Giving blood

By John Murphy

Friday was Day whatever of the quarantine and the CalTrans Girl had the heat cranked to 70. I was starting to melt.

When I protested, she pulled the “It’s my house” argument out of her holster. I hate that.

So, I hopped in the Corolla and made a rare foray into the Twilight Zone we now call our world.

Eventually my travels took me to the Round Table Clubhouse on Highland Avenue. There I hoped to reminisce about those halcyon days of three months ago when my 49ers were still in the Super Bowl derby and I had never heard of the coronavirus.

Round Table was closed, but there was a sign in the parking lot that said, “Blood Drive Here Today” and included a smaller sign saying, “Free Baker’s food item.”

Who was I to argue? So I headed into this nondescript building to get my blood drawn by Lifesteam. Soon I found myself seated behind a blue plastic partition answering a battery of pointed questions from a 20-something.  

“Have you ever used needles to take any drugs not prescribed by your doctor?” she asked.

“Are you a male who has had sexual contact with another male in the past 12 months?”

“Have you ever taken money, drugs, or other payment for sex?”

“Have you had syphilis or gonorrhea in the past 12 months?”

“Have you been in juvenile detention, lockup, jail, or prison for more than 72 consecutive hours in the last 12 months?”

“Are you pregnant?”

No, no, no, no, no and Hell no. Where do they get these questions? But it’s just all part of the deal, I figured.    

Confident I was not a sex worker nor prison escapee, she sent across the room to comfortable “bed” to have my blood drawn.

Male nurse Sean was in charge and introduced himself as a Madonna song played in the background.  

“How are you feeling today?” Sean said.  
“Pretty good, but I could use a coffee,” I said.

Sean then handed me a red, heart-shaped stress ball to hold before he took my blood.

“Can I keep this when we’re finished?” I said.

“No,” Sean said.    

Twenty minutes later, the deal was done. Sean thanked me and I retreated to the Lifestream “cantina” to rest up and grab as many free treats as I could possibly jam into my hoodie.  

Finally, after the required 15 minutes, I scooped up my orange juice, potato chips, peanuts, cookies – and, of course, my heart-shaped Lifestream stress ball – and headed out. It was a win-win.   

First assignment

Ex-newspaper guys and my old buds Dan Young and Ward Bushee at a recent reunion.

By John Murphy

Was thinking about it and it’s been just over 40 years since I started my first full-time job. That was as sports editor of the Watsonville Register Pajaronian in 1979.  

My very first assignment was to cover Watsonville High basketball at North Salinas. Showing me the ropes and watching out for me was my new friend and R-P wire editor Dan Young. Bad idea.

Dan was a very social guy. He decided to call his buddy Ward Bushee at the Salinas Californian so we could all meet for Mexican food before the game. Ward’s dad, also named Ward, was the managing editor of the Watsonville paper. In other words, he was our boss.  

Well, Dan and I arrived on time at a small Mexican restaurant in downtown Salinas. Soon all three of us were scarfing down enchiladas, tacos, rice and beans and washing it all down with either soda or beer (OK, it was beer). Time passed. Another round? Sure. Tipoff isn’t for 30 minutes. Why not?  

Long story short, we got to the game with two minutes left. Two minutes! This was my first game, remember. Fortunately, the game went into overtime and Sherman Cocroft won it for Watsonville with a jumper at the buzzer. All’s well that ends well. I collected some stats, did my interviews, got the job done.

Where’s everyone now? Sherman Cocroft played in the NFL for the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills.  Dan Young I think is semi-retired and living somewhere in SoCal, like me. Ward Bushee? Ward didn’t goof off nearly as much as Dan and I and became editor of the Reno Gazette, Cincinnati Enquirer, Arizona Republic and, finally the San Francisco Chronicle. Go figure.   

Muskrat love

By John Murphy

Once every three months a package arrives in the mail and I cut it open to reveal a different headline on the cover of a new edition of “Cahoots Quarterly” …

  • “Little People Wrestling Returns to Dania Beach after 50-year Hiatus.”
  • “Hollywood Celebrates Historic Atlantic Crossing!”
  • “Local Comedians Take Sonic Ride to Fame!”
  • “The History of Spam in Hollywood.”

That’s Hollywood, Florida by the way and there wasn’t really a Spam factory there, as Cahoots reported.  It’s all the imagination of Jeff Hansen, 70, a former Watsonville resident who moved to Florida several years ago after a colorful run on the Central Coast of Cali.

