Growing Up in San Francisco

by Frank Dunnigan

  I continued my walk, passing by several empty storefronts that may or may not truly be under renovation. I seem to recall that there was a radio repair shop, though that business probably dropped off considerably after the introduction of transistor radios, about 1959 or so. There was also a jewelry store where Mom liked to ooh and ah at the contents of the display window. The old Germanic-looking man behind the counter, jeweler’s eye firmly in place, would always look up as we passed and smile and wave at us. Approaching the corner, I could still envision the Vogue Reweaving Studio where Mrs. Fukuhara and one other lady performed needle and thread miracles on torn sweaters, damaged tablecloths and the like. I know that they were still busily reweaving in the 1980s and 1990s when I lived at 22nd and Pacheco, but they have now vanished like all the others, swept up into the swirling foggy mists of the past.

  Our next stop was at the meat counter of 22nd and Taraval Market (now Walgreens), where our Wawona Street neighbor Mr. D’Angelo worked as a butcher, and he would always offer me a slice of bologna or a hot dog. Mom enjoyed chatting with him and felt sorry that his young wife had died years earlier, leaving him alone to raise a son just a few years older than myself. Sadly, the son was killed in an accident in the summer of 1962, leaving Mr. D’Angelo all alone in their big house for another twenty-five years or so.

  Then we would cross Taraval (remember, hold hands and look BOTH ways) and visit the library, where we could sit and relax for a few minutes after picking up or dropping off books. I can see that the present renovation seems to be coming along, though it is eerie to see it looking like a bombed-out shell, with parts of the building essentially open to the elements. My first memories of that place are from the fall of 1957, when Mrs. Beckerman and Mrs. McAtee, the two kindergarten teachers at Parkside School, walked the entire afternoon class, holding hands two by two, up there one drizzly autumn afternoon. We were all appropriately decked out in our yellow slickers, rain hats and galoshes (anyone else remember adults telling you that you had to take them off in the house or else they would hurt your eyes?). Once we arrived, we were taken into the big reading room in the front, with the floor-to-ceiling windows facing Taraval.

  Climbing up on the big leather chairs and sofas, with a warming fireplace along the back wall and the incredible smell of a library, it was a place of pure comfort. I still remember that the one thing I wanted for my birthday that year was a library card—ah, simpler times! The fireplace, inoperable for years by city ordinance, will likely not be returning, and I’m sure that the leather seating failed to pass inspection by some politically correct bureaucrat. Let’s just hope that no one attempts to change the windows that let in that great southern exposure, since they will be the only element to warm up the place now.

  I passed by the old locations of Hamill’s Hardware Store and, in the next block, Parkside Appliance. Both were favorite shopping places for my parents. Mom had a pair of ceramic Dutch boy and girl figurines that she and Dad purchased at Hamill’s the day they moved into their house, in September 1948. Those two statues stood sentry in the very same spots at opposite ends of the fireplace mantel, appearing in every family photo for the next fifty-four years.

  As I walked east up the north side of Taraval, my imagination could still see the Parkside Theatre on the right. Without a doubt, it defined the entire community with its massive red sign rising vertically four or five stories above its low-rise neighbors and dominating the scene by turning the foggy air a crimson hue, something that could be seen most nights from our living room window on 18th Avenue, several blocks away. That old place was the site of countless summer matinees, for which schoolchildren in the neighborhood could buy ten weeks of admission for a mere dollar at the start of the summer. Those thin yellow perforated tickets were our key to freedom around 1963 or so. Whether with a group of friends or on our own (and usually meeting lots of classmates there), the tickets provided an uninterrupted afternoon away from home, and nobody worried, as long as Mom knew where you were. We faithfully paid the inflated prices at the Parkside’s snack bar, though the really “wild” kids always managed to sneak in candy from the adjacent Dickinson’s, which sold it for far more reasonable prices. Beginning in the late 1960s, when the building was remodeled into the Fox Parkside, it began to lose its allure, and slowly all the old trappings disappeared, from the multistory red neon sign to the ticket booth, and it finally became a nursery school, though with the iconic name Parkside School. Recent updates have totally obliterated any remaining traces of the once-grand movie palace, except for some art deco embellishments on the west wall facing 20th Avenue.

  The cool, quiet interior of the Parkside Branch library in 1959 was a home away from home for many children and adults. Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

  In that same block, there was a small gift shop run by a lady named Evelyn, who lived on 21st Avenue, and Mom would stop in there to buy the occasional birthday card. When I was about six, the fringe on the sleeve of my Davy Crockett jacket bumped a teacup off a shelf, and Evelyn coolly told Mom that she would have to pay for it. Not liking to be taken advantage of for an accident, Mom didn’t bat an eye, but just as coolly told the woman, “I’d like the pieces gift-wrapped, please.” Once home, she carefully glued it back together and placed it on a glass shelf in our living room curio cabinet, where it resided for the next forty-five years.

