In The Beginning

How DOES one begin a blog. Perhaps with just a simple description of what I'm going to put here.

I remember looking at my Grandmother after she died. She was 103 years old, but her face, calm and peaceful after the pain and discomfort of her last weeks in hospital, seemed so much younger. She'd had an unusual life, a life full of little adventures and trials. As I grew up I heard about what had gone on before, sometimes from her and sometimes from her daughter, my dearly loved Aunt Ella, known forever in the family as Auntie Lala because a baby, me, couldn't pronounce "Ella".

I heard stories, family legends in fact, about my Grandfather, Edward Valentine 'Val' Moody, and about Ella's childhood in Santa Cruz, California, a childhood full of sun and water and pranks and adventures. They were all vivid in her mind, as clear as if they'd happened only yesterday.

But looking down at my Grandmother I suddenly found myself wishing I could have just another week, another day, with her so that I could ask her about all the stories, her stories and family stories, that were lost now forever. They were a rich heritage and I wished then, and have wished often since then, that I'd paid more attention when I first heard some of them; that I'd written them down.

I realized that now I'm the repository of family legends, the tale teller. Those stories, and some of my own, grand events or trivial, are my children's and my grandchildren's heritage, and if I don't record them somehow, they'll disappear with my passing and be gone forever, and that would be a waste and a tragedy.

So I'll begin recording some of them here and there. Some of them will be stories about the fore-bearers, the people who, in some often mysterious way, made me who I am, and made my children who they are too. We owe them a lot. Other stories will just be tales from my own history, some funny, some sad. They'll be mostly the truth, at least as much as I can remember. Others may have just a little artistic license applied; after all, I AM partly Irish by extraction.  I'll welcome any comments. And I'll be eager to hear some stories and legends from other families. They're important too, the kind of glue that binds not only a family but a whole community together, and heaven knows we need that glue now.

So here we go ........

A Little Light Relief: I'm Driven Into Puberty

A digression.

My family lived in the Parkside District of San Francisco all through my grammar school days, but we moved to Ingleside Terraces about the time I started Junior High.

I'd always stammered very badly and had a lot of difficulty communicating verbally. I sang OK, but the stammer made me self-conscious and shy and, after being skipped a grade just as I was entering Junior High, I was pretty retarded socially. Everyone in my class was a year older, and when you're twelve or thirteen, a year makes a big difference.

Nevertheless, shy or not, I had  terrific crush on Jeanette Wilson who lived just across the street from me. She was a year or two younger, and she had the cutest sprinkling of freckles across her nose. I would have walked on hot coals if at the end of the walk I could just hold her hand for five minutes. But being shy, I suffered in silence.

Imagine my surprise when I was invited to her birthday party. I was now in the ninth grade, she was in the eighth, and suddenly everything seemed to be coming up roses for me: Jeanette of the nose freckles actually wanted me to come to her party. Vision of ........ I don't know what ..... danced in my head. Alas, as I was later to learn,  I was being invited as the favored guest not of the delectable Jeanette herself, but because Jeanette's cousin, Alma Lou Jenkins, had a crush on me.

Anyway, ignorance is bliss and so I arrived at the party in a pretty blissful state for one reason and another. As I said, I was pretty naive and a little  backward socially. I don't know what I expected to find at the party: pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and that sort of thing, I suppose. But pinning the tail on any animal, donkey or otherwise, was the farthest thing from any other party-goers mind. I was a little surpised when, about ten minutes after I arrived, all the lights in the living room were turned out and a heavy game of spin-the-bottle began.

I suppose there are a lot of younger people who don't know anything about spin-the-bottle. It involved everyone sitting around in a circle and the person who was 'it' actually spinning a bottle, usually a milk bottle (once upon a time milk actually came in glass bottles, strange as that may seem). When the bottle stopped spinning it would be pointing at someone in the circle and that someone, if he or she was the opposite sex from the bottle spinner, had to kiss the person who had done the spinning.

