Grab Bag #030

I will be remembered after my death by my children and some few friends. I may figure as a footnote in a book or two. So be it. Mortality is The Great Fact. Let us respect it as such.
— Charles McCabe

I have my own house to empty, but the books grabbed my eye and arrested my stride.

They threw in broken chairs, cassette tapes, and old suit coats on hangers. Whoever had ordered the debris box estimated well, as the man’s life reached a tidy height just short of the lip. Based on the coats, he was shortish. I am not, and resting my forearms on the metal edge I picked over the musty pile.

There were dozens of books, many splayed out, wrapped in identical brown-paper covers.

I learned to cut and fold grocery bags into covers while in grade school at Star of the Sea. We made them to protect our English textbooks and our reward was the opportunity to decorate the covers as we pleased. Rather than our crayoned animals and airplanes, this gentleman chose author-and-title labels applied to the spines with paste. 

I couldn’t make snap judgements because they all looked alike. I reached for every rough cover and read each title. German type in some, world politics, antique furniture guides, metaphysics…slips of paper and clippings poked out from the edges. The man was a news gleaner and note-taker like me.

I took two smaller ones with labels reading “Swift Gulliver’s Travels” and “Parkman The Oregon Trail,” as well as a slightly larger one, “Boswell’s London Journey 1762–1763.” What would be called classics at one time in one world. As I said, I have my own house to clear out, so I left the rest reluctantly. 

Back home, I opened Gulliver’s Travels and found some mysterious receipts (PCC SAN FRAN CA 962 APO), scraps with some hand-scrawled definitions (“fear of walking beyond a certain distance from home: agoraphobia”), and three clipped San Francisco Chronicle columns by Charles McCabe from 1967, 1973, and 1977. All were about Jonathan Swift. There was also a 1984 Newsweek review of a Swift biography.

Here was the old Internet. The search engine was your eyes scanning a bookshelf. Selecting and opening “Gulliver’s Travels” linked you to four hits about the famous Irish writer, all tipped into his best-known work.

In my youth, McCabe’s column lived on the right edge of the page facing Stanton Delaplane’s “Postcard” column. The two wrote in different styles about the same thing: being men in 20th century America.

The daily Peanuts strips and Emporium ads separated the two.

Delaplane was breezy and coded, missives from frequent travels mixed with wise-guy slang on drinking and his day-to-day. You reached the end of his wispy fragments about toreadors and cooking sherry and had no clue what you’d just read, but know he was generally satisfied with himself and his third wife, the “x-word puzzle girl.” Here’s a typical opening from a 1979 column:

Sempre Avanti! Never say die. Carnation in the buttonhole and a fresh odor of Kentucky rifle whiskey.

Home from the Mysterious East. From Hong Kong and the musty Nine Dragon Hills. To the mystery of how (while I was far, far away) somebody broke the handle off the downstairs john. (Now we take the top off, reach in and trip the flushing chain.)

See what I mean?

McCabe was erudite, self-hating, misogynistic. Here’s one of his openers:

“A woman with a black eye usually deserves it.” These are the words of Mrs. George Arvin, one of the waterfront sages who frequent my North Beach local.

There is much to be said for this point of view.

McCabe frequently attracted hate mail and angry phone calls to the Chronicle. His column was clickbait, 1970s style. He married four times and rented stools at Capp’s Corner and the Washington Square Bar & Grill. Among his friends was his “morning bartender.” You could smell the alcohol through the newsprint.

Jonathan Swift died in 1745, but McCabe wrote about him as if he was an old war buddy. To McCabe, if you didn’t know Seneca or Thucydides or Montaigne, well, reader, you could go to hell.

Here were two of the post-war cultural elite—McCabe grumpy, Delaplane too clever for you, my friend— back when newspapers and magazines and books were the designated torch-bearers and gate-keepers of western civilization. A white man’s world, of course. Women were generally side-lined to society items, slice-of-life stories, home-focused topics. 

