Family must bid for own diner after 73 years

The story gives the history of the restaurant from a shed opened in 1937 by Louis Hontalas, a Greek immigrant, and his wife Helen; how they worked and modestly improved the place over the years and then passed it on to their son who, in turn, passed it on to his two sons, Tom and Bill, how the land eventually became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and how, their initial lease being up, they must now bid to retain the restaurant – an unlikely prospect. We have similar stories up where I live, in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Louis' Restaurant Today

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As I mentioned in another post, in May of 1955 I started working as a dishwasher and general kitchen navvy in the diet kitchen of Mount Zion Hospital. There I became friends with Helen Hontalas, a diet clerk, which isn’t much above dishwasher in the workplace social hierarchy. She told me of her father, Louis, who was by that time either retired or half-retired, and her brother (named Danny as I recall, but I am not very confident of my memory here) who was now running the restaurant. The Hontalases were Cretan – I understand the name is quite common there – who differ in a number of respects from mainland Greeks. We would talk about the cultural differences, how Cretan bouzouki playing was unique (in New York, Chris Rohlfing, who was the designer at the U of Chicago’s University Theatre when I started there, had a collection of bouzouki records, which led to a great puzzle: in the middle of a Niagara of guitar notes the player would say something that sounded like “Yasha-ma-giddy” and we had no idea what it meant; Helen once told me but, of course, I can’t remember something like that) and, of course, the food! Terry and I were wild about Greek cooking (I just recently started buying completely unfiltered Greek olive oil again, via the net).

At one point I got onto the subject of cooking octopus and Helen said that Louis prepared wonderful octopus dishes. That started me requesting, nagging, pleading for Louis to cook octopus for us. There was always something wrong: the weather wasn’t right, the tides weren’t right, the moon wasn’t full or, much of the time Louis was at his little place in Sonoma rather than the house he shared with Helen in the Avenues.

After months of this, on a Sunday afternoon Terry and I were at the end of the pier in Santa Cruz where there was a very large fishermen’s market and there, on a deck scale, was a huge giant octopus. I asked the salesman if I could buy just a part of one and he said, “Sure, how much do you want?” Could I get just one tentacle? He picked up the end of one, wrapped it around his wrist a couple of times, lifted it to put tension on it and sliced off at the body. The tourists witnessing this backed all the way across the pier, almost falling into the drink. The one tentacle weighed nearly five pounds. I did what I knew to do with it. First I dipped it in boiling water for just a couple of minutes to loosen the skin, peeled it and pulled the suckers off (which were exactly like large union-suit buttons) and cut the meat into ¾” wheels. Then I fried it for a long time in olive oil with garlic and served. We chewed and chewed but couldn’t even get a piece to break, it just bounced around in the mouth. I actually swallowed one or two pieces whole. After we gave up, I tried to cut the pieces with my chef’s knife – no luck. The pieces had the consistency and durability of handballs.

I told Helen about this culinary disaster and she said she would consult Louis about it. Louis told her you have to take the raw tentacle down in the basement, wrap the small end around your wrist and then swinging from the hips slam the tentacle on the concrete floor no less than fifty times. Then you do all the rest. The sad story did accomplish one thing though, it caused Louis to relent and he invited us over for dinner – but it wouldn’t be octopus, the moon wasn’t full.

I mentioned that Louis liked to spend a lot time at his Sonoma cottage but not just to look at the mustard flowers, he had a purpose and work to do. In the back he had a small field of grape vines. He grew his own grapes, crushed them, made wine and then distilled the wine into very high powered grappa. To this he added oil of anise (and maybe a little water? I doubt it somehow) and made his own authentic home-made ouzo. How strong was it? Maybe 120 proof, maybe 140, maybe more – who could tell? When we got to the Hontalas’ house there, on the coffee table was a little pump bottle with six glasses hanging from it and a pitcher of ice water. You made a drink by pouring a little ice water in a glass and then pumping in some ouzo which immediately produces a white cloud in the glass (like anisette, for the same reason). The more we drank of these Greek a-bombs the livelier Louis got despite his age (which must have been near 70 at the time) until he was finally performing Greek dances from the deep squatting position – it was some show.

Then came dinner: a great bowl of home-made dolmades, log-piles of fresh asparagus (perhaps from his own garden), rice, or some such, and some meat, almost certainly lamb, I just don’t remember. We especially indulged ourselves with the asparagus (which wasn’t so commonly available then) and the dolmades and went home quite drunk to sleep it all off.

Years later, as I thought back on this incident and about the next morning, as I stood over the toilet, the emanations from the anise and the asparagus rising from the surface, I said to myself “Caryl Chessman had it easy!”

POST SCRIPT OCTOBER 20, 2010

Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle had this front page story:

The family that has run a beloved old-style diner on the western edge of San Francisco for seven decades will get to keep the restaurant, but will have to jettison many of its old ways.

The Hontalas family, whose sweat over 73 years made Louis’ Restaurant a city landmark, beat out three other bidders for a new 10-year lease on the property, according to the National Park Service, which owns the land.

The deal means the oceanside eatery will remain in the hands of the descendants of founder Louis Hontalas, a Greek immigrant who opened the place on Point Lobos Avenue during the Great Depression to help make ends meet.

“People are happy because this is their place too,” said Tom Hontalas, 52, of Pacifica, who runs the business with his brother Bill. “The support we’ve had over the past few months has been great.”

The landmark will now have to close on Dec. 1 for renovations that are expected to take four months. When it reopens, the homey, chew-the-fat-with-your-buddies atmosphere might very well come with a higher price, and less fat, thanks to federal requirements.

The competitive bidding process was a tense affair because it opened up the possibility that some out-of-town big shot would throw out a family that has owned the restaurant for the better part of a century.

The possibility was hard for many loyal patrons to swallow. A Louis’ Restaurant Facebook page attracted nearly 3,000 supporters, most of whom signed a petition urging the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which acquired the property in 1973, to renew the Hontalases’ lease.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/19/BACG1FUAIJ.DTL#ixzz12wAX5Sxw

In the post I said that I was unable to figure out where Abbazia was but that I thought it might be on the Adriatic coast. I was thinking of Italy, perhaps north of Venice. On February 11th, 2010 I received this Comment, which has been posted with the story:

Your hunch was right, it is the Adriatic!

Abbazia is the Italian (and Hungarian) name for Opatija, a resort lying on the Gulf of Kvarner (Quarnero). It’s in Croatia now, but in 1939 the region was a part of Italy (it was ceded to Yugoslavia after World War II).

Until the end of WWI, Abazzia had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a stylish resort and very popular among Hungarians – even in the interwar period. Nowadays it’s known for its old-world charm. It’s beautiful!
Andy Gane
Budapest

I sent this reply to Andy’s Comment:
I would never have guessed. It is one of those small things that gnaw on your mind. It’s a great relief to have the answer.
Roger Kovach

And then followed it with this note:
Just did some map reading: Opatija looks like it is near what used to be Fiume which I think is now Rijeka. Is that right?
Roger Kovach

Whereupon Andy explained the history:
Yes, that’s right. As you doubtless know, at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fiume (Rijeka) was Hungary’s main port. The rail connection from Budapest to Fiume was excellent, and the tourists then went on to Abbazia (which actually lay in the Austrian half of the Empire, the border was just between the two places). Of course, between the two world wars the area belonged to Italy, but I imagine the rail connection from Budapest was still a direct one. Nowadays you have to change trains in Zagreb!!! I also have some old postcards from Abbazia (Opatija). I’ve spent several vacations just south of the resort, in a place called Moscenicka Draga. It’s a beautiful coast (it’s called the Liburnia Riviera), with pebble beaches, crystal-clear water, and a steep wooded mountain (Ucka, or Monte Maggiore) behind you.

I very much enjoyed reading about Erno.

Best wishes
Andy

I then used Google maps to get a better idea of the layout of all of these places. First, a wide view of the area:

Trieste is towards the upper left, Abbazia (Opatija) is the tagged place and Rijeka (Fiume) is a little below and right of Opatija.  Venice is around the bend on the upper left, south and west of this view.

This is a closer view of the Liburnian Riviera:

To  amplify Andy’s history a bit: Trieste and Fiume were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trieste was Austrian and Fiume was awarded to Hungary in 1870. Both were mainly Croatian in populace, culture and commercial significance and were competitors for much of their shipping business.  Fiume was Hungary’s only access to the sea and Trieste was Austria’s main port. (My grandfather, Peter Kovach took the Ultonia from Fiume on October 25th 1906 with his wife and three children, the eldest being my five year old father, landing at Ellis Island. I have a copy of the ship’s manifest, thanks to the wonderful Ellis Island Museum.)

After World War I Trieste was given to Italy (one of the Allied powers during the war) and Fiume was given to Croatia as part of the newly formed Yugoslavia. Almost noone was happy about this arangement. Gabriele D’Annunzio led a famous attempt to capture Fiume for Italy in 1919 and Hungary was bitter over its loss. (My other grandfather, even after the second World War fumed over the loss of Fiume (pun intended)).

Here’s the souvenir postcard that Andy sent:

Morrie Mink, MD Otolaryngologist

I first met him in 1955 shortly after I started working at Mount Zion Hospital and he opened a practice across the street from the hospital. Our connection was my sister Joanne. At the time Morrie was the medical adviser to the San Francisco Association of the Deaf, the local chapter (it may have been the Bay Area Chapter – that is what it is called today) of the California Association of the Deaf, which, in turn was the state branch of the National Association of the Deaf. Joanne was the President of the SFAD at the time and Morrie was a great admirer of her efforts and her personality. Both Joanne and I also had occasion to seek his medical services.

I have one amusing story to tell about Morrie. Robin Sweeney, who had been chief surgical nurse at Mt. Zion and later was a member of the Sausalito City Council for a couple of terms followed by Mayor of Sausalito (after Sally Stanford), rented a Japanese style cottage on Dogwood Road in Bolinas when we were also renting there in the early ‘60s. One Sunday Robin invited us over for drinks and snacks. Also there was Morrie.

