bob-weir – Miller Avenue Musings

When The Grass Was Green

The pages of history are full of turning points which were often the result of cataclysmic events: the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941, the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963. But the turning point I wish to write about here didn’t quite happen that way. It was much more hidden, almost invisible until it was exposed in a very public way.

It was in my senior year at Tam High that I accidentally discovered the existence of a very secret subterranean activity. It was a slip of the tongue by a pretty young woman who sat on my right in Mister Kent’s morning art class, which first alerted me to something mysterious. We were all working on our water colour pictures and the pretty brunette on my right was telling us what she and her boyfriend had done on the weekend.

“We went to Sausalito,” she began in a distracted manner, “and scored a matchbox.” She suddenly stopped talking and muttered “shit!” I immediately asked what the matter was but she clammed up and said no more so I returned my attention to the picture I was paintng of Mead Theatre.

Mister Kent’s art class in Keyser Hall had a very relaxed atmosphere and I was surrounded by attractive young women so it was something I actually looked forward to. The silence of the room was altered by a gentle whisper from the young brunette. “You promise not to tell anyone?” she asked. “He made me promise not to talk about this.” The young lady on my left and I promised not to tell and she continued.

“We scored a matchbox. You know? Marijuana.”

This was heady stuff and, inside, my first reaction was one of terror, though I nodded sagely, as she continued to talk about this new alien activity. The subject of drugs and drug addiction was something that happened, metaphorically, on the other side of the tracks. I had been told cautionary tales by my father Blackie who had known singer Billie Holiday in New York, who was addicted to heroin. He also told me of a sailor on a ship who went bezerk with an axe because his supply had run out. Blackie and his shipmates overpowered the fellow and tied him to a mast. The Chronicle was full of news stories about drug addicts and the police but it was a world away from our lives. So to hear this young woman talking about marijuana was scary.

The jargon she spoke was new to me, using the word stoned to describe being high on weed, rather than drunk on alcohol. Turned on was a phrase I’d heard disc jockeys use on the radio but she used it as: turning on was getting high and she described marijuana cigarettes as joints.

It wasn’t long before I managed to get an invitation to join the pretty brunette and her sister at their mother’s house up on Lovell one Friday night where they were entertaining a guy I’d known in my younger years from Muir Beach. They talked about nothing but getting stoned all night and it opened my eyes to this secret society which existed here in Mill Valley as well as Sausalito and Marin City. More new jargon came my way: a head was someone who smoked weed and the word paranoid was used to describe feeling nervous. The evening’s chatter made me sit up and pay attention. Inherent in all the conversations I was listening to was the attitude that drinking was a drag and that smoking reefer was superior.

Every Friday night, except for this one, my brother Jim and I would join our friend Augie Belden at the apartment in Una Way that he shared with his mother. Mrs Belden would, without fail, spend the weekend somewhere north with her rich boyfriend and this vacuum was filled every Friday night by us getting drunk there and going to the local dance.

So I was privy to this new pot smoking scene but didn’t participate in it and it really was a secret society going on beneath the radar that most students at Tam responded to. It did, however come to the attention of the State Narcotics Bureau who sent an undercover agent into southern Marin to infiltrate the group who was dealing the grass. The agent drove a flashy GTO and befriended the relevant dealers at C’s Drive-In on Miller Avenue, where all the hard guys hung out. He also fanned out into Marin City and Sausalito making deals and gathering evidence.

On the left a photo of a 1965 Pontiac GTO, a highly desirable vehicle at that time, which the undercover narcotics officer drove – and on the right a photo of C’s Drive-In on Miller Avenue.

A few weeks before I graduated in the summer of 1965 they conducted a massive Saturday night raid which made front page news in the Sunday papers the next day. I was shocked to see a photo of Steve Nau on the front page of the Chronicle under the headline: Marin Dope Roundup. Steve was a kid we knew at Tam High who lived in Sausalito. A startled photo of Steve, being arrested at the Fireside Motel, was right in the middle of the front page. The Fireside, where my friends and I used to have pizza eating contests, was commandeered by the agents as their base for this coordinated raid. Dan Terzich, the Mill Valley Police chief, was part of the operation.

The front pages of the Sunday editions of the San Francisco Chronicle and The Examiner on the morning after the raid.

On the left a photo of Mill Valley police chief Dan Terzich in uniform. Centre is The Fireside Motel. On the right Chief Terzich examines a pot plant presented by his deputy.

