[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
Martini: “Today is Tuesday, August 13th, 2002. My name’s John Martini. I’m an historian and a researcher for the National Park Service. And this is an oral history tape of Mr. George K. Whitney, Jr.” --
Whitney: “Junior.”
Martini: -- “Junior, George K. Whitney, Jr., being held at his residence in Friday Harbor, Washington.
“Mr. Whitney’s father and uncle founded Playland at the Beach and, for many years, operated the Cliff House and Sutro Baths. And Mr. Whitney, Jr., himself managed Cliff House Properties until it was sold to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
“Mr. Whitney, we’re doing this tape for the National Park Service. And you understand that this is a public document and other researchers can listen to it?”
Whitney: “Yes.”
Martini: “Great.
“The first thing I’d ask you, for the record, is can you give me your full name and your date of birth?”
Whitney: “George K. Whitney, Jr.; April 21, 1922.”
Martini: “And where were you born?”
Whitney: “San Francisco, California.”
Martini: “Okay. Were you raised in the city?”
Whitney: “Yes, primarily in the city, although at an early age, I went to boarding schools out of San Francisco. So that the answer would be yes and no.”
Martini: “Yes and no. But a native of San Francisco.
“If you could just kind of briefly give me the background of how your dad and your uncle came to be involved with Playland, initially, back in the 1920s.”
Whitney: “My father had -- with my uncle and a crew of Americans from up in the Seattle area, had gone to Australia with a collection of rides and everything and opened or added to the amusement park in Melbourne, Australia, called Luna Park. And they operated there and they got into their late second year or third -- early third year when World War I started; and the Australian government closed all forms of amusements and shows, theater and entertainment. And so the partners, George and Leo, were out of business. And then it was just a case of survival; because they were Americans, and certain jobs were closed to them by the Australian government because they were aliens.
“And out of that, my uncle’s interest in photography was such that they opened a quick-finish studio on Burke Street in Melbourne. And my dad concentrated on an arcade and shooting gallery. He convinced the Melbourne government that young Australian boys learning to shoot would be patriotic for the war, and they bought it. And with the combination of those activities, they survived through World War I.
“And they -- they split up. My uncle went back, I think, to art school. My dad came over, lived in Seattle for a few weeks; decided to go to San Francisco because he thought there would be a better opportunity. He came down to San Francisco, opened a shooting gallery on upper Market Street.
“Later on, my uncle joined him and they did a quick-finish studio. He had worked -- my uncle had worked with Eastman Kodak and had developed the ability to make a photo and get it dry enough that people could walk away with it in a little over a minute. And that was the first of the quick-finish photo, get your picture made while you wait.”
Martini: “Now, was this different from the old-fashioned tintypes?”
Whitney: “Yup.”
Martini: “Real photos.”
Whitney: “Real photos.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And they’d do it fast and you’d get your picture. And because it was still wet, you’d walk around with it, which was an advertisement. So my -- my father wouldn’t let Leo dry the picture completely.
“But they had this down on Burke Street. Then my dad -- or on Market Street. And then my dad had the further opportunity of possibly a shooting gallery out at Chutes at the Beach, which was the amusement park that existed at the end of the Number 5,
Number 7, Number B streetcars, so that they could build up traffic on the weekends.”
Martini: “That was a question that I had. It’s almost a chicken and the egg: Did the streetcar lines come out to the beach because of those old concessions, the Chutes, or were the Chutes built” --
Whitney: “I think in the case of San Francisco, the streetcars came out after things got going. However, most streetcar lines that terminated at amusement parks in the East came about for the streetcar trying to find something to do to get people to ride. So it’s probably a combination of both attitudes, was what started that going with Playland --Chutes at the Beach.”
Martini: “So when your dad and uncle got going out at Chutes at the Beach, we’re talking after World War I, early 1920s?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “What was the Chutes at the Beach amusement park like?”
Whitney: “Very primitive, but it was coming along pretty good; because it had the Big Dipper, the big roller coaster. And it had another ride -- high ride called the Bobsled, and it had the Chutes, which was the -- where the name came from -- which was the water chute. You’d take a car down into the lake and splash water all over everywhere.”
Martini: “Kind of like those log rides they have now?”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“Now, those three rides existed on the property, and the merry-go-round was there. I’m not -- I’m not certain about the -- the funhouse, but I have a tendency to believe it was there, too. Probably in a much more primitive layout and with attractions and so forth that later on came. But it -- my dad started out with the one shooting gallery; eventually, worked up to where he had three. Then later became the manager when the prime lessee went, after the war, back to Germany.”
Martini: “Who was the prime lessee?”
Whitney: “Fred – well, it was Fred and Bill Friedle.”
Martini: “Friedle.”
Whitney: “The Friedles. And Frederick was really the one that domineered. Bill was a very mild, sweet, old German gentleman. And Frederick was a pretty strong-willed, opinionated -- just the opposite of his brother. But he had the power, ‘cause he made certain that the lease was in his name first.
“But my dad -- when Fred went back to Germany, he retained my father to manage the concessions that he had, rather than his brother managing them.”
Martini: “Oooh.”
Whitney: “So this set up a relationship at that time. And Frederick stayed longer in Germany than originally anticipated. And during that time, the -- the representative of the Swinerton estate, who owned the property and the -- leased the property of Playland, became very friendly with my dad and admired his drive and imagination. And by the time Frederick came back, my dad was general manager of the whole operation.
“And -- but the Friedles stayed on the property, ran the merry-go-round and the merry-go-round restaurant. And then gradually, over the years, all of the other activities, except the food, my dad and uncle took over under Whitney’s -- under Whitney Brothers.”
Martini: “Whitney Brothers.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “So the -- so it would be fair to say the Swinertons originally owned the land underneath, and the Friedles managed all the concessions?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “And when your dad and uncle eventually brought it all together, they ran all the -- everything except the food concessions and merry-go-round?”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“Most of the food concessions, it just so happened, were all owned by Greeks, almost completely. And most of them, contrary to the old idea of the Greek greasy spoon, ran very good food operations and clean. They were good and they turned out good products.”
Martini: “So the -- the Whitney Brothers, did they formally -- did they formally incorporate at a certain point? Or how did -- what was the operational organization?”
Whitney: “Well, there was, of course, my mother, my father, my uncle and his wife. The women were just like sisters, had been together in Australia and so forth.”
Martini: “Oh.”
Whitney: “In fact, my mother was Australian, and Dad married out there.”
Martini: “So your mom’s from Australia?”
Whitney: “My mother was Australian. My sister was born there before I came along, but I was born in San Francisco when my father and mother came back to the states.”
Martini: “And they used to take you down, used to play around the” --
Whitney: “Well, for” --
Martini: -- “Playland?”
Whitney: -- “quite a few years, my mother and aunt had the Orange Mill”--
Martini: “Oh.”
Whitney: -- “which was on the front side where the parking was and so forth.
“And it was a fresh-squeezed orange -- orange juice, and there was a big model of a half orange on the back wall with a track that came out of the top and circled around the
onion -- the orange and disappeared into a hole and then went on a mechanical lift back up to the top and rolled around again.”
Martini: “These oranges were like running around on tracks?”
Whitney: “Yeah, down a -- just a wire retaining track rather than on any kind of a vehicle. And they -- the two women had that; that was -- as we always used to joke, that was to keep the women out of the men’s hair.
“But -- and I was about four or five, and I would be free to roam -- to be on the block in front of the Orange Mill and the other activities. I could go from one corner to the other corner. And so it was sort of a nursery for me, had the full run. And, of course, being the ‘bosses’’ -- in quotes -- kid, I got a lot of attention from a lot of the tenants, especially the restaurants, and got fed a lot of extra food.”
Martini: “Now, when did they start calling it Whitneys Playland at the Beach? Was there a clean break from the shooting” --
Whitney: “No. The Whitneys Playland, I don’t think ever became an official name. It sort of -- the ‘World-Famous Cliff House’ rather than just Cliff House. I -- there’d be --because Playland was becoming a very popular name in the amusement business. Playland Rye, New York; Playland, Seattle; Playland, Vancouver. It was the most popular name and was available at the time that my dad and uncle thought of using it. So Whitney Brothers became Playland at the Beach just as an advertising name.”
Martini: “Okay. How did you folks refer to it in legal terms? Was it referred to as” --
Whitney: “It would have been Whitney Brothers, because it would have been the original partnership.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And then it went through the changes, from tax standpoints, of my father giving part of the business to my mother and my uncle giving part of his interest to his wife; and then the consolidations of the later time and so forth.
“And, of course, eventually, my father bought my uncle out, so -- and his wife had already died. So it had come back to him and his daughter. And when my dad bought them out, then it incorporated and it became Whitneys at the Beach. And, of course, it remained that until the end.
“But the ownership made a few flip-flops, because after -- after my father’s death, why, then it was just my mother and my sister and I. Then we had our split-ups and so forth.
“And then -- I wish I could remember his name, but I’ll remind you on here -- Bob” – [ed: Bob Frazier]
Martini: “Bob.”
Whitney: -- “who did the Comstock, bought my mother’s interest; and, all of a sudden, my sister and I have a partner.
“And the same thing happens at a later time up at the Cliff House. And out of the trades all back and forth to get, first, Bob out of the Cliff House property, that was -- had already been commercially developed, we traded his interest for raw land behind.”
Martini: “Raw land?”
Whitney: “Raw. Basically, the original Sutro Baths tank area and the -- and the rear of it and -- and -- oh, I forgot my train of thought for a moment.”
Martini: “Well, we were kind of going over the origin of where the Whitney Brothers, how that evolved.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “And you did mention a couple things. I just kind of wanted to get some
dates” --
Whitney: “Sure.”
Martini: -- “for the tape.
“Your -- when did your dad, George Whitney, Sr., when did he buy out Leo, about when? You don’t have to be exact.”
Whitney: “Can you switch that off for a minute?”
[Pause in proceedings.]
Martini: “Mr. Whitney just handed me a whole packet of information; basically, a time table of the names, the changes, the dates and the titles and ownership transfers. This is incredible. Limited partnership deeds -- yes.
“Could I take this and copy it and bring it back to you?”
Whitney: “Yeah, sure.”
Martini: “Great.”
Whitney: “There might be a second copy there, with loose pages and a stapled page. Is there a group stapled together?”
Martini: “I’m looking right now. It looks like an eight-page document. No, they’re separate documents. That’s okay. That’s okay.”
Whitney: “Okay.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“So your dad bought out his brother and” --
Whitney: “Eventually, he bought out my -- my uncle was seven years older than my father. So he reached an age where he wanted to retire. So my dad bought out his interest. And in the deal, my uncle was -- got ownership of the building that became the maintenance building for all of the Playland maintenance. And then my dad rented it back from a perpetual-lease type of thing.”
Martini: “Where was that building located?”
Whitney: “That was on the block immediately behind the front block, where the -- the airplanes, the office, the arcade. It’s that -- you’ve got a photo -- big, long building with two big doors” --
Martini: “Right; yes.”
Whitney: -- “with a service station in front.”
Martini: “Yes. That was”--
Whitney: “Right there.”
Martini: “That was where, later, Fun Tier Town was located?”
Whitney: “Fun Tier was at the other -- was down where the Laugh-in-the-Dark was” --
Martini: “Where Laugh-in-the-Dark ride.”
Whitney: -- “which was further down -- well, it was the next space, all the way to the corner of Cabrillo.”
Martini: “Cabrillo and -- and, okay, La Playa there.
“And your -- so Cliff House Properties, that’s a name that appears a lot. When did that come in? Was that under your tenure?”
Whitney: “My dad, in partnership with my mother, bought the Cliff House, I believe, in 1937. And so there was that partnership, which was completely separate.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And that was just my mother and father.”
Martini: “It was just your mom and your dad, separate -- okay.”
Whitney: “On the Cliff House.
“On Playland, when my father acquired the property and incorporated -- at least when he incorporated – I’m not too sure if it was before or after getting the Swinerton property, which was Playland property, but it was pretty close to that time – my father incorporated the business, dividing the ownership with 30 – I think it was 36/36 to my mother and father, 13-and-a-half/13-and-a-half to my sister and I. And so we became part of the corporation. And from then on, any transactions involved the sale of the stock, rather than the sale of assets.”
Martini: “Okay. Okay.
“Your dad and your uncle set up some really interesting real estate transactions here.”
Whitney: “Yeah. It -- well, it -- it was his brother and his partner for years. And so he wanted to guarantee him a life income.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “And they had that kind of trust and friendship, as well as their relationship.”
Martini: “Mm-hm.
“Do you know how your dad got interested in the Cliff House itself?”
Whitney: “He saw a potential there very early on and made arrangements with the Sutro estate to get a key. And he used to go up and sit in the southwest corner of the Cliff House, which looked down at -- the length of Playland and down the coast, and dream of the potential of how he, if he took it, could he make money, since no one had before, which is really his great personal challenge: To do what no one else had done.”
Martini: “Make money off the Cliff House?”
Whitney: “Make money off of the Cliff House, in this case; but make money off of collections that he would have bought, different things of that nature. It was part of his life drive. And he did it in many ways, making money for himself and the partnership; making money for others, where he would see something and give them advice. And if --if the -- in many cases, the advice worked out terrifically.”
Martini: “So he -- he was taking an interest in an area that -- well, this is the Depression, 1937. And the Cliff House was shut down.
“Was Playland doing okay? Was it making money during the Depression?”
Whitney: “Playland, as my father always said, was ‘a nickel-and-dime business,’ will do well when -- when the rest of the world is doing bad; because it was a nickel-and-dime. And it was very true. We did, from a family standpoint, very well during the Depression, the years of the entire Depression.”
Martini: “Without being crass, it was cheap entertainment that the unemployed could afford.”
Whitney: “Yup.”
Martini: “That’s great.”
Whitney: “It was good entertainment and fun entertainment and clean entertainment, and it reached a lot of people and what they wanted; and it was a diversion from the hardship of the -- that a lot of ‘em were experiencing, with jobs and so forth, because of the Depression.”
Martini: “Arcades and places, they’ve had -- they’ve kind of been tainted by a carnie-type atmosphere. How did your” --
Whitney: “Well” --
Martini: “How did your dad deal with all these people coming in? There must have been some elements -- you must have to keep an eye on the different concessions.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“One of the best examples, and kind of an interesting story, Harold Smith, Smith’s Club up in Reno, the gambling -- I’ve got to get the names right. The son was Harold; the father -- oh, gosh, I just draw a blank. But then there was another son.
“But Harold was a born gambler, and he -- he went to work out at Playland in the games. And he was up and down the midway, gambling with all of our people. When things were slow, he’d be up betting that he could knock the baseballs off the [shelf] -- that type of deal.”
