50 years of community service

Generations of Scouts and other youth groups that have held meetings, activities and dances at the Los Altos Youth Center owe a big thanks to the Federated Woman’s Club of Los Altos. The popular “LAYC dances,” as we know them, would not exist were it not for the initiative of club members five decades ago who raised more than $60,000 for the construction of the youth center.

More than 70 club members and friends recognized this and other achievements during a Sept. 5 luncheon that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the club’s formation.

Local agencies study regional fires

Although they burn miles south and east of the city of Los Altos, the Moonlight and Lick wildfires have impacted the local area, where smoggy skies and scratchy throats signaled that the smoke was carrying across a wide region.

Local representatives of the Santa Clara County Fire Department, including commissioners from the Los Altos Hills County Fire District, traveled to the Lick Fire base camp last week to study the range of resources the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (Cal Fire) has assembled to fight the Lick Fire.

LAH City Council joins Westwind Barn for annual Hoedown

Westwind Barn volunteers hope to raise as much as $10,000 at the 30th annual Hoedown scheduled Saturday. The event, which revolves around horses and family fun, includes silent and live auctions whose proceeds will fund capital improvements at the town-owned barn in Los Altos Hills.

This year, the committee has an additional goal, according to Hoedown Chairwoman Kathy Evans.

LA veteran requests plea change

Former Los Altos resident Sargent Binkley has retained a new lawyer and is seeking to withdraw his no-contest plea to felony burglary charges in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. The charges stem from two 2006 pharmacy holdups.

Binkley has a court date in Santa Clara County Superior Court later this month to determine whether he will be sentenced for the robberies, or permitted to change his plea and resume his defense.

Police Blotter

Death

Sept. 9, 4:13 p.m., 600 block of Spargur Drive: A 52-year-old woman was pronounced dead after emergency workers responded to a 911 call. The police did not release the deceased’s name, pending notification of the family.

Theft

Sept. 7, 7:06 p.m., 100 block of First Street: Police arrested a 19-year-old male […]

Single-story overlay returns to commission, LA council unanimously expands tree protection

The Los Altos Planning Commission is scheduled to weigh another single-story overlay district in town, this one for the properties fronting Panchita Way between Jardin Drive and Alvarado Avenue.

The meeting, scheduled 7:30 p.m., Sept. 20, will also consider a permit application for the return of a “mom and pop” store in a residential neighborhood on Los Altos Avenue. The permit seeks to use the former J&R’s Foodland location again as a retail market.

Local schools maintain academic excellence

Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District students continued to improve academically based on the 2007 results of the Academic Performance Index (API) released Aug. 31. The district posted an API score of 812, a gain of 3 points.

The Los Altos School District remained among the top elementary districts in the state even with the slight

Spike in burglaries prompts police warning

Responding to a rise in residential break-ins, Los Altos police are warning residents to pay attention to security basics such as locking doors and closing windows.

Detective Wes Beveridge and Crime Prevention Officer Paco Vergara have been investigating the spike in break-ins, particularly thefts from cars, throughout the city. The department recorded more than 20 incidents a month in June and July. They report that in the majority of cases, homeowners left car and house windows and doors unlocked. Burglaries tend to be crimes of opportunity, in which robbers check a neighborhood for uninhabited, unsecured homes and cars.

Editorial

Los Altos has a habit of getting things done. When we look back over the past decade we see how small groups with a vision and a passion on wheels have made permanent marks in our community.

Take for instance the youth center. It remains a valuable resource. The Los Altos Youth Center is essentially a big room with a fireplace, kitchen and some storage space. It’s perfect for get-togethers of 50-100 people. Since its opening in 1960, countless teen dances, Girl Scout father-daughter dances and goodbye parties for city officials have taken place in its space.

Letters to the Editor

The race is on

School has started at St. Francis. How do I know? Not by reading “Welcome Back” banners on campus, but the roar of cars, trucks and SUVs as they race to the finish line, the parking lot at St. Francis.
Yes, the annual fall ritual of racing to […]

Traffic: Residential character vs. public safety

Resolving traffic congestion is not an easy task. Cross-town, cut-through traffic and speeding by Los Altos residents present an ongoing danger to all community members, including other drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists and children. Los Altos residents are to blame as much as anyone; teens, senior citizens, executives, parents in minivans, the affluent-arrogant, building contractors, those claiming to be “too busy” - there is no convenient moniker to classify offenders neatly. We all own it. The question is; what can be done about it?

Over the past couple of years when traffic-calming options have been reviewed, the mantra of “residential character” has often been lamented by city staff and some council members. While residents directly affected by a potential traffic-calming alternative may want a specific option such as speed humps, it is arbitrarily rejected. Speed humps are noted in the Neighborhood Traffic Management Program, however, the option of actual implementation is rejected by city staff.

