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play it in our time. In fact when Jerry got into bluegrass, I gave it to him. He probably traded it somewhere along the line.”
    Jerry often said that one reason he eventually got into playing country music was that Tillie listened to broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, but Tiff firmly says, “She wasn’t into country music. Jerry is fantasizing all this. We knew about it because of her tours she would take and when she’d go to these conventions. She’d bring back memorabilia from these various places. She’d been to the Opry, but she didn’t listen to it on the radio.”
    Of course in the early ’50s everyone heard country-pop crooners like Tennessee Ernie Ford and Vaughn Monroe, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were going strong still. There was also a fellow in the Bay Area named Rusty Draper: “He had a kids’ show on in the afternoon when TV first came out,” Tiff says, “and in fact, one of the first 45s Jerry ever bought was a song [Draper recorded] called ‘Gambler’s Guitar.’ It was sort of countryish and it had some riffs in it, little guitar solos, and I think that’s part of what got him and myself interested in that kind of music.”
    Down at the bar, the jukebox was mainly filled with a mix of big band music and sentimental ballads—a reminder of Joe Garcia’s days around the place. Sometime in the late ’40s, the Sailors Union of the Pacific bought the corner lot where the bar and hotel were located so it could erect its moderne granite-faced meeting hall. “So they made a deal for my mom to have the property across the street, which at the time was an abandoned Curtis Candy Company factory, with a hotel on top called the Claremont Rooms. It had been a funky old seamen’s hotel. Jerry and I used to go upstairs and clean out the rooms for my mom and we’d look at all the girlie magazines they’d leave.”
    “It was a daytime bar, a working guy’s bar, so I grew up with all these guys who were sailors,” Jerry said. “They went out and sailed to the Far East and the Persian Gulf and all that, and they would come and hang out in the bar all day long and talk to me when I was a kid. It was great fun for me.”
    In late ’40s–early ’50s San Francisco, kicks were easy to find for kids. The streets were relatively safe, so Tiff and Jerry roamed the city freely, taking advantage of the long leash their grandparents gave them. “You could take a bus or streetcar downtown, or ride your bike,” Tiff says. “The trolleys had stopped going on Mission Street, but they were still on Market. They had trolley buses that we used to climb on the back of. We went all over the place: we’d go out to Sutro Baths [a defunct indoor swimming pool next to Ocean Beach in San Francisco], and Playland [an amusement park] was out there. You could godown there and spend all day. Sometimes we’d go to Fleishacker’s—it was such a beautiful pool; it was like a
lake.
We’d go to the zoo [also out at the ocean], too.”
    Closer to home there were inexpensive movie theaters and plenty of small parks and playgrounds to keep the kids busy. Jerry spent much of his playtime in the late ’40s and early ’50s with his brother and older cousins Daniel, Diane (the daughter of Bill and Ruth Clifford) and Dave Ross (Leonor’s son). Hanging with the big kids undoubtedly exposed Jerry to many things other kids his age hadn’t experienced, but the influence wasn’t always positive.
    “I remember there was a police station over in the Ingleside district, next to Balboa Park, below City College, where they used to board horses; there was a big corral in the back,” Tiff says. “This must have been ’48, ’49. Jerry, myself and my cousin Diane were in the back there and we noticed all these broken windows and a lot of rocks around, so we started breaking windows. We figured there were so many broken ones, what difference would it make? We were bored. And it was fun—until the cops came running