I started to tell a bout a new album of comic monologues by Bill Cosby (who was of special interest to me because his brother-in-law worked with me at the Naval Supply Center). There was one about “Oops!” that particularly caught my fancy. Cosby talks about certain words that let you know what is coming next. For example, if a busboy goes past your table with a big tray piled high with dirty dishes and you hear him say “Oops!,” you know what is coming next. Cosby then imagines he is lying on an operating table, under only a local anesthetic, when one of the surgeons says “Oops!”

After I recounted that, Morrie said “Don’t make jokes! Don’t make jokes about that.” At the time Morrie was a volunteer medical consultant to San Quentin Prison. His duties mainly consisted of going to the prison once a month to oversee the work of a young otolaryngologist doing part of his residency there. On one occasion there was a huge murderer needing to have a small cyst or wart removed from his outer ear. As the young doctor went about his work, he suddenly said, “Oops!” The con asked in a very menacing tone “Wuddaya mean ‘Oops’? Morrie quickly interjected “Oh, it’s nothing, nothing – I just dropped one of my instruments.”

(A footnote of sorts: about thirty years later I underwent a rather similar experience. A young cardiologist was performing an angioplasty on me when he suddenly let out a low-key squeal of fear, saying “I think I tore it”.  His older overseer reassured him that everything was OK, to just finish the procedure. I was never sure whether there was some minor damage that just healed itself or not.)

Fred Dutton

This got me to reminiscing about some of the entertaining incidents that arose in my very few contacts with the Regents. One of the perks of my job was being occasionally allowed to attend a meeting of the Board. Four of them are fastened in my memory.

At one meeting the location of which escapes me, probably the Regents’ own meeting room in University Hall where I worked, the Vice President in charge of physical plant, Joe Something, had a couple of presentations on the progress of some ongoing construction projects. The first had to do with some remodeling or expansion of Roadhouse Hall, the dairying school on the Davis campus. The VP went on and on with all the details and complications, work schedules and so on. When he was finished there was an awkward pause while the Board members tried to come up with a question or a comment. Then Catherine Hearst (who was head of the Audit Committee, believe it or not) asked “Does it have to be called ‘Roadhouse’ Hall?” The VP answered, “Professor Chester Roadhouse was one of the most widely known and respected members of the Davis faculty who taught dairying there for more than thirty years.” “Oh.”

Professor Chester Linwood Roadhouse

Then the VP took up the subject of a new project, still in the planning and preliminary phases, a Chimpanzee building on the lagoon of the Santa Barbara campus. This one was fraught with environmental problems and therefore, legal problems because of the site selected, the edge of the lagoon, and putting together the required EIR was posing a lot difficulties. After an exhaustive and exhausting exposition of all of this the VP concluded and awaited questions and comments. Once again, after a pause, Catherine Hearst asked, “Does it have to be called the ‘Chimpanzee’ building?” “You know, the same question occurred to me, so I called up Professor So-and-so and he said ‘Yes, Goddamn it! They’re not simians, they’re not primates, they’re not anthropoid apes, they are Goddamned Chimpanzees!’” “Oh.”  

Catherine Hearst at the time of Patty's kidnapping

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In the midst of the student uprisings (I think in 1970) the Regents held several meetings in an auditorium of the UC Extension campus on Laguna Street in San Francisco. This was done so that the Board could avoid the unpleasantness of confronting crowds of students shooting their pictures with Hasselblads and Nikons (described in my post “Above and Beyond …”). The room had a stage and arena seating. The Board sat around a large table on the stage running almost the entire stage width.

One meeting I attended there featured a presentation by Verne Orr, Reagan’s Director of Finance (after being the director of the DMV) and personal factotum. He was perfect for the job being a natural born bureaucrat, capable of carrying out long-running boring and trivial tasks and seeming to be devoid of ego. Reagan had a bug up about the Governor having a lower salary not only than the President of the University but of more than a hundred other university staff members. Most of these were professors in the medical schools who commanded movie star wages but they also included Edward Teller who held two chairs simultaneously and others of that sort.

Orr appeared, set up an easel with flip charts on it and distributed hand-outs containing the same material as the charts. One regent who was missing at the start of the meeting was Edward Carter, former chair of the Board, CEO of Broadway-Hale Stores (formerly called Carter-Hawley-Hale Stores), on a dozen or more boards of major banks, Pacific Tel and Tel and other prominent corporations, a major power broker and huge contributor to the Republican Party, leader of the right wing faction (along with his pal Ed Pauley) of the Regents (such as the group that was the toughest opposition to the Free Speech Movement in 1964) and so on.

After Orr had been droning on for about ten minutes Carter, attired in at least a thousand bucks worth of dark brown Italian suiting, made an intrusive appearance, crossed to the middle of the downstage side of the table and took a seat, so that his back was to the audience. He was a big man, very wide of back and seemed to fill half the stage aperture. He started going through the handout to catch up to where Orr’s flip charts were. Orr stood silent as Carter flipped each page up with a loud enough snap to be heard in the back of the auditorium – Snap! Snap! Snap! When he caught up, he asked in a very aggressive tone, “Verne what is this all about? What’s your point?” Orr started mumbling something about governor …  president … salaries … Carter interrupted “Excuse me Verne. If the Governor has issues about his salary, it is the State’s problem, not the University’s.” Orr stood silent for a moment looking defeated and perplexed, meekly folded his easel and left.

Two other meetings stick in my mind because of the appearances of the governors of the time. I think the first was also in the San Francisco UC Extension theater during the height of student protests over the Viet Nam war when Reagan was governor.

The Governor of California is a member of the Board of Regents by virtue of his state office but, as a rule rarely attends meetings for a number of reasons not least being that it would take too much time to be both informed and a participant in the complex considerations involved in governing a major university. They usually handle the matter by appointing friends and political allies to the board and relying on them to represent the governor and keep him informed.  Pat Brown’s appointees Fred Dutton and Bill Coblentz are good examples of this approach.

On the occasion in question, Reagan made a grand appearance, striding down the aisle of the auditorium with his retinue behind, making an attention commanding commotion as befits the Great Governor of a Great State. What was really astonishing though was his appearance. He was in full Max Factor make-up, a bright rosy color, with his well coiffed hair dyed a rich chocolate brown, apparently wanting look just so for the evening TV news broadcasts. It was like having a street mime in attendance. Everyone in the room pretended not to notice.

The other gubernatorial appearance I remember was early in 1975, the first Regents’ meeting after Jerry Brown was elected, when he introduced himself and his philosophy to the rest of the board. He proceeded to tell everyone there how to run a university. Mouths were agape at the arrogance and the snotty manner. I don’t know whether he ever attended another meeting but I’m sure he wasn’t missed. That scene has left me with a deep distaste for Jerry Brown; I never voted for him again for anything and find the possible or probable prospect of his becoming Governor again rather depressing.

New Governor Jerry Brown 1975

Management Seminars

Another perk of my job was a standing invitation to the President’s management seminars which, I believe, were held about monthly, though probably not the year around, in the Regent’s Meeting Room in University Hall. These were always very interesting and often entertaining to boot. I’ll recount a few that stand out in my memory.

Angus Taylor was, at the time, Vice President for Academic Affairs. His career with the university was as a teacher of mathematics for many years at UCLA. He wrote a fairly successful calculus text with much of its sales coming from UC campuses (support your neighborhood professor!). (In my father’s day the most popular calculus text was Love’s. In my youth it was Granville’s. After that it was Thomas’ and I think these days it’s probably Strang’s – the last two were from MIT which gives their texts a lot of “clout”. While I am on this digression, I have to bring up my favorite trivia item: who invented the textbook? Answer at the end of this post.)

In 1963-1964, Angus Taylor was chair of the statewide Academic Assembly and Academic Council of the Senate and, as such, was deeply involved in resolving the contentious issues brought forward by the Free Speech Movement. Taylor was one of the very few involved who emerged from the episode with an enhanced reputation. It was the Academic Senate’s simple, reasonable proposal which became the basis of a compromise between the hard-shell Regents (Carter, Pauley, Hearst, et al) and the FSM that ended the conflict. This, in part, led to his appointment as Vice President. Not long before I left Taylor was appointed University Provost by Hitch’s successor, David Saxon, but left that post to become acting chancellor and then chancellor at UC Santa Cruz, where he completed his career, once again receiving accolades for a successful reorganization and administration.

Angus Taylor was almost a caricature of the beloved professor – he was charming, engaging, interesting and interested in all he encountered – intensely loved by faculty, students and administrators.

For the life of me, I cannot recall the subject of his presentation that day. What I do remember was that he circulated around the audience a pair of pitons, for he was an enthusiastic climber of mountains all over the world. The first part of his presentation had to do with a famous incident he was involved in about a year earlier. He was in a Swiss cable car which had gotten stuck mid-flight hundreds of feet above an Alpine gorge. It took something like twenty-four or more hours for rescuers to get the passengers down safely. His account had the audience alternately holding its breath and rolling with laughter. 

Angus Taylor as Emeritus Professor, VP and Chancellor

William Coblentz was a very successful, fast-talking, witty and personable real estate lawyer to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights set who was something of a celebrity (often showing up in Herb Caen’s column, for instance). He was also the favorite lawyer for San Francisco’s numerous rock-and-roll musicians – which I will explain later. His “presentation” was personal, anecdotal, apparently completely impromptu and funny.

One of his stories was about an encounter with a grungy student in Sproul Plaza who said “You’re Bill Coblentz that smart rich Jew San Francisco lawyer Regent, aren’t you?”  Coblentz said “I wasn’t sure just what the charge was, so I thought it best to plead guilty.”

Coblentz said being the lawyer to a great number of rock stars had its difficulties, often involving more than business services, but on balance he considered it a good thing because it made him a hero to his adolescent daughters. He explained how it all came about. Bill Graham had been one of his clients for a couple of years, initially brought to him by another client who was a promoter. One day Graham appeared with a young woman singer (Grace Slick – Coblentz was very careful not to use her name but I knew who it was). When introduced to Coblentz by Graham she went up to him and asked, “Gettin’ enough?” Here too he wasn’t sure what the question was but thought it better to say yes.

A couple of years and a large number of performer-clients later a new one appeared and Coblentz finally decided to ask why he had come. The new client said Grace had highly recommended Coblentz saying she has this really cool lawyer who drops acid.

