A Wander Through His Wonder Years

The old neighborhoods look pretty much the same as they did back then, at a time when the whole world seemed younger.

The houses that needed paint still need paint, and the sidewalks are cracked where they always were cracked. The only big difference, I guess, is that the vacant lot next to Tony Silva’s place has a duplex on it now, but even it looks old already.

I’m in Oakland for a few days, wandering the streets of my boyhood. I came up because my sister Emily, the one who always prays for me, is ill, and I wanted to see how she was doing. All those prayers deserve at least a visit.

Emily is 80 and has had a mild stroke, but is just as full of fight as she was when she was giving me the Dutch rub 60 years ago. That was a form of mild punishment administered when no other form of getting a message across worked. You rubbed a victim’s scalp with your knuckles until he cried uncle or help or something.

Emily would chase me down the street when I wouldn’t come home and apply the Dutch rub with a vigor unmatched along 94th Avenue. But that was long ago.

She doesn’t walk too well anymore and has lived alone since her husband, Eddie, died a couple of years ago. A son and daughter remain in the Bay Area, but Emily is as independent as an old buffalo and doesn’t rely on anyone.

Her house is the same one she and Eddie bought just after the Second World War, when he came home from serving in the Army. It was new when they bought it for $7,000, but the years are beginning to tell.

Houses, like people, get creaky and weathered as time passes.

This is the first time I’ve been back to some of the places we occupied during my growing-up years. We lived all over East Oakland, from 73rd Avenue to the San Leandro city limits, and from East 14th Street to MacArthur Boulevard. It was during the Depression, and we moved just about every time the rent came due.

Life got better economically when the war started, ending the Depression with explosive abruptness. The Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond beckoned, and our family home became war housing slapped together near the waterfront to accommodate welders and shipfitters and the others turning out Liberty Ships in record time.

I never considered Richmond my home and spent a lot of time living with Emily and Eddie while I went to Castlemont High. It actually looked like a castle back then, with turrets and arches, but an earthquake damaged it so badly it had to be torn down. That’s the way it is with castles, sometimes. The new school looks like a state prison.

I knew East Oakland as well as I’ve ever known any place in my life. I knew every family in the neighborhoods where I lived, every kid, mother, father (where there was one) and every dog. I knew the dogs because I delivered mail during the Christmas seasons, and had to beat them off with a stick.

I worked at a downtown Sears part-time during the rest of the year, first in hardware and then in the garden department. The old store is gone, and there’s a kind of sadness to the building’s emptiness, like a house after someone has died.

It was Thomas Wolfe who wrote that you can’t go home again. As I recall, he was using the phrase in an emotional sense, entwined with nostalgia for the old homestead. I have memories of East Oakland but not a lot of sentimentality attached to them. San Francisco is something else.

I went to college at S.F. State when it was at Haight and Buchanan, where I met Cinelli. We “discovered” the city together, riding trolleys, cable cars and buses from one end to the other, and walking when we got there. I still know a lot of the alleys and small side streets throughout North Beach and Chinatown.

We wandered San Francisco on this trip too, on a day when fog was unfurling through the Golden Gate like strands of silver ribbon. A chill was in the air around Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor, carried in by the ocean mist that gives San Francisco so much of its mystique.

I miss the fog and the mystery it creates as it slips quietly and softly through the city’s neighborhoods from the Sunset to the Marina, and from Cow Hollow to Potrero Hill. Our first apartment was in the Castro District after we were married, on a hillside above Market Street. It was an old Victorian converted into apartments, and it’s still there, as stately and imposing as ever.

At the end of our wandering on this trip, we dined at a small French restaurant called Absinthe, not far from the Civic Center. One never just eats in San Francisco. One always dines. A speaker system played soft jazz into the foggy evening. The martini was perfect and Cinelli was radiant.

Oakland will be a part of me as long as long as the Queen of Dutch Rubs is there, praying for me every time fires burn through the Santa Monicas or El Nino howls into town. But my dream home will always be the city wrapped in mist. There’s just something about San Francisco that funny old Oakland will just never have, and the City of Angles will probably be a long time getting.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@la times.com