Saturday, February 18, 1939
“Hey Jim, you haven’t forgotten about the party, tonight, have you? The Cuffe’s are putting on that party just for all us folks connected with the building of Zanadu. You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Darned right I’m going if you don’t mind me hitching a ride with you. I don’t think I can find a donkey at this late date. I’d do anything to see Ann, again.”
“And Ann would skin me alive if I were to show up without you! Let’s hurry and get ready. We need to get going; it’s a long way to the Cuffe’s big palazzo in the Berkeley Hills…two ferry rides and a driving tour of the city of Berkeley.”
“Ferries? What about the new bridges. Why don’t we take them to Berkeley,” I ask, knowing the bridges are the only way to get to the East Bay in my era…the great multitude of ferries connecting all points on the bay being long gone.
“Just pulling your leg, old sport! The Golden Gate Bridge will deliver us to San Francisco and then a slog through that city’s street traffic just to get to that other bridge, then crossing that to Oakland and from Oakland north across the wide expanse of Berkeley’s own streetscape. All that automobile traffic, stop lights and all that time spent on our fannies cramped into one little seat unable to get up, walk about a deck, see any unfettered view of the bay or even get a cup of coffee. Sound like fun? Not for me, kid! Up till only last year we could’ve taken a ferry to the foot of Hyde Street in San Francisco, transferred to the Berkeley ferry, right there, and in the process, had two comfortable passages across our beautiful bay with very little of the usual urban driving nightmare. That option has been taken away from us by those darned new bridges. The Hyde Street Terminal is now closed down and dark.”
“You don’t think much of the bridges, do you, Harry? I thought you were a big fan of things modern in this machine age of ours.”
“Those bridges are nothing short of flood gates for the masses, Jim. The Golden Gate Bridge is allowing continuous and promiscuous 24 hour a day access to our little Sausalito and this will cause uncontrolled development and growth that will stomp out our idyllic rural lifestyle here in Marin and all points north of it. The fragile country roads that now benevolently connect each village will be over-ridden or bypassed all together by concrete expressways that will irreverently ignore and cut-up our fragile little network of communities. The little villages of Sausalito, Mill Valley, Larkspur and San Anselmo will become but words on exit signs. And automobiles will become an end and not a means…an uncontrolled cancer and an addiction of the masses that will destroy the Bay Area we know. The bridges started all this and the impending world war will feed it like a spark landing in a pile of dry leaves. If mass transportation by automobiles alone is not controlled by wiser men, it will become a wild fire consuming the whole of the Bay Area and it will cover us in concrete and endless traffic congestion.”
“That’s a mouthful, buddy,” I say, knowing Harry’s prediction is amazingly accurate. “But who would those ‘wiser men’ be to tell us when, where and how we should go, Harry?”
“Sorry, Jim, I’m rambling. Hey, speaking of evil contraptions, let’s get to my car and head for the two beastly ribbons of steel we have been handed of late or we’ll be late for the party. Too bad, too…ferry rides on the bay in the evening are heavenly.”
Harry’s right, it’s 6:30 in the evening as we wind our way out of Sausalito in Harry’s roadster, passing Whaler’s Cove and Nunes Boatyard and then up a steep grade to the new approach road to the new Golden Gate Bridge. We’ll be sitting on our butts for an hour and a half, at least, before we reach Ann’s house high in the Berkeley Hills. Still, it’s a clear dusk time and the view of the Bay and San Francisco from that new-fangled bridge is pretty spectacular.
After the bridge, the feeder highway runs on a high viaduct of steel over the hilly and rural setting of the Army’s Presidio and then sets us down gently, but abruptly, onto the streets of San Francisco proper at Marina Boulevard. From there, Harry pulls the roadster onto Bay Street. Bay Street runs east-west through the northern end of the city and soon we are crossing Hyde Street and the cable car line. We can see the old Hyde Street ferry terminal, now dark and abandoned that, had we been traveling Harry’s way a year earlier, would have been bustling with people and cars.