McCabe’s mostly forgotten now, and unlike Jonathan Swift, probably should be. Delaplane’s remembered not for his writing, but for introducing Irish Coffee to the United States. As long as the Buena Vista Café keeps pouring them across the street from the Hyde Street cable cars, his name will be mentioned.

I don’t know the name of the man whose books I took from the debris box. He didn’t write it inside them.

Sunday Paper Man

Beware an old guy reminiscing about newspapers. Thinking about the days of Charles McCabe made me remember the man who sold Sunday papers on the corner of 8th Avenue and Geary Boulevard beside Star of the Sea Church.

He wore an oily apron with pockets for change and rubber bands to roll the combined Examiner-Chronicle into Duraflame-sized logs. The massive pile of newsprint surrounding him acted as his chaise lounge between masses.

It was the same scene near other churches and their neighboring bakeries, which did booming Sunday morning business. Hawkers set up at Star Bakery in Noe Valley near St. Paul’s and at Wirth Brothers’ bakery across from St. Monica’s.

I remember my grandmother complaining when the Sunday paper—some 300 pages of reading material (and ads)—increased in price to $1.25. Not that she ever bought it when it was a dollar.

The era of paper boys was pretty much over by my 1970s childhood. Men frisbee-ed subscriptions from the windows of slow-moving cars. Papers were sold at corner markets. You could gamble a quarter at one of the rusty, dented metal boxes set at bus stops. The Chronicle boxes were rain-slicker yellow.

The Sunday paper man felt like a bygone relic even then. He looked it, too: a man on the edge of society, possibly a charity case—although with a collared shirt, coat, and hat, he dressed better than just about anyone walking the streets in 2024.

But it all had a boozy thread-worn air. Selling newspapers wasn’t on Master LaBounty’s 1973 list of “when I grow up” possibilities.

The Good Corner

Prospects were different in 1913, when Wilbur Allen began selling the San Francisco Call as a 14-year-old. He went on selling and delivering newspapers for essentially the same outfit over a 58-year-career.

The Call merged with the Bulletin, then the News, and then the Examiner by the time Allen retired in 1971. In a short profile written for the occasion, Allen remembered his first spot as a paperboy was at Haight and Fillmore Streets, a location which he said in the 1910s was “a good corner, a high class neighborhood.”

When I was a boy, Allen’s “good corner” was the epicenter of the city’s heroin trade, an intersection we city-trekking Richmond District kids were expressly forbidden to cross, even inside a 22-Fillmore bus.

Now, it’s darned tranquil, a gateway into tidy Duboce Triangle (a neighborhood name I think was invented in the late 1960s.) The city is ever-changing.

George Moscone famously ordered a crackdown on the Haight and Fillmore heroin dealers when he became mayor. On a November afternoon in 1977, police swarmed the block with 47 officers. They blocked both ends of the 500 block of Haight Street and made 51 arrests. There’s even a plaque noting the event on the Fillmore Street side of 501 Haight Street.

Our current mayor has ordered similar, if smaller sweeps in the Tenderloin to stop the fentanyl trade. I’m not sure it will result in a new Duboce Triangle or a plaque commemorating her efforts... Max Harrison-Caldwell wrote a nice long article on the 1977 raid and what people think it did or didn’t do for the Lower Haight.

Back to Wilbur Allen... the year the old paperboy retired, San Francisco was in a rough patch.

A typical story from 1971: In December, police issued “a precautionary warning for anyone who may have just been given a hand grenade” on the corner of Haight and Fillmore Streets. A guy who had just blown his right hand off said someone was passing them out.

Like in 2024, improving crime statistics meant nothing in the face of how people felt. Just one free hand grenade story is enough to make up a lot of minds about the state of the city. Dianne Feinstein, running for mayor in 1971, said “everybody’s double-bolting their doors, hiding behind big dogs [...] And we’re still afraid.”

