Tales from the Peninsula

By Dennis Venturoni

Take a journey through time and imagination along the mystical and magical San Francisco Peninsula. Crossing multiple genres and writing styles, these stories capture the history, spirit, and vision of a special place that has inspired many and contributed so much to the world.

The San Francisco Peninsula is a storied place with a unique and vibrant history. Stretching from the titular city to the north to Palo Alto in the south and wedged between the crystal cool waters of the Pacific and the glimmering San Francisco Bay, the Peninsula has been the setting for some of the most interesting people, places, and events of the past 250 years.

In these pages, you will encounter the lives of indigenous tribes during the Spanish conquest, face a predator lurking beyond the rubble in the aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake, explore the dark underbelly of Prohibition, examine the sinister origins of the psychedelic movement, meet a vengeful ghost, experience the danger caused by a global oil crisis, visit a place that did not share in the Peninsula's riches and discover a future where history comes full circle. Perhaps by the end, this will inspire you to visit here and enjoy Peninsula life firsthand. You are more than welcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dennis Venturoni
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005361396

Dennis Venturoni

I am an S.F. Bay Area native, growing up in San Mateo and graduating from Serra Hiigh School and Notre Dame de Namur University. I have a master's in systems management.I live in Belmont with my wife and daughter, our cat, Bonnie Blue, and our Shih Tzu, Whimsy. I have worked in various positions in IT for the past thirty years, more than twenty of those with Wells Fargo in San Francisco. I enjoy cooking, binge-watching shows, video games, target shooting, science fiction, classic rock, my favorite podcasts on history and the supernatural, and travel. I am a lifelong Bay Area sports fan who bleeds orange and black and crimson and gold. My bucket list when I retire includes visiting every continent, taking a skydive, doing some ghost hunting, and driving by car through the lower forty-eight states and Alaska.

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Tales from the Peninsula

Stories from across time and imagination

on the mystical and magical

San Francisco Peninsula

By Dennis Venturoni

Copyright 2021, 2023 Dennis Venturoni

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

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DISCLAIMER

Details on the language of the Ohlone tribes are sketchy at best, as they did not write and there are few records of their oral traditions.  Since these tribes died out 150 years ago, there are only a few descendants to mine information from.  Some have researched their ancestors and presented their findings, and you can see them on YouTube and other sites.  But the sum of information is spotty.  Therefore, I had to improvise and use names, words, and phrases from other tribal languages to fill the gaps.

For Barry Jones, rest in peace Big Brother

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWARD

SPIRIT CAVE

AFTER SHOCK

RUNNING WITH THE HALF MOON

TICKING TIME BOMB

FILL-UP

LIFE IS SUPER

ROAD KILL

THE TOWER AND THE SERPENT

AFTERWORD

TIMELINE / CITIES VISITED

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY DENNIS VENTURONI

CONTACT

FOREWARD

In 2019 I wrote a little book called Seismic Events that focused on my childhood growing up on the San Francisco Peninsula in the 1960s and 1970s.  The book also doubled as local history and pop culture history of life at that time.  Since then, I have wanted to write a work of fiction along the same vein, telling an exciting story while also informing the reader on some of the local histories of this unique and remarkable region.  But why tell just one story when I can tell several?  That is where the idea for Tales from the Peninsula was born.  Stories from our past, present, and future that capture the spirit and imagination of this region and its people.

The San Francisco Peninsula is a storied place with a unique and vibrant history.  Stretching from the titular city to the north to Palo Alto in the south and wedged between the crystal cool waters of the Pacific and the glimmering San Francisco Bay, the Peninsula has been the setting for some of the most interesting people, places, and events of the past 250 years.  From the time when the first Spanish explorers set foot in Pescadero in 1769 to the rise of the tech industry as Silicon Valley extended its reach north to Redwood Shores in the 1990s and later, the Peninsula has been a cultural mecca.  Its impact on the landscape of civilization is as seismic as the San Andreas fault that runs underground throughout most of its length.

