Category: 80s Diary

June 11th, 2025

(Memorial Day)

I saw something kind of eerie down near Seventh, a middle-aged woman dressed entirely in a white 1920s outfit — not trace of color, just white. What I could see of her face was just as pallid as her dress, as if it had been powdered or painted white.

I saw her as I was walking to the old Rincon Building south of Market, which was still operating as a post office back then. Everything was a bit misty because it was early in the morning so I could not see her clearly at first. I thought how odd it was that the woman at the end of the block looked as if she were dressed for the twenties, with a low-waisted short dress and a cloche hat. As she drew nearer I saw it was no illusion, she truly wore the fashions of six decades before. I could not see her face until she was quite close and I was shocked to see it thickly caked with white powder.

That was my first look at the person Tim and I called “the white-faced woman,” a fairly well-known figure in downtown San Francisco. A local writer even wrote a poem about her.

Though she was always seen walking the streets, I hesitate to call her a “street person” because I don’t believe she was homeless. Her white dress, white hat, and white stockings looked too spotless, the thick-heeled white shoes she wore too polished. I saw her many times afterwards. It took a couple of more sightings for me to realize she was a black woman in white-face.

The legend was that this was her wedding dress, that, as a young beautiful bride, she had waited at the church only to learn her groom had died that morning from Sleepy Sickness.

Once, in the early nineties, while I was riding a BART train over West Oakland, I looked out the window to see, far below, that tiny but unmistakeable white figure making its way along the pavement beside the main post office. That was the last time I saw her.

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June 10th, 2025

It seemed the issue would never get in. Jackie kept calling from Spilman’s with bad news. The truck would leave Sacramento at 2:00. The truck would leave Sacramento at 5:30. The truck would leave Sacramento even later than that… Much of the day was spent waiting in paralyzing boredom. I divided my time between writing, filing photos and reading, left to pick up Tim at his office and bring him in at about 5:30. Other guests began to arrive: Joan Gaustad, Russ and an older pal of his, Dave Nee and his boyfriend, Carolyn, Dave Clarke, Shelly’s Paul, Trevin’s good-looking younger brother… We had nothing to do but sit around talking. The issue did not actually arrive until we were all digging into the enchiladas Shelly had made.

That was unusually late. Most of the time the issue got there in the afternoon, well before guests began to arrive. I suspect it was delayed because we’d had to do so many last-minute changes in the wake of Heinlein’s death.

I never met “Jackie at Spilman’s.” She was just the name invoked by Shelly or Charlie on collating day when estimating the arrival of all the bagged issues.

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June 9th, 2025

Cleaned out the issue and set up a permanent dummy on a floppy. Shelly paid a visit to Nellie this week and her hair is now a lovely, luminous auburn.

Collating tomorrow.

Nellie was the hairdresser Shelly and I shared, a wizard at coloring my hair whitish blue, Shelly’s golden-red.

“Cleaning out the issue” had, just a year or two before, involved pulling cut paper off of large paste-up boards, then wiping them down with alcohol to remove the wax. In 1988, I believe it involved just clearing out the Pagemaker file. DTP was so new to us that there might very well have been no “dummy” yet, no blank template of the issue saved onto the computer. It might not have even been an option. The Pagemaker file might have been too large and buggy to save something like that onto that 80s era computer in the middle office, or at least, not without causing it to crash while using other programs like Wordstar or Dbase.

A “floppy” was exactly that. Not the hard little squares popularized by Macs, but a large, black, bendable square of soft plastic. I believe we still have some of those in a closet here, Michael’s old backup files. He was still using them into the late ’90s.

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June 8th, 2025

We drove for flat marshy miles, arriving in Napa at dusk. Dad had his AAA book open and wanted a 3-diamond hotel, but Napa was packed. We finally pulled into a fairly ritzy place and Dad, who seemed slightly desperate, went in to beg. He returned looking sheepish. There were no rooms with beds available, but they could give us a couple of parlors of $300 a night suites with rollaway beds for $45 a night.

