June 1956

School was over, and not a second too soon. I’d barely managed to keep one step ahead of a pugilistic priest who had taken his Golden Glove trophy out of his cabinet and vowed to punch my lights out. I also narrowly escaped a posse of snotty rich kids that the principal put up to cutting my prize duck’s ass.

Times weren’t so great for the family, either. Dad had suffered a stroke, and lost his job as CYO director. Mom put her nursing cap on after twenty-five years, and lasted two months, before ending up in a Marin General Hospital bed for two weeks with a bleeding ulcer and heart problems.

Our little house on Brookdale was not a fun place to hang around. Dad seemed befuddled. Mom was often drunk and nasty. “Where the hell we gonna live?” Family fights spilled out to the streets. “The phone’s turned off.” Mom’s wails and screams serenaded the neighborhood. “The kids need shoes.”

Bud and I escaped the bedlam as much as possible, hanging out with Tony Lugot, Mike Ramsey and Bob Butts; older guys, high school drop outs with cars. We cruised to all the hang outs King Cotton Drive-In, Zips, George’s Pool Room, and The Bowling Alley, drinking, looking for girls we never found, dodging brawls, and sidestepping cops.

One wild night, Bud and I got separated. I snuck in around midnight and passed out in my bed. I woke up a few hours later, and still no Bud. To be safe, I piled pillows and clothes under the blankets to look like a body, just in case Dad checked in.

The next morning, Dad came rushing in, “Mike, what happened to Bud?”

“Oh, Dad, he’s sleeping.” I looked over at the lump in his bed.

“Your brother’s in jail. For Christ’s sake, that’s all we need.”

Dad and I went to pick him up. The cops weren’t laughing.

“Mr. Smith, we found your boy passed out, laying in a puddle of vomit on D Street. Your kid almost bit the dust. We had to pump his stomach. He’s a tough guy, won’t answer any questions about where he got the booze, or who he was hanging out with.”

Dad, embarrassed, tried to look tough. “Bud, get in the car. You’re going to be sorry. Officers, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

I whispered, “Bud, I told Dad we went to a party where the punch was spiked. Stick to it, nothing’s going to happen.” Nothing did.

Every day seemed grayer. Mom’s drinking matched the pressure of the mounting financial problems. There were more fights, kids crying, and Bud and I kept running out the door.

One morning it started early. Poor Dad was crestfallen and beaten. He couldn’t find a job. Mom was freaking out and using him as a verbal punching bag.

I just had it. “Mom, shut up!”

“Why, you little shit ass!” She grabbed a serving spoon and lit after me. The chase went from the kitchen through the dining room, into the living room and back to the kitchen. I was laughing to keep from exploding. Mom couldn’t keep up with me. I sailed through the kitchen.

“Mike, watch out!” Bud yelled.

Cunning old Mom was standing behind the dining room door with a huge glass punch bowl over her head. Too late, I got nailed. Glass flew everywhere. I staggered, reached up and touched a small trickle of blood dribbling down the back of my head.

“Shit, Mom, are you nuts?”

Suddenly, my old Mom, the loving caring nurse, my best buddy, appeared.

“Oh, Mikie, Mikie, my Little Mikie, I’m so sorry! Let me wash it. Let me fix it”.

I shook my head and flew out the front door shouting, “Sorry, my ass. You’re crazy.”

July 1956

A few days after the Punch Bowl Incident, just before dinner, Dad made an announcement.

“Kids, I have a special surprise.”

Shit, I thought, here we go again. The last surprise, a new life in Marin, flopped. What now?

“Kids, we’re moving to a ranch, a big house, lots of room on hundreds of acres.” Shit, I thought, we’re going to end up living with the hicks in Point Reyes.

“Dad,” Bud said, “we don’t want to live way out in the sticks, we’re city boys.”

“No, it’s just outside San Rafael. It even has a pool.”

He’s getting wackier, I thought. Maybe he’s had another stroke. “Dad, come on, we don’t have a pot to piss in. How the hell are we gonna pull this off?”

