You can download and listen to this episode in iTunes or click on the red star logo to the right. I would sorta prefer the iTunes path, because each download there makes it more searchable for other people to find. I would also love reviews made in iTunes. Thanks, enjoy the show.
I am sitting outside the joint people most often mention when I tell them I’m working on a project concerning California’s historic bars. The Sun is going down at five o’clock so I know its time to switch from clear to brown liquors for the winter months and the sun has dipped below the coastal mountains on the west side of the San Francisco Bay, casting deep shadows over the Port of Oakland and painting a bluish hue upon the massive four legged cranes that services the container ships, which we’ve all seen lumbering into the bay, like floating citadels arrayed with brightly colored blocks, shipping containers, stacked like legos. I’ve been told that George Lucas envisioned the Imperial AT-AT Walkers seen at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, when he was driving over the Bay Bridge, looking at these monstrous cranes, but I have never looked this fact up because I would hate to find it’s not true.
I am sitting outside the joint people most often mention when I tell them I’m working on a project concerning California’s historic bars. The Sun is going down at five o’clock so I know its time to switch from clear to brown liquors for the winter months and the sun has dipped below the coastal mountains on the west side of the San Francisco Bay, casting deep shadows over the Port of Oakland and painting a bluish hue upon the massive four legged cranes that services the container ships, which we’ve all seen lumbering into the bay, like floating citadels arrayed with brightly colored blocks, shipping containers, stacked like legos. I’ve been told that George Lucas envisioned the Imperial AT-AT Walkers seen at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, when he was driving over the Bay Bridge, looking at these monstrous cranes, but I have never looked this fact up because I would hate to find it’s not true.
This entire bay is
now synonymous with the technological innovations it produces, the ideas that
offer ever-quicker routes to our needs and desires, and make the planet a
smaller place. But here, at this Western mouth of the world, one can
still witness the slow, corporeal industry of the global mercantile exchange.
From here, the world still looks vast, laborious, unknowable,
insurmountable. This trade is all
on a scale that would probably seem unimaginable to someone a hundred years
ago, to someone like Jack London as he signed aboard the Sophia Sutherland
schooner, leaving for Japan, leaving his childhood home for exploits in the
cold, robust and wild expanse of creation. But the process remains very
much the same: longshoremen load, the ships spend weeks plowing across a
desolate waste of rising and setting sunsets, and longshoremen unload.
But the time is gone when boys and young men like London looked at these
deep voyagers and didn’t see a glut of consumer goods, but possibilities,
adventure, a courageous life that forgoes modern comfort for the chance at
something extraordinary.
London lived in a
California, he more or less embodied a California, that was on the precipice of
change, when the Wild West was becoming tame, manageable, docile, like
everywhere else but with a great climate, angelic scenery and self-righteous
bohemians. The call had gone out the world over and been answered, of the
promise of liberty and riches in California, the last stand of Thomas
Jefferson’s rural Enlightenment vision of America, the Eden at the end of the
Earth. But the promised unmared and open vistas were becoming harder to
find, those patches of land that a person could find and work and raise a
family, free of time clocks and bosses and all the unforgiving demands of other
people. California was not only not impervious to the modern age that was
dawning, in truth it would be at it’s forefront, rushing through all the growing
pains societies typically engage, and going straight from being a shit-kicking
backwater to beacon of progress and development.
Jack London embodied
this too; in his short life, going from a penniless oyster-pirate who refused
to beholden to any master, to the nation’s first entertainment celebrity.
The most famous author in the world, tirelessly generating books, despite
his ever failing health and the quality of writing which he little cared about,
to pay off his debts. He was an
idealist and a socialist, but also a racist, a nationalist and sold his name to
cigars, mints, and tailors in New York.
Yet somehow, drunk, bloated, jaded, bitter, dying, a life of hard living
coming home to roust, he still produced masterpieces. Generations would read his books and dream of the free
wilderness that could be still found out there, somewhere.
Today we’re going to Jack London’s California. There is no better guide to Western
saloon culture at the turn of the twentieth century, so we’ll visit the bar the
he himself declared as spot he gave up all things boyish for manly pursuits.
We’re at Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland. And this is
the Bear Flag Libation.
At age fifteen, Jack London had already had enough of
mundane work a day life. He’d gone
from being a paperboy to working ten to eighteen hour shifts at a cannery in
Oakland and could not contemplate spending the rest of life as a “work-beast”,
treated with less value than a horse. Since he had learned to read, young Jack spent nearly
every free moment in books, traveling the globe and through time on the sails
of his imagination, but was always forced to return to difficult, and worse yet,
ordinary reality of the poor child obliged to quit school to earn money for his
family. Nearly everybody in the
boy’s view seemed to toil endlessly without real purpose, dim to any air of
romance and escapade- that is except for the oyster pirates. The oyster pirates sped around the Bay
in their tiny sloops, flouting the law, raiding the shallow water oyster farms,
drinking and fighting and generally doing as they damn well pleased. Young Jack wanted in. So he borrowed money from his one-time
wet nurse, and went to see a man called French Frank about buying his boat, the
Razzle Dazzle. Before the sale even became official
Jack was caught up in the high drama, allowing himself to be seduced by Mamie,
Queen of the Oyster Pirates, and earning the jealous hatred of French Frank,
who would soon try to kill Jack.