The Peninsula was home to the great financiers of the 19th century, like Amadeo Giannini, who founded Bank of America, and William Ralston, founder of Bank of California.  Ralston’s home, the 55,000 square foot Ralston Hall is a Peninsula landmark on the campus of Notre Dame de Namur University.  Leland Stanford, who would one day have a very famous university named after him, built his fortune during the California Gold Rush.  He would join forces with Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins to form the Pacific Union Express Company.  Pacific Union Express would eventually merge with Wells Fargo, and Stanford would serve as its director.

The San Francisco International Airport, constructed in 1926, became a central hub serving the Pacific Rim and the Far East and home to major airlines like TWA and Pan American.  It was an essential conduit for the American military and its Pacific Theater operations in World War II. 

Another construction achievement was the Stanford Linear Accelerator, stretching an impressive two miles west of the Stanford University campus.  It is famously used to smash atoms, a whimsical term for scientists using cyclotrons to shoot high-energy beams of electrons and study the subatomic particles.  It’s a place where Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory might work.

The Hillsdale Garden Apartments, where I lived for 17 years, was built right after World War II and was the largest apartment complex of its kind in the country, with 697 units on 33 acres in San Mateo.

The Cow Palace in Daly City is another Peninsula landmark.  The Cow Palace was built in 1941, a concrete and steel roof structure that covered nearly six acres.  As the name implies, its original purpose was to host livestock expositions and horse shows.  Over the years, this would expand to include boating and sports shows, dirt track racing, circuses, concerts, roller derby, hockey, and basketball.  The Beatles even performed there.  The Golden State Warriors played their home games at the Cow Palace before moving to the Oakland Coliseum Arena across the bay.  And the legendary Bay Bombers thrilled fans as they skated and crashed around the wooden rink led by Joanie Weston and Charlie O’Connell.

The legendary horse Seabiscuit began his storied career on the racetracks at Tanforan and Bay Meadows.  In 1909, the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, defended his title at a ring in Colma.  In the early 1960s, Ken Kesey was throwing acid parties in a house off Highway 84 in La Honda, and his Merry Band of Pranksters were spotted driving their bus Furthur up and down the Peninsula.  A local band called The Warlocks played nightly at the In Room in Belmont.  They would later change their name to the Grateful Dead and make music history.  In 1984, a guy named Steve Jobs and his team built something called the Macintosh at Apple in Palo Alto, which would revolutionize personal computing.  Shirley Temple Black, the star of many 1930s musicals, made her home in Woodside and was active in the local social and political scene for decades.  The Peninsula thrived during the California Gold Rush, was home to bootleggers and speakeasies during Prohibition, and was at the center of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. 

While the San Francisco Peninsula geographically includes its famous city to the north, when locals use the term Peninsula, they specifically refer to everything south, meaning San Mateo County and Palo Alto at the northern extent of Santa Clara County.  It is a form of pride that distinguishes them from their San Francisco cousins.  The county, comprised of 450 square miles of hills and mountains, forests, valleys, estuaries, and shorelines, is wedged like a shiv between almost 300 square miles of Pacific and bay waters.  Along the Santa Cruz Range, which rises to 2,000 feet, one can gaze out over the ocean in one direction and the bay and the east bay hills in the other, catching glimpses of Mount Hamilton with its observatory and Mount Diablo.  Within this county, one can walk through dense forests along the coast and dense urban centers in Daly City and South San Francisco.  The county is home to more than 750,000 people, resulting from the explosive growth in the 20th century.  In 1900, a mere 12,000 people lived here.  It is demographically diverse, with large numbers of Asians and Latinos.

Keeping with the local definition of Peninsula, most of the stories take place south of The City, with one set primarily in San Francisco, another that begins there, and another that concludes there.  It was important to recognize our fair city to the north and its role in the Peninsula’s history.  Along the way, you will journey through the lives of indigenous tribes during the Spanish conquest, encounter a predator lurking beyond the rubble in the aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake, explore the dark underbelly of Prohibition, examine the sinister origins of the psychedelic movement, meet a vengeful ghost, experience the danger caused by a global oil crisis, visit a place that did not share in the Peninsula’s riches, and discover a future where history comes full circle.  Perhaps by the end, this will inspire you to visit here and enjoy Peninsula life firsthand.  You are more than welcome.

