Ragland Tolk-Watkins Interview
1. Were you born in Sausalito? When? If not here, where?
I was born on Halloween, 4:30 in the afternoon, October 31, 1948, in Kaiser hospital in San Francisco. My mother’s doctor was a woman, Dr. Frances Foster. When my father asked Dr Foster what he could do to help, while my mother was in labor, she told him to “buy jellybeans’.
2. How long did you live in Sausalito? What age were you when you lived here?
My parents and I moved to Sausalito from San Francisco shortly after I was born. My mother bought or rented the building that now houses Scoma’s. My father renovated the building a bit, so we could live there, and my mother opened her first “Tin Angel” there. It was part bar/restaurant and a sort of all-purpose social space for artists, poets and the area’s creative community. Later it would become the “Glad Hand”. Eventually, Scoma’s took it over and changed the configuration of the building: moving the front away from the street and moving what was originally the curved back façade to the street.
The “tin angel”, as an iconic object, was itself a roof ornament taken from a now disappeared Georgian-style church building on Houston Street in NYC. My parents rented an apartment attached to the building. My mother got my father to crawl out on the roof and take it. There is now a Whole Foods where the church building was.
My father left California to finish his architecture degree at Tulane University in NOLA. Mother and I moved into the second floor the building with the ¾ circular bay window on the northwest corner of Princess and Bridgeway, across from what was then the IGA and around the corner from The Marin Fruit company, which we called Willy’s.
10 West Court is the next place we lived together. When I was 6, I moved to Mississippi and was raised there by my father, returning to Sausalito in the summers.
39 Cooper is my mother’s next address in Sausalito. About 1960.
3. Did you go to school here? Which one?
Libby Wax’s kindergarten in Sausalito and Presidio Hill School in San Francisco, for half of first grade
4. What are some of your memories of living in Sausalito?
The rocks under the buildings on Bridgeway, The little beach by Enid’s house, the smell of the vegetation and the sea. Juanita’s Galley, Willy’s, the Valhalla, Fort Cronkite,
https://www.nps.gov/goga/planyourvisit/focr.htm
5. What are some of memories of your mother when you were growing up?
The smell of cigarettes and Florida Water (cologne). Automobiles. The smell of oil paint. She was a late sleeper.
6. Did you get to know her colleagues/friends/fellow artists? Any good memories of them?
Ruth Asawa/Albert Lanier and family – Ruth was a well know San Francisco Artist and Albert was successful architect with his own firm, Lanier and Sherril in San Francisco. They were at Black Mountain College with my parents. They had children my age who I am still in touch with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Asawa
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=albert+lanier+architect&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Bill and Joan Roth and family – Bill was a well-known San Francisco art collector, businessman and philanthropist from a prominent SF family. He liked to say he “sold insurance”. He and Joan met my mother at the Sausalito “Tin Angel”. They lived in Sausalito and had children who were my age, and we went to school together. Their daughter, Maggie Best, is married to artist, David Best and very involved in artmaking. I believe she attended the opening of “the Fallen Angel”. I am still in touch with Maggie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Roth
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=josephine-roth&pid=194143021
https://poweroa.org/dt_team/maggie-roth-best/
Odetta - My mother was Odetta’s first manager and she performed at the Tin Angel in San Francisco. Her first recordings were produced with my mother in collaboration with Fantasy records in San Francisco. She was a close friend and spent a lot of time in our house at 10 West Court. I last saw her was after one of her performances in Chicago, where I was in college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odetta
Enid Foster – was my “nanny” and looked after me when I visited my mother in the summers, after I began living with my father. I adored her.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=enid+foster+artist&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Joanne Beretta – was a San Francisco native. She sang at the Fallen Angel and became very good friend of my mother’s. She later moved to New York City and developed a career here. She lived a block away from me in Greenwich Village and we were in touch until she died in June this year.