Martini: “Putting some real money on the games of skill.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And my -- my father didn’t want any professional gamblers connected with the
business -- Raymond Smith was his father, Raymond Smith; and then the other was Raymond Smith, Jr.
“But in the whole thing, my dad’s advice to the father was get the kid out of here and get him up into Reno, where he can make some money. And out of the conversations, Harold, as I understand it, opened a penny bingo. Because who’s going to complain about a penny game? And so he was able to work himself into a business that had a lot of criminal element controlling from the big -- the big shows and the big gambling houses. And he started out with a penny bingo, gradually built it into the” --
Martini: “The Harold’s Club today?”
Whitney: “Hmm?”
Martini: “The Harold’s Club of today?”
Whitney: -- “The Harold’s Club of today.
“But that -- that’s kind of a story of what my dad saw. He and the father became good friends. And the fact that my dad didn’t just throw Harold out and create a deal was greatly appreciated back and forth. And Raymond became a good friend of my father and, at a later date, when Harold’s Club did their first big remodel and did the big panorama that’s out in the front, that was designed by my uncle; and my uncle set up the gun collection inside. So there was a continuing relationship.”
Martini: “Now, you mentioned that your uncle, Leo, was -- did a lot of the artistic and design work?”
Whitney: “Yeah. He was the artist of the business, creative in that way. My dad was the creative artist when it came to the financial and the business and the approach to amusements. My dad was a great one for knowing what people would like, and he then was able to tell his brother what he would like in the way of a finished product without having any ability whatsoever to get that finished product. And my uncle would put it together and do the artwork within the framework of what they both liked in the way of printing, design, all of this.”
Martini: “That – that very unique Whitney’s kind of labeling and typeface, the signage --”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “that was all over?”
“And was your uncle -- he was responsible for Topsy’s Roost design?”
Whitney: “Oh, yes, he did -- almost exclusively.”
Martini: “Tell me about Topsy’s -- Topsy’s Roost. When did that get going?”
Whitney: “Topsy’s -- there was a restaurant at the southwest end of the front block, the Big Dipper block. And a chap put the -- got the idea of the half fried chicken and so forth. And over a little period of time, my dad acquired the right to do that job; because the -- the owner wanted to retire. And so they ran that corner stall as Topsy’s Roost. And my uncle started the design work, and then they realized they had -- really had something.
“So they took the big chateau building or chalet building at the far end” --
Martini: “The casino building.”
Whitney: -- “the casino building, yes, and designed the main Topsy’s Roost.
“And I’m -- I’m hazy at when it opened, but I know that we were going full blast in ’29; and it didn’t last too many years after that because of the -- the economy, as far as food was concerned and restaurants.”
Martini: “Oh, you – yeah, you opened just at the start of the big Depression.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Okay. I’m going to flip the tape.”
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]
Martini: “You’d mentioned -- we were talking about Topsy’s Roost on the other side of the tape. That was -- everybody that worked there, except the manager, they were black?”
Whitney: “Every one, yeah. Now, I’m not certain about the orchestra. But for a while, Red Nickels and his Five Little Pennies played there, before they became as well known as later. And I -- I don’t recall remembering the orchestra. My memory became sharper when the entertainment, basically, was provided by the -- a combo of negros who were employees -- waiters and so forth -- and also played music and tap danced and so forth as entertainment.
“Because the musicians union wanted to change the Cliff House -- or Topsy’s from a Class B or C cabaret to a full-blown Class A, which would have been about two or three times the expense. And as a result of that, plus the fact that the Depression had really gotten going -- well, not the Depression, but the Crash had gotten going in ’29 and was sort of the handwriting on the wall. And my dad said, ‘I’m just not going to let them coerce me.’ So he and my uncle closed it” --
Martini: “Really.”
Whitney: -- “closed it when it was still making money.
“My dad was always very afraid of fire. And it just -- so it started from the first night, when the place was open and jammed with over a thousand people, that a fire, very minor, but got started in the kitchen and -- I believe in the deep fryer for the chicken or for the potatoes. And the fire department came in and very quietly herded people around and so forth, but got the -- the exits opened, everything ready to evacuate; but they were able to get it under control. And practically no one knew that such an occurrence had taken place on opening night.
“But from that moment on, my dad was always afraid of fire. And the connection -- it was an old wooden structure, the whole building.”
Martini: “Yeah, all of Playland was -- was all wood, wasn’t it, out there?”
Whitney: “Yeah, all wood.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“Well, (inaudible) has quite a history of fires and explosions out there in that neighborhood anyway, in the old days.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “So was -- taking over the Cliff House and reopening it, that came after the Topsy’s Roost shut -- shut down.”
Whitney: “Yes.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“I think my dad acquired the Cliff House in ’37, so the reopening of it occurred after that and was just primarily the main restaurant.
“And there was the continual back and forth between my -- my dad, who wanted the -- the business, basically, shopped at the tourist, where my uncle wanted to upgrade it. And his then wife wanted to become the decorator and everything, and my dad lost out to them and opened it. And it had crystals on the table and all of the fine deals of a fine restaurant, but business didn’t take off. And, finally, my dad says, ‘I’ve had it.’ And he took all of the -- all of those fine accouterments and got rid of them and brought it down to -- down to earth, where the people who were wearing the shorts, coming out to San Francisco, could still come in and eat, where with my -- my aunt -- at that time aunt -- she wanted them comin’ out with top hat and tails.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“Restaurants are risky businesses. And in 1937, that must have been a real risk to take on a place as big and as remote as Cliff House and open it to the” –
Whitney: “Yeah.
“I -- of course, I -- I wasn’t that interested in what was going on. I was away in boarding schools and, not too long after that, was up in college; and then I was into the service. And my activity with the business, from a business sense, didn’t start until ’46, when I got out of the Army.”
Martini: “Out of the military, hm-hm.”
Whitney: “And I started laying around, and my father said, ‘Tomorrow, you go down and start doing this at the -- at the Playland.’ And to escape that end, I went back to school. And then I -- I dropped out of school and decided to go to work for my father.”
Martini: “How did you -- how did you first get involved with the day-to-day operations? You said your dad tried to bring -- to bring you in and you went to school.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “When you did finally get back, what did he have you doing?
“I guess this is probably about 1950 or so?”
Whitney: “Well, I had -- I had spent summers -- and I can’t tell you the actual years --but I had worked in some of the hot-dog stands, the pie shop, the different food facilities. For some reason, he wanted me -- I think because he didn’t like the food any more than I did. Not the quality of it or the taste of it, but the business of it. But -- here I go again.”
Martini: “The day-to-day” --
Whitney: “I had something going.”
Martini: “He had you working in the food -- around the food concessions.”
Whitney: “Yeah -- oh, you asked me how did I get going in the business.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “And so that was summer business, quite a bit. And after the war and after the school, when I decided to go to work for him -- I worked for the Bank of America for a short while in the foreign trade division. We were -- I was on an assignment to open
the -- be part of the team that opened the first Bank of America in Tokyo.”
Martini: “After the war.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And I didn’t take to the bureaucracy of the bank and went out and told my dad I was ready to go to work. So my first job and the main job that I had for -- for quite a while was running the midway; all the games, overseeing all the rides, except from a mechanical standpoint” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “from an operational standpoint.
“And I worked most of the games: The skeeballs, the -- the bingos and the things of that nature.
“Now, when I say ‘bingo,’ there was a game that came out down in Southern California called Fascination. And Fascination was a small version of bing- -- of what later became bingo. But my uncle writes about the creation of bingo, and he claims in there that they were -- that he and my dad were the first to do the real big amusement park bingo and give it that name.”
Martini: “Really?”
Whitney: “Now, my uncle was not prone to exaggerate, like my dad was. I don’t know if exaggerate, but -- embellish.”
Martini: “Embellish.”
Whitney: “But -- so there’s a deep tie to bingo in our operation.”
Martini: “That’s -- so bingo of a thousand church basements may have been born at Playland.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“His -- his -- my uncle definitely says that they created the name there. The concept of the game already existed, but it hadn’t been really pulled into a deal. My uncle designed an operation so that it was a big room and -- with a -- a target cart that would roll up and down, so that there would -- it could roll in front of the individual player, who would them throw the baseball to roll around on the top and drop into a numbered box or a lettered box. And it was that concept that became really the bingo in amusement parks.”
Martini: “So when you were supervising these various games, you were -- what would you do? You know, go out to the skeeball and make sure that it was on the up and up?”
Whitney: “Basically -- basically, you patrol the midway” --
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: -- “just constantly, back and forth, and drink coffee.
“God, we had so much horrible coffee in those years, but it -- primarily, it was -- I always worked from noon until midnight. I had a 12-hour day from the day I started, with time out for dinner at home.”
Martini: “So this was -- this was your role when Walt Disney came up and talked with your dad?”
Whitney: “This -- I had graduated so that I had taken over some of the responsibility of the food operations that -- restaurants, as they went out of business, we took over and modified. So that we had, at one time, 14 of our own restaurants or food facilities: The Pie Shop, the It Stand, the Sea Lion restaurant and so forth.
“And we had an excellent man, Al Hines, who was the manager of the food business. And I worked with Al because he’d grown up -- he’d seen me grown up, and he was a great one for teaching. And so we worked together, and I became, in his absence, the food manager. He really ran the thing and told me what to do, but I would have that.
“But the main thing that I had and where I was creative in my own way were in some of the games that we had. Rides were -- basically, my brother-in-law got involved in, although he was primarily in building. And then we retained his brother, who became top engineer, on the ride maintenance.
“So there was a continuation of family. My brother-in-law was my father’s gofer, and --which my father needed. And Floyd did the job and did that job well, and even to the point of helped design the 1950 remodel of the Cliff House and so forth.”
Martini: “What was his full name?”
Whitney: “Floyd R. Gillman.”
Martini: “Floyd R. Gillman.”
Whitney: “My sister was Beatrice Gillman.”
Martini: “Okay. When you mentioned the rides and designing the rides and all that, were the rides that were there, were they off-the-shelf rides?
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “They were? Okay.”
Whitney: “Basically, all off the shelf, except for things like the Fun House. Of course, the (missing) by -- I believe it was the Looff brothers. Either that or they did the merry-go-round.”
Martini: “Looff brothers were the merry-go-round, I know.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And I forget -- Lutz” --
Martini: “Oh, okay.”
Whitney: -- “I think Lutz did the Big Dipper.
“And we had a man, William Smith, Bill Smith, who did all the maintenance and ran the thing. And he was a real old-timer and a wonderful man.
“You know, an awful lot of the people that worked for my dad were Masons, because my dad was a very early-on Mason after Australia, before he came down to San Francisco. And it just so happened that the Masons gravitated -- he didn’t seek them out to make the operation exclusive, but he ended up mostly with Masons. And it was -- the people that came out of the Masonic order at that time were -- were a little above the usual class. They -- they had a belief in things and they had the camaraderie of their lodges and so forth. And they were -- some -- the best employees that we ever had in management were all Masons.”
Martini: “Was it easier to have them all just as straight employees on -- on salary than to have a bunch of independent concessionaires in there?”
Whitney: “Well, we’ve gone through both. I wanted to run the things myself. My dad had gotten tired and wanted to get some of the stuff off his back, and I was still traipsing around in the Army or in the thing. So he switched to a lot of concessionaires. And by the time he had died and I had come in as full -- as president of the corporation, I wanted to go back in and run the thing ourselves; because I saw the way that the whole operation was integrated, that you couldn’t run the rides without the food. There was an integration. And we wanted just more control of the operation, to change it when we wanted and to put in new when we wanted and so forth.”
Martini: “What was the -- what was the big profit there? Was everything bringing in equal or did some things really” --
Whitney: “Games -- games became really -- from a money standpoint, the games that were quasi-gambling, where people could bet -- and they couldn’t bet more than two cents, except that they could bet multiples of two-cents tickets; but they couldn’t ever bet any more than a dollar.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “So it -- the Spinning Wheels of Fortune and so forth were all predicated off of the 10-cent play.”
Martini: “Gotcha.”
Whitney: “And” --
Martini: “Were the rides -- did they -- were they an attraction to draw people in for the games or did the rides” --
Whitney: “Rides primarily attracted the younger people.”
Martini: “Ah-ha.”
Whitney: “The older people wanted to have the fun of -- of the bingo game, playing the Skeeball, which was relatively new and very -- very well liked by the older people because there wasn’t a lot of weight to it and a lot of exercise, but they could play it well. The food went for everybody.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “But the games were kind of divided, because there were, as we said, wheel games and skill games. Skill games are the ones where there is an -- an element of skill. And by that element of skill, at that time, the law was such that it wasn’t a gamble.”
Martini: “Ah.”
Whitney: “And what made bingo legal at that time was the fact that each patron threw the ball into the hopper, and where it ended was a little bit up to his skill. Of course, it was more up to chance than to his skill; but that element of skill was accepted for years.”
Martini: “One ride that I specifically remember -- I could never quite understand -- was the Diving Bell?”
Whitney: “The Diving Bell -- and I’m going to be hazy about this, but I think the first Diving Bell -- and her name was, if I’m not mistaken, was the same as yours, Martine or some -- she’s close to your name.
“But, anyway, she and her husband put this game -- this ride in the San Francisco Fair. And then after the fair was over in ’40 or whatever year, my dad had ‘em come out and they built it out at Playland.”
Martini: “So that -- so it did come from the World’s Fair.”
Whitney: “Yeah. That’s where they had set up it originally. And -- gosh, I -- I’m sure their name is similar to yours.”
Martini: “Was that -- was it supposed to be an underwater aquarium or was it just supposed to be just a ride where you went down and then flew to the surface like a cork? Because that was the outcome.”
Whitney: “Yeah. The -- what eventually knocked the Diving Bell out was the high cost of getting the fish.”
Martini: “Oh, really?”
Whitney: “Getting them alive and into the water, because you had to have salt water” --
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: -- “and all of the things.
“So it was a continual expense to bring in a shark or an octopus. I mean, we had -- in the early days of it, they had any kind of a fish that you could imagine off of the Pacific coast; and it was very good. It was very educational. It was like the early-day Marine World.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And then as it became too expensive to get the fish or you’d only have a couple of them, that was when they’d cut it loose and it would pop up; and that made it a ride, as opposed to an exhibit.”
Martini: “Thank you. For -- for 45 years, I’ve been wondering what did I miss? Where were the fish? I was going down” --
Whitney: “You were just too late.”
Martini: “Too late.”
Whitney: “Yeah. In the beginning, they had -- they had -- of course, most of the sharks are dogfish” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “you know, and these kind of things; and every once in a while, they’d get an octopus.
“They didn’t live very long.”
