Growing Up in San Francisco

by Frank Dunnigan

  Yield: 32 pieces

  BETTY MOLLER’S GIN FIZZ

  For years, my friend Linda’s mother, Betty Moller, enjoyed entertaining friends, relatives, neighbors and co-workers at holiday brunches. (She despised the idea of going out to a restaurant on a holiday—“Lousy food and lousy service, all at the same time,” she insisted.) Betty would deputize all of us teenagers (this was 1968, and I was sixteen years old at the time) into various kitchen patrol chores for her brunches. I somehow found myself assigned to blender duty, and I caught on quickly. Betty had been searching for the perfect and simplest gin fizz recipe for years and had already acquired a cabinet full of exotic ingredients such as rosewater, citric acid, powdered egg whites and other items she labeled as “kooky.” She came across this recipe and directed me to “start mixing.” I’ve been doing so now for nearly fifty years. When our families get together for any holiday brunch, Linda and I will have one of these and remember her mother and all the good times we shared at her family’s home on 27th Avenue. Note that this can be made nonalcoholic by substituting an equal amount of water in place of the gin.

  6-ounce can frozen lemonade concentrate

  6 ounces half-and-half

  6 ounces inexpensive gin

  Ice

  Place equal portions of the first three ingredients into a blender, using the empty lemonade can to measure the half-and-half and gin. Fill blender with about 12 ice cubes. Blend until smooth, about 2 minutes. Serve immediately. Recipe easily doubles, triples and so forth, but be sure not to over-fill the blender jar.

  Yield: 6 servings

  TAMALE PIE

  There’s no agreement in our family as to the origin of this dish. Mom and her sister Margaret were sure that the recipe came from their own mother, but it has been printed in many old newspaper articles and cookbooks. It seems to have been around since the 1930s, and one thing is for sure—it’s always present on my family’s buffet table, and it has a particular affinity with cold slices of turkey and ham. This is also a dish that can be prepared in advance and keeps well, improving with age. I’ve reduced the amount of oil and eliminated the added tablespoon of salt that was called for in the original, but you should use a bit of added salt to your own liking. Note that the baking and the standing time are crucial to the success of this dish!

  1 pound ground chuck

  1 large onion, chopped

  2 cloves garlic, minced fine

  ¼ cup salad oil

  2 cans Del Monte Tomato Sauce

  2 sauce cans water

  1 can cream-style corn

  1 tablespoon Grandma’s Chili Powder

  1 egg

  ½ cup milk

  1 cup yellow cornmeal

  1 can extra-large pitted olives

  1 cup grated Parmesan cheese

  Salt to taste

  Brown the meat, onion and garlic in the oil in a large, heavy pot. Add the tomato sauce, water, corn and chili powder and stir well. In a medium covered jar, mix the egg and the milk. Add cornmeal and shake well to mix thoroughly. Add this to the contents of the pot and simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring often. Add olives and cheese and mix thoroughly. Salt to taste. Pour into a prepared casserole dish and bake uncovered in a 350-degree oven for about 45 minutes or until hot and bubbling. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.

  Yield: 8 to 10 servings

  PINK ICEBOX CAKE

  Mom got this one from her mother, Kitty Westerhouse, and made it regularly in the 1950s and 1960s. She then let it slide for a long time until a young friend heard her mention it when she was well past eighty. He was a budding pastry chef at the time and asked if she could show him how to make one. That got her back into action, and she made one easily. This is a great warm-weather treat—usually served from Mother’s Day through Labor Day. Be sure to buy the exact ingredients—sugar wafers (not vanilla wafers) and evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed milk). Make this your own springtime tradition.

  1 small package raspberry or strawberry Jell-O

  1¼ cups boiling water

  ¼ cup lemon juice (juice of 2 lemons)

  ½ cup sugar

  1 large can Pet or Carnation evaporated milk (very cold)

  2 inner packages Nabisco sugar wafers (not vanilla wafers), crushed

  1 small basket fresh strawberries, sliced

  2 containers whipping cream (½ pint each), whipped with a little sugar and vanilla

  Dissolve Jell-O in the boiling water. Add lemon juice and sugar, mix well. Let cool. When Jell-O mixture thickens slightly, add it to the canned milk, whipped stiff. Beat again to combine thoroughly. In a deep cake pan with a removable bottom, place a layer of sugar wafer crumbs, then add about half of the Jell-O mixture, then the remainder of the crumbs. Then layer the sliced strawberries and one of the half pints of cream, whipped stiff with a little sugar and vanilla. Add the remainder of the Jell-O mixture, cover with waxed paper and refrigerate overnight.

  When ready to serve, whip the second half pint of whipping cream with a little sugar and vanilla so that it is slightly stiff. Remove the cake from the pan, leaving the metal bottom in place. Frost the cake with the whipped cream and serve immediately.

  Yield: 8 servings

  11

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  From the beginnings of life, through the adolescent and the adult years, to the very end, there are steps along the way where we pause to come together in order to reflect on life’s changes.

  For many, a church christening marks an early rite of passage in a religious community. Among Chinese families, a “red-egg-and-ginger” party welcomes the newborn infant, and Jewish families hold a circumcision or a naming ceremony during the first week of a baby’s life.

