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Warren Estate Sales is now open at 2436 Fillmore Street.
By CHRIS BARNETT
The space long occupied by Repeat Performance — the San Francisco Symphony resale shop at 2436 Fillmore — has sprung back to life as Warren Estate Sales, with novel pop-up offerings twice monthly in the back of the shop designed to keep the merchandise moving.
“It’s simply the best resale shop I have encountered,” says one nearby neighbor. “Lots of items and great variety — and the business plan is such that it will move items, so they will be renewing their inventory often.”
Owned and managed by Bangkok-born Bay Area consignment veteran May Warren, virtually every inch of the spacious 1,800-square-foot store is packed with antiques and unusual vintage furnishings, accessories, jewelry, paintings and clothing sourced mostly from nearby upmarket homes and apartments.
Warren, who sits behind a handsome desk just inside the front door, has added a new twist to her latest venture: regular pop-up estate sales. Every two weeks a store within a store pops up in the back filled with treasures that drop in price over a four day span. For the first two days, the price of an item is set. On the third day, it’s cut 30 percent. On the fourth day, it’s half-off the original price tag.
Photographs of Warren Estate Sales by Fran Moreland Johns
For decades, Fillmore Street was known for its many thrift shops. In addition to the symphony shop, the Junior League, hospital auxiliary and nearby schools had resale shops on Fillmore benefitting their programs.
“We get a lot of old world estate items from high-rise condos and apartments in the Bay Area,” Warren says, “and the pieces are constantly moving.” Warren is no solo act. She heads a small team of savvy staffers who scurry around the space wheeling and dealing.
Describing the inventory in the store front and back is practically impossible. Warren has created a “Chinese Room” out of a small niche and stocked it with items dating back to the 19th century. Dishes, glassware, large Asian screens, chairs and chandeliers are everywhere.
Warren says she resists latching onto cherished items for herself. “I can’t love everything in here,” she says. “Otherwise I’ll go broke.”
Kenji Yick with the Sweet Stop’s famous Coffee Crunch Cake. Photo: Frank Wing
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
When the nominations for this year’s James Beard Awards were announced in late January, there was a local surprise. Among the semifinalists for Outstanding Bakery: Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop, a small shop in the corner of a Japantown grocery store most noted for keeping alive one of the city’s most beloved creations, the Coffee Crunch Cake.
The results will be in soon: Finalists will be announced on March 29, and winners unveiled at a ceremony in Chicago on June 5.
For chef-owner Kenji Yick, being shortlisted for the Beard award — the Oscars of the food world — came as surprising, and heartwarming, post-pandemic news.
Yick, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, is the grandson of Sweet Stop founders Moses and Hatsy Yasukochi, who married in 1964 and opened the Sweet Stop 10 years later. Moses learned to bake the Coffee Crunch Cake, made famous at Blum’s on Union Square, from an employee who’d worked there.
Yick grew up “in and out of the bakery” while visiting his grandparents. By the time he decided to pursue a career in the food world and finished his culinary training, his grandfather was having to withdraw from the long hours of baking. So Yick went to work helping his grandmother.
Hatsuye (Hatsy) Yasukochi, was known as the “smile of the bakery” and considered by many the beating heart of Japantown. There were few in the community she didn’t know and love, and the sentiment was mutual. She died in 2020, an early victim of Covid, after a bout with cancer. When Moses lost his wife, he moved to an assisted living community in San Mateo near his children and grandchildren.
Many feared the bakery might not survive. But the Yasukochis’ grandson vowed to keep it going, and he has — and now the family legacy he carries on has been singled out for national recognition.
“We shut down for three months early in the pandemic,” he says, “and reopened for four days a week rather than five.” His grandmother’s absence in the bakery and the neighborhood is still widely felt. “The hardest part is that there now are just the two of us”: Yick and longtime front corner employee Debbie Ishida. “How long have you been here, Debbie?” he asks. “I don’t remember,” she responds. “A very long time.”
