Young Punks Running Our Towns

I’ve come to an awareness in these last few years, since I’ve started writing these little tidbits of my West Valley memories.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, we were just a bunch of young punks who started some businesses in either Los Gatos or Saratoga and we just sort of took over these towns.

We opened places like Mountain Charley’s Restaurant and Saloon, The Grog and Sirloin, the ubiquitous Porch, selling everything from Godiva Chocolates to Tiffany lamps and broadleaved palms, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” with its crafts, cards and whatever sorts of art they could get their hands on.

In Los Gatos, Old Town was just burgeoning over with leather works of all sorts, shiny ceramics off potter’s wheels and hand-made jewelry embedded in a warm atmosphere of mellow guitar music and quirky poetry readings.

The little towns of Los Gatos and Saratoga were just boiling over with energy and exuberance to the point where some of the real old timers were often heard bemoaning the fact that we were turning these places into “CARMEL.”

But, the point to be made here is that it was hard to find an owner or operator of all these enterprises that was more than 30 years old, for that matter, even 25 years of age.

And there was a certain vain of commonality in that all of the cute, young girls, in their floor sweeping “granny” dresses and long locks of hippy hair, had all been seamstresses for the rock and roll bands at one time or another, and all the shaggy boys in their bib overalls and handle bar mustaches had carpenter’s belts always at the ready for the next neighborhood barn raising even if their day job was in a big city law firm or accountant’s office. It was a very unique time.

I think I was a senior in high school before I realized something very obvious about our farm neighborhoods; everyone older than me and my buddies were adults.

None of us had older brothers and sisters, but we all had younger siblings. Then we started hearing the new phrase, “Baby Boomers.” We were the first generation after the end of World War II. During that war, everyone turned away from baby making for the duration. When they turned back to baby making, we were the result. It was sort of a weird awareness, I always thought ...

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