The Brownsmead Flats

“Flashback: Remembering the 60s, Part 2” tomorrow evening at the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum with a “Coffeehouse Concert” featuring the music of the Brownsmead Flats.  There will also be a few minutes to peek at the expanded 60s exhibit which now includes a couple of our neighbor Tucker Wachsmuth’s pinball machines.   Woot! Woot!  It’s not clear yet if Nyel and I will be there but I have my fingers crossed.  I am eager to celebrate the sixties – even though I’m a decade or two off, memory-wise.

The pinball games I remember were often going on at the Pool Hall in San Rafael during the 1950s.  Not that I was a participant.  Heavens no!  Until my friends and I were old enough to drive and could finagle a way to borrow the family car, we walked to high school.  For me, it was a mile or two down Fourth Street, right through a rather questionable part of town – past the Greyhound Bus Depot on one side of the street and the Pool Hall on the other.

Tucker wih His Pinball Machines

There were a lot of sleazy characters hanging out around both buildings, but we walked on the Pool Hall side – mostly so we could glance in and see which of our classmates (the guys with DA haircuts and cigarette packs tucked into their rolled-up tee shirt sleeves) were catching a few games before classes began.  Mostly they played pool but, occasionally we’d see them at the pinball machines, always looking a bit frantic or desperate it seemed to me.  Money was scarce in those years (1953-1957) and ‘wasting’ a quarter on pinball or pool seemed the height of decadence, at least to me.

Coffee Houses were big in the fifties, too, but mostly in North Beach in San Francisco – way off limits to ‘nice girls’ in Marin County, clear across the Golden Gate.  It wasn’t until the seventies that I had a hands-on Coffee House experience.  I was teaching in Hayward and a group of parents wanted to bring folksinger Stan Wilson to Hayward, especially for the teenagers of the area.  Since Stan was a friend of mine, I was the one who was asked to convince him to donate an evening.  It wasn’t a problem – Stan was all about kids and music and readily agreed to make the trip from Berkeley for the evening.

Charlie’s Coffee House Poster c. 1970

The organizers rented ‘a hall’ – an abandoned restaurant in the old Green Shutter Hotel in Hayward (also sorta sleazy as I recall) – and we had a decorating session with a bunch of local high school kids.  I took Charlie along (I think he was a freshman) and he set about making a huge poster (that I still have) full of pop comic book characters.  I remember being blown away that he didn’t us a single reference – all drawn by memory with felt-tipped markers in an hour or two.  It was my first real inkling of the extent of his art abilities.

I find it interesting to think about how we dignify ideas and experiences as time passes.  Things that might have been just a little edgy (perhaps not quite in a good way) when they began and then became popular, but take on a patina of gentrification as we look back on them.  Or maybe I’ve always been half a bubble off.  In any case, I can’t wait to see what other memories Friday night’s experience at CPHM will trigger.