Kenji Yick and Debbie Ishida now run the Sweet Stop. Photo: Fran Johns
The Sweet Stop is still humming along, much as it has since Yick’s grandparents founded it nearly 50 years ago. He says the pandemic made clear the faithfulness of the shop’s core customers, who never abandoned their taste for cakes, pies and pastries from the Sweet Stop. But now the cakes — including the famous Coffee Crunch Cake — are only baked to order. “And we had to discontinue the Danish,” Yick says, “largely because we were designating it to Kimochi, and they had to discontinue their free meals. But we hope to bring it back.”
Tucked away inside the Super Mira Market on the corner of Sutter and Buchanan, Yasuchoci’s Sweet Stop is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. But you might want to order ahead, especially if you want a Coffee Crunch Cake.
Joan Brown | The Night Before the Alcatraz Swim (1975)
ART | JEROME TARSHIS
“JOAN BROWN,” a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the colorful life and work of a deeply imaginative painter and independent spirit who got her start on Fillmore Street and went on to international acclaim. The expansive presentation of Brown’s work features 80 paintings and sculptures spanning the career of one of San Francisco’s most important artists.
Joan Brown’s involvement with the art scene along Fillmore Street began with exhibitions, while she was still an art student, first at the Six Gallery, at 3119 Fillmore, then at the Spatsa Gallery, on Filbert Street near Fillmore.
In 1958, Brown and her husband Bill Brown moved into the apartment building at 2322 Fillmore, where their next-door neighbors were the painters Wally Hedrick and Jay DeFeo. Famous as some of them are today, San Francisco artists of the 1950s had little hope of being exhibited by major galleries or museums. Bruce Conner once said that the art of that time was not made to last because nobody needed it to last. Brown herself has said, “It was important for that day, for that week, or for that moment.”
The seeming lack of any path to success encouraged a deliberate hostility to the art market and its institutions. Life at 2322 Fillmore was characterized by heavy drinking, resourceful parties and the view that making artwork was something like a meditative exercise, to be enjoyed in the present with little thought for the future.
Joan Brown had come a long way from her Catholic high school days. After a time, however, the hard partying became oppressive; quiet and privacy began to look good. In 1959, she separated from Bill Brown and moved to North Beach to live with the artist Manuel Neri, who became her second husband.
Dino Stavrakikis and his son Santino: “It’s time to go.”
By CHRIS BARNETT
After a 34-year run of flipping pizzas, uncorking wine and telling stories on the northwest corner of Fillmore and California, Dino Stavrakikis is selling the longtime pizza palace known for decades as Dino’s — now renamed after his son as Santino’s Wine Bar — to the owner of Ace Wasabi Sushi in the Marina.
The ownership changes hands today [Sept. 20]. New owner Ken Lowe has announced no decision on changing the popular storefront and is likely for now to keep the wine and pizza format and the longtime employees.
“When it’s time to go, it’s time,” says the affable Dino — it seems impossible to call him anything else — on why he is pulling the ripcord. “When I bought the place, Reagan was president. We’ve been though a couple of wars, viruses, a pandemic and many mayors. Fillmore — the street and the neighborhood — has changed, and not for the better.”
Dino’s corner housed a drug store before it became a pizzeria in the 1970s, initially owned by his Uncle Vito. Dino apprenticed in another pie shop at Polk and Broadway straight out of high school. “I knew I was an entrepreneur and I wanted to own my own place,” he recalls.
At 21, he moved a few doors away to Lord Jim’s — “the greatest fern bar ever” — and worked his way up to lead bartender. Dino was behind the plank the infamous night a squad of San Francisco cops raided the saloon on a tip it was dealing cocaine out of the back. It was a bad bust. The bar was packed with lawyers that night who were enjoying their after-work cocktails. They howled. Owner Spiro Tampourantzis, like Dino a Greek, sued the city with the help of Fillmore Street criminal defense attorney Eric Safire and prevailed.
