View from 26 Uranus TerraceSeeing the movie Milk brought those moments back to me in a real time. Gus Van Zant accurately caught the tenor of it by integrating real footage into the mix. His use of color too created for me an erie sense of deja vu. Sean Penn was at his best as an actor. This was, however, more than a movie about a gay activist. it was about a unique person who accomplished, within the political structure of a city long run by Irish and Italian politicians, something often thought unobtainable. He legitimized gay activism and fought for the right of any minority to live freely as themselves. Ironically he did it in a Catholic neighborhood long a conservative stronghold in San Francisco. In doing so he set a precedent and changed the thinking of a country that long ignored the right of a gay person to live openly.
Harvey Milk was an ordinary person, unheroic in one sense, but driven by the need to believe that anything is possible if you have the will and determination to try and make it happen. It took six to seven years for him to prove that he was right in his belief and to convince others to believe in his ideas as well and only ten months to put those ideas into practice. In doing so he left us a lasting legacy. It is all in the doing. The Whites of this world spend all their lives looking for entitlements without the passion to challenge and make things happen. Harvey Milk transcended sexual preference issues by giving them acceptance politically. I was a minor part of that history.
Having grown up between the Haight and the Castro this movie brought back the wonder of those years and a reminder of the time I spent having always to prove myself and others what I was capable of.
Born in San Francisco in 1935 I spent my early years growing up between the Castro and the Haight in 1938 my father, Ralph Chessé, artist, puppeteer, actor and then managing director of the Federal Theater's California Marionette Theater Project was transferred from Los Angeles to present his marionette version of Pinocchio at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition and Worlds Fair on Treasure Island. We rented a Victorian styled house at 26 Uranus Terrace at the top of 17th Street
26 Uranus Terrace1949 Serograph by Ralph Chessé
From his 2nd floor art studio we could overlook all of downtown San Francisco and on a clear day see Berkeley and the Oakland Hills.
Seventeenth Street runs east from Stanyan Street in the Cole Valley neighborhood up a steep hill to Clayton (north of 17th and Clayton lay the Haight-Ashbury) then straight down through the Castro, on past Mission, to the foot of Potrero Hill ending at the Embarcadero.
On the NE corner of 17th and Clayton there is a stairway that leads up to Mt Olympus on Ashbury Heights at the end of Upper Terrace. This is the geographical center of San Francisco. It was also called Statue Hill and from its heights you have a 360 degree view of San Francisco.
We were half way between the Haight and the Castro neighborhoods and for 17 years this was to be the social center of my universe, except for a brief stint in the US Army in 1956, until 1969 when I married for a 2nd time and moved to the East Bay.
During that time I experienced, the Beat and Hippie generations, college riots at SF State and the University of California, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, the Viet Nam War protests, Ronald Reagan, the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and finally the death of Harvey Milk. I saw my first Castro Halloween parade in 1939 long before the Gay movement picked up and continued the tradition started by Cliff (Hilario DeBaca) at Cliff's Variety store.
My mother usually made our costumes for my sister Renée and I and we would walk down 17th, with it's two and three storied Victorians on each side of the street, alternating with single family stucco dwellings, railroad flats, duplexes and some larger apartment houses to Castro and Market streets. That first year my brother Dion was dressed as Captain Midnight. As always the streets were crowded with people. In subsequent years we would attend parades in the Haight as well. Castro however was our favorite.
The Variety store was central headquarters for the parade. Cliff walked with a limp and always dressed in black and sometimes in motorcycle leathers. His store windows were filled with mechanical displays of Halloween Ghosts, Goblins and Witches that moved and cackled ad infinitum.
In addition, Cliff's was always a primary source for everything and the place for kids to go for school supplies, balsa wood glider planes and penny candies. He and his wife knew everyone in the neighborhood. Both the Haight and the Castro were traditional Catholic neighborhoods represented by their individual parishes. Most Holy Redeemer in the Castro and St. Agnes on Ashbury in the Haight.
Their parishes ran the neighborhoods. As I remember most of the other churches were found outside of the Castro and the Haight. There were no middle schools in our districts. Elementary schools went from Kindergarten to the 6th or 8th grades. Most Catholic High Schools were found in the Richmond near USF and Geary Streets. Mission HIgh was across from Mission Delores on 18th in the Mission while Polytechnic and Lowell drew from the Haight Ashbury. Poly High was for blue collars and Lowell always was and still is the elite school which drew students from all over SF if they had the grades. In addition. Haight Street was a color line for blacks who only lived north of Haight street. For a while covenants were required on real estate south of Haight. This changed during the late 50's.
A lot of police and fireman lived in the neighborhoods as well as city employes who were for the most part good Irish catholics. Each district had a movie theater and the Haight had the public Library which was heavily used especially on Saturday. The Castro Theater was the largest and the most ornate movie theater their and had a balcony. However, it drew patrons from the Mission barrios. The 40's was the time of the Zoot suitors and what the whites called Pachukos. They ruled the balcony of the Castro and they could be very rough, so my brother and I tended to favor the Haight. The Haight theater too always had a cartoon, short subject and a raffle on Saturdays as well as a main feature.
Over the years I had a number of paper routes, delivering the San Francisco News, The Call Bulletin, the Examiner, the Chronicle and the Shopping News. These routes took me into the Haight, Cole Valley, Twin Peaks, and the Castro. In those days we had to collect the money as well as deliver the papers and this brought me in personal contact with many of the city personalities who lived in these neighborhoods.
