Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Laying a bit of groundwork...

It begins on a gentle hill just a few blocks north of downtown Reno in a little Craftsman home built, according to somebody, ca. 1911 on a street named Ralston after the Comstock Lode banker who may or may not have ever journeyed to Reno from his home on the San Francisco Peninsula. Into the home, moved a family - a father who graduated from Reno High in 1931, now wed to a Petaluma, Calif. belle, and their two children - a son who would start Kindergarten in another week in an elementary school a few blocks away, the first year of public Kindergarten in Reno. His sister was barely four months old, occupying primarily a bassinette that was frequently positioned in the sunny east front room of the home - a room once used as a beauty parlor during the war, and now the office of their father/shipyard worker-turned-real estate man. Their brother, between them in age, had passed away a year earlier.

The vista from that room was, in its own way spectacular - across the street, actually the steepest one-block grade on the length of Ralston Street, was a park, a full-block square, native stone creating walls, walkways and steps marking its terrain; its expanses of lawn and many trees matured by the passage of 40 years since it had formed  the campus of a private school for girls operated by Episcopalian bishop Ozi Whitaker, from whom the park received its name. An enclave of residences nearby to the north and east housed the faculty and staff of the still-fledgling University of Nevada, its sleepy 11-building campus a few blocks to the east. Far from "cookie-cutter," the architecture of these residences in "Academy Heights" - with streets named for dominant universities around the world, remains some of the most picturesque in Reno, with liberal used of stone and rock, extensive brick, unusual and intricate rooflines and fenestration reminiscent of travelogue scenes from European villages.

Opposite the park to the west the toddler in the sun-room at 740 Ralston Street could see Washington Street, bordering Whitaker Park to the west and its confluence with University Terrace - that intersection the southern bounds of Reno's "Little Italy" district, less a district than a four-block stretch northward of some more interesting homes, their rococo charm typical of the Mediterranean inspiration. Mature trees, shrubs and hedges were the hallmark of developed Reno neighborhoods, but none were finer than those in Little Italy, where every home had a small fruit-tree orchard and truck garden, and many a wood-staved grape press. A highlight of the grape-harvest season in California was the arrival of several boxcars of grapes of all strains at the Railway Express depot on Lake Street, where seemingly the entire male population of Little Italy gathered in pre-war pickup trucks to assess the grape crop then take some home up the Washington Street hill to be put through the presses then bottled in the full-basements of every home (which every home had in Little Italy.) Many residents also kept a few chickens and maybe a goat around, and the chickens weren't pets, but future entrées...  Many wags have said that the only time that front doors were locked in Little Italy was during the zucchini-harvesting season, the doors being locked to prevent neighbors from putting zucchini into a neighbor's home. This may or may not be true, but this web-story embraces the final line of the classic movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,  which John Ford adopted as the title of his autobiography, (...when truth becomes legend,) "Print the Legend."

We print many legends.

The central part of Reno lay substantially down the Ralston hill from 740 Ralston Street. At the bottom of the hill, re-graded substantially by the construction of the I-80 freeway, was the Grand Dame of ditches, the mighty Orr, wending its way out toward the valley northwest of Sparks. We'll send photographer Lo Phat out to the outlet of the ditch's inverted siphon on Evans Avenue when the ditch opens this spring; quite a sight. And smell. A few blocks south of the Orr was one of the four graceful "Spanish Quartette" elementary schools - or often "the Four Sisters" - that we'll read much more of in later visits. This one was Mary S. Doten School and in a few weeks we'd gather there, 200 strong. A twin to Mount Rose School on Arlington Avenue, pictured at the left, it was razed in 1971. Not much development lay to the west of Ralston Street - a few blocks across Washington and Vine Streets with predominantly our classmates' homes, then the quarry for the brickyard on West Fourth Street, a few industrial buildings (the Union Ice Company and the oil distributor, a subsidiary of Southern Pacific Railroad.) There was pastureland to the quarry's north. As I write I confess to a great urge to digress to the Santa Claus market to the west, the Graham mansion that we played in two blocks north of the park, and the magnificent 1908 home with the Chinese roofline, surely haunted to the northwest (I'd love to be able to write "near the southwest corner of King's Row and Keystone Drive" but it's 1945, I'm only five as I write this, and we didn't have those landmarks as I write.) But - we'll all grow a bit older, as will our town develop, and in future pages we'll learn more of these and many more of our landmarks and the influences like Chinese mentioned here, that shaped the fabric of our little town on the Truckee. And, a personal note here: It's heartening to write of my town for strict recreation, following so many years of having to research the exact year or the precise corner. On balance, did a lot of that effort matter....?