Out in Dania Beach and Hollywood, as he did in Watsonville, the former restaurateur runs the sophomoric-but-hilarious Cahoots newspaper which he says has “a couple of real things and the rest I make up.”

“There was never a Spam plant in Hollywood,” Hansen said. “I made it up. But I still have people telling me how they grew up right down the street from it and it was OK, but they didn’t like smelling all the pigs in the stockyard.”

Hansen laughs, nervously, as he often does. He was a successful businessman in Watsonville running restaurants such as the Wooden Nickel Too and the Beach Street Café and in Florida with a beach umbrella rental business, but humor is really his passion.

“Chestnut Wins Hollywood Title,” says a headline accompanying a story about Joey Chestnut supposedly winning a hot dog eating contest on the Fourth of July — or “the day Abraham Lincoln defeated Portugal in 1934,” as Hansen reported.  

Then there’s the advertisement for the phony area rehab center with a picture of Charlie Sheen entitled “Get Clean with Sheen” which invites clients to “limit drinking to five nights a week” or “increase consumption to 2½ men” and “learn to rant while still fascinate people.”

Even Hansen’s byline is a fib. His nom de plume is “Cap Peterson” who was actually a light-hitting utility player for the San Francisco Giants in the 1960s. Hansen loves the Giants and, back in the 1980s, would induct a Giant player per year into his goofy service organization in Watsonville called the “Royal Order of Muskrats.”

The Muskrats rocked outrageous hats made of real muskrat pelts with bills that extended out a foot from a member’s face. Giant players loved the caps and players such as Renie Martin, Mike Krukow, Tom O’Malley, Bill Laskey and Chili Davis were inducted into the club (and received hats) in on-field ceremonies before games at Candlestick Park.

That all ended Al Rosen became general manager of the Giants in 1985, got an eyeful of Hansen’s motley crew milling around on the field in their weird hats and sipping beers, and swore they’d never be back. And they weren’t.  

Hansen marched on, eventually bolting his hometown Watsonville for Florida where he’s continued to dispense his unique brand of humor and funny fake news.

Or, as former Watsonville mayor and Muskrat Dennis Osmer said, “With Jeff, you can’t tell what’s made up and what’s not. It’s like watching Fox News.”

Rain, rain … stay a while

By John Murphy

I woke up to the sound of rain this morning. I smiled.  

It doesn’t rain much around here, as soft rocker Albert Hammond sang in 1972 …

“Seems it never rains in Southern California/Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before …”

Usually when it does rain, it’s huge. It warrants frantic coverage from Los Angeles news stations, like we should all be building an arc. But now they have this coronavirus thing to report, so rain takes a backseat.       

As a Bay Area native, rain and cold and fog was just part of the deal. I often miss it. And when I moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1990, rain was constant. It was not news.

The news of the day near Seattle then was the Goodwill Games, the minor league hockey teams from Portland and Seattle who regularly beat the hell out of each other, and the strange new music emerging from the downtown clubs called “grunge.”

Well, I’m wearing a flannel shirt as I write this. And in honor of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and that wet stuff falling out of the sky, I will pour myself another cup of coffee and enjoy the rain. I’ve missed it.

Summer camp

By John Murphy

Cleaning a room and thinning out my belongings yesterday I came across a scrapbook I kept as a kid.

A page was dedicated to the Santa Clara Coaching Camp, a deal I attended when I was about 12 or 13.

I’m sure it was suggested by my older brother who played baseball at Santa Clara University. Anyway, it was cool. I had never been away from home by myself and I stayed in a dorm room at SCU with two kids I had never met.

We ate in the cafeteria … lots of pasta and hamburgers and soft serve ice cream, all washed down by tumblers of soda. Calories didn’t matter since we all weighed like 70 pounds and we played sports all day!

Football, basketball, baseball, tennis, track and field and swimming … we did them all. We also played something camp counselors like Terry Malley called “speedball” – a brutal game that involved full-on tackling without pads. It was crazy.    

The highlight of the camp was a basketball game we played against “Project 50,” a group of disadvantaged African-American kids who were also on campus.

The Santa Clara University basketball coach at the time, Carol Williams, coached us. I played point guard. We also had two big dudes who became all-section players in high school. So we were pounding P50 pretty good.

Then the P50 kids, wearing T-shirts and swim trunks, caught fire. They pressed and ran. Our lead shrank. Carol Williams called time out and told me to stop dribbling into the press. I didn’t listen.

Fortunately, our big guys made enough plays at the end that we won. It was an experience.

