 is an oral interview with Mr. Mark Marzola of 210 Texas Street, recorded at the Petrero Branch Library on September 15th, 1970. I'm sure that's recording. This is the history of Petrero Hill, also known as Scotch Hill. The Spaniards called it Petrero Nuevo or New Pasture. The Christianized Indians at Mission Dolores were trained to be vaqueros. The main exports from California during the Spanish rule were hides and towels. The meat was consumed here or dried in the sun for local use. Petrero Hill was the ideal pasture as it was bounded on three and a half sides by Mission Bay on the north, and San Francisco Bay on the east, and Mission Creek on the north side also, and the swamps of Islis Creek, which was much larger than Mission Creek. Cattle was slaughtered around the Petrero and Alameda streets to supply the Gold Rush Boom in San Francisco. In 1849, when the sailing ships arrived in bunches and never to sail again, as the crews deserted to make their fortune in the streams of the great motherload country. As sailing ships needed new ropes, a cottage work was started by the Tubbs family in 1854 on a tract of land eight square blocks bounded by 20th and Iowa to 23rd and Iowa to the bay. The sailing ships could come alongside of the works which extended into the bay about a block east of the present day Third Street. This cottage company went out of business in 1966 after 110 years of rope making, and the eight square blocks are now an industrial park. The works were well kept up and had trees and flowers and a stone bridge over a creek that flowed through the works. The next and the greater industry was the Union Iron Works at 20th and Illinois started by Peter Donahue to make mining machinery for the gold mines, lumber, machinery for lumber mills, locomotives and gas house apparatus to make illuminating gas for the new cities that were springing up like mushrooms. The employees of these waterfront industries were isolated from downtown San Francisco by Mission Bay. To get to San Francisco, people had to go around the western edge of Mission Bay hampered by muddy roads, as there were no paved roads. So a community of shipyard workers and rope workers was started on Tennessee Street. It had free churches, an opera house, schools, stores. As the working hours were from 10 to 12 hours a day, people lived very close to the place of their employment. Well, the 12 hour day was abolished in 1918 on the railroads. And this is the period you're talking about here. Yeah. The opera house was used for traveling shows, political meetings, et cetera. In 1868, a bridge about three quarters of a mile long was built to connect the Petrero with downtown San Francisco. It extended from Fortin Townsend to Mariposa and Kentucky Street, now known as Surge Street. Another piling bridge about a mile long extended from 26th in Kentucky to Hunter's Point called Railroad Avenue. Now it's all Third Street. These bridges later became embankments as each side was gradually filled in with fill from the grading operations on Petrero Hill, garbage, et cetera. Soon horse car transportation, namely the Petrero and Bayview Railroad was available to go to downtown San Francisco or to Hunter's Point or the Bayview racetrack. Around 1893, there was an economic depression and the United States government became aware of the nation's lack of naval power. Iron ships were ordered built. War warships were built at the Union Iron Works, the Charleston, the Monterey, the Olympia and the Great Battleship, Oregon. These ships were completed in time for engagement in the war with Spain. The Oregon was sent around the end of Cape Horn at full speed to engage the fleets of Spain in Cuban waters. The Olympia was sent to Manila Bay as Admiral Dewey's flagship. Incidentally, the battle of Manila Bay lasted about 24 hours. With, yeah. Many men from the British Isles came to work here in the Union Iron Works. The Scotch workers, with shipbuilding experience, lived higher up on Petrero Hill. The unskilled workers lived on the flatlands and on Irish Hill, which was the east of Third Street around 20th and 22nd Street. It was graded down around 1912 to make room for the shipyard expansion. Well, it was Union Iron Works then. It disappeared entirely in 1916 to make warships for World War I. Another shipbuilding boom, well, incidentally, the Union Iron Works was sold to the Bethlehem Steel in World War I. Another shipbuilding boom started with the discovery of gold in Alaska in 1897. Many river boats and barges was built for the Yukon River, the Columbia River and the Sacramento River. Incidentally, the only Delta Queen on the Mississippi was built in San Francisco. Is that right? Yeah. Didn't San Francisco shipbuilding port of the west? Oh, yes, well, Los Angeles, in 1900, Los Angeles had only 100,000 people. I don't think that much. And Seattle and Portland were small. The trolley car made its appearance around 1896. This enabled the more affluent workers to move out of the Petraro to better neighborhoods. As the railroad yards and roundhouse made a great deal of noise day and night, the city's garbage was burnt at 15 and D. Harris Street, starting 1896. The whaling ships dried their whale bone on the slopes of Petraro Hill. From 1895 to 1900, oh, they dried their whale bone on the slopes of Petraro Hill from 1895 to 1905. Also, the odors from Butcher Town, slaughterhouses and hog grazing on wharves fed on the slots from the city's restaurants. Also, most of the workers' home had no bathtubs or toilets, only a backyard affair, no electric lights, only kerosene lamps or gas lights. However, people were happier then than now. The boys had social clubs held in neighborhood, which held neighborhood, and held neighborhood dances. One boy would study accordion, the other one banjo, and the other one drums, and they supplied the music with these neighborhood dances. New songs didn't appear so frequently, so everybody could learn them in due time. Won't you come home, Bill Bailey, appeared in 1891, and it's still popular. Traveling mission shows. And Waterville came to the local opera house, boys could go to work at the age of 14, they were self-reliant, they helped their parents. They did not take the drugs, or yet you could buy without a prescription any drug store until 1913. See, the Harrison Narcotic Act was enacted in 1913. Political problems in Russia caused many religious groups in 1905 and 1906 to emigrate to the United States. The Baptists, Molocons, and liberals of some sort settled on top of the hill and bought lots and built their own homes. This is around the Carolina. Yeah, Carolina, yeah. They got away, they'd like to isolate themselves, you see. That's in height, that's hilarious. Yeah. The Scots wanted to live away from the Irish, they moved up here. The Catholic Church was down on Tennessee and they finally moved it up to 19th and Connecticut. Right, right. Yeah. Now the Scots lived on another part of the, the Scots lived off 20th Street around Connecticut. Well, they lived all around the top of the hill. Overlooking the bay, the superintendents and the higher officials of the Union Ironworks lived up there, sea captains, et cetera, you know. Yeah, yeah, I read about it. Yeah. My house still has a widow's walk. Yeah. Oh wait a minute, let's see, where were I? In 18, 1960, earthquake and fire burned 80% of the workers' homes in San Francisco. While the middle class out in the western edition or Pacific Heights or Car Hollow suffered very little. People fled to Petro Hill, Twin Peaks, and the marina. The army provided tents and corn, beef, hard tack, et cetera. They, they had a big supply, I give, as a result of the Spanish-American war, they probably overstocked. They helped the refugees. Oh yes. And the, and later they made houses. Reverie Shack, and there was one on 19th and Connecticut, I could spot it, it was down in a little hole. It was a two room affair. It was portable. You could assemble it and take it down and put it together. My goodness. Hmm? Goodness, I had no idea. Yeah. Where was I? Oh yeah. The refugees were soon employed in rebuilding the city and soon were able to buy a piece of land on the hill. The railroads prospered and a battle of railroad giants emerged. These giants sought land for their terminals. The northern Pacific, southern Pacific, Santa Fe, and the western Pacific. The southern Pacific had their terminal at fourth in Townsend. Their roundhouse was at 15th and Harrison. The Santa Fe had a terminal at Richmond, California. Their freight cars had to be ferried over on barges to the base of Petrero Hill. The western Pacific ferried their freight cars to the southern end of Petrero Hill and they bored a whole, a tunnel under Petrero Hill to reach their terminal at Ninth and Brannon. This tunnel burned down in 1966 and had to be filled with cement and abandoned. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. And the details of the loss, I'm telling you. Yeah. The southern Pacific decided to shorten the railroad, route to Los Angeles, and board five tunnels. One under, two under Petrero Hill and three more under the hills of Bayview and Visitation Valley. They also built a trestle about a mile long across Isla's Creek Swamplands. There was a big swamp there. Now it, hmm. Mr. Rizal, can you tell us the location of the Petrero Hill tunnel? Yes, it started at Sierra and... Sierra, what? Well, that's a little street. Oh, I know Sierra, right off Mr. Yeah. Sierra and Texas. Two, they Carolina and 16th. That was the other end of the tunnel. No, they went on a diagonal. Yeah, diagonal, yeah. No, you said there were two tunnels on the hill. You wanna shut that off? No, I wanted to tell us this. Oh, well, the E.H. Harriman, the railroad giant, wanted to merge the Union Pacific with the Southern Pacific. Southern Pacific owned the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. So he pictured a big terminal that south of the county line. But in the meanwhile, the government broke up his dream saying it would be a monopoly. They cost the railroad companies who would grant rebates if you wrote on a Pacific Mail Steamship Company from China and Japan and Peru or what have you, you see. So they broke up that combination. Incidentally, the Central Pacific used to go around the Great Salt Lake. Then they decided to build a trestle 31 miles long, made of piling. They figured out over a period of years it would pay for itself, you see. And later on, they tore down a big hill, a mountain and filled the trestle with earth. Now you cross over and you don't see that trestle. It's buried. Same way with this trestle and this was Crete. They gradually threw dirt on each side and they gradually filled it up. So the cattle couldn't get away from Petrero Hill. There was a little two or three blocks of barqueros had to chase them back up here. So that's the reason why. Originally it was a grazing ground and a few energetic individuals started small dairies. The funniest. Yeah. The barn for the pharmacy. Yeah, they were. Yeah. There were several of them. Let me get back to... We're talking about the tunnels. Yeah, we have the one now from Sierra and Missouri going to Tetris. Well, the Southern Pacific, Harriman was gonna build an electric road. So he had one tunnel for the electric, the other for the steam. The steam would go to Los Angeles and continue on to New Orleans, you see. But they got and broke up his plans and I get a little, I get the remainder of the, Harriman left a bunch of money for a pension for 40 year employees. So I get the residue at $6 a month. I get a check every month from the lab. Well. They also built a new roundhouse at the foot of Mariposa extending from Pennsylvania to Third Street. Their freight classification yards extended from Seventh Street to Third Street on 26 acres of filled in Mission Bay. They built overhead viaducts over their freight yards so street cars and other traffic would not be blocked. One extended up Sixth Street, another one over to 16th Street, up 16th Street and one over Third Street, which is still there. You see that black viaduct on Third, it's 16th of the viaduct. You can drive up in case of freight cars are blocking you. All right. Later on in 1980, freight traffic reached its zenith. So a larger classification yard was built just over the county line at Bay Shore. New repair shops here were built also a new roundhouse for freight locomotives. This alleviated some of the noise which disturbed people's sleep at night and on Petro Hill whistled bells and the crash of freight cars being juggled around. All night long. World War I started in 1914 and orders were placed with the Union Ironworks for destroyers. After the United States became involved in 1917, 18,000 men were employed in the Union Ironworks because electric welding was not yet perfected and oxyacetylene cutting or welding did not come into use. These thousands of men worked around the clock. There was seven stores on Third Street open all night selling overall shirts, gloves and many restaurants were open 24 hours a day. I used to go down each three o'clock in the morning on 20th Street, 20th and 3rd. The trolley cars went right into the shipyards from many lines to save time for the workers. Even cement boats were built. Besides many wooden ships to carry lumber from for the war boom, they were built at Eureka and Grace Harbor. Even wooden aeroplanes were built to conserve steel. The Great Bethlehem Steel was bought out to the Union Ironworks and built a hospital at 18th and Pennsylvania. It is now a private rest home. Many shipyard workers bought new homes or remodeled the older ones and had their own bathtubs. Before that, they went to the barbershop. The men and the women were left to ship with themselves. There was a lot of barbershops on Third Street. Each barbershop, you got a haircut and a shave Saturday night in the bath. You see, they had six or eight tubs. I never heard of them. The homes didn't have them. The poor working man couldn't afford a bathtub. Well, anyway, while the original city planners knew that the Petrera Hill had the most sunshine and laid out wider streets, the nuisance industries combined with the politicians, they prevailed. But now the Hill Real Estate is in great demand. World War II, the shipyards were very busy but with fewer workers due into the electric welding and gas cutting and welding, new techniques, et cetera. But for the first time in the history of railroading, women were hired to work in locomotive roundhouse. As smoke, grease, and oil, and noise was everywhere, the woman built intended fires in the locomotives. Shovel sand in the sandhouse. The sand was used for the air brakes. They wiped the locomotives and for a while helped mechanics. They gradually got married or found better employment. The last woman retired in July, 1970. And now the roundhouse has gone and only a few diesel locomotives are parked at 7th and Townsend Street. Sure. Nora Gould, she come for more. Well, trains used to run to Santa Cruz. There was a little train line, went over to Santa Cruz mountains, down to the Santa Cruz. They ran to passenger trains, to trespinos, to Monterey. Now only one train a day to Los Angeles and one to Monterey. The rider worked for 43 years in a railroad roundhouse and it was a very interesting and exciting experience. Now peace and quiet prevails except for the pollution from the auto exhaust because everybody wants speed. The county hospital was located on Petrero Avenue near 22nd. Also a school for wayward girls. The pest house turned torn down. St. Catherine's home, it was a Catholic hospital. Was that near around the hospital? Yeah, there's a, you see there's a stone grotto where they had the Virgin Mary in there now. You can, I think it's still there, the grotto. What happened to- The school? Yeah. Well they discontinued. What was the name of the school? St. Catherine's home. And do you remember when it was torn down? It was a wooden building, it was torn down. When? In preschool. Oh, I tell you who can tell you, Miss Cassiano. Do you know Miss Cassiano? Not on hand, I don't think I do. She knows you. Oh. She lives on Texas Street. Oh, I know who's named. Yeah. She lived across the street, she could tell you. She could tell you the exact date. The pest house, as it was called, was for all contagious diseases, leprosy, smallpox, yellow fever, et cetera, was located on Army Street near Evans. As the roads were not paved in those days, the afternoon winds raised clouds of dust, which gave the old shed-like buildings a gloomy appearance. Well, it was still there in 1920. Yeah. There was a streetcar that started in at 8th and Market. And you transferred from the 22 car stopped at Bryant Street, and you had to transfer to number 30. It went around 3rd Street and up Army Street. The streetcar was there, but the street wasn't paved. But before, before 1896, it was just clouds of dust. Even in 1910, it wasn't even paved yet. The dust had fly up. Let's see, we're getting away from woollen mills, hair curling works, paint factories, glue works. We're on the west side of Portrero Hill. Well, Bryant Portrero Avenue. The bottom of Portrero Hill is Harrison Street. There's where the water from Portrero Hill went down Harrison from Twin Peaks, and it made Mission Creek. I'm telling you, the David fell down. You couldn't. The cars couldn't get away over the cattle. Well, let's see. With electric streetcars available in 1897 on, the executors of the eccentric millionaire James Lick and Wilmerding and Melinda Lux built schools to teach, to teach building trades. The Lux School taught girls, it was for girls, dressmaking, millinery trades, and household economics. Now they didn't teach business because no girls engage in business. There were bookkeepers, there were men, even telephone operators were men. The funds that were endowed were depleted after about 50 years by inflation, so that the land and buildings were sold. They probably borrowed money in the meanwhile and had to pay the loans off. The Lux School was sold to Machinist Union and still stands there. The Lick-Wilmerding schools were demolished around 1960, and the property is now the United Parcel Delivery Headquarters and Garage. Now the Lux School still stands down there. It's on 17th and Petrero Avenue. You see that big building there? Yeah. Melinda Lux was the widow of the great cattle kings. Miller and Lux, they owned all that land on the west side of San Joaquin River. They raised cattle. They had a big slaughterhouse here at Butcher Town. You see? So the executors of the estate, well, they saw a chance. But when the street cars came here, and that is electric cars, well, then they bought a piece of land. Here's a good place. Then there was another character, Cogswell. He built a Cogswell Industrial School. But he was a prohibitionist. That is, he had statues. There's one statue in Washington Square. It was originally right on the corner of the Barbary Coast, Pacific and Columbus Avenue. It advocated drinking the water. One forces said, fishy water. The other soda water. But it was all played water. And it had a statue of Benjamin Franklin to encourage you to be frifty. But the Cogswell School, I can dig you up to that on that later. But that old fountain is still in Washington Square. You know, that's on North Beach area, you know. It's still there. So I didn't mention Darry's for housing projects. The first housing project was permanent. That is a tile roof and copper fittings on the roof. So the seawater wouldn't, well, that's one here. But then, yeah. And then when World War I came on, they built them all over. They built them at Hunter's Point. I had two lots at Hunter's Point. They paid $150 for each one of them. And I used to go swimming at weekends, you know. You could buy shrimps for three pounds for 25 cents. Them nice little shrimps. Well, that was built around the night right after the Depression was started. See, they had artists painting up in Coyt Tower. Oh, this is very WP. Yeah, it was something like a WPA project, yeah. It would be interesting if we could talk a little bit about you. You were born in Martinez when, Mr. Marzola? 