  Just uphill from the Parkside was the Different Bakery, a place that Grandma used to visit regularly, just for its jelly roll covered in white frosting—her traditional dessert after serving a corned beef dinner to everyone at her house on 21st Avenue. It came as a surprise to me in the 1990s when Mom mentioned that her own mother had worked there for several years in the late 1930s before World War II, and it intrigued me to think that my two grandmothers had likely known one another long before my parents had gotten together.

  Crossing 19th Avenue, I saw that Zim’s, along with several of its replacements, are now all gone, replaced by yet another eatery that does not open very early. The old painted sign on the south-facing wall of that building, advertising Roberts-at-the-Beach Motel, has been painted over by a new advertiser for many years now. (Roberts itself lasted for several more years before falling to the wrecker’s ball in 2015.) Strange as it seems, even the gas stations along 19th Avenue are another dying breed. The Shell station is still there, alongside the 1960s apartment building where Dad’s cousin Vivian used to live, but all those other ones that used to dot virtually every intersection are becoming a rare breed, indeed.

  The Sunset Motel, built in the 1950s and expanded in the 1960s, is now gone, replaced by a new block of condos, and the adjacent medical building that once housed Dr. Tackney’s dental office (a favorite of St. Cecilia students) now has a whole new roster of tenants. Across the street, the Gold Mirror stands out like an old friend, serving up a month’s worth of vitamins with every bowl of minestrone. The place has been spruced up a bit after a runaway truck did some damage to the entrance a couple of years ago, and it will likely still be around for a good many more years. Reis’ Pharmacy, now a liquor store, was at the southeast corner of 18th and Taraval, with an expansive comic book selection just inside the front door. It was the very last place that I ever saw a druggist use a mortar and pestle to mix drugs. All the work went on in a little room in the far rear corner, entered through a set of barroom-style swinging half-doors, and I remembered having to wait impatiently while Dad would lean on the counter, yakking back and forth with the owner and his brother, whom Dad had known since 1937, when he first moved to the neighborhood with his widowed mother and his own brother.

  Across the street on the north side of Taraval, on the site of the present Safeway store, was Holiday Chevrolet, beginning in the early 1960s. Prior to that, it was known as Spencer Buick, but Grandma always remembered the location as the Parkside Coal Company, and an old advertisement on the wall of her garage confirmed that fact for me. Several blocks up Taraval, also on the north
side and closer to today’s Herbert Hoover Middle School, there was another auto dealership, Avenue Rambler. Each fall, all the boys in the neighborhood would descend, en masse, on each of these two auto showrooms to check out the new models, much to the disgust of the sales staff. The styling differences from one model year to the next were enormous back then, and although I can still identify every GM model from 1950 through the mid-1970s in a flash, I would be hard-pressed to identify most cars on the road today as a 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 or 2015 model year. How some things have changed!

  Charles Reis operated a popular pharmacy at the corner of 18th Avenue and Taraval Street from the 1930s until the 1970s. The comic book rack was just inside the door, and he allowed youngsters to read as much as they liked while their parents shopped. Courtesy of David Reis.

  At the corner of 17th and Taraval, there was Charles J. O’Callaghan Real Estate & Insurance—his youngest son and oldest grandson were both in my class at St. Cecilia School, and one of his granddaughters just retired as assistant chief of police. For many years, he was one of the leading real estate agents in the area. His biggest competition was James Sullivan Real Estate & Insurance on West Portal, where our old family friend Theresa was the office manager. In spite of their business rivalry, O’Callaghan and Sullivan were longtime neighbors living just across the street from each other on the 2500 block of 17th Avenue, near the St. Cecilia rectory.

  As I headed back to the car and drove off, I passed by the corner of 24th Avenue and Fahey’s/The Dragon Lounge, which has been written about a few time on the Outside Lands site. It’s nice to see a bit of the past combining with the present and future so that so many people can share in the same memories and nostalgia going forward. Wally’s Ice Cream, with its red-and-white-striped awning, just kitty-corner from there, is long gone, while the police station, just up the hill, looks much the same, even after some renovations.

  Baronial Bakery at 1033 Taraval Street served the neighborhood for decades. Courtesy of Cathy Nabbefeld Crain.

  Those flats adjacent to the SFPD’s Taraval Station, when new, were the scene of a Valentine’s party back in February 1922. A friend’s grandmother always recalled how she met her future husband there that night, when they discovered that they had matching halves of red construction paper hearts, passed out by the hostess to all the guests as they arrived. They were then paired up for the evening, began dating and were married that December, raising a family and living out the rest of their long lives just over the hill on 24th Avenue near Noriega.

  As I passed by during my recent walk, a young couple was walking up the block, hand in hand, gazing into each other’s eyes as they strolled past that row of flats—buildings that are now fully ninety-plus years old—reminding me clearly that some things in life do not change at all.

