Eagles soar, Spartans march

“Dance as if no one was watching. … Speak out, even if no one is listening.” Principal George L. Perez gave his final instructions to the Class of 2004 Friday evening.

The seniors robed in Eagle blue were alive to his words and to one another’s presence in the bleachers on the Los Altos High School football field. Perez challenged the seniors to learn to see the beauty in themselves and to change the world:

Mountain View High School graduates 351 plus two

Mountain View High School’s 2004 commencement ceremonies began with a special presentation of diplomas to Mary Sadako Okumura Kitahara and Tom Yukio Okumura.

The brother and sister were just a few months away from receiving their diplomas at Mountain View High when they were hauled off to a Wyoming internment camp for Japanese-Americans in April 1942. They were among 24 members of the senior class who “disappeared,” as Mountain View Principal Pat Hyland put it. Anger against the Japanese had reached its peak in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ plunge into World War II.

Vandals torch school field

Apossible post-graduation prank at Los Altos High marred the school athletic field early Monday morning.

Someone torched the center of the artificial turf at Tom Burt field, leaving a melted, charred trail that ran an estimated 12 feet up the center of the playing field.

Bids for new town hall half million over budget

Construction bid results for the new town hall were presented June 9 to the Los Altos Hills planning commission, with the total exceeding the new town hall budget by more than $500,000.

TBI, the firm in charge of town hall construction, will explore solutions for reducing building costs and start the process of rebidding this week.

Editorials

Town Hall expenses need trimming
A few years back, Los Altos Hills residents rose up in opposition to plans for a new town hall that seemed extravagant for a municipality with a relatively small budget and no retail base. In fact, two new members of the Los Altos Hills council were elected […]

Letters to the Editor

Two promising sites for pool
A community swimming complex in the right location would be good for Los Altos. I believe that the current effort to find the best site for this proposed project has missed two very promising alternatives.
The Draft Environmental Impact Report for the proposed Rosita Aquatic Complex concludes that […]

Son offers loving portrait of deceased LA councilman

Editor’s note: Robert “Bob” Gray, a former Los Altos mayor and city council member, died Oct. 15, 2003. The Town Crier ran an obituary that emphasized Mr. Gray’s mistakes while on council. This prompted the following letter from Gray’s son, Michael, who offered a truer vision of Mr. Gray, the person. In the spirit of Father’s Day Sunday, we offer the following letter.

I doubt if anyone could improve on my awareness of my father’s shortcomings. I doubt, too, if anyone knows quite as intimately as I his gifts. Here are some that he bequeathed to me:

It’s about our country

Interesting month - June - graduations, weddings and memories of D-Day, June 6, 1944. What do today’s young grads know about that overwhelming event when United States forces invaded France and began the march toward freedom? It’s difficult to think of Memorial Day as a reason to celebrate with picnics and short vacations. I’ve been to France and Normandy and shivered at the sight of thousands of white gravestones for our troops who gave their lives in the powerful and courageous invasion.

Well, it’s June again and perhaps today’s 18-year-olds will cope with the possibility of a draft that would involve them in the less-than-popular war, Iraq. I remember sitting through many high school celebrations for graduating seniors. What did the future hold for them?

Obituaries

MARILYNN DAWN NELSON
Marilynn Dawn Nelson (80) died quietly in her sleep of heart failure on June 3, 2004 following a brief hospitalization from a recent hip fracture.
Marilyn was born and raised in Montevideo, MN where she attended college and worked as a loan officer.
She met Wallace R. Nelson following his […]

Weddings and Engagements

Serena Cheng and Kelvin Li
Serena Cheng and Kelvin Li were married May 22 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
The bride is the daughter of Frank Cheng and Mayor of Los Altos Hills, Emily Cheng. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at San Diego […]

Kara’s grief counseling services to get boost from 3rd annual gala

Kara, an area non-profit which provides grief counseling services, will hold its third annual gala fund-raiser, July 15, at the Crowne Plaza Cabana, 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto.

The program begins at 6 p.m. with a reception and silent auction, followed by dinner at 7:30 p.m.