  Within many Christian denominations, first communion and confirmation mark additional religious steps on the road to adulthood within the community.

  Bat and Bar Mitzvahs celebrated in a synagogue setting represent a thirteenth birthday and the beginning of adult responsibilities for daughters and sons in observant Jewish families. Likewise, the quinceañera celebration in many Hispanic communities marks both the secular and the religious transition to womanhood for young girls.

  School graduation ceremonies, held everywhere from a middle school stage to a house of worship and the grand expanses of San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, have marked additional steps along the path to employment and full adulthood for millions of residents over the years.

  Marriage still represents one of life’s major milestones in our society. San Francisco offers thousands of public and private venues for ceremonies marking the transition from single to couple lifestyles, as well as the receptions that often follow the ceremony. From a modest gathering of friends at home—a highly popular reception site until recent times—to grand events held in restaurants or other rented venues, we still celebrate the joy of a new couple.

  The Russian Orthodox Cathedral has been part of the Richmond District skyline since its construction in 1965. It is currently undergoing a first-ever renovation. Photograph by Michael Fraley.

  Finally, there are end-of-life rituals—differing within various religious and ethnic groups—but all meant to pay respect to the departed while consoling loved ones left behind.

  Funeral services can run the gamut from a quiet cremation and scattering of ashes in a favorite spot to traditional Judeo-Christian religious ceremonies, Irish wakes, Masonic funerals, elaborate events in the Chinese community that often involve marching bands and everything in between.

  Many families have a traditional provider for such services whenever the need arises; however, this is yet another factor of daily life that has been changing considerably in San Francisco during recent years.

  It’s not too often that a family business manages to thrive for three full generations, while still making meaningful contributions to the community. Sometimes a company will fail to keep pace with changing times (buggy-whip manufacturing or telephone answering services, as examples), while i
n other cases, operations may be moved to another country for the purposes of reducing taxes and production costs (such as manufacturers of everything from clothing to food products and automobiles).

  The baroque interior of Temple Emanu-El on Lake Street has been the congregation’s spiritual home since the 1920s. Courtesy of Keith Lynds Photography.

  However, one business, owned by a family with deep roots in the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, has been in place for ninety-two years now, quietly serving the needs of the community—Arthur J. Sullivan Funeral Directors. But if you wish to avail yourself of their services, it is too late, as the location was set to close in March 2016, with its upper Market Street space to be replaced by a condo-retail complex.

  Please do not blame changing times, though—it is not a story involving techie takeovers or unscrupulous landlords. The current generation of Sullivans—brothers Arthur III and Jim—are both well past the usual age for retirement, and the younger generations of the family are not interested in taking over daily management duties.

  The business began in the years just after the end of World War I, when the original Arthur J. Sullivan, who lived with his family near the southeastern corner of Golden Gate Park, went into business with his brother Alfred at 2254 Market Street, with the sign reading “Arthur J. Sullivan, Undertakers.” Over time, the original Arthur took over the business on his own, and the sign morphed into the industry’s new standard moniker, “Funeral Directors.”

  In that era, death was, sadly, a regular visitor to most households. The lack of antibiotics and preventative medical treatments and diagnostic testing took many San Franciscans to an early grave. Childbirth was the largest single cause of death among otherwise healthy young women. Today—when anyone who dies at less than age ninety is said to have “gone too soon”—it is difficult to imagine the frequency of funerals involving younger people who were often in the prime of their lives.

  St. Ignatius Church on the USF campus celebrated its centenary in 2014 and is now also a parish of the San Francisco Archdiocese. Photograph by Michael Fraley.

  San Francisco was dotted with funeral establishments in the 1920s, with more than fifty listings in each annual edition of the city directory for that era. Services were just beginning to be held outside the home, and various establishments were striving to provide a “homey” atmosphere for pre-funeral visitation and the service itself if the family was not planning to have a church service.

  This was also a time when the automobile was a comparative rarity in many households, so undertaking parlors tended to be conveniently located in virtually every San Francisco neighborhood in order to provide easy access for mourners. (These businesses were also located with easy access to neighborhood bars—often on the opposite corner—but that’s a story for another time.) Many firms in the 1920s had horse-drawn hearses, and the public transit system even offered electric streetcars specifically for funerals that ran to the Colma cemeteries via Mission Street and the center median of El Camino Real. Firms like Sullivan’s were among the first to introduce that new amenity—the automobile—for transporting both the casket and the mourners.

  In the old days, this was a trade that maintained a regular clientele, with families returning again and again to the same firm in times of need. Jewish families generally sought out the services of Sinai Memorial Chapel, while most Italian families gravitated to Valente-Marini-Perata. The once-large San Francisco Irish community had split loyalties, with many favoring the old firm of Carew & English, located for years at Masonic and Golden Gate Avenues. The Mission District was home to several establishments—Duggan’s, Driscoll’s, Reilly Company/Goodwin & Scannell—while the Richmond District had McAvoy & O’Hara at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard. Sunset District residents of an earlier era might choose from Hogan & Sullivan on 9th Avenue or Currivan’s Chapel of the Sunset on Irving Street. Arthur J. Sullivan, with its central location on Market Street, was known to many people citywide.

