Re: Silver Dollar memories

I read the piece about the Silver Dollar and I can remember delivering the mail to that place and Marysville’s Lower End for over 45 years. The Grand Hotel was a well known brothel in a town of over 40 such places.

I can remember the first time I entered that building. It was the summer of 1934 and we had arrived from Saint Helena in our 1928 Ford/ Auburn “straight eights.” It was then a garage and we drove over a pit to have our transmission checked.

I was quite wide awake having slept the awful route over the coast range, in a car with a plush interior fit for sleeping. I remember quite well since this was the first East Indian I had ever seen...his name was Ram Partap.

The brothel was upstairs and there was a separate one in back. I can remember our car had 2 Marmon V-16 carburetors in it and the owner Mr. Partap adjusted them for us while we went across the street to a restaurant owned by Ali Mohammed. On that street there were East Indians, Japanese and Chinese. It was like another world to me.

In my over 50 some years of working in the Lower End, I only remember two pretty girls that “worked the line.”

I had the pleasure to talk over coffee to many of the old timers who had been in Marysville all their lives and during the 1890s. They did speak of one parlour house which was the old St. Nicholas hated which madame had 200 girls in two shifts and a parlour with string quartet piano and where you dressed formal.

That is why people cherish “those good ‘old days!”

Dick Marquette