Our Particular Universe
by
Judy Vaughn

Because it's perched on top of a hill, the house on Valley Street has always seemed large, larger than its actual size.

From this spot at the top of the hill I can look out over the entire valley. Mt. Diablo is on the far horizon. And beyond that? I think I can see Chicago. It's as though I could take a running jump off the planet and fly out into space. And if, indeed, gravity should eventually pull me down, I'd most certainly land on the other side of the world. Maybe Kathmandu.

From this vantage point, three quarters of the view is sky. Below that, the earth is clearly round. Watch the vapor trail from a passing plane. One hundred and eighty degrees across the horizon, it leaves an arched path following the curve of the earth.

This round, fragile earth is spinning on its axis at 8000 miles an hour. So are we.

For forty years this house has been filled to capacity with an overabundance of energy, creativity, hope, surprise, success and failure, unpredictable chaos, undeniable pain and inexhaustible curiosity. It's something of a metaphor for our lives. We sit on the top of a hill on the brink of a valley in the middle of a universe.

Does the building appear to lean slightly to the right? We could hardly move into such a place so contrary to our lifestyle, we laughed to the realtor in 1966, watching as a dropped coin rolled to one side of the floor. "Not to worry," he countered. Adroitly he did a complete about face, turning in the opposite direction. "You see," he smiled, "it actually leans slightly to the left!"

We bought the house and the adventure began.

To pay the moving bills, bless the rooms and welcome our friends, soon after moving in we held an art show sponsored by The Negro Historical and Cultural Society.

Looking back on it now, I can see it was a foreshadowing of things to come. This would be a public as well as private place. Christmas trees and candlelit dinners would happen here. Everyday life would happen -- sometimes splendidly, sometimes with enormous pain. But there would also be business meetings at this table overlooking the valley. Funds raised, contacts made, ambitious educational programs developed and implemented. There was a brave new world to be created and we were part of it. It was a heady time.

The ladies from the Historical Society sensed the spirit. Almost immediately, when the International Visitors' Center needed a home to host a party for 100 Africans, they asked us to help.

Usually, mansions overlooking the Golden Gate host this kind of large international delegation. They have the space. They have the hired help which we, of course, do not. But the bourgeois ladies who were our sponsors saw beyond the prestige of Pacific Heights hospitality this time. They saw an opportunity for African visitors to see how middle class Noe Valley families lived. It's not that we were so normal. We weren't. But we loved to give parties. And our house was certainly big.

The evening came. The time of arrival came … and went. Where were our visitors? As we waited, we posted signs on the decks. Please, no more than fifteen at a time.

The ladies fussed. We waited. The music of Charlie Parker set the mood.

Suddenly, an advance scout arrived to tell us the situation. Drivers of the chartered buses carrying the Africans were perplexed. The hill was too steep. This was no place for a bus.

So the caravan took an alternate route and parked a block away. Then those 100 Africans with skins so dark and so intense they seemed almost purple, those 100 Africans with hairstyles only just then becoming popular in the United States, those 100 future African leaders that the State Department wanted to show how middle class America lived…those 100 Africans got out of their buses in their brilliantly colored dashikis and wonderfully long flowing robes. They hit the pavement, started knocking on doors to see where we lived and in a great wave of sub-Saharan color walked up the street to our front door...

As home movies go, it was an entrance worthy of Cecil B. De Mille!

An auspicious beginning.

A sign of things to come.

You must understand it hasn't been I who have led this parade of people through our lives.

It's always been Royce's show — his optimism, his vision, his demons and his unrelenting force that led the way.

"Royce, the people's choice", the first black elected Lt. Governor of Ohio Boys' State in 1948…Royce, one of the first three black men admitted to Princeton…Royce, the first black man pledged to the prestigious Quadrangle eating club and then cautioned that it might be prudent for him to stay in his dorm while KKK crosses burned on campus … Royce whose gut usually told him to do the more conservative thing, to study art history which he loved, but whose time in history demanded he take a higher road.

How does a sweet young thing from Swayzee, Indiana, stand in the light of so luminous a figure? Very carefully, I think. Our high school journalism class newspaper ran a column asking what you wanted to be when you grew up. My answer was a sign of the times. "A diplomat's wife," I said. Not a diplomat. No one would have expected that. After all, it was only 1955.

Eventually, I married my diplomat. It was San Francisco, 1963.

I remember a Berkeley party, long before I knew what a Berkeley party might be — a huge gathering up a winding path to a house overlooking the Bay. Between the first and second floor was a fountain with running water. In front of it, standing on the landing, was someone radically chic — Rap Brown, I think. Or maybe Stokely. I don't really remember. Would it be terribly impolite to say that on this occasion his rhetoric defined him, not his name?

The speech went on for some time and the audience listened raptly. I heard the word "overthrow." And all I could think was if indeed someone were going to overthrow the government, who would run the water department? A scene from "Lawrence of Arabia" came to mind. It was the chaos of the Damascus city hall and an insurgent government desperately trying to find its voice. The phones needed electrical generators. Who would be in charge? When fire broke out, there was no force in the water pumps. Who would carry the water?

