Nought May Endure But Mutability
By Sam Tolmasoff
Published: November, 2004
When I was a very small boy, the Second World War was fresh in everyone’s mind and the Korean Conflict was looming on the horizon. What was called the “Post War Boom” was in full “spend” mode and my family often traveled between Los Angeles and the tiny town of Albion in Mendocino. It was while traveling through the Bay Area that. I acquired a lifelong fascination with this place and its abundance of colorful characters.
It was an enormous trip in a ’38 Chrysler, and I endured most of the distance in a sleepy haze. It was interrupted occasionally with an occasional bottle of Nehi Orange and the vague amusement of my younger brother’s frequent episodes of carsickness. His head would be thrust out of the window so he could explosively vomit his soda without necessitating an extra stop. My mother would read the Burma Shave signs out loud as we passed them. I invested small effort in trying to understand these.
It was our arrival in San Jose that brought me to full childish attention. Here, my father always managed to locate some miraculous and inexpensive restaurant, where cranky children were welcome and the food was, to us, exotic and delicious. The drive up the Peninsula seemed to me a passage through a mystic gateway to a place of such wonder, that when I was later away from it, scarcely seemed real. I imagine that this is much the same way that my grandchildren perceive Disneyland.
My memory is of a white highway through lush orchards and sparkling towns. I always strained for my first glimpse of the Bay. I was always amused to pass through San Bruno, which I thought meant “Saint Bear”! I could not know then that in this cozy town, the woman I would come to love and spend my life with was then a toddler playing in the sunny backyard of a San Anselmo Avenue house.
Of course, the world was grander then. The fogs were deeper and grayer and concealed far more fantastic things. The very air was rich with cosmopolitan excitement and fathers always wore neckties. Ladies often wore hats and stockings that showed delicate seams up the backs of their legs. Things do, however, change.
There was a saying in the ’60s that, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This is a phrase that I’ve never quite been able to get my mind around, but there is a certain comfort contained in it. It feels somehow attached to, “People don’t change, only styles and slang do.”
It was the trip on the ferry to Sausalito that was the tipping point that convinced me that this was the place I wanted to be. When I was finally old enough to make such choices, I left Los Angeles and came here to live.
Of course, at the time of these trips, the Golden Gate Bridge was already in existence. (It wasn’t that long ago!) We occasionally drove across it on the return trip, but it was seeing it from the ferry that was best.
During the crossing, my younger brother and I would stand outside on the deck with my father while my mother made the trip sitting in the car with my infant sister. That short trip was to me like a journey on the open sea. The waters of the Bay seemed as wide and as deep and dark as ever I imagined the sea to be.
I thought my father wonderfully brave when he stood at the rail drinking a scalding cup of black coffee in three quick gulps. My brother and I clung to the pockets of his sports coat. I was very proud of myself, when in my position as the eldest son, I was designated to return the empty cup to the lady at the lunch counter. I can clearly remember the slight motion of the deck beneath my feet and the feel of the heavy ceramic cup. It was still warm from the coffee.
I have lived here essentially all of my adult life. I have lived in the Richmond, the Mission, and Noe Valley. For the longest time, I lived in the Sunset, just blocks from the sea. Later, I lived on the Peninsula, a decade in Burlingame, and then Redwood City. Here, I have raised my children, worked, and generally enjoyed my life.
There is for me a certain personal melancholy, a longing for a time in California that was even older, richer in texture, and more wondrous than that span I have been privileged to live through. Still, I accept the unidirectional flow of time and understand that this is a living, evolving environment and not a diorama in a cosmic museum.
Over the years, I have collected in memory artifacts of importance that I have identified (sometimes by guess), places of significant historicity, and characters of a colorful stripe. I have tried to keep careful track of those important things and places that give structure to my life and enrich my personal history.
I often pay a silent and sentimental tribute to things like the little train in San Mateo’s Central Park that my children loved so when they were small. Places like the spots on certain docks where we spent soft gray summer afternoons fishing for perch and red crabs. Places like that spot where television blinked and hummed into existence. (I’m sure it seemed like a wonderful idea to Mr. Farnsworth at the time.) There are places that haunt me, like the spot where Bloody Thursday happened.
There are places where things were, and have been replaced with new things. Places like the site of the old Tanforan Racetrack where my late father-in-law spent so many happy afternoons, and the grandstand at Bay Meadows that is soon to vanish forever.
There are places like the slides at Playland. There is Third and Townsend where the Southern Pacific terminal once stood, near where a young Jack Kerouac lived in a flophouse and walked the “redbrick streets of San Francisco.”
And there are the characters that are the cast of life, like the elderly printer with the shop on Steuart Street where I once worked, who had memories and stories of the ’06 Earthquake. Like Harry Lumsden, a Jamaica-born business agent and dispatcher of Local 886 of the Shipyard Laborer’s Union, who witnessed and participated in the organization of the waterfront. Like lifetime laborers in that union with names like “A-Train” and “Bad Brown.”
I remember a kaleidoscope of faces of the people who lived through the ’60s and ’70s. Some of these went on to riches, fame, or notoriety. A large percentage of them have passed on.
The constant about both San Francisco and the Peninsula are their mutability and mystic intangible qualities that invest in their residents a desire to “become.” My hope is to live a very long time yet and to be a witness to the place of wonder I believe they will become.