It must be remembered just how important the print media was in 1965. San Francisco had two major newspapers: the Chronicle and the Examiner and both covered the raid on the front pages of their Sunday morning editions. The Independent Journal had coverage on the Monday as they didn’t put out a paper on Sunday at that time. The newspaper coverage would have been read all over Marin County.

The raid came as a huge shock and the newspapers kept the story alive for weeks after. Why Steve Nau’s name and photo was allowed to be used is a mystery. Steve was 16 at the time of his arrest and all the papers had a policy of only giving the names and addresses of those who were over 18. When Steve appeared back at school the following week, he told a group of us all about his arrest at the Fireside Motel and how the undercover agent who had trapped him, was put into custody and handcuffed along with the rest of them.

The newspaper coverage continued long after the initial arrests at The Fireside.

Mr Prather, our principal at Tam High, was soon being quoted in news stories after he announced that any students using or possessing marijuana near or on campus will be permanently excluded from the school. I have no memory of Mr Prather’s address to the student body about drugs but The Independent Journal reported him as saying: “Many of you seem to believe that the use of marijuana is not harmful to you, as you have been told that it is not a narcotic and is not addictive. While technically, this might be true, I would like to remind you that arsenic also is not a narcotic and is not addictive.” The next day the Chronicle quoted Mr Prather as saying that: “This problem belongs to the whole community. It is far bigger than just one group, and when an easy narcotics source comes along, it won’t be licked by one group alone.”

The continuing coverage in the newspapers was sensational and melodramatic in the style of Jack Webb on Dragnet or a Dick Tracy comic strip. “While Prather was speaking,” read the piece in the Chronicle, “Word came from New York that police there had arrested another suspect in the marijuana ring in Marin. Held in New York pending extradition proceedings was Anthony Pastor, 26, unemployed from Mill Valley. He had been sought on a warrant issued by the Marin County district attorney’s office late last week.”

The newspaper coverage of the raid struck a tone rather like the TV show DRAGNET or the comic strip DICK TRACY.

The Chronicle ran a front page article titled Worried Father Wonders ‘Why’. It was an interview with Steve Nau’s father, Sidney, who was grief stricken at his son’s arrest. Sidney Nau was a longshore gang boss on the San Francisco waterfront. The reporter described him gazing out his window at the bay and clenching his fist when he described the long haired beatniks hanging out down in Sausalito’s park, Vina Del Mar. Mr Nau spent the interview wondering where he had gone wrong with his son and stating that he was standing by Steve.

Sausalito’s police chief, Kenneth H Huck, made headlines by announcing a two pronged attack on drug dealers, asking for more resources from the city council and a programme of education for parents. The curfew laws would be strictly enforced and any “questionable characters” seen in the company of juveniles would face arrest and possible prosecution for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Using pre-feminist syntax, chief Huck said: “We hope to educate the parent in the appearance of marijuana and narcotics so that he will be able to detect its use. We hope to work with the juvenile in showing him the hazards and the danger involved in use of narcotics.” Speaking to a group of 30 representatives of churches and service clubs at City Hall, Huck told them that he’d seen pushers operating in the downtown park Vina Del Mar: “peeking around trees. The major part of the problem is still before us. The amount of youth involved is a great number. You see in the newspaper, 100 or 150. We have more than that in Sausalito who have tried or used marijuana.”

Sausalito’s downtown park, Vina Del Mar, and a photo of then Police Chief Kenneth H Huck.

Although I followed the news coverage to a certain extent, a combination of the excitement about graduation and the anticipation of my trip to sea eclipsed my interest in the dope raid and its consequences which continued to generate sensational news stories.

Two days after my graduation I was working as a mess boy on a Norwegian tanker steaming towards Yokohama. Ironically I shared a fo’c’sle with Kent Baldwin, a younger student from Tam High, but most of my socialising was done with non-Americans. I spent the entire summer on that ship. This was a huge change in my life and none of the things I had become used to as a young person would ever be the same again.

When I returned to Mill Valley I was a very changed person. I had been to Japan, Formosa and the Philippines. I had gone through the Panama Canal, visited New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy had ravaged the place, and finally signed off in the place of my birth, New York City. Before I contacted my relatives, I spent a week at the YMCA which later was made famous by the Village People. I learned first hand about loneliness in the big city and when I returned to my home town, I was much less confident and more introspective. But in addition to the changes within myself, the town I’d come back to was also different.