Mom must have been in on it. She just sat there smiling. Dad, beaming, brushed aside my concerns. “No problem, Louie Frietas is going to let us live there till I get things together. You know, it’s the family ranch just outside San Rafael. Louie uses the cottage, and no one uses the house.”

Louie was a dark-skinned, crafty-eyed bachelor, beloved CYO coach at St. Rafael’s Catholic School and a member of the prominent, wealthy, land-rich, Portuguese milk-farming clan. He was also an uncle of Spike Frietas, one of our snobby Marin Catholic classmates. It sounded to me like Dad hit Louie up for money and we ended up with a mansion and a pool.

I looked at Bud. He seemed to buy it. Maybe things were gonna get better.  The words, “a swimming pool” echoed through my head. Shit. Not bad. The Smiths with a pool. I was already planning parties, barbecues.

“Hey, let’s take a look before it gets dark,” Dad said.

The ranch was bordered on one side by Tierra Linda, the Eichler subdivision, the first suburban development west of San Rafael. It lined one side of the valley north of Frietas Boulevard.

Rolling, oak-filled hills and open fields surrounded the ranch. The house, down a long eucalyptus-lined driveway, was barely visible from the 101 Freeway frontage road. The three-story Victorian with a wraparound porch and French doors, vines clinging to old posts, was badly in need of a paint job. It sat in neglected regal splendor. To me, it was a country mansion.

The pool was just across the circular drive, in front of wide stairs leading to an enormous, oak front door. Surrounded by palm trees and green lawn, its water glistened and shimmered in the sunset, beckoning to me to jump in.

The kids looked wide-eyed.

“Whoopi,” Jane yelled. “It’s so big!”

The house was filled with Oriental rugs, rich mahogany tables and antiques. The kids ran from room to room through the first floor checking out the living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, parlor, den, and a bathroom. They ran up the long stairway to the second floor, which had a long hallway connecting with six bedrooms and two bathrooms. The third story was a high-ceilinged, unfinished attic piled with boxes, furniture, cabinets, chests, and who knew what treasures.

That night, in bed, my mind raced with plans. Happy days were here again. I couldn’t wait to call my old buddies from the city and invite them to a first weekend barbecue and dip in the pool. What a great come on.

“Say, how would you girls like to go for a midnight swim at our ranch?” I pictured nubile bodies, gliding through the moonlit waters, hugging, kissing and dry-humping through the night. On a sultry summer afternoon, I could say, “It’s kinda hot today. How’d you like to cool off in our pool?” Visions of thighs glistening with suntan oil, bottoms wiggling and shaking on the diving board filled my sleepy head.

First thing, the next day, I called Don and Mike, my best buddies from St. Cecilia’s. “Hey, can you come up for a little swim and barbecue at our ranch?”

“Sounds fantastic. A pool? I’ll be there. I can borrow my brother’s car,” Mike replied.

Don, a fast mover with the girls, jumped at the chance to score some points. “I just met a couple of girls from Lincoln at a party last night. Can I invite them?”

My mouth watered, “Sure, the more the merrier.”

Dad wasn’t around that morning. He was checking out a job lead and then had a get-together with Louie Frietas to nail down the exact move-in date.

A few hours later, Dad came home somewhat subdued.

“Hey, Dad, we’re so excited! Don Leonardini and Mike Gaffney and a few girls are coming for a swim and a barbecue to celebrate the first weekend in our ranch.”

He grimaced. “Kids, I’m sorry about this, but we can’t use the pool that weekend. It’s the Frietas family pool day.”

“Ah, hell,” I said, “what a drag. Well, I’ll call them and say we have to postpone it. Wish I knew sooner.”

“Well, it’s more than that. We can’t use the pool at all. Period.”

“You gotta be kidding. Why? There must be some times they aren’t using it.”

“Don’t make it hard on me. We need a place to stay, with or without the pool. We just can’t use it. It’s off-limits.

“Fuck them. Fuck their pool. Fuck their house.” I shouted.

