My grandfather Spiro Raicevich's second hand furniture store was originally located on the south side of Hayes Street near Franklin. It was destroyed in the 1906 fire along with the flat above where my mother and her sisters and brothers lived.
The lot remained vacant for many years and I used to look over a fence to see the brick foundation of his store.
They had been burned out in the famous "Ham and Eggs Fire" which started a block away. A woman lit her stove to cook her husband's breakfast, the chimney was down and the resulting fire burned the City Hall, St. Ignatius Church and much of the Mission District.
My grandfather lost everything, but when Hayes Street was rebuilt he opened his store at 425 Hayes at Gough in a building owned by his fraternal organization, the Austrian-American Benevolent Association.
He went to the store every day until he died in 1945, walking the entire distance from our house at Herman and Fillmore.
In front of the store by the door were some wood chairs That's where grandpa sat every day visiting with his friends from the lodge, speaking with them in Slovenian.
I loved to go to his store as a child because it was filled with wonderful things. I could play with the toys he bought, but knew that when I came back they might be sold.
In the back of the store was a large wood stove. It was the only source of heat in the store and in the winter time grandpa would sit back there drinking the coffee he brewed in an old graniteware coffee pot.
The one thing I did not like was a very old toilet. The water tank was at the ceiling and you flushed it by pulling on a wooden chain. The toilet bowl did not have the curve in the bottom, the water seal, which keeps odors from coming up, but the hole went straight down to the sewer and I thought it must be connected with every sewer in San Francisco. You can imagine what it smelled like. Whenever I had to go to the toilet, I would take a deep breath and hold it.
Once a week the Chinese chair man would come to the store. Grandpa would give him chairs that had to be re-caned and he would hoist them on a long wooden pole over his shoulder, three in front and three behind and off he would go to Chinatown.
Grandpa's son, my Uncle Rudy, would do the deliveries. He had an open truck with solid rubber tires. The back of the truck was filled with a mountain of old bed spreads. Uncle Rudy would let me go with him and I would climb in the back, get on top of the bed spreads and look up at the sky and the buildings of San Francisco.
I felt sorry for Uncle Rudy. He was the kindest, most gentle man you could imagine, but was married to a woman for whom the word shrew was invented. She was always complaining about something and holiday dinners at Grandpa's house usually ended in verbal carnage.