“Jerry and I used to like drawing together,” Tiff says. “I was really into drawing structures, and Jerry was more into drawing characters. When we were growing up at my grandfather’s house we used to draw on these laundry pads we had all over the house. We’d draw a little house, then get a razor blade and cut the window out of the house and go into the next page and cut another little slot for the door and so on and make these flip books.
“We also used to make instruments out of my grandfather’s antique cigar cases, which he used to keep his tools in. We’d make little ukuleles that were actually playable. We didn’t know chords or frets or anything. But we’d string them with fishing line. We went through periods where we’d make dozens of them. We were always fashioning our own little toys. My grandmother had a rumpus room under the house on Harrington Street and with my cousin [Daniel] we’d all sing and bounce around the room, and have parties.”
It’s not surprising to learn that thoroughly modern Tillie Clifford played the oh-so-’20s banjo-ukulele—“Four strings, short neck, strung like a banjo,” Tiff says. “She didn’t actually play it in our time. In fact when Jerry got into bluegrass, I gave it to him. He probably traded it somewhere along the line.”
Jerry often said that one reason he eventually got into playing country music was that Tillie listened to broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, but Tiff firmly says, “She wasn’t into country music. Jerry is fantasizing all this. We knew about it because of her tours she would take and when she’d go to these conventions. She’d bring back memorabilia from these various places. She’d been to the Opry, but she didn’t listen to it on the radio.”
Of course in the early ’50s everyone heard country-pop crooners like Tennessee Ernie Ford and Vaughn Monroe, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were going strong still. There was also a fellow in the Bay Area named Rusty Draper: “He had a kids’ show on in the afternoon when TV first came out,” Tiff says, “and in fact, one of the first 45s Jerry ever bought was a song [Draper recorded] called ‘Gambler’s Guitar.’ It was sort of countryish and it had some riffs in it, little guitar solos, and I think that’s part of what got him and myself interested in that kind of music.”
Down at the bar, the jukebox was mainly filled with a mix of big band music and sentimental ballads—a reminder of Joe Garcia’s days around the place. Sometime in the late ’40s, the Sailors Union of the Pacific bought the corner lot where the bar and hotel were located so it could erect its moderne granite-faced meeting hall. “So they made a deal for my mom to have the property across the street, which at the time was an abandoned Curtis Candy Company factory, with a hotel on top called the Claremont Rooms. It had been a funky old seamen’s hotel. Jerry and I used to go upstairs and clean out the rooms for my mom and we’d look at all the girlie magazines they’d leave.”
“It was a daytime bar, a working guy’s bar, so I grew up with all these guys who were sailors,” Jerry said. “They went out and sailed to the Far East and the Persian Gulf and all that, and they would come and hang out in the bar all day long and talk to me when I was a kid. It was great fun for me.”
In late ’40s–early ’50s San Francisco, kicks were easy to find for kids. The streets were relatively safe, so Tiff and Jerry roamed the city freely, taking advantage of the long leash their grandparents gave them. “You could take a bus or streetcar downtown, or ride your bike,” Tiff says. “The trolleys had stopped going on Mission Street, but they were still on Market. They had trolley buses that we used to climb on the back of. We went all over the place: we’d go out to Sutro Baths [a defunct indoor swimming pool next to Ocean Beach in San Francisco], and Playland [an amusement park] was out there. You could go down there and spend all day. Sometimes we’d go to Fleishacker’s—it was such a beautiful pool; it was like a lake. We’d go to the zoo [also out at the ocean], too.”
Closer to home there were inexpensive movie theaters and plenty of small parks and playgrounds to keep the kids busy. Jerry spent much of his playtime in the late ’40s and early ’50s with his brother and older cousins Daniel, Diane (the daughter of Bill and Ruth Clifford) and Dave Ross (Leonor’s son). Hanging with the big kids undoubtedly exposed Jerry to many things other kids his age hadn’t experienced, but the influence wasn’t always positive.