Music historically in harmony with LA schools

Informal music was a feature of Los Altos Grammar School programs in the school’s earliest years. Harry Dutton described music’s place in 1924: “Mrs. McCrumb lined us all up on the sidewalk in front of the school. I guess there were maybe 50 kids, all grades. I was going into first grade. Mrs. McCrumb appeared with her pitch pipe and ’set the tone.’ The song was ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.’ We would sing each day, then we would all march in.”

In 1927 LAGS began a formal music program. It’s a happy fact that in the 74 years since, the Los Altos community has staunchly supported music programs in its schools. Without this consistent support, the schools alone would never have been able to rally and save their music programs at the times they were threatened, whether by failed local tax elections, Proposition 13 or periodic downturns in the California economy.

Community Briefs

Debate set between assembly candidates
The Peninsula Democratic Coalition and the South Peninsula Area Republican Coalition have teamed up to present a debate between 21st Assembly District candidates Steve Poizner and Ira Ruskin. The debate is scheduled 7-9 p.m., Tuesday, at the Los Altos High School theater.
Richard Henning, founder of the Celebrity […]

Bullis Charter School’s impact on LASD’s enrollment only slight

Despite losing 75 students to Bullis Charter School, Los Altos School District’s student turnover is “pretty normal,” Superintendent Marge Gratiot told the school board last week.

Because Bullis’ enrollment goal for its first year was 155, the district had braced to lose twice as many children from its rolls. District enrollment for next year is about the same as for this year, Gratiot said.

Blach music students make clean sweep

Students in the Blach Intermediate School music program heard the sweet sound of success this month, when every band, orchestra and chorus at Blach won a first-place trophy at May’s annual “Music in the Parks” competitions.

Schools from across the state participated in the events, held at the Magic Mountain and Disneyland theme parks, and received awards on the basis of their performance and the difficulty of the music as well as the size of their school and their grade level.

Shattered dream

As the fastball left the pitching mound like a runaway missile headed straight for the batter, Kyle Spraker could not get out of harm’s way. In a sickening thud, he was knocked unconscious, his left cheekbone and nose shattered - along with his dream of leading the Lancers to a clean sweep of high school baseball titles.

Two hours later, Spraker’s teammates from St. Francis High blew an eight-run lead in the last two innings and lost 14-13 to Serra in the semifinals of the West Catholic Athletic League playoffs. A week later, Palo Alto upset the Lancers 4-3 in the Central Coast Section Division I quarterfinals.

Digging up the dirt on the Bay Area

Los Altos Hills resident Jo Crosby knows a lot of dirt in the Bay Area - literally.

As founder and president of Jo Crosby & Associates, he has studied and analyzed soil for commercial, industrial and residential land development for 39 years as a geotechnical consultant.

Love doth pale when hunting a grail

Roused in the middle of the night from his posh hotel room at the Paris Ritz, symbologist, author and professor Robert Langdon is escorted to the Louvre to decode a puzzling message left at the scene of a murder. Little does he know that he is suspected of the crime.

Enter green-eyed cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and the pair are off and running on a merry chase that lasts the length of the book, following clue after clue from Paris to London and on to Scotland in search of the Holy Grail. Of course, they are not the only ones after the prize. Some seriously bad guys want it too.

Got Game?

In the 1980s video games were typically associated with geeky teenage boys who turned to Atari or Sega as alternatives to dating.

A generation later, gaming isn’t just for boys. Fifty percent of all Americans play video games - 70 percent of college students and nearly every single child, said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. Huang introduced a panel discussion on how breakthroughs in computer graphics have revolutionized gaming, hosted by the Computer History Museum, June 10.

Toxic substance could pose health risks for residents

The Center for Public Environmental Oversight (CPEO), an organization that works with the public to oversee remediation of polluted areas including Superfund toxic waste sites, believes low levels of the cancer-causing agent trichloroethene (TCE) are traveling up from contaminated ground water into the air near commercial buildings, homes and schools in Mountain View. The TCE levels pose no short-term health risks, but are high enough to cause concern about the possible health effects of long-term exposure, according to CPEO.

The contamination was caused by manufacturing plants belonging to Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor, Raytheon and JASCO Chemical Corporation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has since placed the former sites of these corporations on its national Superfund site list. Elegantly groomed business parks now sit on some of the Mountain View Superfund sites. Some of the sites are home to such companies as Veritas and Netscape, which are not involved in chemical manufacturing.