After some uneasy discussion in the car, we went in to see them. The room Tim and I would share was very nice but small, with the usual parlor furnishings, a table and armchairs, sofa, bathroom, and TV set. A rollaway was pushed against one wall. I walked out on the balcony. Through leaves I could see a swimming pool where people were gathered, swimmers talking. That and the scent of cooking shrimp made me think of the old Monroe Country Club. We decided to see what Mom and Dad’s room was like and as we stepped into the hall we encountered a man pushing another rollway. He told us we didn’t need a second one because our sofa pulled out into a bed.

After some drinks in Mom and Dad’s room (wine over ice) we settled on a place called The Penguin for dinner. It was, of course, packed. We waited for an hour in the bar, sitting in a booth behind a row of noisy drunks, men and women who looked like executives out with their secretaries. When we finally got a table, we only had two menus between the four of us. The table on one side of us held the drunks from the bar. On the other side was an equally drunk older couple who smoked and farted the whole time, laughing at the farts. Our waitress, a harried woman in a tuxedo, did her best, but it took us two more hours to get our food — which was quite good.

Back at the hotel, Tim and I discovered the rollaway bed was too lumpy for sleeping, and the TV would show us only a porno flick we were supposed to pay $6.50 to watch. We slept together on the sofa rollout, sharing a pillow.

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June 7th, 2025

That weekend, Tim and I went on a road trip through California with my parents. Hearst’s Castle, San Simeon, was our first major stop.

Luck was with us. Another beautiful day. We drove up the road to San Simeon’s visitor center, Dad got our tickets, and we walked around waiting for the tour to start, looking at pictures of William Randolph Hearst, his parents, framed shots of his letters, etc. etc. Little mention of Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies. The actual tour began with a bus ride up the long, winding road to the castle, past rolling golden hills, rocky outcroppings, the occasional distant cow or zebra. Our tour guide, Lawrence, walked us through the “medium guest house,” Casa del Sol and the main house. Lots of tall, Italianate beds, elaborate ceilings, and shiny upholstery. The outdoor pool, “Neptune’s” was bright, surrounded by pale statues, the indoor pool dark green, dimly lit, flecked with gold.

A break for lunch and then the second tour, which was a bit more interesting because we had a new tour guide. Wayne was slender, anxious, bearded, with delicate features, an earring, and a flair for gossip. He pointed out the tacky department store furniture next to the Roman and Renaissance era museum pieces looted from Europe.

Many years later, when I was writing an article about Tiffany’s for a local paper, I encountered a sort of sequel to Wayne’s observation about the Hearst’s taste. For years Tiffany historians had been in search of The Orchid Vase a beautiful, awrd-winning silver piece sold to an unknown buyer in 1889. Every year, as a matter of course, they would send a desciption of it to various museums. Finally, in 2000, someone at Hearst Castle mentioned the light fixture they had noticed during the yearly silver cleaning. Phoebe Hearst had converted this graceful piece into a goddamned table lamp and topped it with a frilly white shade.

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June 6th, 2025

I stopped in at Old Wives Tales on Valencia this afternoon . Got Mom a belated Mother’s Day gift of Alterhorn earrings, and a pair for myself. It’s a feminist gift shop that offers a fairly even selection of the lovely and the hideous. Female torsos decorate the walls along with spider web glass clocks and Kathe Kollwitz posters.

Old Wives Tales, which closed in 1996, was an important feminist bookstore, run as a non-profit collective by 1988. When we went to eat at We Be Sushi or pick up something at Lucca’s Ravioli, I always walked down the street to either go into Old Wives Tales or peer through its window. I remember it being staffed mainly by dauntingly intelligent and handsome lesbians.

Now it’s just a ghost — or rather, a smaller ghost of that host of phantoms that make up the larger ghost of Valencia Street in the ’80s.

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June 5th, 2025

Clear but cold. The issue, thank God and all His angels, will go out tonight.

Faren is on edge. Charlie wants her to learn Pagemaker, but the fact that she knows next to nothing about pasteup will make it difficult for her to extrapolate the process onto the screen. There were some tense conversations with Charlie in the back. Feel sometimes like I’m locked in a cage with them.

