(copyright)
By Tony Walther
The man sitting next to the inspector now turned away from his dice game. “You know that was Dan O’Malley’s girl that just disappeared. The poor guy comes home from working on the city streets, filling up potholes with a shovel, to find his 13-year-old daughter, his only child, has not come home. My money says it’s one of those transients from the park. You should check em out over there Cracky.”
“The horse cops keep em moving,” the inspector said. “Right now we don’t know if anything bad has really happened or whether we have two teenagers who have run away from home or who are just staying away from home for some reason.”
“I’m glad I don’t have kids at home anymore,” the man said. “This world is turning mean. It’s become dog eat dog, a real rat race, since the war.”
With that, the inspector bid goodbye and walked out into the sunlight of the late afternoon. He turned right and walked down the block toward the Great Highway and the ocean. He passed by the hole-in-the-wall Surf Theater, where various citizens, including several teenagers, were in a queue. The marquee listed the double feature, “The Girl From Jones Beach,” starring Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo, and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” starring John Wayne.
The inspector absent mindedly bumped into a young man.
“Hey watch it pops!”
Taken aback by the insolence of the teenager, the inspector said: “Shouldn’t you be home doing your school work?”
“Whattareyou a cop?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, I don’t handle juvenile cases,” the inspector said, and walked on.
He could have been driving an unmarked patrol car, or at least he could have had someone driving him. He had never bothered to learn how to drive. But keeping with his own eccentricities, he usually chose to walk, take a street car, bum a ride with a local citizen, or even hail a taxi and charge it to the police department.
He reached the end of Judah Street where the street car turned around. He now made a left on Great Highway and stopped at the corner and reached into the police call box, pulled out the phone and waited for the answer. The inspector reported that he was on duty in the Sunset. He worked out of the detective bureau downtown and lived in an apartment near the bureau. But it was out in the Sunset where he felt at home. He knew a lot of different people, working class families, shop keepers, streetcar motormen, even some horse wranglers. People rented horses from stables and rode along the beach and into Golden Gate Park.
After walking several blocks along Great Highway, he came up to a small cottage recessed several hundred feet from the street, unlike the other row houses. He saw the sand flying, mounting into an ever expanding mound.
“Say Louie, how goes it today, my friend?” the inspector shouted, not bothering to peer down the hole.
Momentarily, a rotund little man, wearing a blue watch cap, a flannel shirt, and dungarees, jumped out of the hole.
Tags: San Francisco, Great Highway, Surf Theater, Virginia Beach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, inspector, Frenchman, street car, Sunset District
