Grab Bag #026

Today, November 29, 2023, is my 58th birthday. Nancy and I are going to have an early dinner at Greens and then we will head over to the Plough & Stars (116 Clement Street). If you’d like to have a pint, I’ll be there about 7:00 p.m.

On Thanksgiving, my brother Christopher put on the 49ers and Seahawks. It was the first time I had watched most of an NFL game in years. Football has been off my list for a number of reasons, the least of which is my hometown team decided the words “San Francisco” didn’t have to strictly be associated with, you know, San Francisco. It is only due to the great humility of the people of Santa Clara that a more-accurate “S” and “C” isn’t interlocked on those gold helmets. 

Oh well, as Jerry Seinfeld famously pointed out, we sports fans really root for laundry. It isn’t as if the players a team drafts are born in town. At least not anymore.

My brother, Matt LaBounty, may have been the last to have that honor. Born at Children’s Hospital on California Street in 1969, he was picked in the last round—the 12th—by the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL draft of 1992.

I remember reading the news in the afternoon San Francisco Examiner while taking the 31-Balboa express bus home from work downtown. That’s what sports and the news was like then. No cell phone existed to buzz in my pocket with texts.

The NFL draft doesn’t even go to the 12th round anymore. My brother was a defensive lineman and the Niners chose two others ahead of him who played the same position. Plus, there were veteran free agents invited to training camp. The odds of my brother doing anything that fall other than sheet-rocking for his friend’s father’s company were very, very low.

But Matt went on to have a nine-year NFL career, playing longer (if making a whole lot less money) than Steve Emtman, another defensive lineman who was the number one pick of the whole 1992 draft.

Matt made the 49ers practice squad, was activated for a few games, and then was claimed by the Green Bay Packers when the hometown team tried to move him back to the practice squad. He mostly backed up starters over his career—including Hall-of-Famer Reggie White. He ducked serious injury, played on good teams (even if he missed a couple of Super Bowls by just a year or two), and his generally liberal mindset in the highly conservative world of football once irritated Rush Limbaugh, who called him a tree-hugger.

More on that last story—a good one—another time. First, marvel briefly at the days long before my brother’s career, when a National Football League team played their games in Golden Gate Park. You could watch the action from a nearby rooftop, have a beer at a neighborhood bar across the street after the game, and walk home if you wanted.

The NFL then was not what it is today. Kezar Stadium would fill up for high school or college games, but be half empty for many 49er games. Those were the days of muddy scrums, goal-post poles cluttering up the end zone, and hard wooden bleachers for the fans. 

Most players had to have off-season jobs to pay the bills. They didn’t have access to the year-round scientific training regimens now available even to Little Leaguers. They were still athletes, though. R. C. Owens had some famous hops: 

Unlike the Giants or the Warriors—transplants from New York and Philadelphia—the 49ers were San Francisco born. Some of their first players were too, like Bob St. Clair, who went to high school at Polytechnic across the street from Kezar Stadium.

In 1971, the 49ers left the Haight for the built-for-baseball Candlestick Park. Despite having glorious seasons there, the team always acted like a glum younger sibling having to wear San Francisco Giants hand-me-downs. The 49ers finally decamped to their Santa Clara freeway exit stadium in 2014.

Kids leave home, of course, but it doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it.

A Second Round

A couple of folks wrote some good stories in response to my article on the Acme Brewery. Peter Field noted that the Acme plant on Fulton Street began life as the National Brewery, which had its origins in the Tenderloin:

“It was originally built on the northwest corner of O’Farrell and William (now Shannon) streets in 1861, long before the Tenderloin became the Tenderloin, by John Gluck and Charles E. Hansen, when property tax assessments were still low in that still relatively undeveloped part of the city. (It’s now the site of the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist building.) In 1871, when that neighborhood had developed into a pricey residential community, it moved out to the southeast corner of Fulton and Webster, just across the street from 762 Fulton. It remained there under Hansen’s ownership, eventually becoming the National Brewing Company.”

Ah, the days of the Tenderloin as a “pricey residential community.” 

Mike Phipps had some beer-making family history: “My great-grandfather, John Sherry, came from Ireland and got a job as cellarmaster at Lafayette Brewery (Later American Brewery under a Mr. Knoefke). It was located at 900 block of Green Street, and my great-grandparents lived in a basement apartment under the brewery for a time, along with my grandmother and her older sisters and brother. With the addition of more siblings, they moved to 1803 Taylor Street, nearby, and remained there until 1906 ‘evicted’ them.

“Great Grandpa died in 1900 of cirrhosis of kidneys—that always bothered my cousin who attributed it to his employment. I don't think so, as by all accounts he was a temperate man. He had "stomach problems" according to Grandma, and as a little girl she would go up to the brewery and get a bucket of beer to soothe the “upset.”  She told me she would “lard” the bucket so that there was less foam and more beer in it! The American Brewery was destroyed by the ‘06 Quake and never reopened. I used to sit in Capp’s Corner—frequently—and look out the door at Green & Powell, wondering what the brewery must have looked like, just a couple blocks away, and thinking about Grandma and her family living there.”

More Apartment Building Love

In response to my expressed love of 1920s apartment building (and their names) in the last Grab Bag, Ty Sterkel hit me with one of the city's best: the Ben Hur Apartments at 400 Hyde Street, constructed in 1926.

Long before Charlton Heston wore his sandals on the big screen in 1959, “Ben-Hur” was a hit as a novel, an adapted opera, and a play at the end of the 19th century. As a play, it was staged in San Francisco at the Grand Opera House on Mission Street (between 3rd and 4th Streets) in 1903 and the Van Ness Theatre (259 Van Ness Avenue) in 1908.

Somehow even in indoors, the chariot race was the highlight of the show. To depict the thrilling competition in the circus maximus, canvas scenery was run behind the charioteer actors on giant spindles. I love old-timey stagecraft and would boot up the time machine to catch that show.

As a silent film, Ben-Hur set records for attendance in 1926. That was the same year the apartment building on Hyde and Ellis Streets was constructed and advertised as “a most unusual house; steel frame construction; special inducements now made to desirable people.”

Shall we lobby for a new condo tower to be named “The Barbie” after this year’s hit movie?

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

No need to bring me a present tonight. I will even buy your drink, thanks to Woody Beer and Coffee Fund donors. Can’t make it? Let me know when I can purchase you a beverage of any kind!

Sources

Ad for Ben Hur Apartments, San Francisco Examiner, May 8, 1926, page 28.