Noe Valley Remembered

The Noe Valley Voice, November 1996

Kevin J. Mullen

www.SanFranciscoHomicide.com




NOE VALLEY $489,500. 3919-22nd St. Sun 1-5. PRIME NOE GEM. Elegant 5Br/2ba home + rms dwn. Partial city and by view   South garden & deck. Agent 282-3346

     When Rosemary Smith called on Sunday morning and told me that the old house would be open for inspection that day, I knew where I would spend my afternoon. I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I grabbed my camera and headed south toward the Golden Gate.   It was warm in Marin and as I crossed Divisadero Street, I was glad that I had thought to bring a sweater. Between Haight and Waller, however, the usual summer overcast began to dissipate, and by the time I arrived at the top of the hill at 22nd and Castro, the weather was clear and bright.
    
     Memories flood in. Park perpendicular to the curb in a row on the hill that once knew only my father's 1937 "Chevie." Through the bulkhead entrance, now guarded by an ornamental steel gate, and up the steep stairs to the front door that never saw a key, day or night. On into the foyer where once we "kids" watched from hiding while my older sister Nancy spooned on the stairs with Joe Heaney.

     Upstairs to the bedrooms. Where did we all sleep? Then down the back stairs from the kitchen where I stood one Sunday in 1941 when Jack Logan came home from the 12:15 mass at St. Philips with the news that someplace called Pearl Harbor had been bombed.   All old houses have memories etched in the hearts of those lived there once. 3919-22nd Street, I'd bet, has more than most.

     Charles and Rose Smith were pretty well off by the standards of the 1920s . With five growing children – Charles Jr. Brendan, Emmett, John and Rosemary—and a successful business to boot, life was good in the "set of flats" on the 3800 block of 22nd Street. Extended trips to Ireland “The Old Country,” were not beyond their reach. Then Charles lost his business in the Depression. He found work as a night clerk in the hotel he once owned, and to make ends meet, Rose began to "take in kids." 

     In the late ‘30s Charles was taken ill and died. And Rose was left in those pre-safety net days, a single woman in her 40s with a large family and no marketable skills. What she knew about was children. Boy, did she know children. First came the Logans, three boys from down the block on 22nd Street whose mother had just died. As far as I ever knew, Rose just picked up the children and took them home. That's the way neighbors did things then.

     Meanwhile, Ellen Tully, an elderly widow, whose only son had died, lived up the hill at 3919, rattling around by herself in the three bedroom Carpenter's Victorian she could no longer maintain.   Rose Smith and her brood moved in and agreed that Mrs. Tully would have a place until she died. (It was a promise kept. Mrs. Tully later became blind and severely disabled but she never saw the inside of a "home.")

     Next to arrive as a group, in the Summer of 1941, were the Mullens: Nancy, Maureen, myself, and infant Shelia. Our mother had died a few months earlier , and Rose Smith took us on, along with our father, Jim, as boarders.   Some of the pressure on the house was relieved by the departure of Brendan and Emmett for Maryknoll Seminary in Mountain View, although they returned for holidays and summer breaks.

         In 1941 Rose added a room in the downstairs rear of 3919—where Mrs. Tully lived with her cat, Billy, and endlessly cautioned my younger sister Shelia never to marry a “Protestant, and Englishman, or a divorced man.” Another room was added above, on the wall of which, and the last thing I saw each night before dropping off to sleep, was a picture of Sgt. "Joe" Brady from lower on 22nd Street, murdered in the line of duty by bandits on Nob Hill in 1924.

     When the war started, "the boys" joined up. For Charley Smith it was the Navy and service on a sub-chaser in the Pacific. Jack Logan was with the Army Air Corps in England, and Bill Logan joined the Army invasion forces to Europe. Ours was one of the few houses to proudly display three blue stars on the flag in the front window.  To a kid in Noe Valley the war was fun, if that's the word. During air raid drills, we huddled in the darkness behind drawn shades, straining to hear the sound of enemy planes. We heard that a man who failed to dim his headlights during an air raid alert was shot dead by an air raid warden on the Golden Gate bridge "for signaling enemy submarines."

