Getting out of Placerville has got to be every graduating high school senior’s goal. Very few, any more, stick around for more than a possible two years of junior college. I started out going to junior college myself, but not in Placerville. However, I traded one small town for another and one family household for another. I applied for several four year programs, but the scholarship offer to attend Hartnell College in Salinas was too ideal. This was a theatre conservatory program called Western Stage and it had a more ambitious and grander program than your average state college was offering in those days of the late 1980s. In a year and a half I worked on more productions than the rest of my five year total undergraduate life. My tuition, books, lunch money, gas and a few dollars for other little things that an eighteen year old college freshman might need were all paid for. My grandparents and an aunt and uncle lived in Salinas, a kind of second home to me as we spent every Christmas there (still do) as well as many summer visits, so I stayed with Aunt Carol and Uncle Walter. That first college program expanded my sense of the world in many ways, but living in Salinas itself did not. I had done little more than trade one small town Main Street for another and with relatives watching over me too.
Where Placerville trades on its Gold Rush history, Salinas trades on its John Steinbeck history. This is the land of Cannery Row and East of Eden. Steinbeck’s victorian house still stands and has been museumized, serving a reservation based lunch service certain days a week. My aunt volunteered at the Steinbeck House for many years and even held a big anniversary party there for my uncle and herself. Today there is a grand Steinbeck museum at the end of Main Street, but in the late 1980s, there was just the house and Main Street was only just starting to come out of its dilapidated period that many a Main Street went through in the 1970s.
The Salinas Main Street was split into two areas: an old town built in the 1920s and a newer post war section from the 1950s that still had many useful shops doing well. For some reason the old town section was struggling in 1986, but slowly but surely through the following decade, this section of so much character was rejuvenated. A record shop and a music store that I depended on have disappeared and I don’t recognize the current businesses, but the good news is that there is indeed business. One thing that always rejuvenates a dead Main Street is some night life. It is nice to have the museum during the day, but now at night there are more restaurants and one of the old movie theaters, the Crystal, has been expanded into a multi-screen cineplex called the Maya Cinemas. Also, the grand old Fox California Theater has been restored as a multi-event space where anything from a concert to a wedding can be found, so activity on old Main Street is hopping again.
When I was attending Hartnell College, this lower section of Main Street had a lot of empty stores, a dead hotel, and three of the four theaters were boarded up. However, the Cinema 1, formerly the El Ray, was still open and showing second run movies for a dollar and you got a double feature. The theater was warm and inviting and retained its 1940’s detail and charm. At the moment the interior is stripped and molding, though the building stands and is for lease. There is movement on a restoration, so hopefully the place will be back in business, adding one more marquee to be turned back on along old Main Street. Of course, the thing that caused Main Street to diminish was the usual reason: a mall was built on the edge of town that included a multi-screen cineplex. Now, that cineplex is the absolutely worst movie going option in the region and Main Street is back as the go to destination.
At the other end of Main Street, still operating in all its mid-century modern glory, is the Star Market. It just makes me smile to see it, for it is such a thing of a bygone era and it hasn’t been touched and it hasn’t died, but just keeps serving the public. Directly behind it is the neighborhood of my grandparents and so the Star Market was their grocery store. Across the street is the lettuce fields––the hallmark of the Salinas Valley. If you keep driving out Main Street towards the south west, you are on your way to Monterey and Carmel. My time in Salinas includes those towns as well. They served as a kind of expanded home town, for I was in those places often to shop, see theatre, enjoy the ocean and just get away from the confines of the limited Salinas Main Street and Hartnell College, where I spent the majority of my waking hours for a year and a half.
Even though Salinas feels very small town, the truth is that the general Monterey bay area has an awful lot to offer. For shopping, Placerville never had a mall, but Salinas does and a more upscale mall in Monterey included a Macy’s and a nicer movie theater. Carmel’s Ocean Avenue is the cutest kind of Main Street you could imagine. Looking like a European Pinocchio village, the adorable main thoroughfare of the land of Doris Day and Clint Eastwood (who happened to be the mayor while I lived there) is mostly filled with shops to attract tourists. There are plenty of good restaurants, boutique clothing stores, gift shops and an expansive array of art galleries. There is a lot of old wealth in Carmel––this is one of the places where Hollywood goes to retire and the home of the old Bing Crosby celebrity golf tournament (now the AT&T), so of course there was a mini Saks 5th Avenue for a long time, though it has gone by the way now.
