Hanging Out At The Old Bus Depot

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.