Juanita Aboard the Charles Van Damme (Copy)

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

ILLUSTRATION BY DONA SCHWEIGER

Juanita and her famous motto.

The story of how Juanita Musson moved her Galley onto the Charles Van Damme ferry is as colorful as the old girl and the old boat themselves.

By 1959, Juanita was a nationally known restaurateur. The Fort Worth Press reported on how she found her way onto the old ferry:

“It wasn't only Halloween on the horizon near the end of 1959, it was a double-wheeled ferryboat wallowing a few hundred yards out in the bay. For as long as she had been in the business of feeding people, she had longed to feed them on board the half-sunk Charles Van Damme.”

After nearly a half century of service, bridges had put the old paddle-wheeler out of business and the old hulk was towed to Sausalito. There her petcocks were opened, and the ferry was scuttled up to her gunwales in muddy water. When Juanita's lease was almost up on Gate 5 Road, her rent was raised to an unacceptable $550 a month, and as Sally Hayton-Keeva put it in her book Juanita!, “she decided it was time to fish or cut bait. Without preliminaries, she went to speak to one of the ferryboat's owners [Don Arques]. She wanted it for a restaurant, she told him, and how much would he want for it if she towed it to land? ‘If you can get a permit to put a restaurant on it,’ he told Juanita, ‘you can have the boat rent free for one year.’”

By then Juanita was known for her epic breakfasts and monumental servings of prime rib. Visitors came and went frequently, including a raft of celebrities from Janis Joplin to Noel Coward, sharing space with Juanita’s menagerie of dogs, cats, fawns, turkeys and other semi-domesticated fauna. Despite her prickly reputation, Juanita was soft-hearted and generous to her staff and patrons, some of whom took advantage of her casual business sense by ripping her off. Debts began to mount up even as her reputation became the stuff of legend.

By 1963 Juanita owed the IRS many thousands more than could fit in her cleavage. A series of fundraisers began, largely supported by customers and local teens. The faithful Kingston Trio, Tommy Smothers, Glenn Yarbrough, and many others performed for free. "They were great, those guys,” Juanita remembered.

But there was also a notorious motorcycle gang that held weekly meetings, with her permission, on the Van Damme. One day they got into a brouhaha that spelled the beginning of the end of Juanita’s time in Sausalito. One combatant told Sally Heaton-Keeva:

“It looked like one of those Tom Mix movies, with chairs flyin' out the windows and plates sailin' through the air and jam splashed all over the walls. There must've been about twenty people on each side and nobody was standin' around and waitin'. That fight was really the most amazing thing I ever have seen.

“A couple of days later I saw her picture in the paper with a chair over her head and she was sayin', "This is the end of my business," which it was, at least on that boat. The income tax evasion people got after her and then the Board of Health, until she actually had to close her place down. Its closing was really the direct result of the fight because once that went down, so did everything else come down on her.”

Juanita later told the Contra Costa Times, “After the boat closed, I didn't know where to go or what to do with myself.” Bored and broke, she accepted a job with her old frenemy, Sally Stanford at the Valhalla. Contrary to many rumors, this was the first time Juanita ever worked for the notorious ex-madam. Then, with the help of Stanford and other loyal customers, she took over a ramshackle resort in Sonoma County, which led to a long career running various incarnations of the Galley in the North and East Bay, a number of which were destroyed by fire.

In 1982, Juanita retired from the restaurant business and moved back to Sonoma, where she lived mainly on Social Security benefits. In 2002, friends raised enough money for her to move to a retirement community in Agua Caliente. In 2011, she died at Sonoma Valley Hospital after suffering a stroke, at age 87.

A year later the ferry was demolished leaving just the paddlewheel and smokestack. The Richardson’s Bay Maritime Association (RBMA), a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, is spearheading a campaign to restore those relics for permanent public display in the park off Gate 6 Road, near where the ferry was beached. For more information or to donate to their campaign, go to https://www.charlesvandammeferry.org.

Juanita Saves the Waterfront

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

The Cover of Juanita! By Sally Hayton-Keeva

Juanita Musson, Sausalito’s favorite fun, feisty restaurateur, first laid eyes on our town in 1952 when she came West from Oklahoma to join her husband Dick, who was stationed at the Presidio Army Base. After his release from the service the couple decided to stay in Sausalito as Dick began his career selling insurance.

While Dick was traveling for business, Juanita discovered a bait shop and makeshift café called the Barnacle at the end of Gate 5 Road.

The Barnacle catered to fishermen, dishing out hearty breakfasts as early as 4:00 a.m., and Juanita became a regular. But soon she found that the owner was thinking of closing the place down. According to the book Juanita! by Sally Hayton-Keeva, Juanita declared, "Oh, you can't do that! Where will the boys get their breakfast? They'll get seasick if they don't eat first.

"’I'll rent the place from you,’ Juanita offered after a brief meditation. ‘I've always loved catering to men,’ here speaking the famous words for the first time, ‘and the only way I can do it legally is to feed 'em, I guess.’" And that’s when Juanita, with no experience or cooking skills, became a restaurateur.

Here’s how the periodical Marin This Month described the Barnacle:

“A far cry from the chic seaside bistros of today, it remained during Juanita's tenure pretty much what it had been before; a bait and tackle shop clinging with ramshackle charm to the end of a pier. A hole in the floor was left uncovered so that a line hung from the ceiling could hook the occasional minnow. A bell attached to the line signaled a catch, at which time an assortment of stray cats would assemble to partake of the feast. This procedure was often of more interest to the restaurateur than such mundane matters as refilling coffee mugs. ‘Oh, get it yourself, you got legsl’"

“From the very beginning,” says author Sally Hayton-Keeva , “Juanita put a whole new spin on running a restaurant. ‘I never charged prices high enough to take bullshit,’ she always said. Soon there was a sign on the wall that read, ‘Home cooking complete with argument.’"

After six months of raising hell at the Barnacle, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Juanita undertook a series of moves to other waterfront locations.

She remodeled an old Marinship paint locker and dubbed it the Ferry Slip. In July 1955, the Sausalito News announced the opening of the Ferry Slip “adjacent to the Clipper Yacht Company’s Sausalito Sports Fishing Pier at the end of the Gate 5 road.”

Soon Juanita’s clientele expanded to an eclectic mix from biker gangs to local and national celebrities. Influential columnist Herb Caen got wind of things and mentioned this new and unusual addition to the Sausalito waterfront in his column — putting the Ferry Slip on the map as a place people simply dared not miss.

One night, in Sally Hayton-Keeva words, “She realized that the Ferry Slip had become a favorite hangout for the type of young man who might find the name of the restaurant objectionable. Whacking down the Ferry Slip sign, she replaced it with the name Juanita’s Galley.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lease on the property, and lost it when the owner’s nephew decided to try the restaurant business himself. So, Juanita had to move the Galley once again, to a location near a gas station. That move was a lucky one both for Juanita and the town, as the San Francisco Examiner reported:

“It was a hot summer day. Juanita stepped outside the Galley for a breath of fresh air, only to inhale a lungful of benzene. Across the street a gasoline truck was being filled with such dedicated thoroughness that it had overflowed onto the pavement in a noxious little stream ambling off down the gutter toward town. Juanita began to scream, but since Juanita screaming was not an unusual occurrence, nobody paid her any attention. As Juanita tells it, ‘I know that everybody was just thinking, Oh, there goes that crazy woman again! while gas was just pourin' all over the blacktop.’

"’Now gas and blacktop just don't mix; the blacktop goes all soft and the gasoline explodes and nothin' is the way it should be. If anyone woulda lit a cigarette, the whole waterfront would've gone up, boom!’ “Eventually someone realized what "that crazy woman" was actually yelling about, and the Fire Department rushed clanging to the rescue and washed the pavement down. A newspaper story the next day credited Juanita's infamous lungs for saving the waterfront and there were hash browns on the house that night at the Galley to celebrate the lack of hash browns all over every house in town.”

Juanita! can be ordered through the Marin County library system. The Historical Society has two copies in itscollection and the 294-page paperback can purchased online.

Next week: Juanita aboard the ferry Charles Van Damme.

California’s First Millionaire

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

COURTESY ILLUSTRATION

Sam Brannan, California’s first millionaire  |  post by Larry Clinton

On the morning of Friday, July 31, 1846, Samuel Brannan sailed boldly into the mist-shrouded headlands of San Francisco Bay. His ship, the Brooklyn, carried 238 fellow Mormons, known as Saints. Their goal was to build a Mormon kingdom in the Mexican territory of California without the conflicts they had experienced in the United States. In addition to the Saints, the Brooklyn carried a large quantity of seed, mill and farm equipment and — most fortuitously —a printing press.

The Brooklyn arrived here just three weeks after the American flag had been raised in Portsmouth Plaza during the Mexican American War. Brannan and his passengers were dismayed to learn the Americans were in control.

Nevertheless, officials gave the immigrants permission to disembark and to unload all their possessions free of duty. But Brannan ran up a debt of $1,000 to Captain William Richardson for supplies purchased at Rancho Sausalito. To settle the account, a group of the men went to Sausalito and prepared a load of redwood for the captain to resell.

