On my first visit to San Francisco (1971 or thereabouts) I recognized a lot of street names: Montgomery, Sansome, Haight, Bush, Leavenworth, Grant. That’s not because I had been boning up on SF geography prior to my visit. My acquaintance was via Daniel Montgomery, Alicia Sansome, Gideon Haight, Bush and Leavenworth streets, and shopping at the White House on Kearny.
All courtesy of Mystery at Thunderbolt House, a dandy teen-interest novel set in pre-earthquake San Francisco by boy-book author Howard Pease. I acquired the novel as part of a Scholastic Book buy in my junior high school. Thunderbolt House quickly became one of my all-time favorite books, a steady companion that enlivened several downright dismal years. I must have read it fifty times, revisiting that particular world over and over until entire swathes of the book were memorized.
In a fit of nostalgia, I pawed around and found an identical copy in good shape, really far better condition than the original copy that I read down to sawdust.
Thus Jud comes into possession of a magical dark-panelled gaslit Victorian room stuffed with books from floor to ceiling. Before too long, his print-shop-owning father makes the discovery that many of the books are valuable first editions and collector’s items. So it turns out that Jud has inherited a lot more than books; the library is worth a king’s ransom.
Mysterious pilferings from the library turn out to be the work of Jud’s ne’er-do-well older brother, who has discovered the catalog in the uncle’s old bedroom and has been selling off some items in order to finance his dissolute life. Bit by bit Jud discovers that his uncle had defeated a rival, Gideon Haight, and that the old house on Bush Street had been in fact Haight’s before Edward Judson had won it in a debt settlement.
Then the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 wipes it all out; the house goes up in flames and the books have to be abandoned as the family heads to a refugee camp in the Presidio, with a return to Stockton to follow. All are sadder but wiser: Jud had been in danger of valuing his books for their monetary value alone, but he realizes that he can replace the books that actually matter to him—the volumes on California history—and not with originals but reprints. He has found his calling: he will be a historian and a scholar. The older brother realizes the error of his ways. Mother and sister, having devolved into vapid social butterflies, get over themselves. Stalwart father remains stalwart father.
It’s not some neglected literary jewel. The characters are one-dimensional, the writing blandly serviceable and the plot threadbare. But the portrait of pre-earthquake San Francisco is rich and compelling, and the grand old house on Bush acquires a massive personality of its own. Today, Bush Street near Leavenworth offers only an enervating row of blocky apartment buildings. But back in the day, it would have been lined with grand old mansions, built by some of the earlier robber barons and silver-mining guys, although even before 1906 its panache was fading fast as the nouveau riche flocked to Pacific Heights.
Howard Pease had gauged his audience perfectly: ordinary, non-jock teenaged males. Pease, author of a series of boy-books set on a tramp steamer featuring a plucky teenaged protagonist, once thoroughly pissed off a gathering of lady librarians with a rant about the feminized world of kid’s books. He was bang-on correct, though; most American teenage fiction was about nice young girls and their ladylike concerns. What few male-oriented books were available had a tendency to go over the top on the manly stuff, featuring comic-book bully boys whose machismo skirted the edges of sociopathy. Books about plausible teenaged boys with plausible teenaged problems and plausible teenaged personalities were scarcer than hen’s teeth. I took what I could get, but the space cadets of the Tom Corbett series were hardly realistic role models even if they were at least smart, resourceful guys. The Hardy Boys were weird post-pubescent supermen. Tom Swift was an impossible egghead. But I could relate to Jud Allen, a fellow approaching college age, figuring out what he will be doing with his life, dealing with the many discoveries and disappointments of growing up. That he does this after having been transplanted from a safe, familiar place (Stockton) to an exotic one (San Francisco) only made his coming-of-age story all the more interesting. The handy deus ex machina of the 1906 earthquake tied whatever loose ends needed fastening.
So hats off to Howard Pease, conjuror of derring-do stories on tramp steamers and scourge of refined lady librarians everywhere. Thanks for Thunderbolt House, Mr. Pease, from this whilom teen who eventually wound up living in the city you chronicled so adroitly.