Always practical, I could hardly visualize a coup. It was all far over my head. Frankly I was watching the drama, not really listening to the words.

For that matter, no one else seemed ready to revolt either. Guests were avidly political, but hardly the stuff of overthrow. Rap, or Stokely, or whoever it was, invited discussion and provoked conversations throughout the house. People listened politely and intensely debated the issues, but nobody grabbed a spear.

I was not a part of the discussions. Struggling to fit in, I listened valiantly, but had little to contribute. In those days, when people heard I was a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, they would lean forward in anticipation to see if I had anything interesting to say. I didn't.

Not about politics, at least. Not about overthrowing the government. Not about fighting the system. I didn't enter this marriage to make a political statement. Ideally, I did relish the possibility of a more civilized world. I thought our kids might possibly be made of far better stuff than generations before. But I had never heard of miscegenation and wouldn't have known how to spell it if I had.

I had come to adulthood prepared to talk about Hemingway, Edgar Lee Masters, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, the "soft-as-morphine" poetry of Tennessee Williams, and a writing style called "slice of life." Nobody told me what the realities of the Sixties would be like. I was totally unprepared.

What I knew for sure was that Royce's passion for knowledge thrilled me. It was like sitting at my mother's kitchen table surrounded by encyclopedias. If it was time to eat, we pushed them aside for a "cheesewich," a slice of pasteurized American cheese toasted on white Wonder Bread. Dinner over, we moved the books back again. I suppose I thought life with Royce would be like that. In the end, the slice of life we cut out for ourselves was far different from what I had imagined.

For starters, in spite of what my study with Dr. Coyle had led me to believe, Hemingway's name never ever came up in cocktail conversations. Royce's heroes -- Botticelli, Michelangelo and Da Vinci – also had to step aside. This was not Quatrrocento Italy. It was San Francisco of the 1960's. Times were changing. So were we. It was exciting to adapt classic sensibilities to more pressing social needs. Royce did it easily. It took me longer.

Together — and separately — we've spent 40 years being idealists desperately trying to keep poetry in our lives. At the same time, we've become much more practical. Theoretically, the water department still needs fixing. We're working on it!

Was everything peaches and cream in those early years? Of course not. Although there was a bedrock foundation of idealism underlying our marriage, there were many differences. His mother, for heaven's sake, kept a kitchen floor that was "clean enough to eat off of." She had been a maid in a wealthy home. Her housekeeping was evidently impeccable. What girl in her right mind would marry a man whose mother was such a good a housekeeper as that?

Because he was seven years older than I and a take-charge-kind of guy eager to set up a model household, Royce also tended to take an unnaturally paternalistic role in the beginning. "This is my house, too," I had to remind him. But because he was so supercharged, always working, always adding a new room and always stopping off at the hardware store, it was hard to get to a decision before he had already made it. I had to fight to choose my own towels.

He was solicitous, of course, and always protective, ever mindful of the things he thought a good husband should do. "Every wife should have one day when she doesn't have to cook," he announced profoundly. "Your day off will be Friday."

We were married on Sunday. The next Friday he invited guests for 7:00 and at 6:00 arrived at the door with a hunk of corned beef, a head of cabbage and a pressure cooker.

My gourmet sensibilities at the time stopped just short of Chef Boyardee spaghetti in a box. He knew that. To accommodate his last-minute dinner invitation, he bought a pressure cooker that remains with us still today. Hundreds of guests have enjoyed his corned beef and beef stews. As for Friday nights, Saturday nights and often Sundays, that weekend was the beginning of an endless chain of guests. We entertained or were entertained every weekend for years to come. Business took place at the dinner table. Grand ideas took root there. Life unfolded. We made new friends, built strong relationships.

The first kitchen was small and narrow with speckled linoleum that was particularly ugly, its only redeeming quality being that should some errant morsel of food happen to fall, the pattern hid it. Guests sat at the counter watching as I, of necessity, learned to cook before their eyes. Usually on Friday nights.

The same naivete which brought me to Chef Boyardee applied to music. "Well, baby, what do you know about jazz?" asked my new husband whose expansive collection of LP's ranged from recordings of songs by Mississippi chain gangs to booming Christmas morning Jimmy Smith jazz to the classics, symphonies, sonatas and tone poems and everything in between. I remember him listening to Poulenc's Concerto in G Minor for weeks until he could whistle it almost note for note. In contrast, my answer to the jazz query was tentative and gloriously mispronounced, an error we've laughed about many times since. "At the London Room in Chicago," I demurred. " I once heard this guy called Count Bass-ie."

In fact, my musical upbringing pretty much stopped with "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me" and Doris Day singing, "Que Sera, Sera!" "You'll Never Walk Alone" inspired me as a teen. I listened to it in a darkened room and contemplated my future. Mother played "Claire de Lune" and "The Warsaw Concerto" on the piano, but she had also unfortunately told me I couldn't carry a tune. And unfortunately I believed her. My musical skills were nil.

When I danced, my internal rhythm heard one, two, three/one, two, three while syncopated Royce heard one, one and a half, four.

