Buster Brown Shoes (Pt 1)
I don’t remember if, in 1952, the Buster Brown Show was still on the radio. A few years earlier it had been one of my favorite Saturday morning radio shows, a show advertising kid’s shoes and featuring, most memorably, Froggy the Gremlin. I still remember Buster Brown’s slogan: “I’m Buster Brown, I live in a shoe. That’s my dog Tie, He lives there too.”
I haven’t thought of Buster Brown or Froggy for years but for some reason Buster Brown came to mind today. Actually, I was thinking of my time in Korea. Let me explain.
I’d finished the Korean language course at the Army Language School in Monterey and a bunch of guys I’d graduated with and I were being sent to, surprise, Korea. We were given a short leave before being deployed and I went home to San Francisco to say goodbye to family and friends.
It was only a few days later that I got a phone call from Dave McAllister, one of my buddies. He’d gone home to Lima, Ohio only to find that his former girl friend was now engaged to a high school buddy of his, and his parents were fighting like cats and dogs and he asked me – actually he implored me – to let him come out and bunk with me for the remainder of our leave. I said sure; Mac and I had become pretty good buddies at the language school.
Somehow, he showed up the next day. I picked him up at the airport and drove him home. He met my mom and dad and we sort of just hung out, but that evening I took him to downtown San Francisco, to North Beach and to the Broadway area, the closest thing San Francisco had to a red light district. We were 18, had grown-up money in our pocket for the first time, and it was Watch Out World. I hasten to add that at 18 years old, even though I was a San Francisco native, the only reason I knew about Broadway district was because my father was a police officer and he and my family tut-tutted whenever we went by Broadway or North Beach.
We went in uniform. I figured if we went in “civvies” we wouldn’t have Tinker’s chance of getting in anywhere. We were 18 and it showed, but in uniform and by occasionally mentioning that we were on our way to Korea, some bouncers looked the other way and let us in even though we weren’t 21.. We were even able, at a few places to score a few beers. Eventually, around 11 o’clock we decided to head up to Chinatown for a little chow mein. The north end of Grant Avenue.the heart of Chinatown, was only a block away.
We were walking up Grant Avenue, just a tiny bit tipsey and at peace with the world, when we started to go by a Chinese restaurant just as a Chinese wedding dinner was breaking up and all the guests were pouring out onto the sidewalk. In the confusion Mac bumped into one of the celebrants who promptly turned around and gave him a shove that pushed him back against the front of the restaurant. Being Irish, Mac, naturally, returned the compliment and in a matter of seconds the two of us were in the middle of a fair-to-middling sized brawl, the two of us versus an awful lot of slightly inebriated young Chinese wedding guests. It must’ve looked pretty funny because Mac was 6’2”, I was 6’1”, and most of our fellow combatants averaged, as near as I could make out, around 5’6” or so. It looked vaguely like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.
Despite the odds we were doing pretty well for the first ten or fifteen seconds of the brawl and then we were literally overwhelmed by superior numbers. I found myself on the ground with various young tuxedo clad Chinese wedding guests attempting to tap dance on my posterior. This, I decided, was not good, but I didn’t know what I could do about my predicament. Every time I tried to get up five or six tuxedo clad dervishes knocked me down again and the posterior dance resumed. With no other avenue open, I managed to crawl for shelter underneath the limo that was waiting at the curb for the bride and groom. As I laid there contemplating my limited options I remember being a little afraid that our opponents might simply hijack the limo, and run me over, but they didn’t. They seemed to be content with dancing around the outside of the limo and screaming Cantonese epithets at me. I don’t know whether it was a war dance or a victory dance, maybe both, but they seemed pretty agitated, so I decided to stay under the limo and wait for reinforcements or the police, whichever came first.
I glanced to my right and there, lying beside me was Mac, breathing heavily and covered in dirt and grease but otherwise looking relatively unscathed.
We laid there watching the dancing feet circle the limo. Mac looked at me and grinned. “Have you ever,” he asked, watching the dancing feet, “I mean, have you ever in your life seen so many Buster Brown shoes.”
The cop who rescued us must have thought we were crazy.. We crawled out from under the limo dirty, disheveled, a little bruised, and laughing.