Sweet Swings & 'All Things Begin with the Butcher'
Issue #1: Dog Leg, Guerra's Quality Meats and tasting notes
Welcome to West Side Stories, a digital newsletter reporting on and celebrating the city’s often overlooked West Side. From Ocean Beach to Mt. Davidson Manor, Ingleside Terrace to Inner Sunset, we are the city’s foggy, western flank. Lee Bruno and Dan Rosenheim are long-time Bay Area journalists who have lived on the West Side for a shocking combined total of 73 years. With additional contributions from friends, neighbors and family members, we’ll bring you news and enterprise stories about our community.
In this first issue, we look at two long-time businesses that are bucking the trend toward box-store standardization, the Dog Leg custom golf shop and Guerra’s Quality Meats. For the oenophiles among you, we’ll also have tasting notes from Ryan Bruno, who writes a regular newsletter from longtime Taraval wine store, The San Francisco Wine Trading Company.
Golf Pro Floyd Glenn Mixes Golf Clubs and Wisdom
By Dan Rosenheim
A dogleg, as anyone at all familiar with golf knows, is a fairway with a bend in either direction. Thus, the first hole at Presidio Golf Course is a 362-yard dogleg right, or the fourth hole at Harding Park is a 540-yard dogleg left.
So you might say to someone traveling east on Ocean Avenue, that it’s a dogleg left at Aptos Avenue, then straight on to Ashton, where five doors from the corner the shop named The Dogleg sits in the middle of a small group of stores -- flanked by Gary Cimino’s two-chair barber shop on the north side and a hot-yoga studio on the south.
Arriving at the Dogleg, you may be struck by a sign in the window that reads:
“We do not dispense magic. However, we may be able to help your game.”
And, yet, despite that disclaimer and without too much exaggeration, there is magic on tap at the diminutive Ingleside District business.
In the era of giant box stores, it’s the magic of survival for a small craft shop.
In the day of mass production, it’s the magic of golf equipment that is custom fitted, produced and repaired by hand.
And finally, it’s the magic of 86-year-old Floyd Glenn, a man once prohibited from playing golf because he was black who went on to become a first-rate amateur player and a master craftsman.
“When I was a caddy over at Presidio Golf Course, black people weren’t allowed to play,” Glenn recalls, bending a lanky frame over a glass counter in his store late one afternoon, while an Aretha Franklin track plays in the background. “But on Mondays, when the course was closed, caddies could play, and I did. I was my own teacher, and from the very first, I never had a problem hitting the ball.”
Glenn’s cluttered shop in 21st-century San Francisco’s Ingleside is a long way from Terrell, Texas, the rural town just outside of which he was born in 1932 and spent the first 13 years of his life.
In 1945, Glenn’s family joined the great migration of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South and came to Berkeley, where his father became a minister at the local Baptist Church.
Asked how it felt to be uprooted and moved to a totally different community 1700 miles away, Glenn doesn’t miss a beat:
“If you’re on a plantation, any place away from that is a good place.”
And Berkeley did, in fact, end up a good place for Reverend and Mrs. Glenn and their 13 children (“In those days, not that large a family,” Floyd Glenn says).
But if Glenn found little to miss about rural Texas, he nonetheless came away from that state with a good education -- acquired in a one-room schoolhouse for black children only.
“We had one lady teacher for the first eight grades, and she taught us all the same things,” he says.
Glenn was a fast learner, and he profited when most of his classmates left school to work the fields during the school year’s bookend months of September and May.
“For some reason, my father kept us in school,” he recalls, “and during that time, there were only Glenns in class. We learned a lot.”
Glenn learned so much, in fact, that he was working at a level several grades beyond his age.
“When I got to Berkeley I told the school I was a senior, and they said, ‘No way you are 13 and a senior.’ So they tested me, and I tested out of high school. My only weak subject was English, because I spoke Texan.”
After officially graduating high school at 16, Glenn took a circuitous path, first attending City College and San Francisco State, then enlisting in the Air Force, where he attended the Language School at Fort Ord in Monterey, studying Russian, Chinese and Korean.