Tam High was not the same place I had graduated from a mere few months earlier. Most of the male students had long hair. Kaftans and beads were everywhere and clearly a majority of the students were now smoking marijuana. A friend of mine who was now a senior had, at the time of my graduation, sported a collegiate haircut. He now had long hair and looked like Sonny Bono, complete with flared trousers. And his girlfriend, in spite of having red hair, looked like Cher. He filled me in on the changes which had occurred in the youth culture of Mill Valley. He was now very much part of the new drug culture which had blossomed in Marin County.

I have no doubt that the purpose of the raid which the narcotics bureau pulled off in the summer of 1965 was to stamp out and put an end to the use of marijuana in southern Marin. The publicity surrounding the raid, however, seemed to have the effect of popularising marijuana with young people. I very much doubt that Madison Avenue could have done a better job of selling weed smoking to the teenagers of Mill Valley, Sausalito and Marin City. By the following year, the hippie era was well under way and the way of life I had grown up in was gone forever.

On my return to Mill Valley in September, 1965, I enrolled at College of Marin where I took journalism and worked on the newspaper, The Tower Times. All my friends were smoking dope and any resistance I’d had previously simply dissolved. I started getting stoned in a big way. My initial attempts at smoking grass while still in high school were not at all successful as I couldn’t appreciate the subtleties of its effect on me. But now I was getting loaded after the first toke was sucked into my lungs. Listening to music through a haze of green smoke was terrifically heightened. I would hang out with my friend Matt who lived on a houseboat in Larkspur. It was there that I discovered and listened over and over to the first Lovin’ Spoonful album.

I started doing a weekly comic strip in the college paper called Captain Campus. It was shamelessly influenced by the ABC television version of Batman which was wonderfully funny and its use of comic book graphics was so stylish. I stayed at the College of Marin for just one semester and the comic strip started out with a slightly amateur look but by the end had become professional looking.

I went to the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall where I saw Bill Graham for the first time. He looked very straight with a Frankie Avalon hairdo but he mixed fluidly with the long haired rock musicians on the stage. Later I went to a gig at the Fillmore Auditorium and was amazed at the size of the dope smoking scene. I also saw the posters being done and thought to myself that I could do that kind of work so I put together a package of my comic strips and a psychedelic ad I’d done for a dance at College of Marin and sent it to Bill Graham at the Fillmore. About a week later Bill rang up and invited me to come see him at the Fillmore.

The cultural changes which had occurred between graduating from Tam in June of 1965 and one year later were astounding. The way of life I had experienced in my four years at Tamalpais High School was over. It would never be like that again.

Years later I was living and working in London when the film American Graffiti came out and I saw it at the ABC on Holloway Road. George Lucas directed and co-wrote it with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck. The film reconstructed what my high school life was like brilliantly. I recognised every single character in the film, including myself. The hard guys, the rah-rahs, the cruising on 4th Street, the drive-ins and even someone getting pantsed. It was exactly how American teenage life was like before marijuana came along and took all the kids away.

We don’t normally choose what we’re nostalgic about but if I did have such a choice I would pick the way of life depicted in American Graffiti over the hippie era without a doubt.

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Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay

Sad to learn the news of Bob Weir’s death while writing this.

My brain was still a bit like scrambled eggs but I felt ready to go back to work. On my first day back on the waterfront, I got up early, dressed up warm and caught a bus down to the Embarcadero. I felt nervous inside but I soon learned that it didn’t show.

The hiring hall for local 34 was just north of the Ferry Building on the bayside. You’d enter from the street into an outer room, then through a door, across a walkway and through another door into the hall itself. I had to be there by 7am and as I came in, the air was practically amber with tobacco smoke. It was packed with men who were mostly all smoking. I was, at this time, a smoker but I could never face my first cigarette until after lunch so entering the hall at such an early hour was a truly disgusting experience.

Johnny Aitken, the dispatcher, stood on a big platform behind a glass panel on an elevated stage. On the wall behind him was a blackboard with pier numbers written in chalk. First the union book members would choose their jobs, then the guys on the B-list would take their’s and what was left over would go to those men present whose names were either called out over the microphone by Aitken or not. Blackie knew Johnny Aitken well. His nickname for John was “Oh my achin’ back,” as he always had a complaint to share.

