From the Martin Luther King Middle School yard this evening. A lovely, long sunset and red dusk. So far, this has been some kind of ideal October: lots of rain for an early end to the fire season, and plenty of warm clear days. It’s just a little cooler and a little darker day to day, though, and we’re just a couple of weeks away from having to push the clocks back. Late twilight: love it while you can!
All Star Hotel
On 16th Street near Folsom in the northeastern corner of the Mission. I walk by the place at least two or three times a week. The setting says “dive,” but it’s surprisingly un-divey-looking from the outside. On the strength of two reviews, TripAdvisor.com ranks it 179th out of 248 hotels in the city. Room rate quoted in one of those reviews: $150. A week. Here’s a 2004 piece on the hotel from the alternative online news site BeyondChron.com.
(When I took the picture, a guy on the sidewalk said, “You with the movies?” I didn’t I’d heard him correctly and asked him to repeat what he’d said.
“You making a movie?”
“No, I just liked how that doorway looks.”
“If you’re making a movie, I want to be in it.”
“OK–I’ll be back when I’m making one.” We both laughed. )
All Class/No Class Crete-Monee Reunion, 2009
The big event of the late weekend was a small gathering, at our house in Berkeley, of folks from Crete-Monee High School, from which I graduated in 1972. This was sort of an informal reprise of an actual “all-class” reunion held a couple weeks ago in Crete, a town about 30 miles straight south of downtown Chicago. About 700 people showed up for a catered event at the racetrack on the edge of town. The Crete-Monee diaspora includes at least a handful who have landed in Northern California. A few of us who have stayed in touch or who have happened upon each other on Facebook began talking about a West Coast version of the Crete event. And so this weekend’s All Class/No Class Crete-Monee High School Reunion, 2009 was born.
Who showed up? Anne Kaufman, ’74, right off the plane from Chicago. Mike Rodgers — ’74, too, I think, and Wendy Seehausen Rodgers (not sure what class). Jimmy O’Donnell, who blasted down from his creekside paradise near Mount Lassen in Shasta County; he’s an honorary graduate of the Class of ’74 because his family moved after his sophomore year and he was forced to complete school in the snowless suburban sprawl of Contra Costa County. His sister Laurie O’Donnell, who was in my class (’72) but who I never really talked to much until yesterday. Linda Stewart, who as a German teacher to many of the assembled was in all our classes; she came down from Truckee, the town just across Donner Pass on Interstate 80 in the Sierra. And then there was Kate, my wife, who grew up Crete-less (she’s from the northern Jersey shore, sort of) and me.
So eight in all. More would have been fun, and if we could teleport people I can name several friends (Randy, Ron, Mike, Dan–you listening?) I would have beamed in in a second. But yesterday eight was enough, to coin a phrase. Linda remarked that everyone talked to everyone else, the group kept forming into small groups, breaking up, and reassembling itself into twos and threes of engaged conversation. The food was good. The weather was beautiful. There were some funny memories, some warm recollections, some scary and sad stories about classmates and friends. Most of us ended up taking a walk through our neighborhood just after sunset, and that was the way I imagined the day ending.
I’ve never once gone to one of my class reunions. It’s been 10 or 12 years at least since I’ve been part of a high-school-centered gathering; the last one was at Linda’s when she lived in San Francisco. People are talking about it happening again next year. We’ll see what comes. Meantime I’ll work on my teleportation skills.
‘Please Help Me Find Him’: The Resolution
A couple of days ago, I wrote about seeing a particularly eye-catching missing persons poster in the Mission. It appeared to involve a promising young science student from San Diego. So: I did call the numbers on the poster. The home phone had an answering machine in Spanish — the only thing I understood was the family name, Trujillo.
The listed cellphone was answered in Spanish by a man. I asked whether he spoke English. “Yes — who’s this?” He asked. I explained I was calling from San Francisco and had seen the poster. He said, “I already found my son. Everything’s OK. He’s back home and back in school — everything’s OK.” I was tempted to press him for the circumstances that led to him posting the flyer. I did manage to ask whether anyone else had called with information after seeing the poster. But he was clearly a little uncomfortable–speaking English and talking to a stranger–and I let it go. Anyway, that’s the outcome. A happy one, I’d say, and I’m all for happy endings.
Bay Area Storm Numbers
The storm came, and now it has gone, mostly. It was advertised as the marriage of a Gulf of Alaska storm and some typhoon remnants. Watching the rain pour down here, and seeing the totals mount on the National Weather Service statistics pages, I believe the typhoon part. It was the heaviest mid-October rain for most locations since 1962, when the World Series–Giants and Yankees, at the still-new Candlestick Park–was washed out by rain.
Some of the more amazing 24-hour totals, midnight Monday to midnight Tuesday: Mount Umunhum in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 13.07 inches. Ben Lomond, Santa Cruz Mountains: 10.58 inches. Mining Ridge, a remote recording station at an elevation of 4760 feet in the Santa Lucia range above Big Sur: 20 inches even. The totals of 5-plus inches at lowland locales in the central Bay Area seem semi-arid by comparison–even though they represent anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of what those locations get in an average rain year.
