Balboa Street, 1949

Walking past the concrete blocks, where the empty lot was, the boy looks up and clambers in, and up the concrete stairs, and sniffs the wet concrete and the concrete dust, and the sun slants, lighting the dust in the three o’clock air.  The boy is coming home from school, the men are building a nunnery.

Concrete blocks, dusty air, alone, the boy scampers across the half-built hallway and hoots through windows where stained glass will sit.  He smells another odor there, in the concrete dust, and sniffs and clicks his heels and hollers soft where black garments will rustle down polished halls in years to come.

Later he finds a teddy bear in the street with its belly torn open, its gray cotton hanging out, and carries it home.

My Playland at the Beach Childhood

My San Francisco childhood resonated to the roar of the roller coaster and the shrieks of thrilling girls with their sailor suited dates. Our family lived three blocks up the hill from Whitney’s Playland-at-the-Beach, a classic roller-coastering roaring amusement park at the end of the ‘B’ streetcar line and in 1946 that bopping place was peaking.

Wow! Here they come right now through the fog on the pavement wet midway - the saddle shoed bobby-soxers like my sister Shirley Jo and the cool Jughead capped jitterbuggers like my brother Gary. They knew their way around Playland you bet. Red gleaming magical candy apples on a stick were nothing to them. Fluffy cloudlike cotton candy so beautiful and desirous to look at and so horrible to eat, what did they care?

But me, I was four. Mom was walking little me down the Balboa Street hill to magical - and scary - Playland for a special treat.

We left civilization behind, passing the big apartment house at 47th and Balboa where my friend Lillian lived, passing the little red roofed cottage where the bigger kids played Mother May I on the long rolling front lawn - it was the only lawn in blocks.

Mom had on her de rigeur housewife’s practical cloth coat and a scarf against the wind off the Pacific, me in my little green jacket. We crossed the streetcar turnaround and there they were - the cars! Red, blue green, wonderful little cars with headlights and little horns and without tops, just big enough for a four year old kid to possess for wonderful roundy round moments. They stood off to the south side of Balboa Street just past the rickety wooden Shoot the Chutes.

Once Shirley Jo and her friend Roberta took me on the Shoot The Shoots. We got on a little car and climbed and climbed up the wooden track with a rackety sound. I wasn’t scared. Then, at the top, for just a brief moment I could see far away across the ocean the mysterious land on the other side called Horizon - it’s mountains and clouds were just visible way out as far as you could see, then with a roar and high-pitched squeals of thrilling joy down we came at about a hundred miles an hour into the pool of water at the bottom, with great skips and splashes and everybody getting doused with spray and hooray!

Mom never took me on the Shoot the Chutes . With Mom, I went on the cars, and I liked that even better. My very own car to drive wherever I wanted! I felt proud when I waved at Mom as I drove round and round the little track. She was proud of me too. Only four years old and already driving my own car!

Later, maybe in 1947, Whitney installed little sailboats too. They were great. You could sit in the boat and go around in a circle and ring the bell as much as you wanted. And there was water all around you! Who knew where I was off to? Maybe all the way to Horizon. And there’s Mom looking proud — and cold, as the afternoon wind cut through her skimpy coat.

On a great day, we would end our adventures with a candy apple from the hamburger stand beside the Big Dipper — the gigantic roaring roller coaster no one ever took me on. We got to walk up the Midway to get there. I always stopped to see the ducks paddling in a line through the green water of the shooting gallery. And I liked watch sailors throwing baseballs at the pryamids of grey milk bottles. It looked so easy, but no one could ever get them all to roll off the stand. They kept trying.

Then came the Diving Bell. Too scary to imagine. I was seven before I got up the courage to descend deep beneath Playland into the ocean where sharks and octopuses gathered round the bell with menacing looks and what if the glass broke? We’d all die and get in the newspaper. And what would my mother say?

I also passed up the Laff in the Dark as long as I could but finally, one horrible day at somebody’s birthday party trip to Playland, we got in the car and passed through the doors of terror into the skeleton-filled blackness. The car crashed through black doors and beyond each door was another Vault of Horror tableau of blood covered witch-monsters and giant spiders about to leap, cruel death and horrid decapitation all to the music of even more horrid evil laughter and, if you weren’t scared enough, extra piped in screams. OK, so I was a sensitive kid. Maybe a crybaby! Even a scaredycat! For weeks afterward, I had terror attacks in the bathtub when I remembered that dark tunnel. I didn’t even have to close my eyes. There were skeletons coming up 47th Avenue!

