Sausalito In The News – May 11, 1950

By Billie Anderson Sausalito Historical Society

Marin Schools Receive Nearly 4 Million

The California Taxpayers’ Association reported that local property taxes and support from State Taxes for Marin County School Districts this year has reached a total of $83,817,609, with $81,857,170 from State apportionments and $81,960,439 from local property taxes. High School and Junior College Districts in the County are receiving $8,835,257 in State apportionment for 1949-50, based on 5,567 average daily attendance.

Professional Survey Approved

Sausalito School Board of Trustees faced a little competition at Central School while conducting its business at the Monday night meeting. But despite the donkey baseball game in progress on the School grounds and the Boys Club Orchestra’s rendition of “Five Foot-Two Eyes of Blue”, the School Board session continued.

The Board discussed at length the proposed professional survey for school children in the Sausalito. School District. P.T.A. President stated that Sausalito should join Marin City in raising funds for the $2,250 survey originally proposed by a group of Marin City mothers because of the high percentage of children who were not promoted in the Marin City schools. Mrs. Hailing said similar problems existed in Sausalito, and an objective survey would aid in determining how to effect the necessary corrections and establish better relations between the town and the school. Mrs. John Ehlen suggested that the Rosenberg Foundation in San Francisco be contacted for possible financial aid. The Board agreed to do so. School Board trustees refuted rumors that South School will be abandoned.

Cancer Study Progress Underway

A new technique, which is still in the experimental stage, soon may provide medical science with a considerably improved method of diagnosing cancer of the stomach, one of the most difficult forms of the disease.

Training of diagnosticians and technicians in the new technique is being sponsored by the American Cancer Society, which is continuing its annual educational and fund-raising campaign. The research was financed in large part by the U. S. Public Health Service. Success and reliability of the test is dependent upon proper training of technicians.

Huge Illegal Striped Bass Catch Jails 2

District Attorney Edmund J. Pat Brown of San Francisco points to a huge illegal catch of striped bass. They weigh 514 pounds—more than 20 times the legal limit. The bass, all female full of spawn, were netted in San Francisco Bay waters, and allegedly bootlegged to a San Francisco cafe owner. He and a kitchen helper were arrested by a State Fish and Game Warden and await trial. Anglers and sportsmen are alarmed at the flagrant violation of laws protecting this game fish. Brown, a sports fisherman himself, will prosecute the case.

Independence Drive Starts May 15

The United States Savings Bonds Division of the Treasury Department has announced “Independence Drive” to begin on May 15 and continue through July 4.This Campaign aims at increasing the purchase of Series “E” bonds by urging individuals to buy bonds now and by emphasizing the benefits of regular year-round purchases. This is not a drive for contributions, but rather for the establishment of regular thrift. The campaign symbol is the Liberty Bell and the slogan is “Save for Your Independence.”

Mother’s Day Approval

May 14,1950 marks the forty-third anniversary of the struggle of the late Miss Anne Jarvis to have Mother’s Day incorporated into the national calendar and it marks the thirty-sixth year of her triumph when the Congress and the President of the United States first declared in a joint resolution that “it was fitting that America honor her mothers with a national holiday.

Briefs

--Seventy percent of the area of San Francisco Bay is less than 18 feet deep.

--The Trade Fair offers two local outlets for the new series of Artists’ Post Cards just released in Sausalito. The cards carry the work of Jon Schueler, Jean Varda and L. Moholoy-Nagy.  

On This Date

11- First Netherlands U.S. Telex sent.

13- Diner’s Club issues its first credit cards.

15- Rodgers & Hammerstein receive Pulitzer Prize for South Pacific.