In 1988, Uncle Vito — actually a distant cousin of Dino’s — ran out of dough, and Dino bought the pizzeria out of bankruptcy for $90,000. “I moved into an apartment upstairs,” he says, “changed the name to Dino’s and worked 15 hours a day to get the place back on its feet. Fortunately, I had the gift of gab. All the best Italian pizza parlors are owned by Greeks.” Actually, Stavrakikis is half Greek, half Italian.
From the start, Dino says he loved his landlord and still does, a sentiment rarely heard from retail tenants. “We’ve had the same one from the beginning— Russ Flynn from Meridian Co.,” he says. “They’ve really been super and kind, working with me all the way through Covid.”
Dino’s fledgling pizza shop was thrust into the spotlight in June 1990 when Mikhail Gorbachev, then the charismatic president of the Soviet Union, made a 22-hour swing through San Francisco. Their motorcade was headed back to the Soviet consul’s residence at 2820 Broadway when a couple of dozen wellwishers on the corner of Fillmore and California caught the Soviet president’s eye. The procession stopped and Gorbachev leaped out of his Russian-made Zil limo and started shaking hands.
A stunned Dino said at the time that Gorbachev “was the most famous man I have ever met,” and he had met 49er great Ronnie Lott and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Since then, he met the late Secretary of State Madeline Albright, quarterback Joe Montana, actress Sharon Stone and others who dined on pizza and other dishes in his shop, many created by Dino’s late mom, Koula.
A lifelong bachelor who loves kids, Dino didn’t let his singlehood stop him from becoming a father. In 2011, he arranged with a surrogate what he considers his greatest triumph: a son he named Santino. Practically from birth, Santino became a household name in the Fillmore. The proud papa renamed his shop Dino and Santino’s. “He’s the love of my life,” beams dad.
After three remodels and a transformation into Santino’s Wine Bar, Dino decided he was ready to throttle back. He moved to Walnut Creek to be near his parents and to get Santino in a better school. He gave more operating responsibilities to his longtime lieutenants, Jesus and brother Emilio Ceidillos — both with Dino for 33 years — and Tony Santos, with him for 25 years. Dino continued his annual summer treks to Greece to visit his family, including former boss Spiro Tampourantzis, and soak up the sunshine and culture.
But he found himself wanting to spend more time with his son. So recently, he and Lowe, who Dino’s known for 30 years, huddled over glasses of wine and penciled out a deal. “I couldn’t have picked a better guy,” Dino says. “He’s bringing in an Italian chef, has his own ideas about making some changes.” Dino is tightlipped on this point, and Lowe has made no public announcements.
What’s next for Dino? “I have a gym at my house and I want to get in good shape,” he says. “I love to work. Unfortunately, I don’t have any hobbies. I just love the action. We’ll see what presents itself. But I’m going to miss my loyal customers.”
The Grove on Fillmore has been closed for more than two years.
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT
Slammed shut and lifeless for well over two years, the large space housing the once popular Grove cafe and hangout at 2016 Fillmore is stirring again, but the new venture’s backers stubbornly refuse to disclose anything about it. “I can’t say, I can’t say, I can’t say,” insisted a bearded guy in a hoodie, who appeared to be a general contractor and claimed he is not the owner. Nor would he name the person in charge. Boom, the door slammed shut again. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The team behind the Snug will open Little Shucker next year at 2016 Fillmore, the former Grove space, three blocks away from the Snug, the Chronicle reports. Adrian Garcia, who previously cooked at San Francisco Michelin-starred restaurants Benu and Quince, is in charge of the menu.
A couple of blocks north on the corner of Fillmore and Clay, Sam Fechheimer, a seasoned chef, is the new owner of Palmer’s, replacing Albert Ranier, who launched it in 2014. Sam was his opening chef, so he knows the bones of the building and its culinary history. He’s added a new brunch menu and is streamlining the daily menu with new dishes, including a serious Caesar salad, which replaces the faux Caesar made with kale. “We’re also reinvigorating our cocktail scene,” he says.
Meantime, the heart of the Post Pandemic Fillmore is coming back to life, with more action and somewhat fewer “for lease” signs on empty storefronts.
The new Lululemon store at 2040 Fillmore Street replaces Ralph Lauren.
