Author: Eric Kauschen

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Willie Brown…Herb Caen’s Successor

Willie Brown, what can I say. He is a career politician who was once our mayor that some people said of him, “You’re a crook, but you’re OUR crook.” He just laughed that off with a smile. A politician being called a crook and not getting outraged? Willie has cohones as big as his wardrobe of clothes from Wilks Bashford.

Now that he’s getting up there in years a bit, he’s not slowing down, but he’s moving away from politics and just talking about them. That’s why his “Willie’s World” in the SF Chronicle is one of the first things I go for in the Sunday paper. Willie has been around the block a few times and knows how things work. I get a kick when he says things like, “So I was having lunch with the Governator at the Palace hotel when Micky Rourke walked over and said hi.”

How many people could have the guts to make a statement like that? He is like the glitterati of politics which crosses over to the hollywood world of weirdness. His column on Sundays is true 3 dot journalism just like Herb Caen used to write. He starts off with the state of affairs in San Francisco and ends up with movie and restaurant reviews. I would love to be able to claim myself as the successor to Herb Caen, but I’m more of a bastard child. Willie has it down. This is probably because I spend most of my days living in the boring Sunset District which I love and Willie’s getting a table without a reservation at Tyler Florence’s new place because, well, he’s Willie Brown.

Willie has seen San Francisco’s soft white underbelly and he can still smile about the city. He was asked if he’d fill in as interim Mayor of SF and he proudly said no. He’s been there and done that so I can see that. He needs some sort of honorary title though like City Historian or Ambassador to San Francisco. I think Cyril Magnin had that latter title many years ago. Nevertheless, Willie is a cool guy who I would like to meet one day. I’m envisioning our meet up would be at the Tadich Grill for San Francisco sentiments sake. The Washington Street Bar and Grill or “Washbag” as Herb Caen used to call it was his place, so I think the Tadich would be a better choice.

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Nurses say the darndess things.

So I was seeing my doctor this morning and as I figured he wanted me to have a blood test. I go down to the lab and get called by a nurse who’s going to take my blood and she says to me, “Oh Mr. Kauschen, where does your family name come from?” I tell her it’s the name of an eastern province in Prussia. “Have you ever visited your home country?”

OK. Wait.

She obviously hasn’t looked at a map lately, but she’s sure good with needles. As I’m telling my wife this story she blurts out, “Your home country is Jackson.” I thought for a second and she’s right. You have to go back through a whole bunch of generations to find the first immigrants in my family and they’ve called Jackson, California their home since at least the beginnings of the 1800’s. It’s been awhile since I’ve been back there but Jackson is still the same. We used to go up there every summer and my best friend there was the son of the chief of police who all the teenagers called, “Bubble Butt” and he made Jackie Gleeson in Cannonball run look like a civilized Manhattan business man in comparison. They’ve come up in the world a bit lately with their Indian Casino, but it’s still Jackson.

We used to eat outside in the hot summers there and there was always a neighbor coming into the yard while we was eating with a loud, “Hey how ya’ll doin’!” usually accompanied by something grown on their farm or backyard. So yeah, I’ve got a little country in me and I’d have to agree with my wife, Jackson is my home country and I’m a Native American. I didn’t come from anywhere else, I’m an American. Friends of mine in other countries always find it strange as to the fixation of Americans of what countries their descents came from. I guess it that we have nothing better to do that try and find ways to keep us separated. For me it’s better to say I’m an American because at least I know what I am. The area my father came from was at different times Germany, Poland, Prussia and Lithuania. Who needs all that confusion just be American and be done with it.

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My Old Pal Charles Schulz

Well, he’s not really my old pal, but he was a buddy of my Dad’s and he got this for me. When my Mom died she had a few valuable things, but they didn’t mean anything to me and she specifically told me to auction them off so we’d have a nest egg to sit back on [note to self, nest eggs run out quickly when you’re unemployed].

