Grab Bag #032

Spring is here with new life, new love, baseball and the free-wheelin’ Woody LaBounty Grab Bag. Beware: we’re a little loose this week. 

My friend Diane A. (F.O.W.), in one of her manically veering monologues over coffee at Simple Pleasures, told me of her day meeting a man wearing many rings at a North Beach café, then a plant store owner who shared what a good “snuggler” he was, then a ripped ex-marine who explained how to get work-out advice for free at the health club, then a nattily-attired high school Spanish teacher who watched both his class and her pile of clothes while she swam at Aquatic Park. 

One day, four men, and suddenly spring reverses her numbers from 61 years old to 16. It’s the magic of the season.

Perfect First Date

When I was young, a visit to the Musée Mécanique in the basement of the Cliff House made for the perfect first date. But also, a kind of litmus test. 

Do you dislike walking through a damp concrete-floored hallway smelling of machine oil and echoing with bells, chimes, clunks, ratchet-turns, and recorded laughter? Are you repelled by grotesque automatons of leering sailors and gypsy fortune tellers, shy about yanking iron handles or peering into varnished wooden windows? Will you pass up trying to beat me in one game of Galaga? Do you think by spending an hour and a roll of quarters on antique music boxes, player pianos, and pinball games I am being a cheap date? 

If so, I’m probably not the guy for you.

Not that this truly was a test or I expected the Musée to be everybody’s thing. Obviously, time on the woman’s turf, in her world, in her happy place, us together there, would have to be part of the program, either that day or on another date.

But a walk-and-talk around Lands End, Sutro Heights, and a stop in the Musée summed me up very well. I liked being outside and playing games and the past. I sought places that felt secret and unexpected and better when shared. Slam that lever and get the steel ball past Ducky Medwick in left field.

On my first date with Nancy, after we’d walked 2 1⁄2 miles, hit Park Bowl and the Mad Dog in the Fog and were standing at Haight and Fillmore, she said to me, “Where can we go play some arcade games?”

Easter

Easter (last Sunday for those of you who missed it) used to be a thing in San Francisco. See my blonde mom as a toddler at the Golden Gate Park egg hunt about 1949, and, if you hang for the full 3 minutes or scroll forward, you’ll get some later Easter finery of her with her best friend Melva. And yes, my long-dead grandfather is mysteriously beginning to look more and more like me.

Below is a 1926 Easter Day give-away at what is today the San Francisco Zoo. All those coats and hats would normally make sense, but it was in the unseasonably 80s that day, explaining that kid dipping his foot in the wading pool.

The Mother’s Building was one of the first real structures at what was called the Fleishhacker Playfield, a public park constructed around a massive outdoor swimming pool and playground at Ocean Beach just north of Lake Merced.

A zoo was established as part of the playground and that’s what stuck. The big pool closed in 1971 and is now a parking lot. The Mother’s Building—which was a gift shop when I was a kid—closed in 2000. While recently made a city landmark, the deteriorating building and its Noah’s Ark murals inside languish. Political will and money are two Easter eggs that cannot be found.

Umpire Nuns

I’ve decided that in addition to antique goat cart photos, I will begin collecting photos of nuns officiating sports. Above is Sister Eileen Catharine from St. Cecilia’s blowing a call at home plate. (That kid is out.)

I think this is at Parkside Square’s ballfield on Vicente Street near 28th Avenue. In the background you can see part of the building that is today’s Edgewood Center, which began its life as a protestant orphanage.

Meanwhile, at the House of the Good Shepherd in the Portola District, Sister Mary of the Passion notes the count is two balls and two strikes:

Most of the young women at the University Mound School on Cambridge Street between Bacon and Burrows streets did have two strikes against them. Teenagers labeled “delinquents” were sent to the sisters by juvie courts to be saved from vice, learn a vocation, and “train for a happy life.”

The sisters of the Good Shepherd bought their property from the old University Mound senior home. (Founded by an endowment from James Lick’s will, the original cringy name of the facility was the “Lick Old Ladies’ Home.”)

