Marshall &Kay Family  Histories

 

16 Yrs. old, in S. F. in High School

It was time to  leave Aunt Dot's and go back home in San Francisco (or the decision ws made). But I was sad about the way things  ended at Aunt Dot's.

 

At this point I was finally old enough to be left on my own, I was sixteen, and I was glad to be on my own.  I knew where I wanted to go to school, in San Francisco. In those days you could pick the high school you wanted to go to, you didn't have to go the high school nearest you. And the high school I wanted to go to was an academic high school, it only accepted students that were planning on going to college. And if your grades went low you were asked to leave. It was called Lowell High. I think it's still there but it's not an academic school anymore. But that's where I wanted to go and it was all the way on the other side of town, I remember that. I had to take a street car forever and ever to get there. But I remember applying there and feeling real good about it that they accepted me, because my grades were good. 

 

The first day I was there, I was looking for a class and ran into a girl in the hall, she was looking for her class.  We both told each other, this is our first day here, we didn't know what we're doing. We just kind of started talking, and decided to have lunch together. Her name turned out to be Kay, her first name, (funny that is was my last name), her last name was Hansen, her name was Kay Hansen. We hadn't been talking to long, before we found out we had a number of classes together. So that worked out nicely. So maybe we'd been acquainted a day or so and were beginning to find out things about each other. She found out then, that I was Mormon, and she told me she was Mormon, but that she hadn't been raised in The Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). We talked about that, and I said I hadn't been raised in The Church either. I don't know where she'd been going to school before, but she'd been going somewhere where she'd been having some bad experiences. And then she told me about an experience that always stayed with me after that. She said, you know, I've been praying that if I could meet someone who was Mormon, that we could go to church together... that I could have a friend who was Mormon. She said, isn't it interesting that you're Mormon. So I think we were both impressed that her prayer had been answered. 
 

 

Friendship with Kay and The Church 

Kay lived on one side of the city, and I lived on the other side of the city and we did try to go to church together. She used to come over to my house, and we would go down to what they call the Mission Ward, which was the closest ward to me. She would take the street car after school to my house, and we would walk from my house six or seven blocks to the church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). And we had a really good mutual teacher. She must've been ancient, she must've been fifty, and in our eyes she was ancient. But she was such a good person, and she really made us feel like she really wanted us there. Not just Kay and I but all the girls that would come. So every Wednesday night, for a long time, we would show up there just because she made us feel that way. But we both had a very difficult time getting to church on Sundays. Probably it was because she had to come such a long distance. 

Sometimes she would stay the night, (on Wednesdays), and we'd go so school together. We were both sixteen, not little kids anymore. And she'd been raised in similar circumstance. Her mother was divorced and Kay was an only child, and I was an only child, and I think both of us were rather adult for our age. We pretty much raised ourselves, so in that respect we had a lot in common. I think her parents trusted me, and I think my parent trusted Kay. Very, very often I would stay the night at her house and go to school, most of the time actually. And every once in a while, she would spend the night at my house. And then we'd just go to school and hang out after school, usually at her house, and then I'd catch the street car home, or something. Her mom really liked her going to church, but her mom never did quite make it. And my thought was, that that was great, you know, to go to church, but they didn't quite make it either like my parents. 

 

One thing I remember particularly about my friendship with Kay, and the times that we would go to mutual together at the Mission Ward, is the place itself . The Mission Ward was held in a rented building on Mission Street. The bottom of the building was some kind of a store. And as a Church we met on the second and third floor of the building, and it was an older building. So that was a little different than most people are used to. But it seemed natural to me at that time, you met in what you could afford to meet in. The Mission district was not considered a very good district, it was a really rough district. So that would probably be the only other thing, if I were a parent I would probably not let me walk to the Mission ward by myself, you know. And that's what Kay and I used to do, walk down to the church by ourselves. And it was dark both ways. And on the way there were a number of bars to walk by, because that was the kind of street it was - not a good street. And I can remember a few times actually having people come out of the bars and approach us. And this is when I knew that the Lord was really with us, because Kay and I both felt like, how do I put it, like nothing could hurt us. And we used to just stand up to these guys and tell them, forget it, take off. I'll never forget that. And when I think about that now I think, boy, pretty gutsy, you know. But we did. We just figured that was part of the territory. We never did get hurt or anything like that. Nothing bad ever did happen to us. But as I think about it now, I'm not sure my parents knew how bad that street was. But we knew, we knew the parts of the city that were safe and the parts that were not. And Mission district is not a safe part. 
 

