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Book Mark

By Sarah Phelan

Looking Back

Harold van Gorder makes you feel young. In this nifty nonagenarian's eyes, you qualify as a kid, unless you were born before his birthday, back in 1901. His attitude is hardly surprising, considering he came to Santa Cruz 94 years ago, when the Boardwalk was still being built. He's seen Halley's comet twice in his lifetime, and at the age of 87, he was invited to write a column for The Santa Cruz News about how it felt to grow up in "this future Babylon-by-the-sea" whose streets "were laid out by the cows."

Now and Then (Otter B. Books; $17.95) is a compilation of those columns, and illustrates perfectly van Gorder's observation that "the good ol' days are not all that great, yet they had their moments. Memories surface like cream rising in those early days before pasteurization." Black-and-white photos trigger van Gorder's richly detailed jaunts down the decades to a time of "removing soot from chimneys with wads of newspaper, sampling gooseberries, or suffering through summer scullery at the Boardwalk."

Not your average historian, van Gorder doesn't suffer from the usual selective amnesia. Instead, he vividly recalls the stink of racism toward the Chinese and the bureaucratic crap that forbade his father to teach school here. Faced instead with shoveling steaming, stenching manure, his Dad's attitude toward the maddening, buzzing flies is worth remembering: "They keep us from being too satisfied with ourselves."

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