From the cavernous depths of the Earth. Clawing their way to strike and kill in frenzy.” For weeks afterward, I slept fearing I’d be pulled down under the earth.
An eight-year old only-child as 1957 dawned, I had gone with friends to movies, even Mission Street matinees charging three soda bottle caps for admission. I had always been accompanied by an adult, often my grandma. That Sunday, a friend and I planned to meet, sans adults, at the Castro Theater to confront The Mole People.
My post-WWII San Francisco neighborhood, then called Eureka Valley and now the Castro, thrived on connections. I grew up on Hartford Street, one block from the heart of today’s gay mecca. My just-married mother fell in love with a brick-bottomed house. Unannounced, she knocked on its door to ask Mr. Thomas if he might sell. He had custom built it for his wife. Persistent, my mom insisted he keep contact information. Later, after miscarrying once and undergoing a rough pregnancy with me, my mom heard from Mr. Thomas saying his wife had passed.
We moved in with a cash infusion from my grandmother, who also bought a smaller house up the block with money from selling the corner grocery she owned and operated in the adjacent Noe Valley for decades while raising my mother alone. Marie Richter had migrated to America from between Prague and Vienna after S.F.’s ’06 earthquake. She first cooked for the family whose name affixed two notable city landmarks, Fleishhacker Pool and Zoo.
Rich memories of growing up in the neighborhood, with a sense of community and vibrancy still apparent today, abound.
I remember my Murphy bed-up bedroom, fashioned off the kitchen to be a dining room, as the venue for holiday feasts. The lavish dinners always included Charlie Miles, a Filipino “adopted son” of my grandmother’s and his “lady friend,” Bee Kottinger. Moreover, my mom invariably invited newcomers “who had no place else to go,” just so she didn’t try to seat thirteen at the table, something my Grandmother wouldn’t abide.
I remember the shocked look on my mother’s friend’s face at our front door when my mom shouted “Kenny,” a nickname that thankfully ran its course, and found me trailing my African American playmate from across the street named Penny, who though she was calling him.
I remember playmates suddenly appearing with virtually no English skills, like my friends up the street, Jaime and Alberto, with their thick Portuguese accents.
I remember my Kindergarten classmate Danny Wynn’s mother singing “Danny Boy,” with nary a dry eye, in our Parish hall just before she died of cancer.
I remember countless games of touch football, baseball, softball and strikeouts at Eureka Valley, especially those football games when rain – yes, it rained then — had turned the field into a quagmire. After tippy-toeing around for a while to avoid getting the pegged white pants my Grandmother had fashioned dirty, it was liberating to give in and slide through the mud as if on a contemporary Slip ‘N Slide. Back then, I would have said on a Flexi Flyer, the eventually outlawed head-first bobsleds on little wheels on which kids launched themselves downhill from 19th Street, though drivers had little chance of seeing vehicle or rider if momentum carried the bobsled on wheels into busy 18th Street traffic.
With a different mid-1950’s mindset, I had previously ventured alone to Most Holy Redeemer, my grammar school, and adjacent Eureka Valley Playground. The Parish, before Irish, Italian and German families moved in droves to affordable housing in the Richmond or Sunset Districts, cast the culture of the neighborhood: relational, service-oriented, narrative-rich and joyful. Those values permeated my upbringing, reiterated that Sunday as a marker for me later as a teacher and principal at the same Sacred Heart High School I attended as a student.
I learned the neighborhood and its people intimately. My mom, suspecting my dad, who would disappear for hours, must be stopping at one of the eight bars within three blocks, sent me with him. Eliciting my mom’s vexation, I testified that my dad took as long as he did because he was chatting everyone up, from Angelo, the addled paper hawker at 18th and Castro, to Little Joe, the barber with the eight kids who’d blithely nick customers while waving to fellow parishioners exiting the Hibernia Bank.
Years later, after the ’67 Summer of Love changed seasons, Joe spread thumbtacks on the sidewalk outside the laundromat next to his shop to protest the long hair of “invading hippies.” On our walks, we often did yell a hello into Gene & Frank’s, the tavern which, a couple of years later, thrilled me by offering Sunday Giants’ baseball excursions, with breakfast and dinner served in the bar, first to Seals Stadium and then the ‘Stick.
