Dorothy Kennedy, living in her self-proclaimed exile way up there in Seattle, has, you recall, lost none of her concern for the Sacramento she still considers home.

That includes such inanimate objects as the carved horse’s head she recalls having graced the doorway of the old Van Voorhies-Phinney harness shop on lower J Street.

The source of all such information, Jim Henley, in charge of the city and county archives, was on vacation, so the answer had to wait for his return.

It was positive. In fact, a double positive.

Dorothy had forgotten — as had I — that there were two such equine heads, located at either end of the building rather than one over the doorway. And, yes, they both survive, stored among all the other memorabilia in the archives until a suitable place is found for their display.

•      •      •

When I first wrote about the Van Voorhies-Phinney building a few weeks ago, I commented on the aged men who worked in the saddle shop back in the 1940s and the equally ancient pictures of athletic heroes and pinups which still graced the walls decades after they had retired from the diamond, the prize ring and the stage.

And then, in the weeks since, it struck me that 60 years later I’d see nothing odd about men treasuring pictures of Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Lana Turner, Betty Grable or Jane Russell, the heroes and dream girls of our own youth.

Strange, isn’t it, how a person’s perspective changes with age?

•      •      •

The 150th State Fair has come and gone, and in many respects I found it the “same old same old” but still enjoyable. But I think the exhibit which I found most interesting and in which I tarried the longest was a display of pictures and other artifacts and memorabilia from State Fairs of the past. Like so many others, I found myself thinking, as I do at least once a year, “There hasn’t been a really great fair since it left Stockton Boulevard.”

It was there, as a teenager, that I almost got into show business after a fellow with a voice sounding positively waterlogged offered me a job.
When I hurried home to tell my parents, my mother asked me what I had to do. “Just sit on a board,” I told her, “while people throw baseballs at a target. If they hit it, I get dunked in a tank of water.”

It was strictly no sale. Mom figured out why the guy had a sore throat, even if I couldn’t.

•      •      •

My wife was ecstatic, I’d say, not just about the Music Circus show she’d just seen but how she’d happened on a parking place just when she was headed for the public garage.

But her happy grin turned to angry chagrin a couple of days later when that postcard arrived indicating she owed the city $35 for parking in a limited time zone.

After she had paid, however, she took a second look at the notice and saw that the violation supposedly had occurred on 14th Street and she knew she had parked on G Street. No use complaining, of course, as both areas were posted, but the discrepancy still bothered her.

Does the city take complaints from neighbors and issue citations on the basis of phone calls without checking? Or do the citation writers actually visit the scene of the violation and, when there are more than one, get careless about which car is parked in which illegal place?

Presumably, if a driver had a witness — and she did — the ticket could be contested on the basis the violation did not occur at that address.

Regardless, Joan says folks should be warned to look around carefully for signs limiting parking, particularly in residential areas at night. When she went back to check, she found one, but it was obscured from easy view by a large tree trunk. She looked, she says, but not carefully enough in all directions.

•      •      •

Latest reunions in the works are from Grant Union High, so — and may the animal protectionists forgive me — I’ll try to kill a pair of birds with a single stone:

The classes of the ‘30s are planning a daylight get-together at the Dante Club on Oct. 4, with cocktails at 11 and lunch at noon. Faye Gould W. Slouber (772-4372) and Carol Wilson Nunn (457-1104) are answering questions and taking reservations.

The class of 1953 has a 50-year reunion coming up Oct. 11 and 12, with a dinner dance at the Dante Club on Saturday night and brunch and an alumni museum tour Sunday morning at the school. Karen Bengtson Capps (786-2141) and Jack Westbrook (966-1319) are wrapping up the last-minute details.

•      •      •

After their town was termed “the armpit of America” by a Washington Post reporter, residents of Battle Mountain, Nev., struck back with their annual “Festival in the Pit.” They enlisted the aid of — what else — Old Spice deodorant.

If you’ve ever traversed I-80 through Nevada you know that most of the communities have an initial on a hillside — “W” for Winnemucca, “E” for Elko, and so on.

When our children were young — and while we never stopped there — they’d start asking miles in advance, “Hey, when are we going to pass the big BM?”

Heaven only knows where they picked up stuff like that, but their mother always said they took after my side of the family.