At the same time, Brigham Young led a party of 15,000 Mormons in prairie schooners on the overland trail to a desolate spot near the Great Salt Lake. Despite Young’s attempts to move Brannan’s Saints to the Utah territory, Brannan stayed in California, rejecting the Mormon church which then excommunicated him.

According to an historic report from the Public Broadcasting System, Brannan constructed flour mills, bought land, built the first California railroad from Sacramento to Folsom and printed the California Star, San Francisco's first newspaper. In the fall of 1847 he opened a store at John Sutter's Fort. Sam soon learned that settlers were paying for their purchases with gold. Checking further he discovered the truth about Marshall's January 1848 gold strike.

Brannan packed some of the precious metal into a quinine bottle and traveled back to San Francisco. As he stepped off the ferry, Sam swung his hat, waved the bottle and shouted, "Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" By the middle of June, three-quarters of the male population had left town for the mines.

Brannan didn't actually dig for gold, but gold swelled his investments to a fortune. His store made enormous profits by selling as much as $5,000 in goods per day to miners. He made money with a reckless passion and energy. His more destructive impulses, such as drinking, womanizing and fighting, also burst forth. With property to defend, Brannan took up a vigilante brand of law and order, playing a key role in San Francisco's Vigilance Committee, which dealt harshly with problems like theft, arson, murder, and criminal gangs.

During the 1850s and 1860s Brannan was known as the richest man in California but he plunged into some wild schemes. He once sailed to Hawaii to overthrow the king, a coup that failed. He bought 3,000 acres in Napa Valley, hired Japanese gardeners to tend the land and bought 800 horses. He called his new resort Calistoga (an amalgam of California and Saratoga, the fashionable the New York watering place) and catered to San Francisco's wealthy.

Brannan invested in railroads, which should have made him richer, but he built a track to Calistoga and the resort was too small to make it pay. Brannan faltered financially. Then came divorce. Bitter about her husband's notorious infidelity, Ann Eliza Brannan insisted on a cash settlement. Sam was forced to transform his immense paper fortune into cash in 1870, a low moment for the California economy. His empire collapsed.

He spent the next two decades negotiating land deals in Mexico, but his schemes failed. Impoverished, he moved to Nogales, Arizona. In 1887 Brannan sold pencils door-to-door to raise the money for a trip to San Francisco. The newspapers covered the former tycoon's visit. One reporter described him as "old, gray, broken in strength, able only to get about with the aid of a cane. The old keenness of the eye alone shows that his spirit has survived the decay of his body." Brannan died on small fruit farm outside San Diego on May 5, 1889, leaving his children but a few dollars apiece.

A profile in the 1964 Feather River Bulletin neatly summed up Brannan’s life: “California's first millionaire, Sam Brannan, made money as if it were his own invention. Brannan's only problem was that he spent money like it was going to be declared illegal before the dawn of another day. He was a vital part of the golden age in the golden state and would have felt right at home in today's California which continually opens new promise of fortunes to be made . . and lost.”

Don Arques’ Maritime Legacy

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

We’ve written previously about Donlon Arques, the legendary Godfather of the Waterfront in postwar Sausalito. Now, thanks to research from Knapp & VerPlanck Preservation Architects and the Historical Society, we know that the Arques family has roots as deep as eel grass in Richardson’s Bay.

Don’s father Camillo Luis Arques was a boatbuilder, and his mother, Teresa Nee Clyne was a California native of Irish parentage. Don’s grandfather Luis was born in Monterey and his great grandfather Jose was born in Barcelona.

Camillo Arques started his Sausalito yard at the foot of Napa Street in 1913. The business conducted commercial pile driving, hauling, and dredging. Camillo had sternwheel towboats that carted supplies up and down the Sacramento River. Two of them are now under the mud at Galilee Harbor. An article in the Sausalito News from 1914 announced the yard’s launch of the cabin steamer Grace Barton, “a sight-seeing steamer with a carrying capacity of three hundred.” The Grace Barton was sold to D. W. Griffith (one of the most influential figures in the history of motion pictures) who made a movie right off Napa Street and then blew the Grace Barton up.

Camillo had five barges which he used to deliver molasses to the American Distilling facility located at what is known today as Whiskey Springs. He also transported lumber that was shipped down in lumber schooners from Aberdeen, Seattle, Olympia, or Tacoma, Washington. He would offload the lumber on to barges alongside each schooner, and then take the lumber into Sausalito to be sold.

Don Arques was raised around boats and boat building. He later recalled, “I was brought up as a kid on boats. I was broken-in like that.”

In 1915 Camillo moved to Johnson Street in deeper water so he could bring larger boats in. A customer who wound up not being able to pay for barges built by Camillo gave him eight underwater blocks in

North Sausalito, now known as Waldo Point. When barges were left on the ways or boat ramps at the Johnson Street yard, Camillo would tow them up to Waldo Point and beach them on the mud. When the tide ran out, the water ran out of the holes in a barge, and Camillo would use a “softpatch” to float it and then tow it back up to the ways at Johnson Street.

Thanks to Don Arques’ generosity, Waldo Point became the epicenter of the houseboat community, when WWII vets going to school on the G.I. Bill were allowed to commandeer surplus barges and boat hulls from Marinship and convert them to living quarters on his property.

Don Arques died in 1993, after he and his wife Vera put their property at Gate 3 into a charitable educational trust and a maritime preservation foundation. That legacy has evolved into The Arques School of Wooden Boatbuilding at Spaulding Marine Center, 600 Gate 5 Rd. The small school is dedicated to teaching the art of traditional wooden boatbuilding. Today it’s staffed by Bob Darr, who founded it in 1996, and historian Raymond Cage who worked at the Arques shipyard with his father Lindsay in the 60s.

The Historical Society has just opened a new exhibit on the third floor of City Hall featuring photos, tools, and memorabilia collected over the years from the Arques yard. The exhibit includes items from the Society’s archives as well as from the Arques Preservation Foundation and the San Francisco Maritime Museum. It’s free and open to the public 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays and 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND ARQUES FAMILY ARCHIVES 

 Brothers Donlon (far left) and Bub (far right) with their buddies on the Bay.

New Shop with Vintage Treasures

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

Krystal Gambie is a native of the legendary Gates Co-Op enclave at Waldo Point. Her father, the late Charles Michael Haas II, known on the waterfront as Michael Woodstock, was an editor, shop owner and teacher.

Her mother, Penny Berardi, was the Co-Op office manager, and also helped found the clothing store Waldo Works on Gate 5 Road in the 70s. Together, they published the alternative newspaper Garlic Press. Krystal’s first job, at age 12, was working as editor on the dream journal GATES with John Van Daam. Always actively involved in the community, she was on the Co-Op board of directors in her 20's.

After moving to the East Coast several years ago, Krystal has returned to her roots. She is researching a book titled Gone With the Tide — a waterfront history starting in the 1950s. Each chapter will represent a decade through art, photography, and stories, plus tributes to noteworthy figures in order of their arrival at Gate 6.

Inspired by her research, she has opened a shop called Waterfront Wonders at 314 Caledonia Street (next door to Waterstreet Hardware) that features an eclectic mix of jewelry, fashions, and vintage artworks.

For those interested in Sausalito’s bayfront history, Waterfront Wonders offers a step back in time.

Here are examples of some of the nostalgic works you can find there:

Pen and ink prints by brothers James and John Kendall

Photographs and books by houseboat historian Bruce Forrester  

Photo prints by Rolling Stone photographer Lawrence White

Anchor out photographer Patrick O'Brien is selling his images for the first time at Krystal’s request

Other photographers include Craig Kolb and Judith Bang-Kolb, Jay Tamang and Scott Hess

Local artist and musician Stephen Ehret’s paintings of local scenes

Paintings created expressly for Waterfront Wonders by ark-dweller Ana Harlow

Recent colored pen and ink scenes by Stevie of Pelican Harbor

Oil paintings of houseboats and mermaids by Tom Gardner, aka MOT

When it comes to local authors, Waterfront Wonders stocks:

Catherine Labate’s photobook, Once Upon the Waterfront

Former Co-Op attorney Charles Bush's novel Houseboat Wars

Long time waterfront resident Jeremy Coon's book of paintings

Susan York’ children’s book Meggie and the Mermaid

Michael Konrad’s book, Life on the Dock, an informal introduction to marine biology

Four books by South 40 Pier resident Guy Biederman

Kym Trippsmith’s novel The Amazon Queen, set on Richardson’s Bay back in the day

Colleen Rae's novel One Sausalito Summer

The shop also carries Krystal’s own nautical and guitar pick jewelry, plus other designs by Jessica Green, Dona Schweiger and Jennie Friedman.

Waterfront Wonders is participating in Sausalito’s Gingerbread House tour beginning December 8, and also sponsors Arts & Crafts Night featuring local artisans on Wednesdays from 6-8 p.m. For more information, search for the Waterfront Works group on Facebook.