When we lived on the “big mesa” of Bolinas there was a property nearby, containing a house and an old barn, that had a sign at the driveway saying “Coblentz.” Also, while we were at that location Grace Slick and Paul Kantner bought the house at the beach entrance at the west end of Brighton Avenue which was originally built in the 1920s by Marin Pepper as a teahouse, serving the beach goers of the day.

Grace and Paul did some remodeling of the house, added a big gazebo for rehearsing, double-glazed for noise suppression, in the surrounding yard and a large, irregularly shaped swimming pool. The pool, bottom and sides and its surrounds, was completely covered with a mosaic (depicting what, I do not know) which took well over a year to create. (In the small world department: several years later my son and I went to a tire sale at the Cow Palace and the long-haired hippie salesman assigned to us asked where we were from and when we told him Bolinas he said he was the guy who did the tiling.) 

The "Jefferson Airplane house" today. Note the camera is so good the diving board is visible.

 
She became pregnant while living here and when asked by the old ladies she encountered at the post office or village store what she was going to name the baby she said ”God” just to stir them up. (This anecdote is incorrectly related elsewhere as happening in the hospital and being said to an obstetric nurse.) Not long after the baby, a girl named China, was born they bought a house in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood and sold the Brighton Avenue house. A few years later a big winter storm sent waves crashing over the sea wall that carried off the gazebo. I think the pool tiling was damaged as well.

After his presentation I went up to Coblentz and told him that I lived near his Bolinas property. “Not mine – my wife’s – I hate Bolinas.” Then I mentioned the Slick-Kantner house and he seemed to get genuinely angry (he is a real estate lawyer, remember) and said, “They sold that house for half what it was worth!”

A few years later Coblentz was Catherine Hearst’s lawyer during her daughter Patty’s kidnapping ordeal.

William Coblentz

When Earl Cheit spoke to the Management Seminar he was between jobs, being no more than a mere professor in the Haas School of Business. To see what I mean just look at his list of posts given on the School’s website:
At Haas since 1957
            1993 – 94 Interim Athletic Director, Intercollegiate Athletic and
            Recreational Sports, University of California, Berkeley
            1990 – 91 Acting Dean, Haas School of Business
            1976 – 82 Dean, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
          1981 – 82 Acting Vice President, Financial and Business
                         Management, UC Berkeley (I think this should read
                         “University-wide” – author)
            1965 – 69 Executive Vice Chancellor, UC Berkeley

Cheit was one of the “good guys” in the Free Speech Movement uprising in 1964, Chairman of the Faculty Component of the Committee on Campus Political Activity which took the position that the University had no right to limit students’ off-campus political participation (which agreed with the ACLU and UC attorney Cunningham). Cheit put forth a proposal for the CCPA which was supported by the Academic Senate and agreed to by the students only to have it rebuffed by the intransigent administration. In the end something very like it was proponed by the Academic Senate (see Angus Taylor above) and finally accepted (with added requirements regarding “punishing” the Sproul Hall sit-ins). Cheit was a member of the committee which met with Clark Kerr and the regents in Los Angeles on December 18, 1964 which led to the denouement of the FSM affair. He also was on the search committee that found Roger Heyns to be the new Berkeley Chancellor.

On January 2, 1965 the Regents finally terminated Edward Strong as Chancellor at Berkeley. The next day Earl Cheit notified Alex Sherriffs, Strong’s Vice-chancellor for Student Affairs (described somewhere as “rabidly anti-communist” which had a lot to do with the odd behavior of the administration) that he was to join Strong. This is a passage from an oral history interview of Alex Sherriffs years later:

Sherriffs
So I went out when Roger [W.] Heyns was coming in as chancellor and Earl [F.] Cheit was setting up the palace guard and so on

Rowland
Did you resign?

Sherriffs
Well, Cheit came to me and he said, “This afternoon we’re having a staff meeting and I’m going to announce that you’re resigning.” [pause] I said, “Is this your idea? Is it Roger Heyns’ or is it Clark Kerr’s?” And he wouldn’t answer me. I said, “Well, that’s enough of an answer. I’m tired of empty in-baskets. I think I can do something better for the cause than sit here anyway, so go ahead. Announce it.” Then Cheit said, “Let’s have lunch.” So we had lunch and he said, “You should have six months to get caught up so you can go back to teaching with a fresh start, and so forth.” I didn’t feel hostile. He was doing what he was supposed to do. Actually, I didn’t want to be somebody’s vice chancellor who didn’t want me. I had been somebody’s vice chancellor who didn’t want me because there was a war going on and nobody seemed to know who was on what side: I refer to the
Meyerson episode. 

In the Management Seminar Cheit was lively and spirited and his talk was lively and spirited – all done ex tempore, of course (in case you haven’t noticed, professors are usually great talkers). He talked about university administration issues from an economist’s viewpoint which often appeared as insights. I remember that he spent a lot of time on the subject of Berkeley’s tenure rate, the proportion of faculty that was tenured which also would be the probability of tenure for a new appointee. He said that Harvard’s rate was something like twenty-five percent, Oxford’s five percent and Berkeley’s seventy-five percent! Each year the average age of Berkeley’s faculty increased by nearly a full year. At the time Cal’s pay scale was comparable to other universities of similar size and stature so a high tenure rate wasn’t needed for recruiting and Cheit felt it was a real threat to the quality of the staff. I don’t know what the situation is today.

After the presentation as people were leaving I overheard a number of the conversations of members of the audience saying that they wished Cheit would be the next University President. Alas, it was not to be.

Earl Cheit

Bob Adams was an econometrician who transferred from Berkeley to Santa Cruz in the first round of appointments to Crown College, third of the colleges to be established (after Cowell and Stevenson). Crown was to be the science college at Santa Cruz much like San Diego is the science university of the UC system. He was a cranked up sort, very emotional and obsessed with the tensions that existed between the collegial (or English) and the departmental (or German) models of a university. He kept referring to his job at Crown as “intense”. He said his bedroom window looked across a field toward the college and that he couldn’t stand to wake up in the morning and have that as his first sight – so he kept the shade drawn.

He said that in Berkeley his office was in a building full of economists (think of it!), that his friends were all economists and that his social life, dinner parties and the like, was also exclusively with economists. When he got to Crown his office was on the ground floor with a window and exit right onto the courtyard and in the neighboring office was a professor of English who specialized in eighteenth century English poetry. Adams said that to his surprise he found his neighbor to be quite intelligent and rather good company. He made a number of other funny and witty remarks along the way and had the audience in complete sympathy with his problem: how to combine departmental and collegial affiliations.

After the meeting I went up to him and told of the organization of the Iroquois nations. Each Iroquois was a member of a tribe and of a clan or longhouse. The clans crossed all the nations and each nation contained all the longhouses. Among other things this made war between member nations impossible. I suggested this was analogous to being a member of a department and of a college.

It turned out Adams’ problem was nearly universal at UCSC and a rather serious one to boot. Dealing with it led to an administrative shake-up and the appointment of Angus Taylor chancellor of UCSC. There is an “In Memoriam” document on the web signed, among others, by Clark Kerr and Fred Balderston, which contains this passage:
“…But there was a cluster of issues concerning the relationships at UC Santa Cruz between the colleges and the boards of studies (i.e. academic departments – author). Built into the original campus design was a commitment to have a significant portion (originally, 50 percent) of faculty positions controlled by the colleges and to have the colleges offer some courses in-house.
  
Conflict over control of faculty appointments and course assignments was, in effect, built into the initial academic design of the campus. Many courses that would be given as high-enrollment courses at other University campuses were organized small-scale at UC Santa Cruz. …”

Months later I had an interesting and amusing encounter with Adams again but it takes some setting up, some background, to tell it.

UC Santa Cruz had a campus computing facility like all the others, but it was pitifully underpowered. When University-wide (U Hall) was given the IBM 360 model 65 that had been at Santa Barbara we sent our puny IBM 360 model 40 to Santa Cruz. (The Santa Barbara 65 was famous. It was held hostage for a couple of days by a black student group who were photographed waving a stilson wrench over one of the memory boxes. The students said they were grabbing the man by his computer.)

The titular head of the campus computing center was Harry Huskey who had been an engineering professor at Berkeley for many years, one of the pioneers in building computers (e.g. SWAC) and one of the early presidents of the Association for Computing Machinery and who was nearing retirement. Huskey’s primary function was to lend prestige to the facility. The actual operation and administration was left to Marshall Sylvan, a young lecturer in statistics from Stanford. Among the well known users of the computer center were William McKeeman and Franklin Deremer also from Stanford and near contemporaries of Marshall’s. They were involved in some rather advanced work involving compilers (“compiler compilers” for example) and would seem to have required better computer service than was available at Santa Cruz.

On the next block west of University Hall on University Avenue there was a discount “drug store” that I called the schlock shop. It had the broadest spectrum of crap imaginable – I don’t remember whether there actually was a pharmacist or not. I used to go there to get cigarettes cheaply (I quit thirty years ago). On the day of this story I went to the schlock shop and bumped into Marshall Sylvan. I guess I was in a puckish humor and started teasing him. I asked how he was managing with our hand-me-down feeble 360/40. Before he could finish saying how he was managing I fired another question: how could he meet the requirements of people like McKeeman and Deremer? He said something about having a Burroughs but again before he could finish I asked: what are you doing with wild men like McKeeman and Deremer at that hippie college anyhow?

At this point Bob Adams, whom I hadn’t noticed before, put his face between mine and Marshall’s and said, “I know this isn’t the true measure of a university’s quality, that it should be measured by the value added to its products, the students …” (I love it! He is lampooning his own field, mocking himself.) “still, such things do count for something: did you know there are more fellows of the National Academy of Sciences at Santa Cruz than there are at Ann Arbor?” “No, Bob, I didn’t know that.”

 ***********

The answer to the trivia question is William Whiston, Isaac Newton’s successor to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge. He studied mathematics under Newton and was chosen by Newton to be his successor. He had a prodigious output of books, papers and broadsides in mathematics, theology and history. He contributed to a number of scientific and technical problems (such as the famous longitude problem). Today he is best remembered for his translation of Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews which is still in print. I have a two hundred year old edition I found in a bookstall on University Place in New York.

Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews 1806 edition of Whiston's translation

In a book on algebra Whiston broke the subject up into lessons and provided problems to be worked by the student, the first book ever in this form.

Author’s note: I have been granted permission by the Bancroft and UC Berkeley Libraries to limited use of material contained in their oral history transcripts according to the usual rules of the Fair Use doctrine.

Charles O'Brien - Chief Deputy Attorney General, California

I was acquainted with Charles exactly fifty years before and the occasion for that acquaintance and associated events have some historical interest. The fabric of the story involves a number of threads which I will take up one at a time and try to weave together: Marianne Evans, Leo Dardarian, my time at Mount Zion Hospital, Bert Feinstein, the 1958 California Democratic Convention, Stanley Mosk and Dianne Berman.

Beginnings

Marianne Evans was born in June of 1928 in Longview, Washington, an interesting variant of a classical mill town on the Columbia River. She grew up there and attended local schools through her sophomore year in high school. She then entered the University of Chicago under the early entry program started by Robert Maynard Hutchins who felt most high schools were simply a waste of time. She was housed in Kelly Hall and was part of a loose clique that included Terry Flambert and Molly Bower (see the post about Satish Gujral). After Terry and I married in 1948 we had less association with Kelly Hall and lost touch with other women in the dormitory. During that time Marianne was dating Leo Dardarian. 
 
After graduating from the U of Chicago, Marianne went back to the west coast. She took a job teaching for a year or two in an elementary school in Dunsmuir, California on the upper Sacramento River, a situation somewhat similar to Longview.

Marianne Evans Dardarian in the 1950s

Leo Dardarian was born December 23, 1926, in Buffalo, New York. His Armenian father was a child refugee from the Turkish attempted genocide, sent from his village by his parents under the cover of darkness in 1915.  In Niagara Falls, NY he became the owner of two restaurants and his son grew up learning the trade from early childhood. Leo was drafted toward the end of WW II, taught basic Japanese by the Army and served a year and a half in Occupied Japan. At the U of C he was associated with a group whose members I barely knew (one of them was Charlie Einstein, son of “Parkyakarkas” of Eddie Cantor Show fame, and prolific sports and mystery writer; Charlie’s son David writes a very nice technology advice column in the San Francisco Chronicle; Charlie’s half-brothers Albert Brooks and Dave Osborne are famous Hollywood actor/writers).
 
I am rather vague on the next part of the story. I believe Leo went out to Dunsmuir and proposed marriage (or, perhaps, it was done long distance), that Marianne and Leo lived in Niagara Falls while he managed his father’s restaurants and had their two daughters, Wendy and Nancy there. They moved to Allston Way in the West Portal District of San Francisco in late 1954 or early 1955. (I remember one cute story about their move: when five year old Wendy first saw their new home she said, “This is a nice neighborhood, Daddy”; when Leo asked why she said that, she replied, “No dog doo”; apparently she had a penchant for stepping in it.)
 
Almost as soon as the Dardarians moved into the West Portal neighborhood Marianne got involved with the local Democratic political club which served the west side of San Francisco. There was a young woman who was prominent in that group that earned considerable admiration and praise from Marianne: Diane Berman, wife of a well known lawyer, Jack Berman (who subsequently became a Superior Court judge, appointed by Jerry Brown).
 
Not long after arriving in S.F. Leo took the position of Food Service Manager at Mount Zion Hospital. It is likely that arrangements for him to take this job had been made before the family moved here. It was then that Marianne and Terry got together again and I first met Leo. I had been having a rough time trying to find employment in San Francisco so Leo arranged for me to start at the bottom in Mount Zion’s food service department.

Leo Dardarian in a publicity picture for a staff art show

(This photo is from a Mt. Zion Hospital staff newletter page about an annual art show. This show was installed by Barbara Ruthman an accomplished artist herself {Chicago Art Institute} who is at the left in the top right and lower left pictures below. About three years later she became my wife – our fiftieth anniversary was March 2, 2009.)

My time at Mount Zion began on April 18, 1955 which was the forty-ninth anniversary of the Great Quake and Fire and the date of Albert Einstein’s death. I was assigned to the dish room in the kitchen, working the cleanup from all three meals. The small chamber with limited ventilation contained a huge, thunderous, steam belching machine – it was the ante-chamber to Hell. I learned a lot about the social workings of people in such agonizing situations and came to have deep respect for their way of dealing with hopeless lives and prospects. Some time I will try to describe the people and how they lived in another post.
 
After about a year I was “promoted” to manager of the employees’ cafeteria which was in the basement down the hall from the kitchen. As manager I was really a fill-in for all the other employees when they had their days off or were absent for sickness or whatever. Leo would come in and shout down the length of the service line, “Roger, who are you today?” and I would answer, “Charlie” or “Helen” or “Iola”.
 
In this position I became familiar not only with all the employees of hospital and all the residents and interns but also with nearly all the visiting medical staff. One oddity was that I grew to know all the medics names, mostly from the announcements over the PA system, and I knew all their faces from seeing them in the cafeteria but often did not know which name went with which face.
 
The job was just as dreary as the previous one, just not as physically punishing, so I did little things to lighten the atmosphere. Sometimes, when I was Charlie, the cashier, I would paste little bulletins on the side of the cash register designed to pull medical legs. In one case I wrote “Proctology is not a medical specialty, it is a point of view” (this in the best tradition of medical humor which is often fairly crude, especially for proctology; for example, “what is the definition of a proctoscope?” “a long tube with an asshole at either end”; some others: “what’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? An enzyme is quiet”; a variant on that is, “what is the definition of a hormone? if you can make one you don’t need one”). 
 
Once, after Terry and I had made a Sunday visit, our first, to the Stanford University campus, the old main building of which I thought uncommonly ugly, I made up a mock petition filled with whereas-es asserting that the school was a depressant of local property values, an aesthetic atrocity, a blight on the landscape and so on, followed by a be-it-resolved that the buildings be torn down forthwith. I put this on a clip-board and the next day that I was Helen (steam-table server) I handed it to each doctor coming through. Most took it in the right spirit, some even agreeing, but to my surprise some thought it was serious. Many of the psychiatric residents had some connection with Stanford (they “did” women and children at Mt. Zion and did men at the VA hospital in Palo Alto which served as a Stanford teaching hospital) and one of them, after reading the petition said, “Are you crazy!?”, which still breaks me up (psychiatrists are not supposed to use that word).
 
Bert Feinstein Returns:  A year or so after I started working at Mt. Zion an excited buzz went through all the halls with people in all sorts of jobs telling others “Bert is back – go to the Post Street side of the hospital”. I did as instructed and found what seemed to be the entire staff on the steps and the sidewalks with much laughing and chattering going on. It was a remarkable sight: the entire block of Post Street between Scott and Divisadero had been cleared of cars and the traffic blocked and there, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the block, was a fire-engine-red Mercedes 300SL with its gull-wing doors up.

A 1955 Mercedes 300SL

The background to this incident to the best of my recollection was this. Bert loved cars. He was steeped in the 1950s English sports car craze, little plaid peaked cap, long scarf wrapped around the neck, the whole bit, but he didn’t drive a trite MG, he had an Aston Martin convertible.

A 1954 Aston-Martin covertible driven by Tippi Hedren on a street in Bodega Bay in Hitchcock's "The Birds"

Bert had converted from his previous profession, experimental neurology, to neurosurgery under a famous master in Sweden (see the Ben Libet pages at the end of this post). A short time before I started at Mt. Zion Bert was sent on a federal grant back to Sweden to learn about their continuous monitoring neurosurgery suites. At the time there was only one like it in the United States, at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Bert learned about the design, construction and operation of the facility and the neurosurgical methods that were required for its use. This surgery was then constructed at Mt Zion. The entire facility was mounted on springs to protect it from earthquakes and more ordinary vibrations. It had a separate monitoring room where a technician observed the readouts from a number of diagnostic instruments and relayed his findings to the surgeon – a very advanced facility in its time.

Bert had a partner in his practice at that time named Grant Levin. The story goes that Grant said to Bert when he left for Sweden, “Don’t you dare come back without bringing me a chick-wagon like yours” (Bowdlerization provided by the author) – hence the scene at the beginning of this section.

Grant Levin (in Army uniform - from a WW II photograph)

There is one small incident involving myself and Bert that sticks in my memory. The medical staff at Mt. Zion was broadly divided into two large groups, an older, politically and medically conservative set and their younger, liberal opposition. The big face-off came every year with the election of the Chief of Staff. The hospital hosted a medical staff dinner and the voting followed dessert. On the occasion in question, after years of frustration, one of the young liberal group, Jack Gordon (an internist and my own primary), won the seat. Although Bert was older than most of the liberals, he was firmly with them. That night I was working swing shift and came across Bert in the hallway. He was carrying a paper cup of whiskey, spilling a little, and was, as they say, feeling no pain (this calls to mind all the old burlesque routines of the brain surgeon with a hangover). He raised his cup as in a toast and said, “See? Once in a while the good guys can win”.

The Middle

{In the process of trying to fill in the gaps and correct the errors of my previous account of the 1958 Democratic campaign for Atorney General I learned several disconcerting things in adition to how erroneous my account was. First the transcripts from the State’s oral history interviews for Mosk, O’Brien and Zirpoli almost seem to be about different sets of events. Mosk doesn’t mention O’Brien in remembering the campaign; O’Brien doesn’t mention Leo and Zirpoli also doesn’t mention Charles. This has more to do wih the vagaries of memory (and, perhaps, some clandestine motives) than anything else. In addition to those frustrations, there is a baffling lack of documentation about the ’58 AG campaign everywhere. When I am able to produce a more coherent account I will update this section.}

From the days of Hiram Johnson, almost from the inception of direct primaries in California, the rules had allowed candidates to cross-file, that is, run on several parties’ tickets without even stating their own party affiliation. As things worked out, from 1940s on this arrangement favored the Republicans. Earl Warren won three terms starting in 1942 running as both a Democrat and a Republican and Goody Knight did the same for the election of 1954. The Democrats had gotten comfortable with Republicans running on their ticket because the Republicans tacitly surrendered the Attorney General’s election to the Democrats.
 
