Marin County Genealogy

San Quentin, More memories from Jim Price - San Quentin House

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San Quentin House ~ by Jim Price

 
It’s January 2000 and I am looking at plywood and exposed studs and trying to find something that I can recognize. Isn’t there anything left of our old house? All I can see is a portion of the green wall from our old bedroom through the missing front door. Nothing else is recognizable. Of course the old house was full of dry rot and termites and even if it withstood the “big one” in 1906, it did need to be jacked up and set on a reinforced concrete foundation. It was drafty too. Insulation was unheard of in 1871 when it was built. The older interior walls were single walls built from one-by-eight planks instead of studs. Although the layers of wallpaper were covered with sheetrock in the 1930’s, the wiring still ran in wooden wire molding on the exterior of the walls down to the light switches. Does the the new owner know what he has done? This is too much! This was my house, and now it’s gone.
Whenever I used to hear someone say, “you can’t go back home.” I would reply, “I can.” That was because even after I moved out of the house, in 1959, to go to college, my grandmother, Grace Zubler, and later my uncle Don Zubler lived there. The house was at 31 McKenzie Street but we never called it by that name. We just called it the “San Quentin House.” In fact when I was a kid, we all picked up our mail at the post office and none of the houses had street addresses. Whenever I went back to visit, San Quentin Village and our house and were much as I had left them when I was 19–at least up until a few months ago.

Text Box: In front of the San Quentin House on my first day of school in 1946. width=

 The first part of the house consisted of only two rooms. Over the years a kitchen was added in the back and later an additional bedroom on the side. I know this because one day, I had crawled up into the attic to put in a radio antenna. When I went through a hole into the attic above the kitchen, I could see the original siding of the house behind me above the living room. I asked my grandmother why the attic looked like the outside of the house and she told me that at one time it was.

In July 1885, my great grandfather, William Duffy, left his job as justice of the peace in San Pablo for better pay as a guard at the San Quentin Prison. In October he moved his wife Eugenia and their children Ethyl, Grace (my grandmother), Raymond, William, and Alma into the house. My great uncle Clinton Duffy (later to become warden of the prison) and my great aunt Eugenia (Jean) were born in the house. In 1906 the family moved to the larger house next door at the corner of McKenzie and the main road. In 1913, my great grandfather became Chief Steward and was able to qualify for a larger house inside the prison grounds and they moved just inside the front (East) Gate.
When my great grandfather retired in the 1920’s, he purchased the house on McKenzie Street. He lived there with my great grandmother until he died in 1931 and she lived there until just before she died in 1940. For awhile my great aunt Jean and her husband Parker Thayer lived in the house and later it was rented to the Shattuck family
After my parents divorce in 1944, my brother Steve and I moved in with my grandparents, Ernest and Grace Zubler. While my grandfather was Superintendent of the prison jute mill, we lived in House 110 inside the front gate. In 1946 when he retired, we moved to the house on McKenzie Street. In order to fit all of us in, my grandfather and my uncle Don built a bedroom and bathroom on the back of the house. They removed the canvas awnings and covered the light brown one by eight lapped siding with dark red brown shingles. Also they poured a concrete floor in the basement and garage. They painted the trim yellow.

My grandparents took the side bedroom and my brother and I got the front bedroom. When my mom moved back in with us, in 1949 she took the front bedroom, I moved to the front porch and Steve moved to the back bedroom. Although the front porch had been glassed in it was still drafty and cold. On rainy nights the southwest wind would whip unchecked across the bay and slam the rain into the windows with a loud roar. Sometimes as I huddled down beneath my covers, it seemed as if the house were actually shaking and shivering against the storm. On foggy nights we could easily hear the fog horns around the bay. Most notable were the horn on the end of the Richmond ferry pier and the diaphone of the East Brother lighthouse.

The bay was always changing. On stormy nights it could be choppy, dark and foreboding. On autumn evenings it would be like glass. On sunny mornings, I would sit on the front steps and the wavelets would sparkle like a million diamonds as I looked toward the distant San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Before the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was built, the quiet was only broken by the automobile of an occasional family visiting the prison or the whistle of the Richmond-San Rafael ferryboats as they approached the slip.

Except for a couple of portable electric heaters our only source of heat was a large gas heater in front of the closed off fireplace in our living room. On cold winter mornings, the first thing we would do would be to turn on the heater and get dressed in front of it. I can still remember hearing its “thunking” and crackling as the warm air began to pour out. Our family got a TV in 1950 and in the evenings when we used to watch it, my grandfather would always sit in his green mohair chair and my grandmother would sit on the matching couch. Steve and I would lay on the floor wrapped up in blankets, or sprawl across foot stools. If I felt cold I would sit on top of the heater. One time my friend Charlie Ward and I had a contest to see who could sit on our heater the longest. I turned it up full blast and we climbed up on it. Soon he began squirming and I just sat there smiling. Finally he jumped off with a loud, “Yeeeeow” We kidded each other about it for years.