One of my favorite spots in Carmel is the Cypress Inn owned by Doris Day. My family usually has lunch in Carmel the day after Christmas and I always like to pop in to see Doris Day’s Christmas tree in the beautiful front lobby living room with its big fireplace, comfortable chairs, grand piano and proper afternoon tea service. The Inn is Spanish Californian in design and has many odd corners and interesting spaces. A courtyard includes self filling watering bowls for the many dogs that are welcomed to the Inn. Some years it seems like the dogs might out number the humans in the busy lobby. There is a comfortable little bar and lounge nook decorated with old Doris Day movie posters and it connects to a very nice expanded bar area in the rear. Carmel has numerous motels, hotels and inns that range from basic to adorable, but the Cypress Inn is the best of them all.
There is very little in the form of nightclubs in the area. Entertainment options besides the movies (and there isn’t a movie theater in Carmel) include quite a lot of theatre choices. Western Stage in Salinas keeps up a healthy year round schedule of plays and musicals and Monterey Peninsula College serves Monterey and Carmel as do a dozen other little theatre groups scattered through the county. There is the Monterey Bay Symphony, summer Shakespeare at the Forest Theatre, and touring performing arts groups at Sherwood Hall in Salinas. There is the really big deal: The California Rodeo! This event is accompanied by a Main Street parade, in which my mother and later my cousins participated. Every junky motel in the area has a no vacancy sign turned on during the rodeo days. Otherwise, there is a kind of calm over the area and unless you have tickets to a performing arts event, people stay in. There used to be one gay bar in Monterey during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but the joint has since disappeared. I do know one gay couple in Carmel and I asked them about the gay scene in the area and they said, “We met everyone at the town Christmas tree lighting ceremony.”
This area combines small town atmosphere with world class offerings. To walk along the Monterey Bay or to sit out on the Carmel beach and look out over the Pacific Ocean is to observe one of the most beautiful places of natural beauty on the planet. I feel lucky that my family still gathers in the area for Christmas each year. I grew up taking it for granted, but now I savor it each December. Although, as a kid I did treasure a few simple joys. One was Monterey’s wonderful Dennis the Menace Park. This park had unusually good park toys to climb on and a swinging rope bridge. The next door lake had paddle boats. In Carmel, Thinker Toys (still there), had a wonderful array of puppets, including marionettes. I still have a beautiful wood carved skeleton marionette from that shop. In the back of Thinker Toys was a magic section. There was usually a magician on hand to demonstrate tricks and for a few years I thrilled in picking up a new trick or two for my collection that lead to my high school era career as a birthday party magician. Today the magic counter is no more and the puppet selection is greatly reduced, but Thinker Toys is still a marvelous little shop of wonders.
My grandfather moved his family from Michigan to Salinas when my mother was ten to leave the cold winters and be closer to his brother Paul, who was the publisher of the Salinas Californian. Uncle Paul was a kind of magical person, living with Aunt Charm on a hill looking over the Salinas Valley. He gave me rides on his little green tractor around his little farm. He had funny little painted cutout characters poking out of his vegetable patches. The walls of his garage were filled from top to bottom with his painted canvases of odd portraits and landscapes. Just for fun he built a miniature carousel the way some people build model airplanes. He was expert at bird calls and although I delighted in watching him give his bird calls out over the valley, I never saw the particular birds stop by to say hi. He had ancient home movies that included an old fashioned tent circus setting up. I wasn’t very close to him and I was even further removed from Aunt Charm, but I think of him a lot as a magical and curious elf who brought some enchantment into my childhood.
My grandparents moved into a very small house on the edge of the lettuce fields with the idea that it would be only temporary, but they stayed there the rest of their lives. They added an extra room jutting out into the back yard called the “patio room” because it was built over the existing patio. This was a wonderful room with floor to ceiling glass windows and a large brick fireplace. This room housed the Christmas tree and a big table was set up for large family dinners. The double doors that opened into this room served as the proscenium arch under which my brother and I gave a Christmas show of some kind every Christmas Eve from the age of five through high school. Next to the fireplace was a dog door that I could fit through when I was small. In one of our shows, my brother Mark kept our audience’s attention dressed as a deer and singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” while I sneaked around the house and through the dog door dressed in a Santa hat and beard and chortled “Ho Ho Ho!” at the end of the number. Our surprised family audience thought this was pretty nifty. Uncle Walter exclaimed, “That’s ingenuity for you––you couldn’t come down the chimney because of the fire, so you did the next best thing and came in beside the fireplace!” Uncle Walter wanted to try on my hat and beard and so I dressed him up and we have a photo of this moment hidden away in some album somewhere.
