Remembering the Los Gatos Times–Saratoga Observer

For one year, around 1974, I worked as production manager at the Los Gatos Time Observer, as we called it. As I remember, it was officially called the Los Gatos Times–Saratoga Observer, but everybody left the “Saratoga” out when referring to it “on the fly.” If you were really flying, the paper was simply called “the T.O.”

The newspaper publisher was a peppery old guy named George Kane. He was a sparky Midwesterner who took over the T.O. in 1956 and by the time I came to know him, he was running the paper with the gusto of an excited Mark Twain and the editorial integrity of the Mad Hatter.

While I’m at it, he was famous for squeezing the image of Abe Lincoln right off of those pennies that he pinched ever so tightly. He had a sense of humor, but only when it suited him, and he had a furious temper.

I suffered the temper rashness too many times. That’s why I only lasted a year. His unreasonable tantrums just weren’t necessary to motivate an ambitious management professional like myself. Most of Kane’s employees put up with the tantrums but he was making my young stomach's ulcers turn into molten lava. I was under doctor’s orders to leave the job with the next temper tantrum. I did. Kane was astonished and even a doubled salary wasn’t worth it to me.

But this little bit of a tale isn’t about Kane, but he was a very interesting character. When I started thinking about my friends at the paper, I got caught up in remembering good old George Kane. I’ll have to tell some tales about him sometime soon.

Nope, this is about Jeanne Noyes, the advertising sales manager at the T.O. She was a large, brassy woman with silver hair, a strong, confident voice and a blustery demeanor that you didn’t want to often go toe-to-toe with.

In the early 1950s she headed an entire department of police dispatchers in L.A. Even then, the cops would seldom go toe-to-toe with her. Noyes had a daughter who I met just two or three times in the many years that she and I were good friends. They were never very close.

Noyes loved to socialize and so many times when you visited her little cottage hidden in an orchard near Van Meter Elementary School, there would already be some other guest, or two. They would sit at a small table tucked in the overgrown flower garden having coffee and eating some scrumptious unknown sweet that one of them had just discovered at a newly opened bakery or tea house.

Noyes lived on the edge of poverty the entire time I knew her. The Times-Observer was a small newspaper that came out Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and it wasn’t circulated much outside of Saratoga, Los Gatos or the nearby mountain side communities.

The T.O. was supported by the small shops that populated the two towns so no one involved with the paper had much of an income, Mine was just a few percentages above minimum wage.

It was an obvious fact that Kane’s employees were either very young or very old and they were mostly women, the second income of a wage earner’s family, or high school students supplementing their weekly allowances. No real professional was going to have any sort of career at the T.O. It truly was a community paper, in that what actual cash couldn’t pay to get the paper out on the streets, its young and old worker’s passion for the community filled the gap.

Because of the T.O. employees' commitment and passion for the community, it always got out and almost always on time. As did all of us, Noyes had a grand passion for Los Gatos. She wrote a “gossip” column for the T.O. and called it “Just Noyes.”

She’d keep the community updated about the small town’s events, inform her readers of the minutiae that Kane didn’t feel was significant enough for his grandiose editorials. While everyone read her column and paid attention to her, she held her reports to a high degree of discretion as she never wanted to offend or disappoint her advertisers/readers.

She lived on her advertising commissions and she was vulnerable. Noyes was a “tough cookie” but above and beyond that, she was a very brassy realist. She knew on which side her bread was buttered. She respected her clientele and paid heed to their whims. I, on the other hand, while not writing about my frustrations with the “shop-keeper mentality” that seemed to steer the town’s ambitions, I would sometimes have too much sherry and spout off about those frustrations. Noyes would always rein me in.

But, besides the town of Los Gatos, Noyes did have one other grand passion—cats. On my first visit to her cottage, I knew I’d just have to ignore the smell of cat pee or I’d not have her for a friend.

Most of her clothes had some sort of an image of a cat adorning them, and if not, she’d wear one of her many pieces of jewelry that had some sort of feline theme. Oh, yeah, she did write a second column specifically for the shop keepers, writing about their special sales and discounts, and she called this one “The Cat’s Meow.”

Of course, this weekly column was a bit more catty than the “Just Noyes.” She was a very clever and opinionated lady. She never had fewer than a half dozen cats living in her cottage, and she had a name and a history for each one. She simply adored them. Her bathroom towels were cat related, her door knocker was a cat, her note pad had cats on it and the erasers she put on her pencils were in the shape of cats. So on and so forth. Cats all the time and everywhere.

The glue that held me and Noyes and my other friends together in these days is that we weren’t rich, but we were ambitious and clever. While we were all educated and well read, we put art above income. We would rather forgo the bucks for the freedom of non-conventional money making.

Although Noyes in particular wasn’t a prodigious writer, she was fierce about her freedom. Sometimes Kane would write editorials or establish policy that would infringe on the discretion which she maintained to keep her advertising clients satisfied and happy. When this happened it wasn’t unusual for her to go barreling into Kane’s office and begin just one more loud and emotional shouting match between these two really strong personalities.

Several times in the year that I worked in this small town newspaper, Kane would fire Noyes or she’d quit, but for the two them, the T.O. was the only game in town and within a few days she would be back at her desk, writing ad copy and answering three phone lines at one time.

The physical plant of the T.O. was located in a free-standing, one-and-a-half-story building on the one block road in the center of the town called Royce Street. Kane and his wife lived in an apartment above the newspaper taking up half of the paper’s roof space while the other half of the roof was the apartment’s patio.

When you worked at the T.O., you never forgot that Kane might always be within earshot. When things got a little too silly or hectic at the newspaper, someone would tap the perpetrators on the shoulder and exaggeratedly look up at the ceiling, instantly calming everyone down.

The Los Gatos Times–Observer was run similarly to all other small news operations in those days; there were three essential departments; editorial, production and ad sales.

The advertising department sold ads to make money to pay the other workers in the editorial and production departments. Editorial researched and wrote the stories and took the pictures. The production department took the words and pictures and made them into lithographic printing plates which were put on the press to apply an image onto the huge roll of newsprint paper behind the printing press. The images were of type, photographs and other visual images (such as illustrations) and these images were provided both from the editorial and advertising departments.

This wasn’t rocket science, and as this was about 20 years before the first personal computer, mechanics and chemistry were the only means available to get the written word or photographed image onto the newsprint.

Our small printing press weighed five or six tons and was about 20 feet long. The press and its support took up half of the ground floor of the entire building (the building is still there, but broken into several retail units). It only took one operator to run it. It was one component of the production department.

There were like five or six people in each department. And of those less than 20 people, there were only about four or five full-time employees, the heads of each department, a reporter and Kane. Well, Kane considered himself a full-time employee, but he spent so much time sailing over in Monterey Bay or at political luncheons, no one else on the staff considered him a real “full-time” employee.

Noyes was the manager of the advertising department and I was head of the production department. The editor was the head of the editorial department and her name was Sue.

There were several part-time women administrators who ran the front office, like a receptionist, a bookkeeper and a lady who kept track of circulation.

My deadline on press days was 2:30. I was supposed to have the press plates on the press and making newspapers by 2:30 so that the paperboys could fill up their paper bags and deliver their last papers before dark.

If Kane couldn’t hear the press rev up to production speed after the deadline, he’d come downstairs and grumble at me. The press was old and in a very advanced stage of disrepair

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