Big Al's Condor Club

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In the summer of 1964, the hottest thing going—if you were a sex-crazed teenage boy—was the topless dancer Carol Doda who performed at Big Al’s Condor Club in North Beach. We didn’t drive two thousand miles to San Francisco specifically to see her humongous knockers, but we were in town, and you can eat dim sum only so many hours a day. My recollection is we never got inside the nightclub to see the recent attraction. We did look through the windows, along with dozens of others. My memory tells me there was a closed circuit TV that played the show. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I have a vague recollection of seeing the woman beyond her larger-than-life image on the marquee, where two red lights substituted for her breasts. Then again, years and decades of love and strife and remembering leave smudges on the lens in which we view the past.

Aside from her breasts, the show’s gimmick was a white grand piano, lowered from the ceiling electronically on cables. Carol was already on the piano when it made its short journey to the nightclub floor, after which she began her dance on the piano.

I returned to San Francisco several times after that, but never saw any reason to visit the Condor Club after I was “legal.” My good friend’s parents lived on the corner of Washington and Hyde, a noisy intersection because the cable cars travel up Hyde and turn left on Washington. Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, and City Lights became favored destinations because we could get there on foot. On occasion, we’d walk to the Fairmont or Mark Hopkins.

Many years later I met a geographer who had once worked at US Virgin Islands National Park. Because I had lived in the Virgin Islands, we had something in common and swapped stories. My favorite story involving park rangers happened at Cinnamon Bay, a large beach on St. John that caters to tourists. I must have been with guests from the States, as there are beaches where you can spend the day without seeing a single person—my idea of a good day at the beach. The beach at Cinnamon Bay is shallow and drops off slowly, so you can be quite a distance from shore and stand in waist-deep water, which is where a young woman decided to get some sun on her breasts. She barely got her swimsuit top untied when four fully uniformed park rangers simultaneously waded in after her with the enthusiasm of FBI agents cornering John Dillinger. It appeared to me at least five of us had been watching her. There was a confab between the rangers and the embarrassed young lady, all standing in waist-deep water. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they talked about, but they kept her company long after she covered up. Simply, West Indians are not fond of public nudity.

My geographer friend was born and raised in San Francisco. He told me that during college he worked summers for a company that inventoried department stores and other businesses. He walked with his team to their new job. They were near their destination when workmen came up from a sidewalk freight elevator used to deliver goods. The workmen were excited and waved them over. Seems a building owner had purchased an adjacent building and hired the workman to punch a hole in the basement wall to connect the two. The workmen took them down to the basement to see their discovery. What they found was a German restaurant, the tables all set up for business. Everything was dusty, as might be expected since the restaurant was expected to open again on April 18, 1906, not more than six decades’ later.

Big Al’s Condor Club and Carol Doda disappeared into the a dusty corner of my mind until I saw a 1983 news article about two Condor Club employees who decided to engage in recreational sex on the famed white piano after business hours. In their enthusiasm, one or the other hit the switch that sent the piano on its way to the ceiling. I remember from the article that only the man was crushed. He was thicker than his partner who survived the freaky event. The only moral that comes to mind is to engage in sex only with a partner who is larger than you. Or play all the piano you want, but do not engage in sex on top of it. Or shit happens.

Arrangement in Grey and Black

Winans

In the 1830s, Russia did not have much of a railway system—seventeen miles of track to be exact. Czar Nicholas I wanted to build a line to connect Moscow and St. Petersburg. He looked to America for help. Ross Winans, a locomotive builder in Baltimore and one of America’s first multi-millionaires, sent his two sons, Thomas and William. The Russian delegation that visited America recommended Major George Washington Whistler as consulting engineer. A West Point graduate, Whistler had experience in constructing locomotives as well as infrastructure, especially bridges. The Whistler and Winans families were related. Whistler’s brother George had married Winans’s daughter, Julia.

In 1842, Whistler, with a seven-year contract in hand, moved his family to Russia to oversee the project. His son, James, was eight years old. With a five-year contract, Winans’s sons moved to Russia bringing along major machinery and equipment duty-free. After their first five-year contract, which they completed a year early, they were given another contract. Whistler didn’t fare so well. Just before his contract was up, two years before the project was completed, he died of cholera. Whistler is credited creating what is the standard five-foot-gauge track still in use in Russia and neighboring countries. With his brother-in-law, McNeill, he also designed the Canton Viaduct, in 1835, for the Boston and Providence Railroad. It has been in continuous service since. A bridge model of similar design is exhibited in the October Railroad Museum in St. Petersburg. The Whistler family moved to England for a time before returning to Massachusetts.

The four-hundred-mile-long railroad was completed in 1851.

