November 25, 2006
Los Gatos is home to many great things, many great ideas too, but also home to many fascinating people who are successful in their own fields. The list includes CEOs, sports celebrities, and other famous people. Wikipedia lists several of our Los Gatos contemporaries who are very well known, and if you live here, you do bump into them at Whole Foods, a restaurant, or maybe your child’s school. They’re just normal people, trying to lead normal lives. I, for one, won’t bug them if I see them in public or at some function where we happen to be together. I once spent a year in a body cast and it made me appreciate, deeply, how important it is just to be treated like a “normal person” – no matter what the circumstances are.
But Los Gatos has often been a popular place among those who could choose to live or visit anywhere they wanted – this is not a new experience for our pretty town. John Steinbeck lived here and wrote “Of Mice and Men” in those days. Charlie Chaplin came to visit and was seen a few times at the old Lyndon Hotel in the days when he was filming at Niles Canyon (a district of Fremont). The famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin lived in Los Gatos, up near the Holy Names Sisters convent and the Jesuit Novitiate, for a bit of time in his childhood. It was a treasured time for him.
Want to read up on well-known visitors? Take a look:
Visiting Movie Stars:
http://www.community-newspapers.com/archives/lgwt/10.17.01/pics-past-0142.html
Visiting Presidents:
http://www.losgatos.com/history/presidents.html
In addition to all the famous (and those of us who are not-so-famous) people who have enjoyed making Los Gatos home, there was a time in which ordinary, but very ill, people would pilgrimmage here too. The climate was so favorable it was prescribed. Did you ever wonder about the fact that Los Gatos was so small, but for many years had two mortuaries? Many of these sickly folk did improve here, but many others did not. Read John Baggerly’s surprising bit of history as Los Gatos, the health refuge: http://www.losgatos.com/history/climate.html .
Finally, some residents just won’t leave, even when their earthly life is over. If you are interested in our (mostly) unseen residents, please visit a page on one of my websites dedicated to Haunted Real Estate. Los Gatos is a featured location and I discuss there the old cemetary (which has shops over it now) and other places where the townsfolk remain in spirit.