Speaking of sports, my dad, who never owned a car, took the 33 Haight-Ashbury daily to his job as a warehouseman at Floor Styles on Mission Street. There, I enjoyed a yearly delight, riding rolled Karastans down chutes from upper floors. In ’67, I would take the same bus line the opposite direction to watch the 49ers play at Kezar Stadium. Then, red-clad fans on the bus pointed mockingly to the hippies once we turned onto Haight Street. Simultaneously, resplendent street people, nearer my age, rocked the bus, maligning game-goers onboard.
Torn, I empathized with both.
Sun exploded through my Bay window that Mole People ’57 Sunday, jolting me awake. Five Octobers later, even while inhaling and exhaling the ’62 World Series and attending oft-postponed game six with Dad before his being struck by the cancer sentence that would bury him in 1968 at the age of 51, similar flashes of first light evoked fear of a nuclear cataclysm during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Adventure time arrived at the Castro, but my friend didn’t.
Not wanting to spoil my rite-of-passage, I entered the venerable theater under the Spanish Colonial Baroque façade that paid homage to the rebuilt Mission Dolores Basilica six blocks away alone.
The Mole People, starring Beaver Cleaver’s father (Hugh Beaumont) and Shirley Temple’s husband (John Agar) as archeologists in the cheesiest film ever, began with an ersatz USC professor trying to legitimize the outlandish plot in which the mole people turned out to be the good guys forced to – I kid you not — raise mushrooms to feed the bad Albino colonizers under the earth’s surface amidst a mishmash of Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Judaic connections. Made credible for me by contemporary news reports spotlighting archeologists providing background about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Suez Canal region, the first twenty minutes of the movie scared the bejesus out of me.
I ran home.
Mom, dad and grandma, freed, had gone out. I banged the front door across the street. Ernie was my age. The grandson of the founder, he would eventually take over the iconic Cliff’s Variety Store. The Asten’s garage came alive annually with the “fleshing out” of the papier-mache Dinosaur which would lead Cliff’s Halloween Parade past Littleman’s Market, Fred & Roland’s butcher shop which I cleaned six nights a week during high school, Gertie Guernsey’s best-in-the-world ice creamery, and other neighborhood haunts. That children’s parade morphed into today’s raucous Halloween celebrations in the Castro.
Nobody answered.
I lurched up the street to the door of Jack and Laura Powers. Gail and Kathy, each a striking meld of Jack’s Irish and Laura’s Italian, had baby-sat me when my grandmother couldn’t. Jackie, the middle sibling, came to the door before getting his mom. Laura glided into the hallway looking beatific, radiant in white like a Blessed Virgin Mary.
She had just given birth two weeks before.
The milk and chocolate chip cookies she sat me down for soothed me, but it was her nurturing that still resonates. Later, I realized the magnitude of my frenzied drop-in. Jimmy, who incredibly lived to 55 and earned plaudits as the “Mayor of Noe Street,” had been born with Down Syndrome. So, while reconciling changes from this change-of-life baby and anticipating difficulties (Jimmy’s 2012 obit noted how people advised Jack and Laura to place him in the state hospital at Napa, a system later crippled by austerity cuts), Laura treated me as if my silly fears took precedence, an amazing act of love.
I tried to emulate her warmth and empathy in my vocation whenever a student or teacher voiced qualms even when they might not have been as important as other things in flux.
Jimmy, who couldn’t pronounce “Mrs. Richter,” instead calling my grandma “Mickey Rickey” after his Disney favorite, lived a wonderful life. After the family relocated to a hill-top house filmed in a couple “Streets of San Francisco” episodes, Jimmy eventually moved out on his own, working at S.F. State, Goodwill Industries and Harvey Milk Restaurant. Mayors Alioto and Feinstein awarded him accommodations for his goodwill, greeting neighbors and visitors atop Noe Street with a hand wave and a good day wish. He took up the collection on Sundays at St. Phillip the Apostle, the same church in which my parents had married in 1946.
May he, Jack and Laura, my parents and Mickey Rickey, and even the Mole People rest in peace, buried but not forgotten.
Ken Hogarty served for 46 years as a high school teacher/principal and part-time college teacher. A St. Mary’s College grad, Ken earned an MA from Cal State, Hayward, and an Ed.D. from USF. His wife Sally is a journalist and actress. He also adores his daughter Erin and granddaughter Melissa.