“I remember there was a police station over in the Ingleside district, next to Balboa Park, below City College, where they used to board horses; there was a big corral in the back,” Tiff says. “This must have been ’48, ’49. Jerry, myself and my cousin Diane were in the back there and we noticed all these broken windows and a lot of rocks around, so we started breaking windows. We figured there were so many broken ones, what difference would it make? We were bored. And it was fun—until the cops came running out from all over the place and rounded us up. I don’t remember them having weapons—Jerry liked to say they did, but I don’t know—but they scared the shit out of us. So my parents had to pay for some of the damage and we were in big trouble at home. It was a big deal to me at the time. I was very impressionable. You know—first run-in with the law, twelve years old.”
Daniel Garcia remembers another run-in with the SFPD around the same time: “Right around the corner from Harrington Street, on Mission, there was a barbershop that had one of those turning barber poles out front. It had some kind of keyhole or something at the bottom and Jerry, Tiff and I put a cherry bomb in it. Obviously we didn’t realize the power of it because it blew this thing off the wall. Glass came down; it was a mess. Of course the barber came out and he chased us down the street and then the cops came by and picked us up and put us in the back seat of the car. Then, while the cop was talking to Tiff, Jerry opened the door and jumped out and ran away, and I did, too. [In Tiff’s version of the story Jerry even kicks the policeman before running away.] We went down to Tillie’s house and Jerry was wheezing like crazy from his asthma; he even turned a little blue. It was scary. He couldn’t run for more than half a block without wheezing. I remember that well because we used to run away from stuff that we did.”
Jerry’s asthma flare-ups were infrequent, but fairly debilitating when they occurred. The typical treatment in those days consisted of getting a shot of the bronchial muscle relaxant epinephrine and then staying in bed for a few days. “He liked to say he had a sickly childhood, but that’s bullshit,” Tiff says. “He had asthma once every couple of years, and it would last for maybe a week or two. And every time he got sick, he got something. I remember he got his first 45 record player and some records when he got sick.”
But Sara Ruppenthal, Jerry’s first wife, says that Jerry once “told me a story of being sick in bed with asthma. His mother came to visit and then left before he was ready for her to leave. There’s this image of him looking out the window as she leaves, and having a massive asthma attack—making that connection between the abandonment and the illness.”
Though by all accounts Ruth Garcia tried to be a good mother to her children, the fact is she was not around much during these formative years; the bar took up most of her time. Then, in 1949, Ruth married a carpenter-piledriver named Ben Brown, who’d been working on the Sailors Union construction project, and she saw the kids even less for a while. “It only lasted a year or two,” Tiff says. “But they were friends for a long time after that. He was a drunk, but he was an okay guy.”
In 1953 Ruth married her third husband, a merchant seaman named Wadislof “Wally” Matusiewicz, in a modest ceremony in Reno, Nevada, that was attended by both Jerry and Tiff. (In fact, the two kids got stuck in a hotel elevator during this trip and had to be rescued by the fire department.) Wally had grown up in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Polish immigrants (which didn’t stop seamen from dubbing him “Russian Wally”). He was seven years younger than Ruth and had never been married before. When they got married, Ruth and Wally jointly decided that Ruth should take a greater role in the lives of her children, so Wally took over most of the day-to-day operations of the bar.
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�Then Union Oil decided they wanted to put their office building where the bar was,” Tiff says, “so the business moved across the street again, to another corner. There was a seamen’s hotel there, too, and on the ground floor there was the 400 Club. The original 400 Club had been a bawdy seaman’s bar, but my mom turned that into a typical ’50s nightclubish-type place with the emphasis on the little restaurant. It had red Naugahyde stools and a solid mahogany circle bar. It was classy, a nice place considering the other one she had. So my mom had the daytime bar business there with a little restaurant. At the time, she had the biggest day business of any bar in the city. They were selling beer at six in the morning. You had to peel some of these guys out of the bar at night. They’d go up to a hotel room upstairs. People would rent these rooms for months at a time.