It’s not easy to get apples/apples numbers just casually browsing the Weather Service sites. But the service did publish a record report for 24-hour rainfall (the standard here is from 5 p.m. to 5 p.m., I think).
| Location | New Record | Old Record |
| Kentfield | 6.14 | 4.20, set in 1957 |
| Oakland Museum | 3.86 | 0.37, set in 1988 |
| Richmond | 3.38 | 2.47, set in 1962 |
| San Francisco Airport | 2.64 | 2.62, set in 1962 |
| San Francisco Downtown | 2.49* | 1.80, set in 1962 |
| Santa Rosa | 2.74 (tied) | 2.74, set in 1962 |
| King City | 1.65 | 0.30, set in 2007 |
| Monterey Climate Station | 2.66* | 1.14, set in 1962 |
| Salinas | 1.05 | 0.39, set in 1992 |
| Santa Cruz | 3.16* | 2.49, set in 1957 |
*New unofficial record for 24-hour rainfall in October.
For several days before yesterday’s storm, the Weather Service office in Monterey was highlighting some of the highest October rainfall totals for stations in its forecast area. Here they are:
| Location | One-Day Record | Two-Day Record |
| Santa Rosa | 4.67 (10/12/1962) | 7.41 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Napa | 4.66 (10/13/1962) | 9.32 (10/12-13/1962) |
| San Francisco Downtown | 2.29 (10/15/1969) | 3.72 (10/12-13/1962) |
| San Francisco Airport | 2.62 (10/13/1962) | 4.56 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Oakland Airport | 4.53 (10/13/1962) | 5.85 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Livermore | 2.17 (10/13/1962) | 3.45 (10/13-14/1962) |
| San Jose | 3.22 (10/13/1962) | 4.56 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Santa Cruz | 3.15 (10/20/1899) | 3.35 (10/20-21/1899) |
| Monterey | 1.80 (10/26/1907) | 2.09 (10/26-27/1907) |
| Salinas | 1.50 (10/30/1982) | 1.50 (10/30-31/1982) |
| King City | 1.88 (10/29/1996) | 2.18 (10/29-30/1996) |
Source: National Weather Service, Monterey, California
Storm
That’s the National Weather Service radar map for the Bay Area right now. That area of yellow and orange is heavy rain, and its moving pretty much straight east from the Pacific.
‘Please Help Me Find Him’
I try to make the 15-minute walk to work from the 16th and Mission BART station a little different every day. Change the walking route, maybe, or leave the station from an alternate entrance every once in a while. Just to avoid falling into too blindly regular.
Here’s what disrupted the routine today. A handmade flyer for a missing person. It was the message that made me stop and take a second look: “Please help me find him.” I didn’t study the rest of it. Just took a picture and figured I’d post this later as a little memento of the walk to work.
Then I downloaded the picture and studied it. In the BART station, I thought I was looking at a picture of a man standing in a kitchen. But no: This is clearly a young man, a kid maybe, in a laboratory of some kind. I recognized the area code as being in Southern California, the San Diego area. I looked up the name on the posted, which seems to have been added in ballpoint pen as an after-thought, Edgar Trujillo.
I did find mention of an Edgar Trujillo from San Diego. This past summer, a San Diego paper mentioned him as one of 35 students from around North America chosen to participate in a summer biology program put on by American Fisheries Society. He was working for the summer at NOAA’s regional fisheries center and getting ready to go to UC-San Diego in the fall. Well, the science program would fit with the lab in the picture.
I’ll call the number on the poster tomorrow to find out what the story is. Or maybe I’ll have one of our reporters do it. In the meantime, there’s something a little troubling to me in the brevity and directness of that request: “Please help me find him.” Of course, you never know. Maybe there’s nothing darker about this than a girlfriend looking for the guy who ditched her or a bill collector tracking down a deadbeat. Here’s hoping, anyway.
John Prine, Singing Mailman and Bad Boy
By way of Kate, this note from The Writer’s Almanac: John Prine‘s birthday was Saturday (he turned 64). The almanac contains an anecdote I’d never heard before about how a well-known Chicago movie critic discovered him:
“[Prine] got a job working at the post office in his hometown, and he started playing in coffee shops, but no one paid any attention to him. Then one day, the film critic Roget Ebert went to see a movie that he didn’t like very much, so he walked out of the theater early and headed down the street to get a beer instead. He happened to go to the bar where Prine was playing as background music. And so instead of writing a movie review that week, Ebert wrote a review called “Singing Mailman Delivers the Message,” and suddenly John Prine had a full house every time he played.”