Their was a great diversity to be found there. Customers in Twin Peaks included Mayor Elmer Robinson, Tort Lawyer Melvin Belli, Gus Farber, who owned Farber Jewelers for whom I also helped deliver Buena Vista Winery wines, and Ed Moffit, cabinet maker and unofficial Mayor of Twin Peaks who every Easter held an alternative sunrise service on Twin Peaks in in competition with Mount Davidson. Ruth Heller, children's book author, illustrator, and wife of Henry Heller rounded out this illustrious grouping.
The Cole Valleys most famous resident was Harry Bridges, labor leader and head of the ILWU, Louis Goldblatt, the ILWU International Secretary-Treasurer, and Dave Jenkins head of the California Labor School whose daughter Becky Jenkins was a classmate of mine at Grattan Elementary. The DeDomenicos of Rice-a-Roni fame lived in Ashbury Heights as well
Scattered around were artists and colleagues of my father like the Raymond Puccinelli and his sister and others. Down the block from me a tall skinny kid would walk to the bus stop every day with his music case in hand. On a couple of occasions on a summer evening he even joined us in playing "Kick the Can" with the other kids in the neighborhood and we would see him playing in the Poly High marching band at football and basketball games. In later years, in going to see Dave Brubeck at the Blackhawk nightclub I made the realization that the same kid was Paul Desmond.
There were only three public grammar schools to draw from in these neighborhoods, Twin Peaks, Grattan and Buena Vista Elementary the only school to offer wood shop and home economics classes near Masonic and Haight streets. My brother, sister and I went to all three in the 40'd. Because the community was small we all knew each other and my mother who did baby-sitting on the side drew from these school communities for jobs and my sister and me inherited many of the baby-sitting chores from those families we knew.
Growing up, the Castro and the Haight were residential family communities. In Later years many of the families moved to suburbs in Marin County or down to the Peninsula in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
In the 50's and 60's those families children often returned to go to San Francisco State College which was located in the Lower Haight at Herman and Buchanan and later at 19th and Holloway. I went there in 1953 and was part of the transition to the new Merced campus. Finding cheap housing in the Haight carried over to the 60's which gave birth to the San Francisco Rock and Roll music scene and the Hippie movement. My cousins Rodney and Peter Albin ran a boarding house owned by my Uncle Henry at 1090 Page street which gave birth to the first concerts from which evolved Janus Joplin Big Brother and the Holding Company (Peter Albin was the Bass player), the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. This movement changed these neighborhoods forever.
Further Reflections
My father was a part of the San Francisco Bohemian Artist Community in the 20's and 30's. My subsequent involvement vis a vis the arts beginning at 12 in 1948 which encompassed singing at the Opera House with the San Francisco Boys Opera Chorus during the Golden age of Opera (1948-49) and involvement in art, theater, films and television in San Francisco ending in the 80's, gave me great insight into the development of Gay activism as personified by Harvey Milk. The Bohemian artists of the 20's & 30's were all inclusive in terms of sexual preference. The Bohemian Club has a long history of giving employment and access to talented homosexuals as did the art movements that flourished in North Beach. The arts have always been a unifying element throughout history. It has always drawn people together as a community
North Beach and the Barbary Coast in San Francisco historically was a harbinger of open sexuality. This carried on well into the 20's and 30's. San Francisco has always supported eccentricities, sexual of otherwise. We have only to look at Emperor Norton and how he was an accepted part of the community and cared for lovingly although he was mad as a hatter.
North Beach in the 30's was the center of large literary movement led by James Broughton an outspoken gay activist, poet and and early experimental filmmaker coming to fruition in San Francisco's Beat Scene, His numerous friends included a great cross section of gays and straights that included Stan Brakhage, Joyce Lancaster, Adrian Wilson, Alan Watts, Michael McClure, Susan Hart and Pauline Kael (by whom he produced three children) Anna Halprin, Imogen Cunningham. and Kermit Sheets who ran the San Francisco Playhouse at Beach and Hyde Streets. It too was a center for Gay Activism personified by James Broughton.
During the Beat Generation their were openly popular gay bars and restaurants in North Beach such as Finocchios,12 Adler Place, The Paper Doll and the Black Cat Cafe who Ginsberg described as the greatest gay bar in America. In that period gays, lesbian and heterosexuals in north Beach were, part of an integrated cultural arts movement centered there and who were left undisturbed by the city fathers.
My family and I were associated with The Playhouse all through the 60's. James Broughton was an important part of that association and was a major contributor to the Gay movement until 1979 when he set about traveling with Joel Silver his then lover. in 1980 he moved to Port Townsend in Washington. I saw and met with him again shortly before he died in 1989. In one sense James cultivated the ground that led to a rebirth of the Castro giving a platform for the ideas of Harvey Milk. Interestingly James lived to see his work and Gay Activism in San Francisco win the national recognition and respect it should have always had in his lifetime.
Theater and the arts flourished in the 50’s and 60’s especially in North Beach where ones sexuality was not a questionable point demonstrating, as we artists have always known, that it is a universal world we live in to which everyone can contribute and live together. In addition, along with family members my stay in the neighborhoods gave me a grounding in the world of art which has sustained me thoughout my life.
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