Moving Into Mullen Avenue 1969

By Richard W. Hall

Excerpted from Mullen Avenue (1993), a self-published master's thesis.

We moved into 236 Mullen Avenue a few weeks after Richard Nixon took over the White House. My sons, Rick and Wayne, from an earlier relationship, had come to live my new wife, Della Yavno, and I and we needed a bigger house. Mullen Avenue fit the bill and it was a good buy. The old house was four stories, turn-of-the-20th-century Queen Anne (with the gingerbread removed). It had three bedrooms, living room, formal dining room, huge kitchen, laundry room, full basement and two-car garage. It was a grand old house built just after the 1906 earthquake, so that it had a foundation built by Real Believers. There were high ceilings and large rooms with beautiful sculptures for the long hanging light fixtures. There was just enough charm in spite of the missing gingerbread.

The roof of the house was peaked tall and the attic room perfect for rainy days or privacy. You could hear the rain on the wooden shingles. It was the largest dwelling on our part of the street and had an incredible view of downtown. It was one of the few homes that had remained a single-family residence in the face of hard-to-find rentals in San Francisco. We paid $21,500 for that wonderful house.

We chose our home on Mullen Avenue for reasons other than the price, though that certainly was a factor. We wanted to be in a neighborhood community and one certainly moved into this street, as opposed to onto it. I remember looking at the house several months before we bought it and was impressed with the life that abounded on the sidewalks. As we drove by a crowd surrounded a man who was repairing a bicycle turned upside down on the sidewalk. There were a number of kids watching him work and he looked like he was enjoying what he was doing. The group of kids was racially mixed, balanced white to black to brown. They were older and younger, running from preteens to early twenties. There were both girls and boys.

They looked up at me as we passed by and I nodded a cautious greeting. I had learned to do that. The men nodded back, smiling and saying something that I did not understand, but it was sufficiently non-threatening to make me feel good about my first street contact. There were a number of dogs running around. We had the two kids and a mongrel black setter named Macho. It looked o.k.

We found in this little narrow street what appeared to be a rich cultural mix, one that promised a variety of backgrounds and human experience; a true opportunity for us. We never thought much about how differences (people ones) could clash, at least I hadn't thought about it. I believed that if one was fair with his fellow persons they would be fair back. However, I didn't apply that thinking to politicians, lawyers or car salesmen.

Della had come from a fairly select heritage, mostly upper middle class, professional parents, first generation Americans who had been relatively successful in their new lives in this country. Her father had been a planner for the Federal Government, an F.D.R. Democrat who believed housing projects were the way to provide good safe housing for entitled people. Her mother had been trained as an operating room nurse, giving up her career to be mother and housewife. Both were liberal thinkers and lived in the hope that they might live to see the elimination of social inequities. McCarthyism had driven both to become politically neutral in their later years. They had lived most of Della's adolescent life in a secluded, whites only, residential community, keeping a low profile around things controversial. Seeds of social consciousness were sown early in Della's childhood, seeds that reflected a rare and golden respect for her fellow persons.

Della had been teaching for a number of years in an elementary school that drew almost exclusively from one of the city's housing project communities.

My own background, though very different in its developmental processes and cultural experiences, was not dissimilar to Della's in regard to social values. My parents were the children of farmers from the early years of the twentieth century, two of the 1930s adults who married and began to raise their children during the Great Depression. The difficult and dehumanizing experiences of that time had solidified their views of what is right and what is wrong with social systems. My father had become involved in the early socialist movement of rural pre-World War II. He was convinced that the capitalist system, as it had robbed and abused the working man, was not long destined to continue. He organized voters in the small Colorado community in which he and my mother were living, coming within less than 5% of the vote to electing a county socialist slate.

As World War II grew closer and anti-socialist sentiment became more popular, my parents found it wasn't in their interest to stay in Colorado and moved to San Francisco in 1937. Even then S.F. had the reputation of being a liberal and richly progressive city.

