Mount Holyoke College
South Hadley, MassachusettsDepartment of Physiology
Use until further notice
2510 Green Street
San Francisco, California
October 31, 1940Dear Friends,
I have not been able in these last two weeks to write to any of you about this extraordinary place, San Francisco, even though in spite of the trouble with my back I have seen - by no means all of it, or even any representative parts of it - but things which hve interested me much. This has happened because the semi-invalid member of this family insists on going out to drive every day, and usually I have been along, too, for somehow the automobiling seems to hurt less now than walking. So we have been to many places, not too far off.
Some of you have been here and know that San Francisco is built on many and very steep hills. The founders seem to have had no sense about the laying out of a city with respect to its slopes, but they did large sections of it on the rectangular plan, so blocks and blocks mount steeply up these awful hills while they might just as well have varied the approaches, as they are doing in the newer parts of the city. In some places the slopes are impossible and no travel up them, though there are houses along their sides. The folks go up on foot, sometimes by steps. It would be a pleasure to me to explore some of these quietly, but I can't do that now. Two houses near here - for we are on a hill of medium steepness - have had elevators put in to make their front doors more accessible. One across this street is just having it done, because the owner has some heart trouble and can not climb so many stairs. The front door has been heretofore approached by three flights of steps. The street level has the garage, and I suppose things like the heating plant. The next level apparently has the kitchen and so on, and up one flight more are the windowns [sic] of the drawing room. (This is a residential section - drawing room, not living room.) In this house the grade is not so bad, the basement is just on the level of the back garden. I have told some of you that the parking is often at right angles to the side-walk, with the car half up on it, to lessen the danger of slipping. The next block below this has a fierce hill - I have been up it only the day I came in the taxi. My friend told me to tell the taxi man that this house was between such and such streets so that they might avoid that block and come by more favorable slopes from the side streets above or below. The taxi men say they don't mind hills, but they always notice what I say about the location with respect to the well-known Green Street Hill. However, these hills mean superb and very varied views. We look down on the Golden Gate, bridge and all, and across it to the hills of Marin County, brown and steep, with clumps of live-oak and bay trees, very shapely and ornamental, dotted over them. The little towns lie as in Italy in the clefts between the Fair island Treasure, and the Berkeley hills beyond the Bay. Mt. Tamalpais tops the Marin County hills and is very shapely, around 3,000 feet, I think. We have had one half day of rain and a few little showers and already there is a flush of green on those hills when you are near them. They will be green until next May just as soon as a few more rains come. It seems not to rain very much, even in the rainy season. The present weather is like our mid-September, with folks eating out-of-doors in the middle of the day and with straw hats still in good form. The evenings are cool, of course, especially on foggy nights.
Thefogs are real, even at this season, and come drifting in from the Pacific near night-fall, sometimes so that the fog-horns blow all night. We are so near the Marina and the Golden Gate that we hear them as on the coast of Maine. The Bridge is a beauty, with towers so high that they are often in fog for hours after it is clear below. The towers are painted red, supposably to tone with the Marin Hills but they have not hit it right, to our thinking. The Bridgeto [sic] Oakland is white, and while much longer it has not the symmetry and beauty of the Golden Gate bridge. Both (? but not sure of Golden Gate!) have two stories and the highway level has six traffic lanes. The Bay is much bigger than you think, I am sure, miles and miles both above and below the big cities, and since the tidal change is considerable the current through the Golden Gate is a rapid one.