But moving back to the story. My Dad used to work down in the Marina Districts at Jack’s Phillips 66 prior to it being broken up by anti-trust laws and turned into the Cow Hollow Motor Inn. He’d start work early and get off around 3pm and walk down to Chestnut street to the Golden Horseshoe bar were he’d get a few beers from that smooth old bartender Freddie the Fox.

My dad liked to talk to people, you know like how drunks like to talk to you when you aren’t so interested in being talked to. But this was back in the early 60’s so everyone was pretty much drunk by 3:30pm. He’s sitting next to a guy who’s sipping away at his drink and scribbling out stuff on the cocktail napkins. One thing Dad was always into was comics and cartoons. We used to lay on the bed Sunday mornings and read the comics together. That was considered quality time for him as he spent most of his days off out in the yard working away at his prized garden. So my Dad notices this guy drawing a dog. “Hey! That’s pretty good, that’s looks almost as good as Charles Schulz” says Dad. “Well, I should hope so since I’m Charles Schulz.”

It turns out that while Schulz was living in Santa Rosa he liked to come into the city and have some fun and a few drinks. Each time my Dad would talk to him and watch him draw. One day mu Dad brought in a sheet of paper from the gas station and asked Charles if he’d do a drawing for his son and this is what he got and gave to me. I think I might have been about 5-6 at the time. I might even have been at the bar as he used to bring me down and tuck me in the corner with a Shirley Temple while he was drinking and talking. Things were different back then.

So here I have the one thing of value that I’m not going to sell. I’ve been told it’s worth a bit of money and my silly side wants to put a plaque on it that says, “My Dad went to Freddy’s Golden Horseshoe and all I got was this dumb picture.” But for now I’ve decided to put it up in my daughter’s room since it makes more sense putting a picture of Sally up in a girl’s room than a boys.

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8′ Apple or Pumpkin Pies Now On Sale!

I suppose it’s the casualness of writing today that caused this, but in today’s world where people can’t remember when to use its or it’s is one thing, but advertising an 8 foot pie for $5.99 is going a little too far.

I feel I’ve been ranting a little too much lately so I’ll try and keep this in rant lite mode. I actually thought this was kind of funny and was wondering if  I should demand an 8 foot pie for $5.99, but then I realized, I don’t really like pie enough to eat a whole 8′ of one. Hopefully I’ll get to be at the Lucky’s store when someone demands 8′ of pie for $5.99.[mappress mapid=”23″]

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The Outside Lands

Friday was an interesting day for me as I got together with a couple of friends for lunch in the Inner Sunset district. This is a great place to eat because of the area I refer to as “the Cross”. It runs from roughly 8th avenue to 10th avenue and from Judah to Lincoln Way. Every other shop is a restaurant pretty much and you’ve got a choice of foods from around the world.

As we were sitting and gorging ourselves at Crepevine we started talking about how San Francisco used to be before people decided it might nice to live here. Well, the picture here is of 7th and Lawton streets before the construction boom that finally killed off the last inland sand dunes somewhere around the 90’s [it’s now a soccer field behind St. Ignatius High School]. I remember the sand as a kid, it was everywhere. If you dug down less than a foot in the grass planted around my elementary school you hit sand. I think the street cleaners used to be there more for cleaning the sand off the streets than for picking up garbage.

When my parents bought our house in 1954 their backyard was a long strip of sand enclosed in low cost fencing [much the same as many of the pot farm houses still retain]. My dad used to tell me how he’d take my mom’s dog to rear fence and drop him over on the dunes and let him run. Don’t worry, it was a low fence. These were what was known as the “Outside Lands.” Because of Twin Peaks it didn’t used to be very easy to get here so people would have to drive from downtown out through the Mission and circle around until the street car tunnel was put in and roads were able to built to bring people over.