But first, “We met by appointment, early Monday morning, to complete the
deal, in Johnny Heinhold’s ‘Last Chance’- a saloon, of course, for the
transactions of men.”
Rounds of drinks to celebrate the sale of the boat were
bought for all present, men like Spider Healy, Whiskey Bob, Soup Kennedy, and
even a glass for the barkeep, Johnny Heinold. All aware of French Frank’s vengeful ire toward this new kid,
but Jack remained completely naive of any reason a fifty-year-old man would be
jealous of a fifteen-year-old boy.
Unfortunately for Jack, he was making few friends due his ignorance to
the fact that when other men buy rounds of drinks; you too are expected to
reciprocate with a round. It was
Heinold who finally leaned over the bar and whispered, “He’s got it in for
you. Watch out.” Sure enough, some time later French
Frank tried to ram Jack’s ship, but the young London held him off, cocking a
double-barrel shotgun with his hands while deftly steering the Razzle Dazzle with his feet. This event, coupled with Jack’s
discovery of how to treat others to drinks, gained him a mighty reputation on
the Oakland waterfront and after a drunken fistfight with Frank, the dropped
his vendetta. Such as life among
the oyster-pirates of the San Francisco Bay and the men who drank at Johnny
Heinold’s bar. [1]
At this point, you’re probably asking, what the heck is an
oyster-pirate? And, where do I
sign up for this job? So before we
step down into First and Last Chance, let’s get out, on and under the famous
bay because the rise and fall of the California oyster industry actually speaks
volumes about rapid evolution of the state. By 1890, when Young London embarking on his career as an
outlaw, the San Francisco Bay was drastically different than it had been only
forty years before, and by the time London died in 1916, it had undergone a
whole other set of changes.
The native Ohlone Indians lived in the greater Bay Area for
many centuries, with oysters and other shellfish being a steady part of their daily
diet. Archeologists have uncovered
hundreds of huge mounds of shells all along beaches leading them to believe the
amount of bivalves consumed by people every year could be measured in tons. In drought or flood, if plants and
animals were scarce for a season, shellfish were always abundant and
accessible. When Europeans showed
up, they joined in the foraging; there was plenty for all. But then the Gold Rush struck. And even more important than the sudden
explosion in population in Northern California, was a devastating environmental
impact caused by hydraulic mining in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We’ll talk more about the Gold Rush in
future episodes, but most of the era was not lone miners wandering the hills
with pickaxes and sifters, plucking up nuggets and dancing jigs. Most of the mining was done by huge
corporations using high-tech machines that would redirect entire rivers into
pumps and hoses with so much pressure they could blow entire
mountainsides. Meters of topsoil washed
away in seconds. This is a very
effective way to find gold and the clear the area, but the problem is, what
happens to all that topsoil? This
is the mid-ninetieth century, so the answer is, who gives a damn what happens
to dirt? We’re getting rich over
here. And all that dirt simply
entered the streams and rivers and flowing downhill. The Sacramento River bed rose a thirteen feet around
that capital city in the 1860s. By
the 1880s, it is estimated that eight times more earth was moved along the
Northern California watershed than was moved during the entire construction of
the Panama Canal. Let me say that
again, eight times more earth moved than when they built the Panama effing
Canal!
Eventually, all that sentiment ended up in the San
Francisco Bay and utterly paved over entire populations plants and
animals. The entire shape of the
bay, both the bottom and the coastline were completely and permanently altered. Suffice the say, the native oyster
population was nearly wiped out, but we Americans are an industrious bunch if
we want oysters, we’re going to find a way to get some oysters. So special aquarium train cars were
made to ship all kinds of sea life from the Atlantic Ocean, all the way across
the continent to the Pacific Ocean.
Much of it died on the trip, but oysters are pretty burly little
bivalves and the large east coast oysters made the trip, thrived in their new
home and became big business in California. In no time, oysters were being shipped all over the West, as
far as Wyoming and Colorado, which was great for some someone like a Rockies
miner who didn’t have access to a lot of fruits and vegetables because oysters
are chalk full of vitamins and minerals.
Today, we consider oysters to be something of a delicacy, but in the
late nineteenth century, they were common and considered a workingman’s super
food.
The tricky thing about the oyster industry is how to
privatize and protect the shallow tidal land where they grow. Typically, nobody owns the ocean and
when somebody wanted oysters they just go down and scoop them up. The state made a dispensation and sold
plots of tidal land to oyster farmers, it was legally their property, but there
wasn’t really any way at the time to fence the area off without effecting the
growth of the animal. Enter the
oyster pirate. Now a historian’s
socio-economic argument could be made that these were proletariat foragers
traditionally surviving in urban areas by mining the sea and they were refusing
to conform with modern and legally novel idea of private property in areas that
had always been common-use, but I suspect most oyster pirates were men of a
flexible moral code who preferred to spend their time drinking whisky and
gallivanting with teenage girls, then occasionally boosting somebody else’s
aquatic harvest. However, it worth
noting that Jack London did become a socialist as a young man, and it isn’t a
stretch to imagine that his politics concerning the injustices of capitalism
may have begun during his time as an oyster pirate.