Was he thinking of firing me? That would have been dumb beyond belief, not because I was some super-competent employee, but because I was the one person in that office who knew Pagemaker . Faren was an editor and writer. Asking her to move from that to wrestling with a DTP program was insanity.

I had learned Pagemaker in spite of Charlie, who seemed to think computer programs could be acquired by a sort of osmosis. He’d downloaded it onto the computer, then expected me to know it just by turning on the computer and exporting Wordstar files. Fortunately, shortly after purchasing Pagemaker, he left town for a convention during a long weekend. While he was away, I literally broke into his house/office every morning, climbing in through his kitchen window and clambering over the sink. For three days, the bulk of my time was spent sitting in that back office, poring over documentation and practicing. By the time he returned I was, if not proficient, at least competent.

I still wonder if he ever put two-and-two together and figured out how I did that. Charlie could be stubborn and madly unreasonable, but he was not stupid.

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June 4th, 2025

Gray, gray, wet misty day. Awful morning. I got to work at 8:09 as I promised Charlie. He was in a terrible mood. Richard Curtis called and said his copy of Fritz’ manuscript arrived without a last page. God only knows how that happened. I was embarrassed and Charlie was livid. We express-mailed Richard the last chapter, which is only two pages.

The day got no brighter. I felt as though I were running in place. Finally, I managed to jam in both Heinlein’s and Simak’s obits and appreciations. By the end of the day, Charlie had mellowed enough for me to ask him if I could have Thursday and Friday off for the trip with my parents. “Sure,” he said, “as long as the issue is out.” I think it will be.

Because of the Heinlein additions, the issue was so big I had a hard time backing it up. Had to squash it. Also discovered that someone had obliterated the floppy back-up by overwriting another file onto it. At least I think that’s what happened.

First one in, last one to leave.

Not sure what “squashing it” meant here. Possibly doing a Save As, which seems obvious now and wasn’t back then. It might have been risky given the bugginess of Aldus Pagemaker, could have resulted in the entire file being overwritten and then erased.

Backing up was no simple matter. It involved, as I recall, a mysterious black device and some DOS commands.

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June 3rd, 2025

A lot of tension at work, most of it centered around Charlie and Frank Robinson. I overheard Charlie apologizing to him. Still don’t know for what, exactly, but likely connected to Heinlein’s obit.

The first section of the issue is finally done, though it was a long, irritating process. The computer crashed every few minutes, and it took me more than three hours just to get out pages 57, 58, and 59.

Somewhat to my amazement, I was able to start home a little after six. I gave Robinson a ride home. “Locus is a high pressure place, isn’t it?” he commented in the car.

The computer crashes were likely the result of using Aldus Pagemaker, an unbearably buggy early DTP program.

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June 2nd, 2025

Monday I woke up with a scratchy throat that by midday blossomed into a sore-nosed, miserable cold. Didn’t feel so great this morning, but wasn’t quite as out of it as I had been. I had to pick up Frank Robinson before I went in to work. Charlie wants him to write Heinlein’s obit and since Charlie has more reference material on Heinlein than anybody else, Frank would spend the day (and night) at Locus. He lives in a very nice Victorian on the corner of Noe and 20th. He was sitting on the steps waiting when I drove up. We didn’t talk much. I was beginning to have awful, gagging coughing fits.

Frank Robinson is an elderly gay man with a moustache and a cap. He speaks with a broad, blunt New York accent that turns “Rs” into “Ws” but sounds nothing like Elmer Fudd. His voice is too deep.

At work I sat at the computer and put in corrections, running out pages for paste-up. Charlie and Frank sat in the living room talking about Heinlein. Charlie is getting morbid, as he often does after a major figure dies. “It’s not the emphysema that’s going to kill me,” I heard him say to Frank. It’s my heart.”

For dinner, Charlie fixed barbeque for us all. It was good, but Frank seemed on edge, perhaps intimidated by the task before him. He retired early, shut the door to the middle office/guest room, and typed.

It was, indeed, Charlie’s heart that killed him, but not until more than twenty years later, at 72, when he died in his sleep on a plane while it circled Oakland airport. He was returning from an SF convention. I like that he passed away still busy with what he loved to do.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Category: 80s Diary