The Bait Shop with Bar Stools- The Kingfish Pub, Oakland

    The Kingfish Pub in Oakland is a green shed of a bar that I’ve admired for years every time I went to DMV, which is the only reason most people are on that stretch of Claremont Ave, just north of Telegraph.  Though it took years until I actually went into the bar, I always found its sheer old-schoolness impressive.  While the neighborhood around was tearing down wood and brick and putting up stucco and concrete, the Kingfish was obviously being kept alive by some loyal tribe of some regulars.  I had no idea how right I was or how many threats to the bar had faced in the last decade as Temescal has been growing exponentially hip.
    I started going into the Kingfish about six months ago and moved in about ten blocks away about a month ago (I, of coarse, am not one of those hipster dorks who moved to Temescal because it was cool, I just happen to look a bit like those dorks and I like all the same restaurants and shops those dorks also like).  When I’ve told people about my historical bar project many people (including a librarian in the Local History Room at the Oakland Library) told me that I need to write about the Kingfish.  I explained to them all that I like the Kingfish, but it seemed a little too low profile for this.  Sure, it was a great bar, looked awesome and had some history, but which canonized writer blew entire book advances there?  Then I came across an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how the Kingfish was applying to become a historical landmark.1  If looking into what makes neighborhood bar into recognized historical landmark doesn’t fall into the purview of this blog, then I’m not doing my job.
    The Kingfish opened in 1922 as a bait shop for fisherman when Claremont Ave was one of the few thoroughfares between the Bay and the Delta.2  The Temescal neighborhood was a major commuter hub in the 1920’s in the web of a Key lines (the Key System was a network of street car lines that are a noble slice of East Bay history in of itself worthy of a whole book or blog) and the beginning of the Sacramento Northern railway that ran from Shafter and 40th Street all the way to the city of Chico3.  I was surprised to discover that Temescal had once been it’s own village, founded in the 1860’s with undelineated boundaries, wedged between Oakland and Berkeley.  It was incorporated into Oakland in 1897 and right at the heart of the city’s defining demographic shifts in class and race.4

    Within a couple years of the Kingfish opening it acquired a room in the back (where a shuffle board table and bathrooms now stand), which served as a casual beer-only speakeasy for the fisherman.  Evidently, nobody questioned why a bait shop should have need of barstools or why its customers would be in there for hours buying bait.  After Prohibition officially ended in 1933 the Kingfish ditched it’s bait shop pretence and was in the more lucrative business of serving beer and wine openly.  Eventually, a kitchen was added to serve lunch and according to some old reviews that are framed on the wall the shrimp sandwich was particularly amazing.5 

     A historian’s note that is so obvious that it almost isn’t worth stating, except that it is: Dates are particular fuzzy when it comes to bars.  Not because they are run and patronized by people who enjoy the drink, but because almost all businesses are not operated under the assumption that they will one day be considered historical.  This is even more true of businesses operating in a time of much less stringent bureaucracy.  And then doubly true of a business that was forced to operate semi-illegally under the Volstead Act.  So I’m starting to get the feeling that tracking history of bars is akin to recording Native American oral history or capturing folk songs passed down through generations of hill people.  Somebody is just as likely to tell you the true story of John Henry as they are able to tell you how drinks were served in the backroom of the Kingfish in 1927.
    This hazy history is what lies at the heart of the Kingfish’s uphill appeal for landmark status.  The only other bar in Oakland that is considered a historical landmark is Heinold’s First and Last Chance (see my Oct. 27th post) and that is largely due to the bar’s relationship with Jack London.  The Kingfish has certainly hosted its fair share of celebrities, but they tend to be local sports heroes, rather than literary.  Countless players and coaches from the A’s, the Raiders and Cal-Berkeley have made the bar their place to watch a game, despite and because it is not a sports bar.  There is an egalitarian feel to the space that awards equal status to the winner of yearly shuffle board tournament to a star Raider’s lineman to a high school teacher who has put in years worth of stool time.  In the 1990’s former presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater evidently felt he was not awarded the service according to his station and when given a Kingfish shirt, he used it to wiped his mouth6 (who would have thought old AuH2O, one of the fathers of modern reactionary conservatism, would have been a such a grumpy guy?). 
    The Kingfish has no artifacts like the picture of Jack London learning to read and the Last Chance, but walking in there does have the same effect of stepping in a lost time preserved in amber.  The ceilings are low and along with the walls is covered in pictures, flyers, business cards, ticket stubs, anything somebody felt worthy of attaching to their favorite bar.  The refrigerator and heater are the same since the 1930’s, the benches are from the 1923 Memorial Stadium, there is a popcorn that can’t be more younger than 40 years (and probably has some of the original kernels in it).  The bar room, the shuffleboard room and two bathrooms all stand on different levels.  This old fashion charm was not created or planned, it is simply the result of nobody seeing reason to fix something that wasn’t broken over the last 90 years.