https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/Singer-Joanne-Beretta-Dies-At-86-20200726
Juanita’s Galley – an institution
Irmine Droeger Steltzner – lived with my mother at 10 West court. Elegant and busy, she sewed clothes, made wooden blocks for me and helped put together the Fallen Angel with my mother. She is one of the three people on the cover of “Interviews of Our Times”. We stayed in touch. She later married and had two sons, one of whom lives in France and who is good friend. He makes very beautiful artisanal skis.
http://www.rabbitontheroof.net/en/
Val Bleecker
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SN19510510.2.28&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1
Johnny Mathis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mathis
Sally Stamford’s Valhalla – parfaits with sparklers, piano music, Sally and her parrot – I last saw her at the Valhalla when I was about 23.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sally+stanford&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
7. Did you spend any time at the Tin Angel or Fallen Angel? Any memories of your experiences there?
SF tin angel – I remember being given the job of painting something green at the SF Tin angel and the smell of the paint. I also remember large, dark space with a central fireplace and the smell of smoke. The Sausalito Historical society has photographs of the main room, including the menu on the wall which has “cook wanted!”, or something like it, written at the bottom.
I remember the Fallen Angel physically very well. It is also well documented in photographs that are in the possession of the Sausalito Historical Society. Sausalito artist Enid Foster is pictured in one of these photographs wearing a white fur coat and acting as a waitress.
It was on Pine Street and had been a luxurious brothel owned by Sally Stanford. At the street level the façade was pretty blank, a fortress, with windows above overlooking the street. The entrance was on the far right side and an exit was on the far left side. As you entered and went upstairs, you turned left and entered a foyer. Directly across from this upstairs entrance was the downstairs exit.
On the right of the foyer was a large glass ceilinged court with a fountain in the middle and beyond that, on the back wall, and a very large, deep, eight sided, tile-lined “bathtub” built into the wall in a kind of pavilion enclosure. It had steps leading into it from a higher floor level in back. The plumbing had been retro fitted and flowed with a concoction that was supposed to be sparkling Burgundy but was styled “the Fallen Angel cocktail”. Now-forgotten actress Anna Held was said to have taken milk baths there. The right side of this room was taken up by a colonnade leading ultimately to the backstage of this bathtub feature and possibly the brothel cribs. This room was used for larger entertainments like (possibly) stripper Tempest Storm.
On the left side of the foyer, in a smaller room, was the main barroom. The front of the bar itself was faced with a salvaged baluster railing and the back overlocked the pine street windows. There was a large fireplace in this room on the right as you walked and antique furniture was set up in various conversational groupings. Sometimes this room had a piano in it. To the left was a smaller room called the “Champagne Room”, the walls of which were covered with antique beaded fringe up to about five feet high. The room was furnished with lots of pillows on the floor, which were covered in antique fabrics.
I remember when I was about 10, Johnny Mathis sang at the Fallen Angel. It was the beginning of his career. My mother was friends with his agent, Helen Noga. There was a small party a day or so before. I met him and his parents. Mum champagne was served.
8. Did your mom encourage you to draw/paint/be artistic?
Yes. She loved it when I invented projects particularly things that looked like art. Also, that I liked to dance. She preferred the more primitive things. Made up things. Later, Enid foster was my nanny/art teacher so there was lots of art stuff there – painting etc. Enid and I wrote a play together, when I was about 8 years old. It was an I was the main player, dressed as an angel. Enid made me a pair of wings. Part of the set was the large framed gouache portrait of a woman now owned by the Sausalito Historical Society.
I spent a lot of time with Ruth Asawa and family. There was always a lot of creative activity.
So yes, I was encouraged to be creative because that was the whole environment. Creativity and “making” was just in the air.
9. Do you think you’ve inherited artistic abilities from your mom? Other abilities?
Art and creativity were everywhere in my early Sausalito childhood. I was steeped in it. My world view and careers have been involved in that. Sadye Tolk, my maternal grandmother, who lived in San Francisco, regularly took me all the museums as a very young child. Also, my father was an architect, so he was interested in the esthetics of buildings, music, and culture.