  Newlyweds in the courtyard of Temple Emanu-El on Lake Street in December 1975. Today they are grandparents, nearing retirement. Author’s collection.

  Gradually, consolidations began to occur, and many firms vanished over time. Some of those still in business, such as Halsted & Co. on Sutter Street, are an amalgam of many different firms with deep roots in San Francisco’s history. A sign at Halsted’s indicates that its firm has absorbed N. Gray (a gold rush–era coffin maker that survived well into the twentieth century), Carew & English, Gantner-Felder-Kenny (previously at Market and Duboce Streets), Gantner-Maison-Domergue, H.F. Suhr Company, Godeau Funeral Home, Martin & Brown Funeral Directors and Quock Fook Sang Mortuary. Some of the Halsted records go back to N. Gray’s services, with transactions dating from the 1850s.

  Even into the relatively modern 1950s and 1960s, funerals were often enormous events because many individuals died at relatively young ages, still in their working years and with many friends and relatives still living in San Francisco. Sullivan’s experienced congestion in its small parking lot in those days, and the family member in charge at the time, Arthur J. Sullivan Jr., a lifelong Sunset District resident, wisely purchased a dilapidated old structure facing 16th Street, had it demolished and created a larger lot to accommodate the constant stream of cars bringing mourners to the establishment each day and night for “visitation.”

  During the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Sullivan’s was recognized by the San Francisco Department of Health as being one of the only funeral establishments that would provide funeral services to victims. The Sullivan family has long been known for possessing generous quantities of both common sense and compassion.

  In 1986, second-generation family member Arthur Jr. passed away, and his wife, Catherine, took over the helm, overseeing the work of her two sons, Arthur III and Jim (one living in the Parkside and the other near West Portal). The business changed with the times, as the brothers noted that more and more local residents were opting for simpler funerals, often with cremation instead of open-casket viewing. Changing migration patterns, particularly among their largely Irish-Catholic clientele, meant that many families who once availed themselves of Sullivan’s services were no longer residing locally. Nearly a decade ago, Sullivan’s completed a merger agreement with Duggan’s Serra Mortuary, another firm with deep roots in the San Francisco community, thus setting the groundwork for the current transition.

  It’s interesting to note that within the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, many mothers of baby boomers used to share a wry expression among themselves that defined their personal wishes for remaining at home and aging in place as they grew older. Most widows, dozens and dozens of them, regularly announced to family and friends—this writer’s own mother included—that “the only person who will ever get me out of my house is Arthur J. Sullivan—and that will be feet-first.” We boomers generally tried to abide by such strongly held wishes.

  Now, the final two Sullivan brothers are about to embark on well-deserved retirements, and the Duggan family, with its younger generations still moving into management positions within their family-owned firm, will be taking over completely. The Market Street building is slated to become retail space, while the large adjacent parking area will see the construction of housing units.

  I’ll likely wander through that new space whenever some future retailer sets up shop, just for a final look at the spot where our family once said goodbye to so many loved ones.

  Thanks again to the Sullivan family for ninety-two years of loyal service to San Francisco.

  12

  WORKIN’ NINE TO FIVE

  What was your very first “real” job in San Francisco?

  Not mowing lawns or watching your neighbor’s kids or delivering the Shopping News, not the summer you spent scooping ice cream at Shaw’s on West Portal or dipping frozen bananas into chocolate sauce at Playland or selling baby turtles to the tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf—but your very first full-time, pay-the-rent and b
uy-the-groceries job you had as a young adult?

  By the early 1970s, both shipping and manufacturing were on the decline in San Francisco, and the service industry was beginning to boom. For many of us, our first job was in a downtown office of faceless co-workers, lined up at desks stretching out, row after row into infinity, surrounded by walls of filing cabinets. We might have been processing payments, answering telephone inquiries, typing forms, responding to customer complaints or simply filing endless streams of index cards or paper forms.

  For some of us, when computers were still a backroom operation, we might have spent our days researching data on microfilm (updated daily) of computer printouts. The whirring of film back and forth in the readers, along with the constant ringing of telephones, clattering of typewriters and mechanical adding machines, plus the often-deafening slamming of steel file cabinet drawers, was often far louder than the piped-in music that some offices began introducing at the time.

  The banks—Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Crocker, United California, Hibernia and Security-Pacific—were among San Francisco’s biggest employers back in the 1960s and 1970s, and they employed tens of thousands of us. Fresh out of high school or college, and with no bad work habits, these institutions were willing to take a chance on young grads to deal with the rapid growth of their branches and data centers, as baby boomers came of age and computers were just beginning to be introduced into the workplace.

  Bank of Italy, founded in San Francisco in 1904, renamed itself Bank of America in 1930. It grew to be the country’s largest bank and employed thousands of local residents in its downtown administrative offices and large branch network. Here, employees attend a staff meeting prior to the start of the business in the 1940s. A 1998 merger with an East Coast bank saw the Bank of America name go with the merged institution’s new corporate offices in North Carolina. Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.