It probably had something to do with 1894 Midwinter Exposition that gave us Golden Gate Park as well. First thing built in the Sunset District was the Shannon Bar, the oldest remaining bar in San Francisco. If you travel out by the beach you might find some remains of Carville where people bought old streetcars and cable cars and turned them into housing kind of like what some people are doing with the steel shipping crates today. Steve “Woody” LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project has written an excellent book on this time and I remember seeing him at a removal of an old earthquake shack from someone’s back yard several years ago. Oh, and what was in that backyard…sand. We still have it. If you travel along Taraval or Judah streets closer to the ocean you’ll see it filling in cracks along the streetcar tracks still, just not as much as it used to.

Our cool, foggy beaches are what says Sunset District to me along with the Indian summers that bring us out of our houses more to do nothing except be outside. Oh, and then there’s the sand.

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Superheroes of the Sunset!

There is a family of superheros lurking in the Sunset district and they are my family. I discovered our superhuman powers today on a trip to IKEA. Normally we don’t have much of a problem with IKEA, but the following story will introduce you to our superhuman ways which hopefully only occur outside of San Francisco. Allow me to introduce you.

I am Gravitron! A man of seemingly normal size, yet he has an internal mass of that close to Jupiter. As we were walking around IKEA I noticed people were bumping into me so I stopped walking due to irritation and the need to punch something preferable human that wouldn’t land me in a jail cell. Straight ahead, family of four, walking a straight line and yet as they got closer and closer their straight line trajectory started to veer off, pulled by the gravitation forces Gravitron exudes. I even cleared my throat to make this a near impact event yet Fi! Tis not! They walked right into me. I attracted in excess of 10 tractor beam like collisions with double that in near misses.

Now it is time to meet my wife, The Invisible Woman. She has the power to walk next to you and as you are talking to her when you turn your head your sentence ends with, “where the hell is she?!” She is obviously immune to the pull of Gravitron, but that is to be expected after being married for 14 years. She at least is lucky enough to not be sucking IKEA patrons in to herself like Gravitron, but this also makes Gravitron have to conduct all business transactions because she gets ignored by their dreaded nemesis, Check out Boy who can’t see her until Gravitron throws off the IKEA customers stuck to him at Check out Boy to get his attention.

Ahh, and then there is the sweetest of the family, their daughter, White Dwarf. She who is small in stature, yet at 3.5 years old is like pushing Jabba the Hut in a wheelchair. Luckily she has not folded in on herself to become Black Hole, which, let’s face it would be a creepy superhero name. She is not fat, barely reaching 40lbs, but she has the innate ability to make herself heavier in her vehicle of transport called, “The Stroller” by pushing her feet against the wheel that you will break a sweat within 20 ft of pushing her. Lucky for us, her kryptonite is french fries which weakens her strength.

So now I know why families get a little stressed by group outings. Always remember in the words of Gravitron while shopping in stores, “Walk! Don’t Block!”

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Politics! Politics! Politics!

Note to readers: Having discovered that my name server had changed a little to late when I moved things over to the new server I suddenly lost a few posts and pictures which threw me off for a bit. Now I will hopefully regain my stride and get back to more regular posts.

The only thing that got more people’s attention than the Giant’s winning the world series was the election and pretty much as I figured California mooned the rest of the country.

Jerry’s back as President Governor followed by the rest of the Democrats just showing that we’re more a blue state than we were yesterday. Queen Meg will now have to be questioned on her business acumen after investing over $100 million dollars in a campaign that failed. Think of what she could have done with that money if she hadn’t run and started the Whitman Foundation to help needy kids or homeless people or some other ennobling cause. She’d be seen as a hero, but now she’ll go down as a business woman who spent the most money in a campaign that failed.

Oh yeah, pot is still illegal.

The coastal areas were all in favor of it and the inland empire was against it.  What surprised me the most was that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin showed support for prop 19 yet Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Kamala Haris, Barbara Boxer and the California Cannabis Association were against it. Wait, Governor Moonbeam didn’t want pot legalized? What’s he been smoking? It turns out on the against prop 19 list where a large number of pot producers who would, so they thought, lose money if it was legalized because it would drive the price down. Any quick trip online to look at prices for medical marijuana show that that’s not true.