    My first trip into the Kingfish to do research as the opposite of productive.  It was my own fault though, I had gotten cocky.  I went in at about eight at night and I brought my wife with me.  Aside from the fact of wanting to enjoy her company, I thought it couldn’t hurt to bring a beautiful woman with me to collect information.  For some reason, though, the female bartender was unimpressed with Dawn’s winning smile.  On top of that, the bartender was very busy serving 24 oz cans of Coors Light to the crowded bar because we came in on a night Coors was doing a promotion with a bunch of girls in skin tight snow bunny outfits.  Further, an old acquaintance of ours was sitting at one of the tables and asked us to sit down.  So rather than get any research done I did the type of “research” everybody assumes I’m doing when I tell them I’m doing a historical bar blog and earned myself a neat little hangover for my troubles.
    Two days later I returned alone as soon as the bar opened at four.  Going by myself, I realized, is an elemental part my process.  Bartenders feel compelled to talk to the guy sitting at the bar alone, a couple at the bar asking questions can come off as either amateurish or interrogative.  I had the luck of being the only person in there with the bartender, Dustin, who not only worked at the bar since turning twenty-one, but spent a good portion of his childhood coming in there with his father.  He was just one part of a generational legacy of regulars who made the Kingfish their home away from home.  In the United States these days we tend look down a bit on people spending so much time in the local pub, but in many there countries, and not so long ago here, the pub was a center of the community.  This isn’t a place to just go get hammered, well it can be that, but it is also where one goes because they know their friends will be there.  It becomes part of one’s identity to be a part of this pub culture.  And honestly, at a time when most Americans spend most nights at home, silently sitting next to each other while staring at the TV, there is a lot to be said for people would still rather be among other human beings and have conversations.
    So.  Is the fact the Kingfish is a well persevered and functioning time capsule that is beloved by generations of devoted and wide ranging patrons enough to make it a historical landmark? 
    This is not a theoretical argument.  In the early 2000’s the Kingfish had a run of underage drinking violations and the owner (who Dustin thought was the original owner, but if that was true it would be man of great longevity) was ready to call it quits.  Some legal limbo ensued over the next couple years with the owner’s sisters and a man who wanted to tear down the bar, along with the surrounding houses, to build condos.  At this time the patrons began a bid to the City of Oakland to make the Kingfish a landmark to keep it from being torn down, which was denied.  The “march of progress” was only halted the bursting of the housing bubble and subsequent recession.  Still, the bar sat empty, with everything in remaining untouched, for almost two years, until two of the old regulars came together and bought the bar.  They reopened about four years ago and everybody came back as if the shut down had never happened.7  This was only a reprieve though and the threat of demolition still looms, hence the second, and thus far more successful, bid to make the Kingfish a landmark.  Unfortunately, we are entering the area of pending legalities that I would not be able to report on even if I knew them.  I can tell you that a clipboard sits on the bar with a petition for the city to consider.   There are many pages of signatures from local citizens who can not imagine a world without the Kingfish, but they can definitely use more (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

notes-

1. Carolyn Jones,  “Landmark status sought for Oakland's Kingfish pub”, San Francisco Chronicle, October 12 2011, accessed  November 10, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/11/MNK41LGB81.DTL.

2. Jones, “Landmark status”.

3. Jeff Norman, Temescal Legacies: narratives of change from a North Oakland neighborhood, (Oakland: Shared Ground, 2006), 42.

4. Norman, Temescal Legacies, 1.

5. Dustin Hughes (Kingfish Pub bartender) in discussion with author, November 10, 2011.

6. Jones, “Landmark status”.

7. Dustin Hughes in discussion with author.

photos-
1. taken by author.
2. taken by author.
3. from Carolyn Jones article for San Francisco Chronicle, accessed  November 10, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/11/MNK41LGB81.DTL.

