For nearly seventy-five years, Mr. Roosevelt watched over it all in a downstairs knotty pine room on 24th Avenue near Noriega, his place of honor having been conferred on him by the original owners, Ann and Charles, when the house was new back in the 1930s. It was their subtle little way of saying “thank you” to the man whose fiscal policies transformed them from renters into homeowners, thus ensuring their family’s financial stability for generations to come.
Framed image of FDR that hung in a knotty pine downstairs room on 24th Avenue for nearly seventy-five years. Courtesy of the Charles and Ann Lane family.
Ann and Charles were the grandparents of a St. Ignatius classmate, and I met them back in the late 1960s when their grandson and I were attending the old S.I. on Stanyan Street. They were, to use one of Ann’s favorite descriptions of others, “just grand people”—old-time San Franciscans born before the Fire. Ann grew up with seven brothers and sisters on 10th Avenue near Geary, in a Victorian house that remained in her family for nearly one hundred years, until her last sister died in 1988, when it was sold and demolished by the new owners a few years later for a new structure. Ann and her siblings attended nearby Star of the Sea Academy, where one of their classmates was another Richmond District youngster who grew up to become the famous comedienne Gracie Allen.
Ann and Charles met in 1922 at a Valentine’s Day party held “in one of those new flats near the police station on 24th Avenue above Taraval” and were married later that year, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. They raised two daughters in a series of apartments until the miracle of the Federal Housing Association loan enabled them to buy their first and only house just over the hill from the place where they met. Mr. Roosevelt assumed his rightful place on the wall of their knotty pine downstairs room shortly after move-in day.
Charles earned excellent wages as a union electrician, and there was no shortage of work from the time that he began installing wiring for some early SF Financial District high-rises in the 1920s, lights on the Golden Gate Bridge in the mid-1930s, through all of World War II, the boom years of the 1950s and right up until his retirement in the late 1960s. An enormous painted sign in the garage of his home remained as a souvenir from his days supervising a lighting improvement program at the old Kezar Stadium, under the auspices of Mayor Elmer Robinson, circa 1950.
Ann was a stay-at-home mom, but once the girls were older, she indulged in her love of stylish clothing by taking a part-time sales position at the old White House Department Store. It was the heyday of downtown retailing back then, with stores open only “business” hours, along with Monday nights until 8:00 p.m., and closed on Sundays. The White House went one step further and even closed on Saturdays during the summers so that the employees could spend more time with their families during school vacations—truly a vanished age.
Ann was a wonderful cook, and she and Charley hosted parties that were legendary. They could both pour the perfect Manhattan, and they indulged their guests, even the younger ones, since we were always under their close scrutiny. Their traditional gathering was Christmas Eve, with a wonderful combination of family, friends, neighbors and everyone’s co-workers. The open house began with hors d’oeuvres and a drink or two in the early evening. At about 10:30 p.m., most of the group would progress en masse to midnight mass at St. Ignatius. By 1:30 a.m., it was back to the house on 24th Avenue for a buffet of ham, turkey, salads of all sorts, baked beans, hot chocolate and glasses of champagne. The old Herman’s Delicatessen at 8th and Geary was the source of much of what filled the buffet table, with desserts usually coming from the Golden Brown Bakery on Irving Street.
Ladies were always “dressed up” for the occasion, and the men generally wore coats and ties. Even as a high school student, I joined in the ritual by wearing a natty three-piece suit and a festive Christmas necktie, something that I have not done in a good long time. Chatting with older folks who were eager to share a lifetime of stories that usually began with, “I remember when…” was a great rite of initiation for this future history buff. The festivities would inevitably spill over from the living room, dining room and kitchen and into the downstairs room that held a bar, a built-in record player and an old upright piano—another disappearing relic of San Francisco homes, often a survivor of the 1906 Fire. Occasionally, the party might end before dawn, but more than once, the sun was coming up by the time the last of the guests took their leave, and everyone always had a wonderful time, enjoying the hosts’ hospitality. All the while, through wars, civil unrest and economic crises, Mr. Roosevelt was quietly watching over things from his perch above the piano.