Wilbur Allen had seen just about everything while delivering trillions of newspapers over a majority of the 20th century. After all of it, he announced he had one strong opinion: “San Francisco is the best city in the world.”

And in 2024 I agree.

Caught on the Street 

The story about street photographer Joseph Selle had a few readers unearthing some of their own snaps taken by Selle’s outfit.

Mike Phipps (F.O.W.): “Hi Woody. That was interesting; I didn’t know about Joseph Selle. I know there were wandering photographers going way back in the 19th Century. That’s why we have so many photos of cable cars at their termini. The photographers were hoping to sell someone a snapshot on the cars. On slow days, they photographed the gripman and conductor.

“I have several photos of family members—Dad had said many of them were taken on Market Street. I wonder if any could be Selle? It is fun to think so. Lots too from the 1939 Fair—another subject. Here’s dad in the ‘30s with his father, I think. There is another somewhere in my albums with Grandma and him.

Mike sent me the photo in December. As I was writing this Grab Bag, his father Edward, the boy in the photo, passed away. On offering my condolences, I was treated to a bit more about the man:

“Dad was a ball of energy in his day—the guys at the firehouse used to tease him, calling him ‘Physical Ed!’ He was involved with water rescue, scuba, and so much more in his prime. He was up in his 90s and time had run out finally. Of course, he was the master of telling stories. Dad was the guy who knew everyone—many's the time we walked down Market Street or Columbus Avenue and he’d stop continually, chatting with friends, while I waited with the interminable patience of a 6-year-old kid. A real San Franciscan of another era, and a North Beach kid to the end.”

Dressed for the Cliff House

Don Andreini sent a street shot of his sister, Nancy, at the Cliff House with three of her good friends:

A first lady of San Francisco is in this shot. Gina Bondanza, second from left, married future mayor George Moscone about the time of this photo. Nancy Andreini and Anita Perasso are to the right of her. Don thinks the woman on the far left is Joyce Ann Galli, whose family built thousands of homes in the Sunset District and other neighborhoods.

She was also named “queen” of the Excelsior Marathon Race of 1950, back when almost every event needed an assigned beauty to preside. Joyce handed out trophies donated by Excelsior District merchants.

Back to the 500 block of Haight Street for a minute…

My great-grandparents Milton Otto Slinkey and Ethel Neate Slinkey (and you thought Woody LaBounty was an interesting name) may have bought a newspaper or two from Wilbur Allen when he got his start.

In the second half of the 1910s, the Slinkeys lived at 214 Fillmore Street and then at 538 Haight Street, both a half-block from Wilbur Allen’s “good corner.”

I wrote a little bit about Milton and Ethel in last year’s San Francisco Story annual. As a Friend of Woody, you can download a copy (or, if you’d like a paper copy, buy one).

And while we’re on the topic, get the 2022 annual if you haven’t yet (I still have some print copies, too):

And redeem your official “Friends of Woody” membership card. I can drop it in tomorrow’s mail.

Whew! We are all swagged out for now.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Thanks to Daniel G. for chipping in to the Official-and-First-in-the-World Woody Beer and Coffee Fund. With the not-tax-deductible donations, I purchase liquid refreshment to share with anyone who would like to chat with a guy in a hat. If you’re shy, I can talk for the both of us and you can just sip.

Is it your turn? Let me know when you’re free!

Sources

“Examiner Driver Retiring at 72,” San Francisco Examiner, February 25, 1971, pg. 24.

John Burks, “9 Candidates Agree on Only One Thing,” San Francisco Examiner, October 30, 1971, pg. 3.

“Hand Lost; Police Warn On Grenades,” San Francisco Examiner, December 4, 1971, pg. 3.

Ernest Lenn, “How narcs burst Needle Alley’s balloons,” San Francisco Examiner, November 3, 1977, pg. 1.

Charles McCabe, The Charles McCabe Reader (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1984).