Bay Street skirts by Fisherman’s Wharf and then bounces off the northern base of Telegraph Hill, ending shortly after at the waterfront. There, Harry makes a right onto the Embarcadero, a wide thoroughfare from which the multitude of San Francisco’s commercial wharves spring out into the bay. All these portals sport nearly identical elaborately classical facades, each fronting onto the Embarcadero and always bustling with activity at this moment in time. Trucks of every size and type are waiting in front of and rolling in and out of these portals: unloading and taking on the cargo from the ships of every nation around the world. Saturday night or not, the port of San Francisco is alive in 1939.
The Embarcadero takes us directly in front of the busy Ferry Building with its distinctive Neo-Venetian clock tower. Then, Harry wheels the roadster to the right and up a small hill to the feeder road for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. From there, we are deposited on the upper deck of the bridge which, at this point in its history, is in a two-way auto traffic mode while its lower deck is exclusively for trains and trucks. The trains disappeared in 1962 and in my era both decks were totally devoted to auto and truck traffic. Harry’s prediction that the automobile would rule all proves true in my time.
Heading east toward Oakland on the upper deck of the bridge allows a most beautiful, if fleeting, view of the fabulous exposition that is about to open on Treasure Island, February 21st, just three days from now. Then the highway tunnel through Yerba Buena Island abruptly cuts off the view and on the other side of it the rest of this bridge continues on as a nondescript truss type structure descending ever downward into Oakland and the East Bay. It seems the delicate beauty of the suspension spans on San Francisco’s side are not deemed necessary for the lands of a lesser god…the East Bay communities.
Sliding down this nondescript side of the bridge Harry debates, “Let me see, we could take 38th, turn left onto West Street, which runs into Grove, which runs into Shattuck or we could just as well swing onto the East Shore Highway to University Avenue in Berkeley.”
“Glad you’re doing the driving, Harry, I’m lost,” And I am too. Crossing San Francisco and now in the East Bay proceeding toward Berkeley, our trek is showing my eyes alien lands compared to the way they look in 1987.
“Here we are, Jim…progress with a capital ‘P’. The ferry from Hyde Street would have put us on the Berkeley Mole and then directly onto University Avenue.”
The nearly three mile long Berkeley Mole was built across the mud flats of the eastern side of San Francisco Bay so that automobiles and trucks could reach out from Berkeley and the hinterland to the ferries feeding San Francisco. Harry is quite correct: We would’ve been conveniently deposited on the Mole from that ferry that would’ve embarked from Hyde Street had that route not been abandoned in 1938. The Mole is long gone in my era, the westernmost tip of its ruins marked by an obstruction buoy. It became useless when the big ferries that it was built to reach out into the bay for were made useless by the new marvel of modern transportation, The San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge.
Except for the new bridges themselves, there are no freeways or skyways anywhere in 1939. The new bridges merely deposit auto and truck traffic unceremoniously into the cities of crisscrossing streets and masses of signaled intersections. I guess it was enough of a step to rigidly connect these bay cities; “promiscuously” as Harry put it. Things like freeways would come later. I know that the quaint little East Shore Highway, called route 40 in 1939, will later become the super wide, densely traveled mega freeway known as Highway 80. In the meantime, the transition between the new super bridge and the ancient Oakland streetscape is the scene of horrendous auto accidents. Injury and death will plague it until post World War II freeways relieve the strain and then only temporarily.
“Oh blazes, it’s getting late, I’ll take the East Shore route. Fun, eh, Jim?”
We swing north onto the East Shore Highway. It skirts closely along the eastern edge of those mud flats of San Francisco Bay and within minutes Harry turns the roadster to the right and, finally, we are on University Avenue and within the Berkeley city limits.