PHOTO FROM FACEBOOK

Krystal (r.) waiting on a customer at Waterfront Wonders 

The Boy Wonder

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

Illustration FROM REDWOOD RAILWAYS

Boy wonder Asbury Harpending at the beginning of his remarkable career.

In 1868 several groups of entrepreneurs were vying to establish rail service in Northern California. According to the book Redwood Railways by Gilbert Kneiss, one group incorporated the San Francisco & Humbolt Bay Railraod Company for $8,600,000. A preliminary line was planned to start at “Saucelito, skirting the western shore of Richardson's Bay on the way to San Rafael, and thence as far as Petaluma.”

The partners only had enough money to pay for the rail, but figured that when they had the franchise, capital could be found. And they found it “in the pockets of a man who, had he lived a few decades later, would almost certainly have been known as the Boy Wonder.”

Here are some lightly edited excerpts from Kneiss’ account of the extraordinary history of this unlikely angel:

Asbury Harpending was a gold seeker who arrived in California very late — 1857. However, he couldn't have very well made it much sooner, as he was still only sixteen. A good-looking, black-haired Kentucky lad, brimming with enthusiasm, daring, and a latent touch of Midas, he had been well supplied with funds for the voyage west from the parental purse, but his nest egg was in Kentucky state currency and almost worthless at New Orleans where he embarked. Only five dollars jingled faintly in his pockets after the humiliating purchase of a steerage ticket — this he nonchalantly ran up to several hundred by auctioning off the purser's fruit supply as soon as the ship sailed. Then he moved to a first class cabin and arrived in San Francisco with a good stake.

Thereafter Harpending continued to go first class. Though others found the gold fields played out, young Asbury had the happy knack of coming along just as a group of experienced miners gave up as worthless a claim on which they had spent much cash and sweat, working it a little deeper and cleaning up. Age seventeen found him with $60,000. Two years in Mexico followed. Then he had sailed back through the Golden Gate, owning a quarter of a million in cold cash and a Sonora mine worth a million more, but still too young to vote.

A few days later, Lincoln was elected and secession started. Harpending, an ardent Southerner, plunged himself and his bankroll into deep-laid plots to make California a Confederate state, schemes that just barely missed success. Young Asbury spent his time and dollars freely in the cause but the putsch was called off. Deeply disappointed, he went East, served a few days on General Beauregard's staff at the battle of Shiloh and then was handed a captain's commission in the Confederate Navy by Jefferson Davis, although he had never even been aboard a warship.

Captain Harpending soon stood on the deck of his first command, a Confederate cruiser, anchored in San Francisco Bay! No one knew she was a cruiser but he and his brother officers who had just bought the ex-clipper. None among them were sailors, so they had to hire a navigator who promptly gave away the show. The Confederate "naval officers" found themselves lodged on Alcatraz, charged with high treason, and soon convicted of it. Harpending was released after four months on The Rock. Almost immediately he was warned of plans to rearrest him.

Now flat broke, he hid out in the foothills back of Fresno, stumbled onto another mine, and salted away $800,000. Then, the war being over and by-gones considered by-gones, he reappeared in San Francisco and became a large scale operator in real estate.

Such was the young man Fred McCrellish [one of the original partners] sought to interest in San Francisco & Humboldt Bay Railroad. Asbury Harpending, infected with the railroad bug like most Californians as the railroad neared completion, took over 90 per cent of the deal after a very sketchy investigation.

The young Kentucky wonder now plunged into railroad promotion with his usual impetuous energy and enthusiasm. Astride a horse, he traced out the whole route, marveled at the unhomesteaded redwood forests along the Eel River, and gloated over visions of Congressional railroad land grants through such a country. Why, he asked himself, had he been wasting his time with gold mines?

Grading continued north of Petaluma through the fall and winter of 1868, but at a reduced tempo as Harpending was becoming short of cash.

By March, the roadbed was graded within three miles of Santa Rosa and the bridge over Petaluma Creek was under way. Fifteen miles of iron had sailed from England. Ties began to arrive and bills, too. Harpending was finding railroad-building more expensive than he'd figured.

The driving of the gold spike at Promontory in May touched off a recession in San Francisco as many believed that the transcontinental railroad would lessen the importance of the port. Harpending continued to have difficulty in liquidating his real estate, and it was four months before work on the roadbed could be resumed.

Finally the Big Four [Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker] squeezed Harpending out.

After years of political and financial strife the rail line, now called the Northern Pacific Railway, was completed in 1907. “At last,” wrote Kneiss, “Harpending’s dream was realized. Back in California and at seventy-five still making fortunes and losing them — he speculated on what might have been had he hung on to his railroad. Of the old-timers, he was almost the sole survivor.”

Asbury Harpending ended his days in 1923 in New York.

The Controversial Colonel Frémont

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

This portrait of John C. Frémont by William Smith Jewett hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

John Charles Frémont, the man who named the Golden Gate and became a senator from the new state of California in 1851, was a contrary and controversial figure throughout his life. An opponent of slavery, he nevertheless massacred indigenous peoples on numerous occasions while leading expeditions in the western states. We previously reported that during the Bear Flag revolt of 1846, he directed his scout, Kit Carson, to kill three Californios who innocently approached his camp in Marin because "I have got no room for prisoners.”

Thanks to the power of his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Frémont enjoyed suportive connections and privilege. As an army major, he took control of California from the California Republic and was eventually court-martialed and convicted of mutiny and insubordination after a conflict over who was the rightful military governor of the territory. But his sentence was commuted, and he was reinstated by President James K. Polk.

While Frémont made his early reputation as an explorer, contemporaries often questioned the accuracy of his reports. In 1885, the Daily Alta Californian, in a long essay on California history, noted that “Before the acquisition of California by the United States it was a land as little known to the common world, in all the world besides, as Patagonia or Cochin China. There had been imitators of Marco Polo, who had actually visited the coast and, like him, had strangely exaggerated the scenes they witnessed. Others, after the manner of Munchausen and Gulliver and Jules Verne, had liberally drawn upon their own fanciful imaginations to coin into facts the creations of their own vagaries.”

The newspaper noted that Senator Benton had been  informed about California by the official reports and private letters from his son-in-law, “who had twice made the journey overland to and from California, and had borne part in the war for its possession. That Major Emory [surveyor William Hemsley Emory] was the actual author of the official report which Colonel Frémont had published as his own is a matter of fact. It was prepared from the most reliable data that could be obtained at the time. It bore, in some instances, the dictation of Frémont himself, who was as headstrong in his fancies as General [Stonewall] Jackson was resolute in his convictions, and hence, while it was an admirable description of the topography and apparent characteristics of the country, with a fair statement of its climate and its general features, as to its qualities of soil and agricultural resources, the report might as well have been given of the unexplored regions of New Holland [mainland Australia].

“According to Colonel Frémont's idea of California, it was not destined to become a great producing State. He noticed — it would be curious to learn how— that the honey bee neither existed nor could exist westward of the Rocky Mountains; and he stated this of the land which is now so celebrated for the deliciousness of its honey product as famed Hybla of Sicily was in the ages when the gods chose it for their feasts. The Mission Fathers and the early Californians of Spanish blood had succeeded in raising every product of the earth — cereal, fruit and berry, for which they cared; but that they were, nevertheless, not fully informed of the fertility of the soil is true, for the sufficient reason that they never were required to test it — that it was never necessary for them to do so.”

Frémont was able to shrug off criticisms like that and went on to become the first Republican nominee for president of the U.S. and founder of the California Republican Party when he was nominated. He lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.

In his later years, according to Wikipedia, Frémont “was appointed governor of the Arizona Territory by President Rutherford B. Hayes and served from 1878 to 1881. He spent little time in Arizona, and was asked to resume his duties in person or resign; Frémont chose resignation. Destitute, the family depended on the publication earnings of his wife Jessie.”

Frémont lived in New York in retirement. In April 1890, he was reappointed as a major general and then added to the Army's retired list, enabling him to qualify for a pension. He died of peritonitis in 1890, at the age of 77.

When Sea Lions Were Threatened

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

California sea lions have been federally safeguarded ever since the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1975. But that wasn’t always the case.

Before the turn of the 20th Century, a controversy surfaced other whether sea lions threatened Sausalito’s then-prosperous fishing industry. In February 1928 the Mill Valley Herald reported: “C. A. McNeill of Tiburon, who has sailed the bay habitually for the past forty years, expresses the opinion that the sea lions act as watch dogs of the Golden Gate to capture large schools of striped bass, which would otherwise enter the bay and add materially to the supply of valuable sea food. Mr. McNeill holds that, even when not captured, the bass are scattered and driven away by the onsluaghts of the sea lions.”

The article went on to spell out both pro and anti-sea lion viewpoints:

“Local residents are very familiar with the fact that the City of San Francisco cherishes its Seal Rocks as a leading attraction for tourists. The sea lions have done their bit toward making San Francisco famous. A recent writer on the subject holds that there is comparatively small danger of depredations here as Seal Rocks are used as a sort of half-way house by the sea lions and not as a breeding ground.”

