Around and about the apartment on Durant

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For perhaps as much as a year, I guess, I lived in a building, once a large family house, I think, on the north side of Durant, behind the bank on the corner of Telegraph and Durant (the Google street-level shows that building at least, now with the present-day logo of Bank of America), opposite a big Lutheran church, no longer standing. I shared an apartment with Nancy and a girl who, probably, was the one who drew once or twice in my sketch book, named Mary Lou; at least she was there for a while. Our apartment was at the extreme rear, the bedroom at least being a made-over rear sun porch. In the sixties when I was mostly in Oregon, a copy shop, perhaps an early Kinko, was built right on the street concealing the house front, perhaps concealing its actual removal. I'm nearly sure that this was the apartment where I heard a back-porch screen door slam shut on its spring as a family went in and out next door. It certainly was the apartment where, sitting at our tiny kitchen table, we could hear through the single-board thickness of the partition wall absolutely everything in the bed on the other side (no, I never met these neighbors, as it happened, so know nothing else of them). It was here that we came to know some graduate students in History. Nancy married one of them a bit later.

I had known this address once before, when a student teacher in Art at Berkeley came to our class at Oakland High School and subsequently invited several of us to visit her in the afternoon (the same public transportation that took me to the Elmwood Theater went up to Bancroft Way, very conveniently). She had a made-over apartment in a garage between the rear of the bank and the house where our apartment overlooked it. She had large non-objective paintings and she seemed very, very sophisticated to me. If she didn't know Allen Ginsberg and David Park, she certainly mentioned them. By the time I lived in the Durant apartment I still knew no one, though David Park's wife worked in the UC Library and I knew her by sight, but David and I had taken the A train after classes at CCAC and certainly knew the King Ubu Gallery (though ignorant of the source of the name) and the City Lights Book Store, though making the acquaintance only of stacks of pre-War magazines, Vanity Fair by choice.

(I am reminded of one of the sensory memories of living on Kittredge: the Berkeley electric train, the F train, which ran up the middle of Shattuck Avenue, ringing its bell to warn intersection traffic, was as audible as the early-morning fog horns on the Bay, and right on schedule. When the electric train became the F bus line, I would wake up on schedule, not hearing it, for weeks afterward.)

The main things about living almost on Telegraph Avenue, and then at 2308 Haste, less than two blocks from it, was that this mid- to late-1950s milieu was my village: not where I hung out, not where I remember coming with my "mom" or with friends, but where I lived. Having no car I did everything, major and minor, within a mile of the UC campus, and that on the south and west sides of it, mostly. The F train or bus made San Francisco easily accessible; the 51 bus went to Oakland (I forget which bus I took to the Tower Theater at 51st and Telegraph, which was in Oakland, for first-run foreign films, but those were special occasions since by then we had not only the Elmwood but our own Cinema Guild). A cross-town bus, on Dwight Way, took me to the Poultry Market for as long as I worked there; I remember once or twice taking a Final Exam with my feet tucked behind, under my seat, because I'd barely gotten back in time to take it, and my saddle shoes had chicken guts traces all over the toes. Classes I arranged with a view to my work hours, but Finals were scheduled beyond anyone's control. That felt heroic, but I don't think anyone noticed.

Towns and cities are always changing. For nearly 30 years I've watched Baton Rouge, LA, changing. Businesses come and go. In Berkeley, though, Telegraph Avenue, south of campus, suffered badly, being smaller than San Francisco, perhaps. Everybody's runaway children attracted, at best, all the motorcycle gangs and everything else that preyed on the kids. Haight-Ashbury today is not nearly so altered. Of course, it is several years since I visited. Amsterdam and Rome are not nearly so junky as they were five years ago.
If I could find anything describing this neighborhood in my youth as I actually remember it, I wouldn't try to evoke it here. But only the journalists' Berkeley survives on line.
I think that radical change began with Sproul Plaza, a planned open space, instead of Telegraph Ave. ending at Sather Gate with original sidewalks, shops still lining the west side and the Administration Building, as it was simply called, on the east side, practically off campus. The Bears' Lair was still in Stephens Union. Among the shops was a branch of Roos Bros., high quality fashionable clothing, and a hangout called the Southgate for wannabe philosophers (the coffee shop in the Annex to Dwinelle Hall was still brand new and was not yet a real hangout). There was, as I recall, a Rexall drugstore. When I was an undergraduate, the tenants of these buildings could not renew their leases and closed, one by one; Roos Bros. moved around the corner to Bancroft Way, until, like everything else supported mainly by the Greek living groups and other well-to-do nearby residents, it closed. I think that Sees Candies was in that block, too. Turning west onto Bancroft Way, there were still merchants on the north side as well as the south side of the street. There was, for example, that Maoist book store that I never saw anyone patronize, so it must have been sustained by, well, by Maoists. A door or two from it was the sandal shop which made, by hand, sandals shaped to one's own foot, which they would fix or alter as needed. For those who did not object to the attitudes of the women who owned it (it was plain that making sandals was a favor, not just a business, and you were expected to approve of them, too), the sandals were wonderful, even worth their price, which I could not afford, but I had friends of both sexes who owned and treasured theirs. I think there was a jewelry shop, too, real designer jewelry, silver, not the jangly bangles later sold on the street pavement. These disappeared when the Bears' Lair and the new UC bookstore and assorted appurtenances were built, not to mention Zellerbach Hall so that Berkeley no longer had only the City-High School auditorium at whose opening in my teens I had sung in a mixed choir a generation earlier. Of course, the Department of Music on campus has its own chamber music auditorium with a baroque organ.