Which is a great story. In fact, here’s the transcript of a long and wonderful live interview Prine gave in which he recounts Ebert’s appearance. But as luck would have it, someone from a music rag called No Depression came along and checked some “facts” and came up with a tale that’s a little different than the one above:
“Movie critic Roger Ebert, who also did some music writing back then, was among the first to call attention to Prine after catching him in October 1970. Legend (with help from Prine) has rewritten the details a bit: Ebert didn’t walk out on a movie to get some popcorn and overhear people talking about this guy from Maywood singing and so headed over to the Fifth Peg. He had heard about Prine — and, he conjectured recently, probably had seen him — before. And the headline over Ebert’s column in the Sun-Times wasn’t the Variety-worthy ‘Singing Mailman Delivers the Message,’ but rather the awkward ‘Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words.’
” ‘He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight,’ wrote Ebert. ‘He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.’ ”
I was hoping to find the original Sun-Times article online, but this is as close as I got. The writing reminds me a lot of Mike Royko’s. Anyway, happy birthday, John Prine, from Berkeley. And in honor of the occasion, here’s the lyrics from “Bad Boy.” It contains one of my all-time favorite lines: “I never thought that now would ever catch up with then.”
I been a bad boy
I been long gone
I been out there
I never phone home
I never gave you not one little clue where I’d been
I’ve been a bad boy again.
I got a way of
Fallin’ in love
With angels that don’t shove
You into thinkin’ that you are committing a sin
I’ve been a bad boy again.
I’ve been a bad boy again
Now I’ve been a bad boy again
And all the trouble that I’m in
Makes me a bad boy again
I’ve been a bad boy again
Now I’ve been a bad boy again
And all the trouble that I’m in
Makes me a bad boy again
I must have walked ’round
In a real fog
I was your best friend
Now I’m a real dog
I never thought that now
Would ever catch up with then
I’ve been a bad boy again.
I’ve been a bad boy
I sung a wrong song
I took a left turn
I stayed too long
As you were thinkin’ that I wasn’t
Just like all other men
I’ve been a bad boy again.
I’ve been a bad boy again
Now I’ve been a bad boy again
And all the trouble that I’m in
Makes me a bad boy again
I’ve been a bad boy again
Now I’ve been a bad boy again
And all the trouble that I’m in
Makes me a bad boy again
That’s copyright John Prine. Used without permission, but in an honest, non-commercial spirit.
Ten Ten
I could spin a yarn about October 10, 1979. Eamon–the guy on the left here–has heard all about it and probably has more interest in the story than just about anyone, since it concerns his arrival in the world. Today was his 30th birthday, and he and his wife, Sakura, and our other son, Thom (the lad on the right) spent the day here. No reminiscing, really–we just hung out together and enjoyed the spread Kate put together for lunch. Then Thom went off to see Bob Dylan at the Greek Theatre and the rest of us went over to San Francisco to eat some more. It was a pretty special day for the parents. Happy birthday, Eamon!
Your Autumn Forecast
We bump along from summer, into late summer, into fall.
We hear the usual complaints about June, and July, and August: too cold! too cloudy! When’s it going to be summer?
Then we have a nice run of clear, warm, dry days. Clear evenings. Brilliant twilights, some crowded with unusual shoals of clouds. It’s never been more beautiful, ever.
Just for a change, it rains in September, and everyone thinks about when’s the last time that happened.
The days get shorter, and then overnight summer’s not lingering any more. It’s dark early at night, late in the morning. And cool suddenly–the heat’s going to kick on any day now.
October. One thought holds off the chill: We’re due for one more good run of hot, dry days, maybe windy ones, that will remind you of fire in the hills.
Those days might be a week or two away or could appear right on the edge of November. Just wait.
And while you look for signs the wind’s about to shift and start coming down warm from the ridges, something else happens. Someone breaks into that slow turn of autumn. Someone breaks the mood as only an official government forecaster can:
...WET AND WINDY WEATHER EXPECTED MONDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY... THE WEATHER PATTERN IS EXPECTED TO CHANGE ON MONDAY AS A POTENT STORM SYSTEM MOVES TO THE WEST COAST. THIS STORM SYSTEM IS THE REMNANT OF FORMER WESTERN PACIFIC TYPHOON MELOR. RAIN AND INCREASING WIND WILL BEGIN IN THE NORTH BAY MONDAY AFTERNOON...SPREADING SOUTH MONDAY NIGHT. TUESDAY AND TUESDAY NIGHT SHOULD SEE THE HEAVIEST RAINFALL AND THE STRONGEST WINDS. RAINFALL AMOUNTS COULD REACH 1 TO 3 INCHES ALONG THE COAST AND IN THE VALLEYS...WITH LOCAL AMOUNTS POSSIBLY REACHING 5 INCHES. IN THE HILLS...RAINFALL AMOUNTS WILL RANGE FROM 3 TO 6 INCHES...WITH LOCAL AMOUNTS UP TO 8 INCHES. AS OF NOW...THE HEAVIEST RAIN LOOKS TO BE IN THE SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS. WINDS TUESDAY AND TUESDAY NIGHT WILL INCREASE TO 20 TO 40 MPH ALONG THE COAST AND IN THE HILLS. GUSTS TO 60 MPH ARE POSSIBLE IN THOSE AREAS.
Rain? Wind? You could swear someone said "typhoon."