We had drunk San Miguel in Pete’s Cafe in Half Moon Bay*
Joe Lauricella climbed in the Lancia Aurelia**
and I on the passenger side
“—- going straight back to San Francisco,” Joe said
“Let’s put this car through its paces.”
We climbed up to Skyline Ridge Road
and soon began a wild descent down Page Mill Road
“Joe I’m going to heave,” I said
Joe stopped, the door opened,
and San Miguel poured out of my mouth
We continued, the headlights peering into a light fog
Then, suddenly an apparition. Or reality?
A blonde woman in a red evening dress walking awkwardly in high heels
Joe slowed the Lancia, then stopped
I got out. There was a tense silence
She hesitated a moment, then climbed in
I shut the door quietly
Joe continued driving though he was no longer Manuel Fangio***
Questions raced through our minds
What was she doing on this road in the middle of the night?
It was a good six miles to the nearest town
And why the party house and high heels?
“Where to Miss?” Joe asked
“Palo Alto,” she answered in a determined voice
Joe drove and she directed him like a taxi driver
“This street. Straight. Turn left here. Stop.”
Joe stopped in front of a house with the lights out
She walked up the pathway and was soon inside
We sat there a moment, each thinking: What happened?
Had her boyfriend put her out?
Or had she slapped his face slammed the door of the car,
and said, “To hell with you,” and walked down Page Mill Road
damn glad to be on her own
And what would she have done without us?
Walked on I suppose
We drove back to San Francisco, now more sober
We have fogotten the house
But we remember the blonde hair and the red dress in the fog
An apparition in a drunken stupor.
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*Half Moon Bay: A coastal town 25 miles south of San Francisco [for Erich’s readers in France.]
**Lancia Aurelia: A two-door “fastback” with bodywork by Pininfarina
*** Manuel Fangio: 1954 Formula 1 World Champion
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About the author:
Erich von Neff is a San Francisco Longshoreman. He received his masters degree in philosophy from San Francisco State University and was a graduate research students at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Erich von Neff is well known on the French avant-garde and mainstream literary scenes. he is a member of the Poetes Francais and La Societe des Poetes et Artistes de France.
We sold one of our chapel kits to a fellow in France this week, and took an order for a kit we plan to release in February for a roundhouse (photo attached) to someone in Zurich Switzerland. The roundhouse took over 500 hours, we developed our own freelance design, and drew plans on the CAD program and wrote rough draft instructions included in those hours.
I didn’t know anyone had actually lived in the El Granada Bathhouse–and used it as a home. When I arrived on the Coastside in the 1970s, the bathhouse was gone but I saw remnants of a road, big chunks of which had been and were still being torn apart by the highest of the high tides. If there had been a road there, then, clearly there had also been a lot of terra firma on the west side, the ocean side of the concrete, land once planted in rich fields of artichokes and Brussels sprouts. All gone now as Mother Nature shows us who rules.
The two-story “Bathhouse” was originally part of the Ocean Shore Railroad era, built in the early 1900s as a place for beach-goers to change into their bulky, old-fashioned swim-wear.
By now you know that the railroad’s “mandate” was to open up the isolated Coastside and provide the farming community with a new economy based on tourism. But Mother Nature, tough competition from the Southern Pacific on the other side of the hill, and a powerful love affair with the automobile took the Ocean Shore down.
Then the funniest thing happened: Alcohol, one of the popular drinks being whiskey was banned by the Prohibition Act, and, the dry law, like any law that says you can’t do something, encouraged the innovation of human nature to quench thirst. The natural response was to figure out a way to beat Prohibition. What the law breakers needed was a place to land the illegal booze, an isolated, secluded beach, recently abandoned by the railroad—and fearless men and boys to carry out the rest.
In the mid-1920s Gino Mearini and his family moved into the El Granada Bathhouse. Gino was just a kid, a teenager, smart as a whip, the son of Alesseio, who left his home in Tuscany seeking a better life in the US in 1914– at the beginning of WWI.
Alessio arrived without his wife and children; when he was doing better, he’d bring the family to live with him. The first job Alessio took was working in the dismal Pennsylvania coal mines before heading west to the Coastside where fellow Italians were farming artichokes and Brussels Sprouts.
(Photo: Gino Mearini stands in front of his bountiful orange tree.)