On the east side of Telegraph between Bancroft and Durant were, inter alia, Sather Gate Books and Berkeley Commercial Photo (I still have a few of their envelopes with the negatives and prints that they processed). Sather Gate Books was a conventional bookstore that also sold good letter-writing supplies and greeting cards, and so on, but was by ordinary standards a far from contemptible book store, even for Berkeley. It lasted till the late 1960s, I know, because I got my sister's children gift books when they visited me and my niece Debby, then only a year old, a genuine Raggedy Andy doll, which she tells me she loved for years. This is the kind of shopping that you no longer can do on Telegraph Avenue, though, it must be said, the campus is still a joy for children. Though taken in the 1960s, I attach here photos of my niece with her doll and of the boys at "Ludwig's Fountain" (like Humphrey GoBart for the shuttle bus, typical Berkeley humor: the Ludwig in question was a German shorthair pointer that came daily, for years, to enjoy being a waterdog in a fountain that really had no other distinctions):

In the group picture, the three boys in trousers are the same ones I photographed by Ely Cathedral (see above), and the little boy in short pants and the little girl are my brother's children, also visiting that day. The fountain was from the time it was built practically the center of Sproul Plaza, since the shops and the Bears' Lair and Zellerbach Hall were at a lower level, to the west.

On the west side of this block, between Bancroft and Durant, was one, at least, of the big independent bookstores and a record store (though I bought most of mine from the back of UC Corner) and, if it wasn't farther up, Sees Candies. A very fine women's shoes, I think was on the NW Corner of the intersection; I think it was shoes before it was very nice, really fashionable, really wearable women's clothing, and I've been trying for days to remember its name. Someone on line (to which eventually I resorted) mentioned "Nicole", but that is not a name I remember, thought it might be the same shop. We bought fine sweater sets at Roos Bros., but dresses usually elsewhere.
I think that the News, Paperbacks, and Records called UC corner was on the SW corner of Telegraph and Durant; I already have described it as my Second Campus, or Open University. Between Durant and Channing there was still a wonderful Variety Store, large, name forgotten, with everything inedible that one needed. For example, perfectly useful Japanese flatware and knockoffs of Arzberg, till one could order the real thing from Frazer's across the street. Less satisfactory, reduced imitations of the famous canvas-seated, continuous steel rod framed chairs: the imitations were lighter, thinner, hinged pot metal, and cheaper, thinner canvas, pieced besides. I'd love to have my big orange canvas vintage butterfly chair! Most of those sold now, when you can find any, have joints and are poor. The real McCoy, like everything of lasting beauty, came from Frazer's. When I was at CCAC we were sent up to Berkeley to study design there. I craved everything they had, and Williams Sonoma (for example) can't match them on every size and shape of wine glasses. At my age, of course, some of my favorite chairs are hard to get out of. Later, the premises of that variety store served other tenants; for a while it was an excellent cafeteria run by Iranians. Then there were more bookstores, an Asian imports store (small and actually Asian). Opposite, starting at the SE corner of Durant and Channing, there was another News Stand. Then Larry Blake's, which is still there. The tossed salad was famous, justly famous. Then they sold beer downstairs and called that the Rathskeller. What I can't remember is the name of the place next south of Larry Blake's. It started in very high style, sold mostly beer and snacks and congeniality for those who really liked its Eames chairs. It wasn't so noisy or so crowded with fraternity boys as Larry Blake's, but neither did it last so long. The big specialty cafes, with big espresso machines and nice pastries, seem to have put out of business all but Larry Blake's; the first one, at the NE corner of Haste and Telegraph, took the whole premises of a Lucky supermarket. That was shortly before I went to Greece.
I simply can't remember everything, and I've left out the grocers so far. There was another store, with china and other small furnishings that had some wonderful things. At the NW corner of Telegraph and Channing there had been a store as old as the recording industry, perhaps, a record store that barely survived into the LP era and did not survive into stereo. It was set up for the 78s that had prevailed for so long and was called Art Music Company. A place that mattered. They would order 78s from Europe for you. They had listening booths, an amenity incompatible with vinyl records that required very nice handling and very good pickups and frequently replaced styluses. After we moved to Berkeley and lived for a while when I was still in high school at 1736 Hearst Avenue, I would go and haunt Art Music Company whenever I could. And now I remember: in the 1960s there was a women's wear shop, a good one, which I patronized whenever I came down from Oregon, where Art Music had been. Art Music was the sponsor of Doug Pledger's Polka Party program on KSMO, which became KKHI when stereo FM came in. By subscribing to KPFA-FM for an extra $10 one got an FM tuner, which one put into one's component system. It drifted off station but it worked fine if you tended to it. KSMO and then KKHI also broadcast Music of the Italian Masters, the gift of Frank de Bellis (to whose memory Henry Clay Lindgren dedicated the second volume of his publication of Ancient Greek Bronze Coins). In those days, too, on regular commercial radio, the Giannini family, the Bank of America, la nostra banca, sponsored the Italian-language half hour on KRE-AM, with good Italian singers on all the songs and arias that Beniamino Gigli and Luciano Pavarotti grew up on.
Maybe I'll write in another posting on the Berkeley Market, the Berkeley Grocery, the Blue and Gold Market, and the Garden Spot, as well as the Viennese bakery still run by an elderly Viennese couple. They were the ones who made cats' paws with real almond paste filling. But I'll close for today with the King Pin, which has survived, as well it deserves, still making donuts on the premises. It seems to have expanded a little but the production (in a photo on line) seems to be the same, and, with one omission, so are the donuts. I strongly recommend the raised dark chocolate dough with dark chocolate icing, though the others are good, too. The one that is missing was a delectable thing the size and shape of a Danish 'snail' which they called (I'm almost sure) a Bismarck. It was the sort of pastry that wouldn't hurt you if you ate it only two or three times a year... The King Pin was at Dwight Way. It had little booths, ideal for a couple, served over a divider as in a highway diner. It refilled your coffee mug, too. It was usually busy, but not too full, and unless you saw that it would be inconsiderate to others, the King Pin did not mind if you sat and talked for an hour. Add to that, it was a clean, well lighted place, par excellence.