Our kitchen was fairly large with the dining room table right in the middle of it. We had many leaves for the table and when we had the “gang” over for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, the table stretched so far that the person on the end was sitting in the doorway to the living room. We had one of those 1950 style sink units. It had double porcelain sinks with the drain boards built in on each side. The whole thing was on a metal cabinet. Our Wedgwood gas stove had heavy metal covers (like a wood stove) over each burner. Built-in on the left side was a small wood stove, with two of the round covers, that we usually used to burn papers. My uncle Don built the cabinets and the counter tops were covered with the same dark red linoleum that was on the floor. One of the cabinet ends had those quarter round shelves that were popular in the 50’s.

My grandfather and uncle built a large workbench in the basement and we had several power tools including a table saw, a band saw, a jig saw, and a drill press. There was always some sort of construction going on in the neighborhood and we kids made good use of the spare wood. Often my friends and I could be found sawing and hammering our latest projects together–coasters, model boats and planes, windmills, and kites. In the part of the basement that was not covered by concrete, we dug out an area and used wood and old blankets to build a fort. During Easter vacation, we would usually have my cousins the “Kirby Kids” over and we would set up tents in the yard or up on the hill above our house. One year we built an underground fort over at Tim Hine’s house.

One day, near the Fourth of July, I decided to make a “sparkler bomb.” I took several boxes of sparklers, broke off the magnesium coating and put the pieces in a Donald Duck orange juice can. I had cut slits in the top of the can and bent it in to form a kind of crude nozzle. I was hoping to make one of those fountain things where sparks would shoot up in the air. I put the top part of a sparkler in to act as a fuse and set it in the middle of the garage floor. I suppose I wanted it somewhat dark so it would look better. I lit the “fuse” and when it burned down inside the can the whole thing it went off like a rocket motor in a test stand. Sparks, fire and smoke shot out of the can and rolled across the garage roof like a mushroom cloud. We were lucky I didn’t burn the house down. I guess it happened so fast that nothing had time to catch fire. I’ll never know why kids do such stupid things.

My grandfather was an excellent vegetable gardener. Although our garden was small, we grew Swiss chard, carrots, string beans, radishes, tomatoes and blackberries. We also had an apricot and a peach tree.

When my grandfather died in 1956, my grandmother moved to the back bedroom and Steve and I moved to the side bedroom. The front porch became a study area for me as well as a place for my grandmother to grow flowers. We still have the Christmas Cactus that she grew out there.

 
In June of 1959 I left to spend the summer with my dad and step-mother in Sanger (near Fresno). He had suggested that I could make more money working at the cannery or ice house than I could in San Rafael. What he didn’t tell me what how much harder (and hotter) the work would be. I didn’t realize it at the time but that summer I was moving out of the house that I had grown up in.
 
At the time I was looking forward with eager anticipation to going away to college and possibly joining the Navy or Coast Guard as an officer after OCS. It strange that now I have come to realize what a significant watermark this event was in my life. In the fall of 1959 I decided to attend Fresno State rather than returning to College of Marin, and other than Christmas vacation in 1962, I never lived at San Quentin again.

Text Box: Our San Quentin House in the late 1950’s. My 1941 Chevy is parked in front.
In 1966, after having spent 70 years at San Quentin, my grandmother rented the San Quentin house and moved to 46 Alexander Ave. in San Rafael, to live with my mother and stepfather, Ordell Jacobsen. When my mother and stepfather decided to move to Grass Valley in the early 1970’s, my grandmother decided to move back to San Quentin. Shortly thereafter my uncle Don and aunt Kay moved in with her. Eventually, my grandmother decided to leave San Quentin permanantly and moved to Grass Valley to live with my mother and stepfather.
 
My uncle Don made improvements to the house including central heat and a deck outside the side bedroom. He repainted the whole house gray. Occasionally our family would return to the house for “San Quentin/Duffy” reunions.

In late 1999, while talking with my uncle Phil, who lives in Arizona, he mentioned that my uncle Don had had several strokes and his daughter Joan had to put him in a convalescent hospital. Phil also told me that Joan had sold the San Quentin House several months before. I couldn’t believe it. She sold the house that had been in our family for over a century and never even gave any of us first right of refusal to buy it.

Phil said that the new owner was remodeling the house and I was curious as to how he might fix it up. I decided to swing by the next time I drove down to the peninsula.

So there I stood looking for physical evidence of our original house and not finding much. The rebuilt house looked similar to ours but it was almost all new. As an engineer, I could understand why the house needed to be completely rebuilt, but my emotions knew that the new house wouldn’t be the same. The new front stairs wouldn’t creak like ours did when we walked up to the front door and the glass in the back door wouldn’t rattle the same way ours did when it was closed.

The only thing that remain of the 105 years of life of the Duffy and Zubler families at the San Quentin House is the the stone and brick wall out in front, a few photographs and our memories.

Jim Price @ 2002
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