In 1938 while actively (and legally) protesting Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia, my parents were trampled and beaten by San Francisco's mounted police as they demonstrated at the German Consulate. Some of their friends were put in jail. This was not what they expected from the city by the bay. My parents, as did Della's, drew back from politically active involvements. Once again, though, the seeds were planted in their children.

During my undergraduate work I had been employed for ten years as a garage attendant for the all-white residential community in which Della and her parents lived. I had listened on a daily basis to an incredible volume of bitter racism, anti-Semitism and nearly fanatic pro-war rhetoric coming from the people I was obliged to serve. It never seemed to stop. When Martin Luther King was murdered one of my customers told me with a quiet smug little smile, "When the news came on over the country club TV everybody stood up and cheered." When I finally left I was ready for a different experience.

Mullen Avenue seemed a long way from that residential community and promised an opportunity for us to live in a more meaningful way. And Bernal Heights/Inner Mission had some of the best weather in the city. On a practical note Mullen Avenue was only about three short minutes away from Della's work. (I have always believed that public employees, especially cops, teachers and politicians, should live in the same community to which they designate their services).

Most of the homes in this area were of the same vintage as our own, some older, a few newer, none as pleasing to us as the one we had chosen. There were a number of stairs that needed to be climbed in order to reach our front door, but first you had to pass through a locked wrought-iron gate at the bottom which seemed to be minor drawbacks.

Our neighbors were a mixture of racial and ethnic backgrounds that, under ideal conditions, would provide a growing family with the varied and valuable cultural experience that we wanted. As the situation stood in 1969 the differences on the street had turned into shields behind which people seemed to be protecting their own threatened selfish interests. At least that is the way it appeared to me when we moved in.

Mrs. Browning lived next door to us. Her house was a very nicely kept stucco-front junior-five (with a room down), two-car garage, fifteen years old. Her son and daughter-in-law and two small children, one belonging to them, lived with her. He was a doorman for a large hotel and made a pretty good living. They had two fairly new Cadillacs. Mrs. Browning was a warm and charming woman. She always talked about weather. She was a black person. Her son was also friendly and warm, but did not pursue conversation past a friendly greeting. They had a locked iron front gate on their house just like ours.

Chet lived next door on the west side of us upstairs. Chet and the woman he lived with were congenial neighbors. He ran a popular dance hall out at Ocean Beach called the Family Dog and before that used to have a hall downtown called the Avalon Ballroom. Since Chet's business was with music and bands there were always a lot of musicians hanging around his house. I saw Janis Joplin in his back yard once. I said hi to her and she smiled and said hi back. I didn't know who she was at the time - just a friendly person.

Chet was always very busy. In spite of his hip dress and his waist-length hair he was a businessman. When he left for work he carried an attach case. I had been told he was a good employer, kind to his employees. They had a dog named Echo. Chet was white.

Ron lived downstairs from Chet in a damp, dark little basement apartment that always smelled very strongly of incense. He was about twenty-four years old but had lost a lot of hair and looked older. Ron had been arrested for selling marijuana, his second arrest. His roommate, Bill, moved to Hawaii just after the arrest. They were friendly and likable people. Their dog was named Ralph. Their flats did not have locked iron gates unlike the rest of us. Ron was also white.

Moses lived across the street. He was an old guy who referred to himself as "colored." His hair was tight little gray kinks and his eyes were cloudy. He painted his house right after we moved in and said that he paints every two years and I thought about our house which needed painting very badly. Moses said he knew Pretty Boy Floyd when Moses was young and lived in Oklahoma. He believed that Floyd went to heaven when he died because he had been right in his heart. Moses worked in Mrs. Browning's back yard and sometimes we would talk over the fence.