If only I had known that no one else was taking pictures of Telegraph Avenue in the 1950s. It was simply our street, and, like Greeks in a village, we came out and strolled and browsed after supper almost every evening that we weren't at work. In the 1950s, no one wanted a house with a yard; we had our Avenue, with all its bookstores, with all its wonderful windows full of treasures, and no need even for a single policeman. It was better than a village. It was our true ivory tower.

One More Overtly Self-centered Posting

In 1961, when I came home to Berkeley from two years in Greece, to finish my dissertation, I found an apartment in an old school building at, as I recall, 2437 Haste St. That is to say, it was entered from its row of mailboxes there, the building being right in the middle of the block bounded by Telegraph Ave. on the east, Dana on the west, Channing Way on the north, and Haste on the south. The building had two storeys above a basement (where my apartment was). Many of the renters were Fine Arts students. If we went out the back way, and across a parking lot, Kip's was handy; according to Google, it has morphed into a real restaurant with a liquor license, but I think the one-mile-radius dry zone, to keep alcohol off campus (though there were deliveries to fraternities and beer was OK at restaurants that sold food) was still in effect in my days. Kip's made the best cheeseburgers (real aged cheddar, broiled on coals, buns toasted on the perimeter of the grill; horseradish and other condiments available self-serve) in the world. There on a rented L. C. Smith typewriter I wrote and typed my dissertation (three carbons).

Long before, in Alameda, I had had a black cat called Midnight. When I went to the Pound now I chose a very tame and gentle black female and called her Persephone and let her have kittens (spaying being too expensive for graduate students with impoverished parents).

It was at this time that I got the aegipan chair. It was brought into my grandparents' shop by my mother's high-school English teacher, preparing to enter a retirement home. Her parents had gotten it new when they were married, and a date ca. 1885 seems likely. Chairs to the same pattern, except that some have lion's faces instead of goat Pans decorating the back panel, could be found all up and down the west coast in antique stores in the 1960s (they certainly are factory-made chairs), most of them stripped, the revelation of bare wood being part of the Nature sentiment of that generation. All of those I've seen are of oak, and so is mine, visibly on the arms where the finish is rubbed thin. Perhaps the only rare thing about mine is that, always in one family house, it retains its black Japalac finish. Seekers on line will find the name Japalac highjacked by a Group, but Mrs. Sollers, when she brought in the chair, said that she liked the Japalac, which my grandfather pronounced a varnish with opaque black, such as lamp black, added to it. It seems to have been sprayed on. I like oak as well as anyone, but its grain pattern fights with carving.

If anyone knows where and when these chairs, which look like ornaments for men's clubs or library-smoking rooms, were made, I'd love to know.

I still have it. My students always have liked it (or else were politely silent, if they supposed that I thought it older or valuable or hand-made); when my students came by with their children in due course, the children loved to put their fingers in the lion finials' mouths. With a cushion added, it is remarkably comfortable and serves as a reading chair. After about a century and a quarter and several moves, it is only a little loose jointed.

When I bought my present house in 1986, the things too large to have been brought here in a car, or kept in a housekeeping room on campus, the Aegipan chair and some other pieces that my younger sister had kept in Davis, CA, came South. For a while they were almost the only furniture in this now overstuffed house. Not all cats like this chair, but Lydos came when there was no sofa or rugs, and he liked it. Moving into a house newly painted largely dark rose (and perhaps recalling Kittredge Street), I acquiesced in the color scheme. The floor was already dark, and I added black mini-blinds. The Aegipan chair fit in perfectly. Lydos was called Lydian because of his luxurious fur and nature. He was a found cat: wandered into my friend Denise's parents' yard, wounded and already middle aged, but he looked like a real "Russian Blue". The only flash I had was the tiny one on a tiny Olympus XA, which did the best a pocket film camera could do. You still can't see the Goat Pan face very well. I once had a photo that my grandfather took in his front yard in full sunlight, but it was in a box of especially treasured photos and negatives that my younger sister's husband dumped out when they moved; that photo was taken to show me the chair to ascertain that I wanted it. It wasn't expensive; Mrs. Sollers hadn't found another taker for it.

A tiny digital camera with a digitally controlled flash shows the chair better, only about a month ago. My present cat is quite leery of it. I could not begin to go into the autobiographical content of the rest of this snapshot. The Aegipan chair, which I've now owned for nearly a half century, still as you see preserves its Japalac finish. It normally sits in the other front room of this double shot-gun house. I never, I swear, painted a room dark rose pink (I dislike, besides, the process of painting my living space as much as any cat does), but my friend David did the orange water color, which he said showed his parents in a snowstorm, in January 1954 (it is dated at lower right) in the days of the housekeeping room on Kittredge Street, and it is just as much at home here. The friend who gave me Lydos (her mother did not want him inside) gave me the photographs of her own cats. The drypoint below the watercolor came from my friend Nina in Sofia. That's enough. I may find a picture showing the lion's-head finials of the chair.