There were 50 piers on the Embarcadero. The ones to the north of the ferry Building were all odd numbers and to the south even numbers. The president of Local 34 was Jimmy Herman who I had known for years. He used to always be up at the Hallinan mansion in Ross on Sundays when he would play some card game with Vin and Vivian. So I shuffled around the hiring hall until I heard Johnny Aitken call out my name. I went up to the window and he told me: “Pier 27, R&D.” Start time was 8am so I’d be able to catch a muni bus and maybe have a cup of coffee at a cafe near the dock. R&D stood for “receive and delivery,” which was a job I knew how to do.

So I made my way out of the smoke filled hall, walked back to the ferry building and caught a north bound muni bus to pier 27. There was a cafe nearby so I went in to have a cup of coffee and a glazed donut. As I sat down I was approached by someone with a friendly face. A guy named Steve, who I’d known from my time at Homestead School, came over and said hello. I’d never been close friends with Steve but he was the same age as me and lived in our neighbourhood halfway down the big hill on Molino. His house was on Sunrise, which started at Janes and ran across to Molino. He too was working as a clerk and we were both doing R&D at pier 27 so it was good to have a friendly comrade.

The big hill, which Steve’s family house sat on, was the one that our mother Beth begged Jim and I never to ride our bikes down. To be fair to Beth, it was very steep and because she’d made such a big deal out of it, we never did. Oddly, we always referred to that hill as Molino as if that was its only manifestation, but the road of that name ran from the bottom of the hill up past the playground and Seymour Avenue then took a right just beyond Mirabel, where it continued past the Collett house and the Symmes house before descending, snake like, into Old Mill. As both my sisters went to Old Mill, I would guess they walked to school that way. Ethel was the street we took when we were headed downtown. There was a generous abundance of public steps on the lower slopes of Mount Tamalpais and on Ethel we had two to choose from. The first would take us down to Miller by Brown’s Furnishing and the next one brought us down to Throckmorton by the pet store.

The social centre of our neighbourhood was the playground at Molino and Janes. It was where all the kids played. I don’t recall Steve being there much at all. Though I never enjoyed playing baseball at school, I did at the playground. I guess it was a safe place, unlike school where I was treated as the little guy who was no good at sports. Towards the end of our time in that part of town I remember Johnny Lem, Jimmy Brown, Bobby Patterson, Augie Belden and Marvin Lundwall whose house stood at the very top of that hill. Just across the road from the playground lived Bill and Kelly Giles and Shannon Pixley.

A Russian family named the Popovs moved into a house on Janes in the early ‘60s. They had two young boys named Oleg and Boris, neither of whom we ever had anything to do with. I remember sitting on the swing early one evening and hearing a young boy’s voice singing the title song of the Disney television programme Zorro. It was Oleg, trotting on his imaginary horse around the upper rim of the playground as he sang. But that was when I was still in junior high at Edna Maguire which was a world away from my adventures in 1967.

So I didn’t have much history to reflect on with Steve who I would be working with at Pier 27 throughout that week. All the jobs on the pier were done by union members and the boss for the day seemed a very nice guy. There was a little room where the clerks all sat waiting for instructions and it wasn’t long before I was given a job. A teamster arrived in his truck to collect 40 sacks of coffee beans. The burlap sacks of coffee beans were piled on pallets at a location on the pier which was written on the paper work the boss had given me. So I walked down to the location where I found the coffee beans and two longshoremen waiting by them. The teamster drove his truck onto the pier and pulled up by the pallets. A fork lift truck, driven by another longshoreman arrived and he lifted the top pallet off the pile, lowered it down and manoeuvred it to a position behind the truck. He then raised his forks high enough to place the pallet on the back of the truck. The two guys on the pier then climbed up onto the truck along with the teamster. An essential tool for this work was the hook which each stevedore had in his possession. They would jab the hook into the burlap sack with one hand and with their other hand grab hold of the burlap and lift, swinging the heavy bag off the pallet and onto the floor of the truck in the place the teamster had indicated. There were probably about eight sacks on a pallet so the it would take a bit of time. My job was to make sure that the paperwork matched the transaction which was occurring. At ten o’clock we all had a fifteen minute coffee break. Each operation which occurred in the workplace had been haggled about in negotiations with the union.

On the left a stevedore driving a forklift, winching sacks onto a pallet, a longshoreman’s hook and more winching.

