San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HOLIDAY TRADITION SHINES ON
This year, beloved kitschy display in the Castro is in memory of creator
“It’s as San Francisco as you can get. It’s bold, it’s a statement.
Benji Fujita, gardener and helper
The climb up Castro Hill to 3650 21st St., the place most people know as the “Tom and Jerry House,” is a sharp climb, the sort that leaves a person breathless and nearly turns the city sideways.
“It’s not that easy,” said Barbie Seegmiller. She stood outside the home and looked up at the great big Norfolk Island pine, all 42 — or, by some reports, 60 — feet of it. ( It, too, was fighting gravity, its trunk held in place with metal rods.) “But once you get to the top, it’s totally worth it.”
A hydraulic lift was running, making it hard to hear much of anything. Workers used it to maneuver around the tree, stringing up lights, then adjusting them and adjusting them again. They were three weeks into a monthlong project to cover the tree and the home behind it with an impossible to count number of lights and tchotchkes — an elaborate holiday tableau that reappears every winter.
Seegmiller has been coming by the house every year for something like a decade, she said. So have tens of thousands of others. The Chronicle first wrote about the display and Tom Taylor, the man who dreamed it up, on Dec. 22, 1997, in a short story hidden deep in the A section. By that point, Taylor and his husband, Jerome “Jerry” Goldstein, had been at it for nine or 10 years. Taylor told The Chronicle he figured 30,000 to 40,000 people would pass by the Tom and Jerry House before everything came down on Jan. 1. Twentythree years later, the tradition hasn’t let up.
But this year is different. This year is the first without Taylor; he died from prostate cancer on Oct. 20.
News of his death was reported widely and made its way to Seegmiller. She’d hoped to bring her 3yearold daughter Sia by the house — she’s at that age where she’d love the lights — but first Seegmiller wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to be dark this year.
And yet, there was the display, incomplete but coming together. Seegmiller smiled. The climb hadn’t been for nothing.
“Traditions live on even after you pass,” she said. Then she kept on up the hill.
Last week, during the final stretch of decorating, Benji Fujita was wrestling the lights onto a wreath about as tall as he was. Eighteen years ago, he was working a gardening job down the street when a friend asked if he wanted to do a Christmas tree. “I figured it was an inhouse decoration gig,” he said. “It was not. It was ... ” he waves his hands around, “... a boom lift, and like, you know, a humongous construction presence and all this stuff.”
“All this stuff” was a garage full of tangled Christmas lights and boxes with labels like “SMALL TRAINS” and “DANCING DOLLS.” On the driveway, two elf feet stuck out from under a pile of wreaths, and beside them lay two dusty and sunbleached stockings about 3 feet tall. One read “Tom” and the other “Jerry,” both in glittering silver letters.
These are not fancy decorations and there is no theme. The house is unapologetically chaotic and tacky, like an ugly sweater you might wear to a holiday party. That’s part of the charm. “It’s as San Francisco as you can get,” Fujita said. “It’s bold, it’s a statement … we’re flashy, but we’re not trying to be as flashy” as some upscale displays.
Fujita’s been at this the longest out of the eightperson crew working this year. But Taylor and the house had a habit of pulling people in for the long haul. Jon Orc, the project manager, started in 2012. Hunter Padilla started when he was 8 years old. He lives across the street, and one rainy night he wandered over and asked the man in the Santa Claus costume out front whether he wanted help passing out candy canes. He’s come back every year since; he’s now 21.
They’ve all felt Taylor’s absence. “He felt like a dad or our uncle. Doing it without him, it feels a little empty,” Orc said. “But at the same time, we’ve got each other, and he left us with the knowledge and the skills to build something like this without him.”
The tradition began with the tree.
In perhaps the most detailed history of the Tom and Jerry House, published last year by the San Francisco Bay Times, Donna Sachet writes that Taylor bought the living tree from a Cost Plus sometime around 1970. It was 3 feet tall.
By 1973, according to a Chronicle article, Taylor and Goldstein had moved in together in their white Victorian home high on Castro Hill and the conifer had outgrown its pot, so they planted it right out front.
The display started small, a string of lights and later ornaments made out of paper plates. But as the tree grew — Taylor and Goldstein liked to say the roots found sewer — so did the decorations. “It got to the point where I either couldn’t do it or I was going to have to get serious with a scaffold or a hydraulic lift,” Taylor told The Chronicle in 2003. Taylor got serious.
The history of the Tom and Jerry House is one of those stories best told in broad strokes. Over the past 30 years, many of the exact details have been lost. Did the tradition begin in 1987 or 1988? Not even Taylor could be sure. There’s no counting the number of lights, no real explanation for the purple Teletubby at the center of a spinning Ferris wheel made from K’Nex toys. One year the hydraulic lift slipped down the hill and either knocked down a neighbor’s chimney or crashed through the roof. How tall is the tree? Various reports have put it north of 60 feet, but if you ask Fujita — he’s worked on the display for the past 18 years — he keeps it closer to 40 feet. ( One year, he says, when they let it grow taller, high winds snapped the top off and left it on the roof.)
But the details don’t matter so much as the fact of the thing, which, at its core, was always meant as a gift to the city. Now, after Taylor’s death, friends say, it continues as a testament to his and Goldstein’s generosity and warmth. Both are known widely in San Francisco’s gay community, and five years ago they were honored together with a Pride service award.
“They were the consummate hosts,” said Gary Virginia, a friend of the two and onetime president of San Francisco Pride’s board of directors. “Everybody was welcome.”
He runs through memories of parties at the house — for the San Francisco Bay Times and the Lesbian/ Gay Freedom Band and Gay Men’s Chorus — where there was always an open bar and tables full of catered food and hardly any of their home was offlimits to guests. They would open their warehouse to fundraisers when organizers had nowhere else to go. Taylor, he said, was as “reliable as a steel condom.” He was the “keeper” of the rainbow Pride flag on the corner of Market and Castro streets, and during Pride he’d always show up with bunting and flags and share stories from his life as he taught volunteers how to treat the flags just right.
“Their eyes would just light up like saucers,” Virginia said.
Even two Prides back, just weeks after surgery, Virginia said, “damn if Tom
didn’t just show up with volunteers.” He brought with him an original handdyed rainbow flag made by Gilbert Baker ( the flag’s originator) to hang behind the stage for the virtual event. Don’t let him climb that
ladder, Goldstein had told them. Taylor did anyhow.
“No matter whether it was small or big they were definitely committed,” said former Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who knew the couple socially. When Baker died, they rented out the Castro Theater for a memorial for their friend. When they got legally married in 2013, the party spilled into the street outside their home. “They were totally involved, and I think they saw a way to be productive. They had the willpower and the means to do it, and god love them for that.”
The two of them, Tom Taylor and Jerry Goldstein, were like “putting gasoline and fire together,” Virginia said.
There was a moment, before Taylor died, when the question of whether to decorate was up in the air, said
Orc. Taylor was struggling with prostate cancer, “and we just wanted to be there for him.”
All the while Taylor was mapping out a schedule for putting up the tree and talking about new things they might add this year. After he passed, there was no question the lights would go up.
Take care of it, guys, Goldstein told Orc and the crew.
“He told me he wanted to see the most spectacular Christmas tree ever.”