1889, January. 1894. Oh, no. We moved to Filbert and Columbus Avenue. At that time, it was called Montgomery Avenue. Then they changed to Columbus Avenue. But a lot of street names that were notorious would change. Grand Avenue used to be DuPont Street on the counter. Houses of Bill Fame. Next door to the county jail was Broadway and Hinckley Alley and Pinkley Alley. They changed them to Houses of Bill Fame. The county jail was where Pinocchio Club is today, if you know what that is. And in North Beach. Yeah. And Morton Lane was changed to Union Square Avenue. And that's one block off of Market Street. Well, you see, there was no jobs for women. If a woman became a widow, she was out of luck. She had to go to work in dance halls. Yeah, well, you will say, well, she could have worked as a maid. And no, no, the rich people imported their maids from France and Germany and England, especially Irish girls. And then later on, Donald Delac Cameron used to rescue the slave girls. The police wouldn't rescue them. So she'd hire private detectives, and they'd break the door down and get these girls out. They were slave girls. They were bought in China. When I used to deliver bread to the Barbary Coast about 11 at night. And this was about when? About when? 1900. Barbary Coast was its heyday. Because the people come down from Alaska loaded with money. The Philippine War ended, and the soldiers come back from the film with money. So all them dives, they'd change their name periodically. During around 1900, they were campfire, the recoup, recruit, or different names connected with the war. Before that, the original builders of the Barbary Coast evidently studied Greek mythology because they had the Thalia, the Apollo, the Andromeda. In fact, Stackpole, a great sculptor, designed some plaster character, plaster paris. You'd call them satyrs, half goat and half man. And I think Stackpole, he was a Stackpole, no, wait a minute. Well, he run a bill, and the same way all the others had run a bill, Izzy Gormas. You've heard of Izzy Gormas? Well, they'd run a bill, and then they'd paint. He had, over the bar, quotations for Omar Kayam. I remember one. Into the fires of spring, throw your winter garments of repentance. Oh, no, your winter garments of repentance fling. Incidentally, the first time I went in there, Pacific Street, Izzy Gormas was a big fat portagate from the Cape Wordy Islands. So he was very inquisitive. He asked me, where you work? I said, Southern Pacific. He said, you're Southern Pacific. You know, Manuel Santos Fernandes? I said, do I? He's my helper. See, some of the locomotives still had acetylene gas lights. And his job was to put in the acetylene and then light the lights at six o'clock at night. Only the passengers had electric headlights. So when I said that, he told the bartender, this man don't pay. Give him all he wants to drink. Because they were both from Cape Wordy Islands. And he said, you know my cousin, Louis Gormas? I said, sure, he run the All Nations Saloon. You see, I had that route. Between the Italian newspaper route, that brought me all over town. Today, the boys have three blocks from home. That's all they go. I started in the marina down Montgomery Street, the Montgomery Block. And lawyers, I'd have to climb stairs. There were no elevators, you see, climb the stairs. And I'd wind up at the foot of Mission Bay. The scavengers, see, they subscribed. There was two Italian papers. Now there's none. No, no, no. The l'Italia and la Voce del Popolo means the voice of the people, yeah. Well, the French, I think the French have a newspaper. You see, that brought me all around town. Then the railroad worked the same way. Well, the long hours during the World War I, I'd go and eat up at 20th and 3rd. And then I'd get acquainted with people. And it was full of hotels. That's 3rd Street. 3rd Street. There's a couple left. New Portrero Hotel and further down. So I'd get around anyway. Then my mother'd take me to see Italian. They had vegetable gardens. Well, Beavu District was all vegetable gardens. Huntress Point had a brewery. There's a spring in the hills there. Somebody made a nice stone brewery out of the stone from the Huntress Point. It's still there, but not the brewery. Some artists brought it. During the Depression, you could have bought property from almost a song. At the foot of the hill, there was two shipyards for wooden ships. Browler and Seamer and Anderson and Christophani. The bay was full of scows. Before 1900, they sailed up the Sacramento River and come down with wheat and bricks, gravel, hay. The hay was piled up so high they had extended steering wheel so he could look over the top of the hay. There's where Jack London come in at night. The whole family would be asleep when they'd to sail alongside and grab four or five sacks a week, you know. The oyster beds. Now, this is what I remember hearing about at night. Well, let's don't concern Petrero Elf. But you want to shut this off? No, I think this is very fast. Yeah, well. Now, you told me the other day that you had moved. They belong to the party, yeah. Socialist party. Huh? Socialist party. There was no IWD ever. There was no pre-date. This pre-date. Pre-date. There was Comrade Costley. Open Air Speaking was permitted on Grand Avenue and Market. Saturday night, there was pitchmen selling all kind of nostrums, you know. There was another man sold books from the colony Nesterow, Florida. Estero, Florida. The book says the worth is hollow. When you go up around the North Pole, you can sail inside the area. Incidentally, that colony dissolved about a few years ago and they sold a real estate and they made a lot of money as survivors. And Ford and Firestone and Edison used to go down in winter. And as the place around put the Gorda, they called 10,000 islands. I had a sweetheart in the 20s. She was in Florida. And she told me she's the road of one island with school and that's one of the grocery stores. And she wound up, married a banker's son in Richmond and she made him buy a boat on the bay, something like Jack London, to sail around and come down with cargoes of wheat and corn and stuff like that. Where were you working when you were in the Socialist Party? Well, I was working for the West Electric. Because you were an electrician. Yeah. No, I was an electrician. Well, I was telephone electrician. Oh, I see. We were building all the switchboards. They burned up. And on top of it, at the same time, the American bill decided to junk all the manual operated switchboards. That is, you had to turn the crank, the operator had a crank there. And instead of electric lights, when a subscriber wanted to call up, a little shutter fell down. They still have them in the motherload country, you see them. And you had to flick that shutter up again. They said, junk all them and the common battery system. You had to have two dry cells in each house. You see, now you don't have any dry cells. It's a common battery system. There's one battery in the central office that supplies electricity at 48 volts. Before that, you had to have, you had to have turned the crank to ring up, you know? So they junked all that. And besides, well, we had orders from Vancouver, Washington, all the way down to San Diego. So I was working day and night. Oh, they'd ask you, 24 hours, nothing to work, sometimes 38 hours. Stay there, you finish. We built 80 line switchboards. I could only fit inside of one, you know, alone. I'd have to wire all these jacks, they call them jacks. And before that, I worked for the Ever Ready Battery Company. And I didn't like it, we made them by hand. These little flashlight batteries. Yes. The man says, there's a great future because you can speak Italian and Spanish. And I just laughed at him. Today, Ever Ready has been absorbed by the National Carbon. The National Carbon was absorbed by the Union Carbide. So one day when I was working in a roundhouse, a man come down with some brushes for these generators. And I said, I used to work with that company. I said, where's Oaks? Oh, he retired, he's a rich man. And where's