Jerry Flamm points at the McDonald’s on the corner of Fillmore Street and Golden Gate Avenue. “That was once my Uncle Louie’s store,” he says. “It was called The Practical Hat and Umbrella Works.”
A few blocks further up he gestures at a liquor store. “Goldenrath’s Deli. Everything from paté to enchiladas.”
He might be 81, but Jerry Flamm remembers the 1920s Fillmore District down to the last streetlight and candy store.
He also remembers Jefferson Market, where Jewish customers would select a squawking live chicken and wait for the shochet, the kosher slaughterer, to do his work.
In his mind Flamm still sees Mrs. Karp the cookie-seller, and language teacher Moshe Menuhin, who “had a little boy called Yehudi who played the violin — quite well.”
Flamm, whose career has included stints as a Chronicle reporter and as a press agent for the Rockefellers, wrote about the Jewish Fillmore in his 1977 book, “Good Life in Hard Times.”
His second book, “Hometown San Francisco: Sunny Jim, Phat Willie and Dave,” focused on particular characters from that era.
He will give a free lecture entitled “Growing up Jewish in San Francisco: Memories of the Fillmore in the ’20s and ’30s” at the Feast of Jewish Learning’s Authors’ Night Thursday, Feb. 13.
After the 1906 earthquake and fire, Jews in San Francisco moved from ravaged alleys South of Market to the more spacious Fillmore district.
While that neighborhood wasn’t exclusively Jewish, says Flamm, in the 1920s and ’30s it was the closest San Francisco came to New York’s Lower East Side.
Fillmore between McAllister and Sutter streets buzzed with trade from Jewish-owned bakeries, delis, tailors and drugstores.
There were also Jewish cops: six, to be precise, with Jerry’s father, Dave, among them. Respected throughout the force, Dave Flamm was a cop with heart who was also fairly indulgent toward his only child.
“It was a good life — a kid had a chance to grow up,” says Flamm.
“Parents weren’t afraid to let us out on our own. After supper, we’d go out on the streets and socialize. This was a small-town kind of life.”
But Flamm left the “small town” of his youth. Attracted by Latin America, he worked as a reporter in Mexico City and as a press rep in Brazil. He was in San Juan in 1965 when news came that his father was ill. Flamm returned to San Francisco and got a job as press agent at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, where he realized that one neighborhood being demolished was the Fillmore District.
He was inspired to write his first “nostalgia” article.
“I contacted Hal Silverman, editor of the California Living section of the Sunday Examiner, and asked if he’d be interested in a piece about the 1920s Fillmore,” says Flamm.
The same article later became the “Fillmore” chapter of “Good Life in Hard Times.” It is one of Flamm’s proudest achievements.
“Of everything I’ve done,” he says, “I think I’m happiest with that piece.”
When “Good Life in Hard Times” came out, he was inundated with letters from neighborhood oldtimers. Flamm still treasures them.
“On Saturday my mother would give me 10 cents to go to the Garrick or Princess Theater,” wrote Emile Price from Redwood City. “I would take about half a chicken and some homemade bread, sit down in front, eat my chicken and bread while watching the finest vaudeville acts.”
“I was from South of Market in 1900 and it’s your fault that I reminisce and bother you,” wrote another reader.
Flamm is proud that his books have touched a chord, even if the term “nostalgia” has overtones of sentimentality.
“I may be guilty of sharing an unrealistic view,” he says, “but I still believe it — that I was very lucky to have grown up when I did.”