Places to see! – Page 7 – Baghdad By The Bay

November 30, 2009December 18, 2021

San Francisco Aquarium Society

As a little kid I loved pets. We had a dog when I was a baby, but while he was very protective of me he also saw me as competition so we could be left in the same room together. Once our dog was gone my parents decided to get me more kid friendly pets. A hamster wasn’t good enough for me so my parents got me a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Not the most kid friendly pet, but it was fun to have and show off to my friends. They’re classified as wild animals now so they aren’t legal anymore, but “sniffles” was as cute as a button.

One birthday I got an aquarium and discovered I was hooked. Back in the late 60’s there wasn’t that much in the way of aquariums and the fish you had to choose from were always few and far between. Back then we didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put goldfish in with angelfish [goldfish like colder water and angelfish were tropical water dwellers]. My first aquarium was one of those awful 10 gallons with the metal frame and we always ran into problems with it like when my mother put a decorative sea shell in a freshwater tank [bad because the mostly South American fish like soft water and the calcium in the shell leaches out and makes it hard]. So eventually we gave up and the aquarium was stored away.

A few years go by and I decide I wanted to try an aquarium again and I got a brand new set up with an outside hang on the back filter instead of the garbage undergravel filter I had before. Then something magical happened. I decided to buy fancy guppies. These were really colorful fish that one day did something I had never scene before—I saw baby guppies! and then the dollar signs started to go off in my head. I got a smaller 5 gallon tank and would scoop the babies out to grown them up safely away from their parents who would make a meal out of them. Pretty soon I was turning them in at the local fish store for credit and my hobby was paying for itself. This lasted for several years and I wanted more, so I moved up to a 20 gallon tank. I think by now I had about 5 tanks running and I had a hatcher for brine shrimp eggs to feed and bulk up the babies with live food. For those of you who don’t know what brine shrimp are think of the Sea Monkeys you might of had as a kid. So here I am in my late teens with 5 fish tanks, I should have just stamped geek on my forehead, but I was still able to attract pretty girls who liked to look at the fish in my darkened bedroom [“Eric! why are the lights off in the your bedroom!” “We’re just watching the fish mom!”] That line worked everytime.

Then one day I was in the now closed Nippon fish store and I saw a little flyer talking about the San Francisco Aquarium Society. Cool! There are other fish geeks like me who like to get together once a month and well, be bigger geeks. So I went to my first meeting at the California Academy of Sciences. There were maybe 25 people there and I have no idea what the talk was about, but it was about some fish I had never heard of. At the end after lecture they served refreshments and had a raffle. These guys actually got manufacturers and local stores to donate goods for promotion. I spent $5 on the 25¢ tickets and came home with a bundle.

Then came the big part—The raffle. OMG, I was seeing fish I had never even heard of before and it was the people in the club who were breeding them. Gee, you can breed more than guppies? I was hooked and joined that night. I received their first newsletter, Panorama and it was well, not that great. Good information, but it could have looked a lot better. So me needing an excuse to better learn page layout and graphic design redid that newsletter and brought a copy to the next meeting. I showed it to one of the members of the Board of Directors who’s jaw dropped. He asked if he could have this and I said sure thing and I offered to do the layout for the newsletter. At my third meeting I was asked to be the publisher of Panorama. I asked who the next guest was going to be and after I found out I went home and laid out some quarter sheet flyers and called my new friend on the board and told him, “Hey Jeff, I have something to show you.” Again, his jaw dropped. He took the copy and within a few days I started to notice them showing up in stores around the Bay Area.