Their method was devilishly simple: during the day they
cruised around, collecting slim pickings of oysters that could be found in
common-use areas, but this was a front, just a show for anyone looking to see
they had been out there in common areas.
Then at night they would silently sail up to an oyster farm on their
skiffs, jump out, haul in a literal boatload, and slip off into the
darkness. It isn’t as if farmers
could brand the little oyster shells like cattle; so stolen oysters were
indistinguishable from legitimate ones.
The perfect crime.
Everybody on the Oakland waterfront seems to have known who the oyster
pirates were, but the community had no problem with thieves who stole property that
felt like it should belong to everybody. Besides, they offered cheaper oysters.
Then suddenly at the height of the Bay Area oyster boom,
the industry suddenly took a dive.
The explosion of population that began with the Gold Rush never really
stopped and in the early twentieth century we’re just getting the beginning of
laws to regulate environmental impacts, so this means not just industrial waste
in the water, but all those people means lots more human waste being dumped (no
pun intended) into the bay. Human
waste does almost no damage to the actual oyster, in fact, they may even thrive
on it, but a person who eats an oyster that had been soaking in all that nastiness
will get very sick indeed. After a
string of poisonings the word got out that Bay Area oysters could potentially
kill you and that was the end of that.
Even today, after decades of regulations and clean up, there is still a
little bit of an “eww” factor about jumping into the bay.[2]
At this point, early 1910s, Jack London had long left the Razzle Dazzle and had traveled the world
aboard much larger ships. In fact,
he was up in Sonoma, getting around to writing John Barleycorn, what he called his alcoholic memoirs, in which
Johnny Heinold’s bar plays a prominent role. Heinold, too, was doing just fine with the loss of the
pirate patrons, after all he served alcohol on the Oakland waterfront. And, typically, sailors want a drink
the first chance they get when getting off a boat, or want a one last chance
for a drink before they get on one.
John Michael Heinold arrived in San Francisco in 1876. Enticed by the promise of adventures in
the West, he had run away from home and signed on as deckhand on a windjammer
out of Philadelphia. For several years, he worked odd jobs
along the waterfront in the city, until buying a bar in Oakland on San Pablo
Ave, but Johnny (as everybody called him) decided this was too far from the
salty ocean air and sea dogs he grown to love. So in 1883, he bought a small bunkhouse used by workers on
the oyster farms, cleared it out and ask a ship carpenter to help him build a
bar. Only a few steps from the
estuary between Oakland and Alameda, the bar quickly became a success with the
waterfront crowd and Heinold a fixture himself as he always worked alone, open
until close every single day. As I
eluded to a moment ago, the bar took the name the First and Last Chance because
it was the first and last place to get a drink before you got on or after you
got off a boat. This was also the
case for commuters from the island city of Alameda, as it a dry city at the
time and the ferry landing was only a block from the bar.[3]
The same year Heinold bought the bar, he met the woman who
would become his wife, Christine Marie.
I was a bit hesitant to bring up the Heinold’s clearly unhappy marriage
because gossip about people almost a century dead still sounds like gossip, but
I uncovered some articles from the San
Francisco Call in 1898 concerning their divorce and sometimes these things
can be insightful about the time period.
But I warn that we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about the
character of the people involved in a “he said, she said” dispute played out in
newspaper snippets.
The future Mrs. Heinold worked as a servant for a private
family, but claimed to have aristocratic linage in her country of origin. I’m not sure which country she
immigrated from, but by the late 19th century many old and
distinguished European families had been brought low by the industrial
revolution, so it’s not impossible the granddaughter of some minor German noble
could have wound up making beds in Oakland, California. Johnny was taken by her stories of high
birth and proud family history, as well as charming personality. They married quickly and Christine gave
birth five times in as many years.
This strikes me as a stressful enough way to spend your life, but added
to that two of their children died very young. Johnny blamed Christine for the poor condition of the home,
claiming his wife was reckless and neglectful of her children. When Johnny filed for divorce in 1898,
a very rare occurrence at the time, it was on grounds of desertion of the
family, allegedly abandoning her kids and returning to work as a domestic for
another family. In response,
Christine charged her husband with “extreme cruelty, intemperance and threats against her life.”[4]
Obviously, two short blubs in the newspaper tell us very
little about what actually went on in the Heinold home, but, if I may offer a
bit of speculation. Other reading
has led me to two major traits about Johnny: One, his children absolutely
adored him. His son, George, wrote a short book about his father’s legendary
big heart that George credits for the bar’s fame. And, two, the man was an absolute workaholic who rarely went
home. For the bar’s existence
while he lived, Johnny opened the joint at six in the morning and closed it some
time after at eight at night, every single day. His lack of delegation implies he wanted to be there and I
sense the bar was Johnny’s real home.