I’ve got my mother’s sense of absurdist humor – sometimes goofy, sometimes ironic, sometimes dark. Lenny Bruce was also a childhood inspiration.
(She, along with Irmine Droeger Steltzner, and Max Weiss (then of Fantasy Records), are in the cover photo of Lenny Bruce’s first album, “Interviews of our Time”. My mother and Max wrote the liner notes for the album and the photo was taken at our house on 10 West Court. One of my mother’s paintings is in the photo.)
Undoubtedly, I inherited her unconventional streak under my otherwise more-conventional-than-my-mother’s appearance.
10. You work now as a designer, is that right? Have you always done that kind of work?
My work as a designer is a late development, born out of necessity. For many years I worked in the art world of museums, not-for-profit alternative spaces, galleries showing work of contemporary artists and galleries showing the work of established masters from all periods of art history. I came to dislike working for others. I’d always been interested in the decorative arts and after a late forties’ health setback, I found I could put together a living by helping people put together their houses. It’s not so different from making an exhibition you can live in.
11. You don’t have to answer these questions if you don’t want to. I learned that your father was William Ragland Watkins III. How did Peggy meet William? Did you know your father and spend time with your father growing up? During your adult life?
My Parents met at Black Mountain College shortly after WWII. He was from a conservative, well established Methodist family in McComb, Mississippi, where his grandfather had been a big shot. She was a Jewish girl from Greene Avenue in Brooklyn, where her father was a professional gambler. My father thought she was the most interesting, most talented, funniest woman he had ever met, and she thought he was a handsome, sensitive Southern Gentleman. Their family joke was, “He thought she was a debutante until he saw her legs.” It was a match bound to fail.
My Parents separated. Sometime in first grade, I moved to Mississippi and was raised there by my father. From Bohemia to the Bible Belt! After that, I would make long summer trips to Sausalito where I got full, intoxicating doses of my interrupted life there. When I was about 12, my father got permanent custody and I didn’t see my mother or Sausalito until I was 19, when I drove from college in Chicago to Sausalito at Christmas break.
12. What do you hope people remember most about Peggy?
She was prodigiously talented and appreciative of other people’s talent, creative, generous to a fault, funny in an absurdist way, vulnerable, anti-bourgeois, egalitarian. She was an artist (a painting show at the de Young Museum), a poet, and an entrepreneur.
She was a figure in the human landscape of Sausalito in her time. The old Kettle Deli depicted her in the mural that also shows Enid Foster and other local characters. (I believe this mural still exists and is in private hands.)
She couldn’t cook.
Peggy liked cars. She is probably best known for her pink and orange checkered Ford model T (or A) advertising a late attempt at another Tin Angel on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. But there were other cars.
She and my father drove across the country in another early Ford model. She had cars with rumble seats. She had convertibles. Once she had an elegant old Jaguar with running boards, which smelled wonderful inside. The story goes that on some impulse, she gave the car to a waitress at one of her clubs. I was living in Mississippi then and she sent me the Jaguar hood ornament because I had always loved it.
Black Mountain College
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College
Peggy Tolk-Watkins
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Peggy+Tolk-Watkins&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
William Ragland Watkins III
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20709746/william-ragland-watkins
Some other stuff
The Mural at the Kettle - hot pastrami sandwiches
The Excelsior steps
The Thrift shop – Princess Lane flower shop
The crabs on the rocks under the public pier – people crabbing from the pier
The IGA
The Glad Hand and their blue cheese wedge salad
Ole’s Bakery’s apple turnovers
The dime store, The Trade Fair, The Trade Winds Bar
The little fish pool in the park and the little stature of a faun, soapsuds in the park fountain at Christmas
The soda counter at the drugstore (by the park)
Miss Libby’s kindergarten
Enid Foster – and three of her various residences
The Tides Bookstore and Enid Foster’s windows