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”
“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 …