It’s too bad, with this pandemic happening, kids can’t play summer sports nor attend camp as I did. These are opportunities lost. Experiences missed. Hopefully things get back to normal soon.

Remembering Brian

By John Murphy

The date was November 17, 2003.

The late Brian Goff – my former colleague whose birthday was today – picked me up at my old house in San Bernardino.

He was driving an SUV and our destination was Candlestick Park  in San Francisco. My 49ers were playing Brian’s Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday Night Football. We had tickets. It was going to be great.

Brian and I worked at the old downtown building of the San Bernardino Sun.  The big guy would come in every day with his two sports drinks and plop them down — along with his keys and his coveted Arlington High football championship ring. He loved that ring.  

Up I-5 we traveled on this day. Past Kettleman City and Los Banos and all those places. Finally, we arrived in San Bruno where my mom lived. There we met with my brother Jim who also had a ticket. He played high school ball with Steeler Hall-of-Famer Lynn Swann. Brian liked hearing about that.   

Well, it was a tough night for Pittsburgh as the 49ers won 30-14. By the fourth quarter disgusted Steeler fans were hurling their black and gold gear off the second deck. I had to laugh.    

But Brian was cool – nothing ever seemed to faze him. Buoyed by his strong Christian faith and staunch work ethic I watched him rise in the sports departments of The Sun and later the Southern California News Group. His personal life also soared as he rekindled a romance with an old girlfriend (Tonya) and they married in 2018. She already had three energetic sons, Tyler, Timothy and Trevor. Brian, naturally, treated them as his own.

They lived a fairy-tale existence for about a year. I happily followed it on Facebook until — in a cruel twist of fate – Brian unexpectedly died of a heart attack on April 24, 2019. He was just 45.

Tonya, at times, expresses her grief with Facebook posts such as this: “There’s this hollow/empty pain inside that hurts on a different level than I have ever felt. The tears come and go in waves. My boys need me strong and motivate me. They help me with groceries, and chores, and projects. We grieve together because we miss Brian, but mostly remember the good times.”

So do I, just in a different way. Happy birthday, Brian. We all miss you.    

Thinking more, risking less

By John Murphy

Woke up Saturday and didn’t even know it was Saturday until the CalTrans Girl mentioned it. The quarantine will do that to you.

After a week of this “Shelter at Home” jazz, we decided to hop in the Corolla and head south on the 210. Destination Riverside.

I had a memento for a friend I wanted to drop off. Twenty minutes later we arrived at his quiet ranch house built on what used to be an orange grove.

I knocked on the door and my bud bounded out as his wife reminded him to maintain “six feet.” Doh! Here I was pulling a drop-in during a global pandemic. I felt stupid.

Let’s review the stats: Thirty-six people have died from the coronavirus in California since March 4, including 18 in Riverside County and 13 in San Bernardino County. More than 1,000 people combined in the two counties have tested positive for COVID-19. That’s a lot.   

Dire as that sounds (and it is) it was Saturday, we had been cooped up all week and we needed a break. So we left Riverside and headed west on the 60 headed for Rancho Cucamonga.

She wanted to stop at 85 Degrees, a Taiwanese coffee house/bakery. But first we pulled into Office Depot and I was handed a mask for the occasion. I looked like I was about to rob a Circle K.

“Welcome to Office Depot,” a masked woman from behind the counter said.

I’ve been buying a lot more office supplies lately since I now have my own business. So I picked out a 100-pack of envelopes, then headed for the register.

That’s when I noticed the six-foot-boxes outlined in blue tape on the ground. I felt like George Costanza in the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld as I slowly advanced toward the register. What a strange world we now occupy.  

But consider the alternative.  With more than 13,000 Californians infected since January and with death a possibility, we can all stand to don a mask, wander less and think a lot more. I plan to.    

Happy birthday, Phil Monaghan

By John Murphy

Opening Facebook today, I see April 5 was Phil Monaghan’s birthday.

Phil died tragically five years ago, and I attended his memorial service in San Bruno. Many of my old St. Robert’s School classmates were there.   

So, a few quick notes about him before I move along …

–Phil, or “Peppy” as he was sometimes called, was one of my first friends in grade school. He was energetic and animated, a fun kid to be around.

–He was from a huge Irish-Catholic family that lived on a big corner lot a few blocks from us. HIs obit says he had 12 siblings. Whew. I didn’t know it was that many.  

–By comparison there were “only” four Murphy kids. When Phil casually mentioned at our dinner table that he had never been to a San Francisco Giants game, my dad took him to one. He never forgot that.