Alma Lou must have been practicing bottle spinning in secret because she spun me on her first try. I was bound by the unwritten code of "teenagehood" to kiss her, but I was too shy to kiss her in front of everyone. I wasn't even completely sure how to do it: I'd never kissed a girl before, except cousins and other relatives, and I only kissed them because my mother threatened physical harm if I didn't. Cousin-kissing involved puckering as much as possible, putting at least a minimal distance between you and the kissee, and making minimal contact, usually with a cheek. Now, facing my first boy-girl kiss, I insisted that we do it in the dining room where no one else could see. To the derisive jeers of all the other party goers, Alma Lou and I traipsed into the dining room and situated ourselves behind the aforementioned door.

I 'puckered up' in a "kiss-your-cousin" pose, and aimed for Alma Lou's cheek. She had other ideas. She grabbed my head with both hands - which startled me more than a bit and put me off my guard - and gave me a kiss that she never learned practicing on a cousin. During the course of the kiss she stuck her tongue in my mouth and, as I remember it all these years later, about halfway down my throat.

The effect was wildly startling and yet somehow strangely pleasant. The overall effect was that basically I entered puberty instantaneously, in a split second, on the strength of Alma Lou's kiss. My voice changed, I could feel my beard starting to grow, and hot and cold chills ran up and down my back. It was not to be the only kiss I shared with Alma Lou that night, but none of the subsequent encounters had quite the same magical effect as that first one. I even, during the course of that game and a subsequent game of 'post office' (don't ask, it's too complicated to explain. Look it up on Wikipedia or someplace like that)  kissed several other girls. I was really starting to get into the spirit of things. Most of them were eager and enthusiastic, if somewhat less advanced in the kissing department than Alma Lou. I'll even admit that I tried to spin other encounters with Alma Lou but the milk bottle was recalcitrant and I was not 100%  successful. Even when I did buss Alma Lou again, the effect was less magical than that first encounter. I guess, when you stop to think of it, there's really only one 'first kiss'.

I was feeling less shy with every passing moment. I was even a little disappointed when Mr. and Mrs. Wilson turned on the lights in order to serve cake and ice cream. They managed not to cringe at the lipstick smears and other signs of bacchanal on various faces and the collars of white shirts. I guess, in their time, they'd had their own 'Alma Lous'.

Strangely, I never had a date with Alma Lou. I guess I was tested and came up short. Alma Lou was probably looking for someone who didn't have to stand behind the dining room door to kiss her. I don't know what happened to Alma Lou. I hope she had a wonderful life, full of passion and bottle spinning. I owe her, I reckon, a huge debt of gratitude. She got me started, so to speak. I suppose in time there might have been another young lady who was willing to test the - ahem - social waters with me, but Alma Lou was the one who did, and I'm still grateful. It's a well-worn precept that one should honor one's teacher, and she certainly taught me a few really important things.

Goodnight, Almo Lou, wherever you are. I thank you..... and I imagine my wife thanks you too.

An All American Boy

An All American Boy

I guess it must have been about 1951 or 1952 when I had my chance to achieve basketball glory.   I was in my Junior year at Lowell High School in San Francisco at the time. Lowell, still in the "Old Brick Pile" on Stanyan Street, was what was known as a "college-prep" school. There were no shop classes, just college-prep classes. No shop classes, and no football team. Oh, we fielded a team alright, but we were never very good. We were a basketball powerhouse, though. That suited me to the ground because I was a basketball fanatic.

I was sure that I was going to make the varsity soon, though I still hadn't manage to advance beyond the Junior Varsity. It was going to be, first, varsity, and then on to play in college, and maybe even in the AAU. I practiced every day. My Dad had built a basketball hoop in our driveway. Every afternoon I shot hundreds of shots. This year was going to be MY year. I was sure of it. I was undeterred by the fact that I was only 5'8" at the time and pretty uncoordinated. I was going to make up for my obvious shortcomings with zeal: zeal and dedication. 

On weekends I'd bike around the city looking for pickup games. One of my favorite places, not to far from my home in Ingleside, was the City College of San Francisco gymnasium down at the end of Ocean Avenue.

The basketball coach at CCSF opened the gym on Saturdays for pick-up basketball. Basketball players from every high school and junior high school in the city showed up there to take on everyone else in 3 on 3 basketball games, first team to 21 won. The unwritten rules were that if your team won, you stayed on the court for another game. If you lost you were off the court and had to take your place at the end of the queue of teams waiting to play. If you won two in a row you had to leave anyway so that one super strong team couldn't monopolize the floor for the whole day. It was fun, and it was pretty good basketball, too. 