I told you Playland was scary as well as thrilling. Out where we lived by Ocean Beach, the nights were usually cold and foggy, even in the summertime. The other kids said never to go out late at night (who would?) because, after Playland closed for the night, the drunks came up Balboa Street! I could just imagine them stumbling and cursing, looking for little boys to eat, the fog swirling around so you couldn’t see them till it was too late!

The window of my bedroom opened on to the flat tar-and-gravel roof of the house next door. It was fun to climb around out there during the day when my mother wasn’t home and look down at the cats far below in our backyard or at the vacant lot next to our neighbor’s house. But there was a cypress tree growing in that lot and in bed at night I was sure a drunk had climbed up the tree and was on the roof outside. In fact, if I got up and looked out that window, I knew I’d see a horrible bloody face leering at me and big sharp fingernails with blood dripping down. A drunk!

Sorry, I got carried away. Mom was walking me down the Midway, right? The stand by the Big Dipper sold hamburgers and caramel corn and that red kind of caramel corn in a brick, but what I craved was a candy apple. So beautiful, gleaming with reflected blue-red light, and glistening like Virginia Mayo’s lips. And, when I tasted it…delicious hot cinnamon crackled in my mouth. But you know what? It wasn’t really a candy apple. It was a just regular apple with a candy coating, and once you ate past the crackling cinnamon - it wasn’t even a very good apple. One of those mushy ones. In fact, the only thing worse was cotton candy, which looked like a heavenly pink cloud, but tasted like steel wool.

Then, with my faux-treasure in hand on a little wooden stick, we walked back past the streetcar turnaround to Balboa Street and up the hill home.

Photos from the San Francisco Public Library’s excellent Amusing America Online Exhibit and from a site that unleashed floods of nostalgia for the Richmond District of my heart: The Western Neighborhoods Project.

Baby Beatniks Seek Truth Too

And now I’ve started questioning
If anything is true…
Christopher Newton (1966)

All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth.
John Lennon

In my distress I cry to the Lord,
that he may answer me:
‘Deliver me, O Lord,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.’
Psalm 120

I’m afraid I’m making my Christian readers a little nervous here. Believe me, I am not turning my back on Jesus Christ. I am saying there was nothing in the brand of Christianity that I was served up at the age of sixteen, with its tender ritual and mindless rote prayer and comfortable satisfaction with the status quo, that could hold me.

And second, to those who say why don’t I forget about the past and just forge on ahead, I say “Forget about it? Forget about it!”. My mind teems with these images and memories. I am convinced that what I saw and felt and heard is as eternally important as that snowshoe bunny over there running down the glacier. I hope that’s clear. OK?

Now, meanwhile, back in 1959…

I wanted God in my life. I longed for Him/Her/It. But, near as I could tell, the Biblical God was not really God. For instance, I read Psalm 18 about God riding down to earth on his thundercloud with smoke coming out of his nostrils - well, what God is this? Did he create the entire universe and now is riding around shooting lightning out of a thundercloud in the hill country of Israel? How could anybody take this stuff seriously? That’s how I felt. I’m just being honest, okay? At seventeen, this was an issue about truth for me. And it’s still a valid, if sophomoric, question. Especially if you are presenting a struggling truth-seeker with a fundamentalist, every word is literally true, belief about the Book and how it works.

In a world that was full of lies and deception coming at me from every corner like arrows whizzing by - which is how I and every truth-seeker has to feel, why should I believe your version of the truth just because you say it is the real one? Coca-Cola is the real thing too, according to them.

The book Dharma Bums, which I’ve been blogging about the last few days, presented me with another option - seeking God through direct experience of him. I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment - lost or given away in my many years of wandering - but in memory at least, the book is about three guys searching for God, and God is Truth. Simplistically, that’s what Dharma means. In one episode of the book Jack and Gary Snyder (under novelistic pseudonyms) go on a crazy mountain climbing quest in the Sierras. Even at seventeen I could see climbing the mountain was really about two things — first, going on a totally great adventure with great wild friends , and second, about getting higher - higher into the pure truth and out of the smog of the world’s stupidity. A direct experience. An enlightenment. Real proof because it happened to you!