Family legend has it that about seventy-five years ago one guest indulged herself in a few too many cocktails one night and began ranting loudly against FDR and some of his economic programs, insisting to Ann and Charles, “You’ll have to take that picture down or else I’m leaving.” Without batting an eye, Ann promptly said to the woman, “Let me show you to the door.”
As we baby boomers came along in the 1950s, those knotty pine rooms gradually evolved into rainy-day play spaces and birthday party central, complete with cardboard cups of Arden Farms ice cream that came with tiny wooden spoons, birthday cake, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and lots of balloons. Lined up on benches and folding chairs at long plywood-topped tables that were covered with colorful paper tablecloths, little girls in frilly dresses and little boys in starched white shirts and clip-on bowties, we all helped each other celebrate our annual milestones, year after year.
As the 1960s drew to a close, dust slowly began gathering on all the rows of glassware behind the bar, and the revelry began to fall silent, as many old friends and family members departed for the very last time. Like many Sunset families who lacked a classic attic for storage, Ann and Charles allowed their big downstairs room to evolve into a storeroom for Christmas decorations; excess furniture; empty gift boxes from long-gone San Francisco stores like City of Paris, H. Liebes, Livingston Brothers, Nathan-Dohrmann, Ransohoff’s, I. Magnin, Joseph Magnin and the ubiquitous Emporium; and stacks of old magazines, records and books that were “too good to throw away.”
By 1972, ill health had begun to intrude on their lives, but Ann and Charles still celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary together at home. They always managed to coordinate their medical ups and downs so that just as one might need to enter the hospital for some sort of testing or treatment, the other had sufficiently recovered from his or her own health issues to assume the role of caregiver. They were there for each other until the very end, passing away less than two months apart in 1973.
After Ann and Charles died, their unmarried daughter continued to live in the house—it had been her home since she was eleven years old. She was one of those beloved maiden aunts who had risen through the ranks of Pacific Telephone into a series of comfortably secure positions before retiring in the early 1980s. Sadly, she recently joined the ranks of so many other beloved older relatives who have been waving that great generational goodbye to all the rest of us.
Now the grandchildren of Ann and Charles are confronted with the reality that their own lives have taken them in other directions, far away from 24th Avenue. As they rapidly approach their own retirements, they have reluctantly acknowledged that the old family home no longer fits into their plans. The “For Sale” sign has gone up, and generations of household memorabilia and paperwork have been sifted through, distributed, given away, shredded or simply discarded. Like many of us in the boomer generation, my friend and his sister were astounded by the amount of “stuff ” that their relatives had accumulated in the house over several lifetimes.
Surprisingly, they decided to entrust me with Mr. Roosevelt. Seeing him again was like revisiting an old friend. He is now hanging on the wall of my den, and I see his reflection in the mirror each time I sit down at the computer. Even though he has left behind his beloved knotty pine room on 24th Avenue, I’m hoping that he’ll enjoy life here with me.
I poured a M
anhattan before dinner on the first night that he was here, and we toasted the memory of Ann and Charles and their family, who were all “just grand people.” Mr. Roosevelt gazed at me from across the room, and while not forgetting his longtime Western Neighborhoods home, he seemed rather pleased to be settling in and watching over things from a slightly new perspective.
5
ALONG THE TARAVAL TRAIL
Although I spent most of my first fifty years living in the Outside Lands, I now live outside of Outside, though I still visit pretty regularly. When I don’t spend the night with family or friends, I often stay with those nice folks out at the Ocean Park Motel at 46th Avenue and Wawona. I always seem to find myself awake early and in need of coffee and the Chronicle. This leads to the inevitable trips up and down Taraval to see what is open at that hour.
It always seemed to me that in days gone by, Taraval was a veritable beehive of early-morning activity. Reis’ Pharmacy at 18th, Zim’s at 19th and the Baronial Bakery, the post office and the Overland Pharmacy near 21st, just to name a few, were active, even in the dark, early-morning hours. The familiar old yellow-panel bakery trucks with the pull-out shelves in the back would be cruising up and down the avenues with baked goods and grocery items such as orange juice, ground coffee, eggs and bread. The milk trucks from Borden and Sun Valley Dairy would be following a path, delivering to virtually all the homes on some blocks. Farther out, all the way along Taraval to the beach, were the small corner stores, their lights shining brightly. Many of those small places probably did a huge part of their business selling alcohol, tobacco, milk, bread and laundry detergent in the late-night and early-morning hours, back in the era of Ike and JFK.