Sitting out wasn't so bad either because the stands were usually full of the player's girl friends or other high school girls scouting out the basketball players. There were always other guys from Lowell there too. Like I said, Lowell was a basketball school and we had a lot of good players who loved the game almost as much as I did. 

One Saturday I showed up as usual and found the stands buzzing. George "Bird" Yardley had showed up to play a few games. "George Who?", I hear you think. Understandable. After all, this all took place about 70 years ago and I doubt that many of you will have ever even heard of George Yardley.

George "Bird" Yardley: All-American

George Yardley was an All-American basketball player from Stanford. He'd just graduated, I think, and was probably on the verge of joining the AAU team, the Stewart's Chevrolets, that he led to a national championship. Later he'd go on to play for the Detroit Pistons and eventually be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1951 (or maybe it was 1952) he must have been just out of Stanford and looking for some basketball action. Whatever the reason, there he was, playing at CCSF on a Saturday.

He was a fairly tall - about 6'4" or 6'5" - but really skinny guy. He'd more or less invented the "turn around jumpshot" and was a scoring machine. Everyone was excited to see him play, and as chance would have it, eventually I found myself on a team trotting out on the court to play his team. 

I was really conscious of all the eyes in the stands. I was also determined that I wasn't going to be intimidated. I wasn't going to be made to look foolish.  I was going to play the game of my life and we were going to beat George Yardley, All-American. If we could pull that off it would show me that I was destined for bigger things on the basketball court.

For some reason I was assigned the task of guarding George Yardley himself, and I took on the task with a vengeance. I became an irritant. I swarmed around Yardley like a demented mosquito. I pushed him, I pulled him, I tried to step on his toes. Every time he went to take a shot I was in his face, every time he went to get a rebound I was there trying to block him out, elbowing him and backing into him. 

He didn't say anything; he just went on scoring jumpshot after jumpshot. I was getting a little irritated: he was making me look pretty feeble. But then my opportunity came. Someone took a shot and missed, but it was one of those freakish misses that bounces off the rim of the basket and goes straight up in the air and then straight down again. This was my chance, my chance at redemption, my opportunity to show everyone that one day I might be an All-American too.

I got the inside position on Yardley. I backed into him, pushing him away from the basket, and I crouched to take the biggest jump of my life. I was determined to jump higher than I'd ever jumped before. I was going to get the ball come what may. I timed my leap to perfection. I sprang off the floor like a leopard. Up, up, I soared. 

"Ha," I exulted to myself, "I've got you THIS time, Mr All-American."

George Yardley didn't even jump. He just waited until I went soaring into space and as I jumped he hooked his index fingers in the elastic waistband of my basketball shorts. I was at the pinnacle of my all-time jump when I realized that, for some reason, my shorts were now down around  my ankles and I was soaring clad only, in a Bicyle brand jock strap. 

I actually caught the ball, but it didn't matter. When I came down my shorts were around my ankles and as I tried to catch my balance I took a step and down I went. The basketball went flying and George Yardley corralled it and scored a basket. I realized pretty quickly that that was why he was an All-American and I wasn't, but it still seemed like a dirty trick.

The laughter from the stands, amplified in the huge cavern of the gym sounded louder than a waterfall. 

I pulled up my shorts, collected my jacket and my gym bag, and left. I didn't go back for about three weeks, but it was no use, anyone who'd been there for my "pantsing" hadn't forgotten. Even people who hadn't been there for my "denouement" had heard about it. I just had to grin and bear it.

Strangely, I became a George Yardley fan, and whenever he was playing for "Stewarts", or later when the Piston's played anywhere in the area, I was usually in the stands. 

I never got to be an All-American, but I competed against one once.

Ella and Jim

My father's older sister was named Ella Viola Moody, my Auntie Lolla. She became Lolla because as a baby I couldn't pronounce 'Ella': Lolla was the closest I could come. Later she became like a second mother to me. My parents had problems, and Ella couldn't have children - a sad fate for a woman who graduated with a teaching degree from San Francisco State Teacher's College and ran a nursery school for ten or twelve years. She loved children and my sister and I benefited from all the love and attention she would have showered on a child of her own.