That’s what it still comes down to, guys and girls, truth is true if it happened to you. (For a modernist, I’m quite a good post-modernist). I know God is real. Not because of anything in the Bible, but because I saw him. The Bible fills in the picture because it’s about other guys who saw him.

And there are other scenes in Dharma Bums where Jack (I think this is in Dharma Bums - but maybe it’s On The Road or Subterraneans) is sitting in a library in the Santa Clara Valley day after day surrounded by the spring cherry orchards and reading the Diamond Sutra. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to be some kind of teaching where you didn’t have to belief in all of these stories about God riding around on his thundercloud. He was –Something Else. Unknowable. Ineffable. Something beyond understanding. Both personal and impersonal. Encompassing everything. Wow! I felt that must be the way God really is. Big.

Where was someone who could have shown me the Christian Way in its adventure and power and truth? Who was there to show me Jesus Christ in His awesome complexity?

I didn’t hear you knockin’. In fact, in all those long years from 1959 to 1968, when I encountered my first Jesus Freak, there was not one soul who defended or even spoke to me of the Christian faith with a fair understanding or true commitment. If I didn’t ask - well, who would I ask?

OK, that’s a fair question. Let’s see. At San Francisco State a few years later there was the Campus Crusade for Christ. They had a regular table outside the Student Commons, handing out tracts and stuff. At the next table over there was another group called the Young Americans For Freedom. They espoused every right-wing conservative position available in the early Sixties, from going into Viet Nam to stop the Communists to getting arch-conservative Barry Goldwater elected president. (Man, Goldwater’s looking pretty good these days! He was a man of honor.) Members of both organizations wore the same short sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties, crew cuts and they carried the same kind of bookbags. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t think about it much, but I figured maybe they were both part of the same organization. They both looked like The Enemy. I couldn’t see much difference between them, except they both wanted me to believe things that weren’t true.

I don’t remember ever being “witnessed to” by a Campus Crusade guy but if I had been, you know what I would have said? “The only thing I want to be saved from is having to spend eternity with guys like you! How dare you try to “save me,” whatever that means. You know nothing of the pain I suffer. You haven’t earned the right! Go away!”

No preaching, no witnessing, no handing out of tracts would have had the slightest effect on me. If they pointed out some eternal truth from The Bible, I could counter with an eternal truth from Bambi. They were both just books!

You know who I might have listened to? A Christian girl I was in love with. If she spoke earnestly and I could see through her life that it was true, then I would have given Jesus a fair shot.

Second best would be if I heard about Jesus from another freak. Someone I trusted would speak truth to me about his own experience. Someone I respected. Not some preacher dressed up in hippie clothes, but one of my close friends.

I wish I had known about a secret house church of dirty underground beatniks who were at war against the Great Society of lies and malice for all. In other words, people who were really following Jesus. I would have gone there in a New York minute.

Now that I think about, I STILL want to go to that church!

Life With Father

Sometime in 1946, a touring company of the hit comedy Life With Father breezed through San Francisco and landed at one of the big downtown legit theaters, the Curran or the Geary.

The story featured a family of rambunctious redheaded boys growing up in New York City back in the 1800s, and Father’s attempts to rule his unruly home. The company’s press agent thought he might grab some newspaper space if he invited Dad and his three redheaded sons to have their picture taken with the cast.

Dad was a newspaper man. He was the San Francisco Examiner’s head librarian and a well-known local radio personality. For ten years or so he had been “the voice of the Examiner” on a series of Examiner-sponsored radio programs. He read the Sunday funnies (”And now, Prince Valiant, in the days of King Arrrrrthurrrrrrr.”) He was “Ask Mr. Jones” who could tell you how to fix your leaky faucet or get your social security payment. He voiced “Uncle Harry’s Cut-Up School”, featuring real and imaginary kids from the neighborhood singing and dancing. Well, maybe not dancing.

Eventually, he came up with “Fighting Front Facts”. He told behind-the-scenes stories about whatever location had popped up in the war news that day. If the GIs invaded Iwo Jima, he would pull the paper’s Iwo Jim files for the last fifty years and in half an hour come up with a radio background piece. It was a hit, and soon evolved into “Newton and the News”. Suddenly he was a respected newsman.

So that press agent was on to something. Free promo for Life With Father and free promo for Dwight Newton.

There was great excitement in our big drafty house on 47th Avenue. We were all going to the theater! Downtown! Where the men wore suits and the women wore veils and gloves.