The biggest retail addition to the boulevard is the uber-hot Lululemon store at 2040 Fillmore, which took over the space vacated by Ralph Lauren. Lululemon, with its catchy name and logo, has created an eye-catching “pilot” store on Fillmore that houses a massive collection of women and men’s workout and sportswear. Vancouver-based with stores worldwide, Fillmore is SF’s fourth Lululemon. What makes it different? “We weave silver into all our fabrics and since bacteria doesn’t cling to silver, our clothes never smell,” says a candid Rebecca Jackson, assistant manager. Lululemon will also buy back its old clothes for store credit and recycle them.
Across the street, at 2033 Fillmore, a new lingerie store called Third Love has moved in. Caroline, a sales rep, claims it’s the first such shop to create half sizes in bras such as an A½, B½, C½ all the way up to H½ cup sizes. “We’re new to the industry and we design for all body types,” she says.
Naadam, at 2029 Fillmore — named after a Mongolian holiday — sells lounge and casual wear for women mostly made out of 100 percent cashmere sourced from sheep herders in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. “We have no middlemen,” says Meghan, a store sales rep. Popular are the cashmere hoodies and sweaters. Prices range from $100 to $300.
The August Gallery has moved into 2053 Fillmore where a clothing and CBD company had a long off-and-on run. It’s not an art gallery per se, but has a collection of items aimed at “making the home more beautiful,” says Cameron, the gallery coordinator for owners Lotta Coffey, an interior designer, and her husband Geoffrey, a landscape designer who also has an office in the space. Items? Plants, ceramics, accessories and furniture by local artists.
Coming this fall to 2028 Fillmore: Sézane is bringing Paris to SF.
FOOD NOTES FROM OLD FAVORITES: John Castanon, the suave longtime manager of Florio, retired and went home to Texas in February. But he’s already been recalled for a six-week summer stint. • The former Elite Cafe, now The Tailor’s Son, has fresh additions to its cocktail list plus a 5 to 6:30 p.m. weekday happy hour — but only for patrons sitting at the bar. • A couple of doors away at 2043 Fillmore, at low-priced Apizza, store manager Pierre Luaga from Paris has added new pizzas, including pork carnitas and cacio e pepe — plus $7 wines and beer at $5 per can. • On the corner of California and Fillmore, the always affable TacoBar manager Antonio Solano has improved its online ordering and added new menu items and a parking zone for pickup and go. • On the corner of Fillmore and Pine, Noosh owner John Litz has added two popular cocktails to his repertoire of California-inspired Mediterranean cuisine. His personable general manager and operations director, Diana Ornelas, is also a talented mixologist. She created the Rosé and Rose Sangria.
Just in time for the dog days of summer: a giant gelato over the sidewalk at the Philmore Creamery at 1840 Fillmore.
Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose” being removed from the Painterland apartments in 1965.
By GARY KAMIYA San Francisco Chronicle
The most famous event in the history of avant-garde literary San Francisco was Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street on Oct. 7, 1955. That frenzied reading, the subsequent publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books of “Howl and Other Poems,” and the arrests and obscenity trial that followed launched Ginsberg’s career, put City Lights on the map and made the Beat movement nationally famous.
The site of the Six Gallery is one of San Francisco’s literary shrines. But few people realize that an unremarkable-appearing apartment building just eight blocks up the hill at 2322 Fillmore Street was the quasi-communal home of many of the city’s cutting-edge artists and writers from around 1950 to 1965.
The Painterland era came to an end on Nov. 9, 1965, when Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose” was removed by forklift from the building and shipped to the Pasadena Art Museum. One cutting-edge artistic circle faded away, but another one sprang up at almost exactly the same time and place. A few young people were living in an apartment on 2111 Pine Street, just a few blocks away from Painterland. They called themselves the Family Dog.
Part-time neighborhood resident Pepo Pichler and one of his plastic sculptures.