Anyway, she was two years older than my father. Growing up together in Santa Cruz they did a lot of things together, beaching, swimming, just about everything. At the drop of a hat she'd tell stories about how she and my father got into mischief together and played tricks on each other and on the other members of the family, on everyone except Mama Wallace, her grandmother, who, though she died before I was born, is vivid in my memory as a kind of a dragon lady, a fierce termagant who could freeze a miscreant small boy in his tracks with a single glance.

Aunt Ella loved my father more than just about anyone else in the world. And I guess, being his son, gave me a special place in her heart. She and my Uncle Ernie - I don't think I ever called him anything but 'Unk' my whole life - had me for weekends while my parents, already having problems, did who knows what. Their house, Ella and Ernies, was on 21st Ave and my house was on 23rd Avenue. It was a matter of a ten minute walk to be at their house and I think I spent almost as much time at their house as I did at my own. My Grandma Moody's house was immediately behind Ella and Ernies and Unk had cut a hole in the back fence and put a gate there so that we could all slip through to Grandma's house without having to go around the block.

I think I spent just about every weekend between kindergarten and junior high school at their house. We had a kind of a routine. I'd show up on Friday afternoon. We'd watch TV that night - they had one of the very first TVs anywhere in the neighborhood and so we'd sit in the living room and watch Milton Berle or Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I'd play around the neighborhood on Saturday. The Biaggio boys, Bob and Dickie, lived just down the street and we'd all go over to the big reservoir two blocks away and play cowboys and Indians in the sand hills that surrounded it, or else we'd make roller coasters in their basement.

But on Saturday night we'd go to the Parkside Theater. We'd see a double feature and three cartoons, all for a quarter for me to get in. We'd wait with baited breath to see if one of the cartoons would be Bugs Bunny, my favorite, and cheer like crazy when the Loony Tunes logo came up on the screen. After the movie we'd walk a few doors up Taraval Street to the Parkway Cafe and have ice cream. I always had the Ice Cream Sundae: three kinds of ice cream - vanilla, strawberry and chocolate - with three toppings - vanilla strawberry and chocolate - and sprinkled with chopped almonds, whipped cream, and with a cherry on top. Then Unk would buy me two comic books and the corner drugstore and we'd head back to their house. Auntie Lol would make me a baloney sandwich and a glass of milk and I'd read my comic books and then fall asleep around ten o'clock.

Sunday morning it was up around 8:00 o'clock. I had a toy trumpet (it was really a trumpet shaped kazoo) and I'd sneak into Unk and Ella's bedroom and play reveille on my kazoo until Unk groaned and woke up. Then we'd all sit up in their bed and read the Sunday funnies.

Those days, and the summer vacations I took with them in their summer place in Ben Lomond, near Santa Cruz, are some of the best memories I have. I'll write a little about Ben Lomond in another piece.

Ella loved my Dad beyond any measure. When things started to go really wrong between my parents it hurt her a lot. As my Mother's drinking got worse I think my Father just lapsed into despair. He didn 't know what to do about her drinking. My Mother absolutely refused to acknowledge that she had a drinking problem, even when, eventually, she'd be falling down drunk three or four nights a week. My Father shifted between anger and despair. He'd work as a police officer all day then come home and, as soon as he opened the back door and stepped into the house, would know that my Mother was drunk again and either hiding from him or passed out, often in the empty bathtub.

I guess it was natural for him to turn to his family for some solace or advice. I'd be at Ella and Ernies on the weekend and my Dad would show up on Saturday and have dinner with all of us, Ella and Ernie, Grandma Moody, Great Grandma Cererro, and me. He'd talk to Ella about what was going on at home and it was on those evenings that I saw my Father cry for the first time.

Ella had never been overly fond of my Mother from the start. My Mother was, for a while, a cute, blue-eyed blonde who was used to having the boys fight over her. Ella was the opposite: an attractive, intelligent, level-headed woman who didn't forgive and forget. When she saw how sad it was making my Father and my Grandmother, she got mad, and stayed mad at my mother for the rest of her life.