Martini: “It looks like, from the photo books and all, that Playland was always getting facelifts. They were putting new facades on buildings. Was this to” –
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “ keep it fresh or to” --
Whitney: “It’s just part of -- you can’t let things get stale. It goes on right today in Disney World and Disneyland. They’re constantly changing rides and upgrading things, changing the facades on rides that have been in there for 20 years now. So it’s -- it’s part of the salesmanship or the showmanship of the business itself.”
Martini: “I really noticed it on the dark rides at” –
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “at Playland; they’d -- they’d get some -- some new treatment every few years.”
Whitney: “Well, we -- one of the reasons the dark rides at Playland changed so much was because we moved them a lot. Like Dark Mystery, which was on -- way in the back, that was right where the -- what eventually got there? Well, it was where, originally, Noah’s Ark was or the terminus for Shoot the Chutes, but it was in the forward block. And I just -- I don’t recall right now why we moved it to the back, other than maybe to help get the back going; because it was a popular ride.”
Martini: “When you say ‘the back’ and ‘the front,’ what do you mean by that?”
Whitney: “Well, the front consisted of three city blocks: North of Balboa -- no, north of Anza, then from Anza to Cabrillo, then from Cabrillo to Fulton. And behind that was the block from Cabrillo to Fulton; and then the half block, where the maintenance and so forth was, was in the block just to the north of that. It was the half -- the front-half block. On the corner was the Laugh-in-the-Dark.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “Then the end where, eventually, Fun Tier Town came.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “That would be the northeast corner of Cabrillo and La Playa.”
Whitney: “Well, La Playa runs north and south” --
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: -- “which is truly 48th Avenue.”
Martini: “Yeah, right. Yeah. I got that, yeah.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “And all -- all this -- and even -- it was all the Whitney properties. And then under -- eventually, you bought the land, too, away from the” --
Whitney: “Oh, we bought” --
Martini: -- “Swinertons.”
Whitney: “Well, no, they didn’t have any of that property. My dad had acquired these properties way before he bought the front Playland property.”
Martini: “Oh, my apologies; okay.”
Whitney: “As pieces of property around the area would become available, he’d snatch them up.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And so he ended up with that whole block. There was an apartment house down at the end, which was kind of a hotel. Then underneath that was a restaurant. The first decoration was all boxers, and then it became music boxes and so forth. In fact, I --down in here someplace, I’ve got a bottle of Wray & Nephew rum that was in that bar.
And then the upstairs over there was -- was a warehouse.
“And -- are you familiar or aware of the Dore paintings that we had? Okay. That’s another story, so I’ll get into that later.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “But, in any event, they were all stored up in this building, along with personal property from the family; certain things that my dad wanted to hang on to, like the fuselage from Admiral Byrd’s plane that he flew over the North Pole or one of them that he flew over the North Pole, and these paintings and everything. And that’s where one of the big fires was.”
Martini: “Oh.”
Whitney: “That was a neon sign to let go.”
Martini: “You -- you just alluded to something. Your dad collected -- both your dad and your uncle collected collections.”
Whitney: “Well, my dad collected the collections” --
Martini: “Exactly; okay.”
Whitney: -- “not my uncle.”
Martini: “And he -- kind of -- we kind of jumped around, but” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “I’d kind of like to follow one thing through:
“And that is, for you, personally, you -- you were involved with the Walt Disney Corporation.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“Can you explain how that happened?”
Whitney: “Well, Stanford Research was hired by Walt Disney Productions or by WED Enterprise, Walter E. Disney Enterprise, which is a personal design concept company and so forth. They retained Stanford Research to study, first, the economic feasibility of Walt’s concept of a new outdoor amusement attraction. And they did a good job on it. In that job, they interviewed a lot of people in the business, one of which was my father. And upon the interviewee’s coming back to talk to Walt, they recommended that he meet my father. He says, ‘There’s a kindred soul.’ So they eventually met.
“And when they sent their -- the main team up to talk specifically to some questions, the whole team came up. And I was given the job of showing them around the amusement park and the activities and some of the things that we had created. And they went back. Stanford did the -- at the same time, started a site survey for the property; and, eventually, it was picked down in Anaheim.
“But they -- Walt asked my father -- contacted my dad and wanted to know if he could borrow me as a consultant to talk about the practical aspects of amusement. Evidently, I had impressed the people that I’d shown around; and they -- they recommended me.
“And so I went down as a consultant, and I was there for -- as a consultant at the studio with the artists and everything. And I was just electrified by the whole concept of Disneyland. And Walt picked up on it immediately and wanted to know if I would like to work for them full time, which I did. And I was the only person on the entire project from the outdoor amusement business in Disneyland. All the rest were studio” --
Martini: “Oh.”
Whitney: -- “related people.
“The cartoonists, who did the artwork; Roger Broggie, who designed the steam engines, and on down the line like that. And Walt would take one of his top finance men, Larry Tryon, to become the financial -- the treasurer of Disneyland and so forth.
“So I ended up being the seventh employee of the Disneyland Corporation.”
Martini: “How was it working with those other types of people? Did they get it? Did they” --
Whitney: “Oh, boy. Nobody worked for Walt that didn’t get it because -- but they got it on their own, by example. Walt set the finest example that I’ve ever met. I -- I think he’s, without question, comparable or surpasses my father. But they were two men cut out of the same cloth in quality and in perception and in being able to convey enthusiasm.”
“So people were working 12, 16 hours a day, not because anybody was telling them to, but because they wanted to.”
Martini: “Did you have to do a lot of educating them about what rides were about and how they should work? Did they have ideas?”
Whitney: “That’s -- that’s pretty much -- an artist would come up with a creative idea. I would look at it and make suggestions of the type of equipment that would be needed to do the job or I would come up with a -- with a mechanical device” --
[Tape ends abruptly.]
[Begin Tape 2, Side A]
Martini: “I’m sorry, the tape cut off. You were talking about how you worked with the artists to design the rides.”
Whitney: “Yeah. The artists that worked on the Disney project were usually the finest of the artists that Walt had, and he pulled them into his WED Enterprise company. If they were going -- if he saw them as being full time on designing working, if it wasn’t for a specific project, he’d pull them into WED -- WED being his private company. The head of it was Dick Cottrell, who was Walt’s brother-in-law and who became my closest friend and the man that I traveled all over Europe with looking for amusement attractions and so forth for the park, things that led to like the street of lights, the Parade of Lights. These kinds of things came out of that trip.”
Martini: “How long did you stay with Walt Disney Corp.?”
Whitney: “I was there for almost four years exact, two years before we opened and then two years after.”
Martini: “And Disneyland opened what year?”
Whitney: “Oh, August ’56, I think.”
Martini: “’56, right.
“Was -- did you take some ideas back with you after working with Walt Disney?”
Whitney: “Oh, yeah.”
Martini: “Did you learn from him?”
Whitney: “Fun Tier Town was an attempt to do something along -- to add the character. Of course, it wasn’t economically feasible.”
Martini: “Explain what Fun Tier Town was.”
Whitney: “Well, it was a -- the Laugh-in-the-Dark ride, which was a long, serpentine ride that occupied the corner of the half block behind the main office building and so forth, had gotten to the point where, mechanically, we wanted to take it out. And so it became an excuse for me to come up with the Fun Tier Town.
“And we had a train ride that we wanted to run. And I could see how we could go behind the shop building and into a lot area and make a U-turn and come back and put in a trellis and a tunnel and, you know, all these kinds of things with a little train ride. And then the other rides for the kids: We had a little dark ride and a few other kiddie rides.”
Martini: “It didn’t -- it didn’t work?”
Whitney: “Well, it didn’t work because nobody followed up. I -- I left on something other. I -- I -- the timing is such that I couldn’t tell you what I left. I might have left for the Seattle Fair in ’60, because I ended up being up here for almost four years working on the Seattle Fair.”
Martini: “I remember a lot of media publicity on the kids’ Saturday morning TV shows about the new attraction, Fun Tier Town.”
Whitney: “Uh-huh.”
Martini: “So you -- you -- there was some real (inaudible), they call it now.”
Whitney: “I -- I got a tremendous amount of responsibility in the Seattle Fair by default. Nobody wanted to do the dirty work. And so I ended up with it. I ended up with getting all the food in there, of developing the Armory into the Food Circus; of putting all of the trash deals under the stadium; you know, like the Encyclopedia Britannica and these kind of salesmen, the demonstrators, the potato peeler they’d show you.”
“I had the responsibility of all the shows, other than the art shows, other than the Opera House, the ballet. The girlie shows, those kind of things, I had to do. And then I had the responsibility to get the entire amusement park in.”
Martini: “For the -- for the big Seattle Fair, yeah.”
Whitney: “And I did it with only two paid employees and myself. But nobody wanted to do it, so I had an absolute free hand, almost.”
Martini: “Yeah. Every World’s Fair has kind of like a midway area, right?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“And so -- so you were it for the Seattle Fair.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Wow.
“So -- you kept, in other words, going from one project to another. You became” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “a specialist in this.”
Whitney: “After -- after Disney, then that was the Brussels deal. Later on, I -- well, even before that, I got involved in the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley as the director of -- on the committee for merchandising.
“Then I was the Osa- -- yeah, the Osaka World’s Fair. And I got involved in the Mon- -- in the Montreal one, putting in a Japanese diving-for-pearls deal. And, of course, the Seattle Fair. God, I’m leaving a couple out. But I would -- I was able -- because of the fact that I was an owner and officer and the only one in the family that was really running the business, I was able to get away and work other projects, almost all of them as a consultant; or I’d get in as a consultant on an operation and the operation would go bust, I’d have to take it over, which I did on the -- on the PolyTrade. That was the diving for pearls up in Montreal” --
Martini: “Montreal.”
Whitney: -- “and these kind of things.”
Martini: “Now, your dad passed away in ’58.”
Whitney: “’58.”
Martini: “Right.
“And what happened to the Whitney Brothers corporation when he passed away, it became whose property?”
Whitney: “Well, Whitney Brothers had gone out of existence. It was Whitneys at the Beach, the corporation.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “When my dad died, he gave his interest -- of course, he had no interest -- yeah, he did -- he gave his interest in stock in the main corporation of Whitneys at the Beach and he gave his interest in stock for the Cliff House property. So that meant that in one -- in all cases, it was my mother, my sister, myself.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And before he had died, he had designated me to run the business, primarily because of the success I’d had in doing things in the Disney and so forth.
“And -- then my brother-in-law was a nice guy, but he was a gofer. He just -- he took my dad’s laundry up and got it back to him, and then he dabbled in this design where he’d build eaves way out; and then in two years, they’re like this (indicating).”
Martini: “What, are you referring to the Cliff House, the” --
Whitney: “No. This was primarily ones that he did down in Playland.”
Martini: “Oh, okay.”
“Was this Mr. Gillman, Floyd Gillman?”
Whitney: “Gil, yeah.”
Martini: “Floyd Gillman.
“And the -- at some point, he had mentioned that your mother sold the Playland and it kind of caught you guys by surprise.”
Whitney: “I -- I get, right now, a little confused as to whether she sold her interest in Playland first or her interest in Cliff House, as to which one actually came first. I just -- I got the two mixed up, they’re -- they’re close enough together.
“But, in any event, my sister and I picked up the Sunday paper and found out that she had sold her -- whatever interest in whatever corporation it was to Bob [Frazier], who did the Comstock. And then we got in to -- oh, I believe the first move -- the first move was selling the Cliff House properties, of dividing the front from the back. That’s the one where we got Bob in as a half owner or as” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “or as a third owner or whatever it was.”
Martini: “When you said ‘the front from the back,’ you mean the Cliff House and what bordered Port Lobos from” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “the old site of the Baths.”
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: “This would be after it burned.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And I think that -- in fact, I’m certain that it was preceded, her selling and the newspaper article that came out about her selling her half interest in -- or 36 percent interest in Playland. And, all of a sudden, we got a new 36 percent owner and” --
Martini: “Controlling interest.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“So -- but I -- I -- I would not claim that to be the absolute fact, ‘cause I’m still hazy on it. Because she was still in a position, when we were negotiating -- I, at some point, got involved in the negotiation on the sale of the property at Playland once I said my sister --my mother’s got a third of this; my sister’s got a third; I’ve got a third, and I’m outvoted. Why fight it? I’m -- I’m finished fighting.
“So it came, I’m certain, after the Cliff House, then.”
Martini: “What time period?”
Whitney: “I’m not going to guess right now.”
Martini: “’60s?”
Whitney: “I’m not going to guess.”
Martini: “Not going to guess; okay.”
Whitney: “It had to be after the Seattle Fair.”
Martini: “After the Seattle Fair.”
Whitney: “That’s ’62.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “So it’s after that sometime.”
Martini: “I’ll see if I can’t find in the newspapers when that happened.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “You said there was newspaper coverage.”
Whitney: “You’ll run into it someplace.”
Martini: “We’ve talked mostly about Playland and just peripherally about the Cliff House itself. I kind of want to talk about the relations between your -- your dad, uncle, and how they dealt with the Sutro estate.
“Was Playland -- Playland was down here. Sutro’s -- venerable old Sutro’s was up the hill. Was that competition or did they work -- or did they work together or how did -- how did they see this” --
Whitney: “I believe my uncle was out of the picture completely on the Cliff House deal; that was my father. It was not Whitney Brothers, ever. So right from the beginning, it was Cliff House Properties.”
Martini: “So it would have been George K. Whitney, Sr., dealing right with the Sutro estate?”
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And the -- the other owner, that’s when he gave my mother half interest” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “in that.”
Martini: “Okay. Even though they -- what confuses me sometimes is you always see Whitney’s” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “stretched across the Cliff House.”
Whitney: “Yeah. It’s very hard to figure out what is the real, true name of the operation.”
Martini: “When -- and your understanding is that when your dad got the Cliff House, he also somehow got an interest in operating Sutro’s Baths at the same time?”
Whitney: “No, no. That was a later acquisition.”
Martini: “Later acquisition.”
Whitney: “But I have no recollection as when. That was probably sometime when I was on some other job. It was probably while I was down in Disneyland.”
Martini: “Oh, okay.
Whitney: “It could be tied back to that period.”
Martini: “I know from my reading that they did a big remodel of -- of Sutro’s in the late ‘30s, when they put the ice-skating rink in. And in 1952, it almost closed. And it says that it was purchased by George Whitney.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “And I guess he -- basically, he saved it, but the cost was” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini” -- “closing the baths part down.”
Whitney: “And then kept -- closed the baths part pretty quick and just relied on the ice-skating rink.
“So the back of the building was abandoned, all the dressing rooms and all that sort of stuff. So we had the museum in there, the collection of carriages and so forth, and the ice rink; was about it.”