I was suddenly becoming the buzz of the SFAS. I gave them a vision and a professional look. After being a member for one year a spot opened up on the BoD and I was asked if I would be interested. Hell yeah I was interested. I now had a chance to bring about change and learn more about the hobby. After being on the BoD for a year I was then asked to become the Program Chairman. I think this was mostly because I immersed myself in the hobby and was on the forefront of this new thing social network called Compuserve and it’s forum FishNET that I had the resources. Now I was bringing in guest speakers from all over the country even some from Germany where they were on the forefront. The SFAS started to grow with my new found marketing skills and had outgrown the little conference room and had to move into the auditorium. By year 3 or 4 on the BoD, I was nominated for President. I got elected and things really took off. We grew from just under 50 members when I joined to over 500 members and now I was even giving talks about my experience with new Dutch Plant Tanks. The limit for President was two years and I had to step down after that. After the new President served for a year some of the board members were asking me to come back again. So I did and served as President for another two years. During this time something strange started to happen. I was asked to be on a few PBS shows and I was interviewed by newspapers because keeping fish tanks had taken off like wildfire through the work of promoting the club that the BoD and the members had done. People would stop me on the streets and say, “hey you’re that fish guy”. At the time I had hair almost down to my waist, I was hanging out in the new Metal scene and I was totally dressed as a rocker at the meetings. I was trying to get a new band started, but was having trouble. I wanted to be a rockstar and in a sense I was, amongst the fish geeks. That may not seem like much, but at the time I had managed to turn the words “fish geek” into something that was cool, not dorky. Literally where ever I would go people were recognizing me. I was down at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and people were walking up to me. I was visiting the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and in talking to one of the people who was a biologist there I ended up getting a behind the scenes tour. My name had made it as far as the London Aquarium where I was also given a behind the scenes tour and taken to lunch.

Then as my two years were coming to a close and I had to step down a horrible thought entered my head. I made this club so noticeable because of my rockstar image would it hold up when I stepped down? I decided the find the best person for the job and get behind them and help them along. It seemed to work with me advising the new President for the two years he ran the club and we were invited to a few galas at the Steinhardht Aquarium by the Director of the Aquarium. When it was time for then President John to step down I thought about it. The SFAS has been in existence since 1932 and I only helped it out for 8 years of that time. They’ll be fine if I walk away. My life had changed a lot and I didn’t really have time for the club so I left. Not much of a problem since I was given a life membership and made an ex officio member of the BoD. I lost touch for awhile and then found out the truth—I was right. The club had shrunk down to the point that they don’t even have the required 13 board members. They no longer meet at the California Academy of Sciences and I’m starting to get calls from some of the old board members who also left and now are thinking of getting the old gang back together.

This was a great club and it still has the potential to be a great club. There are still members who have made contributions to the hobby by breeding new strains of fish, such as Dick Au and his German Blue Rams and Blue Angelfish. If you want to learn more about keeping fish properly and also be able to find some fish that you’ll never see in stores, then I suggest you check them out at www.sfaquarium.org, and maybe, just maybe we can get some of the old gang together to bring it back to what it used to be.

December 23, 2008December 18, 2021

Nuts to you!

Today is a bit of a sad day for San Franciscans. Morrow’s Nut House and it’s crazy owner Jackie Helbert have announced that they will close their doors for good on January 1st.

For those of you who haven’t visited I would suggest you do before the end of the year. Jackie was the loud & crazy woman who ran the place for the past 37 and had taken over from her mother. This is one of those family owned businesses that had just enough odd about it to make it truely a piece of SF history. While our local government is trying to keep all the Wal-marts and large corporate chains out of San Francisco to keep us special we still have those special odd little places like Morrow’s to keep us on our toes. Unfortunately we now only have a few more days to enjoy this little place where they roast their nuts daily. I think I’m going to take a little break from work here and walk over there just to remember the smell and to get some nuts.

November 29, 2008December 18, 2021

The San Francisco Zoo

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the SF Zoo. I always used to love going there, but now with the upgraded and newly added areas there are parts of the old zoo that are still there that look very, well, old. The new lemus exhibit and african savannah are very nice, but when you travel across and see the new grizzly gulch area right next to the old bear grottos those old bear grottos look pretty dilapidated.

As you walk around you seem to move from the good new looking exhibits right next to the old exhibits through out the zoo. Some are completely empty and overgrown with weeds, others harken back to the days where zoos were built similar to a public bathroom in a cage–concrete floors and walls with a drain in the center.

Maybe part of the reason is that they need more money to rebuild the outdated areas or figure out what to do with the areas that just need a little work. After returning from todays journey out there I thought it was kind of odd that they’ve added an ice skating rink for Christmas time right smack in front of the area that used to be the main entrance. Incidently if you walk around that they’ve also set up a corral on the grass to house some reindeer in a temporary display. Unfortunately if you turn and look to the left the have managed to use the space in front of the old Mother’s Building with the old concession stands. It kind of makes think of it as the little zoo that tried and couldn’t.