Kaplan, the poor man? Oh, he's another rich man. See, they were tipped off to buy the stock, buy the National Carbon. And then, you know what, you know what oxyacetylene cutting can do, you know? Today, they make oxyacetylene. But the whole one, they didn't have that oxyacetylene. Everything had to be, you made a plate with a lot of holes that was punched in it. It didn't fit exactly right. Then it was put alongside the ship. And if they didn't match, you had to ream it out. And then you had to heat a big rivet and throw it up there in two-manered hammer away at it. Today, it's welding, there's no more riveting. There's a little riveting there, but the sides of the ship are smooth. See, that's why there was 18,000 men all night long, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And the railroads made a, there was no other transportation, you know? No planes, no freight, anyway. No buses, you went to San Mateo and it was dusty. Roots in the dust, when you tried to ride a bicycle, we rode down and broke my fork. I hit a root in a tree. It was covered by dust, you know? Broke the forks and went on, spinning open the air. So the railroad was the main method of transporting it. It reaches Hay Day about 1916. And you went to work for the Southern Pacific? Yeah, 1911. And then that's when you worked in the Roundhouse. Yeah. When did you come to Petraro? Well, I said 1936, I decided to move down here from Twin Peaks. I didn't know anything about it. Because they started to put in traffic signals and it was stop and start. I said, I'm going to move there where I work. You can get up and in five minutes I was home and they had no time cards in them days or no, and I was the only electrician on a job. That was something new on a railroad, have an electrician. Before that, the power supplied by a steam engine. Then they started to put in electric motors and they had electric headlights. The Pullman cars had trail, a generator underneath that run by a belt. Well, I tell you how in 1915 we had exposition. One of the grandest exposition in the country's ever seen. The backers convention has 36 special trains. We borrowed engines from even Mexico. There was conventions every day. So the Mexican locomotives, instead of numbers, they had names, you know, General Velasco or General Delivery. They don't number their locomotives. Incidentally, the Southern Pacific used to run the Guimas. Yeah, they was extended down to Guimas and the Mexican government bought them out. Let's see, I think we'll continue on the other side of this. It was built in Calhalla, there was just sand dunes. Lagoon's were the Chinese raised vegetables for Chinatown. Then when the Panama exposition was projected, they started building it in 1913, 12. Why, it encompassed all the marina from Fort Mason West to the Presidio. Every inch was taken up. They had, we had the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and I think the Great Northern had big locomotives there. And they were fired up at night and the safety valve would pop off and a search light would shine on that. The Tower of Jules was made of thousands of jewels later when it was torn down, they sold for $1.5 a piece. They were made in Austria. All was a beautiful exposition. And that gave the public the first acquaintance with the Hawaiians. Before that, they were known as the Sandwich Islands. They had a vague Sandwich Islands in Canacas. That encompassed all the islands, see. So it was an education. And the Marimba Band came up from Guatemala. They turned out beautiful music on the Marimbas. Oh, and the Hawaiian building was full of tropical fish and plants. And the world got acquainted with the ukulele. Yeah. But I like the Marimba Band the most. Oh, that was beautiful music. Two minutes ago when the machine was off, you told me that you hated those trains. Oh, Christmas, eight or nine extra trains for Los Angeles. That meant, worked for me because they'd bring locomotives from Oakland or somewhere else. And the electrical equipment wasn't, I don't know, boys didn't like the study then. They just gave me a bad time. Well, you got this off the air? No, we're on. Huh? We're on. Oh, I don't wanna, people knew very little about electricity. I happened to go to Polytechnic High School and I had a smattering of it. And it enabled me to carry on. Because with different kind of work, I had to climb poles at night in the rain. They didn't have incandescent lamps. They had arc lights. You know what an arc light is? Two carbons and they automatically go apart as a big flame like. And I had to climb the poles and they'd call me up. The ferry is in the dark down here, the car ferry. They ferry all these freight cars over from Oakland instead of going around the bay. Now they got the Dumbarton Bridge. They come over the Dumbarton Bridge. So I'd have to put a pair of climbers and climb up in the rain and change a carbon. But I knew I could go in the roundhouse and get on a belly on a big locomotive and you were dry in five minutes. They were like a lot of horses. In fact, they put them in stall number six. Put this one in stall number seven. The man that brings it in, they call him a hustler. See, you carry over from the stagecoach days. And it's just like a human being. When they come in, their air supply is exhausted and the pump, they shut off the pump but they generally don't shut it off tight enough and all night long it's going, just like a tired man, you know. I'd lay over them big boilers and I'd dry out in a minute. My work was on top. They had a turbine generator. And then the United States government made the most foolish move. Right in the middle of World War I, they issued an order. All locomotives have to have electric lights. So this poor little company had made these generators. They said, we couldn't start to supply. So the government says, put batteries on them top of the locomotive. Big heavy battery, I'd have to hoist it up and put it on top and take the old one off and charge it up. Besides doing all the other work. Go down here, go down there. From six at night to six in the morning. So whenever I had time, well, I'd go up Tennessee street and I got acquainted with the neighbors and the group. It seems to me that one day you told me that Tennessee street used to be one of the main thoroughfares. It was. It was isolated. You couldn't get across unless you went and rode across Mission Bay. So they stayed there. They had their own opera house. Minstrel shows had come in, traveling shows, you know. They'd go way up the country, like Cloverdale and Hopland. In fact, I was up in Hopland in 1906 picking hops. In downtown, it was a traveling show. I can remember that song. I'll be waiting for you, honey boy. You know, generally the opera house were over a livery stable. Martinez had them traveling shows. It wasn't a traveling show, it was a traveling medicine man with a Negro and a banjo. The first time I heard, she's the Yellow Rose of Texas that I heard in 1894. There was an Italian medicine man. He had a Negro banjo player and he sang it for me. Well, he'd get a can of, he'd send us boys down with a boot black stand and buy all the empty boot black cans. I mean, polished cans. He'd dip them in lye and take all the paint off. Then he'd put it with Vaseline, well, petroleum jelly. See, Vaseline is a trade name. The real name is petroleum jelly. And he put a little eucalyptus oil in and he got a dollar a can for it. Well, you see, you could hang out a signed professor. You couldn't say dog, but the law permitted professorcy. So people got a hold of these, the induction coil come in, it raised the voltage and there was a lot of quacks, put up a sign, electric treatments. In fact, up to 19, say 1930, they made a big belt loop and you put you inside, around your body. And I think they charge you $25 for it or you could go into parlors. They had parlors all over town where you slipped us over your body and they charge you 50 cents for a half an hour's use. Was it supposed to charge you up? Yeah, they had here. They were quacks, you know. You've got a book in the library about them. So one day, I think it was 1952, I see one in the street and I ripped it open and I give the wire to another electrician. He was gonna use it for winding armatures. Oh, that turned after turn of wire, about $5 worth of wire in it. Well, this professor, he came up from Los Angeles. He rented a front room in my house. I lived on Powell in Pacific. And he says, there's no future in Los Angeles. Well, it wasn't until they discovered oil around there. So Union Oil was established in 1890 and then the Standard Oil. The Union Oil property, they sold a piece of land for $15 million that they bought just to drill and didn't find any oil on them. Then they tried raising avocados for a while. They loaded with land, all their real estate, service stations all over California. If you ever liquidate, you'll surely make money on it. William, that's anybody's guess. Well, I don't know what this is going to be. Southern Pacific had one of the biggest deposit of oil in California, land grant. Every other section of land, every 648 acres went to the state, the next 648 acres went to the railroad. But them old-time engineers, they were a colorful bunch. They were from all over the world on account of the big railroad strike in 1896. The locomotive engineers went out on the strike and so they hired engineers from Germany, from