When we tried to revive the family tradition of big Italian/Irish holiday dinners with lots of people and wine and food and laughter it never was quite the same as it had been when I was younger. There was always an undertone.

Later, when my Father died of cancer, Ella swore up and down that my Mother's drinking had killed him. She was sure that his depression had led to his demise, that he just hadn't wanted to live any more. By then I was full grown and out on my own, but Ella and Ernie's place in Ben Lomond - they'd retired there - was my second home. I'd often show up there with a couple of buddies and eat Ernie out of house and home. If I was on my own Ella would hold forth about my Mother's many shortcomings.

It all came to a head after my Father died. My Mother was, as I've said, a vain woman who went to the beauty parlor every week, had her hair dyed so often that I never knew, until after her death, what color her hair really was. She was also an incurable flirt and flirted with most of the men that she and my Father knew, to my Dad's consternation. Even so, I was a little surprised when, about three weeks after my Dad passed away, I dropped by her house one evening to see how she was doing. It wasn't a long trip from Berkeley across the Bay and out into the avenues. Anyway, I came unannounced and when she let me in she was looking a little sheepish. There was a man sitting in her living room and they had obviously been having a few drinks. She introduced me to him as her 'friend', Larry.

He was a tall, overweight guy with a drinker's shapeless red nose. He was dressed in a houndstooth sports jacket and looked like he might be an insurance salesman or something. It turned out that he owned a furniture store and that he was more than my Mother's 'friend'. Over the next few weeks, now that the cat was out of the bag, so-to-speak, my Mother invited me to dinner a few times. I declined until she more or less begged me to come and have dinner with her and Larry. He was, she assured me, a nice guy and he really liked me and blah blah blah. The thing that decided me was when she said that she was really lonely and that Larry took her places and ......  Anyway, I didn't go to dinner but agreed to go to the Elk's Club Gym with larry one Saturday afternoon. I was a little uncertain about the whole occasion because my Dad was a member of the Elks and he and I had gone to the gym fairly often and played handball.

We showed up at the gym and there was a $10 fee for me to get in; I was a 'visitor'. Larry tried to wiggle out of paying the ten bucks, even though I offered to pay. He told the attendant that I was his son and that meant I could get in free. The attendant bought it and I was too polite to embarrass Larry and expose the lie.

I didn't accept any more invitations until Xmas rolled around a few months later. My Mother called me at the University and asked me to come over for Xmas dinner. Ella and Ernie and Grandma Moody were coming up from Ben Lomond and it would be a family affair. I was thunderstruck. Once they'd retired there Unk had never gone further than fifteen miles from Ben Lomond. But sure enough, on Christmas Day they showed up at my Mother's house on 28th Ave. I was glad to see them and we were doing a little reminiscing, having a cocktail or two, when the doorbell rang. My Mother went to the door and buzzed the security gate open downstairs. I heard someone coming up the stairs. I hope it was my Uncle Arthur and his family, but it wasn't. Larry stepped through the door. My Mother did her "... this is my FRIEND, Larry" routine, but she wasn't fooling anyone. The look on my Grandmother's face almost made me burst into tears.

My Grandmother married my Grandfather when she was 17, was married to him for the next 38 years or thereabouts, and wore his wedding ring to the day she died at age 103. And her was my Mother standing  in front of her with a new boy friend less than four months after my Father's death.

The meal was a disaster. As soon as dessert was over they all got up, Unk murmured something about getting home before it got dark on those roads down in the mountains, and off they went. I stayed another 15 minutes and then pleaded that I had homework to do and off I went as well.

The next weekend I drove to Ben Lomond. My Aunt was fit to be tied. "How could she, " she kept saying, ".... and right  in front of Grandma." Then she went into a long rambling narrative about things she and my Dad had done when they were kids. None of them ever saw my Mother again. They didn't even come to her funeral. I couldn't blame them. It's hard to forgive when someone seems to insult someone you love.

