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I recall as a kid (70's and 80's), when my Mom would go to Letterman Army hospital in San Francisco, we would go one of two ways to get to the city. First was to go to Livermore and stay with the people who are the inspiration for Shelly and Frank in my Through the years books, which put us on I580 to the Bay Bridge. But the other way was to get to I80 in Sacramento and take that to the Bay Bridge. What I want to know is did any of you ever go that way an recall seeing little wooden cutout sitting on sticks in the bay near Berkeley? I want to say it was near Berkeley, but it was in that area. I remember having to fight my brother to get the seat near the passenger window just to see it.
I always remember trying to see them. I think one was Snoopy on his dog house, another was the Red Baron. There may have been more because I recall broken sticks a few times. Sometimes the tide was in and they looked like they were flying over the water, other times you could see the beach under them. I miss these. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about?
I also miss seeing the Nut Tree out in the middle of no where every six months.
Comments
Yep, I remember them.
The figures out in the bay were, I believe, in Emeryville, between Berkeley and the bay. There were, at one time, more than just Snoopy on his doghouse.
I'm not sure what became of them, but I believe they are all gone now. I sort of remember them being taken down after they became eyesores through neglect.
Here is a picture I found
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42663379@N04/3982584813/
Yes, the Nut Tree is long gone, though the airport is still there, and Vacaville has sort of grown up to surround it on the south and east.
We stopped there for a break on our move from the bay area to Indianapolis last summer.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
YES YES YES!!!!
Thank you Holly. This is what I remember, although poor Snoopy is getting close to a dip in the Bay.
If I recall there was a Sun, I think a clown at one point and a few other tings, the area stretched out like a mile or so but time and the water helped to take the cool stuff down. Keep in mind, I may not be remembering right. I could be thinking I saw this and that's normal for me. My Mom said (she was born in 1944 in Wyoming and moved to the Bay area when she was 5, I think then she moved to L.A. when she hit sixteen.) She said the stuff in the bay had been around when she was young too, but it may have been different stuff.
I only recall stopping at the Nut Tree like once when I was a kid, like maybe 7 or so. There was a place like that near my old home town, on Highway 70, north of Marysville, just a little shop that sold fruit and nuts outside of a big warehouse.
I miss stuff like this. I stopped at a place on I80 in 1984 with my Mom and Brother as we went to Wyoming to visit her Parents near Burns Wyoming which is near the capitol. Stopped there in 2005 and it's there, but now a dinner club and not a truck stop diner anymore.
Was called the Spring Chicken Inn and I recall my brother asking my mother. "Mom am I a rooster or a hen?"
My Mom burst into laughter, mostly because we lived on a farm at the time.
My grandparents lived in
My grandparents lived in Dixon, and when I went out to visit them, we would spend time going on car rides around. I think I remember some of the stuff, I definitely remember the Snoopy. But it's been some time. The last time I was out in Northern California, I got to spend time with Holly and Shalimar.
Samirah M. Johnstone
Yes, there were a lot more, but I hardly remember them
Yes, there was a lot more, but I hardly remember it. Kiving down the peninsula and around through Milpitas, we ( my family) and I, later, usually went down through Concord, Pleasnton/Dublin and either through Niles Canyon to the Dumbarton Bridge, or around Hwy 17 ( now I880 to San Jose, etc.
So, I only saw them once or twice.