This, compounded with the tragedy of two dead children, adds up to incredible
amount stress and resentment in a marriage. Johnny’s minor fame gives people many opportunities to say
great things about him, while I’ve seen no mention of his wife anywhere besides
these two articles, which gives the idea that these type of events must have
been common place enough if Johnny, his son and Jack London don’t feel need to
mention the problems has some great tragedies. Beyond providing insight into the lives of ordinary
people the divorce reveled in Mrs. Heinold’s countersuit for alimony payments
the bar is valued at $10,000. When
I put this figure into couple online currency inflation calculators, 10,000
dollars in 1898 has about the same buying power as 270,000 to 280,000 dollars
in 2013. Considering the old shack
of a bar is now a federally recognized historic landmark in a popular
commercial waterfront and is considered an indispensible jewel by locals and
tourists alike, I’m willing to bet the bar would sell for much more than that
today.
 |
| London, 1885. |
In 1888, Johnny noticed a boy sitting on a dock pylons near
the front of the bar, reading a pocket dictionary. The kid had recently moved to Alameda from San Francisco and
spent a lot of time on the waterfront collecting firewood for this family or
scavenging loose pieces of metal to sell.
Johnny invited him to come into the bar, warm himself by the potbelly
stove, sit beneath the soft gas lamps and read the thick, proper dictionary
Johnny kept behind the bar. They
boy was not yet a steady drinker at the age of twelve, but young Jack London was
in the place regularly to read and be among men. It is likely he was there during the frequent visits of
Robert Louis Stevenson, who ever obsessed with health didn’t drink himself, but
he wife had lived in Oakland and Stevenson was a friend of Heinold and he
enjoyed the company, conversation and sarsaparilla as he prepared to sail for
the South Seas and Somoa. Other
authors known to stop by the First and Last Chance was the great Civil War
writer Ambrose Bierce, the “poet of the Sierras” Joaquin Miller, Rex Beach and
Robert Service.[5]
On Memorial Day of 1890 a commuter train flew off an open
drawbridge between Oakland and Alameda.
The packed train plunged into the bay only feet from the front door of
Heinold’s saloon. Heroic bystanders
dove in to rescue as many passengers as possible, but thirteen people died on
the spot. Heinold cried out, “Sell
no more whiskey! Take everything in house if it will save a life, or make even
one poor woman die easier!” The
crowded bar was cleared out and served as an ad-hoc hospital and morgue. The newspaper reported, “Drinking men
and rough men became gentle, while tears rolled down their cheeks.” If the reporter on the scene had
happened to catch any names of these weeping angels of mercy, London may very
well been among them, along with the likes of French Frank, Whiskey Bob and
Scratch Nelson.[6]
In the early 1890’s, the powerful Southern Pacific railroad
made a play at taking over the Oakland waterfront. With shaking legal standing to the area, the SP resorted to
dirty tricks like sinking a massive barge offshore to block the construction of
Mayor John L. Davie’s wharf, which would offer a cheap ferry to San Francisco
and cut into the railroad’s business.
The SP also tried to halt the wharf by erecting fences along the
waterfront, so Davie asked his friend Johnny Heinold if he might be able of
some help. Every night, Heinold,
London and the Last Chance regulars would go out, surely blotto, and tear down
all the SP fences around the waterfront.
The next day the railroad company would put them back up, that night
they’d go down again. Eventually,
Davie removed the barge, opened his wharf and ferry, all owned by the city of
Oakland, costing the people only cents for the ride, and the waterfront
remained away from the hands of private developers.[7]
London spent the 1890s in and out of Oakland, serving as a
deck hand on a merchant ship to Japan, riding the rails to upstate New York
where he spent a month in jail for vagrancy, but at age seventeen he returned
and spoke to Heinold about this desire to become a writer. The bartender lent him forty dollars for
tuition at the University of California in Berkeley; “without security, without
interest, without buying a drink.”
London only went to Berkeley for one semester, but he remained eternally
grateful, and he, like Heinold’s son George, credits the fame and success of
the First and Last Chance to be in Johnny’s compassion and generosity. For celebrity writer friends and
unknown homeless boys alike, Heinold could be trusted to provide help and advice.[8]
When I said “step down” into the bar earlier, I was being
literal. In the great 1906
earthquake the pylons that support the tiny bar sank into the underwater ground
below, dropping the floor approximately eight inches below street level. They tried repeatedly to reinforce the
building, but it always sank back down even further. Today, the floor is almost two feet down and a steep ramp
must be traversed to get inside and sit at a bar, which sits at about a
20-degree angle. Obviously, this
is part of the old-timey charm.
Just keep one hand free to hold onto your drink, lest it slide away.[9]
Though I have been unable to verify this, Otha Wearin, who
wrote a short book on the bar, claims that Mayor Davie took President William
Howard Taft to the First and Last Chance for “refreshment and a moment of
relaxation” during Taft’s West Coast visit in October of 1911. Somebody of a lesser standard of humor
might make a joke here about how the portly president is the real reason the
floor is sunken at the bar. And I
am that somebody: Yo Taft is so fat when he arrived on California his ass was
still in Washington. Yo Taft is so
fat that Teddy Roosevelt told him he was starting the Bull-Moose Party and he
brought over a knife and fork. Yo
Taft is so fat the Southern Pacific Railroad Company sunk him in the Oakland
harbor in a bid to take over the waterfront.[10]
During Prohibition, Heinold abide by the Volstead Act and
apparently getting by selling sandwiches, peanuts and sarsaparilla. George
Heinold came back from World War One a decorated hero and Johnny told his
friends, “If my boy can fight for the Constitution, I guess I can uphold it.” Only months before the repeal of
Prohibition in 1933, John Heinold died.
