On fine Sunday mornings, everyone turned up en masse at Juanita's Galley, which was often so full, she fed the overflow crowd on long picnic tables made of sawhorses and old doors in the dirt parking lot at Gate 5 Road.
Doorknobs poked up through the tablecloths—if you got one. Generally there was nothing more than the unvarnished truth between your plate and the door. In those days, anything resembling a dish or a vessel—from ferries to jam jars to bedpans—was also pressed into service. It made the Baghdad Cafe look like a 4-star Marriot.
You rarely ever got what you ordered at Juanita's restaurant, not like Alice! and if you protested, well, then, she'd wave her arms like a windmill and scream bloody hell seasoned with plenty of verbal (as)salt at you in that big crass Panhandle voice, "Eat it, or wear it!" And if, God forbid, you didn't finish your food, then, you had to take it with you. Or else.
Feeling very grown up at the age of six, I ordered a rare treat, pancakes. It was a tough decision between pancakes and French toast. The kitchen was already out of French toast. My mouth watered in anticipation. I wasn't allowed to eat them except on Sundays. My usual fodder was my grandmother's oatmeal mush.
But, after an intolerably long wait, my order finally came. My mother was busy waiting on customers at the other end of the parking lot, so Juanita herself hustled out in her red muu-muu, and plonked down a real fisherman's breakfast: eggs, runny side up, bacon, a big leathery slab of steak, toast, and mountains and mountains of white rice—more than I could possibly eat in several Sundays. I was aghast. No syrupy sweet pancakes?
I just stared at those two quivering yellow orbs staring right back at me from the rim of the plate and did what any reasonable six-year-old would do, I cried. The sunshine had gone right out of my day. Thunderclouds on the horizon.
I was six, and I knew the clean plate rules, firsthand. I also knew about starving pagan babies in China, and all that. And as ill luck would have it, there were no street dogs or starving Chinese kids to the rescue. And mailing my breakfast to China was not an option. I didn't have the postage.
The insurmountable mountain of food would have challenged even a fisherman's prodigious appetite. As customers watched, transfixed—to see what would happen next—Juanita, startled by my tears, softened a bit, seeing as it was me, after all. And so she grabbed a stack of pancakes from a hapless customer who, knowing from experience, the futility of complaining to Juanita, was just about to tuck in to what HE didn't order.
Now instead of giving my first plate to the man, I was stuck with TWO breakfasts. And Juanita took no prisoners. You cleaned all your plates—even if you were six! I began to wail in earnest, while plotting an escape—perhaps I could crawl under the table. Then what? Make a run for the car? My mom was pretty swamped waiting on tables at the other end of the parking lot, so she couldn't run interference, or rescue me until the brunch crowd had been fed.
Someone finally took pity on me and helped me out. I think it was my mom's good friend, the tall, skinny bespectacled New Yorker, Skip Rognlien, who was a Gate Playhouse set designer, playwright and director (along with Les Abbott); he happily polished off a second breakfast.
There are many outrageous stories of Juanita's restaurants—and all of them apparently true. But unfortunately it's hard to find the active bearers of oral tradition. Hence this blog. To see what will crawl out of the woodwork. Most people remember Juanita, but not the specifics. Painter and sonic artist, Richard Waters remembers it was pretty crazy washing dishes for Juanita during his starving artist days the 1960s, but little else, other than he ate well. As classmate, Robin Williams famously quipped, "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there..."
Sometimes Juanita, with her auburn hair piled high and red lipstick often askew, or decorating a tooth—she had a large toothy smile—would sneak up from behind and wrap her big boobs around the ears of a hapless male customer and if he turned around, she'd smother him, rocking his nose deep into her cleavage, and then she'd laugh like a hyena while he struggled for breath. Wives later reported that Juanita's boob-muffin worked like viagra. I remember Juanita muu-muu-ing some poor fisherman who entered the galley kitchen. At Juanita's Galley, you were expected to pour your own coffee and to bus your own dishes—or you might be wearing them as ornaments upside the back of your head.
The kitchen was really a ferryboat galley. Was it The MV Vallejo? I don't remember. Someone insisted that it was the Charles Van Damme but that ferry was stuck high in the mud at the north end of Gate 5 or Tiki Junction and this Juanita's Galley was still floating. I remember that it moaned and shifted like an uneasy horse on the tide.
If I remember correctly, the ferry sported a forest green trim and the Charles Van Damm was white. Maybe Juanita moved the Galley over there later? Some of the mothballed green and white ferryboats were later retrofitted and sent to Puget Sound—in the 1970s, I rode the MV Lagunitas ferry to Anacortes. Does anyone remember what happened to The Trade Fair ferryboat by the park? Please drop me a line...
In her house above Casa Madrone, Juanita kept a strange menagerie of animals. One sunny afternoon when my mother and I were visiting (we lived out in Forest Knolls, my mom must've had a rehearsal at the Gate Playhouse), Juanita wore so many bangles on her wrists, they sounded like an empty closet of coathangers. She offhandedly offered me some grapes. But the monkey beat me to them. Beauregard leaped down from the ceiling molding and stole the grapes right from my hand.