Steve and I went for coffee together and later for lunch. Over lunch he told me that he had a problem with drugs. He had become strung out on Methedrine. But he seemed sober and on the wagon. What he described was full blown addiction and it sounded bad. I didn’t ask if he was using needles but my feeling was that he did. I had tried speed, as it was called, orally once. The high was exciting but the comedown was terrible so I never tried it again. It was like the worst kind of hangover and I guess that’s how Steve got hooked. To avoid the hangover, you take some more and after a bit your body gets used to it. My only experience of addiction was with cigarettes and I would always quit after six months but it was tough stopping. The other thing about speed was that it made you talk a lot.

I was under doctor’s orders not to smoke grass but I only took that advice so seriously. One day I didn’t get a job at the hall and paid a visit to a friend who had an apartment near California Street. He was having a day off from his job in an office so he rolled a joint, lit it and offered me a toke. Out of habit I took it, inhaled the smoke and held it down in my lungs. He had a pretty good record collection and as I exhaled, I leafed through the LP covers which were leaning against the wall near the record player. I chose Otis Redding and put it on the turntable.

3 images of the late Otis Redding. In the centre is Wes Wilson’s poster for the weekend gig Redding did at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966.

I had heard the song Dock Of The Bay on the radio but never listened to it with the intensity that a head full of ganja can provide. I hadn’t realised that Redding was singing about San Francisco bay. The lyrics told me that he left his home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco bay. It was soulful, beautiful and very sad. I was terribly moved. I was feeling lonely and regularly ate my lunch sitting on just such a dock. I listened to it over and over. This would have been either just before or after Otis Redding was killed in a plane crash in Wisconsin.

The weed my friend shared with me was strong and I was very stoned. I started thinking about the hallway outside his door and the stairs down to the front door and I suddenly realised That I was feeling paranoid. Not wishing to alarm my friend I got up and walked around the spacious apartment. I looked out the window, walked into the kitchen and seeing a sink full of dirty dishes, I set about washing them. This activity, bringing order out of chaos, brought me back to earth and I realised that Dr Weinberg’s statement that I couldn’t smoke dope anymore was true. I was now disqualified as a hippie.

One aspect of my madness was that I lost all interest in the various entertainments I had always been passionate about such as going to the movies. Popular music I stayed in touch with but I missed a whole lot of movies which came out during that time. I never saw In the Heat of the Night, Barefoot in the Park or The Family Way.

The press advertising for the movie The Graduate did not connect with me when it came out in December of 1967. Somehow the ads in the Chronicle didn’t appeal to my sensibilities. Perhaps it was because I didn’t know who Dustin Hoffman was as he was completely unknown to me at that time. For whatever reason I had no interest in seeing The Graduate which is odd in retrospect, as this movie was to have a profound effect on me.

It wasn’t until I heard about The Graduate from a fellow ship’s clerk early the following year that my interest was aroused. It was a bit peculiar because this particular guy I worked with was not someone I would describe as a bright bulb. He had been born and bred in San Francisco, was in his early twenties, and had never ever been out of the city. At no point in his young life had he gone across either of the two bridges which took you to Marin County or the east bay. This provincial attitude had not impressed me. And yet what he had to say about The Graduate made me want to see it.

During the time I worked for Bill Graham, my first job was painting signs on the wall at the Fillmore Auditorium and later I began designing posters. One of the perks of working for Bill was getting into his dance concerts for free and as he booked a few bands which interested me, I would often hang around after my work was done to watch the evening’s show begin. While painting signs at the Fillmore during the day, I got to know most of the musicians from the bands that regularly appeared: Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Dead was managed by two guys named Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully. Rock had a younger brother named Dicken. He looked like Rock and was tall like him but had blonde hair in contrast to his brother’s black hair. Dicken’s job at the Fillmore was to sit on a stool in front of the entrance to the band room on concert nights and keep people out who had no business going in. I became friendly with Dicken and would hang out with him. He was a formidable presence on his stool and suffered no foolishness from those who tried to talk their way past him. I think he was a student but to be honest it never came up.

Left: Danny Rifkin & Rock Scully, Pig Pen, Rock Scully & Bob Weir, Rock at home and in front of the press.

Most of the people I hung out with at the Fillmore were considerably older than my nineteen years and I felt like a kid in a world of adults. It’s just that all these adults had long hair and smoked dope. I behaved like an adult but I was really just a kid. I also didn’t have a girlfriend at this time and nothing about that environment encouraged me to take steps to remedy that situation.