Mom dressed me in my sailor suit and we all got into our big 1938 DeSoto and drove down Balboa Street toward the pink light of downtown illuminating the fog.

I didn’t understand much of the play. What I understood was the glamour - the vast darkness of the theater with its gilt curleycues and sophisticated audience and the brightly lit stage below us as we looked down from our box seat. This was Dad’s world. It was wonderful and I wanted to be part of it.

Intermission came. We trooped down the carpeted crowded stairs to the lobby and Dad brought me an orangeade drink while I held Mom’s hand in wonder. I watched the sophisticated people passing holding their cocktails and cigarettes and my big brother Noel sneaking off to explore on his own and Dad took me to visit the white-tiled men’s room with a kind of trough for peeing into.

After the show we all went backstage for the photo op. That’s me wide-eyed and thrilled in my little sailor suit. There’s my mean brother Noel with his broad smile and my adolescent brother Gary looking smooth and suspicious like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. I’m sure my big sister Shirley Jo was there too although she was not part of the photo op. And there are the professional kids who knew the right way to smile for the press.

And, of course, the focus of the picture for me, my Dad, who I loved and admired and was exasperated by for the next 54 years. And still do and am.

The Adventure of the Artificial Rocks

It was great being a little kid in San Francisco out where the ocean loomed gray and green just beyond the vacant lot across 47th Avenue.

There were two tribes of kids in my neighborhood, the Big Kids and the Little Kids. I belonged to the Little Kids. I knew we were braver and bolder than the Big Kids, but they were big, and we weren’t, so they got to go on adventures into the great, wild and scary Sand Dunes above the ocean and even beyond into the wonderland of Sutro Park, a Victorian estate that once belonged to the richest man in the world but then he lost his money and gave it to the City to be maintained in his honor. The big kids could go play on the promontory where his mansion had stood before it burned down long ago and they could look out and see the sea lions having a big fight over on Seal Rocks and see the cars racketing up and down in front of the Cliff House whenever they wanted to. Or if they looked toward the south they could see Playland-at-the-Beach and the roller coaster and the Shoot-the-Chutes and the merry-go-round and the miniature sailboats where little kids like me could tinkle the bell while we went round and round in a circle.

We couldn’t have any big adventures like that because we were the Little Kids. We had to ride our tricycles in front of our houses and sometimes wave to each other from far away. But I got to play with my best friend Jimmy Walker whenever I wanted to because he lived next door. Then his mother decided he was going to be an entertainer when he grew up and started taking him off to piano and tap dancing lessons when we wanted to play cars in the sand of his backyard.

Sometimes my mother pushed me in my Taylor Tot to the duckpond on 42nd Avenue. It was a long ways away, down two hills and through strange neighborhoods where we didn’t know anyone. Once I saw an old lady walk by my Taylor Tot wearing high black buttoned shoes. Why do those black shoes emerge through the screen of memory? We were passing the beauty parlor at 47th and Cabrillo. I can see the black tiles below the shop’s window too.

I wasn’t a bit afraid of those ducks at the duckpond. Once there Mom could depend on me to feed every one until our paper bag of stale bread was gone. Then she pushed me home again under the foggy sky.

Once when I was six, my older brother Noel, who belonged to the Big Kids, issued me a special pass to travel with them for a day. I’m not sure why. Maybe Mom told him he had to.

That Sunday the big kids were going on a scouting party to explore the fake rocks on the cliffs above the Cliff House. I got to travel with Jay Jay and Noel and one other kid whose name I don’t remember and do whatever they did. And I didn’t have to worry about marauding war parties of big kids from other neighborhoods. They were the main reason why we little kids never went into the sand dunes by ourselves. They were much meaner than my brother Noel and might beat you up. Noel just practiced Indian burns on me sometimes and showed me great wrestling holds with me as the model.

But I digress. We took the trail through the ice-plant covered sand dunes and stopped briefly at the cypress tree with the low overhanging bough that you could climb up on and ride like a horse. We traveled though the meadow where Mom and her friends held an easter egg hunt once for the little kids and big kids together. The grass was always bright green there like Easter was. Then we crossed up the ivy covered hill and over the low chain link fence to the old estate where proper Victorian moms in bustles had pushed their perambulators long ago on bright Sunday afternoons like this one.