I'll tell you about a few of the drives we have taken. (1) In the city we go most often through Golden Gate Park, much bigger than Central Park in New York. It was made on a big stretch of sand dunes, by a may [sic] who had vision and who is still alive and honored. It has two wind-mills on the side near the Ocean and these two pump enough fresh water to supply all those miles of growing things with moisture. There are very big trees of many varieties - I can not begin to recognize them, though the various western pines and the eucalyptus are conspicuous. The latter has many shades of grey and red-brown in its continually peeling bark, and its leaves and slender branches are most ornamental. You know the smell from the oil, and it is like that even on a sunny day as you pass a grove of them, or when the park men are burning twigs under them. The park has animal quarters for buffalo, elk, etc, it has an aquarium where there are so many kinds of brilliant fishes, large and small, lots of them from Hawaii and the South Pacific. It has many pools and lakes, with quantities of water birds, very amusing as always, and around the edges of these are so many shrubs and plants. It startled me to see calla lilies in luxuriance and full bloom. Almost everything seems to bloom some in the fall - rhododendrons for instance. Of course geraniums are used in masses on slopes, and I never beheld such lovely plumes of pampas grass, so high and white. There are many palms, and tree ferns, and I can't begin to say how many more. I have not been into the museum yet, except the aquarium. Of course plenty of playing fields, though the golf courses are farther out of the city, on varied hills not so far from the sea. The Park leads out to the Pacific, and for that there has been made a long - two miles or more (?) - and level beach, with a magnificent boulevard above it. The breakers have always been coming in in rows one behind another when we have been out. There are so many lines that one can not hear the crash of a single big, fine wave for it is lost in the continual roar. It is too dangerous for swimming, but the children paddle in the edge and a few bold souls brave the waves. At one end are the seal rocks where the sea lions play, not too many of them now, and at that end is also the famous Cliff House where everybody important goes for lunch sooner or later - we have been! It has a gorgeous view over the Ocean, and across the Gate to the varied coast line at the north.
(2) There is still nearer the Presidio, the military station now in a fever of activity. This is big, possibly half the size of the Park, and in it are the quantities of spaces, with many new barracks going up. It is the site of the earliest settlement, and one very old house still survives as an officers' club. I like that place for there is a speed limit and I can enjoy the place more composedly that [sic] the rest of the world here. One drive follows the shore of the Golden Gate and comes out of the Cliff House after going through a new residential section of interesting houses. Architecture is incredibly varied here, with much that is Mexican of course. I am not yet used to it. I think I like the interiors better than the exteriors, but I am sure the gardens are wonderful, and grow so fast.
(3) We have been some fifteen miles or so to the Muir Woods, so that I could see the redwoods. These are not the Sequoias of the Yosemite, but the species sempervirens of the northern half of California, mostly near the coast. The biggest may be 500 - 1500 years old - great difference in the books - and they grew in circles around the trunk of their ancestor. This gives very impressive groupings. They do that trick to the light which you see in pictures and which I have not yet caught with my little camera - sunlight never gets down to the ground save for a very short time in the day - it is cross-wise up through the tops, and it is as characteristic as the light through jewelled stained glass. The foliage is especially graceful. Of course the trunks are massive and it is all a quiet plac e [sic] among them. There is a pavilion at the entrance to this National Park, with much of the wood in evidence and some for sale. It is a wonderful dark red color - I had no idea how red it was. Some of it is stained to be too red, of course. The house I am staying in has the whole first floor done in red-wood, great wide boards of it, with splendid grain. It is soft, not firm, but seems durable. I am so glad to have been to one of these groves for I missed the finest ones by not stopping on the way down from Seattle. I think Margaret Ball went through them. It is a hard bus ride, and connects with a poor railroad on the point of abandonment.
(4) We went to Berkely [sic] one day across the Bay Bridges, and rode arond [sic] the enormous campus of the Univ. of Cal. Of course the trees were different, of course the style of architecture was different, but campuses are a good deal alike after all. The excitement of that day was also not the lunch at an elegant Women's Club House with some cordial friends of Frances. We went to see a woman who belongs in the group with Boyce and the rest of the philosophers, Miss Alice Hilgard. Her father was evidently one of the early great professors, in agriculture, but he hobnobbed with the philosophers, including all those who came from Harvard to lecture and to visit. She told me of one day when he and James (?) spent the whole forenoon sitting on their fence talking about the relative superiority of fidelity and loyalty. I felt as if I were living in a book to hear her talk. Their front garden - one never says yard here - has two 65 year old sequoias in it and I have a fair picture of one. They are just splendid trees and I can hardly wait to see the really big ones. These are high for any trees we know at home.
