Herb Gold, c/o Letters to the Editor
Image Magazine
110 Fifth St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
It was interesting to read your reminiscences of the other Sausalito; I found myself looking for the other story, the characters and places I remember as a child: The No Name habitué, Lew Welch, and bartender/novelist Don Meredith. The Gate Theatre (my mother was an actress, costume/set designer); where I first met Sterling Hayden—one of my favorite babysitters. I liked Tommy Smothers better because he was so goofy.
At The Gate Playhouse Theatre, I sat through countless performances of Pipe Dream, Of Thee I Sing. My mother was the wicked witch in the Hansel and Gretel matinee. After the performance, we birthday kids were nervously lined up on stage, the audience singing Happy Birthday to You as the cake was carried out by my mother—while still in costume. When she hugged me, there was pandemonium; all the other kids ran off the stage crying and screaming.
No story about Sausalito is complete without some mention of Juanita Musson, the legendary restaurateur who, to my horror, kept a fawn in the back of her white Ford Falcon station wagon. Meals at Juanita’s (the Bridgeway parking lot on weekends) were always a surprise. Juanita’s wrath was legendary; customers quickly learned to shut up and eat, even if what they got wasn’t what they ordered.
Instead of pancakes, Juanita brought me runny eggs and rice. I was crushed, my mother (the waitress) signaling, Let it go. . . When I burst into tears, Juanita exploded, Fer Chrissakes! her cursing louder than her parrot or her muu-muu. The more experienced patrons instinctively ducked as she charged back to the kitchen. Juanita pysically endorsed the clean plate club; for my crocodile tears, I got a lovely stack of pancakes the size of dinner plates, and as tall as Everest, my work clearly cut out for me. . .
Juanita’s apartment above Bridgeway was a realm of filtered pink light, with beaded curtains, gizmos in every available space—and the menagerie—a monkey who might pinch, pee on us (or worse, fling shit), if we didn’t feed him the grapes Juanita handed us. At least one big rooster strutted his stuff in the living room.
At the Village Faire, and the Trade Fair, a converted ferry boat, we were regular little filching Olivers with our five-gallon wide-mouthed black naugahyde purses. We’d sit on the retaining wall outside the Village Faire, pool our money for fish and chips, and compare the day’s catch: wooden mice and cheap silver Navajo rings that we later mailed off to Micaela’s parents’ puzzled friends and relations.
My friend’s father, Patrick Wall, was a retired art dealer from Carmel, and his wife Betty, a potter, so we ran wild through many an artist’s party including one on Varda’s ferry boat. The Charles Van Damme was so rakishly angled that Varda had to nail his cobalt and vermilion montages to the walls. Caught stealing food in the kitchen, and compounded by a case of mistaken identity—as some guest’s brats—we were sent upstairs to the captain’s deck, prisoners with nothing to do but watch the Spreckles House slowly sink further into the mud.
When we were 86ed from another party, we balanced on the thin warped boards that threatened to toss us into the raw sewage as we peered in the portholes of Piro and Alice’s houseboat at Gate Five. Piro Wolfe, who founded the successful Anchor Steam Beer Company, once made legendary history when he and Alice, dressed to the nines, took a dingy to the opera—neglecting to check the tides—only to arriving hours after the opera was over.
The first major influx of tourists came hard on the heels of the flower children. Comedian Robin Williams (with whom I went to school) was right to repeat the Marin adage early and often: If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t really there. I will forgive you for bungling a few facts. We’ve all had to reconstruct our past from the literary fragments that followed. We had no idea we were living through a significant era until after it was over and done with, dead and anthologized, taken from us by the coffin of time and by the tide of eager hordes that followed.
Maureen Hurley