Seal Rocks is a group of small rock formation islands in the ocean just off the Cliff House. More about them later. The Herald article continues:

“Absolute conclusions as to the comparative value of sea lions and as to their depredations have not been reached… At the behest of the fishing industries, the Fish and Game Commission called a meeting in San Francisco to discuss the situation and to decide on a course of action. The fishing industries were represented and several scientific men attended. The conclusions arrived at by this conference were that the sea lions were too numerous, that they were destructive to the fishing industries and that their numbers should be reduced.”

As most of the large rookeries were located on lighthouse reservations, the Commission received permission from the Treasury Department to kill sea lions on those federal installations. “But,” the Herald reported, “before any killing had been done the permission was revoked by wire, on May 31st. The suspension was due to protests from the United States Fish Commission, the Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture, the New York Zoological Society and various others.”

The Herald reports: “Although the California Commission could not kill sea lions on the federal reservations, they were so confident of the correctness of their stand that several of their deputies were ordered to hunt sea lions and a great many were killed.” That culling “arose chiefly from the groundless fear that one of the picturesque features of San Francsico, the Seal Rocks, would be destroyed.”

In October of that year, the Herald ran another article quoting Paul Bonnot, a scientific investigator employed by the Commercial Fisheries Bureau of the Division of Fish and Game, saying: “Bonnot probably knows more about sea lions and their habits than anyone on the Pacific Coast and he is emphatic in his championing of their cause. Due to Bonnot’s investigation the theory that sea lions are a menace to the fishing industry has been exploded, he declares, and his studies disclosed that the sea lions have aided the industry as they generally eat fish that are of little benefit. A recent movement to have the sea lions slaughtered wholesale was doubtless stopped by the publication throughout the State of the results of his investigation of conditions.”

Seal Rocks were a favorite sea lion haul-out until the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco in October 1989. According to the Marine Mammal Center, which treats sick and injured seals and sea lions, the boisterous barking pinnipeds deserted the barren rocks and some moved to Pier 39's K-Dock. After much debate and research, the experts from The Marine Mammal Center recommended that the sea lions stay in their newfound home.

With a plentiful supply of food from the Bay and an environment protected from predators, the Pier39 Marina proved to be an ideal living situation for the sea lions. Within a few short months, the number of sea lions grew to more than 300 and hit an all-time record of 1,701 in November 2009. Pier 39 installed floats to support them, which bring them closer to human sightseers, and — hopefully — keep them off the boat docks.

While the number of sea lions at K-Dock rises and falls with the seasons, available food supply and natural migration patterns, the world-famous sea lions always have a home at Pier 39.

Marine Mammal Center docents are on hand every day to greet tourists and local visitors to K-Dock and answer questions about the popular pinnipeds.

PHOTO BY BILL HUNNEWELL © THE MARINE MAMMAL CENTER

Sea lions are safe and remain a top attraction at Pier 39.

Sausalilto’s Hi Tech Pioneer

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

Sausalito’s Marinship area is home to our working waterfront, and it also serves as an incubator for technology innovators. But that’s nothing new.

One early tech startup, Autodesk, was founded in Marin by John Walker and 12 other programmers in 1982. The package they created, called Autocad, was a software application for computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting. Autocad “quietly became one of the most successful software products in history,” according to the L.A. Times. AutoCAD allows users to do drafting in two dimensions and images can be created in three dimensions. Either a mouse or a digitizer can be used to create the images. This capability had been available in large computer systems, at a cost of $100,000 or more. But AutoCAD made it available to small firms and independents for as little as $5,000.

In September 1985, this newspaper quoted an article in a contemporary issue of InfoWorld that “AutoCAD now constitutes more than 40 percent of the market for similar devices on personal computers. The company went public two months ago.” At that time, Autodesk split up its bulging enterprise between its Shoreline Highway headquarters and an office building at Bridgeway and Coloma. By then the number of employees had grown to 150, Marinscope stated, “and Autodesk's original headquarters on Shoreline Highway became obsolete” so Autodesk relocated to “more plush quarters in Marina Plaza. The company fills most of the three-story building nearest the water."

By mid-1986, the company had grown to 255 employees with annual sales of over $40 million. That year, Walker resigned as chairman and president, continuing to work as a programmer.

In June 1986 the 50,000th package of Autodesk’s CAD software was shipped and this paper reported: “To mark the occasion, Autodesk donated a complete workstation to the purchaser of the 50,000th package — a telecommunications firm in Bakersfield.”

By 1991, Autodesk, then the world's fifth largest computer company, had begun transferring some of its operations to Petaluma. At the end of the year, the Petaluma Argus Courier announced that other divisions would also be moved north: “The new warehouse and production facilities will be located at 9 North McDowell Blvd. The move will put all of the Operations departments, Purchasing, Customer Service and Product Quality Assurance, in one place.”

Now headquartered at 1 Market St. in San Francisco, Autodesk continues to evolve. The company website notes that the firm is “exploring the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up and augment artist workflows.”

By the way, when setting out to research Autodesk, I turned to AI, specifically ChatGPT, to see if it might write this column for me. After I typed in Autodesk Sausalito, this was a bot’s reply:

“While Autodesk has a rich history in the technology and software industry, it doesn't have a notable historical connection to Sausalito that I'm aware of… I don't have detailed information about specific office locations or events in Sausalito related to Autodesk beyond what you've mentioned…

If you have more specific questions or if you're looking for detailed historical information about Autodesk's activities in Sausalito, you may want to consult historical records [or] local archives…”

Score: AI: Zero, old newspapers: 1.

PHOTO BY LARRY CLINTON

Marina Plaza today, at 2320 and 2330 Marinship Way.

Where the Ice House Got its Ice

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

A visitor to the recently reopened Ice House Museum asked, “When this was an real ice house, where did it get the ice?” One answer comes from Ed Couderc, whose family owned the facility in its last days as a coin-operated ice dispensary.

As we reported in the Historical Society’s newsletter in 2016 (viewable at sausalitohistoricalsociety.com)

little is known about the early history of the little structure which apparently dates back to the late 1800’s. But here’s what Ed reports:

“My father, Albert bought Sausalito Fuel and Ice Company in 1952. It was a very run-down operation, so the purchase price was right. The company had been very successful before WW II and up through the end of the 1940's. Originally located at 101 Caledonia Street, the site now of the Marin Theater and Sushi Ran, the landowner wanted to convert the concrete building into a theater as the shipyards had brought in a huge workforce that needed entertainment. He asked the previous owner of Fuel and Ice to move to 333 Caledonia and that was done in 1942 or ‘43. I do not know if the Ice House was moved to 333 Caledonia or if it was built new during the relocation.

“We hauled ice from a Union Ice affiliate manufacturing facility on Fourth Street in San Rafael. At times this plant could not produce enough so we hauled from the west Oakland plant of Union.”

According to a Union Ice Company publication, ice was first delivered to San Francisco by ship in 1850.

The completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869 opened communications with the high Sierra and ice from the mountains was distributed throughout California and the mining camps of Nevada. Union Ice was formed in the spring of 1882, in a merger of competing companies after a ruinous price war.

Ed Couderc recalls that ice was home delivered in heavy duty pickup trucks to various areas of Southern Marin during WWII “and this continued when my father arrived.

“By 1952 however the only regular route for ice delivery was for Marin City as over half of the residences there only had an ice box. Other routes in the 50s were for restaurants and bars, supplying them with cubed and crushed ice. The routes also supplied the small ice houses in Mill Valley, Marin City in the western area and Tam Valley at the intersection to Stinson Beach. These buildings, along with the larger one in Sausalito had two vending belts that dispensed either a 25 or 50 pound block of ice for $ .25 and $ .50. Around 1960 the 50-pound belt was replaced with 12-pound bagged ice cubes for, I think, $ 1.00. The Caledonia Street Ice House was very busy as it served the boating community and their on board ice boxes.

“Another use for ice was for the commercial fishing boats that docked at Dunphy Park in August through October. The full size 300-pound blocks were slid off the trucks into a monster crusher and blower. Each boat took around 30 blocks (9000 lbs.) as these boats would go out to sea for 20 to 40 days catching mainly Albacore for canning. The truck trailers that hauled the boats’ catch would also need about 10,000 lbs. of crushed ice to keep the fish fresh during transit to canneries in Monterey and Coos Bay.

“{Sausalito Fuel and Ice exited the ice business in 1976. The first drought to hit Marin Water District caused severe rationing of water to us. Also, by this time the Moving and Storage operation of the company was 90% of the revenue the company produced.”

Later the Ice House was leased to architect Michael Rex and “after we sold the property and moved to 2900 Bridgeway and Rohnert Park, we gave the building to Michael.”

Rex, in turn, remodeled and enlarged the building into office space, eventually selling it to the City for $1, so it could be relocated downtown as an historic museum.

Today, the building, renovated as an interactive multi-media showcase of Sausalito history, is open to the public Wednesdays through Sundays, from 11 AM to 4 PM at Bridgeway and Bay Streets.

