We hope you will be able to join us on Wednesday February 10, at 7 pm to celebrate our society and to learn some very interesting things about what was and is going on in San Jose.
Mayor Richard Tran Initiating New Board
We are planning on having our usual Installation Meeting for our 2021 Officers and Board Members of the Milpitas Historical Society on Wednesday, February 10,at 7 pm, although unfortunately we will not be able to offer you a delicious dinner to go with it.
Still we hope you will join the Society from home, using Zoom, to celebrate the swearing in of our new Board by Mayor Richard Tran and the launching of a new and much better year for commemorating our history.
At our January 13 meeting, Milpitas Historical Society members elected the following slate of candidates for Officers and Directors for 2021
Officers
- President: Bill Hare
- Vice President: Catherine Pelizzari
- Secretary: Carolyn Tiernan
- Treasurer: Joseph Ehardt
Directors
- Archives: Joseph Ehardt
- Education Outreach Program: Joseph Ehardt
- Historian: Joanne Souza
- Membership: Dan Cosper
- Programs and Publications: Catherine Pelizzari
- Publicity and Public Relations: Harriett McGuire
- Special Events: Harriett McGuire
Author Ted Ramos Speaking on
Images of America: San Jose Gambling
And as we have in past years, we will host a special speaker to tell us new and interesting stories about the history of our area. In this case, our speaker will be the author of a new Images of America book about the history of gambling in San Jose.
Author Ted Ramos is a veteran police officer with the San Jose Police Department and spent five of his years as an officer regulating San Jose’s two large card rooms with the San Jose Police Department’s Division of Gaming Control. It was there that he discovered the city’s gambling past through the division’s records and speaking with the card room industry players and employees both past and present.
From the time San Jose was founded by the Spanish in 1777 as California’s first civilian settlement, the city has had its share of risk-taking in one way or another. San Jose began as a small settlement of farmers who produced food for the presidios in San Francisco and Monterey.
In their free time, the farmers enjoyed a few games of cards despite the strict rules of the Spanish military. Present-day San Jose has become filled with high-tech engineers risking everything to develop the next successful start-up company.
San Jose had a lot of gambling between these times—from the illegal speakeasy-type clubs that featured games such as dice, fan-tan, roulette, Chinese lotteries, and, of course, slot machines to the small legal card clubs consisting of one to ten tables filled with people playing games such as pan, lowball, and poker, that would eventually become two of Northern California’s largest card rooms, which generate millions of dollars every year.
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