Your Bay Area Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week:

 Today I did an interview for a separate project with the legendary East Bay promoter of the Teens N' Twenties rock and roll shows, Bill Quarry.  Bill put on shows from the late 50's to the early 80's at many different venues with acts ranging from Fats Domino to Neil Diamond to the Yardbirds to Michael Jackson (he as even in charge of concessions at the infamous Altamont Speedway concert), but his most successful venue by far was at the Rollarena in San Leandro.  There local bands got to play with their heroes at shows for kids that cost no more than $2.  I got a bunch of flyers today for shows at the Rollarena, and three of them showcase a Fremont band called Peter Wheat and The Breadmen playing alongside The Byrds, 13th Floor Elevators and Them.  In 1966, Peter Wheat and The Breadmen were supposed to be the opening act for the Beatles at Candlestick Park in what turn out to be the Beatles' last live concert, but there was a conflict between the East Bay's musician's union and San Francisco's and they couldn't play.1  I know!  Talk about your bummer, man.
Here is their video for their 1966 song, "All the Time" with the insanely gorgeous British actress, Judi Huxtable.



1. Bruce Tahsler, The San Francisco East Bay Scene: Garage Bands From the 60's: Then and Now (San Leandro CA: Teens N Twenties Publications, 2007), 84-85.

"It ain’t cheatin’ if your doing it with a ghost,"- The Warehouse Cafe, Port Costa

    I had a tidy little plan today to do further historical research on Henri Lenoir, the early bohemian scene in North Beach and the history of neighborhood that made it receptive to the Beats.  I had my eye on the Henri Lenoir Papers, among other things, at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, but right before I made the call to request the documents I saw note that read, “UNARRANGED COLLECTION. UNAVAILABLE FOR USE.” I began the process of applications and waiting periods to gain use, but was suddenly all too aware of this not being a project just for fun.  This is a school assignment with a deadline officially for tomorrow.  I cried the procrastinator’s lament for not taking care of this business weeks ago when I first discovered the Lenoir Papers and ran through my list of potential bars, most of which bored me to merely look at their websites, I suddenly remembered Port Costa.

    Port Costa.  For years it seems every person I know has told me that it is a crime that I have not been out to this bemusingly bizarre biker bar and the hotel across the street that has changed little since it was a 19th century brothel.  Port Costa.  Is that the name of the city or the bar or the hotel?  All I knew was that it was near the Carquinez Bridge and all the stories I had ever heard of the place ran in the same vein as, “So I had just taken my forth tequila shot in Tijuana when the biggest…”  Information online for the city and bar was scant, but intriguing.  Before I thought it over too much, I drained my Earl Gray, gave a high five to some kid standing in my driveway and got on the I-80 North.  Usually if I’m taking that freeway further than Golden Gate Fields it means I’m on vacation, and for a few hours I was.

    I should mention right away here than I barely scratched the surface of history of the Warehouse Café.  I found some helpful resources on the town of Port Costa at the Oakland Public Library, but the bar that most people in the area know the town for has no official records.  The bartender and customers did not even know who to direct me to who could give definitive information.  So I gathered the recollections and stories I could on one afternoon, but I got the impression than entire book could be written on the Warehouse Café and the Burlington Hotel.     

    

    Exiting just before the Carquinez Bridge and driving east, I passed through the beautiful, quaint town of Crockett, fostered like brick laid ivy up the hillside above the Carquinez Strait that the connects the Sacramento River Delta from the San Francisco Bay.  This already felt remote to me, but soon the town gave way to naked rolling hills, brown with October and raw with a warm, dry wind that is impossible not to mark as a fireman’s  son.  I only drove about three miles, but it felt longer because of the windy roads and uncertainty where I was going, when suddenly Port Costa appeared.  The houses, which probably number a few more than fifty, were mostly older California ranch style, but there is wide variety, right up to houses that look like 1970’s tract houses with no tract around them.              

    The one road through town deposited me into a dirt parking lot that ends a chain-linked fence, that is followed up a set of train tracks, then about a mile of water to Bencia directly across.  One would never guess to look at this narrow strip of abandoned coastal land now, but it was not only was the genesis of the town, it was one of the most important hubs during California’s “Bread Basket to the World” grain boom of the 1880’s, supplied a wharf that hosted the largest ferries in the world, and was the impetus behind the ambitious machinations of men who all saw their fortunes rise and fall (usually literally going up in smoke) right here in a town that rarely had more than a population of 300 people.

    I’m not doing a history of the “census-designated place” of Port Costa, see the books in my bibliography for a more in depth look, but there is no telling the story of the Warehouse Café without give some of the story of Port Costa.  That story mainly revolves around two men: George Washington McNear and Bill Rich (who we will get to in time).

    In the 1870’s the Central Pacific railroad company sought a new route from the Oakland and the Bay to the transcontinental railroad and the agriculturally rich Central Valley.  The only other line ran over the treacherous Altamont Pass and it was controlled by the California Pacific company.  Before they built a bridge connecting Solano and Contra Costa counties, it was decided to ferry the actual train cars across the strait from Benicia (which briefly served as the state capital in 1853 and ‘54) to small ranch called Bull Valley, which was chosen because it was so close and had deep waters.  In 1879 the largest ferry on the planet at the time, the Solano, left the West Oakland shipyard to beginning shuttling trains and passengers across the thin band of water.