The City of Berkeley rises up from the expansive unnavigable mud flats and shallows of the eastern extreme of San Francisco Bay and into the hills of the East Bay. Berkeley’s grid patterned streetscape, dominated by wide University Avenue, stretches itself ever eastward away from the bay until it collides with the University of California campus and the foot of the Berkeley Hills. Then, the hills break the grid pattern into a maze of meandering trails worming their various ways in conformance to the rude, undulating steeply angled topography. Situated nearly dead on due east of the Golden Gate, Berkeley’s view of the famous portal and its new bridge is one of the most dramatic in all the Bay Area.
Berkeley is exclusively a university town swallowed up in an urban setting. I lived there when I attended UC in the late 1960’s, the very time of its infamous radical explosion. The Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia and events like People’s Park all but buried the atom smasher fame that the likes of Ernest Orlando Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer brought to Berkeley in the 1930’s and ‘40’s. Yet, the highlight of my time at Berkeley was Professor Mark Schorer’s lectures on the works of his late friend, D.H. Lawrence.
“Hmmm, Shattuck to Cedar and east into the hills,” Harry half mutters while adroitly maneuvering the neat and quick roadster through the Berkeley street traffic, its powerful V-8 snorting away all the while.
I’m not all that familiar with the hills on this north side of the UC Campus, the location of the Cuff palazzo, never having had the necessity to go up there when I was a student here. “I hope you know the way to the Cuffe house, Harry, because I’m useless to help you and more disoriented than ever.”
“Been to the house once before when we signed the contract to build Zanadu, so I think I’ve got the picture. There’s the street I’ve been looking for, La Loma! Now to find Buena Vista and then look for a bunch of parked cars,” Harry says leaning on the wheel trying to read street signs in the ever darker mid-evening made darker yet by a heavily treed, near rural landscape. Streets? They look more like fire roads in 1939. In 1987, the Berkeley Hills are crowded with homes, street lights and teeming with civilization…so called.
***
It’s just after 8:30 p.m. as Harry is still wielding the roadster through the maze of trials of that hilly, undulating topography.
Suddenly Harry jerks the wheel hard left turning into the darkness of what could easily be a hundred foot drop. Then, as if by magic, the lights of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and the new Exposition on Treasure Island flash into our eyes directly ahead as the roadster rolls down a steep decline. A large Italian style palace appears at the steep street’s apparent dead end like it was a villa hovering over the Bay of Naples. In front of it are several parked cars.
“If this ain’t the Cuffe’s place, it is a party just the same. I’m worn out and need a drink bad. Let’s find out what’s going on at this here museum,” Harry gives out with a laugh as he wedges the little roadster between a Chrysler Airflow and a Cord sedan at the street’s precarious downhill edge.
The Airflow I never thought I would ever see in the flesh and the Cord…like pictures of my Uncle Harry’s Cord I had seen in an album when I was a boy. Heck, could he be here and for that matter, my father, too. After all, They are Bay City Foundry and because Bay City fabricated the deck gear on the Cuffe yacht, they are invitees to this shindig, tonight, according to what Ann said on the Bear.
“One heck of a trek, Harry. You did well getting us here…right house or not.”
“Oh, this is it, alright. Just ruffing your fur a bit. I don’t know about you, but its going to do my legs and butt good to finally get out of this crate. Be careful getting out, Jim. Could be quite a drop on your side and I don’t know if I could find you again if you should disappear into this hillside wilderness.”
“I think I can squeeze out okay,” I say and thinking at the same time that this could be the most fascinating party of my life. It’s not every night I can see my late girl friend’s mother as a young and beautiful woman and my father and his brother before I was born. What a reunion this is going to be!
Harry and I follow a string of multi-colored paper lanterns to the gigantic ornately carved front door and I’m worried about the way I look, “Harry, does this tux of yours look alright on me?”
“Yeah, sure Jim. We two are nearly identical in build; remember…only I’m smarter.”
“Thanks, chum.”
