Growing Up- Hayward Style

I grew up in Hayward, CA. A blue collar city in the San Francisco Bay Area between Oakland and San Jose. My family and I lived a lot of those years on Tehama Ave. It was in unincorporated Hayward which means that there were no sidewalks and if something caught on fire you had to call the County Fire Department.





Here is a Google view of the 'hood:


That square at the top of the picture is an apartment building that used to be a field when I was a kid. It caught on fire every year. I guess the County Fire Department would respond. We lived across the street- about where the "a" is in "Tehama" from the pic. There is a large parking lot directly behind the house that served as a short cut to the nearest store, the school and the church parking lot itself which proved to be a playground. It was a blacktop parking lot and in the summer the heat would build up and make being barefoot nearly impossible and I was barefoot a lot during the summer. I remember trying to cross the parking lot one day in the summer and it was so hot I couldn't take more than a few steps. I had to take my shirt off and throw it ahead a few steps then jump on the shirt and repeated that to cross the molten tar of that lot.

Anyway, what got me thinking about the old neighborhood was an article I was reading about a vice bust at a massage parlor. When I was a kid, there was a massage parlor near a liquor store on the corner of South Garden and A Street. I was called "Suzi's School of Sexual Awareness". My buddy and I were eager to learn what went on in Suzi's school. When I was at his house, we used to look up the number in the phone book and call over there "How much for a massage?" "Can I enroll in a class there?" "Is your refrigerator running?"

Invariably, they would ask us how old we were and then hang up on us. They never gave us the salacious details we craved. So we would go to the store and then as we passed SSOSA we would rap on the window and run to the nearby laundrymat awaiting our sexual awareness. We expected to see someone (Suzi herself?) come out in scantily clad lingerie and look to see who knocked on the window. She should have then invited the bold window rappers inside and show them around the school. Sadly, this never happened and one day Suzi closed up shop and moved.

What became of Suzi is anyone's guess.