Like all the other images this one can be 'clicked' to zoom it.  If I hadn't seen so many I'd wonder if these chairs were made for photographers' studios.  In this case, with a Nikon F2 on a tripod, we were holding still for seconds on end and still couldn't achieve Julia Cameron's effects.  But it is better than flash, and it shows the lion's head whose teeth fascinate small children.

A Fuzzy Post: Things, Images, Time, and what to do with Love?

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Animal Crackers are not what they used to be, but I do still have a rose bush, given me by a student (who didn't know what chord it might strike when she bought it at the open-air market about two years ago), similar to a Cecil Brunner except that only the centers are pale pink. Imported Mexican tiles are not what they were in the first first quarter of the 20th century, when in 1918 (in my mother's 4th year) my grandfather made a oak coffee table inlaid with four of them for my grandmother, who very much later confessed to me that she never had liked it, because it was an inch or two higher than it wanted to be in front of a sofa. She didn't refuse it, but marriage being marriage, my grandfather knew what she felt and eventually replaced it with a very nice walnut moderne coffee table of the requisite height, made with equal love and craftsmanship. Well, there were magazines with patterns for weekend cabinetmakers then as now, and many hundreds of plain saw-cut tables, with typical orange and blue Mexican tiles, made of pine or ash and finished with varnish stain, survive to this day. Perhaps Nana did not quite grasp the difference between those and hers. I did. It is something innate, for better or worse, to see and 'read' style. The oak was carefully chosen. The turned legs were carefully designed. The tiles were exceptional even then. This was not a patio table. As so often happens, probably neither he nor she understood what bothered the other. "You praise my eyes, but not for what they see," he wrote half a century later in a verse for her. She could not, and would not, tell him what the table that she hoped, and so assumed, he was building would look like.

Be that as it may, when I moved to Eugene, Oregon, and my brother drove up, bringing me some things from California to help furnish my new post-doctoral life, the Cribbage Table was one of the pieces. I think it came at the same time as the Aegipan chair (my name for it, but I had my own name for the table, too). This is the table where my grandfather had taught me cribbage and tirelessly had played it with me, he sitting on the sofa, I on the footstool opposite. My grandmother had made the 1935 cake and wreathed it with pink Cecil Brunner rosebuds. For my 21st birthday, though she had suffered serious heart attacks, she made me another cake with seven-minute icing and carefully, when I wasn't looking, walked down to the neighbor's where the Cecil Brunners were still blooming. I did not yet drive, but I took the Greyhound bus straight down US 101 through all the orchards; leaving Berkeley shortly after Finals were done, I could be in San Luis Obispo sometime in June. I wept when I saw my cake; the grandparents did not know that I was not then their 'innocent' granddaughter; my grandfather's picture (on the last post) gives no hint of the facts. As soon as I could when I came back from New York City (1981), my first thoughts were to recover the Cribbage Table and the Aegipan chair, not that nothing else was important. By then, however, I had lost both grandparents. I have both that chair and the table, and other things, here now.

My grandfather was teaching school in Chico, CA, when he made the table in 1918. At 91, it is almost officially an antique, but it is simply mine (and theirs), since it qualifies neither as folk art nor as fine furniture.

The other day I took the digital picture. Like the first one it is a deliberate still life and a memento, with my beloved mid-century Artzberg for coffee, a student's china beaker for my friend's wine, and an air letter from Vienna from a dear friend nearly my own age. I took it when the air letter turned up under a stack of CDs to send to him, since he's been ill, but I had in mind also to celebrate the Table for this blog. The housepainter unknowingly cut down the rambling rose bush, so I post at the end of this the last roses of early summer (the bush is growing back, from being cut to the ground, very rapidly, though the graft of the pink to the white may have been lost, but for the time being the previous pictures will do).

Some people do not value things and images, as neither alive nor real, respectively. What, though, is love, what is human in our consciousness, if associations made of a fabric of living memories are not kept alive by images and objects?