He spent, he will tell you, three years nine months and two days in the service, including 16 months in Korea translating intercepted North Korean communications during the war.
Returning to San Francisco, Glenn finished his education at State with a degree in history, got a job at Park and Rec and, while there, picked up a teaching credential. There were few African American teachers in the city’s public schools, and even fewer who were tenured. A counselor told him they weren’t hiring black people to teach in Bay Area schools and refused to sign Glenn’s application to be a student teacher.
But Glenn’s legendary basketball coach at SF State, Dan Farmer, felt otherwise -- thinking so highly of his former player’s teaching potential that he went to bat for him with San Francisco public school administrators.
“Farmer was the worst coach I ever met and the best person,” Glenn says with a smile.
And, after a few false starts, Glenn was hired and began a long career in the public schools, where he taught Civics, US History, Geography and “just about everything but Home Ec.” Along the way, he spent time at Ben Franklin, Herbert Hoover, Polytechnic High and finally McAteer where, in addition to teaching, he coached the basketball team to a city title.
There also was a hiatus early in his teaching career when Glenn got a State Department grant to go to Ghana and write about Americans living abroad.
Back in the United States, along with teaching and coaching, Glenn polished his golf game and became a scratch golfer. He began collecting classic golf clubs and developed close friendships, first with an old Irish clubmaker living in Alameda and then with Carl Paul, a founder of Golfsmith golf shops. Paul was from the same part of Texas as Glenn and, like Glenn, had been an interpreter in the military. Working with Paul, Glenn perfected the craft of clubmaking, and when he retired from teaching for good in 1990 Glenn opened his own custom club shop two doors from its current location on Ashton Avenue.
““I never wanted to be good, I wanted to be very good,” Glenn says. “I found out who was best and picked their brains until I was ready to go on my own.”
At the Dogleg, Glenn gained a loyal following in the city’s golf community. He did it all -- making clubs from scratch, changing shafts, re-gripping clubs. And he coupled skill as a craftsman with a beguiling personality -- shrewd, strikingly well-read, amusing. His language is salty but it belies good humor and a gentle spirit.
“Floyd is a first-rate craftsman,” says Ron O’Connor, a Lincoln High grad, real estate appraiser and Olympic Club member who has been a long-time Dogleg customer. “But more than that he is a gentleman who knows golf.”
In the early days, the Dogleg was one of several custom golf shops in the Bay Area. These were the places golfers went for the right fit, where people like Floyd could measure their ability, size, flexibility and the parameters of their swing.
“How do you expect to walk into a store and buy a set of clubs that’s going to fit you?” Glenn asks. “It’s like a suit. Very seldom do you buy a suit that doesn’t need alterations.”
But time, technology and the economy’s tendency to monopoly combined to take a toll on the independent craftsmen. With computer-assisted design and manufacturing, it became possible for big companies to provide almost the same level of customization as the small specialists. Today, a major club manufacturer has digital equipment to take your measurements, analyze your swing and generate clubs tailored just for you.
“Now everyone can make excellent clubs, mostly computer generated,” Glenn says. “And golf is like many other areas where the big companies don’t stay in business being nice to people.”
Yet, Glenn’s custom shop still holds appeal for golfers who want a craftsman’s special care.
“The trick,” he says, “is to do what the big companies don’t want to do: the things that are labor intensive.”
Labor intensive means small jobs like re-gripping clubs, but it also means changing shafts and making some sets from scratch. In the month and a half before Christmas this year, Glenn produced three complete sets of custom clubs.
And people frequently stop by the shop simply to share a cup of coffee and chat with Glenn. Ken Venturi’s son is among those who stop in from time to time.
The shop itself offers ample testimony to Glenn’s accomplishments. Along with all the grips, shafts, heads and clubs, there are photos of him with famous golfers and trophies galore, including the Clubmaker of the Year Award from the Golf Clubmakers Association.
Today at 86, having raised 10 children and with no compelling financial need to work, Glenn still comes to the shop every weekday. And while a bandaged foot currently has him on the DL, he’s still a regular golfer, as well, typically at Harding Park or Oakland’s Metropolitan Golf Links. He no longer shoots in the low 70s but he remains serious about the game and turns in scores less than his age.
