Reply To: Growing up in Marin in the 1960s (from original forum archive)
The train yard was a great place for kids to goof off in for hours. lot of weed smoked in that yard. I look at it now and wonder what the kids living in Tiburon now do for fun? No train yard no rail road pier and no hills to explore,nothing. sad to see.
Great site...great memories. All my great growing up experiences have already been expressed in this thread....but here are some of my details: scrounging for change under the Boardwalk? Of course, the sweet spot was under the gumball machines in front of the pharmacy. I went to Belvedere School (up the road from cop shop), Reed, Del Mar, and of course "Deadwood". But all the fun was in the trainyard. Jeesh, in 1976 everybody was a pothead and all you had to do was enter the trainyard and check out one of a dozen hideouts to find the party. I visited last year and checked out hidden beach on Belvedere Isle: all the crabs are gone, hardly any ducks (there used to be thousands)...at least the railroad marsh is still there....but where did all the tadpoles go?
In the eighties my friends ran the Dock Restaurant. We would lock the doors and party all night. They also booked some good bands (Zero, Cippolina) but the best show was Jaco Pastorious. I laid out four big lines of blow for him and my friends, he snorted ALL OF IT! He said "thanks man", then went on stage and blew us away.
Should make a correction here...Blackie...who responded to my post is dead wrong about Tiburon being a bastion of Democrat strength. That may have been the case back in the 1960s when Tiburon was still somewhat middle class, but it is definately not the case today. Most wealthy people are not Dems, but conservative Republicans who would rather see people like Bush or McCain running this country so that their stock portfolios continue to stay strong, and their taxes stay low! There may be a number of rich Dems living in Tiburon today, but Ican assure you that Tiburon has the highest concentration of Republicans compared to any other city in Marin today! (with the exception of course of nearby Belvedere!) The neighbors who live next door to my dad, and by the way are very nice people (some of my better friends are, believe or not Republicans who actually voted for Bush!) are staunch Bushies. Marin in general isactually more liberal today than it was in the 60s, but Tiburon has bucked that trend and is much more conservative than it was back in those days!
Hey Bruce, I don't know if you will remember me but you and I went to school together and I once attended your birthday party with lots of cardboard sliding near your house. What happened to John Whitelaw, I remember his sister Alison. I know you work on radio in SF or at least you did. Anyway it's a great post you have written. John Metcalfe. Miss Wilson was the best
I also grew up in Tiburon, great post Bruce. I knew about John Whitelaw, what a shame. I played in a band with he and John Cross and Whitelaw's father took us into the City to try out for the Ted Mack Amateur Hour TV show. Needless to say we didn't cut it. I spent a lot of time up on the Spanish Trail, it was in the hills above Paradise Drive, overlooking Keil's Cove area. We camped out up there, usually with a bottle of Red Mountain wine ! The old Italian bakerery Pangolin refers to was Musso's. He had the whole corner on Main Street originally, then retreated back to the corner of the building by Juanita Lane. Any one remember Prince Charlie's Inn, located in Musso's building in the mid '60's ? Run by an Englishman named Eric, he used to have live music, blues bands from the East Bay. We got to play there once, the highlight of my musical career. Playing in the train yard, hanging out on the Boardwalk (crawling underneath it looking for dropped change), swimming in the harbor by Sam's, a great place to grow up. I don't think people these days have any idea. It was a very down to earth, blue coller town. I feel lucky to have lived there as a kid.
Mr. MacGowan, my friend, that was a good post, but it has a couple of errors. Tiburon conservative Republican? I don't think so. Maybe you need to do some further research, but see The Huffington Post for records of individual campaign contributions. 15K from 27 people for the Republicans and 127K from 121 people for the Democrats in the Belvedere/Tiburon area. More money, more people and more per wealthy person for the Dems. I bet Tiburon is 65% or more Democrat, and liberal on top of that, like the rest of Marin. Note all the Marin Lexi with the Obama stickers. You seem a bit angry, like a lot of Dems. Sitting in traffic on 101 commuting to Rohnert Park?
All in fun, An SRHS graduate (middle-class boomer)
P.S. Marin was once pretty much moderate Republican. We voted for Gerald Ford. Talk about nostalgia.
Great post Bruce. Sorry to hear about John passing away. I too grew up in Tiburon in the 50`s and 60`s when it had the small town feel to it. I can`t believe what it looks like today and all the building on the hills. Those were the days.