Whistler

Also in 1851, James Abbott McNeill Whistler began his studies at West Point, as his father and other relatives had done. A combative young man, he was not fit for the regimen and kicked out. He appealed to Robert E. Lee, the superintendent. Some reports attest he was given a special exam. Others, that it was a regular exam. The anecdotal story: He complained for the rest of his life that if silicon were a gas, he would be a general.

In 1852, Thomas Winans started building houses in the States (the Czar paid in gold). His first project was Alexandroffsky, a Russian-style estate on a city block in Baltimore surrounded by a twelve-foot wall when the hoi polloi started closing in. His next project was Crimea, his country estate on nine hundred acres. Other buildings followed.

In1854, William Winans and Eastwick, of the Harrison and Eastwick firm, hired to construct rolling stock for the Russians, were investigated, after a complaint from DuPont, for manufacturing gunpowder for Russia, as the Crimean War broke out, which suggests the Winans were on Russia’s side in the conflict.

Also in 1854, Julia de Kay Winans, Thomas’s daughter, married George William Whistler, son of Major Whistler and brother of James. The two marriages between the Whistler and Winans families were slightly less intimate than the marriages between the Darwin and Wedgwood families, Charles Darwin’s mother and wife were both Wedgwoods.

In 1861, Ross Winans, a Southern sympathizer and member of the Maryland House of Delegates was arrested twice. His companies were reputedly making arms to defend Baltimore from Union troops. He was released after signing a “parole” that he was loyal to the Union.

In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the US for seven-point-two million dollars. It is reported that more than two/thirds of that payment went to William Winans who continued his railroad work in Russia after the initial project was completed. William retired to England.

In 1871, Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. The iconic painting of his mother hangs in the Musée ďOrsay.

In 1882, Ross Winans, grandson of his namesake, hired McKim, Mead and White, the most successful architectural firm in America, to design his house. Stanford White designed the forty-six-room Queen Anne mansion. Cass Gilbert served as clerk of the works. The big guns were called in. Tiffany was engaged as was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed a small fountain.

Mercurys and Mayhem

On the day I turned fifteen, I got my license to drive a car. There was a written exam and a behind-the-wheel test. My mother took me over to the test center, never believing I would pass—something I didn’t learn until later. On the way, she mentioned that when she was growing up, she went to the drugstore and paid twenty-five cents for her license. I did pass. A week later, I was driving a red and white 1953 Mercury two-door hardtop. It was tired and rusted, but it was mine.

The world changed. First it was just the freedom to go wherever you wanted, pretty much whenever you wanted. After school, we’d all chip in a quarter, drive down to Lake Pepin—birthplace of waterskiing—just to see if the ice had gone out. One day it was up the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to learn if there was snow yet at Indianhead, a ski resort. There was a sprinkling of the stuff in Ashland. When we reached Hurley, they were using front-end loaders to load dump trucks to get the white stuff off the streets.

Evenings we would just go out cruising, meet up at drive-in restaurants. Three would leave their car parked and go off with a fourth. There was a circuit in St. Paul. It started downtown. The first leg was downhill on Fifth Street. A sweet-sounding exhaust helped because the whole point was to get the pipes rapping in the canyon lined by tall buildings. It was all about the echo. Then we’d wind around to Rice Street by the state capitol and hang a left on University. The cool thing about University was it was six lanes, separated by a narrow concrete divider. The really cool thing was stoplights were spaced four or five blocks apart, perfect for drag racing. The end of the circuit was Porky’s, a drive-in where guys with really great cars we aspired to hung out.

Time not spent driving was spent repairing, cleaning, and upgrading our cars, anything to make them better looking and faster. The favored marque in my neighborhood was Ford. It had been manufacturing the flathead V-8 engine since 1932. Over the years, engine displacement and horsepower increased. It wasn’t until 1954 that Ford came out with an overhead-valve engine. If you owned any Ford flathead-powered car, you aspired to get hold of a 1953 engine, which you could find at the junkyard in Hugo. There was a community swing set, which was barely up to the task of carrying the weight of an engine and therefore not ideal, but it got a lot of use when swapping engines.

Chevy was behind the curve, not offering a V-8 until 1955, but striking gold with its small-block V-8. Where is this all going, you may ask? The drag strip, and letting it rip for a quarter mile. Nothing was planned. I happened to be in the right place at the right time and got an invite. The guy with the car, a GM man, had the ability to make anything go faster. That night he was driving a mid-1950s Pontiac. If you won your class, you got your choice of a three-inch-tall trophy or five bucks.

He took the five bucks and took us to this bar on Randolph to celebrate. The bar was located in an older two-story building, apartments on second floor and storefronts at street level. The bar took up two storefronts, but one entrance was closed. I was to learn later that there were two exits on the alley side.

The four of us slid into a booth. I was underage, but had no problem getting a Coke. It must have been a weekend night because the joint was jammed, mostly by guys a lot older than us. So I was feeling cool and grown up until this big guy walked through the front door wearing an old overcoat, a nylon stocking over his head, and the biggest revolver I’d see until Dirty Harry.