So this is the mansion of Ann’s father, Thomas E. Cuffe. I don’t know much about him at this point in his career, but from what Ann told Carol and me when we were children the famous Pacific Far East Line was created by Thomas E. Cuffe after World War II to take advantage of the availability of surplus wartime cargo ships. The line was exceptionally successful for its first decade, operating across the Pacific with 31 ships by 1949 and had an especially strong position in shipping US military cargoes. By the looks of this hillside villa, Thomas appears to be doing just fine at this point in his career, as well.
Harry slams the cast iron door knocker that could well have been fabricated at Bay City Foundry and Machine Shop. The door opens and a stunning blond angel stands before us in a white low cut, full length evening dress.
Oh my Carol. You are so gorgeous! My heart says making the same mistake as when I first met Ann at the boatyard. No, it’s Ann Cuffe, you idiot, my mind answers but no less beautiful…maybe even more so!
“It’s the gentlemen who build the best yachts in the world. Welcome. Hey, everyone, now this party can really get started.” Ann announces as Harry and I step into a foyer that looks like it escaped from the National Art Museum.
Ann immediately grabs my arm, “Oh Jim, I’m so, so glad you could come, tonight.”
An angel is glad I could make it to heaven. Blazes, I can’t become smitten with Carol Whitley’s mother…or can I…or am I already? Ann is no more than 25 and is certainly no ones mother at this moment in time. She is radiant with newness and bubbles with the joy of life only a young and beautiful woman can possess. Something happened to me too when I went into the bay. The mirror at Harry’s house showed me to be no more than 30.
Lovely Ann leads me by the arm into the Great Room of this palazzo. The room is filled to overflowing and the noise of a couple of dozen conversations is bouncing off the walls.
“Let me introduce you around, Jim. Have you met the Blake Brothers at the yard yet or will this be your first meeting?”
I knew it: Dad and Uncle Harry are here. First meeting? What will I look like to them? What will they look like to me? Neither one can be much older than their mid-twenties. I’m getting a sinking feeling like a bank robber being caught and unmasked by the police. I’m a thief caught in a bank whose commodity is time!
“I don’t see Harry Blake but there’s Travis by the bar. Come on Jim, I think you’ll like Travis. You two have a lot in common,” says Anne grabbing my right hand and pulling me toward a guy who looks like somebody I saw in an old family picture.
If you only knew how much Travis senior and I have in common, Ann, I think to myself while cold chills are running the length of my spine. I feel an inertia in me resisting Ann’s gentle but firm coaxing.
“Hey, Travis,” Ann calls out as we approach the bar.
A boyishly handsome brown haired and thinly built young man sporting round tortoise shell glasses turns toward Ann’s voice, “What’s the hoopla about, Ann? Don’t call the police; I’ve only had one Old Fashioned, so far.”
That’s my Dad’s wit, alright!
“Oh Travis, you’re always with the wise cracks! I just want you to meet Jim Travers,” Ann announces rather loudly for my well being at this moment.
“Travis…Travers! Sounds like there’s an echo in here, Ann, or have you taken up yodeling?”
“Funnnnie, Travis, you clown! Jim’s a rigger at Nunes. He and I have been working side-by-side on setting up the rigging on Zanadu.”
“Hi, Jim the rigger. I hope you’re being kind to all the gear my company built for Zanadu.”
“Some pretty fine equipment, Travis, especially the winches and sheet blocks.”
“Yeah, they turned out alright. Where’d ya learn about rigging, Jim?”
“Picked it up practically…been sailing boats and working on them ever since I can remember. Done a little designing, too.”
“Practical experience is the only way, Jim. That’s the way my old man learned the business and now he owns the best shop in the Bay Area. He made me go to college, though, and all just because he never went. I hated it and all I got out of it was the need to wear glasses. I couldn’t wait to get back to the shop floor. Darned parents always try to make their kids do what they were never able to do. Don’t ever let anyone talk you into college, Jim. As a matter of fact, don’t become someone’s old man, either.”
“I have no plans concerning marriage, if that’s what you mean, Travis.” I am so uncomfortable calling my future father Travis and I hope his views on parenthood change as it’s only three years till my birth day!