It was inevitable that Alessio would meet Dante Dianda, the big man in El Granada, the Coastside’s “Artichoke King.” Dianda, in partnership with John Patroni, who ran the Patroni House in Princeton-by-the-Sea owned two large ranches, encompassing Princeton, El Granada and Miramar. (Later, when Dante temporarily moved his family from El Granada to San Francisco, the farmer discovered that he enjoyed working at the busy San Francisco Produce Market much more than overseeing the two sprawling Coastside ranches.)
“Can you cook?” the Artichoke King asked Alessio Mearini.
“Yes!” was the younger man’s reply and Alessio was offered a job cooking for the men at the ranchhouse up the canyon in El Granada.
Alessio Mearini possessed a solid work ethic and business sense. Soon his cooking days were over and he was Dante’s partner, helping to manage the El Granada-Miramar ranch.
Earlier this week I was invited to Gino Mearini’s home in Cupertino. His lovely daughter, Janet Mearini Debenedetti was there, too–the owner of six cats, one of them most entertaining as she wrestled with Jo-Jo, Gino’s 10-year-old irresistible, recently shaved Pomeranian. Janet’s house stands across the street from her dad’s, and she said they bought the property on their street a long time ago, when the area was more rural. The climate reminded them of Italy, she explained.
We gathered at the kitchen table, a light-filled room (Burt sat across from me, with Gino at the head of the table, Janet at the opposite end. Janet grew up on the Coastsider, attending school with well known “Princetonians” Eugene Pardini and Ronnie Mangue.
I noted the small stack of books, all historical: Barbara Vanderwerf’s “Granada, A Synonym for Paradise;” Michael Orange’s “Half Moon Bay: Historic Coastside Reflections, ” and two of mine, “Half Moon Bay Memories: The Coastside’s Colorful Past,” and “Princeton-by-the-Sea.”
Gino wouldn’t like it if I revealed his age, but he has the spirit and curiosity of a young guy.
. (Photo: Gino Mearini looks at a page in Michael Orange’s book.)
Gino and his mom traveled from Italy to El Granada about 1921. At first they lived in a little house near where the El Granada Market stands today. A few years later the Mearinis moved into the vacant El Granada Bathhhouse.
The era belonged to Prohibition–and while the Bathhouse had become a home– when a light in the upstairs bedroom was flicked on past midnight, that was the “come on in, boys” signal–and the rumrunners boated in to El Granada Beach the bottles of whiskey unloaded from the Canadian mother ship anchored 12-mile out in the Pacific.
This was very, very serious business. Big money was involved. Thousands of cases of booze. The product had to be protected.
“There were bootleggers, armed with revolvers, looking for liquor hijackers at Miramar and El Granada,” Gino told me. But if it came down to a close chase with the Coast Guard, headquartered at Princeton, “We’d rather throw the load overboard than lose the boat. They had two Liberty motors, and they were fast engines.”
Gino, a teenager at the time, earned $25 for two hours of work, helping to drag the booze, that might have been tightly packed in gunny bags, across the sand dunes on homemade “sleds.” If John Patroni wasn’t around to pay Gino, “Otto and Anderson,” the Norwegians connected with the Canadian Mother ship, did.
What happened to the whiskey then? Gino said, “It was packed in straw, hidden in a nearby barn, and later picked up by some young guys driving a maroon colored Chrysler. There were velvet curtains covering the windows, maybe seven passengers could fit in there, boy, was it big.”
The drivers of the maroon Chrysler worked on contract, picking up at locations all over the county.
John Patroni was the “padrone,” the man who took care of the local Italians. He had nice cars, first a blue Packard, and then the fancy Cadillac. But who did John Patroni work for? I still can’t answer that question……
During our delightful conversation, Gino would correct things I had written. Clearly, while John Patroni had his own wharf at Princeton, where lots of whiskey was also landed, the El Granada Bathhouse may have played a much bigger role. In one of my books, I mentioned that booze was hidden beneath seawood mounted on a raft and pulled in. No, Gino said, “not possible.”
(Well, maybe it did happen but it sure sounds like nickel-and-dime stuff compared to the thousands and thousands of cases landed at El Granada.)
By 1933, the financial depression was hitting the Coastside hard, and because Prohibition was repealed, there was no more money to be made from illegal booze–but Gino had saved $600, all earned from working for the rumrunners.
The Mearini family moved out of the Bathhouse in February, 1932, and headed south of Half Moon Bay to isolated Lobitos where they rented John Meyn’s big white house. They later purchased land near where the trailer court is located on Airport Blvd., between Princeton and Moss Beach.