Special Announcement:

The Sausalito Historical Society’s Mike Moyle will give a Zoom program on October 30 presenting a set of historic photos taken throughout Sausalito, juxtaposed with current counterparts that Mike has taken from a drone. The photos highlight both significant changes that have occurred over the years, as well as features which remain relatively unchanged. This free Zoom program begins at 3:00 PM and is open to everyone. Please register https://sausalito.helpfulvillage.com/events/4050 to get the Zoom code.

PHOTO FROM SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Ice House was a coin-operated vending facility in mid-20th Century.

Fishing with Cass Gidley

By Annie Sutter and Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

In 1985 the Historical Society’s Annie Sutter wrote a lengthy profile in this paper on fisherman, sailor, sailing instructor, charter skipper and local legend Cass Gidley. Here’s a lightly edited and updated excerpt that describes Sausalito’s days as a fishing village:

PHOTO FROM SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Cass Gidley in a rare moment ashore.

Cass has been around Sausalito since the days when fishermen kept Montereys [double-ended fishing boats] in the cove off Hurricane Gulch, since those long-ago days when, he reports, “I sold crab for $l,” and he remembers that the fishing fleet was divided into factions of Italians and non-Italians, and seldom did the two meet without trouble. But he first arrived at that cove by sailboat. “The first time I ever set foot in Sausalito was in 1929. I was attracted by the building of Zaca at the Nunes yard. I lived out at Pt. Pinole and sailed my little 16’ lapstrake clinker over here to watch Zaca being built. That was a big trip, you know, back and forth across the Bay. [Charles Templeton] Crocker gave me deck work on Zaca, but no big voyages. I should’ve gone when they sailed in 1930. [Zaca was later acquired by swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn.]

Oh, I had another chance to sail round-the-world on the Otter, a great big reconverted fish packer from Alaska, but I got married instead. In those days there were only three boats anchored off Sausalito, the Dragoon, a big racing ketch, the Otter, and another off the point where the Spinnaker is today. Just those and a handful of fishing boats — no docks oh, they had a little fishing dock this side of the Napa St. Pier.”

During WWII he worked in the shipyards as a high rigger. “I put all the staging around the ships,” and at the same time, took up commercial fishing at night. “I started commercial fishing in 1941, got bit by the bug. Me with no experience but I liked the sea. I leased a 40' double ender, the Nina, and fished crab, salmon and albacore. We didn't travel far offshore in those days, but we worked hard for very little money. Salmon brought 12 cents a pound, but money wasn't the real thing, it was the adventure we had out there. I learned navigation fishing; in those days all we had was a compass, no radios. I was the first to have a radio aboard. It was just rule of thumb navigation, picked it up in bits.”

At first, the young fisherman sold his catch at Fisherman's Warf in San Francisco, but soon ran into trouble with the establishment, the Italian fishermen who ran the wharf.

In Neptune's Apprentice, a warm and comprehensive book about the fishing business, author Marie de Santis introduces Cass as “one of those few seekers whose last name didn’t roll off the tongue like a Verdi opera,” and tells how the young fisherman found that his rivals were cutting the buoys off his crab pots and substituting their own. So he followed along behind and re-exchanged the buoys, and brought them back and tossed them on the docks where the fishermen tied up. When his rivals then began taking the entire pots full of crabs, Cass worked all night emptying all the crab pots to return with a full load. “Still, those were some of the best years of my life, and we were all the best of friends.” Cass is quoted as saying. “It’s just the fisherman’s way.

"But finally I got away from it and made my headquarters in Sausalito, in the mid 40s. I sold all my fish through Lefty Sturiales, down at Gate 3. He was a famous character, known up and down the coast. That pier at Gate 3 is still known as Lefty’s Dock. Lefty was fair to the fishermen.” In the early 50’s, in partnership with Ernie Gann (another aspiring fisherman, but one who was to find it more lucrative to write about the industry), Cass set up a shop downtown. [Gann later gained fame as the author of classics such as The High and the Mighty, Fate is the Hunter, and other novels which became major motion pictures.]

The two sold fresh fish directly off their boats to the locals. “The City gave us a float right where the ferry is now, and we sold tons and tons of fish. We’d fish for a week and come in on Thursday and sell on Friday. The people came right down to the dock; we had so many people we had to give out numbers! Of course, the merchants and the butchers tried to get us out, and so the City took the float away from us. And one night all the ladies from the Hill went down to the City Council and demanded that those two boys get that boat back to work down there. And so we went back.”

Cass Gidley passed away in 1998, but his memory is being preserved by The Sausalito Community Boating Center, a non-profit organization established to create a nautical community place at Gidley’s old marina near Dunphy Park.

Rapper’s Roots in Marin City

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

Recent reports of the arrest of a suspect in the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur reminded me of the iconic rapper’s local routes.

STUDIO PUBLICITY STILL

Tupac Shakur at the height of his fame.

The Shakur family lived in Marin City for a time, and Tupac attended Tamalpais High School in Mill

Valley.

The rapper made headlines in Marin in 1992 when his entourage was involved in a fight at a Marin City festival that led to the death of a 6-year-old boy. Qa'id Walker-Teal, of Marin City, was in the crowd at the city's 50th anniversary festival when he was struck in the head by a stray bullet fired during the fight between Shakur's entourage and a group of Marin City men. The killer has never been identified.

According to a 2019 profile in Marin Magazine, Shakur was born in New York and then moved to Baltimore with his mother Afeni, a member of the Black Panther Party. Afeni then “arranged for a fellow Panther to watch over Tupac and his sister, Sekyiwa, in Marin City while she stayed in Baltimore and saved for another ticket to California. Eventually, Afeni would join her children, but by all accounts, Tupac’s time in Marin was one of struggle and extraordinary responsibility.

“In contrast, former Tamalpais High School teacher Barbara Owens has fond memories from Shakur’s brief period of time in her classroom. She says that it wasn’t until much later that she understood how much her student was truly dealing with.

“’I knew he was challenged,’ Owen says, ‘but I didn’t know how, in particular, other than by being an African American student from Marin City at a predominantly white school.’”

In his 2001 book on Shakur, Holler If You Hear Me, author Michael Eric Dyson describes how Afeni’s crack addiction was exacerbated by her move to Marin City, noting that it put her “in dangerous proximity to the drug’s infamous center of distribution in Northern California’s black ghettos.” At some point, the situation with his mother got so bad that Tupac moved out to live with friends in an abandoned apartment. He also started selling crack to afford food. Despite these substantial hardships, Shakur’s grades apparently never slipped.

Barbara Owens noted that one of her favorite memories will always be of the time she asked Shakur to read some Shakespeare aloud. “I asked him to take the part of Othello,” she says. “All of the students read the play aloud and he took that part. It was absolutely, hands down, one of the most stellar performances of Shakespeare, let alone Othello, that I have ever heard.”

Eventually, Shakur dropped out of Tamalpais High and moved to Oakland. in 1989, he attended a poetry class taught by Leila Steinberg, who became a mentor. Steinberg introduced him to Atron Gregory. The two would go on to work together extensively, with Gregory serving as a manager and executive producer as Shakur began his ascent to superstardom.

The Associated Press recently recounted the details of Shakur's death:

“Prosecutors allege Shakur’s killing stemmed from a rivalry and competition for dominance in a musical genre that, at the time, was dubbed ‘gangsta rap.’ It pitted East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect associated with rap music mogul Marion ‘Suge’ Knight against West Coast members of a Crips sect that Davis has said he led in Compton, California.

“Tension escalated in Las Vegas the night of Sept. 7, 1996, when a brawl broke out between Shakur and Davis’ nephew, Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson, at the MGM Grand hotel-casino following a heavyweight championship boxing match won by Mike Tyson.

“’Knight and Shakur went to the fight, as did members of the South Side Crips,” prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo said last week in court. ‘And (Knight) brought his entourage, which involved Mob Piru gang members.’

“After the casino brawl, Knight drove a BMW with Shakur in the front passenger seat. The car was stopped at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled up on the passenger side and gunfire erupted.

“Shot multiple times, Shakur died a week later at age 25.”

After he was murdered, his mother Afeni — who had inspired much of his work — managed his estate and music portfolio, eventually buying a number of floating homes at Kappas Marina. She died in Sausalito in 2016 at age 69.

The Lost Soul of the Vallejo

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

We’ve written before about the odd couple of the beached ferry Vallejo: bohemian artist Jean Varda and Zen scholar Alan Watts. But before Watts walked the gangplank in reverse to move onto the Vallejo, Varda had an earlier boat-mate: Gordon Onslow Ford.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BAMPFA.

Gordon Onslow Ford’s “The Painter and the Muse (1943)” is in the Berkeley exhibition

Onslow Ford, as he came to be known in the art world, was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton. After moving to the Bay Area, he became one of the founders of the influential Dynaton group. While living with like-minded artists in a ramshackle Mill Valley mansion during the postwar era, he created psychedelic paintings in a style called Dynaton, from a Greek word meaning “the possible.”

According to a recent Marin IJ article, “The Dynaton movement was short lived, disbanding after a 1951 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the impact they made on subsequent generations of counterculture artists in the Bay Area was huge. A new year-long exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), ‘What Has Been and What Could Be,’ showcases their work and their influence at the time.”