In the end things slowly got out of hand for Ella, Unk and my Grandmother. Unk died first. He got something called a twisted bowel which turned gangrenous and he died in about three days. Ella was desolate. She'd had Ernie and her Mother with her for her entire adult life and now Ernie was gone and my Grandmother was in a nursing home. I took a job at Borland Software, just a few miles from Ben Lomond and moved in with Ella. Just a short while later the region was tossed and turned by the Loma Prieta Earthquake, one of the strongest in living memory and centered only a few miles away from where we were. Ella was frightened, literally, out of her wits. The doctors said that they thought she had a minor stroke. It didn't effect her physically, but she sank into a kind of dementia that just got deeper and deeper. The quake had frightened her so badly that she never slept in a bed again until she entered a nursing facility near where my wife Yvonne and I were then living. She slept in a big easy chair that she put right next to the door.

Then my Grandmother, 103, passed away and that was just about it for Auntie Lol. She'd spend hours talking to me about her childhood, but the stories often rambled and didn 't make much sense. The one theme that ran threw all the tales was how much she'd loved my Dad.

She died in her sleep one night in the nursing home. She rests next to Ernie and her Mother in a cemetary in Santa Cruz. They spent their adult lives together, and they'll spend eternity together too, I guess.

Captain Findley's Dirty Trick

Captain Findley, my great grandfather, was an unusual man. I don't know how he got the 'captain' attached to his name, but he was always referred to in the family legends as "Captain" Findley. He guide wagon trains across A the plains from St. Louis to northern California and 

 Oregon during the 1840s and 1850s, around the time of the gold rush and the great western movement in America. He had a reputation, even after he eventually settled around Wheatland, California, for being a very tough customer.

Family legend has it that on one of his expeditions as a wagon train 'Captain' he was guiding a bunch of tenderfeet when the train came to a river somewhere on the prairie. The river was in flood and when his train got there there was already a train of immigrants waiting for the river to subside so they could get across and continue their journey west.

"No problem!" Captain Findley told the two wagon trains. And he proceeded to show them how you could take the wheels of the big, wooden Conestoga wagons and turn them into miniature rafts. Captain Findley then, at great risk to life and limb, swam his horse across the swollen, rushing river pulling a rope. When he was on the other side he fastened the rope to a sturdy tree and one by one ferried his trains wagons across, using the rope as a guide and, I guess, a second rope to pull them over.

When his train was safely across and all hitched up and ready to proceed he looked back at the second train waiting on the other side and without a moments hesitation cut the rope and left the inexperienced settlers to figure out how to get across themselves. Members of his own train were shocked and upset at this callous act. "Why? Why did you do that?" they asked.

"Well," Captain Findley replied, "There's only enough grass between here and the mountains for one wagon train." There were no further questions.

They bred 'em tough in the 1840s.

Haute Cuisine

     It was my Junior year at Lowell High School in San Francisco. The Junior Prom was coming up. At that time that was a pretty big deal for reasons that I never quite understood. But anyway, it was a big deal. I wasn't sure I wanted to go, but there was a sophomore named Sally Jane Blau who sat right behind me in Mrs Balensiefer's English Lit class that I really wanted to invite. She had a cute page boy bob and brown eyes so dark that they looked black, and she was tiny and I liked the way she walked. The problem was I had a stammer that made Porky Pig look like Demosthenes, I was painfully shy, and I hadn't the first idea what to do on a Prom date, assuming she said 'Yes'.
      I didn't, but my Dad did. (I guess Proms hadn't really changed that much since he was in high school.) Anyway, he sat me down over the breakfast room table and gave me a game plan. I'd buy a corsage the day of the Prom to give to her, I'd make sure that my shoes were shined and my suit was brushed. I'd make a reservation to take her to dinner somewhere, and all that would be left was the Prom and that would pretty much take care of itself (my mother had made sure that I had ballroom dancing lessons when I was about 13).
     That all sounded pretty easy except for the 'dinner' part. I'd never gone to a restaurant unless it was with my family, and even then our outings was pretty much limited to the Chinese-American diner next to the El Rey theater. I hadn't the foggiest notion what was required, but I was pretty sure it would involve oral communication, and with my stammer, that was where the plan went awry.
     My Dad had a solution for that too: practice, practice, practice. Every evening for about two weeks, right after dinner, the two of us would retire to the breakfast nook and rehearse, over and over.