July 1956

It was another hot summer night for the Smith family, living an impoverished life in the Freitas’ luxuriously furnished mansion. There was no chance of a dip in the pool since it was off-limits to us. We’d finished dinner and the little kids played around the mahogany dining table in what had become the unofficial family room. The chandelier’s reflection sparkled in the built-in glass China cupboards and the French doors that opened to the porch.

Mom was in the kitchen, loading up on wine. Dad lay on the living room couch, overweight and perspiring in his sloppy clothes, still showing signs of his last stroke, which had left him with a slipping vocabulary and slow on the uptake.

Bud and I were upstairs in our shared bedroom plotting how to get our hands on the Plymouth and sneak down the back roads to George’s Pool Hall in San Rafael. Suddenly, there was pounding at the door.

“Open up. San Rafael police.”

We looked at each other. Had someone snitched on us for lifting the four cases of beer from that careless warehouse?

We flew down the stairs to hear the loud crack of splintering wood and see the shattered glass falling around our younger siblings. Four cops, shotguns drawn, burst through the dining room’s French doors. The kids were screaming as Mom arrived from the kitchen.

“What the hell’s going on?” She yelled.

“Ma’am, shut up. We’ve got a warrant for John C. Smith.”

This can’t be happening, I thought. Why would they want Dad? He’d been Marin County’s Catholic Youth Organization Director and a G-man in WWII. He was so honest he squeaked.

Disheveled, Dad appeared, shaking his head.

“Officer, can’t we talk this over?”

“Shit, there ain’t nothing to talk about,” a potbellied cop snarled.

Mom lunged forward.

“I’m a nurse. He’s a sick man. Please don’t arrest him.”

“Get out of the way, or you’re coming too.”

“Don’t take Daddy,” Jane yelled, and Ginny joined in. Bobby was speechless, frozen by the kitchen door. Bud’s eyes were wide and I was hot with rage. A part of me wanted to pick up a chair and bust it over the cop’s head.

They surged toward Dad, his face beet red and his body shaky.

“Officers hold on. Let me call someone,” Dad stammered. “I’m sure we can straighten this out.”

“You should have thought of that before you papered the town with bad checks.”

Two cops grabbed Dad, slammed him against the wall, cuffed him and then pulled him out the door.

“Oh, no. Please,” Mom screamed.

That was the moment things got real.

Robin Hood’s Merry Men didn’t swing from the trees to thwart the Sheriff’s lackeys plundering the poor. Glinda the Good Witch of OZ didn’t wave her magic wand to turn the evil, blue-clad monkeys into guests bearing gifts.
Instead, Mom, with her tenacious, fiery spunk had challenged the cops with the same fearlessness she showed in her job as head nurse at SF General’s locked wards. She shook off the booze and sprung into action calling Dad’s influential West County friends to help defend her husband.

The charges against Dad were dropped and he was home the next day. It was nothing big, nothing worth a police raid. Dad had just postdated a couple of checks to the grocery store on Lincoln for food to feed his family.

My dream world ended. Any illusion I’d had about the affluent life we’d lived coming back vanished. We’d become white trash, living in someone else’s mansion, in a world where we didn’t belong. It was about more than the house and the stuff we’d lost.

My father had been confident, well known in San Francisco. He’d been a well-dressed, articulate man about town, the writer of a popular college fight song and famous for organizing St. Mary’s and San Francisco University parties. He’d worked for the Department of Agriculture chasing down war racketeers, and had managed my grandmother’s vast holdings. His heart attack, several strokes, and our rapid descent into poverty after we moved to Marin had a profound effect on his personality.

My storybook heroes and my dreams of returning to our privileged life disappeared. That’s when mom showed me what real life heroes did.

August 1956

Summer was almost over and I wasn’t looking forward to starting my junior year at Marin Catholic.

Dad was back in the hospital after another stroke and Mom had just been released, with a combination of heart and liver problems. They were both too sick to work and the family was broke.

“Boys, I’m taking you out for a treat, lunch at Marin Joe’s,” Mom announced one morning before Bud and I could vanish for the day.

