Joe and his partner opened their business in the summer of 1937. The bar/restaurant, called Garcia’s, was at the corner of First and Harrison Streets in downtown San Francisco, on the site of what is today the beautiful and stately WPA art deco–style Sailors Union of the Pacific building. In the ’30s and ’40s that section of the city was a rough area whose (low)life centered on the nearby docks. In fact, Rincon Hill, where the bar was located, had been the site of bloody battles between striking maritime workers and local police just three years earlier. Run-down seamen’s hotels and cheap restaurants dotted the area, and, sailors being sailors, there was plenty of nefarious activity to be found. The cheery, well-scrubbed boulevards and cedar-shaded parks of the Crocker-Amazon district must have seemed paradisiacal in comparison.
Joe had only been in the bar business for about six months when, on December 20, 1937, his first son, named Clifford Ramon (after Ruth’s maiden name and Joe’s middle name), was born at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. By all accounts, the Garcias had a very happy home life. Though the bar business was extremely time-consuming, Joe and Ruth managed to keep in close touch with their many relatives in the area, and large family dinners involving various Garcias and Cliffords were common. “The Cliffords were lovely people,” Leonor remembers. “We all got along very nicely and they were very fond of my parents, so we’d get together quite often.”
On August 1, 1942, Joe and Ruth’s second son, Jerome John Garcia, was born at Children’s Hospital. He was named after the great American composer Jerome Kern, whose bright, tuneful songs and music for the Broadway stage and Hollywood musicals made him a legend in his own lifetime. There’s no question that Joe Garcia would have encountered Kern’s sumptuous melodies during his own musical career; Kern’s music was an integral part of American popular culture from the late ’20s (when he wrote his best-known musical, Showboat, with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II) until his death in 1945.
During the first few years of Jerry’s life the family lived together in the small Amazon Street house. Clifford, who was forever branded with the nickname “Tiff” after his toddler brother’s mispronunciation of his name, went to Epiphany School, in the shadow of the majestic Church of the Epiphany about six blocks up Amazon, while Jerry stayed home with his mother; or if she was helping out downtown at the bar, he might spend the day with his mother’s parents over on Harrington Street or at one of his aunt’s or uncle’s houses. Tiff recalls going on a couple of family vacations when Jerry was still very young—to Las Vegas by train, and on a tour of some of California’s missions by car.
The whole Garcia clan often got together on Sunday afternoons down in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco, where Manuel, the family patriarch, had moved during the late ’30s. “He was a very bright guy,” his grandson Daniel says. “He spoke broken English, but boy, he could talk about any political issue, and those were the kind of discussions that were held around the table when Jerry and I and all of us were little kids. I think it’s part of the reason Jerry was an articulate guy. There were hot and heavy discussions, arguments even, between my grandfather and my dad and Uncle Joe. That was before dinner. Then after dinner there would inevitably be singing. Mostly it was songs from the flapper era—the ’20s and ’30s. We’d all be sitting around a big supper table, all the cousins and the aunts and everybody, and we’d sing for hours. It was a big deal. We’d sing American songs mainly—George M. Cohan, show tunes, popular tunes from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s.”
Tiff and Jerry both took piano lessons when they were young—Jerry was four or five when he started—“but we both hated it,” Tiff says. “Even though I was older, Jerry was better than me, but neither of us liked to practice, so we never got very good.” Ironically, years later Jerry composed some of his most memorable songs on the piano, though he never did become more than a rudimentary player.
Although Joe Garcia’s days as a professional musician were over, he still played music whenever he could. He entertained the seamen who frequented his bar with the mellifluous strains of his saxophone and clarinet, and he also played regularly at home and at family gatherings. Ruth played piano fairly well, but her taste ran toward Chopin rather than popular music. She listened mainly to classical music on the family phonograph. Joe liked swing music—Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and others. “There was always music in the house,” Tiff recalls, “either records or my dad playing. He had played clarinet mainly with his group, but I feel like I saw him playing saxophone more at home. There are pictures of me and Jerry with his saxes and clarinets.”