I looked online, but that was all I could find, except, maybe this ... http://www.flickr.com/photos/pbo31/5522674706/
Aha! I fund more ... http://blog.sfgate.com/parenting/2008/07/14/gone-but-not-for...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39722869@N05/5345221302/
It looks as if TIME magazine did an article, but it is limited to paid subscribers ... http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876138,00.html
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
There were more than Snoopy et al
UC Berkley had an art class go to the mud flats and build sculptures out of the drift wood that accumulated there. I remember the Red Barron and Snoopy and heard a story about them but don't remember what that was. I miss the Nut Tree, but up the highway around ten miles was a place I liked better as a child, The Milk Farm. I believe the sign is still there, near Davis. Other places that have gone with the years, The Ground Cow and Nyack Lodge. The freeway pretty much wiped out Nyack and after the ground cow moved to Weimar it just seemed to fade away. As far as dating myself, I remember the excitement when the first stretch of freeway opened outside of Auburn and was nine miles long. The rest was two lane highway and was called Highway Forty. I 80 parallels the same route, except it's straight and the old road was like a snake. Trucks would have traffic backed up for miles. The old highway is a great place to ride a motorcycle, lots of twists and turns. After cresting Donner Summit the highway was treacherous during winter. More than one truck lost control and went over the cliff between the summit and the curving bridge a quarter of a mile away. I loved that bridge and the view of Donner Lake. It signaled that Lake Tahoe was a half of an hour away. My youth was spent at Tahoe and during my teen years worked for my Uncle in consrtuction. I also worked one year at Squaw Valley. Times were fun and innocent and I miss them dearly, Arecee
One of the first times...
...I wondered if I was 'gay' ...it took many more years just to realize I was human... I watched a movie called "The Presidio," which had Sean Connery and Mark (am I really attracted to a man like him) Harmon. I can now enjoy watching NCIS and not worry one way or another. My point, however, is that the movie displayed more than a few wonderful scenes of San Francisco. Oh...and the only other man who tapped my turntable as it were, flew around SF in the only car I ever wanted to own...Racing Green Mustang....Steve McQueen, god rest his soul, in "Bullit," which showed a lot of SF as well.
My father spent much of his youth with relatives in San Jose, and my third cousins (who knows how many times removed)grew up out there as well.
P.S. Mark is also the uncle to one of the most attractive women I've ever wanted to be, Tracey Nelson -
am I the only crazy woman here?
Love, Andrea Lena
Don't forget
Dirty Harry. I do believe a lot of that was filmed in San Fran. And it had a lot of areal shots too. Totally forgot about Bullit.
Dirty Harry was filmed in SF
My glass company modified the storefront of the store they made into a deli at the start of the second Dirty Harry film. A car was driven through the front and they had to be sure it broke out properly. It was fun, Arecee
A question for those who remember The San Francisco bay area
The Streets Of San Francisco TV series was filmed there and Arcee has a story based there as well Show Me The Money! http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/4256/show-me-money
May Your Light Forever Shine
Vague memories ...
As I vaguely remember, they were around Emeryville, tucked just under Berkeley. And, yes, I do know they were designed so at high tide they floated on the water. You wouldn't see them taking the Bay Bridge from 580, but if you came south down I-80 you would see them before coming to the Bridge. As I recall, I-80 South becomes 580 at the Albany-Berkeley-Emeryville corridor, which is where there was a little bay that was reduced to mud flats at low tide. Might be all built up now.
I'm pretty sure the only part of 580 that actually parallels the water (or mud) is that corridor just north of the Bay Bridge entrance.
The big question to you is, when you fought with your brother, did you slide left to the window or right? That should prove it for you, since if you slid left (drivers' side) and saw them, them I'm completely wrong and they were farther south. If they were and you slid left, you were heading north on 580 and you'd have to look across several lanes of 580-South and it would be unlikely to see them anyway. I suggest you slid to the passenger window, looking across the mud flats (or water if the tide was higher), making you south on I-80.
I had an older cousin stationed in Letterman and visited often.
Karin
PS: A-ha! I just thought I'd check and here you go:
http://blog.sfgate.com/parenting/2008/07/14/gone-but-not-for...
We were
Usually headed to the Bay Bridge. So it was for the seat behind the passenger (Right side). Nothing like slap fights to see who got the seat. Oh course, he would rub it in and my Dad would get off the highway and make us change seats at times.
It's strange
but certain things just thrill me to end when I see it while traveling.
Donner Pass rest area (Got a great story my roommate loves to tell about me losing my cool there when my Uhaul broke down in 2005 and the woman insisted that they couldn't send a tow truck till I gave them an adress and I kept saying I was on the highway at the rest area and she insisted someone had to live there.)
In Reno I love to see Circus Circus, The Silver Legacy Casinos. John Ascuguas (sp?) nugget. The great salt lake. Out side Cheyenne Wyoming is a Sapp's brothers truck stop and they have a giant coffee pot on a pole. The first rest area in Nebraska, where the sign for being at the highest point in the state is in a famers field.