“When I was in the service [in the late ’50s], my mom turned the top floor into this real flashy apartment—three bedrooms with a total view of downtown and the Bay Bridge. She had a doberman pinscher named Rusty and you could see him running around the roof as you drove over the bridge into the city.”
With the 400 Club booming, the family made the same radical move as hundreds of thousands of other middle-class American families in the early ’50s—they bought a ranch-style home in the suburbs; in this case in the town of Menlo Park, about thirty miles south of the city in San Mateo County.
“We moved to the Peninsula [as the area is known] in that furious rush to get kids out of the city—sort of a half-hearted attempt by my mom,” Jerry recalled. “I was being a kid in San Francisco. I later became a hoodlum [there]. . . . The thrust of her thinking was to get out of the city, so we went to Menlo Park, a real nice place which was just bursting out of the ground at that point. Everything was new there.”
The Matusiewiczes’ nice, if nondescript, home was on a quiet cul-de-sac off Santa Monica Avenue, half a block east of Middlefield Road, one of the main arteries that cuts through the Peninsula. Across the street were the sprawling grounds of St. Patrick’s Seminary, and close by was the Golden State Dairy. Santa Monica Avenue has no sidewalks, so the overall feeling of the neighborhood is sort of rural-suburban. Certainly it was a much different world than the Excelsior district of San Francisco, which was the point, of course.
“The house was right out of Sunset magazine,” Tiff says. “We moved down there and none of us knew anybody. Still, we were pretty excited. We got all new clothes, new furniture. We had a new beige Cadillac. My mom really set this guy Wally up! He’d been a first mate in the merchant marine, but when he married my mom he became a bartender.
“But it was a culture shock, big time. There was nothing familiar. My mom was on this fetish about getting her family back together. She had a new husband, she had her kids back, she had a successful bar business. She wanted to be a housewife, really. My mom even started making some of our clothes, not because she had to, but because she wanted to. She did all this drudgery and loved it.
“My father’s side of the family was really crushed when we moved down there. We still went up to visit my grandparents on weekends, and as soon as I got my driver’s license I’d go up almost every weekend.
“Before my mom took me to the Peninsula, I was raised, if I can call it that, by my grandparents, who left me largely unsupervised,” Jerry said. “I think that probably ruined me for everything—or made me what I am today. They were both people who worked and they were grandparently. They didn’t have much stomach for discipline, so I was pretty much unsupervised and I was used to having things exactly like I wanted them. I was used to getting up and doing things, doing what I wanted, coming in when I wanted and going where I wanted and not asking anybody if they cared. I was much too much that person by the time my mom tried to get us down to the suburbs. It was really too late. But the change did me a lot of good for other reasons.”
Jerry moved to Menlo Park when he was ten and was there through early adolescence, from part of sixth grade through eighth grade, which he had to repeat because of poor grades. “I was too smart for school,” he said in 1984, a chuckle in his voice. “I knew it; I don’t know why anyone else didn’t know it. I went to school; I just didn’t do any work. It’s not that I had anything against school or even learning. The point was I was reading things and I had my own education, my own program going, and I was really, really bored with school. I already had things decided for myself. I had things I wanted to do, I had plans, and I had my own interests and my own rate of learning and I couldn’t see slowing down or stopping and wasting my time for schoolwork.”
Alienated though he was from the day-to-day of school life, “I had incredible luck with teachers,” he said. “I had a couple of teachers that really opened up the world for me. I was a reader, luckily, because I was sickly as a kid. I spent so much time in bed because I was sick, so I read; that was my entertainment. That separated me a lot from everybody else. Then when I got down to the Peninsula, I had a couple of teachers that were very, very radical, absolutely far-out. I was lucky.”
In interviews, Jerry often cited a teacher at Menlo-Oaks Middle School named Dwight Johnson for broadening his outlook on life and learning. “He’s the guy who turned me into a freak,” he said. “He was my seventh-grade teacher and he was a wild guy. He had an old MG TC, and he had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time. And he was out there. He opened lots and lots of doors for me. He’s the guy that got me reading deeper than science fiction [Ray Bradbury was Jerry’s favorite writer]. He taught me that ideas are fun.”
