Read Garcia: An American Life for Free Online

most of the Garcia side of the family disapproved of Ruth’s decision to stay in the bar business. “She had been a nurse making good money, so we thought that would be better for her,” she says. “We thought the bar was kind of a rough place for a woman to be, but she wanted to stick with it, and she did for a few years. We didn’t see as much of her orthe children after Joe died. Mostly they were with their grandparents, the Cliffords.”
    Tiff says that shortly after he and Jerry moved into Harrington Street, Ruth bought them the first television on the block “and also this big freezer, with a complete food program. I guess she felt a little guilty that we had to stay with our grandparents. But she was only paying twenty-five dollars a month rent for the house across the street.”
    In Jerry’s posthumously published book
Harrington Street
, a slender but beguiling collection of paintings, drawings and writing about his youth up until about age ten (he described the book as “auto-apocrypha, full of my anecdoubts”), he talks about how Bill and Tillie Clifford seemed like such a mismatched pair. She was vivacious, spunky, “a ball of fire; she was really hot.” Pop was “so dull. He was such a quiet person. This was one of the Irish guys that
didn’t
have the gift of gab.”
    Tillie
was
a bright, active, very independent woman. Bill had been a laundry worker most of his adult life—he was a laundry driver mainly—and he supported his wife, but it was Tillie who made a mark in that business. She helped organize the laundry workers’ union in San Francisco, and she spent more than two decades as its secretary-treasurer. She traveled extensively in that position, attending and occasionally speaking at labor conventions. She was modern in another way, too, Tiff says: “She had a boyfriend for like twenty or thirty years that she would travel with when she took trips; he’d go along and he was a single guy and didn’t have a family. My grandfather knew, but the guy never came to the house. It was a discreet situation.”
    Outwardly at least, Tiff and Jerry’s years at their grandparents’ house were fairly normal. They attended Monroe School on Excelsior Boulevard, the same school Ruth Garcia had gone to when she was a child living on Harrington Street. It was Jerry’s third-grade teacher at Monroe, Miss Simon, who first “made me think it was okay to draw pictures,” he said. “She’d say, ‘Oh that’s lovely,’ and she’d have me draw pictures and do murals and all this stuff. She was very encouraging, and it was the first time I heard that the idea of being a creative person was a viable possibility in life. ‘You mean you can spend all day drawing pictures? Wow! What a great piece of news!’ She enlarged the world for me.”
    “Jerry and I used to like drawing together,” Tiff says. “I was really into drawing structures, and Jerry was more into drawing characters. When we were growing up at my grandfather’s house we used to draw on these laundry pads we had all over the house. We’d draw a little house, then get a razor blade and cut the window out of the house and go into the next page and cut another little slot for the door and so on and make these flip books.
    “We also used to make instruments out of my grandfather’s antique cigar cases, which he used to keep his tools in. We’d make little ukuleles that were actually playable. We didn’t know chords or frets or anything. But we’d stringthem with fishing line. We went through periods where we’d make dozens of them. We were always fashioning our own little toys. My grandmother had a rumpus room under the house on Harrington Street and with my cousin [Daniel] we’d all sing and bounce around the room, and have parties.”
    It’s not surprising to learn that thoroughly modern Tillie Clifford played the oh-so-’20s banjo-ukulele—“Four strings, short neck, strung like a banjo,” Tiff says. “She didn’t actually