Those of us facing the entry were the first to get to our feet and make for the rear exits. I was right there with them until I turned a corner and the guys I’d been following were coming toward me, hands in the air. We all learned pretty quickly that the man who came in the front door had two accomplices who came through the back doors, both dressed like the first man.

We were ushered to our seats. Then things got confusing. One man told us to sit and another told us to stand. A bit of dark humor didn’t lighten the mood, but it did end the confusion of whether to sit or stand.

A frail old wino, standing at the bar, didn’t take kindly to being ordered around and got belligerent. The first guy, the man with the biggest gun, smashed the wino in the face with his gun. The wino collapsed and lay on the floor bleeding.

The robbers got their act together. We were ordered to sit. While the leader cleaned out the cash register, the other two started cleaning out the patrons. I watched guys stuffing money in their socks, in their pants, in their shirts. I wished I had their problem. What I really wanted was to borrow a few bucks. I didn’t want to upset the man who was going to be cleaning us out in a few seconds.

I did the only thing I could think of. I turned my pockets inside out and crossed my fingers. Probably because I looked exactly like the scared teenager I was, he didn’t bother with me.

The ordeal was simply over. The three robbers fled. Some patrons lamented their loss. Other bragged when they pulled their cash out from where they concealed it. The wino still lay on the floor bleeding.

The crime spree the three started a couple of weeks earlier ended a couple of weeks later in a shootout with the police. It was bloody. I no longer remember the details, but there were deaths and injuries.

Many decades later, I was looking to get some bodywork done on my car and get the whole vehicle repainted. I looked around for body shops. I found one operated by the guy who had invited me to the drag strip and to that bar on Randolph. We had lost touch after the robbery.

I remembered him as sort of a bad boy in a really cool way, a James Dean.

I could still see who he’d been through what he was, but he was all grown up. I gave him my business because I somehow felt that my car would be the better for it. I loved my car. It was my daily driver for twenty-seven years.

Funny, but I never went to the drag strip again. It was not a conscious decision. It just never happened.

Tales From the Family Archives1

If you’re a longtime fan of Doonesbury, you may remember when Duke was appointed governor of Samoa. Upon his arrival, he met his new aide, MacArthur. The aide acknowledged he was named after the general. In fact, his parents named both their children after the general. Duke thought it was a wonderful way to honor the great hero. The aide replied that his sister, Doug, didn’t agree.

My mother, Marilee, was named after a general, also, but she was proud of it. The general was Robert E. Lee. Marilee’s grandfather, Harrison Monroe Strickler, served with E Company, 35^th Virginia Cavalry. As the story goes, there was a dangerous nighttime crossing of a river. Because Lee ordered flares sent up, the troops were saved. The situation must have been serious enough that Harrison credited Lee with saving his life, and what better way to honor the general than to name his granddaughter after him.

Harrison must have had life-changing experiences during the war. He turned twenty at Gettysburg. His outfit is credited with killing the first Yankees, several days before the big battle. He was with Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. He didn’t surrender. He rode home to Luray. For the next forty years, he traveled as a circuit preacher.

When WWI broke out, Harrison’s son Thomas quit high school and joined the Navy. After training in signals at Harvard, he went to sea. I always though it odd that I had a grandfather and a great-grandfather, both about the same age, that were WWI veterans. Harrison’s first wife died and he remarried. His second wife was a much younger woman. Thomas was born around the turn of the century. Thomas’s mother died in the early 1950s, which was a hundred and ten years after her husband was born.

A few years after the war, Thomas graduated from law school in St. Paul, where he met my grandmother. From what I’ve gathered, the twenties did roar for the two of them. Thomas played polo at Fort Snelling. He sang in the civic opera. My grandmother told me about driving to San Antonio in winter in a Stutz Bearcat, wrapped in buffalo robes. Thomas wanted to fly, not practice law. At Kelly Field, they met Charles Lindbergh, the shyest man my grandmother ever knew. She told me the speakeasies in St. Paul were hidden, but sported neon in Chicago. They had two children.

When Marilee was five or six, she thought it would be cool to earn some money. She charged all her friends a dime to ride in her father’s airplane, a two-seater Curtis Jenny. I’m guessing it was summer because she always said that you didn’t know what cold was until you flew to Minot in winter in an open-cockpit airplane.

Understanding her father could only take up one passenger at a time, she set her mind on the problem. The solution was graham crackers. Her friends could eat graham crackers while waiting for a turn. The idea was sound, but the temptation too great. When my grandmother learned of the plot, the graham crackers and the dimes my mother collected were history.

The stock market wasn’t the only crash that ended the roaring twenties. Thomas crashed and burned in a blizzard near Miles City. He was thirty years old.