“Well, don’t look now, Jim, but Ann’s got her eye on you, pal. Look at her in that white gown looking, for the entire world, like Carole Lombard. Take care with her. Ann and I grew up together and I am her unofficial big brother. I like her very much, myself, but I’m engaged to another.”
I hope to my future mother!
Ann swooshes that white gown across the marble floor of the palatial Great Room and holds out her hand to me, “Hey, sailor, want to dance?”
The same line Carol was so fond of using. Now, I know where she got it, “Sure Ann, but I have two left feet.”
“You’re coming with me, fella. I don’t care if you have six toes on each foot.”
“I wouldn’t turn down that offer, Jim,” Travis says, winks and moves toward Harry Brink on the other side of the room.
“Travis is a honey, isn’t he, Jim?” Ann says while wrapping her long and lovely bare arms around my neck. “He has always been my big brother since we were kids growing up here in Berkeley.”
“Yeah, he warned me on that count. I like him, Ann. He’s my kinda guy.” My kinda father, too, I think to myself.
“And you’re my kinda guy.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the boat riggers you know.”
“I don’t know any riggers that look and act like you, mister. Besides, you can ask anyone here tonight, I’m known as Miss Ice. The men think I’m too aggressive and shouldn’t even be racing boats at all. Un-lady like, you know.”
“That’s one of the things I like best about you, Ann. You go for boats the way I do.”
“Harry’s right to ask you where the heck you come from. You’re like no other man I know, you’re so uninhibited concerning women. The way you unquestionly worked with me on Zanadu’s rigging. I know of no other man who could’ve done that so nonchalantly and gallantly.”
“I have never been thought of in that light, Ann, but any light you throw in my direction, I’ll gladly bask in.” I say, having always been enthralled with girl sailors, especially beautiful ones that look like Carole Lombard.
“That’s some kinda line you got there, fella. What are you trying to do, make me fall for you? You’ve got that already! I’ve wanted to ask you ever since you arrived, this evening: Will you meet me on Treasure Island, next Saturday, Jim? My father got a prevue of the Exposition with none other than San Francisco Mayor Rossi, but I want to see it with you alone…only with you!”
“Of course, Ann, I’d love to see that extravaganza and especially with you by my side. I too, can’t imagine experiencing it with anyone else.”
Somehow Ann and I are suddenly on an expansive veranda covered by a latticework pergola draped in bright and fragrant flowers, the view from which is nothing less than that of the whole Central Bay. The garland-like light draped Golden Gate Bridge is at its very center.
Ann is clinging tightly to me as music emanates through the French doors from inside. A record of East of the Sun is playing on the phonograph in the Great Room:
East of the sun and west of the moon,
We'll build a dream house of love
Near to the sun in a day
near to the moon at night,
We'll live in a lovely way dear
Living our love in memory
Just you and I, forever and a day,
Love will not die, we'll keep it that way,
Ann’s head is on my shoulder, her soft golden hair caressing my face and dangling down my back.
Ann kisses my ear and whispers, “Stay with me, my darling Jim and let’s always dance like this and sail our bay together, always together and forever like this.”
Oh Ann, what cruel joke is this being played on us by the gods of time, H.G. Wells or whomever? I didn’t ask to be here, but by gad, now that I am, I’m not going to waste this opportunity with you. The time hitcher’s rules be damned! Maybe it’s not fair to Ann or to me, as we can only have a few moments in time, but these moments I am determined we shall have. I know I can’t be here long: Carol must be born, I must be born and Jim Travers cannot be here when those events and the events required for those events are scheduled to happen. Carol cannot be of my loins and nothing I might do, inadvertently or otherwise, can stand in the way of my father staying healthy enough and on the right track to become my father in 1942.
“Don’t go back with Harry tonight, Jim, I’ll drive you to Sausalito in my car. I don’t care how late it gets or how long it takes.” Ann whispers in that endearingly pleading voice.
