Boxtop With Cliff House Watercolor (c. 1880s)

Last night I spoke by telephone to my old high school friend, Neil MacPhail, who lives in San Francisco.  It was one of those “covers-the-waterfront catch-up” kinds of calls and, among other things, he mentioned that the Cliff House Restaurant was closing; he’d seen it in the morning Chronicle.  The last time Neil and I saw one another was when we met there for lunch three years ago.  “You and Nyel were on your way to Santa Cruz to see Sandy…”

The Cliff House and I go back a long, long way.  Not quite to its beginnings in 1863 when “the First Cliff House” was built, but certainly as far back as 1896 when the first renovation occurred.  My grandmother wrote of dining there before her 1897 marriage to my grandfather.  Apparently, the two families had gone for a celebratory meal and she told of a conversation she’d had there with her soon-to-be brother-in-law, Ed.  A “city girl,” she was anticipating her honeymoon trip to Washington.  She wrote years later:

My Grandmother Helen Richardson (Espy), 1896

I didn’t know what to expect of Oysterville.  Ed had kept talking about “the ranch” but when I asked him if he lived in the country he said, “Oh no, our house is right in the center of town.”

But, on her arrival, “I saw people pumping water out in their front yards and taking it into the house in buckets.  But the Espys were more civilized.  Their pump was on the back porch.  Even so, Mother Espy was using whale ribs as chicken perches…” 

Among my treasures is a very battered little wooden box in which my grandmother kept her childhood treasures  — paper dolls and little books that she and her friend Mary Wallace had made beginning in 1887 when they were eleven.  On the cover of the box is a delicately painted watercolor of the Cliff House.  I wonder when she got it and what it originally contained.

Cliff House, 1950s (Was I working that day?)

Years later, during the summers of 1953 and 1954, I worked at the Cliff House Gift Shop earning money for college.  I mostly remember selling teacups and saucers which seemed to be all the rage as collectibles.  But I also remember that, on occasion, one of my high school friends — perhaps on a day off from their own summer job — would come over and meet me for lunch.  Corn dogs, I think, purchased from a stand just down the hill from the Cliff House’s front door.  Perhaps one of those friends was Neil…

Neil and I reminisced and lamented the iconic restaurant’s closing.  “Perhaps someone will come to its rescue,” we said.  We can but hope.