–Phil would sleep walk as a kid. I think it was a Saturday night, as his older siblings watched “12 O’Clock High,” that Phil climbed the staircase from his bedroom, ambled past his sibs and walked out the front door … while asleep! He was found on a front porch a few blocks away, crying his eyes out and still in his pajamas.  

Dude was also whip-smart. He attended St. Ignatius College Prep in San Francisco, then graduated from college and became a civil engineer. He was already retired from the city of Burlingame when he passed.

Phil Monaghan, he’d be 64 today. Happy birthday, buddy.  

Kezar adventure

Archway at the current Kezar Stadium (capacity 10,000) is a nod to the venue’s past.

By John Murphy

The year was 1966. I was 10 and my cousin Billy Hogan 9.

I stayed overnight at his house in the Sunset District of San Francisco. This was a normal thing, as I had two sets of cousins up in the Sunset and my family would often go there to visit.

On one trip to The City, Billy and I set our sights on a San Francisco 49ers game. Kids got in for free by snipping vouchers off the backs of Christopher Milk cartons.   

The day of the game we put on warm coats and headed with Billy’s neighborhood pals for Kezar Stadium, the great wooden bowl in the Southeast Corner of Golden Gate Park.

The Sunset and Kezar were not on a straight line. It’s fuzzy now, but I recall walking several blocks, maybe getting on a bus, then hopping on a streetcar before arriving at the stadium.  

I don’t remember who the Niners played. Didn’t matter. It was all about the adventure — much of which happened after the game.    

It was post-game that my cousin and his posse collected cushions. These black-and-orange numbers were trucked over from Candlestick Park. They were then rented to fans to save their butts from the hard stadium benches.

The vendors paid kids a nickel for each cushion retrieved – a bonanza in a day when a Butterfinger or a Charleston Chew cost only five cents.

Well, the game ended, and we were off — scurrying around the vast stadium collecting cushions. This was fun! And I had a big stack of them, almost more than I could carry.

Straining now to hold the tower of cushions, I walked unsteadily toward the vendor’s lair. Pow! Just as I got close a kid purposely plowed into me and sent me flying. I recovered, but an army of kids descended on my cushions like hungry rats.     

Bummer. Afterward, my cousin and his buds pooled all their money and divided it. I had nothing, but I still got a share.

I happily took the coins and we headed home. It was quite a day and it wasn’t done yet.  

St. Robert’s hijinks

Sr. Rose Marie checks a student’s desk for Godknowswhat as my buddy Jim Spinharney muses. Source: Brian Boisson and the eighth-grade yearbook committee.

By John Murphy

Sr. Rose Marie was an excellent teacher and normally a pleasant sort.  

But on this day the nun’s eyes turned crimson and bulged out. It was scary. My buddy Keith Larsen and I knew we were in trouble.

Rewind to 1970, eighth grade at St. Robert’s School in San Bruno. As usual, the eighth grade boys were running amok, heaving dirt clods at each other, scaling fences and causing mayhem. It was all great fun, until our teacher, Sr. Rose Marie, decided to organize us.

A whiffle-ball league was the ticket, she thought. She appointed four captains, including Larsen and me. We were all given score sheets affixed to square backings.

The league lasted, oh, about three days until we tired of it — setting the scorecards down in favor of other diversions. Meantime, the sixth graders saw our discarded scorecards as dandy Frisbee material and, like stars in a Wham-O commercial, hurled them about the blacktop.

Long story short, Sr. Rose Marie came down and found the battered and abused Larsen and Murphy scorecards and went nuts. Next thing we know, we’re headed for the principal’s office, trailing an enraged nun on a mission.

Inside Sr. Dorothy’s office, Sr. Rose Marie raged, loudly recounting our sins. Larsen offered a meager explanation, but they weren’t buying.

Then they turned to me and I — well — refused to speak. Took the fifth. Said nada.

“This boy’s as stubborn as a mule!” Sr. Dorothy said.      

That was about it. There wasn’t much they could do. Maybe we got notes sent home to our parents – but they wouldn’t have cared. My folks had more important things on their minds than me sabotaging (allegedly) a whiffle-ball league.

Oh, the guys called me “Mule” for a few days, but I enjoyed that. Then Whiffle-Ball Gate just sort of faded away, replaced no doubt by some other tomfoolery. Ah, the memories.

(The St. Robert’s Class of 1970 is supposed to have its 50-year reunion on Sept. 26. Unfortunately, I will be sheltering in place).