In 1959, after the election, cross-filing was finally ended.

 Stanley Mosk
Charles was selected to run Mosk’s campaign in Northern California, a job for which he was preeminently qualified not only by his Harvard Law degree but also by his Boston ward politics schooling – there was no greater master than James Curley. Leo put in a lot of time, effort and a knack for politics, pretty much co-leading with Charles in San Francisco. One of their practices for garnering both votes and funds was the old-fashioned coffee klatsch in supporters’ homes. As often as possible, Mosk would make an appearance and give a five minute speech at these affairs. I went to only one, at the Dardarians’ Allston Way house. Bert was there adding his charm and enthusiasm (and, I might add, good looks) to the mix, which I believe he did quite a few times. I do not know if Diane was there – she very well could have been.

Stanley Mosk

Charles and his Southern California counterpart must have done an excellent job: Stanley Mosk won by the largest margin of any state level contest in the entire United States that year.
 
Now I do not know this for a fact – that is, no one has told me this was how things went – but it seems likely. I believe Bert and Diane became well acquainted during the campaign. Of course, they probably moved in several other common circles: Jewish High Society, which is very influential in San Francisco; medical groups (her father was a prominent surgeon at UCSF), supporters of Mt. Zion and the SF Symphony and so on. In any event, she divorced Jack Berman in 1960 and married Bert in 1962. 
 
Charles was appointed Deputy Attorney General for Northern California by Mosk and later became Chief Deputy Attorney General.

Endings

Leo left Mt. Zion a year or two later and started a food and liquor service consultancy (imitating my then father-in-law, Richard Flambert whose firm Flambert and Flambert was well-known). One of the biggest contracts Leo landed was with Leonard Martin developing The Cannery. Leo was in charge of designs and installations not only for the several restaurants but other food merchants as well. In the course of this he became involved with a young French woman who was opening a kitchen supplies store. This led to separation and divorce.
 
Marianne went back to teaching, this time English at the high school level. I don’t remember whether this was before or after the break-up. One of her assignments was to McClymonds High School in Oakland, a school filled with tough, demoralized black kids. She viewed her job as helping her students break out of the confines society and background had built around them. She felt that mastery of standard middle-American speech was essential to those ends. In other words, she anticipated the Ebonics controversy, which centered on this very school, by thirty years. She also believed there was no point in pussy-footing with her kids – they needed straight talk and they respected her for giving it to them. She wrote across the top of the front blackboards “People who aks for a job don’t get it!”
 
The last time I spoke to Marianne and Leo was from her hospital bed in Mt. Zion. She was to undergo a biopsy the next morning on a lump in one of her breasts. Marianne’s mother had survived breast cancer for some years at that point and I guess we all felt she would too (the girls called their Evans grandparents Noc and Papa – I don’t know where that came from).
 
I guess Leo was there to provide some sort of support – I believe he was living with (married to?) the French woman by then. I was angry with Leo for his shabby treatment of Marianne (still am). His business was not going well at the time and I rubbed it in a little. He told me to do something to myself that I don’t think is possible. Those were the last words we exchanged.
 
Marianne woke up the next day after the surgery having undergone a radical mastectomy. I don’t know if her doctors had deliberately misled her about what was likely to happen or that she simply misunderstood what was possibly going to happen or that it was unforeseen by the doctors as well. In any case she was shocked, horrified, felt betrayed and was furious. She discharged the surgeon and, with the support of her primary, refused follow up radiation treatment (I should note that I know the names of all the doctors involved but see no point in offering them).
 
All of this was going on at about the time Barbara, Alex and I had moved to Bolinas and I started a daily commute to Berkeley. We lost touch with all of the Dardarians. About a year later Barbara was taking one of her customary walks with her dog across a pastureland belonging to the original Niman-Schell ranch on her way to Agate Beach when she bumped into Wendy coming back from the beach. Wendy tearfully told Barbara that Marianne had died a year before, two months before her forty-second birthday. What an awful loss!
 
Leo and his new wife moved to Southern California where he started his consultancy anew. I heard somewhere that he was involved in the creation of Spago but that doesn’t seem possible chronologically. Around 1980 Barbara said she saw Leo in Stinson Beach, but I now think she was mistaken, that it was somebody else who seemed to resemble Leo. Marianne and Leo had one of the early houses in the Seadrift development which was for a time the northernmost one on the sandspit. Perhaps that property remained his. Some recent searching on the Web revealed that Leo was divorced from Jeaniene, his French wife, and that he died a month before his fifty-sixth birthday in 1982. His father, Sarkis, born in 1901, outlived him by 12 years. I don’t know the cause but when I knew him he smoked too much and drank too much, factors that could very well have played a part.
 
The last time I saw Bert was in the small parking lot of the small neighborhood Safeway (yes, they existed) that I think was between Lyon and Presidio on California (?). At that time Bert and Diane were living a couple of blocks up from us on Lyon, around Washington or Jackson. The very nice house had belonged to one of them prior to their marriage – I think it was hers. Diane had not yet been elected to the SF Board of Supervisors so I think the date was around 1967 or 8.
 
Bert was a very happy man at that time. As I have said, Bert loved cars and he was the proud owner of a mid-1930s coffee-colored Rolls Royce, with  very unusual wicker work on the sides, he brought home from England – which was right there in the supermarket lot. He went on and on about the glories of the car.

I haven't been able to find a picture of a Rolls just like Bert's - his was "regular" Phantom (not open in the front) with the basket-work on both front and rear doors.

He also went on and on about the glories of his wife, how brilliant she was, how talented, how dedicated to her career and that she would go far (he got that right), how beautiful, etc., etc., etc. They had been married five or six years by that time and he sounded like they were still on their honeymoon. Seven or eight years later he was diagnosed with colon cancer and two agonizing years after that he died.
 
About five years or so ago Diane and husband Richard Blum and her daughter Katherine, herself a Superior Court judge like her father, were in a local restaurant in Stinson Beach, where they had (have?) a Seadrift weekend house, when Barbara and I were there. I went up to their table and out of the blue asked the Senator “Do you remember Marianne Dardarian?” She looked nonplused for a second (well, wouldn’t you be?) and then said, “I certainly do.”

Postscripts and footnotes

If you have been paying attention, you might have noticed a curious omission: there is no photograph of Bert Feinstein. The explanation is simple enough – I haven’t been able to find one, not a one anywhere. Apart from being frustrating to the point of infuriation it is also very baffling. How could anyone who became as famous in San Francisco as he did (he even conducted a brain surgery, live, on KQED television) not appear somewhere on the Web? Let me know if you know of one.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Obituary for Charles O’Brien

Charles O’Brien, prominent S.F. lawyer, dies
      Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
      Sunday, September 7, 2008

      Charles O’Brien, a longtime San Francisco lawyer who was second in command at the state attorney general’s office in the 1960s and narrowly lost an election for attorney general in 1970, died at his Danville home Thursday, two days after he turned 83.

      Mr. O’Brien, born in Lawrence, Mass., enlisted in the Army at 17 and was  an infantry machine gunner in World War II, where he earned five European theater battle stars and a Purple Heart. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and took part in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, family members said.

      After the war, he graduated with honors from Harvard College, got his law degree from Harvard and began a law practice with a San Francisco firm in 1954. He joined the attorney general’s office in 1959 and stayed through   1970, leaving for brief stints as a top aide to Gov. Pat Brown in 1961 and     campaign manager for Attorney General Stanley Mosk’s re-election in 1962.

      Mr. O’Brien served as chief deputy attorney general under Mosk and Thomas Lynch, who became attorney general after Brown appointed Mosk to the state Supreme Court in 1964.

      Mr. O’Brien was the Democratic candidate to succeed Lynch in 1970, but  lost to Republican Evelle Younger by 86,000 votes out of more than 6.2 million votes cast. Mr. O’Brien campaigned against Nixon administration measures to expand police search and detention powers.

      As a state lawyer, Mr. O’Brien led the legal team against Chevron in a       suit over cleanup costs for the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, said his son       Brennan O’Brien. He also advocated gun control and warned in a 1969 speech that the nation would become an “armed camp” unless would-be campus revolutionaries were persuaded that change was possible within the law.

      After his defeat, Mr. O’Brien returned to private legal practice with his       own small law firm, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. He was the attorney for physicians who founded the Doctors Co., which became one of the nation’s largest doctor-owned providers of medical malpractice insurance, his son said. He said his father also helped to draft landmark California legislation in 1975 that limited doctors’ liability for malpractice.

      He also became a breeder of Arabian horses on a Gilroy ranch.

      In 1954, Mr. O’Brien married Marie Fox, a Radcliffe honors graduate and  schoolteacher whom he had known since the eighth grade. He is   survived by his wife, sons Devin O’Brien of Moraga and Brennan O’Brien of Wallnut Creek, daughter Erin O’Brien of San Jose, and nine grandchildren.
     
      This article appeared on page B – 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The Wikipedia entry for the California Democratic Party has this on the end of cross-filing:

Near the end of the Warren era in California, a measure passed requiring cross-filing candidates to list their party affiliations passed. This enabled the Democratic Party to reclaim its nominating process and Democratic registration increased. At about the same time, Democratic activists were organizing into clubs and the powerful association of these clubs, the California Democratic Council (CDC) was formed. Consequently, in 1958, the California Democratic Party rode back into power. The Party captured a United States Senate seat, control of both state houses, and all executive offices except the Secretary of State. Victory that year is often credited to the decline in cross-filing, the power of the CDC, and the personal popularity of the newly-elected Governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.

In 1959, a law to prohibit cross-filing was adopted. The Democratic Party swept the 1962 elections, with Pat Brown being re-elected Governor over former Vice President Richard Nixon.