There also used to be paperboys delivering the Chronicle (if you were in a Republican household) or the Examiner (if you were in a Democratic household) each morning, while those who delivered the Progress and the Shopping News were usually out and about after school. Strangely, most of those newspapers and their carriers are gone today. The big blue Chronicle trucks that used to rumble up and down Taraval frequently, until about ten years ago, loading up the vending stands on each corner with an inbound streetcar stop, are now few and far between, probably a reflection of a decline in readership, fewer people headed to work in the downtown area and more people opting for online news. Today, it seems that it is just those cool silver car tracks, stretching all the way out to the beach, without any early-morning signs of life in the neighborhood.
Taraval Street, looking east from 21st Avenue in the 1940s. The area retains much of its small-shop atmosphere today, though without the iconic Parkside Theatre, shown in the center distance. Jack Tillmany Collection.
At the time of a recent visit, about 6:00 a.m., I found my way into the Tennessee Grill, an old familiar breakfast hangout from the days when Dad would want to get an early start on many family outings, from summer vacation to the annual St. Cecilia Parish picnic. The place hasn’t changed much over the years since the original owners. The food is decent, down-to-earth and still reasonably priced. Service is unbelievably quick, but don’t ask for “cholesterol free” eggs, because they don’t have them. Toast is just white, wheat or rye, and the coffee is definitely not Starbucks. The only concession to modern times is that there are now pink, yellow, blue and brown packets on the tables in addition to a pour-jar of plain old sugar. Ketchup still comes in a red plastic squirt bottle, as God intended.
On that foggy Monday morning not too long ago, I was sitting in the same booth that I did in 1964 and enjoying a pleasant meal, served up cheerily on the very same plastic Melmac platters from days gone by. The Chron was still stringing a few pitiful pages together that I could read as I ate (no more columnists, fewer comics, virtually no business news at all, very little local coverage and no high school sports, with the main focus on vague international issues and Hollywood scandals). Glancing around, I estimated that I was the youngest customer in the place by a good twenty years or so—hey, it’s a great establishment that can make me feel that young again! If they would just repaint the interior in a color more cheerful than battleship gray and warm up the lighting a bit, it would crank things up a full notch or two. Once I was finished, it was time to walk off the fat and cholesterol, so I wandered a bit up and down Taraval to see the sights.
I was reminded of the early 1950s, before I started school, when Mom was still a non-driver and her usual household routine involved one or two weekly walking trips to all those long-gone merchants along Taraval. A regular shopping journey began by walking from our house on 18th Avenue down Vicente and then up 20th Avenue—a route that she selected to minimize the uphill climb. We would pass by the swings and slides of Larsen Park Playground, which would become a stopping-off point on the way home, if I behaved myself. Farther along 20th Avenue, past the older houses that had been constructed in the early days of the streetcar lines, we would wave hello to Mrs. Wolfinger, Grandma’s girlhood friend, who might be sitting by her living room window or out front watering, just as she had been since the early days of St. Cecilia Parish, circa 1917. Then we would pass the side wall of the theatre on 20th, with its memorable billboard advertising 7-Up, along with the stern exhortation that I remember to this day: SHOP THE PARKSIDE.
Looking up Taraval at 20th Avenue, we could see the Parkside Sanitary Barber Shop, whose proprietor would be out there each morning winding up the barber pole with a hand crank so that a hidden mechanism in the porcelain base would spin a red-white-and-blue cylinder in a glass cage—its message being, the barber is open for business. This was something that I always enjoyed watching for reasons that I still can’t fathom. I had my hair cut there for about the first fifteen years of my life, and if I didn’t squirm too much, I could count on Bill the barber to open up the drawer full of Tootsie Rolls that he kept in a desk opposite the first chair near the window. That was also the place where I learned the concept of infinity, by staring into a mirror that reflected the images of another mirror behind me—great stuff when you’re five years old.