Born in the English town of Wendover in 1912 to a family of artists, Onslow Ford began painting at an early age. His grandfather was a Victorian sculptor. At age 11 he was painting landscapes under the guidance of his uncle. Following the death of his father at age 14, he was sent to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The ocean affected him deeply and his early works depicted ocean scenes. The metaphor of taking a "voyage" later became an important aspect of his paintings.

The Historical Society’s Betsy Stroman has recounted how Onslow Ford met Varda while visiting Henry Miller at Big Sur in 1947. The two artists reconnected in the Bay Area soon after. Both Onslow Ford, who had served in the British Navy, and Varda wanted to be close to the water, so the two began talking about finding a place together. 

In 1949 they found the decommissioned ferry Vallejo, about to be disassembled and sold for scrap by Gardiner Steel Mills. Many years later, Onslow Ford described how they acquired her: “We hurried over to the Gardiner Steel Mills office in Oakland, arrived rather disheveled and said we wanted to acquire the ferry. He asked how much money we had. Varda had none. I had $500. So he took that as a down payment and we agreed to pay $60 a month.”

Onslow Ford moved to land in 1953, and he and his wife eventually settled in Inverness, where he continued to pursue his unique painting style; he died peacefully in his home in 2003, at age 90. He’s considered the most famous of the Dynaton painters, which also included Lee Mullican from Chickasha, Oklahoma and Austrian-born Wolfgang Paalen. Here’s how Paalen described their work: “Our images are not meant to shock nor to relax; they are neither objects for mere aesthetic satisfaction nor for visual experimentation. Our pictures are objects for that active meditation which does not mean detachment from human purpose, but a state of self-transcending awareness, which is not an escape from reality, because it is an intuitive participation in the formative potentialities of reality.”

While their art was once dubbed “Surrealism for the New World” their work may not be as well-known now. In fact, BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who curated the show, hadn’t heard of them.

As the IJ reported: “Widholm first learned about them through Wendi Norris, a Marin resident who has a gallery in San Francisco focusing on contemporary and surrealist art. When Widholm discovered that BAMPFA had one painting from each of the artists in the eclectic 25,000-work collection, she was excited to learn more about the artists and include their work in the exhibition. ‘Their work, I think, is still fresh and interesting to view and consider in a new era,’ she says. ‘I thought it was really exciting to revive their reputation, revive this group and bring more visibility to it.’”

The exhibition runs through July 7, 2024, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2120 Oxford St., Berkeley. Admission is $14.

Alan Watts at Druid Heights

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

COURTESY PHOTO

The remains of the Alan Watts Library

A recent online history vignette from the Mill Valley Historical Society (MVHS) mentioned Alan Watts as one of the noteworthy residents of the bohemian community on the southeast flank of Mount Tam back in the 60s.

Druid Heights was founded in 1954 by carpenter Roger Somers and poet Elsa Gidlow, along with their partners, on five acres of a former chicken ranch. Gidlow gave the acreage the name Druid Heights in honor of two female writers, the revolutionary and teacher of Irish lore, Ella Young (the Druid), and Emily Brontë (author of Wuthering Heights).

“Too anarchic to count as a commune, Druid Heights became what Gidlow jokingly called ‘an unintentional community,’” according to the MVHS. It was a popular retreat and meeting place for the Beat Generation of the 1950s, the hippie movement of the 1960s, and the women's movement of the 1970s. It also became a meeting place for many famous figures ranging from Louis Armstrong to Kenneth Rexroth, Bill Graham, Lily Tomlin, Ram Dass, Dizzy Gillespie, John Handy, Alan Watts, Neil Young, Tom Robbins, Catherine McKinnon, and prostitute activist Margo St. James.

Elsa Gidlow and Alan Watts established The Society for Comparative Philosophy in 1962, to foster studies of humanity's relation to nature and the universe. It was headquartered on the converted ferry boat Vallejo which Watts was sharing with flamboyant painter Jean Varda, with the Heights maintained as a closely guarded secret enjoyed by insiders and invited guests.

Alan Watts moved off the Vallejo to 310 Laverne from 1956 to 1963. Beat generation poet Gary Snyder lived at 370 Montford for a few months in the spring of 1956, and his roommate was Jack Kerouac. Watts and Snyder moved to Druid Heights sometime later. According to an obituary in the Bay Area Reporter, Elsa Gidlow was considered the beloved “sister” of Zen philosopher Watts, and he dedicated his autobiography to her.

The Library of Congress reports that Watts moved into the Mandala House (Casa Rondo) and “commissioned the construction of an open reading room and meeting place for his Society for Comparative Philosophy.” He gave public teachings and wrote six of his seminal books in his library and died there in 1973. After that the Society fell on hard times, but in his name and with the help of a solid board of directors, it revived and continued until Gidlow's death in 1987.

In June, the BBC reported: “Watts, Gidlow, and Somers all died on the property, and  all but a few of these buildings now lie abandoned. And as the years take their toll, these structures have become a centre of contention, with preservationists putting increasing pressure on the National Park Service (NPS) to restore them and open the site to visitors.

“In 1977, Druid Heights became part of Muir Woods National Monument and the greater Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). While the NPS initially indicated it intended to preserve the site, little action was taken and most of the buildings are now dilapidated.

After years of research and documentation by the NPS, in 2018 Druid Heights was determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) at both the local and state level.

Preservationists hope Druid Height’s buildings may soon be protected to help preserve its founders' original vision. That doesn't mean the park service has to open the site to the public, but they do have to preserve it."

Cont.

Jimmy Buffet’s Ties to Southern Marin

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

ALBUM COVER

Come Monday was on Buffet’s 1974 album Living & Dying in 3/4 Time

The recent news of Jimmy Buffet’s death from — what else? — skin cancer reminded me of his many ties to our part of the world.

In 1983, Buffet told David Letterman how he got the inspiration for his hit Come Monday at the Howard Johnson’s in Mill Valley. His comments, which can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU8rStLFHXw, go something like this:

“This is the song that kept me from killing myself in a Howard Johnson’s. I was deathly depressed by the size of the room and the food next door. It was awful and I wrote this song and it hit. I paid the rent and got my dog out of the pound.”

The song was written after Buffet had performed at a Labor Day weekend show in San Anselmo, and previously spending “four lonely days in that brown L.A. haze.”

I know whereof he speaks about that HoJo’s (now a Holiday Inn Express with the adjacent Floodwater restaurant) because I spent a few lonely months tending bar there in the 80s. It was one of the few joints that hired newbies right out of bartender school, and it worked for me because there was very little bar traffic and I made all my mistakes in private fixing drinks for the servers to take to the dining room.

One of the highlights of my day shift was serving martinis to the mother of David Carradine, who would come in each afternoon to watch Kung Fu reruns and complain about what a heel David’s recently deceased father (esteemed character actor John Carradine) had been.

Another time, a couple who’d been staying at the inn for a few nights without a car complained they were getting tired of all-you-can-eat fried clams, and asked about a nearby restaurant they could walk to. I recommended El Robozo in the Fireside motel (now a senior community) just across busy Highway 1. They finished their drinks and departed, only to return just a few minutes later.

“What happened,” I asked, “was it closed?”

“No,” they replied, glumly retaking their bar stools, “We couldn’t cross the street.”

In 1985, Jimmy Buffett opened his first successful Margaritaville retail store in Key West, and it soon blossomed into a booming chain of restaurants in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Australia.

In 1990, according to this paper, the chain took over the waterfront space that had housed the legendary Zack’s and turned it into a Margaritaville. Their niche was serving novelty drinks like a Fuzzy Navel or Sex on the Beach. By then I had graduated to weekend shifts at the no name, and whenever some old geezer ordered a Manhattan or Old Fashioned at Margaritaville, the bartenders had to call us for the recipe. That location has been through many incarnations, but it has been the well-regarded Salito’s

since 2011.

Buffet parlayed Margaritaville into various entrepreneurial successes. According to the New York Times,

He “turned his personal brand into a lifestyle empire that included everything from restaurants and  resorts to lines of merchandise such as at-home ‘frozen concoction makers’ and cornhole game sets.” He died a billionaire.

Another rocker who followed in Buffet’s footsteps was Sammy Hagar, who was part owner of Mill Valley’s El Paseo for a few years and has also developed the Cabo Wabo restaurant chain and liquor brands, including a line of canned rum cocktails. He has collaborated with our own Sean Saylor to create some of these drinks and to establish the Cabo Wabo room upstairs at Saylor’s Restaurant on Bridgeway.

Cont.

Gold! Gold! Gold!

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

COURTESY PHOTO

Prospectors working California gold placer deposits in 1850

We all know it as the Gold Rush of ‘49, but the Eureka discovery on the American River was actually announced on the East Coast in August 1848.