Personally, I think it’s a shame that it didn’t pass. It would have increased the revenue that we already get from medical marijuana sales (which is currently north of $100 million) and it would have given California another reason to be a “go-to” spot. Estimates put the potential gains for the state at north of $4 billion per year.  Think of what that money would have done for our schools, our roads. It’s even possible that we could have eliminated state income tax if it passed. Nevada fortifies itself from gambling revenues so its residents don’t have to pay state income tax. Think about it. Even though our own Governator was against prop 19 he decriminalized have up to an ounce as a $100 fine.

I think the best that can be said about this was said by Richard Lee of Oaksterdam University, “Over the course of the last year, it has become clear that the legalization of marijuana is no longer a question of if, but a question of when.” I guess we just need the state to need the money more and have less people who don’t want to put their political careers on the line to support it.

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30 Year High School Reunion

©2010 Emily Bradley

Well they’re all expecting me to write this since I was talking about it so here it is. I attended my 30 year high school reunion today. We all look a little bit older, but we all seem to finally have found our places in life. Well, actually this is the first time I think we looked like we’ve aged. 20 year reunion we all still had our High School faces, but now there’s a few lines  and a few pounds added, but we’re still all in good shape I think.

I graduated from George Washington High School in 1980 and while I’ve kept in contact with a few of my friends it wasn’t until facebook made it easier to find them that we came together again. One of the odd things about that time period was that if you were going to Washington for High School you probably went to Presidio Junior High, except that since Presidio was having renovations you ended up being sent to A. P. Gianinni Junior High which is where my connection to a lot of my friend I met today came in.

I wasn’t in the Richmond District, so unlike today I was supposed to go to the high school closest to me and the Junior High as well. Most of us at the somewhat small get together first met at Gianinni Junior High and in a few cases that’s what we remembered the most. I wasn’t too big on school most of the time. I think it was because I spent so much time taking classes at the Academy of Sciences that what they were teaching in High School I had done back when I was twelve, except maybe for English. I spoke English very well so why would I need to bother learning English when I knew it already?

Needless to say, I didn’t get much from High School and managed to graduate with a 1.0 GPA which was fine for 1980. 1981 I wouldn’t have gotten my diploma and it took me until my college graduation with a 3.9 GPA that my parents finally understood that High School and I didn’t mix very well. I still had fun though. It wasn’t always a beer and skittle time in High School, but I still had fun even if it was mostly a beer time with very few skittles.

But going back to the reunion we went through the usual round of questions to catch up:

  1. Are you married?
  2. For how long?
  3. So what are you doing now?
  4. What did you do after high school?

The usual stuff and the answers were kind of interesting. I honestly was a little surprised that everyone remembered me. I wasn’t elected the best at anything in my 1980 year book, but at least those who remembered me remembered as the funny smart guy. I think I’m OK with that.

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I am NOT a food blogger!

I recently have had the unfortunate experience of seeing quite a few food bloggers on television. This is not a good thing because if they are any indication of what food bloggers are like, I am not a food blogger. Most of them seem to have no luck with the opposite sex, can’t cook and the food they write about while tasty, has them all on high blood pressure and cholesterol meds.

This is not what I am. I love food, I write about food some times, but I don’t write about food I’ve bought at a restaurant all the time, I write about food I cook. Yes, I may have a couple extra pounds on me, but seeing as I’m getting closer to 50 that’s not so unusual and I know people in their 30’s who have more of themselves to love than me.