England, from France. Some had beards, you know. One man was an astronomer out of work. They were an intelligent bunch today. They, all that interest in, how much, he made more money than I did. He made more over time. Every move they make is extra pay. Changing times. You know the squabble about the firemen? They see a freight train, has an engineer and the head breakman. Today there's no more steam locomotives. All the breakmen, all the engineer does is like running a big motor truck. And the head breakman is sitting there to get down and open the key to lock on a siding, to go on a siding, see. So that they want another fireman in there. Well, they have no use for them. There'd be three men in a cab. And the railroad is almost bankrupt. The only good one is the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific because the land grants. Union Pacific has the biggest deposit of coal west of the Mississippi River. Oil lands, uranium lands, they can carry on. Those Eastern roads, especially around the new Haven, new Hartwood, they have to carry the commuters and there's no money in that. One wreck and the damage suits will wipe out any profit, see. You mentioned Tennessee Street. They had three churches. Yeah, this was the Main Street. Main Street police station, emergency hospital. Police station is still there, isn't it? Still there, yeah. A hospital? Yeah. What was the hospital? Well, emergency hospital. Later on when movies came in, they had movie house around 20th and 3rd. Oh, it's gone. They moved the church. The Catholic Church moved from 19 up to here in 1926. Oh, I remember this Portuguese helper of mine. He said to me one day, he told me all his troubles. He was a big lanky. He came to the United States on a whaling ship. Nobody wanted them jobs, smelly jobs, so they could stop the Cape Verde islands. And they'd say, you wanna work on a whaling ship when we get to New Bedford, you could hop ashore and lose yourself. Anyway, he said, mazu, last night, devil come sit on my chest. I can't breathe. I said, you showed the lawyer? So the church was right around the corner, see. I said, mazu, I noticed you passed the church, you didn't take off your hat. Bah, I got you right, I don't take off the hat. So the next day I watched him, you take off. You see, the mind over matter, he said, devil never, devil never sit on my chest anymore. He was a character. He was the only man could splice rope in a roundhouse. He learned it on a whaling ship, you see. You know, incidentally, San Francisco was whaling headquarters from 1895 to 1905. You know why? All the whales, they migrate to Baja California and they mate in the Gulf of California. Then they come up again. So they were harpooning them and they let them at the foot of Folsom Street. I remember the William Bayless, the Nawaal, and the Bear. The big barrels of blubber and oil and water smell. I imagine. Hmm? I imagine. And they dried the whalebone. You know, they use it in women's corsets. You know, it was a strip of bone and it was flexible. You could bend over and it spring back and besides they had steel in them too, you know. So it was quite an industry. So as Saturdays and Sundays, we patrol the waterfront, we start in and wind up way down here. And as I said, the walls were open. You could go on the end of any wall. I don't blame the kids today for being delinquent. There's nothing to occupy them. We could go swimming. You know what Girardelli Square is? Oh yeah. Well, it had hot water from the Girardelli Chocolate Works running in the Bay. And it kept the temperature of the Bay a little bit warmer than the surroundings. We'd go swimming whenever we got a chance, afternoon after school. Clay Street Hill was clay. In summertime, we'd bring each boy brought a can of water up there and pour it down the side of the hill. Then we had a sled. Instead of snow, we'd slide down a slippery clay. Oh my goodness. Well, getting around to them big boys' children, this wagon I made to carry the bread and flour at night, sadly, we'd go up to Knob Hill because the streets were paved with asphalt. All the rest time it was cobblestones. So we'd come down the hill and then make a turn, you know. And these boys would be playing around it. He'd say, give me a ride. And I'd watch the governors, you know. I'd give them a ride. She'd come down and give me the devil. They're afraid they'd get hurt, you know. When was this? Knob Hill. When? All around 1901 to. Tell me something, too, about the earthquake. Where were you? Powell and Pacific. You were living over there then? I'm telling you, when the earthquake, yeah. Right across the street from them. You see, the Southerners, when they came to California to get into the gold act, they brought their servants with them. And they were very proud bunch. In fact, they, across the street from where I lived, there was the African Methodist Episcopal Church. They were all retainers of these rich people. And you know, the only thing that saved the North was the efforts. The first thing that saved the North was the $1 billion worth of silver and gold had come out of Virginia City. And you see the Southerners, there was a lot of Virginians who were very proud. They wanted us to see seed from the North. They wanted California. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And England was on the southern side. They wanted that cotton. And they loaned money to the planters. They're afraid that if the North would probably tie up the cotton production. And what a little Navy we had dissipated. We had the monitor, a little cheese box affair. In fact, one of the pipe fitters that he descended from, his name was Erickson. He said, my grandfather built the monitor. The Merrimack was a Confederate boat with steel rails for armor. The Merrimack had a revolving turret. You see? Well, anyway, we were almost bankrupt till he discovered gold and silver. And then Mr. Sutro made a 10-mile tunnel on the mountain so to drain the mines. The water got in there. Hot water, you know. They went down so far and they couldn't breathe anymore and they couldn't work. So he says, I'll build a tunnel. And he made a fortune selling stock. I see it revived. There's Sutro mining company now. This fellow, Howard Hughes, is buying all of them abandoned mines up there. They went from $1,000 down to one center share. Around 1902, the mining exchange was down in Montgomery in California. And I see them widows that go down and look at the quotation board, they shawls. They wore shawls in them. They shawls are so old, they were green, turning green. And they'd look up there in hopes that they'd have a comeback. They had hail in North Cross, the Virginia Consolidated, the Opher Mine. Oh, they had dozens of them. And every afternoon, paper had the mining quotation on. In the morning, these old widows had come down. Living in hopes. Well, it's Howard Hughes. Silver's coming back. You know who's the greatest user of silver? You couldn't guess. Eastman Kodak Company. Everybody, kids that got cameras, you go down in the picture, snap, snap, Chinatown, snap, snap. These movie films are stored in there. When they obsolete, they send them to a chemical company. They take the silver out. Silver nitrate. They're the greatest consumers. Then with the advent of machinery, every starter now has got silver buttons on the contacts. See, copper gets oxidized by the oxygen in the air. And once it's oxidized, it's a non-conductor. Silver, it gets burnt, it oxidized, you know? But it's still a conductor of electricity. So there's a big demand for silver. So these gamblers, they call it the futures. You can make a deal with, you go down any stock broker. He says, I'm willing to deliver silver in 1971 for $180 an ounce. He'll take you on. I'll go broke maybe. It'll be $2 an ounce. I'll have to buy it in the open market. Everything is bought for the future. There's ways of protecting yourself, see? And I'm sorry for the poor buyer that don't protect his company. They protect it by buying a year from now, see? Pork bellies, that means the sides of the hog used for making bacon. Big speculation in that every day. Wheat, cotton, silver. Well, what's the latest commodity they're gambling in? Wait a minute. Oh, they're buying futures and everything. Oh, orange juice. They're speculating in orange juice. Orange juice? Sure. Do you see what happened in the Middle West? They found out the corn has got a blight as a fungus in the corn. If the corn crops falls off 25%, you won't see prosperity in the United States. Bacon will go up, ham will go up. They lay off these packing houses lay off because the corn is available, the way the greatest corn grown country in the world. So you see, they're speculating why these fellas. Some of them men have 12 telephones from all over the world. They're listening here to listen. How's the crops in Argentina? How's the crops in Sweden? And they make it look like betting that the price is going to go up. And the other fellas said the price is going down. Great speculation. Going back to 1906, they do have any particular experience in the earthquake? Well, the second day of the fire, I decided to go sightseeing. So I landed up at Portsmouth Square. National guards had come here, young man. They gave me a big pan. He says, going in ruins and pick all the decayed meat or human beings, whatever they have. And I had a big hole dug in Portsmouth Square. We dumped