“Hey, you two gonna come up for air and join the rest of us unobsessed mortals?” Harry asks sticking his head out of the veranda doors.
“Gosh, I forgot. I’m being so rude to my guests. See what you’ve done to me, Jim. I’m coming in, Harry. Please tell everyone I’ll be right there.”
Ann quickly straightens up her hair and dashes inside. Harry holds the door open for her and then steps out on the veranda with me.
“I’m Going home with Ann. She’s driving me back to Sausalito, Harry.”
“Ann’s got you hog tied, there, buddy,” Harry says while lighting a cigarette and taking in the view of the bay. “I am still puzzled by your lack of a solid previous existence and what little of it you’ve revealed to me is nothing less than, if you’ll excuse the metaphor, foggy. I like you, Jim or whoever you are, but I’ll give you a warning, pal-to-pal, don’t mess with destiny. It could be dynamite in your hands.”
***
Ann spends the rest of the night playing the perfect hostess giving me glancing looks of affection occasionally while talking with someone else. She very discretely dances with me a couple times between turns with Harry Brink, Travis Blake (Sr.) and an assorted few others. It’s a long time for me till the last guest says goodnight and that is Harry Brink, himself, maybe delaying his departure to see if Ann and I would change our minds.
“Great party, Ann, and thanks for inviting us boatyard guys,” Harry says heading out the door to his car. “See ya back in Sausalito in a century or so, Jim,” He adds wryly while glancing over his shoulder in my direction.
As Harry’s little Ford disappears up the road and into the night, Ann says, “Come over to the carriage house and I’ll introduce you to my car. I think you’ll like it.”
She pushes a button on the stone wall next to one of three large doors of a smallish two storey stone building. The door raises and the lights inside come on immediately. There sits a glistening new Lincoln Zephyr V12 Convertible Coupe and maroon, too. What a magnificent piece of machinery! Somehow the ride back to Sausalito in, as Harry put it: “All that automobile traffic, stop lights and all that time spent cramped into one little seat unable to get up, walk about a deck, see any unfettered view of the bay or even get a cup of coffee.” and across “the two beastly ribbons of steel we have been handed of late.” should be absolute heaven! And to answer your question, Harry, “Sound like fun?”….with Ann, yes, de-lovely, Harry! No offense to a great guy, a fascinating conversationalist and apparent sooth-sayer.
“It’s magnificent, Ann, I gasp as I can see this maroon dream is, indeed, new. Restorations are miracles of human determination, for sure, but new is new and the fresh look of new steel, sparkling paint and the smell and texture of new leather can never be duplicated or brought back to life.
“Come on, Jim, let go for a leisurely drive to a place across our dreamy bay called Sausalito.”
***
Descending from an angel’s heavenly villa in the hills, through the flatlands of Berkeley’s streetscape, Ann guides the delicious convertible coupe. Ann looks even more delicate behind the huge steering wheel, her thin, long bare arms working the Lincoln toward the Bay Bridge.
“I had a ’37 Zephyr, but those darned cable brakes where too much for me. This ’39 model has hydraulic brakes and is a dream to drive,” Ann says as she has this sweet chariot racing onto and up the Oakland incline of the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge.
“That V12 is as smooth as I’ve ever experienced,” I answer thinking of all the snorty, brutish sounding V8’s of my era. As with the trip over this bridge with Harry, about a hundred years before, the lights of the Exposition float on a timeless ether.
I ponder Harry’s warning as well as what I know must happen to Jim Travers. But what makes Harry so smart? He seems to know what’s going to happen to the planet and to the smaller world of the Bay Area almost as well as I do. Whoa! If I got waylaid to this little cubbyhole in time, maybe I’m not the only one getting stuck in time’s web. Maybe that’s why Harry took me in so readily after my mishap with Carol’s boat. He knows?! How many others in my situation are there floating around? Can’t we have a class reunion or something like that and talk? Maybe we better not! It would be like discussing whether there are other intelligent life forms in the universe with a Martian physicist.