ART | JEROME TARSHIS
In this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s preeminent art fair, a kind of 21st century surrealism is said to be the dominant artistic tendency. One of the most admired exhibitions of our time is “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” now packing them in at Tate Modern in London after months as a smash hit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The point of the show is that surrealism happened in places very far from its first home in Paris and much more recently than the years between the wars.
Although I hesitate to say that everything new begins in San Francisco and then spreads to the larger world, here I consider myself to be on firmer ground. Fifty years ago, not far from Fillmore Street, there was a gallery that anticipated much of what now seems to be the present moment in Venice and elsewhere.
The Upper Market Street Gallery, which began its existence at 2229 Market Street, would later find a new home and a new name on Bush Street near Divisadero. It was founded in 1971 by an interior designer recently arrived from New York, Ron Jehu, together with some artist friends. Although much of the art and many of the artists can be thought of as decidedly marginal in one way or another, Jehu himself had a blue-chip practice.
Among the jobs he did were decorating the presidential suite of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and sourcing furniture for the White House. The Upper Market Street Gallery, on the other hand, was a scene of the greatest informality. Jehu’s Weimaraner, Casey, tended to leap at me in the most frenzied way, and the artists and assorted visitors to the gallery were themselves a fairly spontaneous lot. The gallery showed far more women artists than was usual at the time and was an epicenter of gender strangeness. It was the kind of place where members of the Cockettes, an acid-drag musical group by now legendary but then an everyday presence in San Francisco, would fit right in. The latter-day surrealism aspect was also there.
In the case of Steven Arnold, one of Jehu’s artists, the connection was more direct. By sheer chance Arnold, a morally serious man who was at the same time a gifted if ambivalent self-promoter, came to the attention of Salvador Dali, one of the European surrealists of the 1930s and himself no shrinking violet when it came to getting publicity. After they met at a film showing at the Whitney Museum in New York, Dali took Arnold up as a protege and in 1974 invited him to Spain to help design the private museum that was to become Dali’s monument in his native Catalonia.
After its beginnings on Market Street, the gallery moved South of Market and then, renamed the Ron Jehu Gallery, later the Jehu-Wong Gallery, settled into Jehu’s longtime office space at 2719 Bush Street, between Divisadero and Baker. Jehu closed the gallery in the 1980s and died in 2007. His former business partner Wylie Wong, still alive and healthy, has become a private dealer in Asian art.
Today my connection with Ron Jehu’s galleries is for the most part a matter of pleasant memories. But one of his artists, Pepo Pichler, an Austrian who moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, continues to be a part-time resident of the neighborhood. He became and remains a friend whose art I still enjoy.
A recent series of sculptures, made of recycled plastic, addresses one of the most vexing problems of our time: Plastic will last pretty much forever. Pichler’s plastic sculpture is a solution that doesn’t promise to save the oceans, but it does make an ironic point: Plastic would be merely one more difficulty of our troubled times if we thought of it as waste. If we think of it as art, its durability is a plus rather than a minus.
Since 1992 Pichler has divided his time between San Francisco and the part of Austria where he grew up. For much of the year he and his wife, Anita Mardikian, live in Schloss Schmelzhofen, a renovated castle of 70-odd rooms, with outbuildings that include Pichler’s studio.
During the colder months they live in an apartment on Divisadero, picking up the threads of what used to be a year-round life. The neighborhood has changed since the early 1970s, but residents like Pepo Pichler can remind us of a time when it attracted some of America’s most innovative artists and galleries.
IT TOOK A FEW YEARS for David Johnson’s photographs of Fillmore Street during its jazz heyday as the Harlem of the West to be appreciated. Quite a few.
But it happened half a century later with the premiere of the highly acclaimed public television documentary in 1999, called simply “The Fillmore,” and the book that followed. And it’s continuing still, with an exhibition of 65 photographs from Johnson’s vast archive — now in the collection of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley — at San Francisco’s majestic City Hall.
A reception on May 25 from 5 to 7 p.m. launches “David Johnson: In the Zone (1945-1965).” The photographer, now 95, will be on the scene, as he has been for most of the last century. The exhibition continues through January 6, 2023.