Elizabeth Marangell and Kevin Wright

Elizabeth Marangell and Kevin Wright were married July 21. The ceremony and reception were held at La Rinconada Country Club.

The bride is the daughter of Ann and Rob Marangell of Los Altos Hills. She graduated from Pinewood School and earned a master’s degree in elementary education from Boston College. She is employed as a teacher.

Cassie Baze and Douglas Hansen

Cassie Baze and Douglas Hansen were married Aug. 13 in Burlingame. A reception was held at the Crystal Springs Golf Course.

The bride is the daughter of Tami and Russell Baze of Woodside. She graduated from Pinewood School and Azusa Pacific University. She is employed as a kindergarten teacher.

Walter Chronert: A full life of community service through Kiwanis

Walter Chronert, a longtime Los Altos resident and high-profile community leader for more than four decades, died Sept. 8 after a lengthy illness. Mr. Chronert was 88.

Born in Du Quoin, Ill., Mr. Chronert graduated from South Milwaukee High School in Wisconsin and Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Mich.

DR. HOWARD “HOWIE” FRANKLIN (ROSENBLATT) MARTIN

Born March 10, 1928 in San Francisco, a third-generation San Francisco native, died peacefully at home after a long illness on September 4. Dr. Martin was the first facial plastic surgeon to become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He taught at the Stanford Medical School and the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto for more than 40 years, and was a member of numerous medical groups and societies.

He graduated from George Washington High in San Francisco in 1945, and received a B.A. in pre-med and music from Stanford in 1948, where he was the leader of the Marching Band and a Big Band. He completed medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1954, interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, and subsequently completed residency in Otolaryngology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He served in the U.S. Navy as a doctor and attained the rank of Commander. In 1960 he moved to Mountain View and worked at Stanford Hospital until El Camino Hospital opened. He was the first ENT/Facial Plastic Surgeon at El Camino Hospital, and worked there until he retired in December 2002.

U.S. soldier, former Los Altos resident,

Staff Sgt. Sean Kane, who grew up on Dallas Court in Los Altos and graduated from Homestead High School in 1988, narrowly escaped death on Aug. 18 in Iraq when an Iraqi civilian intercepted a suicide bomber reportedly attempting to detonate an explosive near Kane’s squadron.

Retirement from the corporate world became full-time job for this TC staffer

After 40 years of corporate life followed by a retirement growing an abundance of tomatoes and zucchini my neighbors didn’t want, I had to find something else to do became I was only 70 years old. Having written numerous corporate pieces, I was ready for journalism on a part-time basis in retirement.

One evening after I made a presentation to the Los Altos Hills City Council, a reporter from the Palo Alto Times Tribune asked if she could use my notes. I consented, and in 1991 was asked if I wanted to work for the Cupertino Courier on Blaney Avenue.

Los Altos artist’s career retrospective mirrors her life

Isabel Brown, accomplished Los Altos painter, has scheduled a 20-year retrospective art exhibition, “Journey of the Spirit: A Retrospective,” 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. through Saturday, at Gallery House, 320 California Ave., Palo Alto.

Brown was born in Piura, Peru, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Frida Kahlo, the famous Mexican painter with whom Brown shares a similar ethnic background, has inspired Brown since her childhood.

Foothill College prepares to unveil

Foothill College in Los Altos Hills is scheduled to celebrate five decades of providing higher education to Silicon Valley students with a community open house that features the grand opening of the college’s new Campus Center, Student Services Building, Life Sciences Building and Lohman Theatre, 4-7 p.m. Sept. 25.

Los Altos High School welcomes new assistant principal

Los Altos High School welcomed a new addition to its administrative staff this year as the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District hired a new assistant principal over the summer.

Morenike O’Neal has replaced Kathleen Meagher, the former assistant principal who accepted a principal position in the Palo Alto Unified School District. O’Neal will assume responsibility for counseling services, pupil personnel, special education programs and programs for students at risk of not graduating.

MVLA helps incoming students succeed in mathematics

Mountain View High School officials have launched a new program for incoming freshmen who struggled with algebra in the eighth grade.

Ninth-graders who failed or skipped algebra in the eighth grade now have the option to start the year enrolled in geo-

Foothill marks 50th with photo exhibition

As part of Foothill College’s 50th anniversary celebration, the Photography Department has scheduled an exhibition, “Foothill in the ’50s: Images by Morley Baer, Rondal Partridge, Karl H. Riek, Tony Rose and Vano-Well-Fagliano Photography Inc.,” Sept. 25 through Oct. 23 in the newly renovated Photography Department Room 6101. An opening reception is scheduled 4-7 p.m. Sept. 25.