It was through the influence of teachers like Dwight Johnson, too, that Jerry was admitted to what he called “a fast-learner program” in school, sponsored by Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. “So I had the advantage of this elaborate accelerated program at school and a couple of far-out teachers who were willing to answer any questions and turn me on to where to go—‘If you want to find more, this is what you read.’”
When he wasn’t devouring George Orwell’s 1984 (a favorite of his) or more complex tomes by European philosophers, Jerry was engaged in typical adolescent stuff. Through Wally he developed what would become a lifelong interest in comic books; in those days he collected the ghoulish, “ultra-horrible” EC comics—Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and such—as well as Mad Comics (a forerunner of Mad magazine). Tiff was still a major influence in Jerry’s life, although he was nearing the end of his days at Sequoia High in Redwood City, and before he graduated he joined the marine reserves.
“I had a driver’s license so whenever we could we’d go up to the city and visit our friends,” Tiff says. “I remember Jerry and I hot-wired a car that was in my stepfather’s charge; a little MG roadster. We drove it up to the city from Menlo Park. My car [Tillie Clifford’s green ’42 Chevy coupe] wasn’t working so we used this one. I didn’t even know how I was going to do it—I undid a couple of bolts under the dash and I grabbed a bunch of tin foil and I zapped it up there, and it worked, although I singed my hands. We were mischievous in that way.”
On those weekends in the city, Jerry spent much of his time palling around with his cousin Daniel, who recalls, “We spent a lot of time at the movies; that was something we both loved. We used to go down and see every movie that came out about a musician. I remember going down and seeing The Glenn Miller Story on a Sunday afternoon with Jerry. We always had no money, so we’d go through Tillie’s pocketbooks to try to scrounge enough money to go down to the Golden Gate Theater, which was a movie theater in those days.
“I also remember going down to the Fox Theater on Market Street and Eleventh when they had the debut of Rock Around the Clock [in 1956] and that place was jumpin’! Jerry and I and two girls went to see it together. We came out of that movie with the burning desire to be rock ’n’ roll musicians. I remember him telling me, ‘We can do that; we can play like that.’ I remember that very clearly.”
Jerry was already falling in love with rock ’n’ roll by the time that Bill Haley
and the Comets movie came out. Again, Tiff was his main influence—Tiff began listening to local R&B radio stations in the early ’50s, so by the time the first true rock ’n’ roll records came out, the Garcia brothers were primed. “I remember going out with a friend to this record store on Mission near Geneva called the Record Changer, and buying this record, ‘Crazy, Man, Crazy,’ which was Bill Haley’s first release out here—before ‘Rock Around the Clock,’” Tiff says. “I bought it on 78 and Jerry bought it on 45. He got a pretty good 45 collection, because my mom, being in the bar business, used to get all these 45s from the jukebox. We had tons. Most of those weren’t rock ’n’ roll, but there was some good stuff in there.”
Besides Tiff and Daniel, Jerry’s other early rock ’n’ roll buddy was a kid named Laird Grant, who lived a few blocks away from Jerry in Menlo Park. Like Jerry, Laird had moved to the suburbs from San Francisco—he’d lived in the outer Mission district, not far from Harrington Street. The two, who became lifelong friends, met when Jerry was in seventh grade at Menlo-Oaks.
“I met him because he hazed me,” Laird says. “That’s something that went around a lot back then, though it was usually a college thing; occasionally it trickled down. The bully kids—and I wouldn’t say Jerry was a bully, but he hung out with some kids who were, and he was rougher than your normal, average kid—would haze other kids. So there they were, smearing me with lipstick and shaving cream, and there may have even been some perfume involved, and one of the guys was trying to pants me. They’d do that and then throw your pants up in a tree. Jerry was one of the guys and I thought, ‘There’s gotta be more to this guy than this.’ After that we started hanging out together and we found out we actually had a lot in common. We hung out together because we realized that all the rest of the kids weren’t the same as we were.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 4