Moses would tell us about all the kids in neighborhood, though it sounded more like a warning than telling. "You betta watch dem punks, he'd say. "They be gitten friendly wiff yo doag so's he won' do nuttin when dey knock yo' house ovah." He had morning glories growing all over the front of his house and a locked iron gate on his front door. I never saw his wife during the day time. I heard that she went to church in the evenings.

Armando was fifty-one and his stomach muscles were hard as rocks. He let the kids punch him there to prove it. They could pound him with all their might and he said that it didn't hurt. Armando was the President of the Bernal Heights Association, actually Vice-President until the "homosexual man" who was President got in trouble and had to resign. I know this because Armando told me so.

Armando owned twelve pieces of property, most of it in the Bernal Heights area and was the man I had seen fixing the bicycle when we first came to look at the house. Armando grew up in San Francisco's old Butchertown (now part of the Bayview-Hunters Point). He knew, as he told me, what it was like to have to fight for what you got in life. His father was a strong union man, an early socialist, who had to fight the corporation bosses and the union leaders. Armando remembered his family having to live in constant fear because of his father's activities. Armando was always very proud of the fact that his father never compromised any values that he saw as right.

Armando had some ideas of his own about life, having come out of working with different chemicals in his trades. He was a house painter and an acetylene gas welder and so had worked with a lot of different materials. Some of his ideas had to do with why, as he put it, "People were fucked up. The hypothalamus gland is always interfering with the correct function of the forebrain he told me. He had some gases that he invented and mixed together, that he guaranteed could cure anything from arthritis to homosexual tendencies. Knowing very little about any of these areas (forebrain, hypothalamus, gases or homosexual tendencies), I never expressed opinions or doubts about his statements. I do remember that his theories caused some major problems, mostly in his own personal relationships.

Another of the things that Armando told me was that he had figured out why he could never get along with his second wife. It seemed that in their past lives Armando had murdered the brother of this wife, before they lived the now life. That, he said, is what accounted for why they fought so much.

Armando had two children by his first marriage and both had been major problems for him. At the time we talked he was helping his current wife raise her four. Their father had been blown up in an industrial accident.

In 1938 Armando and a friend rode motorcycles from San Francisco to Florida, up the East Coast to New York and back again. He got his picture and the story of his trip in the newspapers when that happened. He showed me the yellowed clippings.

Armando always tried to help the kids who were living in this part of Bernal Heights. One summer he organized a hot dog booth for the annual fair that held in Precita Park. The profits were supposed to go for some kid parties, but problems ensued. Eighty-five dollars disappeared and Armando accused one of the kids was accused of stealing, which left a lot of hard feelings.

Sometimes kids helped Armando in his work painting houses, and he paid them though there were problems there also. Armando did not have a great deal of patience and lost his temper easily. When he did it was all over at least for that project. He would yell and swear at the kids and claimed that being a triple Scorpio had a lot to do with how he behaved.

But Armando helped more than he hurt, I think. He planted a lot of trees with the kids, eight hundred of them on Bernal Mountain, over a period of a couple of years, he said. It wasn't that the trees were all that important, though someday they would be beautiful. The most important thing I thought was that someone had done something with the kids that was constructive, making them feel better about themselves during the process. Our family liked Armando.

The kids who lived and hung out on Mullen Avenue were something else, a completely different experience from the adults. They came to be the main reason why living there was so very unique, yet so very difficult. Here are a few that Della and I came to know very well.

I have to start with Barry Simon. There are a number of reasons for doing so. The primary reason is that if he was about he was the first person who grabbed your attention when you drove along the street. Barry was still working on his identity because sometimes he was "Negro" and sometimes "black." At times he was independent and at others he was slave-solicitous, depending on what he wanted or how he was feeling (mostly about himself). Sometimes he seemed very angry.

He lived up around the corner from us where Mullen turned one way to Montcalm Street and the other way down into a dirt road. He lived with his old great aunt and great uncle, Ike and Margaret Simon, who he called mother and father and who hailed from Big Mamu, Louisiana. They both spoke with a beautiful Cajun accent. Barry had one younger brother, Heywood, and two younger sisters. His real mother was killed in a car wreck when he was little. I didn't know and nor did I ask about his father.