Martini: “The collections, these are the ones that your dad -- the collections that your dad collected.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Right.
“Was a lot of the stuff that was in there things that he’d brought in? Specifically, I’m thinking about the carriages, the bicycle collections. There were spinning-wheel collections.”
Whitney: “Each of those three were acquired by my dad as collections of somebody else’s. I don’t know of other collections in Sutro’s than those.
“My brother-in-law and I went to Fiji and bought a steam engine that ran in the sugar-cane fields down there; brought it -- had it shipped back to the states. And my brother-in-law then, with wood -- not to make it running or anything -- made it look like the cab in front, engine that used to pull the -- the ferries to Cliff House railroad out to the Cliff House area. So we had that on exhibit in one of the windows up on the Point Lobos esplanade” --
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: -- “or whatever you want to call it.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “But little trips like that that we did. And my brother-in-law made the damn train look like the photos.”
Martini: “It looked just like it.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “It fooled a lot of people.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “A lot of people thought that one had survived.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “It was an old Baldwin engine that was built in ’26.”
Martini: “Do you know if it’s still around?”
Whitney: “I have no idea. I don’t even remember who I sold it to.”
Martini: “Well, it ended up at a place -- at a -- at a railroad museum down in the Santa Cruz mountains called Roaring Camp and Big Trees.”
Whitney: “That’s right. Roaring Camp, that’s right.”
Martini: “Yeah, it’s still down there.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“Later on, when we’re talking, I’d like to ask you about a bunch of little specifics, like --that really piques people’s interest.
“At the extent of the properties that you controlled, it ran from Playland at the Beach at Fulton Street at one end all the way to the -- past Topsy’s Roost, which eventually was the Surf Club” --
Whitney: “The third block up.”
Martini: -- “the third block, and then the Cliff House” --
Whitney: “The Cliff House.”
Martini: -- “the Curio Shop next to it” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “Sutro’s Baths” --
Whitney: “Sutro Baths.”
Martini: -- “and the museum and a Louis’ -- was Louis’ restaurant” --
Whitney: “Yeah, Louis’ was -- well, wait a second. Louis’. Yeah, it was one of the restaurants up in the” -- there were three of them in there.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “One of them was Hountalas and the -- one was Louis’. And then there was somebody that had one in and out of the streetcar terminal; ‘cause one of the streetcars terminated right in that building.”
Martini: “Right. The -- that was the -- I think it was the” --
Whitney: “The Number 3 or the Number 2.”
Martini: “-- 2 -- I think it was the 2 Clement.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah. And there was a little -- little sandwich stand in there.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“But that -- I think the -- I think the sequence was Hountalas, Louis’, the entrance to the Sutro Baths and then this other one.”
Martini: “Okay.
“So the Hountalases were out there well before they took over the concession under the Park Service.”
Whitney: “Yeah. They were one of the -- one of the Greek restaurants that my dad had inherited.”
Martini: “They just caught that, Hountalas, yes. That’s a Greek name.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“Well, almost every one of the restaurants out there was Greek.”
Martini: “Greek, mm-hm.”
Whitney: “And they were all just regular -- they weren’t -- you wouldn’t say high class or anything, except that every one of them was a high-class human being.”
Martini: “What was World War II like, the World War II years, for the -- for the Whitneys?”
Whitney: “Well, of course, I was in the service” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “during most of those, but it was -- because of the numbers of military that were going through to serve the Pacific area for the war, Playland did fantastic business.
“And somewhere -- we finally run across it -- there’s a stack of photos like this (indicating) of that particular time of Playland, with the crowds. But we did very well during the -- like the -- like the period of the” --
Martini: “Depression?”
Whitney: -- “Depression.
“God, it’s getting bad.”
Martini: “No.”
Whitney: “Like that, it was a nickel-and-dime business. And the sailors had nickels and dimes. They didn’t have dollars. And then we had lots of things -- like you would buy a ticket to go on the Big Dipper and you would get back maybe two or three tickets that we called booster tickets. And it would say ‘This ticket and 10 cents good for one ride on’ -- naming one of the other rides. And we’d move people around so that the crowd was spread out with these things.”
Martini: “Oh.
“Otherwise, they’d probably all congregated to very few” --
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And these booster tickets worked marvelous, but it also reduced the price so that the military were in a pretty good position to get a lot of enjoyment.”
Martini: “You were right on the Pacific Ocean -- (loud sound of a ferry whistle is heard on the tape) excuse me.”
Whitney: “That’s done.”
Martini: “That’s the ferry boat.”
Whitney: “That’s the one coming in.”
Martini: “Okay. You were right on the Pacific Ocean at the start of World War II. Were -- did your dad ever talk about any blackout regulations?”
Whitney: “Oh, yes. The -- right in the very beginning, the panic of the possibility of Japanese shelling and the balloon bombs and the whole thing like that, they -- they made it very, very stringent on lighting that would show out into the ocean. We could show lighting going the opposite direction, because it wouldn’t pick up except if it was lighting a white building. So we’d paint the whole building gray, these kind of things.
“But General DeWitt, I think, was the commanding general during that period. And it just so happens that his -- his aide in the beginning, without my ever knowing it, was -- at one time, I was married to his daughter. But he was an old cavalry man, and he couldn’t fight a war without his horse.
“But General DeWitt was very, very stringent, as -- of course, later on, he and the other politicians ended up being the ones that shipped all the Japanese into internment camps.”
Martini: “Did you -- was Playland and the Cliff House area, with all the arcades -- got to ask about law-enforcement problems.
“With all those people milling around, did you ever -- did police pay special attention or did you have your own security guards?”
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “How did you work that?”
Whitney: “Security would be -- I had an assistant that -- we pounded the pavement of the midway, back and forth and out in the front, making the circuit. And we were the security. And the problem was that -- the only problem we ever had was a few kids. And you’d tell ‘em you’d kick ‘em in the ass if they did that again and go on. And they never did it again and so forth.
“However, at a later date, the first racial riot in San Francisco of much notoriety occurred at Playland.”
Martini: “When was that?”
Whitney: “It was the beginning of the -- all the racial tension that started. I don’t know what year it was, really.”
Martini: “What -- was it like gang-fight type of thing or what happened?”
Whitney: “Negroes against the whites.”
Martini: “Whites, yeah.”
Whitney: “And rowdy-ism.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Not so much doing physical damage to each other as it was just plain
rowdy-ism; and then the pushing fights that they’d get into and so forth. But it was the first, to my knowledge, real race riot in San Francisco. And then, of course, later on, they had some terrific ones.”
Martini: “Yes. There’s Hunter’s Point” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “and Bay View that, you know, had fires and everything else.”
Whitney: “Yeah. That -- the -- the timing on that could probably be confirmed by newspaper.”
Martini: “When -- do you know, in the early years, was there any type of restriction
on -- on blacks or Asians visiting the attractions” --
Whitney: “No. I have never heard my father or anybody that worked for him, particularly the Masons, make one anti-racial slur. The Masons, though, made some pretty nasty comments about people that were Catholic, but never racially. Anybody was always welcome.
“Well, look at the number of blacks that we had working at Topsy’s and so forth. I set up the entire janitorial service for Playland and it was all -- just so happened all Japanese. But it took one Japanese off the street and put him into a job; and it built up to where he had 75 men working for him in time, Harada.”
Martini: “Harada; okay. Just writing down names here to check out later.”
Whitney: “Harada was -- and he was a -- just a very pleasant man. I don’t know what his reaction to us was. But there was -- never, at any time, do I remember anybody making an anti-black slur or anything like that -- although, of course, everybody, at that time, used the word nigger. It was just part of it. It was not understood to be that much of a slur.
“Because during the war, we set up a game where you’d throw a dart at a balloon; and behind the balloon were faces cut out of pasteboard, first of Hitler, then of Mussolini, then of Tojo. And there was a legend underneath that had ‘Pop Tojo’ or “Pop the Jap” or something like that. But that was the time.”
Martini: “Oh, sure it was.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “And -- and much as we look back now -- and the term political correctness” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “-- something that might not have -- would never make it in the year 2002, in the context of its time, it was (inaudible)” --
Whitney: “It’ll come back.”
Martini: -- “the culture.”
Whitney: “Yeah. Most of it’ll come back.
“In fact, I heard a program the other night about Jewish humor. Gosh, the -- the Jewish humor -- the Yiddish humor was marvelous, terrific people.”
Martini: “Mm-hm. Very inward focused, very self-” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “self-deprecating and” --
Whitney: “Well, you had to -- had to understand it to get the full fun out of it. But the fact that that’s -- they’re starting to play Jewish -- re-broadcasts of old Jewish humor.”
Martini: “Let me -- can I jump into a couple” --
Whitney: “Shoot.”
Martini: -- “of the things here we have?”
“I hit on that one. When -- your brother-in-law came up with the design of redoing the Cliff House” --
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: -- “about 1950 or so.”
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“What -- what was the driving thing to give the Cliff House the new look?”
Whitney: “You mean from an architectural standpoint?”
Martini: “And from -- from a business standpoint. Why did you want to redesign the Cliff House?”
Whitney: “More room.”
Martini: “More room?”
Whitney: “Wanted to put a banquet room upstairs; enlarge -- I don’t know whether we enlarged the gift shop -- no, we didn’t.”
Martini: “I think you might have pushed the wall out forward on the street or something.”
Whitney: “No, we couldn’t; because that was the original building.”
Martini: “Yeah; okay.”
Whitney: “But, in any event, it was primarily for private parties and banquets and so forth. We -- we had quite a business of wedding receptions, and that was the space for ‘em. And, of course, then -- because it was such a nice spot -- wedding receptions, then weddings themselves and so forth.”
Martini: “Now, the downstairs at the Cliff House, there was a banquet room downstairs, too. But that -- my -- in the old plans and my memories, mostly there was attractions in that downstairs room.”
Whitney: “No. There was -- there was attractions down on the lower floor. I don’t recall any attractions.”
Martini: “The California mission display.”
Whitney: “That’s right. That was on the upper -- yeah, the California missions was -- once again, a collection that my dad bought of models of all the California missions -- was in there.
“And then he put what in -- in the business was called a ‘bed box’ so that as you were --you were channeled in free; and as you exited, it had an obvious jar there for you to put a contribution in.
“And most of the time, he would do an operation like that and give all the money to the San Francisco Boys Club. My dad was a tremendous backer of it; gave -- up in the Mendocino County someplace, between Willows and Eureka or Yreka, where the old Skunk [rail] road, there’s a Boys Club up there, Camp Marwadel. My dad bought the property for ‘em.”
Martini: “Oh, okay.”
Whitney: “But he -- my dad was involved in politics in a great amount, in a great way, but he -- always in the back of the scene. He wasn’t pushing himself forward. He would give that property out of his pleasure.”
[Begin Tape 2, Side B]
Martini: “We were talking about the Cliff House” --
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: -- “your dad and how the money went to the Boys Club and all, and we had started to talk about the actual layout of the Cliff House, how it got remodeled.
“And I’ve also got the names of some of the things that went on in there. Because they were always changing the attractions downstairs. Maybe you could tell me about some of them. There was something called the Country Store downstairs for a while?”
Whitney: “I don’t remember that.”
Martini: “You don’t?”
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “The Doll House?”
Whitney: “Don’t remember that.”
Martini: “Yeah. A lot of these are just names on old maps” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “nothing about ‘em.”
Whitney: “Also, you have to remember that a lot of the drawings are ideas of what might be done” --
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: -- “that don’t necessarily mean they were done.”
Martini: “I wondered about that.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “’Cause I didn’t -- did things change that often? Okay. So” --
Whitney: “Yeah, that would be -- especially things that my brother-in-law drew at suggestions from my father. Floyd would draw something that my dad would think about. And my dad would then look at the drawing and he’d either yes or no, and then my brother-in-law would pursue it a little further, so forth.
“But an awful lot of the stuff on drawings, especially that don’t have any name -- you know, because Floyd never --pride of ownership in his architect.”
Martini: “Oh.
“When -- well, Floyd’s remodel of the exterior, when they put that façade up, it looked very much like a lot of those houses that were going up out in Westlake at the time” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “with that sort of redwood exterior and” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “brick-red chimneys?”
Whitney: “Well, I know my dad figured that the redwood would be California, in particular, so forth, because the bar was redwood. And so he -- and he also thought that redwood would weather.”
Martini: “It’s practical.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And, eventually, had to paint the thing and it looked like hell.”
Martini: “Yeah, it did. In the early ‘50s” --
Whitney: “But they -- the redwood was mainly California and tied to the bar.”
Martini: “Uh-huh.
“That very lowest level of the Cliff House” –
Whitney: “Yeah, where the Musee Mecanique was.”
Martini: “Who started the Musee Mecanique, was it Whitney or was it [Ed] Zelinsky?”
Whitney: “No. Dad.”
Martini: “Your dad did.”
Whitney: “Yeah. That was where we ended up putting a lot of the -- there was a lot of the music machines in the gift shop” --
Martini: “The World’s Biggest Gift Shop.”
Whitney: -- “the big one.
“And we consolidated them into this one main operation. And it was eventually Zelinsky who bought them” --
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: -- “most of them, although we did sell some individually.”
Martini: “That was a collection that your dad bought that was already existing, in some ways?”
Whitney: “That was a collection of collections.”
Martini: “A collection of collections, yes.”
Whitney: “And then -- like I went skiing one time up in -- oh, what’s that -- Alta, in Utah. And down in a little town just north of -- between Ogden and Salt Lake, we went in to get a Coke or sandwich, and there was a big orchestrian going. And I got on the phone and called my old -- my dad and said, ‘What’s it -- what’s one of these things worth?’ And then I personally negotiated for it, and it paid for my trip skiing.
“But it was -- that -- that’s the way we acquired quite a few. It was not all just -- even like with the bicycles. People would be -- would see the collection and they’d say, oh, then maybe they’d want that one that we’ve got. So we got an awful lot of singles.”
Martini: “And they -- so that ground-floor area, that was -- that was -- Musee
Mecanique -- something that Ed Zelinsky still has on display down there, are those giant like -- the Mechanical Farm” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “and Cactus Gulch.”
Whitney: “Those -- those -- I don’t know which ones are there, and I’m sure Ed has gotten new -- some new ones in.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “But those were things that my dad bought singlely, as a result of somebody sending in a photograph and him negotiating, bought the thing and brought it out and put it on display; or it was made to put in the window of -- there was one time a whole Christmas display that came out of the window of the -- whatever Macys was before in San Francisco, way back. One was the city of Paris.”
Martini: “Like Santa’s Workshop, a little series of vignettes?”