A special disposition by city hall was made to honor his last wishes and
a pilot released the old bartender’s ashes above the saloon he loved so
dearly. George Heinold took over
the joint and ran it just as dutifully until 1969, passing away only months
later. Ownership transferred his
widow, and then to the bartenders who kept the place just as Johnny had. The gas lights and potbellied stove
even remained until 1989.[11]
You can and should still visit the First and Last Chance
Saloon today, with a great patio for sitting outside, looking west onto the
harbor, and a time warp as soon as you step inside. You’ll find it at the end of Webster Street in the touristy part of the Oakland
Harbor now called Jack London Square. It looks every bit the ninetieth
century relic it is; a diminutive wood shack with a sunken floor, but
surrounded by towering glass and steel commercial structures.
As you should have hopefully noticed by now, we are not at
the Swallow’s Inn Saloon in San Juan Capistrano as I prematurely declared in
last month’s show. I have parts of
that episode written, but collecting information on that bar has proven to be
more challenging that I anticipated.
For all my arguments on the important role bars play in American life,
the reality is that bars lie slightly on the under belly of society and traditionally
have been ignored by scholars. This queasy attitude toward alcohol is not always completely
consciously, but obviously sometimes it has been. I mean, we
tried Prohibition for a reason.
Even aside from the most obvious negative social repercussions of excessive
drinking (alcoholism, increase of domestic violence, generally poor decision
making), it is a truly weird and rather ugly truth that we, as human beings, as
a species, feel the need to occasionally practice ritualistic poisoning of ourselves
in order to achieve an altered state.
It’s been said many times,
many ways, but Jack London said it this way, “When good fortune comes, they
drink. When they have no fortune
they drink to the hope of good fortune.
If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink. If their love-making be crowded with
success, they are so happy they needs must drink [sic]. If they be jilted, they drink for the
contrary reason. And if haven’t
anything to do at all, why they drink, secure in the knowledge that when they
have taken a significant number of drinks the maggots will start crawling in
their brains and they will have their hands full with things to do. When they are sober they want to drink;
and when they have drunk they want to drink more.” Or, as Homer Simpson put it, “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of
life’s problems.”[12]
Sure, many people do not drink, and many more are able to
drink in moderation, but the compulsion to drink is wide spread enough and deep
enough that is an accepted fact that we all must live along side drunkeness. No laws laid down by man or god has
come close to abating our thirst. I
mean, we repelled Prohibition for a reason. London could never admit he was an alcoholic, merely a
“habitual drinker”, but he gave his compulsion for booze a name, John
Barleycorn. The name comes from an
English folksong in which the process for making alcohol is personified by a
man who his repeatedly murdered by three farmers. I’ll post a link to the song at
BearFlagLibation.blogspot.com.
London’s John Barleycorn had a personality, a trickster who
feigns friendship, capable of both unfiltered wisdom and malevolence. It compelled him to drink when he
knew he shouldn’t, when drunk it urged him toward reckless behavior, duping him
into believing he was seeing the world as it really was; harsh, friendless,
contemptible in everyway. One
night after tying it on to tight while saloon hopping in Bencia, London feel
off his boat into dangerous and cold waters in the Carquinez Strait. He spent four hours swimming against
the powerful currents while coming no closer to the shore, all the while John
Barleycorn whispered for him to simply give up, quit life now and know a man’s
death, a death to make him a hero in his small world of boozers and
wasters. In those moments the
young man was convinced he would never amount to anything, so why bother
struggling for a life not worth living.
Eventually, London sobered up as the thrashed in the water and a boat of
Greek fisherman rescued him, but such was the power of John Barleycorn on
London, of alcohol on all people really, to reach into our darkest recesses,
pull out our deepest insecurities, suspicions and fears and present them as the
singular, authentic reality.[13]
If this were
the only effect of alcohol, obviously we would have abandoned this demon long
ago, but as you well know, its reality altering magic works wonders in the
other direction. A single drink
relaxes us, tells us that weight of daily life actually isn’t all that heavy. The second drink narrows the scale of existence,
suddenly everything outside of the bar, the house, the restaurant, fades into
the back of our minds, like sound of steady rain against the window that
signifies a larger storm, but in here you are safe and warm. The third drink changes us, you are the
source of the warmth, you are a wealth intelligence, strength, cleverness, and
you know when you face the storm outside you will do so with impressive
deftness, dancing between raindrops.
The forth drink ruins us. The
first three were felt so nice, how could we quit when so far ahead? It is not always on the forth, but if
you are having a forth, you are on the road toward “the turn”, the moment when
your smiling face will turn slack and dull, when the smiling faces of people
around you begin to look forced, eyes shifting away, seeking escape. You might become an oblivious and
boisterous back slapper, an angry brute or moping maudlin, but no matter what
you will be locked into the narrative John Barleycorn constructed for you for
the rest of the night. If you
tried to swing open the doors and invite in the storm, you inevitability
lost. And now you have a splitting
headache as you try to reconstruct the night and piece together why your
underwear is on backward.
