This is a Miller Avenue Musings Re-Run.
My two sisters probably spent
most of their free time at the library up on Lovell but for me the three
locations which I returned to with all the regularity of a devoted church goer
was Village Music, the Sequoia Theater and the Bus Depot.
It's interesting to me to see how little is known by
the younger residents of today's Mill Valley about the Bus Depot. I suppose my
generation of Mill Valley kids were equally ignorant about the trains which
originally ran in and out of town. That's the problem with progress. The old
gets torn down, built on and a way of life is forgotten forever.
The main reason I was in the bus depot so much was the
comic book rack which sat opposite the main counter as you entered from the
Thockmorton side. I bought and collected a lot of comic books but they were
only a small percentage of the ones I read for free. I never purchased Archie,
Little Lulu, Casper and countless
other titles, but I read them all.
I was also on a first name basis with the ladies who
worked there from a very early age. I knew Margo and Brun pretty well and they
tended to give me special dispensation with regard to comic book reading
whereas most boys were told to put the comics back.
Over the years I spent a lot of time in the bus depot.
Whenever my brother Jim and I found ourselves downtown that's the place we'd
hang around.
Sometime in the very early 1960s Jimmy and I became
friendly with one of the Greyhound bus drivers. We got to know him through
Margo who Jim thinks had a crush on him. He was a very good looking guy about
thirty five and he was always a happy sort. His name was Arleigh. We took to
spending Sunday afternoons down around the depot and Arleigh would let us sit
in his parked bus while he awaited his next departure.
Over time when we were off school Arleigh would let us
ride into the city and back on his bus but we had to be careful not to get
caught because the Greyhound Company hired spotters to ride the buses checking
up on the drivers. Arleigh always gave us tickets and we had to pretend we
didn't know him on these journeys.
The usual route was out through Tam Valley, making a
stop at Marin City which was where you would change to go north to San Rafael
or Novato. The bus would then
continue on through Sausalito and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Once we were
through the tollgate, we'd take the second exit off the freeway by the Palace
of Fine Arts then on up Lombard Street with its endless parade of motels to Van
Ness where the bus would hang a right. Van Ness took us over the hill then it
was left on Golden Gate. The final leg of this journey was to cross Market at
6th, go around the corner to 7th and into the depot where there was a special
angled parking space for the Mill Valley buses.
Amongst our toys from very early on was a fleet of
small Greyhound buses and I can remember running one of these in and out of
Bearville, the imaginary town which my brother and I constructed for our
sizeable teddy bear collection.
I had a medium sized Greyhound Silverside which would
come along the top of a concrete wall just below our front lawn and stop for a
gaggle of imaginary bears on their way somewhere important.
Apart from pretty regular car journeys with my father
to the San Francisco waterfront on Saturdays, the usual form of transport to
the city for us was the Greyhound bus which ran on the hour out of the Depot.
Most of our early trips were with my mother Beth who would buy the tickets
across the counter. There was a huge stamp that Margo or Brun would bang with their
fist once the tickets were within its jaws.
The drivers all wore a pretty smart military looking
uniform. Grey shirt with a tie, matching grey trousers and each man, for I
never saw a woman driver, had a military style hat which he would or would not
wear. Attached to their belt was a leather holster which held the driver's
individual ticket punch. The mark that was made by the punch was never the same
and, thus, later identification of the driver could be made.
Great play was made in Greyhound advertising copy
about leaving the driving to them and, doubtless, the daily commute in and out
of Mill Valley must have been a relatively painless business. Longer journeys,
however, were a different story. I remember becoming impossibly bored and
constrained on long Greyhound journeys like one we went on to New Mexico in
1958 .
It was while sitting in his bus one day that we met
one of Arleigh's colleagues who was named Ernst Heinemann. Ernst was very tall,
dark haired and German. We learned that Ernst had been in the Hitler Youth as a
kid and told us, quite calmly in his excellent English that Hitler had his good
points as well as his bad.
Ernst didn't feel the persecution of the Jews was a
good thing but the concept of full employment and sense of purpose he saw as
positive.
Now my father Blackie had a very strong prejudice
against Germans in general which was interesting because it was the only
nationality he seemed to hold a grudge against. It was clearly to do with the Nazis
for he didn't feel that way about the Italians or Japanese. He always told me
that the Italians made 'lousy fascists' as their hearts weren't in it, whereas
the Germanic character fitted the mold perfectly in his opinion.
One of the many realities of the 1950s that Black had
no enthusiasm for was the post war rehabilitation of the Germans. Werner Von
Braun was not seen in our house as a new hero of the space race but as a Nazi
scientist who invented the bombs which rained down on Britain during the war.