     First he selected a restaurant for me: the Ritz Old Poodle Dog,  a French-style restaurant that now, sadly, no longer exists. A victim of San Francisco's 'modernization'. He made my reservation for me and, on his way home from work, stopped in and picked up a menu to use when  we rehearsed. And rehearse we did, going over every part of my first foray into fine dining.
     "OK," he'd say, leading off the batting, "You arrive at the restaurant and a guy wearing a bow tie comes up and asks, 'Can I help you?' What do you do?"
     Me: " I say, 'My name is James Moody and I have a reservation for two."
    Him: "Right! What happens then?"
    Me: "I let him lead Sally and me to our table."
    Dad: "And then you sit down?"
    Me: Avoiding the clever trap he'd set, I answered, "No, I wait and let him pull out Sally's chair before I sit down."
   And so it went, night after night, over and over. It was like rehearsing for a stage play, and I never stammered when I was on stage. I began to feel a little more confident. This might work out OK.
   My father even went to the trouble of making the reservation for me at a downtown restaurant: a french restaurant near Market Street called the Ritz Old Poodle Dog. He even brought home a menu and we went over it, line by line, until I almost knew it by heart.
   The night of the Prom I figured I was ready. I knew my lines by heart. I drove the old family Studebaker to Sally Jane's house in the Marina and her mother met me at the door. "Sally'll be ready in a minute," she said. She guided me into their living room for a two or three minute grilling. Where did I plan to go for dinner? What were we going to do after the Prom (the danger zone because that's when the school bad boys started drinking and taking girls to Inspiration Point or the Marina Green to neck and do whatever. I was pretty shy and had no idea, really, what went on.
   About that time Sally ended my misery by coming down the stairs in her Prom dress. She paused halfway down and I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest. At that moment she was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was wearing a dark blue - royal blue? - off the shoulder dress and with her tan arms and shoulders and her shining hair she looked like a goddess to me.
     I wasn't brave enough to try and pin the orchid I'd brought onto her dress so her mother took over and did that. With a few remonstrations we were out the door and on our way to the Old Poodle Dog.

The Old Poodle Dog

    At the Ritz I was on familiar ground thanks to my Dad's rehearsing me. It was, to my inexperienced eyes, a pretty posh place. The big doors had brass handles and were inset with etched glass in a fancy design. Insides, if memory serves, the tables were all set with immaculate white linen and heavy pure white bistro plates and sterling silver cutlery. Wow!