The New York Herald carried a two-column article in the form of a letter from a correspondent which quoted an anonymous correspondent:

“The gold mine discovered in December last, on the south branch of the American fork, in a range of low hills forming the base of the Sierra Nevada, is only three feet below the surface, in a strata of soft sand rock. From explorations south twelve miles, and north five miles, the continuance of this strata is reported, and the mineral said to be equally abundant, and from twelve to eighteen feet in thickness; so that, without allowing any golden hopes to puzzle my prophetic vision of the future, I would predict for California a Peruvian harvest of the precious metals, as soon as a sufficiency of miners, &c., can be obtained.”

Who was that anonymous source? According to the California Historical Society, “The origin of this startling bit of news has been the cause of much speculation. In his Overland with Kit Carson, edited by Stallo Vinton from the journals of Lieutenant George Douglas Brewerton, U.S.A., Mr. Vinton, in his introduction, states that ‘A careful analysis of all the available facts and circumstances demonstrates that on the journey of the text Carson and Brewerton brought with them to the East the first news of the momentous discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill.’” Vinton concludes that the carrier of the letter to the New York Herald was none other than the redoubtable Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson himself.

An article in the May 17 1848 Californian, the territory’s first newspaper, stated: “We have been informed by a gentleman recently from the gold region that digging continues brisk, with a great demand for spades and pickaxes. The ore is said to become better and more plenty as the miners advance up the river. It is found scattered over a surface of 30 miles, and we are told that any where within a circuit of that size, one man can dig on an average 2 ounces a day, and that 2,000 men can find employment without difficulty. Many persons have already left the coast for that region, and considerable excitement exists in our midst, which bids fair to become quite a gold fever. The first symptoms of the disease are a strong desire to purchase pickaxes and spades and an immediate rush for a launch.”

But there were unintended consequences from the gold rush. One week later the Californian ceased publication, stating:

“The majority our subscribers and many of our advertising patrons have closed their doors and places of business and left town, and we have received one order after another conveying the pleasant request that ‘the printer will please stop my paper,’ or ‘my advertisement, as I am about leaving for the Sacramento.’ We have also received information that very many of our subscribers in various parts of the country have left their usual places of abode, and gone to the gold region, showing that this fever (to which the Cholera is a mere bungler in the way of depopulating towns) is not confined to San Francisco alone. We really do not believe that for the last ten days, any thing in the shape of a newspaper has received five minutes attention from any one of our citizens. This, it must be allowed, is decidedly encouraging—very. The whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!!’ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes, and the means of transportation to the spot where one man obtained $128 worth of the real stuff in one day's washing, and the average for all concerned is $20 per diem—for such in fact are the reports which have reached us, and from apparently reliable sources. In consideration of this state of affairs, and the degeneracy of the taste for reading so naturally consequent upon the rush for gold, where the word is ‘every man for himself,’ and a total disregard for his neighbor, it would be a useless expenditure of labor and material to continue longer the publication of our paper.”

Even Sausalito fell victim to the fever. According to author Robert Ryal Miller, when the gold rush began, it was a bonanza for Captain William Richardson who transported gold seekers up the Sacramento River and supplied them with victuals. In his biography of Captain Richardson, part of the Historical Society collection, he tells how Richardson employed his launch Guadalupe to take many would-be miners from San Francisco to the future site of the town of Sacramento. “Like most members of the important California ranch families, the Richardsons scoffed at mining. Instead, [the Captain] was occupied with his own maritime activities, especially after his posts as collector and captain of the port reverted to the military about the time the Mexican Ward ended.”

All too soon, Sacramento supplanted Sausalito as the jumping-off point to the gold fields, and Richardson never recovered. Saddled with debt, he died in bankruptcy in 1856 and his heirs were forced to sell his beloved Rancho Sausalito to developers.

Evan Connell’s Bohemian Sausalito

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

Sometimes it pays to be a pack rat. While rummaging through my Historical Society files this week I came across a clipping from the March 2015 New York Times that provides an in depth look at how Sausalito factored into the writing of best-selling author Evan S. Connell.

After describing the contemporary downtown tourist scene, writer Mark Oppenheimer gets down to business, hearkening back to the booth at the no name where “Evan S. Connell used to sit, beautiful in his bomber jacket, sipping his drinks, dreaming of literary success.”

Although he is now considered a great American novelist, “Mr. Connell is not really known,” says Oppenheimer, perhaps “because Mr. Connell worked across so many genres,” from book-length poetry to short stories to historic and contemporary novels, “as if each book were meant to alienate fans of the last.”

Oppenheimer notes that “it also matters that Mr. Connell left behind few people to keep his torch lit. He was a loner: He never married, had no children, rarely entertained, was scant of friends.”

In his research, Oppenheimer interviewed the Historical Society’s Rick Seymour, “a longtime Sausalito writer, born in town, an anchor of its literary and bohemian scene. He regularly drank with Mr. Connell when the writer was incubating ‘Mrs. Bridge,’ and he had written a charming eulogy of Mr. Connell for a local newspaper [that would be Marinscope]. “He was a very good-looking guy,” Ric said of Connell.” We called him Smiling Jack. He always wore a leather flight jacket, had a little mustache, looked like the Smilin’ Jack character in the comics — a macho aviator in a strip that ran from 1933 to 1973.

“In the convivial, hard-drinking Sausalito writing crowd, Mr. Connell kept his distance. ‘Whatever social life he had going, he was pretty private about’,” said Rick who separately has recounted that Connell dated Grammy-award winning folk artist Gale Garnett.

Oppenheimer also interviewed Jack Shoemaker, Connell’s longtime editor: “Mr. Shoemaker is Bay Area literary history: He has also edited or published Robert Hass, Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, M.F.K. Fisher and Anne Lamott. But Mr. Connell was one of his first writers, and the No Name years came at the beginning of a 50-year friendship”.

Shoemaker “met Mr. Connell at the No Name, where Mr. Shoemaker had first gone with the Beat poet Lew Welch, whose work he had published. Mr. Welch was dating a local woman named Magda Cregg. “She had a son” Mr. Shoemaker said, “who became known as Huey Lewis — he chose Lewis because he loved Lew Welch. Lewie always told me that he taught Huey Lewis how to sing.

“Sausalito had the Tides,” Mr. Shoemaker told Oppenheimer, “which was a very famous bookstore at the time. It was owned by a couple of people who were friends of Evan’s, a couple of doors beyond No Name. And those guys, the owners, bought the Washington Square Bar and Grill, otherwise known as the Washbag, which was one of the famous North Beach literary bars, famous for their softball team — Herb Caen played, and Claes Oldenburg made them a bat.”

Shoemaker next visited the location of the legendary Contact Magazine, in what had been an Italianate mansion a few paces from the No Name. Says Oppenheimer, “a little research revealed that this building had also housed the Tides, the old bookstore and hangout. So it seems that upstairs, the literary magazine that published early Updike and Barthelme had its headquarters — and downstairs was the store that nurtured Mr. Connell, Mr. Kentfield and Mr. Shoemaker.

But on Oppenheimer’s visit, “the ground floor was vacant, a sheriff’s eviction notice taped to the window. A worker was painting the trim around the door, and I asked him what was most recently there. “A store,” he said. “It sold hats and T-shirts, I think.”

The article and accompanying photos can be viewed at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/travel/searching-for-evan-connells-bohemian-sausalito.html. The New York Times clipping is now in the collection of the Sausalito Historical Society.

COURTESY PHOTO

The No Name Today

The Other Godfather of the Waterfront

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

SKETCH BY HOPE SAVAGE

Lindsay Cage, a hero of the waterfront 

We’ve occasionally referred to Donlon Arques as the “Godfather of the Waterfront,” but there’s another man who was known by that honorific title back in the 60s: Lindsay Cage.

Lindsay came to Marin County from his native Louisiana to work at Marinship and settled in Marin City.

According to waterfront historian Krystal Gambie, after the war he operated auto repair shops in both Marin City and Sausalito before becoming the first African American to have a Yellow Cab license in Marin.

Eventually he went to work for Arques, who had acquired significant portions of the Marinship site, which was littered with surplus materiel after the war. “Lindsay Cage was loved by a good many people,” recalls Bob Darr, a founder of the Donlon Arques Historical Research Project. “I met him in my teens in the mid-1960s while wandering the Arques property.”

When Lindsay died in 1982, two waterfront residents, Jean Lamb and Shelley Winn, wrote the following tribute to him in this newspaper:

Lindsay Cage, resident of Gate 3, former operator of Marin City flea market, died unexpectedly of a heart attack early evening December 13, 1982. Mr. Cage left behind 7 children, 30 grandchildren, and 4 great-grand-children. For about 25 years, Cage operated a scrap business from Mr. Don Arques' property, took care of his own family, and — most importantly to us — became the godfather of the waterfront. For Lindsay, and us, this meant adding multitudes of brothers, sisters, and children to his family. Lindsay was 66 — not old, not young — but, during his time in Sausalito (since WWII), he became a living legend. Couples with problems, singles with problems, derelicts, anyone wanting some soul solace came to Lindsay. As Robbie Robison said, “you could hate yourself, and hate the world, and come to Lindsay — within 5 minutes, you would be healed and be able to face the world again.” This man had a gift of communication, love, and realism which transcends description. Lindsay, “The Junkman,” had not only a wealth of unusable (to some, but not all) objects, but a wealth of love. Lindsay Cage operated his scrap yard on the waterfront at Gate 3 for over 40 years. If you needed a new coil for your water heater, he could find it. “How about 15¢? If you don’t have it, pay me later.”