Sister's Wedding; Kittredge Street rooms

Self at Grandparents', San Luis Obispo, still Undergraduate

Having just reported, indirectly, that my sister and her Bill were married in 1954 and in that year were working at San Pablo Poultry, now seems the right time to report on movements in 1954-1955. I cannot remember whether I moved to Kittredge Street (between Shattuck Ave. and Fulton Street, into a curious two part, two storey house then next to—i.e., on the north side of the street—a United Artists movie theater) from 2622 College first or quit work at the poultry market first. The fixed points are that I entered UC Berkeley in the Spring of 1954 and that Lorna and Bill were married on December 1, 1954 and, shortly after their marriage, they too got a room in the building on Kittredge. Some time in 1955 that building was demolished to make way for a parking lot. Today, it seems from the Google map, the United Artists movie theater has been replaced by a Great China Restaurant, at 2115 Kittredge St., and there seems to be surface excavation where most of the parking lot was. The two part, two storey house , probably beginning of 20th century, had a corridor down the depth of each half of it on each floor, and the halves were joined by transverse halls about halfway from front to back, on which, as I recall, the shared baths and toilets also were located. I took a room just north of the transverse hall on the upper floor, and my friend Nancy took one nearer to the front, but just south of the transverse connecting hall, both of us in the western half. The structure can never have been anything but a rooming house.  Lorna and Bill took a room (or two rooms I think) at the rear, north end of the eastern half. Somehow, Lorna set up housekeeping and did her laundry; there were, I do recall, pulley lines running from an upper-floor porch or window. I think that Lorna and Bill found an alternative dwelling, with a bit more privacy, before I left Kittredge. I didn't leave until days before they began razing it. One night, in the course of its demolition, I could look, from Fulton Street as we walked past, into the building that had only the west wall standing and see the dark rose plaster of my room; I went and climbed over debris and got as a souvenir a hunk of the rose-colored plaster: the months at Kittredge Street had been personally momentous, and I fancied having something to keep. Each of us, for $5 power surcharge per month, had a hot plate in the corner by the wash basin in our room (but there must have been stationary tubs somewhere, either in the room with a bath or at the back, because Lorna did do real laundry). I joined the ranks of all the bohemian young women who had learned to cook, rather well, on a hot plate that hadn't even a heat control. Dishes were drained on a terrycloth towel on the same table as I, or we, by turns ate and drew and studied at. The rug was old, the furniture was large, heavy, and old, the walls (as I said) were a deep dusty rose; the ceilings were high, the windows tall. I remember now: there was a newer block-shaped building, unless it was a side-rear extension of the theater, between my windows and the theater (one doesn't forget the daily serenade of French horn and trumpet lessons; it all comes back, when, in memory, I look through the ecru machine lace curtains). It was perfect. It was everything that Mrs. Puerta's house was not. It was perfect for me, and for a while. It must have been hard on Lorna, but neither of us stayed there a long time. It afforded David and me an ideal, an idealized, romantic first love, a perfect atmosphere. The film, based on Jean Cocteau's Enfants Terribles, in English called The Strange Ones, with the 4-piano recording of Bach's 4-harpsichord version of Vivaldi's 4-violins concerto running through its soundtrack had been distributed by then, but I don't know whether we'd seen it yet. That kind of atmosphere. Besides David's being gay, we both were still adolescents, and I, for my part, was ready for loving but not for an adult relationship. It was quite consistent with going after that hunk of plaster as Nancy and I went back to Durant (see next posting) from, as I recall, what we called 'sinning', which meant hot fudge sundaes at Edy's on Shattuck, 'Sinning' because it was real hot fudge on real ice cream topped with real whipped cream and chopped nuts.

Through it all, my friend Nancy tried to find a job that was not like working in a cannery or a poultry market and wasn't too repetitious, since she was trying to free herself from parental control. I saw that living on a thin shoestring, so to speak, and knowing that I was responsible, and I alone, for every choice that I made was glorious freedom. And so it is, provided only one is young and in good health and has some reason for a modicum of prudence. Through it all, Lorna was a good young wife, steady as can be.

At this period, my mother had joined Trinity Methodist Church in Berkeley. Lorna, at least, went with her. As the holidays approached, the church asked families to invite young air force men from Parks Air Force Base to their homes. My mother (armed, of course, with a San Pablo Poultry turkey) invited four. One of them was my future brother in law, Bill. This was (necessarily, I calculate) Christmas 1953. Eleven months later they were married in the small chapel of Trinity Methodist, a rather nice neo-Gothic church near the UC campus and downtown. It was, in my opinion, as most weddings ought to be, nice, very nice, but not expensive. It was almost like a movie. My grandfather, driving back to the house to bring the bride to the church, could not find his way back to the house, and the ceremony was delayed more than an hour. Both the bride's dress and the bridesmaids' dresses were home made, Lorna's white and her high school classmates' yellow with the maid of honor a sort of rust color. All of them looked really pretty. Lorna's dress, just as in a story, barely got hemmed in time. Bill, of course, had his dress uniform. Lorna reminded me the other evening on the phone that she had pled with me to be her maid of honor, and I had refused. I had forgotten that. I see now, in retrospect, that taking 18 credit hours at UC Berkeley and working 20 hours per week, and having no spare money at all (also, no access to a sewing machine and no great skill in sewing, apart from handwork), I couldn't have done it . I did love her wedding, though, more than if I'd been in it. I always have tended to be a spectator. I never had been to a wedding before, either. And mercifully nothing catastrophic happened to ruin it for them. Lorna told me on the phone that she still has her dress.

So there we were. I'd had three semesters in art school and was completing my second semester at UCB; I had almost decided to change from a Painting major or an Art History major (it was still simply Art with History or Studio concentration at Berkeley then, but it was in College of Letters and Sciences with its requirements, either way). I had considered majoring in French; it was my eagerness to continue French that contributed to my leaving CCAC for the University, but Art History was winning the day, and the first courses I took at the university were those that CCAC did not offer: Classical Antiquity and Far Eastern, then numbered Art 1A and Art 1D. So it was in the course of my residence on Kittredge Street that my professional future also proved to have been decided for me. I never have regretted it. I can hardly imagine not having studied Greek, which had attracted me ever since the Gideon Society pamphlet had shown me all those languages.

I think that the snapshot by my grandfather that I placed at the head of this posting dates from about this time.

Cado Flo-master; San Pablo Poultry Co.; CCAC; 2622 College Ave.