all them bodies down the hole. And I was in April, and it was raining. And I washed my hands a dozen times. They said, you can go home now. But keep out of here. And then the next day, I run into a man with a camera. And it was a big bulky affair, and he had a lot of plates. He says, you carry this, and I'll give me a couple of dollars. So I went around the ruins of Nob Hill, and he'd take the picture of the ruins. And he said, get in the picture. So I did. And one day I was going out to Market Street. Oh, this was about 1917 or 1918. And in old bookstore, I found a book with my picture in every page, you know. The camera company was named as Hodkins. I should have saved it, but you know, I moved around. I lost this, and I lost that. Hmm? It would be something that would be nice for you to lose. Well, someday I'll locate one somewhere. And you mentioned, too, the other day, about Luban's place. Oh, yeah, in 1901, some rats got off of some ship that came from China. And they infected a lot of Skid Row characters. Skid Row used to be on Clay Street. I was going to say what it was. No, no, Clay Street. In fact, the Salvation Army had a restaurant, one cent a dish, soup, one cent, beef stew, one cent, beans, one cent. And they'd be down to Barbary Coast at night, you know, with the drum laying on the street, you know, and they'd sing, where's my wandering boy tonight? These trunks would stop to cry and throw a half a dollar on a drum. Even the girls would go in a house of prostitution with the tambourine, you know. They weren't bashful. They were, and they, that restaurant was on Clay Street, one cent a dish. Now, when did the Lubanic Plays, then? Oh, 1901. Anyway, you know, they had an unwritten law. You've heard of them, Kearney riots where the Irishmen, even Jack London, used to rape and kick the Asiats out of California. Well, anyway, there's an unwritten law by the tongues. No Chinese shall ever harm a white man. So the federal medical doctor, Blue, that was his name, I remember. They went all the buildings and carried the furniture and possessions out on the street. They were going to burn them up. And they would disinfect all these houses with chloride, a lime, like a white wash. They sprayed it all around. And then they hired pinketed patrolmen to watch. Nobody come in or out. They had a rope all around Chinatown, big rope. So my mother had a habit of getting up early. And we only lived a block away. She says, hey, boys, I had three brothers, you know. There's beautiful silk gowns. You know, the men wore gowns and the women wore pants, the mandarins, you know. And they have beautiful vases. They're going to be destroyed. She says, it's a shame. So she says, we'll go down and get some. We looked around and pinketed and the men were all asleep by the morning, you know. So we carried them home. We had them on the back porch. We had beautiful cloisonnay vases full of dirt. And when the earthquake come, I could, listen, I laid in bed. I didn't get up. The ceiling, I was watching. Pretty something like a plop, plop, plop. We lived on the top floor, you know. And they were shaking, I hear them dropped on. And the next day, the army came and gave us 30 minutes to get out of here. They were blowing up the whole block. You see, they wanted, the order was, get rid of Chinatown, blow up the buildings, let them burn. The fire department made no effort. There was a little water available. From my back porch, I could see a windmill in Chinatown. And they must have had a tank. But the order was, get rid of it. See, them houses were built in the gold rush days. By rich people, they were nicely built. But they were full of fleas and put 30, 40 Chinatown in one room, even in basements. Well, anyway, I grabbed a blanket. My mother grabbed a blanket. And, boy, each got a frying pan and a coffee pot. And off we went to the marina with all sand, sand dunes. And pretty soon, the army gave us a tent, supply of corn, beef, and hardtack. About three days later, these trains arrived from all over the California. And then later from back east, even Vichy water. They sent a call to Vichy water, canned fruit. Well, the cannery, there was piles of canned. The cannery burned down. But inside the pile, the labels were scorched, but they were edible. Oh, we had canned peaches. Right where Gas House Cove was over there. Well, do you know where that Safeway store is? Right across in the, right there, we've camped. And then we moved up to Twin Peaks. And we lived in a tent. And then my mother says, well, land was cheap. We paid $500. And there was water up there. There's still a spring up there. And there was a German. He was a civil engineer. He built the first electric line that ran up to the, from 18th, and it went over to the switchback and then over to the park. The name was Juiced. Huh? Yeah, and he had three big wooden water tanks full of water. And he charges a dollar a month for all the water we could use. And it was a springs on here, on the hill here. One at Hunter's Point where they bottled, they still bottled water, they call it mountain springs. Do we still have one here? Huh? Do we still have one here? Oh, no, you run, there's a house across the street from me. The backyard is always full of water. Is that from the spring? Yeah, there's a spring. Oh, you know, the rainfall. At Alamany Boulevard, they confine that Isla's Creek in a 10-foot tunnel. I mean sewer. First they filled it with gravestones. The gravestones, graveyards, all started Diversadero Street West. So when they demolished that graveyard, all the stones were thrown in. I picked up two or three of them and gave them to Mr. La Grille. I don't know, you know him. His name isn't familiar. Well, he teaches art in San Francisco State. His wife, Professor of English, San Francisco State. They live about 283 Texas. And he's got two or three degrees in art. He's a great friend of Ben and Bufano. And I used to bring him these stones. I'd find them over Isla's Creek before they, now it's Alamany Boulevard. It was a big ravine. And as I said, the garbage service didn't start until 1896. Before that, you dumped, everybody was glad for you to dump garbage that they had a hollow place. Fill it up, you see. As a resident around 1936, you must have seen many, many changes here. Can you talk about some of them? They had row after row of identically built houses on Minnesota Street. Yeah, there were little cottages. Of course, none of them had garages. And Tennessee Street, when I started to work, was full of houses. And a little by little, they disappeared. Then the church moved up in 1926. And oh, there was a lot of places. In 1936, I was looking for a place to buy. And one around the corner here, I had my eye on that. But then I decided to live closer to the Roundhouse. Oh, I see a lot of changes. The soapwork used to be down where the Jackson Park is. The soapwork? Yeah. What happened to them? Well, they moved up here. Over toward the. They're on Deharrow. Deharrow, the vicinity of where the new tune went up. And then they had an incinerator where they burned all the city's garbage. It had a big chimney. It went way up in the air. And the sky was glare, you know, and a smell. And then they tore that down. And then the SP hauled all the garbage to Bay Shore, filled in around Brisbane. And this Mission Bay, while it was filled in, the water had come up. And the weeds had grown. That wild dill, it goes eight, nine feet high. And that was a hobo jungle. And they'd pour through this garbage. So where was this? Right at the 16th and 3rd Street. Oh, yeah. Hobo jungle. And they were important. A lot of tequila or misbranded liquor. The federal agents, you see the viaduct, the old viaduct, go over the railroad tracks. They'd drive up there. And then they'd dump it right down in the gondola cars. They had a hammer, and they'd break each bottle. And it filled it all through all that garbage. And the hobos are underneath with five gallon can. Why, they'd drink in bombing fluid if they could get all of it. And then they'd pour through the garbage. They'd find silver spoons and knives and dishes that was accidentally discarded. They had campfires at night. And the ESP was easy on them, because if you irritate them, they would steal the waste out of these axles under the freight cars. There's a mass of waste saturated with oil. And it presses up against the journals. Well, if you take that out on the road to get a hotbox, and sometimes it breaks off and derails. So the order went on, especially during the Depression, I've seen families even move a stove into a boxcar. The breakman says, where are you going? Well, I'll put you off at that town. They didn't charge any fare on a freight train. They put a mattress on. So the order went go easy on them. In fact, I remember my phone. You know, they paid once a month. There's gold, money, gold, and silver. They don't have any paper money out here. The foreman can then mark, go down to the tunnel, see if he gets them hobos that go to work. So I'd go down there and say, hey, come on. You want a job? Oh, I have one policy. Oh, yeah, I like a job, but I got no money to live on. I say, you don't need no money. You just signed a payroll deduction voucher. And I'd take them to Panama Hotel 6th and Brandon, $13 a month, room and board, and a bottle of wine with each meal. $13. That was in the 19th, 13th, 14th, 15th. So I'd round up these hobos. Because you