  6

  SCHOOL DAYS

  In the not-too-distant past, nearly 25 percent of the city’s population was made up of school-age children. Today, that figure has been cut in half, and there are now more registered dogs than children in San Francisco. It is little wonder, then, that education plays such a significant role when we remember the past.

  The sheer number of baby boomers in the post–World War II era strained the capacity of schools everywhere, but particularly in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, whose parochial school system was impacted by a large Roman Catholic population with a traditionally larger family size. As a result, some parochial schools were forced to shut down their kindergarten operations in the 1950s in order to maintain fire department–authorized capacities in their upper grades. Consequently, thousands of children who were eventually bound for Catholic school educations experienced the warm embrace of kindergarten in the arms of the San Francisco Unified School District.

  Particularly in the growing Western Neighborhoods of the city, elementary schools were constantly expanding in the 1950s. A new concept, “home schools,” sprang up in the public school system, in which small facilities housing only the lower grades were constructed quickly to deal with the onslaught of larger and larger classes of baby boomers—with an understanding that many of these families might likely migrate to the suburbs prior to the time their children reached the upper grades and/or high school. Two of the home schools in the Sunset District were Juan Crespi at 24th Avenue and Quintara and Noriega Home School at 44th Avenue and Noriega.

  Report cards issued by the San Francisco Unified School District have long carried the message about home and school working together. Author’s collection.

  While many newer school buildings are architecturally uninspiring, Francis Scott Key, on 43rd Avenue in the Outer Sunset District, was designed in a classic art deco style and included a winged Pegasus above the entrance. Following recent renovations, the school has one of the largest special education programs in the district. Photograph by Michael Fraley.

  Likewise, the Catholic schools were expanding, too. St. Cecilia School, built in 1930 at 18th Avenue and Vicente Street, originally had just eight classrooms but was doubled in size in 1948 to include two classes at each grade level, plus both morning and afternoon kindergarten sessions. St. Gabriel, at 40th Avenue and Ulloa Street, opened in 1948 and soon expanded to three classes at each grade level—the largest Catholic elementary school west of Chicago at that time. Many Catholic parishes in San Francisco were building or expanding elementary schools in the years after World War II.

  Large public high schools dotted the city landscape in those days, including Balboa, Commerce (closed after 1950, with the school building becoming administrative offices and the one-time football field of the champion Bulldogs now the site of the 1980 Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall), Galileo, Lincoln, Lowell, Mission, Polytechnic (closed after 1972, with the school building demolished and the site converted to housing) and Washington.

  Between 1925 and 1968, Poly won thirty-nine city championships in high school sports, including thirteen football titles. From 1942 to 1961, under the legendary head coach Milt Axt, the Parrots won forty-five straight games—never once losing to their crosstown archrival, Lowell High School.

  St. Cecilia School at 18th Avenue and Vicente Street was built in 1930 with eight classrooms. A 1948 expansion doubled the school’s capacity, and today it is the largest Catholic elementary school in San Francisco. A new church building was constructed in 1956 on the sandlot in the foreground, plus a new multipurpose facility in 1999–2000. Courtesy of Monsignor Michael D. Harriman, parish archives.

  After Poly closed in 1973, the building was eventually demolished. While individual classes no longer hold reunions, the very active alumni association now sponsors all-class gatherings. In 2014, the group held a centennial rededication of the cornerstone in a replica of the original building’s exterior wall. Courtesy of Bob and Carolyn Ross.

  In 1962, Lowell, then located at Hayes and Masonic for fifty years, followed the city’s population to a location west of Twin Peaks, opening a new campus on the shores of Lake Merced.

  For nearly a decade, from the mid-1930s through World War II, San Francisco’s Catholic high schools banded together to conduct joint commencement exercises—a practice largely forgotten today. Reading over the list serves as another quiet reminder that many of these schools are no longer with us today.

  While the San Francisco Unified School District actually has its own published dress code (recently updated for the first time since 1997 to eliminate a district-wide ban on head coverings), Catholic school students continue to have far less wardrobe latitude than their public school counterparts. In particular, girls attending San Francisco’s Catholic girls’ high schools still have very clear uniform requirements.

  Each August, the annual buying begins. Many girls visited the old Sue Mills store on upper Market Street (now relocated but in business since Harry Truman was in the White House) or the downtown City of Paris department store. Most San Franciscans could spot the herringbone patterns a mile away—tan for St. Rose versus gray for Convent of the Sacred Heart—
and easily tell the difference between Presentation’s and Mercy’s plaid patterns, while Star of the Sea’s solid dark-brown skirt also stood out in a crowd. Although there was very little that a student could do to customize her school’s specialized look, there were some options that permitted a bit of fashion consciousness.

  From the Depression through World War II, Catholic high schools joined together to hold a single, consolidated graduation ceremony each year. Many of these once-popular Catholic high schools from 1943 have closed or merged in recent times. Courtesy of Bernadette Ruane Hooper.

  Having completed a highly unscientific poll of Catholic school alums, all with vast experience, we now take a look back at some fashions that once dominated local high school corridors.