(5) Yesterday we drove to Palo Alto going by way of the towns down the peninsula. You may know that there is a peninsula with a low mountain range for a back bone lying between San Francisco Bay and the Ocean. The famous Santa Clara valley comes as the low land beyond the Bay and stretching to the south. Palo Alto is about at the beginning of this, with the University at the foot of the hills some mile and a half to the west of the town. The series of towns between here and there is largely residential and lies along the line of the old trail made by Father Junipero Serra and his associates when the Missions were built, near the time of our Revolutionary War. It is hard to realize how rapidly things have gone in this part of the world. Near Palo Alto is an interesting place to eat, called the Allied Arts. It is a Junior League venture, most successful, for the benefit of a children's hospital. The eating is done in out-of-door patios surrounded by low buildings in which are also indoor dining rooms. The service is by the Junior Leaguers, each girl working perhaps once or twice a week. There are many "arts" in low buildings extending around flower filled patios, Mexican glass, photography, poery of many kinds, Indian weaving and jewelery [sic], and so on. Oh, yes, they have subsidized a florist who has wonderful flowers. There was one tree some 20 feet high, lie a tree sinnia, in full bloom. I took a few pictures, but I have not yet gotten my camera trained so I know how to manage these lights. A friend of the family made a little luncheon party for me at this charming place, with things to eat much like home. The guests were the three Smith sisters, one of whom lives in Palo Alto, and the wife of the former president of St. Johns Univ. in Shanghai, Mrs. Nichols. The Bishop was apparently a famous man - now a few years dead. Mrs. N. knew Tilly Calder Thurston well, and spoke highly of her work in China. After the party we went to the home of Mrs. Becket (hostess) in town where I could lie down a while, for this is by far my longest adventure, and then we went to the home of Miss Grace Smith for tea. She has a sweet little apartment where she gives French lessons as she can find students. She was near Miss Wallace but the latter was not at home. I shall hope to see her later, for I plan to stay a while in Palo Alto out near the university if I can find a spot and get so I can walk the campus distances. Bus service is as poor here as between South Hadley and Amherst.
I hope the cast now on my back and central section will come off in 8 days more. I count the days carefully for it is an abomination. Perhaps the pain is a little less, but the thing itself is such a pest it is hard to tell. The M.D. says the benefit often does not show for some weeks, but I shall hold him to his promise to let me out on November 9. Soon after that day I hope to begin to migrate, first to see Elizabeth Kenyon Owen for perhaps a week. She is a classmate who lives on the side of another of these hills, not so far away from here. There are two splendid view points in her part of town which we have gone up by precipitous roads, Buena Vista Park and Twin Peaks. Then about Nov. 18 if my back should allow this I hope to go to the Univ. of Cal. campus for perhaps a week or two to read in their library and to see some experimental work in progress there, work more or less allied to what we have done on college students. A certain Pauline Hoggson is most cordial about inviting me to see this. There is a Faculty Women's Club right on the campus where I can stay, which would be convenient. The Palo Alto spell would come after this. I had thought of perhaps staying out at Carmel for a bit, but I think it will be too cold then for the best enjoyment. I shall doubtless manage to get there to see the famous spot while I am at Palo Alto - it is not too far. Then I should go south shortly before Christmas. But of course everything depends on whether my back really does rise to its opportunities or not. Dr. King acts like Dr. Goldthwait - he seems to think it will come to sometime, but the date is uncertain. I shall ask to have some x-rays taken when the cast comes off to compare with those which were sent on from Boston. I want to know what the bones are doing.
Many things are left out, other nice drives, the meeting of certain friends of Smiths, but I surely can never be grateful enough for the helpfulness of this lovely homme at just this particular time.
[Unsigned, but written by Abby H. Turner]