Senior Mac Hyde was driving through town during the summer before his junior year when a glaring “for sale” sign stuck on a golf cart caught his attention. The cart belonged to his neighbor, the town butcher, and it was exactly the kind of mobile vehicle that Hyde, the son of assisstant principal Karen Hyde, had in mind for the office members at Saratoga High to use.

“I was like ‘Mom, we need to get it!’ So I turned around in the middle of the town intersection, which only has one lane, and we chased this poor man down,” Hyde said.

Initially, Hyde lost track of the cart but was lucky a week later when he found it again.

“I see it in my neighbor’s driveway and I drive into a ditch, run down the hill, and it was for sale still,” Hyde said. “It cost him like $800, so we bought it and towed it to school.”

With its patriotically themed coat of paint beaming, the office staff’s “cool retro golf cart,” familiarly named Sparky, never fails to turn heads as it whizzes by.

Originally, the cart was nameless. But, that soon changed during its first few days in Saratoga.

“The name just came to us. He was having trouble getting up hills and someone just said ‘come on Sparky’ and the name stuck,” Hyde said.

In addition, Sparky initially had an orange and light blue paint job, but the colors were soon changed due to its resemblance to the colors of a certain rival school.

“We were like, ‘This is awkward, we have a game with Los Gatos this year and he’s kind of in the colors of Los Gatos.’ So maintenance offered to take in Sparky for a week and they gave him this wonderful paint job,” Hyde said.

Hyde himself spent many hours working with the cart in order to make it function more reliably.

“I sort of rebuilt him, I didn’t take too long, just had some wiring to redo, worked a little on the seats, but beyond that not much else,” Hyde said.

Golf carts have been used for years by the maintenance staff around school, but the office never actually received a golf cart for its own use before the purchase of Sparky.

“We had always borrowed maintenance’s, but even then it was a rarity,” Hyde said.

Hyde said Sparky has been used by administrators to pick up sick or injured students from classes and by the guidance department to deliver tests, as well as by the office staff for a variety of other tasks involving cross-campus transportation.

“This is a pretty large campus, so previously, we didn’t have [transportation] and you’d have to wait five minutes for someone to run down to the office and then run back just to get help,” Hyde said.

“Now it takes around two minutes to get from one place to another.”

Although Sparky was purchased just recently, the electric-powered golf cart was originally built in 1964. Because of its age, the cart is constructed from outdated parts that often need re-soldering or replacement.

“We’re about the third or fourth owners, as he used to live across the bay,” Hyde said. “Hopefully [it will last] for quite a while, it would be nice to see it make it to 100 [years].”

The office has developed a certain attachment to Sparky, recognizing the vehicle as one of a kind.

“He’s old and something of an underdog, laughable really, but he’s fun to drive, and has so much character from his age and everything that’s happened,” Hyde said.