Fran Moreland Johns and her new book of stories at Books Inc. in Laurel Village.
FIRST PERSON | FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
It started as a casual conversation in our old Sacramento Street kitchen.
“I can’t write stories!” I remember saying. “Real writers write stories!” This was about 30 years ago, early in my marriage to the Great Encourager. “Sure you can,” he said. “You’ve got stories that deserve to be written.”
I had written news articles, features and columns for magazines and newspapers, including the New Fillmore, plus political speeches, annual reports and a few easily forgettable books written on commission long ago because I needed the money — almost anything nonfiction you can name, but never stories.
With a lot of encouragement, I set about writing the first purely made-up story of my grown-up life. It was about a local character in a small town in Virginia in the early 1940s. “Eddie Rakeleaves” did pretty well for itself, winning an award from a respected literary journal. And it provided more encouragement to tackle a longtime dream — whereupon I entered the University of San Francisco, a short uphill walk but a few long decades since my B.A. in art from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. The MFA Class of 2000 comprised a wide variety of people with day jobs, from young men and women just out of college to a few Vietnam vets and one senior. My fellow students never tired of kidding me about the absence of profanity in my stories — a problem the Vietnam vets did not have. But being the grandmother of the class was as delightful as the assignments were challenging.
My husband Bud,the Great Encourager, took over all the cooking, looked after home and hearth, paid the bills, fielded calls and invitations while juggling his own commitments, and took other women to concerts and gallery openings. More than a few people would look sideways at me when I reappeared after graduation with Bud at Peet’s or a gallery show, having figured I was somewhere in his past. But two years later I picked up an MFA in short fiction. I was writing stories! Soon those stories went into a dusty file drawer to languish while life intervened. I went back to nonfiction — and on to books, activism, nonprofits, talks, marches and letters to editors. Early on I occasionally pulled out a story to fire off somewhere, so a few were published in print or online magazines. But the drawer got dustier and dustier.
Then new encouragers appeared. An irreplaceable friend found an editor who knew how to drag my stories out of their dusty drawer and into the 21st century. Eventually I called her – and immediately hired her. Within a year, and with a lot of help and encouragement from people smarter than I, Marshallville Stories was born.
The time, place and goings-on are not unlike many other towns in those years. You’re invited to pick up a copy at Books Inc. at Laurel Village or Browser Books on Fillmore and take a trip back to a yesteryear seen through fond remembrance.
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION
Marshallville, Virginia, does not physically exist. But in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, towns just like it were home to more of the nation’s citizens than were all of the bustling cities and self-important state capitols combined.
In the Marshallvilles of those days, everybody knew everybody else, including the inhabitants of outlying farms and crossroads villages, to varying degrees of intimacy and embarrassment. Main Street was generally known also as Railroad Avenue, since the railroad traditionally ran through the middle of town. A college, mill or outlying industry often further anchored the socio-economic scene; drugstores, groceries, barber shops and the like bore a family name, and were passed along from one generation to the next.
Marshallville functioned partly as town but mostly as extended family, and life within the family moved with languorous ease. The time and place embodied a combination of uniquely American experiences: the patriotic commitment of the war years, the ebullient spirit of the immediate post-war years, the basic goodness that was seen in and expected of even the sorriest of souls, and the early stirrings of change that would simmer for another decade before erupting into the 1960s.
These stories are a fond look back. I believe that though long in the past, they still have messages for the future.
“I never intended to write a book,” Ronald Hobbs said as we basked in the warm February sun in Santino’s Vino’s parklet at Fillmore and California. “Who does that these days?”
“Well, you did,” I nudged, tapping my copy of his new book, Nearing a Place Called Home. “A pretty good one, too. How did this accident happen?”
“My editor and I — Isaiah Dufour, a very talented young man, from the Mission, a playwright.”
Conversations tend to snake around with Ron.
“We were sitting on my back porch, enjoying something red from Napa, and he knew about the little stories I’d been writing. He sort of talked me into it.”
Ronald Hobbs has been living in the Fillmore since before it was new. He arrived here in September 1970 and stayed, with many an absence, abscondage and return.