    Not a problem. I recognized the head waiter right away and told him, without a hint of a stammer, "My name is Moody and I have a reservation for two." Right on cue he led us to a table and held Sally's chair for her. I could tell she was impressed. I felt as debonair as Fred Astaire, even though I had a dark blue suit and a shiny green tie instead of a top hat and tails.
     I was feeling great. I was even conversing with Sally as we made our way through the soup course. The second course - this was a French restaurant after all - offered a choice between 'sweetbreads' and some kind of fish. Sally asked what I was going to have and, as if I ate French style everyday I answered, in a casual, offhanded way, "I recommend the sweetbreads." In no time at all a waiter, in his black tie and long white French-style apron, arrived with our sweetbreads glistening on immaculate white cutlery.
     I'd never had sweetbreads  before,  but I grew up with an Italian grandmother and we ate a whole variety of food in our household.  Tripe, headcheese, kidneys: Italians eat just about anything if it tastes good. Sally, on the other hand, came from a family where their meals weren't so adventurous. As she consumed her sweetbreads, and they were truly delicious, she asked me what 'sweetbreads' were. And, being a pedantic and thoroughly rehearsed know-it-all I happened to know what they were. And, a fool in love, I told her.
    "They're the thymus glands of a young calf," I responded gaily. "Some come from the neck, but the best ones come from right near the heart."
     You can imagine my surprise when Sally, my dream date, without perceptible pause threw up on the middle of the table.
     It was the one circumstance that my father hadn't covered in prepping me for the big day. He'd covered fire, earthquake, atomic attack, the sudden appearance of a man driven insane by drinking absinthe, everything. Somehow he'd overlooked the possibility that my date would upchuck in a French restaurant. I had an instant meltdown. My stammer returned immediately and I looked, dumbfounded, on the wreckage of my dream date.
     I had no idea what to do, but the French waiters did. My memory at this point gets a little hazy but, if I remember correctly, one of the waiters swung down from  the balcony on a golden rope, like Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, and as he flew past snatched the tablecloth, with it's full complement of plates and silverware, from the table and vanished with it into the mist. A second waiter approached at flank speed and with one polished magical gesture waved his hands over our table and a new table setting appeared.
     The head waiter arrived and, a little unctuously, inquired if "Madam was quite recovered." Madam was, and the a second course, absent any sweetbreads, appeared.
     The rest of the meal was a little strained, as you might imagine. When we went on to the dance Sally perked up a little, but you could tell she was still pretty embarrassed by what had happened. I don't think I helped when I confessed that I had once thrown up a helping of wieners and sauerkraut at a police officer's picnic. (I thought it might make her feel  better. What did I know: I was only 16.)
     I'd like to be able to say that my Sally Jane fantasies - a passionate romance during which she would see past my freckles, my stammer, and my cowlick hair and love the soulful inner me - led to romance and joy. It was not to be. Somehow the memory of her faut pas cast a shadow between us that not even the sunniest attempts on my part could dissipate. We remained friends, sort of, through our Senior year then she went on to Stanford and I to the University of California and we lost contact.
     But there is a happy ending to the story, sort of. Although I never forgot what happened, I also never forgot the glorious food we were served, in the end it was complimentary too, and it led me to a lifelong love of cuisine and cooking, and eventually it led me to a Cordon Bleu Culinary School. In the long run, that was probably a better solution for me. I'm not sure, being a Cal grad, that I could ever really love someone who chose to go to Stanford.

A Cast of Genuine Characters

My Grandmother on my father's side, my 'Grandma Moody', was the daughter of Rosalie Cerrero (born Calcagno) and Esteban Cerrero, formerly a Spanis Cavalryman in the employ of the Medici's in Florence, Italy.

My Great-grandmother Cerrero's family - she was known in the family as 'Rerra', again because as a baby I couldn't pronounce Cerrero - and was the daughter, one of two sisters, of a wealthy Genoese merchant family who lived outside of Genoa in a town called Aranzano. Rerra never really talked much about her childhood. I suppose that that was partly because, even after fifty or more years in America, she still had a heavy Italian accent and spoke English with some difficulty, and partly because the story of how she came to America was, at least in my mind, a sad one. I'll write about that in a later post.

My Grandma Moody was a hard-working woman who labored all of her life. As a young girl she worked in the family restaurant at Third and Townsend, hard by the train station and trainyards where the line south to Los Angeles and points between started and ended. After the 1906 San Francisco Fire and Earthquake destroyed the restaurant, she ended up in Santa Cruz after marrying my Grandpa Moody. She and Rerra operated a Railway hotel and restaurant, the Saint James Hotel, right next to the beach and, again, at the end of the spur line that brought passengers from the Bay Area, or from the South, to Santa Cruz. It was a hotel frequented by salesmen and railroadmen and Grandma and Rerra cooked and cleaned and more-or-less single-handedly kept the hotel going. It was, in the fashion of the times, my Grandpa Moody's picture that appears on the hotel stationery that was kept long after he moved on to another occupation and eventually to another part of California.

My grandfather was born in Northern California, near Marysville. Although I never met him - he died shortly before I was born - family legend records that he was a stagecoach driver, then a volunteer in the Spanish America War, serving in the Philippines and rising to the rank of Company Sergeant.  When he returned home his family had begun to relocate to Santa Cruz and he took a job as a railway brakeman with the Southern Pacific Railway. It was during this time that he met and married my grandmother. He became, probably because he was one of those men who everybody knows and who knows everybody, an easier task in the Monterey Bay area in those days because it was still a small-town kind of area, the first game warden for Monterey Bay. It was a natural for him: he was a hunter and a fisherman and loved the Santa Cruz Mountains. Later, as he rose through the ranks, he moved to San Francisco and the family, including my father, followed him there.

Next post: Brother and Sister: my father and my Aunt Ella