Re: Neighborhood Character

10/21/07 - posted by Frank Dunnigan

Theresa lived just 3 blocks up the hill from us on 18th Avenue at Santiago, in a house that she had inherited from her parents. My grandmother's parents had moved to 21st & Guerrero after the Fire in 1906, and were then the next-door neighbors to Theresa's parents--the beginning of a nearly century-long friendship. My grandmother was 30 when she finally married in 1910, and Theresa, born in 1905, was a very young friend of hers, so Theresa was in her 40s/50s as I was growing up.

Never married, she was always a guest in our home for holidays, First Communions, Confirmations, graduations, etc. She faithfully remembered my father's birthday at the 4th of July every year with a box of See's Candy. Even after he died in 1980, she continued to visit on that date, with the same gift for Mom, every year.

Her main claim to fame was that until the mid-1960s, she was still driving the dark blue 1923 Chevrolet Touring Car that her parents had given her as a high school graduation present in 1923. I can still remember stepping up onto the running board and how I had to twist the knob to open the door as I was getting in. Riding in it seemed like you were on top of the world, plowing forward into traffic. Watching her shift gears was an awesome sight, prim & proper in her hat & gloves & suit, but working as hard as a truck driver to maneuver that high-roofed relic around the neighborhood. You could always see where she parked it, as it stood out so visibly, angled sharply into the curb in front of her house, in front of ours when she was visiting, or along West Portal.

There's more to the story, about her job as the assistant to a member of the SF Board of Supervisors in his West Portal Real Estate/Insurance office and how he failed to pay her when money was tight at election time--people think that scandals on the Board are strictly present-day occurrences! But that's another story for another day...

Theresa died in 1988, and at the funeral, I was astounded to hear from some of her friends that she had cousins who were also my own cousins--we were related, as many of the Irish/Italian/Israeli families in the Western neighborhoods are, but we never knew it. The great-grandparents surely knew of the connection, but the story was gradually lost between my grandparent's generation and that of my parents, only to be brought to the surface again again on that cold November day in 1988 by an elderly in-law of Mom's mother's sister-in-law, who was a friend of Theresa's. To say that I was astounded to learn of a family connection just doesn't begin to describe the feeling.

Every once in a while, as on that day, I discover something new about my family, and can actually feel those long-gone relatives poking me in the chest and saying "GOTCHA!"