Juanita kept a blind cockerel rooster that perched on her shoulder like a parrot, and there were rampant chickens, myriad cats, stray dogs and goats wandering in and out the front door. I remember she adopted an orphaned fawn named Sissy that rode around on a bed in the back of her white Ford Falcon station wagon. I remember that the fawn still had its spots, like a dusting of snow, and its fur was coarse to the touch. But its ears were shaped like the air scoop on the ferry and it had the longest lashes I'd ever seen.
I was already scandalized by the idea of a monkey in the parlour and a rooster on her shoulder. But I was particularly flummoxed by the conundrum of Juanita's owning a pet fawn, because even at the age of six, I knew that deer belonged in the wild, not in captivity.
I was putting together a list of things that had their rightful order in the universe, but with the fawn, Juanita had upset my idea of order. I didn't give a thought to how a nursing fawn could survive on its own. Or the compassion Juanita must've felt as she nursed that orphan from a glass milk bottle with Lucas Valley Dairy imprinted on its side. The fawn was clearly imprinted on Juanita and followed her like a little dog on reed-thin legs. Tiny hooves clattered on cement like a staccato of hard rain.
I was just getting my first glimpses of life lessons and I was learning that my mother was becoming too fey and fragile for this world. It was as if God had made a deal with my mother—trading talent for emotional stability. She opted for talent and it drove her crazy. More than once, Juanita picked my mom up and put her back on her feet. Juanita was that kind of woman. Picked you up by the scruff of the neck and plopped you in front of the trough with the rest of your littermates.
It seems Juanita was always picking up and setting down roots herself (she was a plucky old gal—built like a Peterbuilt) and it seems that someone was always burning down her restaurants—by her own count, she had some eleven establishments.
Several of Juanita's legendary venues were opened in Sonoma's Valley of the Moon: Boyes Hot Springs, Fetter's Hot Springs and Glen Ellen. Then, I'd heard she moved to Port Costa, then to Vallejo and lastly, to Winters.
A surprising number of her places really did burn down. One—was it in Winters?—was lost to back taxes, or maybe Juanita just grew tired of it. There was always wild speculation that she did them in herself for the fire insurance, but as far as I know, Juanita always ran a lean shop, so there was no money for frilliness like fire insurance. Someone said she had a thing going with an insurance salesman....but you know how rumors spread like wildfire.
In the early '70s, I went to Juanita's Fetter's Hot Springs restaurant, and the joint was crammed to the gills with odd antiques and old hunting lodge memorabilia, with dusty moose heads and bucks with impressive racks—sort of like
Speck McAuliff's bar in Lagunitas (another fabled Marin institution that fell to an arson's hands).
Cobwebbed candles stuck higglety pigglety in any convenient corner over the fireplace mantle and chimney, with bright layers of wax stalagtites dripping down the rocks in rainbow hues. Diners were crammed in knee-to-knee, tighter than a party of sardines at a canning factory. Sweet-old-Bob, my boyfriend from the 'burbs, was left speechless by his first (and only) Juanita dining experience.
The menu was prime rib for two and you had to share it with someone, or else. Heaven help the lone diner. When Juanita came out the kitchen with the cleaver in hand to divvy up the slab of meat, diners were surprisingly meek. The Juanita's Galley House Rules were printed on the dining check: 1. Pour your own coffee. 2. Write your own order. Be sure to put your name on your order so we can find you. 3. Our food is guaranteed—but not the disposition of the cook. Check Here for Special Service: Slow. Don't Care. Damned Big Rush. Those in the know never checked the last box.
Goats tethered in the yard on long chains (they ate through ropes), mowed down the weeds. There was Erica the white pig and even a holstein cow looking longingly toward the greener pasture out back of the restaurant. And there were flocks of randy ducks were swimming in the old bathtub cum water trough, or recreating, and nailing everything in sight—including escapee enamel bedpans from Sonoma State Hospital.
In 2006, I heard there was a "Juanita Roast" at Little Switzerland in Sonoma, replete with Juanita's signature dinner: moose-sized slabs of prime rib—enough to feed triplets, set in an acre park of mashed potatoes. The only thing un-Juanita-like about the dinner was the price. She'd never charge $40 a plate! During the Roast, Tommy Smothers (my one-time babysitter at Gate 5), or someone quipped, "Well, now, Juanita was never very good with candles...," and the audience roared with laughter. Ya hadda be there....
I recently ran into someone who remembered Juanita during the Sausalito days, and I had the opportunity to ask her: "Did Juanita really walk around with a rooster perched on on her shoulder or is my memory playing tricks on me?" She answered, "Yes, Juanita really did. So the story is true—which, BTW, inaugurated this blog.
Remember that blind, one-eyed rooster? Well, the story goes, that Juanita would amble up to men in the restaurant with that little banty rooster riding shotgun, and she'd say, "How do you like my cock?" Of course, at age six, that allusion went right over my head. I had to ripen a good decade or three before I finally got it.
© 2007 Maureen Hurley
A shorter version of this story appears in Marin Nostalgia (in fact, this story was revised and expanded in December, 2008 because Jason Lewis wanted to use it on his website.
