SWEET MEMORIES
Coming of age at the Palace Hotel
The following is a script by Laura Hamburg — interspersed with some contemporaneous musings — that she wrote to accompany her three-minute Palace Hotel documentary video produced in 2006 as part of the Placemeant Project: Why Where Matters, a series of Mendocino County digital stories about this place called home.
“When I think about the soul of Ukiah, I always get the same Polaroid visual that smacks me right upside the head. It's the Palace Hotel. It's always been the Palace Hotel.
“For more than 100 years, every incarnation of the Palace has been a reflection of who we are as a community — what we care about.
“For me, I see the Palace as our town narrator reminding us about our shared story — even when we've forgotten ourselves — or even when it's made us wince.
“In my teens, at 17, I remember sneaking into the Palace's back-alley nightclub — the Back Door. Who was playing that night? Samonte? Hanson & Raitt?
“As an underage, ne'er-do-well, I disregarded the line swooping around the block and snuck in to see… Father Guido Sarducci.
“Back then the Palace was practically pulsating with the heat of all those young 20 and 30-somethings looking for love. It was THE scene.
“And there I was — underage, an interloper really, sneaking beers, and spying on the grownups — and their mating rituals. It was Heaven!
“The late `70s was just one slice of life for the Palace. It was as if the building itself was alive, whispering stories of Ukiah for more than 100 years.
“There were the heydays, when the Palace was all gussied up, plush and full of promise, when every stagecoach arrived and departed from the Palace, the swanky cocktail parties, the ballroom, the rooftop garden, hand-painted wallpaper, the town's power brokers leaning against the hand-carved bar.
“Mr. Wong ran the dining room and the Palace's Koffee Kupp for decades up until the mid-40s; a columnist for the local paper — in 1975 — referred to Mr. Wong as the `Chinaman.'
“Sometimes it was an ornate hotel; sometimes it was a creaky boardinghouse.
“When Reagan closed the mental hospitals and cut services, the town's elderly and mentally ill folks rented rooms upstairs at the hotel.
“That's when the Palace's streetlevel lobby was a dusty paradise of eccentric old-timers doing crossword puzzles in their robes.
“I was 9 years old, my brother, Kirt, was 8 and Lizzie was 6. We lived with our parents, Dan and Carrie, in a Class K cabin stashed out in the hills of Low Gap Road on the Mariposa School property, no electricity, no plumbing, no TV.
“We'd come into town once a week to do errands. While Mom was doing laundry, we'd buy a candy bar at Foggy's Liquors and go across State Street to camp out at the Palace lobby for the afternoon while Mom did loads of laundry.
“Armed with a week's worth of coins we'd earned doing our chores, we'd sit in the lobby and watch television while the elderly residents who lived in the Palace's upstairs rooms would drift by in their robes like ghostly figures. *
“I was raised up in that building, with the dusty lobby as my babysitter, plugging quarters into that coin-operated TV.
“By the early '80s, the Palace was the place where I scored a string of firsts: First time doing cocaine; first time having sex in a public bathroom; and, in 1985 when I was 21, my first real job hosting the Palace's fancy-schmancy restaurant with Betsy Luther, Judge Luther's daughter, when Allen Cherry was manager of the Palace Bar & Grill. I can still taste that sautéed Calamari, smell the bowls of roasted peanuts on every table, the famous peanut butter pie.
“Allen was wonderful; he put his heart and soul into that place; he paid exquisite attention to all the details — the tablecloths were measured individually for each table — and the focus was on showcasing local wines.
“He hired people who cared about the place; we really made a go of it; we had the finest chefs and bakers. He once again turned the Palace restaurant into a community center for the town.
“Ed Karsh owned the building and I have no problem going on record as saying he was one bad man. Rarely is there a truly bad human being but he was one of them. In the winter, he turned the heat off upstairs where the elderly people were living — to save money.
“Leslie, who owned Ruby Slippers, a vintage clothing shop on Smith Street, would dress me up in 1940s clothes, suits and jackets, because I was doing commercials for the local public TV station. I went to work in those outfits.
“The finest moment in my life was the day a young boy came into the Palace restaurant with his parents and said, `Look, Mom, there's the queen who lives in the palace.'
“The Palace was the set for the arc of my young life.
“Winter solstice, 1985, we pooled our tips and rented out the entire Palace ballroom for a dressto-kill formal called Laura's Longest Night of the Year Party with guests arriving in limos wearing tuxes and floor-length sequined gowns.
“More than 400 people attended; Sister Haze, a local band played. One guest had a facelift as prep to look her best. I was 21. What chutzpah!”
Laura recounts this to me: “One late afternoon when I was in the restaurant getting ready to open, my sister, 18-year-old Lizzie, who I was having a tiff with, pulls up in her little white truck, parks in front of the hotel and gets out of her car.
“She knocks on the big front window looking into the bar with its packed booths and puts her index finger out to everyone watching to get their attention, indicating to wait just a minute.
“Then she reaches back, unhooks her bra, pulls it out through her sleeve, waves it in front of everyone, hangs it on the nearby tree and gets in her car and drives off. Everyone clapped. She did it to embarrass me and just to have fun.”
“Another time I played one of the final Palace Valentine's dinner shows directed by Susan Husted (now Stewart) featuring Paula Samonte. I played a young drama student, who took herself way too seriously and read her self-indulgent `poems' between each set.
“This was all before the manufacturing crash hit hard, before Masonite went belly-up, when the town theater still had two huge screens, when most folks still had 462 phone numbers.
“And an old-timer will still reel off a string of Palace Hotel stories. And a newcomer definitely shows her stripes as soon as you hear the question: `What's the story of that beautiful, old building rotting in the center of town?'
“It's the Palace, our place, a fine, elegant queen, once the jewel of our town. She lives in me, is part of my bones. I love her so much it hurts.
“What I wouldn't do to bring her back but…i bid her adieu.”
*(Tom Liden, also living without electricity, came down from the hills with a friend on Aug. 8, 1974, to watch President Richard Nixon resign, on that very same, quarter-eating TV in the Palace Hotel lobby.)