“Mediocre doesn’t work,” he says. “You should always want to do better. I don’t shoot 105 and be happy about it.”
The Wit and Wisdom of Floyd Glenn
“I have an insatiable desire for information unrelated to everything. Ninety-five percent of all the bullshit I believe in life the rest of the world does not believe.”
“I don’t believe in jail. If you can’t be here without hurting people then kill your ass.”
“Schools miseducate half their students. They don’t deal with the reality of maturation. One kid may support his whole family when he’s 13; another may be whining and doing nothing when he’s 20."
Texans are crazy. There is not a single sane Texan.”
“Ninety nine percent of teachers understand the golf swing but know nothing about teaching.”
“Golf is repetition. The ball doesn’t move; you have to fix a swing. There is precision involved in what you have to do, and that takes practice. You don’t just do it.”
“Coaching is overrated. If you can get across a few concepts and accept a certain frame of mind, they can carry it through life.”
“We get so hung up on winning that we don’t allow ourselves to be human enough.”
“The main attraction of San Francisco is nobody fucks with me.”
From Lucca to San Francisco…Italian Style
By Lee Bruno
A simple one-story building with a red terra cotta tile roof stands on the corner of 15th Avenue and Taraval. Its black awning reads in bold white lettering: Guerra Quality Meats.
Guerra has been a culinary landmark for more than half a century. Newcomers and loyal shoppers alike frequent the neighborhood shop for the butcher friendly experience…whether it’s a question about cuts of beef, poultry, pork or how to cook a roast. It comes down to the simple human factor: “everybody likes to be recognized,” says Paul Guerra, son of the original owner and longtime co-owner (now retired).
One would think that the old school ways of Guerra’s butcher shop couldn’t survive the changes of online shopping and Blue Apron. But it has endured and grown considerably, attracting a loyal following of young families, couples and seniors who will line up out the door for a holiday roast or a tasty deli sandwich made to perfection with the best breads, meats and cheeses.
Guerra has served customers on the West side of the City from when it first opened in 1954, only a few blocks away from its current location. The family tradition started withMark Guerra who in 1946 arrived in San Francisco from a town outside Lucca, Italy. Mark like other immigrants brought their family traditions of food from different regions, which came from four cities: Genoa in Liguria, Lucca in Tuscany, Cosenza in Calabria, and Palermo in Sicily. In the legendary San Francisco Italian restaurants of the past, diners were served hearty meals of fish, fowl, game, fruits, and vegetables grown locally in the fertile soils of farms and ranches on the Peninsula. The simple regional cuisine was infused with a passion for good food shared with friends and family.
The story goes Mark quickly fell into business with the owner of a grocery chain who was from the same town. And shortly thereafter, Mark and his brother Battista opened at 22nd Avenue and Taraval, providing their meat cuts to predominantly Italian and Irish families of the suburban middle class that characterized the Sunset District of the 1950s. Those baby booming years of the 50s were all about many independent run butcher stores on Taraval Street out toward the ocean.
As neighborhoods grew and changed, so did Guerra. By the early 1980s, Mark and his sons moved to another grocery store, this time in West Portal, and then to their current location. There, Mark’s sons Paul and Robert, and their cousin John, began the work to keep Guerra current with the changing landscape of San Francisco’s palate and its cooking sensibilities.
Today, the Guerra family butcher business is run by Mark’s son Robert and his cousin John, who was Battista’s son. The butcher shop store is not likely to become a relic of the past because it still has lines out the door and loyal customers keep bringing it business. The touch of the butcher is still relevant for shoppers, where custom cut lamb shanks are common along with someone hand pounding scaloppini, or finding a select filet of fresh fish.
As for the changes in modern family life where parents have little time to cook savory dishes for hungry children, Guerra opened a second shop up the block called Guerra To Go, which is devoted exclusively to prepared foods. When you walk through the doors you’re hit with a waft of appetizing aromas and a long glass case of lasagna, salmon, beef bourguignon, chicken cacciatore or roasted vegetables. In this ever modern age of Internet-driven shopping, the butcher has gone digital with a savvy website and online ordering for shoppers on the run.