The band room was open to those of us who worked for Bill and I would hang around the entrance, smoking cigarettes and chatting to Dicken and this pair of beautiful young brunette women who were fashion models and twins. I did, on occasion, meet and dance with young women at the Fillmore, but more often than not, I was too shy to even do that. There was one very attractive young woman I danced with who, while we were moving about the dance floor, casually asked if she could punch me. Being somewhat perplexed by her request I stupidly said yes and the next thing I knew I was doubled up on the floor after she slugged me in the stomach. “Get up!” she shouted. As I did she socked me on the jaw. I suffered a few more blows before I finally staggered away from her.

But the reality was that most of the young women I wanted to dance with I was terrified to even talk to. I was suffering from the age old problem of hesitation. In dealings with the opposite sex, once you hesitate…you’re finished.

When I finally went to see The Graduate in early 1968 at the Metro, I was stunned by Dustin Hoffman’s performance which embodied all the demons which had been in charge of my soul for some time. Benjamin Braddock was every bit a victim of hesitation as was I.

Images of Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft from The Graduate.

The emotional panic which paralysed him as he tried to book the hotel room for his first fling with Mrs Robinson was like watching myself. I had never seen this portrayed on screen before. Men in movies were mostly over confident with women or total buffoons but nothing in between. As this was precisely the reality which had me in its grip, I recognised it immediately. Not only was the movie highly entertaining but it brought this paralysis into focus and sent me a message that I was not alone. Other men suffered in a similar way.

To be continued…

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A Descent Into Darkness

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings: After spending several weeks as a day patient at a San Francisco clinic, I finally started coming down from the drug which drove me crazy. Coco Cutler, a family friend with an interest in psychoanalysis, befriended me.

Unlike my parents, Coco could relate to the state of mind I was in. She leant a sympathetic ear to me and it was a huge help. I soon became a regular visitor to her apartment on top of Telegraph Hill. I learned that she was plugged into the scene that Blackie’s friend Lew Welch was a part of. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Watts were among her acquaintences. But she was nothing like a beatnik at all. Prim, proper, elegantly spoken and with a physical beauty which benefited from growing old gracefully.

Coco was, like all my parents’ friends, a person of the political left and had been married to another of my family’s acquaintances, Al Richmond, who wrote for the People’s World newspaper. I never knew exactly what office job Coco did, but many times I saw her wearily climbing Telegraph Hill after a day’s work.

Sometime in 1966 I discovered a small movie theatre in North Beach which showed a lot of old Humphrey Bogart pictures which I had a particular fascination for. I saw Casablanca, To Have And Have Not, Beat The Devil and a movie which completely entranced me because the opening scenes featured Marin County locations. I’ve always found the joy of recognition to be a powerful emotion and the film Dark Passage began with an escape from San Quentin prison. We saw the fingers of the escapee gripping the rim of a barrel he was inside of, on the back of a flat bed truck. He made it rock back and forth as the truck drove away from the prison and the sound of police sirens began to wail in the distance. The barrel then tumbled off the truck and rolled down a steep hill. The escapee soon found beautiful Lauren Bacall who hid him in the back of her woodie vehicle. Seeing the hills of Marin behind all this action was terribly exciting to me and soon Lauren Bacall’s woodie was going through the tunnel on Waldo Grade. All the cars were from 1946. She crossed the Golden Gate bridge, ending up at her apartment on Telegraph Hill. At some time during a visit to Coco’s flat I must have mentioned this film and it transpired that she had seen them shoot a scene right outside her apartment.

When this film was shot there was only one two-way tunnel on Waldo Grade.

Ms Bacall’s woodie crosses the Golden Gate Bridge. We then see her apartment on Telegraph Hill.

The neat trick that Dark Passage pulled off was that we never saw Bogart’s face until he wound up having plastic surgery. With a big bandage covering his face, he staggered up the steps at Filbert Street to Bacall’s apartment on Telegraph Hill. This was the scene that Coco had witnessed the filming of. She told me she felt very sorry for Bogart who had to repeat the climb many times as they shot take after take.

On the left we see Bogart climbing the steps in 1946 and the same steps today.

Dark Passage was an intricately plotted thriller which combined good writing with excellent acting. Directed by Delmer Daves, it fell into a category that French film critics would, after World War 2, christen film noir. This phrase described Hollywood films which were absorbed by darkness and pessimism.