Portuguese Heritage in Sausalito

By Larry Clinton
The first Portuguese immigrants arrived in Marin County in the early 1800’s from the Azores, where
they had been enlisted by Yankee whaling ships that stopped in the islands for water, food and other supplies. The skilled young Portuguese sailors were brought around Cape Horn to pursue the whales off the California coast.
As described in a new self-guided walking tour that highlights the life, work and final resting spots of these early Sausalitans, this area reminded the sailors of their homeland. They settled quickly, taken by the arid but cool climate. Soon to follow were anchovy and sardine fishermen, boat builders and finally scores of dairymen from the Azores.
From the Gold Rush era on successive waves of Portuguese immigrants arrived. They carved out new lives but clung to the traditions of their past. As late as the 1940s, there was a saying that a traveler from the Golden Gate to Petaluma would never be out of site of a Portuguese dairy
Settling in southern Marin, these newcomers established tight-knit communities in Sausalito and other nearby towns. By the turn-of-the-century, immigrant dairymen had transformed the local industry. The largest numbers of Portuguese immigrants were from dairy farms in the Azores, already famous for its cows and cheese. The Ilha de São Jorge is the center of the Azores’ dairy industry, and many of West Marin’s families have their roots there. Lush pastures and the temperate climate of West Marin were nearly ideal for dairy herds, just as on São Jorge. For decades Marin County was the leading dairy production county in the state, and its famous butter was eagerly sought by urban residents.
Marin’s dairy industry was largely built by the hard labor of these newcomers. Times have changed, and with the creation of Point Reyes National Seashore and the emergence of the Central Valley as a dairy production center, Marin’s dairy industry has become a quieter way of life. Its Portuguese heritage, however, is still celebrated. Descendants of the early immigrants continue to live in Marin, their Azorean names a reminder of their heritage: Afonso, Amador, Avila, Azevedo, Bello, Bettencourt, Boreiros, Brazil, Cunha, DeFraga, Dias, Francisco, Ferreira, Freitas, Lourenço (Lawrence), Machado, Martins, Mattos, Moraes, Paulino, Pedrosa, Lacerda, Ladera, Lopes, Nunes, Quadres, Regallo, Rosa, Sequeira, Silva, Silveira, Soares, Sousa, Teixeira, Terra, and Vieira among others. .
 Sausalito’s Holy Ghost Festa is a reminder of the cultural ties that bind and unite Portuguese immigrants and their descendants. As Jack Tracy wrote in the seminal Sausalito history, Moments in Time, “The Portuguese community’s observance of the festival on Pentecost Sunday is based on an event in the late thirteenth century. Queen Isabel of Portugal prayed to the Holy Ghost to end the two-year famine that wracked her country and her prayers were answered. A celebration was held that has been reenacted each year since. A feast symbolic of the end of famine is a central part of the festival. The traditional meal consists of Sopa, Carne e Vino (soup, meat, and wine) following Mass, a procession through Sausalito streets proclaiming the visit by the Holy Ghost.” This year, Pentecost falls on Sunday, May 24.
Mike Moyle, one of the creators of the Portuguese Heritage Walking Tour, will speak about the project and the history it reflects at the Sausalito IDESST Portuguese Hall (511 Caledonia St.) on Wednesday evening, March 4.  A no-host reception begins at 6:00 PM, and Mike’s talk starts at 7:00.


An earlier Holy Ghost Festa procession proceeds down Bridgeway
Photo Courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society

Ode to Diversity at Marinship

By George Keeney,

George Keeney was Employment Manager for Marinship, and he penned the following memoir describing the diversity of the workforce in the shipyard during WWII.  We are reprinting it here verbatim, including some of the slang of the day:

There were ball players and football players, wrestlers and boxers, golf pros, tennis pros, an ice skater, and a fencing master.
There were actors, singers, artists, cartoonists, composers, writers, carnival men, vaudeville stars, musical comedy stars, theatrical producers, night club entertainers, band leaders, and more than half the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
There were attorneys, teachers, newspapermen, chemists, nurses, tailors, insurance brokers, cameramen, veterinarians, morticians, and a puppet maker.
There was a casket salesman who was put on the graveyard shift, and a bulldogger who became a rigger.
There were assemblymen, former chiefs of police, ex-mayors, a fire chief, and a consul-general who became a shipfitter helper.
There were clergymen, and a rabbi who worked as a pipefitter helper.
There was the first American to join the Lafayette Squadron in World War I, and a man who took part in the Battle of Jutland.
There was an old Sourdough, and a relative of the Pope was a timekeeper.
There was an American Indian ballet dancer who became a slab helper.
There were over 300 Chinese, a large group of Latin Americans, and refugees from Europe.
There was a man whose first name was General, there was one whose first name was Colonel, and there was another whose first name was Baron.
There were ex-convicts who had got shipbuilding training from models in San Quentin.
There was the composer of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart," and there was a pie-eating champ who once consumed twenty-six lemon chiffon pies at one sitting.
There were men who were at Midway, Honolulu, Pago Pago, and Surabaya during Japanese attacks.
There was a man who had been torpedoed twice, a man who had spent eleven days in a lifeboat after Japs had sunk his freighter, and a former tail-gunner in a B-24. There was a welder called Miss Weld.
There were retired men who used their past experience in some related craft, and wives who replaced their drafted husbands.
There was a 72-year-old painter with twenty-one sons, step-children and relatives in the armed forces, and a 35-year-old electrical worker who had a son in the Navy.
There were fourteen deaf-mute chipper s in the Plate Shop, and a welder three feet eleven inches tall in the double bottoms.
There were a Mr. Dew and a Mr. Dont.
There were thirty Australian sailors, welding while their ship was being repaired, and fourteen members of one family: father, sons, daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, grandson and granddaughter.
After helping to build the first Mission tanker one worker joined the crew and sailed away with her.
There was the man who reported for work but had to go back home to get his tools—and his home was in Oklahoma.
The man with the shortest name was Mr. Ng, and the man with the longest was Mr. Papachristopulos.
The shipyard personnel included: a scrap-paper baler, a traffic cop, a refrigerator man, label stampers, window washers, a keymaker, a man who recharged flashlight batteries, locomotive engineers, a hard-hat repairer, goggle repairers, a deep-sea diver, a saw filer, a boiler-petcock checker, a fingerprint taker, a rat exterminator.


A diverse group of applicants lines up outside the Marinship Hiring Hall on Caledonia Street (now the site of Driver’s Market).
Photo courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society

Spring in Sausalito

By Larry Clinton
As we enjoy another gorgeous (if parched!) spring here in Sausalito, here’s a poem celebrating the natural beauties of our town.  It was written by Marin poet D. Wooster Taylor in 1908.

Sausalito

I will tell a simple story
That a poet told to me,
Of a lofty promontory
Bending down to kiss the sea;
Where the houses seem like flowers
Peeking out beneath the trees,
And the sweetest natural bowers
Fling their perfume on the breeze;
Where the roadways wind, half hidden,
'Neath a net of evergreen,
And the hollyhock, unbidden,
Spreads its scarlet on the scene;
Where the rose and wild syringe
Bud and blossom on the slope,
And the evening sunsets linger
With the pink and heliotrope;
Where the fragrant oleander
In the terrace gardens grow
And you gaze from your veranda
On the snow-white yachts below;
'Where the wide-winged gulls are flying
In the ferry's silvery spray,
And you see the islands lying
Half asleep upon the bay;
Where a launch is proudly steaming
Near a mighty man-of-war,
And a fisherman is dreaming
Of his cottage on the shore;
"Where Mt. Tamalpais, terrific,
Holds the Fog King in his lair,
And the salt of the Pacific
Breathes its freshness on the air;
You have heard the poet's story:
Sausalito, that is you! Just a crown of natural glory
On a sea of azure blue.



Views like this from the old Alta Mira Hotel may have inspired poet D. WoosterTaylor.  
Photo courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society

Dr. Steven Egri; Waterfront Veterinarian

by Steefenie Wicks

Sally Stanford was a madam, a restaurateur and the mayor of Sausalito. In her memory, the City of Sausalito commissioned a drinking fountain in 1985 to honor Sally and her dog Leland.   The fountain was constructed by local potter Eric Norstad, its basin inscribed with the words “Have a drink on Sally”.  The runoff pours into a lower basin that reads “Have a drink on Leland,” for the dogs visiting the site at the Sausalito ferry landing.  This fountain pays tribute to the fact that dogs in Sausalito have real personalities. And so are do veterinarians who care for them.  The Sausalito waterfront has one of those veterinarians with a very distinct personality; his name is Dr. Steven Egri.