see the trouble with unions today. You're a prisoner. Your own union card won't let you work in Oakland. To go to work over in Oakland, only in a boom over there, you've got to pay a working permit. So he's a friend, he's got a social security number now. Before they were boomers, oh, I'm going to Florida. I'm going to go on a Florida East Coast. They're moving oranges now, there's a lot of work. And I'm going to New Orleans. They quit every payday. They call them boomers, barbers and machinists. They couldn't stay put. They were restless. And we had a breed of men. After every war, there was a breed of men that were, they call them strike breakers or filibusters. When we tried to get the Panama Canal, see the French started building, they gave up. And Columbia wouldn't give us the right-of-way because England opposed it in Germany. So we sent a gang of these ex-soldiers down there. They started a revolution in Tucco. So the government of Columbia, they belonged to the government of Columbia. But then with that, these revolutionists hoisted up the Republic of Panama. And we gave them 15 million. I think in 1936, we gave them 25 million more and 10 million dollar installments. You see, they were mad that we took over. I was down there in 1897. I could see all that old machinery rusting away that the French, they had to conquer the yellow fever first. And we learned that from the Spanish-American war. You see? I don't think there was 300 men killing the Spanish-American. They died of homemade poisoning. The corned beef was hand-sotted canned and they leaked and yellow fever. So they put a soldier in bed with a yellow fever patient. They tried it too. He never got yellow fever. Some Spanish doctors said, I think it's a mosquito. So they put him in a room with a yellow fever and then they introduced a lot of mosquitoes. And the mosquitoes bit the yellow fever patient and they bit the soldier. One of them died and two of them survived. So then they concluded it's a mosquito. You see? Oh, well, there are no toilets in Panama City. The people who squat right on the ground do their girls, especially one-piece dress. Putt down. The only, huh? The Chinese had the only bath. The hotels didn't even have bathtubs. They went down to a Chinese bathhouse. Old cast iron tub, you know. They didn't learn how to enamel them yet. And you paid them the fee and you'd take a bath. And they gave you a small bar of soap and a towel. Oh, incidentally, James Lick, I mentioned he's an eccentric. He felt sorry for the poor workers of San Francisco. He built a free bathhouse at Tenton Howard. It's still there, but it's a Chinese laundry now. It's a brick front building. It burned down, but it rebuilt it. For free, you got a towel and a big bar of soap. And then they found out, oh, they had big tubs. They found out that the women stayed in there too long, so they peeked in and they found them washing their clothes in the tubs. They bring them in there, in their bosom. So then they charge five cents and appeal to them. Oh, I told you there was a gimmick to it. Well, anyway, he built the James Lick Hotel. He made a fortune in real estate on Montgomery Street. And he lived in the basement room when he couldn't live in the president's suite if he wanted. And he had his meals carried down to him. He never went into the dining room. So then when he got older, he left him some money for this industrial school. The Lick Observatory is southwest of San Jose, 25 miles southeast of San Jose. You ever been down there? No. Oh, it's a nice drive. And he's buried under the main telescope. And you have the Lick Old Lady's Home. It's out here in the Portola District, Bacon and San Bruno Avenue. It's still the same name. Now they call it University Old Lady's Home. Yeah. I looked it up today in a phone book. It's still there. That Irish Hill is gone. And all the vegetable gardens are gone. And you ever see that house at 18th and Tennessee, built in 1873? 18th, it's on a corner. Yeah. And it's got a lot of greenery. Yeah, that's a lot of trees. And I see the bays to come almost up to that house. See, here's Tennessee Street here. On the map, yes. And you just have a quarter of a block away with water. So he was right here, about, see. And they made this bridge from Fortin Townsend. Then they threw dirt over it as the years progressed. And they finally filled in. And that was all filled in, right? Yeah. Was this Southern Pacific again? Yeah, there's all the railroad yards down here. They left a little channel here. Their ships could sail up to Aitton, Aitton Brannon. There was a sugar refinery there. Their ships come from the Sandwich Islands, but they were all sugar. Oh, there's a lot of changes. They had Irish families up here that had a cow. And one woman had two or three goats. And, well, anyway, none of these cows, they were all tuberculia, you know. I went to work for the man. My dairyman said, you want to make 20 cents and a gallon of milk for three hours' work? He'd come by with a two-horse team. And he went somewhere. And I'd drive his team from four to seven, two-horse team. And the milk was carried in 10-gallon cans. And they were never sterilized. The cows were tuberculia. You left your pan out the front door. And I got that gallon of milk. I proceeded to drink it every day. And I come down with tuberculosis of the stomach of the ankle. Boy, I almost died. You see, I would drink too much of that milk, and I couldn't cope with it. And that's another story. I was given up to die. They operated on me, broke my jaw, and called Cooper Medical College. Where is that? Sacramento and Webster. And that's now something? It's something else. The original building is too late. Anyway, they left a hole in my stomach. It wouldn't heal. And that old pus had come out. So the doctor come to my house. He says, well, he'll be dead in two weeks. So when I heard that, there's a little alley off with Jackson and Powell. There was a family there that made lary ads. They had a spinning wheel, and that was a rope alley, where they rope walk. And the place was full of old discarded cow's tail. And that's near the Ping Yang? Yeah, it's near my cottage, where I lived, Ping Yang. But the alley's still there. And the medical center, Chinese medical center, right there, they often saw it, well, them flies. I hate to kill a blow fly. They were lapping up that pus, and I'd watch them. You know, it was only 11 years old, 1900. But that really worked for you. That really worked for you, exposing your chest to the sun. So that's before antibiotics were discovered. World War I, they actually put maggots in a soldier's arm. He cleaned out all the, they evidently have a disinfecting power. You know what pigweed is? Well, they got another name, Purse Lane. It grows in the backyard, and you put it on pork. Well, in Peru, when my brother, you see, we were on, each boy had a horse. We're going over the mountains, and a lightning struck about a half a block ahead, and bang, and a thunder, and the horse reared up, you know, and bolted away, and his foot was in a stirrup. And he repeatedly bounced around, and his scalp was completely off. So we got some cholos, and they went and got, it looked like pigweed, and they pounded it up, made a big pile of it, and mashed it, and they slapped it on its head, and they made a litter, and they carried them to Cerro de Pazca, which is the highest city in the world, the highest inhabited place in the world. That is for a city. Lassa and Tibet is only 12,000 feet. Cerro de Pazca was almost 15,000. And the Cerro de Pazca mine is 16,000 feet. So, there's a lot of cure now. Quineine came from Peru. Those Indians on the Amazon River in Peru, on the east side, it's raining all the time, the green hell, the vegetation is 10 times denser than in Africa. These hippies are going down there now, and from the witch doctors, they're getting these yagi and different herbs that give you hallucinations. See, literally went down to Mexico, and these Mexican witch doctors, they call them curanderas. They said, we got a mushroom for you, but for a price, the hallucinations. The potato came from Peru. Yeah, I remember reading about that. Way up, at the only thing the cholos eat, way up high. They have little green potatoes, and they have guinea pigs running in and out the house. The beds are made of clay, adobe, and they're hollow. You sleep on top of the bed with llama blankets, and these guinea pigs running in and out, and the chickens are roosting over your head. The tats are open, the llamas in the morning are trying to eat the edge of the roof off, and if you open the door, there's only a rug, they'll stick their head in, and they're very friendly to the llamas. So you call it chupi, they'll kill a guinea pig, and they bring the onions up from the lower levels. You can look down a valley, you'll see vegetation. We're way up there on the Altiplano. Nothing grows on a grass like Negro's hair, and they, like turf, they cut it with a spade, let it dry, and they burn it. They make it down. And a stove is made of adobe clay, and a pot's a made of clay. And they make that soup, you know, chupi, they call it, and that's their main staple is potatoes. Oh, but they like it. How do they like to live in up there? When you bring down the lowlands, they suffer, and you suffer if you go up there, you can't breathe. No, I guess what your system gets used to. I guess what your system