This reminds me of two items regarding “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” When little brother was two, he stood up in his crib until the wee hours on Christmas Eve singing that song non stop. It may have been the first song he ever learned. My mother always gave us a Christmas book to read on the long trip from Placerville to Salinas each year and one year Mark received a storybook version of “Rudolph.” My grandfather sat little Mark on his lap to read him the book and read it comically with all the words mixed up: Randolph the Rein Nosed Red Dear. Mark would correct him and make Grandpa read it again, but out came Grandpa’s mixed up version, sending Mark into a frustrated fit.
My grandparents liked to ride bicycles and my grandfather could sit on the handlebars and ride backwards––it was one of his many little tricks. He always had some little trick or puzzle to show me and we communed over magic shows on TV. He’d video tape magic specials and save them for my visits and then we’d go over our theories of how the tricks were done. In the summers my brother and I would take over the bikes and ride around the greater part of Salinas to visit all the many neighborhood parks. Salinas had what we didn’t have in Placerville––miles of sidewalks on flat ground, so we bicycled away the greater part of a Salinas day on summer visits. Grandpa was a veterinarian and ran a popular pet cemetery on the edge of town. He also wrote a column called “Pet Talk” for the news paper. Later he self published a book of his articles called About Pets that I illustrated. Even in retirement, Grandpa rode his bicycle down to the animal shelter to give shots and keep connected to the animals. He was a little like a jolly Fred Mertz from I Love Lucy and he and my grandmother were brilliant at cocktail parties where they could enter into a conversation with absolutely anyone and thoroughly enjoy themselves. I have to work a lot harder at that kind of thing and in a business where I have to shmooze and network a lot, I sure wish I had inherited the ease with which my grandparents could work a room.
My grandmother always seemed a little daffy, a bit off balance, both physically and mentally, though she actually was a sharp lady. She wasn’t a great cook and really latched on to the convenience foods that emerged in the 1950s and never let go. My brother and I joked that the Cheese Whiz she always had in her pantry might be the cause for her daffy personality. Mark and I could always get her laughing with our stories or impressions and theatrics. She enjoyed seeing us in all of our shows and was particularly delighted with having me around during my college time in Salinas. We often played group games after dinner on Christmas and Grandma was usually particularly useless as a teammate, for she never really understood the rules, but she was immensely entertaining as she gave it the good old college try every time it was her turn to play. She out lived my grandfather and was playing golf a month before she died at age 91. The last time I saw her she was on a cruise ship docked in New York’s harbor and I had dinner with her on board the ship––she was 90 and still traveling.
I got to know Salinas intimately during college and also my Aunt Carol and Uncle Walter. Uncle Walter had an attitude that it was his duty to parent me––I did not share this attitude. For the most part we stayed out of each other’s way, though I always sat down to family dinner with them most nights. A few times a week we had Uncle Walter's mother for dinner––known to me as Grandma Sharp. During this time she was in bad shape after a stroke. She was wheelchair bound and a little shriveled up. She smiled at me across the table during dinner a little too long, which made me kind of uncomfortable, but when she talked she only had negative and bitter things to say. My mother approached her at Christmas to say hello and Merry Christmas and Grandma Sharp retorted, “It won’t be a Merry Christmas with me around!” My brother and I observed this moment together and it struck us as rather hilarious. We still pull it out from time to time to get another laugh out of it––it was the timing of the exchange that was so funny and it could have been used in some holiday comedy film (imagine Lionel Barrymore giving the line). Grandma Sharpe wouldn’t say much, but then all of a sudden she’d shoot off with some bitter comment like that and it just struck us as funny. Of course her situation wasn’t funny at all, but she was quite a character and my brother and I always get a kick out of observing characters. One night at dinner after I had moved away from Salinas, Grandma Sharp asked out of the blue, “Whatever happened to that nice young man who used to sit across the table from me?”