One restaurant our family never even considered going
to was the Mountain Home Inn with it's Germanic décor and draft beer served in
big metallic mugs. I can only guess that Blackie hated the huge success that
Volkswagen beetles and camper vans had in America during the sixties.
I don't believe that either Jim or I ever mentioned
our friend Ernst to Beth or Blackie but, I suspect, that if Blackie met him he
would probably like him as we did.
One of the difficulties of growing up in a family
where politics played such a strong role was the fact that most people hardly
ever thought about politics at all. It just never came up with my friends at
school. So, for me, this bag of political opinions that followed me around, was
hardly ever dipped into or used at all, but it was always there.
It was hardly twenty years since that war had ended
and so much had changed for my parents during that time and here we were, no
longer in Greenwich Village but in beautiful Mill Valley.
Mount Tamalpais in all its glory attracted many hikers
from around the world. Many would arrive by Greyhound on the weekends and head
up Throckmorton to climb up any of the wooden steps which ascended towards the
mountain. Quite a few of these hikers were German.
That downtown junction where Miller ran into
Throckmorton always was a nice part of town and on the weekends it was busy but
not unpleasantly so. Directly opposite the depot on Miller stood Women's
Mayers, a sizeable clothing store while the Men's Mayers was about a third of
the way down the block near where Sunnyside joined in. Also along this strip
was Meyer's Bakery where I used to enjoy a cherry Coke at their soda fountain.
This was a time when the stores in Mill Valley had a
practicality about them. Lockwood's Pharmacy, Strawbridge's cards &
stationery, The Redwood Book Store, Ben Franklin five and dime, Esposti's ice
cream parlour and many more.
Sy Weill, a very tall bald man could usually be seen,
immaculately attired, standing in front of his store Redhill Liquors smoking and
watching the world walk by. His shop was on Throckmorton next door to the diner
which had been known as Stuyvesant's but by the early 60s had become Pat &
Joe's.
I used to hang out around the depot, sometimes sitting
on the bench with a clear view of the taxi cabs which parked there. One late
afternoon while I sat on that bench I saw Ernst Heinemann wearing his full
Greyhound uniform with military looking hat talking to this much shorter man
who was dressed entirely in Lederhosen complete with a little cap that had a
large feather protruding from it. Naturally they were conversing in their
native tongue and they made quite a picture standing by the clock tower with
the Old Mill Tavern in the background and the sight of pine trees ascending in
the distance. It looked like a Nazi officer conversing with a German citizen
during the war in some Bavarian village. I sat and watched them chatting away
for some time. The fellow in Lederhosen was much older than Ernst and almost
certainly would have been active during the great fracas.
It must have been at least two years later when I read
a story in the Chronicle all about our friend Ernst. He'd been arrested and
taken off to the psychiatric hospital at Napa.
There was a Greyhound driver named Bill Burke who was
the father of Patty Burke, one of the prettiest girls in my year at school.
Bill was a kind of driver's shop steward and he enjoyed the sorts of privileges
which come with seniority.
So Heinemann turned up on Bill Burke's doorstep one
evening carrying a copy of William L. Shirer's Rise And Fall Of The Third
Reich and telling Bill: "We must
get the men together. We're all meeting up on the mountain."
Presumably Bill humoured him and, once he'd gone,
called the police about it.
The next incident reported in the story was up in the
parking lot at Bootjack Camp where the Marin Sheriff's deputy John Goff, who
regularly patrolled Stinson and the mountain, confronted Heinemann near his
car.
When the officer became convinced that Ernst should be
taken into custody the big German jumped in his vehicle and raced down the
mountain. A high speed chase then occurred and the deputy managed to shoot one
of Ernst's tires out, after which poor old Heinemann was, indeed, taken into
custody and shipped off to Napa.
It's rather difficult to find a moral to this sad
story. I can only guess that the Nazis had more of an impact on poor Ernst's
consciousness than he cared to admit and that, just as I had noticed the similarity
between a Greyhound uniform and that of a Nazi officer's, something must have
snapped in his mind convincing him he was back in the fatherland in 1942.
By the time of this incident, we hadn't seen Arleigh
in quite awhile and I don't think I ever saw him again.
It's strange to sit outside what is now called the
Book Depot amongst all the flamboyant new citizens of our home town and
remember what it was like when big Greyhound buses would come through on the
hour and take up a fair proportion of the parking lot.
Mill Valley is so different these days with its
cappuccino bars and herbal emporiums. I remember my brother Jim lamenting the
fact that there was only one real café left where you could get bacon and eggs
with a short stack without any garnish.
I understand that change is an essential component of
life but I can't help missing Pat and Joe's, all the stores which used to light
up downtown Mill Valley and the wonderful old bus depot, comic books and all.