Darkness and pessimism were two realities that I was slowly descending into. I had been incarcerated in Napa State Hospital from the middle of July until the first week of August when my father got me discharged because of a suicidal inmate who took against me. All the time I was there and for many weeks after, I was in my own universe with practically no interest in or knowledge of what was going on out in the real world. When I got back to my parents’ apartment, I didn’t read the Chronicle or watch the news. I listened to pop music on the radio but that was the limit of my intake.

By August the race riots across the country had simmered down and President Johnson established a senate judiciary committee to investigate the causes. Michigan governor George Romney who, at the outbreak of the riots in Detroit, had asked Johnson to send federal troops to the city, now criticised the president for playing politics with the issue. Romney, though a Republican with an eye on the presidential nomination of 1968, also came out against the Vietnam war.

The summer of love was thought to be all flower children and peace. However a pair of gruesome murders occurred which contradicted that image. They involved both the Haight Ashbury community and Marin County. The dead body of known drug dealer, Willam E. Thomas, referred to in the Haight as Superspade, was found trussed up in a khaki sleeping bag on a steep cliff near the Point Reyes Coast Guard station. He had been stabbed in the chest and shot through the head.

Five days earlier the dead body of Haight drug dealer John Kent Carter, was discovered in his San Francisco apartment. He was found lying on a mattress with a dozen stab wounds and his right arm severed and missing. San Francisco police issued an all points bulletin for the arrest of Eric Frank Dahlstrom, 23, of Sausalito. Dahlstrom was well known as a motorcycle racer at tracks like Cotati and Vacaville. He had a reputation for superb skill and reckless behaviour. Officers in Sausalito immediately checked his parents’ house on Monte Mar Drive and found Dahlstrom’s car in the garage with its licence plates missing. It was nearly 11 pm on a Saturday night when the Sausalito police added Dahlstrom’s plate numbers to the APB for his arrest. Twenty minutes later on a street in Sebastopol, patrolman Charles Baker spotted a car with those same plates. He turned his red light on and pulled the car over. Knowing the APB was for a murder, the officer approached the vehicle with his gun drawn. Dahlstrom, however, surrendered without resistance. In the back seat of the vehicle officers found, wrapped in blue suede, the severed forearm of John Kent Carter.

Eric Dahlstrom was not shy about telling the story of Carter’s murder to assembled reporters at San Francisco police HQ. He said that he had killed Carter while under the influence of LSD and that he had considered dismembering the body. According to Helix, a Seattle underground newspaper, Dahlstrom was undergoing an “Olympics-calibre bummer caused, he believed, by inferior-quality acid” which Carter had sold him. Offended, he went to Carter’s to discuss it. During the discussion, Dahlstrom said, Carter shoved him. “I got shoved,” he told reporters. “Don’t nobody shove me.” The Helix account continued: “Dahlstrom grabbed up a 12-inch kitchen knife and stabbed him rapidly 12 times, most of them fatally. He undertook to dismember the body , but gave it up after neatly amputating the right arm above the elbow. He wrapped the arm in blue suede and split with it, taking also a .38 pistol, $3,000 Carter had assembled to give to an acid wholesaler called Superspade.”

At first it seemed that there might be a connection between the murder of Superspade and John Kent Carter but as time passed, investigators concluded that they were separate incidents. Earlier that week Dahlstrom had been to Slide Ranch where he kept a motorcycle. His behaviour was strange and he was asked to leave because he was “acting goofy.”

These murders inspired sensational headlines in the press.

This story, which was covered extensively by all the bay area newspapers, passed me by completely. Weekdays I spent at the clinic run by Dr. Weinberg which had a calming effect on me. I attended my sessions at the clinic for four or five weeks and when that time was up, the darkness began to claim my soul. My spirits had been fairly up beat until that time. Coco’s friendship became very important to me during this time.

On the left is Dr Art Weinberg who ran the day clinic I attended. In the centre and right are two pictures of Coco Cutler in 1943 and 2002.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, my sister Nell visited from London with her one year old son Michael who we all called ‘Poggy.’ He was a beautiful child and having him there took me out of myself which must have aided my recovery. Nellie looked terrific and had taken to the role of young mother with gusto. Nellie’s new motherhood forged a strong link with sister Kate who was so excited about young Michael/Pog. During the few weeks they were with us, Poggy began to walk, a process which started as a balancing act between his two feet. From my bedroom I would hear a single thump in the hall. Then after a pause a second thump. After a third thump I’d hear a series of them up to my bedroom door which he’d then push open.