Whitney: “Yeah, those things that they’d put in the window at Christmastime. Well, they -- over the years, they redressed the things and ended up calling it the Swiss
Village” --
Martini: “Yeah, yeah.”
Whitney: -- “you know, these kind of things.”
Martini: “Did your dad commission any of those big, mechanical, elaborate things, constructed purely -- or he picked them up? I see. I see. That makes sense.”
Whitney: “Collections of collections.”
Martini: “Of collections.
“What’s -- what’s currently out there now is a whole series of the Corncob Gulch” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “little animated, Western frontier; the Mechanical Farm; the Wonderful -- the Carnival” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “and Ed also has a series of the Toothpick Circus.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “The Toothpick Circus supposedly was built by convicts” --
Whitney: “Convicts, yeah.”
Martini: -- “from San Quentin?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “How did -- how -- do you know how he happened to get that one?”
Whitney: “Oh, God, no, I don’t know the details of that at all, except it was a means of them getting spending money for themselves and so forth.
“And Dad knew -- I don’t think he was a close friend of, but he knew the warden out there, Warden Duffy. So things like that. Like my dad got quite a collection from Warden Duffy of zip guns and knives and a whole bunch of crap like that from there, from Warden Duffy. (ferry whistle sounds again)
“That’s leaving.”
Martini: “For the tape, that’s -- the Friday harbor ferry.”
Whitney: “Yeah. You can -- you live here long enough, you could recognize which ferry boat it is, because every horn is a little bit different.”
Martini: “A little different.
“Your dad also seemed to have picked up a lot of things -- mentioned the little railroad locomotive. He had a cable car. It was supposed to be -- it was labeled the first cable car in San Francisco.”
Whitney: “That was on loan from -- from, I think, the cable-car company. One of the, you know, Hyde Street or whatever. But I’m not that certain on that. But that would be the source to begin to find out.”
Martini: “And he had a Tucker car.”
Whitney: “Had a Tucker car. But I sold it, eventually, and it ended up on the cover of -- completely reconditioned and repainted and everything -- on the cover of Antique Cars and then with a big article in there. But I sold it to a real collector.
“There was that car. There was another car that was on exhibit for a while, which was a three-wheeled Davis; one wheel in the back, two in the front, teardrop. And Davis was quite a renowned designer someplace down Southern Cal. And I ended up owning that and had it on display.
“And then we had the steam motorcycle, which eventually got rid of with Ed Zelinsky. I don’t know what he ever did with it.”
Martini: “He has it in Tiberon.”
Whitney: “Yeah; the red one.”
Martini: “I saw it -- saw it a couple of months ago.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “You -- there was an area called the Marine Deck in -- in the Baths that was full of very high-quality ship models and line-ups of telescopes looking out towards the Seal Rocks.”
Whitney: “I don’t place that.
“The Marine Deck.”
Martini: “Yeah. It was called the Marine Deck or the Marine View Deck. Is” --
Whitney: “I don’t know where it could be. Because as you came down the entry
stairs and you split -- the only place to go at that -- that first level was the Sutro museum.”
Martini: “Right.
“When you went down the next level” --
Whitney: “The next level.”
Martini: -- “you’d reach the promenade -- do you” --
Whitney: “Yeah, there was another floor; and that’s where my dad had the collection of mynah birds.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Yeah, that’s right. There was another floor down there. And that’s where those stairs come down that we saw in that one photo. That’s right.”
Martini: “That’s right.”
Whitney: “And that -- that’s the floor that you’re talking about, with the” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“Now, I don’t remember that at all, other than the damn mynah birds, trying to get those buggers to talk. But he got carried away. He made a trip around the world; and when he was in there, they really pitched them. And so when he got back here, he ended up with about 20 or 30 of these damn things.”
Martini: “In the mid-‘50s, they put in the Sky Tram.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “What -- it kind of was sort of like a Sky Tram that went to nowhere.”
Whitney: “Yeah. My dad thought it would generate traffic out to the far point. And I -- I look at that as his biggest mistake in the entire -- his entire life, because he completely neglected the fact that the capacity or the earning capacity could not be -- would not produce enough to pay for the attendant on there. And, yet, that was the basic thing -- the first question I had, that he then admonished me at Disneyland to study this.
“And the first -- the very first project to increase capacity, which increases earning capacity, was the Adventureland ride. And we accomplished it with the boats. There was one entry into the boat, in the center. I got ‘em to put one at the end and one at the other end, and the attendant would, in essence, push the people out of the front. The boarding guy would push ‘em in from the back. By the time this group was gone, this one was ready to go; that boat was ready to go.”
Martini: “People moving, just get ‘em” --
Whitney: “It’s get the capacity up, the earning. The -- the number of passengers per hour, then you relate that to what you charge will give you the potential gross.
“And then if you’re -- if you’re running it right, you’ll be up around 95 percent, even on the busy days. You’ll never get a hundred, even with lines.”
Martini: “And the Sky Tram was a failure in that regard?”
Whitney: “Sky Tram, there was no way that it could have ever made money.”
Martini: “How so?”
Whitney: “Because it cost more to run the damn thing over than it could earn. It just couldn’t earn enough money. You’d have to charge -- oh, what did it carry; 10, 15, 20 people? You’d have to charge three or four dollars a head. It wasn’t that good a ride. It wasn’t worth that. Who the hell’s going to pay that when they can stand here and look over there, or walk around here and get there?”
Martini: “Was that a preexisting ride, an off-the-shelf?”
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “Was it specially made?”
Whitney: “Roebling.”
Martini: “Roebling.”
Whitney: “Roebling” --
Martini: “It was on the plans.”
Whitney: -- “cable and so forth.
“Yeah. That -- that’s funny. Because I lived to see the day when I chided him about that openly. Because his advice to me really paid off, because that was one of the ways in -- that I’ve developed all of the serpentine lines at Disneyland; how to handle ‘em fast; how to reduce them during off times and so forth. But all of those things came out of this capacity study.
“And I mentioned what I had in mind to Walt, and Walt caught it like that (snaps his fingers) and turned me loose. And -- you know, they -- it -- I forget how many boats we had on that Adventureland ride, but we spent quite a bit of money redoing all of the canopies in order to do the on and off.
“But that was the kind of confidence that he had in me from the fact that I -- I was this practical amusement-park person, saw those things.”
Martini: “It almost kind of harkens back to moving them out of -- you’ve given the add-on, the bonus ticket, to get people to” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “go to the midway.”
Whitney: “It’s -- it’s -- to get that capacity up, the earning on it.”
[Pause in tape; change of dates]
Martini: “No. I just did a test. You’re sitting just close enough.
“This is Wednesday morning, August the 14th, and we’re resuming the oral history with Mr. George K. Whitney, Jr.
“Last thing we were talking about yesterday was -- talking about the Sky Tram and the pros and cons on that, and the -- getting a little bit into moving people.
“What I’d like to do is kind of go to the next major part of the Whitney acquisitions, which was Sutro Baths and ice-skating rink and museum.”
Whitney: “Yeah. I’m -- I’m very hazy about the date that my dad acquired the Sutro property or the Sutro Bath building and so forth.
“It must have been at a time when I was off on another project or something. And it’s -- but I think in some of the stuff that you’ve got or will get, you can pin down the exact time on that. Maybe you’ve got it already.”
Martini: “It says in 1952, I think September ’52, that there was a title change from Adolph Sutro, probably the grandson” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “to George K. Whitney.”
Whitney: “Well, that -- see that would be just a couple years after this article” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “in the Saturday Evening Post, and it’s probably why there’s no mention of it in that article”
Martini: “None at all.”
Whitney: “Okay. Then that -- that would be right, and that would be the sequence.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “He had the Cliff House before he had the Sutro, and that would be about right. Because I was up here in Seattle on the Seattle Fair at that time.”
Martini: “19-“ --
Whitney: “That’s why I don’t know that much about it.”
Martini: “Did you -- you must have gone in there and visited while the Sutros were running, in the ‘30s and ‘40s?”
Whitney: “Oh, yeah. I -- I was free to go there any time I wanted, as far as my parents were concerned, when I was quite young.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Go up and swim and -- long before the ice rink went in.”
Martini: “What -- what were your impressions of that place, when you were young, going in there?”
Whitney: “The big impression was the smell of the interior, tied in with the – all the cedar wood that was in there. The sea air, the hot sea air” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “that was in the thing.
“So you got this sort of high humidity interior.”
Martini: “From the heated pools?”
Whitney: “From the heated pools.
“And that created a -- not an unpleasant smell at all. It was not a -- a humid smell. It was more of a natural smell, as if you were out on a hot ocean, you’d get the smell; and if you were in a cedar forest, that you would get. And it was these two predominant ones welded together made the smell in there.
“But it was -- it was -- that building was a fascinating building.”
Martini: “Yeah?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “What made it interesting, aside from the smell?”
Whitney: “Well, the fact that it was all steel and glass; and then in the interior, all basically wood. And when it was built, to think that they engineered it and made it that big and open, it was -- that was more intriguing to me than the fact that it had seven pools, although they were the fun things. But it was a -- from a structural standpoint and from an architectural standpoint, a very interesting building.
“And then to go from the upper level down to the swimming level, you went through the tropical gardens, where the main staircase coming down had a -- had palm trees that were 30, 40 feet high, growing inside. So it was a -- that was where the tropical gardens,
that -- the water smell and so forth.”
Martini: “He had a museum in there. Even before your family got involved, there were artifacts on display there?”
Whitney: “Oh, yes. He had -- he [ed: Adolph Sutro] was a collector himself, and he had a very extensive Egyptian collection of mummies and funereal types of artifacts and all those sort of things in there; and a complete conglomeration of things. There was no rhyme or reason to the whole operation.
“Other exhibits in there that Sutro had were stuffed animals and quite an extensive rock collection, right alongside the Egyptian mummies and” --
Martini: “It was -- the photographs, it looks like it was rather a hodgepodge.”
Whitney: “Oh, it was very much a hodgepodge, very much a hodgepodge. It was more organized after my dad got it, because his friendship with the curator of the DeYoung museum in Golden Gate Park was such that the curator and my dad exchanged things back and forth for exhibit. And with his interest in my dad, because they were good friends, he did a lot to help to better display the things in there.
“And then there were a few attractions that were put in there that were strictly my dad’s showmanship. And it -- it’s a little -- a little hazy in my memory right now as to what they specifically were, but they were -- there was a deal where there was a stage and a diorama; and it was way in the back. And I forget what it was exhibiting.”
Martini: “There was -- was that the Last Supper, the waxwork Last Supper with the” --
Whitney: “I don’t think -- I don’t recall it ever being displayed up there, but it could have been; and that could have been it. That would be a pretty good guess.
Martini: “From looking over the paperwork and talking, it looks like the Sutros, or their estate, were running the baths up until very early 1950s. And they appear to have tried some changes, too. They put a -- sort of an Art Deco-looking façade on the building in the 1930s” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “based on the photographs.
“But I know that -- and they’re the ones that put the ice-skating rink in, correct?”
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: “Did you know much about the economics of -- of -- before your family got involved, was Sutro Baths, was it a struggling concern or was it making money?”
Whitney: “Well, it was making money until the city put in -- built the Fleishhacker pool and all of the municipal [pools]. And this was a trend throughout the country, that they started a -- a lot of municipal areas would put in a big city or county swimming pool. And there was no tax on it, where there was still an amusement tax on the privately owned ones. And, of course, the business just fell off in the private ones because there was a price differential.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And that was one of the basic demise of the swimming end of Sutro.”
Martini: “When they put the ice-skating rink in, did that bring a new flock of interest in the place?”
Whitney: “Ice skating is an extremely strange type of operation. When you get involved with the Ice Skating Association and everything, you lose control of everything. They --they want to run your business and the time that they can have the ice and they -- their desire is to get more time for them to practice.”
Martini: “Oh, you mean like the skating groups?”
Whitney: “Yeah, the skating groups or the professionals. Primarily more the professionals and the instructors that set up the teaching and so forth. That all -- they just moved in and took over. And you couldn’t -- you couldn’t deny ‘em, because they were the source of anything good about the ice rink getting out. They could kill a story faster than anybody.”
Martini: “Was Sutro’s the first rink in the city?”
Whitney: “No. There was one down on the other side of Golden Gate Park on the equivalent of 48th Avenue. I don’t know what it was called.”
Martini: “Way up by the beach.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “I think a family ran it or something.”
Whitney: “Yeah. It was in the -- right down at the foot of the Sunset.”
Martini: “Did -- do you know, did the Whitneys -- Whitney Brothers see the Cliff House -- see the Sutros as competition, friendly competition, or just another neighbor?”
Whitney: “Oh, I -- I don’t -- that’s a little hard for me to guess on that, because I don’t -- I don’t recall whether my uncle was in or out of the business when my dad acquired -- I think he had retired actively or was in the process of retiring. So his interests were confined to the maintenance shop building and so forth” --
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: -- “down there -- at that time.”
Martini: “Do you know if getting Sutro’s was part of your dad’s grand design when
he” --
Whitney: “Yeah” --
Martini: -- “you know, looked at the” --
Whitney: -- “it was strictly my father’s design.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Those kind of decisions were strictly my dad’s.
“I have some notes written by my uncle, which are a little more, probably, fair to himself about how -- what he contributed over and -- in the business end of things” --
Martini: “Right. Yeah, yeah.”
Whitney: -- “which, over the years, we come to give that credit all to my father and the artistic end to my uncle.”
Martini: “You -- you know a lot about the building yourself, and most people have never seen the baths. And they’ve got a bunch of questions that people wanted me to ask you.
“Start with those two oval exterior ponds that were outside the baths on the east side? You said -- you mentioned that you stocked those with trout at one point?”
Whitney: “Well, that was just a personal thing with my brother-in-law and myself, just to see what would happen. But there was -- those tanks were all filled with spring water. There was a spring there on the hillside, and so there were catch basins for that; and then it was drained off -- I don’t know whether that water was used in the freshwater pool or not.”
Martini: “It was for the use of the bath structure, though, in some way.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “They must have used a lot of fresh water for laundry and boilers and everything else in there.”
Whitney: “There probably was more -- I think there was one -- at least one of the pools was a freshwater pool.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “I know the ice -- the ice-cold one was.”
Martini: “That was the one they called the Plunge, I think, here. It was a very small tank off by itself.”
Whitney: “Well, it was a fairly decent tank, but small, right at the foot of the main entry. And then, of course, there was another raised tank way back in the northwest corner of the L-shaped tank, which was used for diving.”
Martini: “Was that a salt tank or was that a freshwater tank?”
Whitney: “All the rest of those were saltwater.”
Martini: “All the rest, just the ice-cold. Okay.