In those days Sutro Park still held vestiges of its Victorian grandeur. It was before the evil times when gangs of vicious young men broke off the arms of the Greek maiden statues or smashed their heads in the darkness for love of cruelty. There were still lovely strange Greek statues boldly present along the gravel paths and hidden away in secluded shrubbery where there must have once been a gravel path.

The best statue was the brave goddess Diana on her way to hunt the lions that guarded the main entrance to the park. We liked her because she didn’t wear her shirt either when she went on adventures. Both big and little boys approved of these naked ladies frozen forever in the shrubbery and we often stopped to admire them. We passed the gardener’s hut where there were bee hives so electric we stopped and listened and I put my tee shirt back on just in case. I liked to walk shirtless when out on adventures because then I looked more like Tarzan who was my ideal.

We crossed through the grove of monkey tail trees and on past the wishing well with its Gothic hut and interesting graffiti (I could read early). We skirted the steps up to the Lookout where you could see all the way to the Farallon Islands on a bright day like today. We hopped the fence again and climbed out onto the cliff that descended down to the Cliff House far below. Someone in the time of the Ancient Ones had carved stone steps into the cliff and they wound down down fetchingly who knew how far. We thought they might go all the way down to the Cliff House but maybe they just ended in mid-cliff. The fence, by the way, was there to keep stupid kids from rolling to their death in the traffic down below.

The day was bright and airy. Traffic noise drifted up to us on our high cliffs. Big 1947 sedans filled with jolly families, teenagers on Sunday afternoon dates to ride the roller coaster, and tourists going in and out of the Cliff House Gift Shop below with its trays of baby turtles with painted shells of blue tropical nights and palm treed islands crawling over each other while we, far away in the bright sky were edging down the stone steps, and I was with the Big Kids, bold and unafraid with my shirt tied around my neck like Superman’s cape.

Halfway down we saw them: the fake rocks. Giant boulder outcroppings from some cataclysm of yore, brown and pointed like a witch’s teeth. We scrambled across the side of the crumbly cliff and as we got closer it was just as Jay Jay had said: there was a hole in one of the rocks and you could climb inside. We crawled through the little opening like the cowboys who discovered Carlsbad Caverns, not knowing what to expect. Inside you could see it wasn’t a real rocky crag at all, but built by the Ancient Ones of chicken wire nailed over a wooden frame and spread with something like paper mache. Sea gulls and pigeons had found out about it a century or two ago and the whole interior was coated with feathers and guano. Surpassing strange and so far away from the duckpond and playing cars in Jimmy’s backyard. I was a true adventurer in a corner of San Francisco that nobody on earth knew about but me and Noel and Jay Jay and one other kid. The whole world out there beyond the horizon opened itself to me as we climbed cautiously back across the cliff to the crumbly stone steps. This was worth it! As I reached the top of the steps and climbed back over the chain link fence I knew my life was to be henceforth devoted forever to adventure.

But that fall I got a sore throat and came down with rheumatic fever and had to stay in bed for two years.

I come into the world

I was born in San Francisco, February 8, 1942. At U.C. Hospital right above Golden Gate Park. With my baby eyes I could have seen Children’s Playground below, to the east the whole Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and to the west from Stow Lake all the way out to the mysterious Farallon Islands hovering on the horizon. The whole mise-en-scene of my early life.
I was taken home during a blackout. It was the early months of the war and anything could happen. I like to think of myself rushing along the misty roads of Golden Gate Park in our big pre-War DeSoto. Dad’s in a hurry because, as block air raid warden, he has to make sure all the lights are out on 47th Avenue. We lived on a hill only two blocks from the ocean so the slightest light could be enough for a Japanese submarine to target a torpedo right for the roller coaster at Playland-at-the-Beach. In fact the Scorpion was probably out there right now cruising in his Jap Sub at thirty knots through the icy Humboldt Current, just waiting for a light to pop on. Step on it, Dad!
Actually, one night mysterious lights were seen flickering on and off from my brother’s room. Like Morse Code, like some kind of a signal for the Scorpion to attack. The authorities (my father the air raid warden had to work nights) came rushing to investigate. Guys in overcoats and fedoras were banging on our front door, guns drawn. But the enemy agent was only my brother Gary trying to repair his desk lamp.
So you can see, as I began life, I knew right away you had to be ready for anything. Why, one loose wire on a desk lamp could signal the invasion of San Francisco! Step on it, Dad!