    George McNear, a Scot financier and grain impresario, saw the obvious potential in Bull Valley as a hub for big business and began buying up the surrounding ranch lands.  He didn’t just build warehouses for his grain, but aided in the building of a school, churches and other buildings.  He even designed an water system that he owned and operated.  The name Port Costa made more sense than Bull Valley because it was now the port of Contra Costa and it sounded more official.  McNear was open for business shortly after the Solano began running (to be followed soon after by another ferry of the same size called the Contra Costa) and he was partial owner of nearly everything in the new town.1

    One of the many warehouses McNear built was finished in 1886 and was the fist fireproof building in Contra Costa county (as commemorated today on a plaque outside), which turned out to be good thing because a major drawback nobody had seen to Bull Valley was that it was seriously prone to fires.  The withered grasses and chaparral, paired with the strong, dry wind that tore through the hills, that I had noticed on my drive over was not an anomaly.  The next sixty or so years were a succession of blazes that wiped out warehouses, wharfs, ships and the dreams of anybody who invested money in the waterfront.  The 1906 earthquake did its fair share of damage and a teredo (a type of worm that eats ships and docks) infestation in 1921 destroyed most of the waterfront.   People, including McNear, who conspired to corner the wheat market or dominate West Coast shipping by using Port Costa were ruined as they built up and then were forced to rebuild.  Gradually, they stopped rebuilding, a bridge to neighboring Martinez opened in 1931, the Solano stopped running and the town had virtually drifted into obscurity by the fire on Labor Day of 1941 that left only one warehouse left in town.2  Guess which one?

    At one end of the dirt parking lot the warehouse with the bottom floor that house the Warehouse Café doesn’t look much like a warehouse or a bar, just a large concrete building that would seem more like part of an old California Spanish mission.  Across the street, I notice the Victorian three-story Burlington Hotel, a former bordello and cheap place to sleep off the drink rather than tackle the unlit, curvy roads back to all points other than here.  Inside, the dark warehouse is filled with artifacts from the town’s past that probably feel spooky when closing down the bar in the wee hours.  The main bar section is brighter and looks nicely out onto a patio, with the water and adjacent hills beyond.  

 I ordered a drink, identify myself to the bartender as a undergrad at Cal State East Bay doing a project on historical bars and I am met with an expression I’m growing familiar with: a mix between being utterly unimpressed and dread that I’m going a be asking a bunch of annoying questions.  But I’m also learning the value in patience when it comes to discussions like these.  I let him do his work as I sip my beer, ask a couple small questions when the opportunities arise, but mostly chat with other people at the bar and generally try to be a good customer first, then a historian.  By the time I finished my second beer I had Larry, the bartender, and a man from Martinez (whose name I never caught) feeding off each other and competing to tell me what they know about the bar.

    Larry thought the bar opened in this incarnation in 1967 or ‘68, but the man from Martinez said he remembered coming here with his grandfather a few years before that when it was a cowboy bar from all the ranch hands in the surrounding hills.  “I would be the only one in here not in a cowboy hat,” the man from Martinez told me.  He said the windy road, Carquinez Scenic Drive, used to be the only way to get from Martinez to Richmond and from there they would take San Pablo Ave all the way down to Oakland.  He’d often ride with his grandfather on these trips and stop at the Warehouse Café on the way back, though it wasn’t called that back then.  I asked the man from Martinez if he knew how old the bar was.  “Well, let me ask you… is that a buffalo?” he said and pointed to the head mounted on the wall.

    “It appears so,” I said.

    “Is that a big white bear?” he asked, pointing to the glass enclosed and taxidermied polar bear, standing on hide legs for a ferocious man-eating attack.

 

       “Defiantly."

“Is that a… what is that?  An elk?” he asked, pointing to the head of some horned buck.

    “Close enough for my guess,” I said truthfully.

    "Then you know it’s got to be pretty damn old.”