WWII on the Coastside is of particular interest to me, and Gino confirmed that all Italians without citizenship had to move from the beach side of the highway to the east side. (The Coastside Japanese had been interned.) In the town of Half Moon Bay, the center of Main Street was the dividing line. Gino had a lot of empathy for the “women and widows that had to move.” Unfortunately, most of the stores were on the west side of Main Street, causing much distress.
The Prohibition years were heady ones for the teenager, Gino Mearini, but one thing sticks out in his memory. At 6 a.m. in 1924, his mom called to him: “We’re going to get washed away.”
When Gino looked out the window he saw it coming towards him: a series of giant, hungry waves, an old-fashioned “Tidal Wave,”… a modern Tsunami. The family got out before the chicken house, packing shed and squealing pigs were swept away (the pigs survived.)
But when it was all over, the Bathhouse had been turned around a bit, and moved into the artichoke field. The beach around the house was gone. Years later as the sea chewed on more of the cliffs and sucked out the sand dunes, the waves finally claimed the Bathhouse as its own.
Occasionally, Gino Mearini visits the Coastside, and amusement crosses his face when he comes to the spot where the El Granada Bathhouse once stood. Actually, there is no such spot.
Over time the action of the waves has so altered the geography of what was here and what was there in the 1920s, that Gino can only smile and point, “The bathhouse, it’s out there, where the ocean is.”
Dave Cresson, owner of the Zaballa Hotel in town, hosted a lovely evening for the authors who’ve written
books about the Coastside they love. Historical authors. Here’s Dave, and he truly was the “host with the most.”
Casey’s Cafe, located behind the “Z” House, catered, and there were raves about the soup–and nice touches like the mint leaf in my delicious glass of lemonade.
Dave is a businessman with a good streak of creativity. Here’s the invitation he mailed to the authors.
Dave has his own historical book that he’s laboring over, with a working title something like: From the Windows of the Zaballa House. In this endeavor Dave is lucky to have the loving support of wife Shelia (as I do with my parnter, Burt.) I hadn’t seen Shelia in a long while. She was as sweet and spunky as I remembered.
Kathleen Manning came from the Pacifica Historical Society (she told me that tonight, Friday, the PHS is sponsoring an event at the “Castle”)
There were two “stars” present in the reception area of the Zaballa House. Palo Alto historian Jeanne McDonnell told us about her well-researched new book: Juana Briones, the remarkable early Peninsula pioneering woman. Her enthusiasm was contagious.
Accompanying Mrs McDonnell were her husband and daughter who told me how much she enjoyed the friendly atmosphere.
I said two “stars” were present. Jeanne McDonnell was one; the other was the “permanent” historic exhibit (photos, maps, documents) the Cressons have lovingly installed in several rooms of the hotel.
a couple blocks north of the Zaballa Hotel, brought his impressive HMB Drag Strip memorabilia for all to enjoy. Mark was with Jerry Bello who he’s talked about so much. When my “obsession” with Coastside history began, one of the first locals I interviewed was Harold Bello, Jerry’s father.
I applaud the Cressons, David and Shelia, owners of the oldest hotel in town who have rekindled our passion for local history.
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Above, I mentioned meeting the Bello family. While looking through my voluminous files, I found one marked: Interview with Mrs. Harold Bello, August 5, I forgot the include the year but it would be the early 1970s. She was Louis Miguel’s youngest sister. The Miguel family constructed the beautiful Palace Miramar Hotel in 1916—which, burned in the 1960s. It was then owned by Albert and Eva Schmidt and it was also called “Albert’s,” a very popular seafood and steak restaurant. Albert played host to large groups of people, service organizations and important political get-togethers. When Richard Nixon was running for governor of California, a disappointing race he lost, Nixon appeared at a series of fundraisers held at Miramar.
Mrs. Bello and I talked about the hotel, its size, the name of the rooms. She said it was a two-story hotel, with a big ballroom; “the nicest in the county.” There were 16 bedrooms (upstairs and downstairs) A bar and lobby. A swimming pool.
“My father and brother built the pier,” Mrs. Bello told me. She recalled a pile driver, but to confirm it in her mind, she promised to write an older brother in Trinity.
In 1942, she continued, the military was stationed at the hotel. There was also a schoolhouse in Miramar used for barracks. After the war, the Miguels sold the hotel.
“And it changed hands–was a restaurant each time–the last time it was a gift shop until Albert bought it.”