Barry had the most prodigious growth of wild, black, tightly curled (kinky) hair that I had ever seen. It was the time of the Afro or "natural" black hair styles and Barry certainly exemplified that trend. He was fairly tall and thin and looked for all the world like a beautiful, delicately formed black dandelion. He would have been the first to object to that simile. He was very dark and his black, black eyes were ever on the alert, looking, watching and, when he was putting you on, laughing. Barry was pretty cool. He did not rattle easily even when the cops drove by when he had reasons to be rattled. He could snatch a car radio quicker than you could blink an eye.

Barry couldn't read or write at all, and he was eighteen years old. Going to school stopped for him when he was in the eighth grade. For all the good that it did it should have stopped sooner. The embarrassment and humiliation that was the byproduct of his inability to do schoolwork was always with him. He spoke of those raw feelings, always thinking that it was because there was something out of place and wrong about him. Barry went to John O'Connell Trade School but only as a provision of his parole. He had been in trouble a lot. Della believed she could teach him to read.

One night right after we moved into Mullen Avenue our thirteen year old son, Rick, was injured on his bicycle (bad leg and thigh sprain). I happened to look out our window, the one that points west down the block, and saw Barry walking up the middle of the street. He was carrying our son in his arms like a small child. He brought him in through our iron gate and up the two long flights of stairs into our living room where he sat him down on a couch. It was a pretty big effort and I don't think it was easy for him. Barry smoked a lot, mostly Marlboros.

David was sixteen. We always felt that David might have a chance. David's mother, Nelly, was a bright, articulate and aggressive person who had a great deal of common sense. She had worked in some community-based programs and understood a whole lot about how "system things" work and how to get that kind of business done. She knew that David had to learn certain things and act certain ways if he was going to survive. David was sharp as a whip.

His father was a merchant seaman and made pretty good money so that David could go to Shasta School and not to the publics. David's dad did not live with him and his mother. He thought he would like to be a merchant seaman too but only until he got married. He didn't like the idea of a man being away from his family for such long periods of time even if the money was good.

David's "natural" hair was almost as big as Barry's but not as dark. David's skin color was as light as our own children and his hair was a sandy curl, not a tight as Barry's. David smoked a lot of grass.

Frankie had a number of problems, problems compounded by his lack of social opportunity. We always speculated on the possibility that he might have been mentally handicapped in some way. He was a big guy, slow moving and slow talking. When he was in a group he did most of the listening. His mouth was never completely closed and his tongue appeared larger than it should have been. (I took a college class one time called Introduction to Mental Retardation. It's amazing what an uncommonly accurate diagnostician one college class can make a person.) One of Frankie's eyes was lazy and did not ever quite look directly at you when spoke. He was a kind, gentle and loyal person.

One of Frankie's little brothers died from eating some spoiled canned stuff and he was very sad about it. He said nothing ever happened to the people who made the food. Frankie's family was Mexican-American and it was a big one.

Frankie got stoned a lot on grass and reds. When I first started getting to know the street kids I ran into Frankie one day sitting on the sidewalk across the street propped up against one of the houses. He was so loaded on reds that he couldn't even hold his head up. It kept rolling around and falling on his chest with spittle running out of his mouth and down the front of his clothes. I didn't know about reds then. Frankie's parents had enough problems just trying to keep their home and themselves together. They were not able to pay very much attention to the kids. Frankie was fifteen.

Chec's (pronounced "chayk"'s whole name was Steve Pacheco, Steve to us and "Chec" to the kids on the street. He was pretty grownup acting for his age and did not get caught when he ripped off some house. He had learned his skills from his big brother who had did time for burglary. Steve was very bright and very loyal.

