First Street

Napa, with its Rockwellian quality, had a few main streets, one ironically named Main Street, which runs north/south about a block west of the Napa River. 

It was on these few main streets, that almost everything took place. It wasn't like horse and buggies or anything, but the 1960's were a slower time. 

My mother maintained that the song, "Standing on the Corner," written by Frank Loesser and recorded by, among others, the Four Lads in 1956, was written about First and Main in Napa.  An internet search turned up no indication of that. 

Another urban story turned into urban myth.The real "main" street in downtown Napa was First Street, which runs more or less east and west from Silverado Trail to the freeway west of town. It becomes Brown's Valley Road after crossing the overpass. 

First Street had all the cool stores. Right on the corner of First and Main stood Rexall Drugs, with a brown and orange facade. The buidling housed the drug store at street level, with numerous small business on the second floor. The building still stands today. It houses a coffee house and some other businesses.  (A friend worked there during much of our senior year, so I used to visit him from time to time.) 

The block across the street featured a Chinese restaurant and numerous other forgetable businesses. On the south side of the block stood a King Arthur's Round Table, which is what the pizza place was called, back in the day. 

Before Napa's redevelopment of the 1970's, the major store on the street was Albert's, an old fashioned clothing and shoe store. It had wooden floors, a mezzanine, and pneumatic tubes, which carried sales slips and money from the sales floor to the cashier, located on said mezzanine. The tubes were pretty cool.

In the winter of 1962-1963, Jim Davenport, 3rd baseman of the San Francisco Giants came to Albert's for an autograph signing. Seemingly every kid who owned a baseball uniform was there. I just wore a cap. 

Of the hundreds of kids in attendance, only bold 9-year-old me said anything to him. It was like a factory.  I said: "Too bad you didn't beat those Yankees in the Series."He responded:  "Yeah it sure was," in his deep Alabama drawl.

Even before redevelopment, Albert's was taken over by Mervyn's, a San Leandro concern. A new big box store was built for them behind the existing store. That big box store is now a Kohl's.

The coolest store on First Street was Merrill's, marginally a drug store, but it had a little bit of everything, including cool magazines. The well stocked magazine section included sports magazines, women's magazines, car magazines, and the ever popular teen magazines, which included lots of pictures on the latest teen idol, generally from the music world.  (I once wrote John Lennon a fan letter to an address that I had gotten from one of the teen magazines.)  They also had baseball cards, of which I still have an extensive collection.

The Toy Store was also on First Street. The owner was not fond of teenage boys coming in to browse and seldom buying anything. After about 15 minutes of browsing, he would say, 'Can I help you boys with anything?" which was his way of saying it was time for us to leave. 

We would then proceed to Woolworth's which had a really cool lunch counter. We could get a hot dog and a soda for about 65 cents. It was at the western end of the shopping district. 

The visit to Woolworth's would generally wrap up the day. We would then meet Mom or Dad, at a prearranged spot, at a prearranged time, generally around 4 pm.  The entire scene would repeat itself the next week, or the week after that.

Tom Ontis is a Napa ex-patriate now living in East Contra Costa County.  He was raised on a ranchette in Coombsville, east of .