With a 1964 VW bus parked out front, La Rinconada Country Club in Los Gatos went through a bit of a time warp last Saturday night as New Museum Los Gatos celebrated its 60th anniversary in groovy 1960s style.
There were tie-dyed shirts, paisley prints and lots of flowing, long hair — OK, mostly long-haired wigs — as the museum’s supporters channeled their inner “flower child” for the “Peace, Love + Art” benefit, which raised nearly $200,000. That money helps the museum continue its dual missions of providing both art programs, including the annual juried Santa Clara County high school art exhibition, and being a showcase for Los Gatos history.
Board president Julie Micallef led a toast to the milestone anniversary, recognizing the public meeting in May 1965 when a group of Los Gatos residents gathered to figure out if enough people wanted to start a museum, an idea pushed by obstetrician Ethel Dana Atkinson. The Los Gatos Museum Association was officially formed in 1967, the same year the Los Gatos Museum opened on the corner of Tait Avenue and Main Street, with the historical collection eventually making its way to the Forbes Mill Museum.
Everything was reunited under the same roof with the creation of New Museum Los Gatos, better known as NUMU, in the former town library on Main Street. After three years of planning and work, the renovated two-story building opened in May 2015.
On Saturday, NUMU Executive Director Kimberly Snyder helped present the museum’s inaugural awards with historian Alan Feinberg (founder of the “LOST Gatos Project) receiving the Leo & Leona Award for History (named after the large cat statues standing guard near the Cats off Highway 17). Marie Cameron received the Leo & Leona Award for Art, and Michael Parsons was honored with the Dr. Ethel Dana Atkinson Achievement Award.
Parsons served on NUMU’s board of directors from 2006 to 2018 and was board president in 2012. He and his wife, Alyce Parsons, established an endowment for the museum with a $1 million gift in 2022.
POLITICAL DRAW: Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and 2025, was at San Jose State on Wednesday to receive the Hearst Award from the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, joining an illustrious roster of recent honorees that includes Dan Rather, Marc J. Spears, Sara Sidner and Anthony Fauci.
Telnaes, who also participated in a cartooning workshop and panel discussion at SJSU this week, said becoming a celebrated editorial cartoonist wasn’t something she initially planned. She learned Disney-style character animation at the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia and then went to work for Disney as an imagineer. But two major political events — the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the Anita Hill hearings in 1991 — spurred her to start paying more attention to news and current events.
“That determined for me that I needed to try editorial cartooning because I wanted to use my art to have a point of view, to say something,” she said. “It wasn’t something I planned. It was just something I felt I needed to do.”
ONE FOR THE BOOKS: Vicky Nguyen, the former NBC Bay Area reporter who’s now seen all over the country with NBC News and the Today show, was the guest of honor Saturday at the San Jose Public Library Foundation’s Signature Author Event. Nguyen, who was born in San Jose and grew up in Santa Rosa, had a conversation about her book, “Boat Baby: A Memoir,” with Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong at the Blanco Urban in downtown San Jose.
Nguyen recalled she loved visiting the library when she was a kid because it was filled with books she could read for free that sparked her imagination. “They would transport you all over the place,” she said, remembering enjoying books by Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume and Roald Dahl. And now, she notes, she can’t believe that’s she’s an author with a book in the library, too. “Seeing ‘Boat Baby’ as a library book was just amazing,” she proudly said.