Jerry once said he had only fleeting memories of his father, but the sound of the clarinet wafting through the Amazon Street house was ingrained in his memory: “The clarinet is a wonderful instrument. It has a nice, sonorous quality. I remember the sound of the clarinet more than the tunes. The clarinet had that lovely wood quality, especially in that relaxed middle register. And that sound is very present in my ear. Sounds linger in my ear; I can recall ’em. Some people can recall smells. I can recall specific sounds—I can hear a sound and all of a sudden it will transport me to places.”
“I was in awe of Uncle Joe,” cousin Daniel says, “He would take out the saxophone and play for us and we’d sit there completely mesmerized.” Daniel remembers his uncle as “a very mild, kind, decent guy. I never heard him say a bad word about anybody. In a way Jerry reminded me of him. But Jerry’s mom was that way, too—very nice and sweet and kindhearted.”
Tiff says that both of his parents could be stern disciplinarians, too: “My dad once burned my hand to teach me a lesson because I accidentally set fire to the neighbor’s house. Actually, I set fire to some papers under a garage, but the guy happened to be a cop. Big mistake.”
The family was nominally Catholic. According to Tiff, “We went to church every Sunday, and later, when we moved down to the Peninsula, we went to church there. But my parents never came, my grandmother never came. They’d just push us out the door and say, ‘Go!’ Sometimes we’d go and sometimes we’d cut out and go get a milkshake.” In later years, Jerry recalled being alternately spooked and transported by the impenetrably mysterious Latin mass that echoed through all Catholic churches until 1962, when the Vatican II council authorized switching to the vernacular.
In 1945, when Jerry was three, the Cliffords and Garcias bought a small parcel of land and built a summer house in Lompico, an undeveloped, heavily wooded part of northern Santa Cruz County, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive south of San Francisco in those days. Ruth’s handyman father, Bill Clifford (known as Pop), and Joe Garcia built the redwood cabin on West Drive over the course of a couple of summers. In the early years it had no electricity. “We used lanterns, and the kids all bunked together,” Daniel says. It was hard to beat the location—just steps up the hill from Lompico Creek, which was dammed in the summer to create a swimming area, and Lompico Lodge, which was the main gathering place and watering hole for the summer revelers.
It was behind the Lompico cabin, in either the summer of 1946 or the spring of 1947, that one of the formative incidents of Jerry’s early life occurred. As Tiff tells the story, “Jerry [who was four] and I were chopping kindling outside near the fire pit—they didn’t call them barbecues back then. He would put a piece of wood down, take his hand away and I would chop. He’d put another one down, I’d chop it in half. These are long sticks, redwood branches. We got into a rhythm, him pushing the sticks with his finger and taking it away as I chopped, but in a split second we got confused and wham!—I hit his finger. It wasn’t cut clean off but we couldn’t get him to surgery fast enough and so they had to amputate it.”
“My mother had my hand wrapped in a towel, and I remember it didn’t hurt or anything,” Jerry recalled, “it was just sort of a buzzing sensation. I don’t associate any pain with it. For me, the traumatic part of it was after the doctor amputated it, I had this big cast and bandages on it. And they gradually got smaller and smaller, until I was down to, like, one littl
e bandage. And I thought for sure my finger was under there. And that was the worst part, when the bandage came off. ‘Oh my God, my finger’s gone!’ But after that it was okay, because as a kid, if you have a few little things that make you different, it’s a good score. So I got a lot of mileage out of having a missing finger when I was a kid.”
And so the middle finger on Jerry’s right hand was amputated down to the second joint, thereby creating what would in his later years become another iconic symbol: the unmistakable Jerry Garcia handprint, seen on T-shirts, bumper stickers and car window decals. “It was a total accident, of course,” Tiff Garcia says, “but deep down I felt I was responsible. I was the older kid and I was the one who actually did it. I don’t think Jerry ever held it against me, though.”