    I saw no reason to poke holes in this logic and moved on.  Later, I came across a picture of the Burlington Hotel from 1960 with the caption saying the warehouse across the street was “mostly unused” at this point.  An adjacent picture showed the warehouse in 1977, open for business under the name of Juanita’s Gallery.3

    It was on the point of what “mostly unused” means that Larry told me later and was my favorite part of the story.  In the early 60’s the warehouse was the occasional site for a gay dinner theater club!  Throughout my visit the people I talked to always mentioned Bill Rich as the guy who revitalized the town and tilted their heads to a picture on the wall of a older gentleman in a white cowboy hat.  In 1960, Bill Rich, who was a Coors delivery truck driver, borrowed money from his family and bought most of the town for $20,000, including the warehouse and the Burlington Hotel.  Rich spent the rest of his life in Port Costa doing his best to make it into a tourist destination and place for galleries and antiques.4  What I was not able to find in print is that, according to Larry, Bill Rich was gay and sought to make Port Costa into an open-minded haven for people to get away from the city be themselves, weather they wanted to experience art or simply go fishing.  The performances at the warehouse were part of the fun and there are still some colorful glass orbs from those days that hang near the polar bear.  At a time when even homosexuals in San Francisco could not be completely open in public, what a scene Port Costa must have been.

     Rich also reopened the Burlington Hotel, playing up its reputation as a former bordello from the untamed port days when it the sailors and railroad men called it “The Dutchman’s” because it was operated by the “spirited” family with the name Boehm.5  Instead of numbers the rooms are labeled with names of women we are led to believe occupied the rooms for means of ill-repute.  The bartender at the Warehouse Café also serves as the front desk to the hotel and Larry let me borrow the keys to the Wilma room on the third floor.  Sure enough, the red faded wallpaper, simple wood furniture and creaky beds fit exactly what I’ve seen in movies as a Wild West whorehouse.  Needless to say, I loved it.  The hotel is widely believed to be haunted, but as the man from Martinez said to me when he got the keys to his room, “I keep hoping to see one of these ghosts.  I already told me wife, ‘It ain’t cheatin’ if your doing it with a ghost.’”

    At some point in the late 70’s bikers discovered the bar as a great stop on weekend rides and the word spread out to everyone in the Bay Area about the tiny town, perfect for an overnight vacation that cost next to nothing, was less and an hour drive from anywhere, and all with the reputation of anything goes in Port Costa.

view from the Wilma room in the Burlington Hotel

notes- 

1. Dick Murdock, Port Costa 1879-1941: A Sage of Sails, Sacks and Rails (Port Costa: Murdock-Endom Publications, 1977), 5-11.

2. Murdock, Port Costa 1879-1941,  36-39.

3. John V. Robinson and Veronica Crane, Port Costa (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2007), 39.

4. Carolyn Jones, “Venerable Port Costa hotel is one of a kind”, San Francisco Chronicle,  January 11 2009, accessed November 3, 2011, http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-01-11/bay-area/17195664_1_port-costa-hotel-concierge-hotel-s-innards/2.

5. Murdock, Port Costa 1879-1941,  23.

photos-

- the wharf, the Solano and the railroad tracks in the 1880's, from Port Costa 1879-1941, 7.

- the exterior of the Warehouse Cafe by Robert Hurly, found at http://my.opera.com/rfhurley/albums/show.dml?id=651052.

-all other pictures by the author on his iPhone.  I promise to start using some apps that will make up for some of my poor photography skills.

Your Bay Area Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week:

Rodger Collins was born in Texas circa 1940, but his family was among the massive migration of Southern African-Americans who came to the Bay Area in the 40's in search of industrial jobs created by the war.  For a long time his 1967, "She's Looking Good", was his considered his biggest hit, having been covered by Wilson Pickett and David Lee Roth.  But this 1970 song, "Foxy Girls in Oakland", has become a cult hit over the decades and you haven't lived in Oakland until you've seen a dance floor explode when the instantly recognizable opening guitar lick come through the speaker.  I still remember the first time I heard it at the Ruby Room on 14th St. in 2001, it was like the moment in a beer commercial that the bottle is opened, spraying suds and instant fun all over the crowd, making everybody carefree and attractive.

After playing shows with Elvis Presley and Ike & Tina Turner, Collins went on tour with Joe Tex and with him converted to Islam, changing his name to Hajj Sabrie.  He quit the music business, aside from a small handful of shows under is old name, started a family and opened an shop called Trustworthy Appliance Repair in Oakland.  As far as I know, he's still there.

"A saloon, of course, for the transaction of men"- Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon, Oakland

Heinold's on opening day, June 1st, 1883.