Young Poggy was also forming his first words. While out walking with them one day, we found ourselves at the bottom of Russian Hill where Union meets Columbus. The sight of a dog across the street in Washington Square caused Poggy to point and make a breathy sound similar to the noise we made as children to simulate gun fire. It sounded like deoggggh. It bore a striking resemblance to the word dog. It was a very exciting moment.

On the left: Nellie, Pog and myself; My sister Katie; Poggy with my father Blackie.

It was also exciting for me to see how animated my sister Katie was in becoming an auntie to little Pog. Both my sisters had gone to university and dropped out after their second year. Nell had gone to San Francisco State and Katie to University of California at Berkeley.

My two sisters were very different people and until Nellie arrived for her visit it was Katie who had been such a good friend to me. Practically every excursion I took in the city after I left Napa was in her company and she looked after me.

When we were kids it was always Katie who was the peacemaker of the family. Nellie and I were the temperamental two and brother Jim was kind of neutral. Katie always looked on the bright side of any problem and usually found a happy solution.

Politics played a big role in all our lives. The society we were growing up in was gripped by the anti-red hysteria of the McCarthy era. Even being politically liberal was seen by the federal government as highly suspicious and my parents and all their close friends were far left of liberal. So we were aware of a difference to most of the kids we went to school with. Of the four of us only Nellie seemed to gravitate towards active political participation. I was interested but seeing how the federal government operated scared me. Family friends Fred Field, Alvah Bessie, and Vin Hallinan all did time in federal prison and I always worried that the same fate could take Blackie and Beth away from us. The execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 sent a shiver through people of the left and I found it terrifying.

So the politics of the day affected each of us four Myers kids. Jim wound up rebelling against my parents’ values by joining the army. Once he was on the inside and realised what he’d done, he got himself involved in the stenography corps and never went to Vietnam.

Three photos of my brother Jim. On the left with myself and good friend Augie Belden. In the centre with our cat Totem and on the right a shot, later in life, with sister Kate and myself.

Having Nellie around made me contemplate a trip to England. All my travelling had been in the other direction, across the Pacific when in actual fact I had always longed to visit London. Blackie said that when I was well enough I could go back to work on the waterfront, so a little bit of structure entered my life. The idea of working on the front and saving enough to make a trip to England gave me a goal.

When I was in high school, Nellie was sharing an apartment on Greenwich Street with like minded socialists who were politically active. The two main issues they were most concerned about was racism and the war in Vietnam. I remember going with Nellie to a demo at the Masonic Auditorium on California Street where an openly racist organisation was holding a conference. It was night time and demonstrators were lying down in front of the vehicle exit to try and stop the people leaving in their cars. I don’t recall exactly what played out. I think an arrest was made but after some negotiation the demonstrators agreed to let the racists drive their cars out of the underground car park without fanfare.

Nellie saw a lot of the Hallinan boys during this time and was involved in many demonstrations. There were sit-ins at car showrooms on Van Ness, the Sheraton-Palace Hotel, Lucky Supermarkets and famously at Mel’s Drive-In on Geary. Nellie got herself arrested on a few occasions. Ringo and Dynamite Hallinan were often at the apartment on Greenwich Street.

Though Nellie and Katie had similar experiences with their time at university, Nellie gravitated towards politics and Katie, when she decided to drop out of Cal Berkeley, went to work in a bank in the financial district. I remember that, in addition to renting an apartment with her boyfriend Lonnie, Katie actually got herself a credit card which was quite a first for someone from the Myers family. Blackie had always been highly suspicious of the concept of credit, but I remember Katie being so matter-of-fact about the credit card and don’t recall any fuss about this with Blackie and Beth. Katie was always highly responsible with both of them and they appreciated it. It was just a decision on her part to improve the quality of her life.

Nellie did, after she dropped out of SF State, go to work for a shipping company run by the Kiskaddens who were good friends of my parents. When she eventually went east to visit family friends in and around New York, it was on one of Kiskadden’s Norwegian ships, The Torvanger, on which she made the final voyage to London. This would be the very same ship that I went to sea on after I graduated from Tam High.

In London Nellie quickly found herself involved in left wing politics and met, fell in love with, and married Trevor Hyett. Trevor was the father of Michael/Pog who was visiting us in San Francisco.

So these happy events occurred at the same time that I was beginning my descent into the deepest depression of my young life.

To be continued…

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