94 Years Ago

LOS GATOS--The Christmas boxes will be sent out as usual by the Social Service League and supplies and cash donations are being asked for. The League feels that no one in Los Gatos must go without a Christmas dinner and they are hoping for the usual generous response. Last year the boxes held chicken or meat, flour, beans, potatoes, canned corn or tomatoes, bread, rice, coffee, tea, pie or plum pudding, oranges and apples, nuts and candy and toys for the children. A safe way is to send anything that you would like for your own dinner. Notify Mrs. H. S. Beck, with telephone 190Y, or Mrs. N. Harvey, 318R, as to what can be given and deliver the articles at the old Post Office on Monday morning. (San Jose Mercury News, Dec. 20, 1918)

88 Years Ago

You cannot send wildcats through the mail. It is well to know that, for those contemplating the shipment of lynxes, bobcats and other untamed of the cat kind. Los Gatos (Spanish for 'the cats') is a progressive town in California near the foothills where the wildcat still trills its fearsome yodel in pristine freedom. Recently a Los Gatos troop of Boy Scouts trapped a fine feline and offered it as a friendship and Christmas gift to a troop at Evanston, a Chicago suburb. The creature was carefully caged, weighed and the charge calculated as a package for air mail. The postmaster demurred. (Times-Picayune, Dec. 26, 1924)