The author and a customer of the poultry market

We bought our sharp-pointed, felt-tipped, valved Cado Flo-Master pens and their ink at the supply store of the art school, California College of Arts and Crafts, to which I had won a scholarship on graduating from high school in January, 1952, and where I studied and loved life for three semesters. Shortly after entering CCAC, I left my mother's house at 1623 Kains Avenue with what I could take with me in two suitcases and moved into a room, shared kitchen and bathroom, room shared with another girl, too, at 2622 College Avenue. I could do this because, after briefly working in the art school library, I had found a job at San Pablo Poultry Co. on San Pablo Avenue, just north of Dwight Way, in Berkeley, so I had an income that couldn't get sucked up by the family household, where nothing was going to get better. And coming back to get some other things, such as books and memorabilia and other clothing, my employers helped me by coming with the pick-up truck. My mother, hopefully I thought then, assured me I'd be back in six months pregnant, something I hardly knew how to do, having never even kissed with a boy or dated at all. But fem lit had informed her as to what mothers were expected to say. The shared kitchen at 2622, an approved house for off-campus living at UC Berkeley, was truly approvable: persons of the male sex could visit only in the kitchen, which had a great round table, and only until 10pm. The landlady, Mrs. Puerta, was assiduous in maintaining the approved status of her ground floor; she had the upper floor for herself. Around that table, student nurses, student athletes (girls), girls who just roomed in this house, and one art student, me, from CCAC came with our friends and shared a lot of our lives. So my new friends, such as Nati Baldeon, a nurse from Peru, and my fellow art students, especially David and Burt, mingled surprisingly. My art school friends, as I'd only begun to grasp and to realize, were gay. The first San Pablo Poultry sketches, a job that made me nearly as peculiar as my gay fellow students may have seemed, all except the first two used here (the poultry job lasted longer than the 2622 residence), were all done in the space of an hour, to illustrate my account of San Pablo Poultry; the self portrait was done shortly before I got a job in the Loan Department of the UC library instead. The sketchbook was made from a large package of pre-punched unruled binder paper, ordinary school and college paper, placed between the stiff fiberboard covers of a binder made to hold, say, all the notes for a given course or all the drafts of one's first Masterpiece, say, and it was much cheaper than any manufactured sketchbook. Since the common paper has survived quite well for more than half a century, it was a good choice. The Cado Flo-Master was the favorite tool for the discipline of sketching directly. We didn't know that the ink was full of lead (which I just learned from Wiki) much less that in the 1960s and 1970s there'd be gangs that would used the largest, broadest Flo-Masters to write all over subway trains, plate-glass windows, buses, and anything else that afforded a visible surface, for that ink truly is indelible and truly does write on everything. It was great for marking boxes on moving day, for example. Sharpies after an interval replaced it, but are not so good for sketching.

If I had any photos of this period, I'd use them, but I had no camera and for the time being could not have afforded film and processing. Anyhow, the sketches, all done before I was 20, are as good as I'll ever do. That is background sufficient to show that the items in the odd heading of this post really do all go together.

Two sketches of Dolores, Mrs. Bertoni's daughter, who at work always wrapped her hair this way.

It occurs to me that it has been years since I saw poultry sold this way, brought live down from Petaluma, slaughtered, scalded, and plucked (on a rotating drum covered with rubber fingers) at the back end of the long building, one cageful at a time, wheeled into the walk-in refrigerator on a strong metal cart (see at right behind Dolores, where it is indicated), where it hung on hooks. The butcher-paper wrapping of the heads concealed the slit for bleeding as well as the head. The poultry was gutted only when sold, except for the stock that was ready-cut to be sold as parts. This is not to say that the parts were stale; stale skin looks stale, and good poultry was not kept "fresh" by packing in ice or otherwise keeping it wet. Our retail customers knew their poultry, especially (but not only) those who were African-American, about half of them. But parts were usually a day deader than the whole chickens. The price per pound of course considerd the weight of the extremities and guts. As in Sicily, so in Berkeley, the canneries whose products included soup and sauces knew the value of feet and combs; these parts were accumulated in a clean garbage can separate from the guts and lungs and small reproductive parts. A favorite stunt of fraternities, nonetheless, was to send freshman pledges to ask for (and they made them ask the youngest girls behind the counter) a fowl's penis (we did have some ducks as well as the chicken and turkeys): this was before Nature photography had shown what birds in fact do to make fertile eggs, and we just said we were busy but they could come and look through the innards till they found some. My little sister, red-haired and all of sixteen when she came to join me working there, took special pleasure, I think, in saying this to silly frat boys. I assure you the place was clean and proper, and everything was scrubbed and sanitized on a schedule. Just cleaning up daily at closing time was a major job for everyone. Easter, with cages full of little yellow chicks and ducklings, requiring regular vigilance to remove those that didn't make it, was a real pain, and I didn't like the 1954 addition of a fish counter. Brief but nasty was hunting season. Standard Oil had lots of land for the Rod and Gun Club to go out duck hunting, even mud hens (than which there is nothing nastier to clean, that I know of). These great hunters of course were not brave enough to pluck and gut what they shot, but brought them to us in gunny sacks. After hours, so as to clean up the blocks afterward, we stayed and saw to them. Nastier still was self-sustainers who raised pigeons but were too lily livered to wring their necks themselves. Ah, well, that wasn't every day.

Why do I think of chickens whenever I see an eagle on money? Actually, to this day I am fond of chickens and turkeys.

The first sketch shows Don B. selling a turkey, the next his mother (I think—or was it my sister, since the Bertonis wore smocks, and we wore aprons) selling a fryer; the third is a fricasee chicken (big adult white Leghorn rooster that wants a lot of stewing) hanging in the walk-in, and the last shows one of us carrying a couple of restaurant-size tom turkeys back to the walk in.

These sketches are no masterpieces but I thought some of you might like them; they are vivid and they are true. And now you know what a Cado Flo-Master is.

Our wage was just a dollar an hour, but we got a lot of chicken and eggs for free.