As you might guess, my own relationship status with John
Barleycorn, would be, “It’s complicated.”
But I believe this would be true of nearly every person I know. I’ve gone on this extended diatribe in
an attempt to work out the maligned standing of bars in our culture, as not
just the purveyor legal, addictive substances, but as a constant reminder of
our weaknesses as human beings. I
find our peculiar connection with alcohol fascinating and after more time at
this project I hope to have historical examples to solidify a theory concerning
the role of spirited drinks in our society. For now I can say, researching the history of bars has
proven more difficult than I originally thought because nobody ever bothered to
write anything down.
That
said, I’m glad I had to mix up my plan.
I’ll bring you the Swallows Inn episode by mid-December, to talk about
the Spanish and Mexican Eras in California, and the move right in to an episode
in Sonoma to talk about the Bear Flag Revolt (the event which provide this
podcast with it’s snappy, if slightly nonsensical name) and the Mexican-America
War. There is a huge amount of
overlap of historical actors in those two episodes.
As soon as I picked up John
Barleycorn, I knew Johnny Heinold and Jack London were the perfect men to
go to talk about saloon culture in California at the turn of the twentieth century. After seeing what taverns were on the
East Coast in the 18th century in the first episode, now we are
afforded a glimpse of what saloons were in the late 19th century. London defiantly had an “it’s
complicated” relationship with booze.
Pretty much everyone except himself and his wife, Charmian, a classic
enabler, would easily spot London as a raging alcoholic. But his crippling, and ultimately
fatal, disease results in our benefit, because while few others thought to
record anything about saloon culture in California, London a talented and
prolific writer, was a perfect historical witness. John Barleycorn is
a non-fiction memoir and can be trusted as much any other, even accounting for
London’s Herculean feats of denial and self-delusion.
The
book opens with London returning to his ranch on horseback after voting in a
1911 election to amend the California constitution. He admits, “Because the warmth of they day I had had several
drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting it.” The phrase he uses to describe his
state is, “pleasantly jingled.”
His wife, Charmain, greets him to ask how he voted on the matter of
women’s suffrage and he says he voted for it because women giving women the
vote will bring about Prohibition and “drive the nails in the coffin of John
Barleycorn.”
“But
I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn,” she asks.
This
sparks a rant from London, which he admits has comes off sounding like the
ramblings of a drunk who believes his mind his working more logically. He says he has always hated alcohol,
but it has given him so much in life, so many opportunities and friends, but
this is the lie of alcohol because he knows it is ruining him, but is was
always more or less inventible because drinking is just what men need to do to
get away from the control of women, and this is why the women must be allowed
to vote and take the dastardly alcohol away from future generations. In the middle of this circular debate
with himself, London says, “Not only had it always been accessible, but every
interest of my developing life had drawn me to it. A newsboy on the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in
the far lands, always where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and
boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and days,
always they came to together over alcohol. The saloon was the place of congregation. Men gathered to as primitive men
gathered about the fire of the squatting-place at the mouth of the cave…. As a
youth by way of the saloon I had escaped the narrowness of women’s influence
into the wide free world of men.
All ways led to the saloon.
The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together at the saloon,
and thence led out and on over the world.”[14]
This
speech is important for three reasons.
First, it shows the division between sexes that historians these days usually
refer to as “separate spheres”. This is far beyond the old fashion chauvinism of saying
cleaning and cooking are “women’s work” and paycheck earning labor is “men’s
work”. Between husbands and wives,
in families, in the whole of society, men and women kept self-imposed distances
from each other. They rarely
socialized in public, even at parties and gathering, men usually kept to one
room, women another. There has
always been some segregation of the sexes, but the Victorian era saw this at a
peak, with women being held up as the epitome of virtue and all that was right
about a good Christian home, but they are so good, with this fragile purity,
they must be kept detached, sheltered from the cruel reality in which men must
deal with. A great, physical
example of the separate spheres is in that saloons did not have women’s
restrooms because what possible reason would a women be in a saloon long enough
for a need to use the restroom. In
fact, in many saloons, there was no restroom at all, but a gutter that ran the
length of the bar in which men simply urinated into when need arose, without
having to stand up. You can still see
an old-timey pee gutter in Merchants Bar in Oakland, only a couple blocks from
the First and Last Chance, at the corner of Franklin and 2nd
Street. The bar has replaced
recently, but the tiled gutter is still there. Women were not seen in drinking establishments until the 1920’s. Aside from the many other factors
leading toward greater female equality in that era, drinking in speakeasies
already broke the law, contributing to a more lax social vibe. It turned out men thought drinking with
women to be way more fun that having a sausage-fest every night in some dirty,
pee stained man-cave.
The
second thing we see in London’s speech is the importance of bars to the men who
frequented them. Most men worked
long hours, we know they weren’t going home and spending time with their wives,
their lives, in so far as they could choose what to do with their off hours,
were spent at the bar. London
describes being fascinated by this as a boy, he writes, “In saloons life was
different. Men talked with great
voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than common
every-day where nothing happened.