In the summers, Jerry, Tiff, their mother and various cousins and aunts would typically spend weeks on end in Lompico, while the working men in the family—Joe and Manuel Garcia, Pop Clifford and his son, Bill, who was a San Francisco fireman—mainly came down on weekends. In the last week of August 1947, Tiff went down to Lompico to spend some time with his cousins, while five-year-old Jerry accompanied Ruth and Joe on what was to be a weeklong fishing vacation up in the wilds of Humboldt County before Jerry started kindergarten. Joe loved outdoor leisure sports like fishing and golf; Tiff says their garage at home was filled with his father’s sports equipment.
On Sunday, August 24, Joe, Ruth and Jerry began the long but scenic drive north to Arcata, about 275 miles up the coast from San Francisco. They probably spent the night somewhere off Highway 101; the next day they made it to Arcata, where they were planning to stay for the week, and then drove about 30 miles inland to an area near the tiny logging town of Willow Creek so Joe could fish for steelhead in the clear, sparkling waters of the Trinity River. That part of the Six Rivers National Forest is breathtakingly beautiful, with dense forests covering the foothills of rugged mountains that range from 3,000 to 5,000 feet near Willow Creek to 7,000 feet or more in the nearby Trinity Alps. The Trinity River is rocky and wild, its currents unpredictable.
At about 5:30 in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth, Joe Garcia was in his waders, fishing in the river, when he slipped on a rock and was swept into the raging waters. Although he was a good swimmer, he was no match for the fierce current, and within a matter of moments he was pulled underwater into a deep hole and pinned there. A couple of youngsters playing on some nearby rocks saw Joe go under and immediately went for help. Three vacationing fishermen rushed to the scene and managed to pull Garcia from the water, but only after he’d been underwater ten to fifteen minutes. By coincidence, shortly after the three men brought Joe’s seemingly lifeless body onto land, a Humboldt county medical officer happened by, and for the next five and a half hours he attempted to resuscitate the victim, even using a pulmotor brought in by ambulance from Arcata. The struggle was futile, however, and at 11:15 that evening Joe Garcia was pronounced dead. He had turned forty-five ten days earlier.
(Though in a few interviews Jerry claimed to have witnessed his father’s drowning—“I actually watched him go under; it was horrible”—Tiff, based on what his mother told him, questions that. The detailed newspaper account of the drowning the following day in the Humboldt Times makes no mention of either Ruth or Jerry being on the scene; indeed, Jerry is misidentified in the story as Joseph Garcia’s “small daughter.” This is not to minimize the impact of the death upon Jerry, however.)
The next day, Joe Garcia’s body was shipped from the Chapel of the Redwoods in Arcata down to a mortuary in San Francisco. That same day, Tiff says, “My grandfather [Pop Clifford] had to drive down to Lompico from the city in his old Model A panel truck laundry wagon to tell us, because we didn’t have a telephone. He never took that wagon out of town, so we knew something was wrong when he pulled up in that. It was crushing, to say the least. It was the first death in that generation.”
“That was the biggest tragedy we’d ever had in our family,” Leonor says. “We couldn’t believe it. It took us all a long, long time to get over it.” Adds Daniel Garcia, “My father and his brother were very, very close so this was just devastating.”
Though Jerry was only five at the time, he said in 1984 that his father’s death “emotionally crippled me for a long time. I couldn’t even stand to hear about it until I was about ten or eleven. The effect it had on me was really crushing, maybe because it affected my mother a lot and I sensed that. And also, it was something I wasn’t allowed to participate in, and I think now that that was a real problem. They tried to protect me from it. That was the reason I was sent to live with my grandparents after my father died.”