     In Jack London’s 1913 novel, John Barleycorn, the title character purchases a boat from the oysterman, French Frank, in a place that is referenced often in London’s literature and played an important role in his life: “We met by appointment early Monday morning, to complete the deal, in Johnny Heinold’s ‘Last Chance’- a saloon, of course, for the transaction of men.”1  This was event taken directly from London’s life when he bought a small sloop, which he named the Razzle Dazzle, at fifteen years old to sail along the coast of the bay and collect oysters (not always legally).2

Johnny Heinold and his dictionary

    Heinold’s First And Last Chance Saloon, still standing today where Webster Street meets the Oakland harbor, has often been referred to as Jack London’s Rendezvous for good reason.  The author and the bar have fates that indelibly linked.  London was born in San Francisco the same year, 1876, that a young man named John (often “Johnny”) Heinold arrived there from Philadelphia.  Heinold worked along the waterfront for a couple years until he moved to Oakland and opened a bar on San Pablo Avenue.  This was apparently too far inland for the seafaring type so he paid $100 for a tiny bunk house that was built from the hull of an old whaling ship and was only spitting distance from the Oakland estuary.3  In 1884 the J.M. Heinold’s Saloon opened for business, but a nickname was quickly attached that stuck.  For sailors shipping out on a long voyage or returning from one, this bar made a convenient stop to get a quick buzz before going on.  Similarly, the commuter ferry that ran between Oakland and Alameda was near by and Alameda was a dry city for a long time, so Heinold’s had many customers that would make a morning and evening stop in for a drink to either prepare themselves for or shake off the day.  Hence, the bar was your “first and last chance” to get a drink in Oakland.4

Young Jack London and his dictionary

    Jack London had also moved across the bay, living in Alameda and then Oakland, spending most of his days collecting driftwood and bits of metal of the beaches for his family.  In 1888, Heinold noticed the boy sitting out on the cold docks teaching himself to read with a pocket dictionary.  The bar owner invited the boy inside to sit by the pot-bellied stove and gave him proper dictionary to study.  On that same day, Robert Lewis Stevenson happened to be at the bar, his ship Casco moored in the harbor preparing for his last voyage to Samoa, and he bought the young London a sarsaparilla.  Over the years, London and Heinold became close friends; the older man further aided the younger’s education by lending him money to go to high school and college.  Many of London‘s novels were partially written, as he poured over his notes made traveling and working around North America, at the same table he first sat at in the corner of the bar.5

    When you walk into Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon today, you’ll walk passed the outdoor mall shops that always struggle to stay open in Jack London Square; you’ll walk passed the umbrella covered café tables in front of the bar that are filled with Oakland’s growing middle class of hipster mommies (have you not heard?  Oakland is the new Brooklyn [at least that’s what we Oaklanders tell the people who think of our city as the prettiest place in America catch a bullet or get tear gassed]); and then you’ll almost trip as you step into the bar’s famously sunken floor.  The pilings under the saloon collapsed in the 1906 San Francisco and every attempt to shore the bar up eventually failed with the floor sinking back down.6  The result is about a three foot droop in not just the floor, but the actual bar sits at about a 20 degree angle, so don’t let go of your beer.

    It was no surprise that the bartenders were too busy to talk to me on a Friday afternoon and after sitting at the bar for awhile I could see how their patience probably wears a bit thin.  Every jerk who orders a drink has a inane question, or worse, a quip they hope will make the grizzled old bartenders smile (very few are successful).  I had a couple exchanges with the bartenders that were brief, but interesting when put into the context of my research.  I’ll get to those in a bit, but for now I’ll just say they were as impressed with my aspiring historian credentials as they were with the guy in the Ron Paul shirt who asked to have the music turned down outside so he could play his guitar to the crowd (which is to say, not at all).  So I drank a couple of the beers on tap from the Linden Street Brewery only eight blocks away (delivered by bike and so hoppy that it tastes like drinking a joint) and talking to another patron about country music, the lunacy of libertarians and how both our grandparents who came to California in the Dust Bowl migration. 

    I began my research on the First and Last Chance at the CSU East Bay library and was surprised that there were two books were written about the bar on the library shelves.  The first was a skinny memoir love-letter to/history of the bar by a man named Otha Donner Wearin.  The second was an even shorter book, authored by George Heinold, the son of Johnny and successor of the bar when his dad died in 1933.  This book was in the Special Collections room.  I had never considered myself special enough for the Special Collections room and I think I harbored some deep fear of accidentally tearing a page or sweating onto a rare book that ignites from my body heat, burning down a whole wing of the library and destroying all recorded history.  We’ll call this insecurity the Alexandria Complex.

    Of course, it was remarkably less dramatic when I got to the Special Collections and the librarian found the book for me and set it out with a set of white cloth gloves to protect it from my devastating bodily oils.  The book was almost a pamphlet from 1936, but was filled with plainly written, great stories of Johnny Heinold and the saloon.  I snapped a picture of each page with my iPhone.