Here life was always very live, and sometimes even lurid, when blows
were struck, and blood was shed, big policemen came shouldering in.” He goes onto say for all the awful
things he had been told about saloons and what went on there, here where
“reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social approval on
the saloon.” While the official
position of society, in keeping with those same Victorian values, preached
temperance and decrying the evils of alcohol, but here were respectable men of
the world, knocking around together, having a jolly old time with a cup in
hand.[15]
On
the surface, saloons may seem to have the same egalitarian social function as
we saw taverns having in the in the 18th century, but there is a new
development. Most taverns we saw
on the east coast serviced people of a particular area; the patronage was based
mainly on geography. California is
a state largely settled first by miners and other working class men who came
here without families, far from home, working hard, long hours, but with a good
amount of coin to show for it.
This led to an abundance of bars.
In the tiny mining town of Rough And Ready, with on 672 people in 1850,
there were fourteen saloons. A man
in Nevada City describes the downtown area having “five round tents as large as
a circus tent occupied entirely as gambling shops and nine of every ten doors
on the street open way to a liquor bar”.
This abundance of saloons seems to have been maintained over the next
fifty year, as London describes at least five different bars within just few
blocks of the First and Last Chance, and just up the street from there he says,
“the east side of Broadway, between Sixth and Seventh, from corner to corner,
there was a solid block of saloons.”
This is at least ten different bars over the stretch of a mile, running
north-south, and those are just the ones he mentioned. Even of rural areas, he wrote, “Saloons
were always so damnably convenient.
They are everywhere in my western country.” [16]
All these bars lead to choice, frequenting a particular bar
means joining a particular community.
After all, Johnny Heinold moved from his bar on San Pablo because he
liked the clientele the waterfront provided. Jack London did not chose to drink with reporters and
lawyers, but with oyster pirates, sailors and longshoreman. We’ve grown used to idea of forming an
identity around our personal preferences:
are you a foodie? Do you follow football? If so, Raider’s or 49ers? Beatles or Elvis? Sure, you are a fan of Star Trek, but can
you name, of the top of your head, the race of people susceptible to the
disease known as Bendii Syndrome”? The correct answers to those questions are no, no, who
give a fuck, The Beatles and Vulcans. I choose not to drink at the bar
closest to my house because I’ve never seen anybody go in there who is not
wearing a cowboy hat. I realize that I have boiled personal identity to
something pretty insipid just now, but I also just gave you a clearer of idea
of who I am. The type of place you choose to drink at, and who you choose
to drink with, not only says something about who you are, but eventually it makes
you who you are. At the beginning of the twentieth century all these
choices a person could make was still a relatively novel concept, but going
forward the class you were born into would matter less, the job you worked
mattered less, and people began to define themselves who how and where they
spent their free time. If bars themselves gave rise to popular culture, the
abundance of bars led to the rise of subcultures.
Which
brings us to the last point from London’s speech. He did not just enjoy the saloon life, he used it almost like
a tool, to his great advantage. He
calls saloons, “the poor man’s clubs, they were the only clubs to which I had
access. I could get acquainted in
saloons. I could go into a saloon
and talk with any man. In strange
towns and cities I wandered through, the only place for me to go was the
saloon. I was no longer a stranger
in any town the moment I entered the saloon.” He then describes his process of going to multiple saloons
first upon arriving anywhere and by the end of the day knowing half town, from
the mayor to the lowliest ranch hand, they wave to him on the street and offer
him advice on the area. To an
adventurer writer like London, this is both a means of survival and
livelihood. I would argue that
London’s greatest talent was not in the way he put word to page, or navigated
the wild world with courage and passion, though he certainly excelled at both
those, but it was his ability to talk to people, to drink with them, to make
them like him and talk and drink more.
He considers himself blessed with what he calls a “gorgeous
constitution”, even at an early age he shocked people with his aptitude for
putting away drinks and remaining standing, but he also writes about the need
to learn how to drink with men to earn their respect. Proper drinking was more than simply adhering to ritual and
lingo, but a skill, one in which Jack London was well practiced at. Mining gold in the Yukon, or voyaging through
the South Pacific, as a war correspondent in Japan or in Mexico, or tramping
freight trains in New York, London used saloons to put his ear to the ground
and find the story worth writing. He
calls this the “service John Barleycorn renders”.[17]
Had Johnny Heinold not invited the twelve year old boy into
the warmth of bar and began his induction to world wide network “poor man’s
clubs” there might not have had works like White
Fang, Call of the Wild, Sea Wolf, Valley of the Moon and the
scores of other books and stories.
Further, London set a template for the likes of Hemingway, Kerouac, and Kesey;
he was the first of the rugged, drunken American adventure authors, traveling
the world looking some undistilled form freedom, always on the brink of
insanity by the sheer beauty and savagery of the human experience, homeless
even when given wealth and fame, unmoored, but always drifting back to a
barstool and typewriter.
If
it seems like over romanticizing Jack London right now, it’s because I am. Absolutely. When I had read his books before,
spaced out over time, I was able write off certain traits, like his racism and
misogyny as merely being a product of his time. But after spending the last couple weeks in his company
while researching this episode it became obvious he had some fairly out-there
opinions concerning the heroic role of the Anglo-Saxon race and some deeply
embittering mommy-issues. London
spent most of the last years of his life on his ranch in Sonoma, writing books
extolling the healing powers of hard work and returning to the frontier lifestyle
of the hardy pioneer American stock.