The collection is part of the Foothill College photographic archive. Working alongside Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Baer photographed the California landscape but rose to fame as an architectural photographer. Partridge, son of photographer Imogen Cunningham, worked as an assistant to Dorothea Lang and Ansel Adams. He photographed the Western United States before establishing his freelance photographic business. Although little is written about Riek, he participated in the architectural photography of the Marin County Civic Center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Honored local students head for college

MVLA Community Scholars has awarded need-based four-year grants and one-on-one mentoring to students graduating from the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District.

The scholarship selection committee chose seven students from among 32 applicants - five from Los Altos High School and two from Mountain View High School.

Four St. Francis students get ‘High School Musical 2′ makeover

ABC 7’s “The View from the Bay” filmed students on campus at St. Francis High School for the show’s segment on the fashions featured in Disney’s hit made-for-TV movie, “High School Musical 2.”

The visual stylist from “View from the Bay,” Audrey Mansfield, interviewed the costume designer from “High School Musical 2,” Zachary Bilemjian. Together, the two stylists selected four St. Francis students for a fashion makeover.

Robotics competitors seek new team members

The seventh annual Los Altos Robotics FIRST LEGO League program is looking for new team members.

The league introduces students in grades 4 to age 14 to engineering, science, math and technology concepts in a hands-on way. The league pairs an academic challenge with a sportslike playing field in which participants create autonomous robots. Each fall, teams of four to six players have eight weeks to design, construct, program and test their robots. They compete in tournaments, running robots in time trials and demonstrating technological creativity.

Schools Briefs

Castro encourages
literacy in classroom

Castro Elementary School is seeking community members to share stories with third-graders on Tuesday mornings this fall. Volunteers can help children improve their writing and English language skills.
The seven-week program is scheduled to begin Oct. 2. Volunteers will receive explicit week-to-week instructions. No writing or teaching experience is […]

SELPA 1 CAC sponsors parent lecture

SELPA 1 CAC, an organization that aids parents of children with special needs, has scheduled Lynne Muccigrosso, a sexuality educator, to address how to discuss sexuality with children 9-11 a.m. Oct. 24 in the Covington School multipurpose room, 205 Covington Road, Los Altos.

Muccigrosso, an educational consultant, author and advocate for sexuality education, teaches human sexuality at De Anza College to non-special education students and social sexual education to special education students in high school and transition programs.

LAHS girls water polo team falls to Mitty in tourney final

Two of the top girls water polo teams in the Central Coast Section last year – Los Altos and Mitty highs – are looking like contenders this season as well.
The Eagles, who reached the CCS semifinals in 2006, met the Monarchs Saturday in the finals of the Los Altos Invitational, with section champ Mitty pulling […]

High hopes at Homestead

Complacency shouldn’t be a problem for the Homestead High girls volleyball team. When your top player and reigning league MVP never seems satisfied with her performance, it’s hard for the rest of the team to be content, either.

Katherine “Kat” Fischer won’t tell you she’s the best player in the SCVAL De Anza Division - the Los Altos resident is too humble for that - but her new coach will.

Slow start, fast finish

In the opening half, the Los Altos High football team’s offense was in first-game form. The out-of-sync Eagles fumbled twice, rushed for just 28 yards and were fortunate to be in a scoreless tie with Evergreen Valley at halftime.
Los Altos clicked in the second half, though, scoring four touchdowns on its way to a 27-7 […]

Teen running 100-mile race to fight cancer

Michael Kanning isn’t running a 100-mile race to win - or for glory. The Los Altos resident is running for his friend.

Andoni Schultz, a good friend of the 15-year-old Kanning, has dealt with cancer most of his life. Schultz has had “all kinds of surgeries, and it’s pretty hard for him and his family,” Kanning said. “I really admire him how he fights back.”

Cheese, please

Changes are afoot at a venerable local institution. The Milk Pail Market, an open-air European-style market that draws residents across the border into Mountain View, is planning an internal remodel and working on reviving its cheese-tasting program.

The Milk Pail has been tucked into a corner of the San Antonio Shopping Center parking lot for decades. In the 1970s, it was a working drive-through dairy. Mountain View resident Ross Snichols, who has been shopping at The Milk Pail for more than 30 years, recalls motoring up to the dairy window for his regular supply of milk.

Kuleto Estate delights the senses

What an afternoon we recently spent at the Kuleto Estate in Napa - great food, great wine and tremendous views. Restaurateur and designer Pat Kuleto built the winery. His restaurants include Boulevard, Jardinière and Farallon in San Francisco, Martini House in Napa, the newly opened Nick’s Cove in Tomales Bay and the soon-to-be-opened Rincon Park Restaurants, Epic Roast House and Water Bar on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Kuleto has been heard to joke that he was born with a building permit rather than a birth certificate. He has already designed more than 170 restaurants. Locally, he designed the Los Altos Golf & Country Club. To say he is a man of many talents is an understatement.

