In 1964, John sailed from Australia to San Francisco.
THE LODGE
by John Dunnicliff
In July of the year 1964, I was living at the YMCA on Turk Street in the heart of the Tenderloin district. An inauspicious beginning to my career in America, as I wrote to my parents. Finishing college in England I went out to Australia and after 3 enjoyable and memorable years there I started on a visit back to the UK, intending to travel across America. The US Consulate in Sydney gave me a green card; it was so easy in those days.
I had my first sight of The New World when I arrived in San Francisco on Independence Day by way of the ultimate entrance – sailing in under the Golden Gate Bridge on the 900-passenger P&O Liner “Oronsay.” The tug boats sounded fog horns in welcome, water cannons sprayed high arcs and there, before me, was the shining city on the hill.
Friends I had made on board ship invited me to stay for a week in Berkeley and I somehow heard about a company looking for an industrial chemist which is what I had been in Australia.
I was hired for the job at Koret on Mission Street and looked around for the cheapest possible accommodation. After a couple of surreal weeks on Skid Row, a temp secretary at the office advised me to go and see if I could get in at The Lodge. She had once stayed there happily and explained the qualifications were to be single, aged between 21 & 30 and having a white collar job. I duly made my way up to the baroque building at 1590 Sutter Street and went inside to meet Mrs. Loud. I was accepted and agreed to the princely sum of $125 per month for board, breakfast & dinner excluding weekends. That is incredulous. Today it wouldn’t even pay for one night at The Queen Anne but it was fifty years ago after all.
I moved in and was allocated a spacious room on the second floor with windows overlooking Octavia St. There was a wide and quite lovely staircase down to the lobby and the general décor of the public rooms was Goldrush-Victorian with solid furniture left over from the Barbary Coast days. Nevertheless on those cold, foggy, dripping wet San Francisco nights, it was a warm and welcoming home to return to.
On that first night I went down to dinner and chatted with some of my fellow lodgers. Over the years I have told, many, many times, the story of how I arrived in America not knowing a single soul yet within a couple of weeks at The Lodge, I had met 50 people and a dozen or so were new friends. That was a really great benefit of living there – meeting and knowing a constant flux of young people like oneself.
Other benefits were: The Lodge was clean & tidy, it was relatively quiet, the food was varied and good, there was a laundry upstairs, a TV room with Ed Sullivan on Sunday evenings and most importantly, there were a good number of attractive young women around.
After a few days Mrs. Loud announced that I should share with a roommate and so one evening Jim Meeder arrived, having driven across country from Philadelphia.
His car had been broken into so his was an unhappy arrival in San Francisco. Jim kept calm — as I have noticed he usually does in the 49 years of our friendship that began there and then at The Lodge.
I was new to America so Jim took me to my first baseball game at the ‘Stick and introduced me to the realities, the complexities and the poetry of the national pastime. I’ve been a fan ever since.
I seemed to have fallen in with some rather quirky characters at The Lodge.
In fact those such as Ray Regnault, Gar Lohman, Tony Illich, Andy Simonds, Chip Pashaym and Meeder, I frankly regarded as a bunch of eccentrics. We went out most evenings, the Rose & Thistle English pub was at hand and of course, San Francisco was starting to explode in 1964 with the new generation who wore flowers in their hair. At the Pierce Street Annex we grooved with The Jefferson Airplane and I saw Jimmy Hendrix burn his guitar on stage at the the Filmore.
It was a good time to be in the city – when is it not? We all had jobs of course and left early every morning. I would commute by cable car down California Street then up & over Nob Hill. I smirked at the tourists and felt like a true San Franciscan, a title that I claim to this very day – even though I lived there for only four years. After work it was customary, if not mandatory, to go with office colleagues for cocktails at popular watering holes such as The Iron Horse in Maiden Lane, Domino’s in Trinity Alley or the bar at the Sheraton and sometimes all three.
At weekends someone usually had an address for a BYOB party in Pacific Heights and there were always activities and escapades. We played touch football games against Baker’s Acres, nonchalantly smuggled in liquor past the front desk, and had a floating poker game. Once I had to shimmy down the drainpipe outside my second floor room to avoid an unwelcomed visitor.
I don’t think there was much hanky-panky going on but what did I know?
After about 18 months at The Lodge, thoughts turned to having an apartment where loud music and visiting females was not frowned upon so Ray Regnault and I moved to the Haight and a two-bedroom on Frederick Street. Jim grew his hair long and also moved into the heart of Hippyland before later setting off on his globe-trotting tour.
So changes in our lives occurred and the class of The Lodge ’64 moved on and scattered around the city, around the country and around Europe.
I eventually went to Paris for seventeen years. But wherever we all finished up, we would not forget the wonderful days when we were young in San Francisco in the fabulous ‘60’s and we lived at The Lodge.
Escondido, CA, 2014
