Growing Up in SF on Lisbon Street – Part Two

On our block, we also had Ray Sr., the Italian who married Mary, a Native American.  Boy did they have some crazy times. They had four kids, two of the oldest were boys. Our families were close and they wanted our two families to be related by marriage. The cutest boy, Eddie, was supposed to be my future husband.  He purchased a faux wedding ring set for me at Sprouse Reitz when we were young children, and that meant we were “engaged.”  His year older brother, Ray Jr., was not so cute, but a wild one and girls always like the wild ones, and I was no exception.

One time, Mary came after Ray Sr. with a hot iron. The cops were called.  Another time, she came at him with a huge kitchen knife.  The cops were called.  Another time, she threw a pot of spaghetti at him. No cops were called on that one maybe because it was edible and not dangerous.  Our street was pretty quiet for the most part so this was quite exciting to have this entertain all of us as we were glued to the windows watching the action. No one was ever arrested, thank God.

I will never forget one of the parties they had at their house.  Mary was “ice skating” in her kitchen on ice cubes under her shoes. She also put an old long playing record on the stove burner and watched it melt. My folks never did stuff like this so I found Mary very entertaining and funny and thought that there would probably never be a dull moment if she ever ended up being my mother-in-law.

Ray Sr. was a very handsome man.  He was wounded in the service by taking a bullet on the top of his hand. There was this huge raised area from the bottom of his fingers to his wrist that made me shiver whenever I looked at it. It was not pretty.  When I visited their house, he inspected my fingers to see if I had nail polish on.  If I did, he told me that I should go home and take it off because it made girls look cheap.  I thought that he probably would not be a good prospect for a father-in-law because he was already telling me what to do.  I had enough of that with my own very strict Italian father.

I always loved little kids and they loved me and followed me around all the time. One afternoon, five neighborhood boys were on Eddie and Raymond’s stair stoop talking when I was walking by across the street surrounded by three little neighbor kids dressed in my little short white halter top and black stretch stirrup pants.  One of the boys hollered over to me, “Hey, Renanne, do you like kids?” Of course, I said “yes” because it was true.  And he said, “Well, Raymond wants to give you one.”  Boys are all talk when they are with their buddies and they love to tease the girls, but being shy, I was very embarrassed. All I could say was “shut up.”  I was a good girl and would never think of things like that back then, and if truth be told, probably didn’t even understand what it meant.

Our next door neighbor, Bonnie, had a doll repair business in a little detached building in the backyard of the house she rented.  Not only did she repair dolls, she dressed them in period clothing and some of them were absolutely beautiful.  Girls like me would dream about having one of them. Her granddaughter and grandson came for summers from Concord, a place I had never heard of before.  We all played together.  Bonnie could do anything. She was a large Norwegian woman with her long blond-turning-white hair up in a bun who was the most talented woman I would ever know. She always wore an apron and some black chunk old lady shoes and nylons rolled up to her knees.  Bonnie had an infectious laugh. You could not help but like her.

Bonnie was the first recycler I knew and certainly was before her time.  And boy could she bake. Her fresh strawberry pies were out of this world and surely captured my Dad’s attention.  I never knew anyone who made jam thumbprint, snickerdoodles, or springerle cookies before, but Bonnie did and they were wonderful. 

She also was an expert seamstress.  When I started public school after leaving parochial school, Bonnie made a dozen cotton print shifts (dresses) for me for school, because I did not have much of a school wardrobe since I wore uniforms. She taught me how to play Canasta, bought me my first pair of roller skates for my 12^th birthday, was my mentor and confidant, and I adored her.  We moved away when I was almost 16 and Bonnie moved years later but I never saw her for again until I was an adult and had two kids.  When I found out she lived in Pine Grove, my ex-husband, my two kids, and I visited her.  She was a very old lady at that time, but still had the twinkle in her eye and the sense of humor I so loved.  I never saw her again after that but I will never forget her.

Mr. Powell, the African American neighbor, was cleaning his car one Saturday.  He left all the doors open which was obviously an open invitation to the neighborhood dogs.  They went in and out of those doors in a circle several times chasing each other.  Mr. Powell was trying to chase them out but he was afraid of the dogs.  It was pretty funny.  I think the dogs won. Those bad little dogs did the nasty.  We could not figure out how the dogs could be connected like that. It was a sight to see but we had no idea what we were seeing.

There was the Mexican family who sued my Dad (see my “First Day in Public School” blog for that story) and when they moved out, we all yelled from our windows “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”  What followed in that house was a Puerto Rican family with nine kids (in a two-bedroom house). Somehow the mama wanted me to marry one of the three oldest boys and asked me one day to make my selection.  Everyone wanted to marry me off to their kids and I was getting worried.  The three older boys worked in some place called San Ramon, also a place I had never heard of before.

My first serious marriage proposal occurred when I was 12 ½ years old by a next door neighbor’s older nephew, Carlos, from El Salvador. He came to my house with a record album of beautiful music and a box of candy and asked my Dad if he could marry me. Dad said I was too young and Carlos said he would wait. He was patient and waited for me even when he was in the Marines and continued up to my senior year in high school.

Dad insisted that I get a job after high school before I married anyone so I would have some job skill for my future.  I excelled in secretarial skills in school and that is what I wanted to do. Dad wanted me to work and contribute monetarily to the family and “girls didn’t need to go to college because they got married and had kids” so college was never an option for me.  After graduation, I went right to work, still dated others, and ended up sending Carlos a Dear John letter when I was going to get married to my ex-husband a year after graduation.

Also in the neighborhood we had the lady who gave out hot pennies for Halloween, the family with triplets, tall lanky Lily, and several other notables. 

All of us neighborhood kids played outside. We played baseball in the street, hopscotch on the sidewalk, dodge ball, and double-dutch jump rope. We met on stair stoops where we would talk for hours until our mothers called us in.  We had two cinemas in our neighborhood (Granada and Amazon Theaters) and we went to the movies every weekend. We had Garrett’s creamery that made their own ice cream, a soda fountain, bocce ball courts in Crocker Amazon Park, the ice man who came around to deliver blocks of ice to those who did not have refrigerators yet, the vegetable truck that came around each block selling fresh vegetables, the Borden’s milkman who delivered our milk, the chicken store and the fish market where you could purchase fresh chickens and fish, and the best Italian delicatessens around.  It was a wonderful place to grow up.

What we did not have was warm weather. When it got to be 71 degrees one summer, we were in heaven.  I had long hair that frizzed in the foggy mornings so I welcomed the sunshine.

When I was about eight years old, Dad wanted to buy the bar that is now the former Shorty’s Bar in Martinez and I was sad to think I would leave my old neighborhood back then. I could have been raised here, but the tides had turned, and it didn’t happen.  Now I own a business here in Martinez instead. I guess it was inevitable that I would have the connection to Martinez at some point.

It was a real experience moving away from SF for Newark, California, almost at the end of my sophomore year. Kids told me I talked funny.  Faster than them maybe, but funny, I don’t think so.  And of course, we dressed differently because of the climate. Forty miles away was like a different world and I had to find where I fit in living in a “hick town” compared to “sophisticated” SF.