Saratoga, then and now from a former kindergarten teacher

February 25, 2016 — by Danya Wang

Changes in Saratoga have reshaped the community.

Sections of the street were cordoned off, the flow of traffic clamped. But it wasn’t a crime or an accident that had caused the hardware shop, the pharmacy, the barber’s shop, the theater that would soon show its last movie, the sweet classic “Lassie,” and many other businesses in 1970s downtown Saratoga to close. 
In the place of cars, there were people. 
Milling about as the weekend’s evening hours faded, the residents of Saratoga were getting ready for a dance next to a grocery store that no longer stands. Discordant sections of music melded together, the piercing roar of rock overlapping, intermingling, with the gentler acoustic chords of country Western in a bizarre cacophony—but the people didn’t mind. 
Forty years later, in 2012, the same tradition was still in place. Standing in the back of a crowd and trying to peek over the shoulders of other residents, Kathy Finnecy, who was 67 at the time and enjoying her last year as a kindergarten teacher at Argonaut Elementary, tried to catch a glimpse of the classical Indian and Bollywood dancers in the center. 
Local kids from both San Jose and Saratoga were exhausted from spending all of Saturday and Sunday in the downtown. But the adults’ motive was bigger than simply listening to music: “anything to bring the community together.” 
Such was the way of Saratoga decades ago, a close gathering of citizens whose lives had a great common denominator: their zip code was 95070.
 But that meant more to them than just numbers—they could pop over to a neighbor and ask for sugar for their carrot cake or “borrow an egg back and forth.” They were a community in the truest sense of the word, immersed, squirreled, rooted, however obnoxiously or warmly, in each others’ lives. 
Finnecy was one of these neighbors. Described as “one of the kindest people I know” by a neighbor of 32 years, she made a habit of sharing her possessions with a grandmotherly smile and pat on the head. After moving in from Southern California, she lived on a well-to-do street in Saratoga, with professors, teachers, and other professionals being the majority. 
Having first moved into her one and only Saratoga house in 1971, taught kindergarten at Argonaut Elementary for over one and a half decades, retired recently, and raised four children, she’s watched the tide of moving in and out ebb and flow, from a warm sepia to a more indifferent chrome. “Now it just seems so much more quiet,” she said matter-of-factly. 
Back then, it wasn’t the band that residents around Saratoga High heard — it was the woodshop. The classes were more practical, having included home economics, cooking lessons, photography courses, and a car repair class where students worked on actual models. The school’s population was almost double of its current one, and for a few years, streaking was a rampant pre-graduation trend.  
Not all streets had gutters or curbs then, and, in accordance with the typical neighbor-to-neighbor trust of the time, some homes didn’t have fences. On Finnecy’s street, there were two gas pumps to load up petrol into the tractors that worked the nearby plots of orchard. 
But the most noticeable change was that of technology and its influxes. It caused a rift between neighbors, described by Finnecy as a “faster paced, less neighborly attitude,” a slow drifting away that was barely taken notice of at first but eventually created a gulf between them: rather than “jump in the car and go to Safeway for one egg,” as technology and industrialization has made extremely easy, the neighbors used to walk to each other’s houses and ask to share a few ingredients or borrow a recipe. 
“Now what happens is everybody drives into their garage, presses the button, the garage door goes down, and you never see them,” she said. “So it’s not people talking out front when [they’re] gardening or moving trash cans in and out.” 
At the time, the women talked and mingled the most. 
But “that started to dwindle as the years went on,” said Finnecy, because women eventually began finding their way out of the house and into the same industries as their husbands. 
“I know that this is happening everywhere, but it was pretty dramatic for our area,” she said. “It seemed to be around the time that people were going to work, the people moving in were also working longer hours, [and there were] too many working people in family.”
Interestingly enough, Mrs. Finnecy’s husband Gary Finnecy, who taught biology and chemistry while fostering a love of computers at another high school, was one of the most avid proponents of technology; he was responsible for kickstarting the computer programs at two local high schools. 
Finnecy’s family saw the changes, the veering toward technology, at home too: they had a “tiny IBM computer with hardly any power,” and no internet, but Mrs. Finnecy remarked that “it was still exciting because it was a separate desktop that had a separate tower.”
The dynamic of the neighborhood changed too. Before, there had been only one family of Asian or Southeast Asian descent: Finnecy’s street was filled with mostly Caucasian couples. The one Indian couple and their children were friendly to the Finnecy’s daughter. Later, a Japanese woman and her British husband moved in. And then the trickle turned to a flow, and each resident packed up and a new one came in, the tide bringing in waves of new engineers, geneticists and the like. 
But one thing never changed: Saratoga had clung onto its rural origins: in a practical sense, its suburban feel was one of the factors that inflated house prices into the multimillions.
 But on the aesthetic level, it was apparent that this had been a very agrarian setting. Several homeowners still have lots adjacent to their houses with small fruit trees planted in them: one such plot was recently sold for over a million dollars, and the orange paper and bare wooden beams there indicate the construction of a new house. 
Years ago, Mrs. Finnecy’s children often went down to such a patch down at the end of the street, where they played in the stream and hid in the bushes. Next door lived a man who had discovered a valuable pastime in collecting rocks–his garage was home to a rock tumbler, a machine expressly used to smooth out rock surfaces. He often gave away the varied rocks to timely trick-or-treaters. 
But the other end of their lane, there was another house with its own share of idiosyncrasies. Its garden contained the most inane and gaudy decorations: chipped but bold wooden eagles and knotted vines sat next to carefully arranged mosaics, little glass bits almost torn down to the cement by the elements and curious children. The lawn bore a small palm tree, planted just shy of two years ago, that would never grow to adulthood. 
She took her grandson there a few times, watched as he gaped at the crumbling wooden arch in front of the pathway. The house is now being torn down for a new home, undoubtedly bigger, more extravagant, more appropriate and more respectable – but it is also undeniable that nothing will ever replace the stately allure that that house and the decade-old Saratoga of Finnecy’s memories had.
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