     With "the boys" off at war, the three Doherty orphans moved in, Ray, Arlene and Emmett.  I mark the date of the Dohertys' arrival in the early summer of 1943, for they showed up the day I was hit by the ice truck in front of the Quinns' house on Castro Street. I had been swiping empty soft drink bottles from the rear porches of the apartments in Mrs. Kelly's building down the street, and turning them in for deposit at John Mullaney's store at the corner to buy candy and Royal Crown Colas. (He must have known).

     I suppose I was on a caffeine or sugar high when I tried to "nip" a ride on a departing ice truck. The good places at the rear tailgate were all taken so I tried to climb up over the left rear fender. I lost my grip and fell under the wheel, and watched as my left knee was spit out -- like a tennis ball -- from under its rolling edge. An inch or so more and. . . .  The way Ray Doherty tells it, he arrived that day from another foster home, down in the dumps from all the moving around. But his spirits were immediately revived when he saw all the excitement. (He likes excitement still.) There, crowded into the foyer, was the iceman in his leather jerkin, the mandatory collection of interested neighbors, and the emergency ambulance crew. In the middle of it all -- the center of attention -- was a kid pretty much like him.

     The only discordant note was struck by my sister, Maureen, who stood there bawling; and all along I'd thought she hated me. Anyway, Ray decided immediately that this was his kind of place, and his kind of kid. His estimate of the kid dropped dramatically, however, when the ambulance attendant lowered my trousers to check the injury, and it was revealed to all assembled that the object of his admiration was wearing long john underwear, decidedly out of fashion for an 8-year old.

Later  Ray Bowers and Jimmy Lyons were added to the tribe, and others came and went over the years.

 

Rose Smith was tough on kids, or so it seemed to me at the time. With the help of welcome insights from Ray, I can now understand why she was so strict. If she had let down her guard for a moment, we would have run right over her.    Rose had the interrogation skills of a top homicide investigator. The woman could not be fooled. 

    We liked it best when she went shopping downtown. It would take the better part of a day, during which we would be out from under the scrutiny of the all-seeing-eye. Women in those days dressed to go downtown, and we watched eagerly as she prepared to join the shopping wars. We knew the time was close when the hat with the veil went on. Then a final cup of strong tea, on with the gloves, and off she went. Freedom.  

    Our one fear was that one of the girls would "tell." One time, while her mother was off shopping, Rosemary spied me out the kitchen window, burning candles on the back stairs post (which doubtless says something about my psychological condition at the time). I was sure my goose was cooked. But dinner went uneventfully that night; there was nothing the next day either --or ever.

  Last year I met Rosemary at Jack Logan's funeral and asked her why she hadn't snitched me off. "Mother didn't want to hear anything from talebearers," Rosemary told me. "If she didn't have first hand knowledge about an offense, she didn't want to know about it." As it was, there was enough visible misconduct to keep the disciplinary machinery humming along nicely anyway.

 

 

 

Rose Smith and some of her kids, from front to rear, left to right: Ray Bowers, Sheila Mullen, Emmett Doherty; Ray Doherty, Maureen Mullen, Kevin Mullen; Rose and her daughter, Rosemary.

 

 San Francisco really was a small town in those days. We kids convinced ourselves that Mrs. Dollar, the German lady who owned the big yellow brick apartment house at the top of Collingwood Street, was a Nazi spy.   When the poor woman turned us in to the authorities for harassing her – I think we were climbing on the brick wall which surrounded her garden – the call came from the mayor’s office, and the caller knew who we were by name.           

It was at dinnertime that the full scale of the household operation became apparent. Fifteen for an evening meal in the 12-by-15 dining room was normal. Twenty was not uncommon. The kids did all the noncooking chores and to this day I can peel potatoes and wash dishes faster than anyone who didn’t grow up in that house.

 Still there was always an extra place at the table. During the war it was the custom, when every family had someone in the service, to invite servicemen for dinner. How he arrived there I don’t know but I remember one soldier from Texas who wouldn’t eat an artichoke because he thought it was a cactus.

