survives, and exactly where on the property it stood, we do not know. This photograph, published in the May …
Read more “A Head Full of Notes: Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Lost Writing Cabin”
The Woman Under the Oaks: Mrs. Lasley Photographs Yung See San Fong Sometime in the early 1930s, a Los Gatos woman named Evelyn Lasley stopped her car near the foot of Cypress Way, walked a little way up the driveway, and set up a camera under the big coast live oaks. The picture she made …
Somewhere between a Los Gatos estate sale and the present day, an entire artistic life disappeared. As the owner of the Yung See San Fong house, I’ve done some research on the Youngs, and the saddest thing for me is losing a bit of the Senator’s artistic side. When the Historic American Buildings Survey documented …
Read more “The Vanished Lens: The Lost Photographs of Sanborn Young”
Ruth at the Shrine: The Night Her Words Filled a Cast of 400 Of all the stages Ruth Comfort Mitchell wrote for in her long career, none was bigger than the one she commanded on the night of Wednesday, January 15, 1930. That evening the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles presented “Hear, O Israel,” a …
“But isn’t it nice I don’t have to prove it for a long time to come!” The grandfather’s clock which had belonged to a Bob Lee Tenafee three generations earlier struck seven and she came swiftly to her point. “You know, Cousin ‘Gene, I’ve been thinking a lot about Nancy, lately.” Ruth Comfort Mitchell, The …
The Symbols Surrounding the House Name In the first part of this story, we looked at the four Chinese characters placed above the fireplace: 楊氏山房 They identify the house as the Young family’s mountain retreat. The larger view of the fireplace reveals that the inscription was never intended to stand alone. It sits at the …
Central Carving The most important inscription at Yung See San Fong may be the one placed directly above the living room fireplace. Set within an elaborate carved screen of clouds, branches, flowers, birds and geometric ornament are four Chinese characters: 楊氏山房 The characters are read from right to left. In modern Mandarin they are pronounced …