gets used to. Oh yeah, oh, it gets used to anything. Now, back to San Francisco after Peru. Yeah. We were talking about changes on the hill. I've seen some in the two years I've been here. Oh yeah, the people are not friendly anymore. You know, as I say, the boys, right here, it's 18th and Texas. They had the Mayflower Club. The boys rented a building, and twice a week they gave dance, and they'd say, well, with the waves, and the Japanese Sandman, the girls that go down there, and the union forbids that now. You can't play, and they don't want you to play in charge. Admission. Admission, see. And Petrero, down to Petrero, they had the Sea Wolves, the Primrose Club, very sociable, and the mothers had come down, and his Mrs. Dawn, and Mrs. Hiya, her name was Anastacia, religious names, you know. What about that theater? Theater on 18th, on Connecticut, near 18th. Yeah, a Hindu runner. He was a graduate mechanical engineer from India. He'd run it and gave you pictures of about three months old, and he only charged you 50 cents. Was this movie, a movie house? Yeah, his wife was alcoholic, she was a white woman. Mm-hmm. But the Negroes, the women come down, ho, ho, ho, and they drink a bottle of gin and throw it down the aisle. And then the union, with the advent of television, the attendance dropped off, and he paid his operator $5 an hour. He paid him $25 for three hours' work or four hours' work. So he told a man one day, listen, I'm not making it. I don't make 20, I don't take in $25. I'm gonna run it myself, the machines, see. So they put four pickets out there and threatened everybody, you know, the union tactics. So I went and got an injunction from a judge. The judge says, well, he chose the judge's books. I'm not making $25. So the judge put a restraining order. On the pickets? Yeah, so they disappeared. He run until these Negroes come up here. Drunk, noisy, dirty. You couldn't hear what the picture was saying. He was ho, ho, loud talking, giggling. So he folded up. He owned that pal's theater, it's pal right next to Moors. I know that, yeah. He used to own that, but I don't know what become of him. I asked the ticket seller down there, what become of him. And he's a very nice man, well-educated. Yeah, well, my wife and I used to go up there twice a week. And then that drag good store, that folded up. Monetary's very recently. And only got robbed so many times. That poor cleaning woman down there, Texas and 18, she got robbed. Well, the cleaners up here, too. Yeah, well, they're primitive people. They gradually, these youngsters that grow up, they'll gradually evolve, you know. I noticed there's not many boys coming in and read books. I started in branch number two was on Powell and Vallejo. They had two old maids, they put in long hours. And when the earthquake come, there was all the libraries were destroyed downtown. There was only one at 18th and Pond Street. It was McCreary Library. That was down in the 50s. 57 earthquake. But that was a godsend. I'd hiked down from the top of Twin Peak, no transportation. I'd walk down and they had, there was a magazine called A Scrap Book. And a literary digest. And I'd read them and what they had. It was a godsend because all the theaters were burned up. They were all downtown. So there was a place out 10th Avenue in Portland. It was a shoot, it was an amusement park. And they happen to have a big theater. And the Orpheum, which was a nationwide circuit of A number one Waterville, see the best acts from Europe and England, they moved out there and I'd hike from Twin Peaks over there and come home late at night, no transportation. You had to walk through the park and they never got held up or anything, see. They would tell me it's the automobile consumes a people's earnings and that's gone. That's capital gone, gone down the drain. We could build, the bar tenders, all the empty beer glasses, there'd be an inch of beer that emptied and they had a little drain and it went in a big can. Pretty soon some wine bomb, they go, hey, you. Yeah. Give them from the drain glasses? Yeah. Oh, hey, incidentally, the order went around. In 1939, the federal order went around that the drug stores couldn't sell Paragoric anymore without a prescription. So they were stocked up and the labels were getting old. So it was hauled down with the dumps here, you know, and thrown in them garbage and all them bums in the jungle there. Paragoric is opium and alcohol, pure alcohol, they drank them while they were unconscious for a week. They have for diarrhea and colic and everything else. So they had a grand old, I mean they had a woman hobo, she's still down there. I'll bring up a picture I cut out of the chronicle. I'd love to see it. I'd love to see it. She's a claustrophobia. She can't be confined in walls. When the roundhouse moved away, there was a nice garden left by the engineers. See, they only work an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half at night. Meanwhile, they idle, they go to picture shows, they're paid for a full day's work, you know. So they made a nice garden. When they moved out, I took a walk with my dog and my dog was sniffing. There was a little ditch about that deep, you know. And there was a piece of cardboard over and I see the cardboard moving my dog. So I lift it up and she said, get out of here, let me sleep. I said, who are you? Never mind, I wanna sleep. So I went home and I threw some old blankets down there. And the next night I went down and I brought her some food. So she told me, my name is Alma. So that was in 1960, she's still around. She scrounges around, people give her old lunches and she looks in every garbage can. So, I asked her, did you ever work? Yes, I worked in the laundries. Now one day I met a man who worked for the city hall and he looked like he was alcoholic. Open golden gate, you know where their apartments are on the waterfront? They have a private park, yeah. So we got talking and I said, you know, there's a hobo woman there and she's from, he said, where's she from? I say, Fergus Falls, Minnesota. She's a Norwegian descent, she's from Minnesota, so. She says, Fergus Falls, you know what Fergus Falls is? That's a crazy house. So she must have been confined in a crazy house and they taught her laundering. But she sleeps in the weeds. Spite as big as walnuts walk over, she doesn't, don't bother. And you bring her a sandwich, she lays it down on the ground pretty soon, it's full of ants, she eats ants and all. I think she's a little bit alcoholic too because I see wine bottles around. And that creek, the channel, that used to be the greatest hay market. All these horses required hay and every day these scouts, there were sailing boats, flat bottoms, so you could go way up to Sacramento River. They unloaded their hay there. Is it the channel? Is this the one that runs near Blanche's? Yeah. Now what's that called? The channel. That's the channel. Yeah. And you can see by this picture, it's extended up to 8th and Harrison. Well at this side, the north side of the channel was all hay and grain. And there's still a man down there, his name is Deming. He sells hay and alfalfa. And believe it or not, the amount of women that buy pigeon feed. Oh, the title on the hill here was very cloudy before the earthquake even, it was two or three. And when the earthquake came, the city hall burned down and all the records. So if you had a house, you had a hiring attorney to establish your claim to your own piece of land. You call it a McInerney title after the lawyer's name. You posted a notice on your house. Any claimants appear to city hall such a day to new city hall, you know, and bring your witnesses. And if none did appear, the court would grant you a title. They call it a McInerney title. Why was there a problem? Why was there a problem? Well, the records were destroyed. Oh, that's right, destroyed. Marriage records, the birth records, everything was destroyed. The old city hall was built by politicians. Massive big columns there hollow. They were filled with empty cement barrels, which incidentally, there was very little cement made in California. It all came from Europe as ballast. See, they came here to Martinez to load wheat. The Southern Pacific had, Port Corse had a mile long dock loaded with wheat. And Glen County produced more wheat than all the gold produced in California. Glen County alone. You see, there was no market for the fruit until the Pacific Express was, you know, refrigeration. It was jointly owned by the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific. Then they pushed them cars over the back east with lemons and oranges and peaches and apples. Before that, wheat was the Contra Costa County was. Oh, incidentally, after the bubonic plagues spread to the rats, then please spread it to the squirrels. There was squirrels all over Twin Peaks and over in Oakland, Contra Costa County was. They were a pest. So they got the bubonic plague. And then they're spread down to the San Joaquin Valley. They call it tularemia. The same disease when it goes from one animal to the other, the characteristics change. And then it spread to the Rocky Mountains. Today they call it Rocky Mountain fever, the ticks. That was a result. Now they have to have a big disc on the ropes, you know, to prevent the rats from coming ashore. Well, Mr. Marzola, I certainly appreciate all your time and all your information. Yeah, I heard you.