“That’s a sharp hat sir! Is that a rattlesnake?”

“Sure is, this hat’s a classic.”

“You stay in this neighborhood?”

“Yessir, you can find me from Hayes to Grove. Lived here 30 years.”

“How has it changed?”

“Eh, I’d say at this time of the evening there’d be about 2-300 sailors up and down here. Had a lot of jazz clubs down here, it was different. A lot different. A lot of call girls. This time they’d be comin out, gettin their money.”

“When was that?”

“‘54,’55,’56. On like that I’d say until bout November ’61. Matt Christopher came in and changed all that. You see, this used to be 24 hours. Only thing was you wasn’t allowed to sell alcohol after 2 o’clock, but this was something like Las Vegas.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, they had neon signs rollin all night. Call girls up and down here till daylight?”

“When did it start to change into what it is now?”

“Um…’62, ’62 was when it start changing. I was stayin bout 3 blocks down by another club called Both End club where Miles Davis and all them used to play. There was a lot of clubs…it was live.”

“So are you into music and stuff.”

“Yep, I’ve been into it. Well I came here in 1950, I’m from Texas. 60 miles outside of Houston in Huntsville, Texas. So I’m over there and three days outta high school I volunteered for the army. See I was in Korea. I’m 83 so I know what I’m talking about.”

“You’re 83!”

“Yeah, people be like, ‘who you talking to?’ and I tell em, ‘hey, I was born November 29, 1930.’ and they say ‘you gotta be kidding!’ and I say ‘hell no I ain’t kiddin.’ I don’t play about it. I lied about it so much, I almost forgot my age. All these girls out here, I was pretty wrapped up until I went to the service in ’51. So then I went overseas, I was in special service over there. I had all my training in Houston and then they sent me to Okinawa base so I wasn’t all in the fighting zone but we worked with the sailors. We was hauling soldiers outta Ft. Mason and the Presidio to wherever we had army bases. I’ve been all over the world. Panama, Puerto Rico, Virginia, New Jersey, Japan, England, Spain, South Africa. We had army bases everywhere and wherever we had bases we had to deliver soldiers and supplies. But I got tired of sailing, spent all my time on the water so I made two trips to Paris. Then I saw on the bulletin board they were looking for people to be stationed there, so I signed up. And there was two places I coulda been stationed, Paris or Madrid, Spain so I chose Paris.”

“Those all sound like good places to me.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaamen.”

“So how long where you in Paris?”

“I was there 3 years and then I took a year extension because I met a girl from Copenhagen, Denmark. Fell in love…and I didn’t want to leave. So I said, ‘ah well, I’m gonna do 20 years.”

“You were there 20 years?”

“Naw, that’s what I wanted to do. And that was my intention. But I had a Lt. Colonel who was always like- Louis Armstron, Duke Ellington, all those guys were coming over to that area. And everytime they’d come I was right up front with my old lady. So I was sittin over there, I’ll never forget this, I was waiting on my old lady to show up, at Mama Lemons, he walked over and said, ‘how you doin Sgt.?’ I said ‘okay.’ he said ‘you waitin on your old lady huh?’ I say ‘yeah.’ ‘he say ‘me too, ahh these women, they always late ain’t they?’ i say ‘yeah’. he say ‘but you got somethin else on your mind.’ so I looked at him and my first thought was ‘how he read my mind though?’ cause I had less than two months to go and I was thinkin about it, trying to make up my mind what to do. and he said ‘I wanna give you some advice. I’ve been here 19 years, and I’m gettin out. Don’t volunteer. I left Washington week before last and they’ve got something coming up called Vietnam. A lot of people are gonna get killed. Unnecessarily. And if you don’t get out, they’re gonna retrain your regiment, put you in charge, and you gon be right on the front line.’ Beep beep, a bell went off in my mind so hey, I got outta there. So when my time come up after those last 3-4 weeks I got my butt outta there and came home.”

“So what happened to your love from Copenhagen?”

“Well, I was planning on going to get here, we was gonna get married. But I got back to Texas, spent two weeks with my parents, and then headed to San Francisco. And with all these women, she become history.”

“There are a lot of beautiful women in San Francisco.”

“Yep, I came out here because I had an aunt and uncle that lived here and they would always talk about it. Back in Texas is was blacks here, whites there. Black water fountain, all this crap. But I had been in Europe so coming back to Texas really messed me up. But San Francisco was like Europe. And I really like the climate. Here, it’s never been 100 degrees. I like that. And all of my friends, that’s retired like me, they left and went to the East Bay. Oakland, Antioch, Walnut Creek, Vallejo, they bought homes and stuff over there. But I’m the only one who’s still living. Most of my friends from back in those days are gone. I got good genes I guess. I got 2 aunties left. One’s 98 and the other’s 101.”

“Whoa, that is some good genes. You seem like a man that’s lived a lot and has a lot of wisdom. You got any advice for me?”

“My best advice is follow your first mind. You first mind have to come from where you was brought up. You gotta have morals. If you don’t got morals and respect, the rest of it can go somewhere else. My father was a minister so there was a certain way I was brought up. I remember I hit that age and it was ‘oh la la’ but you’ve gotta have a certain limitation on what you’re gonna do. You gotta know what you want outta life. And stick to it. My best buddies when I came out here are all gone, and they was 10-15 years younger than me. They was my best buddies but when they said ‘let’s do this, let’s do that’ if it wasn’t my first mind I wouldn’t do it.”

“Had to let it go?”

“Had to let it go. They’d say ‘come on man let’s go’ and I’d say ‘alright I’ll see you tomorrow.’ The next day they told me they had a car wreck, John got killed. He was comin off of the freeway, his door came open and he started fallin out the car, he grabbed the steering wheel, the car turned, run over and killed him. His own car…man, you see? Me..I didn’t go. When I did go with em I’d always end up in jail. Don’t get me wrong, I done a lot of wrong, but I never got caught. I knew it was wrong, but at the time…hell wit it. But, you have to come from where you were raised and stick to it.”