In books like Valley of the Moon
and Burning Daylight, he criticized
the transformation within California, in which whites crammed themselves into
suffocating and violent cities, abandoning the frontier dream to rot, grow over,
or worse, be managed foreigners, who may be industrious, but could not
comprehend what it truly meant to be American. He did not seem to recognize the hypocrisy in the fact London
did little of the real ranch work himself, instead hiring Chinese, Japanese and
Portuguese laborers. That’s not to
say London was not working hard, writing at least a thousand words a day, good
health or bad, on the road or at home, but he did so while ever incurring more
debt, taking on more servants and building a luxurious mansion on his property,
which sadly burned to the ground when only days from completion with not a dime
to be redeemed from it. London
admitted that he cared little for the quality of the writing he was furiously
producing, saying, “I have no unfinished stories. Invariably I complete every one I start. If it’s good, I sign it and send it
out. If it isn’t good, I sign it
and send it out.” I suppose this
explains why he wrote dribble like Burning
Daylight, I mean the main character’s name is actually Burning Daylight and
he’s a thinly veiled version of London who does all the things London
can’t. And then a little while
later he writes Valley of the Moon,
which, despite its persistent xenophobia, is an epic road book that gives a
gorgeous snapshot of California in the early twentieth century. I was planning to spend time talking
about this book, but time just didn’t permit it. I’m sure I’ll return to it later when discussing other
literary figures and the state’s long bohemian artist tradition.[18]
 |
| London, 1904. |
That
day would never come. The frontier
dream of California London lamented for- rural, white, built on the hands of
hardworking family farmers, with air so clean it could rejuvenate and redeem
all past sins- never really existed.
Like many things that drove Jack London, it was a romantic fantasy. Industry, corporations, constant
growth, urbanization, was always the path California had been on from the
moment the Americans took over, a fact I mean to show over coming
episodes. But I admire London’s
ability to dream, to live always on the cusp of possibilities, and why
not? He was poor child who had
every reason to be conscripted to an unremarkable life of menial work, but
instead refused and got aboard a boat, which turned into bigger boats. He sought to companionship of men he
admired and went into a bar, then entered a thousand bars, making friends the
world over, and became one of the most admired men of his generation. From reading about wild adventures, to
having wild adventures, to writing wild adventures that will capture the
imagination of people for many generations still yet to come. There will always be an audience of people
who still want to believe the free wilderness is out there, in infinite
possibilities beyond the horizon, that the cure for this life is to make
yourself a new one.
Thank
you for downloading and listening to the Bear Flag Libation. I promise the next one will be out
quicker. Thank you again to
Anthony Lukens of the Donkeys for playing the theme song. You can listen to Donkey’s music, see
tour dates and buy any of their three awesome albums at donkeysongs.com. I would also like to thank my lovely
and patient wife, Dawn, who not only aided in the recording of this podcast,
but puts up with my insensate chatter about making this show.
[1] Jack London,
John Barleycorn (New York: Random
House, Inc., 2001), 38-46.
[2]
Matthew Morse Booker, “Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay”,
Pacific Historical Review Vol. 75,
No. 1 (February 2006): 63-88.
[3] George
Heinold, John Heinold and His First and
Last Chance (Oakland, The International Press, 1936), 9-10; Wearin, Heinold’s, 16.
[4] “No Charm in
Royal Lineage”, San Francisco Call,
March 9, 1898, Alameda County News section, pg. 10; “Oakland News Items”, San Francisco Call, March 25, 1898,
Alameda County News section, pg. 11.
[5] Wearin, Heinold’s, 28-29.
[6] “An Oakland
Train Dashes Into an Open Drawbridge with Awful Results”, San Francisco Call, May 31, 1890, pg. 1.
[7] “Slip and
Fences: Exciting Times Across the Bay”, San
Francisco Call, August 12, 1893, pg. 10; “Davie’s Historic Wharf, San Francisco Call, August 20, 1895, pg.
11; Heinold, John Heinold, 15.
[8] London, Barleycorn, 125-26; Heinold, John Heinold, 10.
[9] Otha Donner
Wearin, Heinold’s First and Last Chance
(Hastings, Iowa: Wearin, 1974), 17.
[10] Wearin, Heinold’s, 3.
[11] Wearin, Heinold’s, 21.
[12] London, Barleycorn, 62.
[13] London, Barleycorn, 70-73.
[14] London, Barleycorn, 1-7.
[15] London, Barleycorn, 27.
[16] Robert Phelps, “All hands have gone downtown: Urban Places in Gold
Rush California” in Rooted in Barbarous
Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, ed. Kevin
Starr and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 126
& 131; London, Barleycorn, 27
& 76.
[17] London, Barleycorn, 74-78.
[18] Kevin
Starr, “The Sonoma Finale of Jack London Rancher” in Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford
Univeristy Press, 1973); Pete Hamill, “Jack London and John Barleycorn”,
introduction to John Barleycorn (New
York: Random House, 2001).
[19] Hamill,
“Jack London”, xxv; Starr, “The
Sonoma Finale”, 214.
No comments:
Post a Comment