This is odd, I thought. Taking the family out and spending the last pennies on food was Dad’s trip. For Mom, restaurants were more of an excuse to hang out at a bar and get loaded.

Marin Joe’s was one of Dad’s favorites. I remembered the good old days when the family would drive from Grandpa Collins’ ranch in Inverness Park to Joe’s in San Rafael for dinner and a movie.

When we got there, the waitress recognized our family and seated us at a nice table in the window.

“Boys, order whatever you want,” Mom said.

Our fridge was always too empty for our ravenous appetites. We ordered full steak dinners with sides of ravioli, and chocolate sundaes for dessert. When the food arrived, we dug in. Whatever Mom had to tell us, it was not likely to be good news. I wondered which it would be, another eviction notice, a welfare visit, or PG&E pulling the plug again.

Mom belted gin and tonics while we wolfed down the food. She looked tired. Her bad health, the worries of being poor and taking care of a sick husband were wearing her down.

“Boys, Dad’s not going to make it,” she blurted out.

“Oh, come on Mom,” I said. “He’s a survivor. Dad always pulls through.”

“No, they just told me,” she sobbed. “He’s not going to make it. How can I live without him? He’s the love of my life.”

“Don’t worry.” I hugged her.

“What am I going to do? I’m too sick to work.”

I didn’t want to go back to Marin Catholic. “We’ll dropout and get jobs,” I offered whole-heartedly.

Bud was less enthusiastic but he went along with me.

August 1956

The next day, the three of us met with Father Ryan, the principle of Marin Catholic High School. I didn’t like him, and the feeling was mutual.

At our last encounter, a few days before school let out, he pulled me into his office to chastise me for indecent behavior. The good father was so troubled by the dangers of co-educational recess, our only chance to socialize with the opposite sex, that he spent the time scrutinizing us through his window.

“Mike, I saw you touching a girl impurely. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Father, I don’t know what you are talking about.” I had patted a freshman’s curvaceous bottom.

“This is going to stop,” he’d roared. “You spend too much time playing around with the girls. I will deal with you when school starts again.”

I could tell he hadn’t forgotten that meeting. He greeted us with an insincere smile.

“Mrs. Smith, what brings you and the boys to my office during summer vacation?” He looked at us accusingly. “Are they causing you problems?”

“No. Their father is dying. I have to pull them out of school to help me.”

He smiled like mom just handed him a bottle of Irish whiskey and then quickly shifted into a consoling posture.

“Oh, Mrs. Smith, I’m so sorry. I’ll pray for him. Bud is an outstanding member of our community.” Dad had been the county’s Catholic Youth Organization Director and the organizer of a highly successful countywide high school basketball tournament in Marin Catholic’s gym.

“Of course, we’ll let the boys go. This will make men of them. Our doors will always be open.”

What a laugh.

A year later, when Bud went to the coach and told him he wanted to go back to school and play football with his buddies, the coach gave him a funny look.

“You need to talk to Father Ryan.”

Bud freaked out.

Dad winced when he heard the news, but said, “Don’t worry, boys. It’s going to be okay. We’ll talk to Ryan tonight.

Father Dullea, a former Golden Glove boxer who had frequently threatened to kick my ass if he got the chance, met us at the door of the Priests’ House. He smirked.

“What do you want?”

“The boys are looking forward to playing football for Marin Catholic this fall,” my father replied graciously. “The coach said we should talk with father Ryan.”

Dullea stared at me menacingly and then replied, “The faculty already met and voted overwhelmingly to deny your boys re-admittance. Why should we let two of the worst troublemakers back in?” He slammed the door in our faces.

Dad wilted. His face paled. He seemed unsteady on his feet. His voice cracked as he said, “I’m sorry.”

September 1956

It was mid-morning and sweat poured down my back. An acre of waist-high weeds anchored in rocky soil taunted me in the boiling sun. I swung my hoe at a slow, steady pace, battling a nasty hangover. All I could think about was survival as Johnny Cash belted Sixteen Tons from my transistor radio. I was earning a grand $1.25 an hour, working for the printing mogul Arthur Dettner on his five-acre hillside estate in Ross.

