Baghdad-by-the-Bay

Recently, walking around Lake Calhoun here in Minneapolis where I live, I found myself behind a woman with a weimaraner dog. It surprised me a little. You don’t see many weimaraners anymore. They’re no longer fashionable as they once were, back in the fifties.

In the spring and summer of 1959 in San Francisco I knew a girl with a weimaraner. She called it Heidi. It had the gray suede pelt and pale blue eyes that made the breed so irresistible to young women in those days. The girl and I took the dog with us just about everywhere we went, until one day up in North Beach it jumped out of the backseat of the girl’s convertible and we lost it, never to be seen by us again. The girl’s name was Lois. You run into few girls named Lois these days.

I had gone up to San Francisco with the intention of living there, making it my home. I had fallen in love with the place during long weekend visits from the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms down in the Southern California desert. San Francisco had seemed to me the antithesis of Twentynine Palms, which I loathed. As soon as I was discharged in early February of that year, 1959, I headed north toward what I hoped and assumed would be my destiny.

And, looking back from a remove of fifty years, even with the knowledge that it hadn’t worked out, I can’t say that I made a bad choice. There was something magical about San Francisco in those days—or so it seemed to me. The air was tangier there than elsewhere; the sun, when it shone, shone brighter; the mood of the people you met seemed almost joyous. Clearly San Franciscans loved their city.

The earthquake ordinance was still in effect in 1959, and as I remember it you couldn’t have a building more than twelve stories high. This gave San Francisco and its “skyline” an intimate European feeling that other American cities lacked. Boosterism was checked by seismology.

I found a job working in a warehouse through a fee employment agency. The warehouse belonged to the big Schwabacher-Frey printing and office-supply firm and was situated at Third and Howard streets in the heart of skid row. I used to step over sleeping drunks each morning to get in the door. The fee for finding me the job was a substantial portion of my first month’s pay; I forget just what. I do remember what the pay was, though: $371 a month, which wasn’t bad in those days. I shared an apartment up in Pacific Heights with two management trainees for Woolworth’s, and they were only making $225 a month. Of course they got to wear a suit and tie to work, however, and to them that seemed to make up for the difference.

I had to become a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the fabled ilwu, headed by the leftist archfiend Harry Bridges, in order to get the job. I paid union dues, but I forget what they were. We had a shop steward who wore an orange vest and was constantly after us to slow down, not to work so hard. I was an order filler. This meant that I pushed a cart around the third-floor aisles of the big warehouse, pulling off the shelves office supplies listed on an order form. It was easy work that was boring. Cheap Japanese transistor radios were flooding the market in those days, and we used to wear them on our belts, with earplug cords snaking up under our shirts, to listen to the Giants’ baseball games as we worked. We had a shop foreman named Fagoni who frowned on this. He was forever confiscating our radios, causing the shop steward to negotiate to get them back. Ah, Fagoni. What a name. What a man. Sour and unsmiling, he favored chocolate-colored suits and popped Tums one after another, as if they were salted peanuts. He used to station himself...