Gaye LeBaron: Pandemic’s slow pace refreshes old memories

Being home alone — which is not nearly as exciting as the movie of the same name — one finds oneself looking at things through new eyes, pausing at length to consider, with an abundance of time to spend remembering.

Books on the shelves that haven’t been opened for years; the extra blanket for the bed when the weather turned; a Washington Post story in last week’s paper about the impending release of a “highly awaited” new science fiction film. Not much in common there, you say. Maybe not, but, remembering the Shakespearean promise from not just one but four of his plays (you have 30 seconds to name them all), we say, in all three matters, “Thereby hangs a tale.”

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Charlie Holland is first up on the list of today’s “good old stories.” Charlie was a salesman, a traveling salesman, who navigated the streets and roads between San Francisco and Humboldt bays for much of the 20th century.

In 1986, when he stopped long enough for a visit in The Press Democrat’s parking lot, he was still driving his familiar black 1941 Chevrolet Master Deluxe with his dog, Bosco, in the passenger’s seat and a Utah Woolen Mill’s “Jack Frost” decal on the door.

Charlie was “going on 82” and approaching his 60th year peddling the distinctive wool blankets, “made-to-measure” suits — and long underwear — for the Salt Lake City company.

It was a fine visit, as he leaned on the hood of his spotless old Chevy and told stories.

Charlie had his own brand of “traveling salesman” stories — like the day in 1934 he picked up a hitchhiker who had just debarked from an Alaska Packers ship home from the frozen north. In the course of the ride from Marin to Santa Rosa, Charlie learned how many Alaska Packers ships there were and how many crew they carried and, not incidentally, what the blankets were like.

The next morning, he said, he was in the Alaska Packers office in San Francisco. But it wasn’t the size of the order or the money he made that he wanted to talk about. It was the office itself, with “people wearing green eye shades sitting on high stools; old guys with big black cuffs to keep their shirts clean. A wood stove in the middle of the room. — I thought I’d dropped back into the time of Charles Dickens,” he said.

Pressed, he remembered that he’d sold 300 blankets.

To hear him tell it, most of his sales were serendipitous — an overheard conversation in a place called The Ship’s Café in Richmond about the biggest ships in the world being built in the East by a San Francisco company. Within an hour he was in the company office. “The purchasing agents were Dunn and Short,” he recalled. “Dunn was short and Short was tall.” Oh yeah, and they bought 800 blankets.

He had many more stories like that. He coulda/shoulda written a book. But, truth is, he didn’t know the punch line. I don’t know that he ever knew.

After our parking lot session, I spoke with the president of the Utah Woolen Mills — the grandson of the founder — who sounded a bit teary when I asked about Charlie.

He told me, in strictest confidence, that Charlie was the last man traveling for the company, the sole survivor of all the Jack Frost salesmen that had crisscrossed the American West since 1905. But Charlie didn’t know this. The company chose not to tell him that business was now done only from their store in Salt Lake City. They just let him keep selling — mostly to old customers at that point.

Charlie died almost 25 years ago. I wish I had heard more of his stories.

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Even the slightest hint of news about the science fiction novel “Dune” can cause a ripple of excitement among its multitude of fans. So I took careful note of the news story a week or so ago about a new film based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 work of highly imaginative fiction.

Herbert, as you may know, is high on the list of Press Democrat alumni — ranks that include other novelists and other journalists, including a young Harold Ross, an early 20th century newspaper “rover” on a path to becoming the founding editor of the New Yorker magazine.

Some 15 years before he wrote “Dune,” Frank Herbert was a Press Democrat reporter — 1949-54, if you are keeping track. By 1975 a readers’ poll put his book ahead of “1984” for the title of “most imaginative novel of all time.”

In his time here he covered, among other news stories, the so-called “riots” at the state’s Los Guilicos School for Girls in the early ‘50s. His interview with two scared kids hiding under a blanket was picked up by the wire services. Today we would say it “went viral.”

But Herbert was bent on fiction. He had moved on to the San Francisco Examiner when his first novel, “Dragon of the Sea,” was published in 1955. He quit, and never looked back at newspaper work again.

He did come back to Santa Rosa as the honored guest at a sci-fi convention at El Rancho in 1975 (for location think Costco on today’s city map) and took time for visit with PD veterans, including longtime editor Art Volkerts.

Herbert died in 1986. But “Dune” — with its five sequels — and soon-to-be-released second film, lives on.

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So Christmas is just around the next bend. We are approaching it cautiously, as one of the strangest, if not THE strangest, holiday season on record. Obviously, we can’t let it pass without the traditional visit from St. Nicholas.

(Fear not! We’re not asking you to name the reindeer — although we do deny, vehemently, that Rudolph was one of the original Gang of Eight or that any reindeer ever ran down Grandma. (Boy, my mother hated that song!)

It’s the Santas, plural, we remember, whether in Rosenberg’s window or tucked into a Fifth Street rear entrance corner of The White House, or sitting in the back of a flatbed truck disguised as a sleigh sent out from Tomasini’s Hardware in Petaluma to log requests from kids along the coast, too far away or too poor in the Depression years, to get to town.

Those Santas were well meaning, but rank amateurs compared to people like Bill Sandlin, editor and publisher of the Asti Weakly Grapevine in the 1960s.

Bill was an old news guy who chose not to give it up and kept many of us amused with his sometimes-weekly publication. But Bill had another job. He was Santa Claus. Of course, his work was a short season but he spent the rest of the year getting prepared, keeping his Santa-length gray hair trimmed and ready.

He may have actually worked the Coddingtown Mall in its earliest Christmases, but certainly he was available for private parties.

Now, Sandlin was a good Santa, but there was no way he could compete with the best of the best.

That would be Addie Whitesell. Addie was the Avon Lady in Rincon Valley year-round, delivering orders by bicycle. But beginning in the late 1950s, with a homemade Santa suit and a cotton beard, she began playing Santa to her clients’ kids.

She was very good at it and soon enough was being invited to come to school and community events where Santa was not only needed but also absolutely necessary.

She loved doing it. So, when her husband gave her $100 to “buy yourself something nice for Christmas,” Addie headed for San Francisco (the late, lamented FAO Schwarz) to be fitted for a “real” Santa suit. The magnificently silky white beard she referred to ever after as her “fur piece.”

Properly outfitted, she made her Christmas rounds, often on her bike, all over the valley — and sometimes beyond — for the next 20 years or more. Addie died in 1995, not long after a broken hip took her off her Christmas rounds.

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There you are. Memories. Just a few of the ones that lurk, just below the surface, waiting to be called upon. Some little thing. That’s all it takes.