Feinstein excerpts from  Neurophysiology of Consciousness  By Benjamin Libet: 

************

An Arthur Krock NY Times article on the national significance of the California primaries:

Oware game set by Barbara Kovach

In October of 1993, less than three months before my sixty-fifth birthday, I was fired from a job I had held for twelve years with Boole and Babbage, a firm, co-founded by my friend and sometime boss, Ken Kolence, that specialized in computer performance measurement software. In the old days it was a common practice to fire a longtime employee in his last year in order to avoid paying full (or any) retirement benefits. For example my onetime neighbor in Flushing was fired at age sixty-four by Eli Lilly after thirty years of service to screw him out of his retirement (and you thought we don’t need unions!). In this case retirement benefits were not the issue because like all Silicon Gulch firms they had no fixed benefit retirement plan. I was the highest paid non-management employee, was tied (by management) to a package that was no longer producing much revenue and it was more convenient and remunerative to throw me out with the programs than to assign me elsewhere.

My high school mathematics teacher, Irving Adler, was an avid collector of books on mathematical recreations and frequently used puzzles and games as a teaching device. For several years he had been after me to program an African board game described by W. W. Sawyer in Scripta Mathematica called Oware. When I became dis-employed in 1994 he brought the subject up again and I had no good excuse to avoid the task any longer. History made the timing unfortunate. I programmed the game to operate on a DOS platform and by the time I was finished the first Windows versions were taking over.

Instead of just writing a users manual, I decided to make the book a treatise on the game and had a very good time tracking down all sorts of interesting books, papers, treatises and articles on Oware and the whole family of Mancala games. This was the early days of the public Internet and finding titles, tracking down copies and scanning and OCR-ing them was a difficult but gratifying series of tasks. The details are documented in the preface of the book.

As I said above there are quite a few references to the book in respectable academic publications (some by people I became acquainted with in the course of my searching) and even a listing in Amazon which didn’t tell you where or how to get a copy so I “commented” with instructions on how to download. You can download free here  or Go to the Order page in the Oware website and click on the download link.

I started going to Bolinas in 1956 because a cook in the Mount Zion Hospital kitchen, where I worked, told me of the wonderful small seaside town and, in particular, of Tarantino’s, a good seafood restaurant there.

I became acquainted with Barbara while working with her staging staff art shows at the hospital. In the spring of 1958 we got together, married in the spring of 1959 and had our son, Alexander Frederick Kovach, in the fall of 1960. By the time Alex was three years old, we were renting a small guest cottage from Glory and Bob Berry above Terrace Avenue, a main road in Bolinas. Later, we time-shared a somewhat larger cottage about a block away from the Berry’s with another young couple from San Francisco. That turned out to be more trouble than it was worth because Barbara was so compulsive about leaving the place immaculate after a stay that she spent all her time cleaning and didn’t get much pleasure from our weekends there.

In 1967 I left my job at the US Naval Supply Center, Oakland to work at PG&E, which I did for a little more than year and then, in July of 1968, started working for the President’s Office at the University of California. I cashed out my federal retirement fund of $5,000 and with it bought a house, still in the frame, from the builder, Bob Callagy. We continued living on Lyon Street in San Francisco but after a while that didn’t seem to make much sense. To ease the financial burden we rented our Bolinas place to a college instructor for about a year which meant we couldn’t use it. When we regained possession Barbara would wait for Alex at the Grant School on Friday afternoons to get to Bolinas as soon as she could for the weekend and I would leave University Hall and drive directly to Bolinas. We also spent every holiday and Barbara and Alex would spend the entire summer there. After two years of this, I decided we were paying extra rent and putting Barbara and Alex under unnecessary stress just so I could have a shorter commute to Berkeley. In April of 1970 we moved in full time to our Bolinas house and I started fifteen years of long distance commuting (after Berkeley to Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Sunnyvale). In October of 1980 we moved to our present house, across the street from the cottage we time-shared fifteen years earlier.

Somewhere in the course of the year following our move to Bolinas a young man from Philadelphia, named Dave Duffin, arrived. He took a job with the local school driving one of their buses.

Bolinas was, and is, an artists’ town. If you were not a musician or a painter or sculptor you could just say you were a poet because there was no way to deny your claim. We have well known specimens of all of these. Of course, the school was (and is) heavily biased towards the arts and there was little to no provision for the kids not inclined that way. In his youth, Duffin had been a motorcycle racer so he decided to set up a biking program. He got nervous and conditional permission to set up such a program from the school administration.

A shed adjacent to the school property on Ellen Bourne’s parcel was generously loaned by her to be the workshop. Dave went “over the hill” to East Marin to cadge parts from all the local motor cycle vendors. Then the kids built a motorcycle. Dave taught them sensible and responsible riding – wouldn’t let anyone throw a leg over the saddle without a helmet on, for example.  Pretty soon there were a number of little motorcycles (70-75 cc engines) all over Bolinas (because of the hair styles and costumes at the time it was sometimes difficult to tell a boy from a girl – my rule of thumb was ”if it’s on a horse it’s a girl – if it’s on a motorcycle it’s a boy”)

Then the fighting started.

At the school there were fights over the track, its size, location and surface and fights over scheduling of riding because of the noise and dust (and, I suspect, because of fear of the competition for student attention). In the larger community there were complaints about the noise mainly. I tried to get the kids to stop their habit of riding in a limited circuit – “spread the pain as much as possible” but was only partially successful.

A number of meetings were held to try to negotiate some sort of compromise. The most amusing – and productive – was held at the local public utility’s building after a couple of the kids accused some of the men on the Mesa of chasing the riders brandishing baseball bats and hammers. When I stated this accusation to one of them he said “that’s a lie and if you say that again I’ll punch you in the nose!” That absurdity became a watershed moment, defused the situation and a real understanding and compromise was reached.

Some of the group. My son Alexander is the one behind the gas tank.

The whole gang. Duffin is in the rear. All photos were taken by Dave.

Dave used his familiarity with the motorcycle racing world to have the kids meet with a couple of then current racing champions notably Kenny Roberts who became national champion three times (and is in the motorcycle hall of fame) and Brad Lackey a cross country racer who lived in Richmond across the bay. The kids also became interested in dirt-biking and Dave arranged cross country rides at Alvin Gambonini’s ranch east of Marshall and several camping trips in the Sierra foothills. They got to meet Roger Decoster a living legend in cross-country or motocross racing. There were also trips to Laguna Seca and Sears Point (now Infineon) to watch races.

Meeting Kenny Roberts, 1971. He won 3 champioships in the early '80s

With Roger Decoster, five times world champion motocross racer

After a couple of years, with most of the original participants gone, the program was terminated. Dave went on to have an interesting hop-scotching career.

(Post Script sent to me by Dave today, Sept. 22, 2010, on the origin of the motorcycle shop program at Bolinas School:
Story within the story:

Dave Callagy crashed his mini bike on Dogwood one Sunday afternoon as I read the Chronicle on my deck at 365. I took him to Pt. Reyes to get his thumb cleaned up. Two weeks later a knock on the door brought David, Sean, Eddie Hansen, Randy Bourne and John Barrow. Their question was “Can you help us start a motorcycle shop at the school?”

I had to think fast because I could see an outcome and reaction from the school being NO followed by laughter. I told them I’d write a proposal.

Two weeks after that anther knock at the doors brings the same kids in with the announcement “you have to attend the School Board Meeting tonight”.

Later that night when the Board asked “When can you start” I realized I was on auto-pilot. The idea for the program came from the kids and after a year the school asked me to drive a bus for them too. I believe many of those cowboys decided they did not want tie-dye class.)

He worked for Carolyn Brown (a local personality) at The Growing Mind, a school for children with learning difficulties in Berkeley, for a couple of years. At the time I was commuting to University Hall so Dave rode with me every day.

With his GI Bill scholarship funding about to expire, Dave decided to use it to get a pilot’s license. He went on to get an instructor’s rating and then taught nearly all the old motorcycle troupe to fly, gratis. Two of them went on to become commercial jet pilots.

Alexander Kovach as a flyer.

After that he owned and operated AAA Photo on First Street (between Mission and Market) in San Francisco. The principal business was passport photographs for patrons of the US agency just around the corner on Market. His staff was mostly made up of Bolinas kids working part-time.

Then he worked for movie production companies doing on-location shoots in the Bay Area (and further afield in Northern and Central California) finding suitable sites and arranging all the logistics, equipment, food and so on. He may still be doing this work at least part of the time. A consequence of this is he is now Chairman of the Alameda Film Commission whose mission is to encourage film production in the area.

He started Oasis for Kids, a nonprofit concerned with providing learning and travel experiences for young teens. Motorcycle trips are featured prominently in the program – so this is a blending of Dave’s previous experiences in Bolinas and Berkeley.

************

Shortly before Martin Luther King’s eightieth birthday (he was born four weeks after me) Dave sent an email to a list of friends containing this extraordinary photograph:

Martin Luther King jr at the Penn Center

There was no explanation given. In response to my demand that he provide some sort of background he sent this note:

Hi Roger,

I finished boot camp at Parris Island, SC in Dec. 1964 and then returned to PI after Advanced Infantry Training at Camp Lejeune, NC. Because of my previous training and background I was put into the base PR offices. I became our two-star’s favorite photographer. I also had a chance to take a photo one day of Dorothy Lamour and her son who was graduating. When I used the well-worn photographer’s phrasing “One more Miss Lamour?” she smiled demurely and said “you’re real cute General”.

As we move along, I was out one Sunday (Spring ’65) exploring the moss-lined back roads of some one of the coastal islands in my MG-B and came across a sign indicating PENN COMMUNITY CENTER. I drove into the gravel entrance and was soon met by Courtney Siceloff the director. We found out we were both from Philadelphia. I knew the name Penn well from the history of my city and state and also the connection to the Quaker religion of which Courtney and his family were members. The center was established by Philadelphia Quakers in the 1860′s. I came to be a frequent social guest for dinner and they let me use their guest house on the beach many times. They never mentioned their views about conscientious objection nor did I mention much about my USMC training. I also ended up volunteering my photojournalist skills and helped the center produce two brochures about the center and the social work they did in the (very) poor low-country areas of South Carolina (Google – “Gullah”).

One afternoon I got a call from Courtney to see if I could come out that evening. He said a special event was taking place but to “keep it quiet”. When I got there at dusk I was ushered into their sitting room and there was MLK. I had a chance to shake hands, talk about the photo project and about my background. I asked him if he would mind if I took a photo. I called in the Siceloff’s and made the photo with my Nikon-F with TRI-X and no flash. Later that night King gave a talk to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff (including Andy Young, Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, and others). His oratory was spellbinding and he warned the group to stay on the non-violent track. He was an utterly calm soul.