He spent some early days working in the back rooms of the legendary Minnie’s Can-Do Club, and also read poetry from time to time in the front. He worked at nearby Connie’s West Indian restaurant, too, and remembers Rev. Jim Jones handing Connie a big check after taking over her place one night. For a long time, he was a partner in Spectrum Imports, a shop near Fillmore and Pine that specialized in exotic birds. He’s always been thought of as the poet of our part of Fillmore, and he brings his poet’s eye and ear to this book of prose.
Photograph of Ronald Hobbs by Lucy Gray
“The stories seem autobiographical,” I suggested, as he sipped at his beer.
“Well, they are,” he replied, “but they’re stories. You know.”
Nearing a Place Called Home is a collection of stories, most very short (the longest one is 11 pages). They take you from the Louisiana bayou to Mexico, Japan and San Francisco. They feel autobiographical because Ron writes so well, and every event feels truly witnessed.
We talked about some of the stories in the book, as he asked which ones I liked. I mentioned “When Russell Tracy Sang Butler Yeats” because I knew he was drawn to the musical settings of that poem. The story tells me why. His eyes lit up as he remembered the astonishing voice he’d heard as a young boy when another boy sang Yeats’s words. “It was like being in church, but better,” Ron said. “And it was Ireland, and I’d never heard Ireland before.”
Most of the brief pieces offer a quick epiphany, but they paint distinct pictures. The endings always seem to leave just a little more mystery for a reader to savor or solve. The era in which many of the stories take place is long enough ago that it feels like another country, but still recognizable.
I started to suggest he had a nostalgia for lost times, then caught myself. It’s not nostalgia, but affection, and the affection is for the people, the characters.
He agreed with that description. In the pages of the book, you meet many memorable people, most living at the edges of society and the borderlines of the law. He claims the names have been changed and the incidents rearranged into fiction, but acknowledges that some version of these people did exist.
These stories feel autobiographical because Ronald Hobbs writes so well, and every event feels truly witnessed. He brings his poet’s eye and ear to this book of prose.
Ron’s personal favorite is the one called “Suzonka.” “She was a real person,” he told me, “the wife a friend. She was a beautiful woman, almost to the point of gaudiness.” He paused, remembering. “But there’s always a Suzonka somewhere. Right now, there’s probably a young man sitting in a club in North Beach watching her dance.”
We talked about the neighborhood, which we’ve both called home for decades, dropping some names of those no longer with us. I was happy to see that he’d included a local bass player in a scene in one of the stories, just in passing. Only longtime Fillmore residents would catch it. “Well, you write about what you’ve seen, don’t you?” Ron proposed.
His first love is poetry, and it’s also mine. We both share a vocation for the play of words. His must-have, desert-island anthology is Modern Poetry, edited by Oscar Williams — the 1947 edition. I have the later expanded version. The great sadness in his life is that he feels he’s failed at what he loves.
“Every day I get up and I try to write poetry, but what comes out is crap,” he says. That’s his opinion. All writers dance their own dance with the muse, but I’ve always liked Ron’s poems. If you can find a copy of Songs for Fillmore Street or Beadstringer, you should snap it up and pass it around.
Cheers were coming from the Super Bowl crowds inside Santino’s and the other bars along Fillmore Street. I slid my copy of Nearing a Place Called Home across the table for his autograph. The sun was going down at the end of California Street. I helped Ron up and walked him slowly across the street to the place he now calls home.
Mark J. Mitchell is a local poet and novelist. His newest book, Something to Be, is due out shortly from Pski’s Porch Publishing.
THIS LAVISH oversized limited edition book brings together a collection of favorite photographs and stories from the pages of the New Fillmore. It tells the story of an ever-changing small town in the big city with a rich history and a strong sense of community.
Available exclusively at Browser Books on Fillmore, or order online.
THIS DOCUMENTARY — filmed entirely on Fillmore Street — tells the story of longtime Fillmore resident Kelly Johnson, who used a new California law to end his life on his own terms.