“When your family took it over, looks like one of the first things they did was decide to close down the pools and just focus on the ice-skating rink.”
Whitney: “Could be.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“The -- were the -- the building was a big barn. The pools were aging. Was it -- was it an expensive facility to maintain? Did it take a lot of time and money?”
Whitney: “Well, labor costs at that time were starting to escalate quite a bit, especially maintenance, unions and so forth. And then you had this fact that you’re -- you’re in competition with free swimming by the city. So the business just fell off tremendously.
“So it just wasn’t getting enough to pay for itself, pay for -- of course, the saltwater was free because it came from our own catch basins, but the heating of it was quite expensive.”
Martini: “Talk about the catch basins for a bit. Do you know how that system operated, with the waves filling up the baths?”
Whitney: “Well, there was one kind of using the native rock around there and creating more of a hole in the ground. The waves would come in from the Golden Gate and splash up and go into the -- this first catch basin, which became a -- it was primarily the catch basin. Then the water flowed into the next one, which was the first settling. Get the sand that would come over with the waves a chance to settle out so that the water would keep working towards the boiler would be getting clearer and clearer and so forth. And then it went through, in the boiler, some type of filtration system so that when it went into the pools, it was sand-free, of course, debris-free.”
Martini: “Inside -- out there near the catch basin” --
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: -- “there’s a number of tunnels that go through.
“There’s one tunnel that went down into the rock” --
[Begin Tape 3, Side A]
Martini: “This is the George Whitney, Jr., interview, Tape Number 3; August 14th, 2002.
“The last tape snapped off. We’d just started to talk about the underground chamber and the tunnel.”
Whitney: “Yeah, the tunnel that went down into a chamber. That was to be a pumping room. I don’t know if it was ever used as such. I don’t even recall when I’ve gone in there, if there was any machinery left over. You’ve probably been in there since I have; and whatever was there is still there, I’m sure.”
Martini: “Nothing.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And then the other tunnel, which was more like a lateral tunnel, that went to another little, small cove. And they -- they picked up a lot of rock and debris to help build the wall of the catch basin and so forth. Because most of the rock had been -- that was left was semi-structural from the building; and this was a new source. And since Sutro was a tunnel builder, he loved building tunnels.”
Martini: “So he dug the tunnel for construction material.”
Whitney: “Went -- went through to this other cove and then collected the rocks in there and brought them back” --
Martini: “Oh, okay.”
Whitney: -- “which were then used in the catch-basin walls and so forth.”
Martini: “People -- people are constantly fascinated by it, I think, probably because it goes and comes out the other side” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “favorite route.
“On the -- there was a big rock on the other side of that tunnel that had some strange wave machine on top of it. Do you have any memory of that?”
Whitney: “Only it sitting there as a relic.”
Martini: “As a relic.”
Whitney: “And I have no idea when it was done and had no particular interest -- I knew that it was an experiment that didn’t work. It was a pipe-dream type of experiment.
“And the main thing is -- the main interest that I had out in that area was when the Ohian went on the rocks, which was right close to there. So, you know, we went down a few times and went aboard and” --
Martini: “Really?”
Whitney: “Yeah, right after it had wrecked. I ended up with a Bridgestratten Lou engine, which I ended up building a go-cart way back.”
Martini: “That must have been pretty hazardous to get out onto a ship” --
Whitney: “It wasn’t very safe or prudent. It was semi-dishonest, also.”
Martini: “You didn’t -- I guess somebody, some insurance company, probably had rights to that wreck?”
Whitney: “Oh, yes.”
Martini: “Well, you were young and it was” --
Whitney: “Yeah. I was -- I was just young enough to get away with -- think I could get away with it.”
Martini: “When the Sky Tram was operating, they developed those tunnels out there and that platform into a viewing area. I remember they used to hype it” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “they called it Shipwreck Point or something.”
Whitney: “Right.
“They -- my dad decided to do some attractions, which I -- you recall for me, of a waterfall out there and so forth, using -- he wanted to use some of the water in the cheapest way, get action and build it up as an attraction. And when he found out that most people were walking out and not taking the Sky Tram, it wasn’t quite so attractive a proposition.”
Martini: “Yeah. I remember, as a young teen, you could walk through the fence on the hill up above” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “and save like a dollar on the ride.
“I wasn’t the only one doing that, huh?”
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “When the baths themselves, you know, changed over to Whitney ownership --your dad’s ownership, actually” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “they put a new façade on that sort of matched the Cliff House, a big redwood façade.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Was that -- was that your brother-in-law again?”
Whitney: “That’s -- that’s my brother-in-law again and my dad’s interest in pushing the redwood.”
Martini: “Redwood theme.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
Martini: “He also, from the photographs, appears to have brought lots of his collections into the baths.”
Whitney: “Yes.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Collections of horse carriages, spinning wheels; just a lot of the things that he had -- the collections that he had collected. And, of course, it was part of trying to make the interior of the building more interesting and more attractive.
“And some of those collections were very valuable, and the equipment that was in them was very rare. And so people that had real interest in bicycles could go out there and see bicycles that just don’t exist and haven’t for years.”
Martini: “We talked about like there’s the Whitney lettering style for all the signs and all that went down to Playland.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Cliff House and Sutro seemed to have had sort of the Gay ‘90s lettering style. Was there an intent to harken back to the turn of the century?”
Whitney: “Not particularly on that building. It was more an exploitation of what was there and what hadn’t been successful to be converted into something that would be successful. Change -- like my dad changing the approach to the restaurant from a high-hat type of thing to a -- somebody in a T-shirt and shorts -- although, actually, I don’t remember anybody ever getting in there with just a T-shirt and shorts. But people that were less dressed.”
Martini: “So your dad was just putting a new spin on what was already there.”
Whitney: “Yeah. He was -- he was changing it to where his whole understanding of economics in these things, that we were in a nickel-and-dime business. And he had survived so beautifully through the” --
Martini: “The Depression?”
Whitney: -- “the Depression with his then nickel-and-dime business concept.”
“And he just followed it all through his life. He never did anything not of quality, but nothing was snooty.”
Martini: “Mm-hm. No, no.”
Whitney: “And that also reflected his own social interests. He was extreme- -- in fact, one of the biggest shocks in my life was the size of the funeral cortege for my dad going out to the cemetery, of his friends and the type of people that were in there, from the top politicians all over that were friends with my dad. And my dad was always not out in the foreground of any of these things, but he was always behind the scenes working. But the size of that and the length of that was just staggering.”
Martini: “Well, he was a city institution. He was” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “When -- in the -- going back to him and his collections, what do you remember about the Tom Thumb exhibit and how he got that?”
Whitney: “If I remember correctly, it came out of New Orleans. It was in storage down there. It had been in storage for years and no one had paid on it, and there were a lot of other things. And one of Dad’s good friends in the amusement business owned the park in New Orleans, Pontchartrain Beach, Harry Batt. And Dad got him to search out a few things, because New Orleans struck him as being quite a source, of the age of things and the types of collections that would be in storage for a long time. And I believe that the Tom Thumb stuff came from one of those purchases.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And it was Tom Thumb and Colonel McNutt, who had the carriage that looked like a walnut, and then the Tom Thumb carriage was more elegant and a little more traditional.”
Martini: “There was a -- I believe there were clothes, a lot of photographs; just sort of an assemblage of Tom Thumb-related items.”
Whitney: “Yeah. It was a very extensive -- had been a very extensive collection. And, eventually, a good portion of it went to the Tom Thumb Museum back in Connecticut.”
Martini: “Is that associated with the Barnum museums in any way or is it a Thumb museum?”
Whitney: “It probably is. I -- I just don’t -- I’m not aware of the actual company name.”
Martini: “Was that one of the -- this is probably jumping ahead to when the baths actually closed, but to follow through with Tom Thumb, was that one sold specifically as an auction item or did you negotiate a sale for that collection?”
Whitney: “Negotiated with them direct, yeah.”
Martini: “What about Ito? Everyone remembers Ito, the statue.”
Whitney: “Well, Ito was another one of these things that had been made for one of the fairs in San Francisco. Which one, probably the 1940. A carving of an Oriental man that was so realistic that he actually plucked the hair out of his own eyebrows and put in and out of his own head. And it was a very life-like, showmanship-type statue, not of the classical approach in life. And he was -- he was all nude, except for a loincloth. And the loincloth was arranged so that you could just peek in and see a little bit of his masculinity. And it was -- it became a very -- when any guests -- when anybody had guests, they’d get ‘em around and edge ‘em around and how everybody was looking to see if the statue was anatomically complete.”
Martini: “Kids were very up-front trying to figure it out. You could see adults were trying to be a little surreptitious.”
Whitney: “It wasn’t the kids.”
Martini: “Yeah?”
Whitney: “It wasn’t the kids. It was the adults. And in this particular case, it was the adult women more than the men. The men didn’t -- they knew. But the women had to prove to themselves.”
Martini: “He was bought by an entertainer, wasn’t he, in the East Bay?”
Whitney: “I -- I” --
Martini: “Marilyn [Blaisdell] remembered Bobo the Clown or something like that.”
Whitney: “I don’t know -- I wasn’t there when we got -- well, if I was, I paid no attention. I mean, we -- we negotiated a business deal and -- he’d been, basically, on display out at Sutro’s and that before that, and Playland, and he’d pretty well worn out his welcome.”
Martini: “Some people remember there was a Mrs. Ito statue? Does that ring a bell?”
Whitney: “Yes. It was done exactly the same way, and it was of Ito’s mother. And she’s kind of kneeling down in a -- not actually kneeling, but squatting, as they do in the Orient. And she’s fully clothed; and all the hair is real, put into the mask of the head one hair at a time, the eyelashes, the eyebrows. And she was as authentic looking as he was.
“And she went out of my memory long before Ito did. So I don’t know -- I think it goes back at a pretty early date, from my standpoint, as to when she was gotten rid of; and I have no idea where she went.”
Martini: “We’ll find him. He’s -- I know Ito is still around somewhere.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “You hear rumors that, perhaps, Ripley’s has him. Still trying to” --
Whitney: “Something like that.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “But where she went” --
Martini: “Don’t know.
“One of the pictures in Marilyn’s book shows them hauling off a truckload of stuffed animals in the early 1950s. Was -- do you have any memory of some housecleanings?”
Whitney: “Yeah. All those were in the Sutro museum as part of his collection. And when we bought it, they were in such horrible condition, faded and hair and dirt and everything, that my dad said just get rid of them all. And so they loaded them up on trucks and everything.
“And it was amazing how many people came along and wanted one to take home of different types of birds and small animals and so forth. So the truck driver started selling ‘em, and he made a pretty good pile. And when my dad found out about it, he thought the guy was ingenious that he turned it into money. And so the sale was completely accepted and he was complimented and so forth.”
Martini: “Entrepreneurship there.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “The Tucker car, was that purchased straight ahead to be a display item or was that something that your dad owned for personal use?”
Whitney: “No. At one time, my dad had a very extensive collection of old automobiles. A great number of them ended up with the exhibit up in Reno.”
Martini: “The Harrah’s Club bunch?”
Whitney: “Yeah, and so forth. And so he had an interest in interesting cars. So it was natural -- he’d immediately see the showmanship possibilities of displaying this new car with the single headlight and so forth as a showmanship exploit. So when one came along, he bought it. I think it was -- if I’m not mistaken, it was the 49th car built, which is about, I think, the total. And somebody told me they thought it was the last one built.”
Martini: “The diorama of the Last Supper, the three-dimensional waxwork one” --
Whitney: “Right. The full -- full-size figures.”
Martini: “Yeah.
-- “was that a Playland attraction or was that” --
Whitney: “Well, it -- it was put on exhibit down in Playland. And it also had been exhibited -- and it could have been that diorama that was across the back of the Sutro museum for a while. But it was a set of figurines depicting the Last Supper, and they were bought from the maker. And I think his name was Schlesinger or something of that nature, that type of a name. And it -- it just was one of the collections. And my dad finally put it on exhibit, really set up a nice -- nice display and so forth. And all the monies went to the San Francisco Boys Club.”
Martini: “You used the term “the Sutro museum,” like it was a distinct part of the building. Was it one particular area that you thought of as the museum?”
Whitney: “Yeah. It was the top level after the main entry level. You’d go downstairs and split -- get down to the first level, and the museum sat sort of on the roof of the main building.”
Martini: “And that would have been where Ito was located, the mummies; a long, straight room, correct?”
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “Running north and south.
“And it -- while my dad owned it, just about everything of one -- at one time or another was displayed there; because it gave him a repository for a lot of the collections and different things like that. It also, in his mind, enhanced the interest of the building and so forth. But it was also, basically, good storage space.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“Rickshaws, people in rickshaws” --
Whitney: “I don’t recall.”
Martini: -- “show in some of the photos, yeah.”
Whitney: “I don’t recall that.”
Martini: “Lots -- lots of stuff.
“After that, I remember you went down flights of stairs. And then you came out through like a big promenade” --
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: -- “that circled the ice-skating rink.
“What would you have considered that level to have been? What was its purpose, just” --
Whitney: “It would be -- like if you were entering a home, you’d come in the entrance and the entry, go up and down a level, or whatever, of stairs and get to a level that would possibly be a library, which was the museum.”
“And then if you went on down, the next level was the living room; and it had the biggest collection of the plants, the indoor plants, that Sutro had planted in there a long time ago, and the big trees and so forth. So it was the main --main floor for them viewing, over the railing, the immensity of the pools and so forth.
Martini: “And then the next levels down all pertained to the pools and -- like on the next one -- next level down, I believe, was where the ice-cold tank was, in that stairway. And then, of course, on the main north-south access to the building were the -- all of the changing rooms for the swimming pools. They made a big deal, in the old publicity, about there were all these individual, private dressing rooms.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Were we talking like big rooms, little rooms? Closets?”
Whitney: “Closet.”
Martini: “Closets, yeah.”
Whitney: “Yeah. Yeah, just enough room to comfortably take your clothes off and hang ‘em up and put on your swimsuit, which usually people rented as part of the entry. And then they would -- then they were able to close and lock that -- it became their locker while they were swimming.”
Martini: “Mm-hm. Oh, okay.”
Whitney: “And all of these -- these dressing rooms were built under the main viewing bleachers for the main pools, where they could -- people could sit and watch exhibitions of swimming or races in the big tank and so forth.”
Martini: “When you took over possession of the baths and the last years that you were running it, was there -- we hear rumors of like piles of old bathing suits left behind and stuff like that. Was there -- was there still a lot of remnants?”
Whitney: “Well, they were still there; and we got rid of a lot of them and then, eventually, put the remnants in auction when we were getting rid of some of the Cliff House -- some of the old Cliff House stuff. And, of course, everybody connected in the business wanted one of the swimming suits; and I had four or five of them, of different shapes and ages.