Dennis Venturoni

Belmont, California

June 9, 2021

Spirit Cave

Spanish explorers sailed up and down the California coast for more than 200 years before finally sighting San Francisco Bay, the fabled deepwater port that the flagging Spanish Empire needed to bolster the defense of their colonial territories in the American West.  Ironically, when Gaspar de Portola’s expedition discovered the bay in 1769, they mistook it for an inland extension of Drake’s Bay to the north, not an actual harbor with access to the Pacific Ocean.  It wasn’t until a second expedition led by Fernando Rivera in 1774 that San Francisco Bay was correctly identified, and the first maps were drawn.

It wasn’t long before Juan Ayala, and Juan Batista de Anza were dispatched to chart the bay and its surrounding regions.  De Anza, in particular, established Mission Dolores at Dolores Creek in what would later become San Francisco.  The mission would support the presidio the Spanish constructed a few miles away.  During this time, missionaries led by Father Francisco Palou interacted with the native aborigines.  Termed Costanoan - and later Ohlone - the local natives comprised several tribes, including the Salson, Iamsin, Puyson, and Saucon.  The Spaniards viewed the Indigenous tribes as children in adult bodies, valuable as physical labor, and potential converts to the Catholic faith.  This attitude toward the local natives as being inferior ultimately prevented them from being fully assimilated into Spanish culture and the Spanish eradicating the native culture.

Native tribes, awed by Spanish technology and food production through animal husbandry, settled by Mission Dolores and were put to work by missionaries while indoctrinated in the Catholic faith.  As a result, the natives lost their freedom and independence as their self-sufficiency was replaced by hard labor for a small wage.  There was decades-long resistance against the Spanish occupation by organized groups within the Ohlone, but the Europeans ultimately prevailed.  Ironically, the Spaniards’ promise of the advantages of civilization – which the natives were manipulated and coerced into adopting - cost the Indigenous tribes their identity as a people and contributed greatly to their demise.

As the village at Mission Dolores became overcrowded, the Spaniards built a ranch in San Pedro Valley to the south, providing more food and clothing to the mission and presidio with wheat, corn, grape, and cattle farming.  The ranch continued to thrive after Fr. Palou’s passing in 1785 until disease struck in 1791, wiping out a significant portion of the native population.  The local people had not built up any immunity to the various diseases brought to America by the Europeans.  In this case, the likely culprit was measles.

On this ranch, members of the Salson reject their tribespeople’s submission to the Spanish and discover a way to escape the false promises of the White men who descended on their land a generation before.

I arrived at my Laurelwood apartment at four o’clock and looked out the window at the strip mall across the street, where a woman exited Piazza’s with a full shopping cart.  A light was blinking on my answering machine on the kitchen counter.  Yes, I still have a landline with an answering machine.  I might have an iPhone, but I’m a dinosaur in many ways.  I walked over and pressed a button.  It was my friend Camille, a friend and former teaching colleague who runs an assisted living home over in Shoreview.

You’re always talking about finding the lost Aboriginals from this area, even though we know they died out around 150 years ago.  But a man is living here now who claims to be one.  I think he’s probably Mexican and suffering from dementia, but come over and chat with him for shits and grins if you want.  How is your cat doing, by the way?  Take care.

Camille was probably right; just some old kook.  But I could use a little levity after a week of drudgery punctuated by a ticket for rolling a stop sign.  I teach history and anthropology at the College of San Mateo.  A steady job, but in this California economy, one that is only good enough to afford this one-bedroom apartment.  The houses down the block go for two million.