An old high school friend was in Salinas the summer of 1987 for an internship at Western Stage, but although we were both busy with the same theatre company, our schedules didn’t coincide and so we planned to meet late at night after rehearsals were over at a Denny’s. We had so much to talk about that we sat there over cokes and french fries until nearly four in the morning. I knew I didn’t have to be anywhere until 2 PM the next day, so I wasn’t worried about the late hour. When I got out of bed around 12:30 PM the next day, Uncle Walter was ready with a rather loud scolding about my late return. He didn’t want to hear what I had to say about it, but just cut me off and said, “If you intend on keeping those kind of hours you can find another place to live.” Much later I found out that he had called my father to discuss the issue of my late hour return and my dad had shrugged it off with, “That’s how those theatre people are––rehearse and socialize until late and sleep in until noon.” My aunt said, “If I had been awake I would have been worried.” I had an internal laugh over that comment, because I hadn’t worried her at all except in retrospect.
I imagine that Uncle Walter never told me he called my dad because he didn’t get the answer he wanted to hear. For my part, I just kept to myself and kept more normal hours for a while. Later when I stayed out late for a cast party, Uncle Walter never really said anything. On another issue, my Aunt and Uncle were going on a trip and Uncle Walter laid down the law that no friends were allowed in the house. This made me mad, though the joke was that it was a rare occurrence that I ever had anyone over anyway and it hardly mattered. But, since he made such a point of specifying this rule, I ventured to challenge him by saying, “Are you actually afraid I’m going to throw some wild party?” My intention was to point out that he had observed my daily behavior long enough to know I wouldn’t be causing trouble while he was away on a trip, but his reply was, “It’s no different for you than when the girls lived here.” He meant my four cousins. Cousin Debbie once asked, “So how is it living here?” I returned that things were pretty good and she shot back in an astonished tone, “With Dad?!” I understood in those two words that my cousins felt they had been ruled by a real disciplinarian of the military variety and guessed that I was experiencing only a portion of what Uncle Walter could dish out.
On the other hand, I admired my uncle as a successful white collar farmer, who cultivated a well-rounded knowledge of many things. He was another good cocktail party personality who could mix with any crowd and was very involved in the community. He was quite proper and well mannered, he and my Aunt were active together in tennis and going dancing at the Salinas country club. He always opened a car door for the lady, gave a firm hand shake and looked you in the eye when he talked to you. Regardless of whatever tensions he and I had as he tried to be a substitute father and I rejected his treating me like I was 14 when I was 19, he always had a cheery smile and greeting for me in the years after that time and had an overriding charm about him that was welcoming to anyone who met him.
My Aunt Carol is an elegant woman who has been amazingly strong as a caregiver dealing with the aging process and sickness of Grandma Sharp, Uncle Walter, her father, a second husband Lester and her daughter Cindy. One reason is that Aunt Carol was there on the scene when these relatives became ill and being the strong lady she is, went to work doing what she needed to do. Through all of that, Aunt Carol still managed to host a house full of family for Christmas, cooking dinners and baking an array of Christmas cookies for her neighbors and to send home with us all. Aunt Carol is the hub of my mother’s side of the family and for me, the center of Salinas.
In my final semester living in Salinas I got a little job at a wine shop making gift baskets. I just sat at a work bench in the back of the shop like Bob Cratchit, with my craft and packaging supplies and put together baskets of wine, chocolate, fancy pots of jam and other goodies, all shrink wrapped for the taking. This was my first real job where I took home a paycheck and I really saved up the money because I was too busy with classes in the morning, rehearsals at night and homework squeezed in and around all that to spend it. I kind of wonder how I managed everything now. I guess when you’re 19 you don’t know what your limits ought to be. I left Hartnell College a semester early because I was only taking general education classes at that point and was going to transfer to a four hear college the following fall semester, so I swapped Salinas for Placerville again––just for one spring semester and a summer––then I really left the small town life.
Population growth has taken over some of the farmland, but agriculture is still a major part of Salinas and the small town feel of the town, especially along Main Street, seems to stay more or less the same year after year. Ocean Avenue in Carmel is unlikely to change much as the town is very mindful of keeping it as picturesque as always and Monterey just doesn’t have any room for expansion, so it is likely to stay the same too. The grandparents are gone now and their little house on San Juan Drive sold off. I still drive by it on the way to Aunt Carol’s house where we still gather for Christmas. Uncle Walter is gone and so is Grandma Sharp and when the day comes that we no longer have Aunt Carol with us (I hate to think of that) I imagine that Christmas in Salinas will come to an end. Maybe I’ll think, oh well, I’ve had my fill, but I’ll probably continue to go back for visits, checking in on Doris Day’s Cypress Inn, walking the trail along Monterey Bay and poking around Main Street Salinas. It’s a second home and a lovely corner of the world.
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| Uncle Walter tries on my beard after our show. Brother Mark is Rudolph. |
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