On those shopping trips, my mom’s first stop was the Bank of America branch on the opposite corner. There was still etched glass in the lower six feet of the bank’s tall windows facing 20th Avenue, and it added to the mystery and the allure in the mind of a six-year-old of just what mounds of currency and coin might be found at the desks within. Stepping into the lobby, there was the distinct smell of money in the air—something that is no longer present in the sanitized, air-conditioned bank buildings of today. Some of my early reading was done while standing in that lobby—Paying, Receiving, Savings, Checking, Safe Deposit, Christmas Club, Loans, Note Department and Merchant Window were just some of the signs that caught my eye. In particular, the Christmas Club sign evoked visions in my mind of Santa and his reindeer, kicking back and relaxing in recliners around a fireside with mugs of hot chocolate. How I wanted to visit that part of the bank building! Thirty years later, when Mom was about seventy, I introduced her to the miracle of the ATM one Saturday afternoon, and she had a look on her face that was about the same as if Orson Welles had walked up to her and introduced a friendly Martian.
From there, it was off to the Rite Spot Market just a few doors away for a few grocery items, then a stop at the Baronial Bakery, run by Willie Nabbefeld and his wife, Wilma, where Mom would buy half a cake for dessert or perhaps a loaf of cinnamon bread. For years, every birthday, confirmation and graduation cake in our house came from Baronial, along with plenty of Sunday-morning powdered-sugar doughnuts—we sometimes went to Adeline on West Portal for Danish pastries. In the 1950s, openings above the door emitted warm, fragrant air from the kitchen that drifted out to the street. Dad could stand there and chat with Willie endlessly, having known him from the days when Willie operated a smaller bakery on the north side of Taraval, just east of 19th Avenue, and even earlier than that, when Willie’s father ran a Mission District bakery that Dad had known when he was growing up.
Then it was on to the post office. Prior to 1963, it
was located right there on the south side of Taraval, just east of the Overland Pharmacy, but with the back side of the post office wrapped around behind the drugstore so that the loading docks faced 21st Avenue, thus reducing the impact on traffic on Taraval. If you look really, really closely, you can still see where the three openings for the mail trucks once were in that west-facing wall. We would always stop in to buy stamps and say hello to Dad’s friend Mr. Tobin, who was the husband of the lady who would one day be my fifth grade teacher at St. Cecilia School, and if we were early enough, we’d see Leon, who would be delivering the mail to our block exactly at 1:00 p.m. every afternoon.
Taraval Bake Shop, late 1940s. Note the prices! Courtesy of Cathy Nabbefeld Crain.
Next, we might stop in at the Overland Pharmacy on the corner for some toiletries and to say hello to Richard, the pharmacist. Flash-forward to 2002, and with Overland Pharmacy long gone, I found myself shopping on Taraval, picking up Mom’s prescriptions at Safeway, where I was waited on once again by, yes, Richard the same pharmacist who used to work at Overland. As we talked, it also turned out that I had spent more than twenty years working alongside his widowed sister—nice people, both of them.
Moving along with the day’s errands, we’d bypass the Parkside Paint Store (that was a favorite spot on Dad’s list of weekend errands, and I’d get to go there with him and inhale paint fumes on Saturday) and then stop in at Ping’s Hand Laundry, where Mom took her tablecloths and Dad’s dress shirts. There was something very comforting about the steamy, clean smell of freshly laundered shirts, wrapped in blue paper and string and neatly lined up on the shelves that I can’t quite explain, though it remains with me to this day. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Ping’s elderly father, clad in a traditional silk jacket, ironing shirts by hand against the left-hand wall behind the counter. Years later, as Ping himself was about to retire, he lamented to me that the family business was not going to survive the next generation. “We worked hard so that all of the kids could have college degrees, and now no one wants to run a laundry.” He sold the business to a nice Korean lady about thirty years ago, which turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for herself and her family.
Growing Up in San Francisco Page 3