1.02 104 Green Street

1943 • Sonora, California ~ My father first took a job as manager of the Sprouse-Reitz on Washington Street. Mom came in and helped out. Ten years younger, with jet-black hair like her mother’s and grandmother’s, she wore red lipstick and a wide smile. He was the boss, quiet-spoken, good to his employees, pleasant with his customers. She was courteous and friendly, chatty with the regulars. Dad was detailed, particular how the merchandise was displayed and fastidious about keeping the store clean. No half-empty bins, no messy shelves, no litter on the floor. Under his management it doubled in size, taking over the business space next door, and expanding the sales crew to ten. Returning from his daily trek to the post office, he stopped in at Elsbree’s Cigar Store. He sat at the long mahogany bar and visited for ten minutes with Mr. Elsbree, watching reflections in the French imported plate glass mirror and sipping a room-temperature orange Nehi. Dad thought if you drank cold drinks on a hot day you just got hotter. My brother and sisters spent lots of time in Elsbree’s, mostly reading the comic books on the shelves, especially on winter days when it was too wet to play outside and summer days when it was too hot to be alive. Some Sonora summers got so hot that Claudia got nosebleeds and passed out in the bin. Mr. Elsbree would call Dad and Dad would leave work to carry her home. She always got in trouble for it. First, she wasn’t supposed to be in there reading the comic books, and second, for bleeding all over the place.

Mr. Alonso Elsbree in his cigar store, corner of Washington and Bradford (photo 1910)

Dad ran his register six days a week, walking the block to work in his brimmed felt hat, three-piece suit, and blue tie, his muscles hidden under long-sleeved starched white shirts. Muscles from working on the family farm, from construction and work on the highways, from years of delivering ice. A businessman now, he was finished breaking his back as a laborer outside in freezing snow and blistering sun. He hated that kind of work, hated that kind of weather… that’s why he left home in the first place. That, and his mother constantly telling him what to do.

Our family lived at 104 Green Street in the old Lepape house now owned by the Segerstrom family (who also owned the historic Sonora Inn and Kelley’s Central Motors and Garage), a white two-story residence right in the center of town that rented for $35 a month, and where I would be born in five years.

The house was behind the Inn and Kelley’s. The upstairs had four bedrooms: Mom’s and Dad’s room faced the front, along with a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. The kids’ rooms were toward the back, the smallest was the only upper room with heat. It was so cold during the winter that the girls dressed by the downstairs oil heater so they wouldn’t freeze to death.

Small furry brown bats nested in the walls of my sisters’ bedroom. Dad cut holes in the wall to get at them, then chased them around the room with a stick until he killed them (the bats, not my sisters), throwing their bodies out the window and plugging the holes. With their high-pitched chi, chi, chi, the bats looked big and scary flying around the bedroom, but when dead on the ground below they looked like poor small mice.

A long linoleum hall led to the staircase and wood banister that the kids rode halfway to the bottom when our parents weren’t in sight. I got down the stairs by falling. In the living room, white antimacassars and arm protectors rested on the maroon Chesterfield and overstuffed armchair. In the corner stood the upright RCA radio/record cabinet. It was the center of evening family activity, everyone sitting around the radio listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Amos ‘N Andy. Mom loved Jack Benny and Bob Hope. Dad loved Edgar Bergen. The kids’ favorites were The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, and The Lone Ranger, galloping away with his Indian sidekick, Tonto.