Steve, Chec's brother, was smaller than most of the other kids. He made up for his size in other ways. He had a little dog named Shep who he purposely mistreated so that the animal had become aggressively mean. It even bit our eight year old, Wayne. Steve's father was a longshoreman and his family had lived in Hawaii for a number of years. Steve had never been to "the hall" yet (Youth Guidance Center) and he was already seventeen years old, remarkable for that group. Steve smoked a lot of Marlboro cigarettes too.

Pam was Steve's sister. She was younger and taller than Steve. She smoked grass but did not steal. She was an attractive young woman and liked nice clothes. When she had money she bought hip things to wear. Pam was a friendly person and did not like Steve to tease Shep. She thought it made him mean, which it had.

Reese was a quiet guy. You never knew what he was thinking about. I used to think he was stoned a lot, but he wasn't?. He didn't talk to adults readily and was according to legend the most productive thief on the street, though the other kids would tell us he wasn't very good at it. He took lots of risks but he got lots of stuff. If you ever wanted to know where something had gone you needed to go to Reese. If he wanted to tell you then you might find out. His family was Mexican-American - Ruiz was the name, "Reese" to his friends.

Carlos was the next to oldest kid in a family of nine children. At the time his mother was expecting twins. Carlos had shoulder-length black hair and a soft and gentle voice. He smoked grass and thought the government was wrong to legislate against it. He would say "A man should be able to reach out and pick him some grass any time he wants some." It reminded me of something I read in The Grapes of Wrath, but the Joads were talking about oranges. Different people want to reach out and pick different things that should be free, I thought.

Carlos went to the same trade school as did Barry, but we thought he was learning more. He did not steal as often as the others, mostly he "found" things. He wanted to see things in this country change and said often "The President should do more things for the kids." He wore a silver peace medal around his neck. He was sixteen.

There were many other kids on the block that I didn't know as well or by name, and really quite a lot. I eventually talked to most of them but felt I really didn't see into them. They seemed well guarded and in our early days on the block I wasn't experienced enough at reading things/people that/who were different than me. It was one of the things I hoped to learn.

There was a pretty consistent value system for the kids, even though they were all their unique individuals. They had many common denominators and I was certain that one of them was that they were basically good human beings. We would not have been able to live there for so long if we hadn? believed that.

Della and I made it a part of our street routine to talk with any kids we saw regardless of whether we knew them. If they were out on our street we would try to spend time with them. And since we started talking with them it didn;t seem as though they had taken anything from us! Maybe Moses was right though I kept wondering if they were just getting friendly in order to wipe us out. But I couldn't let myself think that way. It was too discouraging.

The kids would sit on out on our front steps when the weather was nice, right outside our gate. Our stairs were wide and the house was pretty much in the middle of the block. So it made sense that it was a good place to sit which we let them do without interfering.

They would stay for hours, it seemed, talking and smoking grass. The boys would spit on the sidewalk. They would spit through their teeth in long thin spurts and they spit a lot. The spitting was important to them and we never knew why. The girls giggled and smoked but did not share the boys pastime.

So that was our neighborhood when we arrived in 1969.

Again it was not easy living there, not just because of the open dope smoking on the street or the iron gates with their locks. It wasn't the problems attendant to hanging onto one's property and it wasn't the eccentric neighbors. These qualities were all disconcerting, uncomfortable to a greater or lesser degree, but in time the street became livable because we made the effort to know and love the adults and especially the kids who shared the block with us.

The hardest thing for us to accept was what we saw happening to the kids. In some ways the kids themselves seemed to know what was occurring with their lives and for the most part had come to accept the problems of their families, schools and behavior as being their lot in the world. No one, kids or adults, appeared to know how or what to change. They seemed to sit out their existence waiting for someone or something to come along and bring them a life. It was like they were waiting for Godot.

For further details on the experiences Richard and Della had on the block, see Mullen Avenue, available at the Bernal Heights Branch and main libraries.)

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