The nun-as-umpire photo was taken in 1949 as publicity for a building fund campaign in which the sister proposed to begin accepting “pre-delinquent girls,” which I believe matches up to what we call “at-risk” kids today.

The girls’ school closed in the 1970s and the campus is currently used by the Christian Cornerstone Academy and a new Waldorf-education-inspired school. I believe the convent is still operating in the center of the block with a handful of nuns in residence.

Uncle Arthur

In a late July game in 1921, my great-granduncle Arthur Neate took a pitch in the face, breaking his nose. He stands next to the man in the cardigan, arms crossed, looking every bit like the captain of the Schussler Brothers company team, which he was. The nose doesn’t look so bad, so the photograph probably predates the fastball to the schnozzle. I haven’t yet figured out the location, but that water tower behind the telephone pole makes me think somewhere in the southeastern part of the city.

Arthur was a gilder for a company which made and sold “mirrors, pictures, frames, glass, picture moldings, theatrical display stands, window display fixtures, artists supplies.” The factory and wholesale warehouse were at 326–338 Grove Street in Hayes Valley and the retail store was downtown at 285 Geary Street. The 1920s were the era of movie palaces and new apartment buildings with murals, mosaics, and gilt pier mirrors in the lobbies. Schussler Brothers met that demand.

Arthur and his brother Albert married twin sisters, Ella and Ethel Knapp. They were introduced by one of the Neate sisters at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. (That’s the fair that gave us the Palace of Fine Arts in today’s Marina District.)

While still recovering from the broken nose, Arthur became a father. His wife, Ethel May Knapp, bore twin girls on August 25, 1921. The babies only lived a couple of weeks, perhaps born premature, and the couple never had any other children.

Play Ball

Baseball is a perfume from a first date in which decades later a whiff will riffle memories across your brainpan and a send a sizzle across your skin.

It’s back again with new beginnings, revived hopes, honey-haloed memories. Cracks of bats, smacks of gloves, here’s my knuckleball, here’s my turn-the-back Luis Tiant delivery.

Baseball in San Francisco has always been different. Here baseball is not a game of warm summer nights. Blankets aren’t sat on for picnics, but draped over the shoulders for warmth. Sandlot baseball was literally sandlot baseball, a term that originated in San Francisco in the 1870s. We have no room for capacious outfields. Balls are lost in the fog.

You earned being a Giants fan in the Candlestick days. The Muni engaged in false advertising with its “ballpark express” buses. For big games when you parked in the outer lots, the wind blew a desert worth of dirt in your eyes. The teams were not contenders. Instead of a pennant race, our suspense at the end of the season was whether Milt May could crack the National League’s top ten batting averages. (He did, finishing 7th in 1981.)

There were those special years, though: Morgan knocking the Dodgers out of it, Rod Beck getting that double play out of Eddie Murray, Humm-Baby.

The China Basin ballpark and the three World Series trophies redeemed everything for me and perhaps just in time, before the game changed too much from the days of Candlestick Point.

My nephews enjoy their WAR and exit velocities, opener pitchers, and (soon) robot umpires. I don’t begrudge them their fun. They missed hot dog wrappers and Sporting Greens plastered on chain-link fences by a steady wind, Roger Metzger and Johnny LeMaster, Larry Herndon... Montefusco punching Dave Bristol in the chops.

But the same frisson of spring is theirs. Bob Melvin is back, the defense is better, Soler has pop, and maybe Jung Hoo Lee is the key. Welcome spring and welcome hope.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

There is something so satisfying about buying someone else a drink. Thanks to folks like Dennis M. and Laura Z. I get to do it all the time through the Woody Beverage Fund. Human interaction, face-to-face with interesting people... few things beat that for me. Thanks to all of you for being so generous. Is it your turn? Let me know when you are free. 

Sources 

Some of this came from my San Francisco Story Annual 2023 (you can download a copy, Friend of Woody!)