“So they -- they -- there was a great deal of interest, right from the beginning, in these things as artifacts and relics and memorabilia and so forth.”
Martini: “The lowest level down, that was the ice-skating rink; right?”
Whitney: “Well, the ice-skating rink was built up over the end of the main tank.”
Martini: “Like the L, the dogleg?”
Whitney: “Yeah, it was an L. And the -- it was dammed off so that the long leg of -- not the leg, but the upright of the L still remained as a swimming pool, a big, rectangular pool.
“And the ice rink was the leg. The flat part, horizontal part, was built over the tank so that you had full headroom underneath it. And it was all supported; the ice rink was all supported with timbers and so forth.
Martini: “Ooh.”
Whitney: “Now, I know I’ve seen it in there, but I forget completely where they had the big ice-making unit. It had to be back in that maintenance building, and then it was -- the ammonia and so forth necessary to make ice was piped up and they made the ice.
“And, of course, we had one of the very first of those machines that would grade the ice.”
Martini: “Zamboni.”
Whitney: “Zambonis. Whichever -- he had ‘em -- he ended up with a monopoly in that business. And, basically, still goes on; because there’s still a lot of ice skating.”
Martini: “I often wondered how that worked, if the ice-skating rink was set into the pool. So it was actually above it?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Oh, okay.”
Whitney: “Well, you know, in that photo that shows the -- that one other pool all closed off?”
Martini: “Mm-hm.”
Whitney: “That’s done the same way.”
Martini: “Okay. Okay.”
Whitney: “That was dammed off and the floor was lifted up. And you had full maintenance headroom underneath so that you could constantly inspect the timbers that supported the -- the rink or the stage platform.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“What we’re talking about, just for reference for some of the listeners to the tape, is some of the photos that show all of the bathing tanks in operation.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “And one of them has been planked over as a stage for public events” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “one of the five small pools.
“What kind of staff did it take to run Sutro Baths? Was it” --
Whitney: “Well, when my dad acquired the property, he also acquired the manager. And she ran the whole operation almost herself, Manny Glantz. She was an ice skater, but not in a commercial and -- but she knew the ice-rink business enough that allowed the associations to get in and basically take over and create as much rink time as they could.
“And then they would rent it to their members on a time deal, so that they’d rent maybe an hour of time. And she was the one that really got that going. But it was -- the -- it was a very -- there was not a high labor when we took it over, because the ice rink wasn’t that difficult. The -- my -- my brother-in-law’s brother took over the maintenance of the plant, and they rebuilt it and modernized it, made it more efficient. But he still retained his position at Playland. So it was -- that kind of an approach.
“When they needed some construction in there for modifying the museum, or whatever, it was somebody that worked full time on the Playland that would go up there, be assigned up there to do the job. And when the job was finished, they went back to the Playland.”
Martini: “And when I talked with Ed Zelinsky, he was under the impression that, frequently, the smaller attractions, like the operating models and the music machines, were moved between the Cliff House and Sutro’s and Playland, just to see how they’d” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah?”
Whitney: “Yeah. They were space fillers” --
Martini: “Space fillers, mm-hm.”
Whitney: -- “more attraction; traffic generators in certain areas where we weren’t getting enough attraction, to get people to walk that far and then see that there was something just beyond that was worth seeing.
“There was a big collection of large, like full-size dioramas, like a lady swinging on the moon and” --
Whitney: “Yeah. A lot of those figures -- yesterday, I said that the -- that Messmore & Damon did Laffing Sal.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “But I think it was Philadelphia Toboggan Company. But those two companies turned out a lot of stuff that was exactly the same.
“Another thing from yesterday that I’d like to clarify is you mentioned
Jeremy Ets-Hokin with regards to the Playland sale and so forth. Bob [Frazier] and Charles Knapp -- well, Bob, he’s the one that negotiated and got control of my mother and influenced her. Then he got Charles Knapp as a possible financier for the project.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “That fell through, and he got Jeremy Ets-Hokin involved in it. So he was involved; but it was, from my standpoint, after they had acquired the property. And since they -- we had sold all the stock, we were out completely as a source of getting information about the future operation.”
[Begin Tape 3, Side B]
Martini: “So let’s talk about the end of the baths. By the mid-1960s, at some point, you made the decision to just close down Sutro Baths.”
Whitney: “Once again, it ties to the relationship that Bob developed with my mother. And he had a lot of influence and got her interested and so forth. And, eventually, she sold her interest in the Cliff House Properties, which would have been one half of the stock. And I believe that was the actual sale that we read about in the newspaper. Because the Playland one, I think -- I was too involved in changing the terms and a few things like that, of getting them to sell stock rather than assets.
“But, in any event, we woke up and we had an owner. He was a developer. He was interested in the property that I referred to as the ‘back property,’ out towards the North Point.”
Martini: “The baths area, mm-hm.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“And if you cut the building, it would have been right where the ice-skating rink” --
Martini: “Oh, okay. The building as a separate” --
Whitney: “Yeah.
“So in the negotiation with him, we got him to -- he insisted that the front portion of Sutro Baths be demolished.”
Martini: “That was his” --
Whitney: “That was his position in the negotiation.
“And it was -- the handwriting was on the wall. He was a 50 percent owner. He could force the dissolutionment of the corporation and all of these things. So he was working from a position of power equal to what my sister and I had, except that he had experience and we didn’t.
“And in the negotiations, I got the -- an extra two years of operations, while they were doing all their planning for the back property, to keep the museum going and the ice rink going, if we wanted. In two years, when their plans were ready to go ahead --or three years or four years or five years, whenever they could go ahead -- we could keep our operation going until then.
“And so we had gotten to the point of the two years had passed, and he’d gotten to the point where he wanted to exercise getting the front part of the building out so he could do the full design of that cove.
“And so we agreed and we spun the back property off to him, and we kept the gift shop and the Cliff House and those attendant operations.”
Martini: “So you let him take over the entire structure.”
Whitney: “We let him, for his 50 percent, have the back property.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “But he had the responsibility of the cost of demolition of the old Sutro Baths building.
“And, of course, shortly after they got going on the demolition, the -- very suspiciously, the Sutro building went on fire; and that’s when it was destroyed.”
Martini: “Everyone talks -- uses the term “suspicious fire” or “convenient fire.”
Whitney: “Yeah. It was -- their -- the construction -- or the wrecking company’s main guard or so forth was working in the -- and prowling the building that night, which was not necessary or expected. And that was the night of the fire. And it was -- he was an employee of the wrecking company. But, of course, no one knows what really happened; but that’s the -- that was the general suspicion at the time.”
Martini: “The baths physically closed down in late 1965. That’s when the announcement was made. What happened to everything that was inside?”
Whitney: “Well” --
Martini: “All your collections of collections.”
Whitney: “Well, a lot of those had -- my dad had sold off like -- well, he didn’t sell
off -- remember yesterday, I was telling you about the restaurant that was under the storage shed where the Dore paintings were stored down at Playland?”
Martini: “Yes.”
Whitney: “That restaurant was called the Spinning Wheel and had all the spinning wheels on display” --
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: -- “at some point in its development.
“It also had a collection of old-time fighters and boxers, like Fitzsimmons and – all of the turn-of-the-century fighters, the bare-knuckle fighters: John L. Sullivan and so forth, photos throughout.
“And when they lost interest and then Dad had this spinning deal, he ended up getting a concessionaire in; and they used the spinning wheels as the general motif” --
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: -- “for the restaurant.”
Martini: “What about all the big things that he had in the Sutro museum? I’m thinking of the big collections of carriages and bicycles and all of those things. They had to come out of the building” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “because you had mentioned nothing was in there when it burned.”
Whitney: “Yeah. No, we lost nothing. We were -- we had vacated the building completely.”
Martini: “Did you sell everything or storage, I guess, is my question.”
Whitney: “No, no -- well, there was a considerable amount of stuff that was in that warehouse over the Spinning Wheel” --
Martini: “Above the Spinning Wheel; gotcha.”
Whitney: -- “like all the Dore paintings and so forth.
“But a lot of other things -- we sold off some of the auto collections individually, like the Tucker. Carriages usually went to people who would buy five or six of them to augment their collections, and the same thing with the bicycles. Somebody wouldn’t have a model like we had. And in the course of time, we’d sell that, too, to them; and then somebody, maybe, would buy the remnants of the ones that were on display.
“And, of course, a lot of the items in the Sutro museum had been originally loaned from or borrowed from the DeYoung museum. They went back. It was a little -- a little hard to -- since there was no adequate paper trail, to know what they actually owned or had sold or had gifted or that had traded. So it was kind of a problem that we had in it.
“But I -- and I gave the Egyptian to the University of San Francisco, so that took care of a big portion of the displays.”
Martini: “I’m sorry, San Francisco State University” --
Whitney: “San Francisco State, yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah. Oh, okay.
“So I know that several years later, there was a very large sale that Marilyn Blaisdell helped you put together.”
Whitney: “Yeah. But that was” --
Martini: “That was different from” --
Whitney: “Yeah. That was after the Cliff House had been closed.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And we were out of the restaurant business, and it was right at the time when Danny Hountalas and I were working out a deal for him to take over the restaurant. And he wanted new equipment and so forth. So that was -- that was that first auction.”
Martini: “That was” --
Whitney: “That was more of a walk-in sale, rather than an actual auction.”
Martini: “It got a lot of media attention, though, when that happened.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “So the -- when we go back to when the baths were demolished and burned” --
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: -- “the site was clear; it was still Cliff House Properties’ lands?
Whitney: “No. Because we had given half of the Sutro parcel to Bob.”
Martini: “To Bob.”
Whitney: “And we had the front; we retained ownership of the gift shop on down. So the property had been split in ownership. There was this overlapping period where we had the right to use the building. He had a right to eventually demolish and so forth. And that dividing line happened to be exactly where the ice rink ended.”
Martini: “I think something -- now this makes sense.
“In many of the concept drawings that I brought with me, that came from your collection, the ones dated in the early 1960s show the entire cove being developed; and then in the later ones, show only what you’re describing.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “So this -- this is -- reflected what you had control of.”
Whitney: “We started our planning before Bob ever got into it, when my mother was still half owner. And so some of the plans and ideas will reflect that time.”
Martini: “Like this one I’m showing you” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “that’s a reference; it’s a Cliff House Properties file name.”
Whitney: “Right.”
Martini: “It shows the entire cove with high-rises actually at the” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “at the north end of the cove.”
Whitney: “Yeah. This would have been when my mother was still in the operation of ownership. And then later on, when it shows that -- these kind of projects shortened up, like this one (indicating)” --
Martini: “Cliff House Properties 11.”
Whitney: “Yeah. This is right -- this line that went right across here (indicating), you know, right in there” --
Martini: “That was the dividing line.”
Whitney: -- “that was the dividing line.
“And it just so happened that that line was picked because the ice rink was on one side, and we could keep operating during the planning stages, when Bob had the back property.”
Martini: “Oh, okay.
“Now, we have to address -- what was the purpose of this giant development that was going to take place where the baths were located? What was the market idea?”
Whitney: “After the World’s Fair in Brussels, I -- I retained Al Beach to come out and go to work for me and help me come up with concepts of development of the property. Al Beach and I were close personal friends by that time, and I had great trust in his integrity and so forth.
“So a lot of the work that you see in these photos of the model, that’s foreshortened and everything, is work that Al Beach got -- got made for a particular presentation. Al had worked and spoke Japanese fluently. He’d worked in Japan. He knew the Japanese business way. And it was right at a time when the Japanese were buying up the United States and all the hotels in Hawaii and everything. They were going land crazy here in this country for a period of time when their economy first took off. And we thought it was an opportunity.
“So we -- the model was done for that presentation. And he and I went to Japan and made the presentation to the people that ran the Otani Hotel, big name. And if I’m not mistaken, there is an Otani Hotel now in San Francisco or somewhere on the west coast here. But it was the thought of getting a partner to help in the financing of developing the deal.”
Martini: “Okay. So were these going to be -- there’s several different variations. Was it going to be purely hotel/resort or was it going to be” --
Whitney: “Well, we were trying to do, then, within it, a lot of the showmanship of my father. And this also was right at the time when we had -- still had collections. And it was the thought that they could be used and so forth.
“And our negotiations in Japan went very well, except that I made a typical American counteroffer or countermove; and the Japanese dropped the project, just bang.”
Martini: “Really.”
Whitney: “And Al Beach and I talked about it a lot, and it’s -- I made a statement as an American would make about his business. And what I was trying to do was justify the value that we had put on the property for this so that we could find an offsetting value for the work that they would do, so that you could then work out the split and all that sort of stuff. And the statement that I made to them about the value of the -- or trying to justify the value just fell flat, and they couldn’t grasp what I was talking about. Because I was using the word value and they were using the word value, but one didn’t match the other.
Martini: “I understand negotiations with the Japanese, you have to be very careful” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “with intonations and inflections of words” --
Whitney: “Oh, everything, yeah.
“And it was just -- I take 100 percent responsibility for that failure.”
Martini: “All these proposals, none of them show the old landmark buildings of the Cliff House or the baths. Did you have any thoughts or feelings that you were actually going to be demolishing what are now, in retrospect, real landmarks?”
Whitney: “Oh, yeah. I would have loved to have kept the Sutro building going, get the pools out of it; convert the building to a gigantic arboretum, with all the tropical plants and trees. It was so -- so big that you could make an indoor natatorium -- it would be terrific. And then to exploit areas for cocktail lounges and restaurants and do -- do a development of the interior so that there was -- it would be like an indoor Disneyland,
but -- not so much rides, but with the possibility, where it would work out mechanically, we’d consider putting something that would -- in the amusement park, we’d call a dark ride” --
Martini: “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.”
Whitney: -- “type of things.
“Wouldn’t put the merry-go-round, but would put something that we could do – people passing dioramas and so forth.”
Martini: “And I guess, from what you’re saying about when the Bob faction took over, that idea was no longer viable because he wanted it gone.”
Whitney: “Of course, he was -- he was -- I don’t know what they were doing, other than their planning, on this property here. But when they got to the point where they could see what they wanted to do, they knew that they had to get rid of the front part of the building, which gave us the problem in here (indicating).
“Because, see, the property that we would end up with, our line of demarcation would be right across here (indicating); that this would be what was in, but” --
Martini: “Through the north-south line.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah. Just about where -- about where the entrance to the old baths building was.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah. Yeah.”