 

 Street Cars, Cable Cars, Fun in the City

 

There were a number of parts that were not safe, and we didn't usually go to those parts. But you learn when you live in San Francisco where you can go, and where you can't go, and how to stay safe in a city like that. Especially at our age where our transportation was street cars. That was before busses, they didn't even have busses then. And cable cars were different. Cable cars were used just on very, very steep hills that had cables built in the ground that actually pulled the car up to the top of the hill. The street cars would run by these electric wires that were strung on the top of the streets, running down the streets from like a telephone cable, you could see them. And the street car a had a thing on the top of it that would latch onto the cable. And that would help keep it on the track, and keep it going, and that's where it would get it's power. So it was a little different than a cable car. A street car pretty much ran on flat ground and we would switch from one to the other when we needed to. 

 

That's how everyone got around. It was really interesting, hardly anyone had cars in the city. So there was a lot of room for street cars all up and down the middle of Market Street, and all the other streets, because there just wasn't that much car traffic. But of course the car traffic increased, and then the street cars turned to busses, I guess because the busses were more economical, I have no idea. But on the street cars you could get umpteen thousand people squished in a street car, and then you could still have twenty or thirty more hanging out the doors because the doors didn't close. On a bus, you pack the bus and close the doors and that was it. And so I was always turned off by the busses. And the same with the cable car, you could always jump on the car and there was always room for one more, or on the street car. All you had to do was get one hand on a pole and one foot on a rung, on a step, and you were fine. You could just hang on until it stopped at the next block and you could jump off. So it was really easy. If the cable man got around to getting your money that was fine, and you would try to give it to him. But if it was too crowded to finally give it to him, you just didn't sweat it, you know. It was more important to get a ride. That sounds terrible I guess. That's maybe where they thought they were losing money, I don't know, they used to get so many people on those cable cars. Now a days of course they won't allow that. If you're not actually sitting down on a cable car you can't go. In those days we used to hang out everyplace, the doors, the windows, the sides, everything. And that's how you got around in the city. You'd pay maybe a token to get on, and then from there you'd go with transfers, all day long you'd use a transfer slip. A token was probably a nickel. We used to call them tokens because they were special tokens and you would pay so much money for "x" number of tokens and use the tokens until they were gone, and then get a bunch more tokens. I guess maybe they were easier to handle, you didn't have to make change. The picture I'm trying to paint is that it was just very easy to get around the city, especially for teenagers. For anybody who could jump on a cable car or a street car; you could go anywhere in the city you wanted to. You could go from one end of the city to another. And you stayed away from the places you knew it was a good idea to stay away from. In those days there were some places you knew it wasn't a good idea to be. 

 

 

During those years in the city I feel I learned a lot about independence. I learned a lot about taking care of myself and knowing who to associate with, and who not to associate with. You could go down on Market Street, for instance, and if you really wanted to meet somebody, if you wanted to be picked up, you could do that, that was easy. But you had to make up your mind what you really wanted, is that what you wanted? Or did you really just want to go out with good guys. And I think Kay and I both decided early on we were not going to mess around. So we did meet a couple of good guys in high school. They didn't go to our school, I've forgotten what school they went to, but they were good friends themselves and they were about a year older than we were. We used to date as a foursome a lot, there was a lot of things to do as couples all over the city. Because it seemed like we could make entertainment for ourselves fairly inexpensively by just catching a street car out to the beach, and then walk on the beach at night, or something. 

 

 

Sometimes we would (we weren't allowed to) but sometimes we'd go up to "The Top of The Mark", which is like the top of The Space Needle or something like that. Generally you don't go places like that if you under age, or if you don't have the money for it. But as teenagers we'd do all kinds of silly things like that. We'd just go up there to see if we could get in. "The Top of The Mark" was probably about the highest tower on top of a hotel in San Francisco. The Mark Hopkins was the name of the hotel. It was a very, very plush hotel, only the rich, of the rich would stay there. So we used to go in and out of those hotels just to see how the rich live. And nobody really stopped us, we didn't make a nuisance of ourselves too much. But we obviously didn't belong. But you know you could do all kinds of things like that and not really get in trouble. But there were places, like that winding street you see pictures of (Lombard Street), we'd often go up there and try running down. We'd just do crazy things like that. Then there were other streets in San Francisco that were so steep, there were steps, and we'd try running up and down those. So there were so many things to do for teenagers, for us, anyway, that didn't really cost money. It was interesting, there wasn't really a lot of trouble to get in. Once in a while I think we went to movies together. And I think we even went to some church dances. Because Kay and I would find out about them and go, but it wasn't always in our ward, it was maybe in another ward.