I showed their son John my cameras and gave him some lessons in photography – that’s him looking at Dr. King in the photo. I recently contacted the center and learned Courtney was retired in a senior residence in Savannah, Georgia, his wife passed and son John was now a producer for PBS NOW and Bill Moyer’s Journal. The center had heard of the photo so I recently sent them a copy and gave them the publication rights. I have now been in the same room as JFK, MLK and RFK, but that’s another two stories.

And that’s the way it was,

Dave

PS: I also contacted John Siceloff (NYC) and he told me I inspired him to become a photojournalist. I like surprises even if they are not “wrapped”.

David Duffin
344 Westline Drive – Suite C113
Alameda, CA 94501
415 999 5322 cell

Director: Oasis for Kids, Inc.
See: www.oasisforkids.org

Chairman: Alameda Film Commission
See: www.filmalameda.com

I only saw him once but it was a memorable occasion, a preamble of sorts for several careers.

I am not able to pin the time down with any certainty but I think it must have been in 1947, perhaps in the spring. The laborers of the University of Chicago, the maintenance workers, groundskeepers, dormitory housekeepers and the like, people who would today be members of the SEIU, were striking for better pay and working conditions. The business manager for the university was an infamous hard-headed son of a bitch, no more popular with the students than he was with the workers. The union put on a concert in Mandel Hall, which seated a thousand (1066 actually), to raise funds for the strikers, publicize their cause and seek support from the students and faculty. The concert was organized and MC’ed by Studs Terkel who had a popular radio show at the time and wrote newspaper columns about the goings-on in Chicago.

There were three principal performers, all Studs’ projects, people he was promoting – but not for any gain for himself, just as a public service.  First up was Mahalia Jackson who was just getting known outside of the black churches where she had been performing for several years. What a sight and what a sound! That great plain of a face and those small eyes and that huge round voice that made the whole chamber resonate with it. The audience was overwhelmed.

Mahalia Jackson

Next was the choir from the South Park Baptist Church, featuring as director, accompanist and singer Myrtle Jackson (not a relative). The group’s performance was a mixture of gospel and jazz – the choir (which included the director’s grown son)  would start out, setting the background and then Jackson’s wonderful (big!) soprano would come in, riding over the top like Louie’s trumpet. Later in the concert Mahalia sang with the choir and the combination was dazzling.

Myrtle Jackson

The third performer was Brownie McGhee who was known to folk and blues cognoscenti but not in the wider world. He started out by snapping a string on his guitar (even from my seat I could see he had large and powerful hands) which took several minutes to replace and a bit longer for retuning but the audience didn’t seem to mind and sat quietly until he was able to resume. The one piece he sang that I distinctly remember was “Black, Brown and White” in which the refrain goes “If you’re white, you’re alright. If you’re brown, stick around. But if you’re black, O brother, git back, git back, git back”.

Brownie McGhee

Thanks, Studs, for a good memory.

First, about the McGraw-Hill building: it’s still there. I had trouble finding it in Google’s Satellite and Street Views for reasons that will soon become apparent. I was surprised to find that the building is considered an Art Deco architectural treasure by most critics and, as a result, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989. NHLs aren’t knocked down. Here are some views of the building from various sources – there is an abundance of such pictures.

The McGraw-Hill building

The top floors and the Logo

I was surprised by the entrance – I had absolutely no recollection of this gaudy (not Gaudi) entryway. It looks like a movie theater.

I had great difficulty seeing the building in the satellite photograph until I realized that the angle the light was coming from (lower left) was the opposite of the conventional upper right, creating a sort of optical illusion, so I rotated the image 180 degrees and everything became clear. The rounded rectangle in the middle is the cap holding the company logo, the name done in an Art Deco type font.

Satellite View rotated 180 degrees

The Google Street View pictures were taken at night apparently and, until I saw what the entrance looked like, very difficult to distinguish from the complicated collection of structures and construction scaffolding and what-have-you. Finally, there it was, right where it belonged, at 330 West 42nd Street, not far east of Ninth Avenue.

McGraw-Hill entrance today (at night)

The brightly lit store on the right of the entrance with the glass revolving door is where the Walgreen’s in the Freddie story was and, from the look of things may still be (or, more likely, a Duane Reade). I think there was another entrance to the store from the building lobby.

Curtis was the reigning McGraw at the beginning of the ‘50s – he took over in 1950 when his brother Jay retired and died in 1953. The McGraws were stalwarts of the Republican Party, friends and allies of Tom Dewey, and so vehemently anti-union that they paid all union-eligible workers over scale as long as they refused to join a union (this is one way unions improve the lot of all workers in unionized trades – and they don’t pay any dues).

At that time McGraw Hill was mainly a magazine publishing outfit. They had some twenty-five magazines, mostly trade journals such as Engineering News Report (which was the merger of the publications of McGraw and Hill when they merged companies), Factory Management and Maintenance, Aviation Week, Nucleonics and others for the chemical industry, iron and steel, coal mining and so on. The flagship, of course, was Business Week – still a major business magazine and still a large part of McGraw’s income.

The staffing for all of these companies plus the headquarters and its support operations must have amounted to two or more thousands of individuals. A very large proportion of them were Catholics. There was a church directly across forty-second street which was heavily attended by people from our building. In the morning when I came to work there would be people leaving the church crossing the street in the middle of the block to enter 330; four times a day, at morning break, lunch time, afternoon break and quitting time people would stream out of the McGraw building, cross the street mid-block and go into the church. It looked like the one building was pouring its contents into the other.

I worked for McGraw Hill Research which was a company within a company like the magazines and book publishing concerns. Its main function and responsibility was to shill for the publications. The staff at the home office was not large, three or four dozen, I would guess. There were people in the field, mainly sales force personnel. The big boss, a man in his late fifties or early sixties, had an enclosed office with his secretary guarding the gate outside of it. I only saw him two or three times. There were three second level bosses, Bert Peller, Allen Cobb and a third whose name I can’t remember. Peller and Thirdguy were typical office politicians, immaculately decked out in their Brooks Brothers outfits, backstabbing each other (while displaying false congeniality) and ganging up to sabotage Cobb when the occasions presented themselves. Cobb was a shirtsleeves sort, stayed out of all the games and just did his job as well as he could – which was usually as well as anyone could. (It’s amazing how frequently this sort of situation occurs. I’ve witnessed or experienced the same scene and scenario several times in very, very different contexts.)

I’m very unclear on the functional breakout among the three or just which of the next level of managers reported to which of the middle managers. I think Cobb was in charge of operations and I know that Fred Holzer, my immediate boss, reported to Allen Cobb. There were two women somewhere in here – Kay something, quiet and self-effacing, who was some sort of office manager, may have reported to Cobb, and Barbara Ruzitsky (a rare sort of name in that building), a classic “Smith Girl” who may have been part of Bert’s staff. My dealings with both of these were on a cordial, even friendly, basis as were those with Allen and Fred. My dealings with Bert and Thirdguy were always at arms length, stiff and formal. (A death notice in the NY Times, Oct. 10, 2006, says Peller was at J. Walter Thompson for 24 years. An epigraph to an article by Peller in Folio magazine dated 1/1/1991 says “Bert Peller is currently a consultant. He was vice president and manager of media for business markets at J. Walter Thompson for 24 years”).

Fred Holzer came to his position as a result of a background with IBM punched card equipment and procedures and no other particular qualifications for the situation he was in. As a result he never felt quite adequate for the job, operated in a state of anxiety all the time, often so much so that he stammered. He was obsessed with the idea that Peller and Thirdguy were out to get him, which, unfortunately, was probably true because it was a way for them to damage Cobb. Quite inadvertently and unintentionally I compounded Fred’s problem as will become clear after I explain my work there. He was my supervisor because I was using the IBM 080 sorter/counter to produce tabulations and he was also Marie-Wilson’s-lookalike key punch operator’s supervisor, obviously.

The job we were working on, which I mentioned in the Freddie post, was a magazine readership survey. As I said above, the department’s responsibility was to promote the advertising business of the twenty-five magazines in the company. In this case they got a group of about a dozen major American industrial companies to pay for the survey which set about “proving” to those selfsame companies that they should only advertise in McGraw Hill’s magazines – talk about slick scams! This was done by creating “duplication” statistics, showing for instance that if you advertised in Factory, there was no sense in also advertising in Mill and Factory (a competitor). They also did “coverage” studies, showing how to reach a wide range of readers with as little duplication as possible or at the lowest total cost.

My job was to do tabulations from a deck of approximately 43,000 cards (the number 42,787 sticks in my memory) by passing the cards through an 080 sorter equipped with optional counters. There is a decent brief description of the 080 in Wikipedia. The first picture is actually of an 075 but it was structurally and functionally identical to the 080.

An 075 sorter, identical in appearance with the 080

An 080 showing storage bins behind

By using the selector switches I would break the deck into various subsets and make counts of those and selected sets within them. In this way I could develop duplication and coverage counts.

Someone from Peller’s group would make a request for a “study”. Let’s say for illustrative purposes that they wanted to compare Collyer’s and Liberty Magazine. The request would be given to Allen Cobb. He would ask Fred to estimate the cost which was primarily determined by the number of cards that would have to pass through the sorter. Fred had counts that I had given him from previous passes (if a job required me to first sort/count on column 35, say, I would write down all the hole counts a give it to Fred) or if they didn’t yet exist, we would make estimates based on what we knew of the popularity o the magazines involved.

Nominally, the 080 passed about 400 cards per minute, so the first pass should have taken about 109 minutes. In practice, however, it took quite a bit longer because of card jams and the like. The cards had to pass through a very tight slit at the bottom of the hopper to the chute blades. If the edge in the center of the card had been slightly blunted or the card swollen from frequent trips through the slit or from absorption of moisture from the air or from handling, then it wouldn’t go through and I would have to remove all the cards on top of it, pull the offending card and ask “Marie Wilson” to duplicate it on her 029. If she were in the middle of some other task, I might have to wait until she could dupe my card, get the new copy (which I would check for completeness), put it at the beginning of the deck for the hopper, load it and resume the sort and count. This sort of thing would happen a number of times during a pass.