P.S. After posting this, I thought I'd check on my old job.  I found a web site named Yelp and a photo of San Pablo Poultry basically unchanged and notes from customers, mixed, partly reflecting the personalities of the customers.  The "old man" sold a wide variety of specialty meats, an adaptation to survive in today's marketing (but I remember kids and lambs for Easter even in the early 50s).  On the phone with my sister, who had continued working there later than I did, together with her husband, then and now, I learned that the "old man" said to be "eccentric", who was running the place alone, was indeed, as I suspected, Donald Bertoni (sketched, above,  in his twenties, pointing to the good qualities of a turkey).  On a trip to the Bay Area, my sister and brother in law had stopped by the store, to check in as I would have done had I not at that time been living far away.  And there was Don, who also took them out to dinner.  I wish I knew who now would remember them, so I could direct them to this posting.  A customer just last year reported coming by and seeing the store closed and empty, evidently permanently.  I guess Don, who must have been in his 80s, is dead.

Each Apathetic Generation?

Author at Bells console, Nov. 1961

It may seem habit forming to let some book or person from each weekend's BookTV (C-Span 2) prompt another topic for a posting. Certainly this weekend the 35th anniversary of Pres. Nixon's resignation seemed too much like just yesterday to inspire me. It was the much less well understood execution of the Rosenbergs and other events in the 1950s related to politics affecting my parents' generation, and my reaction, apparently, to them that a re-run of the program with the son and granddaughter of the Rosenbergs brought back to me.

The truth, which, as such, I remember perfectly well, was that I'd see a picture of, say, Robert Oppenheimer or the Rosenburgs or someone testifying before the House Committee, and usually turn away from reading about it. Or I'd read only the caption and feel some sort of distress. It wasn't that I was attracted to Soviet Communism or to Marx, both of which stood condemned by their own prose. Indeed, to this day, I have not read more than a page or two of Marx (and about the same amount of Mein Kampf). It wasn't that I thought that the Rosenbergs were innocent. It was that I thought I had no way of knowing. But I was deeply distressed by the charges brought against Oppenheimer, and the commemorations this week of his brother's creation of the Exploratorium in the Palace of Fine Arts, piled on top of American Prometheus two years ago, brought my own political inertia of my youth back to me. I was just a little too young to have been directly affected by the university's loss of a number of professors who refused to sign the Loyalty Oath, but among my teachers I constantly perceived that splits among them were related, in some cases (and I did not know which), to the crisis of the Oath. I would not ask anyone, either. It had happened that a fellow student who liked the bells in Sather Tower, the Campanile, had taken me up to see them played. These were the original ring of 12 bells, from C to E' with an F-sharp and a B-flat (so that one had a whole octave only in C, severely limiting the tunes that could be played). They were not a carrillon, nor were they an English ring with ropes for playing changes. That is, they were such bells, but they were played with oaken levers rigged with pulleys to bring the clapper against the wall of the bell. Thus they required energy and some strength but only very basic musicianship. In the event, I was taught to play them (there seems always to have been one or two students) and take my turn in going up the tower to the enclosure where the console of levers was housed. The bells were always played by a person, live, at 7:50 in the morning, at 12:00 noon, and at 6:00 pm. For the hours when the tower was closed to the public, and there was no elevator operator, one had to have the keys to the door at the base of the tower and to the enclosure of the console. To be issued such keys, one had to be put on payroll, receiving an hour's minimum wage for each time one played the bells, and to be employed by the university one had to sign the Loyalty Oath. On the form printed for that purpose was a list of organizations deemed Communist, besides the disclaimer that one had ever been or was a member of the Party itself. Most of these were from the 30s and 40s, such as the Lincoln Brigade; most of them I'd never heard of and could not recall now, if I had to. Certainly I'd belonged to none of them and could sign with confidence. But I knew that some people had been hurt, or their friends had been hurt, professionally, by that Oath, and I felt bad about signing it, even if only to have a key to go up and make a joyful noise on tons of bells audible in dry weather for a mile all around. As for the money earned, it became my mad money, money that could be, that should be (I told myself) spent on books and phonograph records.

I do not know how many others of my age cohort were haunted by inexplicable guilt (feelings only, since one never did anything or joined anything) and political paralysis. I simply could not think that someone who had been anti-Franco in the 1930s had to be a closeted Communist, or indeed that someone who had been a fashionable Communist in his or her youth had to be one in his or her middle age. That would be thinking like my mother, and, it seemed to me, the impulses that governed my mother would not pass muster as thought—even apart from her pill addictions. The first time I could vote I voted for Adlai Stevenson. To have voted, as my father would have done, for Henry Wallace would have worried me. Adlai Stevenson seemed just right, and everyone I knew also was voting for him. Thus, my first political lesson at the university was that whatever we believed, or even hoped we could believe, would be voted down by the others.

But what to make of students in their twenties who would not read political opinion, even in the daily papers? Who did not listen to any radio newscast? Who did not have television and didn't mind not having it? Who did not believe, except with serious reservations, anything that they read? Who thought, or at least boldly said, that one's ethics could go no further than to try to avoid hurting others, since trying to effect good was morally dangerous?

And yet I do believe that it was blind and stupid for Time in particular and then journalists in general to call those of us just old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, and too mindful of the economic constraints of the 1930s and the rationing of the War years to regard living off the margin of an affluent society as anything better than lack of pride, the Apathetic Generation. Confused we surely were, by the atomic bomb, by the Berlin Wall, by being forbidden to visit, e.g., Hungary, by the atomic energy signs on all the sturdy building which were supposed to afford shelter, confused in short by the rhetoric of the Cold War, and saddened by the quick loss of all the hope that to us eleven and twelve year olds the UN charter had engendered (for children of that age really can believe and hope) and the sudden reversal from Russia as an ally to Russia as an enemy (as if we really knew anything about Russia except for Tchaikovsky). Politically paralyzed, perhaps, if that isn't too strong a word.