Although residential use of the waterfront was frowned upon, many children were born in the area and all became “Lindsay’s kids.” Never a Christmas went by without a present (up to 30 any given year) for waterfront children from Lindsay and his companion, Albertha. Never did a moment go by that a child couldn’t come to Lindsay and speak with him. Never could a child pass Lindsay without him giving a kid a piece of gum. (Lindsay loved dentists!)

Lindsay didn’t spend all of his time scrapping metal and buying Christmas presents for kids. He was the “Sage of Gate 3”, allowing all to come and discuss their problems with him. But all was not problems. Mr. Cage had an incredible wit and sense of humor. Lindsay to a rather rotund man, whilst patting his tummy, “What are you building, a steak graveyard?”

To a young child who was a few days remiss with an obligation, “bring your list back, you gotta learn how to conduct business as a young lady.” None of these really bring home to those that don’t know Lindsay how truly beautiful a person he was, and still remains in the hearts of those who knew him.

A legend in Sausalito has left us. Here we are, looking at his junkyard, fighting and being upset about office buildings and such. And Lindsay’s gone. Since the advent of development of Sausalito, many people didn’t know Lindsay if they lived south of Napa Street. Development was pushing him out, not fast, but his scene was going. He left us, lovingly and in a strong and noble way. On the day of his death, responding to a question of “how ya doin’? ” he retorted “still kickin', but not too high.” It’s up to us, we who received his legacy, to kick as high as we can.

The tribute included this contribution from an anonymous poet:

Thank you my friend for the thoughtful advice

for

when I was confused and unaware

the warm hand on my shoulder when I was afraid

the engineering genius when I was building my boat

the lift when I needed one over a ton

the dad when I never had one

the philosophy and wit to guide

and brighten my day

the eloquent dissertations on racism

and its role in modern society

the many materials from your

salvage yard to build our fishing boats and cooperative work shop

at Gate Three

and most of all thank you for all

the kindness and love you have given us all Mr. Cage

we will never forget you old friend

and will miss you now that you are

gone.

Today, Lindsay’s youngest son, Raymond, is the chief researcher for the Arques Historical Research Project, which has preserved hundreds of files and documents concerning Don Arques and his family’s waterfront properties, and their various shipyard enterprises. We’ll have more about the project, which is housed at Spaulding Marine Center at the foot of Gate 5 Road, in another column.

Not Just Another Tequila Sunrise

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

PHOTO FROM WWW.THETRIDENT.NET

Bobby Lazoff in his element at the Trident

June 19 was National Tequila Sunrise Day, and nowhere was that momentous occasion celebrated more righteously than here in Sausalito, where the modern version of the fruity cocktail was born.

Marin IJ Barfly columnist Jeff Burkhart reported on the origin of the colorful concoction for the National Geographic back in 2012: “The history of that drink is now pretty well documented. The name was invented at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel by Gene Sulit, but it was Billy Rice and Bobby Lozoff, two bartenders at the Trident restaurant in Sausalito, that reinterpreted that name into the drink that we know today.”

Lozoff recently told the website 7x7 how the drink went viral after a party at the Trident to kick off the Rolling Stones' 1972 U.S. tour: “The Stones were really hard to handle, so Bill [Graham] made arrangements to bring them into The Trident for a secure, intimate party. Keith Richards walked up to the bar and asked for a margarita, and I said, ‘Hey, have you ever tried this drink?’ And he went ‘Alcohol? I’ll try it.’ So I poured him the tequila sunrise, and you could sort of see the light go on in his head. Bingo. You don’t need a bartender to travel with you, just buy a bottle of Cuervo, a bottle of orange juice, and grenadine. So they picked it up and took it across the country, and called their tour the ‘cocaine and tequila sunrise tour.’ Then, The Eagles came out with ‘Just Another Tequila Sunrise.’ Tequila caught on, the sunrise caught on, and it was a big deal.”

The Eagles’ 1978 paean to the powers of the sweet-and-sour drink included the classic verse:

Take another shot of courage

Wonder why the right words never come

You just get numb

It's another tequila sunrise

This old world still looks the same

The drink’s cultural status even extended to Hollywood as the title of a 1988 American romantic crime film starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kurt Russell. The flick features a lot of drugs and tequila, and the sunrise cocktail appears to be anti-hero Gibson’s drink of choice, though it’s never mentioned by name. Kind of an uncredited appearance.

To commemorate the roughly 50th anniversary of the Stones’ adoption of the drink, the Trident and the Marin History Museum unveiled a historical marker last month. Members of the Sausalito Historical Society were honored to attend the festivities. SHS President Jerry Taylor commented: “It was an historic and delicious day.”

And what does co-inventor Bobby Lazoff think about his liquid legacy today? He told 7x7: “This is my personal opinion: Candy ass drinks suck. San Francisco is too hard drinking of a town to have silly drinks. The whole idea of this tequila sunrise was to keep it simple. If someone wants a candy ass drink where you can’t taste the alcohol, don’t drink alcohol.”

Local Prosperity During the Civil War

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

By 1865, California had been a state for 15 years, and was flourishing by all accounts. Here’s how the Marin Journal summed up the state of the state at that time:

The progress of the State in the development of all its resources, never was more steadily advancing than now.

Whatever may have been the effect of the war upon other parts of the country, California has not felt it to her hurt; and whether the conclusion of the struggle is to be sudden, or long deferred, we cannot see that our State is to be injured. Most fortunately we have preserved gold as the currency, and every value is marked in coin, so that we have avoided all the feverish changes growing out of a fluctuating and uncertain currency. The past season has been one of unusual dryness, and the agricultural interests have suffered severely; but this unparalleled season demonstrates the fact that we are not living from hand to mouth, but that the resources of our State are sufficient to carry us through one barren and unproductive year. The present rains are sufficient to give us the assurance of a prosperous harvest; and the mines will yield, this year, nearly double the amount in gold of previous seasons.

The discovery of silver in the Territory, now the State of Nevada, is just beginning to tell in favor of our State. Heretofore the draft has been against us for machinery and labor in the development of mines; the balance will be largely in our favor for the next ten months. Railroad interests have advanced with great rapidity. From San Francisco to San Jose, fifty-five miles of road is now in operation. The Sacramento Valley Road has made a branch connection with Freeport [just south of Sacramento] , some twelve or fifteen miles of new road. From Folsom, the terminus of the Sacramento Valley Road, a new Company, under the Presidency of Charles McLane, have built some twenty-three miles in the direction of El Dorado County. The California Central Road from Folsom to Lincoln is being extended under an organization known as the Yuba Railroad Company, Frank M. Pixley, President; the road partially graded; an agent now East buying iron; the road will be in running order to Marysville, a distance of twenty-three miles, by July next. The Northern California Railroad Company here takes up the work, and cars are now running to Oroville, a distance of twenty-nine miles. The Pacific Central Railroad is being pushed rapidly forward; thirty-one miles are now in operation, with a very large amount of ties and iron ready to be laid as soon as the grading can be done.

A recent decision of the Supreme Court secures the State guarantee of interest on $1,500.00 of their bonds. The same Court will give them $400,000 of bonds from San Francisco. The aid from the General Government, from the State and the various counties gives the Company about $11,000,000 Of available cash assets, and secures the prompt and energetic prosecution of the work. The President, Mr. Stanford, has drawn during the past week, $52,000 from the State Treasury, and, we are informed, will immediately place one thousand men upon the line of the work.

Our commercial affairs are not less prosperous and encouraging; the Pacific has not been disturbed by Confederate cruisers, and but few casualties have occurred to interrupt the trade with our port. Our coast trade has increased immensely during the past year.

The gold discoveries in Idaho; the new oil wells; coal and copper mines; the quicksilver mines, all show that our mineral resources are not only not exhausted, but are not yet fairly developed. The product of our own mines are increasing rather than diminishing. Foreign banking-houses are bringing from Europe the capital and facilities for business, and recognizing San Francisco as a moneyed centre. The establishment of a line of steamers to China will soon be brought about. With a Pacific Railroad and an Oriental Line, San Francisco becomes the centre of a vast business circumference. The Northern whaling fleet has made most of its outfit in our harbor this year, for the first time. Our State Treasury is plethoric with gold; our receipts exceed our expenditures; our coupons are paid in gold; State credit and most of our municipal credits stand well. Indeed, the whole aspect of our business affairs looks most rosy. The city of San Francisco is especially prosperous. Real estate, under the decision of the validity of the Specific Contract Law, has received a new impulse. The next season gives promise of very extensive dealings in real property, and very important improvements. Our merchants are in a healthy condition, and we venture the opinion that there is not a city in the United States where there there is more substantial property among its business men.

PHOTO FROM SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Following the gold rush, San Francisco Bay was teeming with tall ships