Much worse were the jams. If a card didn’t fall into a stacker and get out of the way quickly (sometimes the spring supported plate wouldn’t move fast enough, particularly as the pocket was getting near to full) then the card behind it would run up on it, crush it and then become crushed itself and so on. By the time I could push the stop button there would be a dozen or more destroyed cards. I then lifted the glass cover over the pockets, pulled the damaged cards from between the chute blades, flattened them as much as I could and asked Marie to reproduce them. Those that couldn’t be flattened had to be repunched, with the operator reading the holes and keying them in.

Sometimes I caused the jams. Under “normal” operation the machine would stop any time a stacker became full. This would require the pocket to be emptied, cards joggled to line them up, and then stored in the storage bin behind the stacker and the sorter restarted. With thirteen pockets (twelve for punches and the rightmost one, reject, for the no-punches) and 43,000 cards, this would happen very often adding a lot of time to a pass. To avoid the stops the operator slips a finger between two cards in a near-full stacker and pulls the lower stack out with the other hand – this is rather like the diningroom trick of pulling the tablecloth out while leaving the dishes on the table. The only trouble with this stunt was that it sometimes produced a jam.

(Because of all the wear-and-tear on the cards on several occasions I had to have the entire deck reproduced. This was a big job because the Reproducer was a rather slow machine. That, in turn, brought me into contact with the large data processing facility, called the Tab Room, which was run by a Mrs. Pilkington. Tab room supervisors had to be a pretty tough lot, if only because their staffs were a pretty tough lot. Dealing with the graveyard shift often meant dealing with drunks and all the problems they entail. Pilkington filled the bill with some to spare – she and I became quite friendly.

The most entertaining thing I encountered in the tab room was the Senior Tom Watson’s birthday. IBM had a global party for the old tyrant. Every major IBM installation in the whole world was connected by telephone and PA systems so that we could all hear the IBMers sucking up speeches and singing Happy Birthday and the IBM anthem.)

The point of this windy digression is that estimating the cost of a job was complicated by all the unforeseeable mishaps – so a fudge factor was always added. Fred would then give a time estimate for both charging and scheduling purposes to Allen who would pass it on to Peller’s crew who would then decide whether the study was worth the cost. Fred had another problem with the estimates – I often did the job in less than half the time he estimated. I tried to get him to use my estimates, which were based on a mathematical “trick” which allowed me to do a couple of simple pencil calculations rather than lengthy machine passes but he didn’t understand them and he relied on his more “solid” estimates. The net effect of this was to please Peller’s people because of the windfall savings in cost and Allen because it made him something of a hero – but it also meant that Fred’s estimates were deemed untrustworthy.

The “trick” is a rudimentary fact from set theory: the number of elements in the union of two sets is the sum of the number in each set minus the number in the intersection of the two (this is the basis of what is called the principle of inclusion and exclusion in enumerative combinatoric). I’ll illustrate with the Collyer’s Liberty example. Let’s say that Liberty was represented by the 9-punch in col 21 (all the general magazines were in col 21, Life, Saturday Evening Post and so on) and Collyer’s by the 5-punch. The selector on the sorter sends a card to the pocket of the first hole it “sees”. The cards are normally fed nine-edge first. So if a card has a 9-punch, regardless of what others it has, it goes to the 9-pocket. The counters count all the holes regardless of what stacker the card goes to. So, in our example, I would push in the selector switches for the 6, 7 and 8 punches so that no cards containing 5-punches could go into them, run the deck and then, after noting the counts in the counters, would run the cards from the 5 pocket to get the count of (5s without 9s). Now, by the above, the number in the intersection (the duplication) is the original count of 5s minus the (5s without 9s) and the total number of cards (the coverage) is the original count of 9s plus the original count of 5s minus the intersection. So I saved a second pass on the cards that originally fell into the 9 pocket. If I knew that the number of cards in the 9 pocket would be significanly less (from some earlier run) I would turn the cards around feeding the 12 edge first (instead of the 9 edge as God and IBM intended) and sort on column 59 instead of 21 so that the second pass would be the shortest possible.
                                                               *******
Not only was Kay Rooney the most interesting character in that rather dreary office, she had the most character. Kay was Brooklyn Irish, a much more distinct ethnic group then than now, which every New Yorker was familiar with. She lived with her parents, had at least one brother and one sister also in Brooklyn (probably within a couple of blocks of the parents), was a devout Catholic but wore her faith lightly and had the most wonderful sense of humor. Everything about Kay was big. Even in the low heeled shoes she wore she stood about six feet; she was what is politely called buxom, that is she had a shape like a Helen Hokinson matron even though she was not yet 40 years old. She dressed as though she were still in parochial school, white long-sleeved blouses, dark pleated skirts – I can’t remember how her hair looked except that it was pure blond (and not out of a bottle – heaven forfend). When Kay talked she filled the room but I never heard anyone object or shush her. When she laughed she not only filled the room but she made the venetian blinds rattle.
I’m not sure just what her job was. She must have worked for the office manager because she distributed supplies and seemed to spend a part of her day visiting other offices. Not only did everyone in our office love her, everyone in the whole building did. I would see her joshing with the elevator operators only as a girl who grew up with brothers could have; the same went for the counter women in the Walgreen’s and so on.

Kay’s closest friend in the office was the boss’ secretary, Bertha. Bertha was the direct opposite of Kay in every regard: she was petite and demure, always elaborately made up and dressed expensively (but not to my taste); she spoke in a small quiet voice, never seemed to laugh, certainly not audibly. Aside from their friendship, Kay and Bertha shared one other thing: they both had terrible asthma.

One of them heard of a “clinic” in Mississippi that purported to cure asthma by developing a tailor-made syrup just to fit your case, a scam rather like the ones for cancer by the infamous Hoxie. In order to get your prescription you had to go to their resort and clinic, stay for about four or five days (at high prices of course) while they fitted you out with your “medicine” which was also very expensive. The boss gave them a week off to go to but no longer. This meant they had to fly – and neither of them had ever been in an airplane before (not that unusual in 1950) and both were scared to death at the prospect.

The next Monday they were back in the office with Kay describing their big adventure to the entire staff who had gathered around her. She described going to LaGuardia airport and seeing the insurance machines everywhere and feeling that she had to buy some because she was sure the plane was going to crash (about five years later, at the Hungry i, I heard Shelley Berman’s wonderful routine on this very theme). As she stood in front of the dispensing machine, quarter in hand poised above the coin slot she became paralyzed with inner conflict. Who should she name as beneficiary? If she named a brother or sister then the others would feel deprived and her parents offended by the lack of filial devotion and so on. While she was in this suspended state a priest from St. Christopher’s church in Brooklyn approached and asked her what the problem was. After she explained he said “Why don’t you make the St. Christopher’s Building Fund the beneficiary?” “Oh no Father! I couldn’t do that!” Then with a wide, downward sweep of her arm, “St. Christopher himself would swoop out the clouds and knock the plane down!”

Then came her roaring, room shaking laugh.

“You should have seen the look on that priest’s face!”

Although I number three former deputy sheriffs among my friends (two retired and one who quit because he couldn’t bear the contempt of his townsmen), I generally hold cops of all sorts, both institutionally and individually, in low regard. It is my feeling that anyone who wants to be one has something wrong with his head, either intellectually or psychologically or, most often, some of both. Immigration cops seem to me to be the meanest spirited of the lot providing fresh assaults on one’s sense of fair play nearly every day. (I know, I know, they’re just doing their jobs – that was Eichman’s defense too – also see how this tale turns out.) When the agent asked if he could come in and talk to me about a critical matter I became alarmed for the Savareses, so I invited him in.

He told me that the Savarese family, parents and several children, had entered the U.S. legally in 1935 as refugees from the Mussolini fascists. One of the sons, Giuseppe, known as Joey, entered illegally a couple of years later when he was in the Italian merchant marine and jumped ship in New York. He said Immigration had been looking for Joey for years and had never been able to find where the local Italians had been hiding him (It’s remarkable how immigrant communities are able to do this so well. An immigration cop once said the Chinese in San Francisco’s Chinatown could hide an elephant there completely undetected.) Then he said that the immigration cops thought that Giuseppe was about to flee to Canada where the local Italians had several safe-houses and that if he re-entered the U.S., again illegally, from there he would be guilty of a felony and that they, nice guys that they were, were only trying to prevent him from getting into worse trouble. I am embarrassed to say that I mostly bought this line. I told the cop I would tell the family about his visit.

I became quite alarmed for the Savareses. I didn’t know if they could handle English well enough or had enough education to understand the intricacies of immigration law, whether they knew about possible legal assistance available to them and so on.

I kept an ear cocked for Papa Savarese’s return from work. He was very punctual, arriving at 5:30 in the afternoon, tip-toeing up the stairs and quietly opening and closing the door to their flat, which made it difficult to know when he had arrived. On many occasions he was accompanied by one of his sons who worked with him in the family business. They made an amusing pair, almost indistinguishable in appearance, more like identical twins than father and son. They were small, perhaps 5-4 in height, slim and nattily attired in expensive Italian suits (despite my remark in the first paragraph about the rarity of such attire in our neighborhood) and expensive “Italian” shoes which were made in their own factory further east on Houston Street. On the evening in question the son was with his father. I went out to the landing just in front of their flat and told them about the immigration cop being there. The son said he would stop by later and talk to me about the whole situation.

I recounted the immigration agent’s story about Giuseppe, the illegal entry, the Canadian safe-houses, the felony re-entry and so on. As I did so the son asked me several pointed questions, sounding almost like a D.A. getting my testimony. When I was through he told me that Joey had indeed entered fourteen years before by jumping ship, that immigration had been pursuing him fruitlessly all that time, that he was at the time right in New York where they would never find him and that their second-generation Italian Congressman was presenting a private bill the next morning to grant Joey legal status. He further said that this was driving the cops insane and that they were trying, right up to the last minute to grab Giuseppe and throw him out of the country. Talk about rat-terrier dispositions! And nasty, vengeful and mean natures!

And that was how the smart college boy helped the poor New York Italian deal with his government.