I drove over to Camille’s the next day in my 2005 CR-V.  The simple Eichler rancher was built in the 1950s during the Baby Boom expansion.  She had modified it with ramps, wheelchair access, and extra-wide doorways to meet the strict health code requirements for running an assisted living facility.  I rang the bell, and Lupe, one of the healthcare workers, let me in.

How goes it, Lupe?  I’m here to see a nutty native, I joked.

Now, now, we say he’s eccentric.  Yeah, that guy is kind of out there, but he’s sweet.  His name is Joseph, but he goes by ‘Koda.’  Camille is out running errands.  Last room down the hall on the left, She pointed.

After a few more pleasantries about her son’s first driving lesson, I smiled and headed down the hallway.  I stuck my head in the doorway and saw a diminutive older man in a plaid button-down shirt and sweatpants lying on his bed on top of the covers, reading a magazine.

Koda? I asked.  My name is Ted Mann.  Camille mentioned you to me, and I thought we could chat.

With curious eyes, Koda looked over his magazine at me, then lowered it to his lap.

Are you with Health and Human Services? he asked amusedly.

No, I’m just a friend.  I teach history and other things at the college, and she mentioned your interesting heritage to me.

Oh yes, that I’m a member of the Salson tribe.  That was a long time ago, a small smile formed on Koda’s lips.

I noticed that when Koda spoke, it was with an accent I couldn’t put my finger on.  Not American or Latino.  It seemed vaguely Castilian mixed with something else, but I immediately set that thought aside.

It certainly was, I said.  The Salsons disappeared as a tribe before 1800, and its last full-blooded descendants were probably all dead by 1870.

All except one, he replied, pointing to himself.  He looked thoughtful for a moment and shook his head slightly.  No, that isn’t true.  More than one…several.  But they’re not here.  They’re someplace else, far away.

So, you’re a descendant of the Salson tribe that lived here for thousands of years until the end of the 18th century.  And other descendants live in other parts of the world, correct? I asked, amused.

No, no… Koda shook his head.  I’m not a descendant.  I’m a member of that tribe.  The others are right here in this part of the world, just not here now.

Who did this guy think he was, another Ishi?  I pulled up a chair and sat down.  I wasn’t going to argue with an elderly delusional man about his origins.  If he believed he was a member of one of the original Peninsula tribes, then so be it.  Besides, his story might be fun.

So if you are a member of the Salson tribe, how…no, it’s better if you tell me your story.  Would you be up for that?

Of course, I will tell you if you have time to listen, Koda smiled broadly.  It’s a long story.

And then he began.

…

Life was beautiful with my tribe.  We watched the fog break over the hills in the morning, the sun shining high above as we fished and hunted.  We danced under the stars and watched the silver waves crash on the beach under the moon’s glow.  We never dreamed someone could take this away from us.  But then they came.

Our world changed forever when the Spaniards arrived.  They walked into our village as if they owned it, and we didn’t know how to react.  Everything about them was strange - their clothes, tools, weapons.  I suppose it would be like how people would react today if aliens landed here from another planet.  We were cowed into submission, awed by their superiority at everything, and seduced by their promises of a better life for us.  Who could resist the benefits of the clothes they weaved that were stronger and warmer than our own, the vegetables they could grow in abundance with methods we had never seen, or the meat they could produce in great quantity from cattle they raised and didn’t have to hunt?  For all of this, all we had to do was give up our way of life.  They made it sound easy, but it didn’t feel like a choice.  It felt like we had no choice.  The Spaniards pushed us into servitude, weakened our resolve, and in the end, it destroyed who we were.

Our village was on San Pedro Creek, close to where the Spaniards built their ranch.  We had heard from our people living in the north that the Spaniards had already constructed a large mission there.  We didn’t know what a mission was then, but it was enough to know that the White men were settling all around us.

Padre Palou oversaw the building of the ranch, several buildings made of wood and adobe with pastures and cultivated soil.  He brought us over to learn how to farm and breed cattle, among other things.  We had to learn the Lord’s Prayer, recite it daily, and attend Sunday mass at the little chapel.  They gave us clothes made of a material we had never seen and