If the Rosenbergs had been simply imprisoned, as some leading Nazi were, it would have been less troubling, but because they received the death penalty, both of them, and were executed, I never have been able to forget my great uncertainty about them. And with them I have never been able to be sure about condemning anyone else, quite, though the criminally insane certainly must be imprisoned. Or condemning, or condoning, my own worst shortcomings, such as regards housekeeping or dislike of cocktail parties.

Furthermore, I have never been certain whether my own withdrawal from political opinions in my youth is typical of youth, of a need to isolate oneself a bit for a while so as to grow up as well as one can, or peculiar to me and my family. I have noticed that my last students, generations x and y, were more like me at their age than they'd have thought by looking at me now.

Works that helped to form me

I just heard a good interview with Eva Brann in her home in Anapolis. I thought I'd write an entry here on work that has impressed me by persons either of my own parents' generation or, at the youngest, about my own age: Prof. Brann, born in 1929, is only five years older. I'll get my thoughts together and come back to this as soon as possible.

August 4:
The work of Prof. Brann that I've known is the one that she more or less dismissed, the volume on Geometric and Orientalizing (she wouldn't call it Proto-Attic) pottery from the Athenian Agora. It is, as she admitted, a beautiful publication. It was, however, other books, more in the tradition of her later ones, that her interview made me remember.
None of these were assigned textbooks, though one named "An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis" (as I recall) I liked very much, but the author of the current one doesn't ring a bell. Likewise Stephen Pepper's introduction to aesthetics, though it also worried me on some scores.
An evolved newsstand, with clocks showing times around the world over its display of newspapers from around the world, was at the SW corner of Durant and Telegraph; it was called UC Corner. From newspapers and weekly and monthly periodicals (how to learn French: Paris Match), including the Little Magazines, also carried Penguins, color coded conveniently. If an undergraduate didn't know whether an author was Greek or Roman, just look to see whether he was brown or purple. Eventually I owned a hundred or so Penguins of every hue.
But just as I went up to Berkeley (UC is literally up College Avenue from the College of Arts and Crafts) American publishers began their proliferation of quality paperbacks. And UC Corner continued to shelve them by publisher (and persisted in doing so); I wish everyone did. Doubleday, which had been the purveyor of bodice busters to my mother's Dollar Book Club, became my wonderful Doubleday Anchor (or, if religious, Image). Harcourt Brace produced Harvest Books. So The Common Reader was the first Virginia Woolf I read, and the book I nearly memorized, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, as well as Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Scott's Architecture of Humanism, and Elizabeth Holt's Documentary History of Art, all were Anchor Books, and so was Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts, whose final essay jolted me into thinking of our own universities relative to Europe's. I think that Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination was Anchor, too. Harper Torchbooks brought me Panofsky's Studies in Iconology and Ernst Robert Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Second only to Auerbach, Curtius was really formative. This book and Trilling's have been hard to hold onto, and I no longer have the copies I first purchased. They got 'borrowed'. What I want to report, by the way, is that the more than a dozen Anchor books from the 1950s, all more than a half century old, which have been moved and stored and shipped and shelved without much dusting and read over and over, are all intact and their paper almost white—and they weren't even sewn. The Penguins also have lost no pages, but to say that the paper is yellowed is an understatement. Another book of that period that I loved and still enjoy was eventually in paperback, but I read it, checking it out repeatedly, from two university libraries, Berkeley's and Eugene, Oregon's, was Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods. Like the other Torchbooks, it originally was Bollingen; not all Bollingen is Jungian, but all were beautifully published.
Neither paperback nor from those imprints was Hans Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, then only a couple of years old, published by UC Press. He was UCLA, rather than Berkeley, and he died just as I transferred from art school to university, but he wrote like a born and practiced teacher; in this regard, think of UCLA's Eugen Weber in the justly famous PBS series.
Thus, between Berkeley's core curriculum and the curriculum offered by my favorite publishers in the Telegraph Avenue curriculum offered by UC Corner and the other bookstores on the Avenue and on Bancroft Way, you have the education of what those who were under 30 in the late 1960s called a 'wishy-washy liberal', rendered immune to both the radical left (available at a Maoist book shop on Bancroft Way and the Daily Worker on the corner newsstands—the only 'safe' place for it, since it suffered in comparison with even the Berkeley Gazette, let alone the SF Chronicle) and the radical right (readily available in Oakland and in most of the suburbs over the hills). Personally, I was shocked by the youngsters of about 1965 and later, because even when they liked and supported what I'd have thought were right things it was for the wrong reasons, I thought, and often in wrong ways, by publicly pressuring those who were, I feared, ineducable but likely to get hopping mad. Journalistic dismissal of the determinedly open-minded freethinkers as an 'apathetic generation' likewise seemed thoughtless, sometimes dishonest, perhaps dangerous to real liberality.
The question is, was mine the last cohort to be formed by those whose humanity had survived the pain and confusion of both world wars? By American universities richly salted by Berlin and Vienna, in aesthetics as well as every branch of philosophy? Because, there sat Eva Brann, in her last years of teaching at St. John's, Berlin born, talking just like some of the books I had read when we both were young.