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A wartime vehicle maintenance facility operated by the U.S. Army on East Second Street just north of Washoe County Hospital closed in the very early days following the end of WWII and many of the military building on that site were moved - I've written of it in the past but in this context the tale can be localized to our northwest Reno neighborhood. Two Quonset huts landed early on on the playground of Mary S. Doten School, which was destined to burgeon with those of us moving with our parents to Reno following the war. Neighborhoods were springing up - G.I. Bill-eligible homes being built west of Vine Street north of West Seventh Street - the Novelly homes (Orville Novelly, himself), the Weichman-Probasco homes (Wes Weichman, as in Wesley Drive, and George Probasco, on of Reno and Sparks' most prolific homebuilders), the homes on Kimball and Gear and Melba - lot of kids - need lots of classrooms. Quite a few barracks and smaller buildings went north of University Terrace in the Little Italy - you can still spot those. The Darrell Dunkle American Legion Post on Ralston and Tenth. A couple across from Whitaker Park on University Terrace. The playhouse at Whitaker Park, a gift to the City of Reno. Before this book is ever over, if it ever is, we're going to take a "walk" around Whitaker Heights (I don't know who ever came up with that name; it came later but it's kind of neat so you'll read it here.) We'll visit one home built by a church's congregation for its pastor and his wife (the Good Shepherd), and one home that escaped from Stead AFB still sitting to this day among the scores of Sproul Homes (those came later than our 1946 time frame but many found that one G.I. home's presence interesting in an old column I wrote.) We'll learn of a home a block from Whitaker Park that an airplane crashed into, killing the pilot (it's been rebuilt).

A block to the east of Ralston at the bottom of the hill was our local hospital, St. Mary's, a relatively new institution, having been converted from a young ladies' school operated by the Dominican Order out of San Rafael, to a hospital in the midst of a health crisis in Reno. Many of our friends had been born there - in earlier generations Reno residents entered the world in the many "birthing hospitals" in Reno. The upper Ralston Street area was home to many of those small, typically six-bed hospitals, one only a few doors from our home at 740 Ralston. As the birth procedures gravitated toward St. Mary's and the city's other hospital, Washoe County Hospital, the birthing hospitals were slowly converted to residences for the many women who came to Reno and Nevada for so-called "quickie" divorces. Much will be written of this in pages to follow, and the resulting temporal friendships of so many of our classmates, those the children of these ladies in town for a divorce who would later return to their hometowns single and take our new friends with them.

The third distinct influence on our sleepy neighborhood, along with the Spanish Quartette school that we were so fortunate to attend, and the hospital a few blocks away, was the University of Nevada. Much has been written of our once-intimate campus three blocks to our east, and we've mentioned briefly the homes, cottages in many respects, that housed the U's staff - and I hope the casual internet reader will tolerate me using the University of Nevada's accepted sobriquet from many years ago: "the Hill." It's a moniker that's sadly disappearing from use, but I inveigled a decade of newspaper readers to accept "the Hill," and will probably throw it around here once a while. I'm looking forward to writing of the old campus - the President's Home on Evans Avenue, the engineering of the Orr Ditch inverted siphon that enabled the U to develop as it did following 1960. (By the way, the University's President also had a home on Nevada Street, much closer to our Ralston Street home), and while not part of the university, the engine storage yard across from the campus on Evans Avenue The University's students, often sorority and frat members, some even then living in a few basements and apartments nearer the park, figured large in our childhood - we'd sneak over to Sierra Street and watch them (and get put to work!) building their Homecoming floats, practicing their Wolves Frolic skits and Mackay Day activities. Whitaker Park, across from my house, was a perennial gathering place for students looking to evade the campus on a warm weekend afternoon, and would occasionally bring a can of Tahoe or Sierra Beer, heaven forbid, enabling kids like me and Tom Cook and Cecelia Molini and Marilyn Burkham the opportunity to learn cool (not a word yet in 1946) tunes like "Bangin' away on Lulu" and other bawdy classics. The U was a part of our lives even then.