Mrs. Bello remembered Maymie Cowley, the red-haired madam who reigned over the Miramar Beach Inn down the road from what became known as “Alberts.” [At the time I was trying to get a hard date on when Maymie’s place had been constructed. Not all Coastside buildings were officially recorded.]
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Vehicle Energy Solutions
Story by Tom Andersen
Email Tom: ([email protected])
June;
Here is my idea for the solution to vehicle carbon emissions:
For less money than the proposed bailout, the government should buy the big three US automakers. It should replace existing management with that of Tesla, the San Carlos company developing electric cars, and develop an electric cars & light trucks with quick change battery packs, like cordless drills, only bigger. The cities of San Francisco, San Jose & Oakland recently reached agreement for electric battery stations for vehicles. The fed should mandate that nationally. Stations with solar arrays could maintain a stock of recharged batteries for exchange, for a fee, those batteries having been recharged by solar & wind power. Bays with hydraulic lifts could be set up where a car would pull in, and a tech would drop the battery and replace it with a fully charged battery.
Additionally, a cap & trade system for vehicles should be implemented modeled on that proposed for carbon emitting buildings etc. A national milage standard should be set, perhaps 50mpg. Vehicles would be required to have an annual odomoeter reading. If they got less than 50 mpg, they would pay a fee, say a penny a mile for every mile per gallon under 50, so if a car got 40mpg, and drove 15,000 miles, they would pay a fee of $1500. Cars exceeding the standard, they would get a payment using the same formula, so if a car got 60mpg and drove 12,000 miles, the owner would get a payment of $1200.
Initially, the payments would be funded by collections, as most vehicles would be under the standard. As electric vehicle production came into full force, eventually there would be more payouts than collections. At this point, the payouts should be funded by a gas tax, further making fossil fuel vehicles more expensive to operate, thereby creating a financial incentive to go to electric vehicles.
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Tom says he’s encourage by President Elect Obama’s nomination of physicist Steven Chu as energy chief. To read more about the pick, please click here
Here are some photos of my latest trip to Nome in Joe’s 180 Cessna. We were looking for a wrecked P-38 World War II fighter which crashed 50 years ago about 100 miles east of Nome.
Nome is 5 1/2 hours in the 180 and my description of Nome is ‘5 blocks wide and 12 blocks long’ and that’s just about it.
We located the wreck from the air and marked it on the GPS, and the only way to get there (a chopper was $350 an hour) was on a quad.
I got stuck 20 to 25 times. Joe only got stuck a dozen times.
I wish I could have taken more photos however. We didn’t get back to Nome until 2:30am. A long day…………started at 6am.
We crossed back and forth on the river for 30 miles down and 30 miles back. Got stranded in the middle once……….it killed both the quads……….that was about 9pm.
We got close to the wreck but kept getting the quads stuck in the tundra, what a bitch and it was getting late so we had to split.
But, it was a hell of a trip.
Then on the way home in the 180 we got hammered by severe turbulence going through Rainy Pass crossing the Alaska Range. We got the shit kicked out of us. I was amazed the wings weren’t ripped of the plane. That lasted almost 45 minutes.
The few clusters of Americans scattered in the bureaucratically named Department of California felt threatened on the brink of the U.S. war with Mexico in 1846. The settlers smelled invasion in the air. But from whom? They weren’t certain. They feared the Indians who could set fire to their homes and crops; they feared the Mexicans who could take away their livelihood, but for a time these isolated Americans whipped themselves into a frenzy against their old enemy England.
And why not fear England? At that very moment Admiral Seymour of the British Fleet was rumored to be sailing for the Pacific Coast. The settlers wondered if his orders were to take California. The editors of English publications supported the efforts of any country but America in a California takeover. The nerves of Americans were not soothed by the fact that until 1846 England and the U.S. jointly held Oregon.
However, the English decided that Cailfornia was not a plum worth fighting over; or else, as Josiah Royce, author of California, published in 1888, suggests, the British agents were not ready when the time came to strike. After all, it was the United States that went to war with Mexico and won handily in 1848.
Josiah Parker Ames was an Englishman who did not alarm the settlers when he appeared in Half Moon Bay about 1858. Born in England, but reared in New York City, Ames was 20 when he joined Colonel Jonathan Stevenson’s special regiment that sailed around Cape Horn to Califonria in 1847. The colonel’s instructions were to take part in the American occupation and to make the inhabitants “feel that we come as deliverers.” With the completion of the mission, Colonel Stevenson bought a rancho in Contra Costa County. His objective was to turn the land into a large, prosperous city. Josiah Ames followed in the colonel’s footsteps when he cast his eye on Half Moon Bay.
