by Lynn Ruth Miller
December 26, 1999, Jerry Franks got a hole in one. It was an accomplishment he has been working toward since he moved here in 1936, when he was six months old. Franks, 63, was born in San Francisco. As he recalls, his interest in golf did not begin in the city. It was the atmosphere that surrounds the Pacifica Golf Course that molded his attitude toward the game in his infancy. Franks didn’t actually begin playing golf until fifteen years ago, but his life has always revolved around the Sharp Park course.
Our biggest entertainment when I was a kid was at the golf course, he recalls. We hunted for golf balls and sold them to the players for 25 cents. I could make $10.00 a day doing that. . . a lot of money in those days.
Joe Dimaggio’s brother owned a restaurant in San Francisco and used to golf in Pacifica. Franks remembers selling balls to him as well as other notables in the sports field.
Any money I had as a kid, I earned at the course, he recalls. I caddied, and I worked in the pro shop. I remember saving up those earnings until I had $65.00 to buy a Schwinn bicycle.
Jerry Franks family moved to Pacifica when he was 6 months old. We lived in the little house by the golf course, he recalls. Later, after we moved to Pacific Avenue, it became Claire’s Dog Grooming Salon. There were four children in the Franks’ family and both parents worked. Franks mother was a waitress at the golf course and his father worked for Matsons Shipping Line at first.
Then he studied carpentry and he did maintenance, recalls Franks. Back then you did whatever you could. There weren’t any rich people here and there was no industry. People in Pacifica, California, were working people. It was like living in the country.
School was an experience that bears little resemblance to the highly organized system today with its varied curricula and high achievement goals. There was no kindergarten here and Franks attended first grade where Pacificas City Hall is now. One teacher taught everything, Franks recalls.
In the fifth grade, his teacher was Bob Siebert, a retired military man. If you didn’t feel like doing schoolwork, you asked him about the navy and he’d tell stories all day, said Franks.
In those days, there was no cafeteria at school. If you didn’t go home for lunch, your packed it and brought money for milk. There was no day care then either, and when Franks came home from school, he and the other three children in his family took care of themselves until their parents came home.
We graduated from the eighth grade in the Seaview Theater because there was no stage in the school, said Franks.
As Pacifica grew and the numbers of children increased, the Board of Education used classrooms downstairs in the Little Brown Church (the current Police Station) on Francisco. At that time, there was a well baby clinic in the church as well. I’ve done everything in that church but go to jail, Franks said. I went to Sunday School and grammar school there and got married there, too.
Pacifica was a small town kind of place where everyone knew everyone when Franks was a child. There was a reservoir at the top of Talbot Street where the kids used to swim. Happy Hollow Ranch was at the end of Milagra, he recalls. Pacific Manor was a sand dune then. There wasn’t a tree on the hill there. It was filled with strawberries and shrubs. Linda Mar was an artichoke field. There was a duck farm across from the Wander Inn on Coast Highway.
Franks remembers when the war broke out in 1941. There was a Japanese Internment Camp where the archery range is now, he said. I remember seeing people behind a fence guarded by the military. Those people were the enemy and I was afraid of them. Years after, I was in the boy scouts, our project was to tear down the old buildings.
Fun was very different for Pacifica’s children in those days than it is now. We would take our toy guns and climb Gypsy Hill to play war, he recalls. We built a fort behind our house. There was a big Eucalyptus grove up there and we’d sleep out all night.
There was no drug problem then but little boys often experimented with tobacco. We just did it because we weren’t allowed to do it, said Franks. One time, our mother caught us behind the shed and she said shed make us smoke the whole cigarette if she ever caught us again.
Children didn’t swim in the ocean then. They swam in the lake at the golf course, even though it was forbidden. My mother took us to the San Jaquin Valley and was afraid to let us swim there, but we could already swim like fish.
Franks’ family was one of the first to buy a television set back in 1949. All the neighbors came over to watch Milton Berle on Tuesday nights, he recalls. Reception here was lousy and my brother was always on the roof turning the antenna to get better reception.
Franks parents split up when he was young and he was on his own by the time he was seventeen. I rented a room from Doug Hart, he recalls. The Easterby’s lived across the street.
Franks remembers Hazels, the first bar to welcome gays in this area. I don’t remember seeing any gay men there, though, he said. It was just a bar for the locals. Drinking was the only entertainment for adults here. I don’t remember any social clubs, but they had dances at the Firehouse. My dad was a good singer and dancer and he used to sing at all the dances.
As Franks looks back on his childhood, he remembers hopping on the back of the milk truck as it went by and he recalls the Watkins man. My mom would make a list of things she wanted and he’d come back the next week with it. She had a card and we paid a little something toward our bill every week.
In the early forties, Franks recalls two hobos, Whispering Smith and Black Sambo who lived in two shacks in the dump where the RV Park is today. Smith was an amateur inventor and generated his own electricity from the stream there.
Franks became one of Pacifica’s first city employees when he painted signs in the sign department. His ambition at that time was to be a race car driver.
A bunch of guys would get together and we’d have a Destruction Derby at the Belmont Speedway or the Champion Speedway in Brisbane, two or three times a year. We’d buy old cars, take out the glass and chain the doors shut. Then we drove them down highway 101 to the speedway.
Franks believes the major change in the social climate of Pacifica came when we started having city government. They control your life so much they block growth and opportunity, he said. When I first came here, there were no restrictions on anything. If you owned a lot, you built the kind of house you wanted on it.
Yes, it was simpler time when Jerry Franks and his family came here in 1936, and although the town has changed he believes Pacifica is still a good place to live. There has always been enough to do here, he said. I’ve always liked living here.
Times change, life goes on and we adapt. Yet, its nice to stop for a moment to recall the way it was before our houses started to slip off the hill and Devils Slide wasn’t threatening to collapse. Sharp Park Road was a tiny trail up the hill and teenagers hopped on Frank Nolan's bus to go to at the Empire Theater on West Portal.
That’s the way it was. Remember?
Published U.S. Legacies June 2005
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