Who was this oddly matched couple dancing to such wildly different rhythms? I'm purposely exaggerating the superficial differences because there was a mightier force at work. We were part of something big. And we loved it.

Perhaps because he was so driven and because I was so entranced by the intensity with which we lived, it all made sense. It was very exciting. Maybe we could change the world. Royce wrote to my mother that Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty" was indeed a vicious vice. I wrote that besides being politically inept, the candidate was deliberately, insidiously appealing to the WASP vote and racial prejudices. How self-righteous we must have sounded. Mother's response? I actually don't remember. It was our tirade, not hers.

And where, you ask, is the girl from Indiana, protagonist in this memoir?

I had come to San Francisco just three weeks before I got my job at the Chronicle. There is an apocryphal story — I'm not even sure who said it — that when I arrived, I boldly announced, "I'm the new writer in town."

With nerve extracted from some depth I can't imagine, I told editor Ted Bredt that he should give me his job because I could find a one-legged pigeon in Union Square! It's true. I wrote a short graph about looking at a flock of the maligned creatures and seeing one with only one leg. "That's the one I'm going to write about," I boasted. "I'm going to write what other people don't see. I will find a different angle."

Years later, sitting at my typewriter on the fourth floor of the Salvation Army, I looked out the window one day to see a one-legged pigeon standing on the fire escape. "Come quick," I gasped to my secretary. "I know this bird!"

How could this be? How long do pigeons live? What are the chances this same bird would be here sitting above my chamber door? Jan, who appeared to know such things, walked into my office, saw the bird and sighed deeply. "That's the way birds rest, you know. They pull one leg up underneath them..."

So I got the Chronicle job under false pretenses. There were no one-legged pigeons in Union Square. I wonder if Ted knew it. Whatever, he bought the concept and my career began. In Chicago I had been writing department store ads for men's underwear, cosmetics and children's clothing. Three weeks in San Francisco and I had gotten a job many in the city would have given their eyeteeth for.

For four years I was Walt Whitman going forth each day — a girl reporter in high heel pumps traipsing through the city streets reporting the world, becoming part of it, describing it from every angle I could devise. I flew a glider over the salt flats in the south bay, visited the flower mart at dawn, covered drag races, dune buggies and martial arts. Did stories about the mysterious Emeryville mud flat sculptures, photographers, calligraphers, avant garde music and filmmakers. Wrote impressionistic essays focused on things like ferris wheels, parades and a very old bristle cone pine. My first feature was the "Death of a Valley" -- a short essay on a town in the Berryessa Valley that was drowned when they built the Monticello Dam.

"Bonanza" stories were usually short and light-hearted, not serious. In a decade enraged by race relations and political unrest, we were advised exactly what the role of the magazine was to be. An infamous memo came down from Sunday editor Stan Arnold. "Bonanza" magazine was to make people feel good about living in San Francisco. It was to be a mirror of what happened in the City. If, by chance, that mirror should unfortunately show something unlovely, the mandate was unequivocal. Send it to Cityside. In an era of social upheaval, I suppose our stories symbolized normalcy, a kind of balance.

In an earlier incarnation, "Bonanza" magazine had been a house and gardens section. Now we were in a circulation war. Our job was to pep it up. Sell newspapers. Keep it lively. To kick it off, we ran a shameless promotion piece called "The Beautiful Girls of San Francisco." From there it was showgirls and hip San Francisco interspersed with down-to-earth human interest. I usually got the human interest assignments, but also had my share of naked bodies

Once, my byline was attached to a full-color, double-exposure, double-truck photo of a nude by acclaimed photographer Ruth Bernhard. I gave it my best shot and, with wisdom grandly accumulated in my 24 years, solemnly quoted the artist: "If you can't see the beauty in a naked body, never mind going to the Grand Canyon. You've missed the whole point of beauty."

The picture was printed in pin-up girl proportions, which evidently was a big hit with the Corps of Midshipmen of the California Maritime Academy. They wrote a letter to the editor applauding it.

Out in the streets, the challenges continued. When I was eight months pregnant I climbed over a fence marked "No Trespassing" at the condemned Oakland Mole. In three-inch heels, I trudged up an undeveloped hillside when Muni left me an uphill block away from an appointment on 48th Avenue. One incredible day, I hurried through the Tenderloin with a glamorous exotic dancer who had a monkey on her back. Literally, a capuchin monkey! As always, my heels were high, but this woman towered above me, a genuine traffic stopper gliding down the street balancing an animal on her shoulder and vivaciously chatting as we walked. What a picture we must have made! Struggling desperately to match her step, I felt like a gangly two-year-old trying to keep up.

The joke, of course, was that I would wear high heels to the beach. And it was true. It may be hard for a guy to understand, but when your legs are good and skirts are short, there's nothing quite like waltzing through the world on tiptoe.

Forty years later, the arches have fallen ingloriously and some insidious ailment called plantar fasciitis assails the soles. But the memories remain. Sweeping down a marble staircase in three-inch heels makes you feel like the Queen of England. Walking through the theater district at twilight, you feel poised, on stage, as if you too could write something very dramatic.