Locals cook in support of cancer research

Four couples gathered at Sharon, Rodger and Kendra Barkoff’s Los Altos Hills home last month for a cooking-oriented “Party with a Purpose” in support of the locally founded Sunbeam Foundation, created in 2005 in memory of Los Altos resident Sara Laboskey, who died at 21 in 2002 of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

The Aug. 8 fundraiser netted $2,200, and Sharon said she plans to schedule another in October. She has a particular goal - an anonymous donor has offered a $50,000 matching grant if the foundation can raise the money.

Hidden Villa food events draw all ages

Hidden Villa, a non-profit educational farm in Los Altos Hills, is offering an expanded series of hands-on food-related events and workshops this autumn. Make sure to register in advance at www.hiddenvilla.org because the classes fill quickly.

Go, goats!

European-Indian croquettes can be a reluctant chef’s dream come true

Many cooks think that cooking Indian food is so complicated they wouldn’t ever want to give it a try in their own kitchens. But if you like to eat different cuisines and dream of doing so, you can throw together your favorite Indian snack in minutes, be it a tasty samosa or a semolina pancake.

The other day I dreamed of eating croquettes - specifically my style of the savory fried snack, which combines European and Indian touches. I hunted in my fridge to find ingredients I could experiment with. Once you become familiar enough with the basics in cooking, you can throw together a simple recipe based on the flavors and textures you are craving, without needing to find the perfect recipe.

Simple southern summers provide backdrop for author’s trilogy

Aurora County, Miss., the mythical setting of Deborah Wiles’ new book for young readers, may not contain wizards or warlords, but it is as fantastic a place as any Harry Potter could inhabit. Here, kids spend summers playing pickup games of baseball, wander the area without adults and have plenty of time to ponder life’s meaning.

“I have lived those simple summers,” Wiles said in a phone interview from her Georgia home. Thanks in part to Los Altos bookstore Linden Tree Children’s Recordings & Books, Wiles will visit the area next week to promote her latest book, “The Aurora County All-Stars” (Harcourt Children’s Books, 2007).

Travel off the straight and narrow in South Island, New Zealand

I visited New Zealand recently, taking some new routes in my search for unique properties. I found that the road less traveled yields some Canterbury tales.

State Highway 1 is a pleasant enough drive, but in some stretches it is really no more than the shortest route between points A and B. An example is the Canterbury Plains - the Christchurch gardens are legendary, and the college students certainly look as if they were made in England - but why not swerve around the city and take the inland scenic route?

Religious civil war hits Africa

This is the last in a series of articles chronicling the Rev. Malcolm Young’s family visit to Africa. Their trip was sponsored by a Lilly Endowment grant.

I don’t like to talk about it but there is a war going on in my church. About every six months, newspaper headlines remind me of it. Growing up in a Roman Catholic neighborhood, and then a largely agnostic university town, I regarded my church as small and insignificant in the larger scheme of things. It wasn’t until leaving college that I learned that along with 77 million others, I am a member of the world’s third largest Christian denomination, the Anglican Communion.

Kevin and Mary Ann Loney, 50 years

Kevin and Mary Ann Loney celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary June 22. They were married at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, while Kevin was serving in the military.

The couple met at a dance sponsored by Santa Clara University. Kevin was a student and Mary Ann attended Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a general elementary credential for teaching. Kevin graduated with a business degree and worked for the Arthur Young firm in San Francisco briefly before leaving for Fort Bliss.

Ann and George Limbach, 50 years

The Limbachs met when they were 10 and 11 years old, and they married June 29, 1957, in Hudson, Ohio.

Ann graduated from Wellesley College and Harvard Graduate School of Education. George earned degrees from Middlebury College and Western Reserve University Law School.

P.A. Players unleashes ‘Sylvia’ to open its 77th theater season

Palo Alto Players’ production of A.R. Gurney’s comedy “Sylvia” opens the company’s 77th season this week at the Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road.

The play previews Friday, opens Saturday and runs through Sept. 30. Eleven performances are scheduled.

Datebook

Datebook items are run on a space-available basis for entertainment, non-profit events, low-cost classes and groups of wide interest in our circulation area. The deadline is noon Tuesday for the next week’s paper. Notices must be typed and include a contact name and phone number. Items may be submitted via e-mail (peteb@latc.com); fax (948-6647); or post (138 Main St., Los Altos, CA 94022).

THEATER

Los Altos resident gets her goddess groove on

Los Altos resident Corinne Wayshak knew she was going out on a limb with her new business, Groovy Goddess, a woman-oriented apparel line with T-shirts and tanks for women and onesies and shirts for babies. But she was banking on the belief that American women are hungry for a way to connect the modern experience of femininity with its historical roots.

Bench players important in gauging economic climate

The stock market is like a football team. The players on the field are not the only important ones. The players on the bench waiting for future action and opportunity are equally important.

If the star quarterback gets blindsided, you still have to play the rest of the game with players from the bench.