Personal History Pilgrimage

Yesterday we went to San Francisco just to get out of the house, despite the rain. As we left, I remembered a pilgrimage I've wanted to make:  to find the apartment building on Sacramento Street where my parents lived when I was born.

I knew the address from an old letter to my mother I found among her things:

 

The envelope is postmarked April 12, 1948, and the letter is from another Englishwoman who married a GI after World War II.  Her name was Mary Powell, and she seems to have married a man who didn't have a high school diploma and took her to live on the outskirts of Sacramento, where he earned $37.50/week at an unspecified job.  Sometimes they visited Vallejo, she wrote.  Could she and my mother get together?

Jerry and I found the building at the address on the envelope: 3906 Sacramento Street, in Presidio Heights.  I tried to imagine my parents' lives there, from 1947 until 1951, when they moved to San Jose.

3906 Sacramento Street, the beige building, center

 

In front of my first home

Across the street from the apartment building is California Pacific Medical Center, which used to be Children's Hospital of San Francisco, where I was born in 1950.   My mother had only to walk across the street to give birth.  My dad went back to the apartment and washed all the windows while he waited.



California Pacific Medical Center, former site of Children's Hospital, San Francisco

 

In the same block is a medical building where my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease 34 years later.  Beginnings and endings in a single block. 

 

I wonder what happened to Mary Powell and whether she and my mother ever managed to get together. In her letter, Mary wrote, "I just feel anything English would be a real treat just now."

 

She enclosed a photo of herself with a baby:

 

Mary Powell and child, 1948