Poem dedicated to John Heinold upon his death in 1933

     Much of the historical information used in the Wearin’s book was directly quoted from Heinold the younger’s book.  Aside from London and Stevenson the bar also hosted many other literati, including Ambrose Bierce, Rex Miller and Joaquin Miller (the “Poet of the Sierras” who would often get lost in Oakland and end up at the bar, saying it was due to “being out of my latitude”).  Two term and longest sitting Oakland Mayor, John L. Davie was a friend to the Last Chance.   In the 1890’s the populist mayor supported London and the other salty patrons sneaking out of the bar at night to tear down the fences the railroad company put up so as slow progress until Davie could complete the wharf he was building.  Once the wharf was done it ran a ferry to San Francisco for only a nickel and this forced the railroad to keep their rates low as well7 (don’t ask me how exactly this makes sense, I’m chalking this story up to the bizarre web of corporate interests, local government corruption and class conflict that was turn-of-the-century politics).  Wearin expands on Mayor Davie’s relationship with the bar, mentioning the mayor once took President William Howard Taft to the Last Chance for “refreshment and a moment of relaxation”8 (insert your own fat Taft joke here).  In 1893, a passenger train crashed through an open drawbridge nearby killing many people and dropping injured survivors into cold bay waters.  As the wounded people were pulled out of the estuary, Johnny Heinold closed the bar to his packed-holiday crowd and converted it into an ad hoc hospital.9

    It was the heroism of George Heinold that put me a little bit of hot water with one of the bartenders last Friday.  Both books mention George’s winning of French Croix de Guerre during World War One for single-handly capturing twelve German soldiers and a lieutenant.  This fact is also typed on a piece of laminated paper attached to a display case in the Last Chance, but inside the case are a score of captured Nazi pins.  I asked the bartender about this and he said something to the effect of, “George Heinold was a war hero.”

    “In World War One,” I said.

    He paused a moment, eyed me suspiciously and said, “Right.”

    “All those pins are from World War Two,” I told him, doing my best not to sound like a smart-alec.   Never the less, I was given a long, cold stare that men give other men half their age that says, “You don’t know what your talking about, kid, so stop talking.”  But he came out from behind the bar, walked over to the case, looked it over, read the laminated paper and gave me another long, cold stare.  “See, the swastikas?” I asked timidly.  “Those eagles are Third Reich.  I was just curious who captured them.  If it was patrons who fought in World War Two, or something.”

    “Who are you again?” the bartender asked.

    “A history major at Cal-State East Bay.”

    “I got work to do,” he said and was done talking to me for the night.

    I mention this story, not to show off my smarty-pants, I felt quite the asshole sitting back down at the bar wearing those pants.  I tell this because it was a reminder in how people’s history is not just something that exists in books for me soak up and sprout off later.  History is something that exists in the minds and memories of people who lived through it or were told by somebody else first hand who lived through it.  I don’t know how long the bartender has worked at Last Chance, but he was certainly old enough to have known George Heinold, who died in 1970.10  At the least, he had been given the history of the bar from people who had been around it for a very long time.  He accepted what he knew and clearly took a certain about a pride in the history of the Last Chance, the whole bar is practically a museum dedicated to its proud history .  Granted, he was a grump about it, but who was I to come along during a busy shift and start poking holes in how they venerate their past?

    George’s war record was also involved in another lesson I learned in memory and history on this outing.  In his book, George remembers his dad as telling customers that he strictly respected the 18th Amendment prohibiting of intoxicating liquors in 1919 because, “If my boy can fight for the constitution [sic], I guess I can uphold it,” when they came in with “a hint they’d like a little of ‘the old stuff’."11  Wearin quotes John Heinold as saying, “If the Heavenly Father did not want the human race to have alcohol, for one reason or another, He would never would have allowed fruits and grains to ferment.”  And he suggests that Heinold may have looked the other way when customers used a flask to Irish up their coffee and sarsaparillas.12  Finally, the bartender (the other one who I didn’t piss off) told me when I asked about Prohibition that there were a couple liquor bottles kept around for the trust-worthy friends.  “I’m sure Johnny knew everything that went on in his bar, but he never poured,” he said.  This man obviously was not working for the bar in the 1920’s, but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of his tale.  It is probable that all three of these varying degrees of respect for the law are true.  When I use my imagination to connect these stories I can see people’s motivations and attitudes, fleshing them out as real people and I have a more realized picture of what this bar, and surely many bars like it, was like during Prohibition.