Already Ames had tasted the life of tents and cloth houses in San Francisco and the rawness of life in the gold mines. Filled with energy, he was now ready to buy land, start up businesses, and launch a political career.
Perhaps fellow “Regiment” member James Denniston invited him to the Coastside; they were close friends. After marrying into the Guerrero family, Denniston found himself the wealthy owner of an immense tract of land, called El Corral de Tierra, stretching from Montara to the Arroyo del Medio in Miramar. The creek running through the property in Princeton, where the family resided in an adobe, was named Denniston Creek. He operated Old Landing, where little steamers stopped to load produce in the 1850s.
Jim Denniston was politically powrful. During a trial in which he was the defendant, the jury did not bother to rise from their seats to deliberate elsewhere. They acquitted him on the spot.
While living in Half Moon Bay, Josiah Ames found romance. In 1861 he wed Elizabeth Freeman at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in San Francisco. The happy couple lived in a new 12-room house with ocean views. The San Mateo Times & Gazette gave the house the nod: “It is decidedly the finest dwelling on the other side of the mountain.”
Already a county supervisor, Ames now took office as county treasurer.
Josiah Ames was involved in much of Half Moon Bay’s miniscule economy. In 1873 when seven hundred citizens lived in Half Moon Bay, the flour mill he owned turned out 50 barrels of flour per day. He supplied the town with water. He was the proprietor of the Half Moon Bay Liversy Stable at Kelly and Main Streets.
“J. P. Ames has selected and stocked one of the best equine establshments on the coast,” boasted the Gazette. Perhaps he rented horses for the Fourth of July races at the Half Moon Bay Trotting Track. But there were hard times, too: In 1869 Ames’ good friend, 45-year-old Jim Denniston died of Bright’s Disease. Ames’ wife died in 1871.
His most significant contribution was the building of a wharf and warehouse at the mouth of the Arroyo del Medio Creek in 1868. By this time Denniston’s “Old Landing” had slipped into serious disrepair, and the new wharf, called Amesport Landing, opened up a vital economic link with the outside world.
Ameport prospered in the 1870s. It seemed that San Franciscans could not buy enough Half Moon Bay potatoes. In 1874 the Monterey sailed off with six thousand sacks full. “This is almost like shipping coals to Newcastle,” remarked an amused newspaper correspondent.
The political star of J.P. Ames was rising when he donated a new flag staff to Half Moon Bay in 1876. The local paper described it as “a beautiful stick, with a small platform around the base.” The flagpole was planted on the southwest corner of Main and Kelly Streets.
While Ames reached new political heights as a state legislator, the booming potato business at Amesport fell into decline. A pesty worm had destroyed the crop, including future plantings. The little steamers started to bypass Amesport and finally Ames sold the wharf business to the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. But they were never able to duplicate the heady days of the 1870s.
The connection between Josiah P. Ames and Half Moon Bay was severed. He left the Coastside and was appointed the Warden of San Quentin Prision. He was 76 when he died in Martinez in 1903.
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[Image: Mildred Brooke Hoover, author of Historic Spots in California, 1932. The Hoovers, Mildred and Theodore, lived south of Pescadero at Rancho del Oso. Theodore Hoover headed up Stanford’s Engineering Dept. The Hoovers were well liked in Pescadero, often inviting the locals to dinner.]
From Mildred B. Hoover’s book, page 328.
Amesport
A wharf erected in 1867 by Ames, Byrnes and Harlow on the ocean side of the county called Amesport Landing. It was located near the mouth of Arroyo Medio, a small stream dividing the properyof the two owners of Rancho Corral de Tierra. Warehouses used for the shipping of grain from this fertile region were built just south of the creek.
J.P. Ames, the leader in the activity, was a native of England who had lived east of the Missippi for some time before starting west as a member of Stephenson’s Regiment. The men of this regiment had been chosen for qualities that would serve them well in pioneer settlement after military duties should be ended. Ames was dishonorably discharged at Monterey in 1848, and coming to this vicinity in 1856, became county treasurer in 1862. He was appointted by Gov Booth to settle the Yosemite claims and was a member of the state legislature in 1876-77.
Amesport Landing was afterward acquired by the Pacific Steamship Company, which disposed in 1917 of the site of the old warehouses to the present owner of a small hotel erected there. The settlement is now called Miramar, where the weather-beaten piles of an old wharf may be seen near the hotel.