Without warning—like some monstrously cruel twist of fate in a nineteenth-century English novel—everything changed for the Garcia family. Tiff briefly moved in with his uncle and aunt—Bill Clifford, the fireman, and his wife, also named Ruth—while Jerry stayed with his mother in the Amazon house. Tiff was taken out of Epiphany School and moved to a nearby public school, Guadaloupe. That’s also where Jerry spent his first six months of kindergarten. Manuel Garcia (Joe’s brother) and his family lived right near Guadaloupe, so Jerry and Tiff would usually go there after school, and then later someone would drive them back home.
“Then my mom sold the house on Amazon, so she could get into the bar business, buy out the other partner, and Jerry and I ended up moving in with my grandmother and grandfather [Pop and Tillie Clifford, known in the family as Nan or Nana],” Tiff relates. “We lived there at 87 Harrington Street, and my mom lived across the street in a cottage that my grandmother and grandfather also owned. So we lived close to my mom still, but we didn’t see her much, except on weekends. She’d take us out for dinner, or make us dinner, or we’d go out somewhere, but my mom never drove—in fact, I got my driver’s license before she did. She tried to drive after my father died, but she crashed up a couple of cars; she was a terrible driver. So for Jerry and me, our main role models for a long time were my grandparents, which was not bad.
“Before my father died we used to visit my grandmother every weekend and we spent a lot of time there, so it wasn’t that new a thing to be there year-round. In fact, it was kind of nice because we got to go out after school and play, and my grandmother worked late and my grandfather would read the paper and drink his beer—he was the type who made his own liquor during Prohibition. He was very dapper, with a vest and a chain watch. My mom was a whole lot like him; she was very neat.”
According to Leonor, most of the Garcia side of the family disapproved of Ruth’s decision to stay in the bar business. “She had been a nurse making good money, so we thought that would be better for her,” she says. “We thought the bar was kind of a rough place for a woman to be, but she wanted to stick with it, and she did for a few years. We didn’t see as much of her or the children after Joe died. Mostly they were with their grandparents, the Cliffords.”
Tiff says that shortly after he and Jerry moved into Harrington Street, Ruth bought them the first television on the block “and also this big freezer, with a complete food program. I guess she felt a little guilty that we had to stay with our grandparents. But she was only paying twenty-five dollars a month rent for the house across the street.”
In Jerry’s posthumously published book Harrington Street, a slender but beguiling collection of paintings, drawings and writing about his youth up until about age ten (he described the book as “auto-apocrypha, full of my anecdoubts”), he talks about how Bill and Tillie Clifford seemed like such a mismatched pair. She was vivacious, spunky, “a ball of fire; she was really hot.” Pop was “so dull. He was such a quiet person. This was one of the Irish guys that didn’t have the gift of gab.”
Tillie was a bright, active, very independent woman. Bill had been a laundry worker most of his adult life—he was a laundry driver mainly—and he supported his wife, but it was Tillie who made a mark in that business. She helped organize the laundry workers’ union in San Francisco, and she spent more than two de
cades as its secretary-treasurer. She traveled extensively in that position, attending and occasionally speaking at labor conventions. She was modern in another way, too, Tiff says: “She had a boyfriend for like twenty or thirty years that she would travel with when she took trips; he’d go along and he was a single guy and didn’t have a family. My grandfather knew, but the guy never came to the house. It was a discreet situation.”
Outwardly at least, Tiff and Jerry’s years at their grandparents’ house were fairly normal. They attended Monroe School on Excelsior Boulevard, the same school Ruth Garcia had gone to when she was a child living on Harrington Street. It was Jerry’s third-grade teacher at Monroe, Miss Simon, who first “made me think it was okay to draw pictures,” he said. “She’d say, ‘Oh that’s lovely,’ and she’d have me draw pictures and do murals and all this stuff. She was very encouraging, and it was the first time I heard that the idea of being a creative person was a viable possibility in life. ‘You mean you can spend all day drawing pictures? Wow! What a great piece of news!’ She enlarged the world for me.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 3