I grew up in the kitchen. I have a picture of myself at about 3 with an apron on standing on a chair washing dishes in the sink. This is probably because that’s where you always start out — as a dishwasher. I remember around 7 I got to move up helping my Mom mix cookie dough and bake the cookies and at 10 I was helping out my Dad at the BBQ. My family is from an Italian and German background, mostly Italian so it’s always about the food. While I’m a city boy we always spent the summers up in the Sierra foothills in what most city people would call a “red-neck” town. All the guys got a gun for their 16th birthday and you could sit out on the porch in the evening and watch the raccoons, skunks and deer walk right past your house. One of the things I learned from this was an appreciation of nature and vegetables. We used to drive out to Joe Malfino’s farm and get about 10-20 pounds of Italian red onions that his father brought the seeds over from Italy when he came here. Nothing is as sweet as one of those onions and my Dad used to show off to my friends when we’d get back my cutting an onion and having them taste it raw. When we’d be driving home we’d always stop at a place called Sloughouse that had the sweetest yellow corn you could ever imagine. When we’d get back home my Dad and I would plant radishes, carrots and swiss chard out in our foggy back yard which was kind of a way of bringing country life to the city.

I learned a lot from those times growing up. I was a city boy for most of the year, but in the summer I’d have to be a country boy picking the walnuts, figs and apples off the trees at my Aunts house or maybe we’d go over to a cousin’s place were we would be wrestling with the pigs and milking the cows and picking the freshly laid eggs from the hen house. For most of the people that was work, for me it was fun because I got to do something my friends in the city never got to. I remember my Aunt’s friends coming by and dropping off boxes of peaches and other fruits that were maybe off the tree for a couple hours at most.

Now I’m carrying on the tradition by cooking like I learned from my family and adding my own side to things. I’m moving out of the Italian/German comfort zone and playing around with South American, Indian, African dishes just to see what new I can come up with. I’ve wanted to be a chef many times, but some of my acquaintances such as Bruce Hill and Joe Zelinsky have said, “You work long hours, with no overtime and you barely make above minimum wage.” I think I’ll have to pass then, because I want to be able to buy the food I cook at home.

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Look Look Butt Shop!

Traveling on the San Francisco Metro system can be very interesting some times. You can see the strangest things and even like today, hear the strangest things.

I had to take a trip downtown and since driving downtown is crazy and slow and expensive I decided to drive to West Portal and hop on a metro train. Here’s where the fun began.

As I got on the train I sit down and try and tune out everything around me. There was a Chinese couple sitting across from me and they were speaking Cantonese. I’ll get to how I know it was Cantonese and not Mandarin later. So as I’m tuning everything out I suddenty hear. “LOOK LOOK BUTT SHOP!” OK, something like that you don’t just let slip by you.

My minde started wondering what a place called the Butt Shop would be, or maybe it was called the Look Look Butt Shop, kind of like one of silly Asian companies that put English words together to name their company, but not exactly choosing the best words like, “Happy, Sunny Egg Place”. No I’m serious, I actually saw that one time. Maybe the Look, Look Butt Shop sold fanny flattering attire to women who aren’t getting enough attention? Maybe it was a plastic surgery place that fixed dented derrieres?

OK, I’m thinking a little too much here and as I got off the train I realized what she was saying thanks to my Kung-Fu teacher who made us count in Cantonese [Thanks you Sifu Wong!]. They were numbers. 6, 6, 8, 10. They just happened to sound close enough to English words that my mind created the Look, Look Butt Shop out of those sounds. The closest I can come to what the words actually are is luk, luk, baht tsup.

Of course, while I can get my face slapped in about 12 different languages, my knowledge of Cantonese is pretty limited so maybe they weren’t numbers and they really were talking about the Look Look Butt Shop. I tried putting it into google to see if it came up and it didn’t, but maybe that’s a good name for a company that I can make lots of money off of. It’s certainly better than the Cranberry and Apple juice combo that was called “CRAP” when it was released in Japan.

So now I have to ask, what other foreign words can sound like something odd in English and what English words sound like something odd in other languages? Let me know I’m kind of interested in this.