There was no bathroom or water nearby, so at lunchtime, I trudged up the hill, past Arthur and his buddy who were devouring fried chicken and sipping cocktails by the pool. They didn’t invite me to join them. Free lunch and a swim were not perks of the job.

A half an hour later, feeling better after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cooling off in the shade, I picked up my pace. Arthur suddenly interrupted my daydream about my new girlfriend. His friend was in tow, perspiring profusely. “Son, you’ll never finish at that rate,” Arthur said in a gruff, imperious voice and grabbed the hoe. “Here’s how I worked when I was a kid.”

He swung at a killing pace for a minute. I watched his potbelly jiggle and his distinguished, fluffy, white hair catch air. He pointed at his work and stared me down with his penetrating, steely eyes. That’s what I expect for the money I’m paying you. And shut off that goddamn music.” Turning abruptly, he waddled up the hill.

He didn’t see me salute him with my middle finger.

“Screw you fat ass.” I swung my hoe viciously and hit the dirt as hard as I could.

January 1957

My job hunting was short-lived. My friendly employment agent had no problem placing me. My first interview was a success.

Blake Moffitt and Towne Paper Company on 9th and Brannon hired me. The company was a major leader in the paper industry, and its massive building was a familiar landmark visible from the freeway.

With little experience behind me and no recommendations from Dettner or Spiegel’s, once again, I got lucky. The department head interviewing me went to Saint Ignatius High School, where I had made the honor roll in 1955. He graduated from USF, where Dad had written the fight song, “On to Victory” as a freshman in 1927. It was the cultural ties that closed the deal.

I, at sixteen, became the cute mail boy surrounded by secretaries of all sizes and shapes, who flirted and joked with me. One brazenly commented, “Wish you were a few years older.” So did I. But, age didn’t matter in my sexual fantasies.

My boss, and only co-worker in the mail department, Barbara, was in her late fifties. She was a Sophie Tucker type, warm and bubbling with a wise sparkle in her eye. We got along fine. We both loved old movies, history and songs from the 1940s.

Every payday, she bought me a fifth of bourbon, which I carefully packaged, addressed and stamped to avoid any problems with nosey cops or my thirsty mom.

I was astonished to find out I’d been hired at twenty-five dollars more a month than Barbara, who had ten years with the company. She just accepted it. I thought it was outrageous and unfair. That was my first experience with workplace sex discrimination.

Payday also brought Dad, whose life had been saved by a new wonder drug discovered in Texas, to collect all but twenty dollars from my pay. He treated us both to a lunch of greasy meatloaf and lumpy mashed potatoes at the cheap diner down the street.

As summer waned and school grew closer, I began to lobby for a back-to-school clothing allowance. I never got it.

My biggest worry as a new kid at Drake High was getting through gym without anyone noticing I had no underpants.

September 1956

Winter rain ended my weeding job. Dettner moved me to his printing plant at 4th and Howard Street, in San Francisco. I was glad to have a winter job and he was glad to have cheap child labor.

Every morning, Frank picked me up in his 1947 Chevy. He was a journeyman printer, ten years on the job, slim, kind hearted, and a decorated World War II veteran.

On my first morning commuting with Frank, the boss drove past us in his shining new Cadillac weaving through traffic, racing to work.

My new co-worker chuckled. “You know, I’ve been watching him do that for years. I just relax, puttering along in the same lane, and usually get there at the same time he does.” I looked out the window and watched the Pacific Ocean broken by the rhythm of the Golden Gate Bridge’s orange cables whizzing by. “Look, Mike, we call him the whirling dervish because of the way he rushes around the job screaming and shouting. Just try to stay out of his way, and don’t take his yelling personally.”

Luckily, I spent my first two months buried in the deepest dungeon. I was alone in a dirty, airless room, feeding Smirnoff Vodka labels into a voracious finishing machine that clanged, banged and shrieked all day. My ears rang and my head pounded by the days’ end. No one visited me. No one bothered me.

