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 tardy acceptance for indeed I am grateful and do deeply admire your fine and flavorsome daily. It adds definitely to the neighborliness of our town. I yield to no one in my devotion to Los Gatos.
I came here first at the wide-eyed age of four (Yehudi wasn’t going to be born for years) by train and under convoy of my distinguished Uncle Joel Bacon Low a mining engineer with a long black beard and a high black topper. I was going to the country from San Francisco streets! I can shut my eyes now and recreate the strange scenery gliding past us. We were met by a genial gentleman with the bluest of blue eyes named Mister Bill Baker. He convoyed us and our luggage to the grandparents’ house Diamond Cottage at the top of Johnson avenue. As I sat on the high seat between the driver and Uncle Joel I divided my attention between the landscape and my tasseled high-buttoned bronze boots sticking straight-out before me.
Another vivid memory at nine years was my first (and last) act of heroism. On a Fourth of July I walked down to the post office all alone and proudly but I had to pass a group of boys — great creatures of 12 and more— who were putting those horrible “double-headed Dutchman” firecrackers under a can and on it a small American flag and “blowing up the fort.” I asked them feebly to stop, horrified at the sacrilege and when they jeered I thought of Barbara Frietchie and Nathan Hale and snatched off the Stars and Stripes and fled for my life and mother came out and stopped their pursuit.
Most glowing of all was the sentimental syruppy “poem” I wrote “TO LOS GATOS” signed only RCM at fourteen which was accepted and printed in THE LOS GATOS MAIL. We celebrated with chocolate icecream sodas at Mr Crall’s emporium at the end of the bridge (Henry wasn’t born then) and I continued to enrich the paper for a year and then timidly suggested that I would like some remuneration. Dear Mr Walker quite properly rebuked me. “Young poets,” he said “are usually glad and grateful to write for fame.”
Every summer we came down with our Chinese cook and a red-headed nurse-maid for the small brothers. Where the Stillwells now live there was a cottage and tents for young guests and even after moving to Los Angeles I came often to visit Irma Lyndon and Mamie Skinkle. Sunset Magazine generously paid me $15 for a poem which was the exact price of the railroad ticket. Once I complacently listened to the genial conductor, “Well young lady I’ll have to read my Sunset!” and two elderly passengers listening said sharply ”Well she doesn’t look it!”
But it took me half my life and an Evanston Illinois husband to achieve permanent residence here. (All my tribe and kinnery found it hard to believe that the granddaughter of a VIGILANTE could desert her state but SY has become a devoted convert. We freely admit that our hill is the loveliest place in the world to live).
Once after a luncheon of inky guests at Montalvo Senator Phelan challenged each of us to write a verse about a hill and promised to put them in a book. He kept his word with “A Day in the Hills”. I called mine —
MEMORANDUM
I was born on a hill
I have lived on a hill
On a hill I mean to die
And over a hill
When the flame has done
Let my ashes fly
I have hated the look
Of a narrow house
The feel of a narrow bed:
So why should I lie
In a narrow grave
Just because I’m dead?
I have chosen the wind
Instead of the worm
That I may be mounting still —
The quick and the dead
In one frail ash
On a wind-quick hill.
(Eddy Street San Francisco)
Les if you forgive this long delay please ask me again! There are so many things and people I’d like to talk about!
Faithfully
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
EDITOR’S NOTE
I use AI to upscale and turn old photographs into something we can recognize today. I believe it has done a remarkable job of keeping everything true to life. If desired, I can post the original on request.