One of these years, I'll get money and travel from here to Chicago, then take Amtrack and get a fancy room and go to California and just enjoy the trip
I remember
I remember when they only casinos in Reno were the Riverside, in the hotel and Harold's Club. Harrahs came years after and then opened another at Southshore at Tahoe. Harrahs has since opened casinos around the world. I know the rest area well, but you have to forgive the phone operator because I think the people serving you probably lived in the bay area and don't have a clue about the mountains. As an aside my Twisted novel starts under an overpass on I 80 just east of Truckee. Unless you've been here most people don't have an idea of what we're talking about, but if you ever have an opportunity to see the mountains of California don't miss it, Arecee
it was
Someone for uhaul. But English wasn't her first language. When I called back I got someone who understood where I was.
Love I80 also love the Feather River canyon. Nothing better then racing along side of a river for like 15 or so miles
Emeryville Mud flats
I lived in Davis in the early 1970's, SF in the late 70's and 80's and Berkeley in the late 80's through early 2004. I had an office in SF and used to commute from Berkeley to SF daily. One of my favorite things in the world was to round the bend in the road on I80 heading to the Bay Bridge and look to the Emeryville Mud flats to see the sculptures there. These were beyond doubt some of the most creative public art displays that you could imagine and it was all FREE to the public and cost the local governments basically nothing. People would just show up and using hammers, nails and whatever wood might drift off the bay, they would create MAGIC. Some very wonderful stuff and really FUN to watch as you whizzed by on the way to the city.
As you might imagine, the bureaucrats who NEVER understood the joy of creativity found a way to destroy it. About Mid 1980's if I remember correctly, they deemed it a public hazard and cleared all the great sculpture away so that it could go back to it's pristine and truly boring look. I was devastated. My one regret is that I never took the time to go there and create a sculpture that I had been thinking about. Funny to hear people talking about Auburn as I live just outside of Auburn now. Small world. .......... Adoy
p.s. I do remember the snoopy sculpture as well a a few more that were on posts in the bay rather then the Mud flats nearby. it was great fun while it lasted.
To be perfectly fair...
The reason they were taken down (except for a revised Snoopy, although the original was better) wasn't because of "soulless bureaucrats," but because after centuries of treating the margins of the San Francisco Bay as "a bunch of useless mud," to be "reclaimed" for housing developments, dumping garbage, or making salt, someone noticed that most of it was already gone, and that it was a vastly productive part of the ecosystem that supplied the breeding grounds and food sources that supplied a very important commercial fishery with baby fish that grew into bigger fish, birds in their millions, shellfish (which filter the water very efficiently, eliminating a lot of the man-made pollution we humans have been dumping into the Bay for hundreds of years--including many tonnes of deadly mercury used in the gold mining industry). Although the sculptures were very scenic, the artists and the people who admired the sculptures (including me) waded through the water or sloshed through the mud at low tide, doing widespread and continuing damage to an important natural resource.
They were banned for the same reason we ban uncontrolled fires in our National forests and parks, or shooting off firearms in public spaces, a very real problem as well, since bullets fired into the air in celebration of the Fourth of July, or Cinco de Mayo, or Chinese New Year, or the local football team winning the pennant, or whatever, eventually come down, causing harm to many every year. In my former studio, there were two large skylights. In one there were three bullet holes. In the other, there were five.
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Reagarding the Emeryville sculptures, You're right Puddin ...
Many of the Emeryville sculptures fell on their own.
The State Department of Transportation didn't make a concerted effort to take them all down until 1997.
In analyzing them earlier, many of them were found to have had lead paint used in either coloring them, or in the lower portions, apparently in an attempt to slow down the deterioration in the water.
Of course that wasn't good for the ecosystem, either, and got the ecologists after them, too, for good reason.
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
I remember them well riding
I remember them well riding the Greyhound to "The City" a few times a year. They were always the marker saying almost there kids. They were there from the 60s until the 80s at least when I drove truck in the area.
Brenda Sands