Then I got a respite from purgatory, a brief stint as janitor. I had no machines to torment me, and wandered around picking up trash, sweeping floors and talking to folks. They told me Dettner was to the printing trades what my rich Uncle Frank was to the building trades, a bully and a cheapskate. I learned enough from them to confirm I didn’t want to be a printer when I grew up.

Three weeks later I was bound to a machine again. This one was just outside the boss’ office, on the first floor. Stacks of C & H sugar wrappers and a string-binding machine surrounded it.

“It’s simple,” Dettner instructed. “Just grab a stack with your left hand, step on the pedal, wrap them in string, and stack them with your right hand.”

I was a basketball guard who couldn’t dribble with his left hand. It wasn’t so easy. The day wore on. He occasionally peered out his office door and shook his head. Finally, he was in my face screaming, “Faster. Faster!”

My budding coordination shattered and I knocked over a few sugar stacks.

“God damn it, kid. That costs money,” he yelled even louder. I stumbled and knocked half the pallet over. “That’s it,” he screamed.

That was it for me, too. Pissed off, I kicked over the rest of the pallet and sugar packets spilled everywhere. I darted past him and out the door, never to return.

November 1956

Christmas was coming. There were no toys on layaway and we had an empty larder. Bud and I had had no luck finding jobs.

The newspapers were full of positions, all listed under employment agencies that charged a hefty twenty percent fee for the first three months. They also required screening before they would send anyone out on an interview. We didn’t want to do those things, but we had no other choice

The first two meetings were quick. One look at a teenager with no experience brought the same response. “Sorry. We can’t help you.”

We scored at the third agency. An attractive woman took pity and listened to our tale of woe.

“Well, how old are you”?

“Sixteen and seventeen,” I said before Bud could spill the beans. To be employed full-time you had to be sixteen. I was only fifteen.

“Well, I have several seasonal jobs.”

She sent Bud to Penny’s Department store on Market. He was hired as a Santa Claus and fired two weeks later for playing too little Santa and too much Ping-Pong. That turned out to be his only job that year.

My first interview took me back to my old neighborhood. Spiegel’s Department Store, was on 18th and Mission, just blocks from where I’d been raised. I guess my enthusiasm and energy carried the day. It didn’t hurt when I made sure the manager, Mr. O’Brien knew I was baptized and had received first Communion in his parish church, St. James.

He walked me over to the empty hardware section of the store. “This will be your department. Stock and sell the toys. Can you assemble bikes?”

“Oh, sure. No problem,” I lied. I was a mechanical moron. Dad, who could barely screw in a light bulb, thought manual projects were below his boys’ dignity.

What a great job. I managed to get the simpler things put together by myself, and a friendly janitor stepped in to help when I got stumped.

Spiegel’s was a far cry from Mom’s old stomping grounds like The City of Paris, White House or The Emporium. There were no beautifully illustrated OZ books, fancy made in Britain, sets of shiny lead soldiers, or Lincoln Logs, but there were plenty of cheap games, dolls, trucks, guns and off-brand bikes.

I was a natural salesman. I loved kids and had been a CYO basketball coach and a recreation director. Plus, I felt at home with working-class Mission District folks.

Along with the job, came an automatic employee charge account.

One week before Christmas, Mom strode into the store. My younger siblings were expecting Santa Claus to show up. It was my job was to make sure his bag was full.
I worked fast, stuffing the cart with the best toys the store had to offer. Then the clothes and home furnishings caught Mom’s eye.

Within an hour, Mom triumphantly exited Spiegel’s with over $ 500 in charged merchandise – a real haul in 1956.

Two weeks after Christmas, I was busy dismantling my toy department when I received a frantic call from the store manager.

“Mike, get in my office.”

He stood at his desk with my bill in his hand “Mike, for Christ’s sake, you’re a great worker and a good kid, but your job’s almost over. How the hell you gonna’ pay these charges?”

“Wow, Mr. O’Brien.” I opened my eyes wide. “I guess Mom got carried away.”

He shook his head helplessly.

“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.”

I felt bad about lying to the guy, but my family’s happiness came first.