Past Homecoming traditions remembered by staff

Old movies and musicals describe huge all-city parades, with floats, a marching band and lots of young children. Yet nothing like that has ever seemed to happen in the small town of Saratoga.

According to Spanish teacher Arnaldo Rodriguex, however, a momentous parade marched through downtown Saratoga in 1984. Back then, each class from Saratoga High built a large float that they paraded down Big Basin Way in celebration of Homecoming.

“The band was there; the cheerleaders and the elementary school kids used to come and sit there to watch the whole thing. It was really nice,” said Rodriguex, who has taught at SHS since the 1970s.

Although assistant principal Karen Hyde agrees the parade was a fun event, she says it was difficult and stressful to organize.

“The parade was a one-time only thing because it was either that or throw myself off a bridge. I would never do that again,” Hyde said.

Since Big Basin Way is also a part of Highway 9, the school needed permission from the state to close it for the parade, making the event overwhelming to organize, Hyde said. The parade also blocked off downtown from both directions, resulting in numerous complaints from the businesses and townspeople.

“People couldn’t get to … their hair appointments, their nail appointments,” Hyde said. “It was inconvenient [for the school] and it inconvenienced the community.”

As a result, the Homecoming festivities were moved to the Los Gatos High School track. (Until 2005 Saratoga High did not have a lighted football field, so football games were played at Los Gatos.) But this arrangement still presented problems.

Transportation of the gigantic floats was a major issue. The floats students used to parade around the track had to be loaded onto trailers or flatbed trucks and then driven to Los Gatos.

“I had a ship that I built with my class that was 40 feet long, 40 feet up in the air,” Rodriguex remembers. “We had to have a police escort because the thing was so big. It blocked the traffic over to LGHS.”

Despite logistical challenges, creative students still persevered, but Homecoming was much more stressful than it is now. Compared to constructing these floats, merely decorating a section of the quad is easy.

Rodriguex remembers assisting his classes over the years with themes such as Higher Education and China. These amazingly detailed floats were still constructed, often starting months before the actual parade. One of Rodriguex’s favorites from 1987, a huge NASA space shuttle, was extremely realistic.

“When we went by the judges we lit it up, and the smoke came out [the back end so that] it looked like it was really taking off,” Rodriguex says.

Yet Hyde says new problems arose as the years went by. When LGHS got a new track a few years later, they put a weight limit on the floats for each class, making it more difficult for students. Even with the weight limit, Hyde says these floats were far from environmentally friendly.

“Talk about a complete waste. I started to have two dumpsters over at Los Gatos so the kids would do the parade once around and then the cardboard would go directly into the dumpsters,” Hyde said. “Five minutes [for the parade] and then two dumpsters full of stuff.”

From then on, Los Gatos High imposed stricter regulations and began to require students to carry the Homecoming floats.

“We had to reduce the size … We had to have a lot of pieces. We had to build different things,” Rodriguex said. For example, one year they built small models of famous buildings, like the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Eventually, though, hand-carrying the floats began to be too much of a burden.

“It just got to be too much for the kids and then they decided to do away with the floats and have [quad day] here,” Rodriguex says. What we now know as quad days began in the early ‘90s.

Despite the complications, Rodriguex still remembers the early years of Homecoming fondly. “It was just fun,” he said simply.