The blog of a Leslie Wong
I bought a new Magnaflow catalytic converter for my 1979 Alfetta Sprint Veloce. These converters don’t have the flanges like the OEM converters because they are meant to be welded in.
They’re also a lot cheaper (~US$65 vs $200-$250).
I cut the flanges off the old converter and ground them down so they’d fit on the new converter. Robert at Bay Muffler Service welded them on for me.
Though my family lived in Oakland, we had a close connection with San Francisco. In the 50’s and 60’s, my dad, an accountant, had an office in 835 Clay St in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
![A small political pin-back button with black on white lettering that reads: [Dizzy Gillespie for President] Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Jeff Gold and Jody Uttal Gold](https://www.lesliewong.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/dizzy.jpg)
Our family often had dinner in Chinatown and afterwards we would stop at the Lucky Corner, a mom and pop grocery store on Grant and Washington that was one of my father’s accounts. I’d get candy for desert. Once, in the store, a tall, African-American man bent over and gave me a Dizzy Gillespie for President pin.
Then we would walk over to City Lights, the North Beach bookstore. My father, mother and sister browsed the books. As a 12-year-old, I was bored in the bookstore.
On Broadway, we walked past the topless club barkers, who thankfully did not encourage us to go in. When I was older, my father, somewhat embarrassingly, talked about going to the Condor Club to see Carol Doda with my friends’ fathers.
My parents also liked to go out on special occasions. This portrait of them at Bimbo’s 365 Club, probably taken in the early 60’s, was in a frame that sat on our TV room bookcase for 30 years. I can imagine it was taken by a house photographer, dressed in a skimpy outfit and fishnet stockings.
See where your house ends up after the big one.
Take a virtual (that’s how I do everything now anyway) helicopter flight over the Hayward fault in California, courtesy of Google Earth and the United States Geological Survey’s Geologist Jim Lienkaemper.