Today, there are only a handful of local butcher stores, including Bryan’s and Antonelli’s and newer hipster shops like Fatted Calf in Hayes Valley or Olivier’s Butchery in Dog Patch that play off the sensibilities of old school shops but have a modern twist for younger tastes.
One of Guerra’s customers once told the shop that “It all begins with the butcher.” And it’s become a fitting mantra for the owners and all of the butchers and counter staff who take the inspiration of Mark’s original vision to heart every day, engaging customers in conversation about food, cooking and SF sports teams.
Ryan’s Wine and Spirits Notes
West Side native Ryan Bruno writes about wine and spirits for The San Francisco Wine Trading Company
Melville Estate Santa Rita Hills
Pinot Noir & Syrah
We take great pride in being an Estate… owning, farming and growing wine from our land.
–Chad Melville, Head Winegrower, Melville Estate
In 1997, Ron Melville with his sons, Chad and Brent, brought Melville Vineyards to the Santa Rita Hills located in the western Santa Ynez Valley. The cooling trends in the region significantly impact the grapes, and the Melville’s made a decision early on to direct their ambitions toward producing exceptional cold-climate Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah. Located nearly ten miles from the coast, the Melville Estate currently has 120 acres under vine grown on soil that is mostly Lompoc dune sand, interspersed with clay loam and shallow pans of Monterey shale. Similar to the domaine wines of Burgundy, one aspect that makes Melville Estate unique is that they own and farm all of the vineyards themselves. They cultivate grapes with awareness to the natural acidity, flavor balance, ripeness, as well as a prolonged growing season that comes as a result of their near coastal locale—with afternoon winds and consistent morning and evening fog. Their Syrah is a classic Northern Rhone style Syrah with a dark fruit profile, savory elements and spice on the finish that sings with use of whole-cluster and aging in neutral oak. Their Pinot Noir is a Burgundy style single vineyard varietal, also made using whole cluster and is aged in neutral oak. With red cherries and dried rose petals on the nose, the palate offers a blend of earth and fruit, with wild herbs.
Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin
$36.98/bt.
In 1986, James Abdnor, a senator from South Dakota, gave then U.S. President Ronald Reagan a stuffed and mounted jackalope during a presidential campaign stop in Rapid City. “I thought that was a purely Texas thing,” Reagan wrote in his diary that day, “but not so.” PJ Rigney, then working as the executive director at Bailey’s, fast establishing a knack for creating exciting new brands with his Sheridan’s Irish liqueur, likely had not any inkling that the part rabbit, part antelope mythological creature would some thirty years later come to embody his travel-inspired Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin. “This became one of my favorite parts of the business,” Rigney recalls of his success with Sheridan’s Irish liqueur and the branding campaign that followed, “from the initial concept right up to the final product that would appear on the shelf.” Made at The Shed Distillery, the first distillery to be established in rural Drumshanbo, Ireland in over a hundred years, Rigney’s Irish Gin takes its name from its east meets west combination of copper pot distilled and vapor-infused botanicals, including Gunpowder Tea sourced from Zeijang, China—so-called due to each leaf being hand-rolled into small pellets reminiscent of gunpowder. Light and citrus forward on the nose, with hints of lemon zest, herbs and sage, juniper and green tea; while botanically loud, this contemporary style gin remarkably balances its freewheeling inclusiveness of ingredients. Sourcing Meadowsweet from Drumshanbo, Ireland, Cardamom from India, Juniper Berries from Macedonia, Grapefruit from Indonesia and Kaffir Lime from Cambodia, the gin truly is a worldly experiment. “I was particularly inspired by the spice markets in India,” Rigney explains, “where I came across Shahi tukra, the small powerful cardamom seed and I was struck by its both sweet and savory flavors.” Somewhere along the way, the jackalope—despite its long rumored affinity for whiskey—became the embodied mascot for the gin. The first in what PJ Rigney anticipates becoming a range of exotic and unusual small batch premium spirits.
Drumshanbo Signature Serve: One wedge of grapefruit, Gunpowder Gin 40ml, premium tonic 140ml.
1913 OShaughnessy Map of San Francisco