     It was at holiday meals, however, the dining operation received its severest test. In addition to the regular household, there would be Henry and Marie Columbo from Burlingame. And Marie’s sister, Anna Deighan, would come over from Sea Cliff where she worked as a maid.  The Bowens would come up from Jersey Street, and maybe the Arrigonis from lower on 22nd. John Lacoste, the butcher from the Eureka Market, would carve the turkey, all the while making mildly irreverent comparisons between the tail end of the bird and the "Pope's nose."

     Johnny Matthews, Rose Smith's god-father, often made the scene, with his fiddle and always ready joke. Johnny was a bit of a mystery man. The kids weren’t brought in on the details, but it  seems he didn't need to work, having had something to do with adult beverages during the Prohibition years. He moved into the house for  a time as well.

     Because of the crowd at holiday meals, the kids had to sit in the kitchen, with one ear cocked to what was going on at the main table. There would be enough wine to stimulate spirited conversation among the adults, but that was the extent of it; ours was a respectable house.

      Before each large dinner, Rose would establish the ground rules for discussion, To prevent disruptive disputes, certain subjects would be taboo. There would be no talk, she would insist,  about Ireland, the Catholic Church, or politics. "Of course," my father later told me, "that's all anyone wanted to talk about," so the ground rules soon went out the window, often dispatched on their way by Rose herself.

     We learned of the War's end from the off-hour tolling of St. Philip's bells. It was evening and neighbors took the pots off their stoves and headed for 3919 to celebrate. Rose Smith was a force not just in the house but in the neighborhood. From a kid's point of view, the adult gathering provided a much needed respite from supervision.  Ray and I ranged unfettered through the neighborhood that night, and while older miscreants rioted on Market Street we conducted physics experiments on Castro Street busses by jamming potatoes up their exhaust pipes to stall them out.

     The War over, "the boys" came home. I remember a uniformed Jack Logan getting off the bus on Castro Street, the round blue patch of the Air Corps emblazoned on his left sleeve. Emmett left the seminary , and the house was fuller than ever.   Charley Smith married Anna Rose Lacoste (from down the 3800 block of 22nd) and went into the shoe business where he made a great success. Ray and I drained the glasses at their reception and Ray got so sick I had to do his paper route the next day. 

       Jack Logan went to college on the G.I. bill – the first one we knew to aspire to a higher  education. And Bill Logan went on the cops with his friend Bill Murphy from down on 23rd Street. The night before he was sworn in Rose Smith sewed a Sacred Heart medal into the inner left breast of his police blouse. Bill later married Marcella, Rose Smith’s niece from Chicago.

     Sometime in 1947, things began to get weird. Ray didn't want to play step baseball anymore, or "pinky on a bounce." He was satisfied to hang around down on 24th Street, mooning over Cathey Goolden. It's not that I didn't know about romance. I had been in love earlier myself, with Kay of the golden curls.

    I had the most sublime moment in my pre-teen life when I beat up Raul Aguilar on the last day of school in St. Philip's school yard for the hand of Kay, while Kay and her friend Betty looked discreetly on. I don’t know what Kay thought about it all, because we never discussed the matter. Bob Bassett tells me every boy in the class was as smitten as I.)

     Nonetheless, there was a social justice dimension to the conflict. Raul had a nickel plated bike, and I had none; to my mind  the cosmic balance of justice required an adjustment. (We can pass over my fight with Steve Spina in the vacant lot at 23rd and Diamond which I started, over nothing, and he finished.)  But I didn't learn the desperation of real eye-gouging, ear-biting, head-banging, no-holds-barred combat until I mentioned to Ray, in all innocence, that Cathey Goolden and John Shea would make a fine looking couple together. In the ensuing battle, Ray disabused me of that notion.

     In 1948 we moved away from Noe Valley, and from our childhood as well -- to the Inner Sunset, the first step in the now familiar migration of San Franciscans of that generation to the suburbs.  Whatever else was going on, certainly none of us realized at the time that we were leaving an "elegant" half million dollar "Prime Noe Valley Gem." If we had, perhaps we would have stuck around.