If you’ve ever gone through boxes in your garage, you’ve probably found some pretty odd and interesting items — old concert T-shirts, a Girl Scout uniform, maybe a “monkey wearing a fez hat” candle that you don’t even remember stealing from a New York bar. It’s all stuff you’d never part with but wouldn’t exactly put out for company.
History San Jose’s collection center is like a massive version of that garage, and instead of continuing to hide away those strange artifacts, they’re being displayed with pride at “Valley Memories: Curiosities & Treasures from History San Jose’s Collection,” a new exhibit that opened at History Park on Thursday.
It is a truly eclectic show, with early 20th century motorcycles, miniature steam engines, beaded gowns from the 1940s, a collection of matchbooks from San Jose businesses long since lost to history and a movie projector from the old Saratoga theater. There’s a case devoted to San Jose’s soccer history and another filled with vintage radios.
I spotted San Jose City Councilman David Cohen perusing a display case of antique cameras during the opening reception on Thursday, and he noted with pride that he has a Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera from the 1950s. Others spotted a button for Eggo and remembered that the frozen waffle was invented in San Jose.
The “modern” stuff includes a robot named Topo that was made by Sunnyvale company Androbot and an Atari 2600 console, complete with a Space Invaders cartridge.
But the strangest display may be a collection of colorful insulators — those glass or ceramic “caps” on top of telephone poles. An unknown collector donated three racks of them — more than 100 in varying sizes — to the electronics museum at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. When it closed, the collection made its way to History San Jose.
History San Jose CEO Bill Schroh Jr. — who says the inclusion of the Atari console makes him feel old — said what’s on display for “Valley Memories” is just a fraction of the city’s collection. And the public will get to see more as some of what’s displayed will be switched out with other items every six months leading up to the 75th anniversary of the San Jose Historical Museum in 2024. It started in 1949 with a historical exhibit curated by Clyde Arbuckle that was a replica of the original statehouse built downtown to celebrate California’s state centennial.
“Valley Memories” is open every day from noon to 4 p.m., and you can get more information at www.historysanjose.org.
GAME, SET, MATCH: The Mubadala Silicon Valley Classic was quite a show for the sold-out crowds that attended, and it even turned out positive for some people who didn’t attend the women’s tennis tournament at San Jose State. IMG Events, the company that managed the tournament, selected San Jose nonprofit Hunger at Home to rescue leftover food throughout the tournament to distribute through its nonprofit partners to homeless and food-insecure people in the community.
The final score: Hunger at Home rescued over 1,000 meals like sandwiches, pizza, sushi, Caesar salad, pastries and more that would have been thrown out — adding up to 1,200 lbs. Hunger at Home will be performing the same service this weekend at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest and and Levi’s Stadium.
NOONAN TRIBUTE: For friends and fans of Joe Noonan, Plaza de Cesar Chavez is the place to be Aug. 18. That’s where friends, family and fans of the downtown San Jose booster, who died Aug. 2 of a rare cancer, will get together to celebrate his life, his love for San Jose and his passion for the Grateful Dead. The laughter, tears and everything in between get started at 5:30 p.m.
BBQ BONANZA: When you think of cities with a reputation for barbecue, Kansas City, Memphis and just about anywhere in Dallas probably come to mind. San Jose? Yeah, me either. But Clever Real Estate put out one of those data-crunching ranking surveys that proclaims San Jose to be the No. 3 BBQ city in the United States behind San Antonio and Austin.
Its methodology weighed factors like barbecue restaurants per capita, Yelp reviews, Google searches and the cost of buying barbecue meat. Makes you wonder if the tech wizards of Silicon Valley somehow hacked the system, right? (By the way, Sacramento ranked 23rd and San Francisco 30th.)
Clever gives a shout out to the slow-cooked meats of Smoking Pig BBQ but also says San Jose has a surprising number of barbecue joints, with 5.6 restaurants per 100,000 people. San Jose also ranked fourth in Google search interest for how to barbecue, no doubt due to the seasonable weather that encourages backyard grilling. And it’s apparently a bargain to cook your own in Silicon Valley, the survey says, as buying 4 lbs. of BBQ meat every month for a year costs only 0.21% of a “typical” annual income.
We can count Smoking Pig, Sam’s BBQ, Mesquite & Oak and Blue Rock among our favorite San Jose barbecue joints. And, Alan Brown, a reader whose job includes some data-crunching itself, thinks San Jose also may have benefitted if the survey didn’t distinguish between traditional American barbecue and Korean BBQ restaurants, of which there are many in the greater San Jose area. “I can completely believe we rank very high on good Korean BBQ,” Brown said, and he’ll get no argument here.
Source: www.mercurynews.com