Dr. Egri was born in Hungary; he was raised in Buffalo, New York and went to veterinarian school in Italy.    The university medical program in Italy was 5 years long with a series of oral exams that tested his knowledge of Italian, which he speaks, reads and writes.   Dr. Egri has been practicing his skills as a veterinarian on the Sausalito waterfront since 1990. He says that when he returned from Italy he ended up in Virginia, where he took his national boards, and then worked as a veterinarian for cats, dogs, cows, horses and chickens.  He returned to California to take the State Boards, and while staying with a friend in Mill Valley, he discovered that there was room for another veterinarian in Sausalito. Dr. Egri decided to stay in here, thus beginning his career as a waterfront veterinarian.

Listed in town as a Marine Veterinary Specialist, he finds that over the years he has worked on most of our 4-legged friends, but not many seals have made it to his door. “I have worked on a few wounded seagulls that people will find and bring here,” he states,” but that’s nothing compared to the many times someone will come get me and say there’s a dead dog in the parking lot.  I walk back with them so that they can show me the dog, I walk over to the animal, lean down get close and say, ‘get up.’ Most of the time the dog just sits up looks at me like ‘why did you wake me,’ then takes off looking for another quiet spot.  But it’s good that people come to get me because you just never know.”

Dr. Egri’s patients are not only from the Sausalito waterfront but also from San Francisco and the East Bay -- two locations where he worked before he opened his practice here.    When asked what is the difference in a city practice vs. a waterfront practice he will tell you it’s the house calls, because house calls on the water mean that you travel by boat.  Most of his waterfront house calls have to do with sick or dying pets that can’t be moved so he goes out to see them.
“When you have a cat or a dog that can’t be moved, you have to go to them and tend to them along with the owner”, he says. “Compassion is a big part of what I do.  So if a pet needs to be euthanized, I’ll go out, administer the treatment, then sit with the owner until I feel the time is right for me to leave.  It’s like you want someone to be with you when you have to say ‘goodbye’.”
When asked if he has seen any changes on the waterfront with people and their pets he smiles. “When I first came here the dogs roamed free.  They were not on leashes; they seemed to know each other’s territory.  Now that’s changed, I think for the good, because it could make for thrilling times if you got caught near a dog fight, with no owner to yell stop!”

Dr. Egri tries to make his services available 24 hours a day.  You can phone his office or send him a text, which he will answer.  “The calls  get vary from ‘my dog or cat has swallowed something strange’ to ‘my dog is stumbling around disorientated.’ To this I reply ‘please check and see if a pot stash has been left on the floor: if it has, pick it up and keep an eye on the dog if he continues his disorientation I’ll drop by.’  When I don’t get another call, I know they have taken the pot away so the dog can’t eat any more of it.”
He continues with, “The thing about being local is that you get to see generations of not only animals but also the people who have owned them.  Since I have worked here I have seen some really remarkable animals owned by really remarkable people.  Take the dog named Little Bit who was this huge Doberman; or Wig Wag, who fathered many dogs on the waterfront that looked like him, short with stumpy bodies and legs, that are still around today.  Then there was Tess, a beautiful Samoyed/golden retriever mix that had 10 puppies; I took care of after their delivery.”

In Dr. Egri’s office the first thing you notice is lack of advertisement.  He will be the first to tell you that he does not sell food or drugs nor does he advertise them in his office.  He feels that what he does is offer a service and try to answer questions, if he can’t answer people’s questions, then he wants to be able to point them in the right direction to find that answer.

Dr. Steven Egri in front of his office.
Photo by Steefenie Wicks