My feelings are maybe they should close the zoo for a year or so and just rebuild all the exhibits that need rebuilding and work on getting more animals to fill out the empty exhibit areas. The map that they give you on the way in even has areas marked as “future” exhibits. Sort of a, “Here’s what you’d see if we had it, but we don’t.” The Primate Center which was the first remodeled section is beginning to show it’s age and needs a fresh coat of paint and maybe some rustoleum on the metal. The central area home to the old elephant and lion houses needs a lot of work and looks more like a prison camp for the animals than a place to proudly display them. The orangutans are gone, being replaced by the Leaping Lemur Cafe. Monkey Island is gone being replace by, well I’m not sure exactly, but it’s not there anymore. The Children’s Zoo has been beefed up quite a bit, but is very disorganized and the main part of it is still the Family Farm which is basically, goats, sheep and poop.

The three places I’d recommend highly are the African Savannah, Lemur Forest and the Australian Walkabout. If you have kids you can give them a ride on the restored Dentzel Carousel built in the 1920’s. Grizzly Gulch you could pass on unless you really like grizzly bears, but it’s just two of them in a relatively small space that’s just a little bit bigger than the current bear gulags, I mean grottos. Definitely bring your lunch as the cafes while now going upscale have more than done so in price. A 20oz soda at one of the concession stands along the way will cost you $3.00 and a churro will cost you $3.50

$15 for adults $12 if you’re an SF resident. $8 for parking [which if you’re smart and don’t mind a little walk you can get for free. Easily accessible from the L-Taraval metro line or from the slower than molasses 18 & 23 buses. Check it out, but I wouldn’t put it way up on your list. Leaping Lemur Cafe serves up Pizza & Pasta with free Wi-Fi while the Playfield Cafe serves up Asian specialties and the Terrace Cafe is a taqueria with burgers and fries.

November 16, 2008December 18, 2021

The California Academy of Sciences

[click on pics for expanded view]

I worked for the California Academy of Sciences when I was a kid starting off taking classes at the Junior Academy then moving up to working at the Junior Academy and volunteering at the Steinhardt Aquarium and then working for the Morrison Planetarium. I used to get to walk around before anyone was let in and I could walk around behind the scenes and talk with people like Tom Tucker who worked at the aquarium who used to let me steal some of the brine shrimp from their huge tanks for my fish tanks at home to John McCosker the former head of the Aquarium who I kept begging for a real job for years. I used to run around this place like a sponge trying to soak up all that it had to offer. I knew every inch of the CAS from African Hall, Northern American Hall, that room with all the bird dioramas [what was that called again?] to the Hall of Minerals and Wattis Hall of Man. They they closed it all down. Tore down most of it and rebuilt it. I was amazed at all the work that went into it and how they had focused on making things as green as possible. I looked forward to opening day, but me being a bit of a “sunset redneck” as it were didn’t get out there on opening day.

I was glad. When my wife and daughter and I get a chance to go we waited in line for about 45 minutes just to purchase a membership. Now when I was a kid [get ready for the “back in my day…” line] It cost about $25 a year for a family membership. Five years ago when my wife and I took up a membership again it was $45. Today due to inflation the price for a family membership is $159. No, I kid you not. If you’re a single person it’s $25 to get in vs. the $6 when I was in my late teens. Is it worth it? HELL YES! We take our daughter a couple of times a month and my wife goes with her even more often. At first it doesn’t feel like there’s much there because it’s more of a big room than several smaller rooms, but there is a lot going on there. My best advice is that if you live in SF then you should take a day off of work and go mid week. On the weekends it’s way too crowded and you’ll be tripping over strollers left and right. I did find the “food court” rather refreshing from the old days when Duchess Services handled the food and it was cheap greasy fries and tasteless hamburgers and hotdogs. Salads back then were considered to be iceberg lettuce with a wedge of tomato and a slice of cucumber drowned in cheap over the counter Italian dressing. Now everything and I mean everything is organic. Want a Coke? Nope. Even the sodas are organic and they have a range of foods that runs the gamut of the cultures of San Francisco. They also have a rather upscale dining room downstairs called the Moss Room that features very upscale foodie stuffs from the likes of Charles Phan of Dragonfly and Straits, but is overseen by head chef Justin Simoneaux. I haven’t eaten there yet, but when I can find a way to google up a few extra hundred bucks I’m taking the wife there to live it up large. If for no other reason than to see the moss covered wall.