Growing Up on Calmar Avenue in Oakland
I grew up in Oakland, California, in the 1950s and 1960s, on Calmar Avenue. The house we lived in had been in my father’s family since the early 1940s. I only know this because my Uncle Jimmy once told me that what was then my father’s den used to be his bedroom. I never knew if any of my father’s other brothers and sisters lived in the house.
The foot of Calmar Avenue begins at Mandana Blvd, a little east of the beginning of the Lakeshore shopping district. The street is narrow and steep in some places as it rises 180 feet along a ridge. It’s a hilly neighborhood. Our part of Calmar plateaued in a group of about 15 houses, with downslopes behind the houses on either side towards Santa Ray Avenue or Balfour Avenue. It was a good place to learn to ride a bike because it was level. My sister and I would ride our bikes down to King Narcisse’ driveway and turn around.
Our House: Then and Now
Today, in real estate terms, the house is described as a 4 bedroom, 2 bath, 2500 sq ft property. In my childhood reality, it was a 3-bedroom house. There was a bedroom for my parents, one for my sister Alberta, and one for me.
We all shared a single bathroom located on the second floor. The downstairs bathroom served as our laundry room. I don’t think it was properly plumbed as the washing machine’s drain hose simply hung over the edge of the bathtub. You had to carefully step over it to reach the tiny sink. Off the back hallway, there was a separate small room – a “water closet,” which housed the toilet. Behind the toilet, about eight feet from the floor, there was a small window that was hinged from the top that opened to the roof of the garage.
At one time, our TV was downstairs in the living room. It was a Magnavox, similar to this one, but with a lighter finish. I still own the cabinet, because one of my mañana projects is to stick a display in it, maybe driven with a Raspberry Pi.
I also remember that the TV was in the living room because during a fairly big earthquake, I was playing in front of the TV. I was about 4 ½ years old and my father told me to get under the dining room table. The dining room chandelier was swinging, but I remember that I wasn’t very scared.
When we got a color TV, we moved our TV viewing to a room that spanned the entire width of the second floor in the back of the house. At one end, we had the sofa, coffee table and television, and at the other, my mom had her desk.
On the ground floor, between the foyer and the back hallway, my dad, Honki L. Wong, had an office. Because he was an accountant, he had an amazing electo-mechanical Friden calculator on the center of his desk and another adding machine to the side. @CuriousMarc has a page dedicated to the Friden STW 10. As a kid, I remember using it, just to listen mechanical noises that accompanied a simple calculation. I also remember now knowing what I was doing and jamming it to the point where a service call was needed.
Sometime in the 1950s, my parents had the kitchen remodeled. It featured white painted steel cabinets and grey Formica® countertops with a mid-century Charcoal Boomerang (6942) pattern. Our stove was a 1950s Wedgewood, complete with a griddle. On the rare occasions that we made pancakes using the griddle, I learned that they were ready to be flipped when a certain number of bubbles appeared in the uncooked batter.
The narrow garage attached to our house had room for just one car. A wall separated it from a second, smaller room within the garage. Over the years, the concrete floor in the back part of the garage developed cracks, because of earth movement. There was an empty lot on Balfour Avenue behind our house and there has never been a house built there.
The Neighborhood and some of the Neighbors
A driveway ran along the east side of our house, immediately adjacent to the Algies’ driveway, though theirs was a couple of feet higher than ours. Our neighbors on the other side were the Taylors. They had three sons.
John Algie owned a machine shop and was a car collector. He owned some impressive cars, including a 1937 Mercedes Benz 540K Cabriolet, a Facel Vega, a Packard and a BMW Isetta (among others), that rotated through their driveway. Mr Algie used to start the 540K on weekends. The supercharged, straight eight engine sounded like a frantic, electric eggbeater to me. Once, Mr Algie took me for a ride in the 540K down to Lakeshore. The two toned, black and ivory paintwork had running boards with spare tires mounted on them. Two gigantic exhaust pipes exited out the right side of the engine, plunged down into the running boards and made a long trip to the twin exhaust tips at the rear of the car.
The Algies’ daughter Joanie, used to babysit me. They also had a black dachshund named Freddie, that I liked to play with. At the side of the house, they had a doggie door that I was able to crawl through. I guess when I was little.
There were only a few kids my age living on our stretch of Calmar. I occasionally played with Mark Johnson, who lived three houses up, but he wasn’t a school mate because he went to a Catholic school. I went to the public elementary school, Crocker Highlands School. The close friendships I made at Crocker Highlands were with kids who lived blocks away.
The Duhes lived down the street. Since the kids also went to a Catholic school, I didn’t have much interaction with them even though the eldest son Philip, was my age.
At the very top of the hill resided the Cliftons; Joel and Sammy were older, though their French poodle, Bonjour used to roam the street.
Down the street, King Narcisse had a Rolls Royce and several Cadillacs. He owned a third generation Cadillac Series 62. I remember it because it had a hidden fuel filler that was accessed by flipping up the left tail light on the fin. King Narcisse had a red carpet rolled out for him when he made an entrance into his house. In 2021, Philip Duhe wrote a Facebook post about it.