North Virginia and West Fourth Streets bounded our world, when we were too young to cross out of our quadrant of town on our bikes (we did anyway, but didn't talk about it home.) Somewhere in all this musing will probably come to light a few recollections about bikes, mentioned above, and other things made of steel and even wood to some degree after a world war that depleted the stuff of youth - we started school in a veil of our folks digging out of the war - bikes, cars, kitchen appliances, almost anything steel - was catching up to 1946. North Virginia and Sierra Streets were shopping areas; while the "major" stores were south of the railroad tracks (at grade in those days; much to follow about our trains), one could find about all you needed on the many stores interspersed with the primarily-apartment house neighborhoods of those streets. And grocery stores, everywhere; we'll write much of them and on another day will put up a link to the grocery store chapter in my book (as a matter of fact, this web musing will probably be punctuated with many chapters of that book, as they apply to my rambling.) Grocery stores are a natural, as their maturation in the days before there be 21 cubic-foot refrigerators in every home. The Iceman Cometh, at least briefly after WWII. (So did the coal trucks; I'd make an uneducated guess that a third of the homes in the area still burned coal, and of the two-thirds left, half of those had been converted from coal. In our walk, which we'll make on the web, I can show you dozens of homes with the easy-to-spot coal chute doors in their foundations.) A natural to all this oil-coal yak would be a visit to the Reno Gas Company's massive (to a six-year-old) moving gas tank out East Fifth Street near Wells Avenue (whoops, Wells was still called Alameda back then; gotta watch my chronology...)

•••

Ye Gods - we could get carried away enough to actually get a bunch of folks together and walk. Could that happen? Actually Jim Smith from the Historic Resources Preservation Society puts on a dynamite walk around the neighborhood already (Jim walked the Graham Mansion years ago as a member of Sigma Nu Fraternity, which it became after Ludovica Graham moved to her newer home on Bell Street. The mansion was later a rest home, the Jack& Jill Children's Home and finally the "Snakes" bought it in 1951. Miraculously it's still standing. I'll tune you in to that walk when it comes up this Spring. I might tag along...)

West Fourth had a slightly different flavor than North Virginia Street. While both were U.S. highways; Virginia Street in its length through Reno, from distant Moana Lane to the south to the Hatch Building where the University ended, was, and I guess remains, U.S. 395, from San Diego to somewhere in Washington state. But it was Fourth Street, West and East, that was and is a segment of the nationwide U.S. 40, and we were well-poised to watch a nation embrace automobiles as a way of life for everyman, ergo auto courts where a traveler could park and sleep. Somebody dreamed up the word "motel," which I could probably Google, and might even do that, to see who coined it - "motor" and "hotel" - pretty neat word, going up on the length of Fourth Street from the Coney Island Bar to the El Tavern Motel, soon with a vacancy-or-no sign to keep the weary motorist from having to stop for naught. The storied Coney Island Bar, the El Tavern and the stepchild Gold 'n Silver Restaurant that it spawned (same owner, Bill Parker), are high on our radar as we write. And, if we're going to drive a car, we need gas - so here came the "service" stations, where a guy, often the frat-rat who lived down University Terrace, attended the U, and later graduated in mining in time to go off to war in Korea, would actually pump the gas, wash your windshield and check the oil and water before you started over two-lane Highway 40 toward San Francisco eight hours away on a good day. And cars broke, so we had garages like Rissone's and tire shops like Reno Vulcanizing and Guisti's to keep 'em rolling.

OK -  I've got this thing underway - almost every line invites some elaboration, which in many cases I've already done in the past and if I can find it, we'll find is a link, which that isn't but it's what it will look like, to take you to something that's already in print (we'll get everybody reading on the internet yet!) This opener is to get the door open to reading of our town on the web, and the text will be enhanced with some photos in the days and weeks to come - photos I've shot, or will shoot if the sun ever comes out, or gleaned from the Historical Society or wherever else I can scare them up.  What's also missing as I write this is people, so we'll start bringing some folks into the text, like the University professor who lived next door to us that convinced us he was nuts, (or at least his wife did), a post-WWII Hannibal Lechter, and it worked - the place still gives me the creeps. Or Professor Ryan across University Terrace from Whitaker Park with the hot daughter, or Professor Palmer, actually Dean of the Engineering College, with his full-basement-sized pre-WWII Lionel train layout that could make the streetlights go dim if he ran them all at once. Mrs. Beetschen at the Cottage Market on West Fifth was a nice lady that gave us licorice ropes behind her husband's back (Charlie owned the store and was the butcher. Butchers own knives. And hate kids.) Mrs. Graham let us play on the grounds of her mansion, later the ΣΝ House at West 11th Street. Hell, we'll meet all kinds of folks and go everywhere in the next year or two. Even south of West Fourth and east of North Virginia; we've got a town to explore!

Come back to the site occasionally, probably on at most a weekly basis. The blue plate below will take you back to a home page (that page will probably go away in a while after it's been read by all that are probable to read it. We will build a link bar to other pages, like the photo page, the random thoughts page, the coming events page and one for Clicks-from-the-Cable, thanks Herb Caen for that title. We'll use that one after trips to San Francisco, which are fairly frequent (grandkids beckon.) And Cal Pettengill will probably keep us in music...I claim nothing to do with the website start-up tunes...he's the expert.

See ya in a week or so...!