Whitney: “Well, it -- a lot of the ideas and so forth were all pretty much at the same time, because the economy was booming. I had the help of Al Beach, who was quite imaginative and helpful and knew, physically, what to do and where to head to get answers to technical problems that had arisen that, basically, we knew nothing about. And we could get, then, to a source of information. And he had the ability to trace things down like that, but he didn’t do the direct negotiations when we got to that point. That became mine.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “And that’s why I was open to making the beautiful mistake with the Japanese.”
Martini: “The names that appear on the largest proposals or the earliest, the 1965 ones, is a Wurster Bernardi Emmons, architects?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah. That was your” --
Whitney: “That was a -- there was some personal connection with Wurster, and I
can’t -- I think it was through -- more through my sister and brother-in-law” --
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: -- “who knew him socially and so forth.
“And, also, at the same time, I was doing another plan, which was some modifications to Playland. And I was using the other architect” --
Martini: “Mario?”
Whitney: -- “Mario Giordano.
“And then there was a period in between where -- not Giordano, but he became a very --one of the top city designers and planners, did a lot of the freeway work in designing the supports and so forth. Italian name, and I -- but it just goes out now.
“But I was working with him down below, and then we were working with Wurster Bernardi on the first. And then this is really more just Al Beach and me (indicating).”
Martini: “Okay. These would be the ones with the reference numbers” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “Cliff House 9, 10, and et cetera.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “The scaled-back versions, I guess, is a way to describe them.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Did you -- how did the local neighborhood and the City of San Francisco, did you involve them in any of these designs” --
Whitney: “We never got to the point of really involving the city.
“And, of course, somewhere along in this chronology, the federal government got interested, or the Park Service. It was really between the congressman in San Francisco by the name of Burton. And then there was another congressman, and I’m not too sure -- I don’t recall the name offhand. But the two of them got vying with each other in the creation of the size of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And one would say, ‘Oh, I want to include this extra 20 acres.’ The other one would say, ‘Well, I want to include this extra 25 acres.’
“As a result of those back-and-forth deals between those politicians, they got the property up so big that they had to take the Cliff House. And they were working on getting Playland and all that property at the time.”
Martini: “So there was some talk about taking of Playland even?”
Whitney: “They wanted to take every bit of property that they could get along the waterfront. They didn’t want any private ownership of waterfront property.”
Martini: “Did they talk to you directly about this, however? Did Philip Burton or his aides ever come and discuss this with you?”
Whitney: “No, never saw a politician. This was strictly I put up to a Republican trying to outdo a Democrat and a Democrat trying to outdo a Republican.”
Martini: “So” --
Whitney: “And the park just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Martini: “Hmm, boy.
“How did you -- how’d you react to that, when people are planning what’s going to happen to your property without talking to you?”
Whitney: “Well, it -- we finally realized that if they wanted the property, they were going to get the property. And so the best thing to do was to work with them.
“And, eventually -- you mentioned his name, who was the head of the park department.”
Martini: “Bill Whalen” --
Whitney: “Whalen.”
Martini: -- “the superintendent.”
Whitney: “Yeah.
“Well, he and his associates and so forth, and we negotiated then on the property. And, eventually, I came to a figure that I would be willing to take. And, in fact, some of these architectural renderings were done strictly for the negotiation of our trying to establish the potential value of the land.”
Martini: “Oh.”
Whitney: “Which one -- and it might have been the Wurster Bernardi. I’d have to go back and look -- yeah, because it was the whole property.”
Martini: “There are -- there are many others that I didn’t bring.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “So -- okay. So these were -- in some cases, these were illustrations of what could happen” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “future value, rather than existing vacant land value.”
Whitney: “Or potential projects, other than pipe dreams.”
Martini: “Got you.
“What was the number that you felt was fair for the property?”
Whitney: “In excess of $5,000,000. I don’t know whether I said $6,000,000 or six -- or five and a half, but it was somewhere along in those numbers. Because, eventually, what I was paid was six-and-a-half million.”
Martini: “So -- and what were the parameters of the land that the Park Service was dealing with? Was it the baths and the Cliff House?”
Whitney: “All the privately owned property up there that we owned, meaning the Whitney family, or the successors to the ownership of the back property of Sutro. And then, of course, they had all of the city property above Merry Way and so forth.”
Martini: “Right.”
Whitney: “And who’s the ownership in there, I don’t know.”
Martini: “City and county.”
Whitney: “But they were shooting to get a pretty good-sized chunk.”
Martini: “But I would guess that they didn’t include Playland, that” --
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “No. That kind of came along as -- well, you know, we can always do this. I think it was probably more trying to intimidate me than -- because as I might not look my age right now, during this period, I looked more like a kid than I did a man. And I think that an awful lot of the problems I had in negotiation was based on that.”
Martini: “So what was -- what was their response when you said in excess of $5,000,000?”
Whitney: “’Oh, you’re ridiculous, ridiculous.’
“So we ended up with a five-year fight. And during the five years, I was able to develop the economic base of the Cliff House operation by increasing its earning capacity. In association with Danny Hountalas, who did the running, we negotiated -- he and I worked out that he would pay a percentage of the gross -- percentage of the gross as rent. And that number was divised by what he was able to pay the month before.
“And so as business was escalating, the earning capacity of the property was going up, the earning capacity issues as part of establishing value. So by the time we ended up selling the property -- actually, five years later; was just a few days before the condemnation hearing was going to take place -- the government accepted a number very close to mine.
“But we -- we had built the business, the business’ gross, by developing mainly the Cliff House operation. The bar became a fern bar, and the Omelette House, and all of those things produced revenue.”
Martini: “’Cause there was a time, about 1970, ’71, when the Cliff House was pretty much closed down almost entirely, wasn’t it? The restaurant was closed and” --
Whitney: “Well, the big restaurant, yeah -- although after my dad died and so forth, I ended up with the Cliff House. We didn’t do too bad. We didn’t -- we weren’t running losses. We were still doing fairly good. And I think -- ‘cause I carried on my dad’s philosophy of not getting too elegant. So we kept the menu and so forth more to the average person’s liking and -- and it continued to make money right up to the day that the government handed me the check.”
[Begin Tape 4, Side A]
Martini: George Whitney interview, Tape Number 4; August 14th, 2002.
Whitney: “I’m surprised myself at how much I remember, but I also surprised myself how much I forgot. Like I have to get into these conversations; and then, all of a sudden, Wurster Bernardi and Emmons, hell, they worked on this at this time and so forth.
“’Cause as this -- as all this was going on in various phases -- not so much this Cliff House stuff -- I was also fighting the family, the personal relationship between my mother and my sister and I.”
Martini: “I kind of picked that up, yeah.”
Whitney: “Yeah. My sister really was pissed off that she wasn’t richer than she was, and my mother resented the fact that the kids were running the business. My sister was very resentful of the fact that my dad had left me the responsibility of the general, overall management of the business; and that they -- they didn’t come to me for -- when they wanted something specific, but my sister was resentful as hell that she didn’t get the things that she wanted without asking.”
Martini: “It sounds like it got especially acrimonious when your mom went in” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “to deal with this fellow, Bob.”
Whitney: “Well, that -- this started right from the very beginning. My mother -- until my uncle’s wife died -- who basically became my mother’s sister, the two of them were that close; and their daughter, Leo’s daughter, was the exact same age as my sister. And I was the odd man out in the family. I was little Georgie. And one of the first projects that they would do is build me a workshop down in the basement, where I was relegated to. Because the sisters -- I was too young to play with them or too old to play with them, one way or the other.
“And one of the things my dad would do is he would come home from work for dinner. And the first thing he would do is go into the living room with the Call Bulletin, the evening San Francisco paper. There were gates on the entry to the living room. He would close the gates, which was a signal to me not to go anywhere near. My mother would fix him a scotch and soda, and he would sit there and read. He wouldn’t say a word to her or anything. And that was his relaxed time.
“And by the time he’d finished the newspaper, she had dinner prepared. And then he was as gregarious in his thing; and I was allowed to speak, although constantly reminded that little boys should be heard and not -- or seen and not heard.
“But that’s sort of the genesis -- that’s a kind of behind-the-scene reason for quite a few things that happened.”
Martini: “But when you were finally going into those negotiations with the Park Service” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “were you representing the whole family or was there still the split?
“Did they” --
Whitney: “Well, Playland was gone. So that was -- that took my mother out; because she was already out of the Cliff House. I had already gotten enough money put together and bought my sister out on the Cliff House. So, yes, the negotiations with the park department were a hundred percent me.”
Martini: “Did you have control over the back property again at that point?”
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “You didn’t.”
Whitney: “No.”
Martini: “So the Park Service dealt with him [ed: Frazier] as a separate entity?”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “I don’t know what their arrangements were and everything.
“God, I wish I could remember his name.”
Martini: “I’m going to get that.”
Whitney: “Yeah. You -- you” --
Martini: “I’m going to get that. I’m going to give Bob” --
Whitney: “You’ll recognize it, because it’s a big San Francisco name.”
Martini: “So when you walked away from the Cliff House, you -- the Park Service did offer you the option to be the manager, to continue on; correct?”
Whitney: “They wanted me to lease back the operation. Because we had been building the business, knowing that I would keep Danny Hountalas as the operator; and that we would keep running it the same way.
“And I said if you are going to own it, you’re going to run it. And so I said I will not lease it back.”
Martini: “You didn’t especially like the restaurant business as much as” --
Whitney: “No. I -- I wasn’t interested ever in the food business, wasn’t interested in Cliff House. I became -- I got the Cliff House because of the family switching around and my mother getting the power, in essence, to force the sale of Playland, which took it right out of existence, eventually. And so I was out of that.
“And then I was able to get money together and buy my sister out of the remnants of Cliff House Properties, where we had already traded off to Bob the back property. So I -- I ended up owning the building that the gift shop was in and the Cliff House and the Terrace and so forth.
“But I was not really interested in the food business, per se, only in getting it to make money. And the big impetus there came in that I saw the way that we could increase the revenues, thereby increase the value to me, in my negotiations with the government.”
Martini: “Oh.
“Now, how did you -- how did you and Marilyn Blaisdell get to know each other?
Whitney: “Just -- just she was interested in the photos and came out at a time when I wanted to get those -- I’ve wanted to get rid of a lot of these accoutrements along the way. Because I -- everywhere I went when I traveled, I acquired stuff. And out of businesses, I acquired stuff. And, all of a sudden, all of the stuff that I had acquired --which included two homes and an 87-foot boat at one time.
“So I had more clothes than I could ever wear, because I’d keep a wardrobe in one house and a wardrobe in another house and a wardrobe on the boat; so I’d end up with three levels of ownership of clothing. And when I got down to where I was staying in one place, the first bedroom became the closet and those kind of things.”
Martini: “And Marilyn helped you organize all of those photographs?”
Whitney: “Yeah. She was interested in the photographs, and I was interested in selling them off and getting rid of them; because I didn’t want the details of going through ‘em.”
Martini: “Where did all those old photos and negatives come from?”
Whitney: “Just over the years, my dad collecting.”
Martini: “Collections; collections of collections.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “And, of course, he was -- having worked a great deal in the photo studios that he and my uncle had. In fact, in that article, I think it makes him more of a photographer than I ever heard. But, in any event, they -- from -- always interested in photography. So a lot of those collections came that way.”
Martini: “Marilyn also bought a large collection of plans and maps.”
Whitney: “Yeah. Once again, to get rid of surplus.”
Martini: “Get rid of surplus.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Yeah.
“It’s a great collection. A lot of it is Playland” --
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: -- “and that’s where all these artists’ renderings and all came from.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Now, what -- just for background on that particular collection of plans and maps, what -- aside from the artists’ conceptions, what were all the other drawings gathered for? What did you keep them around for? I’m thinking like the rides and the remodelings of the Cliff House.”
Whitney: “Pack rat. Pack rat.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Whitney: “I went through a long period where I couldn’t get rid of anything because I was acquiring new. And I couldn’t justify, philosophically, buying new and still wanting to get rid of stuff. I didn’t know that you could do both.”
Martini: “Well, what do you -- what are like your personal feelings now, looking back, on how the public looks at like the legendary Playland, the legendary Sutro Baths? It was your -- it was your day-to-day life. Does it amaze you? Were you” --
Whitney: “Well, I’m sorry that there isn’t an amusement park in San Francisco. Every big city should have one. I’m not sorry that Playland itself is gone. I’m just sorry that San Francisco doesn’t have a good location with a good amusement park. But I don’t know where else it would be any better than where it was.
“So -- but my interest in the business was the amusement park, the midway and so forth. But keep in mind that I had dreams and desires personally that did not include the business at any time.”
Martini: “Of course; of course.”
Whitney: “I wanted to be a pilot. And, of course, growing up, I was a great airplane modeler and so forth. And when the war started and -- I went into the Air Force and ended up doing a lot of flying; crew, never pilot. But during the thing, I became an illegal pilot, flying military craft; never solo.
“And after the war, then I became a full-fledged pilot. And I’ve owned five or six airplanes of various types.”
Martini: “I noticed the pictures on the walls.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Little jets?”
Whitney: “Yeah. That was the BD-5 jet.”
Martini: “Yeah?”
Whitney: “They made a propeller version of it first. And I -- I was one of the original buyers of that. You know, where you put up the money and it was a pipe dream. He was a -- he was another Tucker, but this time in airplanes. And then at some point, he got the plane flying marvelously and came out with the jet version. So I worked out a deal where he’d take my prop jet -- I mean, the prop -- the propeller-driven one that I’d bought back, and I’d get a jet. And by the time that that was all nailed down and running along smoothly, he went bankrupt and I lost my deposits and everything.
“But I have no regrets, because it was part of a -- mention BD-5 to any pilot and they know the romance of the little plane and what happened to it. And so it was a one-of-a-kinder, like talking about the Davis car that I had for a while.”
Martini: “The little three-wheeler?”
Whitney: “Yes.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Whitney: “So that it was a one-of-a-kinder that -- a pipe dream. The Tucker, a pipe dream.”
Martini: “Obviously, we’ve talked about everything there is to talk about. No.”
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “No. We could probably go on for a lot longer, but this -- this has been great. And I’ll be in touch with you again, because -- I can send you more questions, and maybe come up this way again?”
Whitney: “I would say put it off until you can come up and do it this way. Because I -- I just -- I get to the point where I start working on the keyboard” --
Martini: “Oh.”
Whitney: -- “the -- my hand just gets going; I can’t stop it.
“And I’ve gotten off of the Internet because I -- I just don’t feel comfortable running it. I have to repeat too many things and make corrections. And I -- I find it easier talking than I do writing.”
Martini: “It’ll have to be in person again.
Whitney: “Yeah.”
Martini: “Hey, thanks. I’ll click this thing off.
“End of tape.”
[End of transcription.]