A beautiful post Bruce, which pretty much sums up my experience growing up in Marin, and the changes that have since swept over it. I grew up in Belvedere, later moving to San Rafael, so many of the haunts you mention are familiar to me. We used to enjoy messing around in the old shipyard which was full of old discarded stuff (and some mammoth rats!), and a concrete boat hull that seemed to be perpetually worked on but never finished. Also climbing all over the old train-dock was fun and somewhat dangerous. Unfortunately we never got adventurous enough to explore the hills above Tiburon which sound like they were wonderful once upon a time. I seem to recall fishing off of Elephant Rock too. And we certainly spent a lot of time hiking all over Angel Island, knowing nothing of its history as "Ellis Island West".
One of my earliest memories was a little Italian bakery on Tiburon Blvd., and when I would walk by with my mother the friendly old baker would come out front to give me one of those cookies with the strawberry jelly in the middle of it, like a dot.
I really have enjoyed looking through Jason's very fine Marin nostalgia web page. There is a lot of fun and interesting info and for those of us who were lucky enough to grow up here in the 1950s and 60s, the photos and stories bring back some fond memories. Personally, I grew up in Tiburon, which as you might imagine was a much different place in those days. We still had the Northwestern Pacific Railroad running through town, we still had some cows and horses (my sister and her friends used to ride their horses in the hills up until t he early 1980s when t he staid, stuff folks of Tiburon finally banned horses), and there was lots of open space for kids to roam. I also vividly remember local characters, such as Blackie the sway backed horse, and Rosie Farrell, the "goat lady" who lived in her little cottage for over half a century on the same site where the Auitobon Society now sits. My friends, Gunnar and Anders Carlsson, John Mayer, John Whitelaw and Chris Johnson and myself all used to camp out on the ridge of Mt Tiburon during summer nights. We would take a bunch of food with us and have a real feast, then lie in our sleeping bags under the stars and watch the beautiful lights of San Francisco reflect off the bay while the gentle fog wafted over the ridge in Sausalito. The next morning we would head back to the Carlsson's house on Round Hill Road (just across the street from my home) and Gunnar and Anders' mom would make us a delightful breakfast of Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam! Mr Irving Moulin, who owned most of Mt Tiburon died a few years ago at age 103, and he was the man who unfortunately sold the land on the hill which was developed by real estate moguls. Enormous, obnoxious, over the top Hollywood Hills type mansions now desecrate the beauty of the ridge, and much of Tiburon has in my mind, been ruined by this kind of short-term, money driven thinking. My dad was an architect, and he designed and built the home we grew up in (in a sort of Frankl Lloyd Wright style with exposed beams and floor to ceiling windows) and my parents still live in the same house now 50 years later. The thing I enjoyed most about Tiburon was that it felt like a small town. People watched out for each other, and you went to school with the same kids for years. In those "Baby Boomer" days, it seemed as if every family had at least 3 or 4 kids, so you always had lots of friends to pal around with. I was one of the lucky kids to be among the first to attend the nedw Del Mar Junior High in 1964, and really enjoyed my experience there. Joyce Wilson, Sylvia Vela, and Paul Stevens (our boys' gym coach) were amoung my favorite teachers there. Also, the Tiburon Little League was a fun experience, and I played in that league from 1960 through 1964. We played most of our bames at old "Judge Field" which is now overrun by tennis courts at the Tiburon Peninsula Club. My favorite memory from that period was hitting a g ame winning homer off a guy named Bob Peterson (he was a few years older than me and pitched for the "Riders.") Those kind of memories always seem to stick in the mind. Tiburon didn't have much of a downtown, but it did have some good restaurants. My parents loved the "Dock" where I ended up working summers during college, and my favorite was always Tiburon Tommies. Many of my old acquaintances and friends from those early days of my life still live in Tiburon, like Woody Van Lackum, Dennis Williams, and until he passed away suddenly last year at the young age of 53, one of my best friends, the very fine bass guitarist John Whitelaw. I also remember Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio lived just up the street from us for a few years, and my dad tells me that until recently, the late Tom Synder (he of late night TV talk show reknown) was a neighbor. Tiburon was a great place to grow up, and is still beautiful, but I wouldn't want to live there now. It''s become too stodgy, noveau rich and conservative republican for my taste, although my parents and some of the older folks are still stubbornly holding up the banner of liberal politics!