    In the both the bars I’ve highlighted so far we’ve seen much of their fame being tied to the American authors who spent a good portions of their lives drinking themselves to death there.  Both London and Kerouac are venerated at these establishments with a notable absences in mentioning their flaws and complexities.  Jack London was very prolific and unarguably one of the most gifted writers our country has produced.  His novels so transported his readers to the vast and adventurous world that he was considered a hero and set the template for the rugged, manly American writer for Hemingway, Kerouac, Sebastian Junger to pick up.  The fact that I was assigned White Fang to read in the 5th  grade and recently has Valley of the Moon assigned in an upper division university class speaks volumes to his broad appeal and depth.  The man was also a complete racist, misogynist, xenophobic and, as usual, a uncontrollable drunk.  Some people might also speak against his socialism and subsequent disillusionment with socialism, but I am not one of those people. 

    I’m not saying we should always focus on the faults of all our historical celebrities, but we should use them to help us remember they were actual people who had lives that did not revolve around the tiny bits of trivia that we carry around with us.  When reading Valley of the Moon I was struck that in the middle of a tender discussion between loving husband and wife the husband suddenly drops, “…I ain’t going to be too proud to borrow it off ‘m, if he is a Chink.  He’s a white one…”13, but it was one of those moments that made me remember all racists are not all bad all the time.  It must be considered how many white Californian men  in 1910 weren’t Nativist and vaguely sexist?  So should the First and Last Chance have a caption below the author’s picture that read, “Jack London: Great American Novelist and Casual Racist”?  No.  Should there be plaque next to his table that reads, “At this spot Jack London taught himself to read, wrote Sea Wolf and puked up on himself on more than one occasion”?  That would be awesome, but no.  The truth is I don’t know what I want to say on this subject yet, but I see patterns emerging and sense something on the horizon.  In the coarse of researching and writing this blog I hope to learn a little bit more about the way we venerate people and places, then in the end, be able to tell you something profound about it.  Hopefully it will both deep and clever, earning my own plague that reads: “Mike Burton: Minor Historian and Kind of a Jerk.”

Footnotes-

1 Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 70. 

2 Otha Donnee Wearin, Heinold’s First and Last Chance (Hastings, IA: Wearin, 1974), 31.

3 George Heinold, John Heinold and His First and Last Chance (Oakland: International Press: 1936), 9-10.

4 Wearin, First and Last Chance, 25-27.

5 Wearin, First and Last Chance, 28-34.

6 First and Last Chance website, History page, accessed  October 10, 2011, http://firstandlastchance.com/hew/history.html.

7 Heinold, John Heinold, 13-15.

8 Wearin, First and Last Chance, 3.

9 Heinold, John Heinold,  14.

10 Wearin, First and Last Chance, 21.

11 Heinold, John Heinold,  15.

12 Wearin, First and Last Chance, 19.

13 Jack London, The Valley of the Moon ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 406.

Photos-

1 J.M. Heinold's Saloon, taken from First and Last Chance Website.

2 Johnny Heinold, taken from First and Last Chance Website.

3 Jack London, taken from MF Kron Louisiana Melancholic blog at http://mfkorn.blogspot.com/2009/03/jack-london-ambrose-bierce-and-robert.html

4 photo taken by author from George Heinold's John Heinold and His First and Last Chance.

5 First and Last Chance at an unidentified point I'm going to guess near the 40's, taken from First and Last Chance Website.

Your Bay Area Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week:

In the late 80's and early 90's the Bay Area had a garage rock 'n' roll scene that was the envy of the leather jacket and tight jeans wearing world.  The Mummies, Supercharger, The Trashwomen, The Rip-offs, Phantom Surfers and many more bands took fast, catchy 1960's teen rock and stripped it down even further, playing with ridiculous amounts of reverb, recording on the most low-fi equipment possible and made raw, lewd and explosive music that forever sounded as if it was playing out of a blown speaker.  In other words, they made rock 'n' roll fun again.  The Mummies were famous for breaking their equipment on a regular basis, not for show as The Who or Nirvana were known for, but they just played so damn hard that keys were always flying off organs, amps blew out, or a guitar might have to be used to fight off a drunken fan wielding a broken bottle.  Here are two live performance of the Mummies doing the 1964 Pleasure Seekers song, "What A Way To Die" (I believe this was for a local public access show) and their own instrumental, "The Fly":

Back-washing: Some more on Merchant's Saloon

Since my first visit to Merchant's they have replaced the old wood bar with an ugly slab of aluminum, but the gutter that was once used for the convenient disposal of micturated libations remains